THE VERROCCHIO CODE

At the 23rd Annual Conference of Arts and Letters held last month in Bareggio, Currado Malaspina startled the assembled crowd when he presented his unsubstantiated theory that Verrocchio was a woman.

It has long been suspected that the third figure from the right in Santo Spirito’s Saint Monica is a self-portrait. The fact that her back is turned toward the viewer indicates strongly, according to Malaspina’s far-flunged hypothesis, that the artist had something to hide.

Furthermore, it is significant that the painting in question depicts the mother of Augustine, the saint who famously devoted himself to the pleasures of the senses prior to his convenient return to faith and reflection. Like the memoirists of today, Augustine realized that on the page, vice was more gripping than virtue, so long as the author finds redemption before book’s end.

Verrocchio, according to Currado, was deeply shamed by his shape-shifting gender-hopping and sought a similar, Augustinian absolution through his wonderfully innovative depiction of religious imagery and his all consuming devotion the Florentine clergy.

After delivering his paper, the conference recessed and over coffee and cake, enjoyed a screening of Barbara Streisand’s Yentl.

TEMPERED VEHEMENCE

The short-lived periodical ZUT was a joint venture that included literary lights, Sonia Bartov and Camille Zohnenstein, the bad girl of Cabaret, Tiquette Perdu and the painters, Fédeau Mombart, Molly Rosienne and Anne de Dornay. At the height of its popularity it had a monthly circulation of over 75,000 loyal subscribers.

Among its early contributors was Currado Malaspina. Although he was banished from its advisory board after the fourth issue, (his torrid affair with Bartov, a squalid tempest of depravity that ended in shame for the two of them was the cause of his eviction), he left his typically indelible mark on the magazine’s future.

The inaugural issue, simply titled ZUT, had its cover designed by Malaspina, and was printed in an edition of two hundred. A recent copy was recently auctioned on Ébai-France for
EUR 400,000. (I, unfortunately, sold all my back issues at the marchè au puce for a pittance before moving back to the States.)

What I do have are memories, which some would argue (unpersuasively) are more valuable than coin. The one I cherish most dearly revolves around the week Currado, Sonia, Camille and I worked on the Absinthe issue (ZUT I, no.3).

Our intensive research rendered an awareness of the beautiful fragility of the small hands of fate. We drank our poppied poison till its charms turned toxic and each of us in our own personal way saw the dreadful ecstasy of dissipation.

I have never felt my senses as profoundly again.

FESSES QUI VOLE

TailWinds, Currado Malaspina’s fabled rebuttal of the biblical creation myth is a forty by sixty foot mural, famously installed at the Lourmarin Aerodrome. Commissioned by the Fédération Laïque Luberonois, the giant picture has become an important sight of secular pilgrimage. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was a hallowed venue for communist youth groups and militant Hungarian atheists.

Critics have noted that the imagery seems to be a cross between Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam and Caravaggio’s Boy Bitten By A Lizard, but Currado will have none of that. He sees the work simply as an anti-clerical, visual homiletic that splashes a few cheerful colors on the walls of baggage claim.

An oversized postcard of the image is available at most French airports though due to its volatile subject, most of the country's post offices refuse to let it circulate through the mail.

THOU SHALT NOT

In his treatise Il Cortegiano, Baldassare Castiglione outlined his conception of the complete personality - manners, taste, corporal vigor and a disposition that favors anonymity. Currado Malaspina famously quipped that The Courtier was the West’s first self-help manual.

Throughout the years, Currado has become increasingly obsessed with man’s preoccupation with advice. It struck him that regardless of the culture, the ideals propagated by elders, kings and philosophers never seemed to apply to him. He took no pointers from Plato, no direction from Demosthenes and between Oprah, Deepak and Dr. Ruth there were no recommendations worth considering, even as a temporary experiment in human conduct.

Several years ago, Currado the Jester decided to create a compendium of all worldly wisdom, compressed, distilled and fully illustrated on conveniently sized post-its, so that these behavioral reminders could easily be affixed to notebooks, laptops and refrigerators.

He started with the grossly over-rated Ten Commandments, zeroing in on the first two, which he found particularly inconvenient to the artist’s vocation.