Lingering Gaze

Katrine Lindén

      Umber walls illuminating alabaster marble anointed with grey and purple veins. The longer you gaze, the more you see. This metamorphosed mosaic of rock has travelled from Tuscany, has been chiselled and chipped, sculpted and shaped; all to create these statues, pale like the moon, soft to our sight and hard to our touch. Idealised and purified, all softness and stone; marble and woman combined. These statues are women, but we see bodies. We are presented with intimacy and see sexuality; we react with fervour to their tenderness, with desire to their sisterhood, with greed to their affection. It is an inherently diminishing gaze, a male lust and a female benevolence. Their touch is intended for each other, and yet female intimacy is much like female bodies; inherently owned and inherently marked. It is never just them, never just theirs. But they are also more.

​

      We see bodies, but these statues are women. Not any women, either; they are deae laetificatrices, divinities bestowing pleasure. They are thought to be daughters of Jupiter, a God of power and a man of greed. They do not, however, serve this Jovian father, nor do they serve us; their mistress, who is absent and yet lingers in the draped cloth and the vase, ready to be caressed by her Gratiae. In this sisterhood, they share affection and tenderness, and yet this space is limited; on their pedestal, they are both highlighted and removed; both objects of spectatorship and safe in their sisterhood, in their shared womanhood.

      These Gratiae added lustre to a goddess already divine with beauty and radiance, and they closed in on her body; sharing a touch not even the incandescent and caliginous Vulcan could inhabit with his own wife; sharing a space not even the mercurial and warmongering Mars could stay in with his lover. Only the Gratiae, washing, drying, caressing, anointing, dressing Venus; only they could surround her whole. In ancient tales from the Theogony, the fair–cheeked women dripped love from their eyes, a “limb–loosener” bestowed to any who caught their gaze, a glance of pure ardour. When we see them now, however, these sisters exude love only for each other, beneath their brow are only loose limbs and tender smiles in a space, a love, of their own. They are believed to have been present at the birth of Venus, an unprecedented event in which a woman came not from man nor from woman, only from waves and foam; they followed her to her bridal chambers, a bond far closer than what she would form with her fiery husband; she may have wed a God of fire, but she only stayed truly alight to her Gratiae.

      If you let your eyes linger at their touch, you will see how they unite in pleasure; not sexual, but beautiful; blossoming; poised. The Greek imagined the pleasure of charis as something which could never be entirely private, because its enjoyment flourishes as something mutual, something shared, something reciprocal. These women do not see us. These women do not acknowledge us. Whether they are even aware of our presence, aware of being watched, is unknown. They are absorbed in a gaze of their own, and not even the man–child at their feet is acknowledged; even as the son of their absent mistress, he is not worthied the space. They are silent, like the string–less harp resting against Cupid’s thigh, and yet they communicate with one another, and each other only; modest smiles and knowing eyes aimed only at each other, aimed only at their sisters. If they were to speak, would it be in wispy voices of those who know that they are not alone in their conversation, who know that everyone wants to hear them? Or would they talk freely, unconcerned as if they were alone in the room, in the building, in the world? It does not matter; we will never know. They will never share their space with us, and we must stay lingering, longing, outside.

      These sisters seldom leave each other’s side; not Botticelli nor Rubens, neither David nor Thorvaldsen dared separate them; bound forever in marble or on canvas. Since their early beginnings, they were three women sharing one space, scarcely ever seen without a lingering touch; almost as to reassure themselves that they have not been separated by the violence, which mythological women so often suffered from.

      We long to see them, for that is the power of the Gratiae; the inerrable ability to entice, to provoke a response. They themselves cannot be enamoured with the same need, but we beg and hope for it nonetheless; for them to be as enraptured and spellbound by the grace, their beauty, their shared pleasure that we are somehow not afforded. We long to join their intimate space; be caressed and caress; be bare and safe; be exposed and enclosed. Yet, they are as separated from us as the cool, smooth surface of marble against our touch; no matter our warmth and want, their intimacy is sealed.