Work Text:
“I do marvel at your audacity, though, signorina,” Violante says.
They’ve been arguing for the past hour, or close to it, on whether or not Violante knows how to paint a good lion. Katherine is flushed, and at some point in the argument her hair has become as messy as a mane despite the fact that they have yet to physically engage. She is very beautiful and also quite infuriating.
“You come into my house on the pretense of seeking painting lessons, and do you speak of painting? No, you rant and rave about my perfectly brilliant lions. I rather suspect an enemy sent you simply to goad me.”
“I came on my own behalf, and I would have been willing to accept painting lessons if the painter were competent.”
Violante snorts. She can’t take any more of this nonsense. “Well, then, if you think you know everything about lions, you may try to paint one yourself, if you like! I am the best painter of lions currently alive, possibly the best in history—I doubt you can do better than I.”
She hopes that Katherine will simply give up at this point, and they can put all of this frustration to better use than futile argument. But Katherine mulishly stalks over to an almost-empty canvas—freshly gessoed and slightly sketched on, but no more—and grabs a palette of Violante’s pigments and a brush.
“What are you doing now? You’ll waste my materials.”
“Then you are afraid to see how I might rise to your challenge? I can most certainly paint a better lion than you. Frankly, anyone could.”
“Fine, then! But when you are done, I do expect you to pay for this lesson and for the materials, and I will also be forced to paint over your abysmal lion—for I can only picture how you’ll butcher the form.”
Evidence of Katherine’s lack of experience is that she does not bother to sketch out her painting beforehand, but goes straight into the painting. A long, loping line in gold, and then another underneath. Violante has no strong objections to how Katherine forms the lion’s back. The legs are weak, almost stickish, but she curbs her tongue, figuring she can save all her criticism for when Katherine finishes, at which point she’ll be as scathing as she likes.
But she loses all patience when Katherine gets to the face.
“No, no! What are you doing here? That is not at all the shape of a mane—and your nose looks like a triangle,” she adds, as Katherine adds a nose that is practically a dot.
“That is what a lion’s nose looks like.”
“There’s no nobility in a flat, black, miserable little nose. Here, I’ll improve—”
She grabs at the brush in Katherine’s hand, and when Katherine fails to relinquish it, she grabs Katherine’s hand instead. Crushing Katherine’s fingers, she struggles to shape a more aquiline nose on the lion’s face. Katherine convulses, and the brush goes skittering across the page.
“You fool of a human! Look what you’ve done now. After all I did to tutor you,” Katherine says.
“Now you think you can play the teacher? Your painting was already as weak as any I have seen by a student in my vast experience. The reason you think I paint bad lions is because your idea of a lion is a foul beast rather than a noble being.”
“If you only knew how incorrect your words are—but give me the brush back, I’ll fix it.”
Violante still having Katherine’s hand in hers has no desire to let Katherine continue this farce of a painting class. She tries to wrestle it away again, and streaks of gold and black scissor over the canvas, here and there and everywhere.Katherine has the upper hand and will not let the brush get near the lion, and the background, instead, is in chaos. At last she throws Violante off with a surprising surge of strength, shoving her to the floor. The brush is cast aside, and Katherine looms over Violante, looking almost bestial herself in her rage.
“I am moved to passion,” Katherine says, voice a growl. “Few have moved me like this. Now I may bite your head off, or I may bite your lips—you may choose as you like.”
Violante laughs and pulls Katherine into a kiss.
It has been one of the most tempestuous lessons she has ever given, but in the end, it is as her brother Angelo always says: nearly everyone who comes to Violante saying they want to learn painting actually wants to learn other things.
But when they are done, and Violante is in a marginally better mood, Katherine needs must return to the subject of lions. “I have a good reason for knowing you are wrong about lions, you see, and since you refuse to see reason, I will show it to you.”
“If you must,” Violante says, thinking to herself that whatever reason a provocative amateur like Katherine has, it’s probably bullshit.
Katherine smiles, and she’s still smiling when she transforms into a lion.
She has a lot of teeth.
Violante steps back hurriedly. “…Katherine?”
The lion growls. But the ire in its voice is definitely more Katherine-annoyance than leonine hunger. Violante feels slightly relieved.
“I see why you were so oversensitive about lions, then,” she says, “but you do know that being a lion doesn’t necessarily make your opinions on art more valid—oh!” The lion growls again. She puts her hands on her hips. “And intimidating me won’t change the truth either. If you want, I’ll try to draw you, and we’ll see if you find my new attempt more satisfying. But I maintain that you simply do not understand anatomy…”
In the year 2019, there is a discovery of a previously unknown work by Violante Malatesta. It is arguably of a lion. It does not look much like a lion, to be fair, but none of Malatesta’s lions are particularly anatomically correct. Some people say this is because she had no access to real lions, despite the fact that there were lions in her city’s royal menagerie. It’s an ongoing scholarly debate.
This lion is different because it is not only oddly shaped, but stylistically strange. The background and the foreground both have spasmodic lines on them, especially concentrated in the area of the lion. Deep gashes of black paint mutilate the lion’s side, and the face is so twisted that one cannot discern its features.
The painting’s signature, however, is genuine, and its provenance is good, and the canvas and paint, chemically tested, all point to a legitimate Malatesta. There are discussions of what such a strange work means.
“Clearly it’s unfinished, or rejected. She overworked it and then, angry, painted wildly over it in a fit of temper and left it to lie in a corner of her house.”
“In that case, why sign it? Why keep it instead of throwing it away? No. What this is, is a sign that Malatesta was ahead of her time. This is a surreal lion. A painting of the ferocity of the predator. Perhaps, in the end, we were wrong to take Malatesta’s lions literally to begin with—they were only ever meant to be symbols.”
It is a debate that will never be fully resolved.