Angelica Lost and Found

Chapter 4. Stranieri Interlude

I have given some thought to the Naked-Woman-Menaced-by-Monster theme, of which Angelica and Orca are a prime example.

Always will she be there, naked on her rock, her beauty luminous in the stormy ocean dusk as she awaits the monster. Men lick their lips as the monster in each of them rises, roaring and whimpering, tasting the salt spray on her cool and trembling flesh. Angelica! Always will there be a hero to save her as the artist monsters take up their brushes.

Ingres does a chocolate-box version of the scene with a dainty hippogriff that couldn’t carry two bags of groceries, let alone a hero in full armour. Doré depicts a working hippogriff that still isn’t big enough. Redon gives us Angelica’s tiny glowing nudity in the heart of an empurpled chaos but fudges the hippogriff. Painter after painter takes the ball hoping to score a try with this subject. Some lose it in the scrum and others fumble a pass and end up with their faces in the mud. But Girolamo da Carpi scores with Ruggiero mounted on a hippogriff that will do the job and get him there and back. Here da Carpi has abandoned the smoothness of his Virgin and Child — this is a different matter altogether, a he-man picture for he-men. A bit of rough, this painting, with the emphasis on Ruggiero’s attack and Orca’s defiance, while Angelica, relegated to the outermost corner of the picture, cowers behind her rock.

Beauty in mortal peril! Why is this theme so dear to writers and painters and film-makers? Because such beauty as remains in our world always is in mortal peril. And the beauty is intensified by the terror that lives in it.

The hero, of course, gets the male lead in this part of the story; he has to. But my hero is the hippogriff, that burly flyer as reliable as a Lancaster to bomb the shit out of Orca and get Ruggiero on to the next instalment of Ariosto’s epic.

I, Guglielmo Stranieri, at my desk in the agency where I file and send out press cuttings, am not very strong and I am easily intimidated by anyone at all. And yet in some way Volatore and I are brothers. In my free time I live his life with him and word it on to the pages of this story. We need each other.