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Desire is vast. Vast, absolute, and oddly general. A big general liquid washing through the universe . . . casually ruinous—an ‘Aphrodite’ as we call that throw of the dice that comes up nine and changes the game.
—Anne Carson (speaking as Euripides)
Jean-luc godard kept asking Brigitte Bardot to wear longer skirts. He wanted her to lower the height of what he called the ‘sauerkraut’ of her teased hair, for her role in his film Contempt, scenes for which were famously shot at Curzio Malaparte’s villa on the island of Capri.footnote1 At first, Bardot refused. Godard later said he walked on his hands to convince her to reduce the height of her hair by a couple of centimetres.
Brigitte Bardot at Villa Malaparte became an iconic frisson: the blunt, brutal, blood-colored house on a rocky promontory accessible only by boat, the knife-edge of its flat and massive and sun-blasted roof, and this ur-female who cannot be mistaken for any other woman but herself, a prone sunbather on Malaparte’s terrace, nude with a book balanced on her ass. The merging of sex and stark brutal beauty is perhaps a legacy of Capri itself, which served as the playground for the Roman emperor Tiberius, who famously ‘directed’ scenarios in which boys swam after him and nibbled at his crotch, and when that grew tedious he flung slaves to their deaths from a high cliff. Capri is gorgeous but it’s also a rock. Steep, stark, and solitary. Its beauty is dialectical (indeed, Adorno and Benjamin took walks up its hills). Meaning you cannot fully enjoy the acid azure of the Blue Grotto without a double-dose of boat exhaust. And the view of Bardot’s rear is not complete without also glimpsing the prison bars over the windows of Malaparte’s lair. A political chameleon—ardent fascist-party organizer in the 1920s, testifying on behalf of Matteotti’s murderer; from 1943, liaison officer with the us invasion force; ultimately, member of the Italian Communist Party—Malaparte was sporadically out of favour with the Mussolini regime in the 1930s; during spells of internal exile, he conceived the plan of building his own retreat on Capri in which to enjoy future rounds of house arrest.
Cy Twombly spent the summer of 1960 on the volcanic island of Ischia, due north of Capri, where he produced a series of drawings that were exhibited in Malaparte’s villa in 2015. One would not naturally associate Bardot with Twombly, except that both were positioned as the striking content of this most strange and magnificent architectural frame. And yet squint, and the nested squiggles of bb’s teased hair become the whirls and scribbles of Twombly’s great sly talent, his draw-in-the-dark gift to produce light. Her butt, bare but for that book, and the butts that proliferate in Twombly’s delicate pencil drawings, seem to dwell in the same world. That is, the classical one and the modern one, a diaphanous realm where space and time merge onto one plane of depth, which can hold, or at least suspend, nude body parts, blithe and stylized literary references, the sun and the water, the Tyrrhenian Sea.
‘I’m a Mediterranean painter’, Twombly said. ‘I like that idea of a northerner in the Mediterranean, but more blood and guts.’ Malaparte’s foil in his brilliant novel The Skin is another northerner in the Mediterranean, Colonel Jack Hamilton, who arrives with the occupying American army in Naples in 1943 and brings with him the sweet smell of Virginia tobacco. He’s an American in love with Europe, a Southern gentleman steeped in Virgil and Xenophon, who quotes Proust, Pindar and his African-American childhood nanny. Colonel Hamilton is a send-up but the coincidence remains. Another Virginia gentleman, also in love with Europe, also referencing not just Virgil but the kind of old-fashioned education that includes Virgil, Twombly arrived in Italy just a few years later. And in fact he married into a family that Malaparte mentions in The Skin, the Franchettis, of whom a certain Mimi was famous on Capri in the 1910s when the island was, if one is to believe Compton Mackenzie’s account, overrun with lesbians.
Who can believe anything? What people say matters, whether it’s anchored or not in dreary ‘proof’. Malaparte claims in The Skin that he hosted General Rommel at his house on Capri. And when Rommel asked if he designed the place himself, Malaparte gestured toward the huge picture window and said no, that he did the scenery.