It is a single 14-page sentence addressed to Venetian Renaissance painter Palma Vecchio.

It was translated by George Szirtes, and originally published in English by Sylph Editions, as part of their Art Monographs series.

[2] The models are uneasy with Vecchio, because unlike his fellow painters, he does not touch or have sex with them.

This moment of animal desire, the narrator theorizes, is the true subject of Vecchio's paintings.

He makes his models so uncomfortable because he is looking past their particular bodies to find desire absent from memory.