THE HARP

Stunned, the eye contemplates the images: musical instruments have been turned into instruments of torture. He sees a group of the condemned hanging upside down on the strings of a harp, tormented by reptiles; he sees them tied to the fret of a lute and imprisoned inside a drum, he sees them sodomised by a wooden flute and their buttocks tattooed with Gregorian tetragrams. They sing in the painting naked and extravagant. They sing to lessen the terror. Puzzled, we ask ourselves: could this be our own punishment? What was our crime?