No wonder not only his paintings, but also his drawings were exhibited in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. After seeing them, I decided to also illustrate my book with some of his drawings.
“But first, I will tell you about the women in my life—my wife, my mistresses, and Rudolf’s women. I captured many of them for my master in tales of gods fit for emperors and mortals alike. We were often together, the Emperor and I, when we were young and my studio was in the castle. Then, even his Majesty sometimes picked up a brush on a whim, when we lived a life where nothing was real except for the paints and brushes that created an illusionary world around us. Rudolf didn’t care whether Venus or Minerva grew under my brush. He was God, the Lord of the Habsburg Empire over which, in his mind, the sun never set.
And Rudolf loved women. We both loved women, and at times each other.
Day and night, their curves consumed us, the plump dimples and hollows, the soft, warm, tingly flesh. No emperor had ever befriended a commoner the way he blessed me by giving me goldsmith Muller’s young daughter in marriage. Christine and I lived happily in the first of five houses I bought by the castle steps. Alas, not long enough.
I am getting ahead of myself. I will tell everything, leaving nothing out…”