Frederick had wanted her for years. Lanzo knew that. He had watched him crawl up the ranks, attaining each greased fistful of money with growing desperation to have her. What had he given up in her name? Security, certainly. For a hardworking man, his existence was pitiful. While the others of his age drank back oceans of claret and fine wines, he ordered bread and water. While others married young, wild, beautiful women, he stared at home at the walls, working long into the night. While others had bought mansions and villas across Rome and Paris, he had stayed in his concrete cell block near the banlieues. His suits were at least as old as the outdated works in the Louvre. No, Frederick was an unusual man. But then again, who wasn't unusual in love.

The auction had been a performance in itself. Great swathes of the rich and foolish had gathered, choking beneath a clatter of pearls and fine cologne. The chatter of the biting tongues bit noisily into the expensive high ceilings, echoing down, almost a caricature of the ridiculous scene below. Ministers were there ‘desperate not to be seen with their latest mistresses by the press’, the new money scholars, and the aging wives who prided themselves like sheep to the slaughter at their artistic knowledge, much to the woe of their husbands. And so this pantomime had continued, and no one would have very much noticed a middle aged man trembling nervously at the back of the room. He was holding his paper tightly in his fist, staring at the numbers meticulously. Lanzo knew him, of course, but in the hysteria he was a shadow, unnoticed, unimportant.

And so the auction had begun, painting after painting falling into the greedy, manicured hands of the rich below. The women of the Renaissance were sold once more, unnamed, naked and vulnerable to their mysterious owners. A couple of bowls of fruit and skies were exchanged for numbers and paper, and it seemed as if this slave auction of the past would continue on as any other. Then she came to the platform. Lanzo read out each one with strict impartiality, each name gluttonous with history.There was something indefinably beautiful about her, her defiance, her unusual complexion, certainly no blonde fantasy of Rembrandt or Honthorst. Her stare was both chilling and inviting. Why, to own that stare would be to own the impossible; the control of a real woman, rather than a Pygmalion doll. The audience of the auction had shifted uncomfortably. A woman could easily lose her husband to such a painting. So the bids had started, exclusively male, the ancient owners of wealth, leering down from the balconies. The price rose steadily, until a silence fell, and a hand shot like a bullet up through the stalls, clutching a mass of tattered paper. Frederick’s. The final bid was his, a colossal sum. The audience was silent. This tattered man, balding and in plastic glasses, had usurped her over all their wealth

So who was Frederick Bauer? Lanzo could tell you, although no one else can. He was German, in origin, although his stuttered french was more than adequate. No wife, no lovers, no mistress. No friends, no family. He was a lone man in this world, forever an outsider, sworn to a life in poverty while he slaved away for an enormous income. All for a woman. Did I say he had no lovers? Well, he had one. When he was eleven, he had first met Antonia, staring out of oil and water, her dark eyes blazing. No other woman had ever compared. He had visited her everyday, staring into the painting as if she alone could break the spell, to ruin her perfect image.

He hated her almost as much as he loved her; she consumed him, every waking minute of everyday, ever denying him a word from her lips or the satisfaction of a lustful glance. Lanzo would watch him when he visited from time to time, as his perspiring hands closed around her face on the leaflet, as he watched her for hours. He had one ambition in life; to own her. No amount of wealth or women could ever compete with such a prize. If she could not tell him she loved him, then at least he would have her alone, away from the gaze of all other male attention. A selfish idea, of sorts. But in his mind, he was saving her, saving her from the prostitution of the gallery, the voyeur’s vulgar gaze at her passionate purity. He deserved her, Frederick thought. Only he knew her as he did. They had boxed her up for him the following week, after decades of his waiting. He was a quiet man, and said little, but the gleam in his eyes was new and alive. Here was a man who had achieved his goal.

Lanzo had not seen Frederick again. The police had been to Frederick’s apartment where he lived alone only a month or so later, after a neighbour reported a suspicion of decay. They had found him, the papers said, surrounded by newspapers in a bare room, her painting hanging on the wall, still smiling. She seemed so out of place on the cheap 60’s wallpaper, in the bare little room. Frederick was still staring at her, a look of anguish on his face, not a penny to his name. Lanzo had sighed and folded the paper in half, so he could not see Antonia’s eyes. So he had never been able to own her after all. Still, she was back on the market.