"Mirror, Mirror, Off the Wall"
Diego Fellaspaz

Another scion of the Spanish Depressionist school, young Diego hung around palaces until his talent was noticed and he eventually became a court painter, painting courts up and down the Spanish legislative system. On occasion he would throw in a portrait as well, and his good looks soon had him doing full-frontal boudoir portraits of the wives, sisters and concubines of rich and famous Spaniards. Every now and then he would remember to ask for money.

Fellaspaz soon tired of doing endless nude studies of Spain's most beautiful women, and longed to return to his preferred subjects: dwarfs, the deformed and the insane. His boredom is evident in several paintings of his middle period, most notably this one of Venus consulting her magic mirror and getting only a test pattern instead of the answer to her frequently-asked, tedious inquiry about the fairest of them all. 

The artist was further disillusioned when he discovered that the "young boy" he had rented at the slave market to pose as Eros was actually a randy and well-endowed midget. Fellaspaz would frequently return to his studio after a lunch break to discover Venus and Eros playing their roles to the hilt.

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