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Show 107 their tarnish softened what would otherwise be an abrupt contrast, but he couldn't decide whether they worked compositionally better together or separately and if separately at what distance from each other and on which side of the goblet or whether foreground or back. For the time being he left them in the middle, on either side of the goblet's stem, and concentrated on the placement of the lute and the statuette. These posed a problem that he hadn't thought about when he was selecting and discarding. They were both so much bigger than the goblet and the comb and brush that they had to go behind them-that much was obvious-but as soon as he put them there he could see that he had two separate still-lifes, a large one and a small one, and that the large one, even though it was the background one, was more interesting. The lute in particular grabbed the eye. It was actually only the corpse of a lute; it had no strings, its rose had been broken out leaving a wounded mouth in the belly, it was split in two places and it was missing at least half of its tuning pegs. He had no idea where she had gotten it. It dominated even the statue of the nursing mother which, now that he looked at it closely, had problems of its own. It was smooth, bulbous, and so starkly white that he was not sure he didn't have, finally, three still-lifes sitting in the same chair. She had a disagreeable face too, he noticed. It was pinched and squinting, as though the mold had been held by the nose during casting. The infant at her breast was shapeless, the dome of its head barely peeping from its mass of blanket, from the other end of which a small leg projected, whose foot disappeared into his mother's abdomen. She did not, of course, have to be represented as a nursing mother, or even as a plaster statue, or for that matter as an object at all. The angle of repose that she embodied was intrinsically pleasing, and she could, if necessary, enter the composition as the gesture itself, reduced to its |