The Passion of Artemisia (18 page)

“I have another daughter too, and a son. Their mother and I are cordial, but have never lived together. She's married now and lives in Padua.”

I shifted my gaze discreetly from the candies to his face to try to discern his feelings toward her, but his eyes were unreadable.

“We've spoken too much about my work. Tell me about yours,” I said.

He studied me warily. “I believe you have a mind open to the universe of the eye, not cramped by the dictum of authorized belief.”

“An artist's job as well as a scientist's is to study the universe of the eye.”

“Then I shall tell you, though my detractors oblige me to be circumspect in pronouncing the results of my work as anything but theory.” He leaned forward and spoke quickly. “By the magnified vision obtained through my telescopes, I have observed that the moon has hills and craters just like our Earth, and the sun has spots.”

“Spots?”

“Fumes or vapors which show as darkened areas against the sun—and here's the point.” He set his elbows on the table and moved his hands to demonstrate, forgetting the heat. “They travel across its surface, which suggests that the sun rotates, stationary, on its own axis.” He stood the largest candy on end and swiveled it.

“Stationary! Then how can it rise and set?”

“That is only an illusion seen from Earth.” He held up his index finger, disregarding my shock in his urge to explain. “And finally, the planet Jupiter has four moons”—he set four smaller candies around the large one—“despite those theologians who claim that God would not have permitted the elements of the planetary system to exceed the
sacred number seven. We must acknowledge what our eye sees.”

“And not take the Bible literally?”

“Certainly not in all matters. I have set forth that caution in a letter to the Grand Duchess Cristina, who has her doubts, although her son supports me. I was his tutor. He feels some loyalty.”

“Can you see these moons in your glass? Maybe they are illusion too.”

“They do exist! My telescope shows them moving across the surface of Jupiter, proving that. . . rather, suggesting that heavenly bodies can travel around other heavenly bodies than the Earth.”

“That's astounding! A complete reversal. All we've ever been taught is that everything revolves around . . . us. Are you saying that all that our Holy Mother Church tells us isn't necessarily true?”

He raised his shoulders and pursed his lips.

“This is a wild and dangerous notion, signore. How can you be so certain?”

“Observation over time. And logic. If Aristotle himself were brought back to life so I could show him in my telescope, he'd rip his pages to bits as the primitive thinking of a narrow-minded egocentric.”

“I would like to see these . . . moons.” I pointed to the candies.

“I would show them to you tonight if the sky were clear. With clouds like this, they can't be seen. Sometime, when conditions are perfect, I'll show you. And the craters on the moon and the phases of Venus as well.”

“Phases?”

“From sickle to full round.”

“Then Venus is a moon!”

He smiled suddenly and tipped his head. “You might say that. A moon to the sun, which it orbits.”

“You mean to say the goddess of love waxes and wanes?”

His expression changed rapidly—a touch of pique for diverting his thought, to which I smiled, then momentary doubt as to whether to follow my thought or his, and finally the effort to regain his ground.

“The phases indicate, don't you see, that Venus revolves around the sun, just as our moon revolves around the Earth.” He set down a candy to represent Venus, and lowered his voice. “And because one planet travels around the sun, and since sunspots show the sun rotating on its own axis, it is possible that the sun holds all of us, all the planets, in its rotating grasp.” He moved them in circles around the larger one.

“We are moving?” I looked out the window, and could hardly grasp the concept. “I don't feel us moving.”

“Nevertheless, Artemisia, we
are
moving, and at tremendous speed. We only experience the illusion of standing still.” He said it tenderly, as if laying out the rules of walking for a child.

I pointed out the window. “Then why is that banner hanging down and not billowing sideways? That woman on the terrace, why isn't her hair blowing?”

“Other forces prevent that.” He leaned back in his chair. “You have a keen, original mind.”

I smiled at that. “Where art and science touch is the realm of the imagination, the place where original ideas are born, the place where both of us are most alive.” In spite of the incredulity of his ideas, an affinity of the mind drew us together. I had to look away not to show my admiration.

“Both the artist and the scientist would do well to have a healthy skepticism for traditional thinking,” he said.

“I commend you, signore, for your risk,” I said in a whisper.

“Galileo, please, not signore.”

We walked outside and stood by the balustrade looking off to a row of darkening cypresses like shadowy church spires pointing to his sky. “We are both taking risks,” he said. His expression clouded. “I must go soon and put my discoveries before the pope. To liberate him from bondage to Aristotle and Ptolemy, and to seek his protection in the event that I may need it.”

“Rome! You'll put yourself in the lion's jaw?”

“I'm afraid I am already there.”

“And shall I worry for you when you go?” I put out my hand to stop his answer. “Regardless of how you answer that, I know I will. You are too trusting. Anyone with new ideas has enemies. The papal realm is one that can twist your meanings against you faster than the snuffing of a candle. It is a dangerous city. Rome can brag about your ideas one day, and oppose them the next. Rome can admire strong individuals, but enjoy their fall.”

“How is it that you know this?”

“You forget. I am a Roman.”

We were silent a long time, each thinking about our own Rome in the coming darkness.

A few of the guests approached us. “No stargazing tonight, signore?”

“Heaven doesn't always grant us what we wish,” Galileo answered. He went inside and brought back a lute.

“The lute,” I reminded him, “is the highest of arts. Higher than painting. Higher than sobs. Play something melancholy. For your going away.”

The notes hung in the thickening darkness just as I knew this evening would hang suspended, like a star behind clouds, in my memory.

As people left, Galileo walked with me downstairs and helped me into one of the waiting carriages. He laid his hand on mine on the edge of the carriage door. “Be assured,
I will send you word as soon as I return.” His soft, burdened eyes glistened in the circle of light from a carriage lamp.

“In the meantime,” I said, “I'll try to feel the Earth move.”

14
Mary Magdalene

D
uring midday rest, I asked Pietro as he was lying down with Palmira half-asleep next to him, “What do you think is the primary requirement to be a painter?”

“To be a keen observer—first, last, and always.”

“And what if what the painter sees is unpleasant?”

“He must look anyway.”

“Do you mean she must not avert her eyes even though she flinches?”

“What's all this about?”

“My penitent Magdalen.” I gathered my lead pencils and a small bound album of drawing paper. “Will you stay here awhile with Palmira? I'm going to find that penitent woman.”

“What for?”

“I'm not sure. I'll know when I see her. I'll be back before you finish napping.”

She wasn't at Santa Croce. I circled the Duomo and the Baptistry. Why was it that she was gone right when I needed
her? I found her at San Lorenzo. I positioned myself so that she was in my line of sight between the horse and wagon.

Bare shins to the ground, rocking back and forth, the woman moaned her remorse, feeling a shame so sharp as to make her lose all propriety. What could she possibly have done that was so heinous as to earn her a lifetime of self-mortification? No one short of a tyrant deserved such unremitting agony. I cried there with her, for her, for Eve, for sorrows past, for sorrows yet to come. I put my pencil away. It was wrong to draw live pain. If there had been an artist at Bethany, it would have been wrong to intrude his chalk or charcoal on Mary Magdalene's weeping as she washed Jesus' feet. Some things were too raw for art until time dulled their sharpness.

I retreated between buildings and turned toward home.

If the moment of conversion leads to that abject misery, I didn't want to paint it, but the moment just before—now that was intriguing. The moment before renunciation when Eros still holds her, when her mind reels with what dark future she might have if she followed the drift of her life, at that moment she might dread having to give up things she still wants. Then she could still be in a gorgeous gown that these Florentines would love. Her unconfined hair could show a barely repressed sensuality. I'd give a suggestion of the wild abandonment of Donatello's Magdalen by having one unconsciously bare foot—not a pretty foot, a working woman's foot—show beneath the hem of her gown.

I walked faster, fired by the idea.

She must be ironic, contradictory, and ambiguous. She'd have furrows in her forehead, tears in her eyes, the upper and lower eyelids red and swollen in shame for her past, yet she'd still be in sumptuous silk, still wearing jewelry, just having prepared herself, with her mirror nearby, for the next philanderer. The ambiguity would be in her tears. What were they really for?

Near home, on the Corso dei Tintori, burnished gold silk
hung drying from the upper windows. Panels of it lay stretched on wooden forms. The ideal color for the Magdalen! A young woman was lifting more of it from a vat, and the sun reflected off the liquid and shone on her thick, bare forearms. I watched her awhile, a big, beautiful, golden-skinned girl, broad-shouldered, curly-haired, with her face screwed up in an expression of agony. If I could get her to look that way again and gaze outward instead of down into the steaming vat . . .

I approached her. “That color is gorgeous. Doesn't it make you love what you're doing?”

“No, signora. Would you like to breathe ammonia fumes and scald your skin day after day?”

Her eyes were red and watery. Perfect. It would look as if she'd been weeping.

“What would you rather do?”

“I'd rather weave, or stitch.”

“Something sitting down?”

“Ah, yes.”

“How would you like to get paid for just sitting still?”

She eyed me suspiciously. “I'm a good woman, signora. I'm not a—”

“I'm a painter. I'd like to paint you. You are beautiful.”

She scoffed at that. “My father won't believe me.”

“Let me talk to him.”

She led me into the back of a narrow shop. His answer was a resounding no.

“Who would tend your vat?” he asked her, ignoring me, it appeared. I couldn't be sure. One of his eyes wandered away and gazed in another direction. I wondered how the world looked to him, and felt sorry if it careened off in a distortion.

“I'm sure you could find someone at one-third the cost of what she'd earn from me.”

“She won't take her clothes off, no matter how much you pay,” he snarled.

“On the contrary, I would like her dressed in a gown of that exquisite gold silk. The same as you have drying now. The color looks as though it was woven of filaments of pure gold. I'm sure it's the finest in the city, yes?”

“Of course it is. People in my family have been dyers here for two hundred years.”

“And wouldn't you like Maria Maddalena de' Medici, the archduchess herself, to know the dyer who produced so magnificent a color? It's for her that I'm making the painting. What is your name, signore?”

“Marco Rossi.”

“And your daughter's name?”

“Umiliana.”

“
Bene
. It's settled then.” I held out my hand. Scowling his suspicion, he slapped it as if I were a man. I smiled at him and turned to Umiliana. “Wash. Your hair too. Come on Monday morning. It's just down the Lungarno, not as far as Piazza Piave. Look for a wooden gate carved with the design of a lion's head. You'll see a square well and a fig tree in the courtyard. Pull the bell rope that has three knots in it.”

On Monday, Umiliana brought me a peach. I split it three ways, for Palmira, Umiliana, and myself.

“I am sorry, signora. I didn't know you had a child. I should have brought one for her and one for you.”

“Nothing to be sorry about. Look at this luscious color inside. Almost like the gold silk. A seamstress is coming today to take your measurements, and we shall send her to your father's shop to buy the silk.”

“That will make him very happy.”

“Your hair is so smooth today,” I said.

“Because I didn't work this morning. It's the steam that frizzes it.”

“Ah, but that's what I want. Hair a little out of control. Make sure before you come every day that you hang your head over a hot vat.”

She did, faithfully, though she didn't think it looked as nice. During the week I tried her in many poses, and she proved supple, curious, anxious to please.

Every day she asked, “Do you have the dress?”

Palmira was just as excited about it as Umiliana was. “Will it come tomorrow, Mama?”

“Don't worry,” I told them both. “It will come.”

When it was finally delivered and I laid it out on a cloth on the trestle table, Palmira jumped up and down, and Umiliana whistled through her teeth and stepped back away from it. Her eyebrows were stuck in arches high on her forehead.

I laughed. “
Dio mio
, don't be afraid of it, Umiliana. Here, let me help you put it on.”

A hush came over her as she quickly let her own clothing fall to the floor and raised her arms over her head. Palmira watched with big, envious eyes as I lifted the dress over Umiliana's head. When we had it fastened, Palmira could hardly contain herself. She squealed and shook her arms in admiration. “She looks like a queen,” Palmira shouted, and then curtseyed to her. Palmira waved her arm elegantly at Fina's worn velvet chair I had borrowed. “And this is her throne.”

“Bring my mirror, please, sweet.” Palmira skipped away and came back with it held importantly in both hands.

An abashed, shocked smile spread across Umiliana's face. “I'll never have a dress like this, you can be sure of that.”

I tugged down the neckline to bare one shoulder. “Nor will I, probably.”

“What will happen to it when we're finished?” Umiliana asked.

“Oh, I'll have to sell it, I suppose.”

“Seems like a lot of trouble just for a painting.” She
trailed her finger over the braid on the bodice as she gazed into the mirror.

“Not when it's so important to the message of the painting.”

“I wish Giorgio could see me in it.”

“Giorgio?”

The dress had made her bold, but suddenly she retreated into shyness. “My—”

“Ah. Of course.” I smiled. “When we're finished, he can come to look at the painting before I deliver it. But that won't be for a long time.”

“Good.”

I seated Umiliana by a table, three-quarter view, with the folds of the luxurious, ballooning skirt taking up a good two-thirds of the painting. The wooden-framed mirror on the table gave me an idea. What if the mirror suggested not the woman she is now, but what she would become—gray and hollow, with a ravaged face, Donatello's version? Let the viewer guess whether that would be her if she didn't repent, or if she did. That would be the
invenzione
. I posed her left hand as if pushing the mirror away into a shadow, shielding herself from the ugly trick of time.

“Put your right hand on your left breast. Up further. No, not clutching, just resting there. Good. With your thumb in the cleft.”

“It feels silly.”

“It looks like you're distressed. That's just what I want. Now look as though it's a sweltering day and you have to put your arms into that steaming vat. How would your face look?” She screwed up her face. “Too much. Ah, yes. Like you've just heard a sad story. The saddest story you can think of. That Giorgio left you.”

Her face became distraught, but then she broke into a giggle at herself. “I'm sorry, signora.” She composed herself and tried again.

“That's good. Now look out instead of down. At that crack in the wall running down from the ceiling. Perfect. Hold.”