The Passion of Artemisia (30 page)

“I am deeply honored to escort such a pair. Palmira, you look like your namesake, the Greek queen, and your mother puts to shame the goddess who bore you.”

“You are too kind, Francesco,” I said. Palmira and I smiled together in the glow of his adoration, which dispelled my moodiness and reassured Palmira.

“Will you ladies dance the Spagnoletto tonight?” he asked.

“Palmira will. All week she's been practicing the steps while holding a dance book.”

“Mother! You don't have to tell that.”

“It's only Francesco. It's all right if he knows.”

The palace was lit with torches on the roofline and at the
entrance which was crowded with carriages, their lanterns flickering. A pale yellow glow issued from the palace windows. A liveryman opened the door of our carriage and greeted us. Blithely Francesco got out and offered his hand for us to step down. “My beauties.” With one of us taking each arm, he ushered us to the door, humming.

Palmira asked him, “You're not going to hover like an uncle all evening, are you?”

“On the contrary, I suspect I'll suffer the loss of you as soon as we step inside.”

Two palace doormen opened the double doors, and suddenly music, light, perfumes, and a hundred voices poured out. Up the stairs the great hall was ablaze with candles, the crystal sconces reflecting pinpoints of light. Musicians played violins, cellos, and a bass viol at one end of the room, and guests gathered around long tables laden with trays of meats and other delicacies.

The postures of people shifted when Palmira glided into the hall. From the crowd, Andrea bolted toward us. “Signora, signor, welcome.” He kissed my hand, but in an instant, his eyes were fastened on Palmira. He executed a low, elegant bow. “
Che bella.
I am honored.”

Dressed in midnight blue, with his black hair slicked back and parted down the middle, Andrea looked suddenly older than when I'd seen him last. He offered Palmira his arm to make a
passeggiata
around the hall, and Francesco and I followed at a respectful distance, greeting those people we knew, paying our respects to Andrea's parents and the Count and Countess of Monterrey, and watching the dancing.

The Spagnoletto was the highlight of the evening. Every time the musicians played it, more foursomes joined in. Francesco and I watched in admiration as Palmira and Andrea completed one quadrangle. One moment the four were in a circle with hands joined, doing quarter-turns one way,
half-turns the other, the ladies' skirts billowing about them while they gave flirtatious looks first to one man and then the other in their quadrangle. The next moment, after a rapid leap sideways, a flourish and a seductive lunge, their four hands were joined in a pinwheel. Palmira was graceful, coquettish, and captivating.

Later we saw Palmira and Andrea slip out to the balcony and kiss under the moon hanging over the Bay of Naples like a plump, Egyptian fruit. To see my child do the very thing I yearned to do myself made me ache a little, tenderly, for her, for me, I didn't know. Perhaps the music, the gaiety coming after Galileo's letter made me too sensitive.

“No sadness on such as night as this,” Francesco urged.

“No. It isn't sadness.”

“Then what were you thinking of?”

“Palmira. She's like an apparition floating unknowingly into her future,” I said. “Here for too brief a time.” Francesco listened intently. “I've done the best I could for her, but the injustice I did to her in depriving her of her father and grandfather, the sudden uprootings, the long coach rides between cities with all our world packed into a few trunks, I'll pay for someday, here or hereafter.”

“How?”

“She'll leave me, for one thing, and I'll have to live alone someday.”

“Alone? That doesn't have to be.” He raised my hand to his lips. I withdrew it.

“Rumors, Francesco. I must be vigilant. Rumors hound me everywhere.”

“That poet in Venice? Loredan? He was only a rumor?”

“
Madonna benedetta,
he was only a boy with a hot imagination.”

“Rumors make me jealous, and jealousy makes me bold. You are still young. You can have another daughter.” He looked at me with fawn's eyes.

“I can hardly pay for this one. You must work harder, Francesco, to obtain larger commissions for me. Someday I'll have to produce a dowry, you know.”

As a gentle hint, I looked over at the homely black-haired Countess of Monterrey commanding a circle of women in the alcove near us. Francesco followed my gaze.

“Perhaps she would condescend to have another portrait painted, as a figure from Spanish legend,” Francesco said.

“You read my thoughts exactly.”

“That's
my
art, Artemisia. That's why you need me.”

“I see she even fidgets with those yellowed fingernails when she isn't sitting for her portrait.” I stifled a chuckle. “Once when she was posing in our rooms, Palmira ridiculed her behind her back. She draped her own head in a black shawl like a Spaniard, stretched out her face, sucked in her cheeks, widened her eyes and twitched her fingers. I had a hard time to keep from laughing right in the countess's face.”

Francesco smiled at me indulgently.

“You know, don't you, that in her portrait I heightened that dark ribbon of her forehead and separated her one eyebrow into two? It made her look less furtive for her grandchildren to adore someday.”

“Very intelligent of you. For that, she owes you a favor.”

Just then, the musicians called for a Florentine Venus Tu Ma Pris, the dance Lorenzo de' Medici had invented. I leapt forward to join another couple as the extra lady in the threesome. The room swirled with colors and the sweep of music. I felt Francesco's eyes on me during the entire dance. When it was over, he and Palmira and Andrea applauded.

Out of breath, I leaned against a pillar. The countess was standing across the room, momentarily unengaged.

“Yes. She does owe me a favor,” I said to Francesco. “Why don't you go see if you can collect on it?”

Dutifully he approached her and I turned away so as not to be found watching.

Ravishing and dreamy-eyed, Palmira took Andrea's arm to make another
passeggiata
around the hall. Other men watched her as she passed. When had she become a woman? Those extra-long walks along the bay, were they with Andrea? I must have been blind to the looks that passed between them at court affairs. She was as unwary as a lamb at the edge of a precipice, even after she knew about rape. I worried about her.

Besides warnings, what did I have to give her? The understanding of color and the principles of creating shape. The appreciation of beauty. An example of determination. And love. That above all.

So now, at eighteen, the very age when I was sweating in a Roman courtroom, she was queen of the ball—beautiful, confident, unstained, ripe for the picking. Free to make her own choices.

24
Bathsheba

I
f you're going to paint, then you'll have to learn the female nude,” I said just after I bathed one morning not long after the ball. “That's what they want out of a woman painter. Don Ruffo wants a David and Bathsheba. We'll do one together. Let's see if he can tell whether Bathsheba is painted by you or by me.” I put wood on the fire, took off my dressing gown, and positioned myself on a low bench. “Draw me.”

“Mother!”

The shock of seeing flesh, my flesh, so unexpectedly startled her, and for a long time she couldn't begin, couldn't even look.

“Forget it's me. Pretend I'm a hired model. Remember how you used to run in and out of the studio in Genoa when I was painting
Cleopatra
?”

“That was different. She wasn't you.”

“She was a fine model because she was comfortable being studied nude. And I am too. I have nothing to hide. This is the body that bore you,
cara.
” I paused and then added softly, “Take a look.”

Tentatively, she let her gaze travel over my body.

“Looser than you've known me bound in laced bodices, yes?”

She nodded.

“Is it too real a glimpse into your own future?”

“Kind of.”

“What you see is all right, Palmira,” I soothed. “It's just part of womanhood.”

She took a few strokes and then froze, gripping her pencil. “I can't.”

“Start by marking out the proportions, like any other drawing. Then begin at the head oval and work downward.”

She began again, slowly.

“Notice how the weight of flesh makes shapes asymmetric,” I said.

“I'm afraid of what will come on the page.”

“Be faithful to what your eyes see, and you won't have anything to fear. Don't try to compliment me. Don't ignore folds of skin. Let your eyes study what happens to a woman's nipples after she has nursed a baby. That's the story my body tells. We, you and I, are in the business of painting truth. Let them find the beauty in that.”

I was quiet after that, and eventually she became immersed in her drawing. It was a close, contemplative time, and for the weeks she worked on the sketches prior to painting, we spoke only in soft tones to each other.

One afternoon while Palmira was painting and I was posing for her, we heard a knock at the door. She opened it a crack and reached through.

“It was a courier,” she said, and handed me a letter.

It carried the seal of His Majesty's Royal Mail, in English.
I slid the handle of a paintbrush through the fold to break the wax. Father's script. I read it to myself.

Leave my clients I had worked so hard to get? Wrench Palmira away from someone she loved? I could not, would not do that to her again. I laid the letter on the glowing embers in the fireplace. A worm of incandescence crawled toward the word
alone.
Palmira looked at me curiously. “Nothing important,” I said, and resumed my pose.

As soon as the parchment burned to ashes, phrases sounded in my head.
Dearest . . . welcome you . . . I am alone
. The word
dearest
made me ashamed that I had destroyed it without at least showing it to her.

Only a few weeks later, when we were both painting, another letter came. He hadn't even waited the length of time a reply would take to reach him, had I sent one.

I felt my heart split. Just the word.
Papa.
It unearthed what I thought was dead to me. I saw him swinging me by the arms so that my feet flew over the tall grasses along the Via Appia on our picnics. Weeping as he told me Mother had died. Squeezing each other's hands in awe before the great paintings of Rome. Teaching me to draw the symbols from Ripa's
Iconologia.
Showing me when I was a mere child which pigments needed more oil, which needed less to make smooth-flowing paint. Which could be made ahead, and which would lose their suspension. Which should be ground very fine, and which left coarse to preserve their intensity.
Alchimista di colore,
he called me. Papa, who made me want more than anything to be a painter, and then made it harder to become one.

I slipped the letter up my sleeve and went back to painting.

Palmira groaned at her canvas. “It's not coming right.”

“
Cara,
the pleasure in painting
is
that hurting sense that you're not getting it right, and so you try something else, and you try and you try until you get it. It may not be perfect, but it's comfortingly better than when you started, and when that happens, it's one of the grandest feelings in the world, because it's earned.”

Her expression turned pitiful, and her eyes were moist. Maybe she needed to stop for a while. I set down my brush and read the letter to her.

“Grandpa!” she cried. The years dropped away. She grabbed the letter like a greedy child. “That letter you burned, that was from him too, wasn't it?”

“Yes.”

She glared at me. “Why didn't you show me? He says he's dying.”

“He didn't say that in the first one.”

“Still, you had no right not to show me.”

“What are we to do? Give up everything we've worked for? What about Andrea? Leave right now when—”

Palmira's hands flew up to her mouth. Alarm shot through her dark eyes.

“—when you're so happy? I wouldn't do that to you.” I laid my hand on hers.

“There's another side to your grandfather you don't know. I thought maybe I'd never have to tell you. He isn't thinking of us in that letter. He only thinks of himself.”

Palmira's face clouded. She had happy times with him in Genoa. “How can you say that?”

I spoke softly, evenly, factually. “He agreed to pardon my rapist because he needed him. They became friends again. How do you think that made me feel?”

She said nothing.

“Now that you're old enough to understand, I'll tell you something else. When I was your age midwives examined my pudenda right in court and he let it happen—sat there and watched right along with strangers who came for entertainment, because he wanted a painting back. He was holding out for its return. Otherwise he would have stopped the trial sooner.”

She said nothing.

“Is this the man we're going to give up everything for?”

Nothing. She didn't ask a question, didn't even tighten her brow. Not a single sound or gesture.

I scraped back my chair and stood up, still waiting for her to say something. I took the letter back from her, went into the other room and poured a glass of wine, sat there alone
and drank it all, quickly, three gulps. My cup of bitterness. I had a daughter with no feeling for others.

The letters and numbers of the date,
24 December, 163–,
were smeared and crowded together at the right edge of the paper so that I could not read the last figure. That was a bad sign for a painter who ought to plan spacing better. There was something pitiful about those disfigured numbers.

I read it again.
I am lonely. I am dying. Forgive a foolish old man. Help me finish.
Loneliness I understood. Dying I did not. Though I had painted it, and imagined it, I did not know it. Help him put a finish to what? It couldn't just be the ceiling fresco.

He wanted me there to help him die. It was permissible somehow for him, for anyone, to long to die in the presence of love, such as it was, such as he hoped it to be. I would want the same thing, to die in a daughter's arms, or a lover's. If a stranger were to be with me, that might be enough, if only for that person to hold Michelangelo's brush and stroke my temples with its softness, to remind me that one man thought me worthy of such a gift. We prepare ourselves for death by treasuring such moments when we feel that even the least of us has been necessary for the full expression of God. Maybe Father needed someone to whisper that in his ear, in Italian.

Let that man with the strange name, Ini-something, whisper it.

I went back into the main room. “Let's get back to work,” I said as gently as I could. I picked up my brush and tried to concentrate and let her work out her painting problems on her own. In a little while, Palmira slammed her brush down onto the table between us. I jumped at the noise.

“I can't do this. It's too hard,” she cried.

I looked at her Bathsheba. The proportions were right but the figure was wooden. Bathsheba's gesture was
meaningless. Palmira had been working on her face, but it conveyed nothing. My own daughter, and she had no gift for expression.

“You need to convey her emotion by defining the shape of her cheek with—”

“Lights and darks.” Mockery tinged her voice. She gave me a look I'd seen a thousand times—sharp, narrowed eyes, hardened jaw, throat stretched taut—the look I'd hoped time and teaching would dispel.

“Well, then, you already know this.”

“Yes, but I can't
do
it. Not like you can.”

“You will.”

“When? When I'm thirty? I don't want to be married to painting like you are.”

“Think what you just said!” My voice turned shrill.

She looked sheepishly at the bottom edge of her painting.

“All right. Decide first what you want her face to convey, and then we'll find a way to express it. You know the story. What kind of woman was she, displaying her voluptuous body to David? What has she just been thinking?”

“I don't know!” Her hands flew up like Cesare Gentile's. “I can't make up something like you can. I don't care.”

“Enough. You don't care enough. But to be a painter, you've
got
to care for people, and for their feelings. You've got to understand human feelings in order to convey them. And—you—don't.” I snapped my brush at her once for each of the last three words.

“How do you know?”

“Because I tell you about the humiliation and pain of my life and you say nothing. Nothing! You have no sense for other people, for their pain or the drama of their lives.”

“That's different. It's people in paintings I don't care about.”

“People are people whether they breathe now in front of
you or lived a long time ago. You've got to care for each person you paint as if she were real, as if getting her expression right and true in that painting is the most important thing in the world at that moment. If you can't care for a real person standing before you, then how can—”