I am afraid for the world tonight. Whirling, as you say, on the edge of the universe instead of resting stable in its center under God’s watchful eye, we are not central to God’s concern. Things happen. We take missteps without knowing we have done so, and cannot go back. How difficult it is to rely on our own best selves for the issues of our small lives in order to leave the Father of us all to concern Himself with greater matters.
Take care, amico mio. Although you say that Pope Urban has great affection for you, Rome is as ruthless as I discovered it to be in my youth. Do not think, in your country villa with your citron trees, that Rome’s fingers cannot extend to Tuscan hills to pluck its most illustrious fruit. One pope is not all there is to the Roman hand.
Yet, even while I say this, I know that you will speak truth as you see it, though it might bring you to danger’s edge. With your permission, therefore, if only to ease my concern for your well-being, I will ask my trusted friend, Sister Graziela at Santa Trinità dei Monti, to pray for you.
Ever yours,
Artemisia
I heated water and washed my hair and Palmira’s in the stone sink.
“Ouch, you’re digging too hard,” she cried.
“Doesn’t it feel good to have your scalp scratched? Makes you feel more alive.”
“But you’re hurting me. Let me do it.”
Reluctantly, I stepped back to relinquish this pleasure of motherhood, but I couldn’t take my eyes away from the sweet, slender taper of the back of her soapy neck.
“Let’s go see the sisters today,” I said. “I want to give Graziela some pigments. Take your embroidery to show to Sister Paola. If she isn’t busy, she can teach you a new stitch.”
“She knows how?”
“Of course. She’s made beautiful vestments for the monsignori. With gold thread, too.”
I braided her hair wet so it would keep the waves, and I wound the braids on top of her head. “There. Now you look like a little lady.”
We found Graziela sitting on the L-shaped bench in a corner of the cloisters, doing nothing. I’d never found her doing nothing before. “Is she praying?” I asked Paola.
“No. Just brooding.”
Her face came alive when she saw us.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“I am as God wishes. Did you find a place to live?”
“After some trouble. People still remember. It’s been thirteen years and they still remember.”
Graziela looked with concern at Palmira and then back at me.
“I told her. She knows.” I sat down next to Graziela. “People didn’t want to rent to us. Yesterday we went to Cardinal Borghese’s casino to see my father’s work, and the cardinal’s clerk was rude to me, right in front of Palmira. He asked if I came back to Rome for more rape. People are still beasts here.”
“Those with more sublime faith than ours would see even in this, the working of His loving hand.”
I looked at her in disbelief. Where had her compassion gone? “He said I painted out of my own whoredom! Where is God’s love in that?”
Immediately Paola tried to get Palmira to go out to the herb garden with her, but Palmira plopped herself decisively on the other angle of the bench and Paola sat beside her.
“God’s love is in how one reacts to that,” Graziela said. “When Constantine was told that the Roman rabble had stoned the head of his statue, he raised his hands to his head and said, ‘How remarkable. I don’t feel the least bit hurt.’ A woman your age whining over what some mean-spirited clerk says is not an attractive picture, however you paint it.”
I was hot with embarrassment for her saying this in front of Palmira.
“Look what you’ve done in those years,” she went on. “You’ve lived in three magnificent cities and seen the greatest buildings and sculpture and painting in Italy. You’ve had the experience of love with a man. You bore a beautiful, healthy child. You have earned your own way and had your talent recognized by one of the most prestigious courts in the land. Other women would thank the Lord on their knees for even one of those things.”
Palmira looked from Graziela to me. I felt small and selfish. “I know. I know.”
“I had hoped you would have let that go, Artemisia.”
“I thought I had, until my father betrayed me again, in Genoa.”
“So? There’s got to be a time when daughters tear themselves loose from their father’s shortsighted mistakes. Believe me. I know.”
I felt the reminder of her own father’s betrayal as sharp and hard as a tack in my throat.
“I wouldn’t wish resentment on my worst enemy. It’s a killing thing. Don’t tell me you haven’t progressed beyond that in thirteen years.”
“I have.”
“Then sit up straight and tell me what you’ve learned.”
“From what?”
“Start with yesterday. Borghese’s casino.”
“Stupendous. It’s a ceiling fresco of musicians and listeners on an illusionary balcony.” I saw it again in my mind and it made me proud.
“Yes. And . . .”
“Father and Agostino painted together magnificently. Father could never do that complicated architectural perspective without Agostino, and he knew it. He would have ruined the project and his career would have been over. He had to end the trial.” With an even voice as free of hurt as I could make it, I added, “He sacrificed my reputation and art for his.”
Graziela searched my face.
“I’m not saying whether it was a despicable or a noble choice, only that it was a choice that showed a willingness to pay the inevitable price.”
“Given a similar choice, wouldn’t you have done the same?”
I watched Palmira swinging her legs.
“Yes.”
“What does that tell you?”
“At some times in our lives, our passion makes us perpetrators of hurt and loss. At other times we are the ones who are hurt—all in the name of art. Sometimes we get what we want. Sometimes we pay for another to get what he or she wants.” I looked at Palmira apologetically. “That’s the way the world works.”
“And forgiveness?”
I uncrossed my ankles, planted my feet as if at the edge of a precipice. “I learned that forgiveness is not easy.”
“But it’s possible.”
“Yes, it’s possible.”
After a moment, I said to Palmira, “Show Sister Paola what you’re working on.” She lifted her embroidery out of our drawstring bag.
“Ooh, that’s lovely!” Paola said, and engaged her by naming stitches after saints.
I reached into the bag and brought out the small cakes of pigments wrapped in paper. Graziela’s eyes welled up as she opened them. “They’re beautiful colors, and they’d make brilliant pages. It’s just that. . . without seeing anything new, I keep painting the same things.”
I understood that. Art builds on art. I’d be stifled and repetitive too if I couldn’t see new forms and new combinations of colors and new compositions.
“Tell me about Venice,” Graziela said. “Paint a picture for me right now.”
Some quiet desperation in the forward lean of her body made me comply.
“In Venice every shape of pinnacle, dome, spire, cupola, and parapet rises above the rooftops—flat roofs with balustrades for viewing the city. Statues on one palace roof look across the canals to statues on another roof. Above the keystones of palace arches, the carved masks are tilted downward in order to be more visible from gondolas. Everything’s for show.”
Graziela’s unfocused eyes were staring at the paving stones in front of her but I felt sure she was seeing canals and cupolas. She curled her fingers toward her chest, urging more.
“Crooked alleys suddenly open onto hidden piazzas. Narrow canals turn unexpectantly. We were always lost.”
I looked to my side. Palmira was intent on learning a new stitch from Paola.
“Genoa was all right to be alone in,” I contin
ued more softly, “but Venice—every loggia, every bridge, every stone in Venice was designed as a setting for moonlit trysts, clandestine meetings, hot clasped hands.”
Graziela’s long fingers stretched beyond her black sleeve and rested on my knee. Palmira’s legs came to rest.
“And Florence?”
What was behind this urgency?
“Every small or insignificant church in the city has masterworks hardly seen that any other city would boast of as their opera più importante.” I gave her more detailed descriptions than I had in my letters in case she was searching for an idea for an illuminated page, but the more I told her, the more desperate she was for more.
Graziela scowled when I paused. “Tell me again about Masaccio.”
I looked at Paola for some guidance. She only winced and lifted her shoulders.
“What a genius. Masaccio wrenched my heart when I saw his Adam hiding his tortured face, and Eve wailing a cry that reached right into my soul. I couldn’t sleep the night after I saw it.”
“Was that your favorite thing?”
“No. Giotto’s bell tower was. Next to Santa Maria del Fiore, self-standing, taller than you can imagine, like God’s own reliquary reaching toward Heaven. It has rows of narrow arches separated by twisted pillars to give it lightness, and it’s faced with marble. In rain it has the sheen of white, rose, and pale green satin. Beauty enough to break your heart.”
“And Rome?”
“Rome you know.”
“Not anymore.” Her voice cracked. Shiny rivulets trailed down her cheeks.
Paola, Palmira and I looked at each other, perplexed, not knowing what to say.
Graziela shook her head apologetically. “The hardest thing for me is the confinement. Not to see the beauties of the world. Oh, I remember cypress trees and sunset on the Tiber—vaguely, as a blind person would remember them. But the beauties made by man are harder for me to conjure. They’re made by God too, you know.”
She tried to dry her tears on her wide, coarse sleeve, but they kept coming.
“Beautiful art is all around me, and I’m destined never to see it. To die without . . .” A burst of sobbing shook her.
Paola stood up in front of her, so that no one might see.
“Would it be such a crime for a nun to . . . It wouldn’t take away one dust mote of my love for God for me to see a carved fountain, or a loggia of marble figures, or a painted ceiling.”
Delicately Palmira put her hand on Graziela’s knee, just as Graziela had done to me. Her hesitant, soulful little gesture stopped up my throat.
“What I would do to see the view from that tower, or Eve wailing in the garden.” Graziela’s voice rose and trembled. “To feel the cool smoothness of a marble thigh, or the glide of a gondola. Just once before I die.”
The pity of her longing and deprivation made me feel I had been insufficiently grateful for all that I had seen.
The Mother Abbess and another nun came toward us under the arches. I uttered a warning. Paola turned, opened her arms to spread her sleeves, and walked toward them to divert their direction.
“What would happen if you just did it?” I whispered. “If we, the three of us, just took a walk? You’d come back, of course. Paola would unlock the door. What would happen?”
“I don’t know. Confinement and enforced silence for a while.”
“So? What’s more confined than you are already?”
A bitter chuckle. She sniffled and wiped her face with the back of her hand. “I’ll think about it.”
I took her hand in mine. “In the meantime, I have a task for you. I have a friend in Florence, a scientist, Galileo Galilei.”
“Oh yes. We’ve heard of him. Women in convents are not unaware of the controversies of the outside world. Cardinal Bellarmino—”
“Galilei needs your prayers, Graziela. For his protection. He is a learned and honorable man, and he does believe in God, regardless of what they say.”
She sniffled again. “I understand. I will.”
I kissed her on her forehead as I stood to leave, and when Palmira came to stand in front of her knees to say goodbye, Graziela kissed her on the forehead. Palmira tugged my arm for me to bend down, and, grinning, she aimed a noisy kiss on my forehead.
Outside the convent, Palmira and I stood on the high platform before going down the stairs.
“Do you think she will? Take a walk with us someday?” Palmira asked.
“I don’t know. I hope so.”
We looked down the Via dei Condotti and at the city’s rooftops. “Look, Palmira. That dome in the distance, the big one, is Saint Peter’s in the Vatican. This view is all Graziela ever sees.”
Apparently it was not enough. It wouldn’t be for me either.
“It’s so high up here,” Palmira said. “I love it.”
I was seized with regret for not having taken her up Giotto’s bell tower. I undid her braids. “Shake out your hair and feel the breeze. It comes all the way from Spain.”
I took the pins out of my own hair and let the wind loosen it.
“Look and look and don’t ever forget. Now, close your eyes. Here, give me your hand. And just feel. Can you feel the Earth move?”
“No.”
“Hold onto the balustrade and lean forward. Imagine us speeding through the sky like sparrows at sundown, like the bats over the river in Florence. Wooosh!”
“Yes! Yes, I can!”
I knew right then that no matter what happened in her life, she would be all right.
As for Graziela, I began to worry.
23
Naples
The stonecutters first, signora. The bishop’s orders.”
“But why must a painter wait until every lowly stonecutter has his due?”
“They have families to support.”
“And I don’t?”
The priest’s polished ivory fingernails fluttered just beyond his wide sleeve, as if to discount my claim.
“Have you forgotten, Monsignor, what the Apostle Paul declared? In Christ there is neither bond nor free, Jew nor Greek, male nor female.”
“I’m sorry, signora. Come again after All Saints’ Day.”
I wasn’t going to beg. I turned to Palmira, whose dark eyes burned, and gestured for her to go through the door. Outside, the Naples sun glared down on us.
“Mother, how could you just let him—”
“Ssh. Wait.”
I marched across the piazza leaving the church behind me, and snapped my hand over my shoulder at it as though shooing a fly. “Priests!” I said with a puff of air on the p. “Four years building a strong reputation among the patricians of this city, and this lowly priest thinks he can treat me like a common laborer.”
Palmira hurried to catch up. “What will you do?”
“I’ll have Francesco write to the bishop. Or I’ll write to him myself.” I addressed the air in front of me. “What do they want? Sackcloth and ashes? Repentance that I was born a woman? I’m glad I’m a woman, and I want you to be glad you are too.” I raised my voice with bravado. “Living as a painter would be too easy if I were a man.”
“Now how will we pay for my ball gown?”
“Little by little. Delia can keep the dress until I pay it all.”
“But Andrea’s ballo!”
“Andrea. Andrea. All I’ve been hearing lately is Andrea, as if he arrived fully formed and gorgeous, a mortal Adonis standing naked on a seashell.”
One look at her young face drawn into desperate worry, and I softened. How pure and lovely it must be to be swept away by uncomplicated desire, dreaming of a fancy ball.
“All right. We’ll get the dress today and eat bread and broth until the bishop makes that churl of a priest pay.” I smiled at her wryly to let her know we wouldn’t starve. Her face relaxed.
We turned up a narrow lane that kept changing direction, threading up the crevices of rocky hills of the squalid neighborhood where Delia, our seamstress who charged less, l
ived. Tall mean houses were piled askew on top of one another, and yellowed bed linen flapped from balconies. We held our sleeves to our noses against rank odors issuing from puddles and doorways.
Neither of us liked Naples as well as Rome, where we had enjoyed four good years before the commissions ran out. Yet Naples was where Don Francesco Maringhi lived, my clerk and agent. He had secured commissions for me from the Duke of Modena, Don Antonio Ruffo in Messina, and the Spanish Count of Monterrey who was ruling Naples. Francesco was even negotiating the sale of my first Judith. He was a valuable aide and had become a good friend, and so we stayed.
An old crone whose flaccid yellow wrinkles were grooved with grime slumped on a stool under an arched passageway milking a goat. She would be a good model for some allegorical figure of age, but no one wanted realism now. Buyers saw no courage in age or unpleasantness. They didn’t understand that ugliness caught in real emotion would speak through the centuries. They wanted only ideal beauty. In another time I might have been able to paint her, but I had no more courage for invenzione. I had learned to bow to what paid for ball gowns and bread.
Delia’s house up a narrow stairway was cleaner than I imagined the others to be in this neighborhood. A doublet lay in pieces on a trestle table, and someone else’s unhemmed skirt hung from a ceiling hook. Palmira looked around quickly for hers.
“It’s ready and waiting, child. Don’t fret,” Delia said, and went into a rear room. She came back holding high a billowy silk gown the color of the Bay of Naples on a sunny day. It had slashings in the full sleeves to show puffs of white satin. Palmira’s enraptured expression was priceless. Delia turned it to show a row of small white satin bows down the back.
“How will we tie those bows just like that?” Palmira asked.
“You don’t need to. They’re sewn that way. Put it on.”
Palmira hurried to get off her bodice and skirt and stand in her shift with her arms up to let the skirt float down around her. Delia helped her on with the bodice, attached it with hidden hooks to the skirt, and pulled tight the laces. It fit perfectly.