The Passion of Artemisia

  Palmira shot me a look of panic, not knowing what to do, and we all laughed.

  “He’s absolutely unpredictable,” the woman said in an indulgent way.

  “My wife, Bianca. Signora Gentileschi and Signorina . . . ?” He bent down to Palmira amiably.

  “Palmira,” she said, without letting me introduce her.

  “And Signorina Palmira Gentileschi,” he said, grinning.

  “We are pleased to have you both,” Bianca said. An elegant, dark-haired woman, she wore a dressing gown of wine-colored velvet with a pomegranate design cut into the nap.

  “Palmira and I are heartily grateful, and trust our efforts will meet with your pleasure.”

  “These are our two daughters, Theresa and Margherita.” She motioned for them to come forward.

  They were older than Palmira, beautifully dressed, but not ravishing beauties. Against the wall, the whole serving staff lined up to be introduced. Signora Gentile called forward one young woman who was rolling down her sleeves. “This is Renata. All day she’s been rushing to the windows every time a coach passed. She will tend to your needs.”

  Renata curtseyed, and Palmira, confused again, curtseyed back, which made us all laugh.

  “You must be tired from your journey,” Bianca said. “Please, take your ease.”

  Renata took us up the wide marble stairs to our quarters. Palmira tugged at my skirt. “We’re going to live here?” she asked in wonder. Renata giggled.

  The outer room was large, light, and high-ceilinged with two tall windows. “This is your studio,” Renata said with an exaggerated sniff.

  “I can tell.” I smiled when she pinched her nose against the smell of turpentine. There were three sizes of easels, an adjustable stool, a long trestle table, a chaise longue, and various chairs, pillows and drapes for posing. “A room just for painting. How wonderful.”

  “Signor Cappelini left it a mess. Paint on the floor, oil spills, and smudges of charcoal everywhere, and him being here less than a year.”

  I crossed myself in a frantic, exaggerated way. “Madonna benedetta, let me stay longer than he did.”

  She laughed, which is what I wanted. “He was an old grouch. We’re glad you’re here instead.” She opened double doors to a bedchamber, equally spacious with fine bed linen, two cassapancas for our clothes, and a furnace.

  “What’s this?” Palmira asked, pointing to something that looked like a square box with a round lid.

  “A closestool,” Renata said.

  Palmira gave her a steady opaque look.

  Renata lifted the lid. “A chamber pot.”

  Palmira’s mouth dropped to a tall oval. “Padded?”

  “Only two like that in the whole palace. I’ll leave it to you to guess where the other one is.” Renata turned to me. “Will you be wanting help to put your things away?”

  “Later, perhaps.”

  She curtseyed, blew Palmira a kiss, and left.

  “Look, Mama, a big mirror.” Above a low table laid with a linen cloth, a vase of irises, and a wash basin hung a tall polished metal mirror. “I can see myself.” Palmira spun around, looking over her shoulder at the swirl of her skirt.

  I did not look into the mirror to see my face worn by travel. Tomorrow I would look. Today I wanted just to lie flat on the unmoving bed, rest my aching back, and be grateful I had solid ground under me once again. I sat on the edge of the bed and took off my shoes. “The bed is plenty big enough for both of us.”

  With a knock on the door, Renata, her face wrung with worry, came in again carrying a tray with green glass goblets and a pitcher of water, followed by another servant bearing a majolica platter of sweetmeats, pears, and walnuts.

  “Please, signora, don’t tell Signora Gentile. I was supposed to have this here when you arrived, but I—we were trying to wave that smell out the windows.”

  “How?”

  “With your bed linen,” she said shamefacedly. The other girl giggled. They set down their trays and the two of them pretended they were trying to capture air by lifting a sheet like a billowing sail and running with it to the open window.

  I laughed. “I wish I would have seen that. No, Renata, I won’t tell. What good would this lovely platter of food have served before we came? Thank her please. And thank you too, both of you.”

  Renata blushed, curtseyed, and shooed the other girl out the door.

  I lay down and looked at the carved leaves and tendrils edging the coffered ceiling and felt all the evidences of welcome wash over me again. There was plenty of empty wall space in the great hall. This could last a long time. What would it be like to live with laughter in the house? I closed my eyes and felt my shoulders relax. It would be good for Palmira, good for me.

  The next morning Renata came early to summon me to Cesare’s reception chamber to discuss my first painting.

  “He certainly doesn’t lose any time,” I said.

  “Take it as a good sign, signora. He has been speaking of nothing else but you since he came back from Florence. When you agreed to come, he was so happy he gave his entire household a holiday.”

  I gathered some drawings to show him as a sample of my work. “A holiday?” She nodded energetically. “And what did you do on your holiday?”

  She looked down at her clasped hands. “I went to my favorite spot up in the hills above the city and tried to draw what you might look like.”

  “I certainly hope you made me more beautiful than I feel this morning.” I wrapped my hair in a haphazard fashion and secured it hastily with a comb.

  Cesare Gentile greeted me again with that wide spread of his arms which showed the embroidery on his dressing gown. “Forgive me if I called you too early. It is only a measure of my enthusiasm.”

  “I brought some recent drawings, just for you to take a look.”

  “I will be pleased to see them, but I already know your talent.”

  He looked at them with much interest, nodding and murmuring his satisfaction, and then ushered me out to the garden. We walked along the sandy path beside a flowering hedge.

  “First, as you know, I want you to do a female. A woman painted by a woman—so that you can see deeply into the life of her. You might know some secret that we men, you understand, do not. Second, she must be beautiful, but not too beautiful—in order not to incite a touch of envy in my lovely daughters. But beautiful enough so they see themselves as art, and valuable.” His hands stroked the air as if tracing sensuous curves. “And then, as you know, she must be nude.” He flung his arms wide. “Show us all the glory of woman.”

  “And the figure herself? Allegorical or historical?”

  “Historical, of course. Beyond mere beauty, art must tell us something.”

  “I quite agree. Might I do a Cleopatra reclining? With a mystery to solve? A beauty of the spirit as well as body? Suffering a loss as vast as Egypt?”

  “Doesn’t matter the subject. I am pleased to have any woman painted by you, the great woman artist of Florence.”

  It seemed like he cared more about my reputation, whatever version he knew of it, than my painting, yet he grinned so innocently. I had to wait and see.

  He pinched off a gardenia from a bush and handed it to me. I breathed its heady sweetness. “Beautiful and exotic,” he said. “Like your Cleopatra, no?”

  When I came back to my room, Renata was waiting at the doorway. “Would you like help with anything? May I put away your things?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  I considered a moment using her as a model. She had a natural, artless beauty—soft, gray, thoughtful eyes and a sharply defined, curvaceous mouth. But Cleopatra’s beauty was not artless, in fact was entirely self-conscious. Besides, the painting was a nude. That would be undecorous.

  “Where do you think I could get a woman to model nude?” I asked.

  “Easy. The whores along the docks.”

  “Which docks? The whole city is docks.”

  “At my brother’s tavern. I’
ll take you there.”

  A few days later when the Gentiles took Palmira on an outing in the country, Renata led me through twisted alleyways hung with drying laundry and alive with cats and rats. We made a sharp turn to a wider street incongruously lined with palaces, and came down a stepped pathway which opened onto the busy wharf and the gray sea. Under glowering skies men hoisted bales on ropes and rolled barrels along the docks. I spotted a short piece of old rope lying on the wharf and I picked it up. It would do for an asp. An old man sat on a crate nearby.

  “May I have this?” I asked.

  “Not mine to give.” He puffed on his pipe. “Take it.”

  Fishwives sold live eels and shimmery, golden-spotted bream from large glass tanks.

  “Live squid,” cried a woman holding a writhing one as proof.

  “Oysters and mussels here,” another woman shouted, leaning on her cart.

  “Frutti di mare,” a third woman called.

  “What’s frutti di mare?” I asked Renata.

  “You don’t know? You must try one,” Renata said. “They’re a Genoese specialty. Sea urchins.”

  Using tongs, the woman pulled a round, spiny purple thing out of her bucket, dripping with salt water. She split it with a knife, scooped out what looked to be a slimy reddish egg mass, not at all appetizing, laid it on an oyster shell, squeezed lemon over it and handed it to me.

  “You’ll like it,” Renata said.

  It slid down easily enough. “Tasty,” I said, though I didn’t want another one. I just wanted to please her.

  Renata’s brother’s tavern was wedged between a warehouse and a seamen’s lodging. In the smoky room, dark-skinned sailors with leathery necks and faces gulped ale and looked us over. One wearing a black beret, crimson cummerbund, and a gold hoop earring grinned and said, “Looking for work, eh? Plenty of it here for beauties like you.”

  “Zitto, marinaio!” Renata snapped. Her supercilious tone made him shrink back to his game of dice. It amused me that a servant girl had this commanding power.

  I went to the rear of the room while Renata spoke to her brother privately. He sent his tavern boy out. After some time, a parade of whores in orange, red, and purple skirts came flouncing into the room past the ogling men. Thin, gathered peasant blouses showed their unbound breasts. Some were too old, and I felt sorry for them. One wasn’t much older than Palmira, and I felt even worse for her.

  A dark, wide-hipped Moroccan sauntered in, swaying her full red skirt. “Pick me, signora.” She trailed her hands over her breasts and down to her waist, then leaned forward to show me more. I had the feeling that she teased men along the docks in the same way.

  A lighter-skinned brunette posed sideways and lifted her orange and green skirt. “I have been painted before, signora. I am Sicilian.” She raised her chin in a haughty way. Too much like Vanna.

  A beauty with her black hair pulled back tightly elbowed her way to the front. “I am a Spanish dancer,” she said, executing a twirl and a stomping step and clapping her hands above her head.

  “Aye, aye, aye,” another woman called, and the men joined in.

  The women seemed to know each other and were used to such robust competition.

  “And where are you from?” I asked a dark-haired woman whose expression was detached and wistful.

  “Genoa.”

  “Push up your sleeves please.” Her skin tone was pale honey. “Lift your skirt.” Her legs were beautifully shaped. “Look up a moment please. No, not with your head. With your eyes. Look worried and pleading. Now look peaceful.” Her face was wonderfully fluid and her figure just round enough. “What is your name?”

  “Giuliana.”

  “Will you pose nude?”

  “Yes, signora.”

  “Aye, Giuliana!” the Spanish woman cried in hearty congratulation, and thrust her knee into Giuliana’s backside, shoving her forward.

  Giuliana blushed. Renata explained to her where we lived.

  On the way home Renata said, “I think you picked the right one.”

  “Why is that?”

  “She’ll be easier to work with than the others.”

  Giuliana was not at all shy about undressing in front of me, and Palmira wandering in and out didn’t bother her. As I sketched her in various compositions—reclining to the right on pillows on the chaise longue, then left, I told her Cleopatra’s story—how rich and powerful she was, how captivating to men. “The queen of sensuality.”

  “I wish I knew her secret,” Giuliana said.

  “Don’t we all.”

  I drew her placing the rope to her breast, and then thought, no. That was too common. The asp wound around her wrist? With Cleopatra deciding the moment when she’d put it to her breast? A possibility.

  “Close your eyes a little, Giuliana. Make them just slits, as though you’re thinking hard.”

  “About what?”

  “Think as Cleopatra would think.”

  I turned when I sensed someone behind me. It was Renata carrying a tray of fruit, olive bread, cheese, and almonds.

  “Oh.” She backed away a few steps, but kept on looking at my drawing. “I’m sorry, signora, and signorina. I—”

  “That’s all right. You don’t mind, do you, Giuliana?”

  “No,” she said, keeping her pose, her eyes almost closed.

  Renata set down her tray. “It’s a miracle, what you do. To make her round. When I draw, it’s only a flat outline.”

  “It’s in how you shade it.” I worked a while longer to show her.

  “How do you know how to do that?”

  “By seeing where the light rests on her and where it doesn’t.” I could feel her studying Giuliana.

  “It must be a different way of seeing. Like you’re ignoring color and only paying attention to light and dark.”

  “Yes, that’s exactly right. But it’s more than that. It’s in the shading that you can give interpretation too.” I stood up. “That’s enough for today, Giuliana. Here, have something to eat before you go.”

  She stretched, shook out the arm she’d been leaning on, and then sat completely naked as she cut a wedge of pear and ate it.

  “Do you like posing?” Renata asked.

  “It’s all right. It’s nice here. I like the quiet.”

  “What do you think about while you’re sitting still all day?” Renata asked.

  “I’m supposed to be Cleopatra, so I think about what it must be like to love real love and to be loved back so passionately that men give away kingdoms for a kiss.”

  Renata’s eyes opened wider.

  Her frankness surprised me too. “Oh, you don’t have to be Cleopatra to think about that,” I said with a soft chuckle. “That desire is the naked truth of us all.”

  We sat a moment quietly, each thinking, it seemed, of our own versions of that love.

  “Easier for me to think it than for you to draw it,” Giuliana said softly.

  “Is that what you meant by interpretation? You have to draw thoughts too?” Renata squeezed her eyebrows together, overwhelmed by this vast new aspect of drawing.

  “It’s not impossible, Renata, but don’t be surprised if it takes a lifetime to learn.”

  Months later, after Giuliana had gone home one day and I was painting the asp’s head against Cleopatra’s flesh, Renata was drawing my composition. Palmira pranced in, waving a piece of torn lace Signora Gentile had given her. She stopped suddenly.

  “Ugh! Why is she holding that snake?” she asked.

  “It’s an asp. It’s poisonous. This is Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, Cyprus, Crete, and Syria, a very rich and powerful lady,” I told her. “She had two immortal loves in her life, Julius Caesar, who ruled Rome, and Marc Antony, who ruled Asia Minor.”

  “But why is she holding that snake?” Irritation edged her voice.

  “She’s going to kill herself by letting it bite her. Or maybe she already has.”

  Palmira shook her shoulders. “She’s rich and she wants
to die?”

  “She was defeated in war by a Roman emperor and didn’t want to be paraded through the streets of Rome on display. Rome has always loved a spectacle, especially of a woman humiliated.”

  “It’s dumb to want to die.”

  “Not always,” Renata said. “How would you like to have crowds shouting curses and throwing things at you?”

  Palmira shrugged. “Where’s the bite?”

  I considered each breast, an upper arm, even her throat. I hated to inflict a wound on the flesh I had painted so smoothly. “I don’t know yet.”

  “Maybe nowhere,” Renata said. “Maybe she just willed herself to die. Or maybe she loved enough in her life that she’s passing to the other realm . . . mystically . . . being called there by Marc Antony before the asp hurts her.”

  I liked that. I turned to Palmira to see what she thought.

  “She’s not very pretty,” Palmira said.

  “But she has beauty of the spirit,” Renata said.

  Palmira draped the lace around her neck and twirled around in a dance step Margherita had taught her. “That doesn’t count.”

  Cesare and Bianca loved the Cleopatra, framed it extravagantly and hung it prominently in the great hall. Later that day they came into the studio and saw me struggling to attach my Woman Playing a Lute to a wooden stretcher myself.

  “No, no, signora. You mustn’t,” Cesare said. “You’ll hurt your hands doing that—those wonderful hands that should only paint.”

  Was he making a snide remark or was it genuine? Did he know what he was saying? I didn’t think so. It wasn’t in his nature to hurt.

  “I’ll send in a joiner tomorrow to stretch all your paintings and fit them with frames. They must hang here in your studio, since you are a permanent resident. Isn’t that right, Bianca? Now you choose a subject for your next painting,” Cesare said, tapping me on the shoulder with his pudgy, fluttering fingers. “We have many more walls to fill.”