The Passion of Artemisia

  How could he have let this happen? How could he be so selfish? My dearest papa. All those happy times on the Via Appia—picnics with Mama listening for doves and Papa gathering sage to scrub into the floor. Papa wrapping his feet and mine in scrubbing cloths soaked in sage water, sliding to the rhythm of his love songs, his voice warbling on the high notes, waving his arms like a cypress in the wind until I laughed. That was my papa.

  Was.

  And all his stories about great paintings—sitting on my bed, letting me snuggle in his arms, slipping me some candied orange rind. Wonderful stories. Rebekah at the well at Nahor, her skin so clear that when she raised her chin to drink, you could see the water flowing down her throat. Cleopatra floating the Nile on a barge piled with fruit and flowers. Danaë and the golden shower, Bathsheba, Judith, sibyls, muses, saints—he made them all real. He had made me want to be a painter, let me trace the drawings in his great leather-bound Iconologia, taught me how to hold a brush when I was five, how to grind pigments and mix colors when I was ten. He gave me my very own grinding muller and marble slab. He gave me my life.

  What if I could never paint again with these hands? What was the use in living then? The dagger was still under the bed. I didn’t have to live if the world became too cruel.

  But there was my Judith to paint—if I could. More than ever I wanted to do that now.

  Papa rattled the door. “Artemisia, let me in.”

  “I don’t want to talk to you. You knew what the sibille could do.”

  “I didn’t think—”

  “Sì, eh. You didn’t think.”

  He wedged the door open and pushed the trunk out of the way. He brought in a bowl of water and cloths to clean my hands. I rolled away from him.

  “Artemisia, permit me.”

  “If Mama were still here she wouldn’t have let you allow it.”

  “I didn’t realize. I—”

  “She wouldn’t have wanted it public, like I didn’t.”

  “In time, Artemisia, it won’t matter.”

  “When a woman’s name is all she has, it matters.”

  2

  Judith

  A conversation at our neighborhood bakery shop ended abruptly with embarrassed looks when I came in with bound fingers. The baker’s boys held up their hands with their fingers splayed in mockery. On my way home our tailor’s wife leaning over her windowsill spat just as I walked by. Crossing the Via del Corso in the searing heat, I stopped to watch swallows careening among laundry strung from upper windows. “Puttana! Whore!” I heard. I looked down the street, but there was only an old woman selling fruit. “Puttana!” I heard again, a husky voice. I straightened my back and walked on, refusing to look around. From an upstairs window, a chamber pot splashed down not three steps ahead of me.

  The trial didn’t end. Whenever I was summoned, I had to go and sit through more accusations and lies. It drove me mad that I couldn’t work. When Papa pulled off the bandages to change them, the raw grooves around the base of each finger bled again. When they dried, if I bent them even slightly, the crusted blood cracked. I couldn’t hold a brush or a spoon. Papa told Tuzia to feed me. Ever since Mother died, Tuzia had wanted Papa’s love, not just his bed. She was jealous of his love for me. That’s why she let Agostino in. Better to starve than to let her feed me, and so I didn’t eat. Papa came home one afternoon raging that Tuzia had betrayed me in court. She had testified that she saw a stream of men enter my rooms, so he put her out on the street and asked our neighbor, Porzia Stiattesi, to feed me.

  I tried to keep my fingers straight so they would heal and I could paint again. Still, they festered and oozed, and then the maddening itching began. All I could do was to pace the house, stare out windows, and study my rough sketches for my Judith, the heroine who saved the Jewish people. Papa had told me the story when he painted her. She stole into the enemy camp pretending to seduce the Assyrian tyrant, Holofernes, and got him drunk. She teased him, delaying the lovemaking, pouring him more wine until he fell asleep. Then she cut off his head and showed it to his soldiers the next day, and the army fled. That’s the kind of woman I wanted to paint. Papa’s Judith was so angelic and delicate she could never have done the deed without the intervention of God.

  One morning a fishmonger came through our narrow Via della Croce carrying two baskets of dried fish. She had her sleeves rolled up and her muscular arms were thick and ropey like the veined arm of Moses in San Pietro in Vincoli. That’s what Judith’s arms had to be—thicker and stronger than I’d sketched them, with her sleeves pushed up too, ready for a bloodbath, stiff with determination and repugnance as she drove his steel blade through his neck. And Judith’s maidservant, Abra, also had to have strong arms to bear down on the tyrant’s chest. But more than arms, my Judith would have one knee up on the tyrant’s bed, hacking like a farm wife slaughtering a pig.

  The fish hawker sang out “Cefalo, baccalà” and laughed uproariously at some children playing in the street. She was utterly free, and I envied her, for a moment. Not that I wanted to be a fishwife. I just didn’t want to spend my whole life confined at home to avoid humiliation.

  I put on a shawl and tucked my hands inside, took side streets and crossed the large piazza to the church of Santa Maria del Popolo. Caravaggio’s Conversion of Saint Paul hung in a small chapel there. I studied his chiaroscuro, how he used bright light right against darkness, and I yearned to try it myself. Saint Paul was lying on his back at the moment of his conversion, head and shoulders forward in the picture plane and his body foreshortened. I could do Holofernes like that, with his head practically bursting through the canvas toward the viewer, upside down, at an impossible angle if it were fully attached, but still living, taking his last horrific breath as he thrust his fist into Abra’s chin.

  I remembered being disappointed when Papa had shown me Caravaggio’s Judith. She was completely passive while she was sawing through a man’s neck. Caravaggio gave all the feeling to the man. Apparently, he couldn’t imagine a woman to have a single thought. I wanted to paint her thoughts, if such a thing were possible—determination and concentration and belief in the absolute necessity of the act. The fate of her people resting on her shoulders. Not relishing the act, just getting it done. And his thoughts too. Confusion and terror. The world out of control. Yes, I knew about that. I could do that part.

  But could I do Judith?

  One day I was summoned to court and Agostino wasn’t. Opposite where I sat in my usual seat, two women laid a cloth over a long wooden table and brought a basin of water and rags. What for? Some new torture? The older, larger one, whose fleshy throat hung down under her chin, stared at me with contempt, the wrinkles of her lower lids tightening. The younger woman, so thin she seemed only a bundle of bones, wouldn’t look at me at all. I held my arms against my ribs. The notary sneered.

  The Locumtenente cleared his throat to get order. “And so you say that you, a girl of a mere eighteen years, are no longer a virgin because of the action taken by Signor Tassi? Is that right?” he demanded in his relentless, implicating way.

  I nodded. Admission that I wasn’t a virgin, no matter the circumstances, would brand me forever as lacking in control, and that would make me unmarriageable.

  “Say it for the record.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “What’s right? Say the words.”

  “I am no longer a virgin.”

  The Locumtenente thumbed through some documents and raised his arm toward the two women. “These are midwives of much experience and,” he paused to look at me, “unstained reputation. Diambra of Piazza San Pietro and Domina Caterina of the Court of Masiano. Signorina Gentileschi, you affirm with all your mind and proper being that you are no longer a virgin?”

  I squeezed my legs together. “Yes, Your Lordship, on account of Agostino Tassi’s forceful—”

  “Signorina will be silent.” He flipped his fingers at the midwives. “Proceed with the examination of the pudenda of Signorin
a Gentileschi, and let the notary observe.” He stretched out his legs, leaned back and folded his arms across his chest.

  I froze.

  Murmurs spread through the courtroom. “Believe her,” I heard Papa say. “She never lies.”

  The young midwife pulled the curtain, but it was so sheer I could see shapes right through it. The bailiff set up a screen between the table and the Locumtenente, but the notary walked behind it to stand right at the table.

  I couldn’t move. The courtroom hushed. The older midwife marched toward me. I held onto the arms of the chair even though I could feel my scabs bursting open. She grabbed me by the elbow and pulled me toward the table. The cloth covering it was stained. By some other poor woman violated the same way? How had she managed to keep on living? Or was she shut up in a convent somewhere?

  What could this prove? Agostino would only say that someone else deflowered me.

  I sat on the edge of the table. Expressionless, the older midwife motioned for me to lie down and bend my knees. The bones in my legs melted. The younger one smeared rancid-smelling animal fat over her fingers and then she lifted my skirt. She looked down at me the way a new serving girl looks down to gut a chicken for the first time. Her greasy fingers wormed into me. I squeezed all my muscles against her. The feel of squeezing against Agostino shot through me and I shuddered.

  “It will go harder with you if you do that,” she whispered. “Loosen yourself and it will be over quicker.”

  I willed myself to relax. “Don’t make me remember,” I whispered.

  She pushed farther. A bitter taste filled my mouth, and my eyes stung. She withdrew and washed her hands in the basin of water.

  The larger woman came toward me, pushing up her sleeves. Her fingers were thick and she was rougher than the first. I gasped, and squeezed my eyes shut. In spite of my effort, I felt that hot moment just before crying. I tried not to make a sound. I wouldn’t give them that.

  I kept my eyes shut until I heard her splash water in the basin. I pulled down my skirt, rolled onto my side away from the courtroom and drew up my knees. Oh, let the floor open up and swallow me. Just like I had wished when, as a little girl, I had opened the bedroom door with a fistful of dandelions for Mama, tufted seeds tearing away as I rushed into the room, and found Papa naked with his back to me and Mama on the bed, knees up, skirt raised, showing that secret territory between her legs. Shock had seared me. How I’d cried for days and wouldn’t talk to her, wouldn’t even let her near me. That was how they wanted to display me—as if caught in the act.

  “It is as she has said,” I heard the thin woman say beside me.

  “State the report for the record.” The Locumtenente’s voice was casual, as if they had just performed some inconsequential, routine task.

  “I, Diambra Blasio, have touched and examined the vagina of Donna Artemisia, and I can say that she is not a virgin. I know this because I have placed my finger inside her vagina, and found that the hymen is broken. I can say this because of the experience of being a midwife for ten or eleven years.”

  I tried to shut my mind to everything around me.

  “And you?”

  “I, Caterina of the Court of Masiano, have examined . . . touched her vagina . . . put a finger . . . deflowered . . . hymen broken . . . a while ago, not recently . . . my experience . . . fifteen years.”

  I waited there on the table until the court was adjourned, looked that notary dead in the eye, and dared him to lift one scornful eyebrow at me over that hook of a nose.

  Papa and I were all the way home with our door closed before either of us said a word. “If Mama were here, you’d have been ashamed.”

  “I’m ashamed now.”

  “Of what? Your daughter lying there for all the world to see, or yourself?”

  He shook his head, like a dog shaking off water.

  “Madre di Dio, what’s going to be next?” I said.

  “But it proves it, don’t you see? The damages I claimed.”

  “I am not a painting,” I shouted. “I’m a person! Your daughter.”

  He tipped over a jar of brushes, gathered his painting things, and left. Just like that. Off to paint in Cardinal Borghese’s Casino of the Muses in the Palazzo Pallavicini where he had been working with Agostino before the trial. Like it was any other day. As if nothing had happened. As if there would be no consequences.

  I didn’t want to be there when he came back. I put on my short gray cape and, as I left, I pulled the hood over my head even though the heat shimmered up from the ground ahead of me. On the way down Via del Babuino to Piazza di Spagna, I kept my head down so our apothecary might not recognize me from the door of his shop. Going up the Pincian hill, I straddled the ruts and avoided loose stones as I made a wide arc around the shiftless men who always lounged on this steep course between city and church. They’d be the first to shout some epithet at me. Toward the top of the hill, I climbed more slowly, up to the twin bell towers of Santa Trinità dei Monti. Breathing heavily, I turned at the church and went up the long stairway next to it, which led to the convent. I pulled the bell rope.

  I knew Sister Paola would come to the door. As one of the few Italian nuns in this French convent, it was her job to answer the bell, to sell the medicinal herbs the nuns cultivated, and to communicate with the outside world.

  “Ooh, Artemisia! So good to see you.” Her smile always reminded me of Cupid’s mischievous grin in paintings of classical subjects, but now her face was drawn into worry lines.

  “Have you been well?” I asked.

  She opened the creaking wooden door to let me into the small anteroom. “As well as God wishes, which is good enough for me.” Her voice rose and fell like birdsong. An otherworldliness hung in the air of the convent. I felt myself breathe more easily.

  “And the garden? How is it doing?”

  “It’s glorious this summer. Come and look. Sister Margherita’s rosemary and chamomile are in bloom, and my San Giovanni’s wort is just about to bud. Sister Graziela’s oregano is thick on the stalks and stretching up to God.”

  Walking behind Paola through the straw scattered on the flinty stone floor of the cloisters, I noticed her shoes worn down at the heels. A sadness outside my own difficulties made me feel ashamed. Papa should have paid the convent more while I lived here those few years after Mama died.

  “We even have lavender hanging to dry in the kitchen. It smells like Heaven itself.”

  We crossed the rose-colored stucco cloister and went through a corridor to the garden in back. Rows of herbs were in their leafy prime. A nun I didn’t know was pinching off blossoms.

  “It looks beautiful. Santa Maria must have smiled on it,” I said.

  “And it’s making a little money for the convent too,” Sister Paola added impishly, raising her shoulders and eyebrows and plump cheeks all at once.

  “Beware of such dangerous forays into worldly enterprises,” I said, putting on a stern look.

  She giggled. “Oh, I give away the medicinal herbs to people even if they can’t pay. True recompense is from the Lord.” She smiled sweetly. “Do you want to see Sister Graziela now? We must go to vespers soon.”

  We went back inside. I knew how to find Sister Graziela in the workroom, but I let Sister Paola lead me there.

  “Have you given up on me yet?” I asked.

  “Certainly not,” she said with exaggerated forcefulness. “We believe in miracles here. Someday I’ll come to the door and there you will be, saying, ‘I am ready now.’ And I’ll take you in to our holy sisterhood, and we’ll all send up a grazie a Dio.”

  It might be easy coming here forever, slipping out of the world unnoticed, letting the trial go on without me, never having to face that beast of a judge, that sneering notary who pretended he was just doing his job, never having to fear encountering Tuzia or Agostino on the street. And Papa—I’d make him miss me.

  Sister Graziela was alone, sitting on a tall stool by the narrow window where a shaft
of pale honey-colored light shone on her cheeks and the tip of her pointed nose. Dust motes floated around her in a golden swirl. Her black habit and white cowl framed her unlined, oval face, which glowed with contentment and absorption. Her downward gaze was fixed on painting the border of a page. She reminded me of Mary in Michelangelo’s marble Pietà in St. Peter’s. Like Mary, she was lost in peaceful thought, and, like Mary, she was beautiful to me.

  She had placed the oyster shells I had given her years ago along the edge of her worktable. Each shell held pigments of the most glorious, pure, saturated colors—dark red madder, bright vermilion, the deep ultramarine blue of crushed lapis lazuli, the yellow of saffron, and a green as bright as spring parsley. It made me happy that she still used them.

  She looked up. “Artemisia! Bless you for coming. I’ve longed to see you.”

  She motioned for me to bring over a low stool. She was illuminating a page with delicate vines and tendrils tied in intricate, loose knots and studded with bright red blossoms.

  I could do that, sitting here with Graziela. If I lived here forever, I could do whole books. The convent would become famous for its illuminated manuscripts.

  “It’s lovely. I like the yellow bird.”

  “It’s a Psalter for Cardinal Bellarmino, that hammer of the heretics who crushes anyone with an idea of his own. People don’t make these books by hand much anymore, but this is a gift from the convent. We’re hoping he’ll take a moment from his Holy Inquisitions to pay attention to our request for roof repair. For years we’ve had buckets in our upstairs cells to catch the rain.”

  She waited for Sister Paola to leave. “I get so little done every day, just the smallest section.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Always, it seems, it’s time to go to Office just when I get absorbed in the work. Sometimes from one week to the next, it seems I’ve done nothing.”

  “I have something to tell you.”

  She laid down the tiniest brush I had ever seen and placed her hand gently on my arm. “We have known it.”