The Passion of Artemisia

  “How did you keep them all these years?”

  She chuckled thoughtfully. “Nine years. It hasn’t been easy. Sewn inside my underclothing most of the time. Once I had to keep them in the toe of my shoe.”

  She lifted one and let it dangle a moment. “If the beauties of the world were going to be denied me, then these, at least, would not be.”

  “The world in a pearl,” I said.

  I thought how the pearl’s surface was secreted with infinite slowness to protect the live oyster from chafing and inflammation, like Graziela’s serene calmness year by year smoothing but not completely hiding the rough territory within.

  She laid one of the earrings in my hand. It felt warm against my palm. “I don’t need but one,” she said. “You can pin the other one on a dress.”

  “Graziela, no. I can’t take it.”

  “Yes, you can. Let it remind you,” she whispered. “Do not lose yourself completely to man or God. Do not delude yourself. You cannot afford to believe in illusion—for the sake of your happiness and for the sake of your art. As for the sake of your soul, trust that to me. I have many hours to pray, and it grows tiresome praying for one’s own soul.” She closed my hand around the earring. “You have work to do.”

  “Yes, I have work to do.”

  “Hide it under your bodice now, and remember, the real principles of living are not all in the Scriptures. They are in blood ties, histories, sayings, innuendoes, surreptitious looks, clandestine agreements, and hot clasped hands. When you learn to recognize them, life will become easier, rich in opportunities and rewards. Be wise, Artemisia. Be watchful. Look in their faces and show no fear.”

  I looked in her face now, and said her words over again in my mind. Their importance made them toll like deep bells that I knew would echo in the years ahead.

  Sister Paola came hurrying down the nave, her short legs moving fast, her fingers on her cheeks, her face alive in a hundred expressions of joy.

  “Ooh, Artemisia! I was afraid I missed you. Sister Graziela told me! I’m so happy, I could touch Heaven with a finger.”

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you, Sister Paola,” I teased.

  “I told you we believe in miracles.”

  “Because I’m getting married?”

  “Because you’ll be in the art center of the world. For you, what could be better?”

  “That’s generous of you.”

  They walked me to the door and Sister Paola put the sign of the cross on my forehead with her warm finger, her cherubic face made even rounder with her happiness. Graziela held me by the shoulders and touched her forehead to mine. We stood there together awhile, our heads touching, our feelings pulsing breast to breast.

  “You’re doing that for my sake,” Sister Paola said. “The only time her head will touch a wimple.” We laughed a little, sadly. “Remember us, tesoro,” Paola said.

  “Locked close to my heart.” I touched my bosom where I’d hidden the pearl. Graziela couldn’t speak.

  I pushed open the heavy door. It had begun to rain lightly, and I lifted the hood of my cloak. As the door was closing, I heard Graziela’s soft, desperate cry, “Write and tell us what everything looks like.”

  I started down the stairs.

  Sister Graziela was still grieving. After nine years. When had she discovered he had a lover? What surreptitious look had she passed over? In what private moment of horror had she happened to piece together bits of strange behavior, a stuttered answer, a shifted glance, an errand forgotten? Had she looked him in the face? The first meal she made for him after she realized—was it prepared with the same care as the one before? Had he once loved the sheen and heft of her hair, and did she cry when the sisters sheared it? Were such losses in my path too? If I remembered her words and watched enough, would I be spared the same—a life of contemplation and sacrifice and endless acts of humility?

  All the way back to the church I held Graziela’s still-raw heart in my hand like a relic.

  6

  Pietro

  The carriage wheels clattered across the Tiber on Ponte Sant’ Angelo where a row of eighteen gallows led to the fortress and prison of Sant’ Angelo. Eighteen, the age I was when I went to trial. I was barely nineteen now. I wrapped the single earring in a handkerchief and hid it beneath the lining of my cassone.

  I found Father pacing in front of the church. “What do you mean running off like that? Where did you go?” he demanded.

  “To see the sisters. It’s all right. I’m not late.”

  I gave my cloak to Porzia to hold. Father held my arm tightly and we marched down the dark nave and into a small side chapel lit by four candles.

  I felt separated from myself during the mass, as if I were a passerby witnessing something tawdry. I was seized by a longing for my mother, for her soft touch on the back of my head, her sad singing. It would have settled her to know I was married. Porzia smiled at me in an encouraging way, and I tried to make my face properly cheerful, demure and grateful, but the stone church was so cold that without my cloak on I shivered uncontrollably.

  The Latin words of the priest passed over me in a blur of low tones which made me feel there was something furtive about what we were doing. I repeated the vows and tried to think about them, but when the priest came to “as long as you both shall live,” I realized that these were the same words Graziela must have said. I could hardly get them out. I looked in Pietro Antonio’s face as she told me to. His expression was serious, but without the tenderness of Michelangelo in his red lucco looking through me to touch my soul.

  After it was over, Porzia put my cloak over my shoulders. “I’ll miss you,” she said softly.

  “I feel like a part of my life is over,” I said only loud enough for her to hear.

  “A new life is about to begin for you. Don’t worry. Pierantonio’s a good man,” she whispered.

  “I hope to God you’re right.”

  Rain dripped down my neck, but still I hesitated before stepping up into the coach where the cassone had been transferred. Father flung his hands up, vexed by my faltering moment. I was only waiting for some affectionate gesture from him.

  “Get in, get in,” he said, and slipped me a small blue drawstring bag, weighty in my hand. I hid it in the folds of my skirt as I stepped into the coach. I noticed tight lines around his eyes and realized this was a hard moment for him. “I’ll write to Michelangelo Buonarrotti the Younger about you. Make sure you go see him.” He closed the door, the coach lurched ahead, and this Pietro, or this Antonio, and I were off to Florence, where, I thought with relief, I would be free of dishonor.

  Husband and wife. I kept telling that to myself as the coach headed north through the Porta del Popolo on Via Flaminia and into the countryside of ox carts and puddles. I had a rightful husband. Madonna benedetta, let him be kind. We rode facing each other in silence. Should I speak or wait for him to say something first? His unquiet eyes kept looking out the window, so I looked too. What was it that held his interest so? Vineyards with leaves every shade from gold to russet? Orchards of almond trees? Blocky farmhouses behind the thin curtain of rain? Sodden sheep? It was as though landscape was more important than what was right before him. Me.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “Everything. Nothing. The poplar trees have lost their leaves. We’ll have an early winter. It might even snow.”

  What an odd way to start a marriage. With the weather.

  “Do they call you Pietro or Antonio?”

  He turned to me at last. “Pierantonio.”

  “Hmm. Kind of long.”

  Slowly, he smiled in a wry, intriguing way, on only one side of his face. “So’s Artemisia.”

  “Do you mind if I call you Pietro? I like that best.”

  “Call me what you’d like.”

  The need to say more necessary things hung like an iron weight in my chest. “What do you know about me?” I asked.

  “I know what happened.”

 
“The story talked about in the streets, or the truth?” I was filled with a burning urge to spill out to him the truth. “I am innocent. Though not a virgin, I am innocent.”

  He nodded, and I was grateful for that. “This man, Agostino—”

  “Doesn’t deserve the blood in his veins. He’s a churl and a scoundrel.”

  “You were going to marry him?”

  “Because I thought I had to. I don’t care a pebble’s worth about him, but I do care that I am considered innocent by the one man in the world who might matter.”

  The thought seemed to embarrass him and he turned to look out the window again. I straightened my back. Dignity, I thought. I wanted him to see in me some dignity. A quick movement passed over his lips. Maybe he understood. Or maybe he was merciful, not wishing to make me explain any more. Or maybe it meant that he didn’t even care.

  “Will we live with your parents?”

  “No. They’re dead.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” I felt like a fool to have said that. I should have asked Porzia ahead of time.

  “My uncle took Giovanni and me away to a hill town during the last plague, twelve years ago, but they had to stay. I own their house now.”

  I thought better than to ask any questions about it.

  I grew hungry, but was afraid to mention it. I didn’t want to make demands just a few hours into our marriage. I realized with a sinking desperation how completely a married woman gives herself into another’s keeping—even to the eating of a morsel of bread. Had Graziela felt that way? Had my mother? It pained me now that I had not talked to my own mother more.

  “Giovanni tells me you are a painter,” I said after a while.

  “I am.”

  “I am too.”

  “You?”

  “Surely Giovanni told you.” I pointed to my rolled-up canvases.

  “There were two women painters in Bologna once,” he said. “They painted flowers.”

  “I paint human beings.” Curiosity streaked across his pocked face. “Would you like to see?”

  Pietro nodded. I held them up and let them unroll in front of me. Woman Playing a Lute happened to be on top. He studied the whole canvas. “A graceful hand,” he said. I let it slide to the floor and revealed my Susanna, too large a canvas to unroll all the way in the coach. He couldn’t see the bottom where Susanna’s foot dipped into the water of the stone bath.

  “Oh!” His eyes opened wide. My heart beat more strongly now than during the wedding mass. “It’s very good,” he said with what I took to be mild surprise. He looked at Susanna’s face and his expression darkened. “It has a lot of feeling. Her feeling, I mean. When did you paint this?”

  “A couple of years ago.”

  “Before—”

  “Yes.”

  “So young.” He was thoughtful a moment, and then said, “You have a fine, subtle blending of color, especially in the flesh tones. As lustrous as glass.”

  “Do you want to know the secret? Varnish made from amber resin that lutemakers use in Venice. The colors just glide on. One part amber varnish to three parts walnut oil or linseed oil. Combine them over a slow heat and glaze the entire painting after each day’s work. Then it’s more stable and will dry quicker than oil alone. Glazing with just oil, the colors tend to slide down the canvas and bleed.”

  His face was tipped down at Susanna’s belly but his eyes peered up at me as I looked over the top of the canvas, so the angle of his face gave him a covert, shadowed look.

  “How did you learn this?”

  “From my father. He just combines a drop of the varnish to each oiled color on his palette. The idea to do the whole canvas is my own.”

  He made a low, reverberating sound in his throat but it wasn’t a word.

  “You’ll see. The brush doesn’t tug as you take a stroke, and the colors are more brilliant. Now you know too.” I smiled in what I hoped was a coquettish way. “It’s my wedding gift to you.”

  He didn’t smile back. He motioned for me to reveal the third canvas. Judith.

  “It’s not finished yet,” I said, and let the Susanna fall.

  He blew air out of his mouth with a “whooff!” His face contorted. “Not quite what I’d want hanging in our bedchamber, but very fine. A difficult composition.” I caught his fleeting, astonished smile.

  “Don’t worry. I hope to sell it as soon as I am known.”

  He tipped his head to one side, as if to indicate the thought of me earning money hadn’t occurred to him, but the deliberateness of that action seemed to be pretense.

  “Or maybe I’ll give it to Cosimo de’ Medici.”

  “No! Don’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “You don’t just give away a painting.”

  “As a means of announcing the presence of another artist in the city? And to be hung among the great paintings that he must own?”

  I could see he didn’t like the idea. Be wise, Graziela had warned. “No need to decide now,” I said. “It isn’t even finished.” I rolled up the canvases loosely. “I just want you to know that as soon as I am able, I intend to earn my own way.”

  “Fine with me.”

  We rode until dusk and finally stopped for the night at an inn. My back and shoulders ached from hours of tightening them against the damp. He helped me down from the coach and I was stiff from not moving. His cool palm was firm under mine. I liked the feel of it—at least on my hand.

  The inn was filled with olive harvesters, vineyard workers, carters, farmers and their families. The sweat of their labors mixed with the smells of smoke from the fireplace, wet wool drying, and dung on their boots. I stood before the fire and let the warmth spread deliciously over my palms and creep up my throat. An ash flew into my eye. I turned around. In the blurred room, two squealing, giggling children and a dog ran around the tables and no one seemed to mind.

  A young mother with her hair wrapped in a cloth was nursing her baby next to a weathered crone slumped against the wall in a nest of blankets, wearing heavy socks but no shoes. Her gnarled fingers moved as though still performing some task while the rest of her sat dully blinking, oblivious to the boisterous talk and laughter around her. The spit and crackle of the fire lit only the right sides of the women’s faces and necks. The whole human scene moved me. Rome seemed far away.

  When the serving girl began to ladle something from an iron kettle, I squeezed between Pietro and another man on a bench before the trestle table. She passed bowls, tin cups, and earthenware pitchers of pale Umbrian wine down the line of people. The meal consisted of rabbit stew with onions, white beans and turnips, simple country food that smelled of sage and basil and garlic. With his head ducked low, Pietro ate fast, swallowing even before he chewed, and following with a gulp of wine. “Buono,” he said.

  I couldn’t cook like this. It would take half a day—all that gutting and skinning—and then how could I paint? Lavishing all that attention on a meal that wouldn’t last seemed to be squandering life.

  I looked at the rough, tired, noisy Umbrian folk, and let their wine warm me and the stew fill me with things of the countryside. Pietro tore off a hunk of bread from the loaf.

  “Good bread, eh?” I said. “The innkeeper’s wife probably used grain from her brother-in-law’s farm ground by her husband’s father and baked this morning in a stone oven heated with wood from a forest owned by her own father and carted here by her cousin.”

  He laughed softly. “You know that for certain?”

  “No. I just made it up.”

  Sitting opposite us, a scruffy man whose front teeth were missing said, “She’s not far wrong. You better listen to her, young man.”

  “Is that so?” Pietro turned to me with a skewed smile.

  “That’s what my wife’s been telling me for years. If men would only have ears like the jackasses they are, she says. So I say to her, that’ll happen the day wives have mouths like jack rabbits. We’ve been saying it to each other for thirty years.” H
e spooned in the juice with a sucking noise.

  “Thirty!”

  “Goes by fast as a bat’s wing. How long have you been married, eh?”

  Pietro and I exchanged sheepish looks.

  “Four or five.” He chuckled. “Hours.”

  “Ehi! Madonna santa. Auguri.” The man stood up and announced it in a loud voice to the whole room.

  “Auguri,” they shouted.

  Two young men sent up a whoop and everyone sang a ribald song about a milkmaid’s knowing fingers. At the end, one round workhorse of a woman let out a piercing laugh like a chicken cackling. Pietro laughed too, and then noticed I was bewildered and so he stopped. He stood up, straddled the bench, and held out his hand for me. “Let’s go upstairs.”

  The men grinned and whooped again, and the laughing woman squeezed my wrist after I got up and drew me down to her. “Senti, bellezza, you’ll like it after he breaks you in.” She cackled again, even louder.

  To avoid her, I turned to go upstairs quickly, and everyone laughed again, thinking I couldn’t wait. The heat of embarrassment rose in my throat and cheeks.

  Pietro lit a lantern with a stick from the fire and held it before us as we climbed the stairs together. “Don’t pay her any mind,” he said.

  Santa Maria, let him not be rough.

  The upper chamber was unheated, so I undressed hurriedly, facing the wall, far away from the lantern. Even in this marriage of convenience, I had an obligation to comply, but I couldn’t stand to think of his hand touching me where Agostino had forced himself, where the notary had looked. The thought made me queasy. I slipped into bed quickly. Leave it in Rome, I reminded myself.

  His first touch sent a shock through me and I shuddered.

  “You’ll be warm soon.”

  Grazie a Dio. He thought I had shivered.

  There was a softness in his voice. This would not be rape. It would not be by force unless I resisted. Let me not resist. Let me not cry out.

  With his arm around my waist, he drew me toward him. Every muscle in my body was taut as a stretched canvas. He pressed himself against me. His skin was cold. Like mine. We had this likeness. The same damp cold I felt, he had felt too. It made me feel tender toward him.