The Ruby Ring

  Checking Matteo, she glanced down and saw her rough hands. Baking flour rimmed her small, round nails, as it did her father’s. She cringed, confronted again with a reality no magic could sweep away. Margherita felt the dream steal, like a frightened child, back into the corner of her heart. It was where she kept it safely locked away, with all of the other memories of her mother, who had died when she was young. It was the place she forgot to go more and more now, between the mending and cooking, and the work at the bakery that needed doing. Those were a child’s dreams. She had a woman’s life now—and that life was firmly rooted beyond the ancient Porta Settimiana, in Trastevere.

  “You there! Signora!” The menacing baritone voice startled her and she glanced to see a green-and-gold liveried guard, glinting sword drawn, glowering at her. “Move along! You’ve no business here!”

  Margherita swallowed hard, feeling a sudden odd spark of haughty indignation flare up through the initial burst of panic at the authority in his tone. It was an unexpected sensation, and she tipped up her chin.

  “I believe you do not know that, signor guardia.”

  The guard, in formal puffed trunk hose, vest, and puffed toque, looked at her appraisingly. A moment later, he began cruelly to chuckle. “Indeed I do know it, signora,” he condescendingly declared. “If not by your garments, then certainly by the expression of pure inferiority on your pretty, young face.”

  Well-dressed passersby gaped at her, some of them whispering behind raised hands, one man even chuckling to himself.

  Angry at the sleight, something suddenly caused her to reply. “Allora, is this not a public street, signor guardia, where I may look at whatever I wish?”

  “The street is public, the residence you ogle is private.”

  “I stand only on the street, bothering no one.”

  “Like a bug landing on a sweet cake.”

  “Are you always so charming?”

  His response was a snarl. “True spirit, signora, falls flat in one without the means to sustain it. It takes no more than a glance to see that this neighborhood is well beyond the likes of you, and that there is no good reason on earth for you to loiter here, and so I tell you again to pass!”

  “You know nothing of me. You yourself are but a servant to those beyond your scope. And, by the way, brute force,” she haughtily countered, “falls just as flat as spirit—in one without the mind to see it through!”

  “I shall not ask again,” he growled. “Move along, I say, back to whatever rabbit warren you come from!”

  Someone behind her laughed mockingly then and Margherita felt the heat of embarrassment redden her cheeks. The moment was over, but spirit, for Margherita Luti, the baker’s daughter, was a harder thing to press away forever.

  RAPHAEL STOOD FIRMLY, arms crossed over his chest, in a velvet doublet of deep scarlet, with full gold sleeves. His face, beneath umber-colored, neatly tamed waves of shoulder-length hair, was tight with frustration. It was not a classically handsome face, but sensually intense. His cheekbones were high, his chin was small, and his eyes were like clear black glass. Through the long, unshuttered window of the richly paneled workshop, his studio, with its soaring ceiling and heavy beams, a stream of buttery sunlight crossed the woman. She sat perfectly still on a stone pedestal before the master and his assistant. “Per l’amor di Dio,” he groaned, then turned from her.

  Beside him, still occupied with his own task, a young apprentice in a dark-blue working robe, belted with frayed rope, stood at a long plank table grinding colors into a wooden bowl. Another stood, tying miniver paintbrushes, while still another sharpened drawing pencils. Swirling throughout the workshop was the pungent odor of oil paint and linseed oil, and all around was the relentless hum of ceaseless activity. Worktables were littered with pallets, empty pewter tankards, half-eaten plates of food, and unlit candles in puddles of dry wax from the evening before—the unruly environment of a group of men focused only on excesses of work.

  Raphael nodded to the tall, ruddy-faced bear of a man, with a distinguished shock of gray hair, punctuating his order with an absent wave of the hand. It was a silent directive to pay the girl for her trouble and see her home. It was the second time this week alone that he had dismissed a model. Giovanni da Udine, the assistant who had been with him the longest, let an audible sigh as his heavy lidded eyes rolled to a close. The search would go on.

  Raphael ran a hand over his face. He had known instantly she was not right. To Giovanni, an artist far more literal than himself, the faces of these girls were only acceptable circles, ovals, and other linear or geometric shapes. A study of composition forced the assistant to see forms as highlights and shadows, tones and halftones to be added to or rejected from the work. To the master of this workshop, the mastro, however, the criteria could not be more different. She—this girl—was not right. Not for a Madonna.

  There was nothing extraordinary in her eyes.

  When he turned from the girl she was gone from his mind. Raphael Sanzio was behind schedule on many projects more pressing than this, and even the very lenient Pope Leo X had begun to show frustration. Too many accepted commissions, from too many places, Raphael thought now, and no matter how many apprentices he was given, the works were still his to complete.

  The rest of the large workshop, facing out onto the murky and foul-smelling waters of the Tiber, was stacked with half-finished works. Altarpieces, portraits, banners, and chests shared the room with apprentices and assistants, in their paint-stained aprons, all of them painting, mixing, carrying, or moving something. There were Carrara marble pieces strewn about, heads and hands of wax, and pieces of wood prepared for painting. In a corner nearby was a large, intricate panel of the Assumption.

  Standing before a huge hunting tapestry on an iron rod, another assistant was now doing the skilled work of applying sheets of beaten gold onto the panel. On the other side of the room, nearest the large, walk-in stone fireplace, sat an ancient-looking, withered old man with a thatch of unruly white hair. He modeled for a gaunt-faced assistant, also covered in a paint-stained working robe, who added to a black chalk sketch he had begun earlier. Raphael studied the man’s sunken eyes, protruding lower lip, and plunging nose, all of which suggested determination and weariness with life. They were elements he could use on the face of Noah in God Appears to Noah, for one of the ceiling bays in a new stanza—a grand room, at the Vatican Palace which he was designing for the Holy Father. He made a mental note to speak later with Giovanni about it.

  Beside the old man, another senior assistant stood at an easel adding a vivid shade of crimson oil paint to intensify the heavy cloak in a new papal portrait, while still another was just beginning a panel by applying the first layer of underpaint. Everywhere there were works of art in various states of completion. The sketched figure of a Madonna with no definable face dominated the workshop on a tall, narrow panel propped on a large easel. It was to be part of a grand, gabled altarpiece bearing the Apostles in solemn guardianship, destined for the church of San Sisto. And now it was to be delayed yet again.

  As the girl stood and took the handful of coins, Giovanni turned back to Raphael. “But what will you do if you do not settle for this one, mastro? You have promised Cardinal Bibbiena the altarpiece by month’s end, and you have yet to find the model!”

  “Then we can do nothing more than keep searching, can we?”

  In point of fact, the commission for the new Madonna had been granted to Raphael four years earlier, by the previous pontiff, Julius II. It was to be a gift to the Benedictines in Piacenza as a token of that city’s voluntary annexation by the papal states. With all of the other work given to Raphael by Julius’s successor, Leo X, this old project had claimed little of his attention. But there was to be a celebration in Piacenza and the new pontiff wished to present the painting then. It was whispered that Cardinal Bibbiena, a personal friend and secretary to the new pope, was using the incomplete panel as a way to undermine Raphael’s standing at the Vatican
. The reason involved his own niece, Maria, to whom Raphael was betrothed, yet who he had thus far successfully avoided marrying.

  Bibbiena was growing impatient and angry, and the unfinished commission gave him an excuse to nip at Raphael’s heels.

  “Dio mio,” da Udine could not keep himself from groaning. “But this one really did fit the form perfectly.”

  “I do not care if you believe she fits. Use her at Chigi’s house for one of the lunettes in the Galatea room if you like. She is simply not a Madonna!”

  “Respectfully, mastro, could you not have made any of these women we have brought you into one?”

  Raphael turned to him. His dark eyes were set deeply with commitment. Yet they were eyes that saw life in a different way; with consciousness of form, a strong graphic sense and luminous penetration of detail. How could he make anyone else understand that he must be inspired by a face—driven to re-create it as the very image of the mother of Jesus Christ? It was not that he did not care. This theme had come to symbolize, for him, his own mother holding him as a child. A mother he had lost tragically, when he was just a boy. To Raphael, painting various Madonna images had always been a way to bring her back to life—a mother he idealized far more than he remembered her, but a mother whose loss had forever changed his life.

  Raphael had painted a dozen Madonnas since leaving Urbino. Beneath the tutelage of his own first master, Perugino, the Madonna had become his most resonant theme. He had based them all at first on the models, and the faces, chosen by Leonardo da Vinci, under whom he had studied in Florence. But Raphael was no longer a pupil. Now, at the age of thirty-one, he, too, was considered a master—a mastro. And the idealized face of his youth, the one he had repeated in Madonna after Madonna, would no longer satisfy his goals for the work.

  Here in Rome, at the personal behest of the pontiff himself, the stakes were much higher than in Urbino or Florence. The highest commissions of the new papacy had been bestowed upon him. Michelangelo, once his greatest rival, had fled to Florence, prevented from even completing the tomb of Julius II. Raphael was the one to gain contracts for several drawings, called “cartoons,” to be used in grand tapestries for Michelangelo’s newly completed Sistine Chapel. He had also promised the pope his full personal attention on the dark and dramatic sequence, The Mass of Bolsena, being frescoed over a window arch, that would ornament the second, grand papal stanza.

  In addition, Alfonso d’Este, duke of Ferrara, was waiting impatiently for a Triumph of Bacchus he had ordered for his family castle. Bibbiena had his stufetta, a very grand bathing room, in his Vatican Palace apartments, the concept drawings for which were only half complete, and the fervent call by King Louis of France for St. Michael and The Holy Family had gone thus far unanswered. Raphael also had numerous portraits awaiting his brush, the loggias at the Vatican, more frescoes at the Chigi palace, and such minor projects as drawings for engravings and designs for mantelpieces. Amid this wild torrent of work, Raphael had been given yet another lofty honor which he had no idea how to find time to complete. He had personally been recommended by a dying Bramante to succeed him as the architect of Saint Peter’s, in spite of the fact that he had no architectural experience at all. Raphael’s patience was low and his energy waning. So much work and too little sleep had made him irritable. No matter to whom he delegated the painstaking details, he was still keenly aware that all of the commissions, and the assistants were entirely dependent upon his creative authority—and ultimately upon him.

  In all of the notoriety and wealth, Raphael Sanzio had lost sight of what had brought him to artistry in the first place. Most days, there was little or no heated passion toward creation, as there had been at first. But the assistants did not know that. No one was allowed to get that close.

  “So tell me this, Giovanni,” he asked, coolly tossing a velvet cape over his shoulders. “Did the Lord God settle when choosing his Virgin?”

  To that, of course, da Udine was wise enough to know there could be no retort. In need of air, and the rhythm of simpler times, Raphael left the workshop alone, forgoing a groom or horse. He pressed away the entourage of assistants who always traveled with him throughout the city, and instead walked blissfully alone out into the cobbled stone street.

  It was a threateningly dark midday, rain clouds having moved in from the north, quickly covering most of the azure sky as he headed toward the Vatican. Deep, heavy bells tolled at the church of Santa Cecilia. For a moment, as a breeze off the Tiber lashed at him, he felt almost like the child he had been in Urbino, tugging at his father’s cloak. With that, a stronger memory came back to him. It hit him fully then, and he felt it all again. He saw himself, a small boy, begging to leave his father’s workshop on a threatening day like this one, but long ago. He had wanted to be safely at home, away from the smell of paint and turpentine that now defined his own life. Irony twisted bitterly in him when he thought how his own workshop was more home to him than any other place in Rome.

  His father, Lorenzo Sanzio, had been a court painter at the ducal palace in Urbino. Raphael felt the heavy pull of old sadness recalling the man who had given him his love of painting, but had found little of his own fame or fortune. The same beloved man who had died in his arms when he was a boy of only eleven. The door now opened, another memory came at him.

  “Seize what you can from this life, Raffaello mio . . . You have a great talent, far greater than my own, it is certain . . . I have given you all that I can. I am dying. But now you must go on, you must seek your own great destiny.”

  “Per favore, let me stay, padre mio! I have nothing without you!”

  “No, my son, what you have is what you see when you take a paintbrush into your hand. Depend on no one or nothing but that. Make me proud, Raffaello . . . do justice to your mother’s memory and her love by depending upon only that . . . ”

  And so he had. Raphael squinted through a last pale shaft of noonday light that shot through a heavy cloud, and caught the reflection of tears in his eyes. They had both left him much too soon. Neither of his parents had seen the success he had made of his life, nor seen any of his most acclaimed works. The modest boy from Urbino had painted works like The Marriage of the Virgin that hung now in Milan, the portrait of Pope Julius, so lifelike that people had gasped upon seeing it, and his own version of a piet, after Michelangelo, painted for a church in Colonna. Fulfilling his father’s wish had consumed the last twenty years of his life. Only now, at the age of thirty-one, wildly successful and wealthier than he could ever have dreamed, did he realize fully how completely unfulfilled all of it had left him.

  TRASTEVERE, the densely inhabited area of houses and bottegas between the river and the slope of lush Il Gianicolo, was a meager working-class neighborhood. The Romans there were a world apart from the wealthy and powerful figures like Signor Chigi who filled the pontiff’s coffers with enough gold florins to aggressively pursue the arts. But Raphael liked the modest area for its raw energy and sense of place. Against the advice of Cardinal Bibbiena, he had intentionally set his workshop there.

  The path he took now from the Via Gianicolo toward the Vatican was the longest one. He walked through the small and ordered Piazza San Pietro, hemmed in by buildings wrought of mellow, peeling stucco, the area devoid of grass or trees. Here were shades of orange, cinnamon, and gold cast upon buildings that stood too closely together, creating a dank tunnel of cobbled stones and faded stucco, cooing pigeons on rooftops, and echoed voices.

  Above him, women hung from windows, held out laundry, and called to one another in a rhythmic echo of domestic chatter. On the street level were shops—an ironmonger, a weaver, and a few doors down the workshop of a musical instrument maker—and above them were the modest dwellings of those who ran them. He passed a trash-strewn alleyway where two scrawny dogs scavenged near a drunken man lying in a heap. The smell from piles of garbage was vile.

  He passed them all, as a cart pulled by two dray horses, loaded with baskets of olives, clatteri
ng loudly over the cobbled stones. Yet he saw nothing. Raphael needed time alone to do battle with a fatigue that was consuming his spirit. He missed the old work that had filled him with youthful enthusiasm. Madonnas. The Florentine portraits. Wide-eyed boys. Apple-cheeked babies. Old women, their faces etched with years. The images of those who mattered to this world.

  A few raindrops fell, warning of the approaching storm.

  Raphael clasped his cold hands and closed his eyes. Images of his parents moved across his mind again. Elements of his home in Urbino. Smells, sights. Echoes of childhood laughter he no longer felt, but still heard. His life now was too serious for laughter. Too full of commitment for revelry.

  Giovanni had been right. The girl he had presented today had been acceptable. Good bone structure, warm dark eyes. In truth, he was not at all certain what had held him back from filling in the parts of her he did not see. He simply expected too much. The new Madonna he needed to paint was really the least of his commissions but, by delaying, he had made it more important than it needed to be. And in this hot game of rivalry with every other artisan in Rome and Florence, he could not afford to incur the pope’s disappointment.

  “Dio mio, give me strength to do it all,” he murmured to himself. He walked through an ever-darkening Roman afternoon toward the Vatican and the papal room where his assistants were now at work on a detail on the ceiling, Moses Before the Burning Bush. He had been there earlier in the morning to add to the final sketch of Saint Peter in the particular corner in which they had worked the rest of the day. He trusted Giovanni and Gianfrancesco Penni implicitly, and yet he was the mastro—the one upon whose reputation all rested.

  He made his way through the light rain, away from the Porta Settimiana, the entrance to Trastevere, away from the spider’s web of narrow streets, and avoided the straight and orderly Via della Lungaretta in favor of a country idyll in the heart of the city, the wooded hill called Il Gianicolo. Raphael picked up his pace now and moved toward the sloping green incline and a shady arch of plane trees before him. It was not a quicker path to the Vatican, simply a more peaceful one.