Anyway the real lessons were to be had upon the streets of Venice. That was where we convent girls learnt that our eyes were not made to read but to lure and fascinate, that our fingers were not to sew but to caress, that our mouths were not for grammar but for the manufacture of dazzling fleet-footed smiles. Venice taught us how to be enchantingly capricious, how to wear out our slippers dancing upon Istrian marble and mosaic of mock lapis, how to talk about our dreams so that men hungered to be inside them. The love of God, they taught us at the convent, was our worthiest aspiration. But outside on the street, from the ballads of the gondoliers and the paintings in shop windows, we learnt that the kind of love that was prized in Venice was that which tasted as sweet and lasted only as long as a kiss.
I hasten to add that boys learnt little more, unless they were destined to be scholars. It’s not that we were a stupid city. It was simply that for us education was just another form of entertainment. Our heritage was re-enacted in picturesque ceremonies on the streets all year long, giving us a chance to dress up and perform like beautiful puppets. Our churches were a feast to the eye: who needed to read the Bible when its most picturesque stories were painted upon our walls for us in such gorgeous colours? It was not that we despised the written word – oh no! The regatta laureates, the poets who made verses to inscribe on ladies’ fans, the sonneteers, all flourished in our happy city, but in this last century of our ornate glory Venice was no place to be serious or studious about anything. In Venice, books were sold by weight, like sugar.
So there was no instruction for me in what I needed to know about portraits, art and artists. By the time I met Casanova I was already steaming with frustration at my unwanted and helpless ignorance about the things to which I was irresistibly drawn. Before I met him I would roam the churches, gazing at paintings. I looked at them so hard that they were imprinted upon my eyes and I could still see them with my lids closed. I learnt, without knowing their names, what colours made skin and where shadows must fall on draperies. I learnt which lustre on the forehead makes a saint saintly. I learnt all the lies you have paint to tell the truth: the unlikely yellow the artist must drop into a pearl white eye-ball to make the sunset warm a velvet mantle! I learnt that to be true to the depiction of the truth you do not paint the truth.
I learnt so much that I became a philosopher of painting – as remote from the real work as a philosopher is from real life. My hands ached from the absence of a paintbrush, and sometimes I dawdled in the artisans’ streets, my nose twitching like a cat’s at the smell of oil and artists’ colours. Casanova had already changed all that: now I painted nearly every night. When I left Casanova in the dim light of morning, we locked up my box of paints and laid my canvas upon its side in a small trunk in the gondola. Casanova himself wiped the worst paint smudges off my face with a faded silk handkerchief. I finished cleaning myself at home, in my boiling bath.
It was not entirely satisfactory, my floating nocturnal art, and we both knew it. I was ready to progress and I needed access to a teacher. Casanova introduced me to a friend of his brother Francesco, the artist, who now lived in Dresden. He had irascible relationships with his brothers. Of Francesco, Casanova was dismissive as only a sibling can be. ‘Impotent, my brother. Imagine it. His poor wife loves him anyway, so she does not allow herself to look for satisfaction elsewhere. It’s very sad. And Francesco’s not particularly potent in the studio, either. But he’s very good at painting smoke. And he has the wit to hide what he can’t paint under expert billows of the stuff. I would not apprentice you to him, Cecilia, but he has a friend, Antonio, who paints portraits. Antonio’s still here in Venice. He will see you, tomorrow afternoon. Tell your mother you’re to help the nuns decorate the church for a wedding. Will that serve to explain your absence for some hours?’
I nodded.
I could not concentrate on my saints that next morning. I pushed my finger down the page, unseeing. The hours struck as slowly as if the hands of the clock were silted up. When I was released I pounded across the city to San Vio, where Casanova was waiting for me, leaning against the well, lanky as a collapsed marionette. It was the first time I had seen him in the daylight. He turned to me a little diffidently: he knew how his brittle skin and the thin lines mapped out upon his face would be cruelly exposed in the sunshine. He saw me looking at them, took my hand and ran my finger down the furrow beside his mouth. ‘Look, it’s worn away with smiling since I found you, Cecilia.’
I replied truthfully, ‘Every inch of you is dear to me.’
On the way to Antonio’s studio I tore off my linen cap and balled up its ribbons in my fist. I thrust them into my pocket and shook my hair free. With my hair around me I felt less nervous. Casanova smoothed it behind me as we walked. Antonio’s studio was in San Barnaba, the quartiere of the impoverished nobles whom we call the Barnabotti. Some of them eked out their tiny pensions by renting their great rooms to artists. We climbed the stairs to the piano nobile. I hesitated at the door, until Casanova gently pushed me ahead of him. The first thing I saw was, floor to ceiling, portraits, sketches and empty frames. Then I noticed an exotic confection of tall broken columns, stuffed birds and velvet draperies in a sort of cage at the back of the room, and a little throne upon a raised platform.
Antonio came forward, drying his hands. He was a small, fair and well-favoured man of about fifty, exquisitely dressed. ‘Tools of the trade, you know,’ he said negligently when Casanova complimented him on his frock-coat. ‘They come here looking for style. If I look stylish, it helps them feel confident.’ Casanova watched me with interest as he introduced me to Antonio. He needn’t have worried. The smell of paint on his hands was alluring, but Antonio had none of Casanova’s magnetism. For me, erotic love was simply Casanova. I had not yet learnt to look speculatively at other men.
Casanova did not need to tell me what to do. During that first visit, I stole one of Antonio’s miniatures, pushing it into my pocket when he turned his back. I protected the delicate surface with my hovering thumb. It was a minor but skilful study of a little boy. Antonio was proud of it. I had seen that pride in the way he dropped it down with a dismissive gesture when I praised it. I would have done the same myself. During the week I made a workmanlike copy of it, careful to show promise but no more. On our next visit I produced the original and the copy with a blush and a sigh. At the end of my stammering confession I exclaimed, ‘How I wish I could paint like you …’ I allowed my words to trail off on a hopeless, plaintive note.
‘Cecilia, I shall give you lessons!’ was the reply that I had sought and now received.
Within two months I had learnt all that Casanova and Antonio had to teach me. Antonio, like Casanova, was good to me. When he saw that I would not embarrass him, he persuaded friends and clients to sit for me. Everyone in Venice, not just Casanova, loved a novelty. The clients were happy to give an hour to a pretty young prodigy and were surprised at the result. At first I would be delegated to paint the clothes, draperies, child or dog of the sitter while Antonio worked on the face. But disparities began to appear: the dresses, curtains, children or pets would look more interesting than their owners.
Soon clients were asking for me to execute the main work and I was delighted to accept. Antonio started to look sullen, but I was earning well from my afternoons in the studio. I shared the proceeds with Antonio, but my growing reputation was all my own. I used my real name, Cornaro, and no one was any the wiser. In those days Venice was over-run with both Cornaros and Cecilias. Meanwhile my own family, far across the Grand Canal at Miracoli, lived in quiet retirement. The latest novelties, such as young female painting prodigies, to sweep the happy city went unremarked at our modest table.
You can outgrow an art teacher, as I did. Even before I mastered the paintbrush I developed a style of my own, which was both realistic and expressive of invisible feelings. I had taken to heart Casanova’s words: I wanted to paint people in the heat of their desires. I wanted them to look as if they might fall
from the frame into the viewer’s arms. I would arrive at the studio with baskets of ideas. My little trick was to surround my subjects with the sensual things they loved or which excited them: I painted women with their new-born babies, or with cold white wine upon their lips, soldiers sniffing sulphur, merchants fingering rich fabrics. In the gondola, I continued to paint Casanova, too, surrounded by almost over-ripe fruit, and a hint of my own presence in his life: a laden paintbrush, a piece of torta al cioccolato, or a droplet of peach juice on his chin.
Skin was my subject: pale skin, from skimmed-milk blue to yellow cream; vivid skin stained by the Venetian sun to peach or terracotta. I luxuriated in it. I loved to paint skin against fur; my subjects were often portrayed with their pets upon their knees. Those fur-and-flesh couples often seemed to me happier than the ones made up of husbands or wives. I loved to paint the perfect amity between a young woman and her cat. I delighted in the sound of my sitter climbing the stairs with her yowling pet in a basket. I knew that I would soon make them both happy. Lifting the cat out of the basket, I would soothe it with long strokes before placing it on her lap. The cat would blink at me and understand. I also knew that a woman who had stroked a cat for an hour always looked ready for the attentions of a lover. All this was to my purpose. Casanova swore that I could paint cats purring. I will not be falsely modest – I could. I could also paint women purring; women come lately from their lovers’ beds with a dull sheen of pleasure still upon their skins.
And water was my subject, whether beading a frosted glass or seen through a window behind my sitter. I painted it green, a colour that has to be invented in Venice, as it grows but sparsely here naturally. Water is colourless, so it steals its greens as reflections from the exotically flowering balconies or the verdigris pulverising upon copper domes. I found the other colours in water, too – on any one day the Grand Canal flows with molten jade, milk and honey, dark blood, champagne, nectar and poison. In Antonio’s studio I was learning to paint the dewdrops upon a flower and the pearly ooze of fruit in a bowl. So convincing were they that when I placed my paintings in the courtyard to dry, small birds would come to peck at them. In the gondola I learnt to paint the moistures we humans emit in our times of joy. Those studies I dried discreetly inside the felze with the help of the curtains billowing tart air from the sea.
It seemed to me that I was called into the world for this – to drag a paintbrush across the canvas, just because flesh is, colour is, velvet is.
I had already learnt how to look into the bones of my subjects and expunge ten years from their ages by tightening their flesh infinitesimally here and there. My methods were a little crude in those days, but they worked. Really, I was erasing pain, though I did not know it at that point, because I did not know about that kind of pain. The unwanted grooves and sags had been carved into their flesh by bad loves. By removing them, I made my subjects feel lighter and younger, as if I had really cancelled from their lives the terrorising episodes that had disappointed their skins and scarred their beauty.
Casanova taught me what Antonio omitted, either through lack of understanding or a dawning professional jealousy. It was Casanova who urged me to learn what I could about the interior life of my subjects, and paint it afterwards. All really great portraits are astonishing likenesses, not so much of the physical truth but of the animating essence of the sitter. The true artist does not obsess to achieve technical likeness; he simply cannot avoid it. But the likeness is merely a raw material; it is thrown into the alchemical mixture of a portrait. Sometimes I would talk to my sitters for hours before as much as picking up my paintbrush. Antonio drummed his fingers and looked across at me in disbelief. I ignored him. I would hand them something to read, not to hear their voices, but to see how they held the book – either at nervous distance, or close up to their cheek like a lover’s face. I was curious, but it was more than that. I did not seek to possess my subjects; I wanted to act as witness to their hopes and disappointments, their loves and their dreams.
Casanova had been right. What people want to see in their portraits is what they want to know, but cannot see in their own faces: some kind of inner truth behind their own eyes. The truth they seek is always this: How much shall I be loved?
Even these early portraits of mine had the depth and complexity of novels. Where they lacked technical perfection they showed the marks of my uncontainable curiosity. My pastels were sweet reminiscences, more diaphanous than remembered desires. My sketches were like love letters; my studies were poems in manuscript. I knew when I was successful: when their portraits were finished, my sitters walked away with them, hugging them to their breasts.
You make the road by walking on it. I made my road in Venice, and it started to lead me to money and fame. I was selling dreams, successfully. These were the dreams of people who wanted to look better than their best, to their lovers and families and to the generations who would succeed them. All of Venice knew about me. Eventually the stories even penetrated the private citadel of my parents’ home, and were mentioned in our dining room. That day I lowered my head over my plate while I wondered what they would think if they knew that it was their own daughter who was causing such a sensation. I lived in fear that my father would decide to commission a painting of my sister and myself, to join the other sombre portraits on our walls, but fortunately an outbreak of pimples on Sofia’s face preserved me.
When it was discussed at the table, I asked, ‘Who would want to paint those?’ pointing to the excrescences on her chin, neck and cheeks. Sofia fled, weeping, from the table. And the subject was closed, except that my mother redoubled her efforts to help Sofia. Now she applied the local remedy to Sofia’s fiery face. When she lay in her minted bath she wore a soothing face mask of strips of veal soaked in milk. I am embarrassed to tell you the things I said when I first saw her bedecked like this. ‘Don’t be unkind,’ Casanova would urge me. He gave me a phial of plantain water for Sofia, but when he was not looking I emptied it into the canal. This was not mere unkindness – though I admit that unkindness played its part. I simply did not know how to explain away its provenance at home, or indeed such a strangely charitable act on my behalf. Casanova, invece, believed in only the sweet side of me, and it was therefore all he saw.
By May that year my life had taken an entirely satisfactory shape. I was still creeping out of my bedroom window at night, for love, and spending my afternoon hours in Antonio’s studio, for art. I had contrived a sustainable alibi for the time I spent at the studio: I was supposed to be at the Armenian monastery on the island of San Lazzaro with a blind old monk who had taken a liking to my voice at the convent and needed an amanuensis for his work. In return, he was, I said, instructing me in the rudiments of the Armenian tongue and faith. Although the Armenians were much respected in Venice, my parents were somewhat embarrassed at my new-found piety and studiousness. Though they clearly hoped that it was a passing development, like Sofia’s pimples, they took no steps to interfere.
I was sometimes confounded that my parents had given birth to both me and Sofia. True, she had a passionate and precocious taste for sumptuous clothes, but otherwise she appeared to me entirely inanimate. I had this life that Sofia could not comprehend – ever. Her road was made without her needing to take a step for herself. She had the most inviolable aversion to novelty of any kind, unless she could wear it. She would marry her merchant, not from the higher echelons of the Libro d’oro, the golden book of Venetian patricians, but from a cadet branch of a noble family like our own. Her pimples would fade to pearly scars, her hips would become plumper, her brief bloom would be fertile, and soon her chins would increase. I would be a disinterested aunt in a few years. It was strange to live in the same house with such a bovine presence. But she could still be dangerous, being full of childish spite, so I was careful. At home tiredness now made me so meek as to be unnoticeable. It was, in fact, hard to muster up the energy, venom or interest to bicker with Sofia during that time, but I did, sometimes, so
as not to arouse suspicion with my unwonted peaceableness. And so I managed to simmer Sofia’s resentments without letting them boil over.
My mother always preferred Sofia. I heard her boasting as much to her women friends. ‘Look! the Family Brow.’ She pointed to an ancestral portrait. ‘And underneath the Family Brow – no nonsense, and certainly nothing I didn’t put there. She’s like a little princess, she loves to be good! She never runs down stairs. She never answers back. She’s a little slow, but men don’t like them smart.’
The ladies congratulated my mother, who was a little pink from her long speech. Watching unseen from a corner of the room, I saw her touch her rigid, pomaded hair and straighten the little confection of flowers which had come askew above the sticky, powdered carapace. She put her arm around Sofia, who looked up at her, with a silent mew of satisfaction.
‘And I believe her skin is starting to clear now,’ added one of the kinder ladies.
‘And Cecilia?’ enquired one of the crueller ones.
I, Cecilia, was another story. My mother tried to dress me in identical style to Sofia. We were little adults, perfect miniatures of our mother in our dresses. Like all Venice we dressed in obedience to the law laid down by the Poupée de France, a doll on display in a shop window in the Merceria. La Poupée’s miniature fashions changed as often as they did in Paris, and, as we were rich, so did ours.
On Feast days we were crammed into brocade dresses with gold thread worked through the stiff bodies of flowered Pekin silk and half-sleeves foaming with lace. Sometimes we wore little side-bustles which protruded like small tables. Our necklines were V-shaped. We walked the streets in slippers of striped satin. For cold days we had little capes of camelot – goat and camel hair. We had gold buttons on our camisoles and silk ribbons to fasten our pearly stockings at our knees.