by Diane Haeger
Elena was thoughtful, then she looked away. “My life was very different before I came here,” she said. “But you. Why do you try to read it? Surely you don’t need it for your painting.”
The open expression on her face told him that she was not being critical. Rather, she honestly wished to know. “Many of our commissions are classical or biblical themes, along with stories of love and loss, as in Dante’s work. Mastro Raphael believes that it is not enough to re-create an emotion. An artist must know it himself, and understand it, as well if not better than the story’s author does before he begins to paint.”
He could see that she had never considered that, but it was also clear from her expression that he had not spoken beyond her ability to comprehend it. She moved a little nearer still, and so he politely stood, facing her. She gazed at the wall of leather-bound books behind the chair in which he had been sitting.
“Is that so for all artists?”
“No. Before I came to work for the mastro, I had heard it declared by other artists that the masses would not understand it anyway.”
“But Signor Raphael believes differently?”
“He has never painted for the masses nor with the notion of idealized perfection. He works toward his own desire of re-creating the thing with honesty, in order to move the viewer.”
“You must be an extraordinary painter yourself for a mastro like Raphael to trust you as he does with these concepts.”
“I would not dream of comparing myself,” Giulio said honestly. “He is the genius. They are his ideas, his concepts, and his scrupulously detailed designs, which his assistants only see to fruition.”
“But is it not you, then, by so doing, who brings them to life?”
“Perhaps, on occasion,” he conceded with a small but proud smile.
“It was horrendous what happened to him. Thanks be to God that he had you to help him with all of those commissions until he had fully recovered, or no doubt everyone would be pounding at his door.”
“Thank you for the compliment, but Signor Raphael has many other able assistants who have been painting far longer and more capably than I.”
“Not ones he has trusted enough to invite to live beneath his roof. He told me what you did for him, staying with him by the hour at the studio those first few days, then finishing many of his sketches for him to give to the other apprentices.”
Unaccustomed to adulation, Giulio awkwardly nodded to her. He had indeed done precisely that—taken the sketches to Raphael for approval, then given them to the other artists as if they were Raphael’s directions—exactly in order to maintain the confident flow of the workshop.
“At a time when it is difficult for him to trust other artists,” Elena went on in a voice of simple honesty. “I think he is fortunate to have you, Signor Romano. In his studio and here in his home as well.”
As she turned to go out of Raphael’s library, Giulio wanted to say that he was the fortunate one, but he realized, as her face still shone with kind admiration, that she was absolutely determined to leave him for this evening with a compliment of his own lingering between them.
POPE LEO sat regally on a canopied throne, having just dismissed the papal legate with a bored wave. Behind him stood a stone-faced page with powerfully set shoulders. The page bore the ever-present silver tray brimming with egg-washed, sugar-dusted pastries, one of which the pontiff was just then consuming with great relish. As the pope pressed the final bite between his lips, his cousin, Giulio, came through the door in a sweep of crimson, flanked by two lower-order priests, both wearing black cassocks. Cardinal Giulio de Medici stopped before his cousin, hands linked behind his back. He was younger than the pontiff, and more handsome, a fact he had worked to his advantage all of their lives. Leo’s bulging eyes, with heavy gray bags beneath, and ever-expanding girth aged him well beyond his thirty-nine years.
“Ah, good cousin! Do share a sweet with us,” Pope Leo said, his round cheeks bulging.
“Thank you no, Your Holiness. I have broken my fast already this morning.”
Leo was surprised at that and chuckled. “So have I and yet . . . these are sweets!”
He had been this way all of his life, Giulio thought. Nothing, not even devotion or papal responsibility, compared with food. For Pope Leo, the papacy had not been earned. It was a gift for being a Medici, and the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent. He had left the play of true power to other men with more ambition than he.
“Then why have you presented yourself this day, if not to share the fruits of my good fortune?”
He dipped his head. “It is not those fruits of which I desire to avail myself.”
The response was swift and direct. Leo wiped his mouth on a silk cloth and cast it over his shoulder at another liveried page, as if knowing he would be there to collect it. Pope Leo envied his cousin’s youth and beauty, and required his presence all the more because of it. It was rather how he felt about Raphael Sanzio, as youth and good looks were the attributes with which he himself had not been blessed. But Raphael he needed more for his incredible talent, to ornament his private world, and make his lasting mark on the Vatican Palace.
“Very well. Leave us,” he sighed, brushing away the bishops and cardinals who lingered near him, as if they were bothersome insects on a warm summer day. Only the page who bore the tray of pastries knew to remain.
When the cousins were alone enough for private conversation, he said, “What is it to be this time then? Another villa? More money to impress a new mistress?”
As the pope reached up, the page bent and pressed the tray forward, a single anticipated movement, as was the plucking of a new long pastry decorated with raisins and sugared almonds, which the pontiff began to consume with relish equal to the last.
“No, no. Nothing like that.” Giulio sank onto the small gold stool positioned before the pope’s throne, and fastidiously straightened the length of his own rigidly starched crimson cassock. Only then did he settle his eyes directly onto his cousin’s. “My own legacy is in a dire state, and I wish you to exert your powerful influence over Raphael to see that the commencement of my portrait shall be the next.”
“Raphael shall not be doing any more portraits, good cousin, until he completes the next stanza!” he declared with an imperiousness with which he was now, after a full year on the papal throne, fully versed.
“What the devil is the problem? I know for a fact he has a staff of assistants and apprentices as long as your arm to help with the details and lesser commissions!”
The pope cupped fat fingers around his little bulb of a mouth and swallowed the last of the pastry with an audible gulp. “I am told that his attention is taken up, not so much with art, as it is with an alluring and mysterious new mistress—one who is said to be far more serious to him than any of the others. But that need not get out to Bibbiena, or the Lord God alone knows what form of delays it will create for my stanza!”
“You speak of the betrothal of Raphael to Bibbiena’s niece?” the cardinal chuckled, sinking back and touching his own knee with a slap of incredulity. “Surely the poor foolish girl was told of Raphael’s reputation with women before she agreed to the match.”
“Indeed she was, and she desired him just the same.”
“Be assured that he is a lusty young man who shall always have a mistress or two tucked away to inspire him, no matter whether you warn him against it or not!”
“Such things concern me not at all,” the pope replied, not quite believably. “What does concern me is that Raphael keeps working without interruption. I have bestowed upon him enough commissions here to keep him busy for another two years at least! They are my legacy, the only bit of immortality I shall ever have. And my only way of blotting out the stain of my vile predecessor. And that, good cousin, takes precedence over all else in his life!”
“And what might Bibbiena do if he thought Raphael’s eye had strayed from his sallow-faced little bird of a niece?”
“Sallow-f
aced or not, Bernardo is devoted to the little chit. He thinks of her as the daughter he never had. And, moreover, he believes he has bestowed a rare honor on our good Raffaello by handing that simple son of Urbino a powerful cardinal’s very chaste niece on a shining silver platter. If Bernardo were to believe there was heartbreak in the offing for his little Maria, I do believe he might actually find a way to sabotage the great artist.”
“Forgive me, cousin.” The cardinal scratched his nose with a bejeweled finger. “But it is rather difficult to believe that a mistress, no matter how nubile and comely, could alter Raphael’s ambitions of greatness, or risk the alliance he has forged with Cardinal Bibbiena. Raphael was honored by the important betrothal. I heard him tell you as much myself.”
“Early on, s, it was so. But that was four years ago, and for some reason an ambitious boy like Raphael has not yet seen fit to formalize that honor with a marriage. Nor does he wish to.”
“Perhaps in the end he was looking for something more in a wife.”
“Well, he certainly shall not find what a man such as he desires in a peasant from Trastevere.”
“Trastevere! It is not so!”
“S.” The pope nodded, doubling his chin.
They cackled then, putting their heads together like two old fishwives at the mere thought of two such oddly matched lovers. “And yet my spies report that for the moment, she has entirely won him. He has her installed each evening in his studio, where they remain together until dawn.”
Giulio de Medici pondered the revelation, finally relenting to take one of the remaining pastries from the quickly dwindling supply set on silver still hovering in the hands of the page behind them. He bit into it, savoring the bite. After a moment Giulio said, “Marinated anchovies are wonderful, too, but how many of them can you consume before the thought alone fills your throat with bile?” He pointed his finger in warning. “Mark my word and fear not, my good and holy cousin. Raphael shall tire of this one just as he has all the others.”
“Apparently she is not like the others.”
“She is a body given up to an important man’s unholy desires. Why would she not become, in the end, just like all the others?”
“Because this one, good cardinal, he has painted as the Madonna!”
IN THE SHADOWS of moonlit darkness, through a small stained-glass window, and beside the pallet they had shared, Margherita watched him when he did not see her. At work again so late at night, in this utter stillness, a different aspect of Raphael had come alive before her. Now again he was obsessed, intense, and absolutely driven, but on something other than his passion for her. Sitting naked beside her, legs crossed, he was entirely focused in this silent moment on the chalk and paper he held and commanded. Raphael’s stare was leveled, his body tensed, the broad shoulders hunched forward, devoted to the activity as he confronted, prodded, and caressed the paper. From it, he powerfully coaxed shapes and figures out of nothing with broad, precise sweeps of his hand.
Again, the memory of Marina Luti moved across her daughter’s heart. Her mother would have liked him. And she knew now with a strange certainty that she would have approved. Raphael would have fascinated her, as he did her daughter. Knowing that gave her a warm and settled feeling of peace.
Margherita was transfixed by the energy swirling wildly around Raphael, and also at the sight of him entirely captivated. This was the private, inner dominion of an artist—the secret moment of creation, an experience as intimate and yet powerful as a sexual communion. Margherita felt herself grow warm as she watched his hand sweeping the length of the large sheet of white paper, the red chalk and his exacting strokes pulling forth the naked, recumbent figure of a woman, one arm behind her head, the other laying lazily between her legs. It was Margherita, her naked body, as she had slept beside him. She saw more fully the importance of it—what he did, how he worked, the absolute compulsion of an artist to create when the moment and the inspiration occurred. This was an understanding she knew she would remember for the rest of her life. There was power and delight in knowing that she now played a small role in that. She had never had power over anything in her life, yet suddenly it seemed she was the muse of a great and important man.
“I really must remember to fall asleep only with my clothes on,” she said softly, and her mouth was curved into a slightly mischievous smile. “Soon everyone in Rome shall speak of the forbidden things we do here in this studio, and we shall become quite notorious.”
Raphael glanced at her and bit back his own smile, then lay the paper onto the floor beside his thigh. He moved onto her and kissed her lips tenderly. “You speak as if that displeases you. But the flush of your face belies something else.”
“Happiness.”
“Yet you are right. There is danger in this for us both. And I must protect you, amore mio, for as long as I am able.”
“Why do I require protection?”
“Because a commodity, not only a man, has fallen in love with you—totally and entirely in love with you—and there are those in Rome with other plans for my life.”
“It frightens me to death, loving you.”
“Yet you do?”
“I know not why, yet I do.”
Moved, he said, “Then I am the man of greatest fortune in all the world.”
“You may not believe it is so when the world, and particularly your benefactor, discovers it.”
“I shall never regret a single thing that is between us, Margherita mia. You shall never know how you have forever altered my world.”
“Your world is your art.”
“My world, now, is you.”
He kissed her deeply, sensually, then, and Margherita kissed him back with an innocent passion that still could rock him to the core. In spite of how many times, and how many ways, they had made love, or how many intimate ways he had possessed her, it surprised Raphael that unlike all other women, he had no sense of tiring of her. Nor had he built up the same walls to his heart as he always had before. Each day, she surprised and delighted him. Moreover, she still touched a part of him that was new, vulnerable, and entirely unreachable before her. Thinking of that, as his eyes roamed the length of her glorious body, Raphael felt himself flushed with desire again.
“If you ever wish to change your mind,” she said with heartfelt sincerity, “I have seen what your art means to you. If it comes to that between us that you must choose, I shall promise to understand.”
“It will not happen,” he declared in response, with the passion of a sacred oath. He was holding her hands together between the two of them in a prayerful shape. “You have made my art come alive in a new way, do you understand that? You have given me a new motivation where I had been fading. It is said, amore mio, that a writer has his muse. If that is so, then I have my own artistic inspiration—and that evermore shall be you.”
He left her suddenly then, driven to use the power of his passion not to have her, but to capture her like this exactly. He moved across the room to his sketchbook as she lay naked before the fire, then drew up another stub of red chalk and began to outline her body on a fresh slip of paper, as she reclined so sensually before him.
“Have you not done enough of these studies?” She smiled up at him, her body relaxed and open, her smile slim and sensual.
“Such a thing is not possible.” He smiled rakishly back at her, showing her as he did how to position her arm lazily between parted legs, one knee slightly lifted, and her eyes leveled wide and unapologetically at him. “Dio, but that is wonderful! So erotic . . . ”
“So illegal!” she softly giggled. “You cannot simply go around painting the bodies of naked women!”
“But you are not just any naked woman. You are the artist’s inspiration! If I am ever asked to explain it, this is the classical representation of . . . of . . . ” He paused to think of the perfect classical deity. “I know, of Diana, the goddess of love! Naked women in classical form are perfectly acceptable as artistic subject matter in R
ome, you know!”
“No,” she chuckled. “I knew that not.”
Raphael tossed down his sheaf of paper and chalk and traveled slowly up the length of her body once again, and as he did, kissing the inside of her thighs, and the little triangle of downy hair where her legs ended. Margherita’s head lolled back and her eyes closed as she gave in to the sweet sensation of his tongue on her skin.
As he tasted her, she caught a glimpse of writing scrawled beneath an earlier sketched image, sloping words at the bottom of the page. She reached for it and drew it back to them.
“What have you done to my picture?”
“I have written you a sonnet.”
She was genuinely surprised. “Will you read it to me?”
“Should you not read it yourself?”
“I want to hear it from your lips as I look at the art you created above it. Per favore, Raphael. Read it for me.”
As tentatively as a child about to recite lessons, Raphael took the sketch back and settled it on his lap. He glanced at her once more, then gazed down at the words he had written for love of her.
The way my heart sees you, your beauty is clear.
But my very faithful paintbrush cannot compare it.
My love for you weakens all else . . .
Tears glittered in her eyes. “That is beautiful.”
“It is only the first stanza. I wrote it to you when my longing for you was—unrequited.”
“No one shall ever give me a greater gift.”
“I certainly plan to try.”
“Nothing you could ever buy for me could compare to what comes from the depth of your heart.”
He had never known a woman who could say that and make him believe she meant it.
“Come home with me tonight,” he said suddenly.
“To your house?”
“S. Be there with me. Talk with me, eat with me. I will read to you from the classics, to teach you. Then wake in my arms without the need to rush away before the studio opens. It is far more comfortable than here, to be sure. I have plenty of rooms for Donato there as well, and only one servant who lives with me upstairs.”
