Passion Blue

by Strauss, Victoria

  Giulia looked back as she and Angela passed through the door. The candle-lit table was a heart of brightness in a room whose edges shaded into shadow. Humilità and Perpetua still sat, for conversae did not sing Vespers, while Lucida bent toward old Benedicta, helping her to her feet, her face as lovely as a Madonna’s in the golden light.

  It was a painting. Giulia knew this, with a soul-deep thrill that set her fingers burning. And she knew, against all odds or certainties, that she would one day paint this scene—these women, this light, this moment—and preserve it forever.

  Outside, stars winked down from an inky sky. As they crossed the court, Angela linked her arm through Giulia’s, making Giulia jump.

  “I’m sorry,” Angela said, withdrawing.

  “You startled me, that’s all.”

  “Oh. Well, then.”

  Angela put her arm back. Giulia could feel the dip and halt of her limp.

  “I’m glad you’ve come, Giulia. I think we’re going to be good friends, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Giulia said, because it was the only way to answer such a question. It wasn’t the truth—how could it be? She would be gone soon. But it wasn’t a lie either. She liked Angela. For someone who had never had friends her own age, it was a feeling as unaccustomed as the pressure of Angela’s arm against her own.

  Angela left her at the entrance to the novice wing. Suor Margarita was waiting in the dormitory doorway, her hands hidden in her sleeves as usual.

  “Good,” she said when she saw Giulia. “You’re back on time.”

  “Yes, Suor Margarita. Thank you for allowing me to go.”

  Suor Margarita pursed her lips. “I did not allow it. My girls receive no special privileges. But I was overruled.”

  “I’m…I’m sorry.”

  “Well.” The novice mistress softened a little. “I know it was not your doing.” She turned abruptly toward the dormitory. “Girls! Girls!” She clapped her hands for attention. “Quiet now, I have something to say to you!” They obeyed, setting down their games, turning from their conversations. “You may have noticed that Giulia was not with us tonight. She has been chosen for a special honor—she has joined the workshop of Suor Humilità, where she will learn to be a painter, to the glory of God and our Savior Jesus Christ. Her duties may sometimes take her away from us, so if you do not always see her at table in the refectory, or during recreation hour, that is why.”

  “But, Suor Margarita!” Alessia, standing by the window with her clique as usual, stepped forward, an expression of outrage on her face. “She’s a conversa!”

  “Yes, Alessia, that fact is known to me.”

  “Why should a commoner get such favor, when there are noble girls who could be chosen?”

  “Perhaps,” said Suor Margarita in an icy tone, “because Giulia has abilities they do not.”

  “But Suor Margarita—”

  “That is enough, Alessia. I believe it would be instructive for you to contemplate the sin of envy tomorrow, while working with Bice in the kitchen.”

  Alessia’s mouth opened; for a moment Giulia thought she would defy the novice mistress. But then she clamped her lips together and was silent.

  “To bed now, girls.” Suor Margarita clapped her hands again. “Quickly, quickly!”

  Isotta was giggling as Giulia returned to her bed and began untying her kerchief.

  “Ooooh, Alessia in the kitchen! Getting her noble fingers dirty!”

  “Laugh away,” grumbled Bice. “I’m the one who’s stuck with her.”

  “Poor you,” Giulia offered, trying to be sympathetic.

  “And lucky you.” Bice eyed her. “I wouldn’t mind lounging around all day painting pictures.”

  “It’s not like that. Most of what I do is sweeping and mopping and washing up.”

  “Better than the kitchen, though. Or cleaning out the chicken house. But then, you’ve noble blood. S’pose they couldn’t have you down on your knees like us regular conversae.”

  “It’s not like that,” Giulia said again, but Bice only shrugged.

  The girls folded their gowns and kerchiefs into their trousseau chests and gathered at the washbasin, Alessia first as always. Returning, she brushed up against Giulia, who was last in line.

  “You don’t deserve it, new girl,” she whispered, seizing Giulia’s braid and wrapping it viciously around her fist. “I’ve got my eye on you.”

  Another yank, and she was gone. Giulia put her hand to her smarting scalp. Lisa, in front of her, twisted around to give her a sympathetic look.

  “She’s so mean,” Lisa said in her thick voice, her tongue garbling “s” into “z” and dropping the ends of words so that it was hard to understand her. “Her and the others. I hate them all.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Giulia gave Lisa a little smile. She felt sorry for the crippled girl, who was not only the most frequent focus of Alessia’s bullying, but was disliked and ignored by everyone else as well.

  After the candles had been blown out, Giulia lay open-eyed, listening to the breathing of the other girls. She thought of the beauty she had felt and seen in the golden glow of Lucida’s supper table. She thought of the lush garden courts, the jewel-like chapel where her vestition ceremony had been held, the graceful architecture, the plentiful food. All of it was so different, so completely different from anything she had expected to find at Santa Marta. She thought of the stories she had heard tonight, the circumstances that had brought each of the artists to the veil. She had imagined that all nuns must be like her, forced against their will, or else like Angela, willingly pledging their lives to God. But she was beginning to see that there were many variations of willing and unwilling—as many, possibly, as there were nuns.

  She wrapped her fingers around the talisman, as she always did before sleep, and sank into deep blue dreams.

  CHAPTER 11

  Pigments and Horoscopes

  The following Tuesday when Giulia arrived in the refectory for the evening meal, the scaffold was gone. The whole of the fresco was visible now, in all its glory—not just the figures that had been hidden, but the harmony of the design, the way the positioning of the disciples on either side of Jesus emphasized His solitude.

  For a few weeks, she waited to be summoned to the visitors’ parlor to receive her “cousin.” But by the end of June, she’d accepted that Ormanno was not coming. She struggled to put him out of her mind. She’d liked him, liked his smile and his seriousness about his work and the lingering way he had looked at her. He had seemed to like her too—just, apparently, not enough.

  He wasn’t the one. But someone will be.

  She had plenty to keep her busy in the workshop. Humilità expected the tile floor to be swept daily and scrubbed weekly, the shelves and cupboards to be kept in order, and the preparation areas to be cleared and equipment properly stowed at the end of each day. Giulia sometimes couldn’t sleep for the aching of her knees or back or shoulders, sore from lifting or scrubbing or just the many hours spent on her feet. Suor Margarita sighed at the state of her hands, embedded with charcoal powder, cracked and rough from hours at the washtub, and scolded her for the stains at the hem of her dress, which was not quite covered by her apron.

  But she also learned to fashion brushes out of squirrel hair and hog bristles, and to trim them to shape. She learned to transfer a cartoon, the drawing on which a painting was based, onto prepared wood panels by a technique called pouncing—pricking the lines of the drawing with a pin, laying the drawing atop the panel, rubbing with a coarse linen bag filled with charcoal, so that when the cartoon was removed the drawing was left behind. Perhaps most important, she began to study the making of paint and the uses and properties of the hundreds of ingredients from which paint was made: minerals, metals, clay, plant matter—even the crushed bodies of insects.

  Turning these ingredients into usable pigment was exacting and tiring. Materials must be broken up and pounded to powder in a mortar, then ground with water on a po
rphyry slab until they became a silky paste. The finished pigments were placed in little pots and mixed with more water, ready for the artists to combine with tempera or oil to make them flow.

  Some paints, such as bone black or red ochre, consisted of a single natural ingredient. Others, such as lead white or the yellow known as giallo di napoli, were compounded of several materials. Humilità bought some of these ready-made from apothecaries, but others she manufactured herself, or expected Angela and Giulia to mix for her. The recipes for doing so, along with formulas for tempera, gesso, primers, lacquers, and the purification of oils; instructions for achieving color effects; and techniques for making paint more malleable or more durable or more quick-drying, were collected in a leather-bound ledger with a brass clasp, which was kept in a locked box in one of the cabinets in Humilità’s office.

  “It’s our most precious possession,” Angela said, when she showed Giulia the book for the first time. Humilità was present that day, and had unlocked the box herself. “It contains the knowledge of all three of our Maestras, back to the workshop’s founding. We must always take great care with it, so there is no chance it will ever be lost or stolen.”

  “Stolen?” Carefully, Giulia turned the pages, crammed with writing, diagrams, and figures. Some of the ink was so faded it was barely legible. The portion in Humilità’s strong, angular script was twice as long as the rest. “Would someone really do that?”

  “Oh my goodness, yes!” Angela’s brown eyes grew wide. “When a workshop is famous, like ours, other painters covet its techniques and recipes. That happened to the Maestra’s own father. One of his apprentices copied a dozen of his recipes and sold them to another workshop.” She lowered her voice. “Just because this is a house of God doesn’t mean there aren’t venal women here who would use our secrets for their own gain.”

  “Is Passion blue in the book?”

  “All our recipes are in the book. But the most valuable ones are in cipher. I’ll show you.”

  Angela pulled the book toward her and looked through it till she found what she wanted, then pushed it back to Giulia. The page was filled with an apparently senseless jumble of letters and symbols, written in Humilità’s hand and broken into blocks. Between each block, a square of color had been laid down.

  “The colors say which recipes they are, but only the Maestra can read them, so only she can make them. Here are more.” Angela reached around Giulia to turn more pages. “See? And here—”

  “Passion blue.” Giulia recognized it instantly. Even in the form of a small painted square, it glinted like a jewel. It had an entire page to itself.

  “Yes. It’s the only one the Maestra never lets us see her make. When she needs to compound it, she comes to the workshop in the hour before dawn and locks the doors until she’s finished.”

  A formula for color so valuable it was not just written in cipher, but only mixed in secret? Passion blue was beautiful, with its unique depth and luminosity—but surely there were only so many ingredients from which any paint could be made, and only so many ways of combining them. Would it be so hard for someone else to discover the secret? Would it matter so much if they did?

  Before the workshop, Giulia had assumed that painters must be the sole authors of their work, just as she was the sole author of her drawings. But the workshop’s commissions were almost all collaborative. Their composition was decided by Humilità, who also made the preliminary figure drawings and studies, as she was doing now for the San Giustina altarpiece commission. For the larger and more important works, she also created the cartoons and underdrawings—though for smaller pieces she often left that task to Domenica and Benedicta, the workshop’s two master painters. Of the actual painting, she might do a great deal or relatively little, depending on her own interest and also on the provisions of the contracts that were drawn up for each commission.

  Everything else was done by the other artists, each according to her own particular skill. Perpetua’s talent was the depiction of natural things—trees and animals, rocks and rivers, stars and clouds. Landscapes were generally left to her. Lucida was a portraitist, best at painting faces; she created devotional miniatures, tiny and exquisite representations of saints that, when finished, were sent to another of Santa Marta’s workshops to be set in gilded frames and sold to the public. Stern Domenica excelled at interiors, and at the tricky mathematical discipline of perspective. Benedicta was unmatched at painting drapery, rendering sensuous shadows and lustrous highlights with amazing authenticity.

  Humilità encouraged Giulia to watch the painters if she had no other tasks. Sometimes Giulia kept Angela company as she worked on her practice painting, a small Madonna and Child. Angela was talented—the painting was lovely, with clear colors and graceful lines—but she was an apprentice, not a master, and Giulia preferred to stand by Benedicta’s lectern. The elderly nun might be missing her teeth and unsteady on her feet, but her eyes and mind had lost none of their sharpness, and her hand was firm. She seemed glad to share the vast trove of knowledge she had accumulated over more than fifty years of painting—especially her knowledge of color.

  “Remember, my dear,” she might say, putting the final touches to a vermilion cloak, “color is two things—itself, and what the light makes of it. This cloak is the vermilion of brightness, the vermilion of shadow, and the vermilion of everything in between. You must see all those different vermilions if you are to paint them, yet you must never forget that they are aspects of a single color. One thing made out of many, and many things that add up to one, like God’s own creation.”

  Or, explaining why a mixture of blue and yellow made a more stable green than the pigment known as verderame: “This is the great secret of color, child. Inside every color, other colors live. Thus we can create green from yellow and blue, or paint a purple robe by laying blue over a red ground. That’s why a poppy is not simply red, it is yellow red, and an olive leaf is not merely green, it is gray green. There is no color for which this isn’t so.”

  It was a new language, this color lore, opening a door on a new world of understanding. The more Giulia learned, the more she realized how delicate and demanding a skill it was. The wrong underpainting could spoil even the most exquisite pigment. The slightest error in preparation, the tiniest impurity, could make the difference between a color that was clear and one that was muddy, one that faded and one that lasted. The addition or subtraction of a single element could completely change a color’s properties, and maintaining consistency of hue despite variations in ingredient quality was an art in itself. Giulia began to understand how hard it was to create a color as pure, as profound, as unfading as Passion blue. She began to grasp why, in the world of painters, such a thing was so valuable.

  She imagined Humilità sometimes, alone in the workshop in the light of a single candle, combining ingredients like an alchemist. Like the sorcerer. He too must know things that were too precious to share with others. He too must have a book of secrets. She thought of his blue robe, and of the blue talisman, and of the blue flame that returned sometimes to dance in her dreams. Of Passion blue. So much blue…and so many secrets.

  It never seemed to occur to Angela that she and Giulia would not become best friends. She told Giulia all about herself—her family, the house she had grown up in, her lifelong dream of devoting herself to God. She spoke of her indulgent father, who had wanted her to marry but in the end bowed to her heart’s desire. She described her delicate mother, who had taught her the embroidery-patterning skills that, as a novice of sixteen, had brought her to Humilità’s attention.

  She took Giulia with her to the visitors’ parlor to meet her older brother, Alberto, a slight young man with his sister’s wide brown eyes who was in training to take over the family silk business. Giulia felt the weight of the talisman around her neck as she watched him through the bars of the iron grille that split the parlor in half, so that the nuns and their guests might never forget that they inhabited separate worlds. But th
ough he was polite, she could tell, when his eyes turned to her, that it was her novice dress and kerchief he saw, not the girl inside them.

  Angela was fascinated by Giulia’s life in Milan, so different from her own, and wanted to know everything about it. Talking about herself was not something Giulia was used to. Not since her mother died had she had anyone to confide in—Annalena had always been too busy or too tired, and Maestro, who would talk for hours about scholarly subjects, was uncomfortable with anything that carried too much emotion. She’d gotten used to being solitary, to keeping things to herself. More than that, here at Santa Marta, she was afraid of letting down her guard.

  But to her surprise, she discovered that she enjoyed answering Angela’s questions. Gradually, she found herself speaking of things that were more intimate: her love of drawing, the misery Clara and Piero had made of her childhood (though she didn’t mention the horoscope or what Piero had done to it), her memories of her mother. She told Angela about the Secret Hour, the precious time at the end of the workday when she and her mother would latch the door of their little room, open up the cedar box, and admire its contents—the beautiful trousseau, the topaz necklace, the gifts from Giulia’s father. It was a happy memory. But the box and everything in it were gone now, and the wave of grief and loss that rose in Giulia as she spoke took her by surprise. She had to stop, biting her lips against the tears that wanted to fall. Angela said nothing, only laid a gentle hand on her shoulder.

  On a hot afternoon in the middle of July, Angela and Giulia gave the drawing area its monthly cleaning, dusting the statues and busts, emptying the shelves and cabinets so they could tidy them properly. Reaching into the back of one of the cabinets to scoop out a heap of broken pottery, Giulia felt something more substantial underneath. She pulled it out and realized, to her astonishment, that she had found an astrologer’s astrolabe.