Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind

by Anne Charnock

  This morning, as she recites familiar psalms that require little concentration, she reflects on the coloured grid she painted last night. A moment of clarity seems within reach. The angel whispers: there’s no reason she should only paint squares. She may paint any shape she likes. Odd shapes. Like the glass artist who pours colour and then binds his pools of pure vermilion, pure azurite, with lead strips. She holds this thought and hopes she won’t lose it before nightfall.

  Following noon prayers, the convent community gathers in the refectory for the main meal of the day. It is the turn of Sister Innocence, the novicemistress, to read a religious text.

  “Beloved sisters, open up your hearts and take heed of the holy teaching of Caterina dei Vigri, abbess of the Poor Clares in Bologna, God rest her soul. Allow Caterina to guide you towards sanctification, today and through all your days, through quiet contemplation of her Seven Spiritual Weapons.

  “One: always take care to do good.

  “Two: remember that we can never achieve anything truly good by ourselves.

  “Three: trust in God, for we should never fear the battle against evil, either in the world or in ourselves.

  “Four: meditate frequently on the life of Jesus.

  “Five: remember that we must die.

  “Six: remember the benefits of heaven.

  “Seven: let the Holy Scripture guide all our thoughts and deeds.”

  None of the weapons sound remarkable to Antonia, and she wonders why Caterina should need to write them down. She looks up from her broth, but Sister Innocence sees her and with a scowl instructs her to look down. She immediately bows her head, but the table seems to shift sideways. Her head swims. Too little sleep, an empty stomach.

  “Today, we will consider Caterina’s fifth spiritual weapon,” Sister Innocence continues. “Remember that we must die.” She continues to recite Caterina’s lengthy exposition on death and dying, but Antonia concentrates on her bean broth, which is thick, and hot, and contains large chunks of carrot. If she eats quickly, she’ll feel better, revived, and she’ll be less likely to faint.

  Her tiredness has already landed her in trouble. For last week, she confessed to the abbess that she had catnapped in her cell while working on the portrait of Maria degli Albizzi’s granddaughter. Her tiredness was the result, she told the abbess, of concentrating so hard on drawing the outline of the composition. She confessed, specifically, that she sat back to assess the outline and allowed her eyelids to close, and that she awoke because of her own loud snoring.

  She made the admission out of anxiety—that someone had heard her snoring and might denounce her to the abbess. Rather than rebuke her for the catnap, the abbess inquired if she was satisfied with the composition. As an afterthought, it seemed, the abbess punished her for succumbing to tiredness, instructing her to attend early prayers before vespers.

  Sister Innocence is evidently inspired by the fifth spiritual weapon. She adds great emphasis to each of Caterina’s shorter sentences. Antonia stalls, her spoon almost touching her lips, as Sister Innocence announces, “Let us do good while we have time.” Antonia’s heart beats hard. Yes, she wants to do good. Good work, that is. Good painting. The refectory table seems to shift again. She drops her head low as if in prayer, and she breathes deeply. She must not faint.

  “From my memory of the girl, it seems a fair likeness,” says the abbess. She peers down at the portrait on Antonia’s desk. “Is it finished? The girl’s grandmother grows impatient.”

  “I’m sorry, Mother Abbess, but I still have work to do. The final adjustments . . .” She feels herself blush. “My father taught me not to rush.”

  “Then I shall tell Maria degli Albizzi that the portrait is progressing well. Before I release the portrait to the family, I will need your brother’s approval. I shall write to him and request his attendance in the parlour in . . . ?” She looks to Antonia and raises her eyebrows. “Surely, two weeks will give you sufficient time.”

  Antonia nods, embarrassed to be in negotiation with the abbess.

  “If everyone is happy with your work, I will invite other parents to commission portraits. If their daughters are boarding here, it would be a convenient opportunity for all concerned.” The abbess turns to leave, but hesitates. She looks back. “Antonia, have you slept at all this past week?”

  She sits in the candlelight in her cell and casts her thoughts back to her father’s lessons. Colour is such a puzzle. She wishes she could ask her father for one more lesson. She closes her eyes and tries to tease out from all his lessons the specific points he made about colour.

  He told her that terre-verte created a muted effect in his painting of Noah and the flood, that terre-verte unified his entire fresco cycle in the cloister of Santa Maria Novella. And he often painted elements in his composition in a white colour tinged with yellow; in The Battle of San Romano, he used this colour for the horse, the lance, the soldiers’ hose. It emphasized his composition. And he used this same colour, as well as blue, in the same manner for the hunting scene on her dowry chest; it unified the composition of a long panel painting.

  She can’t remember her father ever talking about colour for its own sake. With hindsight, she sees that the composition always came first for him. The composition, and the story.

  She spreads out her five small paintings. Since her angel whispered to her a week ago, Antonia has worked hard each night, and now she assesses the results. She touches the paintings, lightly, as though her fingertips might divine some insight. In one painting, she created a twisting pattern of coloured shapes. In another, she made triangular shapes of colour. And in another, she combined circles of different sizes. The coloured shapes touch without any paint bleeding across to infect their neighbours. Each colour is pure. In the last two of the five paintings, she repeated the twisting pattern, using different combinations of colours.

  Antonia tidies her mussel shells of pigment into a neat row. She notices she’s running low on vermilion and azurite—she’ll need to pound and grind some more tomorrow. There’s still a full shell of boneblack; she picks it up and cups the shell in the palm of her left hand. She frowns and looks back at her paintings. Her favourite paintbrush is propped against her father’s ivory rest. She picks up the brush, mixes some of the pigment with egg yolk, adds a touch of water and strokes a thick line of boneblack around the edge of a vermilion triangle. She continues to stroke the paint until the painting becomes a black swamp with isolated, shimmering pools of pure colour. She repeats this for a second painting, and as she does so, she smiles and recalls her father’s warning: First and foremost, you must enjoy loading your paintbrush with paint.

  She sits back in her chair. She feels tired, ready at last to slip into sleep. In this muzzy state, she takes hold of the two paintings transformed by the black lines, and it strikes her that one of the paintings makes her feel sad, whereas another makes her feel joyful. She wonders if colours are like letters; they spell out a word, a feeling, if arranged in the right order. This thought creeps into bed with her, and as she drifts into sleep, she wonders if she’ll glean an answer to this question in her dreams, or if a revelation might come during lauds.

  It seems only moments later that she hears the tapping at her door. She wakes in the morning gloom, reaches for her robe and whips it around to throw it over her head. But the action is too hasty, and the edge of the heavy material catches the water bowl on the edge of her desk. The bowl smashes against the wall; paint-stained water splatters across the white plaster and falls in long drips to the cold stone floor.

  The cell door opens; it’s Jacopa. At the sight of a spectacularly drenched wall, she clamps her hands over her mouth to smother laughter.

  Antonia, stupefied, slowly straightens her robe.

  Jacopa says, “Leave the mess. I’ll clean it up after prayers. Come, let’s not be late.”

  Antonia pushes her fingers through her close-cropped hair, ties her novice’s headscarf. She turns to her desk, gathers her sma
ll paintings, unscathed by the disaster, and takes them to her dowry chest. She lifts the lid an inch and slips the papers inside.

  “Hurry, now,” says Jacopa.

  Antonia takes three quick steps across her cell but falters as her hand touches the door. She looks over her shoulder and stares, transfixed by the glorious drips and splatters.

  AUTHOR’S HISTORICAL NOTE

  Antonia Uccello, the daughter of Tomasa di Benedetto Malifici and Paolo Uccello, was born in Florence in 1456. Her older brother was named Donato. Antonia entered the convent of San Donato in Polverosa outside the city walls of Florence, most likely before her thirteenth birthday. The painters’ guild recorded Antonia as a pittoressa—a painter—on her death certificate dated 9 February 1490. This is all we know about the life of Antonia Uccello. None of her work is known to have survived.

  Paolo Uccello was an innovator in creating the illusion of three-dimensional space through the use of linear perspective, and he became well known for his depictions of storms, battles, dragons and wild animals. Antonia was born when Paolo was aged around fifty-nine. His last known painting is a night-time hunting scene, The Hunt in the Forest.

  It was commonplace for wealthy Italian families to board their daughters at convents for their education. The high cost of marriage dowries in Renaissance Italy often resulted in fathers allowing only their eldest daughters to marry. Such was the fear of any gossip being attached to younger daughters that they were packed off at an early age to convents to become “brides of Christ.” I was fascinated to learn that convents were important civic institutions and took a decisive role in the commercial life of Florence. The abbess of a convent was a key player in a complex web of social and power-based relationships within the city. And families vied to place their daughters in convents with high status so that important family connections in the outside world were mirrored and enhanced within the cloisters.

  It took me several years to work out how to combine my interests in art history, science and fiction writing with my experience of actually making art; this novel is my first published attempt. With hindsight, I realize that the exhibition Maurice Denis, 1870–1943 at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery in 1995 sparked my enduring fascination with those painters at the end of the nineteenth century who rejected realism in art. Subsequently, I researched how some of those modernists (Émile Bernard, Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier, André Derain) were influenced by the early Italian painters of the quattrocento. I visited Italy as often as possible, and naturally, it was no hardship when I felt obliged to return to Florence for this novel. I had to visit Antonia’s convent—the location of which I discovered in the tiniest of footnotes in Sharon T. Strocchia’s Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence.

  Although the convent of San Donato in Polverosa has recently been converted to apartments—and a large H&M store now stands opposite—the public church attached to the convent is still a place of worship. Cenni di Francesco’s nativity fresco, The Adoration of the Magi, adorns the nave. It’s in a good state of preservation, considering it was painted almost 750 years ago—in 1383, to be precise. I like to imagine that Antonia Uccello herself spent many hours in quiet contemplation of this truly engaging fresco.

  Few women painters are known from the early Italian Renaissance in Italy, and most were nuns, including Maria Ormani, Caterina dei Vigri, Barbara Ragnoni and, of course, Antonia Uccello. Plautilla Nelli is the best known of the nun painters of the Renaissance, and her astonishingly modern Lamentation with Saints—restored in 2006—is now on display in the great refectory of San Marco Museum in Florence.

  I visited Bologna to see the remarkable saint’s chapel that displays the mummified remains of Caterina dei Vigri. Respected in her own lifetime as a writer and painter, she became the abbess of the convent of the Poor Clares in Bologna. Later in the Renaissance, a few Italian women artists did gain public recognition. In some cases, these painters were the daughters of male artists, and they worked within their fathers’ studios. Among the best known of these Italian artists are Fede Galizia, Sofanisba Anguissola and her sister Lucia, Marietta Tintoretto, Lavinia Fontana, Artemisia Gentileschi and Elisabetta Sirani.

  On a personal historical note, my great-aunt’s fiancé died during the final days of World War I, and he is buried at the Cross Roads Cemetery at Fontaine-au-Bois in France. It has always struck me that there is a missing side to our family, since my aunt did not marry until later in life, and she didn’t have children. I visited the cemetery for the first time while writing this novel, having just delved into the family archive. In the row of graves farthest from the cemetery entrance, there are headstones for two men of the Chinese Labour Corps. Miniature bamboo is planted between their headstones. Both men came from the modern-day Chinese province of Shandong.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I take great pleasure in thanking Alexandra Jungwirth and Robert Charnock for their kindness in helping me to plan my research trip to Shanghai and Suzhou, and for making my stay in China so enjoyable. My thanks also to Wang Yu Hong and Wang Xingyi for their generous hospitality and assistance. I am also grateful to friends and family who read my manuscript at various stages of completion. In particular I thank three members of the Charnock family—Garry, Robert and Adam—Andrew Fletcher, Neve Maslakovic and Jacqui Nevin.

  During the development of this novel, I received invaluable guidance from my editor, Jason Kirk, at 47North. I am immensely grateful to Jason for his sustained support and enthusiasm for this writing project. My thanks also to Britt Rogers, Ben Smith and each member of the 47North publishing team; they are all delightful.

  I always enjoy the research element of writing fiction, and I’m pleased to thank Aarathi Prasad for our fascinating conversation about the future of human-reproduction technologies. I heartily recommend Aarathi’s fascinating book Like a Virgin—How Science Is Redesigning the Rules of Sex.

  This novel makes some sense of my meandering career, which has taken me from science journalism and photography to a fine art practice. I’m grateful to my former studio colleague Fiona Curran for encouraging me to start this novel at a time when I was hesitant.

  Thanks to the many enthusiasts who write excellent websites and blogs on subjects as diverse as medieval writing, ghost advertisements and the customization of denim jackets. And thanks to Lise den Brok of Historypin.

  The extract from Laura Cereta’s “A Letter to Bibulus Sempronius: A Defense of the Liberal Instruction of Women” (in Her Immaculate Hand, Selected Works by and about the Women Humanists of Quattrocento Italy, edited by Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil Jr.) is reproduced by kind permission of the Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies.

  My thanks also to Cheng Jia Wen for her translation of the Chinese inscriptions on two headstones at Cross Roads Cemetery.

  My special thanks are reserved for Garry—always my first reader and my travelling companion on every journey.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Painting and images referred to in this novel can be viewed on Anne Charnock’s Pinterest page: www.pinterest.com/annecharnock.

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