The Painter's Apprentice

by Laura Morelli

  The Painter’s Apprentice

  Copyright © 2017 Laura Morelli

  All rights reserved.

  The Painter’s Apprentice is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the Venetian locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.

  Except for brief excerpts for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form without written permission from the author.

  Published in the United States of America by The Scriptorium.

  Library of Congress Control No. 2017915226

  Hardcover ISBN 978-1-942778-96-7

  Paperback ISBN 978-1-942778-92-9

  EPUB ISBN 978-1-942778-91-2

  mobi ISBN 978-1-942778-95-0

  Audiobook ISBN 978-1-942778-93-6

  Cover design by Kerry Ellis

  Interior layout by Shannon Bodie, Bookwise Design

  The Painter’s Apprentice / Laura Morelli

  Venetian Artisans series

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  Dedicated to those whose hearts

  propel their hands

  The Lazzaretto Vecchio seemed like Hell itself. From every side there came foul odors, and indeed a stench that none could endure; groans and sighs were heard without ceasing; and at all hours clouds of smoke from the burning of corpses were seen to rise far into the air. Some who miraculously returned from that place alive reported, among other things, that at the height of that great influx of infected people there were three and four of them to a bed.

  —From an account of the plague houses by the 16th-century

  Venetian notary Rocco Benedetti

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Venice, Winter 1510

  Chapter 1

  I am scraping golden flakes from my palette knife when I learn that the pestilence has reached the quarter of Our Most Serene City where my father’s workshop lies.

  “Caresini the baker says that planks have been nailed across a half-dozen doorways along the rio de la Sensa.” The painter’s wife bounces her drowsy infant in one arm as she paces from one side of the workshop to the other. The baby’s soft, round head is barely visible in the crook of her mother’s woolen sleeve. With the other hand, the painter’s wife works a lace-trimmed twill into a tight twist, winding it around her fingers. “Crosses nailed on the doors—Dio!” She shakes her head vigorously as if to rid her mind of the image. “How long might it take to reach us?” She sets her wide blue eyes on her husband.

  From my tottering stool in the far corner of the painter’s workshop, my eyes track the lady’s nervous pacing, and I wait for her husband’s response. The painter’s journeyman stops grinding pigments in a marble mortar and stills his lean body as if suddenly frozen, gazing wide-eyed at his master from across the room. For a long moment, the workshop falls silent save for the gentle crackling of the fire in the hearth. The air feels stifling even though delicate ice crystals have formed on the window glass.

  All of our eyes settle on the man seated at the easel.

  The painter’s face remains placid. His eyes never stray from the sanded poplar panel propped before him. I see his mouth twitch left and right, weighing his wife’s question before responding. The movement makes his thick beard shift and roll as if it has come to life. Finally, he removes his brush from the surface of the panel and suspends it in midair, but his eyes remain focused on the Madonna and Child on the easel before him.

  “It is a long walk from Cannaregio to San Marco. The pestilence would have to get very much worse before it reaches us here, amore.” He touches the panel with his brush again. The journeyman resumes scraping his pestle across the bottom of the mortar, pressing small cakes of pigment into fine powder.

  I watch the painter for a few more moments. His hooded eyes regard the indigo pigment at the end of his brush, which he applies in a slow, meticulous motion. He appears composed, I think, but sometimes, what appears on the outside is not what is on the inside.

  My father taught me that. Deception is our trade.

  The gold we apply to the surface of an altarpiece is designed to fool the eye, to convey a feeling of sumptuousness, to bring an appearance of precious metal to what is only a hollow wooden core. That is what we do. It is my trade, my father’s, and his father’s before him, as far back as anyone remembers.

  The painter’s wife moves to the window and peers through its icy, leaded panes into the canal. The dull winter light creates a soft, glowing halo around her wisps of fine curls. “When we were children our father told us of a time when the pestilence descended on Our Most Excellent Republic as no one could remember. He was only a boy but it seemed, he said, that half of our people were dumped into the mass pits at Lazzaretto Vecchio. I have never been able to banish the image from my mind.” She places her handkerchief over her eyes for a moment, then addresses the ceiling. “The worst outbreak of a generation, he said. Che Dio ci aiuti!”

  God help us, indeed, if what the painter’s wife says is true. I shudder, picturing the bodies thr
own five deep into stinking pits on the lagoon island whose hazy outlines we can see from the Giudecca but do not dare to visit. The Lazzaretto Vecchio; many will not even utter its name for fear of conjuring the black hand of disease. It is where our people are sent when purulent boils appear in their armpits and groins, or blood flows from their mouths; where they are whisked on black ferries before they infect their families and neighbors. All of us have heard the stories from the old people.

  The last plague that struck down large numbers of our citizens occurred before I was born. Only the elderly remember that ghastly time but there have been outbreaks more recently, too. Each of us knows at least one person who has perished of the Black Death. It strikes without warning, unfurling its ugly hand to clutch anyone—the young and healthy, the thriving, the rich, the poor, the old. It grasps babies from their mothers’ breasts. Just two months ago, it took our own beloved Giorgione, the only member of our guild of Saint Luke who seemed to paint not with the hands of a human but with those of an angel. Though Giorgione’s house lay only a stone’s throw from our own, my father and the other indoradòri of the quarter have been spared. But I am not naive enough to believe that any one of us is immune.

  “Tesoro.” The painter turns to his wife as he wipes his long, wooden-handled brush on a rag. His face remains calm and reassuring but an exasperated sigh escapes his mouth. “Do not unleash a storm from a glass of water. As far as we know it has not gone farther than one or two streets in Cannaregio.”

  “Better them than us,” says the painter’s journeyman, pinching a square of indigo pigment between his fingertips and dropping it into his mortar. The painter’s face turns dark, and he casts a stern-looking glance at his journeyman, then at his wife. All three of them suddenly turn their gazes toward me in the corner of the studio, as if I have only now appeared.

  Have I been that invisible? With my freckled nose and cascading curls the color of fire, I am accustomed to standing out, not disappearing into the shadows. Could it be that they have only now realized that I am here in the room, that it is my home, my quarter of the city where the pestilence has begun to steal people from their homes?

  Heat rises to my cheeks. I study the knots in the wooden tabletop and try to become as invisible as I believe I have been all along. Ignoring their gazes, I scrape my knife again and watch the gilded flakes drop into my ceramic bowl. Dust-flecked winter sun reflects from the canal and filters into the room. Each gold flake catches the light, flashing brilliantly and briefly before falling into a dark heap at the bottom of the dull brown bowl. There I will collect them and mix them again, pressing them out into thin gleaming sheets and setting them aside for another picture.

  “Stefano!” The painter’s wife comes to my aid, reaching toward the journeyman and shaking her handkerchief at him. “You forget that young Maria’s family lives in Cannaregio. You must not be so callous,” she says.

  The journeyman shrugs, then presses his palms together in a gesture of prayer. He wags his hands in my direction. “Forgive me, signorina,” he says, casting me a sheepish glance as his soft Venetian inflection rolls across the room. “I had forgotten.” The young man’s face is the picture of innocence and I cannot find it within myself to reprove him.

  “Niente,” I say. “You meant no harm.”

  The baby begins to fuss and gnaw her fists. “Shh,” the painter’s wife whispers, pushing the swinging door with her toe. They disappear into the kitchen. The three of us return to the work of our hands: Master Trevisan the painter at his easel, Stefano the journeyman at his pigments, and I at the gold. We fall into a companionable silence, but the words of the painter’s wife ring inside my head.

  The worst outbreak of a generation.

  I wipe my knife along the edge of the ceramic bowl to remove the last flecks of gold as the words turn over in my head. This act of reconstituting the gold leaf does not require my full concentration for I have done it thousands of times. It matters not that I am a girl; I am as much an indoradòr as my father, as competent as any man who is a full member of our guild. In all of my nineteen years, I never wanted to be anywhere else but at my father’s side, laying and punching the gold into the poplar panels.

  But instead of punching gold in my father’s gilding studio, I am learning the ways of the colored pigments in the workshop of Benvoglio Trevisan. I am told that Master Trevisan is one of our guild’s most respected masters of color and light, that he is one of the best painters of altarpieces in our territories and beyond, and that I am fortunate to find myself at his side. I do not doubt any of it, but it does not change the fact that I feel a stranger in his home. How I ended up here is still difficult to fathom.

  Everything is new here. The peculiar, pungent odor of egg yolk and wine from terraferma used to bind the tempera paints. The ringing of the brass bell at the canal-side door. The late hour of the morning meal. The countless images of saints, ancient heroes, and mythical beasts cluttering the walls from floor to ceiling. The warble of the baby girl, the footfall and screech of the painter’s young son in the corridors and on the stairs. The taste of fish stew made with spices I have never sampled before.

  It has all taken some getting used to.

  It is not for lack of a welcome. On the contrary, ever since they brought me here a fortnight ago in a fine new gondola, the painter and his wife have done what they could to fold me into the rhythm of their household. They have fed me and housed me under their own roof, in accordance with the agreement that Master Trevisan made with my father and our guild leaders. Though it is only a short distance as the pigeon flies, I feel far removed from Cannaregio, from that place where my childhood home lies and the pestilence has now begun to unfurl its indiscriminate claw.

  The painter and his wife believe that I am here to help with a new altarpiece commission that requires a significant amount of gilding. That they will not have to pay me the rate established in our guild for apprentices. That instead, I will learn the colored pigments and secure the future of my father’s name. That this arrangement will benefit all of us and strengthen our painters’ guild.

  But just as gold leaf can make something seem what it is not, my place here in the painter’s studio is not as it appears on the surface.

  The truth of the matter is that my father has sent me away.

  Chapter 2

  On the mantel in the painter’s studio there is a small, exquisite gilded box of a kind I have never seen. We make gilded boxes in my father’s workshop, to be sure. From my workbench in the corner of the painter’s studio I can make out the decorative patterns across the lid, the kinds we make with metal stamps that have been handed down to us over generations.

  But this box is different. Nearly all its surfaces are decorated with delicate, white molded figures and animals in relief. Women in flowing dresses, men in exotic costume, a lioness, an elephant.

  Beneath the box on the mantel, I watch the servant woman, Antonella, sweep ashes from the great stone hearth. She gathers the gray powder into a pan, then pours the ashes into a copper bucket. The fire has been out for nearly an hour. Winter’s breath sweeps through the cracks around the canal-side door. I draw my woolen shawl tightly around my neck. Upstairs, the children have been tucked beneath a pile of blankets. The painter and his wife have also retired to the upper floors. The house is silent except for the gentle brushing of the broom on the stones. Flickering light comes from a pair of flames dancing in the draft near the door and a large bronze lantern on the worktable. In the candlelight, the gilded box above the hearth glints like a dull beacon.

  I wipe my paintbrushes clean with a rag and I feel desperate to sing. In the foreignness of the painter’s studio, I do not feel at liberty to lift my voice. I have not anticipated this problem, for it has never occurred to me that I would not feel at ease to sing while I work. It is a popular frottola in my heart now; I feel like a muzzled hound, as if the song that has welled up inside
my throat will burst out of me. My hands and my voice have always worked together as one. Singing is such an integral part of my gilding work that I doubt if I will be capable of fashioning the gold with my hands without lifting my voice at the same time. Sometimes my voice hums quietly, sometimes the words come out loudly, but I make a noise all the same.

  Now I have fallen silent.

  Some of my melodies are the ones we hear on feast days, those melodic chains that echo through the streets once a year and become lodged in our collective minds. Others are songs repeated over years in our parish church. Still others come out of me, sequences of notes of my own invention from someplace inside me that remains uncharted.

  My father says that I sang even before I could talk, inventing melodies from the time I was able to open my mouth and make a noise. “To the joy of your mother’s ears,” he told me, before a shadow passed over his face and he fell silent.

  Outside the painter’s studio, the boughs have been laid in the stalls and the convent choirs fill with the melodies of the Christmas season. I wonder if they have seen or heard any of it back home.

  “Master Trevisan has agreed that you may come home every second Sunday for the midday meal,” my father had said to me as I closed the latch on my trunk and prepared to board the painter’s gondola. It was no consolation. “A presto, amore,” my father had said when he squeezed my hand and helped me step into the rocking boat. Only fifteen days ago. It feels like a lifetime.

  “Are you coming up?” Antonella straightens her plump body, one hand on the small of her back as if it aches. I judge that she is not many years older than I, but her hands are dry and cracked, and she moves as if she is already an old woman.