“This may seem strange,” the painter says, “but would you consider letting me paint you?”
My mouth opens but all that comes out is a guffaw. “Me?” I manage to say.
“As you know,” the painter says, gesturing with his charcoal, “our commission for the altarpiece for Santa Maria delle Vergini calls for an image of Mary Magdalene among the Holy Women. I was struggling with how to compose her in the image until I realized that I have the perfect idea right here in front of me. Now I realize that you might be just the inspiration I need. Come. Let me show you.”
“Maria Magdalena.” The boatman’s mocking voice rings inside my head.
I follow the painter to the leaded window. “Per favore,” he says, gesturing for me to stand so that I imagine the light making a halo effect around my head and shoulders. Trevisan pulls up a wooden stool and observes me for a moment, pressing his sketchpad against his thigh. I feel his eyes running over me. “Would you mind letting your hair down, signorina?”
I pause for a moment, then release the leather tie that binds the end of my braid. Slowly I unravel the braid and the leather ribbon woven through it. I shake my head and pull the waves forward across my shoulders. Immediately, I see the painter’s eyes light up, creases forming on either side of his brown eyes. “Ecco,” he whispers, then begins making careful lines on the page with his charcoal.
In the heavy silence, I feel the canal air slide across my shoulders from the window. I have never sat for anyone to draw or paint; it seems awkward and strange. I watch the painter’s tentative hand move across the parchment, and I feel his brown eyes on me. A shiver runs up my spine, and my eyes study the patterns of grout lines on the tile floor.
I hear the door latch scrape against the wood. The painter’s wife and their young son appear from the kitchen. Little Gianluca holds his mother’s hand, half hiding himself behind her skirts. For a moment she looks disoriented, as if the room she has entered was not the one she was expecting. She blinks at me, then cocks her head toward her husband. “What is this?” she asks, gesturing toward me.
Shame washes over me even though I have done nothing wrong. The painter comes to my rescue. “Maria is posing so that I can work out a composition for the Magdalene,” he says, scraping his stool across the tiles and moving back to the worktable.
I gather my hair into my hands and twist it into a long rope. Then I pick up my leather braid ribbon from the table and stand. The painter’s wife looks at me with a frown. “Benvoglio! You are making her nervous,” she says to her husband.
I feel a rush of heat to my face. “I do not mind, signora,” I say, returning to my workstation and busying myself with examining the sanded edges of the alder wood box that the carpenter has brought. The atmosphere in the studio is thick and full. “It is true that I... I am not accustomed to being on the other side of the picture.” I laugh but the sound of it falls flat.
“I thought you were going to the market,” the painter says to his wife. I see him fidget with his fingers, busying himself by lining up the nubs of charcoal on his table from smallest to largest.
“I want a biscotto, mamma,” says Gianluca, turning his wide eyes up to his mother.
“Yes, cavolino. We are going to do that,” she says to the boy, then turns to her husband, “only that boatman of yours is nowhere to be seen.” She clucks in exasperation. “I told you it was a bad idea to allow him to come back to us after that disaster.”
“Tesoro,” the painter raises his palm toward his wife, “I am certain that the last thing Maria wants is to hear about our troubles with our household staff.”
In a crowded alley, I press my back against a cool brick wall and wait for the procession to begin.
Brightly colored guild banners careen above the heads of the disorganized crowd. A group of youths dressed in matching, multicolored tights sprints past me, their laughter and adolescent screeches echoing off the stone walls. They weave through the crowd, stumbling into the chaotic swirl of costumed guildsmen that has assembled in a small campo, the starting point of the parade. Men’s whistles and two random bursts of the bugle make me clap my palms over my ears.
For as long as I can remember, I have gathered with the other families of our painter’s guild to watch the procession of the feast of San Giuseppe, the patron saint of fathers and my own father’s namesake. This is the first time I have celebrated San Giuseppe without my own father by my side.
The Lenten season is upon us and the annual ban on mask-wearing has been handed down until next winter. Yet even the pestilence has done nothing to dampen the spirits of the parade-goers. Many have decided to watch the procession while holding oiled and scented cloths over their noses and mouths; a few noble ladies wear balls of herbs strung on ribbons around their necks.
The painter has taken his young son by the hand and led him to where the men of our guild are gathering to march. Among the men I recognize a few familiar faces, fellow guildsmen I know by appearance if not by name. I search for someone who might give me news of my father or through whom I might pass a message.
But this year, the number of men from the Guild of Saint Luke is meager, composed only of those lucky enough not to be sequestered behind the wooden barriers of our quarter. No one in the raucous crowd seems to acknowledge our small cluster of painters and gilders. Am I the only one who feels the void of our missing guildsmen? The main face missing is that of my own father. He loves this feast and reserves his best set of clothing to march with his fellow gilders. What was once familiar now feels empty and strange.
Several wives of our fellow guildsmen stop to greet Signora Trevisan. She and Antonella have worn their best and taken care to arrange their hair. The wife has dressed the baby girl in a pale green gown with embroidered cuffs. I have made a fumbling attempt to style my hair like Signora Trevisan’s, winding it in small piles and pinning it around my brow line. Will our guild families see me as part of Master Trevisan’s household now?
While we wait for the procession to begin we watch several day laborers directed by the drapers’ guild to set up a pyre in the square for a great bonfire after the procession. Other women and children line the wall to watch. The bakeries have opened their doors to square. The smell of zeppole fills the streets, so overwhelming that I can almost feel the stickiness of the fried dough and its weightless pastry cream on the roof of my mouth.
The procession begins with the loud cry of the horn, and it only takes a few minutes for the main attraction to arrive. Each March a young boy about ten years old is chosen to portray Joseph, the father of Christ. This year’s youth is a handsome boy with a fair, round face, bright eyes, and hair as dark as coal. With pudgy fingers, the boy tugs on the gold thread of his blue robe and looks nervously at the crowd. The gilded leaves encircling his head shimmer in the morning light. Behind him, a man leads a donkey with Mary, a slight girl dwarfed inside an enormous white and blue dress, also trimmed in gold. A red-cheeked toddler is dressed as the Christ child, balancing an enormous gold halo on his soft head. The child’s father grasps his small leg so that he does not fall from the donkey’s back as they amble down the alley in their mock flight into Egypt. Men with wooden flutes come next, puffing out a plaintive song that fills me with emotion.
Our own guild of Saint Luke, the painters’ guild, follows the musicians. Immediately I recognize Master Trevisan toward the front of the crowd; he has lifted his son to his shoulder so that he can see over the tops of the men’s heads in front of him. His journeyman marches behind, a bored expression on his face. The painter’s wife sees her husband and waves frantically, holding up the baby girl to see her father.
Trevisan’s young son has made something for his father, a small drawing carefully scrawled on a scrap of parchment recovered from his father’s studio. It’s the new gondola, the boy proudly told his father at breakfast, and I watched the painter’s eyes light up when he traced his son�
�s crude outline of the boat with his finger.
“E bellissima, amore,” the painter said to his son, his eyes creasing as he ruffled the boy’s hair with an elegant hand. I think about the gilded box I am working on for my own father, and I wonder how long it will be before I can present it to him.
As the jugglers at the end of the procession pass, Antonella and I follow closely behind the painter’s wife. We funnel into a tight crowd heading toward the Piazza San Marco. Near the square, the merchants try their best to hawk their wares to the crowds pressing their way into the space.
The procession spills into the Piazza San Marco and disperses into a confusing mass of tradesmen. I stick closely beside the painter’s wife as we wend into the familiar square anchored by the façade of our Basilica of San Marco. The piazza is the stage where Our Most Serene Republic proclaims its wealth and power to an audience of its own citizens as well as the traders, diplomats, nobles, clergy, and foreign visitors who ferry themselves here to our damp cluster of islands in unceasing numbers. I have witnessed every manner of public spectacle here, both official and otherwise: religious processions, masked balls, musical performances, humiliations, executions.
My eyes scan the crowd, for I am looking for someone—anyone—from our guild who might have news of my father and Cristiano, and more importantly, who might be able to get word to them. On three sides of the piazza, long arcaded passageways house sellers of glass and lace. On the east side, the façade of the basilica of San Marco dominates the square. I have heard stories about how Venetians wrenched Christian treasures—precious chalices, altarpieces, jewel-encrusted statues, holy relics—from the hands of the infidel, and brought them to Our Great City, where they are housed in the basilica’s treasury. The greatest trophy of all, the four bronze horses atop the church, the quadriga, has been brought from Constantinople itself. Ever since I was a girl I have wondered how those horses were made, their golden surfaces gleaming in the sunlight.
To the south of the church the Doge’s palace sparkles in the sunlight. A fire nearly destroyed the ducal palace when I was just a child, and the place has teemed with stonemasons, carpenters, painters, and other tradesmen for as long as I can remember. Our own Master Bellini has even painted a picture of Our Most Excellent Prince himself, I have heard.
“Signorina Maria.” I turn to see Pascal Grissoni making his way toward me, pushing through a group of women pressing their noses with cloths infused with scented oils. Instinctively I suck in my stomach. I constantly worry that someone will take note of my burgeoning shape. The painter’s wife greets Grissoni with a smile.
“I have just spoken with Master Trevisan,” he says, bowing to the painter’s wife and me. “I wanted to invite all of you to come and visit my family’s studio. I want you to see a cycle of paintings that my father and I are doing for the church of Santo Spirito. I am having a small reception with some of the other members of our guild so that everyone can see the pictures up close before they are installed in the church.”
“A lovely invitation,” the painter’s wife says.
“Perhaps after the festivities are over in a few days,” he says.
He reaches out to touch my sleeve. He turns and sets his brown eyes on me. “Signorina Maria, it would please me if you would come.”
Chapter 20
Antonella has given me a miniature set of sewing scissors which I have used to prick the small stitches of the camicia that I wear beneath my dress. I have little appetite, but my middle has begun to bulge, a small rounded ball. I layer my dress and a leather apron over it, tying it only loosely in hopes that no one will take note of my changing form.
It is only in my work that I forget.
Now that the carpenters have delivered our panels for the Vergini altarpiece, I can turn my attention to my traditional gilding work, the only part of the process where I feel in control. The large, symmetrically cut pieces have been stacked along the wall on one side of the studio where they take up the entirety of one wall. After we have gilded and painted images on them, the carpenters will help us assemble them inside the church. They will fasten large battens of wood to create an armature in a final configuration that will stand taller than three men. Trevisan’s journeyman and I have almost finished sanding the panels and the painter has sent Stefano out for more horsehair cloth.
Trevisan and his journeyman have placed one of the sanded panels atop the worktable in the center of the room for me. I run my hand over the surface, feeling for imperfections. Poplar is vulnerable to warping, and I stoop to examine the surface in the raking light. Overnight I have soaked large swaths of fine linen in three buckets filled with the gesso purchased from the vendecolore. Piece by piece, I lay torn pieces of linen over the surface of the panel to conceal any flaws. With my brush, I soak and press the linen pieces down to the surface, just as my father showed me to do when I was barely tall enough to see over the top of the table.
I dip my brush into the pot of gesso, watching the white, gelatinous mixture jiggle as I load it onto my brush. Slowly, I begin to coat the surface of the wood with the animal skin glue. The gesso is the foundation, the support and adherent for the egg tempera colors and especially the gold leaf.
The best gesso is made from the boiled skins of the water buffalo. That is what my father has always said. Over generations in our workshop, we have tried making the priming material using the hides of mountain goats, minks, and other beasts great and small. Now, the buffalo-skin gesso is the only one we use. When we add powdered gypsum and water it imparts a dull white color to the jellylike mix that transforms even the oldest panel into the perfect surface for gold leaf and tempera pigments.
Over generations my family workshop has become known for our perfectly prepared panels. We work with several carpenters to select the pieces of poplar and maple, shipped on great rafts from the mountains of Cadore and seasoned in store rooms and along quaysides of the canals. Still, I must carefully layer the ground in order to do justice to the reputation of my father’s workshop, and to the quality that Master Trevisan expects of me.
Egg tempera paints impart beautiful and translucent color to our panels, but only when the panels are well prepared for paint. Using brushes of mink, fox, and horsehair, we brush many light layers of sizing on the surface of the wood, covering each layer with powdered charcoal, then scraping down each layer with a flat metal blade to make the smoothest surface possible. Once the surfaces are perfected, I will add red bole, then the gold, then decorative punchwork. But weeks will pass before it is done.
After I have applied the linen to the entire surface, I arch my back and stretch, replacing my brush in one of the now-empty pails. The sizing must dry before I begin to apply another thin layer. This small act of running my brush along the surface of the wood washes my soul in peace. I have no power over where the hand of the plague decides to fall. I have no sway over the small life growing quietly but insistently inside of me. It is only with the brush or the palette knife in my hand that I feel I have any influence over anything at all.
Ever since the painter’s wife found Master Trevisan drawing me from life, she spends more and more time in the workshop. While Antonella sees to the children, the painter’s wife tidies books on the shelves, dusts motes from the windowsills, stokes the fire, comments on the trees that the young journeyman is dotting in the background of a small portrait. If the painter is flustered by his wife’s incessant chatter and flittering about, he does not show it. Still, we all seem to breathe a collective sigh of relief when she finally settles herself by the window with her embroidery ring.
Now it is clear to me that Signora Trevisan senses that there is something more going on inside her husband’s workshop than meets the eye. Perhaps it is the heightened state of carrying a child that brings forth a sixth sense. I can now attest that I see and smell things I did not before.
At the central worktable, Master Trevisan mulls over hi
s preparatory drawings for the altarpiece. He has turned the pages hundreds of times, studying, scratching his beard, making small notes in the corners of the parchment sheets, scraping others and making adjustments to his drawings. With a nub of charcoal, he makes careful marks on the side of a parchment sheet on the table at his side. For several days he has worked on this single figure, wiping lines clean with a rag, then reusing the charcoal to make a new line. The journeyman has drawn a grid over the page so that it can be easily transferred over to the final painting.
As strange as it seems, I have become accustomed to feeling the painter’s eyes on me. After several awkward tries we have abandoned my more formal modeling sessions, some with his wife watching from her embroidery, and instead the painter now contents himself with simply drawing me while I go about my work. I feel his gaze follow me as I move across the studio. He is not obtrusive or leering; he simply follows me with his eyes, drawing quietly in his sketchbook, the only sound the canal water lapping against the side of the stone building. I prefer it this way, for I am filled with nervous energy and cannot fathom how I would go about sitting still.
That evening, in the kitchen, I find Signora Trevisan sitting at the table with her infant daughter at her breast. The dirty dishes from the midday and evening meals are stacked on the wooden table before her. Her face looks lined, her eyes ringed with shadows. If her husband had not announced it, you would not know that she was with child.
Women carry secrets, I think. It is what we learn to do from childhood.
“Are you feeling all right, signora?” I say.
“Exhausted beyond words, if you want to know the truth.” She huffs a little burst of laughter. “Nothing beyond what every mother endures.”
The Painter's Apprentice Page 14
