The Passion of Artemisia

by Susan Vreeland

  The worst, longest pain of all.

  The midwife got me into the chair. “Here it comes. Push now!” she said.

  All of me gritted and pushed down, squeezing. Pushing against the floor, it seemed. Sounds of wild animals came out of me. Finally, relief. Sleep. I wanted sleep.

  I woke up in the bed. How had I gotten there? Waves of ache surged up from my belly to the top of my head. Holding her. A girl child. Such a color. Pale madder. A tiny fist of a face. A dear little translucent ear, perfectly carved in wax. And Pietro. Pietro was here. Pietro on his knees. Close to me. Crooning, “Che amore di bambina.” Pietro, with a deep purple lump on his forehead.

  We named her Palmira Prudenzia. Palmira for his mother. Prudenzia for mine. He didn’t seem disappointed in the least that she was a girl. As for me, I was supremely happy. A daughter. A marvel. A miracle. Someday a beautiful woman. I felt her effect already, a herald of love. Pietro’s lips were kissing my ear.

  “She’s destined for a palace,” he said. “Look at her skin. Veins like threads of blue and red just like in the stone of Palazzo Pitti.”

  Eventually I wrote to Father.

  You’re a grandfather now. Her name is Palmira Prudenzia. She has lips the shape of a cupid’s bow, a dainty, pointed chin, and skin as smooth as satin. Maybe Mother would have said she looks like I did. So far, her only talent is blowing bubbles, but who knows? She might be the first female artist to be born in Florence. You are fathering a legacy. We will take her to see the city’s great art as you did for me in Rome. But of this you can be sure—she will not have her honor ripped from her in a public arena. I’ll make sure of that.

  The academy did not want me. Yet.

  I am fine.

  Your daughter,

  Artemisia

  He wrote back:

  Dear Artemisia,

  When you were born, I couldn’t keep my eyes off you, your littleness and the newness of your hands. I remember watching for nearly an hour as your little pink fingers tried to pick up a bean. If I were in Florence now, it would be the same again for me. I would like to sing to her.

  The academy is as tradition-bound as the church. It moves in paces of a hair’s breadth, but they cannot ignore forever a talent such as yours. Have you forgotten to see Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger? I should have heard from him if you had gone. He lives on Via Ghibellina.

  Teach Palmira Prudenzia the name,

  Orazio Gentileschi

  We took Palmira to be baptized on March 25, New Year’s Day in the old Florentine calendar, the day when all the babies born in Florence during the year are brought to the Baptistry just opposite the Duomo. The line of families carrying infants wound around the octagonal building. Pietro held Palmira facing forward to get her first sight of Ghiberti’s magnificent gilded bronze doors.

  “According to the story, over these doors Ghiberti inscribed, ‘Look at this beautiful work that I have done.’ ”

  “We could say the same about Palmira,” I said. Pietro smiled down at me, his dark eyes alight with pride.

  A barefoot, ragged woman with wild eyes and stringy hair sat nearby on the steps of the Duomo, sobbing between Hail Marys. I had seen a few of these penitents of Florence, but never one so wild and desperate.

  “She’s here often, or at Santa Croce or San Lorenzo, working off some sin in howling penitence,” Pietro said.

  Is this what they had tried to make me become during the trial? I shuddered.

  “Sometimes she’s even on the Ponte Vecchio,” he continued. “Anywhere there are people. It’s not genuine religion. It’s for show. Don’t pay her any attention or she’ll scream more.”

  I’d never been inside the Baptistry. The throng of people squeezed through Pisano’s door, the south entrance. In the press of families with babies, some of them crying, tightly packed around the font, Pietro and I stood like a normal couple, side by side, our bodies touching, offering our child to God. In that moment when Palmira was anointed, we were one—mother, father, child.

  I held Pietro’s arm and whispered, “She’s now among all the great artists and sculptors and poets of Florence who were baptized right here in this same spot. God has blessed their work.” My hope for her overflowed into tears.

  Through the blur, I looked up at the overpowering Christ done in mosaic above the altar, and cringed under the judgment of his penetrating eyes. On one side of him, the good were being welcomed into Heaven, and on the other, the damned were being devoured by demons. Hell’s torments were pictured as lovingly as the blessings of Heaven. Every kind of roasting, beating, boiling, disemboweling was displayed in detail with small glass squares in reds and blues and gold. Maybe it was superstition, but I held my hand over Palmira’s head to shield her from the sight.

  “Who created the ceiling?” I asked.

  “No one knows,” Pietro said.

  It was from an age when artists worked anonymously for the glory of God. As real people, with loves and fears, parents themselves probably, they were nothing. To think that such fine artists were already forgotten. A vast emptiness engulfed me and threatened to spoil the joy of the day. No one even knew their names.

  Palmira gurgled through babyhood in the cradle which we rocked with our feet while we painted. I felt a full and new contentment even though my time at the easel between feedings flew by in a matter of moments. Sometimes, as Father had written, I couldn’t take my eyes off Palmira’s shapely lips blowing bubbles or her tiny fingernails like flakes of candle wax, in order to do my work. Other times, when I was lost in the painting of something difficult, an eye or a hand or a foreshortened foot, her cries yanked me out of my concentration and it took extra time for me to find my way back to where I was. When she began to crawl, she tried to eat Naples yellow from a paint pot I’d set down too low on a stool. “Look, she’s hungry to be an artist too,” I said to Pietro. Palmira gave to our marriage a sheen of normalcy.

  Pietro used us once for a Madonna and Child. He draped me in a borrowed blue velvet mantle banded in rose madder, while Palmira slept in the folds on my lap. He posed me looking down at her, which I never tired of doing. “Che bellina. My holy child,” I crooned. From time to time her little legs thrust out against my belly. Pietro looked at us intensely, for hours, and I felt closer than I’d ever been to love.

  In spite of such hope, sitting still so long made me restless. I wanted to hold her yet I also wanted to be the one painting her. How many women models in the last two centuries—Madonnas, Eves, Mary Magdalenes, Venuses, Delilahs, Salomes, Judiths—had yearned to be on the other side of the easel, I wondered. “Have you ever had a model who wanted to paint?”

  “I never asked.”

  “But there must be some in this city. I wonder how I could find out.”

  “Ssh.”

  At the end of the session, I set Palmira in her cradle and took a look at his canvas. Shock rippled through me. The shape of my face was too oval, my neck entirely too thin, my fingers too long and narrow.

  “This isn’t me at all,” I said. “It’s not a question of skill. You’re a fine painter. This is intentional.”

  His face flushed as he studied the canvas.

  “What am I? Only an armature to hang cloth on and reflect light? All you saw were the folds in the drapery. Pietro, why?”

  He busied himself cleaning his palette and didn’t look at me. “I have a reason.”

  “What is it?”

  He let a moment of consideration pass, then set down his palette and strode toward the door. I rushed to block him.

  “Tell me!”

  “Are you sure you want to know?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked pained. “Don Carlo knows you. You met him once, remember? He knows what you look like. He knows what happened in Rome.”

  “So?”

  “Your reputation. I can’t have a tainted woman for the Madonna.”

  “Tainted! Pietro, do you really think that?”

  “Of course no
t, but it doesn’t matter what I think,” he said softly. “Don Carlo . . . The painting would be scorned.”

  I felt weak and leaned on the table, my back to him. He came up behind me, put his hands on my shoulders.

  “I didn’t want to tell you.”

  I nodded. “Is it to follow me always?” I turned to him, feeling bruised, but not by him.

  He drew my head onto his shoulder. “Someday I will paint you in a golden gown and everyone will know it’s you. It will be so gorgeous I won’t allow anyone to buy it. Not even Cosimo de’ Medici. Not even,” he flung his arm up, “the pope!”

  I laughed softly at his flamboyance. Painting for ourselves seemed foolish. We both had work to do.

  “Tomorrow we’ll continue, eh?” I didn’t want him to find another model and look at her the way I wanted him to look at me. Who knew where that might lead? Florentine women were beautiful, he’d said.

  The next day and as long as he needed a rack for the blue mantle, I sat still and silent in hoped-for love.

  He sold the painting for a fine price and we were happy. Now when we visited churches, he held Palmira, and I linked my arm in his. In the Uffizi, newly open to artists one day a week, Botticelli anointed us with the sweetness of life. In Venus riding on a seashell, I saw our child as a ripe and ravishing young woman mindless of her own beauties. In front of Primavera, Palmira’s dimpled hand reached toward the figure of Flora, whose flowered gown attracted her.

  “How could this be that she has a preference among all the figures in the painting? She’s only a baby.”

  “Not for long. She’ll be wanting pretty dresses soon,” Pietro said.

  Was it this early that a person developed inclinations? Did the baby Michelangelo respond to Donatello’s sculpture of the youthful David? Did his little arms that would someday wield a sculptor’s mallet reach out every time he was carried by a niche with a figure in it? I wondered how young I was when my father first showed me the paintings of Rome. Did my eyes roam hungrily over colors and shapes?

  Pietro and I painted side by side, with Palmira crawling between the legs of our easels. When she began to walk, she stumbled and tipped over Pietro’s easel, which came crashing down on her. She screamed and we rushed to her. “Ssh, Palmira. You’re all right. Mama’s here. Papa’s here too.” Her little body heaved with her sobs and I pressed her against my breast, feeling a little helpless. Pietro held on to her bare feet.

  The next day he built a baby-minder, a revolving pole from floor to ceiling with a sideways bar near the floor, about waist high on Palmira. When we tied her to the cross bar, she was supported and could toddle around in a circle and not be in our way while we worked, but still be with us. It moved me so much that he did this that I wrote to Graziela and Paola about it. To me it meant that he thought I could be a painter and a mother. Not many women could say as much for their husbands.

  9

  Inclinazione

  Eventually I had enough work, and confidence, to show to Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger. Because I could not write well in the florid style such a letter required, I asked Pietro to write a letter from me reminding Buonarroti of my father’s letter and requesting an audience.

  “Your father knows him?”

  “Yes. From years ago.”

  “No.”

  “Pietro, please. I can’t write that fancy language. Just tell me what to say. I’ll sign it Artemisia Gentileschi, wife of the painter Pierantonio Stiattesi. Then he’ll know you too.”

  He relented. I trimmed a quill and wrote what he told me. “Go slower,” I said, and labored over each letter.

  A response came back quickly inviting me to the Buonarroti home on Via Ghibellina. Pietro read it, arched an eyebrow but didn’t comment. I went alone, tripped on a dislodged paving stone, was splashed by a passing carriage, and arrived at a nondescript doorway in a narrow street, anxious and out of breath. A boy servant ushered me upstairs through a small empty anteroom to a rectangular audience hall with a coffered ceiling. A man wearing a green sleeveless lucco was carrying a sheaf of pages from a tall cabinet desk to a long table in the center of the room. The servant announced my name.

  “Ah, signora, I’ve been waiting,” he said, his voice coming softly from under his overhanging moustache.

  “I’m sorry, Your Lordship. I didn’t know the way.”

  “I meant, I’ve been waiting since your father’s letter. You should have come to me directly when you came to Florence.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “No matter. Show me what you’ve brought.”

  He cleared off books and portfolios to make space on the table of polished wood with a border of inlaid stone. I laid out the new studies and drawings. He examined them all carefully, pulling at his tapered beard and murmuring. It sounded like appreciation. We tacked the Judith and Susanna on drawing tables. He tipped up the tabletops, stepped back, and I let the canvases unroll. His eyebrows shot up and a smile played about his lips. “Just as your father wrote.”

  “They please you, signore?” I dared to ask.

  He chuckled and gave me a tender look, unmistakable even through his bushy beard. “That’s real flesh your Susanna is wearing. Those lines in her neck, the crow’s feet at her underarm, the fold of flesh below her stomach—male painters wouldn’t think of those details. And this Judith is an astoundingly complex composition, yet as real and true as if you had been there. Your interpretation will change how the world thinks of her.”

  My heart pounded against my chest so hard I thought he’d hear it. “Thank you, Your Lordship.”

  “I am in the process of turning the rooms on this floor into a memorial gallery to my great-uncle, il divino. This room will present an allegory of his virtues and achievements. Many artists will contribute. All these ceiling coffers will be filled with paintings.”

  I looked up to see deep recesses edged by heavy moldings of gold scrollwork on white.

  “Might I commission you for a panel in quadro riportato?” he asked.

  I lowered my head and gave a slow curtsey, as elegantly as I knew how. “It was my greatest hope.”

  “One figure. A female nude. I want her to represent Inclinazione, by that to mean his natural talent. A quality you share with il divino.”

  I couldn’t control my face to reveal only modesty at that compliment.

  He smiled in a fatherly way and looked at the Susanna again. “Yours will be the only female nude. Clearly, it’s your gift and your advantage by reason of access. Life drawing of nude models is not permitted in the Accademia. Painters have to imagine women by using young male models, and their imaginations aren’t trustworthy. In painting after painting, they create only the ideal. Your touches of realism are beyond their conception.” His eyes wrinkled at the corners, as if in delight that he would have something no one else did.

  He opened a copy of Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, just like Father’s, and we found Inclinazione holding a compass and having a bright star shining above her like a guide. “Place her against a deep blue sky. Give her a proud aspect. You shall have the model of your choice, and a liberal allowance for supplies. I will be pleased, I know.”

  “I will begin tomorrow. With all my heart.”

  My first commission! I felt like leaping and shouting the news all the way to Rome. I wondered if I would have been given it without Father’s letter to him, but I couldn’t think about that. In a rush of hope and excitement I threw myself into the preliminary sketches as soon as I got home. Pietro watched in silence from the edge of the room, arms folded across his chest. I didn’t tell him what Buonarroti said about my inclination.

  “Where can I find a female model?” I asked.

  “At the academy.”

  I saw it as a wonderful opportunity to let the academy know that even without them, I had been commissioned by a man of importance. “I’ll go there tomorrow.”

  “Who will take care of Palmira? I’m going to work.” His voice was flat and final.<
br />
  “I won’t be gone long.”

  “I’m going to draw from sculpture at the Uffizi.”

  “They let you?”

  “My friend is doorman there. He’s going to let us in.”

  “Us?”

  “Friends of mine.”

  “I can’t take Palmira with me to the academy.”

  “Take her upstairs to Fina.”

  I had seen Fina almost every day on the stairs or down in the courtyard drawing water, and we always passed a few moments in conversation, but I had never been upstairs to her rooms. Whenever she saw Palmira she called her sweet, funny names like Stella del Mattino if it was in the morning, or Diva del Lungarno if Palmira had been crying. Sometimes she stroked Palmira’s skin or tickled her softly. The first time I’d let her hold Palmira, Fina’s whole face shone as though lit from within, and she whispered, “Fiore Dolce.”

  I ran right upstairs to ask. Fina had the door open and was singing as she was washing clothes. I was surprised at her strong contralto. She was obviously enjoying herself.

  “Isn’t it a perfectly beautiful day,” she said, not as a question, but as an affirmation.

  “How can you tell? You haven’t gone downstairs.”

  “It comes in if you let it. The windows are all open. Have you been listening to that thrush?”

  “No, I guess I haven’t.”

  Fina wore the day on her face so that even her plain, puffy features were pleasant. “Your singing reminds me of my mother. She was always singing around the house. And my father too. Robust songs of adventurers and the campaigns of condottieri and drinking matches. But my mother’s songs were from the troubadours.”

  “Singing helps to ease the way.”

  Apparently there was only a large attic room with bed, small table, trunk, oil stove, fireplace, sink, and washtub. One item stood out, a once-elegant straight chair, the seat and back of worn burgundy velvet with frayed silk fringe and brass studs. It hinted of better days. Clothes lay scattered helter-skelter.