The Passion of Artemisia

by Susan Vreeland

  “Are all these clothes yours?” I asked.

  “Madonna, no! You take me for a lady of means? They belong to the family below you.”

  I helped her stir them with a wooden paddle as she poured heated water into the washtub. “You do washing for others too?”

  “Yes, sure, for Pierantonio too until he married you.”

  “How long have you known him?”

  “Since he was nothing more than a bulge in his mama’s belly.”

  I was curious to know what kind of a boy he was and what else she knew about him, but that had to wait until I got to know her better.

  She leaned out the window to wring out some clothes, and hung them on a line stretched between two horizontal rods attached to the building. “Signora Bruni on the ground floor doesn’t want them hanging in our courtyard where people who come to visit her can see them, so I hang them here above the street. Foolish woman. Now everyone passing on the street sees them.”

  “I have a job for you, but it isn’t washing clothes.”

  “I’m not good for much else. What is it you want?”

  “You see, I’m a painter too, and I’ve just been given a wonderful commission to do—”

  “A painter? Like that husband of yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “For money?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mamma mia, I suppose if it’s for money, he’d allow it. Imagine, a woman painting for money. You sure you don’t mean modeling? You’re a beauty, you know.”

  “No, Fina. A painter. Is that so absurd?”

  She tipped her head and her bottom lip protruded beyond the shadow of a moustache on her upper lip.

  “I must go to the Accademia del Disegno tomorrow and he won’t take care of Palmira while I’m gone. May I bring her up to you?”

  “Oh, that’s what you’re after, eh? Of course. Bring her up. You know I love the little principessa.”

  “There might be more times too, Fina, if you don’t mind. I’ll pay of course.”

  The next day, the yeasty-faced steward at the academy looked me over, sniffed, and asked, “What is your business here?”

  I was not going to overstep myself this time.

  “I wish to inquire about female models, Your Lordship.”

  “We have a list that artists refer to as they need.” He brought down a sheaf of papers tied together with a leather thong, and laid them on a desk. “You may add your name.” He pushed an inkwell toward me. “If you can write.”

  Rub the mold off your brain, I thought.

  “Your Lordship may recall, I am a painter. I wish to secure a model for a commission I’ve been given by Signor Buonarroti for the memorial gallery. Surely you know of the project.”

  He pursed his lips. “The list is only for members’ use.” He made a quick move to pick up the papers.

  “Is Signor Buonarroti a member?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then I am picking a model for Signor Buonarroti.”

  He took a noisy breath through his nostrils. “You may consult the list,” he replied curtly.

  I must not look smug, I told myself. Do not let my mouth form that gloating expression that Mama detested. Just do the business and say thank you.

  Laboriously I copied twenty names and addresses and hired the academy messaggero to take each of them a simple announcement saying that I’d be choosing one at my home the following Friday.

  Many women came that day while Pietro went out to a street barber and then to draw in the Uffizi again. One after another, I had them take off their clothes, but I was usually disappointed. I liked the face of one, the breasts and shoulders of another, the torso and belly of a third. Maybe that’s how men thought when they looked at women on the street. I settled on Vanna, a lovely, light-haired woman with honey-colored skin, smooth, well-shaped limbs, and just the right combination of strength and fluidity and grace. The only concern I had was her constant sniffling.

  I felt lighthearted and generous, and I had an idea that would keep Pietro at home instead of at the Uffizi and would give him an advantage over his academy friends. “My husband, Pierantonio Stiatessi, is a fine painter. Would you mind if he sketched you too, just while I’m doing the preliminary drawings? Nude, I mean.”

  She considered a moment. “Double the money?” she asked.

  “Half again.”

  “All right. If you pose me and stay in the room.”

  “Of course.”

  “And neither of you can tell the academy.”

  “Understood.”

  In the morning, Pietro and I both sat behind our drawing boards propped on easels and waited as Vanna went through a ritual of undressing slowly, folding each piece of clothing neatly before taking off the next. She made it obvious that she was avoiding looking at Pietro, but by her languid movements she seemed keenly aware, in a primitive way, that he was studying her bare flesh. I murmured a few instructions, she moved accordingly, and I started.

  Pietro didn’t. Although I only looked at Vanna and my drawing, I could tell that for a long time he just sat there, immobile. I tried to read in Vanna’s expression how Pietro was looking at her. What I recognized in the way she held her head, chin high but her eyes lowered at us, was confidence, pride in her beauty, even a tinge of haughtiness. Soon I was lost in my work and it was quiet except for the scratch of both our charcoals, Vanna sniffling, and Pietro clearing his throat every so often. After working awhile, Pietro moved his drawing easel away from mine to get a different angle. It was a good idea. That way we wouldn’t be tempted to look at each other’s work.

  When I adjourned the last pose, Vanna’s eyes lingered on Pietro as she turned and gave him her back when she got dressed. She accepted the coins from me in prim dignity.

  “Do you want me,” she stopped to sniffle, “tomorrow?”

  “Yes, every day now.”

  That evening, Pietro and I studied the sketches. He used a heavier, more confident hand, and brought out the luxuriant sensuousness of the figure, but he missed seeing what I saw, the muscle of her breasts that started as high as her armpit, and the dimples in her hand. “You have a surer line,” I said. “And you did better on the foreshortening of her foot. Look here, and here, in every one. Why is it so hard for me to get that just right?”

  Slowly, he raised a shoulder, but he didn’t offer any suggestion.

  The next morning, Pietro set his drawing board on his easel and tacked down a sheet of paper. When Vanna arrived, there passed between them a look that set me on edge. Abruptly, he left the house, saying he had business elsewhere. It seemed so unreasonable for him to waste such an opportunity.

  Vanna started to undress.

  “You don’t need to today. Just take off your shoes and raise your skirt. Sit here on the table so your feet will hang down.”

  “He doesn’t want you to paint,” Vanna said.

  “How do you know?”

  She shrugged. “I can just tell.”

  “You’re not paid to tell. You’re paid to pose.”

  All day I practiced only feet and ankles, and put everything else out of my mind. I drew feet sideways from the left, the right, three-quarter views from each side, and straight on, over and over, and then painted small studies. Eventually, they satisfied me, and I dismissed Vanna for the day.

  Just after she left, Pietro came in flushed and energetic, flung his doublet on a chair and grabbed me by the waist and swung me around. “I’ve got a commission. I begin tomorrow.”

  “Buono. For whom?”

  “A church in Monte Uliveto.” He poured himself some wine.

  “Then you won’t be able to draw the model. What’s the work?”

  “Fresco.”

  “You’ve never done fresco.”

  “As an apprentice I did.”

  “Ceiling or wall?” I moved behind him as he sat, and rubbed his shoulders where they would be sore.

  “Wall.”

  “That’s good. Do you get t
o choose your subject?”

  “No. It’s—” He took a gulp of wine and looked sideways at my drawings of feet. “It’s for fresco repair.”

  How would that benefit him? By the way he busied himself tearing off a hunk of bread and studying the drawings, I knew I shouldn’t question him, but I felt a vague unease.

  In the weeks that followed he never left before Vanna arrived. They passed a few words, and then he was out the door. The job away might have been a coincidence, or it might have been an act of grace on his part to let me have privacy with her. I didn’t ask. I worked. The simpler the background, Father had taught me, the more exact must be the figure, so with only sky and clouds behind her, I produced three times as many sketches of Vanna as I had for any other painting.

  “Too many choices,” Buonarroti said and chuckled. “You make an old man’s head spin.” He had spread out all the drawings on the floor of the large coffered room, and then walked back and forth studying them. The wooden floor creaked as I waited. He finally selected a forward nude sitting lightly on a gray cloud with her legs stretched downward resting on a white billow. Her front foot was foreshortened. A sudden happy warmth filled me.

  “It will be placed right there.” He pointed to a corner coffer directly above the entrance, wrote down the measurements and handed me the paper.

  “Now, come with me. I have something to show you.” He smiled at some anticipated pleasure and I followed him down the narrow stairs into a small enclosed courtyard bare of plants but with a well in the center. He walked over to a wooden crate resting on the paving stones. “This just arrived yesterday.” He lifted the lid and brushed away straw. A bas relief of the Madonna and Child alongside a stairway lay in the straw. “His first work. Done when he was only sixteen.”

  “Michelangelo’s?” I drew in my breath and could hardly believe it. The marble plaque was just lying there unceremoniously in a crate. I bent over it, daring to touch the crate, as if it were as holy as the manger. The Madonna had such modest grace nursing him, his head tucked under her mantle and his hand and arm flung backward in contended abandon, his fingers curled, just like Palmira’s.

  “He gets so much expression out of so little relief.” My vision blurred. “She makes me feel that motherhood is sacred.”

  I noticed the Virgin’s foot, and saw that the leg where it joined at the ankle was too thick for so short a foot. Even he had trouble with feet, when he was young.

  “It was owned by the Medicis but Cosimo is donating it to the gallery, so it has come home,” he said softly.

  I looked up at Michelangelo the Younger and he had that tenderness in his face again which reminded me of the fresco in Santa Trinità depicting Michelangelo. “Did he look like you?” I asked.

  “You can see for yourself.”

  He took me into a small study on the ground floor. Baskets of letters on benches lined the room, and a portrait hung on the wall. The face had the same shadowed groove extending from the sides of his nostrils to the ends of his moustache, the same curves to the furrows in his forehead, the same three lines fanning out from the corners of his eyes, the same soft penetrating look as the man alive standing next to me.

  “What a responsibility, to bear that likeness to the world. Did you know him?”

  “He was an old man, and I a little boy. He told me once, ‘Work, Michelangelo, work and do not waste time.’ ”

  “Good advice for me, too,” I said, gazing at the portrait.

  On the way home, it was my head that was spinning. I had seen Michelangelo’s first work, had seen his face in fact, and his descendant wanted me to honor him with my own work. With a commission this important, and with the coins he gave me for supplies, I really was living the life of an artist in the greatest art city in the world.

  I stopped at the shop of our apothecary, Franco. Bottles and jars sealed with wax lined the shelves, and withered roots and dried leafy branches hung from the ceiling. Trays of pigment cubes wrapped in paper and smeared with a thumbprint to identify the colors inside sat waiting for me in orderly rows. I could buy any of it.

  “Buon giorno, signora. How is the little bambina, eh?” Franco asked.

  “Growing fast. The joy of our lives.”

  “You came for more diapasm?”

  “No. I came for pigments.”

  I picked alabaster for skin, and Spanish cinnabar for highlights. I selected some saffron strands to pulverize, and ochre clay to dry and grind. I put in my pile plenty of gray and white lead for clouds, and said, “I have a deep blue sky to do.”

  “I have some fine azzurro dell’ Allemagna,” Franco said. His tongue licked up a few food morsels resting between his teeth and bottom lip.

  “No, Franco. This time I want pure ultramarine.”

  He scrutinized me from under heavy eyebrows. “Lapis lazuli pebbles will cost you dearly. As much as gold. Is it for Pierantonio?”

  “What does it matter?”

  He hesitated, his tongue making another pass.

  “If you have none to show me, just say so and I’ll go elsewhere.” I dropped my drawstring bag on the table loud enough so he would hear the coins.

  He stuttered a moment and then turned to unlock a cabinet. He brought out a tied-up cloth, undid the corners, and spread out the stones. “From the Far East,” he said, affecting a hushed, mysterious tone. “Just think how many foreign hands these have passed through to travel that distance.”

  “Yes, each one adding to the price. How much?”

  “Which stone?” He touched the largest one as a suggestion.

  “All of them.”

  His eyes opened wide, we settled on an amount, and he said, “May I ask who it is who shall receive such a painting?”

  I gathered my purchases and drawings, turned back to him at the door, smiled wryly, and said, “Florence.”

  I hired a joiner to prepare the tall, narrow stretcher according to Buonarroti’s measurements for a life-size figure, and to build a larger easel and my very own cabinet for my drawings, brushes, and pigments. From now on, we were truly a two-artist family. Someday, maybe even three.

  I primed the canvas, and ground the pigments ahead of time but did not add the linseed oil until the day I needed them. With Vanna posing, I began roughing in only the barest outline in paint. The weeks flew by in the joy of creating shape through color and shadow. I worked in a rhapsody, forgetting everything except the pleasure of laying on colors. I was working on her ankle when I heard Palmira’s voice as if from a distant land. “Mama, I’m hungry, Mama.”

  I gasped. It was already late afternoon. “Oh, my darling, I’m so sorry. We’ll eat right now.” I hurried to get her a bowl of pici pasta left from the day before. I sprinkled raw broad beans with olive oil and laid out pecorino cheese and bell pepper for Vanna to eat with us too. I put honey on a slice of pecorino and handed it to Palmira.

  “That’s one good thing about having a child around,” Vanna said. “She makes you stop work so we can eat.”

  “As good as one of those new chiming clocks.” I pushed a plate of figs toward her. “Have you ever wanted to paint?” I asked.

  “Never. Why go through all that agony? Men paint. Women pose. It’s the way things should be.”

  “If you feel that way, why did you come when it was clear from my announcement that I was a woman?”

  “I need the money. I am alone and have two boys. You know as well as I the alternatives.”

  Although I wondered what happened to her husband, if there had been one, I respected her privacy and didn’t ask.

  “Do you think you’ll ever become famous being painted?”

  “Yes, I do. They may not know my name, but they’ll see me on a wall or a ceiling of a palazzo I could never get into myself to have a look around.”

  “And there’s some satisfaction in that?”

  “Yes. There is.” She seemed at once defensive and wistful, a strange combination. “Someone who saw me painted there might recognize me in a
piazza or on the street and take a second look. Or even speak. It could happen.”

  “Yes, I suppose. There are also the years to come.”

  “You mean when both of us are dead?” She pulled back her shoulders, which thrust out her breasts. “I, as I am now, will last a great deal longer than any artist who paints me.”

  I had no way to answer that. What she saw was surface only. That which I contributed was, to her, incorporeal, and therefore of little consequence.

  “Do your boys like figs? Take some for them.” A haughtiness came over her features. “Please,” I urged. “We have more than we can use from the tree in the courtyard.”

  “It’s going to shock them with its reality, you know,” Buonarroti said, looking at the finished painting propped on an easel in his audi-ence hall.

  “A naked woman sitting on a cloud has reality?”

  He chuckled. “A woman. A real, rosy, flesh-and-blood woman. She’s exquisite.”

  “I’m sure she’ll be happy to know you think so.”

  “The academy, Bandinelli, Cosimo, they’ll all see it and marvel,” he said as he counted out thirty-four gold florins at his desk, put them in a brown velvet pouch and handed it to me. He grinned. “Do you want to know what part of her I like best?”

  Her breasts? Hips? I didn’t know. “Her face,” I said.

  “No. It’s that plump left forearm with that endearing knob of an elbow. You are another Rubens. And I am the first person in Florence to recognize it.”

  “I’ll be forever grateful.”

  With his back to me, he sifted through papers and quills in a desk drawer and drew out a paintbrush about the width of my index finger. The long handle was oiled walnut with a brass ferule, and the brush hairs were sable. He handed it to me. “Here. Don’t lose it. It belonged to my great-uncle.”

  “Michelangelo himself?”