The Passion of Artemisia

by Susan Vreeland

  “You’re an artist, Delia, as fine as they come.” I slapped the money on the table and Palmira kissed me on the cheek.

  Walking up to our own doorway, both of us carrying parts of the dress, I saw the corner of a letter sticking out from the bottom of the door. It had the seal of the Lyncean Academy.

  My Dear Friend, the Gracious and Brilliant Artemisia Gentileschi,

  I fear you have given up on ever receiving a letter from me again, and I beg your forgiveness so that you may read this with the open mind and gracious spirit I remember yours to be.

  I have been sorely beset by just what you had foreseen. Two years ago, having finally completed the Dialogue which uses sunspots and tides to validate the argument I told you of so long ago, I made a trip to Rome to secure permission of the Holy Office of the Inquisition to publish it. His Holiness Pope Urban granted me such permission with all good will if I would change the opening and closing and title so that it would appear a hypothesis, which I was willing to do, knowing that the arguments in the middle were strong enough to convince God Himself. Since I didn’t want to stay in Rome during the heat and plague of summer, I returned to my villa at Bellosguardo and found my faithful glassblower to have succumbed to the pestilence in a wretched manner.

  I secured permission from the Florentine inquisitor to publish the Dialogue in Florence, and early this year, I presented the first copy to il granduca Ferdinando at the Pitti. One disappointment accompanied this momentous event—that you were not at the Pitti to witness it.

  I am forced by Pope Urban himself, now that his political fortunes have changed, to appear before the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Rome is as you have said, capricious and dangerous, and since my health is precarious, I am spending the weeks prior to my departure in settling the affairs of my estate and informing my good friends of my extremities.

  Hold me ever as a man trustworthy and inquiring, as I hold you a woman unimpeachable and courageous.

  Ever the seeker,

  Galileo Galilei

  Twenty November, 1632

  Astonishing courage. I set the letter down to keep it from shaking and read it again. The handwriting was not Galileo’s usual smoothly arched script. On the first line, ink had dripped sideways. Was he writing this in bed? The issues of Palmira’s gown and a nobleman’s coming-of-age party were inconsequential when Galileo was in such jeopardy. I could do nothing. The black hand of the Inquisition would have its way. And where that stopped, the other black hand, the plague itself, was ripe with horrors.

  It had taken four months for the letter to reach me, because of the blockages to contain the plague, I surmised. Judgment of his case was imminent, if not already executed. I sat down to write what encouragement I could to him.

  My Most Honored and Cherished Friend,

  Only a few moments ago I received your letter and am much distressed for your sake. Remember, as you once told me, we only experience the illusion of standing still. The world is changing even though in our lifetimes it seems as immovable as stone. Even stone bears the footprints of many men. Yours will someday lead to undreamed-of truths. Let my loving and high regard for you comfort you if it can. You have my prayers.

  Ever yours,

  Artemisia

  I sent it to the Tuscan embassy in the Villa Medici in Rome.

  On Sunday I went to church with dread. At mass the monsignor announced with arrogant glee that the faithful need not fear the erroneous claims of Signor Galilei, that the Holy Office justly convicted him of heinous crimes against the sacred Canons, that he abjured, denied, and cursed under oath his former theories as errors and heresies, and that he now detested such claims and would willingly do penance daily in mitigation of his crime.

  A stroke as swift and inexorable as the plague itself. I thought I would be sick. I left Palmira with Andrea in the church, went straight home and lay down in my darkened bedchamber. It was all bigoted treachery. His recanting had to be false. He would never willingly betray his passion unless he was threatened with torture. I knew the hot-to-the-bone panic of that, and I didn’t judge him. That loathsome priest had smirked through the announcement. Trying to control my imaginations of Galileo’s suffering, I spent the afternoon in feverish restlessness.

  The next few days I was sullen and sick. Palmira paid me quiet attentions, took over the work in the kitchen, and urged me to eat. She fretted that I would still be morose at Andrea’s ball that Saturday.

  “I’ll pull myself out of it by then. I promise. Just leave me be for a while,” I said.

  On the sweltering, breathless night of the ball, we got ready together like sisters, tying the side laces of each other’s bodices and winding each other’s hair. When I finished hers, I touched her on the shoulder. “Wait.” I found my mother’s bloodstone and pearl hair ornament in my memento box.

  “Don’t you want to wear it?” Palmira asked.

  “You wear it.” I fastened it on the back of her head. “There. Mother would be pleased.”

  “Do you think he’ll notice it there?”

  “Silly. His dreamy eyes will caress every morsel of you, from every angle.” She giggled, and the melody of her anticipation helped to lift my spirit. “Stand up.”

  She stood and performed a dance turn. Her skirt swirled out around her like a shimmering wave, and the bows on her white satin shoes peeked out from under her hemline.

  “You look stunning.”

  Francesco Maringhi called for us in his carriage. I had never seen him so elegantly dressed—black velvet doublet with white satin sleeve inserts and an understated white ruff. He bowed and kissed first Palmira’s hand and then, lingeringly, mine, his eyes looking up at me.

  “I am deeply honored to escort such a pair. Palmira, you look like your namesake, the Greek queen, and your mother puts to shame the goddess who bore you.”

  “You are too kind, Francesco,” I said. Palmira and I smiled together in the glow of his adoration, which dispelled my moodiness and reassured Palmira.

  “Will you ladies dance the Spagnoletto tonight?” he asked.

  “Palmira will. All week she’s been practicing the steps while holding a dance book.”

  “Mother! You don’t have to tell that.”

  “It’s only Francesco. It’s all right if he knows.”

  The palace was lit with torches on the roofline and at the entrance which was crowded with carriages, their lanterns flickering. A pale yellow glow issued from the palace windows. A liveryman opened the door of our carriage and greeted us. Blithely Francesco got out and offered his hand for us to step down. “My beauties.” With one of us taking each arm, he ushered us to the door, humming.

  Palmira asked him, “You’re not going to hover like an uncle all evening, are you?”

  “On the contrary, I suspect I’ll suffer the loss of you as soon as we step inside.”

  Two palace doormen opened the double doors, and suddenly music, light, perfumes, and a hundred voices poured out. Up the stairs the great hall was ablaze with candles, the crystal sconces reflecting pinpoints of light. Musicians played violins, cellos, and a bass viol at one end of the room, and guests gathered around long tables laden with trays of meats and other delicacies.

  The postures of people shifted when Palmira glided into the hall. From the crowd, Andrea bolted toward us. “Signora, signor, welcome.” He kissed my hand, but in an instant, his eyes were fastened on Palmira. He executed a low, elegant bow. “Che bella. I am honored.”

  Dressed in midnight blue, with his black hair slicked back and parted down the middle, Andrea looked suddenly older than when I’d seen him last. He offered Palmira his arm to make a passeggiata around the hall, and Francesco and I followed at a respectful distance, greeting those people we knew, paying our respects to Andrea’s parents and the Count and Countess of Monterrey, and watching the dancing.

  The Spagnoletto was the highlight of the evening. Every time the musicians played it, more foursomes joined in. Francesco and I watched in
admiration as Palmira and Andrea completed one quadrangle. One moment the four were in a circle with hands joined, doing quarter-turns one way, half-turns the other, the ladies’ skirts billowing about them while they gave flirtatious looks first to one man and then the other in their quadrangle. The next moment, after a rapid leap sideways, a flourish and a seductive lunge, their four hands were joined in a pinwheel. Palmira was graceful, coquettish, and captivating.

  Later we saw Palmira and Andrea slip out to the balcony and kiss under the moon hanging over the Bay of Naples like a plump, Egyptian fruit. To see my child do the very thing I yearned to do myself made me ache a little, tenderly, for her, for me, I didn’t know. Perhaps the music, the gaiety coming after Galileo’s letter made me too sensitive.

  “No sadness on such as night as this,” Francesco urged.

  “No. It isn’t sadness.”

  “Then what were you thinking of?”

  “Palmira. She’s like an apparition floating unknowingly into her future,” I said. “Here for too brief a time.” Francesco listened intently. “I’ve done the best I could for her, but the injustice I did to her in depriving her of her father and grandfather, the sudden uprootings, the long coach rides between cities with all our world packed into a few trunks, I’ll pay for someday, here or hereafter.”

  “How?”

  “She’ll leave me, for one thing, and I’ll have to live alone someday.”

  “Alone? That doesn’t have to be.” He raised my hand to his lips. I withdrew it.

  “Rumors, Francesco. I must be vigilant. Rumors hound me everywhere.”

  “That poet in Venice? Loredan? He was only a rumor?”

  “Madonna benedetta, he was only a boy with a hot imagination.”

  “Rumors make me jealous, and jealousy makes me bold. You are still young. You can have another daughter.” He looked at me with fawn’s eyes.

  “I can hardly pay for this one. You must work harder, Francesco, to obtain larger commissions for me. Someday I’ll have to produce a dowry, you know.”

  As a gentle hint, I looked over at the homely black-haired Countess of Monterrey commanding a circle of women in the alcove near us. Francesco followed my gaze.

  “Perhaps she would condescend to have another portrait painted, as a figure from Spanish legend,” Francesco said.

  “You read my thoughts exactly.”

  “That’s my art, Artemisia. That’s why you need me.”

  “I see she even fidgets with those yellowed fingernails when she isn’t sitting for her portrait.” I stifled a chuckle. “Once when she was posing in our rooms, Palmira ridiculed her behind her back. She draped her own head in a black shawl like a Spaniard, stretched out her face, sucked in her cheeks, widened her eyes and twitched her fingers. I had a hard time to keep from laughing right in the countess’s face.”

  Francesco smiled at me indulgently.

  “You know, don’t you, that in her portrait I heightened that dark ribbon of her forehead and separated her one eyebrow into two? It made her look less furtive for her grandchildren to adore someday.”

  “Very intelligent of you. For that, she owes you a favor.”

  Just then, the musicians called for a Florentine Venus Tu Ma Pris, the dance Lorenzo de’ Medici had invented. I leapt forward to join another couple as the extra lady in the threesome. The room swirled with colors and the sweep of music. I felt Francesco’s eyes on me during the entire dance. When it was over, he and Palmira and Andrea applauded.

  Out of breath, I leaned against a pillar. The countess was standing across the room, momentarily unengaged.

  “Yes. She does owe me a favor,” I said to Francesco. “Why don’t you go see if you can collect on it?”

  Dutifully he approached her and I turned away so as not to be found watching.

  Ravishing and dreamy-eyed, Palmira took Andrea’s arm to make another passeggiata around the hall. Other men watched her as she passed. When had she become a woman? Those extra-long walks along the bay, were they with Andrea? I must have been blind to the looks that passed between them at court affairs. She was as unwary as a lamb at the edge of a precipice, even after she knew about rape. I worried about her.

  Besides warnings, what did I have to give her? The understanding of color and the principles of creating shape. The appreciation of beauty. An example of determination. And love. That above all.

  So now, at eighteen, the very age when I was sweating in a Roman courtroom, she was queen of the ball—beautiful, confident, unstained, ripe for the picking. Free to make her own choices.

  24

  Bathsheba

  If you’re going to paint, then you’ll have to learn the female nude,” I said just after I bathed one morning not long after the ball. “That’s what they want out of a woman painter. Don Ruffo wants a David and Bathsheba. We’ll do one together. Let’s see if he can tell whether Bathsheba is painted by you or by me.” I put wood on the fire, took off my dressing gown, and positioned myself on a low bench. “Draw me.”

  “Mother!”

  The shock of seeing flesh, my flesh, so unexpectedly startled her, and for a long time she couldn’t begin, couldn’t even look.

  “Forget it’s me. Pretend I’m a hired model. Remember how you used to run in and out of the studio in Genoa when I was painting Cleopatra?”

  “That was different. She wasn’t you.”

  “She was a fine model because she was comfortable being studied nude. And I am too. I have nothing to hide. This is the body that bore you, cara.” I paused and then added softly, “Take a look.”

  Tentatively, she let her gaze travel over my body.

  “Looser than you’ve known me bound in laced bodices, yes?”

  She nodded.

  “Is it too real a glimpse into your own future?”

  “Kind of.”

  “What you see is all right, Palmira,” I soothed. “It’s just part of womanhood.”

  She took a few strokes and then froze, gripping her pencil. “I can’t.”

  “Start by marking out the proportions, like any other drawing. Then begin at the head oval and work downward.”

  She began again, slowly.

  “Notice how the weight of flesh makes shapes asymmetric,” I said.

  “I’m afraid of what will come on the page.”

  “Be faithful to what your eyes see, and you won’t have anything to fear. Don’t try to compliment me. Don’t ignore folds of skin. Let your eyes study what happens to a woman’s nipples after she has nursed a baby. That’s the story my body tells. We, you and I, are in the business of painting truth. Let them find the beauty in that.”

  I was quiet after that, and eventually she became immersed in her drawing. It was a close, contemplative time, and for the weeks she worked on the sketches prior to painting, we spoke only in soft tones to each other.

  One afternoon while Palmira was painting and I was posing for her, we heard a knock at the door. She opened it a crack and reached through.

  “It was a courier,” she said, and handed me a letter.

  It carried the seal of His Majesty’s Royal Mail, in English. I slid the handle of a paintbrush through the fold to break the wax. Father’s script. I read it to myself.

  Dearest Artemisia,

  Porzia Stiattesi wrote me that you are in Naples. I am hard at work on the ceiling of the great hall of the Queen’s House in Greenwich, near London. It is An Allegory of Peace and the Arts under the English Crown, done in quadro riportato. There’s work here for you if you want it. King Charles has asked me to petition you to come at once. The Stuart court is friendly to me. A few people speak Italian here. Inigo Jones, the royal architect, spent a few years in our cities. The court would welcome you, as I would. In hopes of receiving a “yes” in your hand, I am saving the female figure of Strength for you.

  Your loving father,

  Orazio Gentileschi

  I am alone.

  Leave my clients I had worked so hard to get? Wrench Palm
ira away from someone she loved? I could not, would not do that to her again. I laid the letter on the glowing embers in the fireplace. A worm of incandescence crawled toward the word alone. Palmira looked at me curiously. “Nothing important,” I said, and resumed my pose.

  As soon as the parchment burned to ashes, phrases sounded in my head. Dearest . . . welcome you . . . I am alone. The word dearest made me ashamed that I had destroyed it without at least showing it to her.

  Only a few weeks later, when we were both painting, another letter came. He hadn’t even waited the length of time a reply would take to reach him, had I sent one.

  My only and most beloved daughter, Artemisia,

  I am lonely. I am dying. Forgive a foolish old man. Help me finish.

  Papa

  I felt my heart split. Just the word. Papa. It unearthed what I thought was dead to me. I saw him swinging me by the arms so that my feet flew over the tall grasses along the Via Appia on our picnics. Weeping as he told me Mother had died. Squeezing each other’s hands in awe before the great paintings of Rome. Teaching me to draw the symbols from Ripa’s Iconologia. Showing me when I was a mere child which pigments needed more oil, which needed less to make smooth-flowing paint. Which could be made ahead, and which would lose their suspension. Which should be ground very fine, and which left coarse to preserve their intensity. Alchimista di colore, he called me. Papa, who made me want more than anything to be a painter, and then made it harder to become one.

  I slipped the letter up my sleeve and went back to painting.

  Palmira groaned at her canvas. “It’s not coming right.”