At the door of the Queen’s House, workmen were carrying in a large unfinished wooden framework. “Orazio Gentileschi?” I said. They looked at each other, said a few words I couldn’t understand and shook their heads. “Sala grande?” I waved my arms to convey a large room and pretended I was painting the ceiling. They took me inside past plasterers and carpenters working on a cornice and pointed to a grand staircase. Upstairs, the rooms had none of the flourishes and ornamentation common in Roman or Florentine palaces.
In the great hall, I recognized Father’s dramatic figures already installed as coffered panels in the ceiling. It was an enormous project—nine panels and a central roundel of eleven women surrounding the figure of Peace bearing a staff and a leafy garland made of an olive branch. She was dazzling in power and beauty. I counted twenty-two figures so far, all female, even Pittura and Scultura, against a background of clouds and sky. Four panels were left to do. And him so frail and old.
A gorgeous ceiling except for one thing. The colors. Predominantly greens, pale violet, light blue, and gold, they were so subdued compared to the paintings he did in the bright light of Rome that it seemed as if the life of the figures was waning.
“English taste is more conservative than ours.” I twirled around at the sound of his voice, edged with apology. His anxious eyes pleaded. “I still have four panels to do.”
“I’ll help you.”
Slowly, tentatively, as if afraid to hurt me, he reached out his arms for me. I felt my body soften in his embrace, like Palmira’s used to when she was a child just relaxing into sleep.
I pulled away from him and looked up. “These are exquisite, Father. You can’t deny that they have given you joy. I see it in every face, even if it’s only private contentment at what you’ve done. Haven’t you ever felt like shouting, ‘Look! Look and let this beauty transform your heart’? A few practically split me with happiness. Hasn’t it been so with you?”
He blinked at me with eyes the deep brown color of need.
“We’ve been lucky,” I said. “We’ve been able to live by what we love. And to live painting, as we have, wherever we have, is to live passion and imagination and connection and adoration, all the best of life—to be more alive than the rest.”
“Than who? More alive than who?”
“Than my own daughter, for one. I feel life more intensely than she does. I take its bite as fully as its beauties. I hope that means I’ll come to die contented that I have really lived.”
“You don’t have any regrets?”
It was the most dangerous thing he’d ever asked. I respected his bravery, his willingness to edge right up to the injury.
“Of how I lived after I left Rome the first time?”
“Anything.” I could see his jaw tightening, his shoulders preparing for what I would say.
Should I tell him I’ve too often felt like a bundle of false starts, like wet sticks being struck with fire only to burn out pathetically when something goes wrong? Should I complain that I wasn’t able to keep the man I learned to love? Should I explain to him Galileo’s discovery that we are not what we thought—that our lives are made smaller by the unimportance of our dwelling place on the periphery, like a touch of color at the edge of a painting, contributing to the whole but unnoticed by most? Should I admit that my mark on the world means everything to me, but my work is a mere trinket to the Medici?
Holding onto the back of a chair, Father waited for my answer, an old man trying to fortify himself for the onslaught.
He’d had enough of his own humiliations. He didn’t need to hear me whine about mine.
“No. No regrets.” I sucked in a long breath, in and out like the tide. “Only I’ve never been able to relax.”
A squeezing around his eyes told me he was trying to understand what I meant.
“There’s been only painting, and Palmira. If I’d had a lover or a loving husband, there would have been something else—someone with whom to enjoy la dolce vita.”
He bowed his head in thought. “Only painting and a daughter,” he murmured.
Like him, I suddenly realized. He’d had the same two. Only I had denied him the joy of one in a way Palmira had not denied me. We looked into each other’s eyes at the same instant, both of us awash with sorrow and recognition, seeing each other face to face. I felt the cords of connection tighten.
“I am my father’s daughter.”
“How’s that?”
“We have both chosen art over our daughters,” I said softly.
“Only time will tell whether it’s been worth the price.” In a moment, he added tentatively, “You didn’t find love?”
“Love.” I grimaced. “To love is to stand willingly in the noose of illusion, adoring someone while you wait to choke.”
His face contracted.
“Yes, that I found, if you can call it love. But even one-way love, fleeting love, is better than no love at all. I’m grateful for having had the feeling. So I guess, no regrets.”
I patted his arm awkwardly. Slowly his expression softened. He teetered a bit and had to sit down. I pulled a second chair close to his.
“I have something to show you,” I said, and handed him the wrapped brush. He let it roll out of the cloth onto his hand. “It was il divino’s. Buonarroti the Younger gave it to me.”
Looking at it lying in his open palm, he drew in a long, rasping breath. “With this he painted souls, Artemisia. Me, I only painted skin.”
“You painted your soul, Father. You remember the Magnificat? ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord.’ That’s what you’ve done—made the Lord’s beauty larger with your life’s work.”
“Do you really think so?”
“With all my heart.”
“But the price.”
I lifted my shoulders. “ ‘Recompense belongeth to God.’ Sister Paola told me that a long time ago. It’s out of our hands.”
After a moment he held the brush up to the air and pretended to be using it on an imaginary painting, smiling and glancing at me as if I were the model.
“You painted me, didn’t you? On Borghese’s ceiling. The casino.”
“You saw it?” His face brightened.
“A magnificent work.” Say it, I told myself. “A magnificent collaboration.” Pain slicked over his eyes, desperation that I would understand. “You worked together as one.”
“The worst and best thing I ever did. It has grieved me ever since.”
“How did you know I’d be distracted, twenty years later?”
“It wasn’t distraction that made that figure look over the balcony instead of at the musicians.” He chuckled softly, sadly. “It was you glaring back at me in accusation while I was painting you.”
He handed me the brush.
“I’ve never used it,” I said.
“I can understand why. Anything less than his brilliance would be a desecration.”
I could take offense at that. I was about to say Buonarroti meant me to use it, until I looked into Father’s eyes and saw only reverence for an ideal.
Father arranged for a room for me next to his and brought me wood from his own supply, carrying it stick by stick, to build up a fire. Then he brought in Mother’s footrug from his room and laid it next to my bed. In his studio, we looked at his drawings and decided which of the remaining paintings I would work on.
“Let’s prime all of them,” he said, suddenly animated, dragging out four enormous stretched canvases.
“All four at once?”
“Why not?”
We set them up in a row and mixed a thin gesso out of gypsum, horse glue, and white lead. He grinned mischievously as he found his wide priming brushes and handed one to me. “Watch this and guess,” he commanded, his eyes sparkling. He loaded his brush and swooped on a huge S on the first canvas, stretching it from edge to edge, and then widening it. He stood back and pointed to each of the other three. “Do you know yet?”
“No.”
He chuck
led and moved to the second canvas. It was good to see him so happy. Sloppily he painted a large P. “How do you like that, eh?” With impish glee, he gestured for me to do the remaining two. “They’ll never know.”
I wasn’t quite sure what he meant me to paint, but I loaded my brush and executed a large O.
“Sì, sì,” he said, watching.
I gave the letter a curving tail, making it into a Q.
“Bene!” he shouted. “Eccellente.”
On the last canvas I painted an R.
“Che meraviglia. There we have it! SPQR. The Senate and People of Rome.” Chuckling, he said, “Under the English claim for Peace and the Arts is Rome, will always be Rome.”
“The foundation,” I said.
He kissed me on both cheeks. While we widened the letters until they filled in the canvas, he sang one of his Roman love songs.
How slowly he painted. How tentatively he mixed his colors. Sometimes we worked on the same canvas, he painting one figure and I another. I often found him watching me. Every morning he took longer before he began to paint. He stopped earlier in the afternoon. But every day, he did something, if only a patch of background. During his afternoon naps, I worked against time, always with an ear alert to his slow, uneven, rattling breaths.
I often hummed the melodies I was sure he knew just to get him to join in with the words. We began to relax with each other in a new way. A curious, unexpected lightness lifted me. Before this I had always held back, had never lived freely, not with Pietro, not even with Palmira, but here, where nothing was known, I did not fear judgment, and because Father and I shared the same sensibilities, all the rigidness of my living melted and I felt myself coming into myself. If it was genuine, if it would last, it was a wonderful feeling.
I had lived too gravely, had hugged judgment to my chest too tightly, had let the fear of it make me stiff. No wonder my back ached all my life. I should have done certain things—put more secret messages behind my paintings, taken Palmira up the bell tower, visited Galileo in Bellosguardo, painted him and given him the painting, danced more, enjoyed the attentions of Francesco instead of guarding against them. I should have taken that stone I found on the Via Appia the day of the verdict and hurled it—not against anyone or anything—just to let it sail out over the open countryside, fall somewhere unknown and mix with the elements—just for the feel of swinging my arm.
It was my own fault if I hadn’t enjoyed la dolce vita. Francesco had said that now I was free to be me. Yes. Naples would be different when I went back.
One morning Father said he had business in London and was going by riverboat. He wouldn’t let me go with him. It was the second time he’d done that. I worried about him, a frail old man traveling alone. I tried to get as much done as I could while he was gone. When he came home out of breath that evening, he sank into the nearest chair and looked at what I’d been working on. “You’re a fine painter. Better than I am now.” His chest heaved.
“You were my teacher.”
“Yes. I taught you suffering.”
“You taught me to see, and to use my imagination. You spared me a life of needlework and picnics.”
“I’m sorry you missed the picnics.”
“Plenty of time yet for picnics. Maybe even with grandchildren. Remember the blue cornflowers along the Via Appia?”
“Your mother threaded them through your hair and made a chain of them around your neck. You looked like a goddess.”
“To you.”
“Come here.” He reached inside his cloak and drew out a small drawstring bag and placed it in my hand. “I had this made for you. Open it.”
The giddiness of girlhood rippled up in me. I untied the string and tipped out a bronze medallion shaped like a stage mask on a long gold chain.
“Do you know what it is?” he asked.
“Something from the Iconologia?”
“Go get it, there on the table.”
I brought it to him and he showed me the allegorical figure of Painting—a beautiful woman with a brush in one hand, a palette in the other, and around her neck a gold chain with a medallion of a stage mask.
“Painting. A woman after all. I had forgotten.” I looked from the medallion to him. His eyes shone with love. “It’s beautiful.”
He pressed his hands on his knees to stand up, took it from me and lifted the loop of chain over my head. “There. Just where it belongs.”
“I’ve never had such an important gift,” I whispered.
He collapsed one cold damp morning in the great hall with a sheaf of sketches in his hands. I rushed to him and gathered him in my arms, his torso on my lap. I supported his lolling head in the crook of my elbow like Michelangelo’s Pietà.
He winced and pressed his hand against his breast. His voice scraped softly. “Artemisia.”
“Where does it hurt?”
“A brief unpleasantness. It will pass.”
The bravery of those words moved me. And the horror of dying unforgiven. His hand clutched mine and his eyes burned with a question he was too embarrassed, even now, to put into words.
“Sì,” I said. I felt a twenty-year knot release in my chest, and I finally understood that what he had wanted was not just forgiveness for him, but healing for me.
He seemed to let go then. I couldn’t tell whether his eyes focused on me, or on his ceiling. Before they closed, I hoped he recognized his figure of Peace above him, soft and light and luminous, holding an olive leaf garland and floating on a cloud.
I thought he was gone. Gone, and I had not called him what he longed to hear. Then his chest lifted. His flaccid bottom lip quivered and curled inward with a breath.
“Artemisia?”
“I’m here, Papa. I’m holding you.”
“Use his brush. Do a self-portrait,” he whispered slowly. “An Allegory of Painting. For all time.”
“Sì, Papa.” I kissed him lightly on the forehead. “I will.”
The Passion of Artemisia Page 28
