Sacre Bleu (21 page)

“He must have used a camera obscura,” Lucien said. The camera obscura: an actual camera that existed before film. The lens flipped the image and projected it onto a sheet of ground glass, often with a grid etched into it, so the artist essentially painted what had already been reduced to two dimensions in a real, living version of a photograph.

“Why would you say that?” Juliette asked.

“Because her face is out of focus, but her bottom is sharp. I mean, soft, but sharp. That’s not the way he paints the cherub, whose face is in vivid focus but in the same plane as the mirror—because he was painted from imagination, or from a different sitting. Your eye changes focus when you look at the different elements of a scene, regardless of distance, but the camera can only focus on a certain range of depth. If he had painted it by just his eye, her face would be in focus.”

“Maybe he just couldn’t see what she looked like.”

Lucien turned to her. “Don’t be silly.”

“Me? You’re the one making up machines.”

He laughed, then looked from her, to the painting, then all around the gallery, at all the paintings, then to her again. “Juliette?”

“Yes?”

“Thank you for showing me this—these paintings.”

“Lot of good it does you if you won’t see them.” She grinned and began to walk away. He followed her, as he was supposed to, but then stopped in front of a very large canvas, a Renaissance Madonna.

“Holy mother of…”

“What? What?” She stopped.

“It’s a Michelangelo,” Lucien said. The picture, while almost ten feet tall, looked to be part of a larger piece, perhaps an altarpiece, with the Madonna in the center and the Christ child, a toddler, reaching for a book that she was holding. Her breast was exposed, for no apparent reason, as she was otherwise fully covered by her robe. The shadow of her robe had been shaded in black, but otherwise it had never been painted.

“I wonder why he didn’t paint her robe,” Lucien said.

“Maybe he got tired,” said Juliette.

“Strange.” He wandered away from her then, on to the next painting, this one also a Michelangelo. “Look at this.”

It was a pietà called
The Entombment,
and in this one, the Holy Mother’s robe had been left unpainted as well, while the rest of the painting was finished.

“He didn’t finish this one either,” said Lucien. “In fact, there’s no blue in the painting at all.” Excited at seeing a masterpiece stopped in progress, he put his arm around her waist and pulled her close. “You know the Virgin’s cloak had to be painted blue. It was called Sacré Bleu, because it was reserved for her.”

“He didn’t finish this one either,” said Lucien. “In fact, there’s no blue in the painting at all.”
The Manchester Madonna
and
The Entombment
—Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1497

“You don’t say,” said Juliette. “Maybe we should go look at the Turners, since we’re in England and all.”

“Why would he finish the whole painting but not use any blue?”

“Maybe because he was an annoying little poofter,” said Juliette.

“A master wouldn’t stop in the middle of painting to be annoying.”

“And yet here I am, almost four hundred years later, annoyed.”

“At Michelangelo?” Lucien had never been annoyed by a painting. He wondered if that might be yet another element of a masterpiece that he might never be able to produce. “Do you think someday I could be that annoying?”

“Oh,
cher,”
she said. “Don’t sell yourself short.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing,” she said, and off she glided to look at the Turners and the Constables, or
ships and sheeps,
as she liked to think of them.

She was being kind, really. Lucien hadn’t a chance of ever being remotely as annoying as Michelangelo Buonarroti. For one thing, Lucien was, at heart, a sweet man, a kind and generous man, and with the exception of a bit of self-doubt about his painting, which served to make him a better painter, he was delightfully unburdened by guilt or self-loathing. Michelangelo, not so much.

Rome, Italy, 1497

T
HE
F
LORENTINE HAD BEEN ABOUT THE SAME AGE AS
L
UCIEN WAS NOW WHEN
she’d first come to him. And like Lucien, he had not dealt with the Colorman directly. She found him in Rome, working on
The Entombment of Christ,
which was to be an altarpiece for the Church of Saint Agostino. He was alone in his workshop, as was often the case.

She was a young girl, wide-eyed and fresh faced, wearing the gown of a peasant, loosely laced and low cut. She carried the color, freshly mixed and packaged in sheep’s bladders, twisted off to size and tied with catgut, in a basket padded with unbleached linen.

The painter didn’t even look from his work. “Go away. I don’t like anyone around when I work.”

“Excuse me, Maestro,” she said with a curtsy. “But I was asked to bring you these paints by the cardinal.” He was painting for the Church; there had a be a cardinal involved somewhere.

“What cardinal? I have my own color man. Go away.”

She crept forward. “I don’t know which cardinal, Maestro. I don’t dare look up when I am addressed by a prince of the Church.”

He finally looked at her. “Don’t call me maestro. Not when I’m doing this. I’m not even a painter, I’m a sculptor. I find the spirit in the stone, guided by the hand of God. I work in paint only in the service of God.”

Not another one,
she thought. The reason she’d left Florence was she had lost Botticelli to his religious conscience, spurred by that maniac Dominican monk Savonarola and his Bonfire of the Vanities. Botticelli himself converted and threw some of his best paintings,
her paintings,
on the fire. But Michelangelo had been here in Rome for a year. How had he heard of the teachings of Savonarola?

“I’m sorry, but I must deliver these colors or I will be punished.”

“Fine, fine, then. Leave them.”

She moved to where he sat on a three-legged stool and slowly knelt with the basket, making sure one knee pushed out of her skirt, baring a thigh, and the front of her gown fell open. She held the position for what she thought was long enough, then shyly looked up into his face.

And he wasn’t even looking. “Oh for fuck’s sake,” she said in English, because she thought it the best language for swearing. “You’re not even bloody looking, are you, you pooft?”

“What? What?” said the painter. “That is no way for a young girl to behave, showing her body. You should read the sermons of Savonarola, young lady.”

“You
read
them?” She snatched up her basket. “Of course, you read them.” She stormed out of the workshop.

The Colorman was right; no good was going to come of that printing press invention of Gutenberg’s. Fucking Germans and their inventions.

The next day, when Michelangelo looked up from his painting, it was a young man, little more than a boy, who carried the basket of color. This time he wasn’t quite so dismissive. In fact, as the young man, Bleu was able to inspire him for weeks while he worked on the two altarpieces, as well as some smaller pictures that the Colorman was happy to take, and they followed the maestro back to his workshop in Florence. A month in, it started to go wrong.

“I can’t get him to paint,” Bleu said to the Colorman.

“What about those two big paintings he’s been working on?”

“He won’t finish them. He refuses to even touch blue color. He says it takes him away from God. He says there’s something unholy in it.”

“But he is fine having you in his bed?”

“That, too, has come to an end. It’s that charlatan monk Savonarola. He’s ruining every painter in the city.”

“Show him old Athens or Sparta. They were religious and they
loved
to bugger each other. He’ll like it.”

“I can’t show him anything if he won’t paint. And he’s not going to. They’ve just moved the biggest block of marble I’ve ever seen into his workshop. His apprentices won’t even let me in the shop.”

“I will go see him,” said the Colorman. “I’ll make him paint.”

“Of course,” said Bleu. “What could go wrong with that plan?”

It was months before the Colorman could get access to Michelangelo, and he finally did by convincing the apprentices who guarded the maestro’s shop that he dealt in stonecutting tools, not color.

Michelangelo was on a ladder, working on a huge statue of a young man. Even in the rough, unpolished form, the Colorman recognized the model was Bleu.

“Why the huge head?” asked the Colorman.

“Who are you?” said the Maestro. “How did you get in here?”

“A merchant. His melon is gigantic. Like those simpletons who eat dirt at the convent.”

Michelangelo put his chisel in his belt and leaned against the statue. “It’s for perspective. When viewed from below, the head will appear the perfect size. Why are you here?”

“Is that why you made the penis so tiny? Perspective?”

“It’s not.”

“If you like the tiny penis, you should try girls. Most have no penis at all.”

“Get out of my shop.”

“I’ve seen your paintings. You’re a much better painter. You should paint. The figures in your paintings are not such freaks as this.”

“He isn’t a freak. He is perfection. He is David.”

“Isn’t he supposed to be
carrying
the huge head?”

“Out! Angelo! Marco! Throw this devil out of here.”

“Devil?” said the Colorman. “Screw the devil. I tell the devil what to do. The devil licks the dust from my scrotum. Donatello’s David carries the big head. You can’t do better than Donatello. You should paint.”

Michelangelo started down the ladder, his hammer in hand.

“Fine, I’m going.” The Colorman hurried out of the workshop, chased by two apprentices.

“Did you convince him?” Bleu asked.

“He’s annoying,” said the Colorman.

“I told you.”

“I think it’s because you have a big head.”

“I don’t have a big head.”

“We need to find a painter who likes women. You’re better at women.”

Back in London, in the National Gallery, Lucien was standing before a J. M. W. Turner painting of a steamship caught in a storm, a great maelstrom of color and brushstrokes, the tiny ship seeming to be swallowed in the middle by the pure fury.

“This is where real painting starts, I think,” said Lucien. “This is where object gives way to emotion.”

Juliette smiled. “They say that he went mad and tied himself to the mast of a steamship that was headed out into a snowstorm, just so he could see the real motion of a storm from inside it.”

“Really?” said Lucien, wondering how a shopgirl knew so much about painting.

“Really,” Juliette said. Not really. Turner hadn’t tied himself to the mast of the ship at all.
“It will be fun,”
she’d told him.
“Hold still, I have to get this knot.”

They were a week in London and returned to the studio in Montmartre without anyone having ever seen them leave. Lucien walked in and collapsed facedown on the fainting couch. Juliette rubbed his neck until she was sure he was asleep, then kissed him on the cheek and took the studio key from his pocket so she could lock the door on the way out.