The Creation Of Eve (13 page)

"Senor,"
the King said icily. "What brings you here?"

Don Juan bowed, then asked the Queen, "May I enter, My Lady?"

"Certainly--if my husband permits it."

"Of course," the King said.

Don Juan's young countenance was lit with a friendly smile as he approached. "I did not mean to interrupt, Your Majesty. I am here as a favor to His Majesty the Prince Don Carlos."

The King drew an irritated breath. "What does my son want?"

"I am sorry to say that Don Carlos's fever has risen this afternoon, and the only way any of Us could convince him to return to bed was to promise to give you this, My Lady."

"Something from Don Carlos?" said the Queen.

Don Juan opened his hand, revealing the black pearl the Queen had ripped from her dress to throw at the Prince.

"He said to tell you that it fell from Heaven," Don Juan said in rapid French.

"Perhaps an angel sent it," the Queen said in the same tongue.

"Yes." Don Juan's smile was genuine. "I believe one did."

The Queen turned pink.

"What is it?" snapped the King. His face was so hard it was difficult to imagine I'd seen a gentle creature in it only moments before.

"Nothing," said the Queen. "A pearl that had fallen from my dress." She reached for it quickly.

"You may not take it."

She stopped, her hand above the pearl.

"It has left your person," the King said. "It cannot be returned by common hands."

"But My Lord," said the Queen, "your son Don Carlos picked it Up. He is family."

The King's chill gaze went to Don Juan.

An edge of incredulousness crept into the Queen's voice. "And so is Don Juan." She took the pearl.

The King lifted the Queen's hand, the pearl still clasped within it. "Keep better watch over your things, my dear." He kissed her hand and left.

When he was gone, Don Juan said in the Queen's language, "I did not mean to interrupt, Your Majesty."

"How can you interrupt when there was nothing to interrupt?" she said lightly in French.

With a quick brush of his lips to her hand, he left immediately, the very model of decorum.

So why do I feel that I was a witness to wrongdoing, when no one has committed a wrong?

My Dearest Daughter,

I am glad to hear you are faring well in spite of the many bull runs you are forced to witness. Do not judge the Spanish too harshly. The grisly spectacle you describe is no more gruesome than the bear-baiting preferred by the Cremonese, and at least it is economical in that it provides meat at the end of the ordeal. Just be grateful that the bulls' terror is short-lived and that soon they are in God's hands as are all His beloved creatures in the end.

My own beloved creatures do well here. Lucia has completed a portrait of your mother that captures her delicate beauty. Gazing upon it gives your mother a moment's respite from her worries, which is a relief to me as well, for the poor woman's anxieties grow greater by the day. Her prayers are so endless she will barely eat or sleep, for she feels that if she stops, something terrible will befall the family. The weight she must feel! But you must not think it is all gloom and sorrow here. On the contrary, Asdrubale still charms us with his clowning as does Anna Maria with her sweetness and Europa with the predictability of her willfulness. Minerva is working on drawing, inspired by your having told her how messer Michelango said the basis of all good painting is to master drawing first.

By the way, I did not tell messer Michelangelo that you were the Painter to the Queen. Why did you ask me about that in your last letter? In the note I wrote thanking messer Michelangelo for his kind attention to you in Rome, I mentioned that you were now serving as a lady to the Queen, as the King wished for you to teach Her Majesty her colors. Have Their Majesties asked you to be their painter? If they have not yet, I am certain they will. Show them your work--they will clamor for their own likenesses to be done, I promise.

From Cremona,
this 1st day of March, 1560

With deepest love and affection,
Your Father

ITEM : The pearl called La Peregrina, which means "The Wanderer" or "The Pilgrim," came from the shores of Panama in the New World. It was given by a conquistador to Isabel of Castilla, who in turn gave it to her daughter Juana the Mad. Juana's son the Emperor Charles took La Peregrina from his mother, assuming she would not want to waste such a precious thing, locked within her tower.

ITEM: Grind bone black for half an hour, an hour, or as much as you please. If you were to grind it a year it would be the better for it. Ochre, ground for ten years, would only be improved. Of vermilion, it cannot be said twenty years of grinding would be too much.

23 MARCH 1560

El Alcazar, Toledo

The dull winter days of Lent, Unmitigated by parties or meat or warm sunshine, have fallen Upon Us. I have been allowed to begin to teach the Queen to draw, which has raised her interest in art to the point that she has asked for her portrait to be made. I leapt at the opportunity, only to be shot down by the condesa, who insisted that the Queen employ the official court painter, the Netherlander Anthonis Mor, not a mere lady-in-waiting. The condesa did find it in her heart to allow me to accompany the Queen to her sittings. But now I fear I have alienated myself with maestro Mor.

I had only been curious. At his insistence, I had been completely silent as he worked on Her Majesty's painting. Other than myself and his assistant, Alonso Sanchez Coello, a painter Dona Juana had brought with her from Portugal, all attendants had been banished from the chamber-- musicians, too, save for one boy, who was bidden to play a single melancholic melody Unrelentingly on a shawm. During the first few sittings, as the shawm squawked and senor Sanchez Coello mixed pigments and the Maestro flicked the tip of his tongue in concentration as he worked, the Queen had darted amused looks at me from where she sat by the window opened for the light, though her teeth did chatter with cold. I cringed, fearing she would burst into laughter, for I could just imagine the Maestro, a wiry man with a rat's shining eyes and a sharply forked beard, furiously smashing into splinters the wood panel Upon which he worked. But the droning shawm and stinking linseed-oil fumes eventually dulled My Lady's spirit, Until at last she lapsed into silent stares, entertaining what thoughts I did not know, as the glowing mound of charcoal, heaped Up against the chill of the open window, groaned in the big brass brazier. Reduced to standing to the side, I was painfully reminded of the irony that Tiberio should think I was Painter to the Queen. Papa had not told Michelangelo that was my role here--why had the Maestro told Tiberio such a thing?

Finally, as maestro Mor painstakingly painted the bluish shadows Under Her Majesty's worried eyes, I blurted out a question that had nagged me since he had begun laying in the greenish-gray shapes of the Underpainting, three weeks ago.

"
Signore
, I beg your pardon, but do you always prefer painting on wood?"

The shawmist looked Up, though he kept Up his dreary bleating. Maestro Mor stepped back from his easel, his fist bristling with five different brushes. Under his floppy Flemish cap, his small black eyes flashed fire. "Excuse me?"

Senor Sanchez Coello, a thin-faced fellow with sad dark eyes, shook his head from where he cleaned brushes behind the Maestro.

"Signore."
I curtseyed. "I am so sorry to have interrupted."

He readjusted the square palette, loaded with Uniform dabs of paint, that was hooked on his thumb. "Well, you have now, so spit it out. What?"

"Wood,
signore
--do you always paint on it?"

"What else would you suggest?"

His tone of voice did not invite suggestion. I rephrased the thought that was needling me. "I notice you Use softer brushes than I am familiar with."

"Not surprising, with your limited experience." He gazed at the smallest brush, from which a thin bundle of hairs sprang from the goose-quill ferrule. "This little beauty is of finest miniver tail. She has caressed the likenesses of two kings, three queens, and I cannot count how many princesses--too many."

Her Majesty's whalebone stays crunched as she raised her arms to stretch. "Is there such thing as an excess of princesses?"

Maestro Mor pointed the forks of his beard at her in a prideful smile. "There is when they demand the impossible. Even I cannot make a mare look like a filly, though I did try my best with Mary of England. H'm, though she was a Queen then, was she not, not a princess."

The Queen looked more lively than she had in days. "Do you mean Mary, my husband's previous wife?"

I curtseyed at the Maestro, feeling my chance for resolving my question slipping away.
"Signore,"
I said quickly, "I have been taught in the Venetian style, which is to paint Upon canvas with stiff hog-bristle brushes. In practicing this technique, I have observed"--he frowned in dismissal, so I sped Up my words--"that Using stiff-bristle brushes on rough canvas results in softer edges than Using soft brushes on wood."

"Yes, that is the disadvantage of Using stiff brushes on canvas." He stepped back Up to the easel. "Your Majesty, forgive me for referring to the King's former wife so disrespectfully."

"Signore,"
I said, "begging your pardon, but can it not sometimes be an advantage to have soft edges? If most edges in a painting are soft, then if there are a few edges that are harder, would these few not be more noticeable? If one wished to call attention to a certain feature, say the eyes or a gem, a softer brush and finer strokes could be Used to harden the edge and thus direct the viewer to that item, as one Uses the contrast of dark against light. Otherwise, how does the viewer know where to look in a painting, if every detail has equal importance?"

"Whatever do you mean, girl? Everything Upon which the viewer's eye falls should be a delight and a wonder." He nodded at the Queen, tacitly ordering her to resume her pose.

"Did she really have a voice like a man's?" the Queen asked. "Had she a man's beard as well?"

"Your Majesty, to answer your questions, yes and no."

"
Signore
, but how do you get across what is unique about your sitter? What is it you wish to say about"--I lifted my palm to the painting--"our Queen? What is your message?"

He laughed. "Message? That this painting is perfect and beautiful." He moved forward from the easel to take the Queen's hand. "As is My Lady." Her Majesty scratched her nose as maestro Mor kissed the Royal knuckles.

"What you learned is lazy painting," he said to me. "I would expect that of those in the Italian states, pleasure-seekers that they are. What I do is give my patrons an accurate portrayal of their features illuminated in strong light, so that their subjects--and history--may know their face. It has been an agreeable enough method for most of the crowned heads of Europe."

"But their personalities--"

"Stick to drawing pictures with Our Lady the Queen--you are good enough at that, yes?"

Senor Sanchez Coello grimaced in sympathy.

After that, I left the shawm to its squawking and the Maestro to his painting. But maestro Mor made me think about the Use of both hard and soft edges in a picture, to control what one wanted to say about the sitter. I would have to work on a painting with this concept firmly in mind, and since I had no other model, I would have to Use the only available subject--me.

But even as my spirits lift in the Undertaking of a new project, I do notice the Queen's spirits sink deeper. For the day after Don Juan had returned the Queen's pearl, the King had chosen to go hunting with his men instead of joining her at the Shrove Tuesday entertainments. He then rode to Madrid without her, where he had gone into retreat for Lent at the Monastery of San Jeronimo, never leaving her word of his whereabouts. She had to learn them from Dona Juana, who was only too happy to demonstrate her superior relationship to the King. Now, several weeks into his absence, the Queen's countenance grows a little more glum each day, made more so by the letters that pour across the border from France at an ever-increasing rate. Word has reached Paris that the King has found My Lady unsuitable for bedding, and her Most Serene Majesty, Catherine de ' Medici, Queen Mother of France, does not plan to tolerate it.