The Creation Of Eve (2 page)

The
First Notebook

In which I shall gather my impressions and observations as a painter, as well as any letters or sundry items of information that may prove useful to me and my work, as have done the great maestros Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Durer, and Michelangelo Buonarroti, also known as Il Divino.

ITEM: "Women are lustful, imperfect creatures. Nature seeks perfection in all her creatures, and would, if she could, produce nothing but men."

--COUNT BALDASSARE CASTIGLIONE,
The Book of the Courtier

ITEM: In painting, three things must be considered--the position of the viewer, the position of the object viewed, and the position of the light that illuminates the object.

ITEM: Rosemary, when its scent is inhaled, concentrates the mind.

7 MAY 1559

Macel de' Corvi, Rome

In the time it takes to pluck a hen, I have ruined myself. I have ruined my sisters, my little brother. Papa--I have ruined Papa. My gentle, good papa, who had encouraged me to paint, when everyone in Cremona laughed.
A girl taking up a man's craft, and such a dirty one at that! Who is going to marry her now? Not that Amilcare could have scraped together a decent dowry--God knows he has already got his problems, if you know what I mean.

Oh, I had heard people whisper. I heard them in Papa's bookshop, when they thought the groan of the printing press covered their voices. I heard them over the splashing of the fountain in the piazza outside our house, when they were strolling in the evening air, or as I waited on the church steps for Mamma to finish her prayers, always longer than everyone else 's. Papa must have heard them, too, but that never stopped him from encouraging my painting. He had begun the day I'd come pattering home from Mass in my little girl's slippers, and inspired by the picture of the Madonna and Child newly hung in the Lady Chapel, borrowed his quill and paper to draw my own Nativity scene. Francesca, nursing the most recent of Mamma's babies, had been my captive model.

Hunched over the suckling infant, Francesca had glared at me Under brows as thick and mobile as a man's thumbs. "You go!" she scolded in her peasant's Italian. "What you want with picture of this?"

By the time baby Minerva drained a breast, I had finished my little sketch. I ran with the results to Papa, who put aside the book he had been reading in the courtyard and held the drawing Up to the afternoon sunlight. "It's Minerva and Francesca, isn't it? You even caught Francesca's frown.
Eccellente,
Sofonisba!"

My chest had swelled with pride. I was all of seven. Now I, the wondrous painting virgin from Cremona, am seven-and-twenty--and ill with fear. For my good papa, I beg the saints and martyrs to not let maestro Michelangelo talk.

Perhaps the Maestro did not see so much. It had been dark in his studio. The Angelus bell marking dusk had been ringing from the church of Santa Maria di Loreto across the piazza when Tiberio and I had run Up the stairs. How could I have been so foolish as to go Up to the studio alone with Tiberio? I must have been drunk, though I had had only a cup of watered wine at
cena
. But I was drunk--on being maestro Michelangelo's chosen one. On Tiberio's choosing me, too. On the feel of Tiberio's thick fingers, rough from sculpting, around mine. I had to be drunk to do what I did.

But Tiberio said he loved me then, and he meant it, I know. His kiss did not lie. Oh, what kind of wicked she-cat am I? Even now, as black tendrils of shame seep through my heart like ink in water, I dream of his lips. I never knew a man's lips could be so soft in the flesh yet so thrillingly hard when pressed against one's own. Was it the pressure of his lips, or just the musk of his skin, that drove me to animal madness? I have never imagined such pleasure. Since the age of fourteen, my thoughts have been consumed by studying with different maestros, pleasing patrons, and painting, painting, always painting. Now thoughts of his body dance through my dazzled brain, beckoning to me like players in a lascivious masque.

It is not as if Francesca did not try to keep Tiberio and me apart. She has approached her role as a lady's companion with ferocious vigor since my first trip to visit Rome, three years ago, at maestro Michelangelo's request. Proud, then, of her recent elevation from nurse, she had at all times positioned her stocky black-clad body between me and Tiberio, who was even then Michelangelo's favorite student. No matter if Tiberio and I were tramping over the vine-covered ruins of the Palatine Hill, making sketches of the broken ancient pillars on which cows scratched their bony rumps, or watching men cart stone from the empty hulk of the Colosseum to Use in the new dome of the Basilica that the Maestro was building, or just pausing in the quiet church of San Pietro in Vincoli to admire the Maestro's magnificent statue of a stern and powerful Moses--Francesca had bent every scrap of her considerable will toward creating a barrier between Us. This visit had been no different. She would have prevented all but one brief touch had she not been seized with a choking cough.

I blame the weather for her fit. It has been hot here, too hot, for May. The sun beats down from morning Until night, baking the scent of the roses, now blooming from every wall, into air thick with the stench of the Tiber, wood smoke, and dung. This afternoon, as our little group made its way through the crooked streets of the old quarter in which Michelangelo lives, the filmy veil sticking to my cheeks, my tight sleeves and corset, and the lace ruff scratching my neck were but minor torments compared with Francesca's suffering in her heavy lady's-companion black. Thickly veiled and buttoned Up to her chin in wool, she mopped her sweating face with a corner of her veil as she struggled to keep Up with Tiberio and me. Even in her misery, had she felt the invisible threads drawing Tiberio and me together? Sweetest Holy Mary, had Michelangelo?

Perhaps the Maestro noticed nothing. He walked ahead of Us, hands behind his back and head pointed down, as if searching the cobblestones for
scudi
. I tried to act properly detached toward Tiberio, coolly discussing perspective and composition and critiquing other artists' work in response to the gruff comments Michelangelo tossed over his shoulder. The Maestro was particularly harsh on the Venetian, Tiziano Vecellio, or Titian, as he is sometimes called, claiming the Venetian needed to learn how to draw, and Tiberio, echoing the Maestro in all things, cited Tiziano's painting of the myth of Danae as a glaring example of sacrificing precision for prettiness. I did not agree. But though I wished to argue that Tiziano's failure to depict each muscle of the naked woman was more than made Up for by the warmth afforded by his open brushwork and Use of color, at that moment the discussion of painted flesh was too much for me, with the very real flesh of Tiberio so near. Instead I calmly (or so I thought) defended the realism in Tiziano's portrait of Pope Paul III and his two nephews, with the Venetian going so far with his honest brush as to portray the subjects as a trio of connivers.

"No wonder Tiziano abandoned the project," I said.

Michelangelo responded with a grunt.

"It's a poor artist who cannot finish a simple portrait," said Tiberio.

"It's a poor artist who would ever start one," muttered the Maestro.

"But there have been some very worthy portraits," I said. "I think of maestro Leonardo's portrait of madonna Lisa, wife of Francesco del Giocondo."

The Maestro glanced at me over his shoulder. "He overdid the
sfumato
. All his lines are too blurry, or is the picture just sprouting mold?"

I smiled at Tiberio's chuckle. "Surely, Maestro," I said, "you see merit in Raffaello's portrait of Count Baldassare Castiglione? They say it's so lifelike his dog mistook the picture for his master."

"He was full of himself," the Maestro pronounced.

"Who, Maestro?" said Tiberio. "Raffaello or Castiglione?"

"Both."

Tiberio laughed. "Raffaello did your portrait, Maestro. Are you not pleased?"

The Maestro growled.

"It's a good likeness," Tiberio told me, "the only portrait anyone has done of him. You've seen it, haven't you, in
The School of Athens
in the Vatican? Raffaello had to do it on the sly."

"Waste of time," said the Maestro.

We continued in this vein, I arguing for portraiture, the Maestro and Tiberio arguing against it. But perhaps my bold talk fooled no one. Perhaps all knew my every sense was trained Upon Tiberio.

I could almost smile now at how Francesca had bustled between Tiberio and me when we arrived at the Pope's chapel in the Basilica, the chapel they call the Sistine. We had stood with our heads tipped back, all of Us, silent. On the vaulted ceiling above Us, over an area as large as Papa's apple orchard, hundreds of brawny, mostly naked figures writhed, bringing the stories from the Scriptures vividly to life. Their flesh, though painted, seemed as real as that of Tiberio's hands, which he placed atop his head in wonder; their painted muscles as palpable as those I could see in my side vision of Tiberio's sinuous wrists. Even Francesca, sweat rolling down her broad face as she wedged herself between Tiberio and me, gaped Up at the colorful grid of scenes above Us.

"I've seen this dozens of times, Maestro," said Tiberio, "and I never know what to say."

Still appraising the ceiling with a frown, the Maestro folded his arms over his barrel chest. "Not bad for a sculptor." He jerked his thumb at the mural covering the wall above the altar. "
The Last Judgment
is better. Ceilings are hell."

I stole a look at him. The maestro of maestros had a head like a cannonball, the thick, high cheekbones of a Slav, and a squashed nose. His sharp eyes were so deeply set it was impossible to determine their color. For a man of four-and-eighty, his arms were unusually muscular, contrasting oddly with his old man's white beard, and his hands were so calloused they looked to be made of the stone in which he worked. Other than his arms, and a disproportionately long torso, he was a small man. The greasy thigh-high boots of dog-skin that he wore only accentuated the shortness of his bowed legs. I smiled to myself as I returned my sights to the ceiling. The greatest living artist in the world, the creator of beauty so heavenly that he was called the Divine One, must have been quite the brawler in his youth.

"Maestro, how old were you when you finished this?" asked Tiberio.

"The ceiling? Thirty-seven. Old, I thought then. By God, I felt it, too, all that damned painting. Ha! I didn't know what old was. Old is bad bowels and trouble pissing. Makes me wonder why we fight so hard to live."

The scrape of our shoes on the marble mosaic floor was lost in the hush of the chamber. It smelled of damp and stone and incense. Outside, church bells began to clang, marking the hour.

"I wish I could paint like this," I said.

The Maestro turned on me, the folds of his coarse face deepening in a scowl. "Who says you can't? That picture you brought with you of your sisters playing chess--you're in it, too, aren't you, old lady?" he said to Francesca.

Francesca glared at the mosaics at her feet, pride and offense warring on her brow.

"It's a good start," he said to me. "I saw their souls, especially the sister turned toward the viewer."

"Lucia," I murmured, with a pang of homesickness.

"Musculature is your problem. I got no sense of it. From the neck down, your people were mannequins stuffed into clothes."

I pressed together my lips. It is difficult to improve one's Understanding of muscle and the structure of the human form when, as a woman, one is not allowed to study a naked body, be it dead or alive. In truth, the only form of painting I have attempted thus far is that kind so maligned by the Maestro: portraiture. As long as I cannot learn by drawing from the nude or from the dissection of a cadaver, I will never be able to paint more than heads, hands, and gowns. I will never be able to depict scenes from the Bible or history or legend and myth, the mark of the greatest painters, and Until I do, I have no chance of being considered a
maestra
by Michelangelo or anyone else.

The Maestro seemed to hear my thoughts. "Be glad you can't do dissections." He brushed a bread crumb from his beard. "There's nothing more foul in the world. No one enjoys doing them--though maybe that braggart Leonardo da Vinci did. Who'd ever guess that old peacock could cut into a dead woman's body like it was a sausage?"

Francesca rapped at my arm, signaling her demand that we leave.

"Fine talk, Maestro," Tiberio murmured.

The Maestro tipped back his head to gaze at the ceiling. "Sofonisba works in a man's world. She can take it."

Tiberio lifted his brows at me in apology, then joined the Maestro in his study of the ceiling. My face hot, I did the same. The cooing of the pigeons outside filled the awkward silence.