The Passion of Artemisia (10 page)

For hours I tried to do what they said, tried not to push, begged them to let me, rested in between. Again and again. I didn't know where Pietro was. I didn't care. I heard myself scream whenever the pain came. Was it to go on forever?

“Get it over with,” I yelled. “Give me something. I know you can make it stop.”

“No, child. You were born into this world to bear this pain. Ever since Eve, it's woman's lot in life.”

“No! I was born to paint!”

The worst, longest pain of all.

The midwife got me into the chair. “Here it comes. Push now!” she said.

All of me gritted and pushed down, squeezing. Pushing against the floor, it seemed. Sounds of wild animals came out of me. Finally, relief. Sleep. I wanted sleep.

I woke up in the bed. How had I gotten there? Waves of ache surged up from my belly to the top of my head. Holding her. A girl child. Such a color. Pale madder. A tiny fist of a face. A dear little translucent ear, perfectly carved in wax. And Pietro. Pietro was here. Pietro on his knees. Close to me. Crooning,
“Che amore di bambina.”
Pietro, with a deep purple lump on his forehead.

We named her Palmira Prudenzia. Palmira for his mother. Prudenzia for mine. He didn't seem disappointed in the least that she was a girl. As for me, I was supremely happy. A daughter. A marvel. A miracle. Someday a beautiful woman. I felt her effect already, a herald of love. Pietro's lips were kissing my ear.

“She's destined for a palace,” he said. “Look at her skin. Veins like threads of blue and red just like in the stone of Palazzo Pitti.”

Eventually I wrote to Father.

He wrote back:

We took Palmira to be baptized on March 25, New Year's Day in the old Florentine calendar, the day when all the babies born in Florence during the year are brought to the Baptistry just opposite the Duomo. The line of families carrying infants wound around the octagonal building. Pietro
held Palmira facing forward to get her first sight of Ghiberti's magnificent gilded bronze doors.

“According to the story, over these doors Ghiberti inscribed, ‘Look at this beautiful work that I have done.' ”

“We could say the same about Palmira,” I said. Pietro smiled down at me, his dark eyes alight with pride.

A barefoot, ragged woman with wild eyes and stringy hair sat nearby on the steps of the Duomo, sobbing between Hail Marys. I had seen a few of these penitents of Florence, but never one so wild and desperate.

“She's here often, or at Santa Croce or San Lorenzo, working off some sin in howling penitence,” Pietro said.

Is this what they had tried to make me become during the trial? I shuddered.

“Sometimes she's even on the Ponte Vecchio,” he continued. “Anywhere there are people. It's not genuine religion. It's for show. Don't pay her any attention or she'll scream more.”

I'd never been inside the Baptistry. The throng of people squeezed through Pisano's door, the south entrance. In the press of families with babies, some of them crying, tightly packed around the font, Pietro and I stood like a normal couple, side by side, our bodies touching, offering our child to God. In that moment when Palmira was anointed, we were one—mother, father, child.

I held Pietro's arm and whispered, “She's now among all the great artists and sculptors and poets of Florence who were baptized right here in this same spot. God has blessed their work.” My hope for her overflowed into tears.

Through the blur, I looked up at the overpowering Christ done in mosaic above the altar, and cringed under the judgment of his penetrating eyes. On one side of him, the good were being welcomed into Heaven, and on the other, the damned were being devoured by demons. Hell's torments were pictured as lovingly as the blessings of Heaven. Every
kind of roasting, beating, boiling, disemboweling was displayed in detail with small glass squares in reds and blues and gold. Maybe it was superstition, but I held my hand over Palmira's head to shield her from the sight.

“Who created the ceiling?” I asked.

“No one knows,” Pietro said.

It was from an age when artists worked anonymously for the glory of God. As real people, with loves and fears, parents themselves probably, they were nothing. To think that such fine artists were already forgotten. A vast emptiness engulfed me and threatened to spoil the joy of the day. No one even knew their names.

Palmira gurgled through babyhood in the cradle which we rocked with our feet while we painted. I felt a full and new contentment even though my time at the easel between feedings flew by in a matter of moments. Sometimes, as Father had written, I couldn't take my eyes off Palmira's shapely lips blowing bubbles or her tiny fingernails like flakes of candle wax, in order to do my work. Other times, when I was lost in the painting of something difficult, an eye or a hand or a foreshortened foot, her cries yanked me out of my concentration and it took extra time for me to find my way back to where I was. When she began to crawl, she tried to eat Naples yellow from a paint pot I'd set down too low on a stool. “Look, she's hungry to be an artist too,” I said to Pietro. Palmira gave to our marriage a sheen of normalcy.

Pietro used us once for a
Madonna and Child.
He draped me in a borrowed blue velvet mantle banded in rose madder, while Palmira slept in the folds on my lap. He posed me looking down at her, which I never tired of doing. “
Che bellina
. My holy child,” I crooned. From time to time her little legs thrust out against my belly. Pietro looked at us intensely, for hours, and I felt closer than I'd ever been to love.

In spite of such hope, sitting still so long made me restless. I wanted to hold her yet I also wanted to be the one painting her. How many women models in the last two centuries—Madonnas, Eves, Mary Magdalenes, Venuses, Delilahs, Salomes, Judiths—had yearned to be on the other side of the easel, I wondered. “Have you ever had a model who wanted to paint?”

“I never asked.”

“But there must be some in this city. I wonder how I could find out.”

“Ssh.”

At the end of the session, I set Palmira in her cradle and took a look at his canvas. Shock rippled through me. The shape of my face was too oval, my neck entirely too thin, my fingers too long and narrow.

“This isn't me at all,” I said. “It's not a question of skill. You're a fine painter. This is intentional.”

His face flushed as he studied the canvas.

“What am I? Only an armature to hang cloth on and reflect light? All you saw were the folds in the drapery. Pietro, why?”

He busied himself cleaning his palette and didn't look at me. “I have a reason.”

“What is it?”

He let a moment of consideration pass, then set down his palette and strode toward the door. I rushed to block him.

“Tell me!”

“Are you sure you want to know?”

“Yes.”

He looked pained. “Don Carlo knows you. You met him once, remember? He knows what you look like. He knows what happened in Rome.”

“So?”

“Your reputation. I can't have a tainted woman for the Madonna.”

“Tainted! Pietro, do you really think that?”

“Of course not, but it doesn't matter what I think,” he said softly. “Don Carlo . . . The painting would be scorned.”

I felt weak and leaned on the table, my back to him. He came up behind me, put his hands on my shoulders.

“I didn't want to tell you.”

I nodded. “Is it to follow me always?” I turned to him, feeling bruised, but not by him.

He drew my head onto his shoulder. “Someday I will paint you in a golden gown and everyone will know it's you. It will be so gorgeous I won't allow anyone to buy it. Not even Cosimo de' Medici. Not even,” he flung his arm up, “the pope!”

I laughed softly at his flamboyance. Painting for ourselves seemed foolish. We both had work to do.

“Tomorrow we'll continue, eh?” I didn't want him to find another model and look at her the way I wanted him to look at me. Who knew where that might lead? Florentine women were beautiful, he'd said.

The next day and as long as he needed a rack for the blue mantle, I sat still and silent in hoped-for love.

He sold the painting for a fine price and we were happy. Now when we visited churches, he held Palmira, and I linked my arm in his. In the Uffizi, newly open to artists one day a week, Botticelli anointed us with the sweetness of life. In Venus riding on a seashell, I saw our child as a ripe and ravishing young woman mindless of her own beauties. In front of
Primavera
, Palmira's dimpled hand reached toward the figure of Flora, whose flowered gown attracted her.

“How could this be that she has a preference among all the figures in the painting? She's only a baby.”

“Not for long. She'll be wanting pretty dresses soon,” Pietro said.

Was it this early that a person developed inclinations? Did the baby Michelangelo respond to Donatello's sculpture of the youthful David? Did his little arms that would someday
wield a sculptor's mallet reach out every time he was carried by a niche with a figure in it? I wondered how young I was when my father first showed me the paintings of Rome. Did my eyes roam hungrily over colors and shapes?

Pietro and I painted side by side, with Palmira crawling between the legs of our easels. When she began to walk, she stumbled and tipped over Pietro's easel, which came crashing down on her. She screamed and we rushed to her. “Ssh, Palmira. You're all right. Mama's here. Papa's here too.” Her little body heaved with her sobs and I pressed her against my breast, feeling a little helpless. Pietro held on to her bare feet.

The next day he built a baby-minder, a revolving pole from floor to ceiling with a sideways bar near the floor, about waist high on Palmira. When we tied her to the cross bar, she was supported and could toddle around in a circle and not be in our way while we worked, but still be with us. It moved me so much that he did this that I wrote to Graziela and Paola about it. To me it meant that he thought I could be a painter and a mother. Not many women could say as much for their husbands.