The Passion of Artemisia (14 page)

“Is that me, Mama?” Her eyes sparkled with pleasure a moment before she remembered that she was sulking.

“It's my darling treasure. What is she called?”

“Tesoro.”

“What else?”

“Palmira,” she said in a voice sweet as honey, and I knew I was forgiven.

I slid out one sausage slice and rearranged the others to fill in. I ate with tiny, delicious bites. I tried occupying myself by
tidying my painting cabinet, but I kept taking one more slice of sausage, repositioning the remaining ones, and with every missing slice from the plate, the reason for Pietro's absence was clearer. He must have learned the news himself by now. I stirred the oil with a piece of bread so he wouldn't see the letters, pushed aside the plate, and took out writing paper.

Dusk came and dimmed the outside world colorless. I lit a candle as well as my mother's oil lamp, to make it a cheery place to come home to. Many times Mother had Father's supper ready and he wouldn't come home until after it got
cold. She'd sing a song softly about the dancing lamplight to make herself feel better, but to me, it always sounded melancholy. The pears were turning brown at the edges. I couldn't stand to see them look so pitiful. I ate all but two wedges. This was my celebration, after all. The first woman in the history of the academy deserved
something
.

I was giving Palmira the rest of the pear when Pietro burst in the doorway, yanking off his doublet. A bolt of anger flashed across his fine, small features.

“You could have waited,” he said.

“Why did you leave her? She was crying when I came home. What do you mean, I could have waited? For what?”

“Until I was admitted.” Flinging his doublet over his shoulder, he brushed past the table without looking at the document. The candle flame fluttered. I heard the door to our bedchamber close and latch.

“Pietro, what are you doing?” I pounded on the door. “
Per amor di Dio
, what does this mean? Don't do this to me.” Palmira ran to me and hooked her arms around my legs. “You ought to be pleased. It will mean more commissions, for both of us.” A muffled sob came through the narrow opening between doorframe and door. “What do you want?” I said to the door. “That I stop painting? Stop being what I was meant to be? Stop breathing?” I picked up Palmira, and paced from the main room to the kitchen and back.

Palmira nestled her head against my neck, as if she knew. I sat her on the sink counter and stroked her face with one hand, while I washed the dishes in the stone sink with the other. I made up Palmira's bed in the main room and gently laid her down. She tucked her curled fingers under her chin like a squirrel. I drew the quilt around her and whispered, “I swear, my precious, I will never allow you to be forced into a loveless marriage. You'll never have to marry out of convenience, never need to make the best of what circumstances give you.”

I leaned against the wall. But wasn't that just life—making do with what circumstances give you? If it weren't for Agostino, if it weren't for Father, I might have been able to marry someone who loved me and would have been proud of me. Yet if I married for love, I might still be in Rome, might not have even been known to the academy. I thought of Graziela. Love marriages had no assurances either. The two things I wanted most in life—painting and love—and one had killed any chance at the other. Why was life so perverse that it couldn't or wouldn't give me one shred of good without an equal amount of bad?

I threw the dirty dishwater in the drip basin out the window with a great heave.

11
Judith

T
hat dough-faced steward was not going to thwart my way to Cosimo de' Medici, and neither was Pietro. I began working on another
Judith Slaying Holofernes
, essentially the same composition but with different faces and richer dresses. This time, Judith's would be deep gold, which seemed to be a Florentine preference, and would have fuller sleeves pushed up in order to do her work. And because Florentines loved jewelry and decorative touches, I put gold braid on Abra's headscarf and gave Judith a bracelet with figures of Artemis in carved green stone framed in gold filigree. Since the making of fine cloth was one of the city's main industries, I used a wider picture plane allowing Holofernes's red velvet bedclothes to be more voluminous. I edged them with gold stitching. And for sensual appeal, I added the tiniest speck of blood on the warm flesh of Judith's full breast, and more specks on her Florentine gold dress—all of this calculated to appeal to His Serene Highness Cosimo de' Medici.

The hardest part was to write the letter presenting the painting to him as a gift and offering my skill for future
commissions. For three days I struggled to perfect the humble language of service. I sat at the table wasting paper with false starts, and watching Palmira play with a paper doll I had cut out of a ruined letter.

Instead, I wrote an easier letter.

When I finished, the letter to Cosimo came more easily.

A week after I had the painting and letter delivered, Cosimo invited me to the Palazzo Pitti, at my convenience, a genteel touch.

Pietro grumbled, “Of course. What do you expect when you give away your art?”

“You could do it too, you know.”

“Push work on him? It's more gracious to paint for lesser patrons in the city and wait until he notices the work on his own.”

“Wait? How long? We are mortal, Pietro. The sand falls through the glass every breath we take.”

“Don't be morbid.”

“I'm not. I'm being realistic.”

Since it was early autumn, that brief, hazy, lovely time in Florence between summer's long sweltering days and November rains, I walked across the Ponte Vecchio rather than spending money for a carriage. The Arno had shrunken to a sluggish muddy rivulet, and the normal reflection of ochre buildings that quivered on the surface of its green water was gone. Instead, weeds and dried grass edged the putrid ooze along the banks, and clouds of mosquitoes billowed up from the standing water. But that didn't darken my spirits.

If Pietro had been with me, he would have let the smell and the mosquitoes sink him into gloom. He might even have turned around, convinced himself that he would try another day, and then lose his resolve. He always did things that hurt himself, it seemed—like taking a job for fresco repair without pushing for a commission on new work. And he never used Venetian amber varnish when it was clear to both of us that it would enhance his work. I couldn't understand it. If a person loves something above all else, if he values the work of his heart and hands, then he should naturally, without hesitation, pour into it his whole soul, undivided and pure. Great art demands nothing less.

I waved my way through the mosquito cloud and went on.

The Pitti stretched out in stiff formality on the left side of Via de' Guicciardini. Even though I knew it not to be the case, the intimidating building seemed the home of a despot rather than a family friendly to the arts. At the tall, heavy door, I gave my name to the porter who checked a list. He
directed me upstairs to the
piano nobile
, the floor of audience rooms. I saw from a window that the palace was even larger than it looked from the street, having two perpendicular wings stretching back toward a grassy upward slope to form a U shape which enclosed a carriage courtyard.

I passed through the first windowed room full of antique sculpture and was ushered through a marble doorway into a room with elaborate white and gold cornices, the walls covered in deep rose brocade with paintings hanging everywhere. I could not look at them now. Courtesy required that I look at Cosimo. He and his guests were seated facing the courtyard eating what looked to be roasted stuffed pheasants surrounded by olives and artichokes. Pheasant feathers arched like a fountain in decorative display over mounds of quince, dates, figs, and almonds. In Rome I had not known food to be a work of art.

A steward announced me and I approached and curtseyed.

“So here is the feminine hand that wields such a powerful brush,” Cosimo said, and extended a welcoming arm. “I had hoped to meet you at the academy.”

“Your Serene Highness, I am greatly honored,” I said, holding my curtsey and looking at the pattern of inlaid stone in the floor between us. “And I beg forgiveness for intruding on your guests.”

“I am the one honored with such a gift, signorina.”

How complimentary to address me that way. Apparently it was a Florentine pleasantry to reserve “signora” for matrons older than I. I wondered what he knew about me.

“You've given your Judith a hard face, you know.”

“She is concentrating. Like all heroines, she feels profoundly her task.”

“As you, no doubt, have felt about yours,” he said with a chuckle. “And who, may I ask, was your male model who deserved such revenge?”

“It is not personal vendetta, Your Highness.” Santa Maria, let me not offend him. “If it is to be called revenge at all, it's revenge against tyranny.”

He gave that a slow, considered nod. “I shall find a fine place for your
Judith Slaying Holofernes
in the Sala dell' Iliade.” He chuckled. “A place where my guests might need to be awakened from more passive pleasures. Be assured that it will be among good company, and further, that it must not be a gift. You shall be generously paid.”

“Honored again, Most Illustrious Highness.”

“But it must not be the sole representative of such a talented hand and mind.”

Hope rose up my throat in waves.

“Let another one of equal skill accompany it and you shall be doubly rewarded.”

“Another Judith?”

“Yes! Surely there are other moments to her story worthy of your brush.”

“I will make it my most immediate task and pleasure.”

“Why do pigeons fly, Mama?” Palmira asked, skipping along beside me the next day as I walked through the streets and piazzas and churches looking for an idea.

“I suppose to get away from little girls and boys who pester them.”

How could I choose another moment with as much drama as the slaying? I thought of Father's version in which the two women huddled together over the decapitated head. I'd copied it when I was just learning to paint. The figures were strikingly posed, but that huddling wasn't what I wanted.

At one end of the Loggia della Signoria stood Donatello's bronze
Judith and Holofernes
. I'd never cared for it. Instead of lying down, Holofernes was sitting up on the mattress
while Judith's arm and scimitar were raised to strike. The figures were awkwardly positioned, the effect without grace.

I stopped before Michelangelo's
David
. His thunderous scowl looking out to the Piazza della Signoria seemed to shout to the giant, Goliath,
How dare you even think you can destroy me with your sword!
Now
that
was boldness. That was confidence. Florentines loved the
David
because he was the weaker force confronting and vanquishing a greater force. It was how they saw themselves against the world, and it was in Judith's story also.

While Palmira chased after pigeons, sending them flapping in the air, I stood in my favorite spot which gave me the profile I loved, David looking to his left toward Goliath. How could I use that wonderful curve to his neck? Looking to the side like that, he was alert to the danger but he wasn't tense, just ready, with his sling across his shoulder. If my new
Judith
could depict the moment after the slaying when Holofernes's head is in Abra's basket, the two women, facing each other perhaps, could be alarmed by some new danger, a noise in the camp. That would be a challenge—to paint a sound. Judith could look to her left toward the danger, just as David was, and she could have the same curve in her strong neck that David had.

Instead of the sling, she would rest her sword on her shoulder, on the lace edging of her white chemise, in fact. I liked that—the sword blade possibly cutting threads of the lace, the world of swords and the world of lace so different, yet touching dangerously. Yes. It would be new. It would be all mine. And it would not be for an age when women hide their skills in deference to men, even husbands.