Slubber de Gullions not what we mange.
The slops they lush would give us rumpus in the chitterlins.
We draw the line in Rat-land
Nothing rotten, kickerpoo or still crawling or
Too damned sad on our red rags, our tongues.
Misery stinks most confoundedly.
Anyway there’s too much competition
From the active citizens, by which I mean
the lice, the fleas, the flies and the mosquitoes.
They’re sharp, the jointed beasts.
They know their trade.
They start eating
Before the culls have dropped their leaves.
Chapter 8
Tute le volpe finisse dal pelisser.
All the foxes end up at the furriers.
VENETIAN PROVERB
In a sketchbook in my armadio I keep the illustrated rendition of Casanova’s famous escape from the Piombi, the leadlined prisons in the attics of the Doges’ Palace. For, as he told me about it, I reached for my sketchbook, and under the mesmerism of his words my hand hovered over the paper, spinning almost involuntary images.
It was not the first time Casanova had told the tale, and nor would it be the last. The story was already a living work of art. He had refined its pungent vocabulary, its knowing pauses and its sharp intakes of breath. I think we both knew that he was polishing it up for the account he would one day write, for the piece of his past he would put out for sale. Casanova would always be fiddling for his supper, long after he laid down the violin.
But this time he spoke the words just for me, and just for me to draw. It was a hot night in early June. We had taken the gondola to Santa Maria della Salute and moored it under a private bridge in a quiet canal. The waves flopped lazily lucently around us, exhausting their small energies, as we exhausted our larger ones. Afterwards, a violin, Casanova’s, could be heard floating over the waves. A little wind sniffled around the lagoon past Salute, and we had moments of relief as it nosed through the velvet curtains. It redefined the lines of sweat down our backs. Casanova reached up to touch the silky roof of the felze.
‘Imagine a ceiling made of nothing but sheets of lead three feet square and wafer thin,’ he began. ‘Imagine living in there like a hunchback in a coffin.’
‘You are the last man in the world I can imagine in confinement,’ I said.
‘I was the last man in the world to be able to bear it,’ he agreed.
And so Casanova was plucked from his charmed life and put in a cell so small that he could not stand up. If he could have seen out, he would have looked down upon his magnificent former playground of the Piazza San Marco, still arrayed in its glory. Prisoners of State, however, had no such privileges. Casanova lived, viewless, under the roof of the Doges’ Palace, for fifteen freezing or sweltering months. Rats as big as rabbits ran over his head, and insects feasted upon his flesh. It reminded him of the boarding house in Padua where he had suffered as a child. Indeed, he felt as helpless and as numb as he had then.
In the Leads, when Casanova lay on his bed, the only possible position, his feet hung over the end. He could not even pace the floor for fear of grazing his head. How to contain his anger in such a small space? How to feed his hungers, for women and good food? And most of all, for novelty? Every day was the same under the Leads. He itched all over with uncontainable desires. Sometimes, in his desperation, he imagined that the little lead nails in the room were nipples and he ran his finger along them.
After days of silence, still no charges had been brought against him. He interpreted the silence optimistically: the charges could not adhere, he thought, he would soon be free. He had been punished enough. Three weeks later, he still nourished hopes that his noble protectors would have him out at any moment.
But more weeks and then months went by, without explanation. He started to think of the noose and the fabled green poison of the Inquisitors. He already felt like an anonymous corpse.
Under the Leads, the heat was as intense as his fear. Casanova shed his finery and sat stark naked on his chair, while the sweat streamed off him into pools on the floor. He developed haemorrhoids, a gift from the Leads that would last for the rest of his life. A dangerous fever soon followed. A doctor visited, leaving him with a syringe and barley water. ‘Amuse yourself with enemas,’ the physician flung over his shoulder as he left.
But worst of all, in the Leads they would not let Casanova write. He felt, for the first time, that his sanity might abandon him. He heard voices. His dreams were contaminated with venomous fantasies. To read, he was offered only religious tracts of lurid fanaticism: Saint Cecilia and her brethren, all suffering the kinds of tortures he dreaded for himself. And, for amusement, he was allowed to cut his toenails, but not to shave.
The filthy, naked prisoner grew a matted beard. At Christmas, Bragadin was permitted to send luxurious presents: a dressing gown lined with fox fur, a silk coverlet stuffed with cotton, and a bearskin bag in which to put his legs during cold weather, which was now as cruel as the heat had been in August. And the nights were long. Each day that winter he spent nineteen of the twenty-four hours in profound darkness.
There was still no news. His cell was directly above the room in which the Council of Ten hold their deliberations. He heard the old men muttering indistinctly underneath him, like water in a cave, but no one came to tell him of his fate.
Casanova determined to escape, or die in the attempt.
He prowled his cage like a feral cat, tearing food from the arms of his guard. He needed strength to seize his freedom. After nine months confined to the same tiny cell a solitary concession was granted. He was allowed to walk in a corridor outside it for half an hour, and in those minutes he found and secreted a metal bolt.
Patiently, day by day he set about making a hole in the floor of his cell. By August, the hole was nearly big enough to serve him, and then tragedy struck. The guard came to give him the happy news that he was to be moved to a better cell. There was a dangerous moment when the hole was discovered but Casanova persuaded the guard that discovery of the hole would cost him his own liberty, for his negligence.
Casanova hid his tool in his bible and it came with him to the new cell. A great privilege was granted there: he was given a pencil. And he had a neighbour, at last. He made friends with a cordial criminal next door, a Father Balbi, locked up for impregnating three virgins of his parish.
Casanova managed to pass the precious bolt to Balbi, who spent eight days making a hole in the ceiling of his cell. The priest was able to hide his work with the religious prints that he had been permitted to paper all over his roof. On the ninth night Balbi pulled his plump self up through the hole into the cavernous space between the roofs of the cells and the rafters of the Doges’ Palace. He crawled across to Casanova’s cell, tore open the ceiling and Casanova climbed up to join him.
Together they clawed a small hole in the ancient roof of the Doges’ Palace. It was easy: the old lady was so ancient she was thinning on the top. They raked at the fragile wood with their fingers and it came away in their hands.
They climbed out into the open air. They were struck dumb by the sharp smell of the sea and the sight of it, so long denied. Below them, Venice played, strolled and slept. In his excitement, Casanova slipped and fell, as if for ever, until he was stopped by a rusty pipe, which opened a bloody seam in his leg. He hung there upon the roof, between life and death. It was clear that there was no way down the smooth facade. They must re-enter their prison and find another way down to the ground. They found a dormer window, tore it open and climbed back inside.
Like clever, agitated rats in a maze, the two men forced their way out through various rooms down to the second floor. They were still trapped. Dawn was starting to reveal the milky stones of the central courtyard of the Doges’ Palace. Casanova, in desperation, pressed his face against a window. This elegant bloodstained apparition – for Casanova had again dressed himself with care, in his
hat trimmed with Spanish lace and feathers – was seen by a guard, who hastened up to them, thinking them a pair of courtiers who had been accidentally locked up overnight. This had happened before.
Casanova drew himself up to his height, only the bandages on his knees detracting from his noble bearing. Casanova and Balbi accepted the guard’s apologies graciously, and then walked with quiet dignity out of the courtyard, round the Piazzetta, over the Bridge of Sighs and onto the Riva degli Schiavoni. Once out of the guard’s sight, they scuttled to the water’s edge and took the first gondola they saw to freedom, to exile.
It was All Saints’ Day, 1756. The first rays of the sunrise gilded the domes of Salute.
As he told me this story, I had filled page after page with tiny vignettes: Casanova on his too-small bed, plump Balbi holing his ceiling, the perilous moment on the roof. In my last sketch I showed Casanova and Balbi, standing in the gondola, and looking back at Salute and the ghostly bell-towers of Venice emerging from the morning mist, like delicate stockings hanging out to dry
I drew Casanova’s thirty-year-old face, choked with an excess of emotion. In my picture Casanova looks like a child taken off to school by force. Leaving Venice, it seems to him, forever, he has broken down in tears.
Chapter 9
La novità le piase a chi non ga gnente da perder.
Novelty pleases those who have nothing to lose.
VENETIAN PROVERB
All Venetians love a novelty! Venice craves novelty the way some cities crave war. A pretty young novelty who can make the Venetians beautiful forever? Bound to succeed!
Within weeks of my opening the new studio, my sitters’ book was peppered with noble names – ancient titles from the innermost circle of the Libro d’oro. I insisted on keeping my book myself, filling out the columns of down-payments given, paintings commissioned, finished, final payments made. Casanova looked over my book and shook his head with delight. He rejoiced in the fact that a young woman who could paint a dewdrop on a peach could also make so much money.
On Casanova’s advice, I used some of my earnings to decorate my studio. I renovated the painted ceilings myself. I bought expensive furniture and carpets. The china was Sèvres and Limoges. A café next door provided French hot chocolate and dark aromatic coffee on silver trays. My divan was furnished with tapestried cushions and a yellow coverlet of flowered Pekin silk. The opulence of my studio was for professional gain rather than personal comfort: to attract even grander clients it had to be impressive. There were comfortable chairs for my rich visitors and a floor-to-ceiling display of faces already executed. I made sure that my studies of well-known subjects were prominently displayed. Young men, other artists, came to my studio. I realised with pleasure that they wanted to be seen there.
My clients, particularly the middle-class ones, came to my studio looking not only for a beautiful rendition of their own faces but for taste and style. They hoped that a little of my refinement would rub off upon them when they left. In their warehouses they stored luxurious silks. They knew which were the costliest bolts, but not whether one silk was lovelier than the other in an aesthetic sense. I showed them, by the silks I draped around them, by the colours I chose for their backgrounds. I gave them not just confident portraits, but also confidence.
My first-time sitters were very dependent upon me. They looked in grateful wonder at the classical busts and musical instruments I placed beside them. Sometimes I would ask them to rest an elbow upon a broken column and to stare into the distance. In this way I indicated a deep knowledge of the classical past on their part (whether they could read Latin or not). Or I would pose them next to a beautiful wooden globe to show their cosmopolitan savoir faire, or holding a kaleidoscope, to show the scintillating variety of their visions. Sometimes I painted them standing cross-legged, to show how much at ease they were in this learned elegant world. They liked to explain to their friends, as I had explained to them: ‘You see, this foot planted solidly in the earth shows the stability of life. The other one, crossed and just tip-toeing the ground, shows the freedom and spirituality of my soul.’
More experienced sitters wanted to choose their own backgrounds and costumes. Venetians ladies chose strange poses sometimes. French fashion still dominated so I too endured our lamentable Marie-Antoinette phase of noble milkmaids. I was relieved when it was over. With their sophisticated coiffures and the luxurious adventures etched in their eyes, my high-born Venetian milkmaids were never completely convincing. The Poupée de France still reigned supreme in the Merceria. Whenever she appeared in a new costume the women of Venice ran mad to copy her within days. When I passed her, dressed in some almost unpaintable confection of lurid colours and exaggerated textures, I shook my fist at her. She wasted my time: my ladies’ dresses might even go out of fashion within the period they sat for their portrait, and they would insist upon being repainted in the latest style. ‘You’re only a doll,’ I sneered. Her glassy eyes glittered malevolently at me. She had dragged many Venetian husbands to their ruin with her excesses of lace and satin. No doubt she had also driven many other artists to desperation.
I still liked to paint my own landscapes and draperies, unlike some of my competitors who sent their paintings out to be finished by jobbing artists who specialised in such things, or employed little Cecilias with a specific skill. It was not unknown for a painting to be sent to three different addresses: to the expert in ladies’ finery, to the foliage painter and to the specialist in ancient ruins. You could even buy paintings ready-made with an extravagant but enduring costume and a timeless background. There was just a vacancy for the head which the portrait painter would add in.
Casanova had taught me that these backgrounds were important. They were part of the character of the sitter, part of the portrait. Venice did not offer me the current fashion for rustic scenery from life, of course. So for my landscapes I arranged little fantasy models in my studio, with heads of broccoli for trees, and chess pieces for ruined towers. Or, where the sitters permitted me to be more imaginative, I tried to paint the feelings straight out of their hearts: I tried to render their hopes, dreams and fears as clouds, mountains and birds of paradise.
An artist is an entertainer. In the studio I dressed myself pleasantly, to look older and worldlier than I was. I knew that I must present myself as the material equal and the aesthetic superior of my clients. When they saw me in a rich gown, of a fabric they could not quite name, my sitters felt comfortable, in safe hands. I had to guard my lingua biforcuta and groom my talents for conversazione. It was necessary to be gregarious to be a successful artist, to make people feel welcome, to be able to talk fluently while you painted. The act of being painted must be a pleasurable thing for my spoiled, bored and rich sitters. Anyway, it helped their faces, and so my portraits, if they were happy. Felicity is a great beautifier.
On prominent display I had all the artists’ manuals. The French ones were particularly impressive. They showed exactly how drapery falls around the body and other such details that impressed the layman. In my opinion I had to know those things merely in order to know how to break the rules, but my sitters were reassured at the sight of them. They felt their money well spent.
I loved my tools. I was happy even to mix my own colours. In the corner of my studio stood a grindstone and jars of vivid powder, which would be liquified with the oil, drop by drop. But when I was very busy, I purchased paint that had been mixed already. The prepared paint lay waiting for me in oiled pigs’ bladders, which sighed sweetly when I pierced them with a tack to release the nectareous colour inside.
I loved my brushes, either horse hairs wrapped with waxed string onto sticks, or little clumps of squirrel fur forced into the quills of birds and then these in turn forced onto narrow batons of wood. The brushes were graded according to the size of the bird that had suffered to provide them: crow, duck, small swan, large swan ... I did not know if the birds were still alive when their feathers were plucked from them, but sometimes I h
eard their indignant squawks in my head when I picked up a brush made from their involuntary gift.
With some portraits I would stand fully six feet from the sitter and use a slender six-foot brush so that I was also six feet from the canvas. This enabled me to examine the painting from the same distance from which the viewer would eventually see it. The portrait painter often sees her subject and her painting too intimately. She needs, from time to time, to stand back and gaze upon it as the world will see it, before going back to the intimacy of close contact with the canvas.
I loved my pastels for quick sketches, but they did not last. I could not use them for my regular work or my popularity would not survive long. The pastels came from Switzerland and smelt of sterile efficiency. I soon humbled them to fragments. When in the estro, the full flamboyant flow of my work, I always pressed them too hard, and broke them in half.
I loved my palette, the curve of wood with what seemed like a bite taken out of it. This was where the swag of brushes would rest. When I was ready to work, I clipped my gallipot, with its measure of oil and turpentine, onto the palette. First, I reached for my twin-headed stick, with white chalk at one end and red or white at the other; with this I sketched in the highlights and lowlights of my portrait. Soon, I would gently blow the chalk away, as I approached with my paint.
I cannot really describe the process of applying the paint, because I do not myself know where it came from. I just know that I would sit in front of my subject, and a few hours later I would wake up, and the painting would be just a little more finished. In the estro of a portrait, I would stride around with my mahlstick, which stopped me from smudging my hand in oils that took days to dry. Sometimes I applied the paint with a brush, and feathered it with my fingers.
If you were to describe it to the inhabitants of another star, you would be obliged to say, merely, ‘I drew the outline of a likeness and then I filled it in with colours.’ But this process creates only pleasing marks upon paper. You need to make an individual who breathes, kisses, laughs, makes love. This does not happen until your colours meet and greet each other. At this moment, something new is afoot. The alchemy has begun.
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