You can paint a portrait di getto, achieve your final effect in one sitting. Or you can give it years of your life. There is not, in any case, a picture in the world that is really complete, other than relatively. When you put down your brush, the portrait is finished only until you pick it up again. If you worked upon it another day, the painting would seem more finished.
Even when you’ve signed and sold it, a painting continues to alter. Oil paint does not truly dry for many years, even though it may cease to be sticky within days. Linseed oil is touch-dry in three days, poppy oil in five and walnut oil about the same. But then the process of immortality really starts, with ageing. First the oil combines with the air to produce a solid film. That coating is at first sensitive and flexible, like baby skin, but it hardens and becomes more brittle as it gets older, and sometimes the oil secretes a yellow patina. Then comes the craquelure, the tiny cracks in the portrait’s skin. Even when you work hard, painting fat over lean (creating a surface that is oilier and oilier), you cannot always avoid wrinkling in the old age of a painting. So it is better to know how it will look in its old age, and make provision for it to be loveable then, too.
As Antonio used to do, I seated my sitters upon soft chairs on little platforms. This raised their eyes to the same level as mine while I stood at the easel, but it also served to give them a sense of their own particularity. From their platform, they watched, with tiny swivels of their eyes, my own movements from paint table, to palette, to canvas. They always drew in a breath when I first raised my charcoal to the paper, and when I wiped away stray flakes with a silk handkerchief they always flinched as if I was erasing their soul. I could see them wondering … Was I inspired in that moment by their eyes, their fingers, their mouth? Did I want to kiss them? Did I like them? Would I make their immortal image beautiful?
Some clients demanded mirrors behind me so they could watch the progress of my work, and caution me. I was not discomforted by the mirrors. A sitter as anxious as that could be helped by the mirror. It would make sure he maintained his animation, his optimum level of attractiveness and alertness. He would monitor his attractiveness in the mirror and not slop into jowls nor slump into potbelly. The mirror kept my clients endlessly amused. No one ever tires of looking at themselves.
They were right to be anxious, my sitters.
They knew instinctively that when you paint a portrait you paint your reaction to the sitter, rather than the sitter himself. You paint your feelings on that day, your irritations, your bad night, your own cycle of the moon. Mixed with all these things are your impressions of the person whom you paint: how they look to you, how they smell to you. You swill in your ears the things they have said. You might even wonder how they will pay you. While your eye is noting the physical detail of their appearance, a more profound emotional transfer is being stamped on your spirit. When your eye has done its prodigious labours, you join all your perceptions together. Then you pick up your brush and load each hair upon it with what you now know.
So I was entirely occupied, in the hours allowed to me, in creating the immortality of others and making it beautiful. While I worked I had time to daydream on my own account. With all his talk of immortality, Casanova had inspired me to look to my own.
I wanted to be like my heroine Angelica Kauffman, twenty-seven years older than I was and already known the world over as ‘die Seelenmalerin– the painter of people’s souls. I monitored her progress jealously, watching as she realised my dreams.
I am indebted to Angelica for several reasons. Of course I owe her some technical matters and a few themes for backgrounds, for example, and some thoughts upon the construction of the human nostril.
But I also owe Angelica my talent for research, which would one day become almost more important to me than my painting. Upon Angelica I practised the art of learning all about someone else who obsessed me and possessing their story as if it were my own. You might call it spying. I call it research, or rather distillation. I learnt how to extract information about her painlessly, drop by drop from my clients who had also been hers. She taught me to scour the Giornale and the Osservatore for news of her successes and the scandals that pursued her. I would go to cafés to pay two gazéte to read the avisi, our gossip sheets. I learnt how to read English and French and even the Venetian newspapers, and press out from each sheaf of crumpled paper a new droplet of information about my quarry. I learnt how to distil truth from gossip. I learnt how to read her work, for a painter always reads a painting, and I learnt how to draw out of it what she had to tell me about what was important to me.
Angelica, unwittingly, had taught me something else: to be ambitious, to want to paint the people who shaped our time with their intellectual or physical charisma. That was a lesson which would one day lead me to hell.
But I run away with myself.
Chapter 10
Al la puta oziosa el diavolo ghe bala in traversa.
The idle girl has a devil dancing under her apron.
VENETIAN PROVERB
Angelica Kauffman knew how to capture personality as well as features. In her long life she knew only two unsatisfied customers. Unfortunately, one of them was Goethe. But even he continued to adore her. She had started young, younger even than I had done. At eleven, the Bishop of Como, Monsignor Cappucino, engaged her to paint his portrait. Commissions followed from the Duchess of Modena and others. She was launched.
You groom your career as an artist by your choice of the paintings that you copy. You learn the skills of the other artists by tracing the paths of their paintbrushes. Angelica followed the path that my wistful imagination hewed for me. She had worked with my idol Piranesi on perspective and copied the great works in the Uffizi, as I longed to do. She had chosen the same paintings, the Raphaels and the Ghirlandaios, the same saints, and the same Madonnas that I craved to master.
Then, in 1765, three years before I was born, Angelica Kauffman had arrived in Venice. She stayed for a year, feasting upon our Tintorettos and Veroneses, and painting visiting English Society who had developed a taste for her work. She moved to London and bought a tall house in the tight streets of Soho. Her London neighbours of the time included Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, former inhabitant of the Palazzo Mocenigo. In Venice, and in London, Angelica knew everyone. Her talent and the sweetness of her personality opened every door. The mad, impossibly talented painter Henry Fuseli was in love with her.
But instead she married a complete impostor, the so-called Count de Horn, who posed as a Swedish nobleman. The truth, as she soon discovered, was that her new husband was a bigamist called Brandt. When he was exposed, he tried to extort money from her, and then to kidnap her. He died, fortunately, in 1780. She was thirty-nine years old, and free again.
Except that she was never free, for Angelica, it seems, was always pushed by her ambitious father. Idleness was a sin, he told the newspapers, or at least it allowed sin to toy with you. So Angelica was endlessly productive and remained innocent. The King of England himself sat for her in 1768.
Then a second husband came to extract more work from her. She married a Venetian, Antonio Zucchi, fifteen years her senior, who had come to London to decorate ceilings, but who soon relaxed upon the earnings of his famous wife. Venice sometimes has this orientalising effect upon its men. Venetians are, as our proverb goes, born tired and live to sleep. Even our lovely buildings seem to be born frail and exhausted, so delicate do they appear in the morning mist, and within a few years they start to lean against each other for support.
During Angelica’s engagement to Zucchi, Marat, the bloodstained French revolutionary, pretended to have seduced her. News of this scandal had come to Venice, and everyone thought the marriage doomed. The Zucchi relatives were to be seen purse-lipped and impermeable to friendly inquiries about their son. Nonetheless the wedding took place on July 10th 1781. Then the newly-weds came to Venice to share their joy with the family
The Zucchis paraded their famous daughter-in-law aroun
d Venice. My parents were invited to a soirée. When they met her, no one could believe the Marat story. Even without her personal charm and obvious wholesomeness, there was Angelica’s extraordinary work: her porcelain complexions, her deep, deep eyes, her exquisite hands. Everyone wanted Angelica to paint their souls. Clients pressed upon her, including the Grand Duke and Duchess of Russia, for whom all Venice had been transformed into a welcoming pageant, complete with bullfighting and extravagant processions. Venice was wild with rumours that the Duke had fallen in love with her. I saw her once, walking through the Piazzetta with a rich English client. I followed them at a discreet distance, staring greedily at her slender outline, the purity of her profile and the rigid tidiness of her coiffure. Her client gazed down upon her adoringly. I picked up his carte de visite as it fluttered from his topcoat pocket. I later heard that ‘Mr Bowles, The Grove, Wanstead’ had ordered dozens of paintings from Angelica.
I pressed my parents for details of their meeting with her, as far as I dared. I could not ask them the questions I wanted to ask. And even if I did, they did not have the language to answer them.
Angelica Kauffman left Venice in 1782, just before I, the unsaintly Cecilia, took my sinful bath and was interrupted by a cat. Angelica had been invited to Naples, where she painted the Royal Family. Sir William Hamilton, the English consul, commissioned a Penelope from her and was enchanted by her. He wrote to William Beckford, a young English friend: As for Angelica, she is my idol. Remember William Beckford, he is part of our story. Angelica, meanwhile, went on to Rome.
In time, Angelica would start to hear about me, never knowing how she herself had prepared my path for me. To me also would come those commissions from the Queen of Naples, the Hamiltons, Goethe and others. For the sitter who has once been painted beautifully, portraiture becomes an addiction. Having been painted by Angelica, they would, one day, want to be painted by me, to see what new beauties I could distil from their faces to display to posterity. I, moreover, was an Italian, so I had the insider’s view of their paintable treasure. Angelica could paint their souls and make you wish for spiritual communication with them. But I – I could make you want to make love to them, to feel their fingers upon your own, their lips upon yours.
Enough of the cloudy future. We are talking of a green time when my favourite palette was the first one given to me by Casanova, when I was learning the truth of Casanova and his stories, when I was privileged to hear them from his own lips as I lay in his arms.
Chapter 11
Bezzi fa bezzi, e peòci fa pèoci.
Money makes money and lice make lice.
VENETIAN PROVERB
‘After the Leads, I lived in exile from Venice for over eighteen years,’ Casanova told me. ‘That’s longer than you have been alive, Cecilia. It’s a long time to be away from home.’
I held him tighter. We were lying on the divan in my studio, on the yellow silk coverlet. He stroked my throat, and went on with his story. He was happy tonight. His first memory took him to a good place.
At first, after his escape, Casanova had returned to Paris. By staying silent at the right moments, and eloquent at even better ones, he had managed to take the credit for a bold plan to organise a state lottery. He had convinced the nervous ministers to back the lottery, and to make it as extravagant as possible. He knew the tastes of the French.
He explained, ‘”The thing,” I told the ministers, “is to dazzle. It’s an art that satisfies everyone. It’s a correction of imperfect life that fails to offer sufficient excitement from time to time.”’
France was dazzled. For the first time, Casanova was a rich man. He showed the Parisians how to live, how to eat and how to make love. Paris was laid waste by his charm. The Parisians devoured the luxuries he pressed upon them. But soon he was back on the road, in search, as always, of more love and more money. He traversed France and Italy, again and again, his strongbox laden with diamonds, watches, and Bills of Exchange.
He just needed one big deal to set him up for life now, he thought.
Just one.
In 1758, Casanova started to prepare for the elaborate scam on Madame d’Urfé. It would be the consummate act of dazzlement.
Jeanne d’Urfé was a rich, shrivelled Marquise obsessed with alchemy and the occult. She wore a large magnet round her neck to attract lightning. When they first met, she took Casanova to her laboratory, where he was astonished to be shown a substance that she had kept over the flame for fifteen years, and that was to stay there for another four or five. It was a projectile powder, which, when ready, she assured him, would be able to transform any metal into gold in a minute. Madame d’Urfé clutched his hand and stared at him avidly. Her chimney was full of black soot, her face lined with old lusts and bitternesses. She had quarrelled with her family. She had plans to replace them, magical plans.
As with Bragadin, Casanova entered into the spirit of it all, and added his own special talents to hers. Madame d’Urfé’s great chimera was that she believed in communion with elemental spirits. Like Bragadin, she refused to believed that Casanova was an ordinary mortal. And, as with Bragadin, Casanova found it convenient not to disappoint her. He dazzled her.
He called up his old spirit-genius, Paralis, who once so effectively entranced his old Venetian patrons. With a series of charming small confidence tricks, Casanova put the Marquise utterly in his power, which is where she craved to be, and he became the arbiter of her soul, which she longed to offer him.
They spent five years in delightful negotiations, during which time Madame d’Urfé bailed him out of scrapes, sent him money, dressed him in fanciful costumes. She herself was sustained upon a continuous diet of elaborate and picturesque bunkum: mysterious manuscripts in invisible ink, ritual bathings, candle-lit ceremonies, naked nymphs and messages from the moon, all orchestrated with unctuous elegance by that talented spirit-oracle, Paralis.
It had to come to a head. Finally, Casanova agreed to impregnate Madame d’Urfé with her own reincarnation. He was to give her a ‘Word’ – an emission of semen, the issue of which creates life. By this operation, a union between a mortal woman and an immortal spirit, he would make her very own soul pass into the body of a male baby.
‘Did you believe in this plan, even for a minute?’ I asked him.
‘No, not for a second, Cecilia.’
‘But you proceeded with it, anyway?’
‘Someone else would have done it, had I not. Europe was full of charlatans in those days! And I was at least gentle with her delusions. I enriched all her mysteries. I gave her something to hope for, secret plans to make, gorgeous ways to spend her money. She had more of that than she could use. She detested all her relatives. I was her family.’
‘Family? Did you never feel guilty for what you did with her?’
‘When I fell in with her crazy notions, I never felt that I was deceiving her. She had already deceived herself so thoroughly that I could not disabuse her, even if I tried. So I consented to enact her desires. I did not create them, remember. And indeed, I respected and even loved her in a way. You see, she was insane only because she had an excess of intelligence.’
There were several false starts to the reincarnation of Madame d’Urfé. One of the assisting nymphs proved venal. Anonymous letters arrived warning Madame d’Urfé against Casanova, but he defended himself with plumed gestures and soft words. He looked deeply into her eyes, and then lowered his own as if to say that what he had seen there was too profound to gaze upon a moment longer. Looking at the wall, he told her he needed more time and more money to prepare new and more esoteric rituals, to serve her better, to be worthier of her mystical gifts. The old lady clasped his hand, panting, and promised him anything.
Finally, in exchange for a vast sum of money, Casanova performed the long-awaited ceremony. Three times in succession he used his own body as a medium to impregnate Madame d’Urfé herself. In the magic world they conjured up, it was not, of course, Casanova undertaking the important bu
siness but Paralis, his immortal incarnation. His lover, Madame d’Urfé, also renounced her human form to become the goddess Séramis.
They met by moonlight in a beautiful bedroom and removed their robes, one by one.
‘And was Madame d’Urfé very old and ugly?’ I asked.
‘Hideous, a monster, poor lady’
‘And so how did you manage to raise the steed to utter the Word, Casanova?’
‘That time, I had my Venetian angel, Marcolina, to help me. In lewd postures, and with skilful manipulations unseen by the goddess Séramis, Marcolina prepared me for my role. And I kept my eyes shut when Marcolina was out of sight.’
*
In the first rite, Casanova worked for half an hour, groaning and sweating. Séramis wiped from his brow the sweat that dripped from his hair, mixed with pomade and powder. The second combat was of fifty-five minutes. Marcolina continued to treat him to the most provocative caresses, preserving the wavering tumescence that Séramis’ withered body threatened to soften to a nullity. The third time, Paralis appeared to faint away completely at the climax.
It was a triumph: Séramis was surely sown with the Word. Flushed and serene, she thanked Paralis for her immortality and pressed another large purse upon him.
I asked Casanova, ‘Could you really make her pregnant?’
‘I doubt it. And I must confess that I cheated. Only the first transport yielded the Word. The second and third times, I merely feigned the final convulsions. In any case, she was thirty years beyond childbearing age.’
When I thought about it afterwards, I fashioned my own theory about what had happened. I could not blame Casanova, even as much as he blamed himself, which was little.
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