Passion Blue

by Strauss, Victoria

  It had been confined; now it was released. It had been held; now it was free. Those were simply the conditions of its being. Human categories like anger, or joy or gratitude had no meaning for it. Giulia sensed its power, fully manifest for the first time—the same eternal power that moved the spheres, so vast and strange it could only be felt, never comprehended.

  It did not communicate in any way she recognized. Yet she understood that it had stayed for her, that it had remained in the paltry human world long enough for her to fall asleep and dream. And as she realized this, the blueness gathered itself and fell on her, sank into her, cool and sweet, into her mouth and eyes and skin, into her muscles and bones and blood. Briefly, with the blue inside her, she was inside the blue, felt it blazing from her body as if she herself had become a star.

  Then she was herself again, just herself. For a moment longer Anasurymboriel remained, raging, coruscating, changing. Then it surged toward the heavens, arrowing toward its home. And Giulia heard the chiming of the spheres as it passed through them, the music of the cosmos.

  CHAPTER 26

  Coming Home

  The bell rang for Prime, waking Giulia from uneasy sleep. She opened her eyes on the predawn darkness, remembering: Today she would return to the workshop.

  She’d been moved the night before to a new cell, in the corridor that housed the poorer choir nuns. It was as bare as the disciplinary cell, though quite a bit bigger. Like the disciplinary cell, the door had a grate, so that anyone could look in at any time and see what she was doing.

  The two weeks of her initial punishment had not been as bad as she’d feared. She’d spent a good deal of the time sleeping, and the rest of it thinking, recalling the color lore she’d memorized, imagining the drawings and paintings she would make when she had paper and implements again. Suor Margarita came twice a day to make sure she performed her morning and evening penances. Lisa came also, sneaking away when she was supposed to be working. The crippled girl pushed two small sweet apples and a slice of good bread through the bars of the grate, then lingered to describe Alessia’s fury on discovering that Giulia was not to be banished after all. Lisa giggled as she spoke of it, and Giulia found herself laughing too. She couldn’t remember the last time she had laughed.

  Lisa, she thought, might become a friend. Small comfort, though, for the loss of Angela.

  She got up, shivering in the early morning chill, and lit her candle. She put on her habit and bound up her hair, then knelt before the crucifix on the wall, wadding up her skirt to spare her knees, though she imagined Madre Damiana would not approve. She did pray during these sessions, and hoped that God was listening. But she also drifted, thinking whatever thoughts occurred to her.

  She rose from her knees when the conversa came with her breakfast. She’d barely had time to finish it before the lock rattled again—Humilità, come in person to fetch her.

  Giulia had not seen the workshop mistress since the day Madre Damiana announced her punishment. Humilità did not speak, but simply waited in the doorway, her face composed within its frame of wimple and veil. Her expression held no welcome, but as far as Giulia could tell, no condemnation either. Giulia chose to interpret that as a hopeful sign.

  She blew out the candle and they left the cell. Humilità led the way at her usual brisk pace. Giulia kept her eyes properly downcast, but she was still able to see how the nuns they passed looked at her, when normally a novice would be beneath their notice. It would be this way, she knew, for a long time to come.

  When they reached the workshop door, Humilità paused.

  “The others know about the book,” she said. “But I have not told them…who it was who wanted it. They believe you never knew the person to whom Ormanno intended to sell it. I must trust you never to say otherwise.”

  “I never will, Maestra, I promise.”

  “You will have to earn their trust again. It will not be easily done.”

  “I will earn it, Maestra, I swear. And your trust too. I swear that also.”

  Humilità’s hard dark gaze acknowledged nothing. “Know, Giulia, that Damiana was correct. It was not for your sake I begged mercy, but for the sake of your great gift, the waste of which would be a worse affront to God than any sin you are capable of. That is why you are still part of my workshop. That is why I am able to bear your presence, in spite of what you have done.”

  The coldness in her voice took Giulia’s breath away. “Will you ever forgive me?” she said. “I brought you back the book. I brought you back Passion blue.”

  “Yes. And there is a part of me that wishes you had not.”

  And for the first time, Giulia understood the true root of Humilità’s anger: not what Giulia had done, but what she knew. Or rather, at what she had forced Humilità to know. She remembered Humilità’s joy in returning to her home. Even though the workshop mistress must always leave again, she’d known she could come back. Now she never could.

  How can I ever make up for that?

  Humilità’s face softened a little. She reached out and touched Giulia’s shoulder.

  “We will find our way,” she said. “Day by day, we will find our way, together.”

  “Yes, Maestra,” Giulia whispered.

  Humilità opened the door. The smell of the workshop came flooding out, oil and pigment and glue and dust and a hundred other things, familiar in a way beyond recognition, beyond thought or memory or desire.

  Home, Giulia thought, the word coming to her like an indrawn breath.

  All the artists were there: Angela at the shelves, Domenica and Benedicta at the San Giustina commission, Perpetua at the long table with ink and paper, even tardy Lucida, laying out the materials to paint one of her miniatures. As one, they stopped what they were doing and looked up. In their faces Giulia saw the same caution, the same distance, that had been in Humilità’s.

  Stepping over the threshold was one of the hardest things she had ever done.

  She crossed to the shelves where Angela stood, feeling the others watching. It won’t always be like this, she told herself. It will get easier. She reached for her apron.

  “I’ll fill the washtub, shall I?”

  Angela nodded, her face averted.

  Giulia dragged the heavy tub into the courtyard and began filling buckets at the fountain. The sky was overcast; the weather had turned during her confinement, and the autumn air held the promise of winter. Across the way, the closed door of the little chapel reproached her.

  Back and forth she went, fitting herself to the familiar routine, until the tub was full. She tipped the last half-bucket down the drain, then set the bucket on the flagstones and put up her hands as if to adjust her kerchief. Instead, above the knot, her fingers found the little lump of the shattered talisman, tucked into her braid.

  She’d carried it there every day, waiting for this moment. The drain was the perfect place to dispose of it. It would never be found.

  She glanced around. The artists had gone back to their work; no one was watching. She pulled the little package free. It was just a broken pendant now, a few bits of stone and a twist of copper wire wrapped in a scrap of linen. Even so, she held it in her palm a moment before reaching again for the bucket. Pretending to empty it, she dropped the talisman through the grating of the drain, into the darkness below.

  She thought she might hear it fall. But there was no sound.

  She set the bucket aside. As she did, the sun emerged from behind the clouds, flooding the courtyard with light, spilling warmth like a benediction across her head and shoulders. She turned toward the workshop. The sun lit up the great half-finished altarpiece—the crowd at the foot of the Cross, the agonized thief, the half-finished form of Jesus. The jewel colors shone with impossible brilliance, impossible intensity, as if the painted figures were on the verge of stirring into life. In the gown of Mary Magdalen and the cloak of the Virgin, in the wings of the angels, in the caparisons of the horses and the clothing of the crowd, Passion blue—the se
cret she had saved—blazed like cool fire, seeming not simply to absorb the sunlight into itself, but to emit its own mysterious radiance, like the breath of paradise.

  And inside Giulia’s head, suddenly, words, as if someone had bent and whispered them into her ear:

  Heart’s desire.

  She knew, with a certainty that flared in her like the sun, that all would be well.

  The clouds were closing in again. The light dimmed. The painted figures flattened into stillness, and the colors were just colors once more.

  Giulia knelt a moment longer. Shadows swam before her eyes, as if she’d stared directly into the sun. At last she got to her feet and put away the bucket. She returned to the workshop, to the familiar sounds and smells, the familiar presence of the other artists—the place where, in spite of everything, she belonged. Humilità ignored her as she passed. Domenica paused to glare. Lucida fixed her attention on her miniature, and Perpetua turned her face away. But Angela, at the preparation table, looked up as Giulia approached, and the corners of her mouth lifted a little before she lowered her eyes again. When Giulia took her place beside her, she did not move away.

  The sky was completely overcast now. But Giulia could still feel a little of the warmth that had touched her in the courtyard.

  Yes. All will be well.

  Author’s Note

  I fell in love with the Italian Renaissance when I was a child. My family traveled widely while I was growing up, and we made several trips to Italy. I can still remember the thrill of seeing Botticelli’s Primavera for the first time, of walking through the echoing spaces of Milan’s vast cathedral, of exploring the narrow alleys and magnificent palazzos of Venice. I loved the landscapes and the architecture and the history—but best of all I loved the art, and the colorful, turbulent lives of the artists who created it.

  It wasn’t until I began studying art history in college, though, that I realized that not all of those artists were men. In a time when women weren’t educated and had almost no rights, a handful of female painters managed to establish and maintain careers, including Sofonisba Anguissola, who became a painter at the Spanish court, and Artemesia Gentileschi, the first female painter to be accepted as a member of the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. I became fascinated by these women, whose lives and art were nearly forgotten in the centuries after their deaths. How did they manage to defy convention and follow their passion? What obstacles did they have to overcome, what social pressures were they forced to cope with?

  Passion Blue grew out of those questions, as well as my interest in the techniques of the Renaissance painters, so different from those in use today. It’s been wonderful to write a book that lets me invite readers into the painters’ world, at least for a little while.

  A few of the locations in the book are real—the Duomo and the porte of Milan, the Palazzo della Ragione and the fruit and vegetable market in Padua. Palazzo Borromeo and Santa Marta are my own invention, however.

  All the characters are fictional as well, though Maestra Humilità Moretti is based on a real painter nun, Suor Plautilla Nelli, who was the mistress of a painting workshop at the Dominican convent of Santa Catarina di Siena in Florence in the middle of the sixteenth century. Plautilla is one of the earliest recognized female Renaissance artists.

  We don’t know many facts about her life. She was born in 1523 to a noble family; her father, Piero di Luca Nelli, was also a painter, and may have helped to train her. She entered Santa Catarina in 1537, when she was just fourteen. Santa Catarina had a long artistic tradition and the convent was known throughout Italy for its artist nuns. Plautilla taught other nuns to paint, and her studio eventually became famous beyond the convent walls, with its work in demand for altarpieces and private commissions.

  Accounts of the time suggest that Plautilla produced a large body of work, but only a few of her paintings and drawings have been authenticated, including the beautiful fresco of the Last Supper that she painted for Santa Catarina’s refectory. The fresco (which, sadly, is badly in need of restoration) now hangs in the refectory of Santa Maria Novella in Florence.

  Plautilla was elected abbess several times. She died in 1588.

  Acknowledgments

  No writer brings a book into the world alone. Thanks are due to many people.

  My wonderful agent, Jessica Regel, who saw the manuscript through several incarnations before finally finding it a home.

  Jean Naggar, Tara Hart, and the rest of the crew at the Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency, who work so hard on their clients’ behalf.

  My amazing and meticulous editor, Melanie Kroupa, who looked deep into the book and saw how to make it the best it could be.

  Everyone at Marshall Cavendish, for turning a work of imagination into a reality.

  Ann Crispin, trusted beta reader, and Michael Capobianco, fellow publishing wonk, who were there at a really important moment. There’s no one I would have wanted to share it with more.

  Alisha Niehaus, whose suggestion about what I should write next planted the seed that grew into Passion Blue.

  Meredith Charpentier, who gave me my first chance.

  My mother, whose sharp editorial eye has guided me through all my books.

  And last and most, my husband, Rob, plot consultant extraordinaire, whose love and support make it all possible.