by Lynn Cullen
28 MAY 1559
Palazzo Anguissola, Cremona
I have seen firsthand the price some are willing to pay to keep honor in the family.
When I was a girl of six, Elena and I had slipped away from Francesca, who was distracted by our younger sisters, to pick gillyflowers from the bank inside the moat surrounding the city wall, though Francesca had strongly forbidden it. “People go little way down the bank,” she would warn ominously, “and—ohimè!—they cannot climb back Up. They fall in the water and drown, just like that.”
But a sweet-smelling pink carpet of the flowers grew in the stony ground in the summer, and that day we were drawn to it like bees to nectar. We had inched our way down the slope and were plucking fat handfuls when a man bolted through the city gates, pumping his arms and legs as if his tail were on fire.
Elena and I laughed and imitated his comic appearance—Until three more men came bellowing out of the gate. Now Elena and I dropped our flowers to run, but before we could scramble Up the bank, the three caught Up and knocked the first man to the ground. We clung to each other as they kicked him, boots thudding against bone, Until he no longer begged for mercy or even moved.
The men—young men, I now realized, hardly older than boys—were standing over the body, panting from their work, when a man in hooded robes propelled a sobbing girl through the stone city gates. I knew the pair instantly. It was the apothecary from our neighborhood, a red-faced hot-head given to shouting when you counted out the scudi too slowly, and his daughter, Camilla. I knew them by Camilla’s hair—a wavy yellow curtain I often admired during Mass.
Camilla’s sobs became hysterical as they neared the body. “Who killed him?” shouted the apothecary. The men looked away, except for one I now recognized as the apothecary’s son, Giovanni, a big-mouth who threw stones at the cats on our street.
“You fool!” the apothecary shouted. “You took away this scum’s chance to make it right! He was going to pay Us. Because he raped you, didn’t he, Camilla?” Camilla’s yellow river of hair rippled as he shook her. “He stole your virginity after you resisted him, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”
“Sì,” Giovanni muttered. “Just not hard enough.”
“Shut Up!” The apothecary barked. Breathing hard, he turned back to Camilla, his expression becoming tender. “Yesterday I had a sweet virgin as a daughter.”
“Papà—”
“Today I’m a man with a whore on his hands.”
“Papà, I’m sorry.”
“And you—”
Giovanni hung his head, a hank of black hair flopping in his eyes.
“You. Big shot. Brother of a whore. Where ’s your chance for honor now? Gone. Poof! You killed it. We’re the scum now.”
“You said he deserved to die!” Giovanni shouted hoarsely.
Tightening his grip on Camilla’s arm, the apothecary reached for the dagger in his belt.
“Papà?” Camilla cried.
I jerked Elena to her feet. We clawed our way Up the bank, dirt slicing Under our nails and skinning our hands and feet. Something pelted my back. When I glanced around in terror, I saw Camilla’s beautiful hair, draped in the dust where she lay.
Giovanni threw another stone. “Cunts! Don’t tell!”
I didn’t. I still have not, not even to Papà, to this day.
Camilla is not the only reckless virgin in the Italian states who has been sacrificed for her family’s good name. But my papà? He will not even fish in the Po, because he cannot bear to stick a worm with a hook. No, I fear the opposite—that if I am exposed, Papà will go about his business, quietly letting my wantonness destroy his honor.
I cannot let this happen. This is the man who took me to a neighboring town to enroll me in painting lessons when I was twelve because he could find no artist in Cremona who would teach me. I can still see him striding beside me, his dull black gown flapping in time to the cowbells clanking in distant pastures. Insects sprang from the fields around Us as I hurried to keep Up, the rich stink of pig manure filling my nose.
“My stomach hurts,” I said. “Let’s go home.” I had seen the way the last painter looked at Papà when we were leaving his studio. The disrespect in the painter’s eyes toward Papà had hurt me more than his disgust toward me. You haven’t read half of the books my papà has read! I wanted to shout. He prints books from all over the world. But I said nothing. It is the place of girls and women to keep their mouths shut and their gazes down, though Papà had never told me that, nor had Mamma, with her mind always occupied by prayers. I had learned it from the disapproving looks of our neighbors in the piazza when I practiced Latin or discussed Dante’s Divine Comedy with Papà as we took our evening stroll.
With a puff, Papà blew a delicate green grasshopper from the sleeve of his gown. “Twelve is the proper age for an apprentice, Sofi. We shall find the right teacher for you.”
“I don’t want to paint,” I said. “I want to embroider, like everyone else,” though the thought of pulling a needle through stiff cloth, day in, day out, only to produce a flat image of the Virgin Mary, made my head ache.
“You are painting,” said Papà. “No argument. Lucky are they who know their gift. Some people live their whole lives without learning it.”
“Everyone has a gift?”
“Everyone. ThoUgh not all claim theirs. It takes great courage sometimes.”
I looked Up at Papà. In light of this new thought, his familiar tall figure, stooped from years of peering at books, became almost strange to me. “What is your gift?”
Papà’s lips had curved within the neat gray nest of his beard. “You.”
Papà, sweet Papà. He is completely oblivious of what I have done in Rome. He would never dream his good Sofi could do what I did.
I had found him in the courtyard in the shade of the poplar trees, Upon my return yesterday from Rome. “Cara mia!” He put down his English copy of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and held open his arms.
He pulled back to gaze at me after we embraced. “Your sisters and brother will be so glad to see you—they are with your mother at Mass. Why, Sofi! Look at your eyes. Are you Unwell?”
“It was a long trip.” I kissed his grizzled cheek and breathed in his dear peppery scent.
“Sofi, are you crying?”
“It is just dust from the road.”
“I do not believe you.”
My breath stopped. Had Michelangelo sent a damning letter before me?
“You are completely exhausted, I can tell. That is it! I must put my foot down, you must rest at home. This trip was too much for you—first going to Milan to paint the Spanish Duke of Alba, then traveling on to Rome to study with Michelangelo. You’ve been gone for months! Now it is time to stay home and enjoy your gift. What is the Use of having one if you can’t enjoy it?”
I laughed, giddy with relief. “Oh, Papà, that is exactly what I wish to do.”
He promptly ordered me to rest. At my insistence, I took to an unused servants’ room on the third floor, away from my family and attendants, where without Francesca’s badgering, I slept the rest of the day and well into this morning. When I rose to make water, I found I was so weak that I had to return to bed, capable only of lifting this pen to paper. Now I lie looking through the open door and the crumbling arches of the gallery beyond, to the courtyard, where sparrows flit among the tops of the poplar trees; the smell of baking rosemary bread permeates the air.
I had left without saying good-bye to Tiberio—our carriage had departed from Rome at earliest light. Will he write to Papà, asking my hand in marriage? What we had done amounted to a betrothal Under the law. Indeed, my family will be within their rights to press for damages from Tiberio’s family should he not come forward with a marriage proposal, as poor Camilla’s family had demanded from her lover. Tiberio has taken something of great value, a maiden’s virginity—worse, he has taken it from a maiden whose virginity is so treasured that she signs her paintings “Virgin.”
It seems now that I rut as well as one, too.
ITEM : The frame upon which a canvas is stretched should never be made of green wood. It will change shape as it ages, leaving the canvas creased and the painting damaged.
EVENING, SAME DAY
No letter yet from Tiberio. I am still hiding out in my aerie on the third floor. It is hot Up here and dusty. I have only the company of a striped cat, who is more interested in the mice scurrying in the walls than in me. I yearn deeply for my sisters, but I do not seek them out, for if my sisters may come, so may Francesca, and I cannot bear her questioning looks. On our three-week journey home, she was not able to extract from me what had happened in Rome, and I will not tell her. Her opinion of me would plummet, and I could not stand for her to be one of those servants who has deference on her face and mockery in her heart.
Early this afternoon, Papà had stepped into my room with a goblet, awaking me from the troubled sleep into which I had fallen after writing the previous entry. The sparrows outside in the sunny courtyard swooped amongst the poplar trees as I sat Up to receive the cup; a donkey brayed in the distance.
“Have your sisters been Up to see you?” he asked.
“No, though I can hear them downstairs. Why do they not come to see me?”
“Remarkable—for once they obey me. I told them not to bother you yet. Drink this.”
I took a sip from the cup. The taste of rosemary and orange spirits lingered on my tongue. Hungary water, an expensive medicine. “Papà, we can’t afford this.”
“Certainly we can. Besides, the apothecary extended me credit again. Why that mean-tempered man should be so generous to me all these years, I do not know, but I shall not look a gift mule in the mouth. Drink Up, cara mia. It is good for you.”
I lowered the cup. “How is Elena?”
“We don’t hear much from your sister, I’m sorry to say. But a convent is not a place that encourages a lively correspondence.”
I watched two sparrows squabble on a bough. I remembered when Elena, at fifteen, announced that she had chosen to take the veil. Papà had reacted with pride tempered with much puzzlement. At Elena’s insistence, he had sent her with me to painting lessons soon after I had begun them, and she had shown great promise. She was excellent at drawing. Did she truly wish to put aside her talent to be a nun? Elena assured Papà she would be able to Use her skills in illuminating manuscripts or embroidering vestments for the clergy, which seemed to comfort him very little. Mamma, on the other hand, was relieved by Elena’s decision—she could turn her worry about Elena over to the nuns. There would be one fewer person on her endless list of prayers.
When I had questioned Elena in the weeks preceding her departure, she had responded with Uncharacteristic piety about wishing to be a bride of Christ. Only on the eve before Papà was to take her in a rented carriage to the Convent of the Holy Virgins in Mantua had she come out with the truth.
We had lain in our bed in the dark, surrounded by the soft breathing of our four sleeping younger sisters: Lucia, age eleven, Minerva, eight, Europa, six, and four-year-old Anna Maria, curled Up with the snoring Francesca. From our open window came the incessant sawing of crickets. “Very well,” Elena said, “I shall tell, but you must not breathe a word.”
“Not one,” I whispered.
I heard her swallow before she began. “You know we have no money for dowries. What little Papà makes printing and selling books is given by Mamma to the Church.”
I could not argue this. Though Papà tried to hide his worries, I had seen the grocer come into Papà’s shop and leave with precious illuminated manuscripts in exchange for Unpaid bills. The baker now owned Papà’s press. Our clothes were hand-me-downs from our rich cousins in Milan. Truth is, Papà reads more books than he sells.
“Have you stopped to think what kind of man I shall attract with no money to recommend me? Some sniffling pale clerk in the magistrate ’s office? A butcher with pigs’ entrails Under his nails?”
“Elena—”
“I have not your talent, Sofi. I shall never rise above my sex and be the wonder that you are. I know what I am—a poor nobleman’s second daughter. It is my fate to be claimed by some dreary Cremonese cheesemaker and made to bear his babies yearly Until at last I give him his all-important son, after which time my dear husband will move on to lying with a mistress, while you, Sofi, pursue your search for Beauty and Truth in art. My only chance to search for Beauty will be in choosing a gown for Mass, and for Truth, in picking apart my spouse ’s lies about his mistress. Taking the veil shall be a relief in comparison.”
“Papà will not let this happen.”
“Which? Taking the veil or the husband?”
An owl hooted outside. Why had Papà not stopped her? Papà, the one who had found me a painting instructor, against all odds. My quiet tower of strength.
“Do you think he has a choice?” she whispered, parsing my thoughts. “What about our sisters? Should he settle all our money on my dowry so I might get a decent husband and leave the rest bereft? I would not have it.”
“I cannot bear to lose you.”
“Sofi, don’t you know that you will lose me no matter what? All of Us women—we are just seeds to be scattered to the winds.” She had smoothed the sheets Up to her neck. “At least I am choosing which wind.”
“Sofi?” Papà patted my hand, startling me from my memory, and once again I was in my makeshift sick chamber. “Sofi?”
His gentle face was wrinkled with worry as he held out the goblet. “You must drink Up. You are definitely not yourself.”
He put the cup to my lips. I swallowed down a tingling mouthful. “Did anyone request a portrait while I was gone? Any new commissions?” If Tiberio were to come calling for me, I had to be ready with a dowry. I would not bankrupt my sisters.
“Not yet.”
“Did the Duke of Alba send money for his portrait?”
Papà shook his head. “I hear he has returned to Spain.”
“Why is it that the richest always pay last?” I said, wiping my mouth with my hand.
“I believe, cara mia, it is harder for them to let go of their ducats. We part the slowest from that which we love most.”
A pain knotted in my chest. Tiberio had let me leave with Francesca after the Maestro discovered Us in the small studio. He had sent no word to our place of lodging before I left for Cremona the next morning. I had tried to linger, hoping for a letter, but Francesca forced me to the carriage, asking me what I was waiting for. I had no ready answer. Neither a message nor Tiberio came. Our carriage rumbled off to the crowing of roosters. No, Tiberio had not parted with me so very reluctantly.
“Sofi, you look absolutely green.” Papà kissed my hand. “Rest. But tomorrow, you must get back to your painting. That is your medicine.”
It is true, painting had been my elixir. The surprising success I’d had with it had been the headiest of brews. In my early twenties I had found, to my amazement, that important persons were interested in the little portraits I had done of my sisters and myself. A family friend had sent one of these portraits—of me, reading a book—to the Duchess of Mantua, who subsequently asked me to her court to paint portraits of her children. Soon after, I received an invitation to the court at Parma. Who cared that my subjects were wan-faced little heirs and their dogs, and I was but a novelty employed to entertain the court along with the dwarfs and buffoons—Sofonisba Virgo was in demand! But the excitement of these achievements paled after Michelangelo himself had asked for me that first time, about four years ago.
&nb
sp; The great Michelangelo Buonarroti, painter to popes and kings—Papà, that Unshakable believer in my abilities, had the nerve to send him a sketch I’d done of Lucia laughing as she taught Francesca to read, and shockingly, Il Divino wrote back. The Maestro said that my drawing was pleasant enough, but that even a journeyman sign-painter could capture a laughing girl. How was I at showing a child cry?
I, the daughter of a Cremonese bookseller, had been challenged by the greatest artist on earth. I would not disappoint. Day after day, I watched the children on my street, searching for a unique subject. I became an expert on the different modes of infant distress. I watched children fall as they toddled after their nurses in the piazza, observed them throwing tantrums when an older sibling wrested a ball from their hands, and weeping from weariness as their nurses shopped at market. It was at the fish market that I finally found my answer, when shopping for the evening meal with Francesca. Europa had tagged along, balancing Asdrubale, then three years of age, Upon her hip. Francesca was arguing with the fishmonger over the price of a trout when I heard Europa’s guilty chuckle. I turned just as Asdrubale reached into a basket of crabs.
Never have I been as proud as when the Maestro sent for me after seeing the drawing of Asdrubale’s tearful encounter with the crab. Who was this virgin painter, he wrote, who captured so much truth in a simple sketch? He invited me to come study with him—something, I found out later from Tiberio, the Maestro does rarely for anyone, let alone for a woman. Once I was there, the Maestro seemed not to care if I were fish or fowl or female, as long as I asked intelligent questions. It was then I began to dream that I could become more than a virgin portrait painter—I could become a maestra, if only I pursued my art hard enough.
Now look at me. Once mildly famous as a virgin, I am about to be mildly famous as a whore if Tiberio does not come forward and maestro Michelangelo brings our act to light. Papà will be forced to press for a proposal. I cannot bear it. I would never wish to make Tiberio marry me. I want him to want me of his own accord. But I dream. Why would he wish to marry me? I have overstepped my place by pursuing a man’s art, I am not of high birth, and I have not the beauty to make these things Unimportant.