by Lynn Cullen
During the voyage home, Sofonisba met and fell in love with the ship’s captain, Orazio Lomellino, a Genoan more than a decade younger than she. By the journey’s end, she had promised to marry him. Sofonisba married, at last, for love.
The devoted couple moved to Genoa. Sofonisba kept in touch with Isabella Clara, Catalina Micaela, and King Felipe, who, Until his death in 1598, granted Sofonisba a generous income. In Genoa, she inspired the many young painters who sought her out, among them Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck. She lived Until the age of ninety-three, painting, always painting, Until blindness finally stilled her brush.
All these things are true, yet the story of The Creation of Eve, while based on a solid foundation of research, is a work of fiction. However, the most fantastical elements of the story tend to be the true ones.
After Michelangelo abandoned it, his beloved and talented follower, Tiberio Calcagni, worked on the Unfinished statue now called the Bandini Pietà or Florentine Pietà, Until his own death (cause Unknown) in 1565. It is likely that Tiberio and Sofonisba met when she visited Michelangelo in Rome, as Calcagni, Tommaso Cavalieri, and Daniele da Volterra, the self-sacrificing friend who painted loincloths on the nudes in The Last Judgment, were in frequent attendance to the great artist. These three men were at Michelangelo’s side at his death in 1564.
As for Michelangelo himself, although during his lifetime he was known as Il Divino, the Divine One, and was sought out by the most powerful men in Italy to decorate their palaces and churches in works of stone and paint, it is true that the only traces he left of himself in his art were as the flayed skin in The Last Judgment and as Nicodemus in The Florentine Pietà. Neither depiction is flattering. When the sculptor Leone Leoni was to strike a commemorative medal of Michelangelo in 1561, the artist asked to be portrayed as a blind pilgrim leaning on a staff and led by a dog. One wonders whether Michelangelo was deeply humbled by the irony that while he was a revered figure of superstar proportions for his emotional rendering of religious themes, he was attracted to men at a time when homosexuality was a crime against the Church, punishable by death. He must have been very much aware of how his public would hate him for his sexual nature, even as he penned poems to or about the men he loved, including one that he wrote in the 1550s about being shot with the arrows of Cupid at his advanced age. At times he loathed himself for his feelings. He wrote:
I live in sin, dying to myself I live;
Life is no longer mine, but belongs to sin;
My good is from heaven, my evil I give to myself,
From my own unbound will, which has been stolen from me.
Yet he also asked:
For if of our affections none find grace
In sight of Heaven, then wherefore hath God made
The world which we inhabit?
That he wrote poetry to men was not a great secret in the exalted circles in which he moved, but soon after his death those who wished to protect Michelangelo’s reputation in a climate Unforgiving toward homosexuality altered his poetry and claimed it was addressed to women. Only relatively recently have historians acknowledged that the subjects of his love poetry were men.
On to the facts about another tormented soul: Don Carlos. It is true that the Prince, always high-strung, became Unstable after a head injury that required trepanning. His Unpredictable and sometimes violent behavior culminated in threats on his father’s life, which brought Felipe to put Don Carlos Under house arrest in December 1567. The prince died in a tower of the Alcázar of Madrid in July 1568, after months of rash behavior such as swallowing large gems and freezing himself on blocks of ice. Some readers will be familiar with Don Carlos through the eponymous play by Friedrich Schiller, or through the opera of the same name by Giuseppe Verdi. Both works romanticize the relationship between Don Carlos and Elisabeth, taking great liberties with the historical record.
From what I have read about Don Carlos, I have a difficult time picturing him as a romantic lead. Sickly and erratic, he was hardly a ladies’ man. His love for Elisabeth is a matter of record, though, and given that she died a few months after he did, I can Understand how a fiction writer might fantasize about them sharing a fatal love. I, however, preferred to take my liberties in imagining the Queen with Don Juan of Austria. As Don Juan was known to be charismatic in real life, and the Queen spent as much time with him as she did with Don Carlos, I thought their romance more believable. I was also intrigued that when Elisabeth died, Don Juan, distraught, raced back from the Barbary Coast (where he had been tucked away by Felipe) and publicly quarreled with Felipe at Elisabeth’s funeral. Contemporaries often observed the friction between Felipe and Don Juan. It does not seem a far leap to imagine the jealousy Felipe must have felt when he watched his handsome young half brother interact with the vivacious teenaged Elisabeth. Nor is it implausible to think that Felipe may have noted the startling resemblance between Don Juan and the younger child, Catalina Micaela, and wondered why that might be, as I did, as I wrote our story.
But back to the record: Elisabeth of Valois’s father, Henri II of France, did indeed die from wounds received at a tournament celebrating her wedding to Felipe. Several years before the event, the famed soothsayer Nostradamus had warned Catherine de’ Medici:
The young lion will overcome the older one,
On the field of combat in a single battle;
He will pierce his eyes through a golden cage,
Two wounds made one, then he dies a cruel death.
When Nostradamus repeated his prediction at the tourney, Catherine was frantic for her husband’s safety, but in spite of her pleas for him to stop, Henri ran at the lists three times against a young Scot named Montgomery. The third time, Montgomery’s lance broke, sending a splinter through Henri’s golden visor and into his eye.
Almost every other bizarre thing I wrote about Elisabeth’s mother is true, also. Catherine de’ Medici is a figure whose life defies belief, from her consultations with Nostradamus to her Use of sorcery to Undermine her husband’s mistress Diane de Poitiers. The “hole in the floor” recorded in Sofi’s notebook is a matter of record, as is Catherine’s clear preference for her third son, who later became Henri III. It has been recorded that Catherine de’ Medici warned Elisabeth to keep hidden from her husband her “condition,” possibly the disease that plagued French kings since François I—the Great Pox, or syphilis.
Contemporary rumor held it that Henri II’s father, François, quite the connoisseur of women, suffered from the disease; hence Europeans called it the French Disease. (The French, on the other hand, called it the Italian Disease.) Then, as now, syphilis could be passed to children of infected mothers at birth. This would mean that Catherine de’ Medici had the Great Pox, contracted from her husband, Henri II, who had gotten it from his own mother, Claude, the long-suffering wife of François. I leave it to medical historians to decide whether Catherine and the others might have had latent cases that developed into tertiary-stage (final-stage) syphilis late in their lives. I myself wonder about the cases of “gout” from which François I, Henry VIII of England, and Felipe II died; all three of these kings ended their days with terrible abscesses on their thighs—a symptom found in tertiary-stage syphilis. Elisabeth herself was weakened by some chronic physical ailment, be it syphilis or otherwise. She suffered from fevers and weakness her entire married life, and had episodes of hemorrhaging through the nose, as in the true-life incident when she saw Eufrasia de Guzmán in advanced pregnancy, an incident recorded in contemporary accounts. No matter the cause of her fragile health, Elisabeth’s repeated pregnancies, so necessary for orderly succession of the crown, Undermined any chance for her recovery.
It is true that Don Juan de Austria was plucked from his quiet life as a country boy when his father, Emperor Charles V, the most powerful man in the world, decided to legitimize him, although the Emperor already had a faithful son in Felipe. The relationship between the brothers was predictably prickly—had the Emperor never heard o
f Cain and Abel when he commanded that Felipe treat his newfound brother well? Don Juan went on to become the most famous war hero of his time, leading the Spanish to an important naval victory at Lepanto. He was also known to have an affinity with animals, even adopting a lion as a pet. He never married.
Felipe, meanwhile, was stuck in his office with the unglamorous task of plowing through mountains of paperwork, thus earning from his contemporaries the title “The Paper King.” Always conscious of the impossible amount of money needed to maintain an empire that stretched around the globe, he avoided war whenever possible—hence his association with the Inquisition, which he allowed the Roman Catholic Church to conduct in Spain, as it had done since the time of Isabella and Ferdinand three generations earlier. Felipe followed his father’s line of thinking that stamping out protest early saved loss of lives (and money) later, and indeed they both were inflexible in prohibiting the practice of Protestantism in their realms. Yet Felipe is always associated with the “Spanish” Inquisition, when in fact most European countries had their own, even more virulent, Inquisitions at the time. More lives were lost Under the forms of the Inquisition in France, Italy, and England (Under “Bloody” Mary Tudor’s rule) than Under the Spanish Inquisition. Protestants such as Elizabeth I of England practiced their own purges of heresy, persecuting Catholics and racking Up death tolls higher than those in Spain Under Felipe II. Our modern-day horror of the Spanish Inquisition and its association with a vilified Felipe are the products of a smear campaign waged against him by the Dutch and the English. Their effort at defamation is still effective today, more than four hundred years after his death, each time he is depicted in books and movies in English as a half-crazed despot. The image of him as an avid gardener, devoted father, and devotee of art, science, and architecture is much more in line with the actual man. His relationship with his daughters, Isabella Clara Eugenia and Catalina Micaela, was exceptional in its tenderness, particularly with Isabella Clara, who as a child liked to work with him in his office. Proud of her intelligence, he renounced his rights to the Netherlands in favor of her just before he died. She ruled the Spanish Netherlands with her husband from 1601 to 1633. Don Carlos, kept from ruling by a father who knew exactly the depth of his son’s failings, would have been envious. Catalina Micaela married Charles Emmanuel I, Duke of Savoy, and bore ten children before she died in childbirth in 1597, having just turned thirty.
About Sofonisba’s place in the court of Felipe II: It is a matter of record that she was invited by the King to the Spanish court to teach the teenaged Queen to paint, and to attend Her Majesty as a lady-in-waiting. Less verifiable is the contemporary rumor that Sofonisba accepted her position at court after a betrothal offer had fallen through. Could this be when she first developed her stated preference for Italian, perhaps Roman, men? She was accompanied on her trip to Spain by two ladies, two gentlemen, and a staff of six servants. I like to think that once at court, she kept the same faithful servant she had recorded in The Chess Game and in Self-Portrait at a Clavichord , our Francesca.
Soon after her arrival in Spain, Sofonisba was sought out by others at court to paint their portraits, and she found herself in the Unprecedented and Uncomfortable position of being both painter and lady-in-waiting. Authenticating her works today is especially difficult; because she was a lady-in-waiting, it was not proper for her to sign her works. Her role as the Queen’s lady always took precedence over her role as a painter, so her high position as one of the Queen’s favored ladies was likely a mixed blessing to her.
In spite of the demands put on her time at the Spanish court, Sofonisba became the first woman painter to rise to prominence in the Italian Renaissance, and she was praised by Vasari in his renowned book The Lives of the Artists. Yet Sofonisba Anguissola’s fame faded over time, in part because there were few signed paintings by her done after she arrived in Spain. Fortunately, her work is being rediscovered, in studies by Sylvia Ferino-Pagden and Maria Kusche, and Ilya Sandra Perlingieri, for instance, on whose books I based my research. Sofonisba’s Unsigned works, long attributed to such artists as Alonso Sánchez Coello and El Greco, are slowly being recognized as hers. One of the rare signed works that has come down to Us, indicating its creation before her time at court, is Sofonisba’s self-portrait in miniature, in which she holds a shield containing curiously intertwined initials—the miniature self-portrait described in this book.
In the last few decades, several of Sofonisba’s portraits of Elisabeth of Valois have finally come to light, though none of those portraits of the Queen was done from life during the three-year period before Elisabeth’s death. Into this breach of pictorial history comes my Use of the painting Lady in a Fur Wrap in our story.
Lady in a Fur Wrap is a mystery in the world of art, with both its creator and its sitter as the subjects of debate. Some scholars attribute the painting to El Greco, but the style is nothing like his and very much like Sofonisba’s. The attribution to El Greco appears to have begun as a cataloguing error when the painting was exhibited in the Louvre in 1838, hailed as a portrait by El Greco of his daughter. A little fact-finding at the time might have exposed this as a mistake: glaring stylistic differences in the portrait from El Greco’s oeuvre aside, the artist didn’t have a daughter.
Filling in the origins of Lady in a Fur Wrap is just the kind of challenge a novelist craves. After examining Sofonisba’s portraits of Elisabeth of Valois as an adolescent fresh from France, with the plucked eyebrows and hairline en vogue at the French court, I tried to imagine how this child bride would look as she matured. Lady in a Fur Wrap, which I’d fallen in love with since I had seen it in Henry Kamen’s celebrated biography Philip of Spain, immediately came to mind. Kamen attributed the painting to Sofonisba Anguissola—my first acquaintance with the painter—and identified the sitter as Elisabeth’s younger daughter, Catalina Micaela. As I researched Sofonisba and her connection to Elisabeth, I wondered why the woman in the painting couldn’t be Elisabeth herself, now mature at age twenty-two and wearing her eyebrows more naturally in the Spanish style. The rest of the facial structure is similar to that in Elisabeth’s earlier portraits. Our story, based on fact and filled in with fiction, began to take shape.
But without the real-life, sometimes ridiculous, sometimes tender, and always flawed characters from history, our tale would not exist. It is their portraits—their fragile and elusive inner selves—I hoped to capture on my own canvas.
Acknowledgments
First, I would like to thank my agent, Emma Sweeney, who since reading an early draft of this manuscript has given me confidence, hope, and great suggestions every step of the way. Her enthusiastic support means the world to me, and I will always be grateful to her for finding the perfect editor for this project, Peternelle van Arsdale.
I fear there aren’t sufficient words to thank Peternelle. I may have lost track of the number of drafts this book required, but I will never lose sight of my debt of gratitude to her. Her Unflagging energy and patience and, most important, her Understanding of my story, buoyed me during the arduous months of revision—all this, and with a sense of humor. She made hard work fun. I am thankful for—and amazed by—how much effort she put into every aspect of bringing my dream book to print.
I wish to acknowledge, too, those at Putnam whose support and efforts are crucial to this book: Ivan Held, Catharine Lynch, Kate Stark, Marilyn Ducksworth, and Meredith Phebus. Leslie Gelbman and Susan Allison at Berkley were early and enthusiastic supporters, and for that I am very grateful. I would also like to thank the Putnam sales force—you are my heroes! A round of thanks goes to Marc Yankus for his gorgeous cover collage, to John T. Burgoyne for the lovely map reproduced on the endpapers, and to Lisa Amoroso, Hyunhee Cho, Andrea Ho, Claire Vaccaro, and Nicole LaRoche for making this book so beautiful. Sincere thanks, also, to Lucia Raatma and Anna Jardine for their meticulous work on the manuscript. And a hearty thanks goes to the indefatigable and indispensable Lauren Kaplan for pursuing various
details to the far ends of the earth.
Thanks are in order to Teresa Antolin, at the Centro Nacional de Educación Ambiental (CENEAM) in Valsaín, Spain, for sharing her time while enlightening me on Felipe II and the natural and human history of the area. I appreciate the insight into Spanish history afforded to me by Rosa Guillén over a memorable dinner at the Posada Monasterio Tórtoles de Esgueva hosted by José L. Ardura. My education was also tremendously advanced by the prodigiously talented painter and instructor Chris di Domizio, of Atlanta, who opened the world of figurative drawing and painting to me, helping me Understand the myriad decisions a painter must make in composing a work. His class changed my life.
I am grateful for my early readers, Ruth Berberich, Brandy Nagel, Lauren Lynch, and Carolyn Koefoot, whose suggestions and encouragement have meant so much to me. Thank you to Grzegorz Filip for his translation work and for his time so generously given on my behalf; to Richard Hooker for allowing me to Use a portion of his translation of Michelangelo’s Unfinished Sonnet 32; and to Steve Berberich for sharing the driving duties with my husband while I was chasing down facts in Spain. I would also like to thank Karen Torghele Anderson, Jan Johnstone, Sue Edmonds, and all the other brilliant members of the book club that has enriched my mind and soul for the past twenty years, for their kind wishes and enthusiasm.
And at the center of my heart, you’ll find my family, whose love and pride keep me going. To my daughters, Lauren Lynch, Megan Cayes, and Alison Cullen, and my husband, Mike, I owe my greatest thanks.