by Various
Her eyes were the shade of a cloudless sky, the perfect complement to her dress. My heart raced.
Lisane straightened. She addressed the man beside her. “This will only take a moment, Damaro. Go on without me.”
Damaro’s irritation was clear, but he leaned in to kiss the convex line of Lisane’s cheek. “I'll see you at the grotta.”
He departed and Lisane turned her full attention toward me. I felt like a lamp catching fire.
“Do you know why we agreed to let you study here?” she asked.
“I have an eye for color and composition,” I said, repeating what her man had told my father.
“And something else,” said Lisane. “Has anyone ever told you how guild painters catch the essence of their subjects?”
I shook my head.
Lisane rested her hand on my shoulder, giving me a warm smile. She looked to Orla. “Give our new apprentice a demonstration.”
Orla was several years older than me, plump with peach-soft skin and strikingly pretty features. When dealing with the sailors, she’d seemed competent and authoritative, perhaps shading into bossy. She’d always been kind—if abrupt—on the ship. Now she looked down at me with suspicious, disdainful eyes. “Yes, mistress,” she said.
At the time, I didn’t understand why her demeanor had changed so rapidly. Now I know she must have been looking at Lisane’s hand on my shoulder and seething with jealousy.
She approached the easel holding the unfinished dragonfly painting and made a show of regarding the panel from different angles. When she was ready to begin painting, she reached into a pouch at her waist and drew out a dead dragonfly pinned to a sheet of vellum. She laid the insect on a small table beside her easel. I recognized it immediately as the same dragonfly as the one depicted in the painting.
Orla wet her brush and feathered in the web of the painted dragonfly’s wing. The real dragonfly’s wing tip turned ashen and blew to dust.
“Orla’s been here for several years,” Lisane said. “She’ll leave soon to set up her own house. When you’ve been here as long as Orla has, we’ll teach you to paint like that.”
Perfecting a mix of ginger and white, Orla brushed highlights across the painted carapace. The dragonfly on the vellum shuddered and disintegrated. The painted wings acquired a new, subtle shimmer, a sense of incipient flight.
My heart fluttered. I thought it was love of painting—and it was—love of painting, love of Lisane, two crushed dyes blending into a rich new hue.
Giatro led me, as Orla once had, into Lisane’s courtyard. Rain pooled in the bowls of upturned leaves, weighing them until they bowed, pouring out their fill. We entered the main room. The tile was swept cleaner than I’d ever seen it, no doubt by the restless hands of grieving apprentices. Through the arched door, I glimpsed the darkened studio, echoes of rain casting navy gloom across the walls.
Giatro started up the steps to Lisane’s room. He paused, lantern uplifted as if he were a messenger on a hill, signaling to troops below. Gathering my skirts, I followed him up.
In her private chamber, Lisane leaned against her ornate headboard, her bedside lamp casting a yellow glow over her face and hands, the lace cuffs and collar of her nightdress receding into shadow. Her face was hollowed by illness, reddened eyes staring blankly upward. I was surprised when she called out.
“You brought Renn?”
Giatro began to reply. Lisane cut him off.
“There’s nothing else I need from you. Leave and get some sleep. Renn, come in.”
Giatro glared at me, suspicious and jealous—but also afraid for Lisane. He made his way out, letting the lantern swing low so that it illuminated his calves.
I moved toward Lisane’s bed. Familiar smells of wood polish and drying oils infused the air. My eyes traced the regimented angles of the furniture and the contrasting curves of the scrollwork decorating the walls. I remembered lying on Lisane’s bed during cloudy mornings, staring up at her vaulted ceiling and mapping out its lines and arches in the sketchbook of my mind’s eye.
Lisane stank of sweat and illness. I resisted the urge to take her hand.
She said, “I've been meaning to ask you here for the past few weeks, but foolishly set it aside. I need to make dispensations for the future.”
My mind raced to catch her meaning. “I'd be honored to take over your house.”
Lisane gave a dry, rattling laugh. “Orla will take the house. She has her own students. She’ll know what to do.”
I struggled to conceal my resentment, but I knew my expression must have betrayed me. Lisane had always said that a gifted portraitist must be able to unlock the secrets of the face, and Lisane was the best portraitist who’d ever lived.
“I see,” I said, tone flat. “Then what do you want from me?”
“I want you to paint me.”
This time, I didn’t even try to hide my frown.
Long ago, Lisane had dismissed my chances of becoming a master. She’d said that depending on magic was the sign of an inferior artist. It was true. I was inferior. I couldn’t make paintings seem real using only oils the way that Lisane and Orla could. That was why I eked out a meager career painting landscapes and still lifes that I could magically endow with a semblance of life—never portraits.
“I want you to paint me into the canvas,” said Lisane. “Tonight. Quickly. Before I die.”
Painters bide uneasily with the church.
The highest levels of the hierarchy have ruled that our magic does not come from the devil—although from time to time, the lesser clergy decry the vague, dark forces they imagine we employ.
Painting a man with magic is another matter, however. According to the church, employing magic to paint a man is a sin for two reasons. First because it is murder, and second because it may interfere with the dispensation of his soul. In case anyone should take a different view, the church is prepared to enforce their assertions with faggots and flame.
We have our own reasons for avoiding that kind of magic. We have records—diaries and observations carefully copied and passed down through generations—detailing what happens to those who try to paint men with magic. Such a painter need not fear the stake. The act itself will drive him mad.
Those who believe in demons say that opening oneself to so much magic creates an opportunity for infernal creatures to crawl inside and hollow you like a husk.
Lisane does not believe in demons.
She told me once that she believed the old artists had gone insane for the same reasons that painters sometimes used to perish from mixing poisoned dyes.
“We learned what ingredients made them deadly,” she said, “and we developed better techniques.
"We strove. We learned. We innovated. Once, art was confined to flatness, but Umo Doani Nazatore gave us the secret to dimension. Given enough time, we will demolish all the barriers that stand in our way.
“Someone will find a way to paint a man with magic.”
During the first months of my apprenticeship, I rarely saw Lisane. I caught glimpses of her remote figure as she drifted past with a manner as stately as a sailboat on a windless sea. I treasured the moments when she stood in the studio speaking to Orla or one of the other journeymen, her hands drawing shapes in the air as she explained the principles of linear perspective.
My painting progressed slowly. Magic was for journeymen and older apprentices, so I was a slave to mundane methodology. My eye for color was thwarted by my impatience. Other apprentices mixed their oils with turpentine in exacting proportions, coating their panels with heavy layers at first and then lightening the mixture until the top layers were almost all oil. I painted like my mother cooked, in haphazard dashes and dollops. My colors muddied. My paint cracked. Left to myself, I’d spend hours trying to catch the way the light pooled on the rim of a porcelain bowl, and then dash in the rest with harsh, rapid strokes.
Orla was patient with me. She tempered her sighs as she led me, time after time, back to the dy
es to reconsider my pigments. Patiently, she described how each hue was created. She showed me how to dab a thread of grey onto a hint of yellow and create the color of lamplight shining from shadow. Overexcited, I’d rush back to my panel and ruin the day’s work with ill considered swipes.
Other apprentices quickly surpassed me. I was used to being the quickest child, able to decide whether to taunt my peers with their limitations or be magnanimous in success. Now I was the object of pity and patience. I liked it not at all.
Nights, I dreamed of Lisane, not knowing why she towered in my vision, her long, pale skirts swishing over me as if I were the tile in her entryway, my form supine beneath their cool caress.
After a year, I finally finished a painting that Orla deemed worth showing Lisane. It depicted an old, lopsided clay urn, with only one remaining handle. For once, my cracked paint worked with the subject, suggesting an imperfect glaze.
Lisane came to view my work that evening. She was sumptuously dressed for a banquet at another artist’s residence. Her umber silk gown rustled as she walked. Jewels flashed at her throat and wrists.
She examined the brushwork and reached out to touch one of the spidery cracks. “I'm sure you've done your best,” she told Orla, “but it’s clear that Renn requires intervention. Send her to my rooms when she’s done with whatever chores you’ve assigned her.”
Lisane was diffident when she gave her instructions, neither looking at me nor speaking with particular emotion. Orla watched me though, anger simmering behind her eyes, fingers clenching around her brush.
“I’d go mad,” I protested.
Lying in her deathbed, Lisane bided my statement of the obvious, expression unchanged.
“They’d burn me alive.”
She waved her hand. “I’ve made arrangements to have the painting stored in secret until after your natural death.”
“But your remains—”
"My agents have located some poor wretch suffering from ague. They rescued her from the gutter and installed her at one of my properties for her last days. I’m told she has the misfortune to resemble me in this miserable condition.”
“And what? You propose to kill her and replace your body with hers?”
“That is my proposition.”
“You've been intimate with half the guild. They’ll know it isn’t you.”
“Orla will take care of it. The face is only another kind of canvas.”
I stared blankly at Lisane. Feverish sweat damped her brow, but she lay calmly despite the pain she must have been enduring.
“All this planning…” I mumbled. “How many people have you told?”
“A few, only a few. They understand. I’ve given my life to art. Why should I stop now? One last devotion, painted by my most gifted pupil.”
I scoffed. “I'm not your most gifted pupil.”
“Not at painting, no. But at magic…”
“Depending on magic is the mark of an inferior artist. That’s what you say, isn’t it?”
Lisane shifted finally, the first sign of perturbation she’d given since I entered the room. She pushed aside the crisp bed linens as she struggled to sit higher. I moved to help, but Lisane pushed me away as she achieved her new position. She looked small, her shoulders pressed against the enormous, dark triangle of the headboard. Her face flushed with exertion. She leveled her gaze at mine.
“Painting requires many techniques. That’s always been your downfall. You’ve only mastered one.” She paused, her breathing labored. “The true difference between master and student isn’t knowing how to use the techniques at one’s command. It’s knowing when to use them. That’s always been my talent. I know when to use my tools. Now it’s time to use you.”
I stood still for a moment, hating her. Yet I couldn’t help being flattered as well, that of all her former students and lovers, it was me who she’d asked to memorialize her, to remake her as paint.
“I’ll go mad,” I repeated.
“Perhaps not,” she said. “Maybe you’re skilled enough to escape it. Who knows?”
The light flickered over her face, luminescence blending with shadow.
“Then again, perhaps you will,” she added. “And so? What is art but madness anyway?”
Through all the fog of love and hatred that had always kept me from seeing Lisane clearly, I nevertheless recognized what she was offering. This was my chance to transcend forgettable snowscapes.
“I'll paint you,” I said.
Lisane smiled. It was clear she’d never believed I might decline.
At first, no one was alarmed when Lisane’s school failed to produce a great painter.
Lisane still had time to train a protégé. Meanwhile, her students made modest careers painting murals or illustrating pages of expensive books. A few made names for themselves as portraitists, traveling throughout the ducal cities, taking on clients who couldn’t afford to travel to Patagnia and pay Lisane’s fee.
Five years passed. Ten. Fifteen. Some whispered that Lisane would be the end of her artistic line. Others countered that she was still young. Prudent voices prompted that genius was not like a crop to be planted in summer and harvested in the spring—that sometimes more than one brilliant voice would emerge in a generation, while other generations lay fallow. No blame attached, they said. It was simply the way of things.
Such good sense might have taken root if Lisane hadn’t given in to her frustrations. Rumors spread. Someone’s cook had overheard Lisane raging at her journeymen, accusing them of being lazy and venal and squandering her tutelage. Someone’s sister who dabbled in oils had gone to buy dyes and seen Lisane pass by three of her former students, refusing to stop when they called her by name.
Other women fell into fits of guilt about barren bellies, but Lisane was responsible for continuing a greater line.
Then the nadir—Firo Torreschi, a minor artist and one of Lisane’s past favorites, returned from Senze with the news that he was being patronized by an elected official. He insisted on attending a banquet at Lisane’s home later that week, during which he presented her with a small still life painted on a convex mirror. According to the gossips’ recounting, Lisane held the painting in her hand for a silent minute, and then shouted for him to be thrown out of her house, the painting after.
Now that Lisane’s frustrations were officially public, the wags frenzied with gossip. Those who’d nursed grudges against the flamboyant portraitist hinted that her lack of a protégé was no surprise given her heritage. How were students supposed to be properly nurtured by some slop’s bastard daughter?
By the time I left Lisane’s school to take my own commissions, it was clear the place had become nothing but a source of bitterness for her. She resented each moment she spent teaching students whose failures reminded her of her own. She allowed the journeymen to take over more and more of the instruction—but still, she kept the school open, hoping a student would appear who was worthy of becoming her protégé.
None did.
The day Lisane first summoned me to her chamber, I was newly fourteen, my birthday just passed. I was still ignorant of what all Patagnia knew—that Lisane would never marry her fiancé or anyone else. Lisane slept with aristocrats, artists, anyone she found alluring. In public, she boasted that she’d never spent more than one night in anyone’s bed. In private, she’d eye someone’s blushing wife and admit that she had occasionally spent a second night in a marital bed—with a different partner.
Few women could have escaped censure for such behavior, but Lisane was an exception to every convention. She was a genius.
Lisane had another famous peculiarity—from time to time, she chose an apprentice to share her bed. She selected boys and girls, well-bred and bastards, talented painters and those who struggled. Once she was through with them, the only trait they had in common was that they were all passionately, relentlessly fixated on Lisane.
I knew none of this as I entered her chamber that night. She was sitting in
a high-backed chair, her garment partially unbuttoned, her jewels discarded in a glimmering heap atop a nearby chest.
She watched, heavy lidded, as I gazed around the room with awe. I’d only seen one painting of Lisane’s before—a small canvas that hung near the house’s entrance, showing a disheveled child standing in an archway. (It was a self portrait, I was later informed, of Lisane remembering what it was like to have been a child looking in on the world of wealth and art from the outside.) Lisane’s room was filled with her sketches. Some were drawn on fresh, expensive sheets, while others were scrawled hastily in book margins, as if Lisane had been overtaken by an irresistible inspiration. One series showed dozens of figures contorting into different positions. Another depicted a cathedral from an array of perspectives, each rendered with dizzyingly crisp two- or three-point perspective.
Lisane watched me stare until, at last, with a contemplative tilt of her head, she asked, “Have you tried magic yet?”
I shook my head. Magic was not for apprentices. That much I knew.
“This might be interesting,” she said.
She took me by the shoulders and directed me to a small easel where a spoiled panel had been prepared for new work. She gave me a horsehair brush and withdrew a moist cloth from her palette, revealing usable oils.
“What should I have you paint?” she murmured to herself, looking me over as if she were testing a composition.
She moved to the chest, shifting her jewelry so she could open the heavy lid. From inside, she dug out a worn velvet slipper.
“Feel the texture of this,” she instructed, extending the slipper. “Feel how soft it is. Run your fingers against the nap and see how it becomes rough.”
I did as she said, marveling in the delicate sensation. Spontaneously, I rubbed my cheek against it. The fabric felt rich, sensual. It smelled musty, like old sweat, but also held lighter scents underneath, reminiscent of perfumed people dancing in elegant halls.
“Ordinarily, you’d paint an impression of the slipper before transferring its essence,” said Lisane, “but let’s experiment. Pull the softness on to the panel with your brush.”