The Painter's Apprentice

by Laura Morelli

  From the corner of my eye I see the painter’s journeyman cross himself, then all of us fall silent.

  Chapter 6

  The Convent of Santa Maria delle Vergini is a grand accumulation of buildings masked behind walls. A series of narrow alleys skirt around the edges of the hulking brick and plaster surfaces that define the perimeter of the convent and give this neighborhood its name. Only the large dome of the convent church is visible above the high enclosure. My aunt, my father’s sister, was cloistered behind these walls long before I was born. Now, she and her fellow Augustinian canonesses take in orphans. They feed and clothe the children, teach them to read and write, and eventually push them back outside the walls to become servants to the patricians, clergy, shopkeepers, and apprentices in the Arsenale state shipyard that stands behind the abbey.

  The journeyman and I follow the painter down a raucous street to the east of the church façade that faces the Arsenale state shipyard. Though Carnival is still weeks away, the streets are beginning to fill with color. People on the upper floors above the street-level shops have begun to hang colored paper banners, festooned with beads and feathers, from their windows. For a few moments I am distracted by a lady shopkeeper who is talking lovingly to a parakeet perched inside an ornate cage. The cage is just one of two dozen similar contraptions, each with different colored birds inside.

  Trevisan pulls a chain outside a modest wooden door in the wall and the three of us—the painter, the journeyman, and I—collect around the door to wait for a response. Behind us, the boatman lashes a rope to a wooden post at the convent’s canal-side mooring.

  My gaze lands on an image of the Madonna and Child carved into white marble and inset into the convent’s brick wall. Below the image is an opening large enough to place a foundling, and below that a narrow slot in the marble where a desperate mother or a charitable passerby may drop donations for the care and feeding of those abandoned there. The white marble has worn down and turned nearly black from the many hands that have rubbed against it over the years, depositing money to support poor babes who have been surrendered to the care of the nuns. I run my fingers over the worn inscription carved under the window and think of a thousand reasons why a woman might want to leave her baby here.

  The door opens and a stooped nun pulls us into the dimness of the compound. They are expecting us. We follow her limping, draped form down an echoing corridor punctuated by dozens of closed doors. The door latches behind us, and the clamor of the street falls away. I have seen the façade of the church from the canal a thousand times in my life, but have only been inside the convent visitors’ parlor to see my aunt. I have never seen the inside of the church.

  The nun opens one of the doors and gestures for us to follow. I step through, and suddenly I am cast from the dark corridor into a vast, airy space filled with heavenly light from windows at the base of the dome. Inside the church the world has fallen silent. In the presence of this magical, echoing space, the malaise I felt in the gondola has melted away and I feel calm wash over me. The boatman’s gaze, the bustle of the streets outside, with the calls of the fruit sellers and fish vendors, the barge captains, and clogs clomping on the stones... Everything outside the walls has fallen away.

  “Here we are,” says the painter, his voice echoing into the cavernous space.

  I follow the nun, Master Trevisan, and his journeyman down a dim side aisle. We hear only the shuffle of our own leather soles on the stone floor and the flutter of wings from a bird exploring the vaults high above us. I follow the picture maker past the side chapels whose walls are darkened with age and soot from thousands of candles and hundreds of years. I see large panels covered in gold and darkened paint. In the dimness, their glittering surfaces call to me.

  Our pictures have always been made in this way.

  Enormous panels of raw alder and poplar pieced together with oak battens and armatures. Wooden surfaces prepared with many layers of gesso made from the hides of beasts raised on terra firma. Surfaces built up with pastiglia to render buttons, rivets, gems and jewelry, horse tack. Layers of gold leaf beaten into thin wafers by our own battiloro and generations before him. Designs punched into the surface with the punches that have hung above my father’s workbench for many generations. Colored tempera pigments for the faces, hands, drapery, and details.

  My earliest memories in my father’s studio are of being surrounded by the serene faces of super-humans, saints who performed miracles and selfless deeds. With a single brush of their hand they healed disease. Calmed a storm. Parted the seas. Brought the dead back to life from the grave itself. Every time I left the dullness of our house I was surrounded by gold. Even our modest parish church is paved with mosaic that sparkles with gilded flecks used in their making. My father says that his own grandfather and great-grandfather made the flecks of gilding that went into the pavements.

  And altarpieces. We have made so many altarpieces that I could not begin to count them. These pictures have put food on our table for generations. We collaborate with the painters in our guild, of course, colorists and picture makers who paint beautiful colored figures that seem conjured from a dream. We paint around their heads and bodies, or rather it is more accurate to say that the picture makers paint within our gold. For we put the gold down first. We punch the saints’ halos, patterns of stars, circles, and feathers. We punch patterns in their drapery folds, in their arm and cloaks, in their shoe buckles. When the candles are lit in the churches across our city, the light reflects the gold and makes the pictures come alive with the sacred stories of the Holy Book. It is what we do, what we are known for, the pride of our family.

  In my grandfather’s time, the gold often covered the entire panel. I remember a panel of Saint Chrysogonous that my grandfather and a painter made for a wealthy patron who had just returned from Crete. My grandfather used actual metal nails for the horse’s armor, gilding the breastplates and spurs of the saint’s armor. He built up parts of the panel with layers of gesso and rice paste and gilded them using real metal studs. As a child I remember running my small hand over the parts of the panels my grandfather had worked on. My fingers traced the texture of the saint’s boots and spurs. At that time the gold was perhaps the most important part of the panel. Our patrons specified in our contracts how much gold and from where. Instead, today they specify the colors they want—lapis, vermillion, indigo—and that they want themselves immortalized above all else.

  We are sometimes asked to restore an old panel that is well-loved and worn with time. I have laid my hands on so many altarpieces, centuries old already, filled with pests that have bored small holes into the wood. They come scampering out of the gilded surfaces, bringing small trails of dust with them.

  “Here it is,” says Master Trevisan, leading us to a space alongside the main altar of Santa Maria. Before us a gilded altarpiece stands twice as tall as a man, showing the Passion of Our Lord. We all look up to an adjacent blank space where, once it is finished, our painted and gilded altarpiece will hang. “The place where the altarpiece will go once it’s finished,” he explains. I look at the space and imagine seven large panels. It is the work where I will use up all the packets of gold leaf that I have brought with me, that have been wrought by the battiloro’s own hands.

  Then, at the bottom of one of the old panels, she draws my eye. Mary Magdalene. She is always there, the sinewy woman with the fiery hair flowing over her shoulders, just like mine. My father says that I was born with hair the color of spring strawberries. It made me smile until just a few years later an old lady told me I conjured the devil himself. My friends laughed so hard that I went home and put a grain sack over my head until my father removed it and replaced it with a kiss.

  “I suppose some would say that the picture is old-fashioned,” the painter’s journeyman says, and I see that he still feels guilty about what he said to me in the gondola, “but this is the way we have always done it in Our Mos
t Serene City. It is still magical,” he says.

  I nod. “And it is helpful to see the old work so that we have the space in mind while we are working on the new.”

  My eye falls on one of the old panels depicting a choir of angels singing, their mouths open in song, their brows creased, their eyes closed. Two of the singing angels have been rendered with auburn hair. Even looking at the picture I can hear their voices lifted up to heaven. I feel a sense of peace wash over me, a feeling that all will be well.

  “Madonna mia, you are a grown woman.”

  My aunt Agnese’s pale, delicate fingers reach through the wrought iron grille. I grasp her hand, an awkward exercise through the grate that divides the convent visitors’ parlor from the sisters.

  Already I feel ashamed that it has taken me so long to come. Could it be that several years have passed since I last visited my father’s sister? Her raised eyebrows reveal how much I have transformed since the last time she saw me. I recognize her delicate face, untouched by the sun and framed by the white linen that covers her hair. Aunt Agnese sets her clear green eyes on me, eyes like my father’s. My father has said that my wavy auburn hair came from her, though I have only seen the fine stubs of her shorn hair that escape from under the cover of her thick wimple. Now I see coarse strands of grey around her temples.

  “I have been praying that you would come,” she says. “I have heard that a great painter is starting work on an altarpiece to be placed in our sanctuary. And that you might be with him.”

  I nod. “Yes. Master Trevisan. Our gastaldo helped arrange it with my father.”

  Through the wrought iron swirls she squeezes my fingers again. “Grazie a Dio.”

  “I have been lodged with Master Trevisan since before Epiphany,” I say. “Mostly we work inside his studio. This is the first time I have been here; the first time I have seen your beautiful church.”

  My father’s sister has been cloistered behind the walls of Santa Maria delle Vergini for my entire life. “What other choice did she have?” my father asked me when I was very young, as if I had an answer. Much later, my father told me that one day, soon after his sister’s fifteenth year, he saw her midsection swell strangely. On another day a baby appeared, but the father did not. My grandfather loaded Agnese and her baby into a gondola bound for the Vergini along with a meager donation. My cousin Paolo spent his early years behind the convent walls under the care of the sisters, learning how to read and work hard.

  Paolo was born with a lame leg and rarely spoke, a result of the sinful circumstances of his birth, a neighbor woman once whispered in my ear. He walked with a loping gait, floundering yet surprisingly fast. His strange, scuttling movements and few words gave no indication of his intelligence. His handwriting was a thing of great beauty, the result of years of careful copying and strict discipline in the convent.

  When he came of age at ten, my father called for his nephew. Paolo emerged from the convent and moved into our gilding studio as an apprentice. I was only four years old then, so Paolo became the closest thing to a sibling I ever had. At first, I adored him and tagged along behind like a hungry dog; later, I defended him when the boys in the alley played wicked tricks on him. After that, they kept a respectable distance from me.

  As obedient and intelligent as he was, Paolo knew nothing of the gold. As a four-year-old, I knew more about how to lay the red bole and punch the feathered patterns in the glittering surfaces. Now he is a strapping twenty-five-year-old man in spite of his lame leg. His mother remains in prayer behind these walls.

  “You miss your father,” Agnese says, as if she has read my mind.

  “Yes,” I say. “And Paolo too.” I realize now that it is the first time I have visited my aunt on my own. Each time my father has brought me along to visit his sister. Seeing my aunt’s face is a bit like looking at my own father. I feel his absence now, deep in my heart.

  “I have hungered for news of my brother, and of course my son. Do you know anything? Have you seen them?”

  I feel even more ashamed now, realizing that she has had no direct news from us for a long time. “I have had a letter from Paolo from the feast of the Baptism of Our Lord.”

  From a pouch in my felted shawl, I retrieve my cousin’s letter. I must have read it forty times or more, as if scouring it again might bring me some small shred of information that I failed to see before. Paolo’s letter brought me both a fleeting sense of elation as well as a gaping void. There is no mention of the battiloro. I have written several letters back, placing the folded pieces of parchment in the messenger’s hand, but I have no way of knowing if my letters have reached home.

  I press the letter through the grate. “I do not have much other information to share. They were well when I left for Master Trevisan’s studio. I only received the news of the pestilence after my arrival, but as far as I know, they are safe. I suppose you have heard that the pestilence has appeared in Cannaregio,” I say.

  She nods, a grim expression on her face. “I did not know if you had heard.”

  “The streets are closed.”

  My aunt nods. “So they have told us. Have faith, cara. A few of the monks from our brother institution have gone with our confessor to help the sick. Our confessor tells us that two citizens have been assigned per sestier. They are paid four ducats from the Salt Office to circulate through the neighborhoods and report on the spread of the pestilence.”

  “Who has been assigned to Cannaregio?”

  “I cannot say,” she says, “but I will try to find out for you. I do not know anything except that it is their job to convince people to go to the pesthouses if they fall ill.”

  What is strange, I think, is that the most reliable and valuable information about what is happening in my city may come from a woman cloistered behind bars, who is not free to roam the city and see for herself.

  “Oh my dear, you must be so worried about them.” She grasps the rosary that hangs from her waist and begins to turn the black glass beads over between her pale fingers.

  “Yes.” I meet her eyes. “If you want to know the truth, I am scared to death. You know that my father is not well. I have written to them but I do not know if the letters arrived.” I heave a large sigh. “My biggest fear is that they need me and I cannot get to them.”

  “I suppose it is thanks to God’s grace that you went to the painter’s studio. You will be safe there.” I fall silent, and she ponders the expression on my face, then grasps the bars of the grille with both hands. “Did something happen?”

  I take a deep breath. “Well, my father says that it was for my own good, for the good of our workshop. We—my father, Paolo, and I—have been working with the painters for a long time on pictures and objects that require collaboration between our trades. Father says that he fears no one wants gilded paintings anymore. They want the colored pigments instead, pictures like those of the Bellini brothers and Master Giorgione, God rest his soul. But then Master Trevisan got a large commission for an altarpiece here at this very convent, where the donor’s contract specified gilding throughout the panel. I brought books full of gold leaf with me to his studio. I am to stay there for a year and a half. In exchange for my working on the altarpiece, Master Trevisan is to teach me how to use the colored pigments. This he will do in lieu of an apprentice’s salary. That is the agreement that my father made with him and that was approved by our guild.”

  My aunt stares at me for a long time and we fall silent. I feel the weight of words unspoken.

  I take a deep breath. “If you want to know the truth, it was because of a man.”

  I had not planned to tell her, but somehow the words spill out of my mouth, unable to stay locked inside for a moment longer. I imagine that my aunt can see the freckles on my face turn red.

  My aunt emits a small gasp and then her face falls with realization. She presses her back against the chair. “Ah.”
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  It just came out, but immediately I feel immense relief at having lifted this burden from my shoulders, realizing now that it has been pinned painfully inside for the weeks I have been in Master Trevisan’s studio.

  My aunt looks pained. “Your father has turned you out,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper. I struggle to respond. If the words spilled out of my mouth before, now they will not come. I feel my heart race, then my aunt reaches through the grille and places her hand on top of mine. “He is only doing what our own father did. Dio.” She brings her palms together, then wags them in prayer and sighs. “Of all people I understand, cara.”

  “I suppose you know of these things,” I say, looking at my fidgeting hands in my lap. I think of my cousin Paolo, so smart and handsome, yet hobbling around our workshop with difficulty.

  She nods and sighs. “You don’t think I know about the pleasures of the flesh? How do you think it is that I ended up here?” she asks, gesturing to the austere space around her.

  If my aunt feels the weight of this burden, she does not show it. Instead, she manages a quick laugh that lights up her face. “Well. When my own father turned me out I was sure that I was doomed to an eternity of tedium, but it is not so bad here,” she says. “I have everything I need. My meals are prepared, my needs cared for. I have my work,” she says. “My pastries are known all over Our Most Serene City, and of that I am very proud. Everything else I do is for the glory of God, but I did not raise my child. That I will never get back.” Her voice wavers. “And, I would not admit this to just anyone, but I always have enjoyed the company of men, and truth be told, I miss a man’s touch.” Her cheeks turn red against the white trim of her wimple. I flush, too.

  She clucks. “O Santa Cecilia, my poor dear,” she says, shaking her head. “Well. None of this would have happened if your father had married you off when I told him it was time.” She wags her finger at me. “He waited too long. It was bound to happen. Look at you. You have been a woman for some time already.”