“Exactly right.” I hear the voice of Master Bellini, the most well-regarded painter in our guild. I know him only by reputation and by his pictures, but have never seen the man himself. All of us turn our attention to him. “The oil pigments are slow to dry, which means that they can be blended better than egg tempera. They also account for the translucency and light reflection that I’m sure all of you can see.”
Master Bellini is now, unbelievably I think, standing alongside me, after I’ve spent a lifetime imagining him as our enemy. What would my father say? Bellini is one of the men my father faulted for the demise of our trade, his name spit out with a strange mixture of disdain and admiration. He is one that I, as a girl, imagined seeing outside my window, the one who would take our gold away. Now I see that he is nothing more than a stooped old man.
“That is what I learned in the Low Countries,” Pascal Grissoni says, and I see his father nod with pride.
“Our Master Giorgione would approve,” says Master Bellini, “God rest his soul.” Several of the people in the group cross themselves, and we all stand quietly for a few moments of respect for the painter who showed such promise before the most recent outbreak of pestilence took him from our guild.
“Look, Maria.” The painter’s wife whispers at my ear. She cuts her eyes to the side to prompt me to follow her gaze. At the far end of the painting studio, the door to the kitchen has opened. Before a roaring fire in the hearth, several servants work at the table, stacking serving dishes and wiping goblets clean. Beyond, a back stairway leads to the main floor of the house. I gaze into the darkness above the stair and work to imagine climbing the treads to the bedchambers on the upper floors.
For a moment I feel a tingle pass through my legs and up my spine. What would it be like to be mistress of this house? I never could have imagined such a fate for myself, the daughter of a humble gilder. Yet my father, my gastaldo, and perhaps even the painter’s wife, are conspiring on my behalf.
I imagine the private chambers upstairs, surely as fine as the rooms on the lower floors. Would it be possible to work myself into Pascal Grissoni’s marriage bed, then bring the baby into this world as his own child?
“You like it, Maria?”
Pascal Grissoni has broken away from the circle of men surrounding him. He comes to stand alongside me before his easel. I feel the heat rise to my cheeks and I hope that he will not see them flush. Could he read my mind, filled with images of the two of us entwined in his bed sheets?
I lean forward and feign intense interest in the portrait. After a few long moments, I feel his soft brown eyes on me, and I feel I must respond.
“If I must be honest, missier, I am uncertain about the oil on canvas,” I begin tentatively. “Those of us in the gilding trade… Well, it is not how we have done it for so long. My father and I.”
Pascal Grissoni laughs. “Then I see that we shall have a lot to talk about.”
Fearing that I have offended him, I add quickly, “But your pictures are beautiful.”
Grissoni bows slightly toward me. “Then my efforts have been rewarded. Your observations have made me more gratified than anything the others have said.”
I run my hands across the surface of the small alder wood box that the carpenters have delivered to Master Trevisan’s workshop.
When I asked the carpenter for a small box the size of the one on Trevisan’s mantelpiece, he brought it to me within a day, the wood still infused with the aroma of the forest. “You know what to do, Maria,” Master Baldi told me, his eyes droopy and soft. He set the box on my worktable and I felt his pity. For a fleeting moment, I saw what he saw: a gilder still working in the old ways—one of the Crivelleschi—pulled away from the influence of her father.
Crivelleschi. That is what they call us.
It is the name given to those of us—painters and gilders—who follow the style of Carlo Crivelli, those of us who continue to make elaborately gilded panels even as our patrons’ taste has led us elsewhere. When I was young my father told me how his own father had befriended Crivelli when their master brought them under his roof as apprentices. The rest of us only knew Master Crivelli by reputation, as much for his masterful use of gold as for what put him in the Doge’s prisons. My grandfather claimed that Master Crivelli signed his pictures as a proud Venetian, Carolus Crivellus Venetos, even long after he had fled Our Most Serene City.
He had been exiled already before my father was born, but Master Crivelli set the path for our own workshop’s gilding practices. It was Master Crivelli who inspired my grandfather to build up the gesso to make the saint’s halos, the details of cuffs and hems seem to protrude from the panel, Crivelli who showed our forebears the possibilities of creating raised surfaces under the gold. When I was a small girl my father picked me up and set me on his shoulder so that I could see Master Crivelli’s altarpiece in the church of San Trovaso, where he had built up the glistening metal armor and horse’s harness with layers of gesso and gold. “That is gilding,” my father had said, and it was all I could do to stop myself from running my small fingers across the raised surfaces of the spurs of Saint Michael’s pointed-toe boots.
I have covered the raw wood of the small box that the carpenters made for me with several thin layers of ox gall. I fished through Master Trevisan’s limited collection of gilding punches, rummaging through two drawers of neglected tools. One with a small wooden handle and a metal wheel that makes stippled patterns when you roll it across the surface of the soft wood caught my eye. I have improvised by alternating patterns of diamond shapes and palmettes. Next, I have applied more layers of red bole over the surface, overlaying the stipple work to prepare it to take the gold leaf. This part I could do in my sleep.
The busy work helps distract me for a time, for otherwise my mind turns to that boatman. Has he made his way beyond the barriers in Cannaregio? Has he found my father’s house? Has he reached my Cristiano? All I can do is wait, so I return to my work.
The part that remains in question are the raised surfaces that I must fashion if this box is to resemble the one on Trevisan’s mantelpiece, the one made in his cousin’s workshop in Padua. The raised surfaces will take more than a simple building-up of gesso. They must be molded instead.
On the worktable before me, I lay out the tin molds that Trevisan has shown me. There is a mold to make a palm tree, several male and female figures in different poses, a cat that may be a panther or a lioness, an archway, and several small molds for making repeating decorative patterns. I imagine that the elements could be arranged in different compositions across the surface of the box, so I shift the tin molds around to try out various combinations.
Next, I take the book of engravings from the shelf and open the binding so that the book lies flat on the table. I turn the parchment sheaths until I reach the now-familiar image of the ill-fated lovers, Pyramus and Thisbe. Following this model, I arrange the molds of the male and female figures on either side of the tree. On one side, I place the mold with the cat.
The color-seller has sent me home with a box of supplies to try, and I finger through its contents to consider how I will proceed. At first, the vendecolore seemed intrigued when I told him I wanted to make a box for my father, that I wanted to emulate the one in the painter’s studio. The more I described the box in Trevisan’s studio, the more excited the vendecolore became.
“Bianco di Venezia,” he said, waving a small glass jar filled with white powder in front of me. “Lead paste. You will need to mix it.” I already know how to expose the flaky white mixture to vinegar vapor in a sealed jar. Mixed with egg white, it takes on a particularly pungent scent and becomes pliable for molding into various shapes.
“I am not sure I can pay for so much, Master da Segna,” I said. “I am sorry. The painter is paying me with instruction, not with scudi.”
“Understood.” He nodded, scratching his head. “The lead is expensive
because of the levies the Republic puts on them,” he said. “Our Most Serene Republic holds the exclusive right to manufacture and sell lead white in our territories. The guild inspectors monitor the quantities I sell and the prices I charge. I am not at liberty to give it to you at no charge; otherwise I would do so gladly. But,” he said, wagging a finger at me, “I have heard of people achieving the effect of lead paste by binding a little rabbit glue with rice flour. “You might try it,” he said, as I considered asking Antonella for a sack of rice flour to try mixing the concoction on my own.
“And one other thing!” The vendecolore dragged a wooden stool to his shelf and produced two small glass vials filled with amber-colored oil. “You could also try mixing the scent of musk or civet to the paste you put in the molds,” he suggested, his eyes bright. He poured a single drop of civet onto a wooden stick then waved it before my face. I wrinkled my nose, unsure if the animal-infused scent would be considered pleasant or not. The color-seller shrugged. “They say it wards off the pestilence.”
Inside the box I brought home from the vendecolore there is also a container of rabbit-skin glue, which he assured me would have the greatest adhesive properties to attach the molded pieces to the box. Finally, there is a pack of sheets of the alloys that resemble pure gold. These he provided to me at no charge. I run my fingers over the small sheets, which seem stiff and dark compared to the brilliant leaves beaten by my own battiloro. They do not resemble pure gold at all to me, but others might be easily fooled. In the dark silence of Trevisan’s studio, I fan my face with the small leaves fake gold, and I wonder what Carlo Crivelli would think.
When I was a girl I overheard the neighbor women whispering about our own Master Crivelli, and I felt they must possess knowledge of him that no one else did. As I grew older, I realized that everyone knew the story. Crivelli had become smitten with the wife of a sailor. Crivelli managed to spirit his lover away from her brother’s house, where she stayed while her husband was at sea. He kept her hidden away for several months in the attic of his own house. Once his adultery was discovered, Crivelli paid a large fine to the Council of Forty and spent several months in the Doge’s prison. Upon his release, he fled the city and never returned, leaving behind churches full of gilded panels that inspired the generations to come.
As I arrange and rearrange the tin molds on the worktable, I think about Master Crivelli and his hidden lover in the attic. I think about Pyramus and Thisbe, the doomed couple whispering to one another through the cracks in the wall of their parents’ house. And I think of my own battiloro and myself, hiding away in the root cellar below my father’s workshop. I feel my throat begin to constrict and with the back of my hand, I press back the hot tears that threaten to spill. With concentration, I force myself to imagine laying the gold alloys across the surface of the molded images on my box. It will be simple, I think.
In the end, the gold is easy. It is love that is complicated.
On a bright autumn day, I found myself alone in the house with the battiloro for the first time. One of our fellow painters had called my father to visit a convent refectory where we were to collaborate on a set of panels illustrating the life of Santa Lucia. My cousin was supposed to be working with me to burnish the bole on a new panel we were preparing, but a friend, the grubby son of another gilder down the street, appeared at our doorway and called him out to visit the market.
“There are girls there. And food,” the boy said.
My cousin rarely received such an invitation, and with my father away, Paolo did not hesitate to set down his brush and hobble down the alley after his friend. He did not give me a second thought. Not once did it cross his mind that he should stay to watch out for me. That I might need watching. It would not have crossed my mind either.
It happened in an instant, with no premeditation. We fell into each other’s arms, found each other’s skin under layers of clothing. I never would have believed it before that day, but I was the one who started it. I reached out to touch his arm, then my hands moved up to follow his broad shoulders and press into his cheeks.
After that, all of our moments were stolen, chipped away from pieces of the day when my father was out of the workshop, or my cousin had been sent on an errand or momentarily turned his head.
At that time I did not think about what it meant, what would happen, how we would possibly continue. All I knew was that I went through my day as if floating on air, as if I might burst with joy, whether anyone saw it or not.
From my father’s workshop I have brought a cloth made of horsehair. It was an afterthought, something I pressed into my trunk just before leaving home. I do not know what I would have done without it. It is slightly abrasive, with the perfect amount of roughness to bring the wood layered with bole to a high sheen. We have used horsehair cloths like this for as long as I can remember, procured from a certain brush seller who makes them from horses from the Levant and sets the cloths aside for us behind the counter in his shop.
Master Trevisan’s workshop is now full of red panels. They are propped along the walls, each one coated in red bole except for the parts where Trevisan has outlined the basic composition of his figures. On those sections the white gesso beneath shows, along with the sketchy lines of charcoal and black ink that Trevisan and his journeyman will use to fill in with pigment. If you squint your eyes, you can begin to imagine the finished altarpiece.
I am glad to have something physical to do, for I am filled with nervous energy. The boatman and Trevisan’s gondola are gone from the house. Is he on an errand for the painter? I wonder if he is going to get my battiloro, and I feel my heart beat faster. Will he be able to get past the guards, weave his way into the canals, and into the narrow stretch behind my house? Will he be able to bring him to me? Will the battiloro agree to come? What will the signora say if a Saracen stranger arrives at her door? I push the doubt to the back of my mind and try to refocus on the panel before me.
Trevisan has sketched an angel and a saint, both outlined with black charcoal. Around the edges the red bole is no longer shiny but has dried to a dull, ruddy color. I put the horsehair cloth in my left hand. I like to change sides from time to time so that the muscles of my right arm are not twice as large as the ones of my left. I rub the horsehair slowly but firmly across the dried bole until the dull surface begins to show a characteristic sheen.
The burnishing process cannot be rushed, for it is the careful preparation of the surface that will make all the difference when the gold is applied. My father taught me to wait until the bole begins to impart a certain gloss, a sheen that cannot be described but only observed with time and experience. The burnishing process is what imparts the rich, multicolored and layered texture of the gold surface. That is when the tide starts to turn, when you feel the excitement build, when you start to visualize the final product.
As much as I admire Pascal Grissoni’s oil paintings, I cannot deny that it is only in the gilding where I feel the excitement, and I wonder what will happen if canvas takes hold of our guildsmen’s imagination.
Chapter 28
The Vianello boatyard stands alongside a narrow canal near the church of San Trovaso. As it lies a short distance from my father’s workshop, I have passed it either from the canal side, where its long ramp slopes into the dark canal waters, or from the land side, where its stone façade looks like any other house in the alley and you would never know that behind stands a large boatyard.
“Càvol,” the painter says, shaking his head as he watches the boatman struggle to lash the rope to a mooring post outside the boatyard. “He is going to scratch the varnish.” The painter pushes himself from the passenger compartment. “Watch the varnish!” he wags a finger at the boatman. “This boat has hardly made its way out of the squero. Master Vianello will be as angry as a beast.”
“Forgive me, missier,” says the boatman. From my position inside the passenger compartment I see him roll his e
yes out of view of the painter. I pretend not to notice.
“Bondì, painter,” I hear a boy say. Through the opening in the curtains of the passenger compartment I see a handsome youth in a soiled work shirt holding a paintbrush in his hand. Two other men are applying black varnish to the keel of another boat turned upside down on trestles. Along the ramp a dozen or so gondolas are turned on their sides, each in various stages of finishing.
“Greetings, young Master Vianello,” the painter hops from the gondola and tousles the boy’s hair. “Your father is here?”
“Papà!” After a few moments the father emerges from the low building along side the boat ramp.
He grasps the painter’s hand with both of his, then presses Trevisan on the shoulder. “How is the ride?”
“I do not remember life before this boat,” says the painter.
In return, the gondola maker barks out a hearty laugh. “We have your new summer upholstery. It took a long time. Our upholsterer is getting old and it takes him a while to finish. We are few but we are good.”
“Bellissimo,” says the painter. “Thank you.” But I see that the gondola maker is not listening. Instead, he is staring at something on the gondola and has not heard anything that the painter has said.
“Where did that lantern come from?”
“Baldi the carpenters prepared it for us,” says the painter, “and my new apprentice gilded it.”
Through the slats of the passenger compartment I see the gondola maker approach. He grasps the lantern from where it hangs on the hook near the boatman’s position on the stern. He turns it over in his hands, inspecting the swirls and carvings through squinted eyes. He runs his fingers across the gilded surface. “You say your apprentice has done the gilding work?”
The Painter's Apprentice Page 18