by Ali Smith
Lightness of spirit, the Falcon said. Not got from anyone. Not Piero. Not Flemish.
The women’s clothes are very fine, the other said. But am I well starred throughout? The auspices? And how like the gods? I mean in inference?
Very, your Grace, but very human all the same, the Falcon said. A rare thing, to be able to do gods and humans both, no?
Hm, the other said.
Look at this woman and this child here, just standing, but in such a choreography, the Falcon said. It’s motherhood. But it’s more than motherhood. It’s as if they’re in a conversation, but a conversation made of stance.
And does this particular painter do any more of me? the other said.
Yes, your Grace, the Falcon said
and I heard them move on the platform and I ducked into the shadow of the wall.
Who is he, then, the lad? the other said then as the ladder beneath him creaked.
Not a lad at all, your Grace, the Falcon said.
I held my breath.
– full-fledged painter, well over 30 years, the Falcon said.
What’s his looks like? the other said.
Youthful in demeanour, sir, the Falcon said. Girlish, you might say. Youthful in the work, too. Freshness all through it. Freshness and maturity both.
What’s he called? the other said.
I heard the Falcon tell him –
and not long after, since the Falcon had liked Cosmo’s St Giorgio so much, I figured him into the fresco again, this time in the month of March (the part of the wall my work was at its best), this time as a falconer with his clothes winged up like the falcon on his hand and the torch bearer drawing he’d liked and I sat him on a horse with a stance a bit like Cosmo’s Giorgio : I made him young and vigorous : I gave him a tasselled hunting glove : above all I made the balls on his horse good and large.)
Painting the months took months.
I made things look both close and distant.
In the upper space I gave the unicorns translucent horns.
In the lower space I gave the horses eyes that can follow you round the room, cause those are the God eyes and whoever has them in a painting or fresco holds the eyes of whoever looks at the work, and this is no blasphemy, merely a reasserting of the power of the gaze back at us from outside us always on us.
I painted the differing skies of May and April and lastly March (cause I progressed from May to March and grew more used to the plaster from each to each, which made the work flourish) : I dared paint, in Venus’s upper space, with its groups of lovers standing in their 3s, women openly kissed and touched by men (to enrage any visiting Florentines who hate to see such goings-on).
Throughout I did as the great Alberti in his book suggests the best picturemakers should always do and included people of many ages and kinds, plus chickens, ducks, horses, dogs, rabbits, hares, birds of all sorts, all in a lively commerce in and about a variety of landscapes and buildings : and, cause Alberti asks in his book that as a reward for my pains in writing this work, painters who read it might kindly paint my face into their istoria in such a way that it seems pleasant I did this too and painted him into it in the gathering of wise men in the goddess Minerva’s space : cause those who do good work should always be honoured, which is something both the greats Alberti and Cennini agree on. As a symmetric to the wise professors I placed on the other side of Minerva’s chariot, where the Falcon wanted the Fates to sit, a gathering of working women and included every woman’s face I could remember from the streets and workshops and the pleasure houses : I arranged them round a good loom and gave them well-made cavework as a landscape behind them.
I painted my brothers.
I painted the figure of my mother resplendent.
I painted a ram with the look of my father.
In these ways I filled the Marquis’s months with those who had peopled my own on the earth.
But when I did, as can happen when you work to picture someone in paint, as soon as I’d painted them into the skin of the fresco they stopped being the people I knew : this happened especially in the colour blue meant for sky, the place between the gods and the earth.
A picture is most times just picture : but sometimes a picture is more : I looked at the faces in torchlight and I saw they were escapees : they’d broken free from me and from the wall that had made and held them and even from themselves.
I like very much a foot, say, or a hand, coming over the edge and over the frame into the world beyond the picture, cause a picture is a real thing in the world and this shift is a marker of this reality : and I like a figure to shift into that realm between the picture and the world just like I like a body really to be present under painted clothes where something, a breast, a chest, an elbow, a knee, presses up from beneath and brings life to a fabric : I like an angel’s knee particularly, cause holy things are worldly too and it’s not a blasphemy to think so, just a further understanding of the realness of holy things.
But these are mere mundane pleasures – I’m tempted to hire a small boy, stand him on a table and have him shout those words MERE MUNDANE PLEASURES – beside the thing that happens when the life of the picture itself steps beyond the frame.
Cause then it does 2 opposing things at once.
The one is, it lets the world be seen and understood.
The other is, it unchains the eyes and the lives of those who see it and gives them a moment of freedom, from its world and from their world both.
And I wasn’t slave to this work for much longer myself cause when I neared the finish of the month of March it was the month of March, near New Year : one day all the assistants and the workshop painters were standing in a huddle in the middle of the room : there was passionate talk, it was about the infidel uprising, I reckoned from up on the scaffolding (cause there’d been an uprising for more food and money among the field workers, 10 men beaten cause of the actions of 1 man, and rumour that some of the 10 were near death and that the 1 who organized the rising was already cut in pieces).
But no, the talk was nothing to do with infidels : what they were arguing so passionate about down there was their latest request to Borse for better pay.
Master Francescho! the pickpocket shouted up the side of the scaffolding.
Ercole! I shouted back down without turning.
(I was touching up the Graces.)
Let us sign your name, the pickpocket shouted up, to this petition alongside ours!
No! I shouted down
cause they had petitioned twice for more money already and the second time, instead of giving them more, Borse had had them all (me too) presented with his medal, the one with his head on one side, Justice on the other and the words on it : haec te unum : you and she are one.
It was a pretty medal and had an appearance of value, but Borse had had so many given out all over town (and not just here but in his other towns too) that they fetched very little at market.
But Borse was well known for his generosity : didn’t he pay his favoured musicians handsomely? Didn’t he cover Cosmo in precious stones?
True, so far I’d been paid the same rate as the others, but it was an oversight, I knew.
I intended to write to the Marquis directly and point out the oversight.
Cause I knew myself exceptional (the only painter here not working to Cosmo’s cartoons, the only one brought in from outside beyond the court workshop) : and when the wrong money first came I had asked the Falcon to intercede : but the Falcon had looked at me, doleful.
Did you not get your medal, then? he said,
by which I knew he had no power in this matter.
The Falcon had liked his St Giorgio a lot : I could see he liked himself as a man of action as well as a poet cause he’d flushed up red to the back of his ears.
But he’d shaken his head at the madmen from the madhouse that I’d painted running behind the horses and donkeys as if part themselves of the palio, their straitjacket tabs flying out behind them : he’d shak
en his head again at the distant view of the Marquis’s hunt – the Marquis and all his men on horseback heading straight towards the edge of the abyss, a dog looking coolly down into it (the abyss I’d made by painting a crack in the foreground architecture, a perspective I took great pride in).
One picture I’d made in particular made the Falcon turn pale.
Here, he was saying. No. This can’t stay. You have to change it.
He was pointing at the first decan for March, at the place where he’d asked for a powerful guardian man and I’d painted him one, in the shape of an infidel.
Something like this is bad enough as it is, the Falcon was saying. Bad enough by itself. And on top of this you ask me to go to him to get you more money? Francescho. Can’t you see? Haven’t you eyes? He’ll have you whipped. And if I ask for more money he’ll have me whipped too. No, no, no. It’s got to come off. Cut it out. Start again. Redo it.
I cowered inside my skin : I was foolish, I’d end up unpaid and dismissed and be poor for a year : I’d never get work at the court again and I was badly out of pocket cause the golds and the blues had cost half a year’s money : so I readied myself to ask the Falcon, what would he like me to paint there instead?
But when I came to speak, instead of any of these words I heard myself say only
no.
The Falcon next to me gave a little start.
Francescho. Redo it, he said again.
I shook my head.
No.
That can’t stay either, he was saying pointing at the Graces up in the Venus space. That Grace there. Make her lighter. Far too dark.
I had given the Graces fashionable hairstyles : I had given them fleeting bodily resemblances, Ginevra and Agnola both facing, Isotta with her back to us : I had painted them holding apples and painted some Vs in 2 spindly trees to catch and repeat the shape of the place on the facing Graces where all human life and much pleasure originates : I had placed 2 birds in each spindly tree : everything rhythmic : even the apples and breasts were resemblances : it was the Grace I’d made like Isotta that had caught his eye : but even she, beautiful as she was, barely held his eye cause I saw that he couldn’t not look, kept looking again and again to the infidel in his white work rags in the space of the best blue.
Then – a miracle – something shifted in the Falcon, changed in the way he stood beside me.
I saw him shake his head again but in a different way.
He called for more light.
More light came.
He put his hands round his face.
When he took his hands away I saw that the Falcon was laughing.
Such audacity. Well. It’s true, you’ve done exactly what I asked you, he said. Though I didn’t ask for such beauty. Well, let’s see. I’ll, I don’t know, I’ll fix it. I’ll redirect him to the figure of the old man here bending the knee to him like he wanted. Borse giving out justice to an aging infidel.
Thank you, Mr de Prisciano, I said.
But, in turn, do me a couple of kindnesses, Francescho, the Falcon said. Make the bending man a shade darker at the skin to show the new Duke’s justice as bigger than any expectation. But I’m warning you. Don’t be any more of a fool. Francescho. Do you hear? And lighten up the colour of that Grace, the one with her back to us. And we might, we just might, get away with it.
Get away with it : as if I had planned a hidden satire or a sedition : but in all honesty, when I looked at my own pictures they surprised even me with their knowledge : cause at the same time as I’d been painting these questioning things I had been telling myself that the Marquis would be just, he’d naturally know and honour my worth and reward me properly for it, of course he would, even if I pictured him and his hunt all clipclopping as if blind towards a crevasse : cause the life of painting and making is a matter of double knowledge so that your own hands will reveal a world to you to which your mind’s eye, your conscious eye, is often blind.
The Falcon was shaking his head at the infidel : he was no longer laughing : his mouth fell open : he put his hand to his mouth.
And if he asks anything, he said with his hand still over his mouth, I’ll tell him, I don’t know, I’ll say it’s, it’s –
A figure from the French Romances, I said.
A figure from a little-known French Romance, the Falcon said. One he’d never admit to not knowing. Since we all know how well he knows them all.
Then he’d looked me in the eyes.
But I can’t get you any more money, Francescho, he said. Don’t ask me again.
Well then, I’d write and ask myself, direct, I thought as the Falcon descended the scaffolding : I did not need an interceder.
Master Francescho! the pickpocket called now from below.
Ercole! I called back down.
I was reworking the Graces, paler reminders now : give, accept, give back : but adequate Graces, still substantial : I’d sliced them out and replastered and repainted but I’d kept them human, made them all Agnolas like a triplet of herself 3 different ways.
Forgive me! the pickpocket shouted.
For what? I shouted back.
For signing the letter on your behalf! the pickpocket shouted up
(cause there had been murmurings among the assistants and workshop painters that they were being refused more money precisely cause I hadn’t signed, cause I hadn’t asked for more with them the times they’d asked before, which might make it look to the Marquis, they said, like I believed 10 pennies a square foot enough pay).
But not by my name, Ercole? I called back down.
But yes by your name, the pickpocket shouted up. And I can well do your hand, Master Francescho, as you know. We need paid. And the more of us asking, the better.
I brightened the apple of the farthest right Grace.
Ercole! I called down.
Yes, Master Francescho? he called up.
I leaned over the scaffolding and spoke quietly direct.
I no longer need an assistant. Pack your things. Find another master,
cause I knew it was simply a mistake, my mispayment, and Borse a man who cared above all things for justice : hadn’t I painted his head there underneath the very word justice carved in stone under a fine garlanded stone arch in a lunette that resembled his own double-faced medal? and beneath that a scene of him dispensing justice to grateful townspeople? He cared about justice more than anything (perhaps cause his own father, Nicco, as we all knew, the same way we knew the legends of the saints and all the holy stories, had a reputation not just for favouring illegitimate sons but for unspeakable unjustness having decided in a temper that his second wife, the beautiful one, and his firstborn son, the handsome one, had fallen in love with each other, for which he had them both beheaded in a dungeon then buried somewhere, nobody knew where) : Borse cared so much about justice that in the anteroom on the other side of this wall on which I was brightening the apples of the Graces he was having a room made where he planned to try small matters of civic justice and we all knew he’d commissioned stucchi of Faith, Hope, Fortitude, Charity, Prudence, Temperance, but that he’d asked the French stucchi master most specifically for 6 Virtues only and to leave Justice out cause he was himself Justice, Justice was herself him, and when he was present in the room then Justice was present too since Justice had Borse’s chin, his head, his face, his chest and moreover his stomach.
Good work, good pay, as the great Cennini says in his Handbook for picturemakers : this is a kind of justice too that if you use good materials and you practise good skills then the least you may expect is that good money will be your reward : and if it so happens that it isn’t then God himself will reward you : this is what Cennini promises : so I’d write to the Marquis : I’d write now on the eve of New Year or tomorrow on New Year’s Day cause it’s a time of generosity (and maybe it was true, maybe the generous Borse did believe, cause I’d not signed my name on the other petitions, that I did think 10 pennies enough).
I saw sadness in the
pickpocket’s back below : you can tell many things from a back : he was packing away his tools and things in his bags : who knew, maybe if Borse were to read a letter from me he’d not just right the error for me, he’d maybe be persuaded to be more generous to those lesser workers too, with a bit of luck and justice, though they’d need the luck, not being as worthy of it as me.
(I am small, sitting on stone in the smell of horse piss holding in my hand the shrunken head with the wing stuck out of it : the thing in my hand is the start of a tree, with a bit of luck and justice.
Luck, I know, is to do with chance happening.
But what’s justice? I call at my mother’s back.
She is on her way to the barrel full of linens.
Fairness, she calls over her shoulder. Rightness. Getting your due. You getting as much to eat and as much learning and as many chances as your brothers, and them as much and as many as anyone in this city or this world.
So justice is to do with food then, and with learning.
But what’s a fallen seed from a tree to do with any of it? I call.
She stops and turns.
We need both luck and justice to get to live the life we’re meant for, she says. Lots of seeds don’t get to. Think. They fall on stone, they get crushed to pieces, rot in the rubbish at the roadside, put down roots that don’t take, die of thirst, die of heat, die of cold before they’ve even broken open underground, never mind grown a leaf. But a tree is a clever creation and sends out lots of seeds every year, so for all those ones that don’t get to grow there are hundreds, thousands that will.
I look at how over by the brickpiles there’s a straggle of seedlings in a clump, seedlings not even as tall as me : they look like nothing at all : I look up at the roof where the 3 thin twiggy arms are proof that a seed’s taken root at the gutter : that’s luck : But justice? And I am not a seed or a tree : I am a person : I won’t break open : I haven’t got roots : how can I be seed or tree or both?
I still don’t see how justice is anything to do with seeds, I call.
You’ll learn, she shouts back from in the barrel trampling the linens again.
In a moment I hear her singing her working song.)