by Ali Smith
You don’t know? the Falcon said.
I shook my head.
That Cosmo, when he talks of you, calls you Francescha? the Falcon said.
He what? I said.
Francescha del Cosso, the Falcon said.
(Cosmo.
I forgive.)
A mere court painter, I said. I’ll never be. I’ll never do anyone’s bidding.
Well but what are you right now, the Falcon said, but a court painter?
(It was true.)
But at least I’ll never knowingly choose to be in the pay of the flagellants, I said
(cause I knew Cosmo to be making a lot of money with the images asked of him by some).
The Falcon shrugged.
The flagellants pay as well as anybody else, he said. And have you seen his St Giorgio for the cathedral organ? Francescho. It’s sublime. And – didn’t Cosmo train you? I thought you’d been apprentice to Cosmo.
Cosmo? Train me? I said.
Who then? the Falcon said.
I learned by my eyes, I said, and I learned from the masters.
Which masters? the Falcon said.
The great Alberti, I said. The great Cennini.
Ah, the Falcon said. Self-taught.
He shook his head.
And from Cristoforo, I said.
Da Ferara? the Falcon said.
Del Cossa, I said.
The brickmaker? the Falcon said. Taught you this?
I pointed down to my new assistant, the pickpocket, filling the time between plastermaking and colourgrinding by doing the drawing work I’d set him of the pile of bricks I’d made him fetch in from the gardens : I look back at my rich court babies pouring out of the hole in the stony ground into life as if the whole world was nothing but theatre and them its godgiven critics.
Since I was infant I’ve lived, breathed, slept brick and stone, but you can’t eat bricks, you can’t eat stones, Mr de Prisciano, which is why –
(and here I got ready to ask for my money).
– on the contrary, the Falcon said. Best way to get birds to hunt well, no? Is to feed them stones
(cause it’s true that this is what falconers will do to keep a bird hungry and sharp, they’ll fool it into thinking it’s been well fed by giving it pellets of stone so that when the hood is removed and the bird out working it’s surprised by its own hunger which makes it sharper-eyed than ever in finding prey).
But it was a dodge to my question and he knew it, the Falcon : he looked askance, ashamed : he looked to my army of babies instead.
Infantile sophisticates, he said. Bare of everything, seen for what they are. Good. And I like your Apollo. Where’s the lute? Ah. Yes. And I like very much the grace of your minstrels. And – these –oh. What’s this?
The gathering of poets you wanted, I said, in the top corner, as required.
But – is that – isn’t it – me? he said.
(It was true I’d painted unasked a likeness of him, in with the poets : I sensed he’d prefer to be seen as a poet rather than a scholar.)
What’s that I’m holding? he said.
The heart, I said.
Oh! he said.
And this’ll be, see, here, heat, I said. As if you’re examining a heart off which heat is rising like breath from a mouth on a cold day.
He coloured : then he gave me a wry look.
You’re a politician, Francescho, he said.
No, Mr de Prisciano, I said. A painter, by the work of my arms and hands and eyes and by the worth of the work.
But he turned his back very quick then in case I asked about the money again.
On his way down the ladder backwards he looked back up at me.
Keep it up, he said.
Then he winked.
So to speak, he said.
(One night I came through the curtain over the month room door, it was only midnight, not late, a good damp night and very few others working cause I preferred it when quiet, but as I came down the room I saw by the shadows the swing of a torch up on one of the platforms at the far end of the room : I stayed in the dark by the foot of the scaffolding : the Falcon, I could hear, was somewhere up there speaking to someone –
Veneziano, yes. Piero, certainly. Castagno, maybe some Flems, certainly a bit of Mantegna, Donatello. But as if, your Grace, the work’s soaked itself deep in them all but then washed itself new and clean and come up with a freshness like nothing I’ve ever.
Your Grace.
Yes, the other said. I’m not sure I like the way he’s done my face.
There’s a charm, the Falcon said. A great, I don’t know what else to call it. Likeableness.
Must never underestimate charm, the other said.
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 shaken 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.