The Passion of Artemisia

by Susan Vreeland

  His hands stroked my thighs. I squeezed shut against him. Try, I told myself. He waited. His hand between my knees urged me. Open. Open. A little at a time. It wasn’t him that was making this difficult. It was me. I felt myself relax, a little at a time. Slowly, his hand moved up my leg and sent a quiver up to the center of me. A soft murmur, not words, just sound. Was it him or me? His weight didn’t rest completely on me. He was being careful. In the surprising hope of becoming precious to him, I put my hands on his back. Let them not be too cold, I thought. I offered up my fear and he took it, gently enough at first, until he lost himself in a temporary madness and I braced against the slamming of his frenzy.

  I ached so badly afterward that I had to hold myself, and then I felt a new sensation—his relaxing into sound and heavy sleep. No stealthy departure. No hurry. No crying. Just stillness.

  Grazie, Maria. He did not make me feel ashamed.

  7

  Florence

  Milk-white oxen wearing flowered wreaths and hauling carts of olives blocked the road, but Pietro didn’t seem to mind. “I like that wooden chuk-chuk-chuk sound of the olive pickers, the way it echoes through the orchards,” he said.

  Out the coach window, netting covered the ground under olive trees made ghostly by vapors of morning fog.

  “It seems like the whole world is outside with something to do,” I said, happy to have a normal conversation.

  “It’s hard work looking up all day long for weeks. Giovanni and I did it at my uncle’s orchard when we were young. Hard on the neck.”

  “Like Michelangelo painting the Sistine ceiling, probably. Or my father. He’s doing a ceiling for Cardinal Borghese.”

  “Just as hard, only with olives you have to do it all over again every year.”

  I was pleased whenever I could make him smile, even though I was still suspicious of his honorable gesture of marrying me. To ask him what his reasons were seemed crass. Could gratitude be the seed of love?

  While we rode, we ate salami, bread, green apples, and fresh pecorino, sheep cheese that the innkeeper had wrapped in a cloth. Simple enough. I could surely make meals like that.

  I noticed a slim, square tower lifting its crenellated crown as if on a slender neck above a row of cypress trees. “What is the most beautiful thing in Florence?” I asked, thinking I might get a painter’s description of a graceful church spire or a marble figure or a fresco.

  He thought a moment, cut an apple wedge, and held it out to me on the sharp tip of his knife. “The women.”

  “You might as well have used the blade on my bare breast.” I laughed softly to show I felt no injury, though my words were closer to the truth. Being careful of the blade in the jostling coach, I picked off the fruit.

  He winced when he noticed the raw pink flesh at the base of my fingers and some deep scabs still there. “I’m sorry,” he said, still looking. “Giovanni told me.”

  “Do you think the marks will ever disappear?”

  “I don’t want to say.” With a wry expression, he pointed his knife toward the rolled-up canvases. “If you paint like that and earn lots of money, you can cover them with rings. Or if you had married a rich man.”

  “I’d rather marry a good man.”

  He smiled in an abashed way, cut another wedge of apple, held it with his fingers up to my lips, and watched me take it between my teeth.

  In the afternoon two days later, the clouds broke apart and sunlight brushed with a light sienna the stone arches and crenellations of Porta Romana, the southern entrance to the city of Florence. Ochre buildings with red tiled roofs and shutters the color of cinnamon or basil lined the road. I felt myself getting as excited as Paola had been for me. Florence!

  “This is Palazzo Pitti,” Pietro said, pushing out his chest as we passed a stone palace, strikingly different from tradition because each of the three stories was the same height and had the same rough-hewn stone. It made the building look more formidable than graceful. “Il granduca Cosimo de’ Medici lives here. Magnificent, yes?”

  I nodded. “It’s a beautiful color, so creamy. An impressive palace.” It gained its impressiveness not with decoration or carvings, but simply by the repetition of its arched windows. To me, it looked austere, but I didn’t dare say so. It was endearing that Pietro wanted me to be impressed.

  “Have you ever been inside?”

  “No.” He shrugged. “The Medici are not what they used to be. This is Cosimo II, a far sight from his namesake.”

  We crossed a bridge into the city proper. Buildings taller than those in Rome squeezed the streets into tight corridors clogged with mule carts and fruit and fish stands. Paving stones sent up a racket of horses’ hooves that echoed off stone walls, and chickens flew out from under carriage wheels.

  Pietro asked the coachman to make one trip around the cathedral, the Duomo of Santa Maria del Fiore. When I caught my first sight of its ribbed terracotta dome, I forgave the palace for being so plain. “Someday I’ll tell you the story of how Brunelleschi built the dome,” he said, as full of pride as if he had been Brunelleschi’s workman.

  “The bell tower is a separate building,” I said, astounded at its self-standing height. I craned my neck out the coach window to get a look at the top, which made Pietro laugh. The smooth green, rose, and white marble slabs glistened in the pale light, and the square tower seemed like a God-size reliquary made of precious stones. “Rome has nothing like this,” I said to the sky.

  “Giotto designed it,” Pietro said. “It was finished long before the dome.”

  In the narrower streets off the cathedral square, throngs of people splashed through mud puddles and shouted to get through. The choking smell of horse manure was everywhere. Was I not supposed to notice that because of his obvious pride in his city?

  “Don’t ever walk on this street,” he said as we rode through foul odors from butcher shops. “The paving stones are so slick with offal that women are always falling and breaking their hips. Go around. Later I’ll show you my friend’s macelleria on another street so you don’t have to come here.”

  The street of the cheese shops, though pungent, wasn’t so bad, and by the time we passed the spice shops, I was breathing normally again. Every shade of yellow ochre, sienna, orange, cinnamon, and dull green powders spilled out of large muslin bags onto the street. The colors of my new city. In every piazza a sculpture, in every niche the patron saint of some guild. Everywhere I looked, art! A new life was opening for me.

  Pietro directed the coachman to follow Corso dei Tintori, the avenue of the cloth dyers. Long lengths of wool and silk hung from every window and roofline. “The street is decorated for your arrival,” he said.

  “Like pageant banners.” Women were buying and selling lengths of silk in a rainbow of brilliant colors. “Their clothes may be more elaborate and colorful, in finer fabrics, but the women here aren’t any more beautiful than Rome’s women,” I said with what I hoped he’d take as a teasing smile. I screwed up my nose at the ammonia issuing from steaming vats in order to make him laugh.

  Along the river, women and girls were rinsing heavy wool fleece in the greenish brown Arno. Just beyond this the coach stopped at a cream-colored stone building with a tile roof and faded olive green shutters.

  “My house,” Pietro said.

  He opened the gate to a small courtyard with one fig tree, a few scraggly geraniums, and a square well that was surrounded by mossy green paving stones. The pail and rope told me what I’d be doing every day.

  “I live on the third story,” he said.

  My. I. Maybe someday he’d say we.

  More well-off families lived on the ground floor and first and second stories, I assumed, just as in Rome. “An old woman named Fina who lives on the fourth used to keep house for me,” he said. I guess that meant it would not continue.

  While Pietro and the coachman carried up my cassone and our other bags, I looked around the three rooms that would be my new home. The large main room for pai
nting and living had three sizes of easels and a wide bench which he probably used for posing since it was stacked with pillows, spreads, and draping fabric. Several straw-bottomed chairs were placed around a long rustic trestle table where his drawing and painting things were spread out. Not wanting to disturb them, I moved an iron lantern with oiled parchment sides to set down my bag and immediately got a splinter from the table.

  Where would I store my painting things? On the windowsill, maybe, unless I wanted to mix them in with his on the table. In the years ahead, would we ever get to a state of no longer knowing whose brushes we were using?

  The kitchen had a stone sink and an enclosed water bucket mounted behind it with a faucet. I assumed that was what I’d have to use to carry water up three flights of stairs from the well. Or would he do it?

  The third room had a low, sloped ceiling so that we had to bend over halfway into the room. There was a bed with a straw mattress, two low chests, and a basin stand. The floors were terra-cotta brick in a herringbone pattern. On the side of the bed where he had laid his cloak, there was a small, thin goatskin on the floor, but not on the other side. I wished I had brought more of my mother’s things, particularly her foot rug and her Roman-style folding camp chair. It had a cushion. Nothing here did.

  Throughout the house the plastered walls were covered with unframed paintings—Holy Families, the Annunciation, Saint Teresa in Ecstasy—all of them voluptuous women with extravagant drapery in rich, strong colors. In one painting of the Annunciation, the eyes of Mary when she was told of the birth of the Savior had no specific emotion. I would have given her eyes astonishment by having them a bit more round and the irises lighter to call attention to them. His blending of color would be improved with the amber varnish, but I’d said too much about that already.

  His paintings covered every wall, sometimes two paintings high. Where would there be room for mine? If I were fortunate, if I were skilled enough in this city of artists, mine wouldn’t stay on our own walls.

  “Florentine models?” I asked when he came in bringing the last of the bags.

  “Of course.”

  “All right. I admit. They’re beautiful.”

  Although he only smiled, I could tell I had pleased him. I had meant the women more than the paintings. Who were they? Was I looking at a history of his—should I call them associations? The women looked back at me holding secrets I doubted I would ever know. For the time being at least, Pietro’s mystery made him alluring.

  He opened the shutters in all three rooms and the double doors onto a narrow balcony overlooking the Arno. We stepped outside. A scant row of working people’s low dwellings huddled against green hills on the other side. The gurgling of the river pouring over a low diagonal stone dam was soothing.

  “Just think. That water will be in the sea one day, and then it could go anywhere in the world, and we’re seeing it right now. It’s a beautiful view.”

  “You may not say so when the river stinks. It helps to keep a little sugar or cinnamon burning over the fire.”

  His little housewifely hint was sweet.

  We looked down at couples arm in arm making an early evening passeggiata on the street separating our building from the river bank. The embarrassment of how I came to be married crept over me again, and I wished that Pietro and I could have chosen each other out of love like other men and women were beginning to do. That wistfulness must have shown on my face. He drew me back inside as if he’d read my mind, through the main room into the bedchamber, tipped me backward under the low ceiling, and lowered me onto the bed. With that amused sideways grin, he untied my bodice laces and quickly solved the mystery of my skirt hooks. Our lovemaking was wordless, swift, only a momentary closeness.

  We fell asleep together, without a cover. When he changed positions, I woke up, startled, remembering where I was. My eyes traveled over his body silhouetted by a shaft of moonlight through the window. The straight ridge of his backbone, the rolling landscape of his back, the hollow in his buttock—all of him was surprisingly, painfully, unutterably desirable. I dared to touch his side. His skin was cool. It couldn’t be love I felt so soon, but an admiration for the beauty of his form which made me tremble and lie sleepless. If I were to be granted love on top of all the rest, I thought my heart would split.

  I learned in the weeks that followed that he was either hot or cold, with me fully, or someplace distant and unreachable. At those times, I trembled between sheets lest I seem a fool if he did not want me after I had made a gesture offering myself to him. His changeableness made me afraid to enjoy freely the times when he was fully mine.

  Graziela had said I must not believe in illusion. In my first letter to her, I wrote,

  I am trusting him only day by day and am trying to resist the allure of untested love. Even though I do see signs of affection, he still might want me only to grind his pigments, and clean his palette and hose. I want no more scars, even invisible ones, because of a man. Tell Paola she was right. The city is glorious with art and opportunity. So far, I am very happy.

  Con amore,

  Artemisia

  And to Father, I wrote simply,

  Thank you. I have high hopes. Florence has many beauties.

  The finest times with Pietro were Sunday afternoons when we went to see the art of the city. Pietro decided each week what he would show me but he wouldn’t tell me ahead of time. He wanted to surprise me. It was this playful aspect of his aloofness that fascinated me. On Sundays I woke with fresh anticipation of some new thing—a subject, a composition, a gesture, or an interpretation. If I used my eyes, and forced myself to go slowly and look with thoughtful consideration, I would encounter something wonderful. In this way, I learned the Florentine taste.

  Dressed in new doublet and hose, new shoes, and a new hat in gathered purple velvet, Pietro held out his arm for me to hold with the air of a courtier who took delight in showing off his city’s treasures. He told me histories and bits of information that made the artists human—how Ghiberti, not Brunelleschi, won the competition for the Baptistry doors, how Brunelleschi left the city in anger and went to Rome to study and measure classical ruins, how Donatello, his boy lover who went with him to Rome called him Pippo, how Brunelleschi challenged the other Florentine architects to make an egg stand on end, how he proved his own cleverness by tapping its narrow end on a table which broke it enough for it to stand upright, how that won for him the commission to build a self-supporting dome over the hole that had gaped over the cathedral for fifty years. And how Michelangelo regretted having kissed only the hand and not the face of the dying Vittoria Colonna, the light and solace of his later years. Through Pietro’s stories, the city came alive for me.

  “Masaccio was a bear of a man who died at twenty-seven,” he said as we entered the monastery church of Santa Maria del Carmine one Sunday. Inside, he directed me to a small side chapel with frescoed walls. “This is the Brancacci Chapel, his patron’s.”

  I stood transfixed before Masaccio’s Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden. In a bleak, brown setting without any hint of a garden, Adam covered his bowed face with his hands. Eve’s eyes were wounded hollows nearly squeezed shut, and her open mouth uttered an anguished cry that echoed through time and resounded in my heart. The pathos of their shame moved me so that my legs were weak. I held on to the stone balustrade. Between Eve and me, I felt no gulf of centuries.

  “I want to wrap her in my arms to comfort her,” I said softly.

  “Michelangelo, Raphael, and Botticelli sat right here drawing from this fresco,” Pietro said as casually as if he had been among them more than a hundred years ago.

  Nothing I saw the rest of the day could I even remember clearly when we fell into bed together. I couldn’t sleep. I stared into the dark at Eve’s tortured expression. That was what it must feel like to be totally abandoned, spurned, deprived of God. For all I’d been through, I had never felt such devastating despair.

  The rhythm of Pietro’s breathing
pulsed Eve’s pain into me and I flung myself over, unable to lie still. My thrashing woke him. “What’s the matter?” he murmured.

  “I can’t get to sleep. I keep thinking of Eve.”

  He turned and drew me to him as if his sheltering arm would quiet me. “Try not to think, amore.” We breathed the darkness in unison until I felt the wakening of his member brush against me. No, I thought. Not now. How could I, now, haunted by Eve’s anguish after her indulgence of appetite?

  A surprising, furtive spasm quivered in me, and an involuntary squeezing deep inside. He turned me how he wanted me and rocked me, soothing me into compliance until I pushed the agony of Eve to the back of my mind and a sweeter agony took over. Afterward we slept as one.

  Months later, alone one morning, I was cleaning brushes in turpentine and a wave of nausea rushed over me. The smell was overpowering. I opened the windows but I couldn’t stand up a moment longer to breathe the fresh air. It wasn’t fresh anyway. It smelled of the river. I sank into a chair and gripped the arms. My mouth tasted awful. The room blurred. I rushed to get a basin, and threw up.

  I had expected blood for more than a month, maybe two. Even though I had known it would probably happen, I was stunned by the reality. A baby. It made me anxious. What if Pietro . . . ? I didn’t even want to frame the thought into words.

  Had my own mother felt this strange dizziness, this swelling—not just in the belly but in the throat and behind the eyes—the moment she suspected? But she had died in childbirth in a bed full of blood and screams. I was twelve and terrified. I had seen it all. I was enraged at father for killing her, or so it seemed to me, and silent for months until Paola’s and Graziela’s love slowly dissolved my stupor and I began to live again.