The Passion of Artemisia

by Susan Vreeland

  I couldn’t allow myself to think about that. I wanted a child, and wanted Pietro to want one too. I wouldn’t tell him just yet. Not until I was certain.

  Every day, the same thing happened—throwing up at turpentine, even linseed oil. I couldn’t mix my paints. But in the evenings, I felt fine. A couple weeks later, I seemed to feel a thickening and there was a definite tenderness in my breasts. It had to be.

  That meant there were things to do. I washed my face, dressed, tied my hair in a knot and, on this important day, secured it with my mother’s hair ornament. I rolled up my Susanna and my Judith and my Woman Playing a Lute and fastened them with a ribbon. I didn’t know when my belly would swell, and presenting myself as a painter soon to be a mother would either be incomprehensible or laughable to some people. I had wanted to show the academy four completed canvases, and though I’d finished Judith, I had no other full-size paintings. I had some studies, but because I hadn’t been painting from a model, they had no individuality.

  “Whether I’m ready or not, it has to be now,” I told Pietro.

  He knew why I was rolling the canvases. The Accademia. We had talked about it before, but because it wasn’t easy to share the intimacy of my hope, I hadn’t said much.

  “Why now?”

  “There’s a reason. I’ll tell you tomorrow. I promise.”

  He gave me a dark look that I didn’t understand. I opened the door, wondering if I was making a mistake.

  “Tell me now.”

  If I did, he might not let me go. I wanted the two things, the academy and a baby, to be separate in his mind. I had to cajole him. I set the roll of canvases down by the door and bent over him where he sat, threading my fingers through his curly hair the way he liked. I kissed him on the ear and whispered, “It’s a surprise. Just for you.” He reached for me in a playful way but I dodged him, grabbed the canvases, and slipped out the door.

  At the gate downstairs, I looked for good omens to reassure me. The geranium had exploded with scarlet blossoms. A chittering pair of finches in our fig tree urged me on. So did the bells of Santa Croce. The sky spread out in pale azure, smooth as spun silk. The air itself was sun-soaked and golden. Everything seemed laden with blessings.

  With my canvases tucked under my arm, and a child in my belly, I stepped out into the street, into the throng of bakers’ boys balancing boards on their heads to carry loaves of bread, handcarts piled with figs and grapes and melons, hawkers shouting their wares of cooking pots and knives. The cracking of whips and clatter of wheels passing on uneven paving stones fed me with the life of the city. My city now. City of Masaccio and Fra Angelico and Michelangelo and me. Artemisia Gentileschi. Maybe I’d call myself Artemisia Lomi, my ancestral name.

  The closer I got to the Cistercian monastery in Borgo Pinti where the Accademia dell’ Arte del Disegno was housed, the harder it was to put Pietro’s look out of my mind. I was kept waiting in an antechamber lined with small paintings of Saint Luke, patron saint of artists. I tried to study them, but I couldn’t concentrate. Now that I was actually here, fear made me hot and cold at the same time. This would be the first time I showed my work to strangers of consequence on my own, without Father’s endorsement. I had to speak for myself. I went over in my mind what I would say.

  A round, yeasty-faced official came toward me. He wore a green damask waistcoat without a doublet, as if he were in his own home. “Yes, signorina?”

  “I am Artemisia Gentileschi from Rome. My father is Orazio Gentileschi. If you may be so kind, I have some paintings to show you.”

  “Ah, yes, Signor Gentileschi. I understand he was a good friend of Michelangelo da Caravaggio.”

  “Yes, he was. I knew him too, before he died.”

  “Under mysterious circumstances, I might add. Most likely caught running for his life after stabbing someone in a fight over a prostitute. Booted, spurred, wearing sword and poignard like a brigand. In and out of jail for quarreling with police and insulting a papal guard. And you say you knew him well?”

  “No, not well. I was a child, signore. My father—”

  I shifted my rolled canvases from one arm to the other to bring him back to art.

  “Your father sends his daughter to bring us his paintings? Why doesn’t he come himself?”

  “No, signore. Not his. My own. I am a painter too.”

  His forehead contracted into a scowl. He gave a quick, impatient nod and I unrolled the canvases onto a long wooden table with adjustable top, and tacked them down. He tipped the tabletop up and stood back to look, but didn’t say anything. He suffered a violent tick in his neck which I tried to ignore out of politeness. He peered down at my hands.

  “One moment.”

  I sat down and waited until he returned with a thin man whose pale brown beard was shaped like a spade. They whispered rudely in my presence. With opaque eyes the brown of snail shells, the thin man looked sideways at my fingers too. I ordered my hands not to move. So that was how it was going to be. They knew. The world of art and artists was small indeed. That told me I needed to obtain a commission before my belly swelled. It would only confirm their judgments, and the Roman jeers of “whore” would follow me here. I folded my hands across my stomach.

  The thin man said, “I am Signor Bandinelli, Luogotenente of the Accademia. My steward tells me you have brought these paintings. Your purpose in showing them to us?”

  I stood up. “Why, to seek admission, of course.”

  “They are yours? Painted completely by you?”

  “Yes, signore.”

  He turned to examine them. After a few moments, he cleared his throat. “Most women painters who aspire to professional esteem consider a conservative emulation of the masters sufficient for their hopes. To aspire to such expressive singularity”—he waved his hand backward at my Judith—“with invenzione like this, might jeopardize your precarious achievement, as well as your unprecedented petition, as a woman, to our Accademia.”

  “What’s the point of repetition?” I asked.

  “The point, signorina, is that deliberate flamboyance applied to biblical themes diminishes the spiritual content.”

  Look in their eyes and show no fear, Graziela had said.

  “Perhaps the great moments deserving of celebration in art are not just moments of spiritual elevation.” Whatever possessed me to counter him? As an afterthought, I smiled sweetly.

  Bandinelli took his time studying Judith and her maidservant, Abra. He couldn’t ignore that these were not weak women empowered only by the intervention of God. He had to see their strong arms and recognize their own control, Abra pinning down the arm of Holofernes while Judith held his head by his hair. Judging from Pietro’s first reaction, I knew it was a view undesirable for men to contemplate.

  “So this is Caravaggist? That shadow on her face?” the steward asked.

  “Yes. For dramatic effect. To draw attention to the lighted side. And to suggest a clandestine act.”

  I hated myself a moment for explaining what should be apparent.

  They passed over the Woman Playing a Lute without comment and peered at Susanna’s nakedness with the same lewd voyeurism the elders did, as though titillated that it was painted by a woman with a shaded reputation. Signor Bandinelli knit his brows as if he was trying to grasp a thought. The painting must be too different. I had not given the focus to the old lechers ogling her at the bath like all the other Susanna paintings did, anticipating with glee their conquest while she waited for the inevitable. Apparently he didn’t want to recognize that her anxiety was the true subject of the painting.

  “For a woman painter to attempt originality in interpretation is unnecessary, and perhaps even hazardous,” Signor Bandinelli said, and looked to the round-faced man to concur.

  “I am not a stranger to hazard, signore,” I said before the steward could agree.

  I nodded to both of them, and when they only nodded back, I rolled up the canvases and paused a moment to give them one last cha
nce to offer me a little shred of encouragement.

  They looked at me blankly.

  “We will, I am certain, see one another again,” I said.

  My heart quaked as I walked out the door.

  8

  Palmira

  Pietro looked up from his drawing as soon as I came in the door. Slowly and quietly, he set down his charcoal. I let the rolled-up canvases fall to the floor and pushed them against the wall with my foot. I went into the kitchen and stared at the heel of bread left from morning. He came up behind me and laid his hands on my shoulders, and patted me a few times, as if consoling a sulking child. I ripped the bread in two.

  “What did you expect? No patrons in Florence have bought your work yet, and the academy has never had a woman.”

  I whirled around to face him. “But they could. It’s not a law.”

  His crooked, knowing smile made me feel like a fool. What a novelty, a wife who painted. How curious. How droll. She even thought the academy would want her. Foolish woman. He could laugh about it with his fellows in the tavern, and repeat the old saying: “A woman is like an egg. The more she is beaten, one way or another, the better she becomes.”

  I fixed a meager supper and went to bed early in sour silence.

  Waking the next morning after fitful sleep, I ruminated in bed over what had happened at the academy, and where I had misspoken. Woman painter, they’d said. Are they painted completely by you? As if my father had held my hand while I grasped the brush. My disappointment made me feel queasy, and then I remembered: a baby. A warmth infused me, counteracting the nausea, an expectation, surprising and foreign. Was this the swell and urge of maternal impulse? I’d never felt it before this moment, never yearned for a child the way some women do, but now that it was here, definitely here, I was hot with anxious hope that Pietro would be happy too.

  When Pietro stirred, I drew his hand to my belly and said softly, “How would it be for a son to learn painting from a father and a mother? Together.”

  He jerked upright in bed. “Is this the surprise?”

  “Mmm, maybe. We’d be the first family of our kind in Florence.”

  “You mean a baby? When? Soon? A son. I’ll have a fine strapping son.”

  “Half a year, I’m guessing.”

  “We have to get ready.”

  I laughed. “Not yet.”

  “We’ll call him Pietro Giovanni Andrea Filippo Leonardo Michelangelo Stiattesi. A fine name for a fine son.”

  His excitement, and my relief, pushed my disappointment about the academy to the back of my mind.

  Feeling a kind of glow around me, I tried to get as much painting done as I could in that half a year, but the turpentine made me sick and some days I couldn’t work at all. I didn’t want to give that any importance even though it seemed a bad omen—motherhood set against painting. Pietro took the painting he was working on and his paints and brushes to a friend’s studio to finish it so the smell wouldn’t bother me.

  When Pietro left the house one day, I found I could paint if I wrapped a cloth folded into a triangle around my face to cover my nose and mouth. He came home and found me that way.

  “Take that off,” he said sharply.

  “Why? I don’t breathe the oil and turpentine so much with it.”

  “Take it off.” He wouldn’t look at me.

  I didn’t understand how that offended him. His dark expression made me afraid to ask. Did he not want me to paint? I put my palette and brushes and bottles of linseed oil and turpentine out on the balcony, closed the door, and untied the cloth.

  “I don’t ever want to see you that way again.”

  I busied myself in the kitchen, put out pasta with eggplant, and broad beans in oil for supper but didn’t feel like eating any myself. I spread out the pillows and lay down on my back on the posing bench resting my hand on my belly to try to feel some fluttery movement. Both of us were quiet while he ate.

  “It’s just that I want to paint so badly,” I said softly.

  I heard his spoon clatter on the table. “When I was a boy, my mother, all the women who couldn’t get out of the city, wore cloths like that at the first sign of the plague. The last time I saw her, she wore one, and kissed me through it before my uncle took Giovanni and me away.”

  I gagged on the saliva in the back of my throat. “I didn’t know.” A trickle of moisture crawled toward my temple. “I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.”

  He came over to the bench and looked down at me and took my hand. “It just shocked me. I didn’t want to think—”

  “It’s all right. My back aches too much to stand at the easel anyway.”

  The next day I drew in bed balancing my drawing album on my stomach and using Pietro’s painting hanging on the opposite wall as a subject. When he came home he had a wooden cradle and a quilt in his arms. He put it down next to me, sat on the bed, and rocked it. They were both used, I could see, but to me they were signs of happiness to come.

  “What’s that? In the cradle?”

  Nestled in the quilt was an earthenware jar with a cork lid. He lifted it out.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  He grinned and handed it to me. “You guess.”

  I shook it a little.

  “No! Don’t do that. The lid might come off.”

  “Is it something to eat?”

  “No.”

  “Something for the baby to eat?”

  “No. Open it.”

  I lifted off the cork. Inside was a fine yellowish powder. “It smells like flowers. Is it for the baby?”

  He stood up, bent over and stuck out his buttocks and pointed there. He looked so funny I laughed even though it hurt my back. “When he gets sore, you put olive oil there and then sprinkle the powder,” he said, making motions in the air as though he were sprinkling and rubbing it in.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “At the apothecary. Franco called it diapasm.”

  “How do you know so much?”

  He grinned and shrugged and raised his chin. “Just intelligent, I guess.”

  It gave me an odd feeling, him knowing what I didn’t.

  “I wish I could do something more than just lie here,” I said, trying to get comfortable by moving onto my side, but that wasn’t any better. Pietro had tried to keep me occupied the last weeks by rotating the paintings on the bedroom walls, but even drawing had gotten tiresome, and for the last few days I had done nothing other than try to find a comfortable position.

  “After the baby comes, you’ll be so busy, you’ll want to have a day of just lying in bed.”

  My time was close. A matter of hours. Fear had crept up from my toes farther each day to squeeze my belly, and now it took all my effort to push it back down. I looked up at Pietro hunched and pacing like a crow on a ledge.

  “Stand still!” I held out my hand and he stepped over to hold it, the ceiling forcing him to bend his head down. I wanted to get a good look at him in case it would be my last.

  “Do I send for her yet?” he asked for the fifth time.

  “No.” He meant the midwife. The neighbor boy was waiting down in the courtyard to fetch her.

  “Maybe if I stood up, I’d feel better.” He helped me up and slowly we walked into the main room. A sudden rush of warm fluid poured out of me. It embarrassed me and I crept back into bed. After a few moments I felt like a giant hand was inside me squeezing and ripping at the same time. I moaned until it let go.

  Pietro knelt beside me and stroked my forehead with a cool cloth. “You’re brave, amore.”

  “No, I’m not.” It irritated me. As if bravery were an easy thing. “I’m not brave at all. I have no choice.”

  “Then you’re brave about not having any choice.” He smiled wanly and I knew that he meant it tenderly.

  “I want this baby, Pietro.”

  The hand squeezed and ripped and let go, over and over for an hour. Then a pain that made the others feel like twitches engulfed me. I tig
htened against it. When a worse one came quickly after, I cried, “Now! Send for her now.”

  He sprang up and cracked his forehead on the beam, ran through the doorway, and shouted down to the boy. He was back before the pain subsided. Fear gripped me.

  “If the blood keeps coming and won’t stop. . .like Mother . . . If it’s a boy . . . If it’s a girl the same. Papa taught me the names of colors right away. Ah . . . Alizarin crimson. Venetian red. Scarlet. Madder lake. It’s from a plant, Papa said. Vermilion. From Spanish cinnabar. Pozzuoli red. From a volcano near Naples. Titian’s red. If . . . If I’m not there, you teach him. Or her. Teach her just the same, Pietro.”

  He took my hand. “You’ll teach her. I’m sure of it.”

  “If I die, if I die, Pietro, give my paintings to my father. No. Not to him. He can look. I want him to look. To mother. No, that wasn’t right. To Grazi . . . ahh . . . ela.”

  “Don’t talk.”

  “One to her. And one to Paola. The rest to you.”

  The midwife and her assistant came in carrying a wooden tub and a birthing chair with grips and straps and a hole in the seat. It looked like a torture contraption designed by the Inquisition. I closed my eyes.

  “Leave us now, signore,” the midwife said. “Go build up the fire.”

  I screamed, cried, and pushed.

  “No. Don’t push yet,” the midwife ordered. “It’s a long time still.”

  For hours I tried to do what they said, tried not to push, begged them to let me, rested in between. Again and again. I didn’t know where Pietro was. I didn’t care. I heard myself scream whenever the pain came. Was it to go on forever?

  “Get it over with,” I yelled. “Give me something. I know you can make it stop.”

  “No, child. You were born into this world to bear this pain. Ever since Eve, it’s woman’s lot in life.”

  “No! I was born to paint!”