The Passion of Artemisia

by Susan Vreeland

  The hardest part was to write the letter presenting the painting to him as a gift and offering my skill for future commissions. For three days I struggled to perfect the humble language of service. I sat at the table wasting paper with false starts, and watching Palmira play with a paper doll I had cut out of a ruined letter.

  Instead, I wrote an easier letter.

  Dear Graziela,

  Palmira is three now and full of inquiry. “Why do ants have fur?” she asked the other day. Fina, my angel helper who lives upstairs, taught her a song about a child carried to a far-off land by riding on a yellow bird, and now I hear it constantly. It reminds me of the birds on your manuscript edging. Are you painting any more Psalters? Have you gotten your roof repaired?

  Pietro doesn’t seem to mind that I paint, but he minds deeply that I have been admitted to the Accademia del Disegno before him. I have painted another Judith as a gift for Cosimo de’ Medici. Forgive me, Graziela, but I have made a cruciform of her sword. Let that puzzle them for centuries. If Cosimo accepts it for his palace, or commissions me for another, I fear stormy times ahead at home. Say a little prayer.

  Ever your admirer and disciple,

  Artemisia

  When I finished, the letter to Cosimo came more easily.

  A week after I had the painting and letter delivered, Cosimo invited me to the Palazzo Pitti, at my convenience, a genteel touch.

  Pietro grumbled, “Of course. What do you expect when you give away your art?”

  “You could do it too, you know.”

  “Push work on him? It’s more gracious to paint for lesser patrons in the city and wait until he notices the work on his own.”

  “Wait? How long? We are mortal, Pietro. The sand falls through the glass every breath we take.”

  “Don’t be morbid.”

  “I’m not. I’m being realistic.”

  Since it was early autumn, that brief, hazy, lovely time in Florence between summer’s long sweltering days and November rains, I walked across the Ponte Vecchio rather than spending money for a carriage. The Arno had shrunken to a sluggish muddy rivulet, and the normal reflection of ochre buildings that quivered on the surface of its green water was gone. Instead, weeds and dried grass edged the putrid ooze along the banks, and clouds of mosquitoes billowed up from the standing water. But that didn’t darken my spirits.

  If Pietro had been with me, he would have let the smell and the mosquitoes sink him into gloom. He might even have turned around, convinced himself that he would try another day, and then lose his resolve. He always did things that hurt himself, it seemed—like taking a job for fresco repair without pushing for a commission on new work. And he never used Venetian amber varnish when it was clear to both of us that it would enhance his work. I couldn’t understand it. If a person loves something above all else, if he values the work of his heart and hands, then he should naturally, without hesitation, pour into it his whole soul, undivided and pure. Great art demands nothing less.

  I waved my way through the mosquito cloud and went on.

  The Pitti stretched out in stiff formality on the left side of Via de’ Guicciardini. Even though I knew it not to be the case, the intimidating building seemed the home of a despot rather than a family friendly to the arts. At the tall, heavy door, I gave my name to the porter who checked a list. He directed me upstairs to the piano nobile, the floor of audience rooms. I saw from a window that the palace was even larger than it looked from the street, having two perpendicular wings stretching back toward a grassy upward slope to form a U shape which enclosed a carriage courtyard.

  I passed through the first windowed room full of antique sculpture and was ushered through a marble doorway into a room with elaborate white and gold cornices, the walls covered in deep rose brocade with paintings hanging everywhere. I could not look at them now. Courtesy required that I look at Cosimo. He and his guests were seated facing the courtyard eating what looked to be roasted stuffed pheasants surrounded by olives and artichokes. Pheasant feathers arched like a fountain in decorative display over mounds of quince, dates, figs, and almonds. In Rome I had not known food to be a work of art.

  A steward announced me and I approached and curtseyed.

  “So here is the feminine hand that wields such a powerful brush,” Cosimo said, and extended a welcoming arm. “I had hoped to meet you at the academy.”

  “Your Serene Highness, I am greatly honored,” I said, holding my curtsey and looking at the pattern of inlaid stone in the floor between us. “And I beg forgiveness for intruding on your guests.”

  “I am the one honored with such a gift, signorina.”

  How complimentary to address me that way. Apparently it was a Florentine pleasantry to reserve “signora” for matrons older than I. I wondered what he knew about me.

  “You’ve given your Judith a hard face, you know.”

  “She is concentrating. Like all heroines, she feels profoundly her task.”

  “As you, no doubt, have felt about yours,” he said with a chuckle. “And who, may I ask, was your male model who deserved such revenge?”

  “It is not personal vendetta, Your Highness.” Santa Maria, let me not offend him. “If it is to be called revenge at all, it’s revenge against tyranny.”

  He gave that a slow, considered nod. “I shall find a fine place for your Judith Slaying Holofernes in the Sala dell’ Iliade.” He chuckled. “A place where my guests might need to be awakened from more passive pleasures. Be assured that it will be among good company, and further, that it must not be a gift. You shall be generously paid.”

  “Honored again, Most Illustrious Highness.”

  “But it must not be the sole representative of such a talented hand and mind.”

  Hope rose up my throat in waves.

  “Let another one of equal skill accompany it and you shall be doubly rewarded.”

  “Another Judith?”

  “Yes! Surely there are other moments to her story worthy of your brush.”

  “I will make it my most immediate task and pleasure.”

  “Why do pigeons fly, Mama?” Palmira asked, skipping along beside me the next day as I walked through the streets and piazzas and churches looking for an idea.

  “I suppose to get away from little girls and boys who pester them.”

  How could I choose another moment with as much drama as the slaying? I thought of Father’s version in which the two women huddled together over the decapitated head. I’d copied it when I was just learning to paint. The figures were strikingly posed, but that huddling wasn’t what I wanted.

  At one end of the Loggia della Signoria stood Donatello’s bronze Judith and Holofernes. I’d never cared for it. Instead of lying down, Holofernes was sitting up on the mattress while Judith’s arm and scimitar were raised to strike. The figures were awkwardly positioned, the effect without grace.

  I stopped before Michelangelo’s David. His thunderous scowl looking out to the Piazza della Signoria seemed to shout to the giant, Goliath, How dare you even think you can destroy me with your sword! Now that was boldness. That was confidence. Florentines loved the David because he was the weaker force confronting and vanquishing a greater force. It was how they saw themselves against the world, and it was in Judith’s story also.

  While Palmira chased after pigeons, sending them flapping in the air, I stood in my favorite spot which gave me the profile I loved, David looking to his left toward Goliath. How could I use that wonderful curve to his neck? Looking to the side like that, he was alert to the danger but he wasn’t tense, just ready, with his sling across his shoulder. If my new Judith could depict the moment after the slaying when Holofernes’s head is in Abra’s basket, the two women, facing each other perhaps, could be alarmed by some new danger, a noise in the camp. That would be a challenge—to paint a sound. Judith could look to her left toward the danger, just as David was, and she could have the same curve in her strong neck that David had.

  Instead of the sling,
she would rest her sword on her shoulder, on the lace edging of her white chemise, in fact. I liked that—the sword blade possibly cutting threads of the lace, the world of swords and the world of lace so different, yet touching dangerously. Yes. It would be new. It would be all mine. And it would not be for an age when women hide their skills in deference to men, even husbands.

  Early one morning months into the work, I took Palmira with me across the Arno to Via Maggio, the street of the antiquarians which I knew she would love, and in a used-goods shop I bought an old, square metal table mirror in a wooden stand-up frame which had a tilting mechanism. I set it on the table at home and studied my neck and my Judith’s neck, Vanna’s neck actually, since I had hired her to model again. Vanna’s neck as I had painted it was too delicate. Judith couldn’t be that feminine and lovely. I was right in telling her to skip a day, even though she had still demanded to be paid. I set to work painting over Vanna’s neck my own thicker neck and the first signs of my coming double chin.

  When Vanna came the following day, Pietro hadn’t left yet. She took one look at the painting and shouted, “What have you done? You’ve ruined it. That’s not me!”

  “No, it’s Judith. But the eyes will be yours, and the mouth and hair.”

  She sniffed in a pouty way. “That neck is ugly.” With big, watery eyes and a pitiful expression, she appealed to Pietro. “Don’t you think it’s ugly?”

  “It’s David’s neck,” I said before Pietro had a chance. “In the Piazza della Signoria.”

  “You expect me to be proud of that? People won’t know it’s me with that man’s neck. Pietro, how could you let her ruin me?”

  Caught between us, he shrugged and lifted his hands sheepishly.

  “Vanna, please, blow your nose and take your position. I only need you for a few more days.”

  She thought a moment. “Double pay. I’ll only stay if you give me double pay.”

  We all stood looking at each other, waiting for someone else to make the first move.

  “Give it to her,” Pietro muttered.

  “All right, all right.” I handed her Graziela’s earring. “Put this on so I can see the shadow it makes.”

  I dismissed her as soon as I could, and used my own features in profile.

  Painting the sheen and nap of Judith’s brown velvet dress, the gold and black onyx beads sewn onto the intricate double panels of Florentine braid, Mother’s bloodstone hair ornament edged in gold, the pommel of Judith’s sword hilt shaped as a Gorgon’s screaming head—all of it satisfied me, but when I got to Holofernes’s head in Abra’s basket, I had more trouble. Though I had in mind Caravaggio’s Goliath, I couldn’t make the greenish gray face look like anything other than Agostino’s. That bothered me. I didn’t want to paint out of hate. That would be cramped and mean-spirited and would limit my art and my expression forever. I worked and worried and it delayed my progress, but I could not let it go. I didn’t want to be linked with Agostino’s likeness forever, hanging among all those paintings created out of love.

  I wrote to Graziela and told her I was paralyzed. How do I get rid of hate, I asked. I was restless until her answer came.

  Cara Mia,

  If that man has not separated you from the love of God, and he has not, then the only thing keeping hate of him alive is your thought about him. Only your pride keeps him in your memory and in your brush. Dissolve your pride, and you dissolve your hate. To be still possessed of the hate that pain made is not intelligent. Take care, Artemisia. It can sap your energy from what you know to be your purpose. By being troubled by it, you have already discovered it to be unworthy of your grander aims, and that, tesoro, is the beginning of humility.

  Grazie a Maria, they have begun to work on our roof. Sister Paola wonders if you have visited Santa Trinità dei Monti in Florence. She wants you to know that the large crucifix in one of the chapels bowed its head to San Giovanni Gualberto who was kneeling in adoration. I long to know everything you’ve seen in Florence—every painting and sculpture, every church, piazza, and tower, everything in sunlight, shadow, even rain. If you could spare the time and if it would please you, put your artist’s eyes into words.

  Sister Paola sends her utmost love, as I do.

  Yours in Christ,

  Graziela

  A burning sensation behind my eyes blurred the words. I had not realized how much I missed them.

  I wrote her back right away and described Michelangelo’s first Madonna and Child in bas relief, his thick-muscled David, Donatello’s winsome, youthful David, the Duomo, Masaccio’s Adam and Eve, Botticelli’s Venus. I felt inadequate to put into words the adoration these works of art stirred in me. I gave up and took a walk with Palmira and drew several little drawings of what I had tried to describe and one of Palmira chasing pigeons, and tucked them into the letter.

  In between times at the easel, there was always food to buy, food to cook, one meal so soon after another, dishes to wash. I never knew when Pietro would be home and when he wouldn’t. After he finished the fresco repair, he moved an easel and some of his painting things out of the house, I didn’t know where. “So you’ll have more room,” he explained. A secret part of me withered like grapevines preparing for winter. He began to live like my father did, dressed more flamboyantly, and painted, ate, and caroused with his friends elsewhere than at home, missing the joy of Palmira’s growing up. I remembered Father singing with Agostino or Caravaggio in the street as they staggered home near dawn all cock-a-hoop about what big things they’d been doing and what great painters they were, and Father banging his way through the rooms, knocking over a chair and falling, stinking, onto his bed. Was this to be my future?

  The winter was particularly cold; it even snowed. Our well water froze and some mornings we had to strike it with an iron rod to break up the ice. Palmira had a fever, chills, and cough, and I was terrified. I stopped painting while she lay sick for a month. At first she cried a lot, choking on her sobs, and then she grew too weak for that. The thought of losing her haunted me day and night. Pietro stayed home more often to crack the ice and haul up water for me to dampen rags to cool her fever. He made endless, worried trips to the apothecary, and tended the fire while Palmira’s wracking cough held me to her bedside. One night Pietro paced the room, picking up objects, setting them down, not knowing what to do.

  “Sit here with us,” I said. He hesitated. “It might help.”

  He brought over another straight-back chair with straw seat, sat down, and put his hand on the quilt over Palmira’s leg.

  “I remember once when I was sick as a little girl. I drifted in and out of sleep, and heard the soft murmurs of my parents’ voices floating in a fog. I didn’t know what they were saying, but it didn’t matter. The blending of their voices sounded natural and loving and it comforted me.”

  A lock of Palmira’s hair was plastered to her temple and lay near her eye. Pietro lifted it away and stroked her leg, awkwardly at first, and then laid his head on her bed. It was the tenderest gesture I had ever seen him make.

  “Say something, so she can hear your voice too.”

  He turned his head sideways on the bed. Inadequacy flooded his eyes. “Palmira, your papa’s here,” he said. “You’re going to be all right.” I nodded encouragement. “I love you, little dove.”

  My heart swelled as if he’d said the words to me, and I returned the feeling, my offered cup of love full and running over. Wanting to make the moment last, I combed my fingers through his hair, which always soothed him. His eyes closed. When his breathing became deep and rhythmic, I leaned down next to him and laid my head on his shoulder and pulled my shawl up around us both.

  We must have slept there awhile, a family, as close as on the day Palmira was baptized. When she stirred, we both woke up, and the stiffness in our necks and backs was nothing compared to the stiffness aching between us once again. Pietro looked at me with his dark, secretive eyes, astonished at his own affection. I kissed him just below his temple.
One side of his mouth smiled in a soft, bewildered way.

  Palmira’s sickness finally let up in the spring, and Pietro was gone more often again. I didn’t know where. I didn’t dare ask. A new heartsickness welled up in me. I was a month behind in painting and still had Holofernes’s face to do. Paint hard, I told myself.

  But I didn’t. Palmira was all the more precious to me because of the threat of losing her, so I spent more time with her. I felt unutterable comfort in her small, smooth hand in mine as we walked along the river. “Look, Palmira. Look at the light on the water. See how it dances? It’s not just green. It’s blue and brown and gray. Look at the colors move.”

  “I can’t see it.”

  “Stand still and you will. Just look at one place.”

  But she couldn’t stand still in her joy to be outdoors.

  Across the river stood a three-arched crenellated tower. I made up stories about a princess imprisoned there whose sad lover was turned into a long-necked white bird that lived along the grassy bank below her tower, devoted still in his love to her. In summer when the water was shallow, we held hands and waded out on the diagonal dam. She loved to feel the cool water rippling across her ankles and to play at fishing with a reed.

  I told her about Graziela and Paola in the convent on a Roman hill. In an open market I bought two wooden bowls and rigged them with twigs and paper sails. We fashioned dolls out of paper which Palmira colored black with a piece of charcoal from the fire, except for their faces and hands. She named them Sister Graziela and Sister Paola. I taught her the letters of their names and she wrote them on the backs. She would not say their names without the “Sister” first, as if they were titled ladies. I tied strings to the bowls and we floated them in the water and watched the nuns bounce and slide downriver as we walked along the bank, supremely happy in our play. Watching her tug Graziela’s string, I realized that because Palmira got well, Graziela’s words were true. I had not been separated from the love of God.