The Passion of Artemisia

by Susan Vreeland

  A woman in a full-length hooded cloak dashed into the loggia and lifted off her deep red-violet hood to shake off water.

  “Vanna!” I hadn’t seen her for years.

  She was more startled by my presence sitting on the floor than I was by hers. In an instant her beautiful face turned surly.

  “Why did you use a common wool washer with rough hands instead of me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “For your Mary Magdalene. Some tart from the vats with raw skin. And other women for Diana and Persephone and Aurora. Four Medici commissions, four chances for me to be in his palace and you didn’t use me once.”

  “How do you know whom I use or what I paint?”

  “Pietro told me. He tells me everything,” she crowed, her nose in the air. She hesitated an instant, caught in her own gloating. “He knows about your bad reputation. You and that greasy coachman. A commoner! You don’t know two nuts’ worth about being a painter, or a wife.”

  In that instant, I knew. She was Pietro’s lover.

  When she saw I was speechless, and realized what she had revealed, she lifted her hood and darted out through the rain and into the corner entrance to the Uffizi. In a gorgeous ruby cloak no model feeding two children could afford, her phantom figure passed before the marble loins of David. A specter.

  Surreptitious looks. Hot clasped hands. Clandestine meetings. Pietro had a mistress who was going right now into the Uffizi. Pietro drew with his friends in the Uffizi, more frequently of late. Right this instant, she was rushing to him in the blaze and swell of passion, unsettled by this chance meeting with “the wife.” And the little girl. Grown older now, and pouty. Should she warn him that the wife knows? No. He might renounce her. Not with the woman and her child just outside. Think about it later. At his studio. After trailing fingers down his spine, his muscled sides, the twin valleys of his loins meeting in a dark tangle, kissing his loins, trailing her tongue, making him arch and rise and rise again, delirious with desire for her.

  Stop! I told myself. Think rationally.

  I couldn’t be here when they came out of the Uffizi. “Palmira, come. We’re going home.”

  “We just got here.”

  “Get your ball.”

  I held my pencils, album, and her doll beneath my cloak, grabbed her hand and ran. “Count the puddles,” I shouted, to give her something to think about. I yanked her around them, past the vats, empty but for rainwater, the dyers inside on such a day, and through our gate. We collapsed together out of breath in our stairway.

  Upstairs, I took off her wet clothes, dried her briskly, wrapped her in my dressing gown, spooned hot broth into her mouth, and cut for her a few wedges of apple. “Are you a little sleepy? Sometimes broth makes you sleepy.” I made up her bed and tucked her in. “This is how to get warm,” I said, rubbing her body through the quilt.

  “Why did we run, Mama?”

  “The rain, sweetheart.”

  “But we were already wet.”

  “Ssh, now. Take a nap. I’ll be upstairs at Fina’s. You can come when you wake up.” I hummed a lullaby, and when she finally fell asleep, I went upstairs. Fina was washing her few dishes.

  “Awful day,” I said.

  “Where’s Palmira?”

  “Sleeping in a warm bed. We got soaked today. We never should have gone out.” I felt my chin quiver.

  “What’s the matter? What happened?”

  “Oh, Fina, you know, don’t you, that mine was a marriage of convenience?”

  She dried her hands on a scrap of towel. “I surmised as much.”

  “And that he has a mistress?”

  “Yes,” she said quietly after a moment.

  “More than one?”

  “Are you sure you want to know?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s had a string of women. I haven’t kept track. It’s a blessing that his poor mother did not live to watch it.”

  “Do you think he keeps another residence?”

  She closed her eyes and lifted her shoulders. “It’s possible. Anything is possible.”

  “Why did he marry me in the first place? Do you know?”

  She took a long breath that raised her chest. “Because he was in debt. The dowry.”

  “Yes, but why else? Why not someone in Florence?”

  “Because of his reputation. Women claiming that he was the father of their children would have issued objections if he posted any banns in Florence. The only way he could get a wife was to find one out of Florence.”

  “A fool! Fina, I’ve been an utter fool.” I slumped on her sad velvet chair and fought back tears. She pulled up a stool next to me and drew my head onto her soft bosom. “Would he have been mine if I had given up painting, do you think? He’s never done or said anything that suggested he wanted more than what I was to him already. He let me in only so far.”

  She stroked the back of my head. “He can let any woman in only so far. That’s why he leaves them and goes on to the next when he’s uncomfortable. It isn’t your fault.”

  I chuckled gravely. “Maybe his mistress will discover that.”

  We were still awhile and I felt the comfort of her heart thumping softly against my cheek. When she stirred to light an oil lamp, I thanked her and went downstairs. Palmira was sound asleep.

  Graziela had said that when I felt abandoned by God, I had to love Him all the more. I had to affirm God’s goodness. I’d do that later. Tomorrow I’d affirm His goodness. Give me one night of bitterness, one night of self-indulgent pity, one night to get it all out.

  I didn’t know two nuts’ worth about being a wife? Was Vanna right? Those times when Pietro and I were most together, in bed, his need had entered me and found a likeness, like a looking glass in a dim room, yet neither of us spoke of the inner place where this need dwelt. If I had, would it have been any different?

  I knew I shouldn’t write to Graziela in such a state, but I couldn’t help myself.

  At first I tried to watch, to be cautious, but in the end I did the very thing you told me not to do—I gave myself to a man. To an illusion, just like you said. A man who was giving himself to another. I never really had his love. What I had was only what I hoped to have. And now what I have is the first glimpse of a sad and penetrating loss, and why? So that one day I can paint it?

  But I will not give myself to God or convent, no matter if I only have a single coin. Even though I have no patron, no money, and no real husband, I have a place to live. My dowry grants me that. And I have talent that shall not be hid under a bushel. I will write letters. I will secure a new patron. I will earn my way. I will go on as if nothing happened. I will find a new life.

  As I was sealing the letter with candle wax, Pietro came home wet to the bone.

  “Nasty weather,” he grumbled, and hung his dripping cloak on a peg. “Writing to someone?” He sat down at the table.

  “Just to Sister Graziela.” I moved the letter to the edge of the table and put an apple on it from the basket. “She wanted me to describe more art.” I dried his hair with a towel. The black curls I loved smelled of unfamiliar hair oil. “Do you think it’ll stop raining tomorrow?” I asked. An inane comment.

  “No.”

  I heated the broth and added onions and stale bread. He cast furtive looks at the letter while he ate.

  “What did you do today?” he asked, reaching for an apple, choosing the one I’d put on the letter.

  “I tried to teach Palmira how to read and write better.” I showed him her notes. “She’s been terribly restless, but she’s sleeping now.”

  He smiled as he read them, and then he touched the edge of my letter to Graziela, either absently or intentionally, testing me, knowing why I’d written it. I froze, staring at his fingers resting on the letter.

  A sudden burst of rain beat against the closed shutters and seeped in along the window frame. It diverted us for the moment. We packed the leaking places with paint rags.

  “At least i
t’s washing the streets and buildings,” he said. “When it’s finally over, the city will look cleaner.”

  I grabbed at an idea.

  “Is it possible to go up to the lantern on top of the Duomo?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What about the bell tower?”

  “What for?”

  “To look at the city. To see it clean.”

  “It’s a long way up.”

  “All the better.”

  “I suppose there has to be a staircase inside for the bell ringer,” he said. “If we give him a couple lire, he might let us up.”

  “I want to see if up that high we can feel the Earth move.”

  Pietro looked at me as if I had lost my mind.

  “You know that philosopher mathematician, Galilei, in Cosimo’s court? He said that the Earth moves around the sun, and other planets do too.”

  “He’ll find himself in trouble someday. Once a priest at Santa Maria Novella preached against all mathematicians as the devil’s workmen. Everybody knew he meant Galileo.”

  “Recently?”

  “No.”

  “If we’re moving, maybe we can feel it that high up. Let’s do it. Tomorrow. Sunday.”

  “It will probably rain.”

  “That doesn’t matter. If we don’t do it now, then we may never.”

  He looked at me in the strangest way—as if he realized I might know, or that our arrangement of convenience might come to a crashing finish. For an instant, I thought I might have seen pain in his eyes.

  Could I actually be fully his? Every day? Every hour? Him the only focus of my life? A painter or a wife. A wife or a painter. Which did I really want to be? Going up there might tell me.

  “I want to get above all this. . . .” I waved my hand vaguely. Let him decide what I meant.

  “Palmira too?”

  “No. Let’s leave her with Fina. Tell her we have some painting business.”

  One side of his mouth lifted in a soft, sad half-smile. “Like our excursions when you first . . . came here.”

  “Yes, just like that.”

  “Do you still want to go?” he asked, opening the shutters in the morning.

  I got up to look. The rain was lightly pocking the river. “Yes.”

  We didn’t tell Fina where we were going, and she gave me the most uncomprehending look. It made me giddy inside, as though we were doing something clandestine. I put on my hooded cloak and we walked quickly with our heads down. We waited in Piazza del Duomo under the loggia of the Brethren of the Misericordia for the bell to chime noon. Rain pelted the stones in the piazza harder now. The marble facing of the square tower shone wet like polished gemstones.

  “I wish Giotto had lived long enough to see it finished,” I said, “to climb to the top just once before he died.”

  “Strange how a person can live in a place all his life and never think to do this,” Pietro said. He was indulging me in this with all good humor. It was good of him, and wrong of me to transfer my hate of Vanna onto him.

  When the bell ringer opened the tower door, we dashed out to stop him from leaving.

  “We are artists,” Pietro said, “and we’d like to take a look at the Duomo from the top of the tower.”

  “For a drawing for the Accademia del Disegno.”

  He looked at me suspiciously. “Both of you? Artists?”

  “If you let us just step inside—,” I said. He moved back to let us get out of the rain. I opened my cloak and showed him my insignia from the academy. Pietro pressed two lire into his palm.

  “You picked a wretched day to do a fool thing like this.”

  “What does it matter to you?” Pietro said, a bit surly.

  The bell ringer shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He waved us up.

  We ascended the steep stone steps inside a double wall closing us in on both sides and closing out the world. The stairs went around the perimeter in a large square until the first piano, and on this level open arches between delicate twisted columns let us see out. The tower of the Palazzo Vecchio was all the more magnificent because the structure supporting the upper tier of crenellations was much taller from this height than it appeared from the ground. Houses, streets, and people looked unreal, like boxes and puppets.

  “Maybe this is what it looks like to God,” I said.

  Pietro smiled at the notion.

  Above the first piano, steps went in a tight circle at the corner in order not to obstruct the open arches. Pietro lifted my cloak so it wouldn’t drag against the three-hundred-year-old stone steps. I had to stop and rest on the way. He let me lean on him. His chest heaved under my cheek.

  At the second open level, wind through the arches buffeted us. We disturbed a family of pigeons in a crevice and they flapped and flew below us. “Strange to look down on birds flying, isn’t it?” I asked. We were almost at eye level with the base of the barrel vault that supported the big brick dome of the cathedral.

  “Imagine the excitement of people to see that dome rise,” Pietro said. “When a boy was born, it wasn’t there, and when he was old enough to notice, the dome started to grow, and when he had a boy of his own, the stone ribs met and the dome was closed. What a time to live.” He put his hand on my shoulder as we looked. I didn’t move so his hand would rest there a moment longer, until we started up again.

  “You know, this tower was finished a hundred years before the dome was,” Pietro said. “How many times do you think Brunelleschi climbed these very steps to get a look at what he was building?”

  “Not every day!”

  “No, but I’d wager at least once a month. I would have.”

  We didn’t stop at the open third level, we were so eager to reach the top. We were breathing heavily. Once I didn’t lift my foot high enough and it caught on a step which pitched me forward. Pietro grabbed me from behind and kept his hands just under my breasts, holding me against him until I breathed normally again.

  A couple more spirals, Pietro opened a door, and we stepped out. Rain lashed against us, and pricked my cheeks like needles. Our cloaks flapped and billowed and threatened to blow away unless we held onto them. To be so high, with nothing more than a waist-high wall blocking us from being blown right off the tower frightened and thrilled me at the same time.

  “Look!” I cried. “You can see the pattern of bricks on the dome.” We had to shout to make ourselves heard.

  He took me by the hand and we walked around the square, looking in all directions—at the dome of San Lorenzo, the white façade of Santa Croce, the roof of Vasari’s Corridor over Ponte Vecchio, the Pitti Palace and its gardens, and beyond that, the gray and ghostly hills—all of Florence in one sweep.

  “Think of all the thousands of people who have lived here and have never seen this,” I said.

  More slowly, we walked around the square again. He leaned over the ledge.

  “Attenti!” I shouted.

  My panic for him made him stand back and look at me softly. “It’s all right. I’ll be careful.”

  The ledge was slippery. He leaned over it again. I held on to his arm with both hands. “Oh, Artemisia!” he cried in awe. “The people down there are so small! The stones of the piazza are like grains of salt. You’ve got to see this. Here, I’ll hold you.”

  He put his arms around me so that I felt safe, and I leaned only a little over the ledge. Wind whipped back my hood and rain soaked my hair. “Ohhh!” Blown every which way, rain glazed the city’s walls, the medallions on the walls, the niches, the statues in the niches. “Hold me tighter!” I cried, feeling dizzy, and when he did, I leaned out farther. My hair came unpinned and snapped back at him.

  I had the sensation that the whole stone tower was swaying in the storm. I closed my eyes. “The Earth is moving,” I shouted. “It’s not an illusion. Can you feel it, Pietro? Galilei was right! Just think. We’re whizzing through the universe.”

  He pulled me back and turned me, and my cloak blew out behind me.
His lips were on mine, wet and smooth and luscious, sliding over my throat, my eyes, and mine on his, juicy and urgent in the shivery thrill of the unexpected. Don’t ask why, I told myself. I ran my hands through his wet hair. He took hold of my wet breast, pressed his loins hard against me, making me quiver and press back.

  We let the rain blow on us, rinsing our hearts of suspicion and hurt, and held each other in the swirl of wind and feelings, our knees weak, his eyes slicked with rain, both of us lifted by the storm above all earthly injury, both of us longing for what was possible once, both of us desperate for what we knew was lost.

  We made love that night with all the urgent, bittersweet misery of lovers soon to part. There were no words between us. I commanded my mind to think of nothing but the present moment, in fact not to think at all, but just to feel—his hands like a sculptor’s stroking his creation, his tongue on my throat, his hand up my thigh, then his knee urging me to open, to ride out the sea of storm with him again and again until the swells subsided.

  I fell asleep thinking of the incomprehensible, baffling order of the universe that kept planets in their courses, birds in flight, and towers from tumbling down. In this universe where I knew now we were not the center, where I was as insignificant and unremarkable as a grain of salt seen from a tower, God still allowed me to take my next breath.

  16

  Graziela

  Watch me, Mama.”

  I was pulling up a bucket of water at the well while Palmira hopped in a circle around a dandelion growing between paving stones, singing a song about the moon that Fina had taught her. I commended her halfheartedly, and then noticed globes of dandelions all over the courtyard, like pale moons on stiff stalks—Galileo’s moons of Jupiter that I never got to see.

  I picked one, held it to my lips ready to blow off the tufts, and went through my litany of wishes—that some day I could see Galileo’s real moons, that Palmira would grow up to be a fine, respected painter, that Umiliana was working as a model now and would never have to go back to the vats. And then I admitted the wishes I felt more sharply—that I had never hired Vanna, never, out of generosity, let Pietro draw her nude, that our time in the tower had meant more to Pietro than a fleeting burst of passion, that he would recognize he was wrong not to love me, that he would come home tonight and tell me that he’d left her.