The Passion of Artemisia

by Susan Vreeland

  “Anything?”

  “Anything you like.” He looked at me directly, expectantly, as if I would decide right then. He clasped his hands across his paunch and waited.

  “Hmm. What about a . . . a standing portrait of . . .” I made him wait, pretending I was thinking hard. “Of you! As a condottiere.”

  “Me?” A wide grin spread across his face. “Me. Yes. Me!”

  Bianca laughed.

  “Do you have any armor?”

  “My father did.”

  “Good. Get it polished.”

  I posed him with a scabbard at his side, plumed helmet on a table, and a fringed campaign banner hanging on the wall behind. He wore the stiffest, widest, most extravagant ruff I had ever seen, with smaller versions at his wrists. I draped a lace scarf over one shoulder. One day he came clanking into the studio with four friends in tow to watch him pose. He assumed his puffed-up stance and blushed at his vanity in front of his friends, which made Bianca laugh. He scowled a pretense of offense. “We’re doing hard work here, so please keep silent.”

  “Amore mio, it’s a fine pose, and a fine portrait,” Bianca soothed. “I love it almost as much as I love you!”

  After more than a year with the Gentiles, I accompanied Palmira and the two Gentile daughters to a birthday party of a child of a wealthy shipping lord. In the loggia of his villa there stood a group of men, and under a tree laden with yellow blossoms, four women were engaged in a game of whist. Not knowing anyone, I sat on a bench between the men and women and watched the children play. A burst of laughter from the men drew my attention and I heard amongst them, unmistakably, Father. My heart plummeted. He had his back to me. I thought of slipping around the corner so he wouldn’t see me, but while I hesitated, he happened to turn my way.

  “Buon Dio. Artemisia!” His breathy voice barely reached me. He broke away from the men and came toward me with his arms opened wide.

  “Father.” I stood up and we embraced. His beard scratched my cheek just as it did when I was young.

  “I didn’t know you were in Genoa,” he said. “Didn’t I write you that I was here?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t know where you were to tell you. I have a new patron. Cesare Gentile.”

  “Is he good to you?”

  “Oh yes. An amusing man, and very generous. I’m happy here.”

  His eyes became watery. “You look beautiful.”

  “You’re combing your hair forward now, in the Roman way.” I laughed softly, but there was tension in the sound. “I thought you said you never would. Too much of caesars.”

  “It’s gray now. I have a right. Never is too long a time for mere mortals to make promises.”

  “Look, there, in the red smock playing hoodman-blind, my daughter.”

  His eyebrows lifted in high arches at their outer reaches, and even his forehead smiled. “My granddaughter?” he said with wonder. “I thought I would never be able to see her.”

  “Palmira Prudenzia.”

  “She’s a pretty thing.”

  “And she knows it. Almost nine years old.”

  “She reminds me of you. Can she draw?”

  “Not very well. That concerns me. Painting is the only way for her to continue to live the way we are now.”

  “You don’t have to worry. Anyone can see that she’ll be a beautiful woman.”

  “I’m going to have quite a time keeping her dressed the way she wants. She has become a favorite among noble families, which worries me.”

  Slowly he drew his eyes from Palmira back to me. “Stiattesi said you left his brother.”

  The sharp way he said it stung, as if I were ungrateful for the effort he took in arranging the marriage.

  “There are two sides to every story.”

  “Why did you leave?”

  I felt my jaw tighten and my back teeth grind. “Pietro could have come with me. I have written. He doesn’t answer.”

  We stood in edgy silence.

  “Artemisia, we must see each other again.”

  “I’m in the middle of a commission.”

  “All the better. Let me see it.”

  “I—”

  “Caravaggist?”

  “No, not particularly.”

  He stole a look at my hands and said tenderly, “Don’t be afraid of me, Artemisia.”

  “I have reason to be, don’t I?”

  The lines in his forehead deepened. “You wouldn’t deny an old man his grandchild, would you?” He looked wistfully at Palmira laughing and hopping up and down with the other children.

  The skin of his cheek had become coarser, as if scoured by grains of sand falling grain by grain through the hourglass.

  “No.”

  19

  Renata

  Father, Palmira, and I dodged a bale of cotton being lowered by a hoist onto the wharf. Men wearing loose pantaloons and black slippers guided it on top of other bales, speaking sharply in a strange language. Wind flapped their full white sleeves like sails.

  “Why is their skin so dark?” Palmira asked.

  “Because of the sun, preziosa,” Father said. “Those men are from Morocco, the north of Africa.”

  I let him answer her questions since he took such delight in it. She deserved someone fatherly after I had yanked her away from Pietro.

  He pointed to bulging sacks along the wharf. “Smell the pepper?” he asked her. “Cinnamon too.” She drew in an exaggerated breath. “It’s probably from Syria. Shipments of things come from many places—Egypt, Sicily, Corsica. Gold comes from North Africa.” He looked down at her to make sure she was listening. “Silk from Asia. Oranges from Spain. So people from all those places come here too. Muslims, Jews, Egyptians. And they bring with them different ideas.”

  “About what?” Palmira asked.

  “Everything. Life. Religion. Art. Government. And from here ships take away wine, olive oil, silverware, marble. The Genoese think that this port is the center of the world.”

  I smiled at the quaintness of that belief. After Galileo’s ideas were accepted, no one could think that. There were changes to come in the world. I was sure of that.

  We stopped at a ship chandlery and Father bought some dry sailors’ biscuits and strong-smelling Turkish coffee. He noticed Palmira looking at a display of brass sailors’ buttons and pins with various nautical and foreign symbols. “Pick one out,” he said, and gave the shopkeeper a few coins.

  “You pin it on me.” She stood up straight while he did so.

  We sat on barrels on the quay to drink the coffee. Every so often Palmira touched the pin on her cape.

  “Tell me what you’ve painted in Genoa,” Father said.

  It was a safe topic.

  “I started with a Cleopatra because Cesare wanted a nude. Then he let me choose my own subjects for several paintings.”

  I took a sip of the thick, dark liquid and could barely swallow it. I pushed it toward him, squinting my eyes. “You drink it.”

  He smiled. “It takes a while to get used to. Here, eat a biscuit.”

  I did. “Kind of tasteless.”

  “I like them,” Palmira said, swinging her legs and knocking her heels against the barrel.

  “Don’t do that, cara. It’ll ruin your shoes.”

  “So, what else did you paint?” Father asked.

  “A standing portrait of Cesare as a condottiere. I suggested it, but he jumped at the idea. I did it in the style of Titian, with a dark background. It wasn’t the kind of subject that bubbled up from the center of me, but I was glad to do it for him since it made him so happy. I’ll probably do Signora Gentile next. I’ve been more prolific here than I’ve ever been. I owe that to the congenial home, I think.”

  He set down his cup on the barrel with a little thud and looked at me suspiciously.

  “I mean, with meals provided, and with Palmira spending the days with Gentile’s daughters, I have more time to paint.”

  I couldn’t quite determine why I felt defensive,
but I knew there was some danger in being too relaxed. Even with Father, I reminded myself, I had to be wary.

  “You are making me envied,” Cesare said one morning as I was cleaning brushes.

  “How?”

  “Plenty of gentlemen in Genoa would vie for a painting from the hand of Artemisia Gentileschi—a woman who understands women. I must treat you handsomely.” He winked. “Otherwise you will go elsewhere.”

  “I don’t even think about going anywhere else. We’re happy here. You know that.”

  “Then it’s time to discuss a new painting. My daughters will be coming of age soon. This time, let’s have a Lucrezia.”

  “The one figure I would most dislike doing.”

  He puffed air out of his round cheeks. “But why?”

  “I have no desire to celebrate a woman who killed herself to escape the shame of rape.”

  He raised a finely plucked eyebrow. “And therefore you must.”

  Then he did know about the trial. Was Rome to follow me to Genoa too?

  He put on a playful frown, balled up his fist and swung it in an arc upward. “Confront the enemy, and crush it dead. Make Lucrezia yours alone.”

  No one but Cesare could turn a frown into an infectious, all-over grin with such fluid movement of flesh. As for his request, I had no way to avoid it.

  I was in misery for hours—so untalkative at the midday meal that Cesare and Bianca surely noticed. I pushed my food around my plate and only took occasional bites. Palmira kept pleading that I take her on an outing to the country.

  “No, Palmira. Not today. How many times do I have to say it?”

  She pounded her elbows down on the damask cloth and moped with her cheeks on her fists. “You’re selfish,” she muttered. “Grandpa would.”

  I was embarrassed by her bad behavior. After the meal, she escaped downstairs to the courtyard and wouldn’t come when I called her.

  By late afternoon, the studio was littered with halfhearted sketches of women in the act of stabbing themselves and women sprawled and bleeding. Renata came in carrying a huge fan of dark crimson gladioli. “These are from Signor Gentile,” she said as she put them on the trestle table below the window.

  “Just for me? They should be in the great hall.”

  “No. Signor Gentile told me to put them in your studio.”

  “They’re exquisite. See how the play of light and shadow on the petals graduates the color from crimson madder almost to purple-black?”

  “Inside the petals,” she pointed, “they look like wax. How can you paint it to look like that?”

  I was about to explain about Venetian amber varnish when she turned and saw my sketches. “Not another woman killing herself!”

  “Not my choice. Cesare’s. That’s why I’ve been irritable. For the first time in my life, I don’t want to paint something.”

  “Why?” She looked at me with that endearing earnestness, and sat down to listen.

  I told her the history of Lucrezia’s shame after her rape by the Tarquin. “According to the story, she thought that if she remained alive, it would set a precedent of pardon for adulterers, men, and women.”

  “I think it’s because of Signor Gentile’s daughters. He wants to scare them into chastity.”

  I tossed my drawing pencil onto the table. “I hate all these paintings where, just after killing herself, Lucrezia is lying in serene virtue with the painter’s peace, not her own, smeared across her face. Killing yourself isn’t like that.”

  Renata leaned forward and peered at me with furrowed brows. She opened her mouth to say something, and then sank backward.

  “In Filippino Lippi’s version in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, she committed the act publicly. To me, that is supreme folly. If she was an innocent victim, she didn’t need to feel shame, and so killing herself was a rash, prideful act, not an ennobling one. A way out that might be appealing for a moment, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “No one who loved life could willingly choose that escape.”

  There was still a look of concern on Renata’s face. “Then it doesn’t make sense.”

  I held up a finger, thinking. “Unless, of course, you think that victims share the guilt, or even cause the act. Lucrezia only makes sense to those who don’t want to recognize that women don’t like being raped. To me, she’s a false and unnecessary martyr.”

  “Are you going to paint her to show her thoughts or yours?”

  “An important question. Mine, I think. Cesare said for me to make Lucrezia mine alone.” The task seemed even more formidable now that I had put it in words.

  The way Cesare had looked at me with that one eyebrow quirked up in that exaggerated curve told me he knew precisely what he was doing by letting me have the freedom of choosing several subjects, and then challenging me. And now this extravagant display of flowers to soften what he thought I ought to confront. All done with understatement and respectful, fatherly intent.

  Renata laid out my sketches in a row on the floor. One of them I had torn in frustration. She held it at arm’s length. “This one. You didn’t want it?”

  “No. It’s the worst of the lot.”

  She examined it, scowling a little in her attempt to understand what I meant. “If you’re sure you don’t want it,” she bit her lip, “may I have it?”

  “Why?”

  “So I can practice in my room at night. So I can go over your lines and shadings and see how it feels.”

  The thought of her doing that moved me. Her spirit was pure and her mind eager and absorbent and her desire keen—all that I wanted in Palmira.

  Renata waited on the edge of her chair for my answer.

  I was suddenly afraid that I could give all I knew only once—that I could express it in the freshest way, at the moment of my discovery, as I was learning it with each new painting, only once. I ought to save this intimate core of my creative self for Palmira, who by virtue of the accident of birth had more claim to it and was in a better position to use it, but . . .

  I stole a look at Renata still scrutinizing the torn drawing, afraid too, it seemed. Of what? That this might be the last time she’d see it?

  “Take it, carissima. And when I’m finished, you can have them all.”

  A tiny, sweet gasp issued from her lovely mouth.

  A rustling of skirts made me turn. Bianca was standing at the open door. I felt caught in an act of overfamiliarity with a servant, and responsible for keeping Renata from her other duties.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt you.” Her voice was unusually solemn.

  “Come in. Please.”

  Renata quickly set down the torn drawing on a chair, curtseyed and left.

  “Cesare’s steward just returned from Florence, and I knew you’d want to know. Il granduca Cosimo has died.”

  “Died?” I was dumbfounded. “He was so young.”

  “Only thirty, I think.”

  “He didn’t have time to finish his project, the extension of the Pitti.”

  “The dukedom will go to his oldest son, Ferdinando, even though he won’t come of age for eight or nine years. And Giovanni, ‘ruling’ Venice now, is even younger.”

  “The poor archduchess. This will send her into years of vigils.”

  “Doubly hard on her, coming so soon after her idol died.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Pope Paul.”

  I thought of Galileo. He had Medici patronage for life, but Ferdinando might not be so firm a supporter as Cosimo had been. And this new pope was an enigma. “This worries me,” I murmured.

  “Cosimo might not have been as great as Lorenzo, but he was a good man,” Bianca said.

  “He was generous to me, and always welcomed me at affairs at the Pitti. And now his sons are fatherless.”

  Bianca put her palms together. “I’m sorry to tell you on a day when—”

  “When I’m selfish? Like Palmira said? That’s all right. Thank you for letting me know.”
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br />   Bianca moved toward the door.

  “Don’t leave.” I removed the torn drawing from the chair. “Please, sit. I’m sorry Palmira was disagreeable today.”

  “Even when she’s disagreeable, she’s adorable.”

  “That’s part of the problem. She knows it. I wish I could interest her in something.”

  “Painting?”

  “Of course. But I’ve tried other things too. She’s learning to embroider, but she won’t read or practice writing unless I’m directing her, and it takes away my concentration.”

  “My daughters could teach her. Theresa, I mean. She’d like to.”

  “Are Theresa and Margherita so different from each other?”

  “Different as the sun and moon. It wouldn’t surprise me if Theresa became a nun, but all Margherita thinks about is picnics and parties.”

  “Strange, isn’t it, how our children grow.” I hesitated, but Bianca’s open expression urged me to continue. “What we most expect of them, what we’d love most for them—”

  “Interests them the least?”

  “Exactly.” I looked at the torn drawing. “Blood ties seem so arbitrary.” I twirled a pencil in my hand. “I was just thinking of Renata. I . . .”

  “Go on. You can be frank. It’s all right.”

  “She’s hungry for any shred of teaching I can give.”

  “She’s a delight, isn’t she?”

  I nodded. Bianca tipped her head, encouraging me to speak.

  “Which one is really my child? The one I brought forth with my own groans who has no liking for the thing I love most in all the world, or the stranger’s child whom fate placed in my life, the one who is absorbing and treasuring every word I give her, whose eyes are learning every day, whom I would love to teach, except that I fear Palmira’s jealousy?”

  I began sharpening the pencil with a knife, ashamed to have admitted this to Bianca.

  “Maybe she’s more like her father. Palmira, I mean.”