The Passion of Artemisia

by Susan Vreeland

A sad, involuntary chuckle escaped me. “No. He’s a painter too. She inherited only his sullen, dark-eyed glare.”

  We sat a moment, looking absently at the drawings on the floor. I felt no hint of judgment from her, only understanding. “I have a question, if it’s not too unmannerly of me.”

  “Please, what is it?”

  “How did Renata come to be with you?”

  Bianca smiled. “I love to tell that. She used to work at the flower market. Cesare adores flowers, can’t live without them.”

  “I know!” I pointed to the fan of gladioli. “Did you know he did this?”

  “Yes. He walks down the hill every Saturday morning early to pick out the best blooms. For years, he always went to Renata’s stall, but then he fell ill and was bedridden for a while. She must have learned of it, and so, of her own doing, she began to bring flowers here each week, picking out the kinds and colors she knew he liked. The first time, she just left the flowers with a servant, not waiting to be paid.”

  “Typical of her modesty.”

  “When she came again, I insisted that she carry the flowers in to him, because I knew she’d bring him joy. She was devoted and so full of pleasantness and cheer, that one Saturday he made up a tale about how he desperately needed another chambermaid. ‘Won’t you stay, just for a week, to help an old man through a sickness?’ He put on an exaggerated pout and sounded so pitiful that she couldn’t say no, but when the week was over, she folded the dress I’d given her to wear and left it on the cassapanca and slipped out before Cesare had awakened. When he learned that she had left, he got dressed for the first time in months, and walked down to the flower market himself and brought her back to stay, both of them blushing with smiles. He hasn’t been sick since.”

  “Do you know how fortunate you are to have a husband so—?”

  “Gentile? I learn it again every day. My only hope is that my daughters will have men half so kind.”

  “And Palmira too. And Renata.”

  “This is a famous Roman woman named Lucrezia,” I said to Palmira who was sitting on a chair behind me swinging her legs and sucking the juice out of an orange.

  I was working on the background now without the model whom I had posed in a disheveled white night shift tangled with a dark crimson velvet bedspread, the same color as the gladioli. The figure was holding my mother’s dagger in one hand pointed at her full breast held firm in her other hand. Life and motherhood set against suicide and martrydom—there they were, both roads.

  “Did you know her?”

  “No. She lived two thousand years ago.” That long ago, I thought, and some things haven’t changed. I stopped painting. “Yes, I did, in a way.” Maybe Palmira was old enough to know some things other than lace and ruffles. “A man violated her against her will and made her ashamed. That means he did something to her she didn’t want.”

  Palmira sucked again. “She’s got a big leg.”

  “That’s to call attention to the tension in her knee and thigh. It goes with her expression. You see, people treated her badly. They thought she enjoyed what the man did but they were wrong. She didn’t want to face them.”

  Palmira scraped her chair back against the floor.

  “And so, she found a dagger—”

  “I don’t want to hear it. No more horrible stories.” Palmira dropped the orange, put her hands over her ears and ran out the door.

  I was stunned. I had no idea the stories affected her so. I set down my brush, thinking I should go after her, but she would only go to Margherita’s room and find some distraction. There was no harm in that.

  But was there harm in the stories?

  One morning I didn’t get out of bed. I hadn’t worked on the painting for three days. I lay motionless and stared at the ceiling and saw floating above me the state I’d left the painting in. I had finished the background, the folds of her white shift, the dark crimson spread crumpled on the bed where she’d been raped, her exposed leg, her arm and her right hand holding her breast ready for the blade, but I only roughed in her left hand cocked at the wrist and aiming the dagger at her breast. I hadn’t been able to go on. I had dismissed the model. For the last three days, I just sat and stared. Renata had watched me with dark, troubled eyes, unsure whether to leave the room or stay.

  The dagger was the problem. I closed my eyes in bed and it swam behind my eyelids, pointing to the right, then left, then stuck in her breast, then resting, bloody, in her open palm.

  Renata burst into the room and said, “Quickly, Palmira. Did you forget the picnic?”

  “What picnic?” Palmira asked. Renata helped her get dressed and Palmira ran out the door with her shoes in her hand.

  Renata opened the shutters to let in light, came back to the bed, and looked down at me without smiling. “Why don’t you stop working on her hand and do her face? Today.”

  I stared at the ceiling.

  “Get up. I have to wash the bedclothes.” She yanked them right off of me and gestured roughly toward the studio.

  I was so surprised, I did as she told me. In my night shift I slumped on the stool in front of the easel and didn’t even look at the painting.

  “What direction does the light come from?” she asked as she rolled up the bed linen. It wasn’t that she wanted to learn. It was an easy question both of us knew already.

  “From the viewer.”

  “Tell me what that means.”

  “There has to be darkness on the other side. I have only a profile, half her face, one eye in the light, to convey the meaning.”

  “So, begin,” her tavern voice commanded.

  With knit brows, Renata stood her ground until I started to work. Silently, warily, she checked on me all day. Once I wasn’t working, so she stood behind me, not saying a word until I started painting again. Then she left.

  Lucrezia’s face began to take on expression. Distress, not fear. I furrowed the space between her eyebrows, like Renata’s. I couldn’t stop darkening her eye and the skin under the eye. It became more and more troubled the more I worked it. I wanted her troubled. Disturbed and disturbing.

  Now, with Lucrezia’s troubled, searching eye, her roughed-in hand with her wrist cocked, aiming the dagger at her breast, seemed wrong. When I loaded flesh tones onto a clean brush, I could not make the hand hold that aim. My arm was paralyzed. Speak to me, Lucrezia. What would you have me do? The room, the whole house was quiet. I waited. Remember, she seemed to say with her eye.

  Remember?

  I cleared off my work table and set up the adjustable table mirror and picked up Mother’s dagger. It was a wicked instrument as long as my forearm, black steel with a brass cruciform handle. I touched its flat side to my cheek. Its coldness shocked me. I pushed down my shift and took my left breast in my right hand, as in the pose. I propped my left elbow on the table and crooked my wrist at arm’s length to aim the dagger at my own flesh. I remembered the day of the sibille. I had not come this close, had not even lifted the dagger from beneath my bed, but I had thought of it.

  With excruciating slowness, I bent my elbow more and moved the point of the blade toward me. Slowly. Pausing. A little more. I looked down the edge where the gleam of light traveled up and down its length as I tilted it. My wrist ached. With my other hand I felt the beating of my heart, even now, just imagining the stab of metal through my flesh. In the mirror I could see my breast making tiny movements up and down. To stop that with one mighty thrust—could I have actually done it? Could Lucrezia? Was the world so devoid of possibility to her? I touched the point to my skin.

  A piercing scream.

  “No!” Renata shouted. The dagger leaped from my grasp. “Don’t!” She lunged at me, flinging aside the tray, the fruit, the water. A horrendous crash. She grabbed on to my ankles.

  “I wasn’t going to,” I sputtered. “I’m only imagining. For the painting.”

  She cried in great, noisy sobs. “You could have told me! What was I to think?”

  “I’m s
orry.” I put my arms around her, stroked the back of her head, felt her heart beating against my knees, the devotion behind her panic.

  “But I know now. I know! My Lucrezia is not going that far. This is not an act in progress. She’s thinking hard, reconsidering what the world has told her, questioning her martyrdom, but she is not aiming. Her wrist has to be painted unbent, the dagger upright.”

  I kissed the top of her head.

  20

  Lucrezia

  I washed my hair and put on a clean dress the morning Father was to come early for the grand unveiling of Lucrezia at Cesare and Bianca’s anniversary. I sat in a Moorish chair in the great hall tracing the design of its embossed leather with my finger. Not wanting him to come when I was upstairs and have him see any of my paintings without me, I waited, scraping at the dry flaky skin on my bottom lip until it bled.

  “I was detained,” was all he said when he finally came in the afternoon.

  We walked around the room and he studied each of my paintings. He nodded, looked close, then stepped back to see each one at a distance. Rocking back and forth on his heels, with one hand holding the other behind him, he seemed as approving and proud as if he had painted them himself, but I wanted more. Say something, I pleaded with my eyes.

  In front of Cleopatra he asked, “Where’s the asp bite?”

  “Is that all you can say? After ten years of not seeing my work? ‘Where’s the asp bite?’ ”

  “I—”

  “Maybe she died without it. The fear of public shame in itself was strong enough to kill her.”

  A sound but not a word came out of his mouth at the idea.

  “Don’t you understand that yet, Father? How deep the fear of exposure can bite?”

  When he shifted his gaze from the painting to me, his nostril wings opened.

  I paused, but when he didn’t say anything, I added, “She deserved the right to grieve her loss privately.”

  He pulled his lips inward. “You—” He cleared his throat. “You’ve learned more from life than I could teach you.”

  I said his words to myself, to hear them a second time. “Thank you.”

  I took him upstairs to my studio. I had covered Lucrezia with a cloth so he wouldn’t see it right away. He looked again at Judith Slaying Holofernes and Susanna and the Elders and smiled in recognition.

  “As magnificent as I remembered them.”

  That was exactly what I wanted to hear. Then I uncovered Lucrezia. He studied it awhile, and thought more carefully this time before he said anything. “You make it seem like she’s afraid to do it.”

  “Look again. It isn’t fear. It’s that she’s troubled. She’s got to think out why, and have a reason all her own that requires it. Maybe she’s not sure she needs to.”

  A concerned expression came over his face. “This isn’t the Lucrezia everyone thinks her to be.”

  “I know. But it’s got to be this way, that she isn’t sure, so people looking at it a long time from now, women and men too, might feel badly, might even weep that at some ignorant time there was once a woman raped who was pressured, even expected, to kill herself.”

  I hadn’t known I would say that—to him or anybody. It came from the deep smoldering center of me in a voice I didn’t recognize.

  “Things will change, Father. They must. And art can help create the change.”

  His eyes shone. “My daughter. The sibyl of a new epoch.” He put his arm around my waist and gazed at the painting. “What does Signor Gentile think of it?”

  “I haven’t let him see it. I’ve kept it covered whenever he might come into the studio.” I chuckled. “He’s been in a fever of excitement. ‘Not even a little peek?’ ” I imitated how he had asked, holding up his fat thumb and index finger close together, fanning out his other fingers, and tipping his head from side to side. “ ‘No, not even a corner,’ I said to him. His bottom lip protruded in a pout. He’s so funny to watch. I like teasing him.”

  “Such a thing—you teasing your patron!”

  “He likes it. He pretended he was going to touch the cloth draping it, but he didn’t. He made the decision of unveiling it at his anniversary party without even seeing it.”

  “That’s a strong trust he has in you.”

  “I know.”

  After Renata brought us something to eat in the studio, she and Father carried the painting, covered, into the great hall.

  “You’re going to love what Signor Gentile did to the room,” she said as we stepped into the great hall. It was filled with roses, lilies, chrysanthemums, and a huge display of gladioli on the central table. “When he sent me to fetch them this morning, he told me to make sure the gladioli were deep crimson. How did he know the color of her bedcover? Did he peek?”

  I smiled. “Instinct, I guess.”

  When the guests arrived, Cesare appeared wearing the same stiff ruff he had worn in his portrait, which he had hung above the fireplace. As the room filled with guests, their oversweet perfumes did little to disguise the musky smell of their bodies. A servant carried a platter of crostini with anchovies in oil and lemon. It almost made me nauseated. I had to get air. Another servant passed with a tray of goblets of wine. I took one and went outside and walked around the perimeter of the courtyard several times to calm myself. I watched Palmira and another child playing with paper dolls I had made to keep them occupied.

  Cesare’s steward called people back in when it was time to reveal the painting. Father came outside to get me. “We shall see what these Genoese are made of,” he whispered.

  Cesare stood next to Bianca with his hands raised ordering silence. Satisfied with everyone’s attention, he made one of his flamboyant gestures to the steward, who lifted off the covering with a flourish. At first there was no response. My soul froze. Water gurgled in the fountain outside. Someone coughed.

  “A-ha,” murmured Bianca. She must have noticed I had changed the position of the dagger since she’d seen it last.

  A broad, slow smile crept over Cesare’s face. I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. People clapped politely. Then the whispering began.

  “I thought she’d be nude.”

  “No blood.”

  “You can barely see the dagger.”

  “She’s not dead.”

  “She isn’t going to do it.”

  Bianca came to stand beside me. In the fullness of our petticoats pressed against each other, she squeezed my hand.

  Cesare swung his fist in an arc and his fingers sprang open in the direction of the painting. “Brava! You have done it, Artemisia Gentileschi!” he said. “A victory of ambiguity. If time stopped right then, at that moment, we would never know what she did. She is yours alone.”

  He knew he had something no one else did. If he questioned this interpretation, that would have colored the reputation of what I’d painted for him earlier. If he approved, that would increase the value of the rest.

  Renata stood alone at the side of the room clutching her hands to her chest, dewy-eyed.

  The guests were bewildered. The painting had disoriented them. Bene. If this Lucrezia gives them a new concept, then they might reconsider the missing asp bite on Cleopatra.

  “You have baffled them, Artemisia,” Father whispered.

  “I know.”

  After a string of congratulations, some of them enthusiastic, some cool, Father escorted me out to the garden. Feeling the lightness of success, I took his arm as we walked under a rose arbor.

  “It might take time for people to comprehend what they congratulated me for,” I said. “And what they think today may not be what they’ll think tomorrow.”

  “They’re disappointed. They wanted blood. They expected blood. They know Lucrezia’s story. You gave them doubt instead. Lucrezia in doubt.”

  “Everyone, Father? Is that what you expected?”

  We met each other’s eyes, as we could not do in Rome. After a long moment, he sat down on a stone bench without answering.r />
  I allowed him the pretense that it was his expectation about Lucrezia that I meant.

  I sat next to him in dappled shade to watch the children play. The fountain opposite us was fringed with deep blue iris and orange tiger lilies. With the plop of water drops and the scent of roses, it was a pleasant place. Father beckoned to Palmira and she came to him and sat demurely on his lap. He bounced her on his knee as if she were a little girl. Her dark curls sprang. “I’m too old, Grandpa. I’m nine now.” Her words burst out at each bounce and made us laugh.

  That bouncing—he must have done the same to me. A surprising tenderness for him bubbled up in me, and I thought—this must be happiness. I wanted to stop time, to make the moment last. I held on to Palmira’s dainty ankle.

  He turned to me. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, Papa. I’m just so happy.”

  He didn’t seem to know what to say. He bounced Palmira again.

  “Palmira, will you grow up to be a fine painter like your mama?” he asked.

  She shook her head ferociously and wiggled her feet, looking at her new red velvet shoes. “I’m going to be a lady and have lots of dresses and live in a palace.”

  “Like this?”

  Her chin pointed up and then snapped down to her chest. “Bigger. And ride in a black carriage with a footman and two white horses.” She measured the size of his hands against hers but soon became distracted and hopped off to play.

  “When you were her age, you’d only want the horses so you could draw them.”

  It was comfortable with him next to me. I felt the trust of innocent times.

  “I’ve been trying to teach her to draw her doll, but she won’t sit still long enough.”

  “You would sit whole days trying to get the baker’s boy just right, rubbing it out and starting over.”

  “When I was her age?”

  “Beginning then. That’s what amazed Agostino, you know. Not just your early accomplishment, but your determination.”

  I tensed at the name. It had been years since I heard it, even in my own head.