The Passion of Artemisia (8 page)

I learned in the weeks that followed that he was either hot or cold, with me fully, or someplace distant and unreachable. At
those times, I trembled between sheets lest I seem a fool if he did not want me after I had made a gesture offering myself to him. His changeableness made me afraid to enjoy freely the times when he was fully mine.

Graziela had said I must not believe in illusion. In my first letter to her, I wrote,

And to Father, I wrote simply,

The finest times with Pietro were Sunday afternoons when we went to see the art of the city. Pietro decided each week what he would show me but he wouldn't tell me ahead of time. He wanted to surprise me. It was this playful aspect of his aloofness that fascinated me. On Sundays I woke with fresh anticipation of some new thing—a subject, a composition, a gesture, or an interpretation. If I used my eyes, and forced myself to go slowly and look with thoughtful consideration, I would encounter something wonderful. In this way, I learned the Florentine taste.

Dressed in new doublet and hose, new shoes, and a new hat in gathered purple velvet, Pietro held out his arm for me
to hold with the air of a courtier who took delight in showing off his city's treasures. He told me histories and bits of information that made the artists human—how Ghiberti, not Brunelleschi, won the competition for the Baptistry doors, how Brunelleschi left the city in anger and went to Rome to study and measure classical ruins, how Donatello, his boy lover who went with him to Rome called him Pippo, how Brunelleschi challenged the other Florentine architects to make an egg stand on end, how he proved his own cleverness by tapping its narrow end on a table which broke it enough for it to stand upright, how that won for him the commission to build a self-supporting dome over the hole that had gaped over the cathedral for fifty years. And how Michelangelo regretted having kissed only the hand and not the face of the dying Vittoria Colonna, the light and solace of his later years. Through Pietro's stories, the city came alive for me.

“Masaccio was a bear of a man who died at twenty-seven,” he said as we entered the monastery church of Santa Maria del Carmine one Sunday. Inside, he directed me to a small side chapel with frescoed walls. “This is the Brancacci Chapel, his patron's.”

I stood transfixed before Masaccio's
Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden
. In a bleak, brown setting without any hint of a garden, Adam covered his bowed face with his hands. Eve's eyes were wounded hollows nearly squeezed shut, and her open mouth uttered an anguished cry that echoed through time and resounded in my heart. The pathos of their shame moved me so that my legs were weak. I held on to the stone balustrade. Between Eve and me, I felt no gulf of centuries.

“I want to wrap her in my arms to comfort her,” I said softly.

“Michelangelo, Raphael, and Botticelli sat right here
drawing from this fresco,” Pietro said as casually as if he had been among them more than a hundred years ago.

Nothing I saw the rest of the day could I even remember clearly when we fell into bed together. I couldn't sleep. I stared into the dark at Eve's tortured expression. That was what it must feel like to be totally abandoned, spurned, deprived of God. For all I'd been through, I had never felt such devastating despair.

The rhythm of Pietro's breathing pulsed Eve's pain into me and I flung myself over, unable to lie still. My thrashing woke him. “What's the matter?” he murmured.

“I can't get to sleep. I keep thinking of Eve.”

He turned and drew me to him as if his sheltering arm would quiet me. “Try not to think,
amore
.” We breathed the darkness in unison until I felt the wakening of his member brush against me. No, I thought. Not now. How could I, now, haunted by Eve's anguish after her indulgence of appetite?

A surprising, furtive spasm quivered in me, and an involuntary squeezing deep inside. He turned me how he wanted me and rocked me, soothing me into compliance until I pushed the agony of Eve to the back of my mind and a sweeter agony took over. Afterward we slept as one.

Months later, alone one morning, I was cleaning brushes in turpentine and a wave of nausea rushed over me. The smell was overpowering. I opened the windows but I couldn't stand up a moment longer to breathe the fresh air. It wasn't fresh anyway. It smelled of the river. I sank into a chair and gripped the arms. My mouth tasted awful. The room blurred. I rushed to get a basin, and threw up.

I had expected blood for more than a month, maybe two. Even though I had known it would probably happen, I was
stunned by the reality. A baby. It made me anxious. What if Pietro . . . ? I didn't even want to frame the thought into words.

Had my own mother felt this strange dizziness, this swelling—not just in the belly but in the throat and behind the eyes—the moment she suspected? But she had died in childbirth in a bed full of blood and screams. I was twelve and terrified. I had seen it all. I was enraged at father for killing her, or so it seemed to me, and silent for months until Paola's and Graziela's love slowly dissolved my stupor and I began to live again.

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.”