Disobedient, page 28
‘But this is no ordinary envy…’ Orazio finds, now he has begun, that the words come untrammelled. ‘I am an artist, not a young man, and as such have become quite used to understanding that some of my profession have greater gifts than mine. But it was when I recognized an ability in one close to me, a pupil… an ability so far beyond my reach, that I tumbled into the ugliest of resentments.
‘I would watch that brush scratch out a few lines, adding a little of this colour, a little of that, until life took shape, until figures occupied the surfaces of those canvases with blood coursing through their veins. They were beings who lived, who suffered, who loved, who sinned, whose skin gave under touch, and bruised, and itched, who were warm, who existed, as do you and I, Father… as do you and I.’ Orazio’s hands are wringing. ‘And the beauty, such soaring loveliness could only have been a gift from Our Lord.
‘I should have been pleased, for this painter was my own offspring, whom I myself had taught to paint. But all I could see in it was God’s derision, my own deficiencies exposed in the cruellest of ways, such divine mockery to give these extraordinary gifts to my daughter – a woman.’
The icy air is seeping through Orazio’s winter cloak and his hands are numb with cold. He hugs himself, rubbing his arms to generate a little warmth, and wonders if the priest on the other side of the grille has a charcoal burner under his feet.
‘You have sinned, my child. If you repent you will be absolved.’
‘But I haven’t told you everything yet, Father.’ His breath makes a pale cloud.
He spits out his sins, on and on. ‘And then, in the aftermath, my daughter began to paint the most brutally violent of scenes, a grisly festival of gore: Judith slaying Holofernes.’
‘A biblical scene.’
‘That painting – that piece of shameful sacrilege – I recognized, even in its unfinished state, as a work finer, more alive, more replete with truth, than anything I could ever have produced. I hated her, Father. I hated my own daughter for her brilliance.’
‘What’s done is done, my child. All you can do now is repent. And you are here. That is the first step to redemption. Our Lord is a forgiving master.’
Orazio has to inhale sharply to prevent himself from succumbing to sobs. ‘She has a new life… as a painter. She has commissions.’ He is boiling inside once more, his envy refusing to be quelled. ‘Commissions that should be mine. All this achieved because of me. I taught her to paint, raised her as a painter.’
‘You cannot change Our Lord’s will. If He makes it so, then so it will be.’
A long pause ensues. Orazio feels shame enveloping him, like a shroud.
‘You should give thanks to Him for bestowing on your daughter such a gift.’
Terror seizes him. ‘Am I going to Hell?’
‘If you do penance for the sins you have confessed, you will find He is a merciful master. But first you must truly accept His will.’
The priest lists his penance. It seems so little: a few incantations to absolve him when the burden of his sins feels so vast.
As he stands to leave, his body painful and stiff as it unfolds, the priest says, ‘One more thing, before you go.’
‘Yes, Father?’ He stoops down to the screen, seeing through it, a single black bead eye catching the light.
‘You might consider also asking her forgiveness.’
Orazio is confused a moment, thinking he is referring to the Holy Virgin, until realization alights. ‘My daughter?’
‘I am not versed in the ways of the world, but I do know the power of forgiveness.’
The bells have started to ring, and the priest douses his candle. The smell of the burned wick emanates through the grille. Mass has begun by the time he quietly slips out into the day.
He hears a whistling, as if someone is trying to attract his attention. When he looks around, the place is empty.
It sounds once more.
Twit, twit, jug, jug.
Birdsong.
He searches for the singer, eyes rummaging through the leafless trees. The clouds are as dense as gruel, the frigid air making a mist of his exhalation.
It is much too early in the year for a nightingale. But that is the song, no mistake.
39. Her Angel
Florence, three months later…
Piero hovers, vast wings reaching out behind him, a breeze riffling through his snowy plumage as he sways gently, suspended in air. A fly dithers. He swipes it away with an arm.
‘Keep still,’ Artemisia says. ‘I won’t be long, now.’
Her husband is hanging from a rope attached to a joist. She studies the way the early morning pours over his goose-feather wings in blushing folds and catches in the pale drapery of his tunic. Dabbing the tip of her brush into carmine, she mixes it into a smear of lead-white and touches the colour onto her canvas, standing back to appraise it. The light is different in Florence, warmer, where it reflects off the red earth. She mixes in a touch more of the red, layering the colours in fine strokes to create the feathered effect.
Her angel is taking shape, while the Virgin crouched beneath him remains a vague bluish blur. She has yet to find a model to sit for her and can’t help but think of Zita. Those days in the via della Croce, Zita’s girls and their constant racket, her brothers and little Luca, all of them creeping round Orazio for fear of his temper, seem distant. Once the court case was won, all those who had jeered at her, or spat at her, or refused to serve her in the market behaved as if none of it had ever happened. Within a month she was married and gone.
She doesn’t miss much of her old life, only her brothers, but Giulio will be arriving in Florence soon to take up a position as her studio assistant. Marco is still happily installed with the Stiatessis. Francesco went to Naples several months ago to work with a painter there, leaving Father to ‘stew in his own juice’. That was how he put it in his letter. The letter Artemisia was able to read, thanks to Piero’s patient tuition.
Her life has changed beyond recognition, and she too. It is almost impossible to remember the girl she’d been two years ago.
‘Shouldn’t we go? We don’t want to keep them waiting.’ The rope creaks, Piero swaying back and forth, as he adjusts the harness. ‘This is digging in.’
Artemisia is deep in contemplation, stippling colour onto the canvas, breathing life into her angel.
‘Artemisia!’ He has caught her attention. ‘Get me down from here.’
She stretches out her hands, joints clicking as they unknot. The pain is fading and the scars are turning silver. One finger will always be deformed, curling in towards her palm like a talon, a constant reminder of her fury, source of her inspiration.
She unties the pulley rope, lowering Piero slowly to the floor and tossing him a robe. He comes to stand beside her.
‘This is good, Arti. Are you happy with it?’
‘Almost.’
They have fallen into an easy rhythm together. No one questions the legitimacy of their marriage. Piero says one day she might even come round to the idea of motherhood. He thinks they would make good parents. Artemisia cannot imagine that day, not yet, while her new life is still unfolding. She had never thought beyond her desire to paint and now she is earning her living as an artist. That dream is achieved.
‘There’s the cart,’ he says. They can hear wheels rumbling outside and a horse’s whickering, the jangle of a bridle.
‘You take the other end.’ Piero has hold of the carefully wrapped canvas by the door. She helps him with it. It is not heavy, only large.
Excitement opens inside her, like a spring leaf unfurling.
She will never lose the thrill of being paid for her work. If her Judith pleases the grand duke’s overseer, then the grand duke himself, the payment will transform their lives completely. Their rent will be paid for an entire year and there will be enough to give Giulio a stipend. She is looking forward to being able to buy better materials, even, perhaps, a little lapis, which trades for more than gold these days.
She takes in the scenery as they trundle down the steep slope towards the river. This city, her new home, with its russet roofs and ochre render, the pale shape of its cathedral nestled at its heart, has beguiled her. There is an intimacy to Florence that is lacking in the grand splendour of Rome. Florence’s secrets must be discovered. It is a place where you can turn a corner and find a masterpiece, loitering there unannounced. Here she has encountered two hundred years’ worth of beauty, works of art she could only have tried to imagine before.
The Palazzo Pitti stands on its own, away from the jumble of streets, an enormous edifice of rose-gold stone. A thousand arched windows watch as they approach, raised brows suggesting they don’t belong in a place like this.
The cart pulls up at a side entrance where the tradesmen make their deliveries.
‘Not here.’ A provisioning clerk gestures at them to turn around. A twist in her gut tells her he is going to send them packing and they will discover that the whole thing has been a mistake. ‘You need to go round the other side, through the arch.’ He points vaguely towards where the high wall disappears around a corner.
‘Carlo always used to sneak me in through the kitchens,’ says Piero.
They enter through the archway, as instructed, to be confronted by the main entrance gilded in sunshine, a great studded oak door, strapped with iron braces, liveried guards on either side. ‘This can’t be right.’ She had expected some kind of workshop or studio.
Piero shrugs. ‘It’s where the clerk told us to come.’
They are waved through into a splendid marble hall with an endless, chessboard floor. ‘I’m not sure about this.’ Piero and she look at each other. She is resisting the urge to turn tail when a slender young man in black satin and velvet steps towards them.
Removing his cap, he bows. She wants to laugh, tell him he has mistaken her for someone else. ‘Signora Gentileschi?’
‘Yes.’ She has a moment of euphoria to hear him use her maiden name, her painter’s name.
With another deferential bow, he says, ‘It is a privilege to make your acquaintance.’
She must be in a dream, this silk-clad man paying homage to her. It is all she can do to contain herself and introduce Piero. ‘And this is my husband, Signor Stiatessi.’
‘This way, if you please.’ More servants magically appear to carry the painting. And they set off over the chessboard, smoothed by generations of Medici feet, and into a long corridor.
She would like to stop to look at the pictures along the walls but the young man is moving at quite a pace. Another corridor, a flight of stairs, along a galleried landing, and they arrive at an interior pair of doors that is swung open by two sentries.
They step into a vast chamber, more works of art on its walls calling for her attention, as they hurry across the space, and through another pair of doors, and yet another, traversing increasingly small rooms. She wonders how she would ever find her way out alone, imagining she would need to leave a trail of thread, like Theseus, and is glad of Piero’s hand holding hers.
Eventually they arrive in a modest chamber where a man and a woman are standing with their backs turned, looking out of a window. The woman’s dress is embroidered with gold and the man’s jacket is of dense crimson velvet. The pair turn in unison. The woman is tall and smiling with a fine-boned face. The man is taller with a thick beard and curious hooded eyes.
They seem to be waiting for something.
The slender young man whispers, ‘It is customary to curtsey before the grand duke.’
She manages a muffled apology, dipping down, thinking they have been brought to the wrong place.
‘Never mind that,’ says the woman. ‘My son and I have been looking forward to this, haven’t we?’ The grand duke is nodding.
Artemisia realizes now that this is Carlo’s mother. Had she looked properly she would have seen how greatly she resembles him. ‘We were expecting to see your overseer, my lord.’ She hopes she has used the correct address, suddenly doubting herself.
‘I instructed Signor Riggoberti to bring you directly to me.’ The grand duke is pointing to the slender young man, and she has made yet another misapprehension – he is the overseer. ‘I was keen to see this one for myself.’ His eyes are twinkling.
Artemisia can feel the tick of her own pulse in her temple.
Her Judith is being placed, with great care, onto a waiting easel beside the window. The sackcloth wrapping is stripped away. It falls to the floor. Artemisia feels faint. She doesn’t look at the painting, but watches the expression on the grand duke’s face, on his mother’s, as they both flinch.
Dismay gouges out her heart.
Her confidence drains in an instant. They should never have come. Who did she think she was, believing her work would stand up in this place?
‘I don’t know what to say,’ utters the grand duke.
His mother makes a small sound, a kind of ‘oh’. Shock is splayed over her face. ‘This is…’
Artemisia has a falling sensation, a great plunge into nothingness.
‘This is all your own hand?’ he asks. She is surprised no mention is made of her sex.
‘It is, my lord, all mine.’ She can’t look him in the eye, keeps her gaze down on the beautiful tiled floor, waiting to be dismissed, to be told to take her aberration out of their marvellous palace, imagining Piero and she, lost for eternity, wandering through the endless marble chambers and corridors of the Palazzo Pitti, seeking an exit.
Piero places a hand on her back, an invisible support.
The silence is dense, the only sound their breath.
Mother and son begin to speak heatedly to each other. It takes a few moments for Artemisia to understand that they are in dispute about where to hang her painting.
‘It pleases you?’ she says.
‘Pleases?’ The grand duke is looking at her strangely. ‘It speaks the truth. The truth pleases me.’
Her heart dilates.
‘Carlo was right about you.’ The duchess holds out her hands to take Artemisia’s, inspecting them. She is horribly conscious of her deformity, wishing she had worn gloves, but the other woman lightly strokes her talon of a finger. ‘I heard about what happened. I’m so terribly sorry.’ She looks directly at Artemisia for a long moment, her expression full of upset. ‘But you have risen above it.’
They fall to silence once more.
They are gazing in wonderment at her Judith and Artemisia is soaring up, up, aware of the strength of the wingbeat at her back, carrying her inexorably towards her future.
Author’s Note
Disobedient is a work of fiction. However, the major events of Artemisia Gentileschi’s life that I describe are based in fact. Gentileschi was raped by her painting teacher, coerced into accepting his hand in marriage, only to discover he already had a wife. She was then forced to prove the truth of her testimony under torture.
Despite this, and perhaps even because of it, Artemisia Gentileschi went on to find great success as a painter. She was the first woman to be admitted to the prestigious Accademia d’Arte in Florence. Her career took her all over Italy and also to England, to paint commissions for Charles I and his queen, Henrietta Maria.
Soon after the trial she married Pierantonio Stiatessi, about whom very little is known. Gentileschi’s authentic voice can be found in her letters, a number of which still exist; several are between her and her lover, Francesco Maria Marenghi, who was also in friendly correspondence with her husband. This led to my distinct characterization of Piero. The letters offer an intimate insight into her ambitious nature and her libertine lifestyle. The court transcripts of the Tassi trial also provide a full account of the terrible ordeal that is recounted in my novel and her testimony, another place to find her own words. The greatest insight into Artemisia Gentileschi, and in my mind the truest echo of her voice, though, lies in her work and the subjects she chose to paint – an often bloody litany of female heroes.
For all her great success, Artemisia fell into obscurity. This was partly because her style of painting went out of fashion but also because of a general disregard of female painters. In 1876 the records of Tassi’s trial emerged, causing some interest in her over the decades that followed. But it wasn’t until the late twentieth century that her work was properly considered as having a place in the canon, with her becoming something of a feminist symbol for the world of renaissance art.
I stumbled upon Artemisia Gentileschi some years ago when, as is often the case, researching something else. It was her Judith Slaying Holofernes that grabbed my attention with a force I was unable to resist. I wish I could say I had first discovered the work in its full, vivid glory on the walls of the Uffizi but that would not be true – it was a fuzzy reproduction in a book. But even this inferior facsimile took my breath away with its unremitting violence, its composition drawing the eye to a catherine-wheel of blood spattering the foreground, runnels of it coursing over the bedclothes, smearing into the white linen, the terrible howl on the victim’s mouth.
It made the other Judiths I had encountered: Cranach’s placid, bovine young woman, Botticelli’s coy sylph and even Caravaggio’s eroticized girl, also depicted in the act of beheading, seem strangely detached and feeble, hardly capable of killing a mosquito. Not so Gentileschi’s two matrons, muscular and efficient, fearless, flushed with effort as they overcome the supine man, one holding him down while the other hacks off his head. There is no turning away from the brutal and messy business of murder.
As my interests lie in women who have found forms of expression through adversity, a subject I have returned to constantly in my fiction, my curiosity about the artist was sparked. Female painters were a rarity at the time, and all avoided controversy in depicting subjects such as this – all except Artemisia Gentileschi. This masterpiece was created when she was only seventeen. And when I learned it was also aged seventeen that she underwent the terrible ordeal of her rape and torture, I came to a visceral understanding of the genesis of the work.
