The Woman in the Painting

‘Giulio! You need to be quicker.’ Taddeo’s voice was all authority. Giulio’s face was all scorn. You couldn’t rush Giulio Romano and to do so made him slow down intentionally. He put down the quills he’d been working on, stretched out his arms high above his head then gave a yawn. Taddeo scuttled back to his place.

Meanwhile, the miniature portrait had made its way around nearly every workbench, dazzling the eye and mind of each apprentice and elevating them above Sebastiano’s net of barbs. Raphael. Quite the hero, and to see his likeness confirmed it. The apprentices at the workbench nearest to Taddeo had put down their tools in anticipation. Unable to resist, they huddled round the boy currently looking at it.

‘Is that him? Is that Raphael?’

It did not matter that the words were whispered, barely audible to the human ear. Sebastiano had heard them. Like a hunting dog, and Michelangelo before him, he sniffed the air.

‘That’s Raphael?’ ‘Is that Raphael?’ ‘Raph—?’ Excitement had rendered the apprentices oblivious.

Sebastiano threw his paintbrush to the floor and roared.

‘I never, NEVER, want to hear that name in here again. Understand?’ The voices of the young apprentices died instantly; the miniature was hastily pushed under a pile of sketches.

‘What’s the time?’ Sebastiano asked.

‘Half past ten.’

‘I know it is, Taddeo. I know what the time is, you halfwit!’ Sebastiano said. ‘But where is she? That’s what I want to know, you oaf. Where is she?’

The maestro stormed off, wearing his bad mood like an aura around his head. He stood before his portrait of the baker’s daughter, as if willing her to step out of the picture.

The apprentices pulled out the miniature again, the urge to see this now forbidden young artist more irresistible than ever. ‘Nature made him then broke the mould,’ one of them said with appreciation, taking care not to mention the artist by name. I was sure I’d heard that phrase somewhere before, but, while I struggled to place it, Taddeo, with eyes cruel and greedy as a tyrant’s, marched over to see what was going on.

That tyranny begets tyranny was never borne out so clearly. Within seconds he had prised the portrait from their hands and was holding it up. He shot a look of victory in Giulio’s direction. His mouth was open, about to chastise the apprentices for wasting time. Then he heard the cry.

‘Taddeo!’

Sebastiano’s faithful assistant glanced up at the portrait in his hand. He lowered his eyes. They met the maestro’s, recognised what was coming next. Taddeo’s eyelids flapped wildly, as if by blinking alone he could become airborne and escape. Beads of sweat broke out across his forehead.

‘It wasn’t me … It was them … They had it … I …’ He mumbled his excuses. A spurt of pleasure shot through me as I watched his suffering. At once unfair and so deserved.

Sebastiano thundered over and snatched the offensive image out of the faithful Taddeo’s hands.

He looked at it.

If the mention of the young artist’s name had irked him already, the sight of Raphael’s image up close put him in the foulest of tempers. Dark clouds marred Sebastiano’s features like flies on rotting flesh. I glanced over at Giulio. He had a knowing look upon his face. It gave me a secret thrill to see it.

Sebastiano, miniature in hand, went over to the far side of the workshop to where his easel was set up. He smashed the perfect image down on a nearby table. ‘Damn that wastrel from Urbino!’

He returned to pacing. This time we all hid behind our work.

‘Have we no letter from the Vatican yet?’ he shouted, pushing the miniature away. We’d heard a workshop was being set up for Raphael. He had wealthy patrons, said to be friends of the Pope. ‘Look at him!’ Sebastiano said to himself, glowering at the likeness as if it were alive, ‘as beardless as a young girl!’ Several of the apprentices came out of hiding. They dragged strange sounds from their mouths and nodded, thinking they’d been called on to agree. They had not.

‘Who asked you?’ Sebastiano growled at their forced laughter and nodding heads. ‘Go back to your work. Now!’

I looked towards the entrance, attracted by a sudden movement. And there, framed in the doorway with her eyebrows raised in mockery at the commotion, stood the girl. The girl the maestro had been waiting for. Here. In the studio. At last. Knowing I’d seen her, she glided in.

Sebastiano, his face blanching at the sight of her, ran to pull the heavy red velvet drape down, an action he had been waiting to perform for such a long time. She made her way to the table, intrigued no doubt to see the face of the man who had provoked the scene she’d just caught the tail of. She picked up the small portrait and gave an approving smile. Her face opened up like a flower in the sunshine at the sight of it.

Sebastiano noticed. His already cloud-eaten face turned blacker still. He tugged on the curtain repeatedly. It resisted his pull.

‘Damn! Damn!’

The atmosphere in the studio cranked up to thunderous; in an instant the velvet curtain had crashed to the floor.

‘Take it to the side, for heaven’s sake!’ At the flick of his wrist he conjured up two apprentices. They scuttled over and made the curtain disappear.

The girl was still waiting. Still amused. Still unperturbed.

‘It’s too warm to be wearing this,’ she said, as she picked up the fur-lined cape hanging over the back of her chair. She draped it over her left shoulder nevertheless, while stooping over to pick up a laurel wreath from her basket. She wore it on her head like a green crown. I watched her, grateful for the patches of light and pockets of calm she had brought in with her. The maestro’s bad temper, like a poison-tipped arrow, breached the walls of almost every other person in the studio, while she remained inviolate.

We had never observed Sebastiano paint this model before, though we’d occasionally heard them behind the velvet. We liked to imagine the scene, full of lust and desire. But today, with no curtain to shield our eyes, nor fuel our imaginations, we would get the opportunity to see Sebastiano and his model in the flesh. There was a sufficient whiff of excitement at the prospect to cut through the dark clouds of the morning.

We buried our heads in cleaning, grinding, planning, sketching. Every apprentice made the workshop seem busy. The noises of wooden brushes dropping on floors, paper tearing, knives cutting, chair legs scraping, had the space filled with life so that Sebastiano and his model would soon believe that no one was interested in what they were doing or saying.

But we were.

Whenever we looked something up in the Cennini, or asked a fellow apprentice for some help, we watched out of the corners of our eyes. Our maestro performed his role much as we’d envisaged, with the wandering hands of an attentive paramour. Yet his model seemed to have forgotten the yielding lines our heads had written for her, replacing them with some feisty ones of her own. She sat, her back straight, on a chair on a raised platform, bathed in the light that flooded in through the window.

Sebastiano went to hang a pearl drop from her ear.

‘Please don’t. I can do this myself,’ she told him, with a shrug. No, Sebastiano’s model was not responding in the way we’d expected at all. Sebastiano’s fingers dropped from her ear to stroke her face; she reeled her head back like an untamed horse. The maestro attempted to smooth down her dress; she brushed his hand away. He caught her hand in his; she withdrew it, a delicate hand from a coarse, ill-fitting glove.

‘I am the great Sebastiano!’ he said, smoothing his own dark hair back with disappointed fingers. His widow’s peak and pointed beard made his face look, in that moment, like a heart. Vulnerable, he cast his eye around the studio. Had we witnessed his humiliation as the girl rejected him? Overheard the girl’s insolence as she refused his help? Our studied concentration on the jobs in front of us, and our louder-than-usual discussions regarding work-related matters, reassured him. ‘The great Sebastiano!’ he repeated, as he returned to the task in hand: the painting of the girl.

‘Your hand needs to be pointing towards your heart,’ he said. Afraid to touch her now, he modelled the pose for this lowborn girl himself.

I stole a glance at Giulio. His eyes twinkled with tears of mirth. To see the power this model wielded over the maestro entertained him.

‘Now turn to the left and look at me. Look at me. Yes, that’s right.’

I too was amused.

Yet something niggled at the back of my mind. Who was this worthless girl to treat the ‘great Sebastiano’ so? And how could he let her?

There was no money in it. And, from appearances today, no profit of the sort Sebastiano was interested in either. Whatever he was hoping to get from her it was apparent that he wasn’t getting it. Nor ever would. I did not know whether to applaud or curse her but one thing was clear – she was not the girl we’d all assumed she was.

‘When can you come again?’ The sitting had come to an end and the maestro’s voice was little, beseeching.

‘I don’t want to sit for you again. You’ve finished.’

‘I haven’t. The hand, pointing to your heart. It’s not quite right.’

‘You are the great Sebastiano,’ she said, her voice mocking, ‘you don’t need me to finish your painting.’

‘You can’t stop coming. I forbid—’

The girl raised her hand. She looked around the workshop. It was silent. Conspicuously so.

‘Sebastiano!’ Her voice rang out like a warning bell. If she’d intended to bring the maestro to his senses, she hadn’t succeeded.

Lust and pride, a heady concoction, had got the better of Sebastiano the great. And it made for the most unedifying of sights.

‘You WILL come back … Powerful Romans pay a lot for a portrait by Sebastiano Luciani …’ Bitterness twisted itself around his words. ‘I have noble families queuing up for the privilege … yes, it’s a privilege … I paint you and receive nothing in return. Girls like you …’

She threw her head back and lifted her shoulders. She’d heard enough. ‘Remember, I did not ask to be painted.’ She was strong, proud.

‘I have an agreement with your father. I have paid him …’

‘To PAINT me,’ she said, giving way momentarily to exasperation. ‘And now you have. But as for—’ She broke off, aware that she had an audience. ‘As for all the rest, believe me when I say that I will not be bought.’

We silent apprentices listened on. Excitement crackled in the air.

‘Besides, my father needs me. There’s a grain shortage going on. It might not affect you, but times are hard for ordinary working Romans.’ She paused. ‘And you made a promise you’d be finished by now. A promise.’

‘Margarita. I can gi—’

‘Ssh!’ she hissed, trying to silence him. ‘It’s not about the money. All right, I will stay, for a little while longer, if you need to paint my hand. But trust me when I say I am deaf to all other entreaties.’ We waited.

But as maestro painted model, they said nothing more to each other. Pockets of chat and the sounds of work built up again. The show was over. For the moment.

Chapter 3

Giulio was the first to retake the floor. He had finished with the quills and was now back on the lapis lazuli. His eyes twinkled with mischief. ‘They found another body in the Tiber this morning, wearing nothing but a pendant of St Stefano.’ He waited for the gasp. Instead, just when Giulio thought it was over, the disagreement between Sebastiano and his feisty model bubbled up again. Apprentices’ eyes shot to the warring pair but Giulio drew them back again. He would not be outdone. He’d found the maestro’s humiliation as amusing as the rest of us, but what was a lovers’ tiff compared to the gruesome tale he had to tell? Lovers’ tiff? It wasn’t even that. No, Giulio had had his fill of listening to the desperate bleating of a lovesick fool chasing some girl the like of which he could pick up easily in one of Rome’s many brothels.

He clicked his fingers, gave a dismissive shrug of his shoulders to show his disappointment at the master’s performance, and carried on with his own story. He beckoned us closer. ‘Man. Young,’ he clarified. ‘Found with the remains of his hose wrapped around an ankle, a coin in his throat with a huge stone wedged in his mouth to keep it there, and a pendant of St Stefano wound one time too many around his neck.’

For a second Giulio looked straight at me, a knowing look on his face. I told myself I was imagining it.

‘He was a pretty boy, if you get my meaning,’ he added. I knew then I was not. My stomach lurched. My skin prickled. I felt threatened. But the other apprentices noticed nothing of the tacit communication that had passed between Giulio and myself. All they wanted was for him to go on with his grisly story and they strained their ears to listen some more.

‘Nose cut off.’ No longer interested in me, he threw himself into the performance, slicing the air with the side of his hand. While his audience made noises of pity for the pain of losing one body part, he hit them with another. He thrust his hips forward and slapped his two hands between his legs. ‘Cock too.’ This time he grinned like a fool. Smothered titters and horrified howls rippled around him. ‘I even heard that they cut off his …’

‘LAMP BLACK!’ Sebastiano’s roar, followed by the sound of something clattering to the floor, put an end to the morning news as told by Giulio. The maestro’s disagreement with his model was over, again, and the one with us was about to start.

My heart was still thumping against the prison of my ribcage, my mind imagining the dead body. But Giulio had been silenced. For now. And I was glad of it.

I looked over to discover what had brought about this change. A messenger from the Vatican had finished talking with a disgruntled Sebastiano. The messenger made apologetic gestures; Sebastiano exuded disappointment. The workshop had not secured the large commission after all. I watched him as he returned to his model. He whispered what I deduced from the look on her face was a question. It caused her to pick up the miniature of the artist Raphael that had been thrown down on the table earlier on while the maestro himself moved his head round the workshop like a lit torch in the dark. We looked down at our work.

‘You shouldn’t ask a question when you have no desire to know the answer,’ his model’s even voice replied. ‘I am no flatterer, nor will I ever be.’ What could Sebastiano have asked? My mind worked hard to fill in the gaps; all I could come up with were the vain enquiries of a self-deluding madman.

Sebastiano puffed up his chest. This could only end one way.

The girl gave her answer. Sebastiano let out a roar.

We worked hard, harder than ever. Lamp black, lamp black, lamp black, I told myself. The pressure was palpable. The maestro’s roar told us his model’s answer had not been the sweet consolation he was seeking after the papal disappointment. He was going to be taking his frustration out on us for the rest of the day. As I struggled to keep up with the demand for lamp black, the girl who was responsible for Sebastiano’s latest show of anger walked by. She passed in front of the bench I was working at, swinging her basket. She displayed none of the outward signs of a lover spurned or model chastised. If she was quaking with fear, she didn’t show it.

I looked up all the better to see what the attraction was now that she was so close to me. Though the clothes she had on now were not as fine as the ones she had been dressed up in by Sebastiano for the painting, and the pearl earrings were no longer hanging from her ears, and a single laurel leaf was all that was left of the wreath sitting on her head, the colour and style of her hair were the same, as was the shape of her face and the deep brown eyes.

I thought about the portrait. Close though the Venetian was in capturing this young woman’s likeness, I could not say that his art had in any way improved upon nature. The girl, though not of noble birth, as was clear from the way she dressed, was a beauty, her skin soft and plump, the light in her eyes warm and radiant. The light in the studio was good and to see her movements swathed in it made me question Sebastiano’s rendition. He acted like a man bewitched but there was no hint of this in his work. What he had produced was a lacklustre imitation, competent in that it was recognisable, but without expressing the life and energy of this bewitching creature who danced past me, skirts swaying, hair bouncing, and whose flesh, I couldn’t help but notice, quivered ever so slightly with every up and down sweep of her arm.

Not that I found this jiggling of flesh attractive myself, not even at fourteen, but I could see, in that moment, why many men would. She moved the way she spoke. There was something to be learned from her. She was rebellious yet not aggressive, confident yet not brash. Strength, grace and gentleness radiated from every step and turn of her head. Qualities I’d thought of as quite disparate harmonised within her. I was in awe and could do nothing to resist. Sebastiano, in the same moment, had noticed her movements too. They elicited an altogether different response in him. And it wasn’t the one we’d seen when he’d been painting her earlier.

‘Stop swinging your basket!’

He was cross with the girl. No longer the amorous artist. It must have been something she’d said.

Though usually changeable in temper, events of the morning had made his humour worse than ever. I looked over to see him push the miniature of the artist from Urbino across the table in a fit of rage. It scraped across the surface, flew off the end, and crashed to the floor.

Not satisfied the miniature was on the floor, he kicked hard at it, pushing it away still further. Giulio sucked the air in through his teeth. The girl with the basket reddened. For the first time she appeared vulnerable. I was surprised.

Then I understood.

Sebastiano was jealous.

I looked at his blotchy face. His nose was an angry red and his eyes were incandescent with a rage so strong it threatened to consume him.

As for the girl’s cheeks, they returned from flush red to a warm pink the nearer she got to the door. She sprang by, determined not to be cowed by Sebastiano’s display of bad temper. She gave me a wink.

‘STOP … SWINGING … THE BASKET!’

Sebastiano’s voice boomed across the workshop like a clap of thunder.

In my shock I jumped. I have no idea what the dancing girl without the pearl earrings did because I froze. It was my heart that now lurched into my mouth – preferable to the contents of my stomach that had threatened to make a reappearance in response to something Giulio had said earlier.

I’d knocked over the lamp and I watched in horror as hot linseed oil surged from it to create the most perfect of arcs. It slipped through the air and landed in the uncovered lapis lazuli dust on the neighbouring bench. Its globular heaviness made the precious pigment puff up. Thousands of specks of exquisite colour cascaded before my eyes. It was as if time had slowed down as I watched this disaster unfold. When I’d looked back up from the now settled ultramarine powder the girl was nowhere to be seen. The main door slammed shut. She’d gone.

I turned to look at Giulio. Mockery had vanished from his eyes. Arrogance had abandoned him. He was looking behind me. His mouth opened as if to speak but it was as if the deluge of the shock within had flooded him so completely that no sound came out.

Then I felt it. Sebastiano’s heavy palm, slap, on the back of my head.

I stumbled forward, gasped for air. I sneezed, my nostrils irritated by the dust Giulio had produced after hours of grinding. Celestial dust. Colour of the heavens and the Madonna’s sacred robe. The most expensive pigment in all the world. And now it lay over the bench like a fine covering of newly fallen snow. The hand that had struck me wrapped itself around my upper arm and squeezed hard. I felt the gold ring on one of his fingers dig into me. I sneezed some more, unable to stop. I watched, appalled, as moisture now clung to the lapis dust to form dark, wet dots. The same hand that squeezed me shook me. Pain and shock rendered me breathless. Sebastiano had achieved his aim: I stopped sneezing. But by then it was too late.

I looked at Giulio. In my naivety I hoped that he might be able to do something, say something, that would save me: it was clear he could not. Invisible ropes had already started to pull him back to his place of work. His eyes looked on me with sympathy but his work-worn hands were securely tied. He had no choice but to watch as Sebastiano dragged me to the heavy oak door of the workshop and cast me outside. He threw my jacket after me.

‘Think yourself lucky I don’t get you locked up for this. The money you’ve lost me! Now clear off! Talentless dog that you are!’

As the door slammed shut behind me, I imagined my father’s knuckles cracking.