The Passion of Artemisia Read online

  “The trial?”

  “Even though we’re cloistered, the convent walls would have to be thick indeed for such a tale not to find its way in. We have been greatly grieved.”

  “You know everything?”

  “We know more than we need to. Are you all right?”

  I brought my hands out from under the cape. They were still swollen and oozing under the stained bandages.

  She gasped. “Poor lamb. Where was your father when this happened?”

  “He let them. He said it would prove my innocence if I kept to my testimony while the cords were on. I don’t know which was worse, my hands or . . . today. Today they had two midwives examine me, you know where, with a notary watching. I know people could see through the curtain. They wanted to show me lying that way.”

  “Dio ti salvi.” She held me and I laid my head on her lap. “It’s just another way to break any woman who accuses a man. They are without conscience.”

  “They’re beasts, all of them,” I wailed into her habit.

  “They may be, but they cannot destroy you.” She cradled me, stroking the back of my head and my hair, letting me cry.

  “My own papa let them.”

  “Cara mia,” she crooned. “Fathers aren’t always fatherly. They may try, but many fail. They’re only mortal.”

  I turned my head to one side, and saw that my dress was smeared with the midwives’ grease. I pulled it away from Graziela’s black wool and noticed her shoes were as worn as Paola’s.

  “There is no way in to the fortress of the soul,” she murmured. “Our Heavenly Father is the guard thereof. He does not betray us. Remember that, Artemisia. Though they might make you a victim, they cannot make you a sinner.”

  I could only sob.

  “Paint it out of you, carissima. Paint out the pain until there’s none left. Don’t take on shame from their mockery. That’s what they want. They want you to shrivel up and die, and you know why?”

  I shook my head in her lap.

  “Because your talent is a threat. Promise me—don’t pray as a penitent when you have no need to be one. Don’t plead. Approach the Lord with dignity, and affirm His goodness. No matter what.”

  “He abandoned me.”

  “Then love Him all the more. That will please Him most.”

  “But everybody thinks—”

  “Don’t care a fig for what they think. The world is larger than Rome, Artemisia. Remember that. Think of your Susanna and the Elders. When that painting becomes famous, the whole world will know your innocence.”

  “How?”

  “Because in that painting you showed her intimidation at the lewd looks of those two men, her vulnerability and fear. It shows you understood her struggle against forces beyond her control. Beyond her control, Artemisia.”

  “You remember all that?”

  “I’ll never forget it. Her face averted and her arms raised, fending off their menace? The night after you brought it here, her face was blazing in my dreams. By the way you had her turn from that leering elder shushing her so she wouldn’t cry out and reveal them, I knew then that you were being threatened.”

  “I painted that before it happened.”

  “Yes, but I could tell you were suffering some menace just as Susanna was. That’s the brilliance of your skill, to have a masterpiece reflect your own feelings and experience.”

  “I can’t even hold a brush now.”

  “You will. Nothing can stop you from bringing your talent to fruition. You are young yet. Never forget that the world needs to know what you have to show them.”

  “The world. What does the world care? The world is full of cruelty.” I touched the rough edge of one of the oyster shells. “If I stayed in here with you, the world wouldn’t matter.”

  “Artemisia.” The word rang with a tone of authority. “One doesn’t live a cloistered life to get away from something. One lives here to serve God because one feels an undeniable voice calling. Any other reason is illegitimate.”

  “I might discover a calling.”

  “You already have. Your art.”

  The bell rang for vespers, which meant I had to go.

  She walked me out through the cloister, stopped at the well in the center, and spoke softly. “You do not want to live where all you ever see is the same nine arches in each arcade, the same few frescoes, the same scraggly pear tree, the same crucifix every day for the rest of your life.” She walked toward the tree and twisted a yellow-green pear until it came loose in her hand. “Here. Remember what I said as you eat it. You have your calling already. Don’t pray as a penitent over someone else’s sin. See yourself as God made you.”

  “Have you ever felt abandoned by God?”

  Her chin pulled back a little, the only hint of her surprise. A disturbance passed over her face that I had never seen before.

  “By God and man.”

  Outside the convent at the top of the stairs, I stopped to feel the wind in my face. There was something light and purifying about being up this high. After a few moments I heard the sisters singing the Magnificat which I loved. “My soul doth magnify the Lord.” Sister Paola had taught me what the Latin words meant when I’d had my first lady’s blood.

  Before that, when Mother had told me I would bleed periodically, I thought she meant it would be God punishing me for pushing her away after I’d seen her in bed that way with Papa. Later, in the convent when my first blood came, I was sure it was God reprimanding me for my unforgiving nature. I prayed to Our Lady to forgive me for treating her that way. The blood still came, gushing like the Red Sea. I ran to Sister Paola thinking that I was dying, and told her everything. She said the blood was part of blessed womanhood just like forgiveness was, and that I didn’t need to be afraid. She told me how the angel came to Mary and said, “Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favor with God.” Sister Paola said I had found favor too, because I was contrite, and then she taught me the Magnificat. Repeating the words to remember them, I had felt them all the way down to where the blood flowed. My soul doth magnify the Lord, just like Mary’s soul. My soul, even my little soul, makes the Lord more magnificent by something I had to offer. Maybe that’s what Graziela meant today by my calling.

  This late in the day the ponentino cooled the leaden air and ruffled my hair, and I imagined it coming all the way from Spain, skimming across the Mediterranean and up the valley of the Tiber to bless me here, high above the city’s pulsing heat. Here the coarseness of the city couldn’t crush me. From the piazza at the base of the hill, streets spread out in three directions. The Via dei Condotti stretched straight ahead, lined with four-story buildings of pale peach and Roman ochre. Farther away the street did get narrower and the buildings shorter, just like Agostino had said they would when he taught me perspective, until street and buildings all came together at a vanishing point far away.

  Why had I thought of him? I plunged down the steep path into the thick of streets and people.

  When I turned onto Via della Croce, a woman I didn’t know stood waiting near our house. She was as stiff as a Vatican guard, dressed in deep green with a black sash. As I came abreast of her, she said in a hoarse whisper, “Do not love him.”

  Another scandalmonger. I turned my shoulder to her and she followed me to my door. I walked with a straight back, looking ahead only.

  “I am Agostino’s sister,” she said behind me. “Listen to me.”

  I stopped.

  She came up next to me. “I saw what they did to you today in court. I’m sorry.”

  I looked around to see if anyone heard.

  “Do not love him,” she said again.

  “Love him!”

  “He’s been a scoundrel since the day he was born. He raped a woman in Lucca so that she was forced to marry him.”

  “He’s married?”

  “That didn’t stop him from making a mistress of his wife’s sister. And now he’s hired two murderers to kill that same wife so he could marry you. As one
woman to another, do not believe a word from him.”

  3

  Agostino

  One night when Papa was out, our neighbor Giovanni Stiattesi and I left the house after dark. We traveled without a torch and took only small streets, avoiding Piazza Navona and any torchlit doorways where music poured out. Papa might be in any of them.

  Giovanni and Porzia had convinced me to see Agostino in the prison of Corte Savella. I thought maybe I could find out whether what his sister said was true. “You could tell him to his face,” Giovanni had said with narrowed eyes, “he’s a son of a whore.” That was exactly what I needed to do, to see if I had the strength to kill him with words. Then I could trust myself to paint Judith killing with a sword.

  We crossed the Tiber at Ponte Sisto in utter blackness, smelling the river beneath us. Giovanni held onto my wrist so as not to hurt my hands, which I’d left uncovered for Agostino to see, and with his other hand, Giovanni felt the stone balustrade.

  “Why are you doing this for me?” I asked. Papa had told me once that Giovanni himself was a jilted lover of Agostino and his anger would serve our cause. He meant in pleading our case in court, though, not in a clandestine errand like this.

  “I have no love for that man. You’ve been wronged. Reasons enough.”

  He led me through streets he knew to the back of the prison, and slipped the guard a coin. I waited in a stone corridor under a torch. The dank passageway smelled of burning tar. No one came for a long time and I began to pace. Finally, Agostino ducked through the door at the far end and swaggered toward me with his broad shoulders, open arms and exaggerated smile, like a warm host greeting an old friend.

  “Artemisia, you’ve finally come! I’ve been waiting, dying for you a little every day.” His voice echoed in the corridor with false sweetness. “Amore, I will marry you if you recant. I promised you then, and I will do it now.”

  “You think I came here for that? To marry a man who dishonored me?”

  His dark eyes widened in arrogant surprise. “There would be no dishonor if you marry me. It will save you.”

  “You mean it will save you. Do you think I want to be married to a lecher? A scoundrel? A reprobate?”

  “You know I love you. Remember all I taught you? You owe me something.”

  “Don’t deceive yourself. I learned nothing from you I couldn’t learn with my own eyes.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Because you can’t paint people. You’ll never last. You’ll be forgotten the day you die, which won’t be soon enough.”

  That got him. He was searching for what to say. “Then at least blame someone else. Say I wasn’t the first so they’ll drop the charges.”

  “I could slice your neck in two and the Holy Virgin would clap her hands.”

  “Say it was Quorli. He’s dead now. How can it hurt?”

  “What do you know of hurt?” I held up my hands with crusted blood lines around the base of each finger and raw, festering wounds between them. “These are the wedding rings you gave me. You sat there and let them do this, and yet you say you love me?”

  He winced at the sight. “Believe me, I didn’t want to hurt you.”

  “Or the woman you married? You didn’t want to hurt her either? Just strangle her kindly? With a rope and an apology?”

  Agostino backed away in shock. Ridges formed across his forehead and his eyes sprang wide open. It was true, then.

  “You’re a monster and a murderer.”

  “Artemisia—”

  “Bastard!”

  I whirled around to leave, feeling blood surging to my fingertips, energizing me.

  The next morning, I started Judith Slaying Holofernes. I could barely bend my fingers to grasp the egg-shaped muller to pulverize the pigments on my marble slab. Pain is not important. I have to ignore it, I told myself. Only painting is important. Paint out the pain, Graziela had said.

  I couldn’t keep my thumb in the hole of the palette so I put a stool on top of a chair to have the palette up high and close by. The smears of color made me breathe faster. Steeling myself against the pull of my skin when I held a brush, I swirled the shiny wetness of pure ultramarine onto my palette and added a touch of soot black to darken it for Judith’s sleeves. Then, awkwardly, I took a stroke to rough it in, sketching with paint. My heart quaked. I felt alive again.

  Every day as soon as I woke up, I threw on my painting gown over my night shift, thrust my feet into my old mules, and painted from the first light, before hawkers shouting behind their creaking carts and old men arguing in the street distracted me. I loved those quiet morning hours stolen from the spectacle in court and I dreaded Papa telling me it was time to stop on the days I had to go.

  I was frustrated that my hands wouldn’t do what I needed them to. Holding the brush between straight fingers, I tried to work by moving my wrist instead of my fingers. Sometimes I lost control and the brush slipped out of my hand. For weeks, after court each day, Papa went to Cardinal Borghese’s Casino of the Muses to work on the ceiling fresco, and I raced home to paint again until the late dark of summer evenings, fired by the thought that both Judith and I were involved in an act of retribution.

  One day I painted two vertical furrows between Judith’s brows, like Caravaggio had done to show that it was hard for Judith to kill, but then in court the next day, Agostino glared at me threateningly now that I knew he was a murderer. Back home that afternoon I painted the furrows out.

  I wanted to catch Holofernes the instant he knew he was about to die, like Agostino’s face when I had called him a murderer. I wanted ridges across his forehead, his eyes wide open, fixed in shock, but still conscious, the white showing below his pupils. I loaded my brush with sable brown. I had to bend my fingers to hold the brush tighter in order to have the control to do the fine edge around the pupils. Scabs cracked open, but I kept on working, loving what was appearing on the canvas—those dark, terrified eyes pleading at me.

  When I drew my hand away, a few drops of blood had landed on the white bedcovers of Holofernes’s bed. The deep brilliant red against the white thrilled me. I squeezed out more blood, feeling pleasure in the pain, and let it fall below his head, mixed vermilion and madder to match the red, and added more. Streams of it. A deep crimson waterfall soaking into luxurious, tufted bedcovers. Like the blood soaking my sleeve in court. Or the blood I had tried to stanch after the first rape. A smear of blood across Judith’s knuckles too. If Rome craved spectacle, then I would give them spectacle.

  4

  The Verdict

  The morning the verdict was to be announced, I opened the door to the street to buy bread from the baker’s boy, and there, leaning up against the house, was a painting wrapped in a dirty cloth. I brought it inside and unwrapped it. “Papa! The stolen painting!”

  “Are you sure?” He rushed into the room and grabbed it from my hands. “It could be a copy.” He took it into the light, scrutinized the brush strokes, and saw something he recognized. “The very one. This changes everything. Hurry. We’ve got to get there early!” He threw on a sleeveless doublet over his shirt as he strode out the door.

  We arrived at the Tor di Nona before the doors were open so we had to wait outside under that horrible noose, smelling the foulness of the Tiber’s stagnant water. All summer and into the fall and not a drop of rain. Clouds of mosquitoes billowed up from the river.

  Once inside, Papa demanded to see the Locumtenente. He pressed a coin into the bailiff’s palm. “Before court convenes, if you please.” Without a change of expression, the bailiff left. “You’ll see now how things are done,” Papa said. His pacing irritated me. The bailiff returned and ushered him down a corridor. I tried to follow but a guard stepped in my way and directed me back to the courtroom where people were being admitted. I took my usual seat.

  The notary arrived, so prim and cold it made me sick. With his lips pursed, he began trimming his pens. Agostino was led in, and then immediately called back. Then the nota
ry was called out too. People in the courtroom murmured and grew restless, arguing their predictions. I tried to shut out their gloating voices.

  Only Porzia and Giovanni Stiattesi in the front row were silent. Porzia lifted her chin to give me courage. Giovanni picked at a sore on his lip. When he had testified a few weeks earlier, he revealed all that Agostino’s sister had told me. Agostino had denied it, saying that his wife had disappeared. Giovanni insisted. Porzia testified the same. Nevertheless, the trial had gone on, sucking in more witnesses—other neighbors, Papa’s plasterer, the apothecary from whom we bought our pigments, and a host of Agostino’s friends all claiming to have had me. I’d had to deny each testimony, pierce the charade of one falsehood after another that tried to make my character the issue and not Agostino’s deed. And Rome enjoyed it all.

  A mosquito kept buzzing near my ear and I couldn’t get rid of it. The room was stifling with all those people, and the wooden chair I sat in seemed much harder than it had before. Someone in the back shouted for court to begin. Others joined.

  “Guilty. Hang him,” someone shouted.

  “Hang the whore,” another voice bellowed.

  “Hang them both together.”

  The whole room laughed. My face flushed hot, and I felt dizzy and faint in the airless room.

  A door opened and the bailiff entered, then the Locumtenente, Papa, Agostino, and the notary. The court fell silent. Sweat dampened my shift.

  I held my back rigid as His Lordship spoke. “In the foregoing case of Orazio Gentileschi, painter, versus Agostino Tassi, painter imprisoned in Corte Savella, not disputing the claim and testimony of the girl Artemisia Gentileschi that she has been raped repeatedly by Signor Tassi, whereas the missing painting has been returned, and whereas the plaintiff has consented, and whereas the accused has already served gaol for eight months during the proceedings, the prisoner is pardoned. Case dismissed.”