Free The Passion of Artemisia by Susan Vreeland Page A

trying to resist the allure of untested love. Even though I do see signs of affection, he still might want me only to grind his pigments, and clean his palette and hose. I want no more scars, even invisible ones, because of a man. Tell Paola she was right. The city is glorious with art and opportunity. So far, I am very happy.
    Con amore,
Artemisia
    And to Father, I wrote simply,
    Thank you. I have high hopes. Florence has many beauties.

    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 meto 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.
    â€œMasaccio 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.
    â€œI want to wrap her in my arms to comfort her,” I said softly.
    â€œMichelangelo, Raphael, and Botticelli sat right heredrawing 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.
    â€œI 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