The Forgery of Venus (21 page)

She moves to her painting and speaks.

“Alas, you are entirely correct about my work, Don Diego. I can
draw well enough, I can mix colors, and my perspective is true, but I cannot find the balance of the forms, or not very well. It is something that must be taught, I think, and no one will teach me.”

“No one taught me,” I say. “When I was your age I knew as little as you. Don Pedro Rubens advised me to go to Italy and look at paintings, and I did, and so learned the art of composition and how to make solid forms appear on a flat plane.”

“Yes,” she says with a laugh, “but unfortunately I am in Italy already, and I am not Velázquez. So, tell me, do you too think it scandalous that a woman paints?”

“Not scandalous,” I say. “Futile, maybe, as if you were learning to fight with a sword. I am surprised your husband permits it.”

A sour face, and she says, “My husband is a Roman count with a great deal of money and no chin. He collects enamels and boys, and if he does not mind that I lie in the bed of the marqués de Heliche, do you think he cares spit about my painting, as long as I don’t publicly acknowledge my sad little commissions and drag down his ancient name? Or piss on the altar at St. Peter’s during the Pope’s Mass—that would be nearly as scandalous. I am sorry, sir, I have shocked you, a fine Spanish gentleman such as yourself, but this is how we Roman courtesans learn to speak. Anyway, no one bothers to stop me from painting. Heliche thinks it amusing, like a monkey taught to dance for a grape.”

I ask, “Then why do you do it?”

“Because I love it. It gives me pleasure to make a world appear upon a white canvas, which I can order as I will. You must understand this.”

“Must I?”

“Of course. Painting as you do, you must love to paint.”

I said, “I love my honor, my kin, my king and my church, and as for painting, I paint as I breathe and eat. It is how I live and make my
place in the world. Had I been born a marqués, I might never have lifted a brush.”

She stared at me as if I had said something coarse.

“That is remarkable. I know many painters and sculptors. Bernini, Poussin, Gentileschi—”

“I know Gentileschi’s work,” I said. “The best of the Caravaggisti, I think.”

“That is the father. I was speaking of the daughter, also a painter, quite aged now, but I knew her when I was a girl. She helped corrupt my mind, as my husband tells me. In any case, it is common for painters to seek to outdo one another. They bring passion to their desire to excel in their art, to confound their rivals. And have you none of this passion, Don Diego?”

“I have no rivals,” I say, and she laughs and says, “Forgive me, sir, I forgot for a moment you are Spanish. Don’t we in Italy send our perfumers to Spain to collect your night soil? It would not dare to stink of anything but violets.”

“The señora will have her joke,” I say, “but I do not care to be the butt of it. I wish you good day, señora.” I make to bow out, but she gives a little “oh!” and dashes forward and places her hand on my sleeve. I can feel the warmth of it through the cloth.

“Please, please,” she cries out, “let us not part so. Of all the men now in Rome, you are the one I most wished to meet, and now I have spoiled all. Oh, Madonna! You have no idea, sir. When your painting of the black man was on display at the Pantheon I went every day. I wished to fall on my knees and worship it, as they did in ancient times when the Pantheon was a temple of the pagans. It is the greatest portrait ever seen, sir, every painter who saw it desired to cut your throat, and you just brought it into being out of…what? Pure spirit? Any cardinal in Rome would have weighed you out in gold for such a promise of immortal fame, and you did it for a
slave
? It is the greatest stroke of bravura this age.”

Her hand still on my arm, and I wish to go now, but I also wish her to leave her hand there. And now I recall what the marqués has demanded and I almost tremble. I do tremble as I say, “You are kind, señora, but we have arrangements to make, I believe.”

“Yes,” she says, “my painting. Obviously, my face cannot be seen, or it must be disguised. Is Venus ever masked?”

“I have never seen her so depicted, but we will arrange something, I am sure.”

“Certainly. You are at the Villa Medici, are you not? Perhaps the second hour after noon would be the most discreet. All Rome is sleeping then. Let us start tomorrow.”

I think of my pocket book and all my tasks and appointments. Impossible! “Not tomorrow, señora, nor the next day, I’m afraid. A week from tomorrow, perhaps?”

“No, it must be now,” she says. “Heliche is like a great baby, and now his mind is set on this Venus of me. He is dismissing me, or will in the next few weeks; as you will observe when we descend to the salon in a moment, he is besotted with the Contessa Emilia Odescalchi, who is more beautiful than I am and more stupid, both desirable traits in a mistress. He will palm me off on one of his train, to salve his conscience, but before that he wishes a souvenir of our liaison, and this is your painting. And don’t imagine that it will be just one painting. So you must begin now, nor should you suppose he will accept excuses. Heliche is vicious, but he is not a fool, and you will not want to displease him, for you are not a fool either. You do not need his enmity in the courts of Madrid.”

I
cannot recall the remainder of that day. I attended my lord for some time at his palazzo and drank more wine than I am used to. I returned to my rooms and slept badly, more dreams of Rome
transformed into hell. Thank God I can remember little of it but the roaring and the stench, or else I would paint like that Flamenco the late king favored, Geronimo Bosco, who they say was driven mad by his visions of eternal torment.

The next day I send boys out with letters to those I cannot see at the time I have appointed, yet I must go out myself to the foundry shop where they are casting my Laocoön, such begging I did to gain permission from His Holiness and the camerlengo, the bribes dispensed…I must be there to ensure it is done correctly, and then I must rush to return in time to meet this accursed woman, driving as fast as we dare through a cold rain; this Roman winter makes my bones ache. The bells are striking twice as I enter the villa; the place is silent as a tomb for the siesta.

I set up my easel and prepare my paints; there is no time to fetch a proper gilt mirror, so I have Pareja bring the plain one from the room the servants use and then dismiss him and the other boys, arrange a red drape behind the couch, and cover it with a linen sheet. There is a canvas already primed that I was going to use for another view of the gardens, but it will do. When all is ready I wait, for of course the woman is late—who can count on a woman to be anywhere at the hour!

Then a knock and she is here, dressed in a heavy black velvet cloak to the floor, hooded and masked, a silk scarf of pale green about her neck. She removes the mask, throws back her hood. She has tied up her hair on top of her head in imitation of the Venuses of Titian and Caracci and of the Medici Venus, I mean the famous statue that is the root of all art devoted to the female form. We speak a little, the weather, the cold; she apologizes for her lateness and then we stand dumb. I have never painted a woman of rank, nude, from the life. There is no precedent, manners are no guide.

She gestures to the couch. “Shall I be a reclining Venus, there?”

“If you please, señora,” I say, “and there is your mirror.”

She walks over and looks at it. “Not a mirror for a goddess, I think. And it is a wall mirror. How am I to gaze at my beauty while reclining on your couch?”

I am ashamed I have not thought of this and I am mute with embarrassment.

She says, “If you had a cupid holding it at her feet, propped up on the couch, she could lie on her back and gaze. You could paint in the child later.”

I agree this is worth trying; I croak, in fact, my throat is so dry. I say, “You may undress behind that screen.”

“I don’t need your screen,” she says, and takes off her cloak. Beneath it she is all alabaster skin, not a stitch on her.

“May I spread my cloak and lie on it? It is cold in this room. Will it spoil your colors?”

“No, please,” I say, stammering. I turn my back to take up my palette and brushes, and when I again look to the couch she is lying on her back, relaxed, her thighs lolling open, revealing the dark curls at her groin and a tiny sliver of pink sex.

“How shall I arrange my limbs, Don Diego? Shall I have my hand here like Titian’s Venus, covering myself modestly? And the other behind my head, like this?”

“Yes,” I say, “that’s good. Turn your head a little, toward the mirror.”

Some adjustments of that damned mirror follow; leaning over her I can smell her, some dense perfume. I am sweating like a Seville porter. When I pick up brush and palette my hand shakes. I begin to block in the forms in gray-ochre; I can see her looking at me in the mirror, amusement in her eyes, the mocking whore!

I stop and put down the palette.

“What is wrong, Don Diego?”

“The pose. It’s awkward with you on your back like that, the line
of your neck is clumsy…” And similar nonsense, but the fact is that I can neither bear to stare at her sex nor ask her to close her legs, and so I say, “Roll on your right side.”

“You wish to take me from the back, then?”

I ignore the coarse wit and say, “Yes, there is a statue I like, an antique hermaphrodite at the Villa Borghese—I am having it cast in bronze for His Majesty—which shows the back very well, and there is Annibale Caracci’s
Venus with Satyrs,
which shows the woman from the back as well. I think it would suit in this case…”

And similar babble, until she rolls slowly over and I adjust the black cloak, and the white linen showing through on both sides of this, and also a wisp of her green chiffon scarf. And now I need not stare at her breasts and their brown buds stiff with the chill, and the darker pink of her clam, and I can paint the line of her back, with just a little more adjustment. If it were a boy or a man I would simply shift the limbs or head with my hands, but now it is like painting the king, I must ask for small, important movements, the lower leg thrust a little forward so the mass of her upper ham falls naturally and the lower is compressed, and between them the light just striking that thin fold of flesh; yes, my lord the marqués will like that, I’ll make sure that shows, a tiny carmine lamp at the gates to paradise.

It is winter; there is little light left, and at four or so we stop and she wraps herself in the cloak again. She sits on the couch with her knees up like a little girl; the woman has no shame at all and yet is not degraded by it. We agree to meet tomorrow, but earlier this time, so as to catch the light.

But she does not come, instead sends a message that she was out late with the marqués, and I have to scurry to fill my day, uncanceling meetings and rushing about the city. I manage to arrange a final sitting with Cardinal Pamphili; his silly face is done and I can finish the rest here, his gown and the background and so on. But I am uneasy all
the day and have the same unpleasant dreams, rooms full of strange light that shows the faces of people glowing like rotted corpses, yet no candle or fire to give it, and those people crying out in a language I don’t know.

She comes early, just after dawn, in the same black cloak, again naked beneath it.

“You must not think, Don Diego, that I travel through the city of Rome like this ordinarily,” she tells me, “but if I am dressed I must bring a woman along to undress me, and dress me again, my stays and laces and the rest—it is a disability of us women—and we wish to keep this painting our secret. Unless you would care to do that service?”

She sees my face and laughs. “I observe that it would not please you to serve me so. Therefore, let me take my pose.”

She does so and I paint. In the morning light her skin glows like pearl, and I brush in thin tints of lake mixed with flake white, always thin so that the white of the underpainting shows through, and plenty of calcite for transparency, tiny blended strokes so that the surface is perfectly smooth, as it would be to the hand’s touch. My fancy is that the light comes from within her, and I paint in the image in the glass, her face plain enough, and then I darken it and change it so that it could be any girl on the couch.

I work without stopping—I have lost count of the bells—until she complains of stiffness and the need to use the jakes. The figure is nearly done, and I say, a moment longer, I say, a few more strokes then, a little more modeling on the upper thigh, a bluish-gray, very thin. I put my brush down and gesture to her that she can move. She rises, groans, laughs, and with the cloak about her shoulders, she comes around and looks at the canvas.

“That arm is out of the drawing,” she says, “but I see why you did it, yes, the line of the back is made bolder, a desperate move, but it
works. Look how thin the paint, the fabric shows through, what a miser you are! There is almost nothing there, but also everything, you compel the eye itself to make up the difference. Yes, my narrow waist, I am as proud as Satan of it, yet she is not much of a goddess, I think, but a mortal woman. I thank you for disguising my face, but you have my big
culo
to the life, and I believe some men would recognize me from that alone. Oh, Madonna, I am speaking like a whore again, I offend your Spanish sensibilities.”

She looks me in the face, smiling, showing her teeth like a peasant. She says, “I do it only because I hate you. This, seeing this work, makes me want to break my brushes. I would give my soul to be able to make flesh shine like that. Heliche will die when he sees it; it is just the kind of thing he likes. I imagine he will find some way of looking at it while he enjoys his new mistress.”

“Are you sure he has one?”

“Oh, yes, in that realm I am an expert, as you are as a painter.”

“And have you been fobbed off upon one of his train, as you foretold?”

“Indeed, I have,” she says.

“Who is it?” I ask, stupidly.