London, 1890
WHILE HENRI HAD SPENT THE DAY STALKING THE MYSTERY OF THE Colorman, Lucien had spent a week in London looking at art and bonking Juliette in every corner of Kensington.
“If you bolt on the hotel bill after only one night they don’t even bother with the police,” Juliette had said.
“But shouldn’t we change neighborhoods?” Lucien had stayed in very few hotels in his life, and he had never run out on the bill.
“I like Hyde Park,” Juliette said. “Now come to bed.”
There had been a lot of firsts on his first trip to London, not the least of which was the realization that France and England had been at war since, well, since they had been separate countries, really. Outside of the National Gallery, at Trafalgar Square, he looked at the great pillar built to Admiral Nelson, in honor of his victory over Napoleon’s navy (and the Spanish) at Trafalgar. The painter Courbet had been exiled for rallying to destroy Napoleon’s version of the column outside the Louvre (supposedly at the urging of his Irish mistress, Jo).
“Courbet was a tosser,” Juliette said. “Let’s go look at pictures.”
Lucien didn’t ask how she’d known he was thinking about Courbet, or when she started using the English term “tosser”; he’d given up on that sort of thing and had just given himself over to her will. In a few minutes they were through the rotunda and Juliette led the way, breezing by masterpieces like they were leprous beggars, until they stood in front of Velázquez’s Venus.
“Put a naked cherub on the couch with her to hold the mirror,” said Henri. “I can model if you need.” Venus at Her Mirror—Diego Velázquez, 1647
She lay on a chaise lounge with her back to them, her skin a smooth, peach-kissed white, and although Henri had been right, her bottom was not quite so fine as Juliette’s, she was a beauty to be sure, and because she was looking at you looking at her, in a mirror held by a cherub, there was just the slightest feeling of naughtiness, the voyeur exposed. But she didn’t regard you, size you up and dismiss you the way Manet’s Olympia did. She didn’t tease you the way Goya’s Maja did. She was just watching you watch her do what she did, which was display the most sublime backside in art. But for all the real dimension, tone, and even light in her skin, on her back and legs, her face in the mirror was dark, out of focus, as if she watched you from a different place, through a window, not really a mirror.
“He must have used a camera obscura,” Lucien said. The camera obscura: an actual camera that existed before film. The lens flipped the image and projected it onto a sheet of ground glass, often with a grid etched into it, so the artist essentially painted what had already been reduced to two dimensions in a real, living version of a photograph.
“Why would you say that?” Juliette asked.
“Because her face is out of focus, but her bottom is sharp. I mean, soft, but sharp. That’s not the way he paints the cherub, whose face is in vivid focus but in the same plane as the mirror—because he was painted from imagination, or from a different sitting. Your eye changes focus when you look at the different elements of a scene, regardless of distance, but the camera can only focus on a certain range of depth. If he had painted it by just his eye, her face would be in focus.”
“Maybe he just couldn’t see what she looked like.”
Lucien turned to her. “Don’t be silly.”
“Me? You’re the one making up machines.”
He laughed, then looked from her, to the painting, then all around the gallery, at all the paintings, then to her again. “Juliette?”
“Yes?”
“Thank you for showing me this—these paintings.”
“Lot of good it does you if you won’t see them.” She grinned and began to walk away. He followed her, as he was supposed to, but then stopped in front of a very large canvas, a Renaissance Madonna.
“Holy mother of…”
“What? What?” She stopped.
“It’s a Michelangelo,” Lucien said. The picture, while almost ten feet tall, looked to be part of a larger piece, perhaps an altarpiece, with the Madonna in the center and the Christ child, a toddler, reaching for a book that she was holding. Her breast was exposed, for no apparent reason, as she was otherwise fully covered by her robe. The shadow of her robe had been shaded in black, but otherwise it had never been painted.
“I wonder why he didn’t paint her robe,” Lucien said.
“Maybe he got tired,” said Juliette.
“Strange.” He wandered away from her then, on to the next painting, this one also a Michelangelo. “Look at this.”
It was a pietà called The Entombment, and in this one, the Holy Mother’s robe had been left unpainted as well, while the rest of the painting was finished.
“He didn’t finish this one either,” said Lucien. “In fact, there’s no blue in the painting at all.” Excited at seeing a masterpiece stopped in progress, he put his arm around her waist and pulled her close. “You know the Virgin’s cloak had to be painted blue. It was called Sacré Bleu, because it was reserved for her.”
“He didn’t finish this one either,” said Lucien. “In fact, there’s no blue in the painting at all.” The Manchester Madonna and The Entombment—Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1497
“You don’t say,” said Juliette. “Maybe we should go look at the Turners, since we’re in England and all.”
“Why would he finish the whole painting but not use any blue?”
“Maybe because he was an annoying little poofter,” said Juliette.
“A master wouldn’t stop in the middle of painting to be annoying.”
“And yet here I am, almost four hundred years later, annoyed.”
“At Michelangelo?” Lucien had never been annoyed by a painting. He wondered if that might be yet another element of a masterpiece that he might never be able to produce. “Do you think someday I could be that annoying?”
“Oh, cher,” she said. “Don’t sell yourself short.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing,” she said, and off she glided to look at the Turners and the Constables, or ships and sheeps, as she liked to think of them.
She was being kind, really. Lucien hadn’t a chance of ever being remotely as annoying as Michelangelo Buonarroti. For one thing, Lucien was, at heart, a sweet man, a kind and generous man, and with the exception of a bit of self-doubt about his painting, which served to make him a better painter, he was delightfully unburdened by guilt or self-loathing. Michelangelo, not so much.
Rome, Italy, 1497
THE FLORENTINE HAD BEEN ABOUT THE SAME AGE AS LUCIEN WAS NOW WHEN she’d first come to him. And like Lucien, he had not dealt with the Colorman directly. She found him in Rome, working on The Entombment of Christ, which was to be an altarpiece for the Church of Saint Agostino. He was alone in his workshop, as was often the case.
She was a young girl, wide-eyed and fresh faced, wearing the gown of a peasant, loosely laced and low cut. She carried the color, freshly mixed and packaged in sheep’s bladders, twisted off to size and tied with catgut, in a basket padded with unbleached linen.
The painter didn’t even look from his work. “Go away. I don’t like anyone around when I work.”
“Excuse me, Maestro,” she said with a curtsy. “But I was asked to bring you these paints by the cardinal.” He was painting for the Church; there had a be a cardinal involved somewhere.
“What cardinal? I have my own color man. Go away.”
She crept forward. “I don’t know which cardinal, Maestro. I don’t dare look up when I am addressed by a prince of the Church.”
He finally looked at her. “Don’t call me maestro. Not when I’m doing this. I’m not even a painter, I’m a sculptor. I find the spirit in the stone, guided by the hand of God. I work in paint only in the service of God.”
Not another one, she thought. The reason she’d left Florence was she had lost Botticelli to his religious conscience, spurred by that maniac Dominican monk Savonarola and his Bonfire of the Vanities. Botticelli himself converted and threw some of his best paintings, her paintings, on the fire. But Michelangelo had been here in Rome for a year. How had he heard of the teachings of Savonarola?
“I’m sorry, but I must deliver these colors or I will be punished.”
“Fine, fine, then. Leave them.”
She moved to where he sat on a three-legged stool and slowly knelt with the basket, making sure one knee pushed out of her skirt, baring a thigh, and the front of her gown fell open. She held the position for what she thought was long enough, then shyly looked up into his face.
And he wasn’t even looking. “Oh for fuck’s sake,” she said in English, because she thought it the best language for swearing. “You’re not even bloody looking, are you, you pooft?”
“What? What?” said the painter. “That is no way for a young girl to behave, showing her body. You should read the sermons of Savonarola, young lady.”
“You read them?” She snatched up her basket. “Of course, you read them.” She stormed out of the workshop.
The Colorman was right; no good was going to come of that printing press invention of Gutenberg’s. Fucking Germans and their inventions.
The next day, when Michelangelo looked up from his painting, it was a young man, little more than a boy, who carried the basket of color. This time he wasn’t quite so dismissive. In fact, as the young man, Bleu was able to inspire him for weeks while he worked on the two altarpieces, as well as some smaller pictures that the Colorman was happy to take, and they followed the maestro back to his workshop in Florence. A month in, it started to go wrong.
“I can’t get him to paint,” Bleu said to the Colorman.
“What about those two big paintings he’s been working on?”
“He won’t finish them. He refuses to even touch blue color. He says it takes him away from God. He says there’s something unholy in it.”
“But he is fine having you in his bed?”
“That, too, has come to an end. It’s that charlatan monk Savonarola. He’s ruining every painter in the city.”
“Show him old Athens or Sparta. They were religious and they loved to bugger each other. He’ll like it.”
“I can’t show him anything if he won’t paint. And he’s not going to. They’ve just moved the biggest block of marble I’ve ever seen into his workshop. His apprentices won’t even let me in the shop.”
“I will go see him,” said the Colorman. “I’ll make him paint.”
“Of course,” said Bleu. “What could go wrong with that plan?”
It was months before the Colorman could get access to Michelangelo, and he finally did by convincing the apprentices who guarded the maestro’s shop that he dealt in stonecutting tools, not color.
Michelangelo was on a ladder, working on a huge statue of a young man. Even in the rough, unpolished form, the Colorman recognized the model was Bleu.
“Why the huge head?” asked the Colorman.
“Who are you?” said the Maestro. “How did you get in here?”
“A merchant. His melon is gigantic. Like those simpletons who eat dirt at the convent.”
Michelangelo put his chisel in his belt and leaned against the statue. “It’s for perspective. When viewed from below, the head will appear the perfect size. Why are you here?”
“Is that why you made the penis so tiny? Perspective?”
“It’s not.”
“If you like the tiny penis, you should try girls. Most have no penis at all.”
“Get out of my shop.”
“I’ve seen your paintings. You’re a much better painter. You should paint. The figures in your paintings are not such freaks as this.”
“He isn’t a freak. He is perfection. He is David.”
“Isn’t he supposed to be carrying the huge head?”
“Out! Angelo! Marco! Throw this devil out of here.”
“Devil?” said the Colorman. “Screw the devil. I tell the devil what to do. The devil licks the dust from my scrotum. Donatello’s David carries the big head. You can’t do better than Donatello. You should paint.”
Michelangelo started down the ladder, his hammer in hand.
“Fine, I’m going.” The Colorman hurried out of the workshop, chased by two apprentices.
“Did you convince him?” Bleu asked.
“He’s annoying,” said the Colorman.
“I told you.”
“I think it’s because you have a big head.”
“I don’t have a big head.”
“We need to find a painter who likes women. You’re better at women.”
Back in London, in the National Gallery, Lucien was standing before a J. M. W. Turner painting of a steamship caught in a storm, a great maelstrom of color and brushstrokes, the tiny ship seeming to be swallowed in the middle by the pure fury.
“This is where real painting starts, I think,” said Lucien. “This is where object gives way to emotion.”
Juliette smiled. “They say that he went mad and tied himself to the mast of a steamship that was headed out into a snowstorm, just so he could see the real motion of a storm from inside it.”
“Really?” said Lucien, wondering how a shopgirl knew so much about painting.
“Really,” Juliette said. Not really. Turner hadn’t tied himself to the mast of the ship at all. “It will be fun,” she’d told him. “Hold still, I have to get this knot.”
They were a week in London and returned to the studio in Montmartre without anyone having ever seen them leave. Lucien walked in and collapsed facedown on the fainting couch. Juliette rubbed his neck until she was sure he was asleep, then kissed him on the cheek and took the studio key from his pocket so she could lock the door on the way out.
When she stepped out into the warm autumn evening she saw a glint of movement from her right. There was a blinding flash, then nothing.
The sound, like the striking of a muted, broken bell, rang through the neighborhood, causing even the few bachelors who were sharing in a dinner of pot-au-feu (beef stew) across the square at Madame Jacob’s crémerie to look at each other with a What the hell was that? expression.
Back in the alley, Juliette lay in the doorway of the studio quite unconscious, her entire forehead turning into a purple and black bruise.
“Maman,” said Régine, “I think you killed her.”
“Nonsense, she’ll be fine. Go check on your brother.” Madame Lessard stood over the model, holding a heavy steel crêpe pan from the bakery.
“But shouldn’t we bring her inside or something?”
“When Gilles comes home he can carry her in.”
“But, Maman, Gilles is working on a job in Rouen, he won’t be home until tomorrow.”
“Ah, the air will do her good.” She stepped over Juliette and into the studio. “Lucien, wake up. Your sister is worried about you,” said Madame Lessard.