On the Quirinal Hill, a young man waits at the door of a palazzo. He hasn’t knocked yet. He’s trying to compose himself. It’s cold, colder than any January he can remember. His eyes are sore and his hands—ungloved, one clutching his portfolio, the other the neck of his coat—have turned a kind of iron blue, except at the fingertips where paint is ingrained—Persian red, verdigris green, orpiment yellow—from the canvas he was working on before setting off for Rome, The Revenge of the Widow Giuditta.
He was told in the letter that the mansion was easy to find, close to the civic barracks and built in the Moorish style of a Spanish palacete, its facades reminiscent of beaten silverwork, but he walked past it several times without realizing. He’d been expecting a splendid mansion—the letter surely implied it—but if it had been once, those days are gone.
He feels duped, after the effort he’s spent getting here, inexorable hours rocking up and down in cramped carriages, shoveled around by barking drivers, barely eating or sleeping and shivering for days. Then, when he arrived in the city and panicked about his appearance, about that vital first impression, he spent the last of his money on a new coat—a garment that turns out to be as itchy and ill-fitting as it is ineffective against the wind.
He knocks and after a pause there comes a shuffle of footsteps, a swing of lantern light through the hall window. The door is unbolted and cracked open, just enough for an elderly steward to peer out.
“Domenikos Kopoulos,” the young man says, in the habit now of shortening his surname. “From Venice. The painter.”
“Yes, yes,” says the steward and ushers him inside.
“My apologies for arriving so late.” Domenikos peers around, disappointed to find that, like the outside, the interior gives no sign that money lives here. “But in the last letter I received, the lady said there was urgency.” He adds, pointedly, “The lady provided me with an address, but I still have no name for her?”
He deserves to know by now the identity of who he’s dealing with, but the steward holds up both palms and says, “Yes, yes. Wait here.” He totters off down a corridor into a room and there come sounds of opening cupboards and rattling glass.
Domenikos looks around. The space is bare, the walls tatty and crumbling. Most worrying of all, not one piece of art is on show, though discolored patches indicate paintings must have hung here once. In her letter to him, signed only as A Lady Collector, she praised his work, had a detailed knowledge of it, surprisingly—even what he’d produced in Crete before leaving for Italy. She explained he was suited for the task. She didn’t say what that was, though, and offered no information about herself. He presumed—why wouldn’t he?—that she was a rich patroness who liked to remain anonymous. In any case, she’d sent a sum of money to cover his traveling expenses to Rome—and that decided it.
“This way, this way,” the steward says, pattering back, a silver tray in his hands, a decanter with brandy and two glasses. “Up, up.” He starts to ascend the stairs to the first-floor gallery. “She’s not been well today, but your arrival will revive her.”
Domenikos follows and at once the light in the hall changes; the space fills out with a pearly luminescence, bringing everything, all the decay, into clarity. White flakes dance against the window halfway up the stairs.
“Snow in Rome?” Domenikos says.
Peering out, he finds the city already half-dusted in it. The old Forum has been transformed into a fairy kingdom. Then, casting his eye along the horizon, a surprise: on the crest of the opposing hill is the new basilica of St. Peter. Since he arrived, he’s only caught glimpses of it behind buildings, an abstract corner here, a part-section of dome there. He thought it was finished—wasn’t everyone saying it was?—but sections remain scaffolded and strewn with ladders and even from the Quirinal he can hear the tap of hammers across the valley.
The steward leads him into a large, dark room. Domenikos notices the fire first, which is housed in a tiled cabinet that comes out from the wall, like an ironmonger’s furnace, though more ornate. Its door is ajar and flames rumble within. In shadow on the far side of it, a lady is seated at a table. The steward sets down the tray in front of her and goes to load up the fire with logs, taking a stoker and shunting them into the heart of the blaze, before closing the hearth door.
“Come closer.” The lady motions with a gloved hand.
“Signora.”
She beckons him again and Domenikos steps forward.
He resists the urge to ask who she is and says, “It’s an interesting chimneypiece. Ceramic? I saw one like it in a house on the Black Sea, but never in Italy.”
“In Germany they are everywhere. Some engineers came from there to install it,” she replies. Her voice is wheezy, like an old squeezebox, and she has an accent Domenikos can’t place. “It keeps me alive,” she says, and the word alive gets trapped in her throat, turns to a cough and it takes her some moments to regain composure. Domenikos tries to see her face, but it’s a dark cobweb of lines beneath her headpiece. “How was your journey?” she asks.
“Eventful, cold, painful at times.” If he’d found himself in a wealthier place, he’d probably keep any gripe to himself. “I’m not built well for traveling. Or the winter. No fat on me.”
“And everyone is talking about you. A young contender for the crown. And a Greek. A Cretan. They call you the Greek, don’t they? A nickname is reassuring. It means you’re being noticed.”
“I hope so. Unless they don’t like that I’m foreign.”
She gives a nod, of understanding, perhaps. “In Italy—as you can hear—I am a foreigner too.” She takes the stopper from the decanter and tries to pour a glass, but she barely has the strength to hold it up and the neck rattles against the rim. Domenikos steps forward to help, but she repels him with a shake of her head. She doesn’t offer up the spare glass, nor does he ask.
“I wasn’t sure,” Domenikos goes on, “from the correspondence I received, what exactly the commission is.”
“There is no commission.” She puts the brandy to her lips, wets them with it, before taking a sip. “Not in the usual sense. I offer something else. Those are your drawings?” She extends an arthritic fist toward the portfolio. “Let me see. Samuele.” The steward collects the folder and places it on the table, along with a lamp. He unties the ribbon of the folio, opens it for his mistress and exits the room. She examines the first work. It’s a detailed cartoon of the painting he’s most proud of, Christ Cleansing the Temple. Creating it had been a revelation from start to finish. Jesus is steady in the center, like a general, as a maelstrom of confusion sweeps around him. A tale told in color. She stares at it for minutes, eyes blinking, before she touches her gloved finger against the surface texture.
“You sketch in oil?”
“For vibrancy, yes.”
She goes through the pictures, two dozen of them that Domenikos selected from hundreds, thousands even, of mostly new work from his three years in Venice, where stories began infatuating him, where the sheer drama of the city inspired him to paint St. Francis and Gabriel and Moses, not as icons like he used to in Crete, but as living, breathing people. Looking around, he notices a canvas on the wall—the single adornment of the room, of the entire house. He squints to see what the subject is, but in the gloom he can make out little more than a portrait of a woman.
“I need no painting from you,” she says when she’s gone through all the drawings and closed the folder. “It would be wasted on these cataract eyes anyway. I have—what is the best word for it—knowledge. I can impart it to one person only. I considered many before settling on you. These drawings are proof I have chosen well.”
“Knowledge?” He only half hides the disappointment in his voice. His debts are on the point of becoming unmanageable and knowledge is not what he’s traveled for.
“Rare knowledge. It would be unforgivable, for those who risked so much in pursuit of it, to take it to the grave with me. And the grave comes soon. I have crossed this continent a hundred times over and my bones are thin. When I try to walk, it’s like balancing on ice. Even the children of my contemporaries have begun to die. I have sold everything. The palazzo is empty. All my furniture gone, every painting except the one there. Only this last task remains.” She pauses briefly, then asks, “How much do you know of the painter Giorgio Barbarelli?” She studies him keenly.
“Barbarelli?”
“Of Castelfranco.” She waits a beat before adding, “Perhaps more commonly known as Giorgione.”
“Giorgione, yes, him I know a little.”
“A little?” Not the answer she wanted. “What paintings of his have you seen?”
“I—can’t recall if I’ve seen any.”
“None? Do you not have to study great work when you train?”
“Of course.”
“You have not seen his Tempest, or Venus Sleeping? Not the altarpiece of Castelfranco, which you can visit and see the colors as fresh as the day they were ground? And you’ve been in Venice three years?”
“I have seen many Tizianos,” he offers, certain they were contemporaries. “Venice is crammed with them.”
“I do not speak of Tiziano.” From somewhere in her broken body her voice finds force. “Tiziano had the luck of long life. Luck all through it. He died an old man, in his bed, his family about. I speak of Giorgione. You are a painter who wishes to make his mark on the world; he should be always in your thoughts. He started it all. He was the Colorist.”
She pauses to get her breath and Domenikos wonders exactly what Giorgione “started.” His name rarely came up during his years of apprenticeships. Tiziano, on the other hand, was studied ad infinitum. “When I return to Venice, I shall seek him out immediately. This information you have, it concerns him?”
She lifts the end of her stick and points it toward the single piece of art on show. “That is one of his.”
“Giorgione’s?”
“It was never finished,” she says softly. “It is me.” For a moment, just the sound of burning from the hearth, and the tapping of hammers from across the valley. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“I was your age, more or less, when I met Zorzo—that was the name we knew him by. Your age when I realized what it is we’re all in search of, in one way or another, the subject of every artist’s sigh, the reason we wake up in the morning and escape into dreams at night.”
“Love?”
“Color.”
Hearing this, Domenikos’s mouth slowly turns up in a smile.
“Stepping into his workroom for the first time,” she goes on, “was like finding myself in another country. I knew nothing of how paintings were made—or how colors were conjured: azurite, crimson lake, pink chalcedony, vermilion, realgar, lead yellow, bone black.”
“Yes, yes.” Domenikos nods, his enthusiasm growing. “I was the same.”
“I knew little of the world either, of the shocks that were about to tear through it at the start of this century, when ideas would light up the continent like fires everywhere. When no one knew if those fires would bring light—or burn us all. When painters were so charged with purpose, so voracious, so rebellious against everything that had gone before, that they described the age as a color storm. And I knew nothing of the new color, the great secret, the color that would change my life.”
“Which color is that?”
“One that had never been seen before. Never imagined either. One that men would die for. He was prepared to die. My love. My other soul.”
Domenikos wonders if he heard right. “He was prepared to—?”
A cry goes up from outside, drums start to beat in time and what sounds like a hundred men—the civil guard from the barracks, presumably—begin a march down the hill. As they scour past the palazzo, feet pounding the frozen ground, the floor shakes and dust falls from the ceiling. In the chimneypiece, a log tumbles and flips open the hearth door. A shaft of light is thrown across the room, illuminating the signora at her table.
“Leave it,” she says, when Domenikos goes to close the fire door. “Let it breathe. Sit here where I can see you.”
Domenikos approaches and takes the chair opposite her. Now he sees her face. Skin like pale parchment, veined and watermarked, stretched over a tiny skull. She keeps her back straight and neck long, though her body, under layers of black tulle, is as thin as twigs. It is like looking at time itself.
“Prepared to die, yes,” she says. “Some people are. They’re ready to walk into fire, into battle, knowing they’ll not return. They’re willing to do it—so the rest of us can be safe.”
In front of her, the decanter and glass rattle on the tray, the surface of the brandy shivers as the pounding of soldiers’ boots reaches its apogee, before beginning to diminish. Down into the valley they go, in their nightly maneuver to guard their city. Domenikos’s heart quickens. He feels suddenly grateful he came to Rome, beyond doubt that the journey was worthwhile, sure he’s found a kindred spirit. He’s desperate to know more of Giorgione now, of what he made, what he painted, what he risked, that six decades later this woman in front of him is still in awe of it. Domenikos feels a light creaking open inside of him, a shiver of excitement—a sensation he hasn’t had in months. In years, perhaps.
The signora gives a nod and with her knuckle pushes the decanter toward him, and then the spare glass. “Drink.”
Domenikos fills the glass, throws back its contents in one, inhales against the reassuring shock of alcohol and says, “I’m listening. Tell me all about him—all about this color storm.”