Antonella has given me a miniature set of sewing scissors which I have used to prick the small stitches of the camicia that I wear beneath my dress. I have little appetite, but my middle has begun to bulge, a small rounded ball. I layer my dress and a leather apron over it, tying it only loosely in hopes that no one will take note of my changing form.
It is only in my work that I forget.
Now that the carpenters have delivered our panels for the Vergini altarpiece, I can turn my attention to my traditional gilding work, the only part of the process where I feel in control. The large, symmetrically cut pieces have been stacked along the wall on one side of the studio where they take up the entirety of one wall. After we have gilded and painted images on them, the carpenters will help us assemble them inside the church. They will fasten large battens of wood to create an armature in a final configuration that will stand taller than three men. Trevisan’s journeyman and I have almost finished sanding the panels and the painter has sent Stefano out for more horsehair cloth.
Trevisan and his journeyman have placed one of the sanded panels atop the worktable in the center of the room for me. I run my hand over the surface, feeling for imperfections. Poplar is vulnerable to warping, and I stoop to examine the surface in the raking light. Overnight I have soaked large swaths of fine linen in three buckets filled with the gesso purchased from the vendecolore. Piece by piece, I lay torn pieces of linen over the surface of the panel to conceal any flaws. With my brush, I soak and press the linen pieces down to the surface, just as my father showed me to do when I was barely tall enough to see over the top of the table.
I dip my brush into the pot of gesso, watching the white, gelatinous mixture jiggle as I load it onto my brush. Slowly, I begin to coat the surface of the wood with the animal skin glue. The gesso is the foundation, the support and adherent for the egg tempera colors and especially the gold leaf.
The best gesso is made from the boiled skins of the water buffalo. That is what my father has always said. Over generations in our workshop, we have tried making the priming material using the hides of mountain goats, minks, and other beasts great and small. Now, the buffalo-skin gesso is the only one we use. When we add powdered gypsum and water it imparts a dull white color to the jellylike mix that transforms even the oldest panel into the perfect surface for gold leaf and tempera pigments.
Over generations my family workshop has become known for our perfectly prepared panels. We work with several carpenters to select the pieces of poplar and maple, shipped on great rafts from the mountains of Cadore and seasoned in store rooms and along quaysides of the canals. Still, I must carefully layer the ground in order to do justice to the reputation of my father’s workshop, and to the quality that Master Trevisan expects of me.
Egg tempera paints impart beautiful and translucent color to our panels, but only when the panels are well prepared for paint. Using brushes of mink, fox, and horsehair, we brush many light layers of sizing on the surface of the wood, covering each layer with powdered charcoal, then scraping down each layer with a flat metal blade to make the smoothest surface possible. Once the surfaces are perfected, I will add red bole, then the gold, then decorative punchwork. But weeks will pass before it is done.
After I have applied the linen to the entire surface, I arch my back and stretch, replacing my brush in one of the now-empty pails. The sizing must dry before I begin to apply another thin layer. This small act of running my brush along the surface of the wood washes my soul in peace. I have no power over where the hand of the plague decides to fall. I have no sway over the small life growing quietly but insistently inside of me. It is only with the brush or the palette knife in my hand that I feel I have any influence over anything at all.
Ever since the painter’s wife found Master Trevisan drawing me from life, she spends more and more time in the workshop. While Antonella sees to the children, the painter’s wife tidies books on the shelves, dusts motes from the windowsills, stokes the fire, comments on the trees that the young journeyman is dotting in the background of a small portrait. If the painter is flustered by his wife’s incessant chatter and flittering about, he does not show it. Still, we all seem to breathe a collective sigh of relief when she finally settles herself by the window with her embroidery ring.
Now it is clear to me that Signora Trevisan senses that there is something more going on inside her husband’s workshop than meets the eye. Perhaps it is the heightened state of carrying a child that brings forth a sixth sense. I can now attest that I see and smell things I did not before.
At the central worktable, Master Trevisan mulls over his preparatory drawings for the altarpiece. He has turned the pages hundreds of times, studying, scratching his beard, making small notes in the corners of the parchment sheets, scraping others and making adjustments to his drawings. With a nub of charcoal, he makes careful marks on the side of a parchment sheet on the table at his side. For several days he has worked on this single figure, wiping lines clean with a rag, then reusing the charcoal to make a new line. The journeyman has drawn a grid over the page so that it can be easily transferred over to the final painting.
As strange as it seems, I have become accustomed to feeling the painter’s eyes on me. After several awkward tries we have abandoned my more formal modeling sessions, some with his wife watching from her embroidery, and instead the painter now contents himself with simply drawing me while I go about my work. I feel his gaze follow me as I move across the studio. He is not obtrusive or leering; he simply follows me with his eyes, drawing quietly in his sketchbook, the only sound the canal water lapping against the side of the stone building. I prefer it this way, for I am filled with nervous energy and cannot fathom how I would go about sitting still.
That evening, in the kitchen, I find Signora Trevisan sitting at the table with her infant daughter at her breast. The dirty dishes from the midday and evening meals are stacked on the wooden table before her. Her face looks lined, her eyes ringed with shadows. If her husband had not announced it, you would not know that she was with child.
Women carry secrets, I think. It is what we learn to do from childhood.
“Are you feeling all right, signora?” I say.
“Exhausted beyond words, if you want to know the truth.” She huffs a little burst of laughter. “Nothing beyond what every mother endures.”
“I would not know,” I say. “My mother was gone before I had a chance to learn such things.” For a moment the air feels heavy and silent, and I wonder if I have it in me to share my own secret.
“You have work of your own sort. But you will know such exhaustion soon enough. When you marry.”
“Signora…” I begin. My mouth opens, but I pause, not knowing how to begin such a conversation. “I…”
At that moment the painter’s young son runs into the room crying, having cut his finger on something sharp in the painter’s studio. Signora Trevisan leans down to see, cradling her baby on her lap. Then Antonella bursts into the room to check her boiling pot.
Amidst the clamor, my moment is gone.
In the artist’s studio there is a book with engraved pictures illustrating the strange story of ill-fated lovers.
When I opened the book the first time, it fell open to a page with an image of a woman and man speaking to one another through a crack in a wall. Their bodies pressed against either side of the wall, and I felt I could almost hear their words whispered through the crack. I turned the pages, watching a seeming courtship bloom around a garden fountain. On the final page, I recoiled to find the couple falling on their swords.
“Pyramus and Thisbe,” the painter’s journeyman tells me, looking over my shoulder. He knows of such things, for his own father was a painter of ancient stories, and he says that he learned them from an early age.
“Who are they?” I ask, running my fingers over the old vellum, the pores of the animal that was sacrificed in the name of the book trade still visible on the page.
“Their parents were neighbors—and sworn enemies—but the two declared their love for one another through a crack in the wall that separated their houses. They began to sneak out to meet near a stream outside the city walls.” I turn the page and follow the journeyman’s tale. “One day Thisbe was waiting for her love to arrive when a lioness arrived, with bloodied jaws from a fresh kill. Later, when Pyramus arrived, Thisbe was gone, but the lioness remained. He had the mistaken idea that the lioness had killed his love, so he threw himself on his sword. When Thisbe discovered his body, she too took her own life.”
“That must be the saddest story I have ever heard,” I say, closing the cover of the book.
The journeyman shrugs. “All of those books are filled with sad stories,” he says, gesturing to the many books on the painter’s shelves.
“How does Master Trevisan have so many books?” I ask, and the journeyman purses his lips as if he is calculating an answer.
“He says that he inherited many of them, but I often see him receive books as gifts.” I run my fingers across the gilded stamping on the bindings. “There are works of antiquity, accounts of the Trojan War,” he says. “Master uses the pictures as inspiration for his pictures. I have never seen him read the words.”
The journeyman pulls a large religious book from the shelf and places it on the worktable. “There are many like this one,” he says, opening the binding to reveal an elaborate hand-painted frontispiece with lettering decorated with ivy leaves. “Breviaries, prayer books, an enormous psalter that the Irish ambassador gave him, monastic manuscripts with marbleized end papers and gilded stamped words on their leather bindings. Would have been the pride of any monastic library,” he says. “But it is the ancient love stories that people want now.” He laughs. “Even—I might say especially—the ones that end badly.”
I descend the stairs into the dark boat slip, but as I approach the gondola, I hear whispering and giggling.
The boatman is not alone.
Through the wooden slats of the passenger compartment, I see figures moving and hear scuffling. The boat rocks against the wooden bumpers that have been placed to prevent the gondola from scraping the stones of the boat slip.
Having heard my footfall on the stone stairs, the boatman emerges from the compartment, his hair disheveled and his doublet turned sideways. I hold my palm up to the side of my face and turn my head away.
“Signorina?” he says breathlessly.
“I... Please excuse me. I just wanted to see if you would take me to Rialto.”
At that moment, Antonella emerges from the passenger compartment, her face flushed. She is fidgeting with hooks on the front of her dress. She sets her black eyes on me, and fixes her mouth in an expression I am not certain is shame or mockery.
“Give me a few moments and meet me at the mooring,” the boatman says.
“No,” I say quickly, returning to the stairs. “Never mind. I will walk there myself.”