The Painter's Apprentice Read online

  “Because my father says that no one wants the gold anymore.”

  For as long as I can remember, our craft has been dying. “Soon enough the gold will disappear,” my father told me when I was still too small for my feet to reach the floor at our worktable. My father set his brown eyes on me through the leather-framed spectacles that helped him see the details of our punchwork. “The trade of the indoradòr is nearly finished,” he told me. “Our patrons... They want the work of Master Titian, the Bellini brothers, Master Giorgione. They are no longer asking for our old colleagues.”

  He gestured toward the window and my eyes followed. Our guildsmen talked of these painters as if they held some magic in their hands; I came to imagine them instead as our enemies. I expected that one day I would see Master Giorgione or the Bellini brothers standing outside in the alley, looking at us through the window with menacing eyes.

  Still, my world has been gilded since the day I was born, and my father continued to teach me everything he knew. He let me select the punches to use, and praised me when I pressed neat, orderly patterns in the wood.

  “What comes next, Maria?” my father would ask, and I basked in his silent approval—the tight-lipped nod, the sparkle in his eyes—when I answered correctly.

  My cousin followed close behind, pressing the gold sheets into the grooves I had made. “It is too late for me,” my father would say to us. “If our workshop is to continue, then when you grow up you must learn the transparent colors of the paint.” I never knew if he meant Paolo or me, but I accepted what he said as fact, just as all children believe what their parents tell them. And even though I did not see any other women among our guildsmen, I never doubted that one day my father’s workshop would be mine. Did my father plant this idea in my head when I was small? If he said the words I do not remember, but I never doubted that it was true.

  Along one wall of our studio was a collection of metal punches, passed down from my grandfather and his grandfather before him. As far back as anyone could count, my father told us, our family’s role was applying gold leaf to the great wooden panels that, by our own hands, were transformed into sacred images. The churches of Our Most Serene Republic were covered in gilded surfaces, and our family collaborated with some of the best painters in our city, my father said.

  For generations we carried out our trade in relative prosperity. Then, my father said, a few of our Republic’s painters traveled to the northern kingdoms and returned home with new ideas. First the Bellini brothers turned away from the gold, he said, then Giorgione, and then other painters from outside of our Republic came to work here. After they had seen the work of those men, my father said, our noble people and our church patrons no longer wanted the gold pictures, which suddenly seemed old-fashioned.

  By the time I was born, my parents had already seen our coffers dwindle, each year fewer and fewer coins in the box. Instead of buying new things, they mended or repaired the old. Instead of patronizing the Rialto market, my mother grew beans and onions in the small plot of earth along the canal-side behind our house.

  When my mother died, my father told me, the neighbors said that he should send me to a convent or to another family who would be in a better position to care for a small girl from a family of meager means. Instead, my father did something unconventional: he kept me at home and taught me his trade. He also pulled his sister’s young son out of the convent of Santa Maria delle Vergini. Together, the three of us cobbled together a living, a life.

  The truth is that he needed us. My father was never well, and many days he took to his bed, lying on the worn mattress that I had mended so many times. At night I would hear the barking coughs begin, then he would gasp for air. Underneath my blankets I would freeze, terrified that in one of those long silences between the ragged gasps, he would stop breathing altogether. From the same neighbor woman who had taught me to sew, I learned to concoct a salve of honey and herbs that would still my father’s coughing.

  My cousin, weak of body and spirit, came to us hobbling. Even though he worked well with the gold, he was not able to help with much else, so I did the washing, the cooking, and tended the garden. We carried on like that for years.

  And then one day the battiloro came to us. Cristiano. After that, nothing was the same.

  “Your father is correct. Things are not as they once were for your guildsmen of our grandparents’ generation.” Master Trevisan’s voice brings me back to the painter’s studio. “But the gold lives on in other ways besides our great panels.” The painter puts down his brush and walks to the hearth, then places his palms on either side of the box. “My mother’s brother, for example, is a master of pastiglia boxes,” he says. The painter removes the box from the mantel and places it on the worktable. I lean in for a closer look. It is of a size where you might hide a large cat or a small dog, I think.

  “He sent us this one upon my marriage to Donata. My uncle and cousin make them in their shop in Padua. They once made their living gilding panels, but one day they began making these boxes using molds that they could reuse to make different compositions in relief across the surface.” I dare to run my fingertips across the gilded punchwork, then across the surface of the molded figures made in white paste that resembles ivory. “These boxes… They caught the eye of the ladies at the courts of Ferrara and Mantua. My cousin has done well. Now they no longer make panels at all.”

  Trevisan walks over to a large wooden desk and produces a key from the drawer. He fits it into the metal hole in the box, and it opens seamlessly.

  Inside, the box is lined with padded purple satin. I imagine that it might be designed to hold a precious trove of jewelry, or a collection of medals or gems.

  Instead, it contains more gold leaf than I have ever seen in my life.

  I gasp, gauging the value of the pile of paper books. It is enough to gild a dozen altarpieces.

  Trevisan smiles, gratified by my reaction. “Much as your father offered you to my workshop along with gold leaf, Donata’s father offered her to me in marriage with the same. We have only had to reach into this stash a few times for our projects.”

  “The signora’s dowry,” I whisper.

  The painter smiles and nods, then closes the lid. There is no more to say. He locks the box, returns it to the mantel, and slides the key back in the drawer.

  Then the painter returns to his silent work, and I to mine.

  Three Friday evenings. Then four. Then five.

  Antonella and I huddle close together, pressing our way through the crowd that funnels into the bustle of the Rialto market. The marangona bell in San Marco tolls its brassy sound, calling the arsenolloti, those men who toil as day laborers in the state shipyard, home from their work. Wives with bags over their shoulders and under their arms make their final purchases from the sellers of salted fish, cured vegetables, and other meager selections of the winter market.

  “I hope there is something left for us at the bakery,” Antonella says, pressing her elbow forward to make a path for us between two plump women heading in the opposite direction.

  “Hmm,” I answer, for bread is the last thing on my mind. I finger the golden ingot that falls between my breasts, hidden under my layers of linen and wool. From a distance, the tower of San Giovanni Elemosinario comes into view. I feel my heart race along with a deep trepidation.

  The narrow alley opens into the expanse of the Rialto market. The fishmonger, a scrawny man with rope-like veins protruding from his arms, sweeps the stones around his wooden table with a broom made of twigs. The vegetable seller covers his nearly empty table with a canvas cover. Against the wall of the church, several hat makers have assembled rickety sales counters of discarded wood. A woman specializing in garlands for ladies’ hair has begun to make small pomanders that noble ladies might wear around their necks or wrists, containing dried herbs. I stop to finger a satin ribbon attached to a pouch of herbs festooned w
ith smaller ribbons and leaves.

  “For the pestilence, signorina,” the garland-seller says, laying several of the pomanders out for me to examine.

  “I am going to see if there are any yeast rolls left for us,” Antonella says, shuffling off toward the bakery.

  “I will meet you there,” I say. As soon as Antonella turns her back I leave the garland-seller and her pomanders behind, and hurry to the garden gate alongside the monastery church.

  Silence.

  The garden lies still, empty, and my heart drops. I pace the winding stone path that leads to the dusty church door, but it appears that no one has opened the door in years. Layers of dust fill its crevices. I wander past the crumbling stone bench where Critiano knelt before me just weeks ago.

  The sun has disappeared from the sky, and the monastery garden falls into shadow. I cover my head with the hood from my cloak, close the latch of the garden gate behind me, and set off for the bakery to find Antonella, who is no doubt waiting to fill my ears with chatter of the baker’s latest gossip. Another Friday, and I will return to the painter’s house with a basket of bread and an empty heart.

  Master Trevisan has tasked me with painting trees on a scrap page of parchment. A good way for me to learn how to handle the various shades of verdigris and malachite, he has told me.

  I dab the tip of my fox-hair brush in a pot of dark green pigment left over from a completed painting of Saint John the Baptist that the painter has completed. Tentatively, I press the dark green glob on the page. It feels strange and unpracticed. I doubt that I will ever be able to do it like Trevisan’s journeyman, like Trevisan himself, much less like any of the men who have made the beautiful pictures hanging on the wall.

  Carmine. Zaffera. Orpiment. Indigo. Realgar. Azzurrite. Vermilione. The names of the powdered pigments roll through my head. I grasp them like one might grasp a foreign tongue—inferred and partially interpreted, but not truly understood. Each color handles differently on the brush, catches light from different angles, looks different each time it is laid on a page or a panel alongside another color.

  Of course I know these colors by sight and from the names scrawled on the jars at the pigment seller’s shop, but I have never used them myself. I pick up another brush from the box, admiring the veins in the wooden handle, and feeling the soft hairs of an animal, perhaps a weasel, that have been made into the head of the brush. I swirl the fibers around in my palm and then replace it.

  The painter does not seem to notice me poking around his shelves. He has so many beautiful things; his studio is a tactile feast. I look at the jars of pigments, each labeled with a swirl of neat script describing what is inside. Umber, white gypsum, lapis, all in small cakes to be ground to a fine powder. Stacks of used palettes are gathered neatly at the edge of the table. I pick one up and admire the dark smudges of green and midnight blue, the result of many pictures. The layers of paint are caked onto the board, creating a bumpy texture under my fingertips.

  My father says he recognized my drawing talent early on in life. He used to give me pieces of coal and I would trace lines on paper or parchment, or draw with the edge of a pointed stick in the sand of the campo near our house. But now, seeing Master Trevisan’s beautiful and delicate sketches, the result of a lifetime of talent and practice, I feel I will never get it.

  The door to the studio opens, and I see the face of the painter’s wife. She holds her little boy’s hand, and in her other arm she holds the baby.

  The painter’s eyes light up. “Gianluca! Off to your lessons?” The image of his family has broken his trance. The boy runs to his father, wrapping his arms around his knees.

  “I don’t want to go, papà,” he pleads with desperate blue eyes.

  The painter grasps his son’s head between his paint-stained palms. “Oh, but you are learning to be a smart boy so that one day you can take over my workshop, just as I took over from your grandpa. You know that already. You must learn numbers and Latin before you learn the paints.”

  The baby girl makes a gurgling noise, and the painter’s wife shifts her in her arms. I have stopped what I am doing to watch the beautiful boy with his perfect blue eyes and flushed cheeks. The boy presses his face into his father’s breeches again and the painter picks up his son, smudging a bit of brown from his thumb onto the boy’s white tunic. Trevisan walks his son around the studio, talking to him softly about what is on each table. “And then one day you will do this all by yourself.” The painter hands the boy a paintbrush, and he grasps it in his fist, waving it in the air proudly as his father laughs.

  The painter’s wife laughs, too, meeting my gaze from across the studio. I feel embarrassed for being caught staring at her husband and child. Quickly I turn my attention back to my incompetent series of trees on the page.

  In the shadows, I see the boatman and Antonella push open the door. Antonella strides into the studio, but the boatman seems loath to enter, as if the threshold of the door constitutes an invisible barrier. The boatman is dark and haggard, wearing a once-elegant ensemble that fits him poorly, as if it has been handed down to him from a more fortunate boatman long ago. A V-shaped scar mars the fleshy part of the boatman’s cheek, just below his right eye. The scar is dark and deeply creased, a distinguishing mark of his face even from far across the room.

  The boy shoots the boatman a distrustful glance, then presses his face into the rough fabric of his father’s smock. The painter tousles his son’s golden curls.

  “Come, figliolo. Your father needs to work on his picture now, and your tutor is waiting for you. Boatman will take you and your mother there in the beautiful new gondola.” Trevisan sets the boy back on the ground.

  “Vieni, amore,” the painter’s wife says. “Your tutor is waiting for you.” She reaches out her hand but the boy grasps his father’s leg again.

  Finally, Trevisan relents and takes the boy’s hand himself. “Come, Gianluca. Let me show you the bronze horse on the gondola,” he says. Trevisan walks into the kitchen, and his wife and the boatman follow.

  “That man is so proud of his new gondola.” Antonella shakes her head, then reaches into the pocket of her apron and produces a sealed parchment envelope. “I almost forgot,” she tells me. “Earlier this morning a messenger delivered a letter for you.”

  My dear Maria,

  Your father has asked me to write to you again. I do not know if our last letter has reached you or if this one will. We have not been able to leave the quarter and no one is willing to come here. You may know that the pestilence has spread across several streets in Cannaregio. They have erected barriers and so we cannot leave, at least not for now.

  But I do not want to frighten you.

  In truth, all is as well as can be expected under the circumstances. We have had new commissions from the Menegi and the Polani. You will be glad to know that our commission for Signor Rizo’s series of panels is finally complete. Signora Rambaldo’s baby was born this week, a little boy. Apart from that we are well but restricted in our movements outside the studio. Maria, I know you found your father’s judgment harsh, but between you and me, it has been strange without you here in the workshop. It is also silent without your singing.

  Bene. Your father will never say it out loud, but without you, he feels a great void. We send you our regards and hope that you are learning new things in the painter’s workshop that will help us when you return.

  Your cousin Paolo

  Indoradòr in Cannaregio

  On the feast of the Baptism of Our Lord

  Chapter 5

  Antonella has brought a small basket of quail eggs from the hennery behind the house. Their brown speckled shells are still warm from where they lay underneath the tiny birds. They seem an extravagance, for I am accustomed to the stale crunch of yesterday’s bread. My cousin and I used to spoon honey out of an earthenware bowl in the middle of the table and drizzle it ov
er the brown crust to soften it. But in the painter’s house, breakfast is as much a production as the midday meal.

  Antonella busies herself with a pot of boiling water hanging from an iron chain over the fire. She has peeled an onion on the wooden block in the center of the kitchen and chopped it into small chunks with a sharp blade. She carries the wooden chopping board and scrapes the translucent chunks into the pot.

  The painter’s wife leans forward in her chair across from me, nursing the baby, a white rag thrown over her shoulder to cover her breast. The painter’s wife is beautiful, or perhaps was not so long ago, before the demands of a house and children fixed fine lines across her brow and drew her mouth tight. Her features are delicate and fragile-looking, her wrists and ankles narrow, her skin fair and clear. “Santa Fusilla, it is so cold.” She seems to feel my gaze. “You must be sure to cover yourself properly.”

  “And it will feel even colder out there in the gondola,” adds Antonella, gesturing toward the canal-side window with her knife before returning to chopping a fistful of shriveled carrots at the worktable.

  I follow Antonella’s gaze toward the window and feel a wave of excitement. The painter has said that we will go to the church today to see the site where our altarpiece will be installed. I am eager to get started on the commission in the church of Santa Maria delle Vergini. Up until now, I have had little reason to use the gold leaf I brought with me from my father’s studio and I feel restless to work the gold again.

  “Please forgive me,” the painter told me the Sunday before. “I have made you toil too much during Christmas and Epiphany, even on Sundays.” He walked over to where I was sitting and plucked the rag from my hand with his elegant, paint-stained fingers. “You have worked enough for the week, signorina. I fear I have set a poor example, working alongside you and even encouraging you on the Lord’s Day.”