Color Song (A Passion Blue Novel) (19 page)

In other cities, pigments were sold by apothecaries. Only in Venice, Giulia had learned, were there shops such as these, for nowhere else was there such a wealth of raw materials, or such an army of artisans to use them: painters, textile dyers, potters, even glassmakers from the vast glassworks on the island of Murano. Precious minerals from Persia, rare woods from Africa, oils and plants and earths and even insects from all over Europe and the Orient: All passed through Venice, the queen of trade, and all could be found on the color sellers’ shelves.

“The fresco progresses well?”

The color seller was an avid gossip, with an astonishing store of knowledge about all his clients. He pressed Giulia
shamelessly for information every time she visited. But he was honest, and the colors Ferraldi bought from him sang true, without any taint of adulteration. And he often tipped a little extra onto the scale when Giulia purchased supplies for herself.

“Well enough,” she said. “Three days should see it finished, assuming the plasterer shows up.”

“A drunkard, that one, or so I’ve heard. But he’s your master’s cousin, is he not? Family. What can one do?” The color seller shook his head. “I can recommend a man if you need one.”

“I don’t think that will be necessary. But I’ll tell my master.”

The color seller tied the chalk up with cord, then brought out a larger bundle, which he opened so Giulia could inspect its contents: an array of raw pigments, ground and dried and compressed into little blocks that only needed to be broken up and mixed with the painting medium of the artist’s choice. Accustomed as she was to a workshop where the paints had almost all been prepared by the artists themselves, Giulia had been surprised at first at how many of his pigments Ferraldi bought ready-made. But she knew now that in Venice, this was common practice.

“That’ll be two scudi for everything,” the color seller said. “Shall I put it on account?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“Don’t forget that plasterer.” The color seller placed both bundles in Giulia’s hands. “Just let me know.”

Giulia pulled up the hood of Bernardo’s mantle—no matter how she tried, she couldn’t stop thinking of it as his—and plunged back into the cold.

—

If, on her first night in Venice, she had been able to look ahead three months and see herself as she was today—easy in her disguise, confidently negotiating the crowded streets and
campi
of the Rialto—she would hardly have recognized herself.

She wore her boy’s clothes without a thought—better clothes than when she’d arrived, for Sofia’s purse had allowed her to replace her travel-worn garments and buy a proper pair of boots. She no longer needed to remind herself how to walk and speak, no longer forgot to respond when someone called her false name. She’d grown skilled at coping with the inconveniences of her masquerade: the privacy she always needed, the excuses and accommodations she had to make. She could untie her hose in scarcely more time than it took a real boy to unlace his codpiece.

It was true, what Sofia had said: People saw what they expected to see. As long as she took care, her clothes and hair and her boy’s name told a story no one thought to question. The dread of discovery, which had made her first weeks in Ferraldi’s workshop an excruciating trial of nerves, was only a shadow now—always there behind her thoughts, but rarely consciously called to mind.

Venice, so huge and alien, had overwhelmed her at first. With no access to a boat unless she paid to hire a gondola, her only option was to go about on foot—and in this too Sofia had spoken true: For pedestrians, the city was a labyrinth. There were no long, continuous thoroughfares as in Padua—only a spiderweb of narrow streets and alleys, carried by slantwise bridges over dark canals, intersecting at strange angles and dead-ending unexpectedly on campi and
rii
, so that finding one’s way could be as much a matter of retreating as of moving forward.

Ferraldi allowed her to accompany the other apprentices on errands, and this had helped her begin to orient herself—in spite of the efforts of Stefano and Marin, who thought it hilarious to give her invented street names and imaginary addresses. Cautiously, on Sundays and in the occasional hours she had free, she began to venture out on solo sketching expeditions, learning the city not just by walking it but through the alchemy of eye and charcoal. She used scrap paper from the workshop, filling the sheets fully on both sides, sometimes drawing over earlier work. She had a growing stack of these sheets in her little sleeping area in Ferraldi’s storeroom.

She was confident enough now to go exploring on her own. She’d found her way to the church of San Giobbe, and spent a rapturous hour before Giovanni Bellini’s magnificent altarpiece, so masterfully painted that its illusion of a chamber just off the church, in which the Virgin sat surrounded by saints, seemed like a window onto a living world. She had visited the Piazza San Marco and gaped at the golden domes of the Basilica and the great brick pile of the Doge’s Palace. She’d explored the busy docks and markets of the Rialto, where hundreds of shops and stalls and warehouses offered every good or service she had ever imagined, and many she had not. It was on the Rialto too that she glimpsed the dark truth beneath Venice’s glittering abundance: the mean back alleys stinking of sewage and refuse, the tenements and the brothels, the beggars and the prostitutes.

She was still an outsider—in the city, whose shape and rhythms she was only just beginning to understand; in the workshop, where everyone, from the artists to the apprentices to Ferraldi’s maidservant, knew her as a charity case Ferraldi had taken on for reasons he had not cared to explain. There were still moments when disbelief rocked her like a slap to the
face:
What am I doing here? All alone? Disguised as a boy?
But with every day that passed, she gained a little more assurance, the mask of Girolamo a better fit over her own true face.

Now and then she found herself missing Santa Marta—not the changes she’d fled after Humilità’s death, but the things she’d loved while her teacher was still alive: the peace and order, the friendships, the certainty of a known future. She wondered sometimes whether it would be risking too much to send Angela a letter, just to let her friend know she was safe. Surely, if she gave no details of her situation . . .

But then she would remember Matteo Moretti. She would think of Domenica and Madre Magdalena. She would feel the presence of the little pouch at her neck, with its weight of secrets. And it would seem too much like tempting fate to remind anyone in Padua that she was still alive.

—

With her errand to the color seller completed, Giulia set out for Cannaregio and the palazzo of the Cesca family, where Ferraldi had his fresco commission.

The Rialto bustled year-round, but midwinter, when the trade vessels began returning from the East, was among its most hectic seasons. Giulia pushed her way through the busy streets, heading for the Riva del Vin, the quay along the Grand Canal where the wine warehouses stood. Boats and barges packed the canal; the quay teemed with workmen unloading goods, merchants in their long black robes, and an occasional cluster of dandies already masked for Carnival, cloakless in the cold to display their fine clothing.

The Rialto Bridge rose at the end of the Riva del Vin. Giulia crossed it and entered the Merceria, the twisting commercial
avenue that linked the Rialto with the Piazza San Marco. Here too she had to fight the crowds, but once she turned north toward Cannaregio, the traffic diminished, and she was soon walking through streets and campi nearly deserted in the cold.

Snow had begun to sift down by the time she reached Palazzo Cesca. The servant on guard at the street door waved her into a courtyard, where a marble stair led up to the
pòrtego,
the long central hallway that was a feature of the
piani nobili
of all large Venetian dwellings. Like much of the rest of the palazzo, the pòrtego was under renovation. Holding her breath against the dust, Giulia slipped into the room where Ferraldi and his assistants were working.

Ferraldi ran a very different kind of workshop from Humilità’s—necessarily, for though Humilità’s workshop had brought in money for the convent, it had not primarily been a commercial concern. Ferraldi did not have the luxury of picking and choosing his commissions as Humilità had; he took on any work that came his way, from portraits, to commissions from churches and civic organizations, to Madonna and Child panels for private homes. He was also in demand as a frescoist. There was not much call for fresco in Venice, with its damp, salty air that ate away at plaster. But Ferraldi, who had trained in Padua, was known as a specialist.

The fresco he was completing now occupied the wall of a bedchamber: a biblical scene, King David spying on Bathsheba as she bathed. The contract for the commission had been very unbiblical about Bathsheba’s endowments and the way she should be displaying them, causing much sniggering among the apprentices—though not when Ferraldi could hear them.

Canvas had been spread across the floor to protect it, and lanterns supplemented the daylight admitted by the windows. Ferraldi, his silver hair tied away from his face and a painter’s
smock covering his clothes, stood over Alvise, who was stirring up the limewater that would be combined with pigments to make fresco paint.

“Did you remember the chalk?” Ferraldi was a kind master, but when deeply involved in his work he could be impatient, even harsh.

“Yes, Maestro,” Giulia said.

“Good.” He gestured toward a trestle table, where Stefano was working at the grinding stone. “Start with the red ochre. I need it first.”

“Took you long enough to get here.” Stefano eyed Giulia as she shrugged off her mantle and began to unpack the color seller’s bundle.

“There was a cart overturned on the Riva del Vin. I had to wait to get past.”

“Or perhaps you were lying late abed and only dreaming of a cart.”

As you would do, given half the chance.
Giulia swallowed the retort. Stefano was a bit of a bully, and could be vengeful if crossed. Giulia got on with him fairly well, but only because she was careful not to provoke him.

“I didn’t oversleep,” she said mildly.

“So you say.” Stefano tossed his long blond hair, about which he was as vain as a girl. “Pass me that ochre.”

Over by the fresco, Ferraldi’s cousin, Eugenio, had completed the
intonaco
, the smooth layer of wet plaster on which the painting would be done. Alvise, finished with the limewater, had begun to unroll the template for today’s work: part of a full-scale drawing of the fresco that had been made on glued sheets of paper, then cut into pieces corresponding to each day’s work. Today’s section was the figure of King David, peering out from behind a column.

“Now, Uncle?” Alvise asked, his voice tentative.

“Don’t always ask direction, Alvise. Take the initiative.”

Alvise swiped his sleeve under his perpetually running nose and held the template to the intonaco, orienting it to the finished sections of the fresco and the underdrawing that had been made on the first plaster layer, which still showed in the areas that had not yet been painted. But, forgetful as usual, he’d neglected to fetch hammer and nails to tack it in place. Glancing nervously at his uncle, who was watching with folded arms and frowning brows, he laid down the template and went to get the tools.

This time he managed to fix the template properly to the wall. But when he began incising the lines of the drawing into the soft surface of the plaster, to give Ferraldi a reference from which to paint, his hand was too heavy. With a ripping sound that carried through the room, his stylus tore through the paper.

“Stop!” Ferraldi stepped forward to examine the mistake. “Clumsy boy, you haven’t just torn the template; you’ve cut all the way through the intonaco.”

“I’m sorry, Uncle,” Alvise muttered.

“Well, take it down. Eugenio, repair it.”

Eugenio smoothed the disturbed plaster, and Alvise positioned the template yet again. He was breathing heavily through his mouth now—Giulia could hear him all the way from where she stood. He took up the stylus; but as he set it to the paper he lost his grip, and it clattered to the floor.

“Enough,” Ferraldi snapped. “Stefano! Clean your hands and come over here.”

“I can do it, Uncle.” Alvise was on his knees, scrabbling for the stylus. “Let me try again.”

“No. You are grinding pigments now.” Ferraldi jerked the stylus from Alvise’s fingers. “Stefano!”

Stefano uttered a long-suffering sigh—though not loud enough that Ferraldi could hear. Before he could do more, Giulia spoke up.

“Maestro. Might I try?”

Ferraldi trained his blue-green gaze on her. “Have you any experience with plaster?”

“No, Maestro. But I’ve been watching. And my hands are already clean.”

“Very well, then. You can hardly do worse.”

“That’s not fair, Uncle.” Alvise’s face had turned red. “He’s not even a real apprentice.”

“Do not argue, Alvise. Go assist Stefano, and try not to drop anything. Girolamo, come here.”

Alvise shot Giulia a scalding look of fury and humiliation, then put his head down and obeyed.

Ferraldi handed Giulia the stylus. She was aware of his scrutiny as she stepped toward the wall, inhaling the sharp scent of the wet plaster. Her hand was steady as she began to trace, mindful of the need to keep her touch light. The template did not reproduce the careful shading and modeling of the original drawing, only the principal lines of King David’s figure. It did not take long for her to finish.

She eased the template off its nails and stepped back. Ferraldi examined what she’d done.

“Good. Roll up the template now and get back to work.”

Through the morning and into the afternoon, the apprentices ground pigments, mixing them as Ferraldi required with limewater, which would bond with the plaster as it dried and fix the paints to the wall. For all his faults, Stefano was an efficient manager; he ordered Giulia and Alvise about as if he
were the workshop’s master, amusing himself by tormenting Alvise at Giulia’s expense. “Oh wait, I think
Girolamo
wants to do that,” he’d say each time Alvise tried to begin a new task, directing him instead to some other job. Or as Alvise picked up something breakable: “Let
Girolamo
do that. He doesn’t
drop
things.”