The Ruby Ring (13 page)

9

W
HEN RAPHAEL ARRIVED BACK AT HIS WORKSHOP,
Margherita was waiting for him. As it was late on a Saturday, the other artists had gone and the door had been closed. Although it was unlocked, she had chosen not to enter on her own. Instead, Margherita waited in the outside corridor, as serene as ever. Her hair was parted in the center and pulled away from her smooth face, but otherwise it was unadorned. Her round, dark eyes eclipsed all else. It was a moment before Raphael realized that her brother-in-law, Donato, had once again escorted her. Margherita saw the recognition and then a momentary flicker of what looked like disappointment cross his face just before he opened the door fully and nodded for her to enter.

Margherita moved inside first, her green wool skirt sweeping past them, along with the faint fragrance of chamomile from her freshly washed hair. She was surprised at the vast silence that had descended on the cavernous workshop without the hum of activity, posing models, and many busy assistants. Raphael took her cloak silently, and Donato’s gray wool cape, and set them on a model’s stool. After he lit a fire in the hearth, he came back and focused intensely on her. “I am so pleased that you have come.”

“Did I not tell you I would?”

Raphael tipped his head, and paused for a moment. “People have told me a great many things in this life, Signorina Luti.”

“I shall only ever say what I mean, Signor Sanzio.”

His lips lifted in a smile. “Well, then. That shall indeed be refreshing.”

“It is pleasing to know that something about me shall make a fresh impression on you other than my appearance.”

“Oh, you have made an impression on me in many ways,
signorina.
Do not doubt that.” He quirked another charming smile that she dared, just for a moment, to find appealing before reminding herself that this was purely business, and would only ever be.

“Shall we begin?” he asked, removing his expensively beaded cape and moving toward the growing fire. Donato sank silently onto a stool nearby, and Margherita watched Raphael then don a black paint-stained smock, rub his hands together in preparation, and let out a heavy, cleansing breath. His smile faded. She saw the artist reemerging. He had such intensity, and she was drawn to it. Realizing it surprised and frightened her.

Raphael seated her on a stool in front of the fire, the gold-and-crimson firelight dappling their faces. He moved her head from one side to the other, then tipped up her chin. Margherita clenched her hands at her sides so that he would not notice her discomfort. Being here was awkward enough, but having him study every nuance of her face and body was actually a bit disturbing. Margherita tried desperately not to let it show. She tried to be the confident model he believed her to be as she watched him move and flex and strain to pull an image from the paper. She saw and felt the unmistakable sensuality in it.

Apparently satisfied at last, Raphael turned to spread out the previous sketches of her onto his own worktable, and studied them for body, neck, and head position. It was so difficult not to move as the time wore on. Margherita was unaccustomed to the long periods of remaining still, and she was not at all certain she enjoyed it, even with the look in his eyes.

At this point he knew only some of the ways he would make her unique, he told her. This Madonna would be standing, of that he was certain. She would be barefoot, and she would look directly at the observer with all of the grace and dignity that he had seen on Il Gianicolo that first day. This would be his most human representation ever.

After an uncomfortably long period of silence in which Margherita fought not to shift the position of her face or the tilt of her head, Raphael turned to her again, and held out a hand to draw her back to her feet. Margherita felt a shiver of panic at the sudden desire in his eyes. It was all still so strange for a modest, working-class girl, this utter intensity—the complete concentration concerning her face and body—and she fought hard to control her fear of it.

Next, he pulled the stool away and positioned her with her arms at her sides, though at a slight angle away from her dress, as if they were floating upward. Then he did something that surprised them both. She knew it by the way their eyes met for only an instant, and his were the first to cut away. Without a word, Raphael knelt, removed her black cloth shoes, and placed them neatly beside the stool. She was actually glad Donato was here, as the sensation of having Raphael Sanzio touch her bare skin slowly and tenderly, almost caress them, felt shockingly sensual. Yet she had begun to feel a new, odd thrill in this lack of familiarity. Something foreign, and dangerous.

“Signor Perazzi,
per favore,
do help yourself to a glass of trebbiano,” Raphael called out in an uneven tone, cutting into what felt to Margherita like thick, nearly unbreathable air. “There is a silver decanter on the shelf behind you.”

“And shall I pour one for you?”

“Thank you, but no. I am unable to drink wine when I work. It clouds my perception,” Raphael explained, beginning another chalk sketch now that he had declared that the full concept for the painting had come to him. Margherita felt his eyes boldly upon her once again, and the same shiver of fear raced through her. Everything about this place, this moment, was unfamiliar to her, and that, most of all, frightened her into silent compliance. “Hold your hands just a bit farther from your body, and face your palms outward,” Raphael instructed with the slightest catch to his voice. “
S,
that is it . . .
s
. . . perfection.”

R
APHAEL WORKED
feverishly for almost an hour with the chalk, his feeling of inspiration like a wave engulfing him so that there was nothing else but the heady sensation of creativity—and Margherita. His eyes moved back and forth from her to his paper in a swift rhythm as his hand moved over the sheet. “And your eyes, keep them on me . . .
s.
. . . your chin up slightly.
Perfetto.
”

Dio,
she was utterly breathtaking. The opalescent light behind her through the slatted shutters was like a halo, and the green velvet curtains on either side of her became an unintended framing device that he actually considered using. Raphael worked on through the powerful undercurrent of attraction that refused to be ignored. The curtains . . .
s
. . . a loose veil flowing from the top of her head . . . more ideas rushed into his mind almost faster than he could take note of them.

“Eyes up again, on me . . . Just a bit more!”

It was the most unnerving sensation. As she looked at him, she seemed to be peering directly into his soul. Raphael felt his always certain fingers tremble slightly as he gripped the chalk. What on earth was that? He had sketched a thousand faces in his life, dozens of bare breasts and thighs, voluptuous women who had lay naked before him, and even when he was physically drawn to a woman who posed for him, it never once had shaken his concentration.

Raphael washed a hand across his face, shifted uneasily from one foot to the other, and continued. Moving away from the image of her face, he began to outline the folds of her dress, the way the fabric highlighted her waist, then clung to her legs. It was November and yet the room was suddenly stifling, and he felt perspiration drip from his brow.

He worked on her bare feet next, small and perfectly shaped, deciding how he wished to see them positioned for the work. The Madonna would be floating majestically on a heavenly cloud, so they must not seem too firmly planted on the ground. She was a human representation, after all, he reminded himself, yet ultimately a Madonna. Her feet and toes were so perfect, small and delicately shaped, and, jarringly, an image pressed back into his mind, a salacious memory—a dark room, raucous noise below . . . the feel of a girl’s bare feet wrapped across his back . . .
raw desire
. . .

He cast his chalk down beside the paper. It snapped in two, startling her. “That is enough for now. You may relax,
signorina.
”

“May I see it?” Margherita tentatively asked.

She seemed to expect something dark and forbidden. He bit back a smile.

“Signor Perazzi,
per favore,
I believe I will actually have a glass of that wine now if you would be good enough to pour.”

Donato glanced up from the stool in surprise. He had been looking through a small black leather-bound book he had found on the shelf. “You actually read this sort of thing?”

Raphael could see that it was his copy of an architectural treatise by Vitruvius. “I find I must, as it helps me with the themes I am called to paint,” he said, hearing that he sounded somehow apologetic. The truth was that an artist’s duty, even more than a courtier’s, was to be as well versed in the broad themes of classical thought, architecture, and religion as was humanly possible. But he did not say that.

“I have been reading it this entire time and I don’t understand a word of it.”

“It does take patience. I quite agree with that,” Raphael smiled kindly. “It is said that Vitruvius’s Latin is so difficult to understand that those who spoke Latin thought he was writing in Greek, and the Greeks thought it was Latin. The drawings, at least, are exquisite.”

“They are indeed,” he said, leafing once again through the pages.

“Would you like to borrow the book?”

Donato’s expression was apologetic. “I am afraid, Signor Sanzio, that I would only be looking at the pictures.”

“Then perhaps one day both of you will allow me to read the descriptions
to
you.”

“Perhaps.”

As Donato poured him a cup of wine, Raphael watched Margherita move slowly toward the table and the new sketch. Rarely did he allow a model to see his work, especially a work in progress. He watched her look at the chalk image of herself, next to which he had lightly drawn the faceless shape of another woman, planned as Saint Barbara. On her left, the shape and heavy cloak of a man kneeling devoutly at her feet was meant to become the third-century pope Sixtus II.

Raphael watched two fingers move to touch her own lips as she gazed at the sketch. “It is magnificent,” she said in a soft voice.

“It is only a beginning,” he replied casually as he came back across the room to stand beside her. Raphael took a second swallow of wine, then a third, as he watched her fan out the earlier sketches beneath this new one. “I often take details from several other sketches and incorporate them into the finished work. A hand gesture from one, a gaze, perhaps, from another.”

Donato brought Margherita a cup of wine then, and the three of them stood looking at the various representations he had already created of her.

“This
is
lovely,” Donato remarked of the last one, a sketch of Margherita’s face, her head tipped to the side on her graceful neck and her gaze directed straight and serene at the observer. “You have captured her entirely.”

“It was my first drawing of the
signorina
from the last time you were here.”

“First or not, the eyes—”

“
S,
they are extraordinary.”

“And they are Margherita’s precisely!”

“Grazie bene,”
Raphael nodded gallantly, forbidding himself to reveal that he had looked at that same sketch, and particularly at her eyes, a hundred times since he had seen her last. No, he would never admit that. He barely allowed himself the thought.

“I fear it is getting late,” he reluctantly declared, knowing that he still had Giulio’s concept drawings of the Coronation of Charlemagne for the pope’s next
stanza
to review, and plans later to meet Gianfrancesco and Giovanni for another evening of gambling, drinking, and very likely whoring as well.

“Have you finished with me then?” Margherita asked as she set down her glass of wine. He could see that she had not drunk a drop.

Ordinarily, this was all he ever used a model for: the preliminary portrait sketches, and then perhaps one last time during the final painting to adjust eye color and skin tone. But suddenly for Raphael, that was unthinkable. He had fought too hard just to get her here. For what he intended to pay her family, he deserved to get as many studies out of her as he needed in order to capture the Madonna.