The Ruby Ring (41 page)

Epilogue

T
HERE WAS NO RECOURSE. IT WAS OVER.

Giulio had told Margherita that he would take her wedding portrait for safekeeping until she chose to leave the convent. But she would never leave this place. She knew that, as he did. They had spoken in tender, hopeful terms as he bid her a farewell at the imposing convent gates, and both of them, for an instant, had tried to smile. Yet neither of them had managed to fool the other. They had each loved Raphael too much.

And she understood fully why, in the end, he had helped Raphael forsake her. Although he asked for her forgiveness, Margherita assured him there was nothing to forgive. Giulio had done it to protect her from those powerful forces who would want to blame her for the past, and now for the
mastro
’s death. Chigi. The Pope. Cardinal Bibbiena. Danger could come from many directions. She would be safer as the vanquished, not the victor. Both of them knew that.

The warmth of Giulio’s embrace lingered on her shoulders even now that he was gone, back into the tangle of streets, back to his own art, to his own life—hopefully to a future with Elena. They were meant to be together. That much was as clear as it had been for her and Raphael.

The sound of his name on her heart, in her memory, as he first had spoken it to her, brought a fresh stab of pain.
I will always treasure you . . . always love you . . . Wait for me . . . I will come to you soon . . . soon . . .

She walked alone then back across the ancient stone floor of the convent of Sant’Appolonia and into the abbess’s chamber. The old nun sat at her desk, unmoving. Unable to look at the ring a final time, Margherita slipped it from her finger, feeling its cool, reassuring band move across her knuckles and then, one last time, touch her fingertip. It had not been off her hand since Raphael had put it there. Now the ring would be gone from her life forever, as he was. Fitting, she decided then, for this ring could only ever remind her of what she had lost.

Margherita reached across the desk and lay the ring before the stone-faced abbess. Her face betrayed none of the anguish, none of the loss, only resignation. It had been like a sweet, beautiful dream. Now it was over.

The abbess folded the ring into a dry, bloodless hand, and Margherita heard it land with a small clink in the bottom of a drawer, now a meaningless ruby and chunk of gold. A moment later, the old woman, her face dry and pale as straw, stood and held out her hand. Glittering there in the pale afternoon sunlight was an unadorned gold band, the ring that would mark her new life and make her now, like all of the others here, a bride of Christ.

Margherita hesitated for a moment, glancing at the band, seeing the stark reality of its meaning before her.

“It is our custom for there to be a ceremony,” the old woman announced matter-of-factly. “But the others here do not know you yet, and, because of your notoriety, we may well keep it so. Under the circumstances, your time here may be made easier by that. We shall simply say you have come to us a postulant from another convent.”

Margherita did not respond, but her answer lay in her own outstretched hand as she reached up to take the other ring she now would wear.
I want you to be my wife, Margherita Luti. I want that more than anything in this world.
She squeezed her eyes, determined to force away the sound of his voice, determined not to think anymore of the past, or of what might have been.
Wait for me . . . Per favore, amore,
she thought instead as she slowly slipped the gold ring onto the same finger where the ruby ring had been, pushing it down with the same determination with which she once had vowed to love Raphael Sanzio forever.

Eternity with him . . . it really was not all that very far away.

F
OR THE LONGEST WHILE,
Giulio stood frozen, the wedding portrait before him, still on its easel, as if the
mastro
might at any moment return to add a finishing touch to the beautiful innovative image of Margherita. The style was so new and daring, so full of Raphael’s sense of creativity. Giulio felt his eyes well with tears as he thought of the life in this portrait—life Raphael no longer possessed. Suddenly, he slammed his fist very hard onto the
mastro
’s worktable, sending several paintbrushes skittering to the floor.

It was not supposed to end this way, the
mastro
so in his prime, with so much yet for them to do. No one had ever been better to Giulio, nor believed in him, more than Raphael Sanzio. He owed his very life to the man who saw talent in him before he saw it in himself.

Giulio shook his head. No one understood the complexity of an artist’s life—the brotherhood Raphael had created within his studio, the safety to paint, to create . . . to realize a bit of immortality at the end of a paintbrush.

He glanced up at the painting again just as the afternoon sunlight filtered warm and golden across the vaulted studio and, like tender fingers, moved across the painting itself. A caress from heaven, thought Giulio with an infinite sadness. One last good-bye to his beloved . . . a final message delivered to Giulio as the sun on the painting moved down like a pointing finger, casting a shimmering highlight upon the painted image of the small, perfect ruby ring. And in seeing it, he knew what he must do. For Raphael—for the woman Raphael had loved. To protect her now that Raphael no longer could.

Drawing in one deep breath and then another to give himself courage, Giulio looked with steady determination for the right shade of paints among the
mastro
’s colors to begin mixing a flesh tone.
Her
flesh tone . . .
I will do this for you,
mastro . . .
I promised you I would protect her, and I shall
. . . Pushing himself to do something that felt, on the surface, like an invasion, a corruption, Giulio then took a slim, boar-bristle brush from Raphael’s worktable and dipped it carefully into a cup of freshly mixed paint. The silence was deafening in the old house where the echo of Margherita’s rich, warm laughter still clung to the walls, and had so recently warmed the place.

How cruel a thing was fate, he thought, pressing small neat daubs of flesh-colored paint onto the canvas with precision and care. Onto the image of her finger. Her ring. As he gently daubed and worked the brush, it began to disappear as if moving back into the canvas just as quickly as Raphael had left this earth. As though it never had been. As though his fervent commitment to her had never been, either.

Now the serene, smiling face began to change in his mind. By his actions, it was no longer a wedding portrait. Now she was only a girl, scantily clothed, sensually posed. A model. An ideal. The ring was gone. This painting could not harm her any longer. The same could not be said for the other factions in Rome who still wished to do her harm. He had been right to propose to the
mastro
what he had. It had brought Raphael peace in those final moments. The convent of Sant’Apollonia was the only way left to protect her.

And to tell the world publicly that, in the end, he had disavowed her.

When Giulio had told her the truth, that Raphael, with his final breath, had approved an order to protect her, she simply gazed blankly out the window that faced onto yet another cobbled piazza with its splashing stone fountain. Then she walked alone down the stairs, prepared to find her fate in a convent she had never seen, with women who would never really know her. There was no voice left in her to change that. There was nothing left for her to say.

A
S A HEAVIER RAIN FELL
now across Rome, Cardinal Bibbiena watched with quiet satisfaction the exhumation of his niece’s coffin from the little cemetery inside the Vatican walls. The hem of his cassock rippled like crimson waves and yet he stood stone still—eyes fixed on the goal. What a stroke of good fortune it had been that Raphael’s strumpet had found the good sense to lock herself away in a convent. Clearly, it was where the girl belonged, her comely face hidden from the rest of the world. It truly was the first decent thing she had ever done.

“Where will we be taking the body, Your Grace?” asked the grimy, gray-bearded man, leaning on the handle of his rusty shovel, and mopping a sheen of perspiration from his brow.

“To the Pantheon, of course,” he declared with a pious smile. “My niece will rest beside her beloved, the magnificent Raffaello. They shall be together now for all eternity. At last things are as they should be. In time, my ring shall be returned to me, and the world shall forget there ever was a baker’s daughter. It shall be as if
La Fornarina
never existed at all.”

Author’s Note

L
IKE THE CLOSING OF A BOOK, THE DEATHS OF SEVERAL
important figures in Raphael’s world came swiftly after his own. Agostino Chigi died suddenly four days after Raphael. Francesco Luti was dead by June. Pope Leo X perished the following year, and Cardinal Bibbiena died a mysterious death twenty days after the pontiff, thus taking many of the true keys to this moment in history with them.

In 1529, Elena di Francesco Guazzi at last became the wife of Giulio Romano. Romano went on to have a distinguished career of his own following Raphael’s death, until his own demise in 1546. Of the many artists who trained in Raphael’s workshop, Romano is considered by scholars the most noteworthy, his style and brilliance so like the master’s that many of their works are still disputed to this day as being by the hand of the other. His own works—including the portrait of Joan of Aragon—hang in the Louvre in Paris, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and other major museums. Sebastiano Luciani, Michelangelo’s student and Raphael’s great rival, is better known historically as Sebastiano del Piombo, the title he received in 1531 after he was appointed to the office of
piombo,
or keeper of the papal seals, by Pope Clement VII—formerly Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, cousin to Pope Leo X.

The purported bakery of the Luti family on 21 Santa Dorotea in Rome remains standing and is, today, a restaurant. The only potential confirmation of the fate of Margherita herself was uncovered in 1897, when historian Antonio Valeri described a sheet he viewed, torn from a ledger and later destroyed, containing the name of postulants at the convent of Sant’Apollonia, now gone, with the entry, “Today, August 18, 1520, Margherita, daughter of the late Francesco Luti, a widow, was received into our institution.” After that entry, Margherita Luti disappeared forever from the annals of history. And Maria Bibbiena, not Margherita Luti, lies buried in the Pantheon in Rome beside Raphael Sanzio.

A Readers’ Guide

T
HE YEAR IS 1514. RAPHAEL SANZIO, THE DARLING OF THE
Italian art world, has grown accustomed to having Pope Leo X wrapped around his talented little finger. Raphael’s innovative portraits, altarpieces, and frescoes have so enthralled Rome’s elite art collectors, in fact, that his archrival, Michelangelo Buonarroti, has stormed off to Florence to lick his wounds. Yet trouble is brewing for the
mastro.
With dozens of commissions from imperious, impatient clients piling up in his bustling studio, Raphael’s energy is flagging. Exhausted and bitter from churning out one masterpiece after another on demand, he yearns for the inspiration and creative freedom he enjoyed before fame wreaked its havoc on him.

Meanwhile, Margherita Luti, a baker’s daughter, dreams of a gilded life outside the stifling confines of her family’s humble reality. When a walk along the Tiber River brings her face-to-face with the legendary master artist Raphael Sanzio, her predictable life lifts off its axis and is recast inalterably. For four years, the
mastro
has scoured Rome in search of the perfect model to sit for a painting of the Madonna to grace the new Sistine Chapel. In Margherita, Raphael finds at last the timeless beauty he craves. So begins a fraught courtship that will blossom and consume them both—sending shock waves through the upper echelons of Rome’s clergy. For Raphael is ensnared in a politically charged betrothal to a senior cardinal’s niece, and his attempts to end the engagement not only enrage the pope and his powerful cronies, but place his beloved muse, Margherita, in mortal danger.

The following questions are designed to direct your group’s discussion of this haunting story of illicit passion and political manipulation:
The Ruby Ring.

1. Like Margherita, Raphael idealizes his dead mother, “whose loss had forever changed his life.” How is his obsession with the Madonna image linked to this tragedy? Does his sense of abandonment abate once he is involved with Margherita?

2. As the story opens, Raphael has lost the “heated passion toward creation” that once fueled his painting. His artistic block is already well known to his increasingly impatient patrons. Why, then, does he attempt to keep it a secret from his assistants? Is he motivated by pride, or by kindness?

3. Francesco Luti urges his daughter to take the plunge and accept Raphael’s extraordinary invitation to model for him. “Look beyond your nose,” he argues. “There is a whole wide world out there, and none of us has ever had the chance to see any of it.” How does his advice echo the advice pressed upon Raphael by his own father? What are both fathers trying to protect their children from, and what counterargument do both Margherita and Raphael offer in response?

4. Margherita’s stubborn refusal to succumb to Raphael’s advances stems from a deep cynicism about the entrenched social hierarchy in Rome: “A man who breaks bread with dukes, kings, and the Holy Father himself does not make a wife of the woman who bakes that bread!” she insists. Does she ever fully transcend this sense of social inferiority beside Raphael?

5. Raphael is surprisingly compassionate toward his enemies. Even when Sebastiano Luciani hires thugs to break Raphael’s hand, Raphael rationalizes, “He is desperate, and desperation can all too easily cloud the mind of wisdom.” Is Raphael too soft for his own good?

6. It is common Vatican knowledge that Cardinal Bibbiena cares deeply about the happiness of his niece, Maria. Yet when she begs to be allowed to call off her agonizing and embarrassing engagement to the unfeeling Raphael, the cardinal refuses her this relief. Why?

7. What does Antonio stand to gain by telling Agostino Chigi that Margherita is the cause of Raphael’s deteriorating work pace? Does he achieve it?

8. With his dedication to his commissions flagging, his distaste for the hypocrisies of the Vatican growing, plenty of wealth amassed, an interested clientele in France, and Margherita with whom to build a new life—why doesn’t Raphael simply throw in the towel and set himself free from the constant pressure that plagues him in Rome?

9. At the beginning of the novel, Margherita makes it very clear that she is too savvy to be bamboozled by the likes of Raphael. Why, then, does she allow herself to be charmed by the sleazy Sebastiano Luciani, even going so far as to dismiss Raphael’s warnings about him: “Raphael must be wrong about him . . . Sebastiano simply could not be guilty of those . . . awful things.” Why does she sit with him, unchaperoned, at the pope’s party?

10. When it becomes clear that the kidnapping plan has backfired and Raphael has not resumed his prolific work pace, Agostino Chigi suggests to Pope Leo that it’s time to confess the plot to Raphael. Is Chigi motivated by compassion here, or by the same self-interest that motivates Leo and Bibbiena? Why does the pope agree to do it?

11. Only when Raphael lies dying and Margherita is in dire straits do we discover that her relations with her family have deteriorated to the point where “They did not want her back now . . . she could never go home to the bakery or the life she once had lived there.” Why do you think the author skips over the potentially juicy story of the Luti family’s disintegration?

12. Margherita’s motivation for destroying Raphael’s new will—which leaves everything to her—and replacing it with the old one, which bequeaths Raphael’s estate to Giulio Romano, is left a mystery. Can you decipher a meaning behind Margherita’s self-punishing decision?

13. How does Donato gently reveal to Margherita both Antonio’s duplicity and Raphael’s genius? Why does he betray his brother’s secret?

14. Why does Raphael blame the supposed celibacy of the clergy for some of his troubles?

15. Why do you think the author includes the subplot involving Maria Bibbiena and her chief guard? Does the guard’s attention and tenderness humanize Maria in your view? What point is the author making about unexpressed attraction?

16. What parting advice does Leonardo da Vinci offer Raphael about how to handle his relationship with Margherita? Is it wise?

17. Does Raphael’s pervasive self-doubt and the episodes of self-pity that verge on wallowing—bemoaning his life “with no family, no love, no reason even to exist, but only to paint and work to the point of exhaustion and blindness! To create only for the desire of others, on and on . . . day after day, then return home completely alone!”, for example—make him a more accessible character? Why or why not?