Kerry Postle - The Woman in the Painting

He clicked his fingers, gave a dismissive shrug of his shoulders to show his disappointment at the master’s performance, and carried on with his own story. He beckoned us closer. ‘Man. Young,’ he clarified. ‘Found with the remains of his hose wrapped around an ankle, a coin in his throat with a huge stone wedged in his mouth to keep it there, and a pendant of St Stefano wound one time too many around his neck.’

For a second Giulio looked straight at me, a knowing look on his face. I told myself I was imagining it.

‘He was a pretty boy, if you get my meaning,’ he added. I knew then I was not. My stomach lurched. My skin prickled. I felt threatened. But the other apprentices noticed nothing of the tacit communication that had passed between Giulio and myself. All they wanted was for him to go on with his grisly story and they strained their ears to listen some more.

‘Nose cut off.’ No longer interested in me, he threw himself into the performance, slicing the air with the side of his hand. While his audience made noises of pity for the pain of losing one body part, he hit them with another. He thrust his hips forward and slapped his two hands between his legs. ‘Cock too.’ This time he grinned like a fool. Smothered titters and horrified howls rippled around him. ‘I even heard that they cut off his …’

‘LAMP BLACK!’ Sebastiano’s roar, followed by the sound of something clattering to the floor, put an end to the morning news as told by Giulio. The maestro’s disagreement with his model was over, again, and the one with us was about to start.

My heart was still thumping against the prison of my ribcage, my mind imagining the dead body. But Giulio had been silenced. For now. And I was glad of it.

I looked over to discover what had brought about this change. A messenger from the Vatican had finished talking with a disgruntled Sebastiano. The messenger made apologetic gestures; Sebastiano exuded disappointment. The workshop had not secured the large commission after all. I watched him as he returned to his model. He whispered what I deduced from the look on her face was a question. It caused her to pick up the miniature of the artist Raphael that had been thrown down on the table earlier on while the maestro himself moved his head round the workshop like a lit torch in the dark. We looked down at our work.

‘You shouldn’t ask a question when you have no desire to know the answer,’ his model’s even voice replied. ‘I am no flatterer, nor will I ever be.’ What could Sebastiano have asked? My mind worked hard to fill in the gaps; all I could come up with were the vain enquiries of a self-deluding madman.

Sebastiano puffed up his chest. This could only end one way.

The girl gave her answer. Sebastiano let out a roar.

We worked hard, harder than ever. Lamp black, lamp black, lamp black, I told myself. The pressure was palpable. The maestro’s roar told us his model’s answer had not been the sweet consolation he was seeking after the papal disappointment. He was going to be taking his frustration out on us for the rest of the day. As I struggled to keep up with the demand for lamp black, the girl who was responsible for Sebastiano’s latest show of anger walked by. She passed in front of the bench I was working at, swinging her basket. She displayed none of the outward signs of a lover spurned or model chastised. If she was quaking with fear, she didn’t show it.

I looked up all the better to see what the attraction was now that she was so close to me. Though the clothes she had on now were not as fine as the ones she had been dressed up in by Sebastiano for the painting, and the pearl earrings were no longer hanging from her ears, and a single laurel leaf was all that was left of the wreath sitting on her head, the colour and style of her hair were the same, as was the shape of her face and the deep brown eyes.

I thought about the portrait. Close though the Venetian was in capturing this young woman’s likeness, I could not say that his art had in any way improved upon nature. The girl, though not of noble birth, as was clear from the way she dressed, was a beauty, her skin soft and plump, the light in her eyes warm and radiant. The light in the studio was good and to see her movements swathed in it made me question Sebastiano’s rendition. He acted like a man bewitched but there was no hint of this in his work. What he had produced was a lacklustre imitation, competent in that it was recognisable, but without expressing the life and energy of this bewitching creature who danced past me, skirts swaying, hair bouncing, and whose flesh, I couldn’t help but notice, quivered ever so slightly with every up and down sweep of her arm.

Not that I found this jiggling of flesh attractive myself, not even at fourteen, but I could see, in that moment, why many men would. She moved the way she spoke. There was something to be learned from her. She was rebellious yet not aggressive, confident yet not brash. Strength, grace and gentleness radiated from every step and turn of her head. Qualities I’d thought of as quite disparate harmonised within her. I was in awe and could do nothing to resist. Sebastiano, in the same moment, had noticed her movements too. They elicited an altogether different response in him. And it wasn’t the one we’d seen when he’d been painting her earlier.

‘Stop swinging your basket!’

He was cross with the girl. No longer the amorous artist. It must have been something she’d said.

Though usually changeable in temper, events of the morning had made his humour worse than ever. I looked over to see him push the miniature of the artist from Urbino across the table in a fit of rage. It scraped across the surface, flew off the end, and crashed to the floor.

Not satisfied the miniature was on the floor, he kicked hard at it, pushing it away still further. Giulio sucked the air in through his teeth. The girl with the basket reddened. For the first time she appeared vulnerable. I was surprised.

Then I understood.

Sebastiano was jealous.

I looked at his blotchy face. His nose was an angry red and his eyes were incandescent with a rage so strong it threatened to consume him.

As for the girl’s cheeks, they returned from flush red to a warm pink the nearer she got to the door. She sprang by, determined not to be cowed by Sebastiano’s display of bad temper. She gave me a wink.

‘STOP … SWINGING … THE BASKET!’

Sebastiano’s voice boomed across the workshop like a clap of thunder.

In my shock I jumped. I have no idea what the dancing girl without the pearl earrings did because I froze. It was my heart that now lurched into my mouth – preferable to the contents of my stomach that had threatened to make a reappearance in response to something Giulio had said earlier.

I’d knocked over the lamp and I watched in horror as hot linseed oil surged from it to create the most perfect of arcs. It slipped through the air and landed in the uncovered lapis lazuli dust on the neighbouring bench. Its globular heaviness made the precious pigment puff up. Thousands of specks of exquisite colour cascaded before my eyes. It was as if time had slowed down as I watched this disaster unfold. When I’d looked back up from the now settled ultramarine powder the girl was nowhere to be seen. The main door slammed shut. She’d gone.

I turned to look at Giulio. Mockery had vanished from his eyes. Arrogance had abandoned him. He was looking behind me. His mouth opened as if to speak but it was as if the deluge of the shock within had flooded him so completely that no sound came out.

Then I felt it. Sebastiano’s heavy palm, slap, on the back of my head.

I stumbled forward, gasped for air. I sneezed, my nostrils irritated by the dust Giulio had produced after hours of grinding. Celestial dust. Colour of the heavens and the Madonna’s sacred robe. The most expensive pigment in all the world. And now it lay over the bench like a fine covering of newly fallen snow. The hand that had struck me wrapped itself around my upper arm and squeezed hard. I felt the gold ring on one of his fingers dig into me. I sneezed some more, unable to stop. I watched, appalled, as moisture now clung to the lapis dust to form dark, wet dots. The same hand that squeezed me shook me. Pain and shock rendered me breathless. Sebastiano had achieved his aim: I stopped sneezing. But by then it was too late.