So when the invitation came to accompany a musician friend to Avignon — Avignon, which Master Giotto claimed would be the new promised land for artists — only a fool would have refused, and Simone was no fool. He and the musician, a mischievous flute-player, set off through the Susa Valley, paying a larcenous toll at the Savoy Gate, the monumental arch guarding access to the Alps. They’d followed, in reverse, the tortuous route taken by Charlemagne’s troops five centuries before, and by Hannibal’s lumbering war elephants ten centuries before that.
The ancient alpine route was well traveled but not easy. Winding along foaming rivers, skirting the faces of looming glaciers, the road was often blocked by rock or ice, occasionally cut by landslides; the June weather alternated between mild sunshine, fierce rainstorms, and occasional brief blizzards. If not for the help of a band of monks crossing from Turin to Grenoble, Simone and his friend might never have completed the crossing. But complete it they did, and as they followed the Rhône down to the arches of the beautiful bridge and the bustling papal city on the hill, Provence had wrapped her warm arms around Simone like a sweet lover, and he’d found Avignon to be quite fetching.
Also quite chaotic. If ever a modern-day Babel existed, surely it was Avignon. The official language of the church was Latin, but with French cardinals and courtiers, Roman emissaries, German and English theologians, aimless Spaniards in varying degrees of drunkenness, and the Provençal natives jabbering in their own ancestral dialect, it was not uncommon to hear half a dozen languages within the space of a block, and to understand none of them. Fortunately, a city so brimming with languages was also brimming with translators, so Simone found ways to communicate.
He spent his first few days sketching faces and buildings in the city’s main squares and churches, but then — inspired by the chance sighting of a cart bearing a body to a graveyard — he decided to cast his net in different waters: the waters of the Styx, river of death. Simone liked knowing that he was swimming against the current, and he smiled as he thought of a passage of scripture he was deliberately turning on its head. The day of Christ’s Resurrection, when His grieving followers went to visit His tomb, an angel had asked them, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” Here in bustling, booming Avignon, Simone set about to seek the dead among the living.
His initial inquiries, at charnel houses and hospitals and apothecaries, were met with suspicion and incredulity, not surprisingly. After all, why would any artist in his right mind want to draw corpses when he could paint pretty women instead — chaste virgins or, better yet, lovely madonnas, baring ripe breasts to suckle holy infants? But gradually, as he persisted in his rounds and deployed his charm and his coins, nuns and priests and gravediggers began to trust and like the crazy painter. Fortune smiled on him during his second week in Avignon: A stonemason fell from a scaffold in the nave of a church, breaking his neck when he hit the floor. The sketches of his corpse would surely be useful references for some future painting of the death of Lazarus or the murder of Abel. Two days after the mason’s fall, a child was trampled by a runaway horse — not ideal, the mangled little body, yet still potentially helpful if Simone is someday commissioned to depict, say, King Herod’s Slaughter of the Innocents.
But this latest find — a robust man killed by crucifixion! — this, for a fresco painter, was manna from heaven. Simone had profusely thanked both God and the jailer for this unique opportunity. To God, he expressed his thanks in prayers; to the jailer, in florins.
Now, studying the corpse in the warm glow of the flickering lamps, he marvels at how poorly the crucified Christ is always portrayed. In every representation Simone has ever seen — and ever done — the wounds look contrived, even silly, with their spurting fountains of blood, and the flesh and bone lack any semblance of sinew or substance. For the first time, Simone Martini feels a sense of obligation and duty — not to the sacred subject matter of some scene he’s being paid to paint, but to the human subject himself, this dead man offering himself so freely to the hungry gaze of the artist. “This is my body,” the man seems to be saying, “which is broken for you. Feast your eyes upon it.” And so Simone does, devouring the visual banquet of legs, belly, chest, face, and ignoring the jailer’s panicked pleas for haste.
Simone’s first drawings of the corpse are quick and crude — a flurry of fast, flowing lines he makes without even lifting the charcoal, without even taking his eyes off the body to inspect his work. Despite their swiftness and spareness, the sketches capture the essence of the lifeless form: the long, sad face; the strong sinews, now gone slack; the tangibility and carnality of the corpse. Next he makes detailed drawings of individual structures — fingers, feet, nose, eyes, ears — cramming pages full of body parts, like macabre still lifes of some thoroughly dismembered corpse. Finally, having gotten to know the dead man in all his particulars, he draws the entire body with great care. Except that what he draws is not, in fact, the body; what he draws is light and shadow — but no, he draws even less than that. His charcoal pencils cannot draw light, they can only sketch darkness: shades of shadows, ranging from the watery gray of dawn to the soft, utter blackness of velvet. And such magic Simone can work with shadows! Curving a shadow around an oval of blank white, he can create the illusion of roundness and of highlight: the illusion of an egg, or a forehead, or a breast. And from two simple elements — shadow and not-shadow — he now conjures flesh, blood, hair, fingernails, even mortality and mournfulness. Seeing this magic unfold, the jailer is bewitched, finally forgets his fears, and watches in rapt silence.
At last, just as the first paleness of dawn begins showing through the narrow slits that pretend to provide air and light to the prisoners’ cells, Simone tucks the remaining stubs of charcoal into his cloak, rolls the sheaves of drawings, and nods his readiness to leave. After making sure the way is clear, the jailer leads him out. He is about to close the door when the painter stops him, speaking for the first time since entering the cell and beholding the dead man on the floor. “What can you tell me about him? What crime did he commit to merit such a death?”
The jailer — a man who has witnessed, and who has inflicted, more than a few deaths in his service to the Church — fixes the painter with a long look. Answering questions — especially troubling questions — was not part of the bargain he made with the Italian. He shakes his head and withdraws through the stone archway, and the door groans on its hinges. But just before it closes completely, he puts his lips to the narrow gap. “They claim he preached words from the Devil,” he says, “but I heard him speak only with kindness and faith. I’m a simple man; I don’t pretend to understand the arguments of these churchmen. But his crime, I think, was to put them to shame by his faith and his goodness. I do believe he was a holy man — the only holy man I’ve seen in my twenty years among cardinals and popes. His sin, I think, was to be free of sin.”