It wasn’t easy, pulling up roots and setting sail to Marseilles and then upriver to Avignon. Twenty years of hard work, judicious flattery, and crowd-pleasing paintings had forged a solid career and a sterling reputation for Simone in Siena and as far away as Naples, where he’d been handsomely paid for his work — and knighted, too — by Robert, King of Naples. Moving to Avignon would require proving himself again, which now, at age fifty-one, was a daunting prospect. The move also meant uprooting his wife from her close-knit family — a leave-taking nearly as painful for Simone as for Giovanna, for her family is like his own, only better.
The good fortune of his marriage still fills Simone with gratitude. At forty years of age — and a homely forty, his discerning artist’s eye had forced him to admit — he’d given up on the idea of marriage. Then a miracle occurred. He and another Sienese painter, Lippo Memmi, worked together and became friends, and bit by bit, dinner by dinner, Lippo drew Simone into the circle of his family. Simone fit there as naturally as if he’d been born into it. Lippo’s father, uncle, and brother were painters as well, and dinners at the family’s table were lively, raucous, joyous occasions. The other family member, Lippo’s young sister, Giovanna — eighteen years Simone’s junior — astonished Simone with her glances, her smiles, her blushes, and — eventually, astonishingly — her love. They married and moved into a cozy house Simone bought from her father, and for ten years they were happy in it, except for their occasional spats and their dwindling hopes for children. But the work was slowing down, not through any lessening in Simone’s skill or reputation, but simply because Siena’s building boom — and therefore its fresco boom — had peaked. The paint on his last major commission there, an Annunciation scene for the cathedral, had been dry for two years now, with nothing much on the horizon. So when Simone had sighed and told Giovanna that Siena’s sun was setting, and that the future of art lay not in Italy but in Avignon, she’d cried…and then dried her tears and started packing.
As the late-afternoon breeze begins to calm, the boat tacks lazily up the final river-mile to the wharf beside the bridge. The twenty-two arches of the monumental span are the crucial links joining southern France to the Holy Roman Empire, the Kingdom of Savoy, the papal territories, and the great Italian city-states. Above its nearer end, the turrets and spires of Avignon seem illuminated from within, glowing with a golden light that soon deepens to orange and then to rose as the sun sinks. The effect — stone set ablaze by light — is dazzling; Simone has never seen its equal in any painting, not by himself nor even by Master Giotto, one of the few painters he acknowledges as his better.
Standing there in the bow of the boat, he feels Giovanna nestle up behind him, her arms burrowing beneath his to wrap around his waist. “Così bello,” she murmurs. “So beautiful. And you, Simone — you will make it even lovelier.”
Aside from being mad with love, the young Italian poet Francesco Petrarch is a charming and intelligent fellow. A thirty-year-old wonder boy whose family was exiled from Florence and ended up here, Francesco is a cleric of some sort, but his chief duties seem to consist in being eloquent, indignant, intellectual, poetical, moody, or whatever suits his fancy at any given moment. He loves to rail against the city and the papacy—“the Whore of Babylon,” he calls it, when he’s not busy feeding at her breast. He’s been posted at some godforsaken village in the dry, dull west of France for the past few years, but he’s currently maneuvering to return to Avignon, or some loftier place nearby, from which he can keep closer watch on the city he hates and the woman he loves.
The story, which Francesco clearly loves to tell, is this: During a Mass on Good Friday, nine years ago, he glanced to one side of the church and saw a beautiful young woman, with whom he fell instantly and forever in love. Pursuing her after Mass, he learned that her name was Laura de Noves — and that although she was only seventeen, she was already married, and to a French nobleman, a count. She refused to listen to Francesco’s words of love, and so he began writing them down instead, and publishing them: hundreds of love poems dedicated to a woman he spoke to for half a minute, nearly a decade ago. Now, he’s commissioning Martini to paint a portrait of her — an image he can gaze at whenever he needs to rekindle the flame of his love.
But perhaps “love” is not the right word. Martini has a sneaking suspicion that Petrarch cultivates his pain — a child picking at a scab — because it pleases him in some perverse way to carry an unhealed wound on his heart. It is his own version of the stigmata, Martini realizes, the wounds that proclaim, “Behold how I suffer!” Martini has been married to Giovanna for nearly a dozen years now. The two have fought, they’ve made up; they’ve laughed, they’ve cried; they’ve cooked and cleaned and pulled weeds together; they’ve made tender love and half-hearted love and primal, grunting animal love. Martini’s pretty sure that since Petrarch has done none of these things with Laura — has done nothing at all with her, in fact, and furthermore knows nothing about her except that he can’t have her — what the poet’s really in love with is not the woman, but in fact himself and his own sense of heartbreak. The man is writing a never-ending tragedy, and casting himself as the tragic hero. What’s more, it’s beginning to make him famous; other poets have started to copy and circulate Petrarch’s verses; some are even imitating his writing and his heartbreak.
No, Martini’s got no starry-eyed illusions about this goddess: She’s doubtless a pretty and privileged Frenchwoman of twenty-five, a knight’s daughter who married up and became a countess at age fifteen. She certainly wasn’t the first pretty girl whose youth and beauty were sold for a title and a life of ease, and Martini doesn’t begrudge her the good fortune. Martini’s got no illusions about his own role, either. If Petrarch wants him to immortalize his muse in paint, and is willing to pay well for the job — fifty florins! — Simone’s happy to unpack his paintbrushes and start mixing his reds and greens and golds. “I’ll get started right away,” he tells the poet. “When it’s finished, you must write a poem immortalizing my picture of your lady.” Petrarch nods gravely, as if he doesn’t realize that Simone is just joking.
CHAPTER 30
In all his thirty years of painting, Simone has never worked this way before; has never had to squint and strain and sneak to snatch furtive glimpses of the face or figure he’s painting. Often, in fact, he’s had the opposite problem: a model whose ripe lips or plump breasts were offered not just to his artistic eyes but to his strong hands; a woman — or occasionally a man — whom Simone had to push away, but gently, so as not to spoil the sitting and hinder the painting.
At first, he hated watching the young woman, hated following in Petrarch’s pathetic shoes — lurking in doorways near her house on Sundays; trailing her to Mass, or lying in wait inside the church to snatch a glance at her forehead or eyes; lurking across the aisle or behind a column as he studied her profile; dashing to his studio after the benediction to sketch and paint before the details of her face fade from his memory for a week. Gradually, though, Simone has been forced to admit that he likes the challenge — painting someone he can scarcely see — and he looks forward to studying her each week.