Blood and Gold - Anne Rice [118]
“Certainly not,” I responded. “You ask me what I think? I think it’s a miracle. I’m surprised that you would ask.” I looked at the painting. “This is a goddess,” I said. “How could it be other than sacred? There was a time when millions worshiped her with all their hearts. There was a time when people consecrated themselves to her with all their hearts.”
“Well, yes,” he answered softly, “but she’s a pagan goddess, and not everyone thinks that she is the patron of marriage as some say now. Some say this painting is sinful, that I shouldn’t be doing it.” He gave a frustrated sigh. He wanted to say more, but I sensed that the arguments were quite beyond him.
“Don’t listen to such things,” I said. “It has a purity I’ve almost never seen in painting. Her face, the way you’ve painted it, she’s newborn yet sublime, a woman, yet divine. Don’t think of sin when you work on this painting. This painting is too vital, too eloquent. Put the struggles of sin out of your mind.”
He was silent but I knew he was thinking. I turned and tried to read his mind. It seemed chaotic, and full of wandering thoughts and guilt.
He was a painter almost entirely at the mercy of those who hired him, but he had made himself supreme by virtue of the particularities that all cherished in his work. Nowhere were his talents more fully expressed than in this particular painting and he knew this though he couldn’t put it into words. He thought hard on how to tell me about his craft and his originality, but he simply couldn’t do it. And I would not press him. It would be a wicked thing to do.
“I don’t have your words,” he said simply. “You really believe the painting isn’t sinful?”
“Yes, I told you, it’s not sinful. If anyone tells you anything else they’re lying to you.” I couldn’t stress it enough. “Behold the innocence in the face of the goddess. Don’t think of anything else.”
He looked tormented, and there came over me a sense of how fragile he was, in spite of his immense talent and his immense energy to work. The thrusts of his art could be utterly crushed by those who criticized him. Yet he went on somehow every day painting the best pictures that he knew how to paint.
“Don’t believe them,” I said again, drawing his eyes back to me.
“Come,” he said, “you’ve paid me well to look at my work. Look at this tondo of the Virgin Mary with Angels. Tell me how you like this.”
He brought the lamp to the far wall and held it so that I might see the round painting which hung there.
Once again I was too shocked by the loveliness of it to speak. But it was plainly obvious that the Virgin was as purely beautiful as the goddess Venus, and the Angels were sensual and alluring as only very young boys and girls can be.
“I know,” he said to me. “You don’t have to tell me. My Venus looks like the Virgin and the Virgin looks like the Venus and so they say of me. But my patrons pay me.”
“Listen to your patrons,” I said. I wanted so to clasp his arms. I wanted to gently shake him so that he would never forget my words. “Do what they tell you. Both paintings are magnificent. Both paintings are finer than anything I’ve ever seen.”
He couldn’t know what I meant by such words. I couldn’t tell him. I stared at him, and for the first time I saw a little apprehension in him. He had begun to notice my skin, and perhaps my hands.
It was time to leave him before he became even more suspicious, and I wanted him to remember me kindly and not with fear.
I took out another purse which I had brought with me. It was full of gold florins.
He gestured to refuse it. In fact, he gave me a very stubborn refusal. I placed it on the table.
For a moment we merely looked at each other.
“Good-bye, Sandro,” I said.
“Marius, was it? I’ll remember you.”
I made my way out the front door and into the street. I hurried for the space of two blocks and then I stopped, breathing too hurriedly, and it seemed a dream that I had been with him, that I had seen such paintings, that such paintings had been created by man.
I didn’t go back to my rooms in the palazzo.
When I reached the