What you didn’t know until now was that I, Marco Gianetti, am apprenticed to Signor Tintoretto, the contract drawn up six months ago by my father, Jacopo. Apparently he had almost begged Il Furioso to accept me as his apprentice as my talent is, at best, ‘pedestrian’.
I could have had the talent of a flea, but the Gianetti family is one of the wealthiest in Venice and artists – even revered ones - always need money. Naturally, if my father had tried the same approach with Titian he would not have had the same result; Venice’s premier painter is sleek with success and boasts full pockets. Kings and Doges fight to be subjects of Titian, Tintoretto having spent years growling and running behind for scraps.
No one disputes his genius, but Il Furioso is just that; furioso that his talent has been constantly undermined by Titian. But as Venice is a city of opportunists when Titian was called to Germany and France his absence left a sinkhole into which Tintoretto dived, head first.
And so it was in the winter of 1548, when Il Furioso was glossy with triumph, his reputation fixed by the four paintings had created for the Scuola di St Marco. In Titian’s absence the little dyer had been seen stomping across the city, with me in attendance, often carrying small wooden boxes and a battered felt bag of paints and oils. My master had other assistants, but I made him laugh, so he favoured me.
The very thing my father loathed, made me popular with Tintoretto and one bitter February morning when Venice glowered like a sick cat, my master called for me, grabbing my arm as I entered.
“You are late! You are always late. Why?” he asked, pausing at the sound of the clock striking from St Marks. “We begin work at the same time every day, why can you not remember that?”
“‘We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.’” I replied, smiling. “Aristotle.”
“Aristotle was not a painter, Marco. You are. Only if you were learning to be a philosopher would quoting a dead Greek support your argument.” He led me to a side table, pulling away a cloth. “Light the candles.”
As he did many times before when he was planning a new work, Tintoretto had created a series of wax figures, in various attitudes, one suspended from the top of the box by a piece of string. An angel, I presumed. The box – a vegetable box I had fetched from the market the day before – was stained with tomato juice and measured no more than two feet in depth and four feet in width. In height it was around eighteen inches, the whole tableau crowded. His wax figures frantic, urgent. Furious with activity.
“An angel?...” I asked, pointing to the suspended figure.
He nodded brusquely.
. “…… he has a tomato stain on his arse.”
Tintoretto laughed, nudging me with his elbow and was about to respond when we heard footsteps approach.
A heavy footfall, accompanied by a hoarse cough, as a man entered. He came in from the bitter cold, his breath leaving his lips in a vapour, his weighty body covered in a white cloak, like a mountain under snow.
Of course I knew him, Pietro Aretino.
Dear God, it was such a cold day. The oil for the paint had begun to freeze so I had placed it close to the fire, and the linseed scent was rising. It contested the gardenia cologne Aretino had rubbed into his beard, his booted feet stomping over to the box of figures.
Now I look back – so many years later – I realise the appeal that coarse tableau had for him. Tintoretto made – and manipulated – his models to compose his paintings. They were aids to his genius; without life, and later to be melted and reformed. But when Aretino stared at the wax figures, those colourless clever forms like squirming embryos, he saw them as he saw people. Humanity he could manoeuvre, twist, contort into the shapes he chose. A man. A woman. An angel. As ripe for picking as tomatoes.
“Marco Gianetti, is it not?...”
I nodded.
“...I know your father.” Aretino continued, circling the box like a hawk circles a stoat. “Do pass onto him my admiring regards. We are old, dear friends, as you must well know.”
I wanted to reply that my father had never spoken of him, but then my father spoke little to me of anything. So instead I remained silent and watched the great white mass of this famous – and feared - man walk about Tintoretto’s studio, his gardenia cologne pungent in the stinging air.
“How many apprentices have you killed, Il Furioso?”
Baffled, he glanced at his visitor. “What?”
“The cold!” Aretino mocked him. “Before long, you will not need your little boxes, you will have frozen humans to work with.” He glanced over to me and smiled. “How would like to be a frozen statue, Marco? A beautiful young man for Tintoretto to put in a box and play with?”
Embarrassed I flushed, struggling for a retort. Impatiently Aretino walked away. He could hear him exchange a little conversation with Tintoretto and then he moved to the door.
He did not look at me.
He did not speak to me.
He did not acknowledge my existence.
He didn’t have to.
I was already swinging, like the little wax angel with the tomato stain on its arse.
Chapter Six
Discomforted by the pomp of Venetian Catholicism, Barent der Witt hesitated at the entrance to the chapel, remembering the cool white interiors of the Dutch churches in his homeland. He longed for the cold North light that glowed on white alabaster pillars, for the azure blue of a silent morning and the first powdering of snow on the canals which promised a hard freeze. Nothing froze in Venice. Nothing burned the skin as savagely as when a man accidentally touched an Amsterdam railing on a winter’s morning.
He fingered the vial around his neck, amused at the furtive attention it provoked. Of course it would have been self defeating to explain what the potion inside was; much better to allow people to imagine; to fret over supposed sorcery. Der Witt pushed back his rigid black hat – so popular in Amsterdam – and glanced at his watch. Perhaps he had missed her, but she had said that she would meet him at eleven. And it was only ten minutes passed.
Guilt had dried into his bones, into his blood, and even the nerves of his teeth. And there were only poor examples of those, his teeth blackened by years of chewing herbs, a broken canine kept numb by the application of tincture of cloves. No one realised his dental problems because Der Witt never smiled. In fact his embarrassment over his teeth had made him draw down his top lip slightly when he spoke, a mannerism that he had adopted as a child and was still using in his fifties.
But apothecaries were not obliged to be light hearted. People believed in a potion given by a dour man in dark clothes far more than they would in one provided by a smiling boy. Let others charm in Venice, allure was not der Witt’s trade.
The touch on his arm startled him, a woman pulling him away from the church entrance towards an alleyway. He could hear her laughing. “How fearful you are!”
The Dutchman was not about to be amused. “Why did you call me out at this time of night?”
“Did I disturb you, Signor der Witt? Did I pull you from the Doge’s dining table? Or a game of cards at the palace?”
She took off her hood, her hair piled high on her head to allow her neck to be seen to its best advantage. Blonde, of course. All Venetian courtesans were blonde, and if not, they wore wigs, or dyed their mouse-back tones with urine. He had seen them sitting at the windows in the backstreets letting the sun do what God had not. Later, they would gravitate to the front rooms of the palazzos that looked out over the Lagoon, or parade across St Marks Square on their vertiginous chopines. Glorious specimens, dressed like Contessas, although Venetian law forbade the whores to wear pearls. Jewels, certainly. Pearls, never.