The Ruby Ring (3 page)

“Then we can do nothing more than keep searching, can we?”

In point of fact, the commission for the new Madonna had been granted to Raphael four years earlier, by the previous pontiff, Julius II. It was to be a gift to the Benedictines in Piacenza as a token of that city’s voluntary annexation by the papal states. With all of the other work given to Raphael by Julius’s successor, Leo X, this old project had claimed little of his attention. But there was to be a celebration in Piacenza and the new pontiff wished to present the painting then. It was whispered that Cardinal Bibbiena, a personal friend and secretary to the new pope, was using the incomplete panel as a way to undermine Raphael’s standing at the Vatican. The reason involved his own niece, Maria, to whom Raphael was betrothed, yet who he had thus far successfully avoided marrying.

Bibbiena was growing impatient and angry, and the unfinished commission gave him an excuse to nip at Raphael’s heels.

“Dio mio,”
da Udine could not keep himself from groaning. “But this one really did fit the form perfectly.”

“I do not care if you believe she fits. Use her at Chigi’s house for one of the lunettes in the
Galatea
room if you like. She is simply not a Madonna!”

“Respectfully,
mastro,
could you not have made any of these women we have brought you into one?”

Raphael turned to him. His dark eyes were set deeply with commitment. Yet they were eyes that saw life in a different way; with consciousness of form, a strong graphic sense and luminous penetration of detail. How could he make anyone else understand that he must be inspired by a face—driven to re-create it as the very image of the mother of Jesus Christ? It was not that he did not care. This theme had come to symbolize, for him, his own mother holding him as a child. A mother he had lost tragically, when he was just a boy. To Raphael, painting various Madonna images had always been a way to bring her back to life—a mother he idealized far more than he remembered her, but a mother whose loss had forever changed his life.

Raphael had painted a dozen Madonnas since leaving Urbino. Beneath the tutelage of his own first master, Perugino, the Madonna had become his most resonant theme. He had based them all at first on the models, and the faces, chosen by Leonardo da Vinci, under whom he had studied in Florence. But Raphael was no longer a pupil. Now, at the age of thirty-one, he, too, was considered a master—a
mastro.
And the idealized face of his youth, the one he had repeated in Madonna after Madonna, would no longer satisfy his goals for the work.

Here in Rome, at the personal behest of the pontiff himself, the stakes were much higher than in Urbino or Florence. The highest commissions of the new papacy had been bestowed upon him. Michelangelo, once his greatest rival, had fled to Florence, prevented from even completing the tomb of Julius II. Raphael was the one to gain contracts for several drawings, called “cartoons,” to be used in grand tapestries for Michelangelo’s newly completed Sistine Chapel. He had also promised the pope his full personal attention on the dark and dramatic sequence,
The Mass of Bolsena,
being frescoed over a window arch, that would ornament the second, grand papal
stanza.

In addition, Alfonso d’Este, duke of Ferrara, was waiting impatiently for a
Triumph of Bacchus
he had ordered for his family castle. Bibbiena had his
stufetta,
a very grand bathing room, in his Vatican Palace apartments, the concept drawings for which were only half complete, and the fervent call by King Louis of France for
St. Michael
and
The Holy Family
had gone thus far unanswered. Raphael also had numerous portraits awaiting his brush, the loggias at the Vatican, more frescoes at the Chigi palace, and such minor projects as drawings for engravings and designs for mantelpieces. Amid this wild torrent of work, Raphael had been given yet another lofty honor which he had no idea how to find time to complete. He had personally been recommended by a dying Bramante to succeed him as the architect of Saint Peter’s, in spite of the fact that he had no architectural experience at all. Raphael’s patience was low and his energy waning. So much work and too little sleep had made him irritable. No matter to whom he delegated the painstaking details, he was still keenly aware that all of the commissions, and the assistants were entirely dependent upon his creative authority—and ultimately upon him.

In all of the notoriety and wealth, Raphael Sanzio had lost sight of what had brought him to artistry in the first place. Most days, there was little or no heated passion toward creation, as there had been at first. But the assistants did not know that. No one was allowed to get that close.

“So tell me this, Giovanni,” he asked, coolly tossing a velvet cape over his shoulders. “Did the Lord God
settle
when choosing his Virgin?”

To that, of course, da Udine was wise enough to know there could be no retort. In need of air, and the rhythm of simpler times, Raphael left the workshop alone, forgoing a groom or horse. He pressed away the entourage of assistants who always traveled with him throughout the city, and instead walked blissfully alone out into the cobbled stone street.

It was a threateningly dark midday, rain clouds having moved in from the north, quickly covering most of the azure sky as he headed toward the Vatican. Deep, heavy bells tolled at the church of Santa Cecilia. For a moment, as a breeze off the Tiber lashed at him, he felt almost like the child he had been in Urbino, tugging at his father’s cloak. With that, a stronger memory came back to him. It hit him fully then, and he felt it all again. He saw himself, a small boy, begging to leave his father’s workshop on a threatening day like this one, but long ago. He had wanted to be safely at home, away from the smell of paint and turpentine that now defined his own life. Irony twisted bitterly in him when he thought how his own workshop was more home to him than any other place in Rome.

His father, Lorenzo Sanzio, had been a court painter at the ducal palace in Urbino. Raphael felt the heavy pull of old sadness recalling the man who had given him his love of painting, but had found little of his own fame or fortune. The same beloved man who had died in his arms when he was a boy of only eleven. The door now opened, another memory came at him.

“Seize what you can from this life, Raffaello
mio
. . . You have a great talent, far greater than my own, it is certain . . . I have given you all that I can. I am dying. But now you must go on, you must seek your own great destiny.”

“Per favore,
let me stay,
padre mio!
I have nothing without you!
”

“No, my son, what you have is what you see when you take a paintbrush into your hand. Depend on no one or nothing but that. Make me proud, Raffaello . . . do justice to your mother’s memory and her love by depending upon only that . . . ”

And so he had. Raphael squinted through a last pale shaft of noonday light that shot through a heavy cloud, and caught the reflection of tears in his eyes. They had both left him much too soon. Neither of his parents had seen the success he had made of his life, nor seen any of his most acclaimed works. The modest boy from Urbino had painted works like
The Marriage of the Virgin
that hung now in Milan, the portrait of Pope Julius, so lifelike that people had gasped upon seeing it, and his own version of a piet, after Michelangelo, painted for a church in Colonna. Fulfilling his father’s wish had consumed the last twenty years of his life. Only now, at the age of thirty-one, wildly successful and wealthier than he could ever have dreamed, did he realize fully how completely unfulfilled all of it had left him.

T
RASTEVERE,
the densely inhabited area of houses and
bottegas
between the river and the slope of lush Il Gianicolo, was a meager working-class neighborhood. The Romans there were a world apart from the wealthy and powerful figures like Signor Chigi who filled the pontiff’s coffers with enough gold florins to aggressively pursue the arts. But Raphael liked the modest area for its raw energy and sense of place. Against the advice of Cardinal Bibbiena, he had intentionally set his workshop there.

The path he took now from the Via Gianicolo toward the Vatican was the longest one. He walked through the small and ordered Piazza San Pietro, hemmed in by buildings wrought of mellow, peeling stucco, the area devoid of grass or trees. Here were shades of orange, cinnamon, and gold cast upon buildings that stood too closely together, creating a dank tunnel of cobbled stones and faded stucco, cooing pigeons on rooftops, and echoed voices.

Above him, women hung from windows, held out laundry, and called to one another in a rhythmic echo of domestic chatter. On the street level were shops—an ironmonger, a weaver, and a few doors down the workshop of a musical instrument maker—and above them were the modest dwellings of those who ran them. He passed a trash-strewn alleyway where two scrawny dogs scavenged near a drunken man lying in a heap. The smell from piles of garbage was vile.

He passed them all, as a cart pulled by two dray horses, loaded with baskets of olives, clattering loudly over the cobbled stones. Yet he saw nothing. Raphael needed time alone to do battle with a fatigue that was consuming his spirit. He missed the old work that had filled him with youthful enthusiasm. Madonnas. The Florentine portraits. Wide-eyed boys. Apple-cheeked babies. Old women, their faces etched with years. The images of those who mattered to this world.

A few raindrops fell, warning of the approaching storm.

Raphael clasped his cold hands and closed his eyes. Images of his parents moved across his mind again. Elements of his home in Urbino. Smells, sights. Echoes of childhood laughter he no longer felt, but still heard. His life now was too serious for laughter. Too full of commitment for revelry.

Giovanni had been right. The girl he had presented today had been acceptable. Good bone structure, warm dark eyes. In truth, he was not at all certain what had held him back from filling in the parts of her he did not see. He simply expected too much. The new Madonna he needed to paint was really the least of his commissions but, by delaying, he had made it more important than it needed to be. And in this hot game of rivalry with every other artisan in Rome and Florence, he could not afford to incur the pope’s disappointment.

“
Dio mio,
give me strength to do it all,” he murmured to himself. He walked through an ever-darkening Roman afternoon toward the Vatican and the papal room where his assistants were now at work on a detail on the ceiling,
Moses Before the Burning Bush.
He had been there earlier in the morning to add to the final sketch of Saint Peter in the particular corner in which they had worked the rest of the day. He trusted Giovanni and Gianfrancesco Penni implicitly, and yet he was the
mastr
o
—the one upon whose reputation all rested.

He made his way through the light rain, away from the Porta Settimiana, the entrance to Trastevere, away from the spider’s web of narrow streets, and avoided the straight and orderly Via della Lungaretta in favor of a country idyll in the heart of the city, the wooded hill called Il Gianicolo. Raphael picked up his pace now and moved toward the sloping green incline and a shady arch of plane trees before him. It was not a quicker path to the Vatican, simply a more peaceful one.

He felt himself breathe more easily as he reached the top of the hill and passed beneath a rich canopy of bristling evergreens. Before him was a sweeping view of the ancient wonders of the city, including the Pantheon, which sat majestically in the distance. Raphael was late already, but for a moment it seemed not to matter as he slowed his pace along the gravel walkway, bordered with delicate purple bluebells and a shimmer of perfume from the wild jasmine bushes. The pope wished to be given a personal accounting of the work going on in his room, with its odd-shaped ceiling, four truncated pie shapes, in which the artwork needed to fit exactly. After that, there was the work at Chigi’s villa to assess—the mythological fresco, a scene of Perseus and Medusa, being added to the fresco there.

Raphael drew in a heavy breath of the deeply scented surroundings. He lingered for a moment near a lush jacaranda tree. High above the rooftops and domes, above the little classical statues set between the trees, a dark flock of birds crossed the Roman sky. He felt his heart slow. This lush hill, the escape here, was the closest thing he had to a personal bit of life. Of course there were the women, courtesans, other men’s wives, and the ever-present whores who threw themselves boldly at any famed artist. Yet they were nothing but a momentary indulgence—a distraction.

He thought of Maria Bibbiena again, the woman to whom he was betrothed, and he cringed. With sallow skin, sunken dark eyes, Maria was quiet and consumptive. But she was fascinated by the painter from Urbino. Shortly after arriving in Rome, her uncle, the powerful Cardinal Bibbiena, had offered her to Raphael as a prize. And thus he found himself now in a situation from which there was no escape.

In a foolish moment, full of more ambition than wisdom, he had accepted the cardinal’s offer. Seeing quickly the repercussions of a moment’s wild decision, he had tried promptly to break the agreement. And he had been trying ever since. But the cardinal was tied as closely to Pope Leo as if they were brothers. Offend one, he quickly saw, and he offended the other. So delay had become his sole defense. An impolite tactic that had, thus far, lasted four years.

He kept walking as the grand domes and towers of the city became nothing more than gray shadows across the Roman vista behind him. But he liked the rain, the vital sense of nature bearing down upon him. He felt alive beneath its increasingly heavy force. Alive and
almost
free.

Raphael passed a marble bust of Socrates, a hand extended upward toward the heavens, the other bearing a heavy book. There were strollers coming down the hill toward him, men in their nether hose, velvet caps, and cloaks, women in full, wide gowns and decorated hoods. As he glanced up, a female figure walking alone behind them drew near. She wore a midnight-blue cloak, hood up over her head, and she was shielding a child she held beneath the weighty reach of fabric.