Snapshot Fiction: In The Workshop

“Good! Very good. The lighting on the vase is quite well done, Vinca. Now just a bit more blending on the surface of the table. Do you see how sharp it is?” Vinca studied the section of the painting Papá pointed at and dutifully blended out the sharpness between the colors. She frowned in thought as she did so. She rather liked the sharpness; it was her own attempt to emulate Simone Martini’s style using the art of outline. Papá, however, preferred a more realistic style and a daring use of light and shadow. Vinca believed that the appropriate path for her would be to follow the styles of the greatest artists rather than to reinvent a style of her own. She sighed and touched up a smudge of color she was unhappy with. As a woman, there was little hope either way of her paintings being anything beyond something she did for her own entertainment. Fortunately Papá let her indulge her love of the art.

“Lovely. Very good.” He smiled and nodded then patted her shoulder before returning to his own painting standing vigil on the easel in the corner. He kept it carefully turned from her, not wanting anyone to see his works before they were complete. Oft times as children, her brothers would talk about sneaking into Papá’s workshop just to dare the one law in the home that there was no breaking. She never would, however, for while she did not share the habit with her Papá, she could understand the desire to keep the work hidden until complete.

“You will be done with that one soon, yes?” The question was casual and she glanced at him watching him adjust his painting and easel unnecessarily. Though he would deny it, it was as close to a command as he would ever get with her paintings. He thought she had worked it enough (overworked it he would more likely say) and wished for her to try her skill on something else.

She forced a smile and nodded. She didn’t feel it was done well enough to be complete yet but he would ask the same question several times a day until she declared it complete. It would be a great deal simpler to call it finished, scrape the canvas, and begin whatever he wished her to work on this time. “I think so, Papá. I would like to show Pietro before scraping it this time, however. I rather like the lilacs.”

“Oh no! No, child. Do not scrape it this time. I have another canvas for you. That one is finely done and I have someone else in mind to show it to. Do set it aside if you would please.” He caught her eye from behind his canvas and simply raised a bushy eyebrow at her when she opened her mouth to protest. She closed it again, no words spoken, and added one last slashing stroke to the painting before setting it against the wall to dry. “That’s a good child. Now fetch that canvas I’ve set out by the rack. That is for you.”

“Yes, Papá.” Seldom did she get a clean canvas to work with, often scraping her own failed works off one or using one her father had scraped so often of his own he found the quality of it compromised. She wondered what he had in mind that he would give her a fresh canvas to work with. “What would you like me to practice?” She asked, setting the canvas on her easel and staring at the blank surface.

“Your still life work is adequate enough to leave off for a while,” he said after a moment, his brush moving methodically over his canvas, “but I would like to see more of your life paintings. You have a strong hand and accurate eye for the features which make each person who they are. Behind the shelving you will find your washer woman and children at play paintings. Pull them out and study them. I like those and should like to see you develop your work in such a way.”

Vinca frowned at the canvas. She remembered the paintings, the last ones she did before they departed Piombino, but she thought they had been painted over already. “Papá, you saved those? They were not very good at all and inappropriate for a woman to paint.”

He snorted. “Child, whatever your hand conjures to brush is appropriate for you to paint. I believe those came so well to you, however, because you could see them.” He leaned around his canvas again and pointed at her with his brush. “And your rendition of Jesus upon the cross was wretched. You work much better with what you can look at. Not that which you have to imagine in your mind.”

She wrinkled her nose and removed the forgotten paintings from their hiding spot, setting them up along the wall next to the one she had set to dry. “Must you always remind me of how wretched that one was?” The question was spoken with humor rather than anger for she knew her father was correct, though at the time that she completed the work he tried quite hard to give his critique of it with kindness.

He smiled an impish smile, shrugged, and returned to his work. She shook her head and turned her attention to the paintings he had so carefully retained. She had never formally titled them, simply calling them by their descriptions.

The washer woman was by far her favorite; she had seen the woman working laundry in a tub by her home in Piombino and the image had stuck in her mind so strongly she could not resist putting it on canvas. The woman was old for the area, her skin wizened and brown from the sun. Wrinkles surrounded her dark eyes and wisps of white hair escaped the braid that peeked from beneath the scarf tied about her head. The worn spots and patches on the woman’s overdress had been the hardest for Vinca to capture and at one point had to ask her father to help her with the texture of the fabric. The dust in which the woman stood and the bucket her hands were plunged into seemed relatively simple for Vinca but capturing the life of the woman, the personality of her face, took a great deal of effort.

She turned to the children at play and studied it as she had the washer woman but found it didn’t capture her as well. The children were alive and active, their colors vibrant on clothing and the ball of cloth they kicked between each other. Smiles brightened their youthful faces awash in glorious sunlight. She remembered the day she had sat sewing on the bench outside their small casa in Piombino watching the children. There was laughter and squeals of joy as only children could, but now looking at the painting she realized she had painted them, not as they appeared, but as she thought others would appreciate them. Her children were clean and well dressed with no patches of clothing nor smudges of dirt. She remembered the children at play were covered in dirt and dust with mud splattered and ground into the skin of their bare feet. Their clothing had been tattered and patched and the ball was even more tattered than their clothing. She frowned, trying to remember why she would paint the scene so different than what she saw.

“Does something bother you?” Since her back was to her father she wondered how he could know of her disturbed thoughts.

“I didn’t paint them right,” she said suddenly. “These are not the children I saw.”

She heard him set his brush on the edge of the easel and walk over to glance at the painting. “Ah yes. Those boys were ragamuffins. I remember them now that you say this.” He shrugged obviously unconcerned about her lack of accuracy in the work. “Your mind saw them differently at the time.” He reached out and gently tapped the side of her head. “What you look at is a guideline but sometimes the mind wants to create something else. Do not argue with it for great art comes from the dark places we cannot see or touch freely.”

With that he returned to his easel and she heard his short bristle brush scratching texture into the paint. She pondered the painting, and his peculiar words for a few more moments before she went back to her own blank canvas and took up a stick of charcoal to begin laying out her lines. She stared at it for several moments before laying the charcoal down again with a huff. “I do not know what to paint.” She said finally.

“A person, child. I want you to paint a person. Surely you have seen someone recently that you remember well enough to paint. Someone unique. And certainly not someone you see every day.”

The sharp features of Domenico flashed briefly through her memory, his dark eyes deepset and brooding. She could see the golden highlights on his curly hair and imagine how she would recreate that color with paint and brush. The velvet doublet she last saw him in would pick up lantern light easily and the orange glow would provide an amazing contrast to the black fabric.

She shook her head, dislodging the image and stared once again at the blank canvas. “Nobody, Papá. The canvas stays blank in my mind.”

He snorted. “We will have to rectify that then. They are having a great celebration at the Piazza del Campo tomorrow. I will escort you there and we will look for someone to paint. We will take Fina too for surely there will be musicians there and I know how she loves music.”

“A celebration?” She turned to her father, the blank canvas forgotten. “For what? It is not time for Carnivale nor any other feasts that I know of. What do they celebrate?”

She saw his brush pause before he spoke. “A treaty has been signed at Lodi. Meant to still the fighting between Milan and Venice. I have heard it establishes an agreed upon border for them and confirms Francesco Sforza as Duke of Milan.”

Vinca puzzled over this. “So they celebrate in Siena?”

“Anything that stops the shedding of Italian blood is worth celebrating, child. If you take no lesson to heart, remember that one. There is no disagreement worth the spilling of blood of our brothers.”

The wars in Lombardy were well known and there were few families that had not been touched in some way by them. A series of conflicts between Milan and Venice over territory and political control. Vinca had tried to understand and quizzed her father about it once but even with his patient and gentle explanations she could never comprehend those who have so much wanting so much more. Even when they lived in the small, simple casa in Piombino where wind and water blew in through cracks around the windows and dripped through the roof, she never could have conceived of harming another to gain more. To take a life was a sin against God and surely damnation in His eyes. To willfully kill so many? Especially those whom you may share blood with? The very thought was foreign to her.

“There you are!” She was startled out of her thoughts by Fina sticking her head through the doorway, her dark hair escaping her braid. She smiled brightly at Papá before turning to Vinca. “Agneta said the cook needs our help in the cucina. She sent me to fetch you.”

“Well! Off with you then! I’ll not have my dinner spoiled by a lack of hands!” Papá grinned at the girls and waved Vinca from the room. She nodded and heard him call after she left the room, “And tell your sister what we are doing tomorrow! If you keep it from her she will never forgive you!”

Fina tugged anxiously on her sleeve as they went up the stairs to the attic. “What? What are we doing tomorrow?”