Cinnabar or vermilion is made of sulphur and mercury ground together on the porphyry, then burnt in the furnace until they are sublimed.
—René François, Essay on the Wonders of Nature, 1621
I do not travel far; I wake in a small room
that is all great cities compressed.
With my five loyal girls I mix myth, medium
and linseed to tell a story you must know.
I have it over the boy apprentices:
permission to draw and paint female nudes,
blue veins coursing beneath ivory skin like
fogged rivers, half-dreamt, ever distant.
Elena models John the Baptist’s head in clay
one sharp March morning. Well-lashed eyes
roil back in his head like a beaten dog’s.
More beaten dog! I cry. Pull the hair tighter!
Her gifted sister Giulia models a lazuline drape,
brandishes the knife as hormonal Judith,
avenging art, her family’s women. I paint
more light, not less, gloss steel and muscle.
My father’s boys aren’t allowed in. All day
they snuffle over oyster shells filled
with teaspoons of alizarin and lapis,
jerk off to female breasts, charcoaled
over sample male torsos. One squanders
vermilion, adds nipples and lips
to a tired Magdalene cartoon.
My father Orazio struck the pimpled pervert,
docked bread and mortadella for two days.
The red weal on his cheek won’t heal fast;
he sits by used paint jars, gut rumbling
over contrapposto stances. A demotion.
Father teaches the boys how to soften the graft
between male and female. The results
are cheesy, gymnastic. I dare not say: my father’s
atelier risks selling itself down the river.
Father is not bitter, for standard works pay,
while genius suffers and begs. Let me out father!
You looked long enough to weep at my juve
Susanna and the Elders – by candle and daylight.
You did not beat me! You encouraged me.
Oh rare pater familias who would cover
Susanna’s pale, hunched shoulders! Chiaroscuro
does not mystify suffering, you told me. It reveals it.
I am allowed at last to work unchaperoned.
But the painting of Holofernes’ death only awakens
when I wake to destruction: my father’s ‘friend’.
Orazio, broken, defends me against the lawyers
until the rapist-thug Agostino Tassi receives small time.
Then they torture me to prove my memory
sharper than cutlery! Tassi serves two years;
we suffer thirty more of his drab frescoes.
Watch me travel past pain and mediocrity.
I travel with my studio sisters to new cities
where no possibilities compress. I mix
myth and medium, history and linseed,
teach my girls how to wield the knife.