The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant Read Free Book Online

beautiful that one might indeed believe that God is carried in its shafts. I had once sat there for hours waiting for the Holy Spirit to reveal Itself to me: eyes closed, my soul warm in the light, the sun like a beam of holiness piercing through my eyelids. But instead of divine revelation all I got was the thud of my own heartbeat and the incessant itch of an old mosquito bite. I remained stubbornly—and now I look back on it almost excitedly—unblessed.
    But my Madonna is more worthy. She is rising from her seat, her hands flying up like nervous birds to defend herself against the rushing wind of God’s arrival, the perfect young virgin disturbed at prayer. I have taken the greatest care with both of their garments. (While much of the world was closed to me, the fabrics and fashions at least I could study at will.) Gabriel is dressed in a long chemise made from my father’s most expensive lawn, its soft cream falling in a thousand tiny pleats from the shoulders and gathered loosely at the waist, the material light enough to follow the speed of his limbs. Our Lady I have made quietly fashionable, her sleeves split open at the elbow to show her chemise poking through from underneath, her waistline high and belted, and her silk skirt falling in a waterfall of pleats around her legs and across the floor. When the outline drawing is complete, I will begin work on the shading and the highlights, using various degrees of ink solutions and a wash of white lead paint applied by brush.
    Mistakes at this stage are not easily corrected, and my hand was already unsteady with nerves. I was becoming decidedly more sympathetic to the plight of the apprentices in Bartolommeo’s workshops. To gain myself a little time I was filling in the receding floor tiles to practice my skill at perspective when the door handle moved and the wood rattled against the chair.
    “Not yet!” I grabbed a sheet from the bed and threw it across the drawing. “I am . . . undressing.”
    Once, a few months before, Tomaso found me here and “accidentally” knocked the bottle of linseed oil, which I use for making tracing paper, into a pestle of white lead powder that Erila had managed to find for me in the apothecary’s shop. His silence had been bought at the cost of my translations of the Ovid poems he was struggling with. But it wouldn’t be Tomaso now. Why waste his evening tormenting me when he could be prettifying himself for the fallen women of the streets with their regulation bells and high-heeled shoes calling young men to attention? I could hear him upstairs, the boards creaking under his footsteps as he no doubt procrastinated over which color hose would go best with the new tunic the tailor had just delivered to him.
    I unhooked the chair top and Erila swept in, a bowl in one hand and a pile of almond cakes in the other. Ignoring the drawing—though she is my accomplice, it is better for her to pretend she is not—she settled herself on the bed, divided the cakes, and pulled my hands toward her, stirring up the paste of lemon and sugar and applying it thickly to my skin. “So. What happened, did Maria snitch on you?”
    “Lied, more like. Aah. Careful . . . I’ve got a cut there.”
    “Too bad. Your mother says if they’re not white by Sunday she’ll make you wear chamois gloves for a week.”
    I let her work for a while. I love the feel of her fingers pushing their way deep into my palms, and even more I love the fabulous contrast of her jet-black skin against mine, though it always taxed my charcoal supply when it came to sketching her.
    She says she remembers nothing of her homeland in North Africa except for the fact that the sun was bigger there and the oranges tasted sweeter. Her history might be the stuff of a modern Homer. She was brought to Venice with her mother when she was, she thought, five or six years old, and sold at the slave market there to a Florentine merchant whose business later collapsed when he lost three