The Ruby Ring Read Free Page A

than himself, the faces of these girls were only acceptable circles, ovals, and other linear or geometric shapes. A study of composition forced the assistant to see forms as highlights and shadows, tones and halftones to be added to or rejected from the work. To the master of this workshop, the
mastro,
however, the criteria could not be more different. She—this girl—was not right. Not for a Madonna.
    There was nothing extraordinary in her eyes.
    When he turned from the girl she was gone from his mind. Raphael Sanzio was behind schedule on many projects more pressing than this, and even the very lenient Pope Leo X had begun to show frustration. Too many accepted commissions, from too many places, Raphael thought now, and no matter how many apprentices he was given, the works were still his to complete.
    The rest of the large workshop, facing out onto the murky and foul-smelling waters of the Tiber, was stacked with half-finished works. Altarpieces, portraits, banners, and chests shared the room with apprentices and assistants, in their paint-stained aprons, all of them painting, mixing, carrying, or moving something. There were Carrara marble pieces strewn about, heads and hands of wax, and pieces of wood prepared for painting. In a corner nearby was a large, intricate panel of the Assumption.
    Standing before a huge hunting tapestry on an iron rod, another assistant was now doing the skilled work of applying sheets of beaten gold onto the panel. On the other side of the room, nearest the large, walk-in stone fireplace, sat an ancient-looking, withered old man with a thatch of unruly white hair. He modeled for a gaunt-faced assistant, also covered in a paint-stained working robe, who added to a black chalk sketch he had begun earlier. Raphael studied the man’s sunken eyes, protruding lower lip, and plunging nose, all of which suggested determination and weariness with life. They were elements he could use on the face of Noah in
God Appears to Noah,
for one of the ceiling bays in a new
stanz
a
—a grand room, at the Vatican Palace which he was designing for the Holy Father. He made a mental note to speak later with Giovanni about it.
    Beside the old man, another senior assistant stood at an easel adding a vivid shade of crimson oil paint to intensify the heavy cloak in a new papal portrait, while still another was just beginning a panel by applying the first layer of underpaint. Everywhere there were works of art in various states of completion. The sketched figure of a Madonna with no definable face dominated the workshop on a tall, narrow panel propped on a large easel. It was to be part of a grand, gabled altarpiece bearing the Apostles in solemn guardianship, destined for the church of San Sisto. And now it was to be delayed yet again.
    As the girl stood and took the handful of coins, Giovanni turned back to Raphael. “But what will you do if you do not settle for this one,
mastro
? You have promised Cardinal Bibbiena the altarpiece by month’s end, and you have yet to find the model!”
    “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