The Ruby Ring Read Free Page B

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