A Name in Blood by Matt Rees Page A

loggia, all faces are flat and dull, because the light is uniform. If I look at you this way, you’re just the same as if I stand
over here. What am I to search for as an artist when every perspective is identical? How can I show that what I see is different, when it isn’t? The sun gives life to everything, but
not to painting.’
    He caught himself and frowned. What is it that does give life to painting? Is it only the light? Lena’s face came to him and he smiled.
    Scipione patted at Caravaggio’s wrist. ‘That’s how you capture the character of a man?’
    Caravaggio shrugged. ‘When a painter looks at a man, the man thinks, “How will he make me look? Will I recognize myself? What if he sees me as I really am?” The painter’s
eye draws out every man’s guilt. That’s why it’s hard to paint a saint from life.’
    ‘Very hard, indeed. But what if the guilt is the painter’s?’
    Caravaggio’s easy feeling left him. He shuddered and looked at his hands. ‘Then the painting would show what even the artist didn’t know.’

    Lena saw him as she left the Thursday meat market behind the Madama. He kept to the shadows under the wall of the palace as if he wished not to be noticed. She came to his side
and caught his arm.
    ‘I’m waiting to model for you, Maestro Caravaggio.’ Her voice was light and playful. She set her basket against her hip. The tripes packed inside it slopped towards her.
    ‘I’m still painting the Holy Father,’ Caravaggio said. ‘I’ll come to you as soon as I need a—’
    She wondered that he stuttered before her. He didn’t seem like the kind. Is he having second thoughts about revealing himself to me? she thought.
    ‘As soon as I need a—’ he repeated.
    ‘A Virgin,’ she said.
    He smiled with an embarassed shrug.
    ‘I’m going the same way as you, it seems,’ she said. ‘Will you accompany me?’ She started to walk and he caught up beside her.
    She looked at him sidelong and pursed her lips, pretending to be affronted. ‘Is it that you don’t wish to paint me anymore?’
    He shook his head, reached for her basket. ‘Let me take that.’
    ‘It’s not heavy.’
    ‘Really, give it to me.’
    His hand on her wrist, he took the basket. He examined her fingers. She wondered if he was thinking about the gloves he had bought her. ‘I don’t wear them when I’m
working.’
    He didn’t register that she had spoken. He rubbed his thumb against her knuckles.
    ‘My hands do get dirty, don’t they? Look at them now. They’re an awful state,’ she said. ‘This morning I was cleaning the grooms’ waiting rooms at the
palace. A big mess those gentlemen make.’
    His touch was very hot. He let her go.
    They went into the Via della Scrofa. She took longer strides as the market crowd thinned, holding her hands before her belly and swinging her shoulders. A man who spends his days with the
Pope himself , she thought, walking beside me. She glanced at his features. They seemed feverish, as if he actually did see her already as the Virgin and were wrestling with the presence
of God. Perhaps you have to be a bit odd to do what he does. The Pope might even expect it. If a man arrived to paint him wearing stockings without holes in them and a jacket that wasn’t
spattered with oil paint, the Holy Father might throw him out as an impostor.
    ‘You have some pigment on your chin.’ She pinched a lock of his black beard between her index finger and thumb. She ran her fingers to the end of the beard, but only yellowed the
entire strand with the oils. ‘It hasn’t come out.’
    ‘It won’t. If you get oils in your hair or on your skin, you might as well leave it there. You can try to clean it, but you’ll just spread it around and rub it in.’
    ‘I bet I could get you clean.’ Her daring made him laugh. With relief , she thought, as much as with amusement. ‘You didn’t change your mind? About me
modelling?’
    He shook his head and sucked in his lips.