The Passion of Artemisia Read Online Free PDF

dead now. How can it hurt?”
    â€œWhat do you know of hurt?” I held up my hands with crusted blood lines around the base of each finger and raw, festering wounds between them. “These are the wedding rings you gave me. You sat there and let them do this, and yet you say you love me?”
    He winced at the sight. “Believe me, I didn’t want to hurt you.”
    â€œOr the woman you married? You didn’t want to hurt her either? Just strangle her kindly? With a rope and an apology?”
    Agostino backed away in shock. Ridges formed across his forehead and his eyes sprang wide open. It was true, then.
    â€œYou’re a monster and a murderer.”
    â€œArtemisia—”
    â€œBastard!”
    I whirled around to leave, feeling blood surging to my fingertips, energizing me.

    The next morning, I started Judith Slaying Holofernes . I could barely bend my fingers to grasp the egg-shaped muller to pulverize the pigments on my marble slab. Pain is not important. I have to ignore it, I told myself. Only painting is important. Paint out the pain, Graziela had said.
    I couldn’t keep my thumb in the hole of the palette so I put a stool on top of a chair to have the palette up high and close by. The smears of color made me breathe faster. Steeling myself against the pull of my skin when I held a brush, I swirled the shiny wetness of pure ultramarine onto my palette and added a touch of soot black to darken it for Judith’s sleeves. Then, awkwardly, I took a stroke to rough it in, sketching with paint. My heart quaked. I felt alive again.
    Every day as soon as I woke up, I threw on my painting gown over my night shift, thrust my feet into my old mules, and painted from the first light, before hawkers shouting behind their creaking carts and old men arguing in the street distracted me. I loved those quiet morning hours stolen from the spectacle in court and I dreaded Papa telling me it was time to stop on the days I had to go.
    I was frustrated that my hands wouldn’t do what I needed them to. Holding the brush between straight fingers, I tried to work by moving my wrist instead of my fingers. Sometimes I lost control and the brush slipped out of my hand. For weeks, after court each day, Papa went to Cardinal Borghese’s Casino of the Muses to work on the ceiling fresco, and I raced home to paint again until the late dark of summer evenings, fired by the thought that both Judith and I were involved in an act of retribution.
    One day I painted two vertical furrows between Judith’s brows, like Caravaggio had done to show that it was hard for Judith to kill, but then in court the next day, Agostino glared at me threateningly now that I knew he was a murderer. Back home that afternoon I painted the furrows out.
    I wanted to catch Holofernes the instant he knew he was about to die, like Agostino’s face when I had called him a murderer. I wanted ridges across his forehead, his eyes wide open, fixed in shock, but still conscious, the white showing below his pupils. I loaded my brush with sable brown. I had to bend my fingers to hold the brush tighter in order to have the control to do the fine edge around the pupils. Scabs cracked open, but I kept on working, loving what was appearing on the canvas—those dark, terrified eyes pleading at me.
    When I drew my hand away, a few drops of blood had landed on the white bedcovers of Holofernes’s bed. The deep brilliant red against the white thrilled me. I squeezedout more blood, feeling pleasure in the pain, and let it fall below his head, mixed vermilion and madder to match the red, and added more. Streams of it. A deep crimson waterfall soaking into luxurious, tufted bedcovers. Like the blood soaking my sleeve in court. Or the blood I had tried to stanch after the first rape. A smear of blood across Judith’s knuckles too. If Rome craved spectacle, then I would give them spectacle.

4
The Verdict
    T he morning the verdict