SIMONE GASPS WHEN THE BOAT ROUNDS A BEND IN the Rh?ne and the city comes into view. Seven years earlier, he had thought that Avignon could not possibly grow bigger or more glorious, but the mighty stone towers rising from the dome of rock prove him spectacularly wrong. The cathedral, which once held pride of place atop the rock, is now dwarfed by a mighty tower, which looms so close to the nave that the two structures all but touch. Wooden scaffolds surround three other towers in various stages of construction. “Bellissimo,” Martini breathes, partly because the city truly is beautiful, but also because he feels such secret relief: His painful decision was surely the right one after all.
On his previous trip to Avignon, in the fall of 1328, Martini had come to scout the city, to see what prospects and commissions it might offer one of Italy’s most talented and respected painters. Avignon was indeed thriving then, but as he made the rounds of potential patrons—mostly the flock of wealthy cardinals who were descending on the city, trailing clouds of architects and decorators behind them—he was frustrated to find that most of the cardinals, and therefore most of the commissions, were French. For an Italian artist to move to Avignon on the strength of mere talent and brio would have been a foolish gamble in 1329. But now, in the fall of 1335, Martini’s been begged to come by a newly hatted Italian cardinal, and he knows now that his family won’t starve.
He has already landed a most unusual commission: a secular painting, a small picture of a young married woman, commissioned not by her husband, but by a poet who’s madly in love with her. A simple assignment, really—the face of a lady, nothing else in the picture—and yet Simone has never done such a painting before, nor, for that matter, has any painter he knows of. Oh, it’s common, and even crucial, to shoehorn the faces of rich patrons into chapel frescoes—to give one of the Three Wise Men, for instance, the craggy good looks of Count Corsino, if Corsino’s the one who’s piously paying for the fresco. But a picture of a woman—a woman as her real, true self, not masquerading as some saint or martyr, some spectator at a miracle? It’s unheard-of! Simone’s not sure how much demand there might be for such paintings, but who knows? If he does an inspired rendering of this heartbreaking beauty, portraits might actually catch on.
The lady’s heartbroken mad poet, needless to say, is Italian.
On his prior trip Martini had traveled light. Now he’s ponderously laden, freighted with so many tools of his trade that even he—who packed everything himself—finds the sheer quantity incomprehensible: boxes and jars of pigments, oils, solvents; cases of brushes and chalks and charcoals and easels and palettes; rolls of canvas and huge folios of paper; parchment envelopes containing gold leaf beaten thin as a day’s layer of dust; a carpenter’s shop worth of woodworking tools, needed to saw boards and build frames. The working gear is only the half of it, because he’s traveling with his beloved wife, Giovanna, and all their clothing and household goods. Rounding out the party is his brother, Donato, also a painter—a wonderful man but a mediocre artist, the meagerness of his talent exceeded only by the meagerness of his earnings.
It wasn’t easy, pulling up roots and setting sail to Marseilles and then upriver to Avignon. Twenty years of hard work, judicious flattery, and crowd-pleasing paintings had forged a solid career and a sterling reputation for Simone in Siena and as far away as Naples, where he’d been handsomely paid for his work—and knighted, too—by Robert, King of Naples. Moving to Avignon would require proving himself again, which now, at age fifty-one, was a daunting prospect. The move also meant uprooting his wife from her close-knit family—a leave-taking nearly as painful for Simone as for Giovanna, for her family is like his own, only better.