A FEW DAYS AFTER RECEIVING PETRARCH’S POEM and money, Simone receives a new commission, for a project he hopes will distract him from his longing and guilt: frescoes in the papal palace—in the pope’s own bedroom! The room is high in the Tower of Angels, the massive stone fortification that Pope Benedict’s army of workers has created during the past year. Just fourteen months ago they notched the massive foundation blocks into bedrock; now, the masons are capping the tower with crenellated battlements. Curious, Martini thinks. Siena’s cathedral, dedicated to God, took fifty years to complete, but this immense structure dedicated to the pope—papal palace, fortress, and strongbox—has sprung up overnight.
Simone identifies himself to a guard at the tower’s entry portal. The guard inspects him, clearly finding him lacking or distasteful in some way—perhaps it’s the odor of turpentine, or perhaps it’s the scent of foreigner that the French guard detects. Nevertheless, the guard waves him in, pointing to the back of the room. “Go see Monsieur Poisson. Architect and master of the works.” Poisson is hunched over a mountain of drawings, invoices, receipts, and notes. He looks up, weary and bleary, as Simone bows and announces himself in French. “Simone Martini, painter of Siena, at your service.”
“Martini? Ah, yes, Martini—you’re here to help the French painters in the pope’s chamber.”
Simone shrugs. “I prefer to think that the French painters are helping me,” he jokes, but Poisson doesn’t notice.
He leads Martini up two stories via a spiral staircase built into one corner of the tower. The pope’s chamber, the fourth floor of the square tower, measures some thirty feet square, with walls twenty feet high: room for buckets and buckets of paint. Martini counts two dozen workers—a third of them masons and plasterers, a third of them painters, and a third of them spectators or bosses, he can’t tell which. Scaffolds scale every wall, from floor to ceiling. At floor level, painters weave in and out of the legs of the scaffolds, covering a blue background with loops and swirls of golden vines, their branches populated by legions of birds. A level higher, a troop of plasterers has just finished applying a fresh coat of smooth plaster, and painters elbow them out of the way, eager to apply the blue background paint. They must work swiftly, applying not just the background but also the vines and birds, before the damp plaster dries. On the third and highest platforms, masons are applying the base coat of rough plaster to the top courses of bare stone. It is this level, the last five feet of wall below the ceiling, that Martini has been hired to paint—this, plus the deep recesses where windows have been notched into the massive walls.
Simone can’t help feeling disappointment. The best part of the room—the largest, lowest portion—has been given over to the French painters, and clearly it’s being wasted on them, these daubers with their simple swirls of gold on blue. Child’s play! Simone could paint vines and birds left-handed—with his eyes closed!
He clambers up the ladder to the top level of scaffolding—his level—and surveys the bustling room from there. He has not yet settled on the theme for his frescoes, but he knows it will be something far more challenging, far more impressive. Something with depth, detail, and drama; something that will move the pope to point to the scenes and say, “Bring us the painter who has done these, that we may reward him and exalt him above all other artists!”
His reverie is interrupted by a shout from below. “Martini!” He looks down; the chief of the contingent of French painters, Jean d’Albon, is waving to catch his eye. “We need to mix more tempera,” d’Albon says. “Can you bring us more eggs? Twenty eggs?” Simone glances at the clay pots in which the powdered pigments of red, blue, green, and gold have been stirred with egg yolk to moisten them and glue the paint to the plaster; indeed, the pots are nearly empty. Simone considers refusing—is d’Albon assigning him this menial errand simply to establish the pecking order?—but, in fact, all the French painters appear to be busy, and d’Albon puts his hands together in prayer posture, bows slightly, and adds, “Soon, when you are hurrying to finish your magnificent frescoes, I will bring eggs to you.” Simone can’t resist smiling—d’Albon will almost certainly never play the errand boy; he has apprentices for that—but the good-humored offer acknowledges that Simone is d’Albon’s equal, and the other painters cannot fail to have noticed the gesture.