Sacré Bleu

The painter didn’t even look from his work. “Go away. I don’t like anyone around when I work.”

“Excuse me, Maestro,” she said with a curtsy. “But I was asked to bring you these paints by the cardinal.” He was painting for the Church; there had a be a cardinal involved somewhere.

“What cardinal? I have my own color man. Go away.”

She crept forward. “I don’t know which cardinal, Maestro. I don’t dare look up when I am addressed by a prince of the Church.”

He finally looked at her. “Don’t call me maestro. Not when I’m doing this. I’m not even a painter, I’m a sculptor. I find the spirit in the stone, guided by the hand of God. I work in paint only in the service of God.”

Not another one, she thought. The reason she’d left Florence was she had lost Botticelli to his religious conscience, spurred by that maniac Dominican monk Savonarola and his Bonfire of the Vanities. Botticelli himself converted and threw some of his best paintings, her paintings, on the fire. But Michelangelo had been here in Rome for a year. How had he heard of the teachings of Savonarola?

“I’m sorry, but I must deliver these colors or I will be punished.”

“Fine, fine, then. Leave them.”

She moved to where he sat on a three-legged stool and slowly knelt with the basket, making sure one knee pushed out of her skirt, baring a thigh, and the front of her gown fell open. She held the position for what she thought was long enough, then shyly looked up into his face.

And he wasn’t even looking. “Oh for fuck’s sake,” she said in English, because she thought it the best language for swearing. “You’re not even bloody looking, are you, you pooft?”

“What? What?” said the painter. “That is no way for a young girl to behave, showing her body. You should read the sermons of Savonarola, young lady.”

“You read them?” She snatched up her basket. “Of course, you read them.” She stormed out of the workshop.

The Colorman was right; no good was going to come of that printing press invention of Gutenberg’s. Fucking Germans and their inventions.

The next day, when Michelangelo looked up from his painting, it was a young man, little more than a boy, who carried the basket of color. This time he wasn’t quite so dismissive. In fact, as the young man, Bleu was able to inspire him for weeks while he worked on the two altarpieces, as well as some smaller pictures that the Colorman was happy to take, and they followed the maestro back to his workshop in Florence. A month in, it started to go wrong.

“I can’t get him to paint,” Bleu said to the Colorman.

“What about those two big paintings he’s been working on?”

“He won’t finish them. He refuses to even touch blue color. He says it takes him away from God. He says there’s something unholy in it.”

“But he is fine having you in his bed?”

“That, too, has come to an end. It’s that charlatan monk Savonarola. He’s ruining every painter in the city.”

“Show him old Athens or Sparta. They were religious and they loved to bugger each other. He’ll like it.”

“I can’t show him anything if he won’t paint. And he’s not going to. They’ve just moved the biggest block of marble I’ve ever seen into his workshop. His apprentices won’t even let me in the shop.”

“I will go see him,” said the Colorman. “I’ll make him paint.”

“Of course,” said Bleu. “What could go wrong with that plan?”

It was months before the Colorman could get access to Michelangelo, and he finally did by convincing the apprentices who guarded the maestro’s shop that he dealt in stonecutting tools, not color.

Michelangelo was on a ladder, working on a huge statue of a young man. Even in the rough, unpolished form, the Colorman recognized the model was Bleu.

“Why the huge head?” asked the Colorman.

“Who are you?” said the Maestro. “How did you get in here?”

“A merchant. His melon is gigantic. Like those simpletons who eat dirt at the convent.”

Michelangelo put his chisel in his belt and leaned against the statue. “It’s for perspective. When viewed from below, the head will appear the perfect size. Why are you here?”

“Is that why you made the penis so tiny? Perspective?”