Sacré Bleu

“Because her face is out of focus, but her bottom is sharp. I mean, soft, but sharp. That’s not the way he paints the cherub, whose face is in vivid focus but in the same plane as the mirror—because he was painted from imagination, or from a different sitting. Your eye changes focus when you look at the different elements of a scene, regardless of distance, but the camera can only focus on a certain range of depth. If he had painted it by just his eye, her face would be in focus.”

“Maybe he just couldn’t see what she looked like.”

Lucien turned to her. “Don’t be silly.”

“Me? You’re the one making up machines.”

He laughed, then looked from her, to the painting, then all around the gallery, at all the paintings, then to her again. “Juliette?”

“Yes?”

“Thank you for showing me this—these paintings.”

“Lot of good it does you if you won’t see them.” She grinned and began to walk away. He followed her, as he was supposed to, but then stopped in front of a very large canvas, a Renaissance Madonna.

“Holy mother of…”

“What? What?” She stopped.

“It’s a Michelangelo,” Lucien said. The picture, while almost ten feet tall, looked to be part of a larger piece, perhaps an altarpiece, with the Madonna in the center and the Christ child, a toddler, reaching for a book that she was holding. Her breast was exposed, for no apparent reason, as she was otherwise fully covered by her robe. The shadow of her robe had been shaded in black, but otherwise it had never been painted.

“I wonder why he didn’t paint her robe,” Lucien said.

“Maybe he got tired,” said Juliette.

“Strange.” He wandered away from her then, on to the next painting, this one also a Michelangelo. “Look at this.”

It was a pietà called The Entombment, and in this one, the Holy Mother’s robe had been left unpainted as well, while the rest of the painting was finished.

“He didn’t finish this one either,” said Lucien. “In fact, there’s no blue in the painting at all.” Excited at seeing a masterpiece stopped in progress, he put his arm around her waist and pulled her close. “You know the Virgin’s cloak had to be painted blue. It was called Sacré Bleu, because it was reserved for her.”

“He didn’t finish this one either,” said Lucien. “In fact, there’s no blue in the painting at all.” The Manchester Madonna and The Entombment—Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1497

“You don’t say,” said Juliette. “Maybe we should go look at the Turners, since we’re in England and all.”

“Why would he finish the whole painting but not use any blue?”

“Maybe because he was an annoying little poofter,” said Juliette.

“A master wouldn’t stop in the middle of painting to be annoying.”

“And yet here I am, almost four hundred years later, annoyed.”

“At Michelangelo?” Lucien had never been annoyed by a painting. He wondered if that might be yet another element of a masterpiece that he might never be able to produce. “Do you think someday I could be that annoying?”

“Oh, cher,” she said. “Don’t sell yourself short.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing,” she said, and off she glided to look at the Turners and the Constables, or ships and sheeps, as she liked to think of them.

She was being kind, really. Lucien hadn’t a chance of ever being remotely as annoying as Michelangelo Buonarroti. For one thing, Lucien was, at heart, a sweet man, a kind and generous man, and with the exception of a bit of self-doubt about his painting, which served to make him a better painter, he was delightfully unburdened by guilt or self-loathing. Michelangelo, not so much.

Rome, Italy, 1497

THE FLORENTINE HAD BEEN ABOUT THE SAME AGE AS LUCIEN WAS NOW WHEN she’d first come to him. And like Lucien, he had not dealt with the Colorman directly. She found him in Rome, working on The Entombment of Christ, which was to be an altarpiece for the Church of Saint Agostino. He was alone in his workshop, as was often the case.

She was a young girl, wide-eyed and fresh faced, wearing the gown of a peasant, loosely laced and low cut. She carried the color, freshly mixed and packaged in sheep’s bladders, twisted off to size and tied with catgut, in a basket padded with unbleached linen.