Piranesi part two: Giulia

1.

The father and the son resembled each other less when both were older. Paolo favored me enough that people thought he was Carlo’s, like his sister Natalia. She was our concoction, proof that a man who in general prefers the young men who model for him and assist him in his studio can fulfill his role as my husband and father of our household. It was my own father who suggested Carlo to me, admiring his work and spirit. Carlo has always worked near the harbor, the source of his models and most of the materials he uses.

Natalia is proof that I fell in love with Carlo enough to lure him to bed. He told me later that our romance was so singular for him that he recorded it. After she was sparked, after I’d passed through the hunger for a man that women get early on, our lovemaking became more occasional. Natalia was easier than Paolo to carry and birth. As we imagined, she’s quite remarkable — Carlo’s sculptor’s head and gorgeous eyes mixed with the family’s womanly beauty.

I didn’t intend to have Paolo, but his father deserved him to mark the fireworks we set off together, this man who took me for a season the way his kind take to horses for the sport and pure enjoyment, yet lavish on them immense care, affection, generosity — almost childlike in its immediacy and intensity, but with an experienced man’s sense that nature sets life’s rhythms and limitations, and we have to fall in.

I got what I wanted, which was to be with a man as his equal, as I foresaw as a girl in my country summers, wanting that freedom. When Matteo visits me, other memories can arise. Paolo can spark them too owing to their physical resemblance. The rest is sensory, and for me at least it resulted in self-knowledge and self-confidence.

2.

Across his adult life, Luca has shared his theories with me. His word for us, courtesan, is misleading, as is the way he conflates our bespoke businesses with the arrangements we occasionally make. My way of looking at this reflects my determination from a young age to follow what I hoped would be a life shaped by intention, the way an artist sets out to make something concrete of her encounters using the skills, tools, and materials at her disposal. The normal sequence of a woman’s life seemed in the wrong order, postponing everything the way the Church points to Heaven. When and where could I give free rein to my love for a man whose desire for me was palpable? But desire is no simple thing, for all our experience of it. Luca has some knowledge of this, and his theories address it. Cures for love are scarce and unsure, the French say. Our arrangements, as Luca calls them, surely derive from our sense of love’s contingencies.

I infer from some of Luca’s poems and a handful of encounters that a crisis of some kind occurred in his marriage, perhaps Laura’s reaction to his many quirks, but in the end they carried on as before.

3.

God help you if you take no pleasure in everyday life. Humanity is facile in making the most ordinary things its means: the market, the kitchen, the children to be bathed, dressed, and raised, the meals we share, the rounds that farms and towns necessitate. The humblest human part of this ties a woman to all the rest, gives her a place to stand and a purpose, and the higher arts begin and end with her, an individual within a landscape or a scene, anchoring it to her reality.

Sensory pleasure also begins and ends here. In the country, the seasons unfold minutely, variations on ancient themes. Old people speak of the sheer range of what they’ve experienced — how the crops withered or the fields were flooded, but also how the bees lavished this or that bush with their attention, and how their kitchen garden fed the family. It’s harder in town, although the sea tempers the extremities. Winter’s great swells make journeys perilous and men idle whose livelihoods depend on the constant flow of trade. A kind of public works ensues to set their hands on repairing things, moving things, storing things. It’s true at home, too, if one has a home, but winter brings out the vagabonds that warmer nights conceal. The churches, following the teachings of their founder, shelter them. Others leave them to their suffering.

There used to be a public display of charity, a sense it rebuked the city’s overseers if suffering went unchecked. This meant that the churches were supported in their efforts, but then another order of things crept in that saw the sufferers acting out a different drama in which some won and others lost — possibly lost everything. A sense of their numbers leads the marginal to press against their fate, which stirs reaction. In the midst of these tensions, I make my art.

4.

Christ took on our suffering, we saw. Painters made it their subject. Yet suffering continued. Part of me wanted to capture this, and I still have the small sketchbooks I carried with me to record things seen. If we’re aware of it, the streets are filled with signs of frailty and death. In the countryside, domestic life struggles with nature, lulled by its patterns and undone by their irregular, implacable violation. For several years, I sketched only this, seeking to shed the academic training I’d received — the subjects and motifs suitable for a woman.

Some painters rub the faces of the powerful in the suffering at the margins. They call this realism, but it seems like parables or lives of the saints — what we grew up seeing in church or in books. It’s not that the powerful are unaware of the suffering in their midst, but they’re prone to make empty gestures and let winter clear the streets.

In the past, religious paintings foregrounded the sufferings of Christ and his followers, but gave them a recognizably local context. Certain realist painters brought this context forward and some of them kept what’s painful in life in plain view so pertinent others were forced to see it and, their consciences pricked, try to help.

Carlo has little time for this. He sees his art as a bulwark against time’s depredation, pointing to antiquity for proof. But bronze and stone are still subject to human whims, melting the sculptures down or robbing them of noses and other body parts. Sculpted friezes, being more like frescoes or mosaics, use the motifs of ordinary life to suggest the continuity underlying change. I sympathize with this.

Misfortunes causing widespread suffering are taken as signs that the powerful have broken the tie to beneficence that justifies them. This too can find a place in a painting — a mood that underlies it so subtly that the mind only registers it later. As the suffering of the powerful is primarily in their heads, this is the best way to do it.

5.

What is our remembered pleasure? Or, we could ask, what forms do pleasures take that we’re capable of remembering? It’s notoriously hard to capture love’s physicality. There are famous paintings of the Church’s female saints enraptured in their sacred marriages. The painters and their models at least knew their subject firsthand, although displaced from the convent to the studio and its divan.

I remember the role small rituals played that signaled what lay ahead, and how they echoed childhood games that did this too in that we reacted similarly, had the same sense of daring each other. So much of life consists of sequences of anticipation and sating. If we paint the everyday, meals and their preparation inevitably figure. When I look at paintings of society, I see a similar arc, attended of course by a different cast of actors, depending on who’s paying, but with a visual quality in keeping with who’s looking. Is the painter’s audience society itself or the artist and her moods? With society, splendor is the rule, whatever the setting. With the artist, ambiguity reflects ambivalence, as with self-portraits. She can be for or against what she sees, depending on her experience.

Men remember differently, I imagine. An observant man’s aware of the landscape of his lover. It’s both a tactile awareness and an appreciation of difference, of what distinguishes her from all others. Do I remember men in this manner? Yes, but in a more general way, as an aid to recognition, and often more by manner than detail until we’re face to face. Specific to lovemaking, what I remember is how intuitively he improvised to stretch anticipation out, delay its sating through half a dozen courses served raw, cool, or hot, depending.

I should ask Carlo what he remembers of those different men.

6.

Men misinterpret why women ride for pleasure. I think they identify with horses and envy them, but if I can generalize from myself, a woman loves to make these animals, substantial enough to be quite dangerous, do her will despite their high-strung nervousness and irrational fears. A horse bred to race has to be walked across even familiar terrain to assure him there are no snakes, no dogs, nothing to spook him. At speed, horse and rider are one — the horse is her extension, awaiting the signs she gives him, a vocabulary of sound and touch, perhaps also of smell as her excitement builds. Men ride similarly, the best ones. We could call this dominance, but it’s really the attachment of two minds that trust each other. One is readily disturbed, so the other must be able to recall it from its confusion.

That horses are all emotion is another way to put it. This can be bred up or down, of course, although never completely eliminated.

7.

In novels, women’s lives unfold on set paths and the woman reader compares their experiences with her own, as lived or anticipated. Age gives her a stronger sense of reality. What she finds credible will vary, although the best novelists are credible always and so reread. This may reflect the ambiguities and deviances that tie their fiction to life as we come to know it and perhaps learn to see through it.

People are often superstitious, prone to dread ordinary things for their potential to go wrong while ignoring randomness. It could be said that the potential for things to go right is wrapped up in this.

Luca believes that women are ruled by stories they’re told early on about destiny, reinforced by rituals and social pressures. We judge ourselves by how well we fit in or, conversely, fail to do so, with the extremes of fitting in or not fitting in becoming items of particular pride. To step out of this dichotomy is one kind of not fitting in. This being society, roles are provided that enable women not to fit in fittingly. I’d say that our family excels in this. Art offers a cover — I use the term broadly. To not fit in can of course prove detrimental; to be an artist is not much help if the atmosphere turns leaden.

Art though is what I do, what Carlo does. It has a necessity. We are the same in this regard, prepared to sacrifice a good deal to have what we need to make the art we make. It seems true though that artists treat the making of art as ordinary — an everyday undertaken for their art’s sake. And artists are quite ruthless, without regret.

Fittingly not fitting in is to carve out space within a reactively touchy society, dealing with it by camouflage — a marriage and a household with children, a respectful distance that avoids rousing envy or enmity, never a bad word. This is my way, not Carlo’s — he has a demeanor that warns off questions. We both make an art of experience. Is this artifice? It feels real enough.

8.

“He fucks like a dog,” Natalia told Paolo, quoting a friend. For many reasons, horses more often feature when men describe making love to a woman. Dogs are saved for whores and rent boys. If Carlo fucks his assistants like a dog, he hasn’t told me. He comes on like a husband in bed, tender and dutiful. Matteo, the chosen partner of my contractual bliss, gave the lie to these animal allusions.

Matteo saw lovemaking as conversations in which body and mind took turns speaking in their native tongues. Arousal sets women on an arc that is as long as the situation permits. Matteo saw in this an analogy to music made up by two virtuosi, playing together. His desire for this was inflammatory. It also made it easier to think of it as a season — to know from the start that we would end it with elation. My painting of him was a coda or an encore, like Paolo.

Women are erotic planets, fecund and self-sufficient. Any desired partner can arouse them and they can arouse themselves. Beauty runs through women — just look at the paintings in museums and on dynastic walls, the men with their hooked noses and the women consistently gorgeous. The leaders among men can be striking, but in general it’s far better for men to have character and bearing.

That Matteo loved me I had no doubt, but the bliss lay in the fact that we wouldn’t marry, we would fuck, memorably. That we made Paolo was an accident, although a wonderful and tangible sign.

9.

What tradition hands us are life’s sacraments. The Church names them and gives them seasons and rituals. We distinguish among greater and lesser ones, each with its greater or lesser saint. We learned, growing up, how to direct our prayers efficaciously. A figure like the Virgin wraps a universe in her flowing robe — saints with actual histories and others who stand in for goddesses whose altars can still be found in rural estates where the help know better than their current masters who they should be propitiating.

Life’s cyclical nature gives the Church’s calendar its reality and pertinence. We grow up observing the ocean and the fields, and they reveal to us that we’d best pray to sustain our good luck. Not that we ever can be certain if our luck is changing for better or for worse.

Take Paolo, an obvious outcome of lovemaking, yet not. Where was the angel to tell me? He may have felt it unnecessary, but I was caught unaware. Imagining a child would keep me from my work led me to panic and resist, the way the old expect death yet also see it as inconvenient. Babies proclaim their season, their birthright. They’re so remarkable, these beings we make who aren’t us. Oddly, I was never afraid for them. The Virgin and her saints — with or without provenance — gave me a sense that my fate and theirs was taken seriously, that we had our own small measure of dispensation.

10.

Carlo works from life as the raw material of what he envisions — heroic, Apollonian, intended for civic spaces or their private equivalents. The life from which I work is here around me and the scale of what I paint is suited to its subject matter: the head of Matteo, a field of horses, the standing young Natalia. These aren’t formal, civic works, like those Odes of Horace that paid his bills. They’re what he and I noticed while taking in the world.

Women are said to be objects, but to ourselves we are subjects who play with and to this audience even and perhaps especially in our nakedness, all adornment set aside or bathed away so we’re left with our heightened sense of self. We know early on what to do with it — -the boys too when young, but then most suppress it as unmanly or are told to suppress it. And this may be useful, as a man has to lose his self-consciousness to play the part again, or perhaps he has to learn a new kind of awareness of this other, this subject.

Around me, life moves more deliberately. Farm life starts early, but trade is also up at dawn, despite the taverns the night before. Not precisely sober, country folk are aware of their responsibilities to other living things. They don’t need churches or convents to enforce the point. Dionysus is my god of choice. Not that I share his temperament, but he’s the patron of an awareness I try to practice.

11.

Like Carlo, I give form to what I see, and what we form is meant to go beyond us, to pass into life, where it lives on independently.

I wonder sometimes if I would think differently of Matteo, of my time with him, if Paolo hadn’t resulted from it? I could say the same of Natalia — they both gave form to specific times in my life and in the lives of their fathers. There was an art to both encounters, but we were still humans who played our parts. That Natalia was a girl was a relief to Carlo, just as Paolo’s history led him to be familial and kind rather than competitive. That Paolo resembled Matteo never bothered him. If it came up, he shrugged it off: “Takes after his mother.” And he does, although his manner is very much his father’s.

But I’m avoiding my own question, which is really if the love a woman feels for a man innately wants to be given form. In reference to Matteo, I would say that it enabled us to be friends. The nature of our encounter may have done so anyway, but Paolo honored our tie without tying us together as a couple. He’s the result of the love of two friends — a commission, Matteo called it later, but really we were two artists temporarily collaborating. Parting, our intimate experiences were all we possessed except what we made together.

Friendships are the long art of living, part of its everyday but the part that, being episodic, stands out as weft against the great warp of familiarity. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that friendships are the insertions the weaver makes against patterns that catch the eye.

12.

At convent school, as we were coming into our womanhood, one of the sisters raised the topic of the Incarnation. Through Mary, the Holy Spirit became human, she explained. The Angel Gabriel asks the Virgin’s consent, that she will be the vessel, because God will know her as a man knows a woman — a bodily knowledge. The Wise Men arrive and worship Him, but what draws them is the Holy Spirit. In Bethlehem, they find a newborn like any other. The nun contrasted Him to the minotaur, the result of a Cretan sun goddess being taken by the white bull coveted by her husband, who properly should have sacrificed him to Poseidon, whose gift the bull was. He caused the sun goddess to fall obsessively in love with the bull, coupling with him through artifice and then bearing his child, who, unlike Jesus, resembled his father all too well. The king can only blame himself. He locks the minotaur in a maze, a life worse than any bull’s and unworthy of a man. Jesus grows up and we learn that the Holy Spirit He embodies is in the world to free everyone who lacks power there. He speaks to them plainly. For the powerful, His replies and rebukes make clear how far they’ve strayed from the covenant God made with them. They turn on Him, using the Roman invaders as their means, but He meanwhile is the yeast that sets the poor uprising. His followers speak of His resurrection, but what He embodies is what survives. We carry Him, each of us, she said. We are also vessels. This is what I remember her telling us.

I sometimes thought of this after Matteo and I were together. Did we profane the Holy Spirit, mingling our two bodies mixed with Him? And later, when Paolo seemed so evidently his father’s son, I thought of the minotaur — how the Cretan sun goddess too wanted this tangible sign of shared knowledge, however wasted on the beast. And the minotaur, with his odd parentage, must surely have had a mind no doubt crazed by isolation, alone in his maze. It may be due to our familiarity with bulls, but I could never do that.

13.

Women and men serve each other and God, the nun told us, but she was clear that women were inherently more creative than men. If we marry them and bear their children, this is a creativity unique to us, but our whole being also differs, both in spirit and as a body. As children, these differences are less obvious, but then they appear. We resist, not least because the world has its own plans for us.

She counseled us not to resist the world directly, but to live in it as we live with snow in winter and the sea in summer, as springtime labors give us the harvest. God made Eve and Adam from dust, she said, but we carry them. This frees us to trust we’ll know what to do when the world crashes in through man’s folly or children underfoot.

Art for me is looking, sketching, bringing to mind how a place, person, or object struck me — not just seen but felt or loved — and wanting to give it form. Her sense of our creativity stays with me.

If we fail to serve each other and God, the nun added, we can be caught up in arrogance or, restless, grow desperate for distraction. Some manage to see through this and repent, reclaiming their true selves, but others grow monstrous, siding with the Devil.

14.

Does our family, bourgeois as it is, seek exemption? We live at a calculated, shifting midpoint, serving power and enjoying its protection while living modestly in the everyday, hidden to some extent in plain sight. Natalia sees most clearly the position of the family. Luca argues that it shows that it’s possible to live according to one’s lights within a society bent on conformance. I think he misconstrues or overstates what society can really do about it. True, some leave for what they take to be a more cosmopolitan world, but only a few prosper. They may come around in their finery to rub local noses, but usually they cover their tracks, being in their own minds self-invented. A rare few are themselves in both places.

Natalia is attached to her work, her household, her husband and their children, particular friends. What convent school gave her was an abiding sense of life’s transience, which she finds unnerving. This may also come from my family. For whatever reason, I have innate confidence in my life and my place within it. Convent school only cemented this, but my real schooling was summers in the country. Natalia likes the countryside, but her mind works so differently than mine. Carlo was right to see her as a lawyer. I didn’t see it. It makes her more visible than I imagine she expected, but an earned visibility can offer its own protection, if Carlo is any example.

I do think we seek exemption, to come back to my question. This is a bourgeois trait, though, as much as a trait of the family.

15.

Luca is really describing an economic order within which the family fits — an order that aligns with the desire of the powerful to separate themselves from the everyday in part as a testimony to their power. The family is one of many enablers of this separation, and I wonder if my season with Matteo wasn’t an example of this?

The family carefully positions itself below its patrons, yet close enough that they recognize and value our proficiency. (This was certainly true with Matteo!) Bespoke is the word Luca uses to describe our enterprises. It’s true that the world in general is increasingly awash in dull sameness. Piranesi’s distance from any metropolis, along with its undiminished self-regard, save it from the dead hand of commerce. Even our whores are originals.

No, I was inspired. Matteo brought that out in me. It’s best to get past this, singular as it is, and turn to or return to family life, memory firing your art and your dreams. I can’t speak for Matteo. He’s lived by our agreement, is unfailingly affectionate when I encounter him. The fact of Paolo is also a tie, a denouement. I was the perfect age.

We thicken, unavoidably, or perhaps life layers itself on us, gives us the experience we lacked or shifts what we imagine is important. A great tragedy for a woman is to feel she’s missed out. I was lucky: I missed nothing I deemed significant. Natalia would say that I’ve skirted, that we all have skirted, the perils that befall others. In saying it, her tone mixes wariness with admiration. She knows her limits, my Natalia, and has a healthy sense of peril. Paolo, like his fathers, never thinks of such things except as they come up as table stakes in the games that others force on him. Luca is more like my Natalia, a rabbit in fox’s clothing — or maybe it’s the reverse?

16.

In museums, we see fertile maidens and mothers. This is what the past left us, along with heroes. The mothers’ stone caskets are like baths and the maidens are abundantly desirable. The message is clear that we live to be loved, to prove our fecundity, to be honored for it when, exhausted, we slip into our eternal baths to rest.

Before God called on the Virgin, other gods had their way with women. Evading them was never pleasant — you could end up as a river or a tree. Of course, the goddesses were perilous to the men.

I used to sketch sometimes at the museum, and I still sketch at Carlo’s studio — the young men and the sculptures both. A museum is like a beloved house from childhood, the rooms melding these memories with their current reality. If a painting is missing or is found in a new place — worse, if a gallery is altered — it’s jarring, yet I accept it as it’s not really mine. In the everyday, we’re constantly immersed in our surroundings, so these changes are part of it, barely noticed. If our encounters are episodic, we notice them more. We compare here and now with here and then, here being a rough constant. This is also true with people — we measure our absences by what time has done to them, marveling if they’re more or less as they were. That we’re seen similarly we tend to overlook. We reassure each other, but no one is fooled. Yet we believe it to some extent.

One thing about making art is that there’s always more to do. You grow old, your vision and hearing falter, yet there’s still resonance and the urge to set it down. If something doesn’t work, then I start again or make something of the mistake, playing with it. This has always been my method, especially in bed.

17.

Luca is for artifice and against exchange, if I grasp his meaning. In the end, though, we women interact with men, and they with us, in the everyday. In the household and the family, for example, Carlo is a husband and father, fulfilling these roles. Matteo and I pressed ourselves to be the other’s complement, but unconsciously, like a river and the ground it covers, both in flux. Artifice belongs in the theater. But I agree with Luca’s insistence that no trade’s involved, even if agreements are made. We fit within the domains of power like the old retainers Homer describes. It was as a desired familiar that Matteo sought me. As with Paolo, the favor he showed me is affectionate largesse. That favor is and was uniquely his to bestow.

For artifice I would substitute an instinct for what gives pleasure. Women are aware of pleasure’s seasons and schooled, if raised properly, in a repertory of connection — for this is what pleasure is. Women live more consciously with the changing rhythms of their bodies, while men live out their natures, adjusting awkwardly. A pleasure a woman affords is to ease this process, if the man is lucky.

If a man is the woman’s complement, and vice versa, in the places they share through marriage and other circumstances, then how they are with each other in the countryside and the city is as natural to them as any other familiar thing. Between the generations, it’s breaking down. Natalia’s world isn’t mine and her places carry other meanings. They overlap, these worlds of ours, but are drifting apart.

18.

When the grandchildren are here, I find them irresistible and they run me ragged. Carlo absents himself. He takes a certain pride in them, but if he had his way, they would appear at family feasts and otherwise remain at home. But the countryside is heaven for them, as it was for all of us growing up. Matteo knows this, because his father brought him along when, as a favored client of the family, he visited to see the most promising of the next generation. I suppose I was one of them, come to think of it. Pietro loved children in a way that’s rare among men. Luca once read to me from a polemic against women by Schopenhauer: “Leave a man with a child and in five minutes, he’ll be looking around frantically for a woman, but a woman can play happily with a child for 30 minutes.” Even longer than that, in reality, as women get caught up in children’s games.

Luca loves his children. He loves his wife too, but he makes his life difficult by being endlessly of two minds about most things. It makes him wonderfully competent as an envoy, as he can see all sides of some controversy and often figure out how to get free of it by some formula acceptable to the different parties, but it makes him hopeless about small things that can be solved by a yes or a no. I gather that envoys try to avoid choosing clearly, leaving ambiguities and contradictions in their wake that only they can sort properly, in their own view. This works less well at home.

But Luca’s love of the family — each and every sibling or cousin — is pure and simple. He believes in our peculiar genius at getting on. In the presence of children, he tells stories of his sea crossings and the ports where he’s stayed. He has an ear for sailors’ tales, their songs, their jokes, their odd ways of talking. He’s a good mimic and his listeners roar with laughter, even if they’ve heard it before. I’ve listened with half an ear long enough to know that he tells the same story differently every time he trots it out. His characters, scenes, and lines are snippets of a mighty epic he recalls and recites.

10.

Matteo’s portrait always brings him to mind. A portrait is inevitably a mix of artist and subject — a subjective view, despite wanting to capture a likeness. Matteo sat while I sketched — a series of sketches to which I referred when I began to paint, but I found that I looked at them less and less as he possessed it the way he did me.

Matteo can sit perfectly still and yet not lose the strength that motion reveals, the gracefulness. I see this also in Paolo, a sureness about his immediate ground. Carlo finds his strength in relation to the materiality of his art, whether stone or bronze. The whole of life for him is material; he has no expectation of paradise. Yet his work seems animated by it.

Luca gave me a sheaf of his poems. His odd nature makes him a good poet, observant as any painter and alert to the way human nature spills out from its supposed confines — how the pleasure of transgressing is followed by a painful undoing. There’s no sense of judgement. This is how it is, he says. This from our great theorist, convinced of the family’s genius in taming the most human of human afflictions. Well, he may be right. When I look at Matteo on the wall or Paolo in the flesh, I have to agree with Luca that something like genius was in play. Had we not arranged it, I’d attribute it to luck. Genius isn’t the right word for it. It’s alacrity and close observation, like horses, actually. If you have a feel for them, you know it early on.

20.

Luca is close to his sister Marta, who sometimes confides in me. In the world of his theory, we’re paired — two examples of the family’s mutually beneficial arrangements. I don’t agree with this pairing, although I can see why Luca asserts it. I loved Matteo, and our arrangement was what I desired. Marta wanted to be broken in — that was how she put it to me. Carlo said once that she reminded him of certain men. They’re a headache if their appetite for this continues, he added, but Marta was in search of a cure.

She hid all this behind a display of modesty she honed at convent school. It was a look that ensured depravity when the right partner found her. At least there was no danger of pregnancy! After barely making it through a season, she married and lived blamelessly, a mother of four, calm and devoted. What pairs us in Luca’s mind is that we both acted on our desires and the family made this possible. Yet “it’s not a business.” This is true in that what the family does is done in the name of self-preservation, personal or familial, a dance with power that takes place at the edges. Horses and bulls are our main lines, but much else can be negotiated within relationships that reflect a long history of discretion, of intuiting what’s needed.

A prize horse has one season. Luca’s racing analogy is apt to me and Marta. She once looked at my painting of Matteo and said, “I barely remember his face, but some other things I’ll never forget.”

21.

When you’re sick enough to lie in bed, your world shrinks to the body itself. You watch with half an eye as the illness plays out. Age gives you a sense of the stages you pass through, and if you feel any alarm, it has to do with unexpected variations — the way the illnesses of their children disconcert young mothers unless older women are present to voice their opinions. Even if we’re raised with younger siblings, it’s not the same and we’re unprepared. Boys fall into this territory but then grow out of it, taught to be stoical. If a man is sick, his sickness fells him — there he lies, almost comatose. The doctor visits, if the man can afford it, and the women bring him their remedies, to which he adds his own whispered requests. Men tenaciously remember whatever aided them in these dire periods when their bodies turned against them. They often have it on hand if it’s not readily available. Women suffer from chronic debilitation, and of course from the pain of childbirth. If they experienced such pain, men would call it torture! We share with them what arises seasonally — a summer or winter cold or influenza — but they seem to pass faster through us, while the men wheeze and cough for days.

Perhaps it’s those moments when we’re free of it, heads clear and bodies again at ease, that compensate us. Even as children, we’re aware of this, and it buoys us up into old age. Feeling horrid, we retain some memory of this, some confidence in reviving.

22.

The countryside and the sea both have nights of abundant stars. You name the constellations if you know them, aloud for the benefit of children, retelling their stories or making them up. One way to think of the family is as a constellation — minor, perhaps, yet catching the eye of man. Luca would dispute this, but I think it’s true, that catching that eye is the point and it happens very much as a constellation is viewed. If the family made a spectacle of itself, it would invite envy or derision, but a constellation is part of nature. Beauty is like a comet. Men marvel and feel themselves lucky to have seen it, sensing its rarity and heat. Are we comet-makers, then? Marta sought out her tamer, but Matteo knew me long before — we were both raised under the same starry sky.

To paint this cosmos is my ambition, and every portrait, every landscape is a fragment of it, a piece of space and time I’ve snatched. Carlo constantly measures himself against competing sculptors and his own ambition — art for him is a climbing, measured progress. My art records what I’ve taken in. If I wrote poems, they would sketch this same terrain, while Luca’s poems tell where his heart has been.

Still, if you ask Luca about a particular alley or an odd old warehouse you happen to notice, he’ll have anecdotes about it — and you’ll sense that much more could be said.

23.

If our family is a constellation, the planets rotate in and out of it. I look on carefully, noting things of interest — a marvelous face or a torso set off by the peerless taste of whoever dressed it. I also note the furnishings, the objects, the colors, the mix of smells and scents. I paint what I see, but other senses cloud my sight.

Matteo told me once that when a woman is genuinely desirous, she leaves a trail of signs that are hers alone. If another sparks a comparable desire, then the signs will be theirs alone, I replied.

Matteo’s head is also a constellation, a torso implied, a mind and sinew dancing. All this and yet a painting. Set it down, I think. Luca has words, but I have something more tangible. Paolo will be long dead when they look at Matteo’s head and wonder who he is, knowing nothing of his son. And that woman’s head, found in the same place and painted in the same style — who was she? Those small Greek heads Luca collects raise such questions.

24.

“So soothing,” Luca has it in a poem, said by a woman who throws her lover over. This is how it is with infidelity: they discount what their lovers gave them. I count myself lucky to have known intense desire, freeing me to have Carlo as my husband, quite satisfactory. When I look at my portrait of Matteo, it brings him to mind in the entirety of our experience together. I feel the same heat flashing up the instant he sees me, watch him calm himself, remember who he is and where. And I forget myself too.

The family’s farmstead is a relief from the city, artificial as any theater but the props are bucolic and of course the activities are real enough. It’s the countryside of wealth’s imagination, populated with imposing bulls and horses proudly bred to race and stud or whelp the next crop. This is where I’m most myself, despite seeing through it. I’m at peace with the one who loved and bred, who paints as she ages. In town, age is more burdensome. Here, it’s all of a piece, unfolding, life plain and simple.

The Church interferes with our need to be women in a bodily sense. Such clerics relate to us unnaturally, taking pride in their celibacy and the many ways they test their consciences. We have to know our bodies early, love and be loved purely from desire. Then a family — this is the proper order, or else desire will derail us later.

25.

My studio is a long, utilitarian space with high windows on two sides. The walls are whitewashed. There’s a stove, canvas slots, and shelves and drawers for the rest. I mostly sketch and then work from them later, which is to say that I spend more time in the world than in my studio, the world giving me my subjects. I use the studio to try things out. At my request, Carlo added a pottery kiln to his, and I sometimes work in that medium. I follow how art unfolds, its long exit from narrative and realism. Sometimes I let form, color, and shading dominate — or the hue and tone vary — just to see it.

I don’t really think of myself as an artist, but as one who makes art the way Luca is one who makes poems. He doesn’t think of himself as a poet, either. He doesn’t sketch, of course, but he takes life in like I do and then finds the words and lines. I sketch in part because my visual memory needs that prompt. It also starts the composition.

What is this dance I do with life to intuit its shifting rhythms? It applies as much to love as to art. Both lead us to get past the surface of things, wonder at their sheer variety, and hold all of it in affection. I always thought, growing up, that Jesus felt this way, expelling the devils that took people over so they could be our neighbors again.

26.

My paintings summarize all these sketches, my impressions of their subjects. My landscapes are also the result of years of living with them. If I’ve portrayed my household, it’s because its denizens are so familiar. Lately, I’ve tried to combine more than one vantage point in a single composition. At first, I placed them side by side or in a sequence, but then I started overlaying them. Landscape can be overlaid by shifting the viewpoint. When I walk up from the harbor, the walls of the town above it are in motion. As the fog burns off, the great stone walls, textured by slanted sunlight, and the northern sky are in motion. How to paint this, I wonder? And what exactly am I painting? It reflects how I move through a place and see it changing. I could mix the different seasons or the same person at 10 and 30 — the raw material in my sketchbooks and my head.

I suppose this is why I return to a given terrain again and again, always seeing some new aspect. Within the household, I see the same unfolding, each one a past within a present. Not everyone sees it this way, I’m aware. It always shocks me if people see the present as the past’s possible negation. Our lives in time should support us, ground us, give us the narratives we tend so faithfully. That two people can remember the same event differently is only natural, and both versions have to be admitted, I think, not made into a quarrel.

27.

I think of Natalia as conventional, but then so am I, despite having done exactly what I wanted, or perhaps because of this, because it was convenient to be conventional — this could be the family’s credo.

On paper, there’s Carlo and our two children, Paolo and Natalia, part of that useful family, the source of so much that makes the lives of wealthier families so pleasant. Paolo was like this, a gift on top of the thoroughbreds, the breeding bulls, the provisions. Matteo loves his wife and their family, but men who love women crave a certain kind of woman. Reverse this, and he fit that description for me.

Am I really conventional or am I fooling myself? It’s interesting how some painters who are men wear suits as often as smocks, in contrast to their naked or half-undressed models. Nothing if not normal, they tell the world. Convention is a defense, a screen.

Natalia has a prodigious memory for texts, scenes, conversations, everything. At unexpected moments, she will recount something overheard or vividly describe an experience. Awareness for these things isn’t unique to her, but her powers of recollection amaze me.

28.

The countryside is more aware of the earth’s jeopardy. We think of Demeter’s daughter in this connection, but the weather is a god of sorts. Peasants propitiate it, especially if it turns against them. The priests know this and their hearts are with them. Every village has its local saints whose roots are older even than the Romans.

Matteo spoke sometimes of the way power is easily distracted from the things that really matter. He admired the family for its attentiveness to what he called husbandry, which I suppose is the role of Persephone’s man, unlike the sterile god she winters with. This, Matteo said, is the hell of power when it fixes on self-display and sees the world around it as a mirror. Saying this in the midst of our liaisons became a joke between us, how love is magnanimous when it’s there and overflowing. It’s true that love opens your heart. It’s not just pleasure — you feel the usual limits of things loosen.

Peasants live in the different ordinary of their country year, aware of portents that city folk wouldn’t notice. I’ve lived here long enough to hear their fears directly and watch them try to guard the life they know from calamities embedded in country memory.

Fishermen and traders also have their particular saints, and priests who understand their daily terrors, some inherent in the work, others just bad luck. The harbor is as alive with shrines and talismans as any country village. Superstition, some might scoff, but it’s very like the rituals of children, kept as fervently in both cases.

29.

I shouldn’t overlook the women of different natures. Cosima, another of Luca’s sisters, is an example. She also chose a man who liked women for what they had in common with men. Carlo was bemused. “It must run in that family.” But she liked it. I had this from Luca, who helped her accommodate the man’s taste. He hosted parties for others who interested him. Cosima held her own in this circle, and when their arrangement ended, she took herself to Milan, attracting an impresario involved with La Scala.

They married and she acquired a title. The Count, as Cosima’s late husband was known, was in the thick of theatrical and operatic events, and she immersed herself in that world, knowing everyone. She drags me along sometimes, but I prefer to wait for her return then listen to her vivid impressions, which she sets down later in a notebook, apparently. “I have shelves of them,” she told me.

30.

What is Piranesi to me? I mean the whole of it, from the ocean to the hills that catch its storms and fog. Where do I fit best, and why? Our house on the estate, the use of which the family granted us when we married, is typical of others in Piranesi’s countryside, with grounds that pay for its upkeep — produce from the estate sold on and prized by those who know the locale by taste. This working of the land happens around me — a cohort of familiars that lives with me as equals in the sense God intended, all of us being human.

Piranesi has an endowment from nature that men respect despite the dictates of commerce and fashion. It makes the showing off you see elsewhere seem out of place. These men have seen everything, like their fathers and uncles before them. Living with the ocean and the weather, their women see life as tenuous. (Consider their saints, Matteo once told me.) What is Piranesi to me? Its beauty is constant and fleeting. I sketch it as fast as I can.

31.

Immortality is a game with which we torture ourselves. Carlo makes things he believes are likely to endure, but they could be broken up or melted down, the way the remnants of Piranesi were put to other uses, even as other parts live on, worn by use but not otherwise molested. For artists, the game begins in childhood when our work — children’s work is invariably of a high order — is praised and sometimes kept. Or we keep it because someone liked it and, by extension, liked us. Then there’s the market, if the artist’s ambitions range beyond making art to selling it as proof of being seen, of worth — a gallery and the pull of a public.

The world prompts me to make art, I seek it out and sometimes it comes to me. Love, marriage, households, children — where does art fit with them? Does it measure up to them or are they separate? Are they woven together, giving form and substance to both? This is life as we live it — all the ways we find calmness in the wake of passion or effort or ruinous flood or drought or war. This calm — finding it — may be our family’s genius. We can take a blow to the balls, as Carlo puts it, and stagger on, if only at a crawl at first, hobbling back and rebuilding. Piranesi’s saints, not the ones we hope will ward off evil, are the guardians of this persistence. Perhaps they’re angels.

There’s an art too of loving, as Matteo and I proved exceptionally.