The Venice Sketchbook(51)
The professor was a buxom woman with long dyed red hair that cascaded over her shoulders. She was dressed in a flowing garment that revealed cleavage. When she talked, she waved her hands around a lot, and I couldn’t help feeling she should have been an actress, not an artist. She talked about the beauty of the human figure, the importance of the line. Once we had the line right, the details would fall into place. Some of the youngest students seemed to find this funny. I suppose they were thinking about the details falling into place.
A dais had been placed in the middle of the room with a ladder-backed chair on it. The professoressa , having given her opening remarks about what we were to look for, called forward her model. It was a well-built man, which I found a little unnerving. He stepped on to the dais, dressed in a bathrobe. Then he calmly removed it, revealing himself to be stark naked. I heard small gasps and even titters from my fellow students. I have to admit to shock myself, realizing that this was the first naked man I had ever seen in my life. I had studied naked figures in my art books, but this was different. I tried not to stare.
Our first assignments were thirty-second sketches. Then one-minute sketches. Then five minutes.
“You are paying too much attention to detail,” the professoressa complained, as she walked around the class. “Half close your eyes. Draw what you see.” She paused behind me. “Not bad,” she said.
The model moved from standing to sitting, then to standing with one foot on a rung of the chair, and we drew each position. Only then were we allowed to do a full rendition, either in charcoal, pastels or watercolour. I chose charcoal. We worked on it for the last hour of class, and the professoressa seemed quite pleased with mine. “You have taken this class before, I can tell,” she said. “You are new at the accademia?”
“I’m a visitor from England,” I replied. “And I’ve had one year of college art, but never a figure class, which was why I chose this.”
“Good. You have aptitude with the human form.” She gave me an encouraging nod and went on to the next person.
“Clearly you have been hiding your light from us,” Gaston muttered. He was sitting behind me. “Obviously, you have studied many men in great detail before this, like the handsome boat driver last night, eh?”
And I couldn’t stop myself from blushing scarlet. “Don’t be silly,” I said. “I seem to be able to draw people, that’s all.”
“I feel that prim Miss Browning has more to offer than it would seem,” he went on.
I ignored him. I could hear him chuckling. I didn’t quite know what to make of him. He was a flirt, but what could he see in me, especially when he was clearly interested in Imelda? Was it perhaps a national sport in France to flirt? I knew so little of men in any country, only that the English boys I had met in my youth lacked any finesse in approaching the opposite sex. Too many years of boarding school, I suspect.
Anyway, the encounter had cheered me in a strange way. I had expected to feel annoyed, but now I realized it was nice to know I was not to be the older spinster, overlooked and unimportant. I gathered up my things and started down the stairs, wondering where I should go for lunch. There was a small sandwich shop on Calle della Toletta nearby that did wonderful tramezzini : little finger sandwiches containing interesting things like tuna and olives, ham and shrimp. They were very cheap, too. One could pick six of them and only pay pennies. I knew I should be having my main meal at midday, but somehow I couldn’t face eating a whole plate of spaghetti in the heat. The only problem about the sandwich shop was that they spoke Venetian. By now I had come to realize that the local language was not just a dialect, a difference in pronunciation, but a language of its own. “Bondì ” was a classic example. Nothing like “buon giorno,” the normal greeting for “good day.”
As I came down the staircase, I heard two students in front of me speaking the language. Quite incomprehensible. How lucky that my landlady had been born in Turin and was thus not a native speaker. While I was thinking this, I was joined by one of the girls from the class. She had a young, fresh face and light hair and eyes. I thought she might be another foreign student, but she greeted me in perfect Italian.
“Well, that opened the eyes, didn’t it?” she said. “In more ways than one. If my grandmother saw me now, she’d demand that I come straight home again.”
I smiled with her. “Where are you from? Not from Venice?” I asked.
“I’m from South Tyrol. Used to be Austrian, now part of Italy. We still speak German at home. I miss my mountains. How about you?”
“From England.”
“Madonna!” she exclaimed. “Are you not afraid of the war? Everything we hear says that Hitler intends to invade Poland, and when he does, England has to declare war.”
“England let them have Czechoslovakia. Perhaps they will come to terms over Poland,” I said.
She shook her head. “Don’t you understand? Poland is the excuse. Hitler wants to be pushed into a war. He wants to be the injured party. You know what he says: ‘Here I am, reclaiming German territory around Danzig, and these brutish English are trying to stop our people from reclaiming our historic birthright.’ And Russia will side with him, you know. And France will side with England, and pretty soon it will spread. Hitler wants the world. Stalin wants the world, too, and Mussolini just wants the Mediterranean. But who will stop them?”