EMPIRE REWRITTEN - Book III / Chapter 38: The Rules of Painting

Blachernae, December 1439, evening

The red seven had been in his hand for three turns.

Constantine held it past the point where it would have brought him to his last card, played a low green instead, and watched Katarina's mouth go firm with concentration as she laid her next to last card on the pile between them. The fire took a knot in the log just then and spat, and the nurse by the hearth put her arm out from habit, though Zoe was a full pace from the sparks and deep in a business of her own on the carpet, walking two carved horses to a stable only she could see.

Katarina played her last card and sat back.

"Again," she said. "That is three."

"Three," he agreed, and gathered the pile toward himself to square it. The cards were pasteboard, printed in the city, the numbers stamped large. Half the sets in the palace had come from the same press run. He tapped the deck even against the table and left it between them.

"The ladies play it every afternoon now," Katarina said. "Eudokia Kantakouzene has a table of it after the midday meal and they play for almonds, and the almonds are counted out at the start like army pay. Anna lost forty in one sitting last week and has spoken of little else since." She turned her cup of wine by its foot without lifting it. "Filelfo says there is another game now, in Italy. With painted cards, triumphs, he called them. Great figures that beat the common suits. He says in Ferrara they have decks painted in gold for it."

"Yes," Constantine said. "I have heard of that game too."

He answered evenly and reached for his own cup. Beyond the inner door, open a hand's width on the dark of the nursery, Manuel made a small sound, then went quiet again. Katarina turned toward it and waited, reading the quiet, then came back to the room. He had gone in to sleep at dusk. After the long months of broken nights he had settled into proper hours at last. The wet nurse slept in there with him.

"The book you have been reading at night," Katarina said. "Is it good? You were far inside it yesterday. I spoke to you twice."

"You spoke to me once," Constantine said.

"I spoke to you twice. The first time you turned a page."

He smiled and let her have it. "It is a book I read when I was young," he said. "I am reading it again. It gets me differently this time." He turned his cup a quarter and set it down. "It is the newest thing the presses have put out. It went up for sale at the start of the month, the old Emperor's book, the one he wrote for himself in camp and never meant for anyone. The press house tells me the first printing sold through in a week." He looked at the fire a moment. "You should read it. I will have a copy sent up to your rooms."

"It will have to wait its turn. I have a book of my own at present," Katarina said, and there was more life in her voice for this one. "Chortasmenos lent it to me. The Alexiad, the Komnene's book. A princess of this house wrote it, born in this palace, in the purple room, and she set down her father's whole reign, the wars, the Latins, all of it, and she saw everything and forgave nothing. Every other woman in the histories is a wife or a mother, a marriage in one line, somebody's daughter. She has a book. Her own, under her own name, and three hundred years on, men still copy it out by hand. I read her and I sit straighter. When Zoe has her letters, that book goes into her hands.”

The child on the carpet, hearing her name, looked up, found nothing in it that concerned her horses, and went back to them.

"His copy is older than both of us together," Katarina said, "and he made me swear on my children to keep it from damp, from lamps, and from Zoe."

"I have never read it," Constantine said.

"You should."

"I will. And it should go to the presses," he said. "Three hundred years of copying her out one page at a time, and it comes down to one old man's chest. Put her into type and every school we ever build has her. Chortasmenos will insist it be done from his copy and no other, and he will stand over the compositors until they hate him, which is exactly what I want from him."

Katarina smiled at that, and let a small silence come, and Constantine knew the shape of her silences well enough by now to know this one had something behind it. She straightened a card that had strayed from the squared deck.

"The east wing is finished," she said. "The great hall has been finished for a year. The masons open the last three rooms off the north corridor in the spring, and then there is no room left in this palace with scaffolding in it, and I have been thinking about the walls. They are new plaster, all of them, and they are bare, and the only painting done in this house since we came is the corridor saint, where they made the missing half new and matched him to the old half." She looked at him across the table. "You can see the seam. The new robe is a brighter blue."

"The painters matched what was there."

"They did. That is what I am saying." She turned her wine cup again. "Filelfo talks about the painting in Italy, he says in Florence they have found a way of making a picture like a window, that the floor in the picture runs away from you the way a real floor does, and a man standing far off is small the way a far man is small, and they measure it, there are rules for it, a man in Florence has written the rules in a book."

"A book of rules," Constantine said. "For painting. That is worth having."

"Filelfo says they draw from the living face now, the sitter in front of the painter for hours. He saw a portrait of a Doge that he said was the man himself, caught, the way ice catches a leaf."

She paused. "And he says the Italians have a name for painting the old way now, the flat way, the way our churches are painted. They call it the Greek way. It is their word for the past."

She moved the lamp a little from the cards.

"I want a portrait made," she said. "Of us. You, me, the children. Emperors have always had their families painted, there are emperors and empresses standing flat and golden on half the walls in this town. But ours made in the new way. From our faces. My father wants one too. He said so in his last letter, he means to write to Italy for a painter. I would have ours made properly, and first."

Constantine was quiet a moment. Zoe had brought her horses to the leg of the table and was walking them up the carved foot of it, one and then the other, with great care.

"Then it will be made," he said. "I will speak to Filelfo myself for the names, and we will pay well, and the painter can spend a winter learning what our light does to his rules." He picked up his cup and drank. The fire moved and he set the cup down. 

"If it has rules, it can have students. I will not have the one man who knows the new craft paint one wall of my palace and sail home with the whole of it in his hands. Let him paint us, and let him teach while he paints. There is room in the university for it, a new hall for the craft of painting, as there is for law and for medicine, and in ten years the painters of Italy will be coming here to study."

He moved the squared deck an inch to the left. "I will address it in the spring, with the building program. Antonio will have to draw one more hall."

Katarina looked at him for a moment with the stillness she kept for the moments that had gone better than she had aimed. 

"Then you will sit for him when he comes," she said. "And you will not bring papers to the sittings."

"One paper."

"None, Constantine." She looked over at the carpet. "It is past her hour."

The nurse rose, and there was the usual small negotiation, conducted entirely in the language of a body going limp, and then Zoe was up on the nurse's shoulder with her horses left fallen where the stable had been, her cheek down, her eyes at half. She was brought around the table for her kisses, her mother first, her father after, and it was as her father kissed her head that Katarina, straightening the small fist that had gone around a fold of the nurse's collar, found the two cards in it.

The red seven and a green three, folded soft at the corners with the heat of her hand. She had been at the table's edge some time in the evening, then, on her own errand, and no one had seen it done. Katarina worked the green three loose and set it on the deck. She looked at the red seven, and at the small closed fist, and left it where it was.

"In the spring," she said to the child's bent head, "you will start your letters."

Zoe, from the nurse's shoulder, half asleep already, said one word. It was meant to be a word from the grown talk, the painting word, and it came out as all such words came out of her, missing its middle. Then the nurse carried her through the nursery door, and it closed to its hand's width, and the room was down to the two of them and the fire.

Katarina gathered the cards and squared them and set the deck at the table's center. It was one card short, and she left it short.

"You ride early," she said. "I will have them put something in you before you go. It will be cold on the water meadows."

"Before light," he said. "Back before dark."

She stood, and put her hand on his shoulder in passing and let it rest there a moment, the way she had put it to his cheek on the loggia at Glarentza a lifetime of work ago, and went in to look at Manuel before her own room.

Constantine sat a while longer with the wine he had never finished, in front of the fire. A man in Florence has written the rules in a book. He had known what it was from the moment she said it, and he had been reaching for the name all evening, the way a man reaches for a word that sits behind his teeth. Now, in the quiet, it came to him whole, from a long way off. Alberti, he thought. On Painting. He set the cup down on the squared deck like a paperweight and went to bed himself.

Author's Note:

C is reading the Meditations! Marcus Aurelius wrote it in Greek, as his private notebook, kept on campaign and never meant for readers. It survived the Middle Ages only in the Greek East, copied by Byzantine scholars; Western Europe didn't print it until 1559.

Katarina's book is great as well. Anna Komnene was born in 1083 in the Porphyra, the purple birthing chamber of the imperial palace, and her Alexiad covers her father's whole reign, the Turks, the Latins, the First Crusade passing through. It is generally considered the first major history written by a woman, and for centuries it survived exactly as described: hand-copied, in very few copies.

The "book of rules for painting" is Leon Battista Alberti's De pictura (1435), the first written theory of the new Florentine art: perspective, the picture as a window, drawing from the living face. "Maniera greca," the Greek manner, is what the Italians called the old style of painting they were leaving behind.

The card game Filelfo describes is real too: trionfi, the ancestor of tarot, appearing in the Italian courts right around this time. The earliest luxury decks we know of were painted for Ferrara and Milan, some in gold. The trump cards came first; the fortune-telling came centuries later.