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matter of hands in themselves, since the delicate hands of girls and women, providing they’re young enough, are more patient, he says, than those of a man, from spending so much more time indoors which makes them more suited to making the best blue.
    Myself I went out of my way, then, to be expert at the painting of hands and be good at thegrinding of blue
and
the using of blue, both : there were others like me, painters I mean, who could do my particular both : we knew each other when we saw each other, we exchanged this knowledge by glance and by silence, by moving on and going our own ways : and most anyone else who saw through the art of what some would call our subterfuge and others our necessity graced us with acceptance and an equally unspoken trust in the skill we must surely possess to be so beholden to be taking such a path.
    In this way my father made sure of an education and an apprenticeship for me, though it maddened my brothers to be always what they considered his workshop serfs, like infidel workers compared to me they thought, carrying and working the stones and bricks that I sat and drew and calculated with, seeing to the shaping of the windows I then used as frames for seeing or sat below using the light of for reading a mathematical book or a treatise on pigments, protecting my hands.
    I’m good at walls too cause I also learned from looking how to handle stone and brick and how to build a wall to last a lot longer than this one the boy is sitting on now.
    But though I was descended from the men who’d made the walls which themselves made the municipal palace – the walls on which the greatMaster Piero in his stay in Ferara had painted for the Ests the victorious battle scenes
    (and from looking at whose works I learned
    the open mouths of horses,
    the rise of light in landscape,
    the serious nature of lightness,
    and how to tell a story, but tell it more than one way at once, and tell another underneath it up-rising through the skin of it) –
    I would paint my own walls
.
    So my father, when I’d trained to what he thought enough degree (which was not until I’d seen 19 summers) and news reached him that there was a need for someone to provide 3 pietà half-figures and a quantity of painted pillars to the side of the high altar in the cathedral, went out into the wet night with works of mine rolled up under his arm wrapped in treated skins to keep the rain off and showed the priests how I could with colours turn plain stone to what seemed marble column : the priests, who’d seen me many times in my youth with him and my brothers, gave me the job and paid us good money : by both luck and justice we all benefited and I did not formally leave my father’s tutelage till 3 years before he died, old father, old wallmaker, by which time I had come of age, was full grown, had been binding my chest with linen for a decade, not too difficult being slimand boylike then, and had been visiting the house of pleasure with Barto for nearly as long, where the girls taught me both binding and unbinding and some other useful ways in which to comport myself.
    Barto.
    Cause if this boy could hear me I’d tell him : we all need a brother or a friend and at some point you need a horse too : I had 2 brothers and admittedly was more friends in the end with my horse : but even better than brothers, and even than horse, my friend Barto, whom I met after fishing barefoot out on the stones in the river on my 12th birthday, and though usually I caught not much, that day the fish had been opening their mouths at the surface of the water as if congratulating me on having been born and I had caught 7 altogether, 3 fat carp with their whiskers trailing and the rest were little and middle-sized perch, the black stripes over their gold : I knotted the lines together and hung them over my shoulder and left my brothers to their displeasure (they’d caught less) and was walking home through the cow parsley along the foot of a tall