Written to the prompt A is for Art
The Portrait
So I says to Frankie, ‘How do I look Frankie?’ and he says, ‘Bellissima, doll, Bellissima!’ which me giggle, and I’m already like a cat with two tails because Frankie’s spent a cartload of money hiring that Leonardo da Vinci to do me portrait. He’s so generous, my Frankie.
Anyway, it’d taken me a couple of hours to get ready what with having Lucia in to put my hair up in one of them complicated buns threaded through with pearls and having her tong me side bits into ringlets and that. I’m wearing me most georgeousest dress – scarlet velvet with like a waterfall of spangly sequins down the bodice.
And – no word of a lie – I am dripping in jewellery. I’ve rings on every finger and thumb, bangles up each arm and across my chest I’ve got this gold filigree bib necklace and the matching earrings are dangling nearly down to me shoulders.
Anyway, off I go in my sedan chair – I’m not walking through these streets with all this lot on – and I get to Da Vinci’s studio. And as soon as the door opens, oh, the stink is enough to knock you backwards!
Oh… varnishes, paints, linseed oil, turps, animal glue… oh, god, you’ve no idea. So I’m frantically pushing me nose into my little posy of flowers I’ve brought when Da Vinci turns up… and of course, he spends most nights down at the morgue cutting up and studying bodies and oh, boy does he reek of it. You can see it coming off him in fumes.
Well, my stomach rolls and I’m desperately looking around for some bowl to honk up into when he says, ‘Take off all that jewellery and unfasten your hair.’ So I look at him gone out and he says, ‘Go on – hurry up!’ so I have to take off all me lovely jewellery and unpin Lucia’s convoluted bun and just let me hair flop all over the place like a yard of pump water.
And then he says ‘Take that dress off!’
‘Signor da Vinci!’ I says. ‘I will do no such thing!’
‘Wear this,’ he says, and he gives me the drabbest black dress you’ve ever seen – just a bit of gold thread work round the neckline – with some bronzey-coloured sleeves and a flimsy shawl-type thing and a gauzy veil.
‘I’m not wearing this!’ I says. ‘It smells like a dog’s dragged it through a farmyard and given birth on it!’
And then he says, ‘You don’t wear that, I don’t paint you.’
And I just want to wrap it round his head, but Frankie’s spent so much money on this portrait I can’t go home and tell him I’m not having it done.
So I have to sit in this skanky, mangy, rank old frock for a week while he draws sketch after sketch after sketch.
Have you seen the portrait he produced? I wouldn’t put it in the pigsty. People say, ‘Oh, haven’t you got an enigmatic smile?’ That’s not a smile – that’s me just trying not to hurl my breakfast across the room.
© Carol Carman 2025
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