Sayantani Dasgupta

THE CHURCH OF SANTA MARIA NUOVA

Viterbo, Italy

June 8, 2017

I enter the Church of Santa Maria Nuova armed with a sketchpad, a recently purchased 2B pencil, and nervousness. I don’t know what my professor, the artist Justin Bradshaw, has in mind. That his work is routinely exhibited at galleries in Rome, and our classroom for today is this ancient church, in a foreign city and culture where I have only spent ten days so far, adds to the heft of the moment. I haven’t been in a drawing class since I was twelve, and that was over twenty years ago. I have doodled, yes. In the margins of notebooks, receipts, and writing pads, I have drawn professors, bosses, and colleagues in love with their own voices; old women admonishing young women in restaurants; bored frogs; fish with cigars in their mouths; my husband cooking with every gadget we have ever owned; and for my brother, scenes from our childhood, where I, the older sister, have always emerged the hero. 

This church is modest-sized, unlike, say, the cathedral in Orvieto that I visited last week. That one, with its detailed mosaics, rose window, bas reliefs, and bronze doors, rises like a challenge to the gods, daring them to look away. In its size and scope, it’s reminiscent of lavish Hindu temples I am used to back home in India. They seem to say the exact same thing to the puny humans jostling to enter, “Here’s your chance to lock eyes with the heavens. Take it all in. Look up, up, and up.”    

Thanks to thick stone walls, the interior of Santa Maria Nuova is cool compared to the brutal heat outside. It smells damp, a little earthy, as if our class has accidentally chanced upon a shaded, wooded spot in the middle of a desert. Although I am a child of the tropics—I was born in Calcutta and raised in New Delhi—I am uncomfortable in the 35-degree Celsius heat of Viterbo. For the last ten years, my home has been in the northwest of America, and its annual snows and ice have taught me to forget the roasting temperatures I once accepted as an unalterable reality. 

The interior walls are covered with frescoes whose colors have faded over time, but their subjects are easily recognizable. Justin assigns every student her “own” fresco. He tells us that these date back to the 15th century AD although the Church itself is another five hundred years older. 

“My” fresco resembles others I have seen thus far in Italy. It is Christ on the cross, his arms outstretched, face set in piety, upper body bare, and the lower half draped in sparse, white fabric. He is flanked on each side by two figures. A devotee rests at his feet, while two angels hover close to his head.  

When Justin points to my fresco and says, “Draw that,” my jaw drops. Did I hear him right? Did he actually say, “Draw that?” Please, I have not come to Viterbo because I have stumbled upon a new calling. I am not here to give up a life of writing and transform myself into an artist. I am here to teach Travel Writing. Justin and I are colleagues at the same institute. I am only taking this class for fun. He and I have shared a few coffees and meals, which is probably why I am less intimidated by him than his other, more traditional students. 

“Surely, you aren’t serious?” I ask. “You want me to draw crucified Christ on my second day of class? Come on, you must be joking.” 

Justin chuckles. He moves closer to the fresco and breaks down the complicated painting into recognizable shapes. I follow the movement of his right index finger as it jabs the air. “See the heads and the halos? Those are circles. Look at the shape of the bodies. Oblong. Where is Christ standing? On a rectangle. These are not unfamiliar shapes. You know them.” 

I bite my lip as my mind races to come up with excuses. But Justin’s right. Now that he’s shown me the shapes, it’s impossible not to see them. Still, my hand hesitates over my sketchpad. I write thousands of words every month and think nothing of deleting old drafts. I kill my darlings all the time. But this, this act of putting pencil to paper and drawing the first circle, this freezes me. Instead, I move closer to really study my fresco. 

 If you exclude the angels, it comprises six figures in all, two of whom are female. The first is the Virgin Mary. Just like other representations I have seen of her in Italy thus far, here too, she looks pious. She has covered her head. She has eyes only for her son, and they are filled with adoration. We, the audience, are not her priority. 

The other female figure is Santa Barbara, a 7th century saint. Her eyes, on the other hand, are squarely on us, on me, and her gaze, unflinching. In that moment, I am transported out of this small, quiet church in this small Italian city to halfway across the world to the bustling port city of Chittagong in Bangladesh. Chittagong is several times the size and population of Viterbo, but like Viterbo, Chittagong too is hot and sweaty in the summer. I remember that feeling well, as if I was constantly walking through a warm shower, from my visit nine years ago, when I went to Chittagong to research the branch of my family that chose not to migrate to India after the bloody and violent Partition of 1947 and opted instead to stay behind. 

I remember how on the eve of that trip, I had felt good about visiting Bangladesh. I would get to stay with family. I was fluent in Bengali, my mother tongue and the national language of Bangladesh, so I would not have to learn a new language. I would eat deeply familiar foods. Outside of family too, I would surely be able to take pictures and interview folks without any hassle. I would fit right in because I would look like everyone else. Nobody would be able to tell me apart from the locals, unlike in my current hometown in America, in Moscow, Idaho, where I stand out, where I am one of probably forty brown people in a town of 23,000. In Idaho, everything about me gives away my “foreigner” status—my accent, my questions (what is Black Friday), my preference for food with a minimum of five spices. In Bangladesh, I will be just fine. 

That illusion shattered the very first day. As soon as I walked into a bookstore, the salesperson asked, “When did you arrive from India?” I mumbled an answer while patting my clothes. What was it? What gave it away? This went on the entire duration of my stay. Every time I entered a store or someone’s home, even before I could open my mouth and introduce myself, they would greet me with the same identical question, “When did you arrive from India?” 

One evening, while my aunt was putting dinner together, and I was watching her add the finishing touches to shutki, a dried fish delicacy, I asked, “How do they always know I am not from here? What do I do differently from all of you?” 

My aunt gathered two handfuls of chopped cilantro and added them to the simmering gravy. She gave the resulting goodness a stir, laughed, and said, “Because you look them in the eye.” 

“Where else am I supposed to look?” 

She shrugged. “At the floor. At the person if you so choose. I don’t know. But women here don’t look at others with the straight, frank gaze you have. That’s all Indian.” 

It stunned me that it was my eyes that gave me away. Not their color or their shape. But the way they engaged with the world. The irony of it was not lost on me. Whereas in America, I often had to answer patronizing questions about the state of women in India, with the speaker making it abundantly clear that they thought my best life was unpacking now that I was in America, in Bangladesh, it was the exact opposite. Here I, the citizen of a powerful neighboring country, had the self-assured gaze to match it. 

Back in Viterbo, on that first day inside the Church of Santa Maria Nuova, our class spent close to two hours sketching. Sure, my Mary did not look pious, nor did my Santa Barbara possess an unflinching gaze, and my lopsided Christ did have an arm longer than the other. Still, it felt good to finish the assignment. 

Later that evening, inside the one-bedroom apartment the institute had allotted me, I fixed myself dinner—salty olives, salumi, and crusty bread from a store in my neighborhood, and a glass of loamy, red wine. Then I sat at the dining table, opened my laptop, and looked up the life story of Santa Barbara, she, the 7th century saint and possessor of the powerful gaze. 

Born to a wealthy family, she was raised by a loving but overprotective father. He kept her locked in a tower, Rapunzel-like, hidden from the world outside. The more I read about him, the more he reminded me of another overprotective father. King Suddhodhana, the father of Prince Siddhartha, the future Buddha. 

At the time of Siddhartha’s birth, seers had prophesized that upon reaching maturity, the child would either become a world conqueror or a world renouncer. Needless to say, Suddhodhana wanted his son to conquer the world. So he filled Siddharatha’s life with happiness. Additionally, he employed runners to ensure the roads of his kingdom were always clear of the old, sick, and dying, so that every time Siddhartha rode out in his carriage, the only daily details he saw were pleasant, perhaps even ordinary. 

And yet, despite Suddhodana’s efforts, one night things didn’t go as planned. There were no runners on duty, and Siddhartha saw the very sights—old age, sickness, and death—his father had avoided thus far. Distraught, he forsook his home, his princely duties, his young wife and baby son, and set out in search of Enlightenment. Even after he found it, he never returned home. 

It might have been my mother who first asked me to consider, “What if Siddhartha had been a woman? Would he have been able to slink out in the middle of the night, forsake his home and family, and set out in search of enlightenment?”

Although there is no way to predict what would have happened in such a scenario, I think I can make an educated guess. Runners and soldiers would have been sent after Yashodhara. She would have either been killed for forsaking her wifely and motherly duties and bringing dishonor to the family. Or she would have been brought back and confined to a life strictly indoors.  

I remember being struck by the question, by the possibilities it opened up—a major world religion founded by a woman—but also everything—like any illusion of fairness and equality I might have had until then—that it took away. Really, what did Siddhartha’s wife Yashodhara make of her husband’s quest? Where was her side of the story? 

When Santa Barbara confessed to her father that she had embraced Christianity, he had her imprisoned and tortured. Eventually, he had her beheaded. Legend has it that for as long as she lived, she performed miracles, and after her burial, they continued being reported from the site of her tomb. I find it ironic that though she is regarded as the patron saint of engineers and mathematicians, Santa Barbara failed herself. She couldn’t devise an escape. She couldn’t design a contraption that would protect her from her father, or his love, and ultimately, from his sense of right and wrong. 

In my two months at Viterbo, I returned to the Church of Santa Maria Nuova several times just to stare at Santa Barbara again and again. I learned from Justin that she might not have been a part of the original fresco and may have been a later addition. Some afternoons, the Church would be busy with tourists, on other days, I’d be the only one. Once, I even addressed her in my head. Why are you staring at us? Was this the artist’s way of granting you agency? Are you holding us all accountable?  I wondered if martyrdom was something she had never even considered. After all, she was a young girl. What if she had only wanted to push back against the rules established by her father a little bit but somehow her intent got lost in translation? What if instead of asking her for miracles, someone had asked her for a story instead? Who are you? No, not what you can do for us but who you are. Who do you want to be? 

It’s a question that spurs in my mind because of Santa Barbara but it stays with me all through my time in Italy. I visit several churches, museums, and art galleries. I go to Florence, Rome, and Siena. Yes, I am awed by the scale, historicity, and the imagination of their creators. But even to my untrained-in-Italian-art eye, it is apparent that there are few roles available to women. They are either saints, virgins, mothers, or at the other end of the spectrum Mary Magdalene. The point of view, the gaze, the execution, they are all Masculine. There is adoration to the point of obsession with heavenly subjects and comparatively scant interest in the earthly or the secular, in anything that might be considered Feminine.

It makes me realize yet another reason for the specific type of art I most cherish from my part of the world—the paintings made in India during the Mughal period. Rooted in Persian miniatures, they flourished between the 16th and 18th centuries, and depict, to my eye, a far wider scope and conceit. They include scenes of hunting, courtship, weddings and processions, combats, tournaments, royal courts. Women appear—by themselves, with their female companions, with birds. They can be seen dressing their hair, drinking from cups, idling in gardens, in royal portraits, and playing musical instruments. I am drawn to them, of course by familiarity, since my hometown Delhi was the Mughal capital for centuries, and I personally love the dynasty so much that my first graduate degree was in Mughal history. 

Sure, these paintings do not depict everyone in society, nor do they create heaven on earth. But they show that there is much to be seen and achieved in this earthly lifetime. Most importantly for me, they show women’s stories. They show women laughing, flirting, fulfilling a bunch of roles, and taking as much delight in enjoying music as in watching two elephants lock their tusks. They help me imagine that on the morning she discovered her husband had left her and their young son, Yashodhara considered the vast amounts of work to be done, but instead of getting to them immediately, she sat yogi-style in her favorite corner of the room, the one replete with sunshine and cushions. She pulled toward herself her heavy tanpura and laid its long neck across her lap. She adjusted her back, plucked at the strings. Then she closed her eyes, and played an imperfect, satisfying note. 

Sayantani Dasgupta is the author of Fire Girl: Essays on India, America, & the In-Between—a Finalist for the Foreword Indies Awards for Creative Nonfiction—and the chapbook The House of Nails: Memories of a New Delhi Childhood. Her essays and short stories have appeared in The Hindu, The Rumpus, Scroll, Economic & Political Weekly, IIC Quarterly, Chicago Quarterly Review, and others. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, and has also taught in India, Italy, and Mexico.