How to Be Both

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death and graphic violence.  

When he is well into his twenties, Francescho tells his father that he is ready to strike out on his own, no longer needing apprenticeship or guardianship. Francescho’s father agrees and returns two pieces of paper to Francescho, neither of which Francescho remembers. One is the first page of writing he produced as a young child under his mother’s guidance, chiding his father for smacking him unjustly. The other is a contract that Francescho also produced in childhood, ready for their signatures to mark the official end of Francescho’s apprenticeship under his father. Accepting them is bittersweet, and Francescho leaves soon after. Three years later, Francescho returns and sees a beggar trying to sell one of his father’s tools. Fearing the worst, Francescho rushes to his father’s home only to find the man well and in the process of forgiving all debts owed to him. Shortly after, once Francescho has returned to Bologna, he receives word that his father has died. His brothers have abandoned their hometown so as not to inherit their father’s debts, so Francescho returns alone. A neighbor gives him five coins that Francescho’s father had gave to her shortly before his death, and Francescho keeps them for the remainder of his own life.

Following his father’s death, Francescho is haunted by memories of the man. He has trouble sleeping for nightmares, and Barto notices his changed demeanor manifesting as a bitterness in his paintings. To help him, Barto conducts a “Ritual of Mnemosyne” in his kitchen, providing Francescho with two glasses of water that will supposedly allow him to forget and then remember everything in turn, thereby liberating him from painful memories. Francescho drinks the first cup and then knocks the other over deliberately. Barto is aghast as Francescho pretends to have forgotten everything about himself and his life. Francescho eventually drops the act in surprise upon accidentally falling onto the eggs in his pocket. Barto is too relieved to be properly angry, and Francescho feels lighter as they laugh together. Barto allows Francescho to paint his unofficial portrait, since Barto’s wife dislikes Francescho and refuses to let him paint the official one. As Francescho works, Barto tells him the story of a man who found a gold ring capable of granting his every wish on the condition that he renounce love. Barto is haunted by the story, thinking it unfair that if someone is lucky or brave enough to get such a ring, they can’t have both it and love. Francescho understands this as a veiled lament for the fact that Barto’s position means he can never act on his love for Francescho, and he paints his friend holding a ring.

Francescho recalls painting Christ with his father’s face in the portrait of Saint Vincent. He also recalls Ercole’s disquiet with Francescho’s painting of Saint Lucia, which shows the saint holding a stalk with two eyes. A year after work on Piazza Schifanoia is completed, he sends Ercole to check up on the now-dry fresco. Upon his return, an excited Ercole recounts the enormous popularity of Francescho’s work. Borso is currently working stone masons to death in an attempt to create a mountain from scratch, and many dissatisfied locals feel vindicated upon seeing Francescho’s Justice scene. Many Black field workers come to pay tribute to the Duke just so that they can see the painting of the worker in Francescho’s fresco. They spend as long as they can looking at it and even drop flowers before it. Francescho, flustered and frightened by the effect of his art, accuses Ercole of lying, and strikes him. He locks Ercole out of their room for several days before relenting, and wonders if Cosmo knows of the popularity of his work.

Francescho first saw Cosmo in passing when he was very young, but he already recognized him as the celebrated court painter who had started out as the son of a cobbler. Years later, when Francescho was 18, his father took most of Francescho’s drawings to try and procure him an apprenticeship at court. Cosmo came to Francescho’s outdoor studio and interrupted him while he was painting a version of the myth of Marsyas as told by his mother. In traditional tellings of this myth, Marsyas is a mortal man who challenges the sun god Apollo to a music contest. When Apollo is declared the victor, he punishes Marsyas by skinning him alive. Cosmo was enraged that the painting depicted Marsyas as a woman and the skinning as a moment of liberation and ecstasy. He studied it closely nonetheless, and two days later Francescho found his workshop wrecked and all his paintings and sketches stolen from his storeroom. At the time, he didn’t know where his work ended up, but he now knows that Cosmo kept it secreted in a back room of his home. When Cosmo was ousted from court by Francescho’s own apprentice to spend his old age in ignoble poverty, the long-dead Francescho laid the heavy canvas of the painting over him like a blanket and forgave him.

Francescho finally recalls how he died: He left his studio in Bologna one day to procure more paints, and chanced across a man who had been dumped on a rubbish heap. The man was still alive, though terribly ill with the “blue sickness” (bubonic plague). Francescho offered to fetch someone to help but acceded to the man’s request that he instead be left there to die. Several days later, Francescho woke feverish after having collapsed on his studio floor. Ercole promised not to leave any of Francescho’s work unfinished, and soothingly talked him through his fever dreams and hallucinations. Although the rest of the workers abandoned the studio for fear of the plague, Ercole nursed Francescho in his own bed until he succumbed to the illness and died.

As Francescho recalls these episodes from his life, he continues to watch over George. He notes that she often has difficulty sleeping and admires her artistic skill as she sticks the photographs of Lisa Goliard’s house together into a long collage resembling a brick wall. H, who Francescho notes resembles Isotta, visits and is impressed by the project. The girls remove two photographs after accidentally damaging them, and stretch the collage out between them. They wrap the ends around their respective shoulders then tumble together to meet in the middle, the pictures scattering apart around them. Later, they work together to paint eyes on the wall opposite Lisa Goliard’s house. At the behest of the woman who lives opposite, they add glimmers of reflected light onto the eyes, and as he stares into the dot of light Francescho feels the world around him fade alongside his memories and consciousness as the prose narration breaks down.