AN ARTIST IN THE HAREM, BY ELIZABETH ZELVINI was born poor and female in Venice in the year of Our Lord 1508. Thus I was destined to bear blows from my father and scolding from my mother in childhood, go to bed hungry many a time, marry some lout from necessity, bear his children, and die as miserably as I had lived. But God gave me a gift. From an early age, given a stick of charcoal snatched from the fire, I could limn what I saw: a tree, a horse, a gondola, a palazzo, a human face. Once I had drawn a thing, I who owned nothing but my ragged clothes and hopeless prospects, it was mine.
Had I been a boy, I might have sought an apprenticeship with one of the master artists of the day: Vittore Carpaccio; Giovanni Bellini, still alive in my youth; or Titian, still young, but whose reputatio
