Arte

Episode 12

Of all of the many types of endings out there, I think my favorite is the “life goes on” finale. It's also the hardest to pull off – whereas a happy or a tragic ending just needs to make those elements stand out, a finish that implies that the story continues away from our eyes must balance happiness, tragedy, hope, and a sense of an unfurling future, and not every story is up to the task. (That sometimes leads to what is known in my family as the “don't be a tuna head” ending for the truly stupid final line of the old game Maniac Mansion.) Arte isn't fully capable of giving us a perfect finale, mostly because of mistakes and omissions made along the way, but this twelfth episode comes close, and it really does feel like enough to say that it works.

It comes as no surprise that the episode opens with Arte realizing that no matter how sweet a deal Lord Yuri has offered her, she doesn't want to stay in Venice. It's not that she doesn't appreciate what the benefits are–she certainly hasn't been offered a comparable deal from the Medici family, whom we could call at least roughly analogous to the Faliers–but her heart is very firmly back in Florence. This is driven home to her by Matei's apology; he admits that it could have come off as ungracious when he basically told her that she was only in Venice because of the novelty of her being a woman and a noble, and when Arte thinks about what's she's doing, she realizes that no matter what it looks like, she's still not the polished artist that she wants to be. That means that she's still really an apprentice, regardless of whether she got this job through her own talents and has carried it out beautifully. If she's an apprentice, then the place she belongs is with her master.

That this is meant entirely in the sense that a “master” is a “teacher” becomes clear when she returns to Florence. Yes, she's excited to see Leo, and his studio has become home to her in most senses of the word, but when Darcia tells her that Leo has collapsed and is at Ubertino's house recovering, Arte's first thought (well, second; she does rush over there) is that she has to finish Leo's ceiling mural while he's ill. If he can't do the work as contracted, his business will suffer; it doesn't matter that he was sick. Arte's duty to her master is not to sit by his bedside and bathe his brow in properly womanly fashion, it's to finish the work the studio was hired to do. She's his apprentice before she's a woman, and that's what Matei's apology helped to fully solidify in her own mind. Even if she still has a crush on him, that's going to take a back seat to her role as an artist, and that, more than anything, is what makes this work as a final episode.

That's not because I don't think there should be a romantic subplot (still Team Angelo if there is one!), but more that Arte is a story that doesn't need one. Arte should eventually have as much of the world as she wants, whether that includes a romantic partner or not, but the purpose of the narrative of her early days in the art field is to show us how she perseveres and becomes a painter. If it's a love story, it's about her love of art, and that's what this episode ends on: Arte has finished her teacher's task, learns that she didn't do it perfectly because there's no way she could at this stage, and is ready to keep on the path she set out to walk. She knows that everyone in Florence missed her and cares about her, she's keeping up with her Venetian connections, and the world keeps turning.

It isn't perfect, but the series hasn't been as a whole. But although it could be annoying at times and made a few baffling choices, on the whole Arte was pretty good. That may be damning with faint praise one of the series I was most looking forward to in this very odd spring 2020 season, but at the end of the show I don't regret having watched it, and in this case, that feels like enough.

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Arte is currently streaming on Funimation.