Da Vinci's Tiger (12 page)

“L
OOK OUT, SIGNORA!
”

Leonardo called out too late. Just as he released a pair of doves from their cage, Sancha and I stepped through the gate into the inner garden of Verrocchio's studio.

“Oh!” I cried, shielding my face. The birds flew straight for me on their way out to open sky. But when I felt the fan of air from their wings and heard the rhythmic swoosh of each flap, I dropped my hands to look up into their snowy plumage as they fluttered past me.

“For God's sake, man! How many times have I told you not to do that in here!” Verrocchio whacked Leonardo with his cap as he hurried toward me. “Are you all right, signora?”

“Yes,” I replied as Sancha fussed with brushing off my skirts, muttering curses and looking for bird droppings. I laughed, a little breathless. “In truth, that was rather extraordinary. I have never looked up straight into a bird in flight that close up. It is a wonderment, isn't it, that they are able to lift themselves off from the earth like that.”

Leonardo strode toward me, his handsome face alight with questions. “What did you see?”

“It was as if they swam in the air, pushing and sweeping it as a man can the water.”

He pulled out a small notebook and scribbled.

Verrocchio sighed with exasperated affection. “Leonardo thinks he can build some contraption that will allow man to fly. I have suggested he visit the Duomo's stone relief of Icarus plummeting to earth, the sun having melted the wax on the wings he built for himself. Man's vanity!” He swatted Leonardo once more. “God did not give us wings.”

“But he did give us minds, Andrea, and the ability to imagine,” Leonardo said.

“Bah.” Verrocchio waved him off and spoke to me. “Always, this one has other ideas in his head that pull him from the work at hand. He's interrupted sketches of the Madonna and child that Giuliano de' Medici awaits with fantastical drawings of . . . I struggle to know what to call the thing. An enormous turtle shells with wheels . . .”

“That is an armored wagon to protect soldiers as they attack a castle!” Leonardo protested.

“And who has commissioned you to do that?” Verrocchio
laid his hand on Leonardo's shoulder. “Yes, God gave us minds and imaginations and hopes and dreams. But he also gave us stomachs, Leonardo! I know you like to understand the causation of things. Well, think on this: to purchase food requires coin and coin comes from work and work comes from commissions. By all means, go with your flights of fancy, but do so after you have finished your paid work. It is not as if we work the dye vats. Our paid work is tremendously fulfilling. We create art, Leonardo, art!”

Verrocchio turned to me. “And that brings me to you, my lady. We have been asked to paint you.” He put his hands to his hips and gazed at me intently. Leonardo did the same.

Under their scrutiny I felt horribly shy. I looked toward the studio, hoping to see Simonetta inside so that she could be my guide to survive being gazed at so pointedly. She must have been so used to it by then. “Is Simonetta here? She told me that she would be sitting for you today.”

“She was,” Verrocchio said. “The poor lady was coughing so badly, she had to go home.”

“And why was that, maestro?” Now Leonardo had the upper hand. “Is that not because of the mess of dust and stone chips you make with your chiseling that cloud the entire studio? The poor woman could not breathe.”

“Come, Leonardo, I do not think that such a racking cough could be caused by my sculpting.”

Leonardo swatted Verrocchio this time, prompting dust to plume up in a cloud and Verrocchio to sneeze. “No? Why, look at you, maestro,” he teased. “You look more like a
baker, you are so plastered with marble dust! By contrast”—he held out his arms and turned himself around so we could inspect him—“a painter sits before his work well dressed, as he applies delicate colors. No dust clogging his home. Plus, no crashing hammers!”

Verrocchio laughed. “But sculpture better captures the contour of a thing, its motion, its proportion. Painting cannot reveal the flex of muscle, the expression of a human face, or the direction of his gaze as well as sculpture does.”

“Certainly it can! With a little more study of the layers of muscle underneath our skin, I will be able to. Besides, sculpture cannot include nature's variety of colors,” Leonardo countered. “A painter can suggest distance. He can paint mists on snow-capped mountains, and fishes playing among underwater plants and even pebbles on the sand of a river bottom.”

“So which is the better art?” I asked, joining the banter.

They both answered and contradicted in the same breath. “Painting!” “Sculpture!”

“Perhaps we should put it to the test,” a deep voice spoke from the gate. It was Bernardo. Honestly, the man moved with the stealth required of stalking rabbits in a thicket. Almost all our encounters seemed to begin with his having listened and watched me without my knowing. I didn't like it. But my heart still did a little flip at the sight of him.

Bernardo joined the artists. “Let us use the lovely Ginevra de' Benci as a way of seeing which type of maestro—sculptor or painter—can best capture her beauty.”

Verrocchio was delighted. “A marvelous idea!”

I knew Verrocchio was also tallying the florins that would come from two commissions over one. For me, the idea was flattering beyond compare. With all the attention lavished on Simonetta, never had she been sculpted as well as painted. I felt like preening. Still, I demurred. “But good my lord, that will be terribly expensive. I do not want you expending so much on me.”

“Ah, La Bencina, your modesty becomes you.”

“But I mean it, Your Excellency. Truly, I do not warrant such grandiose expense.” As delighted as my pride was with the suggestion of two portraits, it also me made me uncomfortable, beholden to Bernardo in a way I was uncertain that I wanted to be.

“No, no, we must have both!” Bernardo swept his arms out in a gesture of largesse. “Mustn't we, maestro?”

Verrocchio knew how to close a deal. “Let us talk inside about what you would like, Your Excellency.” He quickly ushered Bernardo toward the privacy of the small adjacent room where he did business.

I started to protest once more but realized it was futile—these men had decided what to do with me, and that was that—as always. My mouth snapped shut. I looked instinctively toward Sancha, who stood in the corner, as the only other woman present. She seemed to beam with pride and a sense of adventure. Well, I thought, escorting me back and forth to the studio would make her life more interesting than house chores.

Why not, then? I felt myself shrug as a voice inside me told me to relax and bask in the attention. Besides, if Bernardo ordered two portraits of me, Leonardo would certainly be responsible for the painted version. That was what I had hoped for, after all. I turned to him expectantly.

Leonardo watched Bernardo and Verrocchio exit, disdain on his face. I knew it was not directed at his old master, whom he clearly adored. “You do not like the ambassador much—why?”

Surprised by me for once, Leonardo mulled over his answer before speaking. “I happen to know the ambassador placed a large and losing wager on the
palio
. I doubt he has the florins for two commissions of art. I saw a great many gentlemen like him come to my father for notarizing legal documents. They seemed inordinately impressed with themselves, calculating, and blind to the effect on those they used to achieve their aims. Braggadocios all. Quite often they did not have the money they claimed to.”

I noted with concern the statement that Bernardo was a betting man but knew it was unseemly for me to ask for more details. Leonardo might think me a gossip. Sancha could find it out for me later. “So you did not think of becoming a notary yourself?” I asked instead to make what I thought would prove polite conversation.

He snorted. “As an illegitimate son, I am not allowed to go into the law.”

I blushed at my thoughtlessness. “Pardon me, signor, I forgot that restriction.”

Leonardo caught his breath. I was sure it was in anger at my rudeness, and my face flushed even more. When he reached toward my cheek, I flinched, having endured Uncle Bartolomeo slapping me for insolence when I was home from the convent. But Leonardo cupped my chin and tilted it up so the sun spilled along my face and cheeks. “I must find a way to capture all these layers of color—rose, violet, cream, tan.”

As I stared at him in bewilderment, his eyes refocused from my skin tones to me, the person. “
Scusa
, Madonna.” He stepped back abruptly. “But your face's flesh, the blush and cream of it, will allow me to show precisely what I was talking about being the painter's particular gift—the ability to use colors, shadow, and light to represent transparent and luminous surfaces, where the life of something emanates from within.”

He backed up and continued to assess me.

I fidgeted, feeling aflutter under the unyielding scrutiny from an artist and from such an attractive and vibrant young man. As all girls in Florence must, I had grown accustomed to being appraised by older men and relatives—like a horse being readied for market—especially regarding the fit of my gown and coif of my hair. But Leonardo's lingering evaluation felt different, very different.

Only Sancha's chortling in the corner finally interrupted his concentration. He turned. I turned. She held several sketches in her hand. Sancha had been snooping.

Even with the heaviness of my dress, I got to my servant
before Leonardo moved. “What are you doing, Sancha? Those are private to Maestro Leonardo.”

“But look how funny these are.” She pointed to a smattering of faces on one page—men with enormous noses and jutting jaws, with great jowls hanging from their chins, toothless grins, and mirthless frowns. All roughed in lightly, with urgent stroke marks, as if Leonardo had drawn one after another while they passed him on the street.

I couldn't resist. I reached out and took the stack from her. In my hands were such complete miniature scenes—cats washing themselves, dogs barking, men arguing, all so alive. I recognized the horses, prancing and straining, from the meadow before the run of the
palio
. Underneath them was a page with a petite maiden pointing to a unicorn. Her face was round like an apple, framed by a froth of tight curls, the rest of her hair swept up and back. Her pointing hand was delicate, its fingers long and thin.

“My lady!” Sancha gasped. “That's you!”

Indeed. The sketched maiden appeared very like me.

“An idea from the day of the race,” Leonardo said quietly. He had approached and stood by as we looked at his drawings, complimented by our rapt examination of them.

I was too moved by the image to look up from the page at him—both for the prettiness of the depiction and because of the symbolism inherent in a maiden taming a unicorn. It was one of Florence's favorite metaphors for goodness.

A silence hung between us as I kept my gaze on the paper, but I could sense Sancha looking from me to Leonardo and
back to me. There was one last page underneath the maiden. I pulled it out. I had never seen anything like it—a pure landscape, no human being upon it, dated 5 August 1473. The Feast Day of Holy Mary of the Snow.

“Ah, yes.” Leonardo seemed relieved to switch the conversation. “This is overlooking the Arno Valley near my village of Vinci.”

The drawing included a waterfall cascading into a gorge, rocky cliffs crowned with trees, and a walled fortress on a hilltop. I could feel the expanse of the view, could smell the sweet fragrances of new grass and budding trees carried on the wind, could hear the song of clean, rushing water. Looking at it, I remembered the feel of lying in a field in Antella, basking in the sun, rolling down a small incline, gathering wildflowers in my skirts. No one telling me what to do, what to say, or what to wear. “How lovely,” I murmured. “Your drawing brings back the childhood happiness of my family's country home.”

He nodded, pleased.

“Have you read Petrarch's ‘Ascent of Mount Ventoux'?”

“I do not like Petrarch's works.”

Surprised, I looked up at him. No one who wanted favor among Florence's elite should admit that. He shrugged.

“Well, this drawing of yours is extraordinary, signor, for many reasons. But I am particularly struck by the difference from Petrarch. He climbed Mount Ventoux and was inspired to look inward to examine his soul. His essay is all about man's perceptions of nature and using that to find God. But
this . . .” I tried to find the right way to describe something that would seem so radical to Lorenzo and Ficino's Platonic society. “This has nothing to do with man.”

Leonardo grinned. “Precisely!”

I laughed.

“I had a thought, signora, about your portrait, having watched you in the meadow the day of the race. I would like to put you in front of a landscape like this.”

Leonardo seemed unaware of how inappropriate it was for him to say he had been watching me or to suggest a portrait in which a gentlewoman be presented out of doors. We were domestic creatures, our definition coming from the houses we occupied and our roles within them. I had seen female portraits that included glimpses of the wide world, but only through windows behind the human subject. I asked if that was what he meant.

Frowning impatiently, Leonardo waved his hand as if to rid himself of a fly. “No, no. I am doing that for Giuliano de' Medici's Virgin and child. In fact, I will ask if I can paint Madonna Simonetta in the Medici palazzo, in front of those arched windows, to avoid her suffering from the dust Andrea makes with his chisel here. No, I would like to paint you as if you are out in the world, part of it. I have been thinking that a woman's ability to conceive and bear children is very like nature's ability to regenerate and create new entities.” He pointed to his drawing. “Just as this waterfall carved the rock over time to give birth to the riverbed.”