I, Mona Lisa (9 page)

Two days after the murder, Leonardo had dispatched a letter to Lorenzo de’ Medici.

My lord Lorenzo, I need to speak privately with you concerning a matter of the utmost importance
.

No reply was forthcoming: Lorenzo, overcome with grief, hid in the Medici palazzo, which had become a fortress surrounded by scores of armed men. He received no visitors; letters requesting his opinion or his favor piled up unanswered.

After a week without a reply, Leonardo borrowed a gold florin and went to the door of the Medici stronghold. He bribed one of the guards there to deliver a second letter straightaway, while he stood waiting in the loggia, watching the hard rain pound the cobblestone streets.

My lord Lorenzo, I come neither seeking favor nor speaking of business. I have critical information concerning the death of your brother, for your ears alone.

Several minutes later he was admitted after being thoroughly checked for weapons—ridiculous, since he had never owned one or had any idea of how to wield one.

Pale and lifeless in an unadorned tunic of black, Lorenzo, his neck still bandaged, received Leonardo in his study, surrounded by artwork of astonishing beauty. He gazed up at Leonardo with eyes clouded by guilt and grief—yet even these could not hide his interest in hearing what the artist had to say.

On the morning of the twenty-sixth of April, Leonardo had stood several rows from the altar in the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. He’d had questions for Lorenzo about a joint commission he and his former teacher Andrea Verrocchio had received to sculpt a bust of Giuliano, and hoped to catch
il Magnifico
after the service. Leonardo attended Mass only when he had business to conduct; he found the natural world far more awe-inspiring than a man-made cathedral. He
was on very good terms with the Medici. Over the past few years, he had stayed for months at a time in Lorenzo’s house as one of the many artists in the family’s employ.

To Leonardo’s surprise that morning in the Duomo, Giuliano had arrived, late, disheveled, and escorted by Francesco de’ Pazzi and his employee.

Leonardo found men and women equally beautiful, equally worthy of his love, but he lived an unrequited life by choice. An artist could not allow the storms of love to interrupt his work. He avoided women most of all, for the demands of a wife and children would make his studies—of art, of the world and its inhabitants—impossible. He did not want to become as his master Verrocchio was—wasting his talent, taking on any work, whether it be the construction of masks for Carnival or the gilding of a lady’s slippers, to feed his hungry family. There was never any time to experiment, to observe, to improve his skills.

Ser Antonio, Leonardo’s grandfather, had first explained this concept to him. Antonio had loved his grandson deeply, ignoring the fact that he was the illegitimate get of a servant girl. As Leonardo grew, only his grandfather noted the boy’s talent, and had given him a book of paper and charcoal. When Leonardo was seven years old, he had been sitting in the cool grass with a silverpoint stylus and a rough panel of wood, studying how the wind rippled through the leaves of an olive orchard. Ser Antonio—ever busy, straight-shouldered and sharp-eyed despite his eighty-eight years—had paused to stand beside him, and look with him at the glittering trees.

Quite suddenly and unprompted, he said,
Pay no attention to custom, my boy. I had half your talent—yes, I was good at drawing and eager, like you, to understand how the natural world works—but I listened to my father. Before I came to the farm, I was apprenticed to him as a notary.

That is what we are—a family of notaries. One sired me, and so I sired one myself—your father. What have we given the world? Contracts and bills of exchange, and signatures on documents which will turn to dust.

I did not give up my dreams altogether; even as I learned about the profession, I drew in secret. I stared at birds and rivers, and wondered how they worked. But then I met your grandmother Lucia and fell in love. It was the worst thing ever to happen, for I abandoned art and science and married her. Then there were children, and no time to look at trees. Lucia found my scribblings and cast them into the fire.

But God has given us you—you with your amazing mind and eyes and hands. You have a duty not to abandon them.

Promise me you will not make my mistake; promise me you will never let your heart carry you away.

Young Leonardo had promised.

But when he became a protégé of the Medici and a member of their inner circle, he had been drawn, physically and emotionally, to Lorenzo’s younger brother. Giuliano was infinitely lovable. It was not simply the man’s striking appearance—Leonardo was himself far more attractive, often called “beautiful” by his friends—but rather the pure goodness of his spirit.

This fact Leonardo kept to himself. He did not wish to make Giuliano, a lover of women, uncomfortable; nor did he care to scandalize Lorenzo, his host and patron.

When Giuliano appeared in the Duomo, Leonardo—only two rows behind him, for he had made his way as close as possible to Lorenzo, the better to intercept him—could not help but stare steadily at him. He noted Giuliano’s downcast demeanor, and was filled with neither sympathy nor attraction but with a welling of bitter jealousy.

The previous evening, the artist had set out with the intention of speaking to Lorenzo about the commission.

He had made his way onto the Via de’ Gori, past the church of San Lorenzo. The Palazzo Medici lay just ahead, to his left, and he stepped out into the street toward it.

It was dusk. To the west lay the high, narrow tower of the Palazzo della Signoria and the great curving cupola of the Duomo, distinct and dark against an impossible horizon of incandescent coral fading gradually
to lavender, then gray. Given the hour, traffic was light, and Leonardo paused in the street, lost in the beauty of his surroundings. He watched as a carriage rolled toward him, and enjoyed the crisp silhouettes of the horses, their bodies impenetrably black, set against the backdrop of the brilliant sky with the sun behind them, so that all detail was swallowed. Sundown was his favorite hour, for the failing light infused forms and colors with a tenderness, a sense of gentle mystery, that the noon sun burned away.

He grew lost in the play of shadow on the horses’ bodies, on the rippling of muscles beneath their flesh, the spirited lift of their heads—so much so that as they came rumbling down upon him, he had to collect himself and move swiftly out of their way. He crossed in front of them and found himself standing on the southern flank of the Palazzo Medici; his destination, less than a minute’s walk away, was the Via Larga.

A short distance in front of him, the driver of the carriage jerked the horses to a stop; the door opened. Leonardo hung back and watched as a young woman stepped out. The twilight turned the marked whiteness of her skin into dove gray, her eyes and hair to nondescript darkness. The drabness of her gown and veil, the downward cast of her face, marked her as the servant of a wealthy family. There was purpose in her step and furtiveness in her posture as her gaze swept from side to side. She hurried to the palazzo’s side entrance and knocked insistently.

A pause, and the door opened with a long, sustained creak. The servant moved back to the carriage and gestured urgently to someone inside.

A second woman emerged from the carriage and moved gracefully, swiftly, toward the open entry.

Leonardo said her name aloud without intending to. She was a friend of the Medici, a frequent visitor to the palazzo; he had talked to her on several occasions. Even before he saw her clearly, he recognized her movements, the cant of her shoulders, the way her head swiveled on her neck as she turned to look up at him.

He took a step closer, and was finally able to see her face.

Her nose was long and straight, the tip downturned, the nostrils flared; her forehead was broad and very high. Her chin was pointed, but the cheeks and jaw were gracefully rounded, like her shoulders, which inclined toward the Palazzo Medici although her face was turned toward his.

She had always been beautiful, but now the dimness softened everything, gave her features a haunting quality they had not heretofore possessed. She seemed to melt into the air; it was impossible to tell where the shadows ended and she began. Her luminous face, her décolleté, her hands, seemed to float suspended against the dark forest of her gown and hair. Her expression was one of covert joy; her eyes held sublime secrets, her lips the hint of a complicitous smile.

In that instant, she was more than human: She was divine.

He reached out with his hand, half thinking it would pass through her, as if she were a phantom.

She pulled away and he saw, even in the grayness, the bright flare of fear in her eyes, in the parting of her lips; she had not meant to be discovered. Had he possessed a feather, he would have whisked away the deep line between her brows and resurrected the look of mystery.

He murmured her name again, this time a question, but her gaze had already turned toward the open doorway. Leonardo followed it, and caught a glimpse of another familiar face: Giuliano’s. His body was entirely obscured by shadow; he did not see Leonardo, only the woman.

And she saw Giuliano, and bloomed.

In that instant, Leonardo understood and turned his cheek away, overwhelmed by bitterness, as the door closed behind them.

He did not go to see Lorenzo that night. He went home to his little apartment and slept poorly. He stared up at the ceiling and saw the gently lucent features of the woman emerging from the blackness.

The following morning, gazing on Giuliano in the Duomo, Leonardo dwelled on his unhappy passion. He recalled, again and again, the painful instant when he had seen the look pass between Giuliano and
the woman, when he had realized Giuliano’s heart belonged to her, and hers to him; and he cursed himself for being vulnerable to such a foolish emotion as jealousy.

He had been so ensnared by his reverie that he had been startled by a sudden movement in front of him. A robed figure stepped forward an instant before Giuliano turned to look behind him, then released a sharp gasp.

There followed Baroncelli’s hoarse shout. Leonardo had stared up, stricken, at the glint of the raised blade. In the space of a breath, the frightened worshipers scattered, pulling the artist backward with the tide of bodies. He had thrashed, struggling vainly to reach Giuliano with the thought of protecting him from further attack, but he could not even hold his ground.

In the wild scramble, Leonardo’s view of Baroncelli’s knife entering Giuliano’s flesh had been blocked. But Leonardo had seen the final blows of Francesco’s unspeakably brutal attack—the dagger biting, again and again, into Giuliano’s flesh, just as Archbishop Salviati would, in due turn, bite into Francesco de’ Pazzi’s shoulder.

The instant he realized what was happening, Leonardo let go a loud shout—inarticulate, threatening, horrified—at the attackers. At last the crowd cleared; at last no one stood between him and the assassins. He had run toward them as Francesco, still shrieking, moved on. It was too late to shelter, to protect, Giuliano’s good, innocent spirit.

Leonardo dropped to his knees beside the fallen man. He lay half curled on his side, his mouth still working; blood foamed at his lips and spilled from his wounds.

Leonardo pressed a hand to the worst of them, the gaping hole in Giuliano’s chest. He could hear the frail, gurgling wheeze of the victim’s lungs as they fought to expel blood and draw in air. But Leonardo’s efforts to stanch the flow were futile.

Each wound on the front of Giuliano’s pale green tunic released its own steady stream of blood. The streams forked, then rejoined, creating a latticework over the young man’s body until at last they merged into the growing dark pool on the marble floor.

“Giuliano,” Leonardo had gasped, tears streaming down his cheeks at the sight of such suffering, at the sight of beauty so marred.

Giuliano did not hear him. He was beyond hearing, beyond sight: His half-open eyes already stared into the next world. As Leonardo hovered over him, he retched up a volume of bright, foaming blood; his limbs twitched briefly, then his eyes widened. Thus he died.

Now, standing in front of Lorenzo, Leonardo said nothing of Giuliano’s final suffering, for such details would only fuel
il Magnifico
’s grief. Leonardo spoke not of Baroncelli, nor of Francesco de’ Pazzi. Instead, he spoke of a third man, one who had yet to be found.

Leonardo recounted that he had seen, in the periphery of his vision, a robed figure step forward on Giuliano’s right, and that he believed it was this man who had delivered the first blow. As Giuliano tried to back away from Baroncelli, the figure had stood fast, pressing hard against the victim to trap him. The crowd had obscured Leonardo’s sight to a great degree at that point—the unknown figure had briefly disappeared, perhaps had fallen, but he had gotten back on his feet. He did not even recoil when Francesco struck out wildly with the dagger, but remained firmly in place until Francesco and Baroncelli had moved on.

Once Giuliano had died, Leonardo glanced up and noticed the man moving quickly toward the door that led to the piazza. He must have paused at some point to look behind him, to be sure that his victim died.

“Assassin!” the artist shouted. “Stop!”

There was such outraged authority, such pure force in his voice that, amazingly, the conspirator stopped in mid-stride and glanced swiftly over his shoulder.

Leonardo captured his image with a trained artist’s eye. The man wore the robes of a penitent—crude burlap—and his clean-shaven face was half shadowed by a cowl. Only the lower half of his lip and his chin were visible.

Held close to his side, his hand gripped a bloodied stiletto.

After he had fled, Leonardo had gently rolled Giuliano’s body onto its side and discovered the puncture—small but very deep—in his mid-back.

This he relayed to Lorenzo. But he did not admit what he knew in his tortured heart: that he, Leonardo, was responsible for Giuliano’s death.