Signora Da Vinci (15 page)

But the greatest delight was yet to come. Across a tiny landing from the study I found a closed door. This bore a padlock, but it was so rusted that a blow with my broom handle pulled it off, hinges and all.

Papa had told me that my new home had once hidden a laboratory, for old Bracciolini, aside from his work in the herbal arts, had been an alchemist. He’d been Ernesto’s teacher in both. So when the door creaked open and I beheld that most heretical of all chambers, I felt a thrill of delight, though not surprise.

There was little left of its equipment for an untrained eye to recognize the room’s purposes. But
I
could tell. It had been placed on the top floor facing the garden, the most private room in the house. There was a lingering smell of sulfur and the sharp bite of mercury that permeated the walls and floor. The long tables were stained and burned in the same way my father’s laboratory tables had been. And there, on the far wall, was the furnace—not a normal hearth or a brazier to give heat on a chilly evening. This was a proper fire-and-brimstone oven, one that once lit was tended constantly, with sacred fervor . . . and never ever let to burn out.

By now I had lost the sun and I was forced to carefully feel my way down the dark stairway to the ground floor and find a lamp to light. By its glow alone I swept and mopped my bedchamber, being careful to remove every last spiderweb and rat dropping from the bedstead, and finally with some trepidation carried up a thin mattress, sheets, coverlets, and pillow to lay in its boards. The moment the bed was made exhaustion overtook me, and barely able to remove my outer clothes, I collapsed there and fell deeply asleep.

CHAPTER 9

In the next weeks my new young friend Benito was good to his word and helped me with the cleaning and refurbishing of the first two floors of my house. Of the rest he saw nothing. I had clandestinely carted all of my books and alchemical equipment to the third floor. The bedrooms, too, I determined to keep private.

The boy worked cheerfully, this being his nature, but also because having secured my services to his family in exchange for his work he had, indeed, raised his currency with them.

Wearing kerchiefs over our faces we disposed of the most disgusting tasks first, cleaning the storeroom and shop of their ingrained filth, tearing out walls and floorboards that were rotted away, concealing years of black mold. Benito was a more than adequate carpenter and replaced the rotten planks with wood donated by his father, the overage from a shed he had recently built in their garden.

I took special pride in my large glazed front window, which I washed with vinegar and polished to a glittering transparency. The shop shelves, floors, and walls were sanded smooth and finally given a fresh coat of paint in three different shades of green. The travertine marble counter, scrubbed with borax, showed itself to be the gleaming white glory of the apothecary. Then Benito built me rodent-proof containers for my storeroom.

I worried that my shelves would look bare with too few jars and bottles of remedies, but I cleverly conceived of displaying myriad bunches of herbs in the empty spaces rather than, like my father had done, hanging them in the storeroom. In this way I managed, by bringing the outdoors inside, to cheer up the look of the shop as well as improve its smell.

During those weeks, neighbors and passersby stuck their heads into the shop and I happily made their acquaintance. They were, I later learned, typical Florentines—friendly but wary, loathing stupidity and loving to gossip. Where in Vinci I had eschewed the practice of gossiping, now I embraced it. It was the best way to stay informed, and the people with whom I enjoyed this friendly chatter were likely, when I opened for business, to become my customers. And the more of them that came to believe my disguise now, the better.

All the talk in those weeks was of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s marriage, how his mother, Lucrezia, had made a special trip to Rome to spy on the sixteen-year-old prospective wife as she was coming and going to church, in order to decide on her appropriateness. The Medici matron had found Clarice Orsini’s face too round and her neck too thin. The education she’d received had been ordinary, not nearly as fine as her three daughters’. Perhaps it was Clarice’s shyness and modesty that caused the Orsini girl to “poke her head forward like a chicken” when she walked, my neighbor surmised. Lucrezia de’ Medici had conceded that Lorenzo’s prospective wife had pretty reddish hair, long graceful white hands, and a nicely shaped bosom. But in the end, my neighbor concluded, the size of her dowry was the deciding factor.

Despite a promise of many customers, I was not yet ready to open my apothecary. I had need of an outdoor sign, and I knew exactly where I would procure one. The thought made my heart race.

I would be going to the famous bottega of Andrea Verrocchio.

The confidence I had acquired in the past month from successfully passing as a man began to evaporate as I took to the streets on foot to visit my son. I had deemed it wise to keep both the move to Florence and my male disguise a secret from him, for no other reason than worry that the letters might fall into the wrong hands. I had no fear of Leonardo’s response at seeing me in a tunic and cap. In the years since his birth in Vinci, the adversity and ostracism we had endured on one hand, and the joyful education we had shared on the other, had forged the deepest understanding between us. It was one that allowed for games and practical jokes—a bond that few mothers shared with their children.

He would recognize me in an instant and join the ruse with relish. For he missed me in his life as sorely as I missed him. I was sure of this.

What I did fear was my ability to fool Maestro Verrocchio, with his discerning artist’s eye. Surely he could tell a man from a woman. But I had no choice. Today would set my course in stone. If I was found out, the humiliation and scandal would not simply be mine, but my son’s as well.

I had to be strong, fearless. And I had to succeed.

As I made my way through the streets I was but mildly distracted by the beauty of the frescoes painted on the façades of the churches, at every corner shrine, their candles illuminating a Madonna and child painted by one of the great masters. I was coming to see that such displays were less a sacred art than Florence bragging about its world-famous artisans. Old Roman columns graced a minor piazza, or an ancient stone sarcophagus, now a water trough where horses stood and drank.

I arrived at the artisans district and was directed to Via Agnolo, a narrow but carefully paved street lined not with houses or palazzos but with one workshop after another.

For all his disreputable behavior toward his son,
I thought,
Piero has done well by Leonardo in arranging this apprenticeship with Verrocchio.

Looking down Via Agnolo I could see at a glance that one bottega above all was a hive of activity. I approached slowly, watching several young men loading an ornately carved and painted headboard on a horse cart, trying, with some difficulty, to avoid a clutch of boys playing with a ball, and chickens pecking at scratch on the pavement. Finally they lashed the bed head securely to the cart’s rails and sent it on its way.

Standing before Verrocchio’s bottega I saw its grand arched entry-way, which, except for a heavy awning, left open the whole expanse of whitewashed studio. Its vaulted ceiling stretched out in a long, broad rectangle, with a smaller opening to a work yard. Some of the studio’s wares were on display in front—a gilded basket and a fantastically painted wedding chest, the scarf that Lorenzo de’ Medici had worn on the day of his betrothal festival, and next to it his brother Giuliano’s suit of armor.

Verrocchio was very much a favorite of the city’s leading family. Indeed, from all the artisans in Florence, he had been chosen to create the tomb of Cosimo de’ Medici.

The young men who had loaded the cart had gone back inside and I could see now they were, each one of them, an apprentice in the shop. Straightening my back and rising to my full height—now two full inches above that with which nature had endowed me by use of a lift in my slippers—I entered the bottega.

I could see a stairway at the back leading to what I presumed were the living quarters above. On both sides of me rose the most astonishing array of industry. My nose was assailed by dust and sweat and pungent varnishes and solvents. The place echoed with hammering, clanging, the hiss of white-hot steel meeting water, a metal point chipping marble. Strangely there were no human sounds. All the boys and young men were working in concentration, or at least obedient silence.

One apprentice swept the floor with a wide broom. Another stood at a workbench cleaning a vast array of paintbrushes, and next to him an older boy ground colors at a large grindstone. The walls were variously hung with tools or sketches or carnival masks and death masks. A wooden model of a small church stood on a turntable.

I watched as a boy plucked an egg from a chicken’s nest box next to a worktable, delivering it to another apprentice mixing bright blue tempera. The egg was cracked into a bowl and added to the color. Near him on a bench was another boy gathering onto a stick a bunch of boar’s bristles, fashioning a paintbrush. Near him was a youngster covering a large wooden panel with white paint.

I studied every face, looking for my son, but he was so far nowhere among these boys. They were—here in the front of the shop—younger than Leonardo, no more than thirteen, the age at which he had arrived in Florence.

At an imperceptible demarcation in the studio, the age of the apprentices rose a year or two and the jobs at which they worked became more skilled. One was decorating a chest with a fire-breathing dragon, another applying gold leaf to the halo of a sweet-faced Madonna. A boy polished the round cheeks of a small bronze cherub. Another stood at a large panel laying the first colors onto a cartoon outline of what I could see would be a major painting of saints and angels.

Neither was Leonardo in this group.

The final third of the bottega held the most impressive level of artifacts. There was sculpture of every kind—bronze and marble and wood. Gold work and ironwork. There were portraits of ladies and gentlemen unknown to me, but clearly wealthy enough to pay for their likenesses to be painted by Maestro Verrocchio. Another man sat at a loom, threading glittering fibers through a long swatch of cloth of gold. Last there was a lad covered in fine dust, tapping away with his chisel at a marble slab, the subject and features of which were not yet discernible. I had been told that a bottega produced more than frescoes and statues, but never had I imagined that the world of the artisan was so broadly imagined.

But where was Leonardo? And where was his master, Verrocchio?

As I made my way to the far end of the studio I began to hear the sound of a lute being prettily played, with no accompanying voice. It was coming from the open back door, so I proceeded on. An unused anvil and a huge kiln stood untended, shimmering with internal heat. But when I peeked around the door I was met with a shock of the unexpected.

While the yard directly outside the back door was nothing more than a serious workplace, the other half was another world altogether. I might have been looking into a small wooded glen outside of Vinci. An ancient walnut tree shaded the better part of a high-walled garden that had been planted with shrubs and smaller trees, and the stone walls hung thickly with vines. There was even a tiny patch of “meadow” with grasses and wildflowers abounding. In a corner where two of the garden walls met, a rock waterfall sent cascades of crystal water bubbling down a tiny pebble-strewn stream, complete with ferns and moss!

Amidst this bucolic haven under the branches of the thick-trunked tree I could make out several young men lounging on the ground and an older, heavyset man on a bench, each with a sketchbook before him. Another man stretched out in the grass leaning on one elbow plucked at the lute. A platform was centered between them, and on it sat a grisly sight—the severed head of a long-haired and heavily bearded giant, or at least a clever likeness of such a head. Clearly it was Goliath.

But where was David?

I heard the older man call out, “That is the longest piss in Florentine history!”

The others laughed good-naturedly and then, from behind the walnut’s massive trunk stepped a most beautiful youth, a thin sheet draped around him. Gracefully he bent to pick up a wooden sword lying in the grass, and in the moment before he let drop the drapery and struck his pose above the head of Goliath, I knew this perfect creature to be my son, Leonardo.

I was thoroughly transfixed, as though I had caught sight of a Greek god. He had retained the leanness of boyhood, but in the years since I’d seen him last his muscles had defined and hardened. His height, the shape of his legs, and the vertical cut of his loins were so like his father’s that a breath caught in my throat. His cheeks, jaw, and chin still retained the round lines of youth. The mane of curly brown-gold hair curling around his face was angelic.

My son!
I cried silently.
Leonardo!

Wishing to gather my wits I pulled back through the doorway and stood as still as one of Maestro Verrocchio’s statues. There I stayed, my eyes closed, one moment practicing the first words I would speak to the group in the garden, the next planning a cowardly escape.

“Surely you don’t mean to stand in that spot the whole day.”

The voice behind me was so close and so unexpected that I nearly came out of my skin.

“Whoa! Sorry, lad.”

I turned and was greeted with the third shock of the day.

Lorenzo de’ Medici stood behind me with an amused expression on his dark, handsome face. The look changed when he saw me. While I knew instantly who he was, he had only a vague memory of having seen my face. I could tell he’d not yet placed it.

I executed a small, respectful bow. He nodded at me with what appeared as equal respect.