Signora Da Vinci (45 page)

Lorenzo listened wide-eyed to this story. Like so many of his brother Platonists, he tried to reconcile the old religion with the new, and though he did not say so, I thought it disturbed him to think that Christ had never died on the cross but traveled back to India to die there.

Once Salai had fallen asleep in his great-grandfather’s arms, Ernesto spoke of the wise men he had met. Of an Indian saint he had traveled for months into the high mountains to find. In a cave little larger than the apothecary storeroom, the man had lived for thirty years in a near constant state of bliss. We heard Papa’s stories of Eastern gods, philosophies and ecstatic potions. Lorenzo and I talked of our “journey into wonder” at the Vatican.

Papa himself had eaten
hashish
in a flower-filled garden of a pasha’s palace. He believed in his ecstasy that he’d died and gone to a heavenly paradise. When a peacock had come and fanned its huge blue-green tail with its dozens of “eyes” before him, he was sure the bird was a great and all-seeing god, and collapsed into tears when the fan retracted and the peacock strutted away.

“Once,” Leonardo said in that tone he reserved for his most outrageous storytelling, “I greedily devoured too many of Mama’s cakes. I flew up through the sky, past the blue into the blackness with the stars and planets. I landed on one. It was both heaven and hell. The whole place was a great machine with wheels and cogs and gears and ladders and giant screws. Monsters and demons roamed about. Winged creatures flew at will.
I
flew. Suns exploded.” He paused, remembering. “When I came back to this world I found I’d pissed myself. I hadn’t moved from the spot I’d laid down in almost a whole day before. I was worried at first. Had I damaged my brain? But I hadn’t. So many of the images I had seen in here”—he tapped his forehead—“I could still recall. I began to draw them. Odd contraptions. Devices for walking beneath the water. Terrible weapons of war. And faces. Oh, so many faces! Hideous grotesques. Fearsome dragons. Men and women alike. Humans with animal features. Dragons with human faces. Remind me to show you sometime.”

“All that from a little brown resin?” Papa said, amused. “I wish I had brought more home with me.”

We all groaned loudly and abused him for his oversight, and he laughed, as I’d never seen him do before.

“Tell us about your wife, Papa,” I said.

His face seemed suddenly to collapse in on itself. His closed lips trembled and his eyes filled with tears. “Perhaps another time,” he whispered. Then, sniffing sharply, he looked directly at Lorenzo. “What I would like to tell since I have you all here is a little story of my youth. Of a journey that I took on behalf of your grandfather, with his friend, Poggio Bracciolini, to a monastery in Switzerland.”

Lorenzo beamed with pleasure. “Would this be a tale of ancient manuscripts discovered in moldering basements and translated by the light of a single candle? Books that ended up in Cosimo’s library?”

“It might be,” Ernesto said with a sly smile.

“Leonardo,” I said to my son. “Perhaps you should put another log on the fire. I think it is going to be a long night.”

CHAPTER 33

We were all aware of how time was racing by, mostly visible in the progress of Lorenzo’s disease. Less and less could he hide the pain. The dampness and cooler temperatures of Milan worsened his symptoms and now all of his joints had stiffened, making it difficult for him to walk or climb the stairs, to sit or rise from a chair or bed. But rise he did, every day, determined to see through to the end this vast complexity of intrigue against the demon Savonarola.

It was late afternoon in the great ballroom.

“This is a great and solemn occasion.”

Lorenzo, Zoroastre, my father, and I stood very still listening to Leonardo’s words. It seemed a mystical moment, with motes of dust suspended in the air so like the day thirty years before in the Vinci meadow.

“We have joined in conspiracy to defeat a self-proclaimed Lord of Destruction who will, if unchecked, obliterate all that we love in Florence. Much of what we do may seem profane”—he could not help smiling—“even to the most profane among us. But this cannot be helped. The cost of inaction is far too great. I, for one, must help in any way I can, so that this course should not be sped in vain.”

“We are indebted to you, Leonardo,” Lorenzo said. “With your dreams and your visions, you make our hopes possible.”

The failed flying machine had been carted away. Now Leonardo drew our attention to a small rectangular box on a table. Within a foot away, at the same level, sat a plaster bust of a woman, the full light of the sun shining on her face from a window. The sculpture had been painted in bright colors—the hair yellow, the skin of her face and neck red, the shoulders of her gown cerulean blue.

Leonardo, hovering nearby, beckoned Lorenzo and Papa and me closer, gesturing that we should not step between the window and the box contraption. He wore a mysterious smile, and I was suddenly sure that we were about to be shown another wonder, perhaps greater than any before.

“While I understand the principles, I have not yet put this into words,” he began, “so you must forgive me if I stumble while I explain.” Without touching it, he pointed to the top of the box. “This is a
camera obscura
. Not my invention. Something Alberti used to watch the sun as it eclipsed. Come carefully around,” he instructed us, then pointed to a small hole in the side of the box facing the bust. That side appeared to be made of metal.

“See the aperture here,” he said, pointing at the hole drilled through a very thin sheet of iron.

Leonardo stepped back for a moment. “I have been studying the eye very deeply, and this
camera obscura
mimics how
we
see things. There is a hole in the center of our eye very much like that aperture.” He pointed back at the pinhole in iron. He had to stop and think, creating the words as thoughts formed in his head. “When an object is illuminated”—he indicated the sunlit bust—“and its image penetrates through a small round hole into a very dark habitation”—he pointed to the box, which clearly was the “habitation”—“you will then receive these images on a sheet of white paper or cloth placed inside it somewhat near the hole.”

It was difficult to grasp what Leonardo was saying, and he saw the questions in our eyes.

“Bear with me,” he pleaded, grappling for his next words. “When I say the images will be ‘received,’ I mean that you will
see
the illuminated object on the paper or cloth with their true shapes and colors . . . but they will be less . . . and they will be upside down.”

We were all quite speechless, unable to form the simplest question. A moment later he took us out of our misery into a state of magical illumination.

He pulled the top off the box and pointed into it to the side opposite the pinhole aperture. There, on a small expanse of white linen, was the distinct image of the painted bust! The hair was yellow, the skin red and the gown blue, though all of it was, as Leonardo had said, top at the bottom, bottom at the top.

Now Zoroastre appeared, and at Leonardo’s nodded assent he carefully pulled the linen-covered back panel out of the box and raced away with it.

“What is he doing!” I cried.

Leonardo smiled. “Taking Alberti’s
camera obscura
to a further level. Come.” We followed him out of the studio and arrived at the door of Zoroastre’s alchemical laboratory, where the young man was bent over several candles in a row, holding in front of it the square of cloth from inside the
camera obscura
.

“Before sliding the linen into the box we coated it with egg white,” Leonardo said. “The sun’s rays shining in through the aperture, hitting the cloth and making the image created a reaction with the egg.”

I moved up close to Zoroastre and the candles. “The cloth is being scorched,” I observed.

“But only in the places where egg white and sunlight did not react. The egg made the cloth
insoluble
in those places.”

I could see the beginnings of the bust’s image take form on the cloth in the form of a scorch mark. Lorenzo remained silent, though I heard Papa muttering, “Yes, yes, I see.”

A moment later, Zoroastre rushed the cloth to a basin of water and pushed it in, scrubbing it together like a piece of laundry. This I found alarming—so delicate and precious a thing to be handling so roughly.

I fixed my son with a look of amazement.

“Just wait,” he said.

Then Zoroastre turned to us triumphantly, holding up the linen square. There was the image of the woman’s bust. Though there were no colors other than the reddish scorch, her features were clearly apparent, an outline of hair, her shoulders. . . .

We were dumbstruck.

“Pittura de sole,”
Leonardo announced with pride.

“A painting made from the sun,” Lorenzo murmured, altogether awestruck.

“We are still experimenting,” Leonardo said, excitement in his voice. “I believe that by using mirrors to increase the light shone on the subject, and a lens inside the
camera obscura
to focus the image, it will be sharper, more lifelike.”

“And I believe there are better fixatives than egg white,” Zoroastre added. “I have tried gum Arabic, and gelatin, but there is something that I am missing.” He cast his eyes to his feet. “I am, after all, just an apprentice alchemist.”

I found Leonardo gazing at Papa and me. “Here are two of Italy’s finest.”

“What are you suggesting?” Lorenzo asked him. “That you not
paint
a forgery of the Lirey Shroud? Rather, create it as a
pittura de sole
?”

“I believe it can be done,” Leonardo said. “But Zoroastre will need the help of experts. And of course the work must be accomplished in the greatest secrecy. Certainly not here.”

“Do you know somewhere?” Lorenzo asked.

“The perfect place. Pavia. Twenty miles south of here
. Il Moro
has sent me there on several occasions to work on the horse. There is a villa. Empty now. Very private, with many small rooms, and one very large. A perfect studio.”

“The owner?” Lorenzo pressed.

“A young nobleman with serious gambling debts.”

“Get me his particulars,” Lorenzo told him. “I will make him an offer he cannot refuse.” Then he turned to me and smiled. “Ah, Cato, what a miracle of a man your sister has created!”

 

The Pavia house was purchased, and Zoroastre was dispatched to make it ready for use as a bottega and alchemical laboratory. Lorenzo’s generosity made everything possible in the shortest amount of time. Meanwhile, Leonardo—even in secret from the rest of us—made his “unholy” plans, which, he did explain, were vital to the shroud forgery’s success.

At dawn on the day we were meant to leave for Pavia I was stirred from sleep by Lorenzo’s cry. I bolted awake to find him sitting in his nightshirt, his legs hanging over the side of the bed. He was frantically pounding his thighs with his fists. He turned and looked at me with desperation.

“I cannot feel my legs. I cannot move them.”

I went round and knelt before him and took one bare foot in my hand and rubbed it briskly, then up and down the calf. I did the other, noting how alarming was the color of his skin—bruised and purple brown in places, deathly white in others. His knees were so swollen I dared not touch them.

I willed myself not to weep, to stay strong and calm, while inside I was wild with terror. I managed a smile up at Lorenzo. He had a strange look on his face, as though he were listening for a sound from a long distance away.

“Continue, Caterina. What you are doing . . . I feel something, just a little, in my right foot.” I rubbed it more vigorously. He nodded, then smiled weakly. “Yes. It’s pain.” There was a choked laugh. “I have never been happier to feel pain.”

I worked in this way until all sensation had returned. In no time he could move his toes, his ankles, his knees. Nothing was said of the sickly colored skin that remained.

“I think you should rest, Lorenzo. Get back in bed.”

“No, I must walk.”

“Please, my darling.”

“I need to know if I can
walk
, Caterina.”

With his arm around my shoulder I pulled him up, and quite miraculously he could walk with help, albeit slowly at first. Then he bade me step back. I was loath to let go of him. Wished in that moment I could cling to him forever.

But I released my grip. He straightened his back and with great effort took a step on his own. Then another, and another.

“Lorenzo,” I said quietly. He turned. “Will you sit down now? You’ve proven you can walk. Do not tire yourself.”

He shuffled to the morning table and with great agony of his bending knees, sat down. He was quiet for a long while, thinking, making plans. I knew that look so well.

“Caterina,” he said finally. “Send for my chests.”

“What do you mean? Lorenzo, you cannot mean to travel to Pavia today. Not in your condition.”

“I’m not going to Pavia. I’m going home, my love. To Florence.”

“Florence!”

He was silent again, collecting his thoughts while mine were racing, pounding inside my head.

“I must be back in Florence so that I am able to complete my part of our plan. You know what that part is.”

I was shaking my head no. I did not wish to hear it. But he was determined that I would.

“My part is to die, Caterina.”

“No,” I said and began to weep where I sat, unable to go to him, paralyzed as he had been before.

“If I cannot say what must be said to Savonarola on my deathbed, our conspiracy will come to nothing. I thought you understood this.”

“But you’re not dying!” I cried. “You cannot be dying!”

“Come here,” he said in his gentlest voice.

I went and sat at his feet. He pushed the damp hair back from my brow and stroked my head. I was grateful he could not see my face.