Signora Da Vinci (55 page)

She rushed back to the marriage chest. There on top of the remaining books was a parchment letter folded and sealed with red wax. Bianca took it up and held it to her heart, then walked as slowly to the window as a bride to the altar. She broke the seal and by the cold winter light began to read.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

While I dove into dozens of books about the Italian Renaissance and their brightest stars to research
Signora da Vinci
, there were two that served as my impetus and inspiration for the direction I took, and provided priceless insights into that period—what I came to call “The Shadow Renaissance.”

Lynn Picknett’s and Clive Prince’s two brilliantly researched and utterly compelling books—
The Templar Revelation
and
Turin Shroud—
opened a little-known world-beneath-a-world to me. Reading about the all but ignored philosophical and esoteric underpinnings of the movers and shakers of the Renaissance—particularly Leonardo and his ties to the Lirey Shroud (later known as the Shroud of Turin)—exploded in my mind and literally set me and my characters on the path to my plot.

Picknett and Prince did not stop with compiling and comparing the best theories and solutions to the greatest mysteries of the times. When it came to proving their own theory that Leonardo da Vinci perpetrated the shroud hoax using his own face for Jesus’s, they did months of scientific experiments in their garage with a homemade
camera obscura
, plaster models, and several types of chemicals and salts known to be available in fifteenth-century Europe. They were relentless with their trials and errors until they had convinced themselves—and me—that not only was it possible for Leonardo to have orchestrated this masterpiece of deception, but quite probable indeed. I cannot recommend the Picknett/Prince books more highly.

I was fortunate to have as inspiration for my characterization of Leonardo one of my oldest and dearest friends—Los Angeles artist and philosopher Tom Ellis. He is the one true genius I know, who has generously decorated my life with his masterful and wildly eclectic works of art. Outrageous, flamboyant, intellectual, and eccentric beyond measure, he shares with da Vinci a sweet temperament, worship of nature, and an obsessive desire to explore the deepest wells of religion, sexuality, psychedelics, and the human condition. I couldn’t have had a more perfect template to reference the maestro than Tom.

I owe a special debt to my mom, Skippy Ruter-Sitomer, who, in 2006, left us for that great South Florida Retirement Community in the Sky. Had it not been for her, I would never have had firsthand knowledge of a mother like Caterina—one who unfailingly believed in her children and wholly accepted them, warts and all. Skippy was kind, and unfailingly generous with her love. She knew how to sacrifice without martyrdom. She was a woman who rolled with the punches, continued to evolve, and surprisingly became more mentally and philosophically flexible with age . . . not less. Nothing shocked her, she was always good for a laugh, and by the age of eighty-nine had learned to swear like a sailor. Skippy enjoyed every one of my heroines, but I think she would have loved Caterina the best, identified with a woman whose proudest achievement in life was being the very best of mothers.

This is the third of my books to benefit from my good neighbor James “The Padre” Arimond, who is always ready with Latin benedictions and religious expertise. Kathleen Chambers braved my scribbled, scratched-out, arrow-ridden yellow pads to type the first draft of this novel, and lent her knowledge about herbal medicine.

My mentor, Betty Hammett, gave me the first read and a thumbs-up. Old friends and fellow authors Billie Morton and Gregory Michaels offered insightful notes and myriad helpful suggestions.

My trusted agents of many years, David Forrer and Kimberly Witherspoon, believed in
Signora da Vinci
from the get-go. David, especially, has been like a dog with a tasty bone, something any author in her right mind dreams about in a representative. Wonderful, too, when your agents are creative and can be counted on to give you worthy story input. Many, many thanks, you two. And a special acknowledgment to Susan Hobson, my foreign agent—a broad who works tirelessly abroad.

What can I say about the perfect editor? Kara Cesare loves her work and is dedicated to that old and most honorable profession. She has proven herself to be a wellspring of brilliant ideas and clever solutions to the stickiest of my stumbling blocks. Moreover she has helped me understand the fine balance of art and commerce in the publishing world. Kara is young enough to be my daughter but wise enough to be my mother. I am so grateful to have her as a working partner.

How do I thank the person without whom my life would not be worth living? A melodramatic description of Max Thomas, my husband of twenty-five years? Perhaps. But he’s also the silliest man I know. There are no depths to which he will not stoop to make me laugh—a lifesaving talent so necessary in these whacked-out times. All my love to you, Barney.

A CONVERSATION WITH ROBIN MAXWELL

A. I feel that, for now, I’ve “written myself out” with the most fascinating individuals of that most fabulous and colorful place and time. I always insist on being, if not the first to write about a given character (nearly impossible with such well-known figures), then having a strong and wholly original “angle” or “hook” for my story: Elizabeth I and Robin Dudley’s illegitimate son in
The Queen’s Bastard
; the intimate mother/daughter connection from beyond the grave in
Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn
; and the early lives of Anne and Mary Boleyn at the erotic French court in
Mademoiselle Boleyn
.

For some time I’d been intrigued by the ridiculously fertile mind and staggering accomplishments of Leonardo da Vinci. Long before
The da Vinci Code
, he was a firmly entrenched icon in human culture and consciousness, but my research piled mystery upon mystery about this polymath genius. However, Leonardo was so obsessively secretive about his personal life, and was such a success in that regard, that with all his thousands of pages of notebooks and various works of art, invention, science, architecture and philosophy, very little was revealed about Leonardo the
person
.

And while we do know something about da Vinci’s father, Piero—his social climbing and business successes, his almost inhuman coldness to his bastard son, and his struggle to sire legitimate children—we know next to nothing about da Vinci’s mother. By my own simple logic I deduced that Piero, while an intelligent and resourceful man, never displayed an ounce of creativity, that divine spark that utterly defined Leonardo.

That would, of course, leave his mother as the donor of the “genius genes.” But of the woman who gave birth to one of the world’s most remarkable minds, we possess exactly two facts: 1. Her name was Caterina. 2. Leonardo was taken from her the day after his birth to be brought up, as a bastard, in the Vinci home of Piero’s father, Antonio.

Virtually everything else is conjecture. We don’t know Caterina’s age when she gave birth to Leonardo—fifteen or twenty-five; whether she was a mideastern slave girl or “a girl of good blood”; if Piero loved Caterina, or simply used her; whether she was a Vinci native or an out-of-towner. What I can (and did) imagine is how any woman would feel having her child ripped from her arms one day after he was born, knowing that the household he was going to be raised in would be an unloving one.

Clearly, Piero’s grandfather, who recorded Leonardo’s exact date and time of birth and baptism, believed that Leonardo’s mother had married Antonio “Accattabriga” Buti several years after his illegitimate grandson’s birth, but in those days all sorts of additions and subtractions were made to family rolls for purposes of tax breaks and evasions and business scams, and the da Vincis and Butis did, according to records, do business together.

A. In 1493, according to notations in Leonardo’s writings, an old woman named Caterina came to live with him for a little more than a year before he paid for her funeral. It’s not clear whether it was his mother or a servant. Another phrase written on a notebook page asks, “What does La Caterina want?” Some historians believe the maestro would never have mused about the thoughts and desires of a mere serving woman nor made detailed lists about the costs of her funeral arrangements. Others say that calling her “La Caterina” gives her a certain stature. Still others insist that the “La” is used in a cynical way—that she was a nobody.

Whoever this Caterina might have been, she was the only female member of his household that Leonardo ever mentions in his voluminous notebooks, and she was old enough to be his mother.

A. All of my research added up to an enormous hole in a most fascinating period, within the life of its most compelling personage. Because I’m a writer of historical fiction, these gaping chasms are what I live for. They provide a rare opportunity to create something from little or nothing. I am happily forced to take the tiniest cluster of cells, no larger than a fetal blastula, examine the medium in which it develops, the world into which it is born and grows, its ancestors and associates, until it blossoms into a living, breathing, thinking, feeling human being. With so little known about Caterina, the sky was the limit.

Because I had chosen that she was the parent responsible for not only Leonardo da Vinci’s brilliance, but his sweet temperament and supreme open-mindedness, I was free to give her the best qualities a woman could possibly have. I made her the mother that every child deserves to have—one who, without becoming a martyr, would do anything and everything to protect that child, shower him with love and tenderness, and provide him with every possible opportunity.

Happily for me, what began as sacrifices Caterina made for Leonardo, turned into the greatest adventure a woman in fifteenth-century Italy could imagine in her wildest dreams. Disguising herself as a man, being accepted into the Platonic Academy, becoming the lover of Lorenzo the Magnificent, meeting and conspiring with the greatest minds of the times, were not only boons to Caterina’s character arc, but they were doorways into the topics that I was keen to explore in a book about the period.