The Birth of Venus (5 page)

Five

I
N ITS RAW STATE THE ROOM HAS LITTLE OF GOD ABOUT
it. He has cordoned off a small part of the nave where the sunlight comes through the side window, falling directly in a broad band of gold. He himself sits in the shade, by a small table on which is paper, pen and ink, and some newly sharpened stalks of black chalk.

I come in slowly, with old Ludovica behind me. Maria, alas, has been struck by an acute attack of indigestion. You must believe me when I say that though I wished her ill enough that day I had nothing to do with the amount of food she consumed or the sickness it left her with. Looking back, it has made me wonder at the strange ways in which God works. Unless you believe that this, like the hangman’s noose, was not an example of His handiwork.

He stands up as we come in, his eyes on the ground. Ludovica’s gouty age makes our progress slow, and I have already asked for a comfortable chair to be placed for her nearby. At this time of day it will only be a matter of time before she falls asleep and then no doubt forgets that she has done so. She is of invaluable assistance to me during such moments.

If he remembers our last meeting he does nothing to show it. He gestures me to a small dais in the light, with a high-backed wooden chair placed at an angle so that our eye lines will not cross. I take a step up, already self-conscious about my height. I think we are as nervous as each other.

“Shall I sit?”

“As you wish,” he mumbles, still not looking at me directly. I arrange myself in a pose I have seen from the women in the chapel portraits, back straight, head high, my hands folded across my lap. I am not sure what to do with my eyes. For a while I look straight ahead, but the view is dull and I drop my gaze to the left, from where I can see the lower half of his body. The leather at the bottom of his hose, I notice, is badly worn, but the shape of his leg is good, if a little long. Like my own. As I sit there I become aware of the odor of him, much stronger this time: an earth smell, mixed with sourness, almost a kind of rotting about it. It makes me wonder what he has been doing the night before to have such a stench upon him. Clearly he does not wash enough—it is something I had heard my father remark about foreigners—but to draw attention to it now would stop any chance we might have of conversation. I resolve to leave it to Plautilla. The stink will almost certainly drive her mad.

Time passes. It is warm there, under the sun. I glance up at Ludovica. She has brought some embroidery, and it is sitting on her lap. She puts her needle down and watches us for a while, but she has never shown much interest in art even when her eyes were good enough to see it. I count slowly to fifty, and by thirty-nine I hear her breathing start to rumble in her chest. In the silence of the chapel she sounds like a great cat purring. I turn to look at her, then glance across at him.

In today’s light I can study him better. For a man who has spent the night wandering the city he looks well enough. His hair is brushed, and if its style is too long for current Florentine fashion, it is still thick and healthy, his complexion even paler against its richness. He is long and thin, like me, but it is less a fault in a man. He has broad fine cheekbones, and his eyes are almond shaped and have almost a marble effect, gray-green flecked with black, so that I am reminded of the stare of a cat. He is not like any man I have seen before. I do not even know if he is good-looking, though that may be more to do with the way he keeps himself hidden inside. Apart from my brothers and my tutors he is the first man I have ever been in such close proximity to, and I can feel my heart thudding inside my chest. At least sitting I am less like a giraffe. Though I am not sure he notices. While he is looking at me, he doesn’t seem aware of me at all. The light shifts around the dais to the intermittent scratching of the chalk on the page, each line careful, considered, the result of a singular communion between the eye and the hand. It is a vibrant kind of silence that I am familiar with. I think of all the hours I have spent in similar pinpoint concentration, my fingers bent around a sharpened pebble of black chalk, trying to capture the head of a sleeping dog on the stairs or the strange ugliness of my own naked foot, and it makes me more patient than I might otherwise have been.

“My mother says you have had the fever?” I say at last, as if we were relatives who had been talking for an hour and just fallen silent that very second. When it is clear he is not going to answer I think about bringing up his nocturnal wanderings, but I can’t decide what to say. The sound of his chalk continues. I move my eyes back to focus on the chapel wall. The quiet is now so profound that I begin to think we will be here forever. Though eventually Ludovica will wake and then it will be too late. . . .

“You know, if you are to succeed here, painter, you may have to speak a little. Even with women.”

His eyes flick to one side so that I know he takes the words in, but even as I say them they seem too crude and I feel embarrassed for myself. After a while I stir in my seat, shifting my pose. He stops, waiting for me to be still again. I make a little noise. The more I try for stillness the more uncomfortable I feel. I stretch myself farther. He waits again. Only now I am alert to the possibilities of mischief. If he will not talk, I will not sit properly. As I settle I bring my left hand up in front of my face, deliberately obscuring his view. Hands. They are always difficult. So bony and yet fleshy at the same time. Even the greatest of our painters have trouble with them. Yet immediately he is drawing again, this time such insistent scratching that the noise makes me hungry for paper.

After a while I get bored with my failure and put my hand back into my lap, flexing the fingers upward till they stand up like monstrous spider legs upon my skirts. I watch the knuckles go white and see a single vein throb up against the skin. How strange the body is, so full of itself. When I was younger we had a Tartar slave girl, a fierce character who suffered from fits; when they came upon her she would fall rigid on the ground in spasm, her head flung so far back that her neck strained and stretched till it looked like that of a horse and her fingers clawed at the floor. Once she made foam come out of her mouth and we had to put something between her teeth so she did not swallow her own tongue. Luca, who I now think was always more interested in the Devil than God, believed she had been entered by a demon, but my mother said she was ill and should be left to recover. My father sold her later, though I am not sure he was entirely honest about her health. Even if it was illness it could have easily passed for possession. If one had to paint Christ casting out devils, she would have made a perfect model.

Ludovica is snoring loudly. It will take a thunderbolt to rouse her. It is now or never. I stand up. “May I see what you have made of me?”

I feel his body go rigid. I can see he wants to hide the paper, but he also knows it would not be proper. What can he do? Pick up his equipment and run out? Attack me again? He would be on a mule back to the northern wastes if he did that. And underneath all the silence I do not think he is stupid.

My courage deserts me at the table edge. He is so close I can see the dark stubble on his face, and the sweet rank smell of him is acute now. It makes me think of decay and death, and I remember his violence from the time before. I glance nervously at the door. What would happen if someone came in? Maybe he is thinking the same thing. In one awkward move he pushes the board across the table, face up, so that I can see it without moving any farther toward him.

The page is filled with sketches: a study of my full head, then parts of my face, my eyes, the lids half lowered, in a manner caught between shy and sly. He has not flattered me, as I do sometimes with Plautilla as a way of buying her silence when she sits for me, but instead I am myself, alive with both mischief and nerves, as if I cannot speak but cannot stay silent. Already he knows more of me than I do of him.

And then there are the sketches of my hand held up to my face, palm and back, my fingers rounded little columns of living flesh. From nature to the page. His skill makes me giddy.

“Ah,” I say, and there is pain as well as wonder in my voice. “Who taught you this?”

I look at my fingers again, real and drawn. And I want more than anything to see how he does it, to watch the way each mark goes onto the page. For that alone I would risk being closer. I look at his face. If it is not arrogance, it has to be shyness that keeps him so silent. What must it be like to be so shy that you find it hard to speak?

“It must be difficult for you here,” I say quietly. “I think if I were you I might be homesick.”

And because I do not expect him to reply it registers like a small thrill inside me to hear his voice, which is softer than I remember.

“It’s the color. Where I come from everything is gray. Sometimes you can’t tell where the sky ends and the sea begins. The color makes everything different.”

“Oh, but surely Florence is as it must have been then. I mean in the Holy Land, where Our Lord lived. All that sunlight. That’s what the Crusaders tell us. Their colors must have been as bright as ours. You should visit my father’s warehouse sometime. When the bolts of cloth are finished and stacked together it is like walking through a rainbow.”

It strikes me that this is probably the longest speech that he has ever heard from a woman. I feel the panic rising in him again and remember his earlier wildness, the way his whole body had shaken in front of me. “You mustn’t worry about me,” I blurt out. “I know I talk a lot but I am only fourteen, which makes me a child rather than a woman, so I cannot possibly harm you. And besides, I love art as much as you do.”

I put out both my hands and lay them gently on the table between us, spreading my fingers loosely on the wood so there is both tension and relaxation to the pose. “Since you are studying hands, perhaps you would like to have a record of them resting? They are easier to see than in my lap.” And I think my mother would have approved of the humility in my voice.

I stand very still, eyes lowered, waiting. I see the board slide off the table and a crayon move from nearby. When I hear its sounds on the page I risk looking up. I can only see the paper at a slant but it is enough to watch it take shape: dozens of tiny fluid strokes raining down onto the page, no time for thought or consideration, no breath between the seeing and the doing. It is as if he is reading my hands from under the skin, building the image from the inside out.

I let him work for a few moments. The silence between us seems a little easier now. “Mother says you have been visiting our churches.” He gives the slightest of nods. “Which frescoes did you like most?”

The hand stops. I watch his face. “Santa Maria Novella.
The Life of John the Baptist,
” he says firmly.

“Ghirlandaio. Yes, his Capella Maggiore is one of the wonders of the city.”

He pauses. “And . . . another chapel across the river.”

“Santo Spírito? Santa Maria del Carmine?”

He nods at the second name. Of course. The Brancacci Chapel in the convent of the Carmine. My mother has directed him well, no doubt using her connections and his status as a lay monk to gain him access to usually forbidden areas. “The frescoes of the life of Saint Peter. They are also highly thought of here. Masaccio died before he could complete them you know. He was twenty-seven years old.” I can see this fact impresses him. “I was taken there once as a child, but I barely remember it. Which did you like best?”

He frowns as if the question is too hard. “There are two scenes from the Garden of Eden. In the second, when they are expelled, Adam and Eve are both crying—no, more . . . howling—as they are banished. I have never seen such sorrow at the loss of God’s grace.”

“What about before the Fall? Are they as joyful as they are later sad?”

He shakes his head. “The joy is not as strong. It comes from a different painter’s hand. And the serpent hanging from the tree has a woman’s face on it.”

“Oh, yes, yes.” I nod, our eyes meeting, and for the moment he is too interested to look away. “My mother has told me of this. Though you know there is no scriptural evidence for such a rendering.”

But the mention of the Devil in woman has pulled him back into himself again, and he falls silent. The scratching starts again. I glance down at the board. Where did such talent come from? Is it really God-given?

“Did you always have such skill, painter?” I ask softly.

“I don’t remember.” His voice is a murmur. “The father who taught me told me I was born with God in my hands to make up for my lack of parents.”

“Oh, and I am sure he was right. You know in Florence we believe that great art is the study of God in nature. That is the view of Alberti, one of our foremost scholars. Also Cennini, the artist. Their treatises on painting are very widely read here. I have copies in Latin if you would like. . . .” And while I know such knowledge is a way of showing off, I still cannot resist it. “Alberti tells how the beauty of the human form reflects the beauty of God. Though of course he owes such insight partly to Plato. But then you may not have read Plato either. If you are to be noticed here in Florence you cannot ignore him. Though he never knew Christ, he has much to say about the human soul. The understanding of God in the Ancients has been one of our great Florentine discoveries.”

My mother, had she been here, would by now have had her head in her hands at my lack of modesty, both for myself and my city, but I know he is listening. I can tell from the way his hand has stopped on the page. I think he might have spoken more had not Ludovica given a sudden loud snort, which went some way toward waking her up. We both freeze.

“Well,” I say quickly, stepping back, “perhaps we should stop now. But I can come again and you can practice on my hands if you like.”

But as he puts down the board and I look at the drawing, I realize he has already taken everything he needs.

Six

I
TOOK THE COPIES OF ALBERTI AND CENNINI OUT OF MY
chest and placed them on the bed. I could not part with Cennini. I depended on it for everything from the fall of drapery to the colors I would never get to mix. But Alberti he could have.

I made Erila my messenger, with the offer of a red silk scarf.

“No.”

“How can you say no? You love this color. And it loves you.”

“No.”

“But why? It is simple. You just go down and give it to him. You know the room as well as I.”

“And if your mother finds out?”

“She won’t.”

“But if she does. She will know it is from you and she will know it is by me. And she will have my skin for a pouch.”

“That is not true.” I search for the words. “She . . . she will understand that we are both about the business of art. That our acquaintance has only God’s purpose about it.”

“Ho! That’s not how old Ludovica tells it.”

“What do you mean? She was asleep. She couldn’t see anything.” She is silent now, but I have jumped too quickly and she begins to smile. “Oh, you cheat, Erila. She didn’t tell you anything.”

“No. But you just did.”

“We talked of art, Erila. I mean it. Of the chapels and the churches and the colors in the sunshine. I tell you he has God in his fingers.” I paused. “Though his manners are impossible.”

“That’s what worries me. You’ve too much in common, you two.”

But she took the book anyway.

THE FOLLOWING DAYS WERE FRANTIC ONES. WHILE MY MOTHER AND
the maids prepared Plautilla’s wardrobe, Plautilla spent endless hours on the preparation of herself, lightening her hair and bleaching her skin until she began to look more like a ghost than a bride. The next night when I got to the window it was late; I remember because Plautilla was in such a state of agitation that it took her hours to fall asleep and I heard the bells of Sant’ Ambrogio strike the hour. The painter appeared almost immediately, dressed in the same enveloping cloak, sliding into the gloom with the same determined stride. But this time I was equally determined to wait up for him. It was a clear spring night, the sky a full map of stars, so when the thunder arrived later it seemed to come out of nowhere, the lightning that followed it scorching a gigantic cross-stitch in the sky.

“Whoa!”

“Yeah!”

I saw them as they rounded the corner, my brothers and their entourage, like a gang of pirates unsteady on dry land, slapping and hugging one another as they tottered down the street. I slid back from the window, but Tomaso has eyes like a falcon and I heard his insolent whistle, the one he uses to summon the dogs.

“Hey, little sister?” His voice boomed off the cobbles. “Little sister!”

I shoved my head out and hissed at him to be quiet. But he was too drunk to register. “Whoa . . . Look at her, boys. A brain as big as the inside of Santa Maria del Fiore, and a face like a dog’s arse.”

Around him his friends yelped their approval of his wit. “Keep your voice down or Father will hear you,” I spit back, covering my injury with anger.

“If he does, you’ll be the one in trouble, not me.”

“Where have you been?”

“Why don’t you ask Luca?” But Luca was having trouble standing unaided. “We found him with his hands on Santa Caterina’s stone tits, spewing his stomach out over her feet. He’d probably have been arrested for blasphemy if we hadn’t got to him first.”

The next flash of lightning lit up the sky like daylight. The thunder that followed was close, not one but two cracks, the second truly deafening, as if the very ground itself had split beneath it. Of course we all knew of such things: the way that sometimes the earth can slice open and the Devil grab a few lost souls through the gashes in between. I got to my feet in sudden terror, but it was already over.

Down below they were similarly startled, though they covered it with whoops and fake horror. “Yeah! Earth shake,” yelled Luca.

“No. Cannon fire.” Tomaso was laughing. “It’s the French army come over the Alps on their way to conquer Naples. What a glorious prospect. Think of that, Sister, rape and pillage. I hear the uncouth French are hot to pluck young virgins from the new Athens.”

From the garden at the back of the house the peacocks started up, a screeching fit to wake the dead. Along the street I saw windows opening, and in the direction of the cathedral a glow of light appeared. The painter would have to wait. I was back across the floor and up the stairs within seconds. As I slid into my bed I heard my father’s voice rise up in anger from below.

Next morning the house was alive with the news. How in the deepest night a shaft of lightning had struck the lantern of the great dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, cracking open a block of marble and hurtling it to earth with such force that half of it crashed through the roof, the other half crushing a nearby house though miraculously leaving the family untouched.

But worse was to come. For that same night, Lorenzo the Magnificent, scholar, diplomat, politician, and Florence’s most noble citizen and benefactor, was lying in his villa in Careggi, crippled by gout and stomach pain. When he heard what had happened in the city, he sent to find out which way the stone had fallen, and when they told him he closed his eyes and said, “It was coming this way. I shall die tonight.”

And so he did.

THE NEWS HIT THE CITY HARDER THAN ANY THUNDERBOLT. THE
morning after, my brothers and I sat in an airless study as our Greek teacher stumbled over the words of Pericles’ funeral oration, his tears watermarking the pages of the specially copied manuscript, and though we later made fun of his lugubrious tone, I know at the time even Luca was moved. My father closed his business for the day, and from the servants’ quarters I heard Maria and Ludovica wailing. Lorenzo de’ Medici had been the city’s foremost citizen since before I was born, and his death blew a cold wind through all of our lives.

His body was brought down to the monastery of San Marco for the night, where the nobler of the citizenry were allowed to view it. Our family was one of those who made the pilgrimage. Inside the chapel the casket was so high up I could barely see into it. The corpse was dressed modestly, as befits a family which, though it ruled Florence in private, had always sought to appear otherwise in public, and his countenance was peaceful, with no sign of the stomach agonies he was said to have suffered at the end (for which Tomaso gossiped that his doctor had prescribed pulverized pearls and diamonds; later, those who disliked him would say he died swallowing what remained of his private wealth so the city could not get its hands on it). But my central memory was how ugly he was. Though I must have seen his profile on a dozen medallions, it was much more arresting in the flesh: the way his flattened nose reached down almost to his lower lip and his chin jutted up like the headland on a rocky coast.

As I stood gawping, Tomaso whispered in my ear that his hideousness was its own aphrodisiac, driving women wild with desire, while his love poetry ignited fire in the coldest of female hearts. The sight of him made me think again of that day in Santa Maria Novella when my mother had drawn attention to the making of history with Ghirlandaio’s great chapel. And because this was clearly such a moment, I turned to find her in the throng and so caught her unawares, her tears shining like crystal drops in the candlelight. I had never seen her cry before, and the sight of it disturbed me more than the corpse.

San Marco’s monastery where the body lay had been Lorenzo’s grandfather’s favorite retreat, and the family had spent a fortune endowing it. But its new prior had marked himself out as an independent thinker, railing against the Medici for promoting the works of pagan scholars over the word of God. Some said he had even refused to give Lorenzo absolution on his deathbed, but I think that was scurrilous rumor, the kind that spreads like fire through a crowd on a hot afternoon. Certainly that day Prior Girolamo Savonarola confined himself only to the most respectful of words, preaching a passionate sermon on the transience of life compared to the eternity of God’s grace and exhorting us to live each day wearing the eyeglasses of death so we would not be tempted by earthly pleasures and thus be ever ready for our Savior. To which there was much nodding and agreement in the pews, though I suspect those who could afford it still went back to the smells of rich food and good living. I know we did.

Because both our own and Plautilla’s future family were well-known Medici supporters, the wedding was postponed. My sister, never one to be willingly upstaged, and whose nervous system was already teetering on the edge of collapse, now wandered round the house with a face as bleached as a bedsheet and a temper as black as the Baptistery Devil.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. Lorenzo’s death put the city out of sorts in many ways. In the coming weeks Erila brought back all manner of cruel stories: how two of the lions, the very symbol of our greatness, had fought and killed each other in their cages behind the Piazza della Signoria the day before his death, and how the next day a woman had gone crazy during mass in Santa Maria Novella, running down the aisles screaming that a wild bull was charging toward her with its horns on fire and threatening that it would bring the building down on top of them all. Long after they took her away, people said they could hear her screams echoing around the nave.

But worst of all was the body of the young girl that the night watches of Santa Croce found in the marshland between the church and the river a week later. Erila wove it in all its gory detail for Plautilla and me as we sat over our embroidery in the garden under the shade of the pergola, the yellow spring broom all around us and the smells of lilac and lavender making the stench of the story somehow even worse.

“The corpse was so rotten that the flesh was falling off the bones. The watchmen had to hold camphored cloths to their noses just to search it out. They say she’d been dead since the night of the thunderbolt. Whoever did it hadn’t even buried her properly. She was rank in a pool of her own blood and the rats and dogs had got to her. Half her stomach was eaten away and there were bite marks everywhere.”

The proclamation they read out later in the market square said she had been grossly assaulted, and it called upon the perpetrator to come forward for the sake of his own soul and the good reputation of the Republic. That young girls were violated and sometimes even died of it was a sad but acknowledged truth of the city. The Devil found his way into many men’s hearts through their loins, and such outrages only proved the efficacy of the traditions that kept respectable men and women so strictly separated until married. But this crime was different. According to Erila, the damage done had been so dreadful, her sexual organs so cut and torn about, that no one could be quite sure if it was man or beast that had been responsible.

GIVEN THE HORROR OF IT, IT DIDN
’
T REALLY SURPRISE ANYONE
when, months later, the notices fell from the boards, streaked with rain and trampled underfoot by pigs and goats, and no one had come forward to confess to the outrage that left such a stain upon the city’s soul.