The Birth of Venus

by Sarah Dunant

  The night the painter arrived is sharp as an etching in my memory. It is winter, and the stone balustrades have a coating of frost as my sister and I collide on the stairs in our night shifts, hanging over the edge to watch the horses arrive in the main courtyard. It’s late and the house has been asleep, but my father’s homecoming is reason for celebration, not simply for his safe return but because, amid the panniers of samples, there is always special cloth for the family. Plautilla is already beside herself with anticipation, but then she is betrothed and thinking only of her dowry. My brothers, on the other hand, are noticeable by their absence. For all our family’s good name and fine cloth, Tomaso and Luca live more like feral cats than citizens, sleeping by day and hunting by night. Our house slave Erila, the font of all gossip, says they are the reason that good women should never be seen in the streets after dark. Nevertheless, when my father finds they are gone there will be trouble.

  But not yet. For now we are all caught in the wonder of the moment. Firebrands light the air as the grooms calm the horses, their snorting breath steaming into the freezing air. Father is already dismounted, his face streaked with grime, a smile as round as a cupola as he waves upward to us and then turns to my mother as she comes down the stairs to greet him, her red velvet robe tied fast across her chest and her hair free and flowing down her back like a golden river. There is noise and light and the sweet sense of safety everywhere, but not shared by everyone. Astride the last horse sits a lanky young man, his cape wrapped like a bolt of cloth around him, the cold and travel fatigue tipping him dangerously forward in the saddle.

  I remember as the groom approached him to take the reins he awoke with a start, his hands clutching them back as if fearful of attack, and my father had to go to him to calm him. I was too full of my own self then to realize how strange it must have been for him. I had not heard yet how different the North was, how the damp and the watery sun changed everything, from the light in the air to the light in one’s soul. Of course I did not know he was a painter then. For me he was just another servant. But my father treated him with care right from the beginning: speaking to him in quiet tones, seeing him off his horse, and picking out a separate room off the back courtyard as his living quarters.

  Later, as my father unpacks the Flemish tapestry for my mother and snaps open the bolts of milk-white embroidered lawn for us (“The women of Rennes go blind early in the service of my daughters’ beauty”), he tells us how he found him, an orphan brought up in a monastery on the edge of the northern sea where the water threatens the land. How his talent with a pen overwhelmed any sense of religious vocation, so the monks had apprenticed him to a master, and when he returned, in gratitude, he painted not simply his own cell but the cells of all the other monks. These paintings so impressed my father that he decided then and there to offer him the job of glorifying our chapel. Though I should add that while he knew his cloth my father was no great connoisseur of art, and I suspect his decision was as much dictated by money, for he always had a good eye for a bargain. As for the painter? Well, as my father put it, there were no more cells for him to paint, and the fame of Florence as the new Rome or Athens of our age would no doubt have spurred him on to see it for himself.

  And so it was that the painter came to live at our house.

  Next morning we went to Santissima Annunziata to give thanks for my father’s safe homecoming. The church is next to the Ospedale degli Innocenti, the foundling hospital where young women place their bastard babies on the wheel for the nuns to care for. As we pass I imagine the cries of the infants as the wheel in the wall turns inward forever, but my father says we are a city of great charity and there are places in the wild North where you find babies amid the rubbish or floating like flotsam down the river.

  We sit together in the central pews. Above our heads hang great model ships donated by those who have survived shipwrecks. My father was in one once, though he was not rich enough at the time to command a memorial in church, and on this last voyage he suffered only common seasickness. He and my mother sit ramrod straight and you can feel their minds on God’s munificence. We children are less holy. Plautilla is still flighty with the thought of her gifts, while Tomaso and Luca look like they would prefer to be in bed, though my father’s disapproval keeps them alert.

  When we return, the house smells of feast-day food—the sweetness of roast meat and spiced gravies curling down the stairs from the upper kitchen to the courtyard below. We eat as afternoon fades into evening. First we thank God; then we stuff ourselves: boiled capon, roast pheasant, trout, and fresh pastas followed by saffron pudding and egg custards with burned sugar coating. Everyone is on their best behavior. Even Luca holds his fork properly, though you can see his fingers itch to pick up the bread and trawl it through the sauce.

  Already I am beside myself with excitement at the thought of our new houseguest. Flemish painters are much admired in Florence for their precision and their sweet spirituality. “So he will paint us all, Father? We will have to sit for him, yes?”

  “Indeed. That is partly why he is come. I am trusting he will make us a glorious memento of your sister’s wedding.”

  “In which case he’ll paint me first!” Plautilla is so pleased that she spits milk pudding on the tablecloth. “Then Tomaso as eldest, then Luca, and then Alessandra. Goodness, Alessandra, you will be grown even taller by then.”

  Luca looks up from his plate and grins with his mouth full as if this is the wittiest joke he has ever heard. But I am fresh from church and filled with God’s charity to all my family. “Still. He had better not take too long. I heard that one of the daughters-in-law of the Tornabuoni family was dead from childbirth by the time Ghirlandaio unveiled her in the fresco.”

  “No fear of that with you. You’d have to get a husband first.” Next to me Tomaso’s insult is so mumbled only I can hear it.

  “What is that you say, Tomaso?” My mother’s voice is quiet but sharp.

  He puts on his most cherubic expression. “I said, ‘I have a dreadful thirst.’ Pass the wine flagon, dear sister.”

  “Of course, brother.” I pick it up, but as it moves toward him it slips out of my hands and the falling liquid splatters his new tunic.

  “Ah, Mama!” he explodes. “She did that on purpose!”

  “I did not!”

  “She—”

  “Children, children. Our father is tired and you are both too loud.”

  The word children does its work on Tomaso and he falls sullenly silent. In the space that follows, the sound of Luca’s open-mouth chewing becomes enormous. My mother stirs impatiently in her seat. Our manners tax her profoundly. Just as in the city’s menagerie the lion tamer uses a whip to control behavior, my mother has perfected the Look. She uses it now on Luca, though he is so engrossed in the pleasure of his food that today it takes a kick under the table from me to gain his attention. We are her life’s work, her children, and there is still so much more to be done with us.

  “Still,” I say, when it feels as if we may talk again, “I cannot wait to meet him. Oh, he must be most grateful to you, Father, for bringing him here. As we all are. It will be our honor and duty as a Christian family to care for him and make him feel at home in our great city.”

  My father frowns and exchanges a quick glance with my mother. He has been away a long time and has no doubt forgotten how much his younger daughter must say whatever comes into her mind. “I think he is quite capable of caring for himself, Alessandra,” he says firmly.

  I read the warning, but there is too much at stake to stop me now. I take a breath. “I have heard it said that Lorenzo the Magnificent thinks so much of the artist Botticelli that he has him eat at his table.”

  There is a small glittering silence. This time the Look stills me. I drop my eyes and concentrate on my plate again. Next to me I feel Tomaso’s smirk of triumph.

  Yet it is true enough. Sandro Botticelli does sit at the table of Lorenzo de’ Medici. And the sculptor Donatel
lo used to walk the city in a scarlet robe given in honor of his contribution to the Republic by Cosimo, Lorenzo’s grandfather. My mother has often told me how as a young girl she would see him, saluted by all, people making way for him—though that might have been as much to do with his bad temper as his talent. But the sad fact is that though Florence is rife with painters I have never met one. While our family is not as strict as some, the chances of an unmarried daughter finding herself in the company of men of any description, let alone artisans, are severely limited. Of course that has not stopped me from meeting them in my mind. Everyone knows there are places in the city where workshops of art exist. The great Lorenzo himself has founded such a one and filled its rooms and gardens with sculpture and paintings from his own classical collection. I imagine a building full of light, the smell of colors like a simmering stew, the space as endless as the artists’ imaginations.

  My own drawings up till now have been silverpoint, laboriously scratched into boxwood, or black chalk on paper when I can find it. Most I have destroyed as unworthy and the best are hidden well away (it was made clear to me early that my sister’s cross-stitching would gain more praise than any of my sketches). So I have no idea whether I can paint or not. I am like Icarus without wings. But the desire to fly was very strong in me. I think I was always looking for a Daedalus.

  I WAS YOUNG THEN, AS YOU KNOW: FOURTEEN THAT SAME SPRING. The most preliminary study of mathematics would reveal that I had been conceived in the heat of the summer, an inauspicious time for the beginning of a child. During her pregnancy, when the city was in turmoil during the Pazzi conspiracy, there was a rumor that my mother had seen bloodlust and violence in the streets. I once overheard a servant suggesting that my willfulness might be the result of that transgression. Or it could have been the wet nurse they sent me to. Tomaso, who is always rigorous with the truth when it contains spite, told me she had later been arraigned for prostitution, so who knows what humors and lusts I suckled at her breasts? Though Erila says it is only his jealousy speaking, his way of paying me back for a thousand slights inflicted in the classroom.

  Whatever the reasons, I was a singular child, more suited to study and argument than duty. My sister, who was sixteen months older and had begun to bleed the year before, was promised to a man of good family, and there had even been talk of a similarly illustrious liaison for me (as our fortune rose so did my father’s marriage expectations), despite my emerging intractability.

  In the weeks following the painter’s arrival my mother was eagle-eyed on my behalf, keeping me closeted in study or helping with Plautilla’s wedding wardrobe. But then she was called away to Fiesole to her sister, who was so torn apart by the birth of an oversize baby that she was in need of female counsel. She went, leaving strict instructions that I should go about my studies and do exactly what my tutors and my elder sister told me. I of course agreed that I would.

  I ALREADY KNEW WHERE TO FIND HIM. LIKE A BAD REPUBLIC, OUR house praises virtue publicly but rewards vice privately and gossip could always be had at a price, though in this case my Erila gave it for free.

  “The talk is that there isn’t any. Nobody knows anything. He keeps his own company, eats in his room, and speaks to no one. Though Maria says she’s seen him pacing the courtyard in the middle of the night.”

  It is afternoon. Erila has unpinned my hair and drawn the curtains in readiness for my rest and is about to leave when she turns and looks at me directly. “We both know it is forbidden for you to visit him, yes?”

  I nod, my eyes on the carved wood of the bedstead: a rose with as many petals as my small lies. There is a pause in which I would like to think she looks upon my disobedience sympathetically. “I shall be back to wake you in two hours. Rest well.”

  I wait till the sunshine has stilled the house, then slide down the stairs and into the back courtyard. The heat is already clinging to the stones and his door is open, presumably to let in what little breeze there might be. I move silently across the baked courtyard and slip inside.

  The interior is gloomy, the shafts of daylight spinning dust particles in the air. It is a dreary little room with just a table and chair and a series of pails in one corner and a connecting door to a smaller inner chamber ajar. I push it open farther. The darkness is profound and my ears work before my eyes. His breathing is long and even. He is lying on a pallet by the wall, his hand flung out over strewn papers. The only other men I have seen sleeping are my brothers, and their snores are harsh. The very gentleness of this breath disturbs me. My stomach grows tight with the sound, making me feel like the intruder I am, and I pull the door closed behind me.

  In contrast the outer room is brighter now. Above the desk are a series of tattered papers: drawings of the chapel taken from the builders’ plans, torn and grimy with masonry marks. To the side hangs a wooden crucifix, crudely carved but striking, with Christ’s body hanging so heavily off the cross that you can feel the weight of his flesh hanging from his nails. Beneath it are some sketches, but as I pick them up the opposite wall catches my eye. There is something drawn there, directly onto the flaking plaster: two figures, half realized, to the left a willowy Angel, feathered wings light as smoke billowing out behind him, and opposite a Madonna, her body unnaturally tall and slender, floating ghostly free, her feet lifted high off the ground. I move closer to get a better look. The floor is thick with the ends of candles stuck in puddles of melted wax. Does he sleep through the day and work at night? It might explain Mary’s attenuated figure, her body lengthening in the flicker of the candlelight. But he has had enough light to enliven her face. Her looks are northern, her hair pulled fiercely back to show a wide forehead, so that her head reminds me of a perfectly shaped pale egg. She is staring wide-eyed at the Angel, and I can feel a fluttering excitement in her, like a child who has been given some great gift and cannot quite comprehend its good fortune. While perhaps she ought not to be so forward with God’s messenger, there is such joy in her attention that it is almost contagious. It makes me think of a sketch I am working up on my own Annunciation and brings a flush of shame to my face at its clumsiness.

  The noise is more like a growl than any words. He must have risen from his bed silently, because as I whirl around he is standing in the doorway. What do I remember of this moment? His body is long and lanky, his undershirt crumpled and torn. His face is broad under a tangle of long dark hair, and he is taller than I remember from that first night and somehow wilder. He is still half asleep, and his body has the tang of dried sweat about it. I am used to living in a house of rose- and orange-flower scented air; he smells of the street. I really think until that moment I had believed that artists somehow came directly from God and therefore had more of the spirit and less of man about them.

  The shock of his physicality sluices any remaining courage out of me. He stands blinking in the light, then suddenly lurches himself toward me, wrenching the papers out of my hand.

  “How dare you?” I yelp, as he shoves me to the side. “I am the daughter of your patron, Paolo Cecchi!”

  He doesn’t seem to hear. He rushes to the table, grabbing the remaining sketches, all the time muttering in a low voice, “Noli tangere . . . noli tangere.” Of course. There is one fact my father forgot to tell us. Our painter has grown up amid Latin-speaking monks, and while his eyes might work here his ears do not.

  “I didn’t touch anything,” I bark back in terror. “I was simply looking. And if you are to be accepted here, you will have to learn to talk in our language. Latin is the tongue of priests and scholars, not painters.”

  My retort, or maybe it is the force of my fluent Latin, silences him. He stands frozen, his body shaking. It is hard to know which one of us was more scared at that moment. I would have fled had it not been for the fact that across the courtyard I spot my mother’s bed servant coming out from the storeroom. While I have allies in the servants’ quarters I also have enemies, and Angelica’s loyalties have long since proved to lie elsewhere. If I am
discovered now there would be no telling what outrage it would cause in the house.

  “Be assured I never harmed your drawings,” I say hurriedly, anxious to avoid another outburst. “I am interested in the chapel. I simply came to see how your designs were progressing.”

  He mutters something again. I wait for him to repeat it. It takes a long time. Finally he raises his eyes to look at me, and as I stare at him I become aware for the first time of how young he is—older than I am, yes, but surely not by many years—and how white and sallow his skin. Of course I know that foreign lands breed foreign colors. My own Erila is burned black by the desert sands of North Africa from where she came, and in those days you could find any number of shades in the markets of the city, so much was Florence a honeypot for trade and commerce. But this whiteness is different, having about it the feel of damp stone and sunless skies. A single day under the Florentine sun would surely shrivel and burn his delicate surface.

  When he finally speaks he has stopped shaking, but the effort has cost him. “I paint in God’s service,” he says, with the air of a novitiate delivering a litany he has been taught but not fully understood, “and it is forbidden for me to talk with women.”