The Birth of Venus

by Sarah Dunant

  “Really,” I say, stung by the snub. “That might explain why you have so little idea of how to paint them.” I cast a glance toward the elongated Madonna on the wall.

  Even in the gloom I can feel how the words hurt him. For a moment I think he might attack me again, or break his own rules and answer me back, but instead he turns on his heel and, clutching the papers to his chest, stumbles back into the inner room, the door slamming closed behind him.

  “Your rudeness is as bad as your ignorance, sir,” I call after him, to cover my confusion. “I don’t know what you have learned in the North, but here in Florence our artists are taught to celebrate the human body as an echo of the perfection of God. You would do well to study the city’s art before you risk scribbling on its walls.”

  And in a flurry of self-righteousness I stride from the room into the sunlight, not knowing if my voice has penetrated through the door.

  Two

  SEVEN, EIGHT, TURN, STEP—NO . . . NO, NO. . . . ALESSANDRA . . . no. you are not listening to the beat inside the music.”

  I hate my dancing teacher. He is small and vicious, like a rat, and he walks as if he has something held between his knees, though it is fair to say that on the floor he is better at playing the woman than I am, his steps perfect, his hands as expressive as butterflies.

  My humiliation would be bad enough even without the fact that, in the lessons leading up to her wedding, Plautilla and I are joined by Tomaso and Luca. There is a large repertoire to get through and we need them as partners or one of us will have to play the man, and while I am the taller I am also the one with three feet and most in need of tutoring. Fortunately, Luca is as clumsy as I am.

  “And Luca, you do not help by simply standing there. You must take her hand and guide her around you.”

  “I can’t. Her fingers are covered in ink. Anyway, she’s too tall for me.” He wails, as if it were a fault of my own making.

  It appears I have grown again. If not in fact, then in my brother’s imagination. And he must bring it to everyone’s attention so we can all laugh about how ungainly it makes me on the dance floor.

  “That is not true. I am exactly the same size as I was last week.”

  “Luca’s right.” Tomaso is never at a loss for words if he can use them as darts toward me. “She has grown. It is like trying to dance with a giraffe.” Luca’s snort of laughter spurs him on. “Really. Even the eyes are alike. Look—deep pools of black with eyelashes as thick as box hedges.”

  And though it is shocking it is also funny, so that even the dancing teacher, who is paid to be civil with us all, finds it hard not to laugh. If it were not about myself I would laugh too, because it is clever, what he says about my eyes. We had all seen the giraffe, of course. It had been the most exotic animal our city possessed, a gift from the sultan of somewhere or other to the great Lorenzo. It lived with the lions in the menagerie behind the Piazza della Signoria but was paraded out on feast days, when it was taken to the city’s nunneries so that devout women married to God could see the wonder of His hand in nature. Our street was on the way to the convents in the east of the city, and more than once we had stood at the first-floor window and watched its giddy progress, its stilty legs faltering over the cobbles. And I must say its eyes were indeed a little like my own: deep and dark, too big for its face, and fringed by a box hedge of lashes. Though I am not yet so strange or so tall that the comparison is fair.

  There was a time when such an insult might have made me cry, but as I have grown older my skin has become tougher. Dancing is one of many things I should be good at and am not, unlike my sister. Plautilla can move across the floor like water and sing a stave of music like a songbird, while I, who can translate both Latin and Greek faster than she or my brothers can read it, have clubfeet on the dance floor and a voice like a crow. Though I swear if I were to paint the scale I could do it in a flash: shining gold leaf for the top notes, falling through ochers and reds into hot purple and deepest blue.

  But today I am saved from further torment. As the dancing teacher starts humming the opening notes, the vibrations in his little nose sounding like a cross between a Jew’s harp and an angry bee, there is a thunder of knocking on the downstairs main doors and then a flurry of voices, and old Ludovica puffs her way into the room, grinning.

  “My lady Plautilla, it’s here. The marriage cassone has arrived. You and your sister Alessandra are called to your mother’s room immediately.”

  And now my giraffe legs take me out faster than Plautilla’s gazelle ones. There are some compensations to beanpole height.

  IT IS ALL CHAOS AND CONFUSION. THE WOMAN AT THE FRONT OF the crowd is toppling over, a hand flung out wildly in front as if to steady herself. She is half undressed, her undershirt diaphanous around bare legs, her left foot naked on the stone ground. In contrast, the man beside her is fully clothed. He has a particularly fine leg and a richly embroidered brocade jerkin; if you look carefully you can spot pearls shimmering in the cloth. His face is close to hers, his arms clasped hard around her waist, the fingers knotted together to catch her falling weight better. While there is violence in the pose, there is also a grace, as if they too might be dancing. To the right a group of women, nobly dressed, are huddled together. Some of the men have already infiltrated this group; one has his hand on a woman’s dress, another his lips so close to hers that they are surely kissing. I recognize one of my father’s gold-veined fabrics in her skirt and fashionably slit sleeves and go back to the girl at the front. She is far too pretty to be Plautilla (he wouldn’t have dared to undress her, surely?) but her loose hair is fairer than the others, a transformation of color the like of which my sister would gladly die for. Maybe the man is supposed to be Maurizio, in which case the portrait is a blatant piece of flattery to his leg.

  For a while none of us say anything.

  “It is an impressive work.” My mother’s voice, when it finally comes, is quiet but brooks no disagreement. “Your father will be pleased. It brings honor to our family.”

  “Oh, it’s magnificent,” Plautilla twitters, happily by her side.

  I am not so sure. I find the whole thing somewhat vulgar. To begin with, the marriage chest is too large, more like a sarcophagus. While the paintings themselves are of some delicacy, the stucco and ornamentation is so elaborate—there is no inch of space that isn’t covered in gold leaf—it takes away from the pleasure of the art. I was surprised that my mother was so deceived, though I later came to realize that her eye was a subtle thing, as much trained to read the nuance of status as of aesthetics.

  “It makes me wonder if we should have employed Bartolommeo di Giovanni for the chapel. He is much more experienced,” she mused.

  “And much more expensive,” I said. “Father would be lucky to see the altar finished in his lifetime. I hear he barely completed this chest on time. And most of it is painted by his apprentices.”

  “Alessandra!” my sister squeaked.

  “Oh, use your eyes, Plautilla. Look how many of the women are in exactly the same pose. It’s obvious they’re using them for figure practice.”

  Though I have later thought Plautilla did well to put up with me during our childhood, at the time anything and everything she said seemed so trivial or stupid it was only natural to goad her. And equally natural that she would rise to it.

  “How could you! How could you say that? Ah! But even if it were true, I can’t imagine anyone noticing it but you. Mama is right; it is very fine. Certainly I like it much better than if it had been the story of Nastagio degli Onesti. I hate the way the dogs hunt her down. But these women are most handsome. And their dresses are perfect. The girl in the front is quite striking, don’t you think, Mama? I’ve heard that in every marriage chest that Bartolommeo does, there is always one figure that is based on the bride. I think it’s most affecting how she seems to be almost dancing.”

  “Except she’s not dancing. She’s being violated.”

  “I know that well enou
gh, Alessandra. But if you remember the story of the Sabine women, they were invited for a feast, which then turned into a violation, which they accepted with resignation. That is the purpose of the painting. Out of womanly sacrifice the city of Rome was born.”

  I think of replying but catch my mother’s eye. Even in private she will only tolerate a certain level of spatting. “Whatever the subject, I think we can agree that he has done a splendid job. For all the family. Yes, even you, Alessandra. I am surprised you have not yet found your own likeness in the painting.”

  I stared back at the chest. “My likeness? Where do you see me here?”

  “The girl at the side, standing apart, engaged in such earnest conversation with the young man. I wonder how well her talk of philosophy is keeping his mind on higher things,” she said evenly.

  I bowed my head to acknowledge the hit. My sister stared on at the painting, oblivious.

  “So. We are decided.” My mother’s voice again, clear and firm. “It is a noble piece. We must hope and pray your father’s protégé serves the family half so well.”

  “How is the painter doing, Mama?” I said, after a while. “No one has seen him since he came.”

  She glanced at me sharply, and I thought of her maidservant in the courtyard. Surely not. The encounter had taken place weeks before. If she had seen me I would have known about it before now. “I think it has not been easy for him. The city is raucous after the silence of his abbey. He has suffered from the fever. But he is recovered now and asked to be given leave to study some of the city’s churches and chapels before he continues with his designs.”

  I dropped my eyes in case she should notice the spark of interest. “He could always come with us to service,” I said, as if it mattered not a jot to me. “He would get a better view of certain frescoes from our position.”

  Unlike some families who frequented only one church for worship, we had been known to spread our favors around town. This afforded my father the opportunity to see how much of Florence was wearing his latest fabrics and allowed my mother to enjoy the art as well as compare the preaching—though I doubt either of them would have admitted to it.

  “Alessandra, you know very well that would not be fitting. I have arranged for him to make his own way.”

  The conversation having moved on from her wedding, Plautilla had lost interest and was sitting on the bed, running her hands over the rainbow colors of fabric, pulling them across her chest or lap to see their effect.

  “Oh, oh . . . it must be this blue for the overdress. It must be. Wouldn’t you agree, Mama?”

  We turned to Plautilla, both of us in our own way equally grateful for the interruption. It was indeed an extraordinary blue, shot through with what looked like metallic lights. Though a little paler, it reminded me of the ultramarine that painters use for Our Lady’s dress, the pigment painstakingly washed from lapis lazuli. The fabric dye is less precious but no less special to me, not least because of its name: Alessandrina.

  Of course, as the daughter of a cloth merchant I knew more than most about such things, and I had always been curious. There was a story that when I was five or six I had begged my father to take me to the place “where the smells came from.” It was summer—that much I remember—close to a great church and piazza near the river. The dyers made up a shantytown all of their own, the streets dark and jammed with slum houses, many of them teetering on the edge of the water. There were children everywhere, half naked, splattered with mud and streaked with color from stirring the vats. The foreman of my father’s work looked like the Devil, parts of his face and upper arms wizened from where boiling water had scalded him. Others, I remember, had scratched patterns into their skins, then rubbed different dyes into the wounds so their bodies were marked with bright signs. They were like a tribe from a pagan land. Though their work kept the city alive with color, they were the poorest people I had ever seen. Even the monastery that gave the district its name, Santa Croce, was home to the Franciscans, who chose the most destitute areas in which to build their churches.

  What my father felt about them I never knew. Though he might be stern enough with my brothers, he was not a hard man. The ledgers of his company included an account in God’s name through which he gave generous alms to charity, and in recent years he had paid for two stained-glass windows in our church of Sant’ Ambrogio. Certainly his wages were no worse than any other merchant’s. But it was not his job to alleviate poverty. In our great Republic, man made his fortune by the grace of God and his own hard work. If others were less fortunate that was their business, not my father’s.

  Still, something of their desperation must have infected me during that visit, because while I grew up yearning for the colors of the warehouse, I also remembered the cauldrons, their steamy heat like the pots of hell where they boil sinners. And I did not ask to go again.

  My sister, however, had no such pictures to cloud the pleasure of the cloth and was at this moment more interested in how the blue might complement the swell of her breasts. Sometimes I think that when it comes to her wedding night she will enjoy her nightdress more than her husband’s body. I wondered how much that would bother Maurizio. I had only met him once. He seemed a sturdy enough fellow, with some laughter and force, but there was not much sign of the thinker in him. That might make it better, of course. What did I know? They seemed satisfied with each other.

  “Plautilla. Why don’t we leave this for now?” my mother said quietly, pushing back the fabrics and sighing slightly. “The afternoon is particularly warm today, and some sun on your hair might further develop its fairness admirably. Why don’t you go out onto the roof with your embroidery?”

  My sister was taken aback. While it was well known that fashionable young women regularly addled their brains with sun in a futile attempt to turn dark into light, it was a vanity their mothers were not supposed to know about.

  “Oh, don’t look so surprised. Since you will do it regardless of what I think, it seems easier to give you my blessing. You will not find much time for such fripperies soon anyway.”

  My mother had recently gained the habit of saying things like this, as if somehow all natural life for Plautilla would end with her marriage. Plautilla herself seemed to find this prospect rather exciting, though I must say it put the fear of hellfire into me. She gave a small squeak of delight and flapped around the room in search of her sun hat. When she found it, she took an interminable time to fit it, pulling her hair out through the central hole to make sure that while her face was in shade every strand would be exposed to the sun. Then she gathered up her skirts and went swooping out. If you had tried to paint her exit, you would have had to fling swaths of silk or gauze cloth around her body to suggest the wind in her speed, as I had seen some artists do. Either that or give her bird wings.

  We watched her go. I got the impression it made my mother rather sad. She sat for a moment before she turned to me, which meant I caught the glint in her eyes too late.

  “I think I’ll join her.” I got up from my chair.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You hate the sun, Alessandra, and anyway your hair is black as a crow’s. You would do better to dye it if you were so inclined, which I doubt you are.”

  I saw her eyes slide to my ink-stained fingers and curled them up hastily.

  “And when did you last treat your hands?” My appearance was one of many things about me that tested her sorely. “Oh, you are impossible. I will send Erila out this afternoon. Do them before you go to bed, you hear? And stay now. I want to talk to you.”

  “But Mama—”

  “Stay!”

  Three

  I BRACED MYSELF FOR THE LECTURE. HOW MANY TIMES had we been here before? We would never sort it out, she and I. I had almost died at birth. She had almost died giving birth to me. Eventually, after two days of labor I was hauled out with tongs, both of us screaming all the way. The damage done to her body meant there would be no more children, and long before she began to see s
omething of herself in me there was a powerful bond between us. I asked her once why I hadn’t died, as so many others I had heard about. “Because God willed it so. And because He gave you a curiosity and spirit that made you determined to survive, come what may.”

  “Alessandra, you should know your father has started talking to prospective husbands,” she said now.

  I felt my stomach curdle at the words. “But how . . . I am not even bleeding yet!”

  She frowned. “You are sure of that?”

  “How could you not know? Maria checks my laundry. It’s hardly a fact I could keep secret.”

  “Unlike other things.” Her voice was quiet. I looked up. But there was no sign that she would go any further. “You know I have shielded you for a long time. I cannot go on doing so forever.”

  Such was the seriousness of her voice that it made me almost frightened. I looked at her for guidance as to how we should continue this conversation, but she gave me none. “Well,” I said moodily, “it seems to me that if you did not want me this way, you should not have allowed it.”

  “And what would we have done otherwise?” she said gently. “Kept you from books, taken away your pens? Chastised it out of you? You were too loved too early, child. You would have taken such treatment badly. Anyway, you were always so stubborn. In the end it seemed easier to keep you occupied by sending you to your brothers’ tutors.” She sighed. By this time she must have realized that the solution had proved as troublesome as the problem. “You were so eager in their place.”

  “I doubt they would thank you for it.”

  “That’s because you have yet to learn the power of humility,” she said, more sharply this time. “As we have discussed before, such a lack sits loudly in a young woman. Perhaps if you spent as much time in prayer as you do in study.”

  “Is that how you did it, Mama?”

  She gave a short laugh. “No, Alessandra. In my case my family put a stop to any temptations of vanity.”