The Birth of Venus

by Sarah Dunant

  “All I know is that I don’t want to live with a God who would send you or even my husband to hell without hearing their story first,” I said quietly.

  She looked at me fondly. “You were always soft, even as a child when you tried to be hard. Why should you care for him?”

  “Because . . . because in some way I don’t think he can help it. And because . . .” I paused. Did I really believe what I was about to say? “Because in some way I think he cares for me.”

  She shook her head as if we were indeed a foreign race that made no sense to her. “For what it’s worth, you may be right. Though he’s not to be forgiven for that reason.” She paused, then got up and offered me her hand.

  “What is it?”

  “There’s something you should see. I have been waiting for the right moment.”

  And she walked me out of my dark cavernous bedroom across the stone landing to a smaller room, which in another household would have been waiting as a nursery.

  She slipped a key from her pocket into the heavy lock, and the door fell open.

  In front of me was a newly fashioned workshop: a desk and a stone sink with a few buckets to the side and on the table near the window a row of bottles, boxes, and small soft parcels all labeled, next to sets of different-sized brushes. Close by was a porphyry slab for grinding, and two generous panels of wood ready for sizing and priming and the first strokes of the paint.

  “He had it brought here while you were ill. And I fetched that from your chest.” She pointed to my dog-eared manuscript of Cennini’s handbook, over whose pages I had shed such bitter tears because it offered me knowledge without the wherewithal to turn it into paint. “It’s the right one, yes?”

  I nodded dumbly and moved toward the table, slipping open the catches on a few of the boxes, sliding my fingers into the powders: the thick black, the fierce yellow of the Tuscan crocus, and the deep giallolino with the promised shades of a hundred trees and plants within a solid lump of rock. The shock of so much color was like the first sunlight on the frozen city after the snow. I could feel myself smiling, but there may also have been tears.

  So. If we could not have love, my husband and I, then at least I could have alchemy.

  OUTSIDE, THE ICE MELTED AND TURNED TO SPRING AS I COOKED UP a feast of colors, my fingers growing calloused with grinding and dark with paint stains. There was so much to learn. Erila helped me, measuring and mixing the powders and preparing the surface of the wood. Nobody bothered us. Around us the house ran itself, and if there was gossip it was surely no more damning than for the sins already at large. It took me the best part of five weeks to transfer my Annunciation onto the wood panel. My life became absorbed in the swirling folds of Our Lady’s skirts (no lapis still, but a fine-enough shade of blue mixed from indigo and white lead), the deep ocher of the floor tiles, and a gold-leaf halo for my Gabriel, in luminous contrast to the dark surround of the window frame beyond. At first my hand was much less steady with the brushes than with the pen, and my clumsiness made me despair at times, but little by little my confidence grew, enough so that by the time it was finished I wanted immediately to start again. And in this way I forgot the pain and madness of my brother and my husband and healed myself.

  Eventually my curiosity returned and I began to chaff against my self-imposed exile. Erila played her part well, bringing me nutritious bits of gossip, like a mother bird regurgitating food to her young until it is strong enough to go catch its own prey.

  Still, our first outing together shocked me. It was late spring now, yet the city was dreary with its own piety. The tap of prostitutes’ heels had been replaced by the click of rosary beads, and the only boys on the streets were there to save souls, by whatever means they chose. We passed a gang of them in the square practicing their marching: children as young as eight or nine in God’s militia, encouraged by parents who, Erila said, were buying up bales of white cloth to make their angelic robes. Even the rich had muted their dress so the very color palette of the city had become bleached and monochromatic. Foreigners who came in and out of the city for trade and business were amazed by the changes, though they couldn’t decide if they were indeed witnessing God’s kingdom on earth or something more sinister.

  The pope, it seemed, had no such doubts. While Florence championed purity, Erila brought gossip that the Borgia pope had installed his mistress in the Vatican Palace and was handing out cardinal’s hats like candied fruit to his children. When he stopped making love he started making war. The French king and his army, gorged on Naples and too weary for the Holy Land, were returning north. But Alexander VI was not a pope to suffer the humiliation of a second occupation, however temporary, and had raised an army from a league of city-states to chase them home with their tails between their legs.

  With one exception. From his pulpit in the cathedral, Savonarola declared Florence exempt from such duty. What was the Vatican after all but a richer, more corrupt version of the convents and monasteries he had pledged himself to purge?

  DURING THOSE LONG EVENINGS WHEN THE CITY HAD BEEN FROZEN and before Cristoforo’s lust had taken him away from me, he and I had talked much about this conflict. How Savonarola’s aggressive piety not only threatened the pope’s lifestyle but the very fabric of the Church. The glory of God was not just in the number of souls saved but in the influence wielded, the power of the buildings, and the art, the way foreign dignitaries stared in awe at the paintings crawling up the walls of the Sistine Chapel. But such wonder needed income to sustain it, and no hunched-up hawk-nosed prior with an urge for self-flagellation was going to get in the way of that.

  It was the only challenge that might stop him. In recent months, opposition within Florence itself had collapsed like mud houses when the floods come in. I could barely believe how easily an old order could be swept aside. Cristoforo had said something else wise then: that just as there were those who feared and hated Savonarola now but would do nothing to try and stop him because his power was so great, so equally there had been people who had felt the same way about the Medici, men who had truly believed that that benign dictatorship—despite or even because of its glories—had been sapping Florence of her republican strengths and purity. But that when a state is so confident it takes wild or stupid men to stand up directly against it. Dissent, he argued, was an art best conducted in the shadows.

  Yet even the shadows had gone silent now. The Platonic Academy, once the pride and joy of the new learning, had crumbled. One of its greatest exponents, Pico della Mirandola, was an open follower of Savonarola, waiting to take his Dominican vows, and Erila said there was even talk that men from families as loyal as the Rucellai were leaning toward the cells in San Marco.

  Such gossip made me think again of my own family.

  This new fad for whiteness would give little work to the dyeing vats of Santa Croce. I remembered the children down by the river with their stick legs and patterned skins. Take the color from the cloth and you took the food from the workers. For all that Savonarola might preach equality, he had little understanding of the ways in which the poor get richer without charity. This too was my husband’s observation. I must say there were times during our conversations when I wondered what good he might have done for the state if he had been more interested in politics than the contours of boys’ buttocks. See—in my bitterness I was even learning my brother’s language.

  But in the end what hurt the dyers also hurt my father, for while he might have more fat to live off than his workers, not even his profits could last forever.

  “Your father would like it if you came to visit. He is much weighed down by the matters of business these days. . . . I think it would distract him a little to be visited by his favorite daughter,” my mother had said.

  Even if she had offended me, I could not forget my father. And as soon as I began to think of them, of course I also thought about the painter and how much more we would have to share now I too had begun to wield a brush.

  Twenty-nine<
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  THE OLD SERVANTS WELCOMED US AS IF I WERE THE prodigal daughter returned. Even Maria with her beady eyes and mean little mind seemed pleased to see me. No doubt the house had got quieter since my leaving. I may have been trouble, but I was also life. I must have looked different in some way, too. Everyone who saw me told me the same. I think my face might have changed with my illness, its shape starting to show more through the pillows of my cheeks. I wondered what my father would say—his younger daughter with the face of a woman rather than a girl.

  Well, I would have to wait to find out. Both he and my mother were at the hot springs taking the waters and unlikely to be back for some weeks. I should have sent ahead to tell them I was coming.

  The house felt strange to me, like somewhere I had visited only in a dream. Maria told me Luca was home eating lunch and would I like to join him? I got as far as the entrance to the dining room. He was hunched over a plate, stuffing his face. For an Angel he looked terrible. Plautilla was right; the haircut was a disaster. It made his face look huge, like a lump of porous rock, his pockmarks speckled like tiny water holes over the surface. He was chewing with his mouth open, and I could hear the sound of the food squelching.

  I crossed to the table and sat down beside him. Sometimes it is worth knowing your enemy. “Hello, brother,” I said, smiling. “You have changed your clothes. I am not sure that gray suits you as a color.”

  He frowned. “I am in uniform, Alessandra. You should know I am in God’s army now.”

  “Oh, and a great thing it is. Though I think you should probably still wash occasionally. When white gets too dirty it can tend toward black.”

  He sat with the words for a moment, separating out the wit from the meaning. If I had a florin for the time wasted in lessons waiting for Luca to arrive at a place I had already left, we would be a richer family than we were today. “You know what, Alessandra? You talk too much. It will be your damnation. Our life is but a short walk to death, and those who listen to the sound of their own voices rather than the word of the True Christ will rot in hell. Is your husband with you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Then you should not be here. You know the new rules of our godly state as well as I. Wives without their husbands are vessels of temptation and must stay behind closed doors.”

  “Oh, Luca,” I said. “If only you had always had such facility for remembering things that matter.”

  “You would do well to watch your tongue, sister. The Devil is in your false learning, and it will bring you to the flames faster than a poor woman who knows nothing but the Gospels. Your precious ancients are an outlawed caste now.”

  I had never heard my brother so fluent. Still, he was itching to make words into deeds. I could see his fist clenching on the table. His cruelty to me as a child had always been more physical than Tomaso’s. My mother hardly ever caught him red-handed and the bruises only came up later. Tomaso was right. He had always been a thug. The only difference now was that he was less beholden to his elder brother. Though what problems his changed loyalties might cause us all had yet to be tested.

  I got up from the table, my eyes to the floor. “I know,” I said sweetly. “I am sorry, brother. I will go to confession when I get home and ask the Lord’s forgiveness.”

  He stared at me, wrong-footed by my sudden meekness. “Hmm. Very well. If you do so humbly enough, He will give it.”

  Before I got to the door he had his face back in the plate again.

  WHEN I ASKED ABOUT THE PAINTER, MARIA GOT FLUSTERED. “WE don’t see him anymore. He lives in the chapel.”

  “What do you mean, he lives in the chapel?”

  She gave a little shrug. “I . . . I mean he lives there now. All the time. He never goes out.”

  “What of the frescoes? Are they finished?”

  “No one knows. He sent the apprentices away last month.” She paused. “They seemed eager to leave.”

  “But . . . I thought he went to church. That he had become a follower. That’s what Mother told me.”

  “I . . . I don’t know about that. He used to go, I think. But not now. He hasn’t been out of the chapel since the thaw.”

  “Since the thaw? But that’s weeks ago! Why hasn’t my father done something?”

  “Your father . . .” She paused. “Your father has not been quite himself.”

  “How do you mean?”

  She glanced at Erila. “I . . . I can’t really say any more.”

  “And my mother?”

  “Er . . . she is looking after him. And then there’s Tomaso and Luca. She has no time to be dealing with tradesmen.” Maria, like Ludovica, had never been one to champion the elevation of art. Too much fuss over a few colored scribbles. Better to say your prayers with your eyes closed and not let your imagination get in the way.

  “I wonder that she didn’t ask for my help,” I said quietly, but I already knew the answer. She had, but I had been so angry I had shunned her.

  Maria was looking at me, waiting to know what I would do. Everybody had seen me as the baby of the family, precocious, maybe, but barely able to look after myself, let alone anyone else. What could have happened to make me change? I am not sure even I knew.

  “I will see the painter,” I said. “Where are the keys?”

  “They don’t work. He bolts the door from inside.”

  “How about the other entrance, from the sacristy?”

  “The same.”

  “What about food?”

  “We leave a plate outside once a day.”

  “The main door or the sacristy?”

  “The sacristy.”

  “How does he know it’s there?”

  “We knock.”

  “And he comes out?”

  “Not while anyone’s there. The cook waited once, but he never came. No one bothers now. We’ve got better things to do.”

  “So no one has seen him?”

  “No. Though at night sometimes he makes a noise.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I don’t know, but Ludovica—she doesn’t sleep so well—said she’s heard him crying.”

  “Crying?”

  She shrugged, as if it was not her place to say any more.

  “And the boys? Have they tried?”

  “Master Tomaso is hardly ever here. And Master Luca . . . well, I suppose he thinks he’s in church.”

  Which I suppose in a way he was.

  In the upstairs kitchen the cook was phlegmatic about the whole business. If the man didn’t want to eat, he didn’t want to eat. The last four days of food had been left untouched. Maybe God was feeding him. John the Baptist had lived on locusts and honey for months, after all.

  “I bet it wasn’t as good as your pigeon pie, though,” I said.

  “You always ate well, Miss Alessandra.” He grinned. “It’s quiet around here without you.”

  I sat for a while, watching his fingers dice a dozen fat cloves of garlic faster than a moneylender divvies up his coins. My childhood was all here in the smells and tastes of this kitchen: black and red pepper, ginger, cloves, saffron, cardamom, and the pungent sweetness of our own crushed basil. An empire of trade on the chopping block. “Prepare him a plate of something special,” I said. “Something whose smells will make his juices flow. Maybe he’ll be hungry today.”

  “Maybe he’ll be dead.”

  He didn’t say it cruelly, more as a matter of fact. I thought back to my father’s careful chivalry toward the painter when he first arrived on that cold winter night years ago. I remembered the excitement we had all felt: a real live artist living under our own roof, capturing our family for posterity. Everyone had seen it as a mark of the family’s prestige, a statement of our status, our future. Now it just seemed to be about the past.

  I left Erila and the other servants in the kitchen gossiping with the cook and made my way down the stairs and out across the back courtyard to the painter’s quarters. I had no idea what I was looking for. The journe
y was filled with my younger self skipping out in front of me, sneaking her way down from the main house during the heat of the siesta to confront the new arrival in his den with her boundless enthusiasm and curiosity. If I met her now what advice would I give her? I could no longer work out at what point it had all gone wrong.

  The door to his room was closed but not locked. Inside, the atmosphere was musty, a whiff of neglect in the air. The exuberant figures of the Angel and Mary on the wall of the outer chamber had peeled off the unprepared plaster like a relic from an earlier age. The table on which he had kept his sketches was empty and the crucifix gone from the wall. Inside the inner room, the bed was a wad of tossed straw with a grimy cloth thrown across it. Whatever few possessions he owned had gone with him to the chapel.

  I’m not sure I would have even bothered with the bucket if it hadn’t been for the smoke stains above it. It was sitting in the corner as I turned to leave, and at first I thought the marks might be a rough painting of sorts: a mass of dark curling shadows crawling up the wall and onto the ceiling. But when I got closer and put my hand out to them my palm came back covered in soot, so I turned my attention to the bucket positioned underneath.

  The fire had not been successful with the crucifix. Though it was smashed in two, the wood was barely burned at all and it was hard to tell whether he had broken it first and then tried to incinerate it or, irritated with the failure of the flames, had taken it out and smashed it against the wall. The cross was fractured and Christ’s legs had broken off, the nails still attached to the feet. His upper torso hung painfully from the T of the cross. I held him carefully in my hands. Even in its damaged state, the sculpture carried passion.

  Part of the reason it hadn’t burned was that the fire in the bottom of the bucket hadn’t been strong enough. He had fed it with paper but carelessly, the leaves too packed together to allow enough air in. There was a feeling of haste to the whole affair, as if something or someone had been nipping at his heels. I scooped my hands in and pulled out the charred remains. The pages at the bottom fell apart in my fingers, bits of feathery ash breaking loose and floating through the air like gray snow, their content lost forever. But the pages nearer to the top were only partly damaged or, in some cases, simply charred around the edges. I carried them into the outer chamber where there was more light and laid them gently down upon the desk.