The Birth of Venus

by Sarah Dunant

  “Tell me again,” he said quietly.

  “You have heard it a dozen times already.” I shrugged. “The blade slipped and—”

  “—and you used the blood to paint your body.” He smiled. “And where did you paint, here?” He touched my shoulder. “Then here?” running his finger down across my breasts. “And then here?” and his finger moved over my stomach toward my sex.

  “No! Even I did not have so much wildness.”

  “I don’t believe that,” he said. “Still, it would have looked fine enough—the scarlet against your chestnut skin. Though there are other colors that would suit as well.”

  I smiled and let his hand lie where it had reached. Tomorrow I would put on my habit, go back to my chapel, and become a nun again. Tomorrow.

  “If you knew how many times I have painted your body in my imagination . . .”

  “And once in reality—on a chapel ceiling.”

  He shook his head. “You were never the right model for the Madonna. Your eyes were always too bold. Why do you think I was scared of you for so long? You have always been Eve. Though I wouldn’t rate the serpent’s chances against your mind.”

  “I think that might depend on whose face it carried,” I said.

  “Ah, you still do not think of the snake as a woman? You still defy Masolino in that.”

  I shrugged. “I think,” I said, and smiled as he mouthed the next words along with me, “I think there is no scriptural evidence for such a rendering. Though I have yet to see a painter brave enough to challenge it.”

  So it was that the serpent joined us in our bed on that last night. And though I know that what we did was a blasphemy, I cannot wish it undone: the way its wild green and silver body grew under his brush, curling over my breasts, then plunging down deep across my stomach before disappearing into my hair where, just as the thickest encased it, he placed the lightest outline of his own face in the tangle. And as he worked, I remembered moments of desolation as well as pleasure, and the body of the mountebank with the slow lust of his muscles rippling under his shining skin.

  Next morning I rose from the bed, concealed the glorious painting that was now my body under my habit, and said goodbye to my lover and our child.

  I SPENT SO MUCH ENERGY CONVINCING PLAUTILLA THAT SHE MUST go, I had forgotten to store up enough to console myself. The days after they rode out the sadness flowed in like disease, wrapping me in a cold fever of desolation, and the farther the miles unwound between us the more it felt as if my insides were unraveling off a spit onto the floor.

  I had once accused my lover of the sin of despair. Now it seemed I would succumb to it myself. My chapel remained untouched, the life of the Virgin barely begun. At night I lay on my bed, tracing the memory of desire in the folds of the snake’s body. But the summer flared up like fire and with the heat came night sweats and dust and dirt, and before long the shining colors started to bleed and fade like my father’s rich fabrics left out in the sun. And so my spirit faded with them.

  The Reverend Mother humored my pain for a while and then became impatient with the delay. In the end it was Erila who saved me, though to begin with I feared she too had deserted me. Florence was a long journey from Loro Ciufenna and the dyers of Santa Croce were a closed guild unto themselves, so that even when she found them in the back streets by the river, their makeshift workshops bright with needles and stolen colors, they were loath to give their secrets to a stranger. But no one could resist Erila for long. Of the mountebank, she told me later, there was no trace.

  She arrived back one evening when the light was at its most sublime, unpacking the small leather case and laying the contents out on the floor by my pallet: medicaments, ointments, cloths, needles and scrapers, and the collection of tiny bottles. The color in each little vial was muted and muddy, the density of ink rather than paint. It was only once the skin was punctured and the dye leaked pinpoint by pinpoint into the wound that its vibrancy was released. Oh, but then the shades were amazing, raw and new like the first brushstrokes of God in the Garden of Eden, and at the sight of them mingling with the sting of my blood something of the old flame flickered up in me. That first night we worked by candlelight, and by the time the dawn came in there was half an inch of serpent’s tail on my shoulder restored to its former greatness and my body was exhausted from the pleasure to be had from bearing the pain.

  As the days went by we got faster and I became more resilient. The snake under our fingers grew more seductive as we learned better how to wield the needle and judge how many tiny wounds it took to bring alive each flicker of its muscle. As it rolled and curled its lascivious way over my breasts and my belly, I could see it well enough to take over the needle myself. So it happened that the moment when I reached the fading contours of my lover’s face I was alone, and there was a sweet catharsis to be had in the cruelty of the needle as I added the dart of a serpent’s tongue sliding from his mouth toward my sex.

  In this way I got back my appetite for living and returned to my chapel walls.

  THE YEARS THAT FOLLOWED WERE TUMULTUOUS. THAT NEXT SPRING my father died, propped in his study chair, his abacus and ledgers in front of him. Luca took over the house and my mother retreated to a convent inside the city, where she took a vow of silence. Her last letter wished God’s grace upon me and urged me to confess my sins as she had confessed hers.

  Meanwhile, in her beloved Florence the battered Republic took back the Medicis after decades of exile. But Giovanni de’ Medici, now Pope Leo X, was a pale shadow of his learned father. My fat greasy half-brother—for that, amazingly, was who he was—had been forged in the flames of sycophancy and squandered wealth. Under his pontificate, Rome grew as flabby as his body. Even her art became corpulent. The letters from my painter told of a young woman artist whose brush would soon be as fine as any man’s, but of a city stewing in its own decadence; of banquets that went on for days and patrons so rich they threw their silver plate into the Tiber after each course (though it was rumored that they later sent servants to dredge it up again).

  The next year my painter and my daughter left Rome bound for France. In the past he had received invitations from both Paris and London, cities where the new learning was still in its infancy and where there would be better chances for patronage for those who stood by the old ways. So they left with their brushes and the manuscript. I charted their course on a map my learned nun procured for me from a cartographer in Milan. Their ship landed in Marseille, from where they traveled to Paris. But the invitation promised there did not lead to rewarding work and in the end they were forced to sell some of The Divine Comedy to keep themselves alive. In this way they moved through Europe, but their letters told of a growing aggression toward the established church and what some considered to be its idolatrous art, and finally they crossed to England, where the young king, schooled in the Renaissance, was eager for artists to make his court great. For the first years they sent me stories of a rain-soaked people with a harsh language and harsher manners. And of course I couldn’t help but think of his monastery and wonder that life had led him back into a gray palette once more. But then the letters stopped coming and I have not heard from them for some years now.

  I had little enough time to mourn. Soon after the chapel was completed, the church came down upon us. Our creativity had become too monstrous even for these louche times. It had always been a matter of time until the whispers reached the wrong ears. When our bishop died the man appointed in his place was cut from sterner cloth, and in his wake came church inspectors who smelled the Devil everywhere: in the cut of our habits, the perfumed cloth in our cells, and most of all in the books on our shelves. Only my chapel survived their scrutiny because by then the humanity of such art had become almost ordinary. My chapel and my body. But that was a matter between God and myself.

  Those of us who had been through it before took it quietly. We knew better than to fight. The few who did resist were crushed and transferred. In some ways it was not
so terrible. Our playwright and most of our seamstresses and beauticians went, but the scholar remained, though her library was purged. A new Reverend Mother was brought in from outside, pure and upright with a more censorious God in her backbone. With the chapel finished, I developed a healthy voice for Vespers and hid my eccentricities behind my prayer book. As long as I was acquiescent I was too old to be a threat. Of course I lost my painting materials. They left me my pens, though, and so it was that I started this history of my life, which for a while staved off the loneliness and boredom of the new order.

  My greatest loss was Erila. Of course there was no room for her wayward commercial spirit in this strict new world. To have stayed she would have had to become the menial she had always rejected, and anyway she had already forged a life outside. With help from me and her own savings, she set herself up in an apothecary shop in the town nearby. Such a quiet place had never seen such a wildwoman, and of course there were those who thought she was a witch, though ironically more of a white one than black. But it didn’t take long before they came to depend on her remedies and advice as much as the nuns had done. And so she achieved a respectability of sorts. We laugh about it on the occasions she is allowed to visit: how life provides the most bizarre of endings to one’s story.

  I FINISHED THIS MANUSCRIPT TWO MONTHS AGO, AND IT WAS THEN I decided what I must do. It is not so much that I am in pain—by now the memories are as dim as my eyesight—it is more that the years roll out in front of me like thin pastry and I cannot bear the idea of this rigid foreverness and long slow slide into decrepitude. Having decided, it was of course to Erila I went for help, one last time. The tumor was her idea. She had seen a number of them, evil things that rose out from the skin in a manner both gross and mysterious. Women especially were prone to them around their breasts. They grew as much on the inside as on the surface, eating deep into the vital organs of the body until the sufferers drowned in the agony of their own decay. There was no treatment, and even so-called physicians were frightened of them. Once afflicted, sufferers were known to hide themselves away from society like wounded animals, howling their pain in the darkness, awaiting their own death.

  The pig’s bladder was inspired and easy, a matter of a visit to the kitchen while the others were at prayer. Erila helped me fill it and fix it to my chest and gave me drafts and ointments to make me vomit or raise my body temperature for times when I needed the illness to be more overt to keep them away. And in the end it is she who will bring me the poison when I need it, extracted from the roots of one of the medicinal plants she tends in her garden. It will cause me pain, she says, and she cannot guarantee its swiftness, but of the outcome there is no doubt. The only remaining question is what they do with my body afterward. Our convent has yet another new Reverend Mother now, the last remaining survivor from the old days: our scholar, who over the years has managed to find genuine vocation in her solitude. I cannot tell her everything, of course, though I have asked for her indulgence in leaving my body and the habit intact. It is not my intention to embarrass her rule. I like and respect her too much to do that. Because she knows this and has some memory of my past misdemeanors, she inquired no further, only agreed.

  YOU ARE WONDERING ABOUT MY DEATH, YES? ABOUT THE SIN OF suicide and the final impossibility of God’s forgiveness.

  I have thought much about it.

  Before the manuscript left my hands I studied those crowded circles of hell. Suicide is indeed a grave sin, in some ways the gravest. But I find it almost comforting how Dante portrays it. The appropriate punishment for the appropriate sin: for those who would choose to leave the world before their appointed moment, hell has them bound back into it forever. The souls of the suicides are rooted deep into the earth, woven into the structures of trees, their blasted branches and trunks acting as live food for all manner of harpies and birds of prey. In the middle of the canto, Dante tells of how a pack of hounds in pursuit of sinners comes bounding in through the wood and, in their flight, rips to shreds a small tree whose soul cries out plaintively to have his leaves collected and returned to him.

  Hunted by dogs. I have hated the Onesti legend for so long, maybe I was always bound to share its heroine’s fate. But it will not all be pain. I have memorized Dante’s geography of hell well. The wood of the suicides is near to the burning ground of the sodomites. Sometimes they rush in, beating down the flames that ignite constantly all over their scarred bodies, and, as Dante would have it, on occasion there is time for them to stop and converse a little with other damned souls about art and literature and the sins for which we are all condemned. I would like that.

  I have made my goodbyes. One afternoon I took off my wimple and lay in the garden with my face in the sun, near to the fig tree that we had planted soon after our arrival and by whose growth we had measured Plautilla’s own. I did not even bother to move when the young nun found me there and ran twittering back to the house with news of my “transgression.” What do they know of me anyway? It was all so long ago and old nuns are so invisible. They shuffle and smile with watery eyes and mumble over their porridge and their prayers, all of which I have learned to do admirably. They have no idea who I am. Most of them don’t even know it was my fingers that were responsible for the images that shine off the walls as they sing in the chapel.

  So now I sit in my cell waiting for Erila, who comes tonight to deliver me the draft and say her goodbyes. It is to her I will entrust this document. She is no longer anyone’s slave and she must do with the rest of her life as she sees fit. All I have asked is that she dispatch it to the last address I have for my daughter and the painter, in an area of London near the Kings Court called Cheapside. Still, we both know my father would never let a document or contract of any worth out of his hands unless he had either a copy or proof that his agent was there to receive it, and even then he might take out insurance against its safe arrival. Recently Erila has talked of travel with a kind of hunger that comes only to those who were born in a place other than that in which they will die. If anyone can find my daughter, she will. I can do no more.

  The night is coming in, a blanket of heat and humidity. Once Erila is gone I will swallow the draft quickly. In accordance with my mother’s wishes I have prepared my confession and the priest is called for. Let us hope he has a strong stomach and a silent tongue.

  THERE IS ONE THING I HAVE FORGOTTEN: MY CHAPEL.

  It took so long—in some ways it was my life’s work—and yet I have said so little of it.

  The lives of the Virgin and John the Baptist. The same subjects as Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Capella Maggiore of Santa Maria Novella, which my mother and I had seen together when I was just ten years old. It was my first taste of history, and just as it remained the greatest Florentine memory for my painter, so it is also mine. Because while there may be better artists and greater achievements, Ghirlandaio’s frescoes tell you as much about the glory and the humanity of our great city as they do the life of any saint, and in my opinion it is that which makes them so affecting and so true.

  So in the spirit of that truth which was once so central to our new learning, I will not hide this fact now.

  My chapel is sadly mediocre. Should future connoisseurs of the new art come upon it they will glance at it for a moment and then pass on, noting it as an attempt by an inferior artist in a superior age. Yes, it has a feel for color (that passion I never lost), and there are times when my father’s cloth moves like water, and the occasional face speaks of character as well as paint. But the compositions are clumsy and many of the figures, for all of my care, remain staid and lacking in life. If kindness and honesty were to be held in mutual regard, one might say it was the work of an older artist without training who did her best and deserves to be remembered as much for her enthusiasm as for her achievement.

  If that sounds like a statement of failure from an old woman at the end of her life, you must believe me when I tell you it is absolutely not. Because if you were to put it with all th
e others—all the wedding panels and birth trays and marriage chests and frescoes and altarpieces and panel paintings that were produced during those heady days when we brought man into contact with God in a way he had never been before—then you would see it for what it is: a single voice lost inside a great chorus of others.

  And, such was the sound that the chorus made together, that to have been a part of it at all was enough for me.

  NOTES

  MICHELANGELO’S WHITE CEDAR CRUCIFIX WAS LOST FOR MANY YEARS after Napoleon’s invasion of Italy. It was rediscovered in the 1960s, reattributed, recently restored, and now hangs in the sacristy of Santo Spírito church on the south side of the river. When he was a very young man, Michelangelo also worked as an assistant to Domenico Ghirlandaio on the frescoes for the Capella Maggiore in Santa Maria Novella.

  Botticelli’s illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy disappeared from Italy soon after they were painted, only to turn up in various parts of Europe centuries later. In 1501 his name appeared in one of the church’s denunciation boxes, and he was brought before the Night Police on the charge of sodomy. There is dispute among scholars as to whether the charge was slander or truth.

  The Night Police operated throughout the fifteenth century and beyond, policing sodomy and other forms of indecent fornication in Florence. With the exception of the Savonarola years, 1494 to 1498, their control was much lighter than in many other cities.

  In the early sixteenth century, as dowries rose and the number of unmarried women increased, certain convents in northern Italy were found to be operating with particularly lax rules on behavior. The Church investigated, and the offending convents were either cleansed or closed down.