‘Build the fire higher,’ my master ordered.
‘But—’ began Zoroastro.
The Maestro swept past him.
‘We will have to send out for wood,’ said Felipe. ‘Our store is exhausted.’
‘There’s wood aplenty around us,’ my master said grimly. He threw off his cloak and, grasping the axe, which Zoroastro had discarded upon the floor, he made with firm steps towards the scaffolding.
‘Assist me here, Matteo,’ he said, and began attacking the supports of one side.
I glanced from his face to that of Felipe and Zoroastro. Such a look of horror appeared on Felipe’s as he took in his master’s purpose. The Maestro pulled a short plank from its position and ordered me to add to the fire.
‘This will have to be paid for,’ Felipe protested. ‘The City Council was very clear in the terms of the contract. The wood and all other parts of the scaffolding must be returned to them or we would owe them the cost.’
‘Let them come and take it back then. They can roast their penny-pinching fingers in the fire as they root about among the embers.’ The Maestro made a mighty chop at one of the struts.
Felipe stepped back in fright.
My master loosened a spar. He wrested it from its socket and hurled it into the brazier.
Zoroastro leaped forward. ‘The fire basket stands too close to the wall for safety.’
‘Leave it be.’
‘It will singe the work already done!’
‘Leave it be, I say again,’ the Maestro cried. ‘Don’t you know the Florentines love bonfires? It’s not so long ago that under the encouragement of their great prophet Savonarola they rushed to burn their glorious art in the piazza outside. Then in the space of a year or so in the same place they burned the very man who ordered that bonfire of the vanities. Let them have another one!’ He lifted a piece of wood and split it with his axe. ‘Fitting that it should be within their Council Chamber this time. Open the windows and doors! When they smell the fire and hear the crackle of the flames they will run to witness this conflagration just as they did the others.’
We watched helplessly as he piled wood into the brazier. The fire surged higher with great licking crimson tongues. Viewed through the flames the figures and horses appeared to be struggling in some hellish damnation. The colour on the upper reaches curled at the approach of the enemy that threatened to consume it. Was it working? Was the intense heat drying the paint and plaster? But then Flavio cried out, the piercing wail of a lost soul.
‘Eeee! Look!’
Through the wavering light we saw the lower part of the fresco begin to blister. Zoroastro rushed to the wall but Graziano pulled him back. All of us there within the hall were forced to watch. There was nothing anyone could do, for this was beyond redemption. The crackling, spitting fire gave no quarter. And we moaned and clustered together in our anxiety, the noise and the fierce heat adding to our terror of the ravenous monster that was devouring the masterpiece. The expressions on the faces of the doomed soldiers in the battle were reflected in the anguish on the faces of the craftsmen watching their creation destroyed.
When the fire basket could hold no more my master faltered. At once Felipe took his arm and coaxed him to walk with him to the furthest end of the hall. Zoroastro, paying no attention to the safety of his own person, went close in and, hooking one of his blacksmith’s tools into the grid of the brazier, dragged it away from the wall. The others, moving like monks in a funeral procession, began to pick up the objects lying scattered around. No one spoke. I went to the table where we kept our food and found the drinking goblets and poured a large draught of wine into one. I added some cinnamon, then I put a long poker into the heart of the fire and after a minute I took it out and plunged it into the liquid. I lifted a stool and carried it, and the hot wine, to my master. When I placed the stool before him he looked at me as though he did not recognize me, but he sat down readily enough. I held the wine cup in front of him where he would smell the hot spice. He passed his hand over his eyes. Then he grasped the goblet and began to sip from it. I knelt down at his feet.
He put his hand on my head. ‘Leave me,’ he said. He glanced up at Felipe, who stood beside him. ‘Leave me. I would be alone.’
The two of us went back to the centre of the room, where I prepared hot spiced wine for everyone who was there. There was no conversation. The only sound in the room was Flavio’s teeth chattering. I made myself drink some of the wine. Only then did I dare to look at the wall.
The fresco was ruined.
The upper part was a confusion of colour and few clear outlines could now be seen. The hours spent meticulously forming models of men and horses, the months and months of careful drawing, the weeks of preparing the wall, transferring the cartoon, the careful application of the paint, all gone in minutes. The lower wall was scorched and blackened, and although the figures in the central part prevailed, as if their energy could not be extinguished, even there the heat and smoke had blown across to mar their definition.
After a while my master came from the back of the hall and went to where the tables and workbenches were grouped together. It was as if he was looking for something. Eventually he scooped up some of the prepared paint in his fingers and sniffed it. Then he rubbed it between his palms.
‘Why did you change the mixture?’
Everyone looked at each other.
‘Maestro,’ stammered Flavio, ‘we have not altered it in any way.’
‘The proportions are the same,’ agreed Felipe. ‘I check these most carefully.’
Zoroastro said, ‘You know the craftsmen you employ. No one here works sloppily.’
My master acknowledged this, but said, ‘Yet there is something amiss.’
Everyone stood around miserably as he prowled among the tables and workbenches, pausing now and then to turn and stare at the fresco.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘It worked when we tested it in Santa Maria Novella.’
‘It was only done on a small section of wall,’ Felipe pointed out. ‘Perhaps over a larger area . . .’ His voice trailed away.
Zoroastro had gone to the stone slabs, where the ground paint lay ready for mixing. He stirred one of them with his finger, put some powder on his tongue, closed his eyes and chewed it. Then he went to the jar of oil, newly opened when we began work today. He dipped his fingers in the jar and smeared some over the back of his hand. He walked to where Felipe stood. ‘This oil,’ he said in a low voice; ‘who sold it to you?
Felipe looked at him in concern. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘The consistency . . .’ Zoroastro held his hand up for inspection. ‘See for yourself. The quality is not the same as we have been using previously.’
‘We use different suppliers.’ Felipe went to the jar and examined the tag tied to the stopper. ‘This one is from the riverside warehouse but the order was the same as the others.’
‘It is not the same,’ Zoroastro insisted.
‘The Pope has begun so many new projects,’ said Graziano, ‘in his determination to have Rome outdo Florence as the centre for art and culture in Europe. The traders know they can get higher prices there. I’ve heard that they keep the best materials to send to the artists working for him.’
‘That may be true,’ said Felipe. He sat down very heavily upon a stool. ‘In any case, if this oil is inferior, as Zoroastro says, it is my fault. I only tested the first batch to make sure it was all right. I didn’t think to check each individual jar as it was delivered.’ His face was grey and he looked as if he had aged a year in one morning. ‘I must go and inform the master of my error.’
‘My error too,’ said Graziano, loyally flinging an arm around Felipe’s shoulder. ‘I didn’t listen to Flavio earlier, when he tried to tell me that the paint was not settling and that we should leave off. I suspected that he wanted to go and warm himself by the fire and wait until the room was less cold. I told him to keep working.’
Zoroastro stuck h
is chin out. ‘I also bear some blame. In my panic I placed the fire basket too close to the wall. When the fire was built up then the fresco could not withstand the heat.’
‘I could have run faster through the streets to fetch him.’ I added my voice to theirs. ‘If he had got here sooner then he might have dealt with things differently.’ This was not completely true. I had run so fast that I still had a stitch in my side, but I did not want to be left out of their confraternity of guilt.
Graziano stretched out his arm and gathered me in so that the four of us were linked together. ‘Let us go and beg pardon from him now.’
‘You see!’ Zoroastro took the opportunity to hiss at me as we approached my master. ‘This is what happens when humans ignore warnings they are meant to heed. This project was cursed by its start on that Friday at the thirteenth hour.’
The Maestro listened to us. And immediately declared that there was nothing to forgive. He had dismissed the others, telling them to treat it as a holiday, assuring them that they would be paid for the day’s work. He suggested that we did the same. ‘I will stay here a while,’ he said, ‘and I would prefer to be on my own.’
When leaving I looked back and saw him standing there, staring up at the wall, his tall figure silhouetted by the light of the fire.
Before we left he took pains to reassure us in order to raise our spirits.
‘Don’t be downcast,’ he told us. ‘I will restore it to the original state.’
Felipe turned away. I heard him say distinctly to Graziano, ‘He will never restore it.’
Chapter Forty
HIS PUPILS AND apprentices began to drift away.
Like many others, they travelled to Rome. Raphael, the painter, was working there and Michelangelo, the sculptor, was making a fresco within the Vatican, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It was said it would take years to complete. With that project ongoing and the many other commissions available, the Romans boasted that there was work in their city for all the artists in Italy. Our Maestro did not seem too concerned about losing his craftsmen. His restless, enquiring mind ranged over a great number of other subjects which kept him busy and he left it to Graziano to try to rectify the fire damage to his painting. Felipe’s job was to placate the members of the City Council, who were beginning to enquire when the Maestro would finish their fresco in the hall of the Palazzo Vecchio.
Outside forces were pressing in on him, in addition to the many requests for paintings that he received. The French, having established a court in Milan, had become more insistent that they would like him to attend there. They had made representations to him, and how intended to petition the Council of Florence directly to release my master from his contract. There was also a long-standing argument over a piece of work for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception in Milan. The fathers considered it unfinished and were withholding payment. But I think that it was being used as an excuse to encourage the Maestro to go to Milan to deal with this himself. And although there were matters in Florence that required his attention, he was more inclined now to quit the city. He talked of returning to the place where he had spent earlier years working on projects that used all his skills – as an engineer, an architect and a designer – and where it seemed the French might be more appreciative of his talents. I knew that Felipe would be glad to have done fending off Pier Soderini and his Council, who were now, as he had predicted, demanding the return of their scaffolding.
‘If we took it apart into the smallest pieces, then parcelled it up and delivered it separately, I wonder if they’d discover that there are spars missing?’ Felipe asked us.
‘They’d never notice,’ laughed Graziano. ‘Those men are so ignorant they could not find their own backside to wipe it.’
Graziano was very keen to be in Milan, where he deemed the French held a civilized court, full of style and wit and enough ladies to please him.
And Salai? He would go where the Maestro went, for although he had a devious mind I believe he did truly love him. He was loyal. Salai did not desert as the other pupils did, but then that might have been to do with his own self-interest. He had some talent in drawing and painting and, taking advantage of the reputation of the da Vinci workshop, would accept private orders to fill his own purse. Sometimes he would have my master do the outline drawing for him and then complete the portrait using the materials from our storerooms. Felipe was wise enough not to comment openly on this but it created a certain tension within the household.
My master either did not notice or did not care. He spent more and more time at the place where I had found him on the day of the disaster: the house of Donna Lisa.
It became his refuge. She now sustained him in his troubles, where once he had helped her out of her grief. He had few female friends, but she was one of them. She had educated herself and was slowly building a small library of both ancient and modern texts, and they spoke together on the books they had read. He respected her for this; also for her resilience – indeed, he admired the fortitude of all women.
‘Women who marry and have children only live until they are worn out with childbirth,’ he told me, walking back from her house one day. ‘Some years ago I did an anatomy on the body of a woman who had borne thirteen children. I saw where the pelvis had been cracked many times with the labours of childbirth. And of these sons and daughters only one survived her. She’d had to suffer the bodily pain of giving birth, and also, in her mind, the torment of losing her children.’
I thought of Rossana and Elisabetta. What would have become of them if they had been left to grow up at Perela? By sixteen years of age they would have been married and ready to bear children for their husbands. Now Elisabetta was with her brother on some remote farm, and Rossana, her sister believed, dwelled among the angels. But I tried to turn my mind from this. When I remembered Rossana, it was as though someone struck a blow across my chest.
‘Men do not think of these trials that women undergo as much as they should,’ my master went on. Then he added, ‘With the exception, perhaps, of one man that we know.’
He was referring to Donna Lisa’s husband, Francesco del Giocondo. It was because he valued his wife and empathized with the desolation of her soul at the loss of their child that he had come and asked my master to paint her portrait.
‘Donna Lisa is not his first wife,’ my master said. ‘He has one son already by a previous marriage to a woman who died. But I think he holds this wife close to his heart. My own father was married four times, each wife, save the last, dying before him.’
My master rarely spoke of his father, a respected notary of Florence, who had died about eighteen months previously. He seldom displayed his emotions in any case, but in this instance it was more than the loss of a parent that he’d had to suffer. I’d heard Felipe say that while the law did not acknowledge a bastard child my master had been grieved when it became apparent that he was not to be given any share of his father’s estate. Was he ashamed to have it so plainly marked that he was left unrecognized as a son? Like me, unacknowledged by both mother and father? This may have been the bond of kinship that connected us. Although as a child my master had had the care and attention of one woman who was as near to a mother as possible. His natural mother being considered unsuitable, after his birth his father had married another woman and had taken Leonardo, his bastard son, with him when he set up his household. His new wife had treated my master very kindly and he had been sad to leave when he came of age to do so. Though she was now dead he kept in touch with her brother, who was a good friend to my master. This step-uncle was a canon in the church at Fiesole, just outside Florence, and this was where my master went to rest after the destruction of the fresco.
My master stayed at Fiesole through Christmas and into the next year for the feast of the Epiphany, and then past the end of January. The leader of the Florentine Council, Pier Soderini, was deeply unhappy at this prolonged absence, and came to the workshop at Santa Maria Novella to complain.
Felipe had to seek any way he could to deflect his pursuit of my master. He would bring out his accounts and ledgers and pore over them in front of him. Then he would calculate and recalculate the payments already authorized by the Council, and mark off in his almanac how many days had been worked and how many were still required for completion. Meanwhile Graziano would press liberal draughts of our best wine upon this conscientious but dull man, and flatter him subtly by urging him to tell us his opinions on the political situation.
‘He would do well to spend less time worrying about things not done,’ said Graziano one day as he watched Pier Soderini depart, a little unsteadily, ‘and pay closer attention to what is actually happening within his own city.’
Felipe agreed. ‘If he were such a shrewd observer of the political situation as he thinks he is, he would see what is cooking up under his very nose.’
I had begun to clear away the wine jug and goblets. ‘What is that?’ I stopped to ask them.
They glanced at each other.
‘Better that you remain ignorant, Matteo,’ said Felipe. ‘That way you cannot be accused of being with one faction or another.’
‘What factions are those?’ I asked.
‘The Pope has an army ready now to march into the Romagna. He is intent on taking more cities there than even Cesare Borgia conquered. There are those in Florence who see this as an opportunity to . . . make changes . . . here.’ Graziano was choosing his words carefully.
‘And there are spies who report conversations such as this,’ Felipe said brusquely. He gave Graziano a warning glance.
I picked up the wine cups and went to rinse the dishes. This talk chimed with what the Sinistro Scribe had told me. But still I could not believe it possible. Florence teemed with commerce and life. It was obviously prosperous; why would anyone want to change it? The Council was part of the existence of the city. Pier Soderini had been appointed leader for life. He was so fixed there, backed by the matchless Machiavelli and his citizen army, that I could not see him toppled from his place.
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