by Rice, Anne
How could I go into this workshop? How could I see what work was being done there now? Only by night could I come to this place. Never had I cursed the night so much.
Gold had to do this for me. Gold and the Spell Gift, though how I would dare to daze Botticelli himself I had no idea.
Suddenly, unable to control myself any longer I pounded on the door of the house.
Naturally enough, no one answered, so I pounded again.
Finally a light brightened in the upstairs window, and I could hear footfall within.
At last a voice demanded: Who was I, and what did I want?
What was I to answer to such a question? Was I to lie to someone whom I worshiped? Ah, but I had to get in.
“Marius de Romanus,” I answered, making up the name at that very moment. “I’ve come with a purse of gold for Botticelli. I’ve seen his paintings in Rome, and I greatly admire him. I must put this purse into his own hand.”
There was a pause. Voices behind the door. Two men conferring with each other as to who I might be, or why such a lie might be told.
One man said not to answer. The other man said it was worth a brief look, and it was he who pulled back the latch and opened the door. The other held the lamp behind him, so I saw only a shadowy face.
“I am Sandro,” he said simply, “I’m Botticelli. Why would you bring me a purse of gold?”
For a long moment I was speechless. But in this speechlessness, I had the sense to produce the gold. I handed the purse over to the man, and I watched silently as he opened it and as he took out the gold florins and held them in his hand.
“What do you want?” he asked. His voice was as plain as his manner. He was rather tall. His hair was light brown and already threaded with gray though he was not old. He had large eyes that appeared compassionate, and a well-formed mouth and nose. He stood looking at me without annoyance or suspicion, and obviously ready to return my gold. I didn’t think he was forty years old.
I tried to speak and I stammered. For the first time in all my memory I stammered. Finally I managed to make myself plain:
“Let me come into your workshop tonight,” I said. “Let me see your paintings. That’s all I want.”
“You can see them by day.” He shrugged. “My workshop’s always open. Or you can go to the churches in which I’ve painted. My work is all over Florence. You don’t have to pay me for such a thing.” What a sublime voice; what an honest voice. There was something patient and tender in it.
I gazed upon him as I had gazed on his paintings. But he was waiting for an answer. I had to pull myself together.
“I have my reasons,” I said. “I have my passions. I want to see your work now, if you’ll let me. I offer the gold.”
He smiled and he gave a little even laugh. “Well, you come like one of the Magi,” he said. “For I can certainly use the payment. Come inside.”
That was the second time in my long years that I had been compared to the Magi of Scripture and I loved it.
I entered the house which was by no means luxurious, and as he took the lamp from the other man, I followed him through a side door into his workshop where he put the lamp on a table full of paints and brushes and rags.
I couldn’t take my eyes off him. This was the man who had done the great paintings in the Sistine Chapel, this ordinary man.
The light flared up and filled the place. Sandro, as he had called himself, gestured to his left, and as I turned to my right, I thought I was losing my mind.
A giant canvas covered the wall, and though I had expected to see a religious painting, no matter how sensual, there was something else there, altogether different, which rendered me speechless once more.
The painting was enormous as I’ve indicated, and it was composed of several figures, but whereas the Roman paintings had confused me in the question of their subject matter, I knew very well the subject matter of this.
For these were not saints and angels, or Christs and prophets—no, far from it.
There loomed before me a great painting of the goddess Venus in all her glorious nudity, feet poised upon a seashell, her golden hair torn by faint breezes, her dreamy gaze steady, her faithful attendants the god Zephyr who blew the breezes which guided her landward, and a nymph as beautiful as the goddess herself who welcomed her to the shore.
I drew in my breath and put my hands over my face, and then when I uncovered my eyes I found the painting there again.
A slight impatient sigh came from Sandro Botticelli. What in the name of the gods could I say to him about the brilliance of this work? What could I say to him to reveal the adulation I felt?
Then came his voice, low and resigned. “If you’re going to tell me it’s shocking and evil, let me tell you, I have heard it a thousand times. I’ll give you back your gold if you want. I’ve heard it a thousand times.”
I turned and went down on my knees, and I took his hands and I kissed them with my lips as closely as I dared. Then I rose slowly like an old man on one knee before the other and I stood back to gaze at the panel for a long time.
I looked at the perfect figure of Venus again, covering her most intimate secret with locks of her abundant hair. I looked on the nymph with her outstretched hand and her voluminous garments. I looked on the god Zephyr and the goddess with him, and all of the tiny details of the painting came to reside in my mind.
“How has it come about?” I asked. “After so long a time of Christs and Virgins, that such a thing could be painted at last?”
From the quiet figure of the uncomplaining man there came another little laugh.
“It’s up to my patron,” he said. “My Latin is not so good. They read the poetry to me. I painted what they said to paint.” He paused. He looked troubled. “Do you think it’s sinful?”
“Certainly not,” I responded. “You ask me what I think? I think it’s a miracle. I’m surprised that you would ask.” I looked at the painting. “This is a goddess,” I said. “How could it be other than sacred? There was a time when millions worshiped her with all their hearts. There was a time when people consecrated themselves to her with all their hearts.”
“Well, yes,” he answered softly, “but she’s a pagan goddess, and not everyone thinks that she is the patron of marriage as some say now. Some say this painting is sinful, that I shouldn’t be doing it.” He gave a frustrated sigh. He wanted to say more, but I sensed that the arguments were quite beyond him.
“Don’t listen to such things,” I said. “It has a purity I’ve almost never seen in painting. Her face, the way you’ve painted it, she’s newborn yet sublime, a woman, yet divine. Don’t think of sin when you work on this painting. This painting is too vital, too eloquent. Put the struggles of sin out of your mind.”
He was silent but I knew he was thinking. I turned and tried to read his mind. It seemed chaotic, and full of wandering thoughts and guilt.
He was a painter almost entirely at the mercy of those who hired him, but he had made himself supreme by virtue of the particularities that all cherished in his work. Nowhere were his talents more fully expressed than in this particular painting and he knew this though he couldn’t put it into words. He thought hard on how to tell me about his craft and his originality, but he simply couldn’t do it. And I would not press him. It would be a wicked thing to do.
“I don’t have your words,” he said simply. “You really believe the painting isn’t sinful?”
“Yes, I told you, it’s not sinful. If anyone tells you anything else they’re lying to you.” I couldn’t stress it enough. “Behold the innocence in the face of the goddess. Don’t think of anything else.”
He looked tormented, and there came over me a sense of how fragile he was, in spite of his immense talent and his immense energy to work. The thrusts of his art could be utterly crushed by those who criticized him. Yet he went on somehow every day painting the best pictures that he knew how to paint.
“Don’t believe them,” I said again, drawing h
is eyes back to me.
“Come,” he said, “you’ve paid me well to look at my work. Look at this tondo of the Virgin Mary with Angels. Tell me how you like this.”
He brought the lamp to the far wall and held it so that I might see the round painting which hung there.
Once again I was too shocked by the loveliness of it to speak. But it was plainly obvious that the Virgin was as purely beautiful as the goddess Venus, and the Angels were sensual and alluring as only very young boys and girls can be.
“I know,” he said to me. “You don’t have to tell me. My Venus looks like the Virgin and the Virgin looks like the Venus and so they say of me. But my patrons pay me.”
“Listen to your patrons,” I said. I wanted so to clasp his arms. I wanted to gently shake him so that he would never forget my words. “Do what they tell you. Both paintings are magnificent. Both paintings are finer than anything I’ve ever seen.”
He couldn’t know what I meant by such words. I couldn’t tell him. I stared at him, and for the first time I saw a little apprehension in him. He had begun to notice my skin, and perhaps my hands.
It was time to leave him before he became even more suspicious, and I wanted him to remember me kindly and not with fear.
I took out another purse which I had brought with me. It was full of gold florins.
He gestured to refuse it. In fact, he gave me a very stubborn refusal. I placed it on the table.
For a moment we merely looked at each other.
“Good-bye, Sandro,” I said.
“Marius, was it? I’ll remember you.”
I made my way out the front door and into the street. I hurried for the space of two blocks and then I stopped, breathing too hurriedly, and it seemed a dream that I had been with him, that I had seen such paintings, that such paintings had been created by man.
I didn’t go back to my rooms in the palazzo.
When I reached the vault of Those Who Must Be Kept, I fell down in a new kind of exhaustion, crazed by what I had beheld. I couldn’t get the impression of the man out of my mind. I couldn’t stop seeing him with his soft dull hair and sincere eyes.
As for the paintings, they haunted me, and I knew that my torment, my obsession, my complete abandonment to the love of Botticelli had only just begun.
16
In the months that followed I became a busy visitor of Florence, slipping into various palaces and churches to see the work that Botticelli had done.
Those who praised him had not lied. He was the most revered painter in Florence, and those who complained of him were those for whom he had no time, for he was only a mortal man.
In the Church of San Paolino, I found an altarpiece which was to drive me mad. The subject of the painting was a common one, I had discovered, usually called The Lamentation, being the scene of those weeping over the body of the dead Christ only just taken down from the Cross.
It was a miracle of Botticelli’s sensuality, most specifically in the tender representation of Christ himself who had the gorgeous body of a Greek god, and in the utter abandon of the woman who had pressed her face against that of his, for though Christ lay with his head hanging downward, she knelt upright and her eyes were therefore very near to Christ’s mouth.
Ah, to see these two faces seamlessly pressed to each other, and to see the delicacy of every face and form surrounding them, it was more than I could endure.
How long would I let this torture me? How long must I go through this wanton enthusiasm, this mad celebration before I retreated to my loneliness and coldness in the vault? I knew how to punish myself, didn’t I? Did I have to go out of my way to the city of Florence for this?
There were reasons to be gone.
Two other blood drinkers haunted this city who might want me out of it, but so far they had left me alone. They were very young and hardly very clever, nevertheless I did not want them to come upon me, and spread “the legend of Marius” any further than it had already gone.
And then there was that monster I had encountered in Rome—that evil Santino who might come this far to harry me with his little Satan worshipers whom I so desperately deplored.
But these things didn’t really matter.
I had time in Florence and I knew it. There were no Satan worshipers here and that was a good thing. I had time to suffer as much as I chose.
And I was mad for this mortal, Botticelli, this painter, this genius, and I could scarce think of anything else.
Meantime, there came from Botticelli’s brilliance yet another immense pagan masterpiece which I beheld in the palazzo to which it was sent upon being finished—a place into which I crept in the early hours of the morning to see the painting while the owners of the building slept.
Once again, Botticelli had used Roman mythology, or perhaps the Greek mythology that lay behind it to create a garden—yes, of all things, a garden—a garden of eternal springtime in which mythical figures made their sublime progress with harmonious gestures and dreamy expressions, their attitudes exquisitely gentle in the extreme.
On one side of the verdant garden danced the youthful and inevitably beautiful Three Graces in transparent and billowing garments while on the other side came the goddess Flora, magnificently clothed and strewing flowers from her dress. The goddess Venus once more appeared in the center, dressed as a rich Florentine woman, her hand up in a gesture of welcome, her head tilted slightly to one side.
The figure of Mercury in the far left corner, and several other mythic beings completed the gathering which entranced me so that I stood before the masterpiece for hours, perusing all the details, sometimes smiling, sometimes weeping, wiping at my face, and even now and then covering my eyes and then uncovering them again to see the vivid colors and the delicate gestures and attitudes of these creatures—the whole so reminiscent of the lost glory of Rome, and yet so utterly new and different from it that I thought, for loving all this, I will lose my mind.
Any and all gardens which I had ever painted or imagined were obliterated by this painting. How would I ever rival, even in my dreams, such a work as this?
How exquisite here to die of happiness after being so long miserable and alone. How exquisite to see this triumph of form and color after having studied with bitter sacrifice so many forms I could not understand.
There is no despair in me anymore. There is only joy, continuous restless joy.
Is that possible?
Only reluctantly did I leave this painting of the springtime garden. Only reluctantly did I leave behind its dark flower-rich grass and overhanging orange trees. Only reluctantly did I move on to find more of Botticelli where I could.
I might have staggered around Florence for nights on end, drunk on what I’d seen in this painting. But there was more, much more, for me to see.
Mark, all this time, as I slipped into churches to see more works by the Master, as I crept into a palazzo to see a famed painting by the Master of the irresistible god Mars sleeping helplessly on the grass beside a patient and watchful Venus, as I went about clasping my hands to my lips so as not to cry out crazily, I did not return to the workshop of the genius. I held myself back.
“You cannot interfere in his life,” I told myself. “You cannot come in with gold and draw him from his paintings. His is a mortal destiny. Already the entire city knows of him. Rome knows of him. His paintings will endure. He is not someone you need save from a gutter. He is the talk of Florence. He is the talk of the Pope’s Palace in Rome. Leave him alone.”
And so I did not go back, though I was starving just to look at him, just to talk to him, just to tell him that the marvelous painting of the Three Graces and the other goddesses in the springtime garden was as glorious as anything that he had done.
I would have paid him just to allow me to sit in his shop in the evening, and to watch him at his work. But this was wrong, all of it.
I went back to the Church of San Paolino, and I stayed for a long time, staring at The Lamentation.
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nbsp; It was far more stiff than his “pagan” paintings. Indeed, he had seldom done something quite this severe. And there was much darkness to the painting, in the deeply colored robes of the various figures, and in the shadowy recesses of the open tomb. But even in this severity there was a tenderness, a loveliness. And the two faces—that of Mary and Christ—which were pressed together—drew me and would not let me look away.
Ah, Botticelli. How does one explain his gift? His figures though perfect were always slightly elongated, even the faces were elongated, and the expressions on the faces were sleepy and perhaps even ever so slightly unhappy, it is so difficult to say. All the figures of any one painting seemed lost in a communal dream.
As for the paint he used—the paint used by so many in Florence—it was far superior to anything we had had in the ancient days of Rome, in that it mixed simple egg yolk and ground pigment to achieve the colors and the glazes and the varnishes to make an application of unsurpassed brilliance and endurance. In other words, the works had a gloss that seemed miraculous to my eyes.
So fascinated was I by this paint that I sent my mortal servant to procure all the available pigments for me, and the eggs, and to bring me by night an old apprentice who might mix up the colors for me, exactly to the right thickness, so I might paint a bit of work in my rented rooms.
It was only an idle experiment, but I found myself working furiously and soon covering every bit of prepared wood and canvas which my apprentice and my servant had bought.
They were, of course, shocked by my speed, which gave me pause. I had to be clever, not fantastical. Hadn’t I learnt that long years ago when I’d painted my banquet room as my guests cheered me on?
I sent them away with plenty of gold, telling them to come back to me with more materials. As for what I had painted? It was some poor imitation of Botticelli, for even with my immortal blood I could not capture what he had captured. I could not make faces like those he had rendered, no, not by a very long way. There was something brittle and hopeless in what I painted. I could not look at my own work. I loathed it. There was something flat and accusatory in the faces I had created. There was something ominous in the expressions that looked back at me from the walls.
