The Miracles of Prato

by Laurie Albanese

  “There’s no one else who knows so much about childbirth. I want to be prepared, Filippo.”

  By her own calculations the child had taken root any time between the ninth of September and the first day of December. If the child came in June, and was a healthy size, she would know Fra Filippo was not the father—and so would he. Despite his reticence, she knew the monk also carried the secret of her stain. He swore he loved her, and she believed him, but sometimes she lay awake all night, afraid he would refuse to claim her child as his own if she did not carry it long enough.

  “Sister Pureza is not our friend now,” the monk said heavily.

  “She was my friend once.” Lucrezia hung her head. She’d eaten only a few pieces of bread, but her stomach felt full. “Maybe she’ll be my friend again, when all is right.”

  Fra Filippo gazed at the place where her dress swelled under her breasts. He pictured the robes of the Madonna, still full after the birth of the child, and wondered at the ample breasts he might paint in his altarpiece. He rubbed his eyes, to secure the vision there, and finished his meal in silence.

  Lucrezia slept long and hard as the cold stone of the moon rose that evening, but Fra Filippo could not rest. He’d written again to Ser Francesco Cantansanti but heard nothing for two weeks. With Lucrezia’s large belly in his sight even while she slept, the monk gnawed at the end of his quill and composed a lengthy, suppliant letter to the Curia in Rome.

  Your Blessed Holiness, Pope Callistus III, whose face is always closest to the Lord’s, he began.

  For two pages, Fra Filippo poured out his reverence, his dedication, and all he’d done to honor and celebrate the Lord in churches from Rome to Naples. He listed his patrons, beginning with his days at Santa Maria del Carmine and the Madonna and Child with Angels for the Carmelites of the Selve Monastery, followed by the tabernacle and frescoes for the Antonians of the Basilica del Santo in Padua, through to the Coronation he’d completed for the church of Sant’Ambrogio.

  Fra Filippo wrote:

  Your Holiness,

  In my lifetime of gratitude and in service to the Lord, my requests never have been sent to trouble or worry but only to honor the Church and the great office of the Holy See. Now I prostrate myself at your feet and beg that in Your Great Mercy and Your Holiest Power you might grant absolution and dispensation to me, a humble servant of the Lord, so that I might enter in the Sacrament of Matrimony with one Lucrezia Buti, fourth daughter of Lorenzo Buti of Florence, who comes to me with no dowry and for whom I renounce all claim to one now or henceforth. Ut in Omnibus Gloricetus Deus.

  Chapter Twenty

  The Second Week of Lent, the Year of Our Lord 1457

  Fra Filippo labored every morning on the frescoes, and every afternoon he hurried home to work on the Adoration altarpiece. Sometimes he skipped lunch, and often didn’t stop until long after the sun went down. He’d promised Giovanni de’ Medici something truly new, and in the past it had never been difficult to conceive and execute a fresh concept. He’d been the first to paint matching portraits of a couple gazing at one another as if through the window of a confessional. He was the one who’d continued his landscapes from one wall to the next, coaxing the viewer to follow the thread of a storyline. And it was he who’d been inspired to use the impish faces of the ragazzi for the angels in his heavens.

  Now he strove to depict the wilderness as a scene of penitence, with the Madonna kneeling over the newborn Christ in the open air. To paint a Madonna under God’s sky, without the walls and buildings that man had built around her, was a bold idea that had never been done before: not by the great masters of the earlier centuries, not by Masaccio, not even by Fra Giovanni the Dominican. It wasn’t in the Gospels, nor even in the apocryphal legends.

  The open landscape would put the Madonna in the natural world, showing her divinity and closeness to creation. And to be worthy of all that he’d staked upon this single work for the Medici, the Madonna had to be a simple woman whose beauty suggested the strength and grace needed to bring the Christ child into the world. She had to be convincing and meditative, sad and hopeful at the same time.

  As he worked, Fra Filippo imagined the pope reading his request for dispensation to marry Lucrezia, and he prayed the Virgin would help to sway the ailing prelate. He tried not to dwell on the Curia’s silence. He tried not to remember the feel of the lash on his back, or to feel the pressure of Lucrezia’s blossoming belly, her hungry beauty, the beseeching look in her eyes every afternoon when he returned from the market with an ever-smaller sack of food for their meal. He tried to focus only on the Madonna, on the Child, on the hope the birth brought to the world.

  Yet when he put down his brush at the end of each day, and stepped back to see what he had accomplished, Fra Filippo knew that he was failing.

  The Madonna’s body wasn’t sufficiently beautiful; the trees and animals he’d so carefully sketched, the fat angels in the clouds, even the clouds themselves weren’t potent enough to delight a king. The weeks of working on the painting, adding one troubled brushstroke after another, hadn’t made the piece better, clearer, or more powerful. With so much at stake, his inspiration had been muddled and confused, and this was evident in the work.

  Fra Filippo had come to this painful place before, when the only thing to do was to begin again. He knew what must be done, and as dawn broke on the second Thursday of Lent, Fra Filippo stole into his workshop while Lucrezia slept, and quietly mixed a sticky batch of white gesso.

  He acted in detached defiance, splattering gesso on the floor, on his robe, and across the unformed wilderness on the panel. With a dozen broad strokes, he blotted out eight months of work.

  Half asleep, Lucrezia entered the workshop with a cup of watered wine for the painter, and instead of the altarpiece she’d been watching him coax into life, she saw the rough painting of her own face and hands floating in a sea of white. Everything else was gone, covered by streaks of white.

  “What have you done?” Lucrezia cried. She put the cup down on the worktable and cradled her belly with her arms. “The altarpiece is our only hope—you told me yourself, the dispensation from Rome won’t come without it!”

  The monk swung around, the flat gesso tool clutched in his hand.

  “It’s not good enough for a king,” he said sharply. “Our dispensation won’t come with muddied colors and vague lines! I can’t send this in the Medici’s name.”

  The painter wiped a hand over his face, smearing gesso across his forehead. Lucrezia looked at the scraps of paper and dirty rags he’d tossed onto the floor during the long night.

  “Tell me what’s happening, Filippo,” Lucrezia said. “Tell me what to do.”

  His eyes were staring past the panel, at a place on the wall where there was only a crack in the plaster.

  “Do you still love me?” she asked, her voice breaking. She looked down at her bloated stomach, her once-slender hands puffy and stiff. The ring he’d given her in December now cut into her finger. “Am I not beautiful to you anymore?”

  “You’re the most beautiful woman on earth,” he said fiercely. “Your face on the panel is the only thing worthy of the king. It’s the only thing worth saving.”

  “Please, Filippo, you’ll begin again, won’t you?”

  “I will,” he said as he rubbed his hands across his face, streaking his cheeks and scalp with white until he looked like one of the figures carved on a church façade. “I will.”

  He began again that very day, deciding on three angels to hold up the plump body of the Christ child, the hands of God reaching through a cloud that hung over the blue-green forest. There would be a midnight sky and, above it, a blue sky framed by a rainbow, emblematic of God’s promise.

  He woke early the next morning and briskly executed his sketch, prepared the panel, and opened his container of woad to grind blue pigment for the sky.

  But the corked jar was empty.

  He opened the pewter canister of buckthorn, thinking he’d w
ork at least on the deep green of the forest leaves. That, too, was nearly gone. Even the powdered margherita, which he’d taken from Lucrezia’s hand on that June day in the convent garden, was nearly finished.

  The painter bent over his worktable and hung his head.

  For two years he’d been relying on Sister Pureza to supply him with many of the herbs and plants he needed for his work. But he hadn’t set eyes on the old nun since September, when she’d turned her back on them and left the bottega in silence. It would take days to get materials from Florence, not to mention payment which he could ill afford to make. His money was almost gone. Only yesterday, he’d counted the last five pieces of silver hidden in the pouch he kept under a hearthstone.

  Without supplies, he could not paint. Without money, he could not buy supplies. And if he did not paint, he would be ruined.

  Running quickly through his commissions, Fra Filippo realized his only hope was to complete a significant portion of the frescoes at Santo Stefano, and hope he’d be able to cajole a few more florins from the Comune di Prato.

  Saying nothing to Lucrezia, who was dressing in the bedroom, he grabbed a piece of dried salami and went out. In the church he found his assistants in the cappella maggiore, just beginning to layer the color in the scene depicting young Saint Stephen taking leave of his parents.

  “Buongiorno,” he said, glaring at the yawning young men.

  Fra Filippo stared up at the wall, where he’d labored for weeks on the birth scene of Saint John. He’d lovingly drawn the gentle smile of Saint Elizabeth and the sure hands of the nursemaids who washed the infant. He’d pictured Lucrezia’s gentle glow as she reached down to feel the soft skin of their new child, and in his mind he’d replaced the orange and gray interior of Saint John’s birth chamber with the simple rooms of his own home.

  “I’ve mixed the intonaco for the new giornata, maestro,” said Tomaso, coming up behind him. “What colors will you need for the background of the funeral scene?”

  The morning was cold, and Tomaso’s words formed clouds in the frigid air. The painter whirled around to face him.

  “The work is not going quickly enough!” Fra Filippo snapped. The months of speaking to his assistants with quiet approval were gone. “Work faster!”

  He directed Fra Diamante to take over the background scenery for the missions of Saint Stephen and Saint John.

  “The white caves and stones for Saint John, the deep woods for Saint Stephen,” he instructed, indicating where and how the colors should be placed for the best effect. “They must be done now. They must be done so I can paint in the figures.”

  He put each assistant to work on a different giornata, placing the buckets of paint roughly in front of them, barking his instructions, urging them on.

  “Do you want to eat? Then you must work!” he said, spinning around the chapel from wall to wall, looking at the incomplete versions of his dreams.

  “God, you ask more of me than I can give,” he muttered to himself as he leaned against the heavy worktable and hastily drew the figures that would people the frescoes. “I can’t paint without color, without supplies, without lire.”

  The assistants saw his lips moving and assumed he was praying. They made wider circles around him, and each time he glared at them, they worked faster.

  “Veloce!” he said, watching Young Marco taking his time with the folds of a leaf. “Faster.”

  The day passed in a frenzy. No one stopped for lunch. They worked until the light was gone and Fra Diamante put a tired hand on Fra Filippo’s shoulder.

  “We’ve done all that’s possible in a single day, maestro,” he said. “We must go home now.”

  After the others had left, Fra Filippo threw down his brushes, climbed off the scaffolding, and snuffed out the candles. He made his way down the nave to where the Sacra Cintola was kept. He’d been in proximity to the Holy Belt of the Virgin for many years, but had never felt the need to call on its powers until now.

  Kneeling before the locked gate that guarded the holy relic, he sank to his knees and wrapped his hands around the bronze bars.

  “Hail Mary, full of grace.” He whispered the words of the Virgin’s prayer, suffused with more feeling than ever before. “The Lord is with thee.”

  When he finished the prayer he began again, and then again, finding solace in the rhythmic repetition of the words.

  “Madre mia, forgive me if I’ve wronged you. Forgive me.”

  As he prayed, Fra Filippo recalled that day in the confessional, when he’d searched for just the right words to comfort Lucrezia in her weeping.

  “Virgin Mother, I cannot fail,” he whispered. “I must be able to work and take care of Lucrezia, or all will be lost.”

  The candle beside him burned down until it was extinguished, and the monk was surrounded by darkness. As he tried to get his bearings, he heard footfalls from the direction of the altar. Turning, he made out a red-robed figure, carrying a candle, passing through the transept.

  “Inghirami?” he whispered hoarsely into the dark. “Good provost? Are you there?”

  The figure seemed to move more quickly. He heard one, maybe two men. Standing abruptly, the monk rushed up the nave, toward the altar. The flame vanished around a corner to the right of the presbytery. Fra Filippo heard a door open.

  “Who’s there?” His voice echoed through the church, past the silent wooden statues of the Virgin Mary and Saint Elizabeth, across the high altar where the heavy crucifix stood in darkness. He thought of Lucrezia, alone and vulnerable.

  Seized by an unnamed fear, the painter spun around and ran from the church, white robes whipping from the wind of his own movements. From the church steps he saw his bottega windows were dark, as they’d been on that terrible night many months before.

  “Lucrezia?” He shouted for her as he stumbled through the dark workshop into the kitchen. “Lucrezia?”

  The bedroom door was closed. He flung it open.

  “Lucrezia?”

  Her sleeping body rolled toward him in the dark. Panting, he put a hand on her forehead. Her eyelids fluttered, and she spoke as if from a dream.

  “What is it, Filippo?”

  The painter dropped to the floor, his head at her side, all the worry he’d been carrying for months finally bringing him to his knees.

  “Is everything all right?” She was so deeply asleep that her eyes didn’t open.

  “Yes,” he said, barely choking down his fears. “Everything’s fine.”

  After that night in the church, it seemed Fra Filippo saw red robes everywhere. He saw a flash of red rounding the corner in front of him as he walked to the market in the morning, and the edge of a red robe seemed to flash beyond his vision every afternoon. Of course Provost Inghirami couldn’t be everywhere at once, and yet it seemed he was haunting the painter even in his dreams: grimacing as Fra Filippo counted the silver pieces that ran through his fingers like fish slipping through a stream.

  “Have you seen Provost Inghirami?” the painter asked Tomaso one morning. He’d slept badly again, and woke determined to ask the provost to authorize the Comune di Prato to advance him more florins for the fresco work. He was already in arrears to the church and the city for money he’d used to pay back debts to the Augustinian Order, and knew it was highly possible that the provost would refuse. But without something, he and Lucrezia would starve.

  “He comes when you’re not here,” the assistant replied. “And he never says a word, only stands behind us and watches.”

  Fra Filippo thought he saw Young Marco blush, but he couldn’t be sure.

  “Young Marco, have you had some problem with the provost?” he asked.

  “No, maestro, nothing,” the soft-spoken young man assured him, his eyes dewy and sweet.

  Fra Filippo set everyone to their work before settling at his table to review the rough plans for King Herod’s banquet scene. He was sketching the silver platter that would hold the head of John the Baptist, and mentally composin
g the words of supplication he would use with the provost, when a messenger arrived from the home of Ottavio de’ Valenti.

  “My master wishes to see you at the palazzo today. It’s a matter of some urgency.”

  Filled with foreboding, Fra Filippo gave a few hurried instructions to Fra Diamante, and stopped before the chapel of the Sacra Cintola to say a quick prayer to the Virgin once again.

  “Good Mother, I’m nearly without hope,” he whispered. “Please don’t let me fall into ruin.”

  Fra Filippo was greeted at the Valenti palazzo with the same civility as always, and shown into the merchant’s study, with its rich intaglio carvings, where he accepted a glass of vernaccia from Ottavio’s decanter. Perched on the edge of a chair beside the fire, the painter offered his patron a weak smile.

  “You don’t look well, Brother Lippi,” de’ Valenti said, frowning.

  Fra Filippo straightened his spine as best he could, and leaned across the mahogany table. “I have many worries, but they aren’t your troubles, good friend, they’re mine.”

  Ottavio de’ Valenti was a formidable ally, one of the few people in the painter’s life to whom he currently owed nothing. The monk raised his glass to the merchant and drank half of it down in a fast gulp.

  “And our Madonna?” De’ Valenti smiled. “Is she well?”

  Fra Filippo was taken aback, startled by the fear that perhaps he owed de’ Valenti some work he’d forgotten. When he realized the merchant was speaking of Lucrezia, he bowed his head in a grateful nod.

  “She’s well enough, praise the Lord,” he said cautiously. He couldn’t help but let his eyes wander around the magnificent room, noting the ample pile of firewood next to the hearth. Without realizing it, Fra Filippo put his hand to the coin pouch at his belt, and felt for the single piece of silver there. De’ Valenti got right to the point.