by Lisa Rochon
She set off again, and when she reached the fountain carved with three lion heads, she unwrapped the bandages from her knuckles. Sturdy houses, one and two stories high, surrounded the fountain on all sides. She could hear iron pots banging against stone floors and the scolding of children by exhausted mothers. The lions spat thin streams of water into the basin. Beatrice bent over the fountain and scrubbed her hands, then splashed water over her neck, her arms, and loosened her hair. She placed her crown of olive leaves on her head and pinched her cheeks to draw color, to impress on her city clients that she embodied all that was good from the country. Let the Florentines enjoy the lie; she was happy to pretend to be fed on goat’s milk and fattened pig if it brought customers.
She bumped her cart down the dirt road and into the back lanes where guild artists kept their studios. Traffic on the path was growing to a frantic morning pitch. Two finely dressed boys wrapped in matching peach velvet capes passed by; Beatrice felt a silk merchant’s sleeve decorated with pearls graze her naked hand. She walked on to discover a group of ironsmiths kneeling over a fire and, traveling in the opposite direction, a young man, reeking of red wine, who cradled a framed canvas in his arms. Its protective woolen shroud was poorly arranged, allowing Beatrice a glimpse of a woman in a Greek tunic who looked horribly old-fashioned—why paint something from so long ago? Next, several laborers, thick woolen tunics stained with sweat, forced her to the side of the road. They carried a church altar, their hands wrapped around its fat wooden legs, each elaborately carved with bunches of grapes and lilies.
Her first client was Filippino Lippi. He was stiff-necked, with lecherous wet lips, as if he’d just been released from a long stay in a damp prison cell. The right wheel groaned, filling her with bitterness; the stolen figs weighed heavy in her belly. She had not forgotten all of her Christian teachings—she would repent and ask forgiveness for stealing. God would smile down on her, and she would blow him a kiss from the dirt road.
Beatrice selected jars from her cart and approached Filippino Lippi’s studio, passing his healthy lemon tree, eyeing its golden fruit. Before her father was killed, her mother often made a salad with thin strips of lemon peel mixed with olives and parsley. Sometimes she sprinkled violets on top, but only to inspire her husband, who would scratch a rapturous poem in the dirt about their meal and erase it when it was time to teach their child her letters. Beatrice learned well, and this pleased her father and even her mother, who worried that there were never enough florins to support the three of them. Though they owned very little, Beatrice always thought they were wealthy.
The door burst open before she knocked; Filippino was an early riser and moved with frantic energy. He was not an old man, but he seemed to Beatrice not long for the world. His skin had a leaden sheen to it, and his eyes were cavernous. She hoped he would not die too soon, as she needed his business. He waved her inside and shut the door.
She moved delicately away from his hands and placed the olive oil on the table, next to his drawings. Laid out was a sketch of the Virgin and the baby Jesus, drawn in loose strokes of brown ink. Angels and men stood nearby, all of them looking and gesturing at each other.
“It looks like they’re talking to each other,” said Beatrice.
“It’s an experiment,” said Filippino, studying his sketch. “Artists have always painted the saints doing nothing. Just standing and staring.”
“And you?”
“I’m trying to paint a sacred conversation between saints about the Holy Child.”
“A sacra conversazione.” Beatrice considered this piece of news, bending closer to the sketch to seize the details. “Where did you learn how to draw like this?” She gazed at the charcoal sketches on the table, the half-finished altar works propped against the studio wall.
“With Botticelli. I was apprenticed to him.”
“Who is that?”
“Oh dear, you truly are an olive oil girl. He’s only one of the greatest painters ever known to Florence. We painted for the Medici and their wealthy circle of friends. The Adoration of the Kings, a vast work we painted together. He did the crowd on one side. Insisted on including a white horse rearing up and a man wielding an axe. Tempera on wood, the usual technique.”
“What is tempera?”
He looked at Beatrice and let out an exasperated sigh. “Egg yolk, pigment and water.”
She knew she was testing his patience, but she needed to ask: “Were there girls studying with you?”
“Girls? Of course not. Too distracting.” He stepped closer to her and slid his hands inside her quilted jacket. “Like you.”
“With your permission,” she said, her eyes turned cold like the angels in his sketch, “I would like payment for this month’s olive oil.” She paused, looking again at his artworks, absorbing lessons from his technique that she might apply to her own rough sketches. “I would also like three of your lemons.” With the fruit she could make ten jars of lemon oil and sell them for a handsome price.
“Your skin reminds me of copper dipped in gold. One lick of my tongue,” he murmured. She stepped away from him, his hot, sickly breath on her neck. From a safe distance, she held out her hand. He sighed, rummaged in a leather purse and, unsmiling, dropped four quattrini into her palm while motioning her out. “It will take me hours to focus again on my art. Don’t come back next week!”
Outside, she climbed high into the artist’s lemon tree, balancing against one of its magnificent branches and selecting three perfect fruit to toss down into her cart. She took another lemon for herself and bit hungrily into it, enjoying the shock of the sour taste and the yellow flesh dripping all over her hands. It was glorious to be up in the leafy greenery, away from the dirt of the alley. Another bite and she felt brighter than she had for days. She counted on her fingers to make a cold calculation of her world. Finger number one: Father was dead. Finger number two: Mother had disappeared. Finger number three: She was starving. Finger number four: Not everybody can be trusted. Her thoughts thus enumerated on sinewy fingers, she looked down on her misfortunes as if inspecting tongue, tripe and other innards spread out raw on a butcher’s block. But, this morning, there was something else to add to the hardened facts of her world. A great man had defended her at the city gate. She felt a series of knots coming undone around her mouth, possibly, even, the hint of a smile. Perhaps there was reason to feel less alone. She felt something warm—a tiny flame flickering inside her. She cocked finger number five, which was actually a thumb: Survive.
Chapter 4
His humiliation at the city gates continued until the guards eventually tired of the game and turned back to processing the peasants clamoring to pay their tolls and come through.
“Step to the side. Let me see your papers,” said one thuggish guard delegated to handle him. He waved a reassuring hand at Salaì inside the carriage and allowed himself to be shoved below the towering arch of the gate. He stood tall and would not look at the ripped edges of his cape. Somebody’s pig, escaped from a wagon, hurtled by. Above the noisy squeals, he heard a voice ringing out: “Maestro! Maestro!” A priest in a long black cloak hurried toward him, waddling as quickly as his fat body would allow, like an old, broody hen. “We are delighted, all of us, all Florentines—” said the priest, anxious to launch into his speech, a beatific smile printed on his face.
The guard, recognizing the Servant of Mary crest emblazoned across the front of the priest’s cloak, lowered his dagger.
“You know this person?” He tipped his head toward the man in the velvet cape.
“Idiota.” The prior shot the guard a look of disgust. “This is Leonardo da Vinci, a genius come home to honor us with his presence.” He grasped the master’s hands and bowed low, kissing each of them.
Another pig and a pair of donkeys pushed past. The maestro looked at the cart driver as he sped past, mesmerized by his remarkable chin, as if two beets had been permanently stacked there. The Tuscan face, he thought, sculpted from the gifts of t
he earth like no other.
“Master, many long years have passed,” said the prior, interrupting his thoughts. The priest was quite obviously dismayed to see how Leonardo had aged. His auburn hair had turned white and his erstwhile jawline was now covered by the curly beard of a prophet. Still, he knew he possessed a regal bearing that was missing from most dukes and governors lording over their small, feuding Italian states.
“The messenger informed me of your decision to leave Milan and return to Florence. We have prepared your lodging,” the prior said. “I hope most fervently that you will find my monastery to be hospitable.”
“You have to pay the toll,” the guard interrupted, cocking his chin at the carriage. “Triple for the wheels and the horses.”
The prior dug into his satchel and produced a piece of heavy bond paper. “An invitation, stamped with the pope’s seal,” he said, waving the document at the guard and offering a look of apology to his honored guest. “Can you read, soldier? Of course you can’t.”
“Pay the toll. It’s the law.”
“Prior, allow me,” said Leonardo, bowing slightly at the hip and producing the coins in one elegant sweep of the hand.
Cursing at the guard, the priest stepped up into the carriage, sending it rocking on its wheels. “Now, then, let’s get you to the peace of our monastery.”
The master climbed in reluctantly, but not before gazing back at the crowd, wonderfully wretched as they were. Every face a unique portrait of raw, pure emotion. He would rely on this picture of humanity for a future commission; the memory would fuel his imagination.
“Prior, how kind of you to welcome us,” he said, settling against the leather seat. “Let me introduce my assistant, Salaì, an artist of much talent.”
Salaì ignored the introduction and looked out the window.
“The honor is mine,” said the prior, inclining slightly forward. “I had hoped you’d miss the flood of people, but I fear they are arriving earlier and earlier. All of them God’s creatures, but given to such terrible manners and smells. More animal than human. Born to sell their simple wares, I suppose, and bask in our sunshine.”
The master smiled, unlacing his velvet cape to allow for air. He was accustomed to the elites bashing the downtrodden. “My hometown has changed, it seems, from the little city I once knew.”
“Indeed, the old Roman settlement has grown in population and wealth. And notoriety,” agreed the prior. “What other city can boast the presence not only of a genius such as yourself but Michelangelo di Buonarroti besides, whose Pietà in Rome causes people to fall to their knees and weep?”
Leonardo turned from the prior as if absorbed by the ongoing chaos outside. He had barely cleared the gates of Florence and already Michelangelo’s name was slipping easily from local tongues. “By all reports he is a fine young sculptor,” he said, turning back to the prior. One who was recently commissioned by the monied Wool Guild to sculpt the biblical David to sit atop the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. Word that Michelangelo was being considered by the Arte della Lana had reached Leonardo months earlier, in Milan. The duke had mentioned it at a dinner, wiping his mouth with linen. “This young Michelangelo assigned to sculpt David from the Old Bible? I wonder they did not ask other talented ones, such as yourself? But you have been busy, Master. Tell me, is your fresco of the Last Supper nearly, finally, complete?”
Past the tollgates, Florence unfurled like a sail, and Leonardo inhaled its architectural magnificence under clear Tuscan skies. The marketplace was pumping with energy, and it seemed that the squalor he had witnessed outside the gates had been dissipated and softened within the grand civic spaces where buildings had been demolished a century ago to make way for inspiring views of the city’s monuments. He watched, amused, as boys gathered at the base of the Campanile tower, selling bundles of beeswax tapers wrapped in garlands of gilliflowers. A clutch of women he was sure had deliberately crashed their carts against each other outside of the gates sang in unison to beckon customers, scooping black olives into wooden bowls. The chill air was fragrant with the sweet smell of bread being pulled from a stone oven in a panetteria tucked down Via dei Martelli, across from the Baptistery of San Giovanni. The baker’s son sold the bread to a lineup of customers, digging into the pockets of his apron to make quick change for overworked servant girls. The master leaned forward in the carriage to take in the dazzling pattern of the white Carrara and green Prato marble of the holy monument glowing in the morning sun. He wondered if the local gossips still occupied their place in the square. Right on cue, he spied them: a trio of old men sitting on a long wooden bench with their backsides next to the golden eastern doors. He watched as they watched him, imagining what they might be saying about him.
“Is it he?” the man with a bulbous nose would whisper, elbowing his companions. “His body has not shrunk. But what of his mind?”
Ah, yes, recalled the Master of Arts, the gossiping bench-sitters, known locally as the sersaccenti delle pancacce.
He looked their way. Then he glanced to the north doors of the baptistery, where his eyes lingered on the panel depicting Abraham, sword drawn, preparing to kill his only son to satisfy God’s wishes. His own father might be equally inclined, though not because of a desire to please God.
“Those are his eyes,” another of the gossipers might murmur. “Always hunting for something, like a hawk.”
He watched as the gossipers squinted and pointed at him. One of them had attracted a crowd and was speaking loud enough for everyone to hear, even the subject of their gossip.
“I tell you. That is Leonardo da Vinci, riding by in all his finery. The talented, beautiful one. Arrested for sodomy, as God is our witness. When his hair was freakishly red.”
They were right. He had been accused anonymously, unceremoniously hauled from a late-night party to the gallows behind Florence’s city hall, the Palazzo Vecchio. Accusations, true or false, were easy to make. Scribble something on parchment and drop it into one of the city’s tamburi—letter boxes, or holes of truth—placed conveniently around the city, and let the Office of the Night and Conservers of the Morality of Monasteries do the rest.
He considered himself lucky. He might have been flogged to within an inch of his life if he’d been discovered with other sodomizers in devout Venice, where the doge fancied himself as significant as the pope. But in Florence, money talked. If you were privileged enough to have florins in your satchel (which he did) or friends who were wealthy (which he had), you were forgiven your wickedness after a few nights sleeping rough in stone cells underground.
The horses pulled the carriage quickly over the cobblestones, up the Via dei Servi to the Piazza della Santissima Annunziata, where the congestion of the city was suddenly interrupted. Leonardo breathed his thanks to Brunelleschi as the carriage rumbled through the square. They had never met. The architect had died a few years before he was born. But his belief in lifting people’s spirits through ennobling architecture and grand, edifying public spaces that framed the heavens lived powerfully on. Those squatters on the wrong side of the gates? Brunelleschi believed they had a right to the city and clean air to breathe. On the east side of the square stood his stone arcade fronting the Ospedale degli Innocenti. Leonardo observed every detail—the blue glazed terracotta sculptures of babies in swaddling clothes gracing every one of the archways of the loggia, every column topped by a capital decorated with thick foliage. To him, they were offered like harmonies in a long, sustained chant. To the north, in sober contrast, the Basilica of Santissima Annunziata presented a meditative dome to allow worship in the round.
He gazed out the window of the carriage, and a prayer floated through his mind, words written long ago by Saint Francis of Assisi: “Most High, glorious God, enlighten the shadows of my heart, and grant me a right faith, a certain hope and perfect charity, sense and understanding.”
The driver pulled the carriage below a grand arch and down a narrow lane alongside the church before coming to
a halt.
“I’m starving,” said Salaì, the first words he had uttered since crossing under the tollgates.
The prior bristled at the girlish whine. Leonardo knew what he was likely thinking: Italy might be shaped like a womb, but the population of Florence was dwindling thanks to the sodomizers wedged in the carriage next to him.
“Not long now,” Leonardo reassured Salaì, though he was uneasy about their arrival. Shifting house and home from the princely accommodation within the duke of Milan’s monumental castle to a few rooms at the Santissima Annunziata monastery was unsettling. And the scourge of being named a dirty sodomizer more than twenty years ago had never left him. Now the gossipers had thrown his shame back out to the public. He stroked his beard and tried to calm the feeling in his stomach.
The prior heaved himself out of the carriage; the master jumped down easily, the bird basket in one hand, the carafe of olive oil in the other. Salaì followed, stretched his arms and yawned loudly. “Looks a bit of a dump,” he said, leaning over to Leonardo. “Send a message to one of those fancy merchant families. Or the bankers—they must have palazzi with room to spare?”
“Apparently not,” said Leonardo, looking at the two-story compound, its courtyard garden dusted with November pallor. He had memorized the plan of the monastery from a drawing sent to him in Milan by messenger, and his eyes searched for a secret entrance across the commons.
The men ascended a narrow stairwell, white stains of mildew at the edge of its stone steps. Nothing like the Sforza Castle, where he and his assistants had thrived among musicians, dancing masters, military men, servants and dwarfs. How he had delighted in painting a fantastical forest to cover the vaulted ceiling in the magnificent Hall of the Axis, weaving branches and leaves together and then knotting them with a sinewy rope burnished with gold. He scanned the long, low corridor of the monastery and its plain plaster walls. “Icarus descending,” he said to himself.
