by Lisa Rochon
Two forest-green velvet curtains were draped around the tub, the better to keep the heat in and ensure privacy. She and Michelangelo had built the round basin from oak dried in her shed for two years, pounded into place through mortice and tenon joinery. Most Florentines contented themselves with bathing on occasion in large open bathhouses called stews. Agnella considered that a disgusting and unclean habit. To her, bathing was all about pleasure and healing, deserving of the most luxurious attentions. She shifted position on a thick cushion covered in white linen and allowed the girl to float on her own. What a beauty she was, still an innocent, though the wolves had been biting hard at her heels. Despite her skinniness, the sharp angles of her shoulder blades, there was a bloom to her lips and to her breasts rising above the water. Agnella stroked the girl’s cheeks. Water dripped from her bangles, the gold and silver glittering in the morning light.
A neighbor in the village had sent word to her at the hospice that Beatrice had been seen walking in a state of distress to Settignano the night before. She had trotted her mule over to Michelangelo’s studio, woken him and ordered him into the cart. They had discovered the girl at the base of the great olive tree in the gray predawn, stiff and seizing up.
Michelangelo parted the curtains, his face turned away, and passed her the cauldron and a ladle. “Careful now, pour it in easy, away from her,” he said, his voice heavy with worry.
Despite her own concern, Agnella couldn’t suppress a grin that he was instructing her.
“Pass me the rose oil—it’s on the shelf above the fire.”
He stuck his hand through the curtains again and handed her the earthenware jar.
Agnella caught some of the perfumed elixir in her hand and rubbed it gently into the girl’s cheeks. “She doesn’t want to open her eyes,” she said, angling her head to try to understand.
“Wash her hair,” he said, shifting restlessly. “You know, how you used to do.”
She smiled that he remembered the times she had washed his hair when he was a small boy, her fingers lovingly massaging his scalp with her soap made from lavender and mutton oil. Later, when he was older, she would rub her poultice of olive oil and salt into his hands, dried and calloused many times over from days of working with the chisel without a break. And then there were the times when she would dress the welts on his small back, the result of beatings from his father for daring to dream of becoming a sculptor. He would wait patiently, never speaking a word of malice about Lodovico, while she applied linen strips cooled in a tincture of chamomile.
She reached a wet hand to brush away stray locks running across Beatrice’s brow. “Stay with us,” she said to Michelangelo, hoping to convince him to rest for a while. “You used to live here. Remember?” She wiped a sleeve against eyes running with tears as she recalled their years together, when her husband was alive and Michelangelo was a little boy.
Together, she and Michelangelo would help set Beatrice back on her feet. And it would keep him away from Florence for a time—away from the naked colossus and the Office of the Night.
“Can you get the towels ready?” she said, her voice harsh to hide her emotion. “They’re in the cedar cupboard.”
He found a stack of linen towels and inhaled their sweet fragrance, made from the quince tree in the back orchard. Handing them through the curtains, he said, “Wrap one around her head.”
“You know I will.” She remembered wrapping his own freshly washed head in a towel and telling him he looked like a Medici prince or the sultan of Syria, though he was only five years old. Then she would kiss him on both cheeks and hand him a cup of rosehip tisane.
“Tell her she looks like a fair duchess,” said Michelangelo. “She’d like that. I’ll make the tea.”
Chapter 28
A flash of color caught his eye and Leonardo bent to look out a window from the upper corridor. Just as he had hoped, it was Madonna Lisa leaving her carriage and crossing the inner courtyard of the Santissima Annunziata monastery, wonderfully, bravely alone again. Her red silk gamurra spilled like pomegranate juice onto the cobblestones. The monks had gone outdoors to pull weeds now that the heat of the day had lost its intensity. They tugged their hoods over their shaved heads and stared sideways at her.
Lifting her full skirts with one hand swept to the side, she traveled up the stone steps leading to Leonardo’s studios. “A gift for you and your assistants,” she said, setting the heavy basket of lemons and pears down and walking past Leonardo to the windows. “Do I look strange to you?” She was peering at the gardeners in the courtyard below.
“They mean no harm,” said Leonardo. “Most are young, parochial and accustomed to women being kept behind closed doors.”
“I feel their eyes burning my skin when I walk across the field. They are thinking strange thoughts, no doubt.”
“Such as?” Leonardo was intrigued.
“‘A woman. Alone. Outside at sunset. Scandalous! Will this harlot pose nude for the great artist?’ Oh, and another thing: ‘What’s in the basket she’s carrying against her hip like a peasant?’”
“You provide their only delight.” Drawing at this time was his preference, when the brilliant, unmediated light of the day was nearly extinguished. That or posing his subjects against blackened walls.
“It’s true. Their life must be one of excruciating monotony.”
“Beatrice would chase them away.”
“Yes, so true. I miss her.”
“A villager at heart, our dear Beatrice.”
“Given to the whims of a hot-blooded teenager,” said Lisa.
“Never mind. I shall greet you at the carriage next time; we shall dance across instead.”
Lisa clapped her hands. Without a moment’s hesitation, she stepped lightly across the studio, quick on the balls of her feet. “Soderini will want to see our entertainments.”
“I was thinking the pope,” countered Leonardo.
Lisa turned a pirouette. “We will charge for the privilege.”
“One ducat per person,” agreed Leonardo.
“One golden florin,” corrected Lisa. The currency common in Florence, not Venice. She stopped at the long wooden table and picked up a drawing of a machine with enormous wings attached to a man. “We need to fly like birds?” she said, looking at him from the corner of her eye.
“Would you like to try? I’m looking for willing candidates.”
“Ask Salaì,” she said. She went behind the screen and called out: “My feet are staying on the ground.”
He could hear her unlacing her clothing, dropping the garments onto a wooden bench and stepping into the gamurra he’d chosen for her.
“It feels like a second skin,” she said from behind the screen. “The silk is finely woven—Francesco must have helped you source the material.”
“Not him, but his assistants did,” Leonardo called back. “How do you feel about the neckline?”
“It’s lower than I would normally wear,” she said, looking down at her cleavage as she emerged from behind the screen. “The monks in the courtyard would be scandalized, no doubt.”
Leonardo nodded, appreciating the effect of what was barely visible to the eye: a sheer black veil to define the edges of her face and her female, married virtù.
“How do you feel?”
“Exhausted and exhilarated.” She tilted her head, considering. “As if a teenager after riding for miles along the valleys of Chianti. Beatrice has helped me retrieve those happy memories.” She touched her ring finger to her forehead and tapped it. “I feel you, too, are touching my mind.”
His thoughts darted to the dissection of the man’s brain he had performed in the room beside his studio.
“Cleaving it open,” she continued, “reminding me to believe again in my strength, the old power of the Gherardini family.”
A long period of silence followed, with Lisa turning slow circles around the room while Leonardo worked. He encouraged her to move—it revealed so much more about
her interior mind than sitting ever could. Looking at his sketches and working from the woman standing in front of him, he drew an underpainting of Lisa in charcoal, wiping away where he wanted to create shimmering highlights, going in and out with the black pencil to model the shape of her body, pushing and pulling to emphasize the body’s contours, the angles of her face, the length of her neck. He needed to establish the ground before applying color, layer upon layer of translucent color.
“You have gone into the face of the deep,” he said at last.
“As written in the Bible.”
“It’s a powerful book.”
“I stayed in my dark place a long time. Unmoving in my boudoir, unable to eat, incapable of feeling. Beatrice and Agnella saved me. I would eat figs that the girl stole from my neighbor’s orchard. They cared for me in ways my popolo grasso society friends never did.”
“Those village women threw you the rope of life.”
“Yes, they did. But I’m trying to understand my life before that, with Francesco.” She pressed a hand gently against the side of her veil. “I spoke, but I was never heard.” She considered, waiting. “You listen to me.”
He looked up, encouraging her to go on. The bodice of her dress had turned the color of green hills darkened by the evening’s gloaming.
“When I first came here, I was shaking with fear. I didn’t know what to say, or how to impress you.”
“But you’re an intelligent being,” he said, and he realized that when he read to her verses of love and humanity by Petrarch or heartfelt poems by Dante Alighieri, he savored them all over again because of her, because of the way her eyes glowed when he looked at her. Salaì had never warmed to poetry. Though playing baletta inspired him to no end.
“‘A mighty flame followeth a tiny spark,’” he quoted, eyeing her.
“You know”—Lisa smiled—“that might well be my favorite line by Dante because when you first recited it, I felt that you saw me.”
“There is much to see in you.”
“My husband is ever occupied with his business—importing leather from Ireland these days—and he purchased a new slave the other day.”
“Oh?” Leonardo hesitated, disturbed by this new information. The cruelty. The dehumanization. “Does she have a name?”
“He gave her the name Sophia. Though she has not been shown to me. I do believe he thinks me stupid. But you don’t seem to mind my mind.” She tapped her forehead again and smiled her half smile. “Your battle scene,” she said. “Have you started it yet? My husband hopes to arrange a tour to impress his friends.”
“War must be honestly captured,” said Leonardo.
“When the idea is complete, the sketching is quick,” she said, feeding his own words back to him.
He walked to the window ledge and looked up at the sky, now fully dark. He motioned to her to stand beside him, as a brother might beckon a younger sister. “See it there—the white specks way up high? I think of it as white sand thrown from a beach into the sky.”
“Milk from a Greek goddess?”
“A nighttime path of souls traveling from Earth to the heavens.”
“Why a path?” He heard her step next to him to look even more closely at the sky. “God transports the deserving souls immediately to Heaven.”
“How do you imagine the specifics of the transportation?”
“God wills it and His command is granted.”
“In midair appears a wooden carriage, a white stallion? Or Swiss fighters? Maybe somebody who can fly?”
“You are more scientist than Christian,” she granted, her hand on his shoulder. “But how can any of us know the details of all that is unseen? You make a mockery of Him to imagine the mechanics of how a soul travels upward to Heaven.”
In art, simplicity of line captivated him. In life? His relationship with the mercurial Salaì could be described as a series of sharply angled valleys and peaks. With Lisa, he felt their conversation carried them forward along a cobblestoned road that disappeared gently into the distance.
“My intention is not to rankle. Otherwise, I may be forced to throw my portrait on a great burning pyre.” Only seven years had passed since the crazed Dominican prior Savonarola had worked Florentines into a frenzy over their hedonistic ways and an apocalypse to come, provoking them to burn their cosmetics and jewels, even their Botticelli paintings, in a massive fire at the Piazza della Signoria. Leonardo had been away in Milan during the terror. “Madonna, did you contribute anything to the fire?”
“We had to. It wasn’t that I wanted to. The police were checking homes. I gave a string of pearls to a servant to throw onto the pyre. The apocalypse never arrived and I regretted the loss of the necklace, given to me by my most beloved grandmother, from the old Gherardini lineage.”
He returned to his easel and she looked around the room, suffused with golden candlelight. The workday had long since passed, but Leonardo had no intention of quitting.
“Are you satisfied with my portrait?” she inquired. “So far, I mean.”
“I’ll likely have to start again,” he said, shrugging and smiling kindly at her. “This one’s not that good.”
On hearing this, she ran to the easel. Leonardo blocked the portrait with his body. “Though I would hate to part with this fine piece of poplar board.”
She threw her arms up in the air. “When can I have a look?”
“Soon enough, soon enough, my fine Florentine lady.” He motioned to the chair in front of the table, placed his hand at the small of her back and, using his fingertips, propelled her forward. “Now, shall we try to make something of this portrait, Mona Lisa?”
She sat and pressed her hands down the flats of her bodice. She settled herself, straightened her back and arranged her sleeves like hills of ocher falling over the wooden arms of the chair, saying, “You place your faith in knowledge. I place mine in religion.”
“True enough. As you have already observed, I am more scientist than believer.” His mind wandered to his preliminary drawings for the altarpiece: was he right to place the daughter, Mary, on her mother’s knee? He shook his head; he could settle that later. For now, he needed to concentrate on the task at hand. Looking at his palette, Leonardo weighed the steps necessary to create a shimmer of sweat: his assistants had ground white pigment, placing a small amount of the precious powder next to rose pigment and a dash of powdery cinnabar. Moving delicately, he transferred a mix of the pigments into walnut oil, one at a time, and stirred the ingredients slowly to create a thin glaze that looked nearly colorless, a rose-gold, approximating the color of damp skin. Oils were slower to dry than egg used to dilute tempera paint, and they produced more subtle shades of color. That’s what he wanted, what he needed to test, to paint lightness emanating from the wooden board—it mattered very little whether this experiment would take months or even years.
With a thin hog-bristle brush, he selected from powders of muted, earthy tones: blues, browns and forest green—the color of Lisa’s gamurra. Using the blade of a small knife, he transferred the pigments into walnut oil held within a freshwater mussel shell. He stirred the liquid patiently until it registered as another almost colorless glaze.
“Where do the best pigments come from?” asked Lisa.
“Venice. Salaì fetches them for me. Cinnabar for reds, malachite for greens. The German blue comes from the mineral azurite. Sometimes I use Florentine suppliers, the Ingesuati and the convent of San Giusto alle Mura. The monks there have a laboratory with small furnaces.” He wiped the side of his brush and tapped its bristles against the pestle. “They are suitably skilled in the manufacture of colors.”
When he touched his brush to the board, she murmured that it was almost as if he were stroking the skin of her face, the transparent glaze of walnut oil sticky and wet down her cheek. One stroke. Another, then another.
Thirty minutes into the sitting, she signaled with her hand, then rose from the chair. She stretched and walked across the room to the
bowl of fruit. “Orange?” she asked boldly. It was not her place to handle food without the help of a servant. Leonardo remained bent over the portrait, concentrating intensely, and did not reply. She hesitated, then peeled the orange herself and handed him a dripping section. “I’ve never noticed before how sticky the juice is, and how pulpy the flesh. The textures of an orange are mesmerizing.”
“I do place my faith in knowledge,” he said, straightening, picking up the earlier thread of their conversation. “In ideas and theories and places still undiscovered. I am also unlearned and ignorant.” He watched her lift an orange segment and bring it to her mouth. “I am an uomo senza lettere.”
She dismissed this last assertion with a wave of her hand.
“I place my hope in my ability to imagine,” he continued. “In my imagination there is a pair of glasses that you and I could place in front of our eyes, the better to see the moon. There is a machine that allows me to speak to the sultan of Syria without having to travel to see him. And another that allows us to breathe underwater. But please, don’t misunderstand me. Like you, I am amazed and inspired by the way God works.”
She returned to her chair. Her body appeared to be trembling.
Leonardo considered her face, the robust, full bones of her profile, a generous, wide forehead giving way to delicate nostrils. He could not read her now. She moved like a woman of wealth and good fortune, was shuttered from the world. And yet. A moment ago, peeling an orange by herself. How strange and remarkable.
Truly, her profile was inscrutable. A thought, unbidden, came to him: the old nobleman whose gnarled face he had sketched the other day, the one seated with his back against the baptistery. Who sat motionless for an hour, then stood and walked away without asking to see the drawing.
She was a woman of sorrow, but hers was a mind in flux. He knew what it was to desire, to despair, to regret. But to descend into darkness, as she clearly had . . . taken by surprise, he realized that he felt seduced by her capacity for emotion.
