Tuscan Daughter

by Lisa Rochon

  “Press run of five hundred?” asked Sister Camilla.

  “Yes, five hundred and be done with it. If there’s a furor, we can reprint.”

  Sister Francesca turned her attention back to Beatrice. “We had grown accustomed to printing biblical pamphlets—thirty pages for every broadsheet. Setting type for The Decameron has allowed us to invent new forms of italics.” She looked around the room furtively and leaned in, as if delivering some whorish gossip. “The type for this publication is lacy and organic.” Her eyes widened. “Intentionally so.”

  The abbess moved away from the press. “Come, I’ll show you the studio where we keep the paper.” They ascended the stairs of stone slabs and entered a room bathed in sunlight. Colored inks in glass jars lined the shelves. Rolls of paper—French hemp and Italian flax, of varying weights and shades of cream and gray—were stacked up to the ceiling. Beatrice could read some of the labels: Fabriano, Prato, Coll.

  Heavy footsteps on the stairs announced visitors. Beatrice recognized both of them from Leonardo’s studio.

  “Gentlemen, come in,” said the abbess. “I was expecting you. You have come for drawing paper?”

  “Give us your best price for Dutch-made,” said Salaì. “And some wine if you have it.”

  Beatrice observed his energy, his jiggling feet. He seemed corked from a night of heavy drinking.

  His companion, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, looked older and wiser. “The devil moves inside you this morning.” He spoke with a harsh Milanese accent, without the luxury of vowels. He turned to the abbess. “We’ll need enough to cover a wall measuring sixty by thirty feet. He wants the very best. Carta bambagina or finer, if it can be found. And not yellow—”

  “He’s looking for creamy white,” said Salaì.

  “No need for secrets between colleagues,” said the abbess, wiping her brow with a linen cloth. She patted the bench beside her, gesturing for the men to sit down. “Am I correct to assume that this paper is for Leonardo’s preparatory cartoon of The Battle of Anghiari?”

  “Olive oil girl, I recognize you,” said Salaì, ignoring the abbess and sliding his gaze over to Beatrice.

  “And I recognize you, and your wild eyes. Like a hunter about to snare a rabbit,” she said curtly, her cheeks growing hot. She remembered his kindness in Leonardo’s studio when he wrapped his arms around her so tightly she could smell his sweat from his baletta game. That was then; this was now. She would not stoop to remind him of her name. He knew it well enough.

  “My understanding is that Leonardo is obsessed these days with geometry,” the abbess interrupted, “being most disgruntled with the brush. And yet here you are!” She looked at the gathered trio. “So Leonardo is preparing to paint again. Thanks be to God.”

  “My father,” said Beatrice, looking at the abbess for encouragement, “loved Signore da Vinci’s portrait of a girl called Ginevra.” In fact, Leonardo had told her that the girl, who looked straight out at the world without fear, reminded him of her. “Papà described it to me so often I knew it as if it were hung in our house.”

  “When had he seen the portrait?” asked the abbess.

  “Oh, he did not see it for himself! He heard about it from a priest at Santa Maria Novella.” The memory made her eyes sting. She set down her basket and recovered herself. “He used to stand me in front of our juniper bush as his own Ginevra.”

  “As his own Ginevra,” said Salaì, clapping his hands and leaping to his feet. “This is a revelation. It makes me think that all people should be able to see Leonardo’s work.” He gestured to Beatrice. “A peasant can enjoy it—here is proof. We should make his work public.” His eyes darted between Giovanni and the abbess. “The preliminary drawing at the monastery where we’re staying. The Virgin, the Child, Saint Anne and Saint John. Take it out from behind closed doors. Why not show Leonardo’s genius to the public?”

  “You can’t be serious,” said Giovanni.

  “It is stunningly beautiful—so dark and haunting—full of humanity,” said Salaì.

  Beatrice didn’t trust Salaì. He was selfish, always thinking of himself and whining to Leonardo about everything wrong in life. Maybe she was jealous of him. But this idea of his intrigued her.

  “Abbess, you will be moved to tears. Imagine the most intimate moment between mother and daughter,” said Salaì, bouncing on his toes. “The Virgin sitting on Anne’s knees, their bodies pressed so easily together.”

  “Is it finished?” asked Giovanni.

  “No, it is not, but what of it?”

  “I would be most interested to see it,” said the abbess.

  “You will understand what I mean,” said Salaì to the nun. “Leonardo has captured pure love. It is daring and brave, like an explorer discovering land for the first time. Leonardo as our Columbus!”

  “I don’t know who Columbus is,” said Beatrice, her shoulders thrown back. “Perhaps he has discovered what has already been lived by other people long before him.” Her words tumbled out, but she did not speak all of her thoughts. She was mostly remembering the feeling of being loved by her mother. It was inconceivable that all that nurturing had been taken away from her, though she was far from being done with it. She dared herself to speak again: “Sister, I have something to ask.”

  The nun folded her hands patiently together and waited in her gentle, pious way.

  “I’ve been looking everywhere for my mother. She has been gone for almost four years. Maybe you could help me?”

  Salaì was pacing the floor impatiently. “Grazie, grazie. We are all looking for someone. Did you know I’m an orphan, too? Leonardo never knew his mother. At least, he’s never mentioned her to me. This is a culture of illegitimates, I’m afraid. Get used to it.”

  “Thank you, Salaì,” the abbess said, cutting his observations short. “Have you tried the charities that care for homeless women, Beatrice? Finding missing people isn’t my expertise.”

  “She has auburn hair and a long, beautiful neck!” Beatrice said, loudly and insistently. “Leonardo drew her. Please help me.”

  The abbess dropped some quattrini into Beatrice’s hands and waved her toward the corridor. “It is in God’s hands. But do come visit another day.”

  As Beatrice left the room, looking beseechingly back over her shoulder, Salaì was holding forth. “We must invite the gonfalonier, the priori, the guildsmen, the city’s leading artists and navigators,” he said, bouncing on his feet. “Invite Florentines young and old. And most definitely invite her,” he said, pointing at Beatrice, “to represent the popolo minuto.”

  Chapter 30

  It’s a cool evening, but the stars will warm us,” said Leonardo, his face sun-kissed from a day spent in the hills, sketching cypress and poplar trees and watching the flight of the red kite birds. Under the cover of night, they had walked through the streets from Leonardo’s studio to Santa Maria Novella, using his thick iron key to let themselves into one of the private courtyards of the church.

  “How would you paint the stars?” Lisa stopped to breathe in the space. The air had a November chill to it and she gathered her long wool cape tightly around her.

  “They are unknowable. To represent them on a board might be an awful vulgarity.” Leonardo spread a damask coverlet on the grass. There was daring in their decision to walk through the streets, hoods pulled over their faces, while Lisa’s husband was away hunting bear in the north, her children tended by a houseful of servants.

  “How are you doing tonight? These days?” he asked.

  She looked at him seriously. “Free. Free as a man.”

  He raised a hand to the sky. “Could you paint them?”

  “Can you believe I have never painted anything?”

  “But if you did?”

  “Well, then,” she said, grazing her shoulder against his. “I would paint them the way I’d paint my soul.”

  “I like that,” he said. He sat down and rummaged in his leather bag. “In my experience, with careful st
udy and considerable patience, you can make a start of knowing the unknowable. As for the stars,” he counseled, holding up a sliver of metal, “they have character and moods. Here, look through this. Hold it close to your own eye and look at these stars that appear so minute it seems nothing could be smaller.”

  She took the metal and sat beside him, arranging her skirts, then squinted to see.

  “It is, in fact, the great distance that causes their diminution, for many of them are very many times larger than the star that is our Earth.”

  “If what you are saying is true, Leonardo, the sky is full of stars that are bigger and much older than the one we are on right now.”

  “I believe this to be true.”

  “What does one do with this knowledge?”

  He drank from his wineskin and passed it to Lisa. “Live,” he said at last. “Try to live honorably.”

  “You sound like the pope. I imagine he might say that to a crowd and do otherwise in his private rooms.” She sighed deeply and took another sip, leaning closer to Leonardo. “Compared to those stars, we are very, very small. There was a time when all I wanted was to survive. But now?” Her thoughts seemed to travel. “It doesn’t seem enough anymore,” she said softly.

  “Think beyond yourself. Once you begin to do so, you can observe much that most people ignore.”

  “Such as?”

  “The air moves like a river and carries the clouds with it,” said Leonardo. “Just as running water carries all the things that float upon it.” He had put these thoughts down—writing right to left—in one of his notebooks, but it felt more satisfying to speak them aloud to her.

  She reached over and gripped his hand, their warm fingers entwined. “My dear friend, Leonardo, I have come to depend on you.”

  He noticed that her eyes flickered with delight, but there was doubt lurking there, too. To be alone within the courtyard, as if they were children discovering a secret garden, was enchanting, but it wasn’t enough for her. Her suffering still moved like heaviness across her eyes; sadness tugged at the corners of her mouth.

  “Does anything bother you?” she asked him. “Make you sad, rile you?”

  There it was again: a spark of interest to cover what lay behind.

  “I’m human, just like you,” he said. But he was observing her closely, thinking about her portrait. Watching her, he decided he must honor her shifting, layered emotions. To do otherwise would be to create a wooden puppet. It would mean layering pigmented glazes, countless times, achieving transparency, not hard lines; this great lady was no battle soldier with howling crease lines. Neither was she a Florentine lady given to dramatic swooning. If he could take his time, he could do her justice. Around the eyes and the mouth, he would paint her as she truly was: a woman in motion, with a veil of ambiguity.

  “Go on,” she urged.

  “I have been mulling something over for a while,” he said, speaking softly.

  “I’m listening.”

  “This Earth.” He paused and looked past Lisa to the cypress trees and the stone wall beyond. “It’s in flux all the time, as you are.”

  “Me?”

  “As you and I are,” he said. “Its flesh is the soil; its bones are the strata of the rocks that form the mountains. Its cartilage is the tufa stone. Its blood the springs of the waters.”

  “Yes,” she said, taking the wine, looking up at the sky. “Our bodies are like worlds unto themselves.”

  “It is my opinion that the veins that feed the human body are very much like the streams and rivers that feed the lakes and the oceans.”

  “What else?”

  “In your portrait,” he began, “I am trying to paint the fullness of your being.” He decided against telling her the whole truth: that he wanted to paint the meandering curve of a river floodplain into the detail of her sleeves, and hint at rippling streams in the fine curls of her hair. He had finally settled on the background of the painting. The details still had to be worked out, but it would acknowledge the ancient dramatic shifting of land, mountains falling down, ice collapsing, rivers dammed, the creation of new lakes.

  He changed tack. “I tell you, my dear Lisa, I am poorly schooled. I do not write Latin, never studied law.”

  “But you know more than all the citizens of Florence,” she said, shaking her head. “Tell me something else you know.”

  “Well,” he said, lying back on the blanket. “I have held a man’s brain in my hands; I know the weight of a brain, its depth and structural intricacies. It is capable of delivering galaxies of experience! And it’s an honor to feel that.” He kissed the palm of her hand, happy in the telling. “Life is to be lived as a series of experiments. Cherished. Understood. Protected. Defending the city from the enemy. Defending people from plagues and pestilence by separating the city into safe zones. I have wanted to tell my father exactly this, many times—”

  “Your father is alive, Leonardo?”

  “He is.”

  “Allora . . . go to him,” she said, pressing a hand to his shoulder. “Tell him of your life, what you have learned—”

  “He measures success by the number of documents negotiated and signed, not sketches of old men, or horses whose eyes scream with terror.”

  “But your notebooks are your life.”

  “I wonder whether he is correct. ‘Such mad scribblings,’ he would say, and I would have to agree.”

  “Surely you have a memory of him that is not so dark?” she asked.

  “I see what you’re doing,” he said, smiling over at her, sitting up. “Did I not ask you the same the other day during your sitting?”

  “One-way conversations are dull. I’ve attended enough parties at the grand palazzi to know that.”

  “My father is Ser Piero da Vinci. Notary at the Palazzo del Popolo. Father of ten sons and two daughters. Four wives, two of them younger than I. Also, I’m illegitimate. He helped me to get three of my painting commissions.” He shrugged. “Not much else to tell.”

  “Soon you will begin drawing the cartoon for a great battle scene here,” she said, pointing to the arcaded cloister and the Hall of the Pope. “Will that not make him proud?”

  He settled back on the blanket and motioned Lisa toward him. She placed her head on his chest, and he was surprised and secretly delighted by the kindness of her physical touch.

  “What would you rather?” she asked. “Paint a portrait that only a few will ever lay their eyes on? Or create a work for all to see?”

  “What do they pay?”

  She pinched him, and his laughter echoed in the air.

  “Do you care that my portrait will hang in our salon on Via della Stufa to be enjoyed merely by my friends?”

  “The ones who paint their teeth? Now, that is disturbing.” They laughed softly.

  “When I painted the mural of The Last Supper in Milan, it was for a dining hall in a monastery. Have you ever seen what monks eat in a refectory? Mostly bean gruel. Mouths to coarse earthenware bowls, ladling it back, thinking about their next meal. I doubt any of them have looked seriously at my fresco.”

  “But maybe the magic was in the making?”

  “The prior in charge would hound me every day, check on my progress, as if I were making spokes for a wheel.”

  “Leonardo the wheelwright. I can imagine it,” she said.

  “Lisa, a jester from the wrong side of town,” he teased back.

  “Fine by me,” she said, clicking the heels of her leather boots together. “Beatrice said she liked my feet.”

  “She has a keen eye, that girl. Brought me a raspberry branch. I drew it the same day. She looked directly at me and declared: ‘Signore, it doesn’t take much to create art. The light of the paper, the shadows from a pencil.’” He smiled and shook his head. “Her hands were scratched from the prickles, her lips bright as a rose, ready for a bee to come down and pollinate. Maybe I should have thought more of her, but she spoke the truth.”

  “She’s daring. I like
that about her. Aspires to be an artist.” She sat up. “Michelangelo has been tutoring her.”

  On hearing Michelangelo’s name, he felt unsettled, as if the young sculptor was interrupting his peace of mind. Let him teach Beatrice. That was fine. But why hadn’t she asked him to do the same? He stood up and brushed the grass from his cape.

  “I suppose . . .” said Lisa.

  “Yes, the city is quiet. All the actors gone from the stage. The servants will be sending the Office of the Night after us!” Offering his hand, he helped Lisa to her feet and waited patiently for her to dust her skirts. He took the iron key from his satchel, and they walked together to the gate, arms linked, holding on to their peace.

  Chapter 31

  The midday bells of the Duomo chimed: bright, clanging dissonance. Michelangelo had worked the leather buff back and forth across the planes of marble, smoothing the youth’s cheekbones to a fine luster. The commission was nearly done. His father would be pleased to hear that the final payment was forthcoming: there were repairs to be made on their rental house over on Via San Procolo. “The roof is leaking—the servants have buckets on the table where we eat,” his youngest brother had complained, loudly, to him. They rarely visited him in the studio, and when they did, it was with hands outstretched, eyes trained on his leather purse.

  He skipped the buff over the surface of David’s curls, causing brilliance to leap from the marble onto the thick tresses. His feet shuffled slightly on the wooden platform, inching forward so that he could reach his arms partly around the muscular chest of his colossus. Dissections at Santo Spirito had shown him the red rivers of muscles and blue streams of veins that ran through the body. He set his head gently on the sculpture’s left arm. The marble biceps bulged cold below his cheek.

  Michelangelo gazed intently at the left side of the face, the warrior revealed by the fierce glint of the eye and the flared nostril. He reached his hand up and traced his fingers along the chiseled mouth. The lips were fleshy, young and boyishly impulsive. He put both hands around the sculpted head and examined its Janus face, for in every face, in every body, he believed, there was a double personality.