by Lisa Rochon
Chapter 36
He rose before sunrise and rinsed in silence at the washing bowl. Paolo stood beside him, linen towel at the ready. Quietly, Leonardo shuffled from the sink to breakfast—a plate of beans with cabbage grown in the monastery garden, doused with olive oil warmed with rosemary and mint.
Already he had received warning from Soderini’s office that his wall painting required attention. Further delays would mean calling off the commission and ceding the great room in the Palazzo Vecchio to Michelangelo.
Paolo helped Leonardo dress, handing him clothes with ceremonial care, as if they were artifacts belonging to the Etruscans: leggings the color of eggplant, a white silk blouse, a linen gambeson—rejected: “not today, too constricting”—a favorite tunic (“the rose-pink one”), hand-stitched leather shoes with three buckles. Then out of the bedroom to the hallway, past the kitchen, toward the back stairs, avoiding the other workrooms.
None of his apprentices said it out loud, though he knew they all thought it. It was why Paolo had taken it upon himself to hide his sketches of flying machines. They were in favor of Machiavelli’s strategy; it ensured The Battle of Anghiari cartoon would be completed. The deadline was only months away.
Rarely did his new morning ritual feel ethical or right. For who could say that his time sketching peasants in the marketplace, freeing birds from their cages, sitting on stone benches with vagrants, was wasted? His wanderings produced images of the real and wretched who populated the earth. There was beauty in the line of a thieving prostitute’s long neck, a drawing he continued to deepen and detail. His dissections of the muscles around an old man’s mouth and lips, turned stone gray with death, showed him how to authentically draw somebody howling in pain or softly smiling.
“Very good, very good, yes, this way, here we go!” Paolo chirped like a bird as Leonardo appeared in the back hall. “The boys are downstairs, Master.”
Giovanni and Ferrando had been tasked with escorting him west to the studio, the Hall of the Pope at the Santa Maria Novella church complex. The old dwelling place for visiting popes was rarely used, but it was magnificent and grand enough to accommodate the monumental preparatory drawing.
Leonardo hesitated at Raffaello and Zoroastro’s room, where his colors were expertly prepared, ground to fine powders, and where he was making a drawing of Neptune. Thinking of it, his mind pounded with the waves of an ocean, the sound of the sea spray filling his ears. He yearned to pick up a stick of black chalk to begin detailing the chariot churning through the deep waters.
Paolo, anticipating where his mind had wandered, began to urge him along. Leonardo sighed, then stopped to absorb a flash of color just ahead: two birds frescoed on the wall. So this is what happens when I am gone, he thought. “Zoroastro! Raffaello!”
“Likely still sleeping, those two,” said Paolo, unwilling to be delayed. “I’ll have them paint over it,” he said, gesturing to the wall. “Shall we?”
“Boys?” Leonardo stepped closer to the fresco. He put a hand on one of the birds and withdrew it hastily. “You reduce both of these creatures to floating and sitting,” he said, not bothering to acknowledge the apprentices who had arrived half-dressed from their rooms. “Paint a third that dives with the speed of a cannonball, straight down to the earth.”
He took some conté from his pocket and curved three vertical lines down the wall, adding a flourish at the bottom to indicate a bird’s head. “Like that,” he said. The young men stepped closer to examine Leonardo’s sketch. They nodded slowly.
“Well, then,” said Leonardo. “Paolo, shall we meet the others?”
“Right behind you,” said Paolo, delivering his master to the studio assistants.
Waiting patiently by the carriage, Ferrando and Giovanni greeted their master with encouraging smiles. “Today we will leave the wheels behind,” said Leonardo, stepping past them toward a low-slung stone building. “It’s a good day to ride.”
In the stable, Leonardo kept three horses. Before being thrust into this battle of painters, he had enjoyed riding in the mornings along the banks of the Arno, winding among the willow trees, picking his way past the boys who fished in the river.
A stable novice in a Dominican cloak emerged from the shadows. He held up a clutch of rope halters without iron mouth bits. “Is everybody at ease with bareback?”
“Halters will be sufficient. It’s a magnificent day,” Leonardo said, observing the blue sky. “Let’s ride to the river first.” He stepped forward and stood perfectly still, his hands at his side, waiting for the horses. Ropes dangling, they trotted toward him. Only when he could feel their velvet nostrils touch his face did he feed them apples pulled from his satchel. He stroked their long, chiseled heads and stared directly into their massive, shining eyes.
“Let’s go,” he finally said.
Ferrando, an athletic rider, climbed lightly onto the back of a silver-gray Andalusian. Giovanni—a city boy from Milan—heaved with both hands until he managed to hoist himself onto a spindly Caspian.
“To the Arno,” said Leonardo, sitting easily on a big black gelding. The horse flattened its ears and pranced in circles. Leonardo turned his mount with a gentle pull on the lead rope and led the others across the cobblestones.
The river plain was scattered with marsh grass and juniper, and the thistles were beginning to blossom pink and lavender. Leonardo skirted the Ponte Vecchio and allowed his horse to run free on the muddy flats. The others followed, though Giovanni’s horse quickly wandered to a grove of willows and began pawing at a dead fish rotting on the banks. Giovanni gripped tight to his horse’s mane. Ferrando came up alongside him, took the halter rope and walked the horses to Leonardo, who was now standing on a bank of shale. The ground was slippery, and the horses shifted uncomfortably on the rocks, ears pinned back, tails swishing.
“Bring your horses close,” Leonardo said, leaning forward to insert his fingers into the mouth of his gelding. He pulled up the lips of his black beast, revealing teeth.
“Should we be getting to the cloister,” said Giovanni, shamelessly hugging the neck of his horse, “to sketch the battle?” Leonardo had overheard him complaining that pasting together hundreds of sheets of royal folio paper with flour, then lining the lot with Florentine linen, had left him with a sore body. Sitting a horse bareback was no doubt making the pain worse.
“This is the battle,” said Leonardo. “Hold tight.” He leaned forward and gripped the gelding’s mane with both hands. Trotting forward, he brought his horse alongside Giovanni’s so that their muzzles touched. Instantly, the animals flattened their ears. Ferrando’s horse let out a high-pitched whinny and pawed the ground. “Bring him in, too,” instructed Leonardo.
The third horse was led into the knot, and the men yanked hard on the lead ropes to keep the animals bunched. Leonardo handed his lead to Ferrando. “Hold them,” he said, bouncing on the gelding’s back and kicking it forward. The eyes of the horses rolled in their heads. This time, the gelding bared its teeth and lunged forward at the other horses. Leonardo kicked again, wanting to feel the intensity of battle when soldiers lunged for the flag, piercing the bellies of their enemy with long swords.
Leonardo drove his horse forward, provoking the others to fight. He felt himself freefalling to his days as a young blood. There was a time when he had indulged his body boldly and freely, and felt no shame. Until one night there was loud banging on his door and the Officers of the Night burst into his studio to find him in bed with one of his lovers, a seventeen-year-old boy. He remembered the humiliation of being half-dressed, turning away from the young Jacopo, the officers spitting their disgust on the stone floor, tying his hands with rope, pushing him out into the streets. He had been accused of sodomy, the tamburazione written on a slip of paper and deposited anonymously into one of the holes of truth.
“Again!” shouted Leonardo, heat gathering behind his eyes. He reversed his mount, gave a swift kick and felt it transformed into a raging beast. Giovanni’
s Caspian was wild with fear, its head bobbing frantically. Ferrando, understanding what his master was after, grabbed a long willow stick and threw it to Leonardo. “The standard!” he shouted. “Warriors and horses fighting for it! Horses biting each other—”
“I want it,” said Leonardo, in a voice so dark with malevolence it truly frightened his assistants. They watched as he curled his body to grasp the willow stick, how his horse flexed its entire side to match his movement. The other two animals bowed their necks in warning; Ferrando’s strained its head forward, bared its teeth and bit down hard.
Finally, his heart racing, sweat clinging to his body, Leonardo swerved his black gelding away. “That’s enough,” he said. He rode his horse to the bank of the Arno and allowed it to drink its fill. The others followed, swishing flies from their backsides with their tails, the scene transformed to a bucolic, peaceful landscape.
“The fury of slaughter. Men and horses swirling. A desperate, endless circle of violence,” Leonardo called to his assistants over his shoulders. “Well done, you two.”
* * *
Leonardo took his time fishing the keys from his bag while his assistants wiped down the horses and roped the halters to iron rings on the walls outside Santa Maria Novella. They walked along the Great Cloister and pushed into the vast Hall of the Pope, admiring again its vaulted ceiling and two rows of thin, elegant pillars marching down the length of the monumental room. Through the windows, light fell in a series of slashes on the stone floor.
Although their clothes were soiled by the violence along the river, the mood of the artists had softened and turned reflective.
Leonardo eyed the preparatory cartoon, measuring some sixty feet long on the wall. The figures—four cavalrymen waging war on their horses, other men fallen and being trampled, the horses themselves biting and tearing at each other—were far too rigid; he could see that now. He needed to make them light and agile, not weighed down like knights in heavy plate armor.
Giovanni walked to the large scaffold they had built, an accordion on movable wheels. When adjusted on a scissor lift, it could be raised to create a sturdy platform some fifteen feet in the air.
Ferrando picked up the willow stick they had brought from the river’s edge. “And the flag—the standard—does it actually break in the struggle?”
“I think so,” said Giovanni.
“In two places,” Leonardo agreed.
Just then the doors swung open and Beatrice stepped inside the great hall. She nodded curtly at the artists and set a basket heavy with offerings on the table next to their drawing materials.
Leonardo bowed and smiled at her, though his thoughts turned sharply to the moment when she had intervened during his petty, dog-pissing argument with Michelangelo, shortly before Soderini and Machiavelli had loudly announced a battle of painters.
“Madonna Lisa sent me with enough food to feed all the mercenary soldiers of the land.” Beatrice looked at her boots and over to the artists. “I’ll stay quiet,” she said, her long black hair falling over one shoulder. “I only want to learn.”
“Well, then, I’ll try to keep my ego quiet,” said Leonardo, bowing slightly. He strode to the far side of the mural and marked the lower edge of the paper, then returned to the other edge to leave another scratch. He motioned for the scaffold. Ferrando and Giovanni pushed over the machine on groaning wheels, and he climbed to the second-story platform. Homing in on the central battle scene, drawing with his left hand, he shaded with rapid crosshatched lines, heightening the muscular power of the Florentine calvary chasing down the Milanese enemy.
“I like the horse he’s riding,” he said, pointing to the animal collapsing on its hind legs. “Let’s work on mirroring that collapsing action of the horse on the far right of the mural.” The artists hustled to gather black chalk.
“Will you shield the beasts in armor—chamfrons, crinets, peytrals, flanchards?” asked Ferrando.
“No, let them be as naked as their fear. For the soldiers, no hose or footwear. But wearing fantastical armor. I’m imagining one of the Milanese horsemen wearing a ram’s head for a breastplate.” He paused, surveying the emerging scene of violence. “All right then, send up the white.”
Giovanni gathered a fistful of white conté, but Beatrice snatched it from him and climbed the scaffold effortlessly. “Make the ass a brilliant, glossy white,” instructed Leonardo, apparently oblivious to her presence. “Lift the tail high and darken underneath.” The girl bent to the drawing and did exactly as instructed.
Leonardo stepped sideways and focused his attention on the bare-footed soldier—the Milanese enemy—riding the horse. He paused for a moment, peering at the paper, then boldly shadowed the twisted curve of the rider’s back in black conté. Five minutes later, he had deepened the crosshatching of an arm twisting at a deranged angle, desperate to extend far enough to hold on to the shaft of the tattered Milanese flag that the Florentines had seized. The Florentine cavalry was riding them down, and he needed to show the terrible fear and fury of the moment.
After an hour of working next to Beatrice, he lowered his arm and stepped off the scaffold. The face of an old soldier with a curved sword raised high had taken on an intensity that pleased Leonardo. He liked how the man cried out, his mouth a darkened cave, his eyes inked with hatred and a knowledge that he was at the end of his life. He had not been given the commission to transform the coveted massive slab of Carrara marble into a biblical hero by the name of David. But he would astound the world with his Battle of Anghiari and his antihero. Leonardo—not Michelangelo—had witnessed the cruelty of men warring against each other, the hideous slaughter of men, the blood of young and old staining the ground. There would be no limits to their malignity; an antihero was what war demanded.
As for Beatrice, he had always thought of her as an artist. She had an eye, and an irreverence, and an ability to look laterally at the world. Now, looking at the horse she had partly completed on the mural, he could see that she had a talent for drawing, as well.
“Looks fine, very fine,” he said, reaching for Beatrice’s hand. “Let’s have a look from the floor. And then we’ll see what Lisa has arranged for our afternoon meal. Giovanni, Ferrando, lay some blankets outside in the courtyard for our banquet! Enough of this war.”
Chapter 37
She felt a little drunk on herself. Her success in business, her friendships with powerful Florentines, her ability to learn from Michelangelo and Leonardo while showing them their petty, competitive ways—all of it made her swoon with joy, a feeling she had not thought possible in these last years. True, the guards at the city gates seemed to be on high alert for her, jostling among each other to harass her, an eighteen-year-old unmarried girl from the village, eyeing her boots, pawing through her fancy cape (also gifted from Madonna Lisa), doubling and tripling her toll payment before allowing her to pass. She ignored them, daring to look defiantly in their eyes. Let fear curse others, not her.
Outside the city gates, the dawn sky lightening to the gray-blue of a snail’s shell, she stood tall—taller than most of the villagers, who hunched protectively over their carts and baskets. She cast her eyes over the miserable crowd, snagging the lines and angles of the hardened faces to sketch later on. She no longer saw the crowd as an unknowable, seething mass but as many individuals gathered tightly in a desperate knot. Some of them had offered her food, or warmed her shivering body with a nod and a smile. Over the years, she had come to know many of their names and some of the details of their hard lives. Their kindness had helped her feel whole again.
Today, a boy caught her attention. His hair was the color of a freshly harvested pumpkin. She knew him as a child from the squatter camp, where beggars slept below their shanty roofs, some with only battered grass weavings separating them from the elements. When he found her in the predawn, his fingers would immediately seek hers, and she would allow it. Once he had given her some golden acorns from a cypress tree. She watched as he ran hard toward her
. Beatrice noted that he’d lost his cap. He had something clutched under his arm.
Yes, it was time, she mused. Time to offer this sweet orphan boy a job helping to carry her baskets of goods to the artists. In time, she imagined purchasing a wagon and a donkey so they could ride across the city in style.
She wondered why he was moving so desperately through the crowd. He was running, not skipping, as he usually did. She registered a memory, the voice of her father: “Do not become useless to yourself.”
A pair of hands clapped once, twice, three times and panic slashed through her. A massive sentry—as big as a monster—leapt from the city gates into the recoiling crowd, a path opening to allow him clean passage. Toward the boy. Toward her. Let him come. I will protect this child, she thought, and stand my ground.
She stepped away from her cart and tucked the boy under her long skirts the color of a faded pink rose. She felt his scrawny arms, his hot mouth and his cheek wet with tears pressed against her naked thigh. His hands gripped her leather boots. The loaf of bread the child must have stolen—the bakers were always earliest at the gates—felt warm and comforting against her leg.
She stood tall in her boots, pleased with her plan for growing her business, looking forward to the telling of the story when she saw Michelangelo and Agnella, who had spent the night in the city at the Santa Caterina hospice.
Beatrice often imagined Hell to be a scorched and ruined land where olive trees collapsed into the maw of sinkholes. But there was another kind of Hell, and it clawed at her from all sides. The guard bashed his way forward, sending birdcages flying in his search for the thief. Head down, she commanded herself. The crowd tensed around her. Even the roosters seemed silenced by fear. She dared not look up. Soon, she hoped, she would be allowed to pass through the city gates.
She could feel the boy’s hands ripping bread from the loaf and stuffing it into his mouth. My little redheaded friend, I will repay you for the golden acorns. She was offering him protection and, coming up, a new way to live. Maybe there was some sense to giving love freely.
