by Diane Haeger
The portrait, done in a tondo format, painted within a circle, felt magical the moment it began to burst forth from his paintbrush. It was swiftly praised by those fortunate enough to view it. But, amid all of the Vatican work, the Chigi fresco he was straining to complete, and the intricate and laborious designs of Saint Peter’s, the project that still obsessed him through the next autumn was to paint Margherita. This time, however, she would not be the Madonna; rather, he wished to paint her as herself, in portraiture, as he had done for Maddalena Doni. As the elegant, noble woman of calmness, dignity, and grace that she had become.
“I cannot possibly wear that!” she laughed incredulously, seeing the opulent gown laid out on her bed on a warm Sunday in September. With the sun through the long, half-shuttered windows, it lay there like spun gold and jewels, the sleeves thick layers of billowing snow-white silk and intricate gold thread.
“But of course you can!” Raphael smiled devotedly at her. “You must. I absolutely mean to paint you in it!”
“The world would laugh at a peasant girl dressed up as so grand a lady!”
He took her chin in his hand and leveled his eyes on her with absolute adoration. “You are a grand lady, amore mio. The fine lady of Raphael di Urbino.”
“Ah, the things you can almost make me believe,” she wistfully sighed.
“Believe them only because they are true—for to you, I would not speak otherwise.”
There was an easel set up in an alcove of their large bedchamber, in which he maintained a carved Venetian desk topped with art supplies, pots full of paintbrushes, ink, pens, and boxes of different colored chalk, and white lead for highlighting, so that he might sketch or paint at any hour or moment he wished. In spite of it officially being Margherita’s house, Raphael’s presence was everywhere in it. Many of his finest clothes were in her dressing chamber and his favorite wine now filled her cellar. Quick chalk sketches and various studies of Margherita, Donato, and the children lay scattered in almost every room as sources for possible future subjects.
“Signorina di Francesco Guazzi!” he called out to Elena, who seemed properly to always be lingering nearby in case she was required. She came forward from the small dressing room beside the bedchamber, now dressed much better by Margherita in a billowing gown of azure silk with fashionable sleeves slashed with gold and an azure velvet cap.
“See Signora Luti into this new gown at once, per favore.”
He gasped when he beheld her a few minutes later walking slowly toward him. In the last of the afternoon sunlight through the tall windows it would not have been possible to do otherwise but feel astonished. How was it, he wondered, that she always made him breathless? She always made him want—no, ache—to ravish her, and that sensation was only heightened with the days. Looking at her now, that desire was mixed with a need to paint her, to create on canvas what he saw, felt—what he ached to possess forever. Her face in that light was luminescent, her head held so high and gracefully that she looked, he thought, like one who had actually been nobly born.
With a soft grunt of intention, Raphael strode across the room, drew up a straight-backed chair, and set it near enough to the window to catch the afternoon light. First must come the sketch, the way he intended to position her, but this crystal, honeyed illumination, like liquid jewels, had already inspired him.
Raphael sat her down, moving her body, her limbs and neck, looking at each part of her with a critical painter’s eye: the tilt of her head, the placement of her arms, the exact cast of her gaze. Still, he could not take all of her in, could not process the loveliness of her for the voluminous richness of the fabric that had enveloped her. The play of light over the skin of her exposed neck and face was opalescent, shimmering.
He sank before her onto his knees, heels beneath him, a sketchpad in his hands, and a stub of blue chalk staining his fingertips in the other. Once he began, his hand moved wildly over the blank pages as his eyes went back and forth from the paper to her. In an instant, his expression grew wild, his own color heightened, and he could feel his heart hammering the rhythm of excitement against his rib cage.
Sketching a subject had never seemed erotic to him, not even the women of the bordello who had allowed themselves to be used as models for a few extra scudi. He had never had the same wild sexual urge build within him as he gripped the chalk more tightly, pressed it against the paper, moved it in a rhythm that in and of itself was arousing, as he looked at her, studied her. Re-creating her. Arousing him.
“There, s, like that . . . look at me now . . . s, bene. Your eyes must be directly upon me!”
Raphael bolted to his feet and took the light Spanish lace shawl from the back of a chair and put it over her head like a veil. She was not the Madonna to him now but secular and courtly. Serene and elegant. Sensual in the reserve that was implied. Just the thought of her warm, sweet skin beneath those layers was powerfully erotic to him now, to a point that he could not think or work but only feel the desire. He was hard, his face was flushed, the blood having rushed swiftly to every extremity he could feel. His hand felt on fire as he gripped the chalk so tightly between his fingers that it snapped in two.
He tossed the pieces onto the floor, along with the sketch, and came back up onto his knees, clutching her waist and bringing her forward. His lips moved across her skin, giving in to the warm swell of her breasts where they met the silk, the beads, and the lace at the bodice. Elena, who had come into the room behind them, saw them as they were, and silently withdrew.
Driven, Raphael pressed Margherita back onto the heavy velvet bedcovers. He did not remove the dress or the veil, but only lifted them and the chemise beneath. Then he drew down the delicate lace drawers, tossing them onto the Turkish carpet as he looked to see the beautiful triangle of downy hair, and the private place it hid, waiting there for him alone. Falling to his knees, her hips firmly in his hands, he ran his tongue slowly up her inner thigh until she gasped with guilty pleasure. As his fingers traced the path that his tongue had found, he saw the line of blue chalk from his fingers branding her bare skin in a fresh, erotic way. Even the scent of her flesh, freshly washed, sweetly musky, was a new and powerful element of this addiction.
A single drop of perspiration fell onto the chalk, then dripped in a wet blue line to the place near her navel, mingling, pooling there. Margherita glanced down, seeing it too, her lips parting at the sight. The effect of that on what remained of his reserve was lethal.
Afterward, gently stripped of the costly gown, which now lay neatly at the foot of the bed, they lay naked and drenched in their shared perspiration on the rich, smooth damask bedcover, and Margherita began very softly to laugh.
“Can this be the surprise you had in mind for that gown?”
“This was spontaneous, and a surprise even to me, I assure you.”
“It is a pity you got a streak of blue chalk on the skirts, as I fear it will be impossible now to clean.”
“Ah, but every time you wear it, I shall feel ardor rise for the memory of how it got there!”
Margherita blushed. “I cannot wear it again.”
“Wear it now,” he bid her. “Come to dinner with me.”
“And where would we dine?”
She saw the moment’s hesitation, a flash of uncertainty before he smiled at her. “I dine with Signor Chigi each Saturday, and often the Holy Father attends. From now on, I wish you to accompany me when I do.”
The expression that changed her face just then belied, she knew, only a small portion of the terror she felt. Seeing it, Raphael took her powerfully into his arms. “You need not fear any place where I am with you.”
“Even the great Raffaello cannot stop their cruel whispers and their raised eyebrows when they see your companion is a baker’s daughter.”
“Can we not stop them, the force of us, together?”
“I bid you humbly, amore mio.” She glanced around at the absolute splendor in which she now lived, the elegantly appointed cocoon th
at insulated her from the hardships of life. “Do not force me when I have faced so many new changes in my world already.”
“I ask, I shall never insist. Nothing gained from you that way would ever please me.”
“Then the answer is no. I want not fame, nor notoriety, from what we have together.”
“And what are we to do with this most opulent new gown?”
“May I not wear it only for you?”
“Tomorrow you must pose for me and, s, I bid you, wear it again.”
“And will it end between us as it has today?”
“Only if I am very fortunate indeed!” Raphael smiled.
MARGHERITA came unexpectedly into the bedchamber, where Elena was laying out the gown and headdress her mistress was to wear first thing tomorrow to visit Padre Giacomo, and to offer what help she could to the poor of his parish. Elena jumped, and the beaded headdress clattered to the floor. But the moment she saw Margherita standing before her, her face blanched, ringing her hands, Elena’s fear dissolved. Margherita was ghostly pale, her body rigid with concern.
“You must teach me to dance!”
To Elena’s complete surprise, Margherita reached out her hand and clasped Elena’s in her own. “Per favore,” she said in a tone of gentle pleading that shocked Elena almost as much as it moved her. “I have avoided it for as long as I was able, but I must know enough not to make an entire fool of myself when we are guests at Signor Chigi’s coming wedding.”
Elena was genuinely surprised. It was spoken of throughout Rome as the event of the year. “You will attend?”
“I would do anything to get out of it. But I cannot. It is the mastro’s wish that I accompany him.”
“Of course we will all see that you look lovely.”
“But eventually I will have to speak! If I cannot dance like the others, I will not succeed, and if I do not do that, Raphael will know I can never sustain my place in his life!”
Their relationship, in these first weeks, had been full of such twists and turns, Elena thought, neither of them ever fully in command. And she respected Margherita immensely—for respecting her. “I can teach you what you wish to know.”
“Grazie a Dio!” Margherita groaned. Unexpectedly, she pulled Elena to her in a sudden, very fond embrace, and began to laugh. “What would I do without you?” Margherita asked, her countenance changed entirely by what Elena imagined was relief.
“Respectfully, signora, I am beginning to ask the very same thing about you.”
RAPHAEL and Leonardo da Vinci rode out of Rome together, Raphael on horseback, his aged companion in an elegant curtained litter, pulled by horses and a formally clad horseman. The wind was heavy against them as they neared Monteflavio, where Leonardo intended to look at a large farm that was for sale. In it, he required, he said, the advice of a trusted friend. That was the expressed reason for the journey. But the elder artist also wished to seek advice from the younger on an entirely different matter. Although Raphael had once been an apprentice, and now had eclipsed him in promise and importance, still the friendship, the connection, unlike that with Michelangelo, had never wavered.
At the end of a long dirt trail that melted into a vast open hayfield, they stopped, dismounted, and left the horses to graze for a moment beneath the warm country sun. They stood beneath the shade cast from the last fragments of an ancient chestnut forest. Beyond were jagged purple hills dotted with old stone convents and ruined castles in their craggy niched terraces.
“The truth is that I have had an offer,” Leonardo revealed as they walked across a rock-strewn path leading to the remains of a small Roman bridge. Beside it lay the dignified ruins of a once-proud chimneypiece, along with a stone staircase leading to some rich Roman villa, long ago destroyed.
“A generous one, I hope.”
The cool autumn breeze tossed back the edges of both their riding capes and tousled their hair, one man’s snow white, the other still bearing the rich umber hue of his youth. “The offer is from the new king, Franois I. His Majesty has invited me to come and live in France as artist in residence, accorded all honors and privileges thereto.”
“A very generous offer indeed,” Raphael observed as he leaned casually against the trunk of a tree. “And will you go?”
“I am considering it.”
“You would be greatly missed here.”
“By you, perhaps. But it is the sunset of my artistic years in Florence and Rome, Raphael, and you bask in the full summer sunlight of those days. Little but shadow remains for everyone else.”
“Very poetic, but vastly untrue,” Raphael tried to joke. “There will always be room for the man who taught me technique and portraiture. I still use many of your sketches of posture and attitude when I begin a new portrait of my own.”
“It was the musings of an old man and yet, alas, the sad truth.”
“Then why buy a farm all the way out here if you wish to go to France?”
“An investment for the future if the king should tire of me there.”
“You have, it seems, thought of everything.”
“Age brings with it perspective, if nothing else, Raphael.”
They walked back through the grass a few paces. “So it goes well with your signorina?” Leonardo asked, changing the subject as they prepared to continue the journey.
“Better than I have ever had a right to hope.”
“You certainly seem content. But perhaps a bit distracted, might I say, from all of your work.”
“For the first time in my life, my personal happiness exceeds my drive to paint. If only—”
“If only?”
“She is not—” Raphael stopped again, unsure of an expression that would not lessen her dignity. “Margherita is not comfortable in many of the circumstances in which I find myself in need of engaging,” he carefully confessed, not wanting either to belittle her to this man he so respected, or even in his own thoughts.
“She has lived a very different life than you.”
“But that was in the past. We are equal now. She has a fine new home, clothes, and all of the respectability—”
“That you can buy for her?”
“She is my partner in all things.”
Leonardo looked over at him. “In your mind perhaps,” the elder artist sagely observed, his eyes heavily lidded by experience and years. “But you must be patient, for changing the costume changes not the person beneath.”
Raphael thought of the rich white gown that to him had transformed her—its elegance and cost a mask of beauty for the baker’s daughter beneath. “I am invited to attend Agostino Chigi’s wedding in just over a month’s time, but I have put off responding because—”
“Because you must take her with you.”
“She has always declined to accompany me anywhere publicly. It is the gossip that she says she fears.”
“Insist the first time. If you mean to have a life with her, do what you can to press her to reconsider. Perhaps something less daunting at first. Gossip shall never cease if those with wagging tongues have mystery upon which to build their talk. Take her there proudly,” Leonardo advised. “And in time the tale of the artist and his love shall be an old and familiar one. Only then are they bound to move on to someone new.”
“Wise words, but the reality of that is a difficult thing to wait for.”
“Nothing shall be so difficult for either of you as that first time. They shall grow accustomed to the notion of your mistress as your wife, just as they did with Agostino Chigi’s less-than-noble inamorata.”
“But Agostino is a patron with power over the pope. I am only an artisan indebted to him and his minions.”
“Then you shall need to be twice as clever, and thrice as insistent.”
A quarter of an hour later, they rode together down a long causeway surrounded by olive groves and rows of sentinel junipers, then passed through a vine shaded archway. The property, on a hillside with a sweeping view over the fields and wooded forest
beyond, was flanked by richly sculpted marble pillars and two great marble lions.
Raphael chuckled, glancing around. “A farm, is it?”
“A rather grand farm,” da Vinci admitted with an endearing little shrug.
Raphael held the reins of his elegant Spanish jennet as it pawed the dirt, then helped da Vinci from his litter once again. The two men stood facing one another in an open courtyard in the shade of vine leaves, the wind shaking them like hundreds of small emerald flags in the afternoon light.
“If the offer to go to France pleases you,” Raphael said sadly, “I hope it is what you wish it to be. But be assured, your presence in Rome shall be sorely missed.” He fondly embraced the old man. “By Raphael Sanzio most especially.”
Weeks later, in the late autumn of 1515, Leonardo da Vinci left Rome for France, to live there as an honored guest of the French king, Franois I. Leonardo was installed at Blois, on the property of the king’s magnificent chteau, in his own grand manor. Raphael received several letters back over the next years detailing life at the French court, full of gossip and intrigue. Leonardo was old but well cared for and respected. His opinion, he wrote, was sought on many matters. Raphael read those first letters with a bittersweet smile. It was, he believed, a fitting finale for a true artistic mastro.
26
November 1515
“I THANK YOU FOR THIS, CARISSIMA AND YOU LOOK magnificent,” Raphael declared, gazing in admiration at Margherita. She had come into the music room of their house at last, seeming to float toward him, dressed exquisitely in a new white damask gown—strikingly similar to the one in which he had painted her, smiling her serene Madonna smile.