The Birth of Venus

by Sarah Dunant

  Below me the main courtyard was a well of darkness. I made my way down the stairs. One of the house dogs raised a sleepy eye as I passed him, but he was long used to my nocturnal wanderings. My mother’s peacocks in the garden were more to be feared. Not only had they sharper hearing but their shrieks were like a chorus of souls in hell. Wake them and you woke everyone.

  I pushed open the door into the winter receiving room. The tiles were polished and smooth under my feet. The new tapestry hung like a heavy shadow and the great oak table, my mother’s pride and joy, was laid for ghosts. I curled myself onto the stone windowsill and slipped the catch carefully. From here the house looked out over the street and I could sit and watch the nightlife. The torches in their great iron baskets on the wall illuminated the front of the house. It was a sign of the new wealth of the neighborhood that there were households rich enough to light latecomers home. I had heard stories of how on moonless nights in the poorer parts of town people died from falling down pits in the cobbles, or drowned in overflowing gutters. Though their blindness was probably made worse by the wine.

  No doubt my brothers’ sight would be similarly impaired by now. What they lacked in vision they make up for in noise, their drunken laughter hitting the cobbles and bouncing in exaggerated echo up to the windows above. Sometimes the racket woke my father. But there was no such excitement tonight and my eyelids were beginning to droop when I noticed something down below.

  From the side of our house a figure emerged into the main street, his body briefly illuminated in the glow of the torches. He was long and lanky, with a cloak pulled tight around him, but his head was bare and I caught that certain flash of whiteness in his skin. So. Our painter was going out into the night. He would see little enough art at this hour. What was it my mother had said? That he was finding the city raucous after the stillness of the abbey. Maybe this was his way of sucking in silence, though there was something in the manner in which he walked, head down, eager to lose himself in the dark, that spoke more of purpose than of atmosphere.

  I was torn between curiosity and envy. Was it that simple? You wrapped yourself in a cloak, found the right door, and just stepped out into the night. If he moved fast he could be at the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in ten minutes. Then cross by the Baptistery and head west toward Santa Maria Novella or south to the river, from where you might be able to hear the chatter of the women’s little bells. Another world. But I did not like to think of that, remembering his Virgin, so filled with grace and light she could barely keep her feet upon the ground.

  I set myself to keep watch until he returned, but after an hour or so I grew sleepy and, not wanting to risk being found there in the morning, I went back upstairs to my room. I slid under the sheet, noticing with uncharitable satisfaction how the bite on Plautilla’s wrist was starting to swell. I curled myself round her warm body. She gave a whinnying little snort, like a horse, and slept on.

  Five

  IN ITS RAW STATE THE ROOM HAS LITTLE OF GOD ABOUT it. He has cordoned off a small part of the nave where the sunlight comes through the side window, falling directly in a broad band of gold. He himself sits in the shade, by a small table on which is paper, pen and ink, and some newly sharpened stalks of black chalk.

  I come in slowly, with old Ludovica behind me. Maria, alas, has been struck by an acute attack of indigestion. You must believe me when I say that though I wished her ill enough that day I had nothing to do with the amount of food she consumed or the sickness it left her with. Looking back, it has made me wonder at the strange ways in which God works. Unless you believe that this, like the hangman’s noose, was not an example of His handiwork.

  He stands up as we come in, his eyes on the ground. Ludovica’s gouty age makes our progress slow, and I have already asked for a comfortable chair to be placed for her nearby. At this time of day it will only be a matter of time before she falls asleep and then no doubt forgets that she has done so. She is of invaluable assistance to me during such moments.

  If he remembers our last meeting he does nothing to show it. He gestures me to a small dais in the light, with a high-backed wooden chair placed at an angle so that our eye lines will not cross. I take a step up, already self-conscious about my height. I think we are as nervous as each other.

  “Shall I sit?”

  “As you wish,” he mumbles, still not looking at me directly. I arrange myself in a pose I have seen from the women in the chapel portraits, back straight, head high, my hands folded across my lap. I am not sure what to do with my eyes. For a while I look straight ahead, but the view is dull and I drop my gaze to the left, from where I can see the lower half of his body. The leather at the bottom of his hose, I notice, is badly worn, but the shape of his leg is good, if a little long. Like my own. As I sit there I become aware of the odor of him, much stronger this time: an earth smell, mixed with sourness, almost a kind of rotting about it. It makes me wonder what he has been doing the night before to have such a stench upon him. Clearly he does not wash enough—it is something I had heard my father remark about foreigners—but to draw attention to it now would stop any chance we might have of conversation. I resolve to leave it to Plautilla. The stink will almost certainly drive her mad.

  Time passes. It is warm there, under the sun. I glance up at Ludovica. She has brought some embroidery, and it is sitting on her lap. She puts her needle down and watches us for a while, but she has never shown much interest in art even when her eyes were good enough to see it. I count slowly to fifty, and by thirty-nine I hear her breathing start to rumble in her chest. In the silence of the chapel she sounds like a great cat purring. I turn to look at her, then glance across at him.

  In today’s light I can study him better. For a man who has spent the night wandering the city he looks well enough. His hair is brushed, and if its style is too long for current Florentine fashion, it is still thick and healthy, his complexion even paler against its richness. He is long and thin, like me, but it is less a fault in a man. He has broad fine cheekbones, and his eyes are almond shaped and have almost a marble effect, gray-green flecked with black, so that I am reminded of the stare of a cat. He is not like any man I have seen before. I do not even know if he is good-looking, though that may be more to do with the way he keeps himself hidden inside. Apart from my brothers and my tutors he is the first man I have ever been in such close proximity to, and I can feel my heart thudding inside my chest. At least sitting I am less like a giraffe. Though I am not sure he notices. While he is looking at me, he doesn’t seem aware of me at all. The light shifts around the dais to the intermittent scratching of the chalk on the page, each line careful, considered, the result of a singular communion between the eye and the hand. It is a vibrant kind of silence that I am familiar with. I think of all the hours I have spent in similar pinpoint concentration, my fingers bent around a sharpened pebble of black chalk, trying to capture the head of a sleeping dog on the stairs or the strange ugliness of my own naked foot, and it makes me more patient than I might otherwise have been.

  “My mother says you have had the fever?” I say at last, as if we were relatives who had been talking for an hour and just fallen silent that very second. When it is clear he is not going to answer I think about bringing up his nocturnal wanderings, but I can’t decide what to say. The sound of his chalk continues. I move my eyes back to focus on the chapel wall. The quiet is now so profound that I begin to think we will be here forever. Though eventually Ludovica will wake and then it will be too late. . . .

  “You know, if you are to succeed here, painter, you may have to speak a little. Even with women.”

  His eyes flick to one side so that I know he takes the words in, but even as I say them they seem too crude and I feel embarrassed for myself. After a while I stir in my seat, shifting my pose. He stops, waiting for me to be still again. I make a little noise. The more I try for stillness the more uncomfortable I feel. I stretch myself farther. He waits again. Only now I am alert to the possibilit
ies of mischief. If he will not talk, I will not sit properly. As I settle I bring my left hand up in front of my face, deliberately obscuring his view. Hands. They are always difficult. So bony and yet fleshy at the same time. Even the greatest of our painters have trouble with them. Yet immediately he is drawing again, this time such insistent scratching that the noise makes me hungry for paper.

  After a while I get bored with my failure and put my hand back into my lap, flexing the fingers upward till they stand up like monstrous spider legs upon my skirts. I watch the knuckles go white and see a single vein throb up against the skin. How strange the body is, so full of itself. When I was younger we had a Tartar slave girl, a fierce character who suffered from fits; when they came upon her she would fall rigid on the ground in spasm, her head flung so far back that her neck strained and stretched till it looked like that of a horse and her fingers clawed at the floor. Once she made foam come out of her mouth and we had to put something between her teeth so she did not swallow her own tongue. Luca, who I now think was always more interested in the Devil than God, believed she had been entered by a demon, but my mother said she was ill and should be left to recover. My father sold her later, though I am not sure he was entirely honest about her health. Even if it was illness it could have easily passed for possession. If one had to paint Christ casting out devils, she would have made a perfect model.

  Ludovica is snoring loudly. It will take a thunderbolt to rouse her. It is now or never. I stand up. “May I see what you have made of me?”

  I feel his body go rigid. I can see he wants to hide the paper, but he also knows it would not be proper. What can he do? Pick up his equipment and run out? Attack me again? He would be on a mule back to the northern wastes if he did that. And underneath all the silence I do not think he is stupid.

  My courage deserts me at the table edge. He is so close I can see the dark stubble on his face, and the sweet rank smell of him is acute now. It makes me think of decay and death, and I remember his violence from the time before. I glance nervously at the door. What would happen if someone came in? Maybe he is thinking the same thing. In one awkward move he pushes the board across the table, face up, so that I can see it without moving any farther toward him.

  The page is filled with sketches: a study of my full head, then parts of my face, my eyes, the lids half lowered, in a manner caught between shy and sly. He has not flattered me, as I do sometimes with Plautilla as a way of buying her silence when she sits for me, but instead I am myself, alive with both mischief and nerves, as if I cannot speak but cannot stay silent. Already he knows more of me than I do of him.

  And then there are the sketches of my hand held up to my face, palm and back, my fingers rounded little columns of living flesh. From nature to the page. His skill makes me giddy.

  “Ah,” I say, and there is pain as well as wonder in my voice. “Who taught you this?”

  I look at my fingers again, real and drawn. And I want more than anything to see how he does it, to watch the way each mark goes onto the page. For that alone I would risk being closer. I look at his face. If it is not arrogance, it has to be shyness that keeps him so silent. What must it be like to be so shy that you find it hard to speak?

  “It must be difficult for you here,” I say quietly. “I think if I were you I might be homesick.”

  And because I do not expect him to reply it registers like a small thrill inside me to hear his voice, which is softer than I remember.

  “It’s the color. Where I come from everything is gray. Sometimes you can’t tell where the sky ends and the sea begins. The color makes everything different.”

  “Oh, but surely Florence is as it must have been then. I mean in the Holy Land, where Our Lord lived. All that sunlight. That’s what the Crusaders tell us. Their colors must have been as bright as ours. You should visit my father’s warehouse sometime. When the bolts of cloth are finished and stacked together it is like walking through a rainbow.”

  It strikes me that this is probably the longest speech that he has ever heard from a woman. I feel the panic rising in him again and remember his earlier wildness, the way his whole body had shaken in front of me. “You mustn’t worry about me,” I blurt out. “I know I talk a lot but I am only fourteen, which makes me a child rather than a woman, so I cannot possibly harm you. And besides, I love art as much as you do.”

  I put out both my hands and lay them gently on the table between us, spreading my fingers loosely on the wood so there is both tension and relaxation to the pose. “Since you are studying hands, perhaps you would like to have a record of them resting? They are easier to see than in my lap.” And I think my mother would have approved of the humility in my voice.

  I stand very still, eyes lowered, waiting. I see the board slide off the table and a crayon move from nearby. When I hear its sounds on the page I risk looking up. I can only see the paper at a slant but it is enough to watch it take shape: dozens of tiny fluid strokes raining down onto the page, no time for thought or consideration, no breath between the seeing and the doing. It is as if he is reading my hands from under the skin, building the image from the inside out.

  I let him work for a few moments. The silence between us seems a little easier now. “Mother says you have been visiting our churches.” He gives the slightest of nods. “Which frescoes did you like most?”

  The hand stops. I watch his face. “Santa Maria Novella. The Life of John the Baptist,” he says firmly.

  “Ghirlandaio. Yes, his Capella Maggiore is one of the wonders of the city.”

  He pauses. “And . . . another chapel across the river.”

  “Santo Spírito? Santa Maria del Carmine?”

  He nods at the second name. Of course. The Brancacci Chapel in the convent of the Carmine. My mother has directed him well, no doubt using her connections and his status as a lay monk to gain him access to usually forbidden areas. “The frescoes of the life of Saint Peter. They are also highly thought of here. Masaccio died before he could complete them you know. He was twenty-seven years old.” I can see this fact impresses him. “I was taken there once as a child, but I barely remember it. Which did you like best?”

  He frowns as if the question is too hard. “There are two scenes from the Garden of Eden. In the second, when they are expelled, Adam and Eve are both crying—no, more . . . howling—as they are banished. I have never seen such sorrow at the loss of God’s grace.”

  “What about before the Fall? Are they as joyful as they are later sad?”

  He shakes his head. “The joy is not as strong. It comes from a different painter’s hand. And the serpent hanging from the tree has a woman’s face on it.”

  “Oh, yes, yes.” I nod, our eyes meeting, and for the moment he is too interested to look away. “My mother has told me of this. Though you know there is no scriptural evidence for such a rendering.”

  But the mention of the Devil in woman has pulled him back into himself again, and he falls silent. The scratching starts again. I glance down at the board. Where did such talent come from? Is it really God-given?

  “Did you always have such skill, painter?” I ask softly.

  “I don’t remember.” His voice is a murmur. “The father who taught me told me I was born with God in my hands to make up for my lack of parents.”

  “Oh, and I am sure he was right. You know in Florence we believe that great art is the study of God in nature. That is the view of Alberti, one of our foremost scholars. Also Cennini, the artist. Their treatises on painting are very widely read here. I have copies in Latin if you would like. . . .” And while I know such knowledge is a way of showing off, I still cannot resist it. “Alberti tells how the beauty of the human form reflects the beauty of God. Though of course he owes such insight partly to Plato. But then you may not have read Plato either. If you are to be noticed here in Florence you cannot ignore him. Though he never knew Christ, he has much to say about the human soul. The understanding of God in the Ancients has been one of our great F
lorentine discoveries.”

  My mother, had she been here, would by now have had her head in her hands at my lack of modesty, both for myself and my city, but I know he is listening. I can tell from the way his hand has stopped on the page. I think he might have spoken more had not Ludovica given a sudden loud snort, which went some way toward waking her up. We both freeze.

  “Well,” I say quickly, stepping back, “perhaps we should stop now. But I can come again and you can practice on my hands if you like.”

  But as he puts down the board and I look at the drawing, I realize he has already taken everything he needs.

  Six

  I TOOK THE COPIES OF ALBERTI AND CENNINI OUT OF MY chest and placed them on the bed. I could not part with Cennini. I depended on it for everything from the fall of drapery to the colors I would never get to mix. But Alberti he could have.

  I made Erila my messenger, with the offer of a red silk scarf.

  “No.”

  “How can you say no? You love this color. And it loves you.”

  “No.”

  “But why? It is simple. You just go down and give it to him. You know the room as well as I.”

  “And if your mother finds out?”

  “She won’t.”

  “But if she does. She will know it is from you and she will know it is by me. And she will have my skin for a pouch.”

  “That is not true.” I search for the words. “She . . . she will understand that we are both about the business of art. That our acquaintance has only God’s purpose about it.”