The Birth of Venus

by Sarah Dunant

  “Ho! That’s not how old Ludovica tells it.”

  “What do you mean? She was asleep. She couldn’t see anything.” She is silent now, but I have jumped too quickly and she begins to smile. “Oh, you cheat, Erila. She didn’t tell you anything.”

  “No. But you just did.”

  “We talked of art, Erila. I mean it. Of the chapels and the churches and the colors in the sunshine. I tell you he has God in his fingers.” I paused. “Though his manners are impossible.”

  “That’s what worries me. You’ve too much in common, you two.”

  But she took the book anyway.

  THE FOLLOWING DAYS WERE FRANTIC ONES. WHILE MY MOTHER AND the maids prepared Plautilla’s wardrobe, Plautilla spent endless hours on the preparation of herself, lightening her hair and bleaching her skin until she began to look more like a ghost than a bride. The next night when I got to the window it was late; I remember because Plautilla was in such a state of agitation that it took her hours to fall asleep and I heard the bells of Sant’ Ambrogio strike the hour. The painter appeared almost immediately, dressed in the same enveloping cloak, sliding into the gloom with the same determined stride. But this time I was equally determined to wait up for him. It was a clear spring night, the sky a full map of stars, so when the thunder arrived later it seemed to come out of nowhere, the lightning that followed it scorching a gigantic cross-stitch in the sky.

  “Whoa!”

  “Yeah!”

  I saw them as they rounded the corner, my brothers and their entourage, like a gang of pirates unsteady on dry land, slapping and hugging one another as they tottered down the street. I slid back from the window, but Tomaso has eyes like a falcon and I heard his insolent whistle, the one he uses to summon the dogs.

  “Hey, little sister?” His voice boomed off the cobbles. “Little sister!”

  I shoved my head out and hissed at him to be quiet. But he was too drunk to register. “Whoa . . . Look at her, boys. A brain as big as the inside of Santa Maria del Fiore, and a face like a dog’s arse.”

  Around him his friends yelped their approval of his wit. “Keep your voice down or Father will hear you,” I spit back, covering my injury with anger.

  “If he does, you’ll be the one in trouble, not me.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Why don’t you ask Luca?” But Luca was having trouble standing unaided. “We found him with his hands on Santa Caterina’s stone tits, spewing his stomach out over her feet. He’d probably have been arrested for blasphemy if we hadn’t got to him first.”

  The next flash of lightning lit up the sky like daylight. The thunder that followed was close, not one but two cracks, the second truly deafening, as if the very ground itself had split beneath it. Of course we all knew of such things: the way that sometimes the earth can slice open and the Devil grab a few lost souls through the gashes in between. I got to my feet in sudden terror, but it was already over.

  Down below they were similarly startled, though they covered it with whoops and fake horror. “Yeah! Earth shake,” yelled Luca.

  “No. Cannon fire.” Tomaso was laughing. “It’s the French army come over the Alps on their way to conquer Naples. What a glorious prospect. Think of that, Sister, rape and pillage. I hear the uncouth French are hot to pluck young virgins from the new Athens.”

  From the garden at the back of the house the peacocks started up, a screeching fit to wake the dead. Along the street I saw windows opening, and in the direction of the cathedral a glow of light appeared. The painter would have to wait. I was back across the floor and up the stairs within seconds. As I slid into my bed I heard my father’s voice rise up in anger from below.

  Next morning the house was alive with the news. How in the deepest night a shaft of lightning had struck the lantern of the great dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, cracking open a block of marble and hurtling it to earth with such force that half of it crashed through the roof, the other half crushing a nearby house though miraculously leaving the family untouched.

  But worse was to come. For that same night, Lorenzo the Magnificent, scholar, diplomat, politician, and Florence’s most noble citizen and benefactor, was lying in his villa in Careggi, crippled by gout and stomach pain. When he heard what had happened in the city, he sent to find out which way the stone had fallen, and when they told him he closed his eyes and said, “It was coming this way. I shall die tonight.”

  And so he did.

  THE NEWS HIT THE CITY HARDER THAN ANY THUNDERBOLT. THE morning after, my brothers and I sat in an airless study as our Greek teacher stumbled over the words of Pericles’ funeral oration, his tears watermarking the pages of the specially copied manuscript, and though we later made fun of his lugubrious tone, I know at the time even Luca was moved. My father closed his business for the day, and from the servants’ quarters I heard Maria and Ludovica wailing. Lorenzo de’ Medici had been the city’s foremost citizen since before I was born, and his death blew a cold wind through all of our lives.

  His body was brought down to the monastery of San Marco for the night, where the nobler of the citizenry were allowed to view it. Our family was one of those who made the pilgrimage. Inside the chapel the casket was so high up I could barely see into it. The corpse was dressed modestly, as befits a family which, though it ruled Florence in private, had always sought to appear otherwise in public, and his countenance was peaceful, with no sign of the stomach agonies he was said to have suffered at the end (for which Tomaso gossiped that his doctor had prescribed pulverized pearls and diamonds; later, those who disliked him would say he died swallowing what remained of his private wealth so the city could not get its hands on it). But my central memory was how ugly he was. Though I must have seen his profile on a dozen medallions, it was much more arresting in the flesh: the way his flattened nose reached down almost to his lower lip and his chin jutted up like the headland on a rocky coast.

  As I stood gawping, Tomaso whispered in my ear that his hideousness was its own aphrodisiac, driving women wild with desire, while his love poetry ignited fire in the coldest of female hearts. The sight of him made me think again of that day in Santa Maria Novella when my mother had drawn attention to the making of history with Ghirlandaio’s great chapel. And because this was clearly such a moment, I turned to find her in the throng and so caught her unawares, her tears shining like crystal drops in the candlelight. I had never seen her cry before, and the sight of it disturbed me more than the corpse.

  San Marco’s monastery where the body lay had been Lorenzo’s grandfather’s favorite retreat, and the family had spent a fortune endowing it. But its new prior had marked himself out as an independent thinker, railing against the Medici for promoting the works of pagan scholars over the word of God. Some said he had even refused to give Lorenzo absolution on his deathbed, but I think that was scurrilous rumor, the kind that spreads like fire through a crowd on a hot afternoon. Certainly that day Prior Girolamo Savonarola confined himself only to the most respectful of words, preaching a passionate sermon on the transience of life compared to the eternity of God’s grace and exhorting us to live each day wearing the eyeglasses of death so we would not be tempted by earthly pleasures and thus be ever ready for our Savior. To which there was much nodding and agreement in the pews, though I suspect those who could afford it still went back to the smells of rich food and good living. I know we did.

  Because both our own and Plautilla’s future family were well-known Medici supporters, the wedding was postponed. My sister, never one to be willingly upstaged, and whose nervous system was already teetering on the edge of collapse, now wandered round the house with a face as bleached as a bedsheet and a temper as black as the Baptistery Devil.

  But that wasn’t the worst of it. Lorenzo’s death put the city out of sorts in many ways. In the coming weeks Erila brought back all manner of cruel stories: how two of the lions, the very symbol of our greatness, had fought and killed each other in their cages behind the Piazza della S
ignoria the day before his death, and how the next day a woman had gone crazy during mass in Santa Maria Novella, running down the aisles screaming that a wild bull was charging toward her with its horns on fire and threatening that it would bring the building down on top of them all. Long after they took her away, people said they could hear her screams echoing around the nave.

  But worst of all was the body of the young girl that the night watches of Santa Croce found in the marshland between the church and the river a week later. Erila wove it in all its gory detail for Plautilla and me as we sat over our embroidery in the garden under the shade of the pergola, the yellow spring broom all around us and the smells of lilac and lavender making the stench of the story somehow even worse.

  “The corpse was so rotten that the flesh was falling off the bones. The watchmen had to hold camphored cloths to their noses just to search it out. They say she’d been dead since the night of the thunderbolt. Whoever did it hadn’t even buried her properly. She was rank in a pool of her own blood and the rats and dogs had got to her. Half her stomach was eaten away and there were bite marks everywhere.”

  The proclamation they read out later in the market square said she had been grossly assaulted, and it called upon the perpetrator to come forward for the sake of his own soul and the good reputation of the Republic. That young girls were violated and sometimes even died of it was a sad but acknowledged truth of the city. The Devil found his way into many men’s hearts through their loins, and such outrages only proved the efficacy of the traditions that kept respectable men and women so strictly separated until married. But this crime was different. According to Erila, the damage done had been so dreadful, her sexual organs so cut and torn about, that no one could be quite sure if it was man or beast that had been responsible.

  GIVEN THE HORROR OF IT, IT DIDN’T REALLY SURPRISE ANYONE when, months later, the notices fell from the boards, streaked with rain and trampled underfoot by pigs and goats, and no one had come forward to confess to the outrage that left such a stain upon the city’s soul.

  Seven

  PLAUTILLA’S WEDDING, WHEN IT FINALLY TOOK PLACE, was a testament to my father’s cloth and our family fortune. When I think of her it is always on this day. She is seated in the receiving room, dressed for the ceremony. It is early, the light tender and sweet, and the painter has been called in for a last sitting to capture her for the future decoration of our walls. She ought to be tired (she has been awake most of the night, despite the sleeping draft my mother gave her), but she looks as if she has just risen from the Elysian fields. Her face is full and soft, her skin fabulously pale, though with the rouge of excitement lighting up the cheeks. Her eyes are clear, their inner edges shining and red like a pomegranate seed against the white, her eyelashes neither too thick nor too dark—no box hedges here—and her brows full in the middle, then tapered like a painter’s line toward the nose and the ears. Her mouth is small and pouty like a Cupid’s bow, and her hair—what can be seen of it under the flowers and the jewels—reflects her admirable commitment to indolence and a host of afternoons spent staked out in the sun.

  Her dress is in the latest fashion: the neckline scalloped, showing off her plump flesh and my father’s cunning Flemish lawn, already madly in demand; her underskirts soft and full as angels’ wings so that when she glides past you can hear the material sighing across the floor. But it is the overdress that makes you want to weep for its beauty. It is made of the finest yellow silk, the shade of the brightest crocuses grown especially for their dye in the fields around San Gimignano, and its skirt is embroidered, not grossly like some of the dresses you see in church, which try to compete with the altar cloth, but subtly so that the flowers and the birds seem to entwine through the stitching.

  In such a garment my sister is so lovely that, if Plato is to be believed, one would expect her to be shining with goodness, and certainly she is nicer than usual this morning, almost floaty with excitement. But while she wants her likeness recorded, she is far too impatient to be sitting for long. With everyone else in the house occupied I am brought in as companion and chaperone to amuse her, while on the other side of the room our painter’s hands move steadily on the page.

  Of course, I am as much interested in him as in her. Everyone in the house has been given new robes in celebration of the day, and he looks handsome though not particularly comfortable in his. It is weeks since I sent him the Alberti, but I have heard nothing from him. He is fatter (our kitchen is renowned) and is it my imagination or does he hold his head a little higher? Our eyes meet as I come in and I think there might even be a smile there, but on this of all days he must also practice humility. The only thing that has not changed is his hand, as concentrated as ever, each line bringing her more alive, then marking the fabrics with numbers so he can tell which colors to add later.

  What he does on his nights away I still have no idea. Even my queen of gossip has nothing to tell me. In the house he is still a loner, shunning the company of others, only now they see him as snobbish rather than sick, placing himself above them, which given his status as the family artist is of course fitting. It is only much later I realize it is less snobbery that stops him from talking than the fact that he does not know what to say. Children brought up in a monastery, in the company of adults, learn better than most the power of solitude and the pure but harsh discipline of speaking only to Our Lord.

  I catch his eye and realize that his hand has moved on to me. But my likeness is not within his instructions and his attention makes me blush. As the younger sister, it is important I do not outshine the bride, though there is little enough chance of that. Despite all my mother’s ointments, my skin is as dark as my sister’s is fair, and recently my giraffe body has begun to sprout in ways that all of Erila’s skills with lacing and the thick box pleats of the tailor’s design cannot hide. He has no time to finish me. The room is suddenly awash with people, and we are being bustled out. In the courtyard below, the main gates are open and Erila and I watch as Plautilla is hoisted onto the white horse, her dress arranged so it flows like a golden lake around her, and the wedding chest is lifted to the shoulders of the grooms (Erila says it takes as many men to carry as Lorenzo’s coffin), and so the procession to the house of her in-laws begins.

  As we parade through the streets a crowd gathers, which gives my father particular pleasure, but then he knows that our fortune grows from spinning women’s desire into fabric and that waiting to greet us at Maurizio’s house are dozens of Florence’s more affluent families, each with an appetite for fine cloth.

  The façade of their palazzo is hung with ornate tapestries especially hired for the occasion. Inside, the wedding banquet is laid out on long trestle tables in the courtyard. If my father is the master of the cloth, his in-laws rival him with the food. There is not an animal within hunting distance of Florence that hasn’t lost at least one member of its family to the oven that day. The greatest delicacy is the roasted peacocks’ tongues, though given the screeching of their cousins at our house I can’t bring myself to pity them too much. I feel more sorry for the turtledove and the chamois deer, both of which are much less glorious dead than alive, though the smell of their spiced flesh is enough to make the old men dribble over their velvet jerkins. Along with the game there is poultry—boiled capon and chicken—followed by veal, a whole roasted kid, and a great fish pie flavored with oranges, nutmegs, saffron, and dates. There are so many courses that after a while you can smell the belches as much as the food. Of course, such culinary excess is officially frowned upon. Florence, like all good Christian cities, has laws to limit luxury. But just as everyone knows that a woman’s marriage chest is a way to hide her excess jewels and rich fabrics from the authorities, so the feast that follows the ceremony is a private affair. Indeed, it’s not unknown to see the very people whose job it is to police the law stuffing their faces with the rest of the gluttons, though what the pious new prior of San Marco would make of such hypocrisy and decadence doesn’t be
ar thinking about.

  After the food comes the dancing. Plautilla is the true bride at this moment, turning a sweep of her hand into an invitation of such subtle coquetry that it makes me despair anew at my own clumsiness. When she and Maurizio lead the “Bassa Danza Lauro,” Lorenzo’s own composition (and its own statement of allegiance danced so soon after his death), it is impossible to take one’s eyes off her.

  I, in contrast, am all left feet. On one of the more complex turning moves I lose my place completely and am only saved when my partner of the moment whispers the next steps in my ear as we pass. As I recover, my rescuer, a man of older years, holds my eye firmly during the next move, steering me through, and as we interlace for the last time—with a certain elegance, I am proud to say—he bows his head toward me again and says quietly, “So tell me—is it better to excel at Greek or at dancing?” before turning on his heel in time to pay court to the girl standing next to me.

  Since it is only my family who are so intimately acquainted with my failings, and my brothers in particular who would be spiteful enough to use them as gossip, I feel myself flush with sudden shame. My mother, of course, has been following the whole encounter like a hawk. I anticipate a rebuke in her eyes, but she simply looks at me for a moment, then glances away.

  The festivities last far into the night. People eat until they can hardly walk, and the wine flows like the Arno in flood so that many of the men become quite rude on it. But what they say to each other I cannot tell you, because by now I am banished to one of the upper rooms with two fat chaperones and a dozen girls of my own age for company. The segregation of unmarried young women at these moments is accepted custom (flowers still in bud must be protected from any forced advent of summer), but recently the gap between the other girls and me feels wider than our age, and as I looked down on the party that night, I vowed that this would be the last time I would be an observer rather than a participant.