The Birth of Venus

by Sarah Dunant

  And I was right, though I was yet to understand the cost.

  TO MY SURPRISE I MISSED PLAUTILLA. AT FIRST THE EXPANSE OF white linen and my undisputed sovereignty over what had been our room gave me pleasure. But after a while the bed began to feel too big without her. I would no longer hear her snoring or grow tired of her chatter. Her babble of words, however trivial or annoying, had been a backdrop to my life for so long that I could not imagine what the silence would be like. The house began to echo around me. My father went abroad again, and with his absence my brothers took more often to the streets. Even the painter was gone, to a workshop near Santa Croce where he could practice the art of fresco, which he would need for the altar. With the right teacher and with my father’s purse behind him, he would buy himself entrance into the Doctors and Apothecaries Guild, without which no painter could work officially in the city. Just the thought of such elevation made me ache with longing.

  When it came to my own future, my mother proved as good as her word and there was no immediate talk of marriage negotiations. My father’s mind when he returned was on other things. Even I could see that in the wake of Lorenzo’s death the geometry of influence in the city had begun to shift. Florence was noisy with speculation as to how far Piero de’ Medici could fill his father’s shoes and, if not, whether the family’s enemies would, after so many years of suppression, gain enough support to tip the balance. While I knew little of politics at that time, it was impossible to miss the venom now spurting forth from the pulpit of Santa Maria del Fiore. Prior Savonarola had recently outgrown his church at San Marco and now delivered his weekly sermons to an increasingly packed cathedral. The holy friar, it seemed, was in direct contact with God, and when they looked down together on Florence they saw a city corrupted by privilege and intellectual vanity. After so many years spent daydreaming my way through sermons full of scriptures but no fire, I found his lava flow of words spellbinding. When he railed against Aristotle or Plato as pagans whose works undermined the true church while their souls rotted in eternal fire, there were arguments I could find to defend them, but only afterward, when his voice was no longer ringing in my ears. He had a passion that felt like possession, and he painted pictures of hell that curdled one’s insides with the smell of sulfur.

  What all this meant for my future marriage plans was hard to tell, though married I must clearly be. In Savonarola’s vision of this bleak, stained city, virgins were more at risk than ever before—just think of that poor girl whose body had been destroyed by lust and left for the dogs to ravage on the banks of the Arno. My brothers, who would remain single till their thirties, at which point they would be deemed sober enough to become husbands, having ruined God knows how many virgin servants on the way, made it their business to taunt me about the whole marriage business.

  I REMEMBER ONE ENCOUNTER IN PARTICULAR THAT TOOK PLACE IN the summer of 1494. The house was full again, my father busy with the affairs of another journey and the painter, recently arrived home from his apprenticeship, barricaded in his room intent on completing the designs for the chapel. I was sitting in my room, a book open on my lap, my mind filled with schemes as to how I might visit him, when Tomaso and Luca swaggered past me on their way out. They were dressed for pleasure, though the new cut of the tunic high up the thigh did more for Tomaso’s leg than for Luca, who wore my father’s cloth with all the elegance of a bullock cart. Tomaso, in contrast, had a fast eye for fashion and from an early age had walked as if the world were watching him and approving what it saw. His vanity was so naked it made me want to laugh, but I knew better than to make fun of him. He had bloodied me too many times in the past.

  “Alessandra, dearest,” he said, sweeping me a mocking wide bow. “Look, Luca, our sister is reading another book! How charming. And such a modest pose. You had better be careful, though. While husbands like meek wives who keep their heads down, you will have to lift your eyes up to them sometimes.”

  “I’m sorry? What was that you said?”

  “I said you’re going to be next. Isn’t she, Luca?”

  “Next for what?”

  “Shall I tell her or will you?”

  Luca shrugged. “Rolling and plucking,” he said, making it sound like something the cook does in the kitchen. While they might be slow at Greek grammar, my brothers had a talent for the most recent street slang, which they used whenever my mother was out of earshot.

  “Rolling and plucking? And what is that, pray, Luca?”

  “It’s what Plautilla’s been doing.” He grinned, referring to the fact that our sister had recently set the household alight with the announcement of her pregnancy and the promise of a male heir.

  “Poor little sister.” Tomaso’s sympathy is worse than his spite. “Didn’t she tell you what it is like? Well, let’s see. I can only speak for the man. With a ripe one, it would be—like the first suck of a juicy watermelon.”

  “And what do you do with the skin?”

  He laughed. “Depends how long you want it to last. Though maybe you should ask your precious painter the same question.”

  “What’s he got to do with it?”

  “You don’t know? Oh, dear Alessandra, I thought you knew everything. That’s what the tutors always tell us.”

  “They only mean it in comparison to you,” I retorted, before I could stop myself. “What are you saying about the painter?”

  But I am too eager, which gives him an advantage.

  He makes me wait. “What I’m saying is that our apparently devout little artist has been spending his nights poking around the Florentine slums. And he’s not there to paint pictures. Isn’t that right, Luca?”

  My elder brother nods, his face fat with a silly grin.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because we met him, that’s why.”

  “When?”

  “Last night, sneaking back over the old bridge.”

  “Did you speak to him?”

  “I asked him where he’d been, yes.”

  “And?”

  “And he looked guilty as sin and said he was ‘taking the night air.’”

  “Maybe he was.”

  “Oh, little sister. You have no idea. The man was a mess. Face like a ghost, stains all over him. He was positively reeking of it—the stink of cheap cunt.” Though I had not heard the word before, I knew from the way he said it something of what it must mean, and while I chose not to show it, he shocked me by the contempt in his voice. “So. You had better be careful. If he paints you again, keep your cloak wrapped tight around you. He might take more than your likeness.”

  “Have you told anyone else about this?”

  He smiles. “You mean have I snitched on him? Why should I? I think he probably paints better on the juice of a good whore than he would on a diet of the Gospels. Who was that artist you so love? The one who plucked the nun for his Madonna.”

  “Fra Filippo,” I say. “She was very beautiful. And he offered to marry her afterward.”

  “Only because the Medici made him. I bet old Cosimo took a bit off the price of the altarpiece though.”

  It is clear that Tomaso has inherited something of my father’s business acumen.

  “So what bargain did you strike with the painter in return for your silence, Tomaso?”

  He laughs. “What do you think? I made him promise to give Luca and me a good leg and a wide brow. Our beauty for posterity. And to give you a harelip—and a shortened leg, to explain your dancing.”

  Though I am expecting it, of course, his cruelty still takes me aback. It always comes to this moment in our arguments: his need to punish me for the humiliations of the study room; my refusal to be crushed. I sometimes think the trajectory of my whole life was played out in my battles with Tomaso. That each time I won I also somehow lost.

  “Oh, don’t tell me I’ve hurt your feelings! If you only knew . . . We’re doing you a favor, aren’t we, Luca? It’s not easy finding a husband for a girl who quotes Plato but falls over her
own feet. Everybody knows you’re going to need all the help you can get.”

  “You better be careful, both of you,” I say darkly, thickening my voice to cover my hurt. “You think you can do what you like. That Father’s money and our coat of arms give you license. But if you opened your eyes you’d see things are changing. The sword of God’s wrath is rising above the city. He stalks the streets at night in your footsteps and sees what evil you commit.”

  “Whoa, you sound just like Savonarola.” Luca laughs nervously. I am good at voices when I put my mind to it.

  “You laugh now”—I turn on him, drilling his eye as I have seen the prior do from the pulpit—“but you’ll be crying soon enough. The Lord will send plague, flood, war, and famine to punish the ungodly. Those who clothe themselves in righteousness will be saved; the rest will choke on the fumes of the sulfur.”

  For a moment I swear even my lumpen brother can feel the heat of hell.

  “Don’t listen to her, Luca.” Tomaso is harder to scare. “He’s a madman. Everyone knows that.”

  “Not everyone, Tomaso. He knows how to preach and he quotes the scriptures well. You should listen to him sometime.”

  “Ah . . . I do start listening, but then my eyelids grow heavy.”

  “That’s because you’ve been out too late the night before. Look behind you and see the effect he has on those who have slept in their own beds. They have eyes as big as hosts. And they believe him.” I can see Luca is listening hard now.

  “War? Famine? Flood? We see the Arno in the streets every other year, and if the crops fail people will be hungry again. It doesn’t have to be God’s will.”

  “Yes, but if Savonarola predicts it and then it happens, people will connect the two. Think about the pope.”

  “What? He tells us that a sick old man is going to die, and then when he does everyone calls him a prophet. I would have thought it would take more than that to impress you. Anyway, you should be more worried than most. If he’s suspicious of learning in men, he believes the Devil resides in women. He doesn’t even think women should speak. Because, if you remember, dear Sis, it was Eve who used her words to beguile Adam and—”

  “Why is it when there are voices raised in this house it is always you two?” My mother sweeps into the room dressed for traveling, Maria and another servant trotting behind carrying a set of leather bags. “You brawl like street fighters. It is an offense to hear you. You, sir, should not taunt your sister, and you, Alessandra, are a disgrace to your sex.”

  We all bow to her. Halfway down I catch Tomaso’s eye, and he gives my unspoken request for a truce some thought. There are still some moments when our need to help each other is greater than our differences.

  “Dear Mama, forgive us, we were simply discussing religion,” he says, with a charm that might undress certain women but was lost on my mother. “How far we should pay heed to the good friar’s recent sermons.”

  “Oh!” She let out an angry breath. “I would hope my children would follow God’s will without Savonarola’s words to sting them into action.”

  “But surely you don’t agree with him, Mama?” I said urgently. “He believes the study of the ancients is a betrayal of Christ’s truth.”

  She stops and stares at me, her mind still half on other things. “Alessandra, each day I pray that you will find a way to contentment by questioning less and accepting more. As to Girolamo Savonarola—well, he is a holy man who believes in the kingdom of heaven.” She frowned. “Still, I do wonder that Florence should have had to find a friar from Ferrara to hold a mirror up to her soul. If one has to listen to bad news, it is better to come from one’s own family. Like now.” She sighed. “I have to go to Plautilla.”

  “To Plautilla? Why?”

  “There is some problem with the baby. She has asked for me. I will almost certainly stay the night and send word back with Angelica. Alessandra, you will stop brawling and get ready for your dancing teacher, who apparently still believes that miracles are possible. Luca, you will go to your studies, and Tomaso, you will stay and speak to your father when he gets in. He is at a meeting of the Security Council in the Signoria, and it is likely that he will be late.”

  “But Mother—”

  “Whatever it is that you have planned to do this evening, Tomaso, it will wait until your father returns. Is that clear?”

  And my pretty brother, who always has an answer to everything, remained silent.

  Eight

  I STAYED UP LATE, EATING MILK PUDDINGS FILCHED FROM the pantry—our cook adored me for my appetite, and such theft was viewed only as the sincerest form of flattery—and playing chess with Erila for gossip. It was the only game where I could ever beat her. At dice and cards she was a master gambler, though I suspect it was as much her skill in cheating as in playing. On the streets she could probably have made a fortune, though gambling was one of the sins that Savonarola was now breathing fire on from the pulpit.

  When we had tired of playing, I made her help me mix up my ink washes and then pose for me in my Madonna’s silk Annunciation dress. I set the lamp to the left of her, so the shadows created came nearest to the effect of daylight. Everything I knew of such techniques came from Cennini. Though he was long dead, he was the nearest I would come to a teacher and I studied him with the devotion of a novitiate to the scriptures. Following his lore on drapery, I used the richest ink wash to create the darkest part of the shadow, then graduated the ink lighter until it reached the tops of the folds, where I added a streak of watered white lead so the ridge of cloth seemed to capture the shine of the light. But while it gave Our Lady’s costume a certain depth, even I could see it was crude, more a trickery of the brush than an expression of truth. My limitations made me despair. As long as I was both my own master and apprentice I would be forever caught in the web of inexperience.

  “Oh, keep still. I can’t capture the fold if you move.”

  “You should try standing here like a piece of stone. My arms are falling off, they ache so.”

  “That’s from the speed with which you move your chess pieces. If you were sitting for a real painter you would have to be statue-still for hours.”

  “If I were sitting for a real painter my purse’d be heavy with florins.”

  I grinned. “I’m surprised they haven’t plucked you off the streets. Your skin shines so when the sun is on you.”

  “Ha! And what story would they put my color in?”

  Looking back on it now, I wish I had had the courage to make her my Madonna, just to capture that coal-black sheen. There were those in the city who still found her skin strange; they would turn and gawp at her as we walked together back from church, half fascinated, half repulsed. But she would have none of it, holding their stare until they broke first. For me her color had always been glorious. There had been times when I could barely stop my brush from tracing a line of white lead along her forearm just to marvel at the contrast between the light and the black.

  “What about our painter? Mother says the chapel frescoes will be the life of Santa Caterina of Alexandria. There would be room enough for you there. Has he never asked you?”

  “My likeness done by Skinnyboy?” She looked at me intently. “What do you think?”

  “I . . . I don’t know. I think he has a great eye for beauty.”

  “A young monk’s fear of it, too. For him I’m just another shade he wants to capture.”

  “So you think he is impervious to women?”

  She snorted. “If he is, he’ll be the first one I’ve ever met. He’s just rigid with purity.”

  “In which case I wonder why you go to such lengths to keep me out of his company!”

  She stared at me for a moment. “Because in the right hands innocence can spring more traps than knowledge.”

  “Well, that shows how much you know,” I said, triumphant that for once my gossip was fresher than hers. “From what I hear he spends his nights with women whose souls are blacker than your skin.”<
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  “Who told you that?”

  “My brothers.”

  “Pah! They don’t know their arse from their elbows. Tomaso loves himself too much, and when it comes to a woman’s body Luca couldn’t find a crow in a bowl of milk.”

  “You say that, but I remember a time when he looked on you eagerly enough.”

  “Luca!” She laughed. “He’s only got the stomach for sin when he’s halfway down an ale cask. When he’s sober I’m the Devil’s creation.”

  “And so you are. Oh—Stop moving! How can I get the shadow right if you shift so?”

  Later, when she was gone, I developed a throbbing in my belly that came and went in uneven rhythm, though how much that was a surfeit of milk pudding was hard to tell. The summer heat was upon us now, and it could curdle the brain. I wondered about Plautilla. Could it be her pain I was feeling? She would be at most only four to five months gone with child. What did that mean? Between Erila’s gossip and my brothers’ crudeness I probably knew more about the act of sex than most closeted girls of my age, but for every fact there was a small ocean of ignorance, and the growth of a baby was one of them. Still, I could read my mother’s anxiety enough to know when it was serious. The ache came back like a fist squeezing my bowels. I got up and started to walk around to try and ease it.

  I could not get the painter out of my mind. I thought about his talent, the way he had captured my hands at rest, how peaceful he had made them seem, how full of soul. Then I saw him stumbling across the Ponte Vecchio with my brother’s gang splayed out in front of him, and try as I might I could not equate the two images. Yet whatever Erila’s doubts, the fact that he had been there at all was deeply incriminating. The old bridge had a fearful reputation: the butchers’ and candlemakers’ shops with their womblike interiors and thick smells of rotting meat and boiling wax drifting out onto the street. Even by day there were dogs and beggars everywhere, sniffing around for scraps or offal, while at night on either side of the bridge the city splintered into a maze of alleyways where darkness hid all manner of sins.