The Birth of Venus

by Sarah Dunant

  Such secular celebrations, of course, were not within Savonarola’s creed. There could be no carnivals or jousts in the New Jerusalem, and though he spoke passionately enough of joy when it came to God, his God was such a hard taskmaster that they were both becoming more associated with suffering. And while suffering cleanses, it can also get dreary after a time.

  What better way to banish dreary then, than by a religious spectacle, an event that spoke of God but also served to light up one’s everyday harsh existence? To make it—well, less dreary.

  I MUST SAY THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES WAS AN INSPIRED IDEA. And the way Savonarola told it from the pulpit was irresistible: If Florence was suffering, it was because God had chosen her above all others and her journey had become a matter for His personal attention. As he, Savonarola, scourged and starved his body to make himself the perfect vessel for the Lord, so the city must show herself willing to make the sacrifices worthy of His great love. From the relinquishing of unnecessary wealth came exquisite blessing. What need did we have for such fripperies anyway? Cosmetics and perfumes, pagan texts, games, indecent art—all such objects and artifacts only distracted our attention and muddied our devotion to God. Give them up to the flames. Let our vanity and our resistance burn into nothing and disappear with the smoke. Into the space left would come grace. And while I am sure the friar himself never considered this, such a purging would also help ease the pain of the poor: for as well as bringing humility to those who had too much, for those with nothing, it offered the comfort that no one else would have it either.

  Over the coming weeks, the vanities collected by the Angels rose up into a great eight-sided pyre in the middle of the Piazza della Signoria. Erila and I watched it grow with a mixture of awe and horror. You couldn’t deny that the city felt alive again. The building of it provided work for people who would otherwise have grown weak from starvation. People had something to talk about, a focus for gossip and excitement. Men and women went through their wardrobes, children through their toys. Where once we had flaunted ownership, now we explored the attractions of sacrifice.

  Of course, not everyone was enthusiastic to the same degree. There were many people who, had they been left to their own devices, might have chosen not to participate. This was where the Angels came in, a clever move in itself because God’s young army had been somewhat underemployed of late, idle in a city brought low by famine and illness. Some were more persuasive than others. Savonarola had inspired certain young souls to great rhetoric during his reign; there were a few whose words glittered like the gold lacquer from Gabriel’s mouth in the Annunciation. I once saw one of them talk an elegant young woman into giving up her concealed bangle and admitting to a hidden switch of false hair. They had both parted shining from the encounter.

  The Angels rolled carts through the streets, the leading one carrying Donatello’s sweet statue of the boy Jesus at its head. They sang Laudate and hymns and visited each house or institution in turn, asking what they would like to give up. In some places it became almost a new snobbery, as one household vied to outdo another. In others the visits took on the edge of the Inquisition. The Angels had done their homework, seeking out the richer families first to set a good example. If enough was given, they thanked them and went on their way. If not, they invited themselves in to look around. Of course the giving was voluntary, but adolescent boys can be awfully clumsy when they are in a hurry, and it only took a few tales of smashed Murano glass or torn tapestries to bring out in many families a generosity born of fear. Even when Florence had been invaded, our enemies had behaved with more gentility, though it would have taken a brave man to use the word looting in the Angels’ presence.

  The morning they came to our house I was sitting at an upstairs window observing their progress down the street, their raucous singing—too many broken voices muddying the angelic ones—laid over the percussion of the cart wheels. The rules on indecent art were well known. There should be no images of naked men and women in houses where there were young girls. Since most houses had young women, even if they were servants, this could be more or less ruthlessly applied. By these standards my husband’s sculpture gallery would be considered obscene. It was now behind locked doors, the key on his person, while in the courtyard a box of offerings was ready: some rich out-of-fashion clothing, some playing cards, various trinkets and fans, and a great ugly gilt mirror, which spoke more of bad taste than bad faith. I had been fearful that it wouldn’t be enough (my pregnancy was making me more anxious than before), but Cristoforo was phlegmatic: While there were those in power who would almost certainly know about such collections as his, he argued, they would be careful whom they betrayed. Fortunes change quickly in a climate as volatile as the present one, he said, and clever politicians could smell dissent on a fair wind.

  When they arrived at our house, we flung open the gates to them and Erila brought out a tray of refreshments while Filippo carried out the boxes.

  There was a boy, maybe seventeen or eighteen, on the top of the cart, knee-deep in books and costumes, arranging the treasures to make room for new arrivals. I watched as he flung a wood panel painting of naked nymphs and satyrs to one side, the surface cracking and flaking as he manhandled it.

  There were rumors that it wasn’t only the patrons who were giving up their art but also the artists themselves, with Fra Bartolommeo and Sandro Botticelli leading the throng. Of course Botticelli was an old man now, more in need of the love of God than of any patron, though my husband hinted that if he had his eyes on paradise he would do better to confess to something other than sins of female flesh. For my part I couldn’t help remembering Cristoforo’s description of his Venus being born from the sea, and it made me glad that such paintings were locked away in the country. At least our cart’s nymphs and satyrs would not be missed by history; the women’s legs were entirely too short for their bodies and their flesh looked like dough before the oven.

  “Hi, pretty lady. Have you anything for the flames? Any coral beads or feathered fans?”

  He was a good-looking boy and had taken some trouble with his robe and haircut. In another Florence he could have been serenading me from below after a drunken night on the town. Especially since from his angle of vision there was no way he could know the size of my belly.

  I shook my head, but I couldn’t help smiling. Maybe it was nerves.

  “What about those combs in your hair? Aren’t those pearls I see on the edges?”

  I felt the top of my head. Erila had braided me that morning, though with which headdress I couldn’t remember. It would hardly have been ostentatious. Nevertheless I pulled them out. As I did so a section of my hair tumbled down my back. He watched it fall and grinned at me. His smile was infectious. Maybe even the Angels were getting tired of goodness. I threw the combs down to him and he caught them with a flourish.

  Down below, his companions were discussing whether or not to go inside to look for more.

  “Come on,” he shouted, flashing me another fast smile. “If we waste time on every house we’ll miss the flames.” And as the cart rolled away, I swear I saw him slip the combs into his pocket.

  By next morning the pyre was as big as a house. They lit the surrounding faggots at noon, and the moment could be heard all over the city, played in by a fanfare of trumpets and church bells and a swell of chanting from the great crowd gathered there. But not everyone’s voice lifted up to heaven. While the piazza was full, there were some, like us, who came to watch the watchers as much as celebrate the deed.

  As we stood there jostled by the throng, Erila and I saw things that made us despair. A few days before, a Venetian collector had sent a message to the Signoria, offering the fortune of 20,000 florins to save the art from the flames. His answer now came in the form of his own effigy, placed at the very top of the pyre. They had dressed him in the finest clothes, covered his head with a dozen switches of women’s false hair, and placed firecrackers inside his stuffing. As the flames reached him, t
he crackers exploded and the effigy jiggled and yelped as the crowd roared and cheered. I later heard people swearing that they could smell singed hair, and such was the excitement and merriment that you felt it would be only a matter of time before it was human flesh we were roasting.

  The chanting and prayers continued all day, led by the Dominicans and the Angels. But anyone with eyes could see there was one element of the church not represented. The Franciscans, who were feeling the cold winds of favoritism erode their traditional support among the poor, had begun to question Savonarola’s great power. But they could not dent his triumph. The bonfire burned long into the night. For days to come the ashes of our luxuries rained gray snow over the city, coating our window ledges, dusting our clothes, and filling our nostrils with the sad smell of incinerated art.

  And this time, when he heard, the pope excommunicated the friar.

  Thirty-nine

  WHEN THE DECREE REACHED HIM, SAVONAROLA TOOK HIS scourge and prayer book and locked himself in his cell in San Marco. He would do or say nothing until God had spoken to him directly. While few doubted his passion, now for the first time there were open mutterings about his judgment. Whatever his faults, the pope was still God’s representative on earth, and without due respect for authority how could any state or government be safe?

  While he prayed, the plague fed off the faithful. Even his own monastery was struck, the infection so rampant that many of the monks left. Meanwhile, those still committed to the New Jerusalem became even more intent, seeing enemies everywhere. The sodomites who had been arrested and imprisoned in the summer were now paraded through the streets and publicly flogged and mutilated in the main square. One of the men my husband had claimed acquaintance with, now named as Salvi Panizzi, was exposed as a continual and notorious offender and marked down for burning. But while his body might have been broken by the strappado and the rack, at the last minute the city proved nervous of such public shame and his punishment was commuted to a fine and life imprisonment in the insane asylum.

  At Christmas, Savonarola gave his answer, returning defiantly to preach before a great crowd in the cathedral. His body was so thin he looked like a skeleton in robes, and his nose was as sharp as a death scythe. But his voice was cannon fire: force and flame. The pope’s reply was swift. He sent ambassadors to the Signoria and demanded that they either imprison “this Son of Iniquity” or send him in chains to Rome. Disobedience would result in the whole city suffering his wrath. While the government procrastinated, Savonarola answered both of them at the same time. His words, spoken in the pulpit, slid through the city by a chain of whisperers: “Tell all those who seek to make themselves great and exalted that their seats are prepared for them—in hell. And tell them also that one of them has his seat in hell already.”

  Of the pope’s reply to this, there is no record.

  I NO LONGER REMEMBER THE EXACT CHRONOLOGY OF THE FOLLOW- ing months. There are times when sorrows and drama rain down with such force that you buckle under their weight for a while and cannot make out where you are.

  What I do know is the plague hit our house early in the new year. The cook’s younger daughter went down first. She was a thin little thing, no more than seven or eight years old, and though we did what we could she was dead within three days. Filippo was next. It went harder with him, and I felt such sorrow because he could neither hear our comfort nor tell us of his pain. He languished for ten days, growing weaker with each one. In the end he died in the night while no one was there. When Erila brought me the news next morning, I burst into tears.

  That day my husband and I had our first proper argument. He wanted to send me out of the city, to the spa waters in the south or the hills to the east, where he said the air would be clearer. I was taking Erila’s daily dose of aloe, myrrh, and saffron against the contagion and had grown stronger since the vomiting stopped, but I was still not yet my old self and for all my curiosity I think I might finally have been persuaded had not events overtaken us.

  We were still locked in his room talking when the servant arrived from my parents’ house.

  The note was in my mother’s hand:

  Little Illuminata is dead from the fever. I would go to Plautilla but your father is ill and I fear contagion if I move from one house to the other. If you are well and feel fit to travel, your sister has need of you now. There is no one else I can ask. Take care for yourself and the precious young soul within you.

  Plautilla had barely seen Illuminata since she dispatched her and the wet nurse to the country almost a year before. It would not be the first or last time that a child did not make it through the weaning, and my sister, who as far as I knew had spent her whole life more concerned with matters of surface than depth, already had another on the way. So I am ashamed to say that I was not prepared for what I found.

  The sound of her grief met us as soon as we disembarked from the carriage. Her maidservant came running down the stairs to greet us, and both Erila and I could see the panic in her face. As we reached the top landing, the bedroom door opened and Maurizio emerged, almost haggard. The rise and fall of her wailing rolled like a storm wind after him.

  “Thank the Lord you are come,” he said. “It has been like this since the news came this morning. I can do nothing with her. She will not be comforted. I fear she will make herself ill and lose the baby.”

  Erila and I entered the room quietly.

  Plautilla was sitting on the floor by the empty crib, now ready for the new baby, her hair unpinned and her dress half open at the top. Her belly was larger than mine and her face was bloated with tears. I could not remember a time in my life when I had seen her so lost and unkempt.

  I sank myself down clumsily next to her, my skirts rising up around my protruding stomach, so that together we looked like two fat birds of plumage. But when I put out my hand to touch her, she veered away and her voice was shrill.

  “Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me! I know he sent for you and I will not be comforted. I knew that woman would kill her. She had strange eyes. Maurizio must go to her house and bring back the body. I would not put it past her to palm us off with some scrawny corpse she has found in the village while she keeps Illuminata for her own. Oh, if only we had given more to the flames! I told him it was not enough, that God would punish us for our meanness.”

  “Oh, Plautilla, this is nothing to do with the vanities. This is the plague.”

  But she put her hands to her ears and shook her head violently. “No, no, I will not listen to you. Luca said you would try to sway me with your talk. You know nothing. Your head speaks and your soul suffers. I am surprised He has not brought you further down. Luca says it is only a matter of time. You should look to the baby when it comes out of you. If it is not healthy, there is no medicine that will save it.”

  I glanced at Erila. In loyalty to me she had never had much time for my sister, and I could feel her intolerance of this hysteria now. If it could not be stopped by reason, we would have to find some other way. I told her as much in my eyes. She nodded and moved silently out of the room.

  “Plautilla, listen to me,” I said, and though my voice was nowhere as loud as hers I made sure she could hear it. “If this is indeed His judgment, your grief is a vanity in itself. If you continue like this, you will bring on your own labor and have another death on your hands.”

  “Oh, you don’t understand. You think that the way you see things is the way they are. You think you know everything. But you don’t. You never did and you don’t now!” And her cries grew wild again.

  I let her sob some more, disturbed as much by the force of her passion against me as by her own pain.

  “Look,” I said more gently, as her thrashings subsided a little. “The one thing I do know is that you loved her. But you cannot blame yourself. You could have done nothing to save her.”

  “No, you are wrong—” She broke off. “Oh, I should never have hidden my pearls. I almost gave them—I did. But . . . but . . . they are
so lovely. Luca says admitting our weaknesses will bring us closer to Him. But sometimes I don’t know what He wants of us. I pray every night and I confess my sins, but I am not made of such stern stuff. They weren’t even very fine pearls. . . . And I don’t think that when I wear them I love God any less. . . . Are we not allowed to care for what we look like at all? Oh, I don’t understand!”

  But she had run out of rage and tears now, and this time when I put out my hand she did not pull away. I pushed a lock of damp hair back from her face. Her skin was glistening with sweat and tears, but she still looked—well, so comely.

  “You are right, Plautilla. I don’t know everything. I live too much in my head and not enough in my heart. I know that. But it seems to me that if God loves us He does not want us groveling. Or starving. Or even ugly simply for the sake of it. He wants us to come to Him, not to make it impossible to do so. Your selfishness did not kill Illuminata. She died of the plague. If it was God’s will to take her, it was not to punish you but because He loved her so much. It is right that you grieve for her, but not that you destroy yourself in the process.”