The Birth of Venus

by Sarah Dunant

  In their place grew a certain pleasure from ritual and order. My days were simple: rising at dawn for prayer, then spending the first hours applying the screed plaster to the area of wall I would work on that day. A break for morning food—in summer, cold meats with fried zucchini flowers and vegetable jams; in winter, cured hams and spiced pies and broth—then filling in the paint before the plaster dried or the sunlight fell below the window, making the light too dim for my brush. Where once I had yearned for the world outside, now my vision was reduced to the transformation of a damp square of plaster into a set of shapes and colors that could only be understood once the whole was completed.

  Thus, after so many years, Alessandra Cecchi finally learned the virtue of patience, and each twilight as she put aside the brushes and walked back across the cloisters to her cell, I think you could say that she was content.

  And this feeling lasted for many years, until the spring of 1512.

  Forty-eight

  THE CHAPEL WAS ALMOST HALF FINISHED WHEN LATE ONE afternoon word came to me that I had a visitor.

  Given the liberality of our institution, visitors were not uncommon, though less so for me. My mother had come every other year since my arrival and stayed for a few weeks to savor the growing of her granddaughter. But recently her eyesight had grown dim and she was needed full time to companion my father, who had become something of a recluse as well as an invalid. Her latest news had arrived by letter through a courier only a few months before. Luca had finally been married off to an ox of a girl who was pushing out sons as if she were equipping an army, while Maurizio, who after my sister’s death had taken a wife with more dowry and less breeding, was widowed again. Of Tomaso and Cristoforo there was nothing. It was as if they had disappeared into the air. Sometimes I imagined them somewhere in an elegant villa on the edge of a town, living like two survivors of a brutal war, tending each other’s needs and spirits until one of them died. And through all these years I heard nothing to disabuse me of this fantasy.

  So to my visitor.

  I asked that he—for it was a he—be shown into the reading room, which housed our small but proud collection of books and manuscripts, both secular and divine, and said that I would come when I had cleaned my brushes and my hands. I had forgotten that Plautilla was already there at the writing desk, busy on the illustrations for a newly copied Psalter, so when I opened the door quietly I saw them before they saw me, sitting together at the desk bathed in a honeyed light of late-afternoon sun.

  “You see now? It makes a finer line that way,” he said, handing her back the pen.

  She stared down for a moment. “Who did you say you were?”

  “An old friend of your mother’s. You do much illustrating of the word of God?”

  She shrugged. Though she had developed a comfortable enough level of conversation with our young chapel artist, she was shy of men—no doubt as I had been at her age so many years before.

  “I ask because you have a lively pen. I wonder that the sheer force of it might not detract from the words.”

  I heard my daughter click her tongue in that gesture of quiet frustration she had learned from Erila. “Oh, I don’t see how you can believe that. The more glorious the image, the closer it brings the supplicant to Christ. Write in one place the name of Our Lord, put a figure representing Him opposite, and which one stimulates more devotion?”

  “I don’t know. Is it a wise question?”

  “Yes indeed! The man who said it is a wise painter. Perhaps you do not know him; his work is quite modern. His name is Leonardo da Vinci.”

  And he laughed. “Leonardo? Never heard of him. And how do you know what this Leonardo says?”

  She looked at him seriously. “We are not as isolated as we may look here. And some news is more important than other. Where did you say you came from?”

  “He comes from Rome,” I said, walking across the darkened room into their sunlight. “Via Florence and a monastery at the edge of the sea where the winter wind is so cold it freezes your eyelashes and turns the breath in your nostrils to ice.”

  He turned and we looked at each other. I would have known him immediately, with or without the fashionable cloth. He was a good deal sturdier, the coltishness of youth long gone, and he was handsome; one could really see that now. Although that may also have come from the fact that he knew it. Confidence is a dangerous thing: too little and you are lost, too much and you are guilty of the other sins that grow from it.

  As for me? What did he see in the nun who stood before him, her working habit stained with paint, her face aglow with the sweat that comes from concentration? My stature had not altered. I was still ungainly, still halfway to a giraffe, though he had always been tall enough to make me forget my height. For the rest—well, though there were forbidden mirrors in our convent then, I had long since stopped looking in them. There had been a certain pleasure in leaving behind the primping and crimping that comes with desire. Over the years the beauticians of the cloisters had occasionally cajoled me into trading skills, and I had conjured up half a dozen decorative devotional scenes in their cells in exchange for a better-cut habit and softer skin. But it had never been my intention to woo anyone. My fingers did the work of a man, both with the brush and sometimes in my own bush, as Erila was so poetically wont to put it. As a result I had grown from a girl into a woman without noticing it.

  “Mama?”

  “Plautilla?”

  She was staring at us both. The room now held two sets of cat’s eyes. It made me giddy to look into both of them. I touched her lightly on the head. “Why don’t you finish up, child? The light is beautiful outside. Go and record God’s hand in nature for a while.”

  “Oh, but I am tired.”

  “Then lie in the sun and let its rays lighten your hair.”

  “Really! May I?”

  Wary lest I change my mind, she packed up quickly and left. And in her going I saw again her aunt, unplaiting the same rich chestnut hair and gathering up her belongings as she sped out of the room to leave my mother and me to talk the harsh business of marriage in the silence left behind. It was so long ago it felt almost new-minted in my mind.

  We stood in silence for a while, half a lifetime in the space between us.

  “She has a strong stroke,” he said at last. “You have taught her well.”

  “It did not take teaching. She was born with a true eye and a steady hand.”

  “Like her mother?”

  “More like her father, I think, though I doubt his first teachers would know him now from his fast dressing.”

  He moved his cloak aside to expose its vermilion lining. “You don’t approve?”

  I shrugged. “I saw better dyes in my father’s warehouse. But that was a long time ago, when artists bothered more about the color of their paints than their own cloth.”

  He smiled a little, as if the sharpness of my tongue pleased him. The cloak fell shut.

  “How did you find us?”

  “It wasn’t easy. I wrote to your father many times but he never replied. Three years ago I went to your house in Florence, but no one was there and the servants were strangers and would tell me nothing. Then this winter I spent an evening in the company of a bishop who boasted that there was a nun in one of his convents who was painting her own chapel with help from her natural daughter.”

  “I see. Well, I am glad that Rome has afforded you such drinking companions, though I had better hopes for the painter I once knew than to be reduced to the likes of Bishop Salvetti. Still, if the wine flowed well enough, you probably don’t even remember his name.”

  “Actually I do. But I remember more how his story made me feel,” he said evenly, treating my tart tongue for what it was, a hasty defense against feeling. “I have been looking for you both for so long, Alessandra.”

  I felt a flush go through me. Erila was right: It does not do for women to stop thinking about men. It leaves them vulnerable to the moment when they return.


  I shook my head. “It was all a lifetime ago. I wager we are much changed now.”

  “You do not look changed,” he said gently. “Your fingers are as stained as they always were.”

  I curled them up beside me as I had done so often when I was a child. “Your tongue is more honeyed, though.” And my voice was still stern. “Where did your shyness go, I wonder?”

  “My shyness?” He was silent for a moment. “Some of it went in my journey to hell those weeks in the chapel. And some of it was shocked out of me in the Bargello prison. The rest I keep locked inside. Rome is not a city for the shy or the unsure, though you would do better than to judge me by appearances. When I was a young man I met a girl who had both rich costumes and a sharp tongue. Yet her soul proved larger than many who wore more holy cloth.”

  The forcefulness in his voice touched a chord of memory. I felt something twist inside me, but it was all so long ago I could no longer be sure what was pleasure and what was fear.

  The door opened and a fresh-faced young nun put her head in. She was recently arrived from Venice, where her parents had had trouble keeping her in the house of a night, and she was still something of a thorn in our sides. She saw us together and giggled. As she swooped out, still grinning, he said, “Does your convent have somewhere we could be alone?”

  With the door closed, my cell which up till then had been big enough to contain my whole life, was suddenly too small. Above my bed was a full-sized study of the birth of the Virgin, the baby’s delicious plumpness taken from a hundred sketches of our daughter. I watched his face break into a smile.

  “Is she in your chapel?”

  I shrugged. “It is only a sketch.”

  “Still, they are alive. Like the woman and baby in Ghirlandaio’s Birth of the Virgin. I saw the chapel again when I was in Florence last. Sometimes I think I have seen nothing painted that surpasses it.”

  “Really?” I said. “That’s not what our bishop tells us. He is forever extolling the new fashions of Rome.”

  He shook his head. “I am not sure you would like the art of Rome so much now. It is grown a little . . . fleshy.”

  “Man as important as God,” I said, thinking back to my late-night conversations with our learned nun.

  “In some hands, yes.”

  “And in yours?”

  He moved away from me to the window. Outside, a group of younger sisters were crossing the cloister for Vespers, their laughter entwined with the sound of the bells. “It is hard sometimes to swim against a tide.” He turned and looked at me. “Perhaps you should know that I am come wearing my best clothes.”

  We stood watching each other. There was so much to say. But I was finding it hard to breathe. It was as if someone had lit a fire in the room and it was taking up all the air between us.

  “And you should know . . .” I faltered. “You should know that I am given to God now,” I said firmly, “and that He has granted me forgiveness for my sins.”

  He looked directly at me, and his cat’s eyes were serious now. “I know that. I too have made my peace with God, Alessandra. But in that peace there is not a day that has gone by when I have not thought of you.”

  He took a step toward me. I shook my head against the words. I had grown so quiet in my self-sufficiency. It was too painful to let it go.

  “I have a child. And a chapel to paint,” I said fiercely. “I have no time for such things now.”

  But even as I said it the old Alessandra was back in me. I could sense her stirring, desire like a dragon’s head lifting from slumber, sniffing the air, feeling in its belly a great rush of fire and power. He sensed it too. We were so close, I could feel his breath around me. His smell was sweeter than I remembered, despite the grime of the road. In another lifetime I had been the bold one to his fear. Now it was his turn. He took my hand and knitted my fingers through his own. Between the two of us our stained flesh made up a palette of color. We had always been bound to each other through the power of longing, even when we understood nothing of desire. I made one last try.

  “I am scared,” I said, the words spilling out without my approval. “I have lived so differently these last years, and I am scared now.”

  “I know that. You forget I have been scared too in my time.” He pulled me toward him and kissed me gently, pulling at my bottom lip with his own, sliding his tongue inside, calling me out to play. And the taste of him was so warm and I remembered it so well, even though we had been almost children then. . . . He broke off. “But I am not scared now.” And his smile lit up both our faces. “And I cannot tell you how long I have waited for this moment, Alessandra Cecchi.”

  He undressed me slowly, placing the layers of my habit carefully to one side and studying me anew with each garment gone, until at last my shift was removed and I stood naked in front of him. I had been most frightened of my hair, which had once been my only glory and which could no longer fall like a river of black lava down my back. But when the wimple was off its unruly shortness sprang up like tough grass, and he moved his hand across it, ruffling and playing with it as if it was an attribute of great joy and beauty.

  I have heard it said that some men like the idea of taking nuns. Of course, it is the grossest of crimes because it is adultery against God. I suppose for that reason alone one can see how those who live for sensation would find it most potent, which is why they usually have to be mad on war or drink before they can do it. But he was neither. He was mad on tenderness.

  He put his hands between my legs, tracing up the line of my inner thigh, sliding his finger into the crack of me, playing with the swollen folds of skin he found there, his eyes bold as his touch, locked into mine, studying me all the time. Then he kissed me again, and as he broke away he said my name over and over. And all the time he seemed to be at such ease that it made me laugh and I wondered again how someone once so gauche should have become so confident. “Since when did you become so sure about such things?”

  “Since you sent me away,” he said softly, kissing me again, closing my eyelids with his lips. “Stop thinking now,” he whispered in my ear. “For once, still that vibrant spinning mind of yours.”

  He lay down with me and he parted my sex with his fingers again, carefully, acutely, his eyes holding mine the whole time, and when he had found my rawness he used his fingertips to catch at the edge of it to orchestrate the pressure and so begin the sweet-sour rise in me. That afternoon he showed me things I had never imagined: specialties of sex, delicacies of desire. Most of all I remember the feel of his tongue on me, like the clean edge of a cat’s tongue, firm rasping little flicks, lapping up the milk. Each time I groaned he lifted his head to check that I was with him, his eyes bright as if laughter were no more than a breath away.

  I have heard it said that in heaven even the substance of matter is changed by the light of God, so that you can look through solid things to see what lies beyond. As the light turned to dusk in my cell that night, I think I could for that moment see through his body to the very soul of him. Though Erila would no doubt claim a more musical experience, one where after many years I finally heard the sweetness of the top string on the lute.

  . . .

  BECAUSE OF HIS TALENT WITH A BRUSH, THE REVEREND MOTHER gave him leave to stay awhile. By night he taught me the art of the body and by day he helped with the chapel. Where there were mistakes, he did what he could to rectify them; where I had settled for adequacy without fire (and there were many examples of it), he added the spark of his brush to bring it more alive. I know he saw its shortcomings, but he did not dwell on them.

  When he wasn’t with me he was with Plautilla, and under his charge she blossomed. I watched as his knowledge lit up her curiosity, growing them closer together both in art and conversation.

  And the longer they spent in each other’s company, the more sure I was about what I had to do.

  Even without him it would only have been a matter of time before she left me. I had always known that. Not i
n the most lenient of orders would she have been allowed to stay indefinitely without taking the veil, and I could never allow that. Her future was too big to be contained by convent walls and there was nothing more that I could teach her. She was almost fourteen, the age when young talent must find a master if it is to flourish. If Uccello could train his own daughter in his workshop, then so could he now, and if there was ever a city that could bend the rules to include the errant talent of a female hand, surely Rome at this moment was it. The rest would be up to her.

  It was arranged that they would leave before the worst of the summer’s heat came in. Of course when I told her, she could see only the loss and the terror, and at first she refused to go. I was gentle with her, mindful of how my mother’s chastisements had never achieved anything but to make me more stubborn. When my reason did not work I told her a story: of a young woman who had wanted to paint so much that it had led her into transgressions of such magnitude that her greatest wish in life was now to give to her daughter what she could not have herself. And having listened, at last she agreed to leave me. She was, I realize in retrospect, a more obedient child than I had ever been. But it would not do now to dwell on the ways that my rebellion had defined my life.

  In her chest, along with my hopes and dreams, I also packed the manuscript swaddled in velvet cloth. I had no need of it now and it deserved better than the damp marriage chest of an aging nun. Before I wrapped it away for the last time he sat with it open in front of him. I watched his fingers read the penned lines with awe, and I knew he would take as good care of it as I, and in that way it would find its way forward into history.

  Forty-nine

  THE NIGHT BEFORE THEY LEFT WE LAY TOGETHER ON MY hard bed, our bodies sticking and sucking in the summer heat. The exhaustion of our fed desire had left us languid and sleepy. He dipped his fingers into a bowl of water and traced a cool wet line from my hand up one arm across my chest and down the other, resting gently for a moment on the thin white scar that decorated my wrist and inner arm.