Signora Da Vinci

by Robin Maxwell

  “I shall do my best,” Leonardo called after us as we moved toward the chapel door.

  “Don’t forget to visit the horses!” Lorenzo called back.

  CHAPTER 14

  I had never seen Leonardo so nervous before. He, and the younger of the bottega’s apprentices taking orders from him, were rushing around the nave of the still-empty silver-gray and pillared interior of the Church of San Spirito, perfecting last-minute details on the set for this evening’s sacre rappresentazione , “The Descent of the Holy Ghost to the Apostles.” This performance, overseen by Giuliano de’ Medici, was meant as a spectacular climax of the state visit to Florence of the royal family of Milan—four weeks of insanely indulgent entertainment.

  Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza was an Italian tyrant known far and wide for his appalling cruelty. A myriad of stories had circulated in tavernas and over backyard fences in the past weeks. One about the poacher that Galeazzo had had executed by forcing the man to eat whole the hare he’d caught on ducal land—fur, teeth, and claws included. How he raped his courtiers’ wives and enjoyed ripping men’s bodies apart with his bare hands.

  Why, the opinionated citizens of Florence argued loudly over my apothecary counter, was Lorenzo seeking such a despicable man’s friendship? But even the simplest Florentine understood the importance of alliances.

  “His wife, ‘Bona,’ is the French king’s daughter,” one of my customers had observed.

  “A poke in the pope’s eye,” said another. “Sixtus will see that our friendship with Milan is unbreakable. No better way to show strength than that.”

  “How does it look, Uncle Cato?” Leonardo had come up behind me.

  I regarded the realistically painted wooden mountains that stretched across the front of the tabernacle. I opened my mouth to speak.

  “Just wait. One moment more,” he told me, then gave a signal to a thirteen-year-old apprentice standing to one side of the set. The boy promptly disappeared, and all at once I heard the metallic grinding of gears.

  To my amazement the mountains began to move, first to the left and back to the right.

  “Tonight,” Leonardo said, his eyes sparkling, “with lights flashing as brightly as lightning bolts, and the loudest, most ungodly noises you’ve ever heard, it should look as if an earthquake is happening amidst a storm.”

  I shook my head in wonder at the effects created by my son’s latest ingegni. “It is the most fantastical thing you have ever done,” I said sincerely. “And that, Leonardo, is saying a great deal.”

  He smiled with pleasure. The wide-eyed village boy had come so far so quickly. Within five years under Verrocchio’s tutelage he had graduated from paintbrush cleaner to trusted assistant to First Apprentice. His master had never once chosen jealousy over advancement. Leonardo’s first assignment on a major work, The Baptism of Christ, was a single little angel holding Christ’s robes. The maestro himself had completed the tortured figures of Jesus and the Baptist in the River Jordan, then given his young student full flight with the oils he had recently learned to use. The resulting figure, a celestial child with his head thrown back over his shoulder, all rose and honey skin tones, and ethereal blond curls, was recognized at once as a minor masterpiece. So moved was Verrocchio by Leonardo’s angel that in a stunning admission of his own inferiority he’d let it be known he would abandon his own work with oils, leaving that art to its true maestros. His first loves, gold working and overseeing his bottega, would thereafter suffice. Leonardo’s work on that single angel had demonstrated so staggering an originality and depth of feeling that my boy’s reputation in the world of Florentine artists was established, and once and forever sealed.

  The visiting Milanese royals had been in Florence a full month now, during which time I had seen little of Lorenzo. He was spending all his time proving his worthiness to his ally of the north. Leonardo and Giuliano were constant companions, however, for it was that Medici who provided the approval and the florins for every spectacle and pageant that had been planned for the Sforzas.

  Indeed, now Giuliano arrived at San Spirito, ahead of the guests who would soon be filling the church. As I stood in the back he entered and headed down the long central aisle, straight for Leonardo, who at once began pointing out to his patron how the evening’s scenario would unfold. As the pair of them put their heads together I caught glimpses of Giuliano’s face and was reminded how beautiful a man he was becoming. He’d lost nothing, I was happily reminded, of his sweetness or boyish charm.

  Suddenly their jovial laughter rang out in the church, thundering amidst the massive columns and monstrously high arches. My own heart expanded with the sound, and as I watched the apprentices light a thousand candles, throwing Leonardo and Giuliano into golden light, I knew that I could not have wished for a finer friend for my son.

  Before long the huge doors of San Spirito banged open and hordes of Florentines and Milanese entered. They had traveled on foot and horseback and in coaches south from the Palazzo Medici, across Ponte Santa Trinita to this church on the other side of the Arno.

  As Lorenzo strode up the center of the cavernous church followed by the Milanese nobles, he spotted me and brought forward a young man looking to be no more than fifteen. He was small and muscle-bound under his velvet doublet, a young tough in fine clothing. It was his complexion, though, that was his most outstanding feature. It was dark olive, to the point of looking brown.

  “Cato, meet Ludovico Sforza. Vico is Duke Galeazzo’s youngest brother.”

  As I executed a brief formal bow I felt a twinge of premonition, as if I were seeing this young man in my future.

  “What do you think, Cato?” Lorenzo said, playfully elbowing the Sforza boy. “Is Vico even swarthier than me?”

  “He looks to have enjoyed the sun more than most,” I offered, unsure of how familiar I should be.

  “I love to bake in the sun,” the young man said, having taken no offense whatsoever. “I slather olive oil on my skin and it turns me this color.”

  “Vico Il Moro,” Lorenzo jested.

  “The Moor,” Ludovico repeated. “I like it. It fits.”

  More people crowded in and Lorenzo, finding his wife and mother, took one on either arm and gestured that I should join his retinue at the front of the church. I did follow, but cut off by a group of raucous young men overeager for the best viewing, I found myself half a dozen rows behind my friends. It seemed an eternity before the enormous crowd settled and the first eerie strains of pipe and lyre music commenced.

  Then suddenly with the violence Leonardo had promised, the mountains began to move and rumble, and the sky filled with a band of angels, who were men and boys hoisted high and flying through the air on all-but-invisible ropes and pulleys. Explosions like thunder rocked the air, and a brilliant light flashed, then quickly faded, almost as real as bolts of lightning.

  I heard women around me shrieking with fear and delight at the spectacle, and I guessed that more than a few men were quaking in their boots.

  The story of the descent of the Holy Ghost—here a tall, gaunt creature in flowing tissue robes and a golden spiked halo—down into the presence of twelve cowering apostles was played out amidst wooden painted clouds and smoke billowing from behind the mountains. The effect was so gripping, so terrifying—even for a nonbeliever like myself—that no one realized that the smoke was real.

  Fire had broken out behind the set.

  All at once Leonardo’s painted scene burst into flames. People shrieked in panic and stampeded back toward the doors behind them.

  I caught sight of Lorenzo and Giuliano. Their eyes met and locked in brief but fierce concentration of purpose. They were altogether calm and seemed to be of one mind, as though such a catastrophe was as commonplace as a game of calcio. With a few signals of hand and head they leapt into action.

  Giuliano sprang forward through the thickening smoke to the front row, grabbing his mother and sister-in-law, Clarice, and pushed them ahead of him to the side of th
e church. Lorenzo spun on his heels and like a furious shepherd sliced Bona, Galeazzo, and Ludovico Sforza from the chaotic mass now surging to the doors, and herded them in the same direction as Giuliano had taken the Medici women.

  Determined to follow them I moved to the right but was violently plowed into by a man twice my size, and suddenly found myself on the marble floor, trampled underfoot by men and women screaming and fleeing. The air was thick with acrid smoke.

  I tried to rise and was knocked down again. My eyes burned and I began to choke. Flames rose in columns all around me. But as the wooden mountains, completely consumed by fire, began toppling toward me in a nightmarishly slow fall, a pair of strong hands grasped me roughly under the arms and tugged me backward.

  “Mama!” was all Leonardo had time to say before the set, with a horrific roar, collapsed entirely, exploding into a plume of burning wood fragments and a rain of molten embers.

  Clutching one another and cradling our heads from falling debris, he led me, gasping and blind from the terror, through a doorway in the side of the church.

  A moment and a lifetime later we were gulping fresh air and rubbing the pain from our eyes. Once I knew we were safe my thoughts sped like a loosed arrow to Lorenzo, shocking me with the intensity of my fear for his life.

  A moment later he was there, soot-smudged and altogether unhurt.

  “All right, you two?” he said with utter calm. But I could see in his expression the same panic I had felt in the moment before he’d appeared. “Come back to the house later,” he pleaded, then left us.

  My friends were all safe, and miraculously the fire that destroyed much of San Spirito claimed not a single life.

  It was a night I would never forget.

  Companies of Night

  CHAPTER 15

  The weather had turned warm and lovely. My existence, while having settled into something I might call comfortable, was never quite routine. But then how could living a man’s life in a woman’s body ever be routine?

  This day, having borrowed Benito’s family horse—Xenophon too stubborn to be coaxed into the harness anymore—we clip-clopped past the last of the stone houses and headed northwest along Via Faenza into the countryside.

  I passed by small landholdings with modest cottages worked by their owners and kin. But here and there I could see spread out before me what had lately become the newest fashion—great tracts of land owned by the wealthiest families of Florence, their gracious villas surrounded by orchards and vineyards, immense barns, herds and flocks of farm animals, all tended by small armies of hired laborers.

  Observing the contrasts of the two circumstances, I was catapulted suddenly into musings about the contrast of my own existence. The one constant blessing was, of course, Leonardo. It seemed as if the Fates had consistently rained down blow after violent blow on Caterina, the woman of Vinci, but they had nothing but gracious smiles and blessings for Cato, the apothecary of Florence.

  I pondered the rights I now owned as a man. I no longer had to read the Stoics to bolster me against the barrage of ugliness and petty gossip aimed at a fallen woman in a small town. I was free to move about in city streets and markets, alone if I chose. I could speak as I wished, in any tone I liked, and I could study as I saw fit. My opinions were heard and considered with respect. I debated in all manners of discourse, from medicine to animal husbandry to politics, with no one naming me a witch, a shrill housewife or a freak of nature.

  But what would it take, I wondered, to thrust me from Paradise to Hades? The removal of my breast bindings and the drawing in of my bodice? The loosing of my hair and the softening of my voice? It seemed absurd that such inconsequential actions would deprive me of all the freedom, all the strength and standing in the world that I had recently won. But it was, I was sorry to concede, all too true.

  Save Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’ Medici, matron of the wealthiest and most enlightened family in Europe—the rarest of all birds, revered as much for her mind as her mothering—the lot of even the happiest of women, those with gentle, loving, well-to-do husbands and many healthy children, was nevertheless one of constraint, submission, and subservience. Their thoughts, unless of Christian piety or domestic virtues, were neither sought nor spoken. And those with cruel, ignorant, or drunken fathers or husbands were subjected to lives no better than a slave’s.

  The ritual bath in which I had submerged myself the night before Lorenzo’s first appearance at my shop had, indeed, opened a portal into an altogether new life. I had undergone a birth as profound as Leonardo slipping from my womb into Magdalena’s hands.

  Birth, I mused, playing the word in the soft recesses of my mind. Rebirth. Rinascimento. How many in this life are so fortunate as to be granted a new beginning such as this? How many even consider such a thing as possible?

  I thought of my destination this day—another blessing. Lorenzo had invited me for a brief holiday at his family’s country villa, Careggi. I looked forward to seeing his mother, Lucrezia, still in mourning for her husband, and the handsome, winsome Giuliano. Clarice would certainly be there with her and Lorenzo’s infant son, Piero, and daughter, Maddalena. Perhaps Sandro Botticelli would take time from his painting to join us. I smiled, thinking of my petty longing for the simple but excellent meals I would surely enjoy at the Medici table. And the quiet beauty of the countryside, which I missed, living in the crush and bustle of the city.

  Lorenzo’s directions, written as a map, brought me at length to a crossroads marked by a stone pillar carved simply with the well-known “six balls” that symbolized the Medici—these represented medicinal pills of a family whose earliest ancestors had been doctors—and an arrow pointing up a narrow, tree-lined lane.

  The dappled sunlight filtering through the branches and falling on my arms and lap and horse’s back lent a magical quality to my approach to the long, gracious white stone house, simple but for a second-floor loggia spanning its entire length. There was an olive orchard and a pasture of grazing cattle on the left, a vast vineyard and a field of flowers that looked more like a wild mountain meadow than the garden of a rich and formal home on the right. Genius, I thought. Pure genius. The illusion of pastoral simplicity amidst opulent glory.

  And then a most welcome sight to my eyes—Lorenzo standing at the doorway of the house, all smiles, arms opened wide in welcome. My heart soared at the sight of him. That which others saw as ugliness, I could only see as beauty. The swarthy complexion was exotically handsome to my eyes. The pugnacious chin simply strong. The crushed nose a testament to his manliness. Were I a woman still, I would have wished him for a lover.

  “You found us with no trouble, I see.”

  “And what a place to find,” I said, sweeping my arm to extol the wild garden and the orchard and the vineyard.

  “My favorite in all the world,” he said with sincere reverence. “I am finding that in my poetry, nature is the greatest of all inspirations.”

  “Even greater than love?” I challenged.

  He began to unharness the horse from my cart. “For the moment, yes. But then again, I have yet to find a great love.” He led the horse to the pasture where the cattle were grazing and, opening a gate, let him in. “The woman of my sonnets was not really mine,” he confessed. “More a figment of my imagination. An ideal . . . Come, Cato, grab your bag. I’ll show you to your room.”

  I took my satchel down from the cart and followed Lorenzo into the Medici villa.

  Two great marble staircases rose in identical curves to the first floor. The vestibule was flanked by a great salon on the right and a dining room on the left. The furnishings were simple and informal, and I was reminded of the dining utensils at the city palazzo. To my surprise I saw no house servants at all. In fact, the place looked altogether empty.

  We took the steps to the right, passing half a dozen niches in which were displayed works of antiquity—an old Roman mosaic of a woman’s head, a graceful marble hand, perhaps all that was left of an ancient statue.
>
  Lorenzo nodded to another niche, where a chubby naked boy with wings clutched a dolphin almost as large as he. “From Verrocchio’s bottega,” he said. “I see some Leonardo in it.”

  My heart swelled with the knowledge that my son was, in so many ways, entwined with this noble family.

  Climbing another staircase to the second floor, Lorenzo showed me to a bedroom. I saw nothing of its furnishings, as I was instantly attracted to its double doors, ones that opened out onto the villa’s forward loggia. I went to them and flung them wide, stepping onto the covered overhang, gazing out at the vast expanse of rolling green from a height that allowed a great distance to be viewed. From where I stood, nothing of the city could be seen at all—an illusion, I thought. So close was it . . . and yet so far. This was to be my room for the next several days. What a privilege it was!

  “Thank you, Lorenzo. This is wonderful.”

  “I thought you’d like it. Month after month of city stone and marble, no matter how elegant, can be stultifying. And you were a country boy growing up.”

  I wanted to throw my arms around him for his kindness, but instead flung my bag on the large plainly covered bed and began to empty it.

  “There’s a place for your things,” he said, pointing to a painted chest with a pitcher and a bowl on top. “You can wash away the dust of the road.” I saw he wore an enigmatic smile.

  “Is your mother here?” I asked. “Giuliano? Your wife?”

  “No,” he answered, that smile growing more and more mysterious. “This weekend you shall be meeting my other family.”

  “What family is that?” I said, but Lorenzo was already halfway down the hall, calling back to me:

  “Come to the back garden when you’ve freshened up. You’ll find us out there.”

  I splashed the cool water on my face and was suddenly struck by the novelty of the moment. Here I was, standing alone in “my” room of a Medici palazzo, its private door opening onto a splendid loggia, cheeks dripping, a pure white towel at my fingertips. The bounty of my life, it seemed to me, was a bottomless cornucopia.