“The irony is,” I said, finally finding my voice, “that Leonardo had fallen in love . . . or at least lust, with a woman.”
“So I heard. Though I understood Ginevra Benci recently broke his heart.”
“What about the scandal, Lorenzo? Leonardo’s reputation?”
“People will talk for a while. Such things are the sweetest fodder for gossips. But it will pass. Look at Sandro. He’s no worse for the wear.”
We’d come to the corner where we would part. I wanted so much to bring Lorenzo home with me. To pass this terrible night with my dearest friend. Take comfort from his strength.
“I wish I could come to the apothecary now,” he said, reading my heart, “but there are arrangements to be made.”
“Of course,” I said.
“Go home. Try to sleep. Be at the Office of Night at noon.” We embraced stiffly. Then he pushed me to arm’s length. “You know I’ll do everything in my power to protect him.”
“Thank you, Lorenzo.”
He turned to go. “Tomorrow, then?”
“Tomorrow,” I called after him.
Despite Lorenzo’s assurances, the hearing was no less than a Dantean Circle of Hell.
All the accused men, as well as the victim of their alleged sodomy, Jacopo Saltarelli, were standing trial for their “violence against nature,” as the prosecutor, one Fra Savonarola, had endlessly repeated to three ecumenical judges behind an ornate table, a crowded room of relatives, and vicarious spectators. The monk was small and very darkly complected with a huge hooked nose and fleshy lips. The heavy eyebrows covered a great deal of his forehead, but nothing softened the hard gleam of vindictive fury in his eyes.
“These are diabolical creatures!” he shouted, jabbing a finger in the direction of each man in turn. “A wretched crew of heretics so filthy and perverted they might as well have carnal knowledge of Satan! Sodomites, sodomites, one and all!” the prosecutor shrieked. “Look at this man—if one can call him a man.” He pointed to Tommaso di Masini, who wore a tasteful black tunic with a fashionable collar so tall it hid the lower part of his face. His hair had been plastered back against his head with gum arabic.
“See how he wears devilish black. And there is a good reason for this. The man, a bastard of the Rucellai family”—the prosecutor paused for his slur to be well accounted by the audience—“is a self-styled master of the occult. A magician . . .”
I heard shocked whispering behind me.
“. . . who goes by the name Zoroastre!” The prosecutor continued, scanning the faces in the audience. “Do you know who Zoroastre is, good people? His is a pagan god! A god of the Turks!”
I heard a woman weeping, and wondered if it was perhaps Tommaso di Masini’s poor mother. I myself was close to weeping.
“And this boy”—Fra Savonarola glowered fiercely at Jacopo Saltarelli—“already at sixteen a piece of homosexual scum. He, too, wears all black. And has dozens of regular customers in his prostitute’s trade.”
“I am not a prostitute!” Saltarelli shouted back, his face flushing crimson. “I am a goldsmith’s apprentice!”
“Silence,” Savonarola hissed, then turned, to my great horror, in Leonardo’s direction. “And this young dandy,” he began.
“I object, Your Grace.” A tall, slender, and distinguished man of middling years came to his feet and with a deep, level voice addressed the three friars who sat in grim-faced silence. This must, I realized, be the lawyer Lorenzo had hired, probably a longtime friend and Medici supporter.
“If you notice,” the lawyer said, allowing himself a small smile, “I, too, am wearing black. And I am neither a magician nor a prostitute. I respectfully submit that the prosecutor should reread Aristotle’s principles of syllogistic logic.”
Fra Savonarola spluttered with outrage, “I have no need to read the heresies of the Greeks, who themselves were all homosexuals! Every law of God and man that one needs to know can be found in the blessed Scriptures!”
“But in any court of law, whether it be God’s or man’s, one is bound to have evidence of the crime being committed. Is that not true?” He looked directly into the judges’ eyes. Then he swiveled gracefully on his heels and smiled at the audience. There was murmured agreement.
“Of course evidence must be shown,” the lawyer continued. “Something more than one anonymous man or woman’s accusation dropped in a tambura drum. That anonymous person . . .” His pause now cast subtle aspersions on the faceless, nameless denunciation. “. . . may have a personal complaint with one of these young men . . . or with someone in their family that has nothing at all to do with the reason for this charge. I ask the prosecutor, before another vile word is spoken out against my clients, to provide this much-reputed office with signed statements from witnesses to the alleged crime.”
The prosecutor’s lips were working in furious agitation.
“You do have signed statements, do you not, Fra Savonarola?” the silver-haired lawyer asked.
The judges seemed to be squirming in their seats. One muttered, “Evidence, Friar. Provide your evidence.”
The man seemed ready to explode. “These young sodomites”—he fairly spat the word—“were only yesterday arrested. I have had insufficient time to gather my written statements from witnesses, and the criminals’ own confessions.”
Confessions? My mind reeled. Leonardo tortured for a confession? Indeed, all in the hearing chamber began grumbling.
“There will be no confessions,” said the men’s lawyer with calm confidence. “Without signed statements or other proof of their guilt, all of these fine young gentlemen of Florence will walk out of this hearing with me today.”
The middle judge was as perturbed with his prosecutor as with the Medici lawyer’s inarguable defense. But he was unready to completely forgo the public humiliation of six potential heretics.
“The accused are hereby discharged . . . ,” the judge began. The perceptible sounds of relief rippled through the room. “. . . on condition,” the cleric continued, his voice booming with pomposity, “that the case be brought back to the drum to be reheard in two months’ time.”
“Unfair!” one of the relatives cried from behind me. “You condemn them to two months of Purgatory!”
The judges stood and, herding the chastised prosecutor before them, left through a side door, pulling it closed with an angry crash.
But the families were already celebrating their sons’ freedom, temporary as it was and shadowed by the threat of another public airing. Everyone was embracing.
Leonardo came to my side. He was terribly subdued, unsmiling. “Can we go, Uncle Cato?”
“Yes, of course we can. But first you must thank Lorenzo, and the lawyer who spoke on your behalf. I see them over th—”
“Please. Let me out of here. I cannot breathe.”
Leonardo’s distress was evident. I made way for us through the crowd of well-wishers, stopping for no one until we were out the door.
We were met by the most welcoming and cheerful of sights. Verrocchio and a dozen of his apprentices were waiting, all smiles, for their brother. They took Leonardo in their arms with hearty backslaps and genial ribbing. I detected the faintest hint of a smile as he allowed himself to be led away.
Before they rounded the corner he turned back and caught my eye. In his world of pain there glimmered a single ray of gratitude, and another of thanks.
I raised my hand to wave, but he was already gone.
The second hearing had, with no further evidence of guilt from the prosecutor Savonarola, come to nothing. All the young men, including Saltarelli, had been “absolved” of the crime of sodomy.
But the scars those two months had left on Leonardo’s spirit ran deep. As I watched him and his friends be dismissed from the bench, I saw that much of his innate joy had drained away. The smile was subdued between the growth of beard and mustache he now affected. It covered the handsomeness of his jawline and the sensuous curve of his lips, but that
, I knew, was exactly what he desired.
A disguise. A mask. Anything to hide his shame. Shame that his reluctant absolution by the church fathers could never erase. In Leonardo’s mind his reputation had been permanently and irrevocably sullied.
As the doors opened and families and friends piled out into the sunshine, Lorenzo and I followed a few steps behind Leonardo, who was—as had become his habit—alone. I saw him heading for Andrea Verrocchio, who had proved a steadfast friend through the ordeal. But another figure was suddenly barring my son’s way, looming before him like an angry god.
It was his father.
I could not see Leonardo’s face. I started toward him but Lorenzo stayed me with a hand on my arm.
“Do you not think this is Leonardo’s fight?” he said.
I sighed heavily and together with Lorenzo stepped back to a place out of Piero’s sight, but within hearing of father and son.
“How could you, Leonardo? What have I ever done that you should dishonor your family so horribly? How can I possibly hold my head up in society now?” Piero straightened his fine doublet and glared with disdain. “If your grandparents were alive they would soon be dead of humiliation. As for me, I’m not really surprised. You are simply acting according to your deepest nature—the bastard son of a whore mother that you . . . aaigh!”
At Piero’s cry I chanced a glimpse and found Leonardo’s large hand wrapped around his father’s neck. Piero was trying to pry away the viselike fingers.
“You will not speak of my mother so,” Leonardo whispered with Herculean restraint, then released Piero. Many eyes were fixed on the pair of them now. Verrocchio had taken up Leonardo’s back. Lorenzo was moving forward, I with him.
The maestro spoke directly to Piero. There could be no mistaking the disgust in his expression. “Your child is illegitimate because of you, Piero da Vinci, not for some sin of his own.”
Piero looked stricken at Verrocchio’s words. He opened his palms to the artist. “Andrea . . .”
“Do not call me by my given name. You are no friend of mine. And why would you wish to be? I am a bastard son, did you not know?”
Lorenzo and I moved into Piero’s sight. He knew instantly that the ruler of Florence had just witnessed this public humiliation by the much-loved Verrocchio, but his eyes grazed my face without recognition.
Piero glared at Leonardo and, trying to salvage a bit of his dignity, made his final thrust. “My wife has given me a son. A legitimate son. Praise be to God.” With that Piero swiveled on his heels, pushed his way through the gathered crowd, and disappeared.
I still could not see Leonardo’s face but his posture straightened suddenly, as if a rod had been pushed up inside his spine. Without a word he took a step forward. The cluster of onlookers parted for him, like the waters of the Red Sea for Moses.
And in a moment he, too, was swallowed up by the crowd.
“I cannot understand the cruelty of parents toward their children,” Lorenzo said. “And for such a beautiful soul as Leonardo.”
I was straining in the direction my son had gone. Lorenzo stayed me with an arm around my shoulder. “I think he needs to be alone.”
“I’m afraid that now he will always be alone.”
“He has you, Cato,” Lorenzo said with a consoling smile, “and all of the Medici behind him. He is a man who knows how to survive. Surely you know that.”
“I do. Sometimes I need to be reminded.”
CHAPTER 21
Lorenzo and I were both right about Leonardo. He did survive the devastation of the sodomy charges. But more and more he became a solitary man, one consumed less by his loves and lusts for women or men and more for his artistry, invention, and experiments.
He was making a name for himself in Florence, eccentric as he was. His foibles were tolerated, even indulged. And blessed Lorenzo, along with Giuliano and Lucrezia, began a quiet, almost secret patronage of Leonardo as an artist of which few were aware.
I’d seen little of him in the months following the trial, and I missed his company. Taking myself to Verrocchio’s bottega one Sunday afternoon, I was told I could find my nephew at the hospital of Santa Maria Novella.
The nursing nuns all knew him by name and directed me to a stairwell leading down worn stone steps into the hospital’s cellar.
It was dark and damp and felt like the bowels of the earth—not a place I would wish to spend my time. But Leonardo was here, and I was determined to see him.
At the end of a long hallway I saw the door to which I’d been directed, and opened it. A waft of frigid air struck me, and in the next moment the smell of the place knocked me back on my feet. Rot and death, I thought. How can Leonardo, who so loved the fresh scents of rivers rushing through spring meadows, exist in such hideous environs?
But there he was, his back to me, hunched over the center of a long table. Resting upon it, though canvas-covered, there was no mistaking the head and torso of a corpse. Indeed at the far end, the feet and calves of what appeared by their delicacy to be a woman were undraped and glaringly naked.
To his left were two smaller tables, upon the first of which was spread open his folio and some pieces of red and black chalk. On the other was a row of metal knives and clamps and saws.
A kerchief that must have covered his nose and mouth was knotted at the back in his long wavy hair. He worked with such rapt concentration he did not hear the loud creak of the heavy door.
“Son,” I said, and he turned with a start.
He looked beyond me into the deserted hallway. “Mama,” he said and smiled awkwardly. “I would say, ‘Welcome, come in,’ but”—he gestured helplessly at the body before him. “You should close that door.”
“Is it awful?” I asked, doing as he told me.
“No,” he said. “It’s . . . breathtaking.”
In his satchel he searched for and found another kerchief and a small vial. He sprinkled a few drops from the vial onto the cloth, and even through the stench I could smell lavender oil. He handed it to me, and I placed it around my face. A saving grace, I thought. The way such onerous work was possible.
He gestured me forward to the corpse’s feet. I fully expected a gruesome dissection, but nothing could have prepared me for the sight of a fully pregnant woman, her great belly flayed open, her womb parted and the child within lying in deathly peaceful repose.
I failed to stifle my gasp. Never in a thousand years could I have imagined such a thing. Far from being speechless, I recovered quickly and became a fountain of questions. How did she die? How old is the fetus? Is this the placenta? Where is the umbilicus? Is it male or female?
Leonardo patiently began to explain, unflinching, as he touched the miniature limbs, moving them aside with the tenderest care to reveal the genitals.
“Big cazzo for a little man,” he quietly joked, trying to put me at ease. “Can you see the fingernails? They’re so tiny.” His voice was filled with wonder. He turned suddenly to his folio and with red chalk filled in a missed detail in several sketches of the fetus.
I looked closer and I could see the plastered-down tendrils of silky hair.
I burst into tears and turned away, pulling off my mask.
“Mama, I’m sorry,” Leonardo gently said, coming to my side and removing the kerchief from his own face.
“Why am I weeping?”
“Dead children always make you weep.”
“I suppose they do. Leonardo,” I began, allowing my eyes to fall on the corpses of mother and child.
“You don’t have to say it. I know this is madness.”
“And done so carelessly.” I knew my voice was becoming shrill. “One question to the boys at the bottega and this is where I was led. The Office of Night let you slip through their fingers once. A second arrest for necromancy . . .” I shook my head. “The best Medici lawyers will not save you from that.”
“But how else can I learn? How do I study the physical nature of man?” he asked with almost childlik
e sincerity. “How muscles make limbs move? Cause expressions in the face? The few men who teach anatomy ignore what they see before their eyes and instead spout off verbatim what has already been taught and written by the Greeks and Romans. Why bother doing dissections at all?” He was growing more passionate. “Experience is everything!”
“My darling boy,” I began, but he was on fire now, hardly hearing me.
“In another cadaver I found a tree of nerves that descends from the brain and the nape of the neck, stretching along the spine and into the arms and legs! On that same body I dissected the hand. I was not content to see the structure but wished to understand its workings, so I took threads and wires and used them to replace the muscles. When I pulled on them, they moved the fingers!”
I was silent, but my expression must have been drawn with concern.
“Mama, please, you must be happy for me. I know it is all grotesque, but it is marvelous beyond compare!”
“I am happy for you,” I said most unconvincingly. “But do you spend all your time here, with the dead? What of your friends? Have you a lover?”
He looked away as he spoke and though the words were chilly, his voice was turgid with feeling. “Love is a hell of which fools make their heaven. It is poison with a sweet taste. A death having the appearance of life.”
I knew he was quoting Petrarch, but I let him go on.
“And lust? It slows the intellect, and all that comes of it are disappointment and sorrow.” His voice trembled. “Those who do not restrain their appetites . . . place themselves on the same level with beasts.”
“Leonardo . . .” My voice was pleading. “You’ve been wounded by the church. . . .”
“Damn the church!” he cried, wheeling around to face me.
I placed a hand over his mouth and begged his silence. He placed a hand over mine and, curling my fingers into a fist, kissed them and brought them to his heart.
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