Signora Da Vinci

by Robin Maxwell

  “Maestro,” she said, “would you push aside the rug, just there?”

  He did what had been asked of him, revealing the fine outline of a trapdoor in the stone floor and a metal ring that needed tugging on top to open it.

  Holding her skirts high, Bianca led the way down some moldering steps, lighting numerous torches as she went, so that the vault that emerged from the dark was hardly ominous.

  “Soon I will marry Maximilian,” she said, lighting more torches. “I’ll be the Holy Roman Empress.” We had arrived at the bottom of the stairs. She turned to us with an earnest expression. “Had you not written to me when you did, come now to Milan, I would surely have been unable to help you. I have no idea where my future husband stands in all this.”

  “It’s hard to say,” Lorenzo told her. “He is a celebrated intellectual, a friend and patron of scholars, but his ties to Rome cannot be overestimated. And alliances are shifting as quickly as the Alpine weather. As for the rulers themselves—who takes a crown, a pope’s throne, who dies and when, who wars with whom—all will determine the outcome of our endeavor. But if the Fates are with us—for we surely know that right is on our side—we will see success.”

  Bianca nodded hopefully, and in the warm glow of the torchlight she seemed pretty to me. I wondered what kind of life she would lead in the northern climes of Austria and Burgundy. Whether she would miss the soft Italian springs, the gray green of olive groves, her family and her countrymen.

  Her Greek tutor.

  This had been the key to her involvement with us, Bianca Sforza’s knowledge and love for the Platonists . . . and Hermes Trismegistus. That, and the symbol of her learning, which she’d cleverly embroidered onto her sleeve in the portrait Lorenzo and I had seen in the Vatican—the Egyptian cross. The ankh. Symbol of Isis. A brave, shining beacon for all who had eyes to see that, even as a girl, here was a kindred spirit and philosopher.

  The basement vault was stacked with sturdy chests. I imagined that some, like Il Moro’s treasure chests, were piled with jewels and gold and silver coin. But now Bianca was kneeling before one that itself needed unlocking—another key emerged from the folds of her gown, this one made of gold. She spoke with her back to us. “I always wished that I could have been born a man, but not just any man, anywhere. I wished I could have been born a man who grew up in Florence in the golden years of the Medici—the years of Cosimo, Piero . . .” She turned and looked back over her shoulder with a tear in the corner of her eye. “. . . Il Magnifico. To have studied with Ficino, Alberti, Mirandola.”

  Lorenzo placed a hand on her shoulder. “Bianca, sweet girl. Know that we will be forever in your debt. That by your actions here today you become one with us.”

  The look on her face was one of transported joy. A few of her tears fell before she turned back to the chest. We watched as she reached in and withdrew its contents.

  Her arms full, Leonardo and I helped her to her feet, and we all followed as she moved beneath a wall torch, where her treasure was revealed. From a crimson velvet bag she took a wooden case decorated with silver gilt nails. This was unlocked with her golden key. She brought out of the box a bundle draped in red silk. When this was laid open we saw a many-times-folded piece of yellowed linen. It did not look like much. But now she carefully instructed us in the way to unfurl the thing—one on each side, one on each end.

  It was many times longer than it was wide, its width two feet across. Along its length was the image in dark red of a man’s body, front and back—Christ’s body, as though this had been his winding sheet, the blood of his wounds having stained the linen—limbs, torso, and head.

  It was, to even an untrained eye, a painting. A forgery, and a poor one at that. This was the Savoy family’s precious holy relic—the Lirey Shroud.

  “Your uncle Jacque told us in Rome it had not been displayed in public for many years,” Lorenzo said.

  “I can see why,” Leonardo said, unable to hide his disdain.

  “Can it be done?” I asked him.

  He was silent as he stared hard at the long, thin length of linen. I saw that look on his face, the changing tilt of the head. I was reminded of the day he had, as an eight-year-old, observed a flower’s stem and stamen on my red rug in a sunny meadow outside of Vinci.

  “Yes,” he said, his lips tilting into a smile. “It will be my finest work. And if not my finest, the one I will most enjoy creating.”

  It was night before we returned to Corte Vecchio, and as we pulled into the courtyard I saw a carriage I recognized, though it was not one that made sense being there. A Medici carriage, the family’s finest, one that took Lucrezia or the girls on the longest trips, to Rome or Naples, in grand style.

  Its appearance here confused me. Who had traveled from Florence to Milan?

  Zoroastre had come to greet us and opened our door. When I stepped out I saw in the shadow of the palazzo door the figure of a tall man stooped down and speaking to Salai. They both turned to face the new arrivals.

  “Papa?” I whispered, and looked to see Lorenzo smiling broadly. “You did this?” I said, my whole body trembling.

  “When he returned from India, he came to Florence,” Lorenzo said. “Went to Verrocchio’s when he found us gone. My mother wrote and told me. I had him brought here.”

  Now Leonardo recognized Ernesto. “Grandfather!” He strode quickly to the door and took the old man in his arms with a fierce embrace. Then he came back and likewise embraced Lorenzo.

  I was finding it hard not to weep with joy and gratitude as my father and I closed the distance between us. I’d worried that all the years of traveling would have aged him, weakened him, but it was quite the reverse. When he took me in his arms and embraced me, his grasp had never felt so strong, nor when he pushed me back to regard my face did his countenance appear so vital. He was riven through and through with a great force of life.

  We never slept that night. Leonardo, Papa and Salai, Lorenzo and I gathered in the ducal bedchamber, each of us taking turns feeding the fire in the hearth. We sat or lay sprawled across the great bed, nibbling on cheese and bread, and the grape and olive compote I had taught Julia to make.

  For the most part my father regaled us with tales of his many adventures in the East. The barefoot and painted holy men who wandered the countryside wearing nothing but loincloths and twisted themselves into fabulous shapes. The almond-eyed, dark-skinned women in silken veils wearing gold bracelets and nose rings, their hands and feet decorated with intricate inked designs. Ancient temples carved with men and women in the most immoderate postures of love. Elephants with immense snakelike noses upon whose backs my father had ridden on a wooden saddle.

  While on his travels he’d heard next to nothing of the Christian world. The Indians, he said, were so steeped in their own culture—more ancient by thousands of years than the Western world—that Europe barely existed for them. He did hear many stories about the Judean saint the people called “Issa,” who had spent many years wandering India as a teacher, only to return to his home to be persecuted and crucified. Finally, so the legend went, Issa came back to India to live out his long life, and died there.

  Lorenzo listened wide-eyed to this story. Like so many of his brother Platonists, he tried to reconcile the old religion with the new, and though he did not say so, I thought it disturbed him to think that Christ had never died on the cross but traveled back to India to die there.

  Once Salai had fallen asleep in his great-grandfather’s arms, Ernesto spoke of the wise men he had met. Of an Indian saint he had traveled for months into the high mountains to find. In a cave little larger than the apothecary storeroom, the man had lived for thirty years in a near constant state of bliss. We heard Papa’s stories of Eastern gods, philosophies and ecstatic potions. Lorenzo and I talked of our “journey into wonder” at the Vatican.

  Papa himself had eaten hashish in a flower-filled garden of a pasha’s palace. He believed in his ecstasy that he’d died and gone to a heavenly p
aradise. When a peacock had come and fanned its huge blue-green tail with its dozens of “eyes” before him, he was sure the bird was a great and all-seeing god, and collapsed into tears when the fan retracted and the peacock strutted away.

  “Once,” Leonardo said in that tone he reserved for his most outrageous storytelling, “I greedily devoured too many of Mama’s cakes. I flew up through the sky, past the blue into the blackness with the stars and planets. I landed on one. It was both heaven and hell. The whole place was a great machine with wheels and cogs and gears and ladders and giant screws. Monsters and demons roamed about. Winged creatures flew at will. I flew. Suns exploded.” He paused, remembering. “When I came back to this world I found I’d pissed myself. I hadn’t moved from the spot I’d laid down in almost a whole day before. I was worried at first. Had I damaged my brain? But I hadn’t. So many of the images I had seen in here”—he tapped his forehead—“I could still recall. I began to draw them. Odd contraptions. Devices for walking beneath the water. Terrible weapons of war. And faces. Oh, so many faces! Hideous grotesques. Fearsome dragons. Men and women alike. Humans with animal features. Dragons with human faces. Remind me to show you sometime.”

  “All that from a little brown resin?” Papa said, amused. “I wish I had brought more home with me.”

  We all groaned loudly and abused him for his oversight, and he laughed, as I’d never seen him do before.

  “Tell us about your wife, Papa,” I said.

  His face seemed suddenly to collapse in on itself. His closed lips trembled and his eyes filled with tears. “Perhaps another time,” he whispered. Then, sniffing sharply, he looked directly at Lorenzo. “What I would like to tell since I have you all here is a little story of my youth. Of a journey that I took on behalf of your grandfather, with his friend, Poggio Bracciolini, to a monastery in Switzerland.”

  Lorenzo beamed with pleasure. “Would this be a tale of ancient manuscripts discovered in moldering basements and translated by the light of a single candle? Books that ended up in Cosimo’s library?”

  “It might be,” Ernesto said with a sly smile.

  “Leonardo,” I said to my son. “Perhaps you should put another log on the fire. I think it is going to be a long night.”

  CHAPTER 33

  We were all aware of how time was racing by, mostly visible in the progress of Lorenzo’s disease. Less and less could he hide the pain. The dampness and cooler temperatures of Milan worsened his symptoms and now all of his joints had stiffened, making it difficult for him to walk or climb the stairs, to sit or rise from a chair or bed. But rise he did, every day, determined to see through to the end this vast complexity of intrigue against the demon Savonarola.

  It was late afternoon in the great ballroom.

  “This is a great and solemn occasion.”

  Lorenzo, Zoroastre, my father, and I stood very still listening to Leonardo’s words. It seemed a mystical moment, with motes of dust suspended in the air so like the day thirty years before in the Vinci meadow.

  “We have joined in conspiracy to defeat a self-proclaimed Lord of Destruction who will, if unchecked, obliterate all that we love in Florence. Much of what we do may seem profane”—he could not help smiling—“even to the most profane among us. But this cannot be helped. The cost of inaction is far too great. I, for one, must help in any way I can, so that this course should not be sped in vain.”

  “We are indebted to you, Leonardo,” Lorenzo said. “With your dreams and your visions, you make our hopes possible.”

  The failed flying machine had been carted away. Now Leonardo drew our attention to a small rectangular box on a table. Within a foot away, at the same level, sat a plaster bust of a woman, the full light of the sun shining on her face from a window. The sculpture had been painted in bright colors—the hair yellow, the skin of her face and neck red, the shoulders of her gown cerulean blue.

  Leonardo, hovering nearby, beckoned Lorenzo and Papa and me closer, gesturing that we should not step between the window and the box contraption. He wore a mysterious smile, and I was suddenly sure that we were about to be shown another wonder, perhaps greater than any before.

  “While I understand the principles, I have not yet put this into words,” he began, “so you must forgive me if I stumble while I explain.” Without touching it, he pointed to the top of the box. “This is a camera obscura. Not my invention. Something Alberti used to watch the sun as it eclipsed. Come carefully around,” he instructed us, then pointed to a small hole in the side of the box facing the bust. That side appeared to be made of metal.

  “See the aperture here,” he said, pointing at the hole drilled through a very thin sheet of iron.

  Leonardo stepped back for a moment. “I have been studying the eye very deeply, and this camera obscura mimics how we see things. There is a hole in the center of our eye very much like that aperture.” He pointed back at the pinhole in iron. He had to stop and think, creating the words as thoughts formed in his head. “When an object is illuminated”—he indicated the sunlit bust—“and its image penetrates through a small round hole into a very dark habitation”—he pointed to the box, which clearly was the “habitation”—“you will then receive these images on a sheet of white paper or cloth placed inside it somewhat near the hole.”

  It was difficult to grasp what Leonardo was saying, and he saw the questions in our eyes.

  “Bear with me,” he pleaded, grappling for his next words. “When I say the images will be ‘received,’ I mean that you will see the illuminated object on the paper or cloth with their true shapes and colors . . . but they will be less . . . and they will be upside down.”

  We were all quite speechless, unable to form the simplest question. A moment later he took us out of our misery into a state of magical illumination.

  He pulled the top off the box and pointed into it to the side opposite the pinhole aperture. There, on a small expanse of white linen, was the distinct image of the painted bust! The hair was yellow, the skin red and the gown blue, though all of it was, as Leonardo had said, top at the bottom, bottom at the top.

  Now Zoroastre appeared, and at Leonardo’s nodded assent he carefully pulled the linen-covered back panel out of the box and raced away with it.

  “What is he doing!” I cried.

  Leonardo smiled. “Taking Alberti’s camera obscura to a further level. Come.” We followed him out of the studio and arrived at the door of Zoroastre’s alchemical laboratory, where the young man was bent over several candles in a row, holding in front of it the square of cloth from inside the camera obscura.

  “Before sliding the linen into the box we coated it with egg white,” Leonardo said. “The sun’s rays shining in through the aperture, hitting the cloth and making the image created a reaction with the egg.”

  I moved up close to Zoroastre and the candles. “The cloth is being scorched,” I observed.

  “But only in the places where egg white and sunlight did not react. The egg made the cloth insoluble in those places.”

  I could see the beginnings of the bust’s image take form on the cloth in the form of a scorch mark. Lorenzo remained silent, though I heard Papa muttering, “Yes, yes, I see.”

  A moment later, Zoroastre rushed the cloth to a basin of water and pushed it in, scrubbing it together like a piece of laundry. This I found alarming—so delicate and precious a thing to be handling so roughly.

  I fixed my son with a look of amazement.

  “Just wait,” he said.

  Then Zoroastre turned to us triumphantly, holding up the linen square. There was the image of the woman’s bust. Though there were no colors other than the reddish scorch, her features were clearly apparent, an outline of hair, her shoulders. . . .

  We were dumbstruck.

  “Pittura de sole,” Leonardo announced with pride.

  “A painting made from the sun,” Lorenzo murmured, altogether awestruck.

  “We are still experimenting,” Leonardo said, excitement
in his voice. “I believe that by using mirrors to increase the light shone on the subject, and a lens inside the camera obscura to focus the image, it will be sharper, more lifelike.”

  “And I believe there are better fixatives than egg white,” Zoroastre added. “I have tried gum Arabic, and gelatin, but there is something that I am missing.” He cast his eyes to his feet. “I am, after all, just an apprentice alchemist.”

  I found Leonardo gazing at Papa and me. “Here are two of Italy’s finest.”

  “What are you suggesting?” Lorenzo asked him. “That you not paint a forgery of the Lirey Shroud? Rather, create it as a pittura de sole?”

  “I believe it can be done,” Leonardo said. “But Zoroastre will need the help of experts. And of course the work must be accomplished in the greatest secrecy. Certainly not here.”

  “Do you know somewhere?” Lorenzo asked.

  “The perfect place. Pavia. Twenty miles south of here. Il Moro has sent me there on several occasions to work on the horse. There is a villa. Empty now. Very private, with many small rooms, and one very large. A perfect studio.”

  “The owner?” Lorenzo pressed.

  “A young nobleman with serious gambling debts.”

  “Get me his particulars,” Lorenzo told him. “I will make him an offer he cannot refuse.” Then he turned to me and smiled. “Ah, Cato, what a miracle of a man your sister has created!”

  The Pavia house was purchased, and Zoroastre was dispatched to make it ready for use as a bottega and alchemical laboratory. Lorenzo’s generosity made everything possible in the shortest amount of time. Meanwhile, Leonardo—even in secret from the rest of us—made his “unholy” plans, which, he did explain, were vital to the shroud forgery’s success.

  At dawn on the day we were meant to leave for Pavia I was stirred from sleep by Lorenzo’s cry. I bolted awake to find him sitting in his nightshirt, his legs hanging over the side of the bed. He was frantically pounding his thighs with his fists. He turned and looked at me with desperation.