Signora Da Vinci

by Robin Maxwell

  “I do, Father. Lorenzo—”

  “The Medici tyrant,” he corrected me.

  “The Medici tyrant,” I continued obediently, “is in full cognizance of his sins as he lies dying, and wishes to confess them to you.”

  “He is at Careggi?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he has no trap laid for me along the way?”

  “No, Father! He has simply seen, as the end draws near, the shrieking abyss of his sinful life, and wishes for redemption.” I fell to my knees before him. “Please be merciful.”

  He stared at me suspiciously. “Do I know you?”

  “Yes, Father.” I looked down at the floor. “Some years ago your angels brought me to the Office of Night for an infringement of God’s law. I quickly saw the error of my ways and was fortunate to have received personal instruction from your fair, correcting hand.”

  “And you are yet an intimate of the Medici,” he accused.

  “Only recently, Father. Only since I have helped guide him to God. Please . . .” I grabbed the prior’s hand, forcing myself to kiss it. “Please hear his confession. Do not let him die unshriven!”

  “How close is he to death?”

  “Hours. The doctors say he will be gone by morning.”

  “Leave me,” he said dismissively.

  “But will you see him, Father?” I pressed. “His is a soul worth saving. Imagine how many would benefit from knowing Lorenzo de’ Medici has, with your help, stepped from the shadows into the light.”

  I dared look up only enough to see Savonarola nodding in silent agreement. I lowered my eyes quickly.

  “Rise,” he said. “I will see this wretched devil. It will take a merciful God indeed to bring him from the edge of the great abyss to salvation.”

  “Thank you, thank you!” I cried, kissing his hand again and again. Then I rose, revulsion in my throat, and quite unable to look into that face again, I left his cell and walked swiftly from the monastery.

  Outside on Via Larga, sure no one was watching, I spat the filth of his person from my mouth onto the ground. I walked the short block to the Palazzo Medici and stood in the front doorway peering back at San Marco. It was not long before a band of angels began pouring forth into the street. Now a carriage appeared, and the prior emerged, a phalanx of Dominicans surrounding him. They helped him inside and the carriage drove away.

  Soon enough, Via Largo began to fill with Florentines. Word had gone out. Angels were spreading the news. Il Magnifico had called for Savonarola to hear his confession!

  With that knowledge, and realizing some hours must pass till the next measure of success, I disappeared into the palazzo.

  The courtyard was deserted but for a few guards. Lorenzo’s library door was wide open, the shelves obscenely empty. I pulled the door shut and went to the man guarding the grand stairway.

  “Did you see him?” he asked me.

  I nodded. “He is very brave,” I told him. “He means to die a good death.”

  The man began to cry. He moved aside and let me pass. I took the steps for what I knew to be the last time, to the first floor, now all but deserted.

  There was glory here, I thought, glory of a kind perhaps never seen before and once disappeared, never to return. Beauty reigned without question—towering colonnades, statuary, paintings and gardens. But something greater lived in the House of Medici.

  Love of family. Care and passion and pride. Reverence for ancestry. Hope for the young. Loyalty. Goodness. Grace.

  It would die with Lorenzo. The time of greatness has passed. I knew this as I walked the echoing hallway. Stepped into the great salon. Stood gazing at Gozzoli’s frescoed chapel.

  I went to the east wall where Lorenzo had shown me the artist’s two renditions of the one-day Medici ruler—the idealized, handsome young man with fair curls riding a proud horse, and the red-hatted scholar pressed amidst a gaggle of boys, his squashed nose and swarthy complexion easy to miss in a crowd.

  Lorenzo had been both of these, I thought. Friend to princes and philosophers alike. Bawdy. Reserved. Playful. Fearless. Common. Kingly. Humble. Generous. Kind.

  Il Magnifico. He had earned his title.

  It had been my honor to have loved him.

  Even now he lay dying, pearls and diamonds coursing through his veins. With his last breath he would whisper secrets into a devil’s ear, the slender dagger blade of lies that would pierce the fine chinks in that glittering armor of false righteousness.

  Lorenzo. Florence.

  They would live as one until the end of time.

  Sitting alone in the great salon I heard the noise of the crowd below on Via Larga as it grew in size in anticipation of Savonarola’s return. I had willed myself to be numb, without feeling of any kind. I thought that if I allowed myself even a dram of emotion to seep to the surface I might lose my grasp of this world. Like Silio Ficino see ghostly battles in the sky, or that poor woman with her visions of a raging bull pulling down the church. I must, for all our sakes, for the sake of the city, for the memory of Lorenzo, hold tight to my own sanity. Save my grief for later.

  There’d be time enough for that.

  A great cry rose up from the crowd and I knew the prior had returned. I took myself down the staircase and out the door of the palazzo to find the length of the street overflowing, all the people pressing in the direction of the chapel’s front door. My body became the sharp prow of a ship slicing through waves as I pushed through the mass of humanity to the base of the church steps.

  There he stood in his glory, burning with obscene religious passion.

  “My children!” he shouted, quieting every voice, “I come with great tidings! The Medici tyrant is dead! Remember my sermons! Remember that I foretold of his death in this year!”

  Now there was murmuring in the crowd. I felt my knees go weak, but I forced myself to straighten, knowing worse was to come.

  “As I arrived at the Devil’s lair of Careggi, fiery lights blazed in the sky above! I trembled at the sight, for I knew it was God’s beacon leading me to help in that sinner’s salvation! In his luxurious bed he writhed and suffered in great agony, but less of the body than the spirit, for he knew how atrociously he had lived! He begged me to absolve him of his sins, desperately afraid of dying unshriven, screaming at the prospect of Hell for all Eternity!”

  I turned myself into stone to endure the words, hoping for some sign that Lorenzo had managed to accomplish his part.

  Savonarola raised his arms to the heavens. “The fiery star above Careggi began to dim as the life did from the sinner’s body. In that moment he pulled me close and whispered in my ear a confession that I believed sincere!” He closed his eyes as though in ecstasy. “And then a miracle happened! Another voice spoke to me through the lips of this sinner . . .” The crowd was still and the silence fearful. “And it was the voice of God!”

  There were shouts of surprise. A woman began to weep in terror. I heard Lorenzo’s name called, and “God save us!” all around me.

  “What did the Lord say!?” someone called from the street.

  “This prophecy is one that shall be revealed in the fullness of time!” Savonarola cried with grave portentousness.

  I felt my body sag with relief. Like carefully aimed arrows, Lorenzo’s words whispered to this unholy monster in his final moments of life had found their intended mark. As Savonarola had done in the past—culling his parishioners’ most secret confessions to create his corrupt predictions of the future—he had greedily pulled the loosened threads of our shroud conspiracy to use for his own self-exalting purposes, never realizing that we were the weavers, and that the completed fabric would become his very own winding cloth.

  In the fullness of time, indeed.

  The wait would seem interminable, but the reward would be savory.

  CHAPTER 36

  It was a year of death and of new beginnings, 1492. Pope Innocent, upon hearing of Lorenzo’s passing, proclaimed, “The peace of Italy is at
an end!” then promptly succumbed to a final convulsion and died.

  Roderigo Borgia, to great acclaim, ascended the papal throne, assuming the pagan name of Alexander—after the Greek sodomite general who had conquered the world. His first act as pontiff was to write Pico della Mirandola a personal letter of support, absolving him of his heretical crimes of Cabalist scholarship.

  What Jews Queen Isabella had not murdered in her brutal Inquisition she expelled en masse from Spain, while her navigator Christoforo Columbus, sailing west across the Ocean Sea, found a new world, claiming all the gold and heathen souls there for Christendom.

  King Louis of France went to his grave, leaving his throne and the first standing army in Europe’s history to an ambitious twenty-two-year-old named Charles, who, with his huge flaring birthmark near one eye, a fearsome facial twitch, and six toes on each foot, was most sympathetically described as appallingly educated, most disparagingly as “an abortion.”

  I remained in Florence alone in my little house living half a life, for though Lorenzo had left me well provided for, I had no work to do. Without my apothecary I had no means to heal my neighbors, even if they had dared seek help from one of the “sorcerers” the Prior of San Marco decried from his pulpit. Books were too dangerous to own except for Scripture. If one was found it was burned along with its owner.

  There was no one left in the Palazzo Medici who knew me, Lucrezia having followed her beloved son to the grave within months. After Lorenzo’s death at Careggi, Piero and his family had slinked back to Florence like dogs who cower at the sound of thunder. And though he ostensibly ruled in his father’s place, he was granted neither credence nor respect.

  My friends of the Academy were taking shelter in Rome or Venice, or keeping their heads down in the sad city of Florence. No festivals, horse races, gambling, no dancing, no Sunday calcio matches. All that was left were solemn masses and sermons that grew blacker and blacker, and a populace beaten by their fears of eternal damnation into dull submission.

  I had begun attending Savonarola’s church services, knowing it was there at the Duomo that I would receive the first signal that our conspiracy had sprung to life.

  “Oh, my sinning children,” he sang out to an overflowing crowd at the cathedral one Sunday in early 1493. “I must speak to you of prophecy today. Of a holy relic that will shortly be revealed to us.”

  The audience pressed forward, straining to hear, for there was nothing more dear to the hearts of Christians than their relics.

  I covered my smile with my hand, remembering all that had transpired at the Corte Vecchia and in the Pavia house. In the last moments of his life Lorenzo had whispered word of the shroud not as a message from God—the prior would never have believed such a sinner. But we knew the man was a cheat. He called intelligence gleaned from confessions made to his priests “the word of an all-knowing God.” We’d gambled that the self-proclaimed “Prophet of Florence” would be unable to resist so exciting a prediction, as a bribe from Lorenzo to save his soul.

  The Prior of San Marco.

  I wondered what thoughts must be crashing round in his head. His prophecy of Lorenzo’s and Innocent’s deaths in 1492 was surely no more than educated calculations. All knew how ill the two men had been. But this, this revelation would be proof of his infallibility. And news of it had come from Lorenzo, his greatest enemy.

  After that day, the people of Florence, already aquake at the prior’s words, grew excited, and impatient for further news of the relic’s public showing. But now, finally, it was my time to leave the city.

  There was so much more work left to be done.

  I left for Rome immediately, this time allowing myself the comfort of a coach.

  Two cardinals came out to greet me—Ascanio Sforza, now the right hand of the pope, and Lorenzo’s son Giovanni, whom I’d known since birth. He was only sixteen but looked as serious as could be in his red cassock and cap. Ascanio asked after my nephew, Leonardo, and we shared condolences on our loss of Lorenzo. Just before his death, Lorenzo had written Giovanni a long letter, the boy told me, knowing that his son was about to take up his cardinal’s position in Rome and wishing to impart to him the best of his knowledge and wisdom as he took his place in the world of powerful men. Knowing what dear friends we had been, Giovanni offered that before I left the city he would allow me, if I wished, to read Lorenzo’s last letter.

  Then he slipped away and Ascanio escorted me through the Vatican with no further delay and into the Holy Father’s private apartments. I found it a scene of great artistic industry, the scaffolding just then being removed from newly painted frescoes in the four rooms of his personal sanctuary.

  Roderigo Borgia had, as did so many Italian men, thickened with age. There were remnants of his handsomeness, but the nose had sharpened into a beak, and a bloated wattle of skin extended from chin to collarbone.

  I began to make the appropriate kneeling obeisance to the most Christian man in the world, but he pulled me upright, dispelling all formality. In the Room of Saints he, Ascanio, and I sat in three chairs in front of the grandest hearth I had ever seen—solid gold pillars upholding a green marble mantel over which was painted a fresco from which I could not take my eyes.

  “Pinturicchio has done a marvelous thing with my apartment, do you not agree, Cato?” said the pope, aware of my steady gaze on the fresco.

  “He is the painter of all these new works?” I asked.

  “The man has been decorating the Vatican for twenty-five years.” Roderigo smiled and cocked his head. “He is no Leonardo, but perhaps we shall yet have your nephew in Rome.”

  “Forgive me, Your Grace,” I said, tilting my chin at the painting above the fireplace, “but is not the lady on the throne Isis?”

  “She is.”

  “And if I might presume,” I went on, “that the man sitting to the right of her is Moses, then may I assume the man on her left is Hermes Trismegistus?”

  “You have a good eye for the heretical, my friend.”

  I was startled. Though I knew where Roderigo Borgia’s sympathies lay, it had never occurred to me that as the pope he would so blatantly flaunt his own Hermetic bent. Thus is the nature of absolute power, I thought. In such a position a man believes himself unassailable, infallible. Godlike. I thanked the Fates that at this crucial juncture, the most powerful man in Christendom was a like-minded soul, and dedicated to the same mission I was.

  “Yes,” he said lightly, calling for more wine with a mere twitch of his finger at a silk-clad page. “Later I will show you the other frescoes. I’ve got Hermes again in the Room of Sibyls, and behind you, it’s yet to be uncovered”—he pointed to a canvas-draped wall—“is a wonderful scene indeed. The bull is the Borgia family emblem, as is the Egyptian bull, Apis.”

  “Apis is worshipped as Osiris, the sun god, if I am not mistaken,” I said.

  Roderigo nodded. “In the frescoes I have Egyptians worshipping the holy cross as well as the pyramid, as well as the bull.”

  “In the end, they are all worshipping you, Roderigo,” Ascanio Sforza quipped.

  “As it should be,” the Holy Father said with a wicked grin. “Now, Cato, you must tell us the news of Florence and the Prior of San Marco.”

  With some relish I described Leonardo’s shroud hoax. Both pope and cardinal might have been bolted to their chairs for all they moved during my telling of our failures with the decomposing corpse, alchemical adventures, and the magic of the camera obscura.

  “And when will this masterpiece be shown?” Roderigo asked me.

  “On Easter Sunday in Vercelli, the most Christian Holy Roman Empress, Bianca Sforza, will for the first time in forty-five years display for all pilgrims the Savoy family’s Lirey Shroud.”

  “Though much improved,” Roderigo added with a sardonic smile.

  “Beyond all imagining,” I said. “I believe that our work, together with Savonarola’s obsession for sainthood, will coalesce into our conspiracy’s first triumph.”


  “Well,” said the pontiff, sitting forward, “I can now enlighten you as to the second chapter of our conspiracy. While the first was of a scientific nature, this one, I’m afraid, is of a most political and strategic complexion.”

  Political? I thought. Of all the civilized arts, and though Lorenzo’s forte, politics was the one of which I understood the least.

  “My brother Ludovico Il Moro,” Ascanio began, “has for reasons of greed and revenge set into motion a most disturbing chain of events that will affect all of Italy. As it cannot be undone, we have happily conceived of a way to use it to our advantage. Once more, we will need Leonardo’s artistic skills.”

  “And Savonarola’s appetite for self-aggrandizement,” Roderigo added.

  “Both of which are already in great supply,” I said.

  Roderigo sat back and began to drum his fingers on the gilt claw arm of his chair. “What do you know of the French king, Charles?”

  “Nothing but the greedy and lecherous reputation that precedes him,” I replied.

  Roderigo and Ascanio exchanged a mysterious look.

  “Think a hundred times worse,” the cardinal said to me, eliciting a smile, then continued. “Now consider a scenario in which Il Moro, the King of France, and Savonarola himself all become unwitting players in the tragic downfall of our favorite prior.”

  “I do not believe I can imagine a more pleasurable pastime,” Roderigo said.

  “Then all I will need to set things in motion,” I said, “are the details for my nephew.”

  “Bring me Il Moro’s letter,” Roderigo said to Ascanio, “and let Cato see the means to our end.”

  CHAPTER 37

  I was needed in Milan for help with the showing of the Lirey Shroud. I looked forward to traveling north again. Florence now held more evil memories for me than happy ones. Indeed, there was no place on earth that I would rather have been than Milan, for there lived my father, my son, and my grandson.

  The day I arrived a small army of workmen was installing four large furnaces at the corners of the great pit that had been dug for the bronze horse casting. The clay model itself was nowhere to be seen.