Hunting Piero

by Wendy MacIntyre

  “It gets worse,” Pinto said.

  She looked at him in apprehension. Her hands were very cold. “What?”

  “He was tortured, Agnes. Burned around his chin and throat. His beard was singed off. And on his chest. And down below as well. His pubic hair. His genitals.”

  She groaned and slumped in her chair. The terrible idea came to her that Fergus’s passion had turned on him; that the roaring intensity of his belief had consumed him. She considered, her mind churning, the awful symbolism of where he was burned: the throat that formed the words of his sermonizing and his diatribes; the chin that moved to utter them; the chest where the deep source of his affections lay; and of course, his sex.

  She had always recognized that sexual magnetism underlay his charisma and was instrumental in his power to make them listen to his every word and watch his every physical move. She had never liked to dwell on this particular aspect of his performance, sensing it was too slippery, androgynous and dangerous. It was simplest just to yield to the spell of Fergus leaping about the stage, urging them to join the good fight on animals’ behalf, messianic and incomparable in the depth of his passion.

  She wondered if he’d thought of animals’ torture when he was being tortured himself. If he had seen himself, in the crucible of his agony, as a sacrifice offered up to them. This speculation was just too horrible to hold long in her mind.

  “Who would do such a thing? And why? What about the torture? Who would do that to him, Pinto?” More childlike questions, but she could not stop herself.

  Pinto just looked at her blankly, then swung his head back and forth so slowly she wondered if time was indeed visibly running down. There was a new curse on the firmament, so that the space-time net juddered.

  Open on the table was a bottle of cheap brandy, which Agnes assumed was for general consumption. She poured some into a mug and drank it down quickly. This time Pinto did not try to stop her, not even when she reached almost immediately for the bottle again.

  THIRTEEN

  The Rack

  “EITHER YOU LOVE ME, OR you do not.” So Savonarola daily proclaimed from his pulpit in the Duomo. He was evermore the relentless warrior for Christ, despite being near starved from the severe rigours of his fasting. His sparse flesh was rubbed raw by the hair-shirt girdle and punctured around his midriff by his belt of metal spikes. It was said the Prior’s apocalyptic visions gave him strength to endure these mortifications. The divine messages were meat and drink to him. In his sermons he relayed with relish the calamities to come: the punitive famines, plagues and wars God told him He would inflict upon the people of Florence if they persisted in their worldly indulgences and evil ways. He urged his followers to imitate his example and meditate ceaselessly on the oozing wounds of Christ; keep ever in mind the countless ways the Saviour’s body had been beaten, broken and pierced through to the bone until there was no part unracked by pain.

  This intense probing into the excruciating suffering of Christ the Lord revealed itself in the Prior’s eyes, so huge, black and liquid that a wicked man caught in his gaze might fear being sucked into their depths, as a live sheep into a whirlpool. The fearsome orbs under beetling brows were thus one of Savonarola’s prime weapons in winning new warriors for the Lord. But his chief instrument in that battle remained his voice, which over the years became even more resonant, compelling and thunderous. It was the clangor of the Dies Irae encased in silk and velvet.

  “Either you love me, or you do not.”

  Piero di Cosimo did not. After his first exposure to Savonarola’s sermons, and the sublime instrument of that voice with its seductive hint of corvine music, Piero had taken the most assiduous care to insulate himself from the Prior’s influence. As he had grasped on his sole exposure, Savonarola’s oratory had the power to unmake his artist-self and turn him into a shadow-man shuffling through the streets in penitential mood. He would then become one of those who spied corruption everywhere: even in the clear regard of a new-born child, or in the guiltless creatures of the woods and skies and waters.

  Over the four years of Savonarola’s ascendancy, Piero had seen the vibrant, boisterous Florence turn grim and grey; even the air was grainier, as if men’s obsession with sin-riddled mortality had stirred up a thick dust that coated every surface. There were no more bawdy songs heard on the streets; no more music of flute or lute spilling from an upper casement. The people’s garb was practical and drab; Piero found his eyes aching for the sensuous textures of yesteryear, the lucent threads of gold and silver woven through a rippling brocade, the glow of garnets and agates that made the light play lovingly at ear lobes, fingers and wrists, cloth dyed in Lydian purple and in cochineal.

  Savonarola abhorred all such decadent, meretricious display. His followers accordingly went about, shrinking inside coarse cloaks, their minds fixed on their grievous faults and the looming Day of Judgement. What Savonarola had created was a city locked in a mood that too much resembled Piero’s own worst fits of melancholy, where to die would be deliverance.

  Those Florentine nobles who could not stomach the Prior’s dire visions and moral strictures had fled the city to live in exile. Piero too sought refuge through his regular rambles in the contado. The Prior’s gloom could not contaminate the animals and birds he saw there. He wondered sometimes if the company of a loyal and loving dog might cure Savonarola of his hatred of life. But to give voice to such a thought would be dangerous, and might even be deemed treasonous. The ever-swelling bands of Savonarola’s vigilant young Piagnoni would soon hear of it. They would batter down the door of his workshop, seize him by the hair and drag him out to the street. There they would cut off his nose, or worse, his fingers.

  And so Piero kept close guard on his tongue and diligently carried out the commissions that come his way, which these days were almost always religious works. His patrons asked him for altarpieces which they wished to donate to their family’s church, or for circular tondi to grace their homes and inspire their daily personal devotions. Unlike Sandro Botticelli, who was among the Prior’s most zealous followers, Piero did not paint the crucified Saviour, either hung upon or newly taken down from the cross. His patrons come to him for Madonnas of gentle regard, with rounded, rosy cheeks as innocent as a country girl’s. On their laps, his Madonnas held a chubby, merry Christ child whose pearly flesh showed not the least shadow of the suffering to come.

  Savonarola ranted from the pulpit against the shamefulness of artists who depicted the Mother of God as if she were a whore, in immodest dress and with too much redness in her lips and cheeks. Piero was thus ever vigilant to keep the Virgin’s robes even more modest than before, and the pigments for her complexion subdued.

  The Prior had also now forbidden the painting of mythological and pagan subjects that had been so popular with the Medici and other noble families. Such pieces were an abomination, the Prior said, sprung from the devil and his minions. Piero thought it a great blessing that Savonarola, for all his vaunted gifts of prophecy, could not see men’s private thoughts. For inside the sealed sphere of his brain, they frolicked still: the riotous company of goat-legged men who kept drunken attendance on Bacchus and Ariadne; the sprightly satyrs who were so wild and free it was a delight to see them bound into his fantasies; the tritons and the nereids with their naked chests and breasts and glorious curving fish tails who sported and slithered against one another in ways that would outrage the Prior.

  To proscribe such artworks was not enough. Savonarola was driven to root out and destroy all worldly things he abhored. Thus he speedily championed the Piagnoni’s plan for a massive bonfire to consume all lewd and frivolous objects that the people of Florence might still have hidden about their homes and persons. This towering blaze, the largest ever seen in the city, was to be called The Bonfire of the Vanities.

  It was held at Carnival time. In former years, Florentines had donned astounding masks for Carnival, bejewelled and bedecked with long waving plumes and crowns of stiff lace. They h
ad danced and sung in the streets in a joyous release from the strictures of Lent, and flung themselves at wanton pleasures. Now they yielded up their magnificent masks and gowns and wigs and cosmetics to be put upon the mammoth pyre. Into the fire as well went mirrors, which fed vanity, tapestries of pagan gods that inflamed lechery, and the musical instruments that encouraged idleness and folly. Indeed, any object made purely for beauty’s sake must go into the flames, to twist and melt and seethe.

  Piero, who knew the drain on artists’ health and strength the making of such objects entailed, was saddened almost to despair by this waste and desecration. Savonarola’s Bonfire struck him as unholy, for surely it was a sin to repudiate and destroy the fruits of talents bestowed by God? He was shocked when he heard that Sandro Botticelli would willingly consign to the bonfire one of his own paintings he now considered unseemly. It was terrible to think of Sandro standing by, watching with composure, as all his dear labour was rendered ash which the wind then twitched away.

  Piero prayed his patron, for whom he’d painted the tender-hearted satyr and noble hound mourning the dead nymph, would hide it well. Were they ever to spy it out, the young Piagnoni would revile this painting on account of the young nymph’s naked breasts, the satyr’s human face and chest above his furry legs and sharp hooves. It pained him sorely to think these gentle creatures might be seized and put to the torch. She will sleep a while yet, he reflected, this nymph whom he saw, more clearly now than ever, was the human soul drained of her sweet vitality in the dark time of Savonarola.

  On the day of the great bonfire, Piero left the city, striking out as far as he could go beyond its walls before nightfall. Surely the reek of the burnt cloth, canvas and wrought bronze would not reach him in the heart of the woods. It was a relief that Savonarola had not issued an edict making attendance at the Bonfire mandatory for every Florentine. Had he been forced to watch the great pyre of destruction, heaped so high no man could constrain its antic, unpredictable raging, it might well drive him mad. His flesh shrank in remembrance of the writhing ox-inflames he had seen as a boy, when the lightning struck its spine and the beast stumbled blindly, bellowing in its agony, the strings of its charred flesh hanging in obscene tassels. Its boiling blood bubbled through the scorched hide.

  When they burned, he fancied, all those artifacts born of artisans’ shaping hands and spirits would moan as piteously as did the flaming ox. Piero was perplexed as to why Savonarola perceived the devil’s hand in the ever-questing, urgent work of the artist. Was this daily struggle not also a moral one: the perilous and unflagging quest to catch and give shape to fleeting forms: the manifold beauty of the world and its creatures and the wondrous life that thrived in human fantasy?

  Saper vedere. His master Cosimo Rosselli was the first to teach him this maxim. Train the eye. Know how to see. Despite the Prior’s intense black gaze, Piero doubted that Savonarola really saw the resplendent diverse works of vast Creation. With his constant dwelling on corruption and sin, the Prior had blighted his vision. What other reason could there be that Savonarola beheld only foulness and imperfection wherever he looked?

  Piero pitied him. How dead the world must appear to Savonarola, for he had deliberately rolled a massive crude wheel of stone over its sublime, intricate beauty, flattening it and draining it of colour.

  Come with me, he wished he could tell the Prior. Let us walk quietly together in the woods. Let your molten voice, with its power to bend the minds of men to your will, be silent a while so that we may sit and wait for the hart and the doe to appear. Let us observe closely how delicately they move toward the emerald moss to graze; how they bow their heads toward the earth and thus become a perfect arc of grace, quivering with a life-force so unsullied that only to observe them might redeem the most sin-encrusted of men.

  Saper vedere. Train the eye. For every wild creature, including the birds of the air, creates by its movement and being this most solemn and potent tracery which holds in place the soul of the world.

  Should he make such remarks in reality, rather than within the secure confines of his brain, Savonarola would set the Piagnoni upon him. They would cut off his digits with a sharp blade one at a time, and then pluck out his eyes.

  He nonetheless strove to keep in mind the benefits Savonarola had brought to the city during the years of his sway. The poor of Florence no longer went hungry as they had under the reign of the Medici. Under the Prior’s counsel, the city government had reduced the heartless burden of tax which the Medici had imposed on peoples of every class, except their closest cronies. And he had used his influence to bring in a fairer, more representative system of government for Florence, similar to the Great Council of Venice and administered by men of upstanding character.

  Piero also admired, if he thought reckless, Savonarola’s sermons inveighing against the profligacy, bribery and self-indulgence rife at the papal court. Now, with Rodrigo Borgia on the papal throne, a libertine who flaunted his mistresses and fawned upon his numerous children, the tyranny, extravagance and hypocrisy of the Pope were more flagrant than ever before. In his public condemnation of Pope Alexander, the Prior insisted his words came direct from God.

  Nevertheless, any good the Prior wrought in the lives of Florentines, he simultaneously cruelly undercut by instilling in the people a hatred of earthly life so intense they were filled with self-loathing and yearned for death. They whipped themselves raw and spied upon their neighbours for evidence of sinfulness or secreted luxuries. Savonarola’s militia of young, able-bodied Piagnoni made daily forays through the streets, seeking out sinners. The violence of their punishments grew apace with their vigilance.

  How long, Piero wondered, can people live in such a climate of fear before a questing spirit leaps up within them and cries “no more”; before they have the urge to sing again a joyful song with one voice?

  It was not a spontaneous outburst of song, but the machinations of the Prior’s fiercest enemies that began to loosen his grip on Florence. In May of 1497 Pope Alexander VI, Rodrigo Borgia, excommunicated Savonarola, who had railed once too often against “the prostitute church . . . the monster of abomination.” Savonarola was unfazed. Why should he heed the sentence of Rodrigo Borgia, who was no true pope but a man so steeped in sin he did not hesitate to appoint his own sixteen-year-old son the archbishop of a very lucrative diocese?

  Behind the scenes, the Arrabbiatti — the “rabid dogs” that supported the Medici — joined in the plot to bring about Savonarola’s downfall. Pope Alexander then commanded Savonarola to cease preaching, even inside his own convent. This command too Savonarola defied, by celebrating Christmas mass in the church of San Marco. He continued to declare that his every word came direct from God.

  And so the morning came when the city’s government turned against him and sent officers to San Marco with orders for his arrest. The charges were heresy, sedition and uttering false prophecies.

  There was always a clutch of enthusiasts to be found outside the tower of the Palazzo della Signoria in whose tiny top cell, the wryly named Alberghettino or “little hotel,” Savonarola was held prisoner. These people came, not to pray for his release or comfort, but to listen to his screams while he was being tortured. Savonarola’s guards were only too ready to describe to those waiting below the gruesome punishments inflicted each day on the gaunt body of the deposed Prior. The people laughed and thumped their fists in triumph in their opposite hand when they learned the prisoner had been hoisted on a pulley and live coals applied to the soles of his feet. They nodded at each other in glee when told that Savonarola had been stretched repeatedly on the rack, only his right arm left unbroken so that he would be able to sign his confession.

  On the day that the screams coming from the “little hotel” were particularly protracted and curdled, jubilant cries rose up from the crowd gathered below. The news soon spread that within an eight-hour span Savonarola had been put upon the rack fourteen separate times.

  When he heard of these terr
ible things, Piero lay on his bed for two solid days, his face turned to the wall and his knees drawn up to his belly. In his blood some peculiar alembic frothed, a mixture of pity and disgust that conspired to thicken his despondency. In those instants when he was able to think clearly, he recognized his pity was purely for the fallen Prior. His disgust was directed at his fellow citizens who clustered beneath the prison tower and smacked their lips when they heard Savonarola’s screams. Such feelings of repugnance for his own kind always turned into a vile self-loathing. If this was the depravity to which humans so readily sank, how then was he any different? Was he not by fact of species complicit in their degenerate behaviour?

  If only Savonarola had sometimes used the magnificent instrument of his voice to praise, as well as to censure. If only he had allowed himself on occasion to be nourished by the transformative splendours of the world, and not just take horror as his meat. I might have shown him, thought Piero, that passage in Cennino Cennini’s Libro dell’arte where he spoke of the artist’s constant quest “to discover things not seen, hiding themselves under the shadow of natural objects, so that what does not yet exist may come into being.”

  Was this not the true nature of things, he would have liked to ask the Prior, that they are forever transforming, shifting, coming into being? Leonardo taught us how to paint this coming-into-being, the subtle shift and shading of one thing into another, by the technique he called sfumato. And by such technique, we painters are able to show the glow that surrounds all objects and all living creatures.

  There came a day at last when Savonarola could bear the torture no longer. He signed with his right hand, which his captors had left unbroken. They then did him the courtesy of executing him by hanging. Then his dead body was set swinging above a live pyre on the same spot in the Piazza della Signoria from where he had overseen his two great Bonfires of the Vanities. His enemies would have had it otherwise. They wanted him to experience the utmost pain, to be stuck like a live pig upon a stake and roasted before the feasters’ eyes.