by Kate Quinn
“She needs reining in,” I warned, as I had been warning him for quite some time now, but of course he just chuckled and shook his head.
“Bah!”
“Madonna Giulia,” Maestro Pinturicchio called to me plaintively. “Can you please stop the goat from eating my supplies!”
I rescued a paintbrush from my pet goat, and Rodrigo had already moved on to the next bit of business. “What of it if Juan’s troops are a little wild? Success will do that to a man! Ten castles taken from the Orsini, that’s cause to celebrate.”
“And Bracciano?” I couldn’t help but ask. That could not in any way be qualified a success.
“If Juan couldn’t take Bracciano, it couldn’t be taken.” Dictating blithely. “It is Our decision that the Gonfalonier shall mount the attack at Ostia next—”
Ha. Juan had made much this past fall of his rapid capture of ten Orsini castles—but they had been small castles, and I’d heard whispers that Juan’s part had involved prancing about at the army’s head adjusting his banners and plumes while his generals got on with the work of the matter. Bracciano had been a disaster, whether Rodrigo admitted it or not. And as far as Juan’s troops went, well, if I’d been a lordling or a farmer anywhere near Ostia, I’d have been decidedly worried to see the young Gonfalonier and his troops pointed my direction.
“‘Rapine and plunder are regrettable things,’” Rodrigo was dictating to another secretary, answering some lord near Bracciano who had written a protest to how his lands had been treated. “‘But necessary evils when war raises its banners’—couch that a bit more artfully, will you? Next—”
I sighed. Lucrezia flirting her way through the papal court, Sancha sleeping with both her brothers-in-law, Juan raping his way toward Ostia—“Maybe there’s a reason popes aren’t supposed to have children,” I couldn’t help saying, but Rodrigo didn’t hear me and it was just as well.
“My deepest thanks, Your Holiness.” Pinturicchio was bowing now, relieved and eager. “I assure you the figure will be finished in all speed—the final touch upon the Resurrection—”
Rodrigo rose, dropping his hands from their pose of prayer and flicking the secretaries back. “Let’s have a look,” he said, and shrugged his priceless jeweled cope from his heavy shoulders to the floor. “Hm. Does my chin really droop that way?”
“Of course not, this is a hasty sketch only. I assure Your Holiness that he will be pleased with the final result.”
“A very fine work,” Maestro Botticelli smiled. Apparently Resurrections met with his approval where goddesses of love did not.
“We would have a portrait from your hands as well, Maestro Botticelli.” Rodrigo’s gaze found me, and he held out his hand. I twined my fingers with his. “A portrait of La Bella, as We had mentioned previously.”
“Just not as the Holy Virgin this time,” I warned. “Really, it’s too hypocritical for words.” Rodrigo preferred the Virgin Mary for his private devotions—he kept various images of her about his chambers, and he always addressed his personal prayers to her ears. I suppose he thought of the Blessed Virgin as yet one more woman he could wheedle: “Oh, Rodrigo,” he envisioned her saying as she heard his prayers, shaking her veiled head fondly and going to intercede on his behalf with God the Father. I admit, I too found the Holy Virgin far more approachable than some stern-faced saint. But putting my face on that exalted image seemed a bit much!
“No virgins or saints this time,” my Pope agreed. “Something more . . . fleshly. You as you first came to me: Persephone, clad only in your hair with a pomegranate in your hand . . .”
Definitely not, I thought. Not as Persephone. Such a very private memory, that was. One of Rodrigo’s first gifts to me had been not my great pearl or some other jewel, but a pomegranate. A simple, rosy fruit pressed into my hand as he wooed me with the story of Persephone, whom the god of the underworld wooed in turn with pomegranate seeds. Persephone had eaten the seeds and stayed with her dark lord, and in the end so had I; I’d brought the pomegranate back to Rodrigo on the day I decided I would share his bed, and we’d fed each other the jewel-red seeds, Rodrigo kissing each of my pink-stained fingers like a ritual. Avernus had a sonnet comparing his Aurora to Persephone—lovely daughter of the earth, he put it, and how I loved that one!
But I didn’t want to be Persephone for any eyes but Rodrigo’s. I parted my lips to demur, but Rodrigo had dropped my hand and took hold of my shoulder instead, his thumb slipping inside the edge of my dress.
“I want a record of your beauty,” he whispered. “All of your beauty.”
Maestro Botticelli was blushing red as a virgin girl. “Your Holiness, I am honored. But I have sworn to renounce paintings of that kind—if you will please allow me, I shall recommend another painter . . .”
Rodrigo looked at him. “We desire your brush. No other.”
“Fra Savonarola, he—”
“His decrees do not hold sway in Our Holy City,” Rodrigo snapped. “Which is the only Holy City, Maestro Botticelli. If We wish you to paint La Bella, you will do so.”
Maestro Botticelli’s eyes dropped to the woven carpet. He fiddled with his shirt cuff, and I noticed its fraying edge. “Yes, Your Holiness,” he muttered.
“He doesn’t have to,” I put in swiftly. “Really, I’ve no wish to be preserved through history as a naked goddess.” I tried for a laugh. “To be preserved as a holy virgin is absurd enough!”
“But I want you as Persephone too,” my Pope insisted. “So every man in Rome can see what I have!”
What if I don’t want every man in Rome to see what I have? I started to say. But Rodrigo’s fingers slipped further along my shoulder inside the edge of my dress, and a familiar spark of desire kindled in his eye like a dark fire. “You could drop your gown and let Maestro Botticelli take a drawing.” His breath whispered hot along my neck. “Here. Now.”
“Your Holiness, you cannot be serious!” Bad enough sitting chilled and stiff-necked in a Madonna’s veil and feeling like the world’s greatest joke. I was not going to strip out of my gown before half the papal secretaries and pages in the basilica, not to mention a cluster of cardinals who looked equally avid and appalled. I drew breath to argue, but Cardinal Piccolomini spoke up in a shocked expostulation.
“Really, Your Holiness—a naked woman, here in the sacred walls of the Vatican? It is blasphemous!”
There was another rustle at his words, the same rustle that had gone up when Maestro Botticelli quoted Fra Savonarola’s pious strictures. Even those bishops and pages whose eyes had been eating me up had a moment’s flash of discomfort across their faces, and Cardinal Piccolomini looked at me reprovingly as though this were all my fault. “It would be indecent,” he said, crossing himself in great distaste. “She is indecent.” And my Pope’s face went hard all at once.
“Surely we can arrange a private sitting later!” I jumped in, desperately—perhaps I could offer a sop to please both propriety and Rodrigo’s pride. “I have been meaning to visit Florence, to see my sister. I could call upon Maestro Botticelli there, in his studio—you could still have the portrait, Holy Father, but painted in proper privacy—”
“We do not require privacy,” my Pope said in cutting tones, not to me but to Cardinal Piccolomini and any of the other men who had dared to rumble against him. “Because nothing about you is indecent, Giulia Farnese. Nothing We order done within these walls is indecent. And We refuse to have any man from the College of Cardinals, or any frothing Dominican from Florence, or any pious little sheep of an artist dictate to Us otherwise.”
The silence fell, chastened and complete. Rodrigo’s eyes raked the room. “Good,” he said curtly, and turned in a swirl of robes. “A painting, then, of La Bella as Persephone. Pinturicchio, clear your easel and offer Maestro Botticelli the materials he needs to make the initial sketch. It is Our will that the first sitting be done here and now. You may all watch, my good gentlemen, to be certain nothing indecent takes place within these sacred h
alls.” A contemptuous glance over the silent cardinals and bishops. “A pomegranate, have one fetched from the kitchens at once—”
And there were pages at my back, hastening forward at the snap of the papal fingers to take my little goat’s leash from my wrist and begin unlacing the gown down my back, and my mind had gone blank from astonishment. How had this all happened so fast? I caught Rodrigo’s arm with one hand, feeling my sleeve slide down the other and drop to the floor. “Your Holiness,” I said quietly. “They spoke out of turn, and I know you wish to chastise them. But I am yours alone. I am not for common viewing—not for any reason.”
Why did I have to tell him such a thing? We had been together more than four years; he had never before—
“Let them see,” he breathed. “Let the word carry all the way to Savonarola in Florence if they like. I do what I please, and I will not be censured for it.” Rodrigo brought my hand to his lips. “After today, when they see what God gave me in you, I will not be censured. I will be envied. Envied by every man in Rome—every man in Christendom, once the painting is showed to the world.”
I could have shouted, I suppose. Thrown a tantrum, stamped my feet, and I drew a breath to do so—but his enemies here from Cardinal Piccolomini down would have mocked him for it. He had made such a gesture, and by now Maestro Botticelli was already laying out paper and sticks of fresh black chalk with a resigned tilt to his shoulders, and the gown was falling down about my feet, leaving me in my shift. I crossed my arms instinctively across myself as the men behind Rodrigo looked at me furtively, either excitement or distaste or some blend of the two in their eyes, and I didn’t see a way through them. Not with my dignity, anyway, and Rodrigo’s dignity too.
“Take down your hair,” Rodrigo whispered in my ear, looking over my shoulder at his churchmen.
Slowly I began to remove pins and undo plaits. Surely that was as far as he would—
But he reached under the curtain of my hair and slipped the shift off my shoulders. It puddled about my feet, and I stood naked in a room full of staring men.
A thick silence had fallen. My Pope retreated to his heavy chair as all eyes drank me, and his cardinals settled around him like chastened children. I could see his eyes drifting from face to face, noting which eyes drank me in and which looked away in shock. A great deal of shock, I thought, feeling the blush of humiliation rise clear up from the soles of my naked feet—even the men who had licked their lips to see my gown drop were now looking uneasy as I continued to stand there, naked in their midst. Had such a thing happened in the Vatican before, or at least openly and before public eyes?
“Maestro Botticelli,” my Pope called, enjoying the general discomfiture. “Pose her.”
The artist would hardly look at me. “My apologies, Madonna Giulia,” he murmured. “One arm across the breast. The other arm curved lower, under the, ah, belly. The hair behind the shoulders—”
I remembered coming to Rodrigo for the first time, wearing his pearl, clutching his pomegranate, summoning the courage to draw myself up naked before him. Nearly five years later, and he was still the only man to ever see me unclothed—my one brief coupling with Orsino had been done beneath the awkward cover of skirts and hose pushed aside. Only one man had ever looked on my naked body, and now twenty or thirty pairs of eyes were drinking me in.
Avernus’s Aurora, in her ten sonnets. Aurora as Persephone, desired by Death himself; Aurora as Helen of Troy, desired by everybody; Aurora as Calypso, Leda, Venus, Europa . . . All those couplets and classical tropes, and not one to tell Aurora the most important thing—that desire just means trouble.
I arranged my arms woodenly, put my shoulders back, raised my head. You faced a French army, I reminded myself. What were a few stares compared to that?
“That’s how she looked when she first came to me.” Rodrigo’s eyes had a particular malice looking at Cardinal Piccolomini’s tight-drawn face. “‘Domine Deus,’ I remember thinking. ‘I’m the luckiest man on earth.’”
You’re the luckiest man on earth because my brother can’t hear you saying such things about me, I thought. Thank the Holy Virgin Sandro was off in Bologna on some bit of papal business. He’d be out of his chair with his fists swinging for Rodrigo, pope or no. And then for good measure he’d take on the rest of the men in this cold room, every one of them no matter how exalted, because they dared look on his sorellina like this. Yes, good thing Sandro wasn’t here. I didn’t want him in trouble.
My eyes blurred. I didn’t try to blink it away. A blur, I thought, would be useful.
“Your pomegranate, Persephone. Actually no one could find a pomegranate. So we shall make do with a lemon, and make good use of our imaginations.” I looked down in the direction of the voice, and saw Leonello. His gaze was as cool and his voice as cynical as ever as he put a withered little lemon in my hand, and I was grateful. He looked at me, standing flushed and bare-skinned before him, and then he glanced away as though he hadn’t even noticed my nakedness. He looked over his shoulder at the painter instead, and lifted a brow. “Are you sure you want her posed standing, Maestro Botticelli? Surely Persephone would be reclining in her underworld garden—”
“Yes, but if she is reclining we won’t see the full glory of the hair.” Maestro Botticelli looked suddenly much less like a tortured saint about to be put on the rack for violating his holy oath, and much more like an absorbed craftsman contemplating an interesting problem. “Pull one lock of hair over your shoulder, Madonna Giulia, and let it fall loose . . .”
“Just get the proportions right,” Leonello advised as the artist fussed with my pose again. “Your Venus’s lines were very improbable. No woman alive ever had that long of a neck.”
“Of course not.” The painter was unruffled; his hands flew as they sketched goddesses in the air. “Venus was intended to represent an unearthly ideal of beauty—her proportions are elongated, perfected. Persephone will be a depiction of earthly maidenhood, riper and lusher . . .”
They descended into a discussion of proportion and shape as related to linear distance, and somehow that thick, shamed, avid silence in the room was broken. Botticelli bustled forward, all business now, directing me this way and that with his eyes narrowed in thoughtfulness rather than lust, and I felt my own eyes clear. I was able to gaze ahead, as the cardinals and pages stared at me in silence. Let them stare. Hungry little boys gazed longingly at the sides of meat that hung in a butcher’s yard, but even if their mouths watered, they still weren’t allowed to touch.
“A beseeching Persephone, framed by her hair,” Botticelli muttered, arranging my unresisting arms again. “The pomegranate cupped in the lower hand, below the belly; the other hand extended across the breast—yes, like that. Six seeds lying across the palm like jewels, offered to the viewer. Tilt the head, part the lips, the eyes lowered just a trifle. Persephone before she eats the seeds, the agony of choice before she dooms herself to the underworld . . .”
I heard scratching as he took up his chalks and began to sketch. I held my pose. Cardinals gazed at me avidly, pages, archbishops, secretaries, all gaping. Johann Burchard, the prim little master of ceremonies, was flushing so dark he looked like a Moor. Cardinal Piccolomini and his supporters still sat tight-lipped. Rodrigo looked saturnine, amused—and so tender, when his eyes rested on me.
“She should have jewels,” Leonello observed, looking over the painter’s shoulder. “Venus was born from the waves naked, but the king of the underworld showered all the jewels of the earth on his bride, trying to win her love. One wonders how well it succeeded . . .”
“A ruby, perhaps,” Botticelli agreed. “Like a drop of blood at the throat, echoing the pomegranate . . .”
I kept my gaze serene, fixed on the Resurrection over their heads. I suppose it didn’t take as long as it felt.
“For a first sitting, that will do.” Botticelli laid down his chalk judiciously. “I’ll mark the colors in later—the red of the pomegranate, drawing the eye in the cen
ter; the hair, hmm, perhaps picked out in gold leaf. A dark space behind her, I think; the whirling dark of the underworld . . . Echoes of Eve, with the pomegranate symbolizing the eternal apple . . .”
“If Maestro Botticelli is finished, I think you have all ogled my Giulia long enough!” Rodrigo approached, his eyes gleaming with fond pride as I dropped my posed arms and shook my hair around me again. “What a picture you are, mi perla. In paint or in the flesh.”
I ignored him, nodding my thanks to Leonello as he handed me the bundle of my shift.
“It will be a splendid painting,” Maestro Botticelli said, and oddly my heart squeezed out a little gladness for him. He had a flush in his thin cheeks, a fire of creation in his eye—far better than the worn, graying man who had parroted Fra Savonarola’s dictates of damnation. Leave off Savonarola’s hellfire, I thought, and go back to painting your goddesses. He certainly looked happier that way. “Several more sittings will be required, of course. But I am to set out for Florence in two days . . .”
“Then let us continue the sittings in Florence,” I said, shrugging my dress up over my shoulders and turning so the pages could fasten the lacings up my back. I was still clutching the lemon that was supposed to be a pomegranate, so hard my nails scored the withered skin. “I am to visit my sister there very soon; we can finish the portrait then. I will be staying some weeks, so there will be plenty of time.”
“Weeks?” my Pope protested. “How can I do without you for even one week?”
“Perhaps I’ll stay a month.” I tossed the words over one shoulder, bending to retrieve the leash of my little goat.
“Giulia—” Rodrigo sounded exasperated but still fond, keeping his voice low. “This was not about you, mi perla. You think I like these straitlaced fanatics like Savonarola prating their lunacy at me? My cardinals use the excuse to chastise me, and where does it end? I’ve sent a message, that’s all.”