“My lord—”
“Do you see?”
“With the light of the summer sun.”
“Not summer, Leonardo, spring! It must be finished by the spring?”
The Duke makes a signal to the assembly and prepares to leave.
I give Lucrezia one last, longing look, but she has forgotten about me. The Duke takes her hand. She is escorted towards the door. The lords and ladies, courtiers and courtesans, handmaidens and hangers-on all follow in their wake.
The Fool, meanwhile, pretends to cry, then laugh, then cry, then laugh. He waves at me, shakes his fist at me, produces a horn from under his jerkin and blows on it, creating a noise fit to bring down a wall. Several courtiers cover their ears, wincing. My master pulls a face and looks at me as if I am to blame.
The Fool is the last one to leave. He gives one final blast on his trumpet and closes the doors behind him. Then there is silence. We walk to the doors and open them. No one about. Even the guards have gone off to eat, it seems.
“I want to show you something,” the Master says, looking left and right. “Now, while we are alone and unattended.”
XIII
He pulls me by the wrist up a flight of stairs and then down a corridor. We come to a door. He searches in the small leather pouch at his waist and pulls out a key. It opens the lock. We are inside a large room—a very large room, and cold—but it is too dark to see anything. The Master, however, has no hesitation in walking ahead of me, and soon he is pulling open two heavy curtains. Then he goes from window to window—four in all—repeating the action. And the vast room is filled to its farthest reaches with light.
The walls are hung with paintings in such quantity as I could never have imagined in the possession of one man. Every space, floor to ceiling, is taken up with panels large and small, square and round. And on the floor—more paintings stacked one in front of the other and sitting on easels dotted around the room. There is no order to the display. The Duke professes to be a lover of art, but this cold and gloomy room would seem to be a place he never visits.
“The Duke’s private gallery,” my master says. “I have a key copied from his own, unknown to him. There is a painting here that is as important to me as anything I have ever done. If I could not see it from time to time, I would not care to see anything.”
My eyes rove the walls, trying to separate the lesser works from what I know will be a masterpiece. So many paintings! So many ugly, gaudy representations of pagan myths, of satyrs ravishing round-hipped, rosy-lipped women, many painted by Capponi and Felloni. I recognize these from my master’s descriptions, although until now I have never seen them outside of my imagination. They are as far from matching his skill as an ass is from jumping a high fence.
Then my expression changes from disapproval to wonder.
“You have found her,” he says.
“Oh yes, Master, she is—”
“She is Cecilia.”
Cecilia Gallerani, the first mistress of Duke Ludovico, who lived with him at the Castle for nearly ten years, so my master told me, from the age of seventeen. I met her once, in 1491, just before she left Milan. She had come to tell my master that the Duke had grown weary of her and was going to send her away. The Duke was a fool. That must be why he keeps a Fool, to remind him.
In the painting her hair is quite blond, the same color as my own. That is not so common in Milan. Why, she could almost be my sister. But that is impossible—this was painted fifteen years ago.
“Master, you have captured her to perfection.”
“It was the Duke who captured her; I tried to release her. In this portrait.”
I look closely at it. She is even more beautiful than I remember—and I remember very well.
Her eyes, brown as ripe hazelnuts, hold a yearning that any man would die to be the object of, but she is not looking at the person facing the painting—that would be the Duke—but away, into the far distance. This, I think, is what the Master means when he says he has tried to release her—from the imprisonment of the Duke’s ravenous gaze.
She has started to smile, but the Master has turned it into an expression of loss, as if all delight in her youth and beauty has vanished and been replaced with a rueful acknowledgment that what was hers by right has been taken by another.
Now I study the ermine she holds in her arms, her slim, elegant fingers lightly grazing its back. The creature’s white fur and proud bearing serve to draw attention to Cecilia’s white skin and noble character. It is the ermine, rather than Cecilia, whose head seems to be turning to face me as I look.
“What does it mean, Master?”
“I want you to tell me.”
Let me think, then.
“The ermine is incorruptible,” I say.
“Correct.”
“As is Cecilia.”
“You have it, boy.”
Then it comes to me—this creature, hunted mercilessly for its magnificent coat, is the bravest of animals. It prefers to die rather than be caught and humbled. My master wants me to conclude that Cecilia has a spirit like the ermine’s, unbreakable, and that if a man—even such a man as the Duke—hunted her down, nothing could tame her.
I repeat this to the Master.
“Did I speak to you of this painting before?”
“No, Master.”
If the Duke had known what Leonardo da Vinci signified by putting the ermine in Cecilia’s arms, he would not have been very pleased—might, indeed, have fallen into a dreadful choler. But he had never thought about it. Why would he? To him it was an ermine, a mere animal, and he has worn enough of those around his shoulders not to have any regard for them other than as lifeless skins to warm him on a chill day.
“Let us go.”
My master inhales deeply when we finally emerge from the corridors and mezzanines of the Duke’s citadel. A trio of horsemen in armor, lances aloft, rides past us with a muffled thunder of hoofs on earth. We walk down the road leading to the main gates. My master, deep in thought, is silent.
Once outside the Castle walls, he halts abruptly, then says: “He sent Cecilia, the soul of purity, away from the Castle and replaced her with that—that courtesan! How much has changed during my time in Milan. When I arrived I was given gifts and lavished with praise. But, more importantly, I was left in peace to pursue my own interests. What I did was not questioned, and I performed my tasks for the Duke at my leisure. All that went when Cecilia did. The court is now no more than a circus of performing beasts seeking to please their master. He scolds me for not finishing the Last Supper, when any fool can see it is not ready to be finished. Does he expect me to do nothing about the insults he heaps on my head? Not if I am Leonardo da Vinci—no, I’ll not take it! He’ll see! He’ll soon see!”
And with these inexplicable words, the Master turns in the direction of our house and sets off at such a pace that I must trot in order to keep up with him.
If Milan is not what it once was, then it must be true that neither is my master what he once was to the Duke. Perhaps it is time for us to consider one of those offers of work in Venice, Florence, or Bologna that the Master claims to have received. But I do not think he will ever leave Milan willingly—not while the Duke owes him so much money.
I hope not, anyway.
Not until I have met the alchemist and shown him my medallion.
But who knows when that will happen?
XIV
Evening, the next day. The dying sun is an orange discus hurled across the heavens by Zeus in a competition with Mars. The gods have battled enough. And so have I. Time for my dinner.
“Ah, boy, where have you been? I haven’t seen you since the bell tolled midday,” Caterina says.
I was with Renzo. We were on the scrubland to the northeast of the city, near the Lazaretto, which the Duke built to house victims of the plague outside the city walls, in order to prevent the spread of infection within Milan. The Lazaretto lies empty now, the city not having been infested for
many years, thanks be to God. It is an excellent place for our practice, because no one comes near, fearing the ghosts of the plague dead.
Renzo throws a knife well and knows many moves employed in hand-to-hand fighting. He learned it all from an old soldier, Umberto of Lodi, who had retired from battle and was employed in Maggio’s workshop to sweep up the sawdust and wood shavings. He had hurt his leg badly, fighting for the Duke in one of the wars, and could only walk sideways, in a kind of shuffle. For this he had earned the nickname “The Crab.”
Today we were practicing the underarm throw, drawing the knife and letting it fly from below in one single action, releasing it at shoulder height. An especially effective move when fighting at close quarters, it has the advantage of surprise. Before your enemy has a chance to counter, the knife is buried to the hilt in his gut.
If the intruders return to our house, they will have more than the Master to contend with.
Caterina has prepared rice and fried pumpkin, pickled tomatoes and goat cheese. The Master is locked in his study, working, and Caterina takes him his food there.
While I am eating, I ask: “Caterina, what do you know about the Master and Cecilia Gallerani?”
“Why, what business is that of yours?” she says sharply.
“I saw her portrait at the Castle, that’s all. Don’t you think she looks very like me? Our hair is the same color, you know.”
“I don’t know anything about it,” she says.
“Then what do you know?” I say.
“Nothing.”
Nothing. It’s not like Caterina to know nothing—she knows something about everything. I’ll try another way: “Was the Master very close to her?”
“Oh yes. When the Duke sent her away he wept, I tell you, and I have never seen the Master do that before or since. For days afterwards he kept to his room, eating nothing I set before him. The Master does not care for women, as a rule; but I tell you, Giacomo, he would have married our Cecilia, had such a thing been possible.”
“And why wasn’t it?”
“Marry Cecilia? Why, the Duke would never have given permission for a painter to be her husband. The thought of it! She was married off to a lord, a man with a great country estate where ostriches and peacocks roam the grounds. The Master—”
“Hush, Caterina! I hear his door opening.”
And a moment later he appears in the kitchen. He is holding a brush and there is paint on his fingers.
“Come in here, boy.”
We enter the study and over his shoulder I can see Lucrezia Crivelli! No, it is her portrait.
“Master, she is so real I almost bowed to her!”
How different her shadowy beauty is from the pure loveliness of her predecessor, Cecilia Gallerani. I could not, however, tell you who was the more beautiful, any more than I could choose between the differing glories of day and night.
Another painting is sitting on a second easel. It is already bound with cloth and rope. He does not want me to see it, then, but I will find a way.
“There.” He applies the final dab of paint to her lip. “She is finished.”
He stands away from the easel, and I stand back in wonder. Whereas my master had shown in Cecilias face shyness and pride entwined, a gaze that beckoned without surrendering, Lucrezia’s eyes sparkle with scorn and seductiveness, challenging you to come closer, closer, if you dare. Her mouth, ripe with readiness, promises more than mere kisses. Cecilia was a child compared with Lucrezia. With his next mistress, the Duke traded innocence for experience.
But there is something new here.
“Master, on Lucrezias face, a shading—”
“A new style I have been working on, Giacomo, a blending of colors at the corners of the mouth and eyes that adds depth and expressiveness to the face.”
“It is truly miraculous, Master.”
This is not flattery. Flattery is the result of intention. I said what I said without thinking. The painting is another great victory for Leonardo da Vinci; but however great his fame may be now, the future alone will record the true extent of it.
What I would give for him to teach me this new trick, along with all the other ones he has in his collection. If I show him how well I can copy the drawings from his sketchbooks … why, I’ll run and get them now!
But, no, I cannot show him—not yet. I dare not! He will laugh at me. Tell me I am a servant and always will be. Oh, I know my work is still rough and unpolished. But I am improving. I feel it in my hand. And I can already draw a head or a hen or a hawk better than any of his students.
The Master sets down his brush in a clay pot.
“Tomorrow morning, I want you to take the painting of Lucrezia Crivelli to the Duke. That should keep her quiet for the moment.”
“Yes, Master.”
“I will wrap it and set it here, against the table.” He points. “Hand it to the Duke himself. Can I trust you with this office?”
Need you ask, Master?
“Then we shall see whether the almighty Duke is satisfied with my work.”
The Master has already left the house by the time I rise. I dress quickly and hurry to the kitchen. Caterina gives me a chunk of Parma cheese, hard and salty, my favorite, and a red pear. When I tell her where I am going, she says: “You went there once, boy. Do not tempt the Devil anew!”
“What have I to do with the Devil? I am delivering a painting for the Master. Do not trouble your head so, woman.”
“That is how the Devil works, mark my words! And this time you might not escape so easily.”
I smile. I nod. I eat my food. I have nothing to say to this; in truth, there is nothing she wants me to say. My job is to listen until she has exhausted herself. And when she has, I go to the Master’s study—the door is open—and take up the painting bound with cloth and rope that he has placed against the table, where he said it would be. That other painting is still sitting on the easel. I could untie it now and take a look—but there is no time.
I set off for the Castle as fast as I can, clutching the important package to my side and keeping a watchful eye on every person I pass in the street. Perhaps this time I will have my chance to meet the alchemist. I walk all the more quickly.
A peasant leading a huge sow by a rope asks me the way to the market. I hope he will get a good price for her—his family must have had empty stomachs while he was feeding the beast to such a size.
Here I am once more at the Castle gates.
A head comes to the window. It’s an ugly shaggy thing, this head.
“What do you want, boy?” the head says.
“I am Giacomo, servant to Leonardo da Vinci. I have a painting for the Duke. I must deliver it to him myself.”
“Leave it there and shove off,” comes the reply. “Were busy.”
“You’ll open the gate and let me in, or the Duke will hear of it,” I say.
“You what?”
The guardhouse door is kicked open, and the brute and several of his fellows file out. Saint Francis, what have I done now?
One of them laughs and says: “Oh ho, we have a live one here, lads! He needs a lesson, and no mistake!”
The big brute moves towards me, his head turned slightly to one side, as if I am too insignificant to look at.
“Who are you, then, fool?” he says, now looking straight at me and standing to his full height. Saint Francis, are you listening to me? He is huge. “Whoever you are, when I’ve finished working on your face, even your mother will cross herself and swear she never saw it in her life.”
“And when you came out of your mother,” I say, “she must have given your face its first wash in quicklime.”
That did it.
He roars at me and charges, in armor plate, too, and before I have time to move he has shouldered me a tremendous blow to the chest, knocking me down flat. Then he kneels on me and gives me a terrible whack on the side of my head with his gauntlet.
When I open my eyes once more, I am still lying in
the dirt, looking up at the sky. I cannot move. One of my enemy’s lead-heavy armored feet is planted on my chest. He starts pressing. He aims to crush the very life out of me!
And then—
“Aldo, look sharp. The Duke!”
I twist my head to see the Duke approaching on horseback with a small party of guests. A mere one hundred or so. They have been out hunting, to judge by all the dead game falling out of the saddlebags. He rides up to our group at the head of his party.
“What is going on here?”
“Lord,” the guard says, “this knave—”
“Was delivering the painting—” I manage to say before the villain presses down again and squeezes all the breath from my chest.
“He threw a stone at the guardhouse and shouted, ‘Death to the Duke!’”
“He did?” says the Duke. “Brazen boy!”
“Yes, my lord,” the guard says, “and then—”
“But, don’t I know you?” the Duke says, peering down at me.
“My lord, he—”
“Silence! And remove your foot from his chest!”
The guard obeys, and somehow I struggle onto my hands and knees, but I seem unable to raise myself farther.
“What are you doing down there, looking for worms?”
Some of the Duke’s guests laugh at this. If that’s the best he can do.
“Why, it is Master Leonardo’s boy!” A female voice, soft as raised velvet.
“What? Look at me,” says the Duke. “It is you! Jacopo …”
“Giacomo, my lord.”
“What happened here, Giacomo?”
As I tell my brief, exhausting story, a woman dismounts from her horse and helps me rise to my feet. It is Lucrezia—Lucrezia Crivelli! When I am standing, with her support—she has an arm around my waist, the most gentle pressure—she beckons to a handmaiden for a cloth and, dipping it in the frosty dew on the grass, with strong fingers applying the lightest touch, cleanses my brow of the blood. A lock of soft, shining hair peeks out from under the hood of her cloak. She blows it away from her face. Her perfume floats on the air, something musky and sweet yet lemony and sharp, all mixed in with her sweat from the morning’s hunt.
Leonardo’s Shadow Page 9