The Madonna of the Almonds

by Marina Fiorato

  And then came the wars – years of turmoil and struggle between state and state, Guelfs and Ghibbellines. Milan, Venice, Genoa, the Papal lands, all became pieces in the game of bones between powers both foreign and domestic. Lorenzo, trained from birth in the arts of war, won glory and was soon given leadership. His commissions took him from home, and more than once his lady held Michealmas or Christmas feasts with his great carved chair standing empty at the head of the board. At these times Simonetta felt her spirits much depressed, but turned to her other pleasures of archery or the lute to pass the time. Sometimes in Lorenzo’s absence she had a fancy for his child to be with her when he was gone, to give her some occupation, but the wish passed as soon as he rode home up the road between the almond trees and she ran to meet him. He would crush her against his armour and kiss her hard on the mouth, and though they retired directly to the bedchamber she hoped no more for any fruits of their reunion.

  Now, such fruits would never be born. From this last campaign, when he had gone to fight under the command of Maréchal Jacques de Lapalisse, Lorenzo would never return. That great French General was dead, Lorenzo was dead, and now at last she felt keenly what comfort she might have had from his son or daughter. But now she was seventeen, and the best years for childbearing were over. She was utterly alone.

  And that is why Simonetta di Saronno wondered if there was a God. For would he have broken her in this way? Would he have wrested apart two such devoted creatures, whose union was blessed in his house as one of the sacraments?

  Then she began to be afraid. She had not prayed once since Gregorio had come. If she turned her back on God, she would surely sink into the void and take that other path – the darkest path of all. And once in the eternal damnation of hell, she would never see Lorenzo again. This would be a fate worse than the one she endured now, for only in that hope of a far-off reunion in paradise could she draw her next breath. When she had been happy she had always prayed to the ear of the Virgin, for did not Santa Maria know the love of a man, and the joy of marriage to Saint Joseph? Simonetta was resolved: she would go to the Sanctuary of Santa Maria dei Miracoli tomorrow, the church of the Miracles, and pray to that Blessed Virgin for comfort. For that would be a miracle indeed, and she was in need of nothing less. She took her hands from the sword and the gun and left her window at last. She knelt at the foot of her bed to say the Pater Noster, then, wrapping herself in the vair, dropped onto the coverlet of her bed as if felled.

  CHAPTER 3

  Selvaggio

  ‘Nonna, there’s a Wildman in the woods.’

  ‘Amaria Sant’Ambrogio, you have been on this earth for twenty summers, and you still have no more sense than a bean. What nonsense is this?’

  ‘Truly, Nonna, I swear it by Saint Ambrose himself. Silvana and I were at the wells, and we saw him. And besides, they talk of him in the town. They call him Selvaggio, the savage!’ Amaria’s dark eyes were as wide as saucers.

  The old lady sat down at their humble table and regarded her granddaughter. The girl looked little better than a savage herself. Her black hair which normally hung straight to her waist was tangled with comfrey flowers and briars till it stood out from her head. Her complexion, normally tanned, had a rose blush to it from her exertions. The girl’s olive-black eyes showed the whites all around like the stare of a frighted horse. Her bodice was ripped to show more than was seemly of her bosom, her full breasts straining at the lacings, and the girl’s skirts were kirtled round her knees for ease of running, displaying her sturdy legs. Amaria could not be called fat; never that, for the indigence of their household would never allow gluttony. Yet she was a softly rounded, peach of a girl, all womanliness in figure and a glowing, glossily healthful embodiment of life. She made a tempting picture for any passing gentleman, with her rosy, abundant beauty; despite the fact that her rounded features and full-bodied figure were at odds with the fashions of the day. Courtly ladies craved white alabaster skin, even rubbing leaden paste into their faces to achieve the right hue; Amaria was tanned to the colour of warm sand. Noble women were whippet slim; Amaria was all curves and dimples. Great Signoras used all sorts of arts to lighten their hair to red or gold; Amaria’s fall of hair had the blue-black sheen of a crow’s wing. Though no woman could ever be more beautiful to Nonna than her granddaughter, the old lady despaired of getting Amaria wed; for who wanted a maid of twenty, with plenty of meat on her bones but no sense and no fortune? Even more when she went about Pavia like this – like the whores that hung around the square at dusk.

  Nonna sighed and transferred the sage that she always chewed from one papery cheek to the other. She fiercely loved Amaria and wished the best for her, and because the love she held for the girl was so great that it made her afraid, she always spoke to her harsher than she meant. ‘I might have known that Silvana had something in the case. She encourages you in all your foolishness. Tidy yourself, child, and say your Ave Marias. Look to God instead of your fat friend, and pray instead of chattering like a parrot.’

  Amaria smoothed her hair and let down her skirts. She was used to such censure and it did not lessen her affection for the old lady. She found a bobbin and needle on the mantle and sat to sew her bodice. ‘But I saw him, Nonna. We were…looking in the water and I saw his reflection before I saw his person. He has red skin, claws and fur, but his eyes are kind. Do you think he is a woodsprite?’

  ‘Red skin? Claws and fur? Woodsprite? Where do you get such pagan notions? More like he is a poor fugitive from this lately ended action – a soldier who has lost his wits. Mayhap a Spaniard, for they are witless enough.’ (From Nonna’s levity of tone it could never be guessed that the Spanish had destroyed her life.) ‘What were you doing at the wells anyway, as if I need to ask? We have water aplenty and more besides, and a perfectly good spring in the town square from what I know of it.’

  Amaria dropped her head over her sewing and her cheeks flushed. ‘We were…that is…Silvana wanted to… look in the pozzo dei mariti.’

  Nonna snorted scornfully but her old eyes softened. She knew that local folklore had it that if you gazed into one of the natural wells in the woods beyond Pavia it was said that you would see the face of your future husband. She knew that Amaria longed one day to fall in love and be married, but she also knew that the girl’s advanced age and lowly station meant a good match were impossible, and a grandmother’s love precluded her from a bad one. Her disappointment for her granddaughter made Nonna even more acerbic than usual. ‘Girlish nonsense! Depend upon it. He were some hermit, or mayhap a Frenchman. They say the French king is took by the Spanish at Pavia…knocked clean off his horse by Cesare Hercolani…did he wear a crown, your future husband?’

  Amaria smiled. She knew nothing of the politics of the recent battle, just that many men had gone and few returned, lowering her chances of a match still more. But at least she had had no man to keen and cry over, and light candles like the widows in the basilica. She knew that the French king Francis was indeed a prisoner of the victorious Spanish who now held Milan. But she knew little of his citizens save that they had tails and it was said that they could converse with their horses, so curious and snorting was their language. She sighed. ‘You’re right. He must have been a madman. Or some soldier.’

  She sewed in silence looking closely at her work, but the talk of war and the French led her grandmother’s eyes to the wall where Filippo’s dagger hung above the mantle. Had it really been more than twenty years since Nonna had lost her son, her beloved only son, her shining boy? Had all that time truly passed since the great battle of Garigliano in 1503, when she and all the other mothers had prayed for news of their sons? The fate of the others, left to guess whether their sons lived or died was not to be hers though – the Spanish left her in no doubt of Filippo’s fate when they brought hundreds of corpses back to Pavia to display in the square. She and those other mothers had searched the grisly pile as the flies and buzzards circled, till she saw his beloved face, beaten and bloodied.
The Comune had decreed that the pile was to be burnt to prevent pestilence so she could not even bring him home to wash his body as she had done so often when he was a little boy, and lay him out with prayers as she ought. She had time to do little more than close his eyes and take from his body the dagger that he had placed in his hose – all that the looters had left. She had returned home, thinking she would never forget the stink of human flesh as the pyre burned hot and high and the smoke gave her eyes at last the tears that would not come.

  She might have continued so forever, numb with grief and feeling nothing, had God not given her Amaria. For at that very well where the girl had gone this morning she had found her, like Moses among the bulrushes. Babies were often left there, and more so now, with so many war orphans of girls that had been gotten into trouble by absent soldiers. Nonna had gone there for water, as the city’s wells were polluted with corpses. As she stooped to the pool she heard a strangled cry and parted the rough grass to find a naked, bloody child, its limbs weaving at the unaccustomed light, dark eyes blinking from the squashed features of a newborn. Nonna had swaddled the babe and taken it home, not knowing if it was a girl or a boy. She wanted only occupation, and a chance to feel again now that she had lost the son who had been her life. She sat impassive as the babe cried all night from the redgum, when it bawled all day for its honeyteat, when it protested at the swaddle that she sewed her into, for she knew now it was a girl. Nonna remained numb until the day that the baby fixed her currant eyes on her and smiled her first toothless smile, so guileless, so innocent of the war and all that had gone before it. Nonna held the babe to her broken heart and wept for the first time since she closed Filippo’s eyes.

  Nonna had saved Amaria and Amaria had saved her. She had a heart so full of love and grief that it would have burst had she not found another human soul to lavish it on. She called the child Amaria after Amore and gave her the name of Milan’s local Saint: Ambrogio. Orphans were always named thus in these parts in the hope of conferring the Saint’s blessing on their blighted lives. She had told the growing girl to call her simply Nonna – Grandmother – as she thought herself at forty too old to be known as mother. Amaria had grown into a beautiful, lively girl who would forever be talking, of both sense and nonsense all at once. Her beauty and good nature recommended her to many a young fellow, but her orphan status and poor circumstances always caused them to withdraw their affections. Amaria thanked God that she had Nonna to love her. And Nonna thanked the same God that she had found someone to love. In helping Amaria she had lived again. Now, twenty years later, it sounded as if someone else needed help, Wildman or not. God had taken Filippo but he had sent her Amaria, and she had been blessed. Was he now asking for something in return? She looked at her beloved granddaughter, and back at the dagger. She took it from the wall and placed it in her hose, at the right ankle exactly at the place on the legshank where she had taken it from her dead son. Amaria looked up surprised as Nonna said: ‘Show me.’

  They walked for the better part of an hour between Vespers and Compline. The bells of the basilica and the constant chatter of Amaria marked their passage and Nonna, as she always did, averted her eyes from the square as she passed the great cathedral. She could never see the piazza without seeing the pyre and smelling the flesh of her son. In doing this she missed, as Amaria did not, the appeals to God and all his Saints that were pinned to the church door – hundreds upon hundreds of scraps of fluttering paper, supplications for the return of the missing, the feared dead.

  As the ground began to rise behind the town, Amaria held out her arm to her grandmother and they continued thus, Nonna breathing so hard that she was forced to spit her sage. They paused and looked back at Pavia, the place they called the city of a hundred towers; the second city of Lombardy only to Milan which lay closeby to the north. Grandmother and granddaughter caught their breath, seated for a moment on the tufted grass, arms flung around each other’s shoulders. They watched the sunset rooks rising and wheeling around the tall stones that pierced the bloody sky. The red shoulder of the Duomo hunched against the skyline and the russet houses hugged the steep incline down to the riverside, where their own humble cot huddled in the crowded wharf. The Ponte Coperto, the famous covered bridge, seemed a knobbly red serpent which had flung its coils over the river. The waters of the Ticino were the colour of a blade. Beyond the river to the south lay the great field where thousands had lately died. Quiet and empty now; a dark and sorrowing plain looted of all the fallen arms and pecked clean of wasted flesh. As the sun dipped further, the bricks of the houses and towers glowed red in the evensun, as if they had drawn up blood from the battleground as a flower draws water.

  Aware of the latening hour, Nonna bid Amaria help her to her feet, and they went into the darkling woods. At last they reached the place they sought, but in the quiet dusk they saw only the dark blue pool and no Wildman. But a twig snapped, and Nonna drew her knife at once. These hard times had sharpened her wits and she often came into these hills to snare rabbits for the pot. Her old ears were sharper than Amaria’s and she led the girl through the undergrowth, to the leafy mouth of a black cave.

  He was there. As the old woman and the young inched into the darkness, Amaria called the name that she had heard given to the shuffling shadow. ‘Selvaggio!’

  ‘Simpleton,’ hissed her grandmother. ‘How can he answer to a name he doesn’t know he has?’ Nonna called in Milanese dialect: ‘Do not be afraid! We are here to help you in the name of Saint Ambrose.’ There was an awful pause as both women contemplated what they might have called forth. Nonna remembered Filippo and said, ‘We are neither Spanish nor French, but friends.’

  They saw his bright eyes as he shuffled to the light, but as he appeared Amaria gasped in horror. The creature was painfully thin, his ribs showing each and every one. His red skin was caked blood. His fur was matted hair and a beard of many months growth. His claws were the nails of toes and fingers that had grown unchecked till they curled around on themselves. He could have been any age between seventeen and seventy. But his eyes were leaf green and, as Amaria had said, had the light of kindness in them. It seemed he could not speak but he could hear – he came forward, almost collapsing at each step into the open. Nonna felt herself close to tears for the first time in twenty years, for so might Filippo have looked had he lived, and come back to her. Here was no savage. He was just a boy. Those that had done this were the savages. She stayed her fleeing granddaughter with one hand and held out the other to him. She hardly knew what she uttered but she knew it was right. ‘Come home,’ she said.

  CHAPTER 4

  Artists and Angels

  At the moment of Filippo’s death on the battlefield of Garigliano, a great artist began his great work. At the very instant that Filippo exhaled his last breath; the master’s brush touched the canvas of what was to become his greatest painting. But it is not this artist but his pupil who concerns us – a young man of exactly the unfortunate Filippo’s age. A man who would one day be great but not yet, a man who was lazy, dissolute and given to easy pleasure, a man with talent but without morals, a man who had never cared about anything in his life, certainly not enough to lay down his life for it, as Filippo had done. On this same fateful day when God took a soldier from his mother and gave an artist the touch of divinity to imbue his work, this creature of pleasure was probably beneath His notice. This man’s name was:

  ‘Bernardino Luini!’ The shout, almost a bellow, echoed through the studiolo. Bernardino recognized the voice instantly. It was the voice he and his lover had both dreaded hearing when, last night in her bedchamber, they had sported together until the dawnlight warmed the roofs of Florence. If Bernardino were honest with himself, he had to admit that the fear of the husband’s return had added a certain frisson to their coupling, for dawnlightbeauty; for all that he had met her while she was modelling for his master. Bernardino was used to the anger of husbands, or what his friends laughingly called the ‘mariti arrab biati’
when Bernardino met them with another black eye or cut lip marring his striking beauty. But there was such venom in this voice that he instantly dropped his brushes and scanned the studiolo for a place to hide.

  Everywhere there were canvases being oiled or stretched, frames being constructed, or apprentices finishing the work of their master. Unhappily, no ideal hiding place presented itself, until Bernardino’s eyes lit on the dais at the end of the long room. There sat his current amour, hands crossed virtuously, but her eyes a little shaded from her nighttime exertions. Her hair hung in dusky coils about her face, and her green gown helped her sallow complexion not at all. Had there been more time, Bernardino might have asked himself once again why his Master da Vinci was so intent on painting her – she had not even the bloom of youth, being the mother of two sons. When he, at last, was allowed to paint the entire female form he would choose a lady of passing beauty – an angel to reflect the divinity of his work…but there was no time for such speculation. Bernardino had found his hiding place – there was a rough screen behind the model’s head, a sort of triptych that he himself had constructed. It was a covered wooden frame and Bernardino had painted on the stretched cloth, at his master’s instruction, a pastoral whimsy of the Tuscan countryside – trees, hills and a stream. Bernardino had balked at the task, he had thought himself ready to paint the human figure, but Leonardo, for some reason, seemed intent on giving his student the most menial of tasks. Bernardino was barely ever allowed to pick up a brush unless it was to paint hands. Hands, hands and more hands. For some reason Bernardino had a natural aptitude for these the most difficult of subjects, and was asked to paint them again and again. He never got a sniff of the more interesting work, unless it was to sketch out the vast charcoal cartoons that his master then completed with his greater genius. He had hoped that Leonardo would recognize his drawing talent and reward him with a commission. But now he was glad that his talent had been so little recognised, for the screen would do nicely. As he ran towards the dais the sitter widened her eyes in alarm – she too had recognised the voice and feared that confrontation was inevitable. But she need not have feared. Bernardino was a coward. He held his finger swiftly to his lips and slipped behind the screen, seconds before the studiolo’s double doors crashed open and Francesco di Bartolomeo di Zanobi del Giocondo entered the room.