Signora Da Vinci

by Maxwell, Robin

  Bianca turned the page. Here was an array of eight connected rectangles with the sun’s rays from a nearby window bouncing off them. And another page with the box device again, but this time she could see quite clearly a brilliantly rendered sketch of a naked man lying on a table nearby, his arms crossed over his groin.

  Sweet Jesus, she thought. Blessed Isis!

  Despite her desperation to view the rest of the notebook, she found herself unerringly gentle. But within a few pages she was sure—here was Leonardo’s shroud! The fruit of the great conspiracy of which she had been a part. Had the maestro sent her this box full of treasures?

  She rushed back to the marriage chest. There on top of the remaining books was a parchment letter folded and sealed with red wax. Bianca took it up and held it to her heart, then walked as slowly to the window as a bride to the altar. She broke the seal and by the cold winter light began to read.

  Bianca, dear girl,

  How do you like your treasure chest? Which is your favorite book? There are so many I love. This copy of the Timaeus was my favorite as a young girl. I hope the contents will provide you with many months, perhaps years, of reading and translation. If I’m not mistaken you are not schooled in Hebrew, so that language you will be compelled to learn.

  I have placed in your keeping Leonardo’s notebook documenting our labors with the unholy shroud that now, I understand, is displayed and venerated in Turin. If you wish to read the notebook’s writing you must employ a mirror. But my purpose for sending you this folio is twofold. Of course I know it will be in the best of hands, our secret perfectly safe.

  But more important it is a reminder to you, Bianca, of all that you are—truth-seeking, warmhearted, and courageous. I understand that the Fates have blessed you with neither a loving husband nor any children of your own. I imagine that you—tender soul that you are and bereft of friends—might sometimes get sick with loneliness. At times like these it is easy to forget your true worth and to belittle yourself.

  I remember so well that day you led us down the moldering stairs to the place that hid your family’s treasure, unlocking the crypt with a golden key in an act so dangerous that if discovered could have been the end of you. Remember it was a relic that, in its natural state, was no more than a worthless rag but one that, by your will and wisdom, became the weapon that slayed the unholy beast of Florence.

  Take comfort in such memories, Bianca. Lorenzo taught me that before he died, and I have lived by it. You are a champion. As brave as any knight riding into battle.

  There is one final gift to be found in a small metal box at the bottom of my mother’s marriage chest—the recipe for a sweet confection and its vital ingredient, tiny balls of bitter resin. Eat the cake and your chilly chamber will dissolve into celestial light and sound and the wonder of fantastical worlds without and within.

  I will write of my travels till these old fingers of mine can no longer hold a quill.

  I remain your friend and fellow seeker,

  Caterina

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  While I dove into dozens of books about the Italian Renaissance and their brightest stars to research Signora da Vinci, there were two that served as my impetus and inspiration for the direction I took, and provided priceless insights into that period—what I came to call “The Shadow Renaissance.”

  Lynn Picknett’s and Clive Prince’s two brilliantly researched and utterly compelling books—The Templar Revelation and Turin Shroud— opened a little-known world-beneath-a-world to me. Reading about the all but ignored philosophical and esoteric underpinnings of the movers and shakers of the Renaissance—particularly Leonardo and his ties to the Lirey Shroud (later known as the Shroud of Turin)—exploded in my mind and literally set me and my characters on the path to my plot.

  Picknett and Prince did not stop with compiling and comparing the best theories and solutions to the greatest mysteries of the times. When it came to proving their own theory that Leonardo da Vinci perpetrated the shroud hoax using his own face for Jesus’s, they did months of scientific experiments in their garage with a homemade camera obscura , plaster models, and several types of chemicals and salts known to be available in fifteenth-century Europe. They were relentless with their trials and errors until they had convinced themselves—and me—that not only was it possible for Leonardo to have orchestrated this masterpiece of deception, but quite probable indeed. I cannot recommend the Picknett/Prince books more highly.

  I was fortunate to have as inspiration for my characterization of Leonardo one of my oldest and dearest friends—Los Angeles artist and philosopher Tom Ellis. He is the one true genius I know, who has generously decorated my life with his masterful and wildly eclectic works of art. Outrageous, flamboyant, intellectual, and eccentric beyond measure, he shares with da Vinci a sweet temperament, worship of nature, and an obsessive desire to explore the deepest wells of religion, sexuality, psychedelics, and the human condition. I couldn’t have had a more perfect template to reference the maestro than Tom.

  I owe a special debt to my mom, Skippy Ruter-Sitomer, who, in 2006, left us for that great South Florida Retirement Community in the Sky. Had it not been for her, I would never have had firsthand knowledge of a mother like Caterina—one who unfailingly believed in her children and wholly accepted them, warts and all. Skippy was kind, and unfailingly generous with her love. She knew how to sacrifice without martyrdom. She was a woman who rolled with the punches, continued to evolve, and surprisingly became more mentally and philosophically flexible with age . . . not less. Nothing shocked her, she was always good for a laugh, and by the age of eighty-nine had learned to swear like a sailor. Skippy enjoyed every one of my heroines, but I think she would have loved Caterina the best, identified with a woman whose proudest achievement in life was being the very best of mothers.

  This is the third of my books to benefit from my good neighbor James “The Padre” Arimond, who is always ready with Latin benedictions and religious expertise. Kathleen Chambers braved my scribbled, scratched-out, arrow-ridden yellow pads to type the first draft of this novel, and lent her knowledge about herbal medicine.

  My mentor, Betty Hammett, gave me the first read and a thumbs-up. Old friends and fellow authors Billie Morton and Gregory Michaels offered insightful notes and myriad helpful suggestions.

  My trusted agents of many years, David Forrer and Kimberly Witherspoon, believed in Signora da Vinci from the get-go. David, especially, has been like a dog with a tasty bone, something any author in her right mind dreams about in a representative. Wonderful, too, when your agents are creative and can be counted on to give you worthy story input. Many, many thanks, you two. And a special acknowledgment to Susan Hobson, my foreign agent—a broad who works tirelessly abroad.

  What can I say about the perfect editor? Kara Cesare loves her work and is dedicated to that old and most honorable profession. She has proven herself to be a wellspring of brilliant ideas and clever solutions to the stickiest of my stumbling blocks. Moreover she has helped me understand the fine balance of art and commerce in the publishing world. Kara is young enough to be my daughter but wise enough to be my mother. I am so grateful to have her as a working partner.

  How do I thank the person without whom my life would not be worth living? A melodramatic description of Max Thomas, my husband of twenty-five years? Perhaps. But he’s also the silliest man I know. There are no depths to which he will not stoop to make me laugh—a lifesaving talent so necessary in these whacked-out times. All my love to you, Barney.

  A CONVERSATION WITH ROBIN MAXWELL

  Q. You’ve written six novels about fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England and Ireland. What possessed you to abandon the Tudors and head south to Renaissance Italy?

  A. I feel that, for now, I’ve “written myself out” with the most fascinating individuals of that most fabulous and colorful place and time. I always insist on being, if not the first to write about a given character (nearly impossible with such well-known f
igures), then having a strong and wholly original “angle” or “hook” for my story: Elizabeth I and Robin Dudley’s illegitimate son in The Queen’s Bastard; the intimate mother/daughter connection from beyond the grave in Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn; and the early lives of Anne and Mary Boleyn at the erotic French court in Mademoiselle Boleyn.

  For some time I’d been intrigued by the ridiculously fertile mind and staggering accomplishments of Leonardo da Vinci. Long before The da Vinci Code, he was a firmly entrenched icon in human culture and consciousness, but my research piled mystery upon mystery about this polymath genius. However, Leonardo was so obsessively secretive about his personal life, and was such a success in that regard, that with all his thousands of pages of notebooks and various works of art, invention, science, architecture and philosophy, very little was revealed about Leonardo the person.

  And while we do know something about da Vinci’s father, Piero—his social climbing and business successes, his almost inhuman coldness to his bastard son, and his struggle to sire legitimate children—we know next to nothing about da Vinci’s mother. By my own simple logic I deduced that Piero, while an intelligent and resourceful man, never displayed an ounce of creativity, that divine spark that utterly defined Leonardo.

  That would, of course, leave his mother as the donor of the “genius genes.” But of the woman who gave birth to one of the world’s most remarkable minds, we possess exactly two facts: 1. Her name was Caterina. 2. Leonardo was taken from her the day after his birth to be brought up, as a bastard, in the Vinci home of Piero’s father, Antonio.

  Virtually everything else is conjecture. We don’t know Caterina’s age when she gave birth to Leonardo—fifteen or twenty-five; whether she was a mideastern slave girl or “a girl of good blood”; if Piero loved Caterina, or simply used her; whether she was a Vinci native or an out-of-towner. What I can (and did) imagine is how any woman would feel having her child ripped from her arms one day after he was born, knowing that the household he was going to be raised in would be an unloving one.

  Clearly, Piero’s grandfather, who recorded Leonardo’s exact date and time of birth and baptism, believed that Leonardo’s mother had married Antonio “Accattabriga” Buti several years after his illegitimate grandson’s birth, but in those days all sorts of additions and subtractions were made to family rolls for purposes of tax breaks and evasions and business scams, and the da Vincis and Butis did, according to records, do business together.

  Q. Why did you choose to have Caterina come to live with Leonardo at the old ducal palace in Milan?

  A. In 1493, according to notations in Leonardo’s writings, an old woman named Caterina came to live with him for a little more than a year before he paid for her funeral. It’s not clear whether it was his mother or a servant. Another phrase written on a notebook page asks, “What does La Caterina want?” Some historians believe the maestro would never have mused about the thoughts and desires of a mere serving woman nor made detailed lists about the costs of her funeral arrangements. Others say that calling her “La Caterina” gives her a certain stature. Still others insist that the “La” is used in a cynical way—that she was a nobody.

  Whoever this Caterina might have been, she was the only female member of his household that Leonardo ever mentions in his voluminous notebooks, and she was old enough to be his mother.

  Q. Isn’t it a stretch to create an entire novel around a woman with so little history?

  A. All of my research added up to an enormous hole in a most fascinating period, within the life of its most compelling personage. Because I’m a writer of historical fiction, these gaping chasms are what I live for. They provide a rare opportunity to create something from little or nothing. I am happily forced to take the tiniest cluster of cells, no larger than a fetal blastula, examine the medium in which it develops, the world into which it is born and grows, its ancestors and associates, until it blossoms into a living, breathing, thinking, feeling human being. With so little known about Caterina, the sky was the limit.

  Because I had chosen that she was the parent responsible for not only Leonardo da Vinci’s brilliance, but his sweet temperament and supreme open-mindedness, I was free to give her the best qualities a woman could possibly have. I made her the mother that every child deserves to have—one who, without becoming a martyr, would do anything and everything to protect that child, shower him with love and tenderness, and provide him with every possible opportunity.

  Happily for me, what began as sacrifices Caterina made for Leonardo, turned into the greatest adventure a woman in fifteenth-century Italy could imagine in her wildest dreams. Disguising herself as a man, being accepted into the Platonic Academy, becoming the lover of Lorenzo the Magnificent, meeting and conspiring with the greatest minds of the times, were not only boons to Caterina’s character arc, but they were doorways into the topics that I was keen to explore in a book about the period.

  Q. Signora da Vinci was a highly unusual take on the Renaissance. Was it really the way you wrote it?

  A. For me, the Italian Renaissance was not simply an explosion of the art and architecture that most people think of when they hear the words. What my research uncovered was a “Shadow Renaissance” steeped in Platonic and Hermetic philosophy and Egyptian magic. Almost every ruler, writer, scientist or thinker in those years at least toyed with alchemy and the occult. Despite the church’s prohibitions, most of these great men (and a few women) took these views very seriously indeed. Few admitted to being outright atheists like Leonardo, but attempting to meld Christian Scripture with the pagan mysteries was extremely common, especially in educated and highly cultured circles . . . even in Rome.

  Despite its importance, one finds little if anything written about the Platonic Academy and its impact on the early Italian Renaissance—as though it was a men’s social club and not an overarching philosophy that informed the lives of its members, making them especially vulnerable when Savonarola came to power. Authors—of both fiction and nonfiction—tend to ignore the implications of such towering figures as Lorenzo de Medici—one of the greatest patrons of the Academy—adhering to such heretical beliefs.

  Q. You rarely see Lorenzo’s name tied with da Vinci’s. Yet in Signora da Vinci, Lorenzo acts as Leonardo’s “godfather.”

  A. Lorenzo’s tie with Leonardo is pondered in some detail by historians. Some say the maestro was ignored by Il Magnifico, who felt the lowborn artist was “below him socially.” Others go so far as to suggest that Leonardo—like Michelangelo after him—was actually housed for a time in the Palazzo Medici and treated as a son.

  While there’s little evidence that the artist lived in the Florence palace, I find it hard to believe that Lorenzo would not have held the insanely talented young man, apprentice to the family’s own court artist, Andrea Verrocchio, in very high regard.

  And I believe that in 1484 Leonardo’s leave-taking from Florence for Milan, to the court of Lorenzo’s friend, Ludovico Il Moro, was a well-planned move, probably to protect the well-known heretic and necromancer (scandalized by his sodomy trial) from the worsening religious persecutions he would certainly have suffered had he stayed. Too, Lorenzo was such a man-of-the-people that I cannot imagine him snubbing Leonardo simply because he hadn’t been born noble.

  Q. Don’t most people believe Leonardo da Vinci was a homosexual?

  A. As for the maestro’s sexuality, that subject, too, has mystified his biographers. When people learn I’ve written about da Vinci’s life, it’s usually the first question asked about him. Once more, his secretive nature serves him very well, for while everyone seems to have extremely strong opinions about the man, no one—biographer or historian—has conclusive evidence about whether Leonardo was straight, gay, bisexual, or asexual.

  My best guess is that his sexual preferences changed according to his age, his social setting, and the emotional and political pressures brought to bear upon him. You can’t forget that sodomy was considered a burnable offense by the chu
rch in Florence, even before Savonarola arrived on the scene. As a young apprentice in Verrocchio’s bottega (Verrocchio was himself openly homosexual), Leonardo was surrounded by lots of “pretty boys,” who had little or no money to spend on whores, so homosexual behavior was perhaps more of a necessity than a choice.

  The famous sodomy trial (that most people cite as proof of Leonardo’s proclivities) in which two of the others arrested were related to the Medici (and probably a means to embarrass them) proved nothing whatsoever about Leonardo, except that he caroused (or hobnobbed) with the boys of “good families.” Once he was a bit older, there was every reason to think he visited female as well as male prostitutes.

  I do think the sodomy trial had an effect on Leonardo’s sexuality— putting him off it for a time. Despite charges being dropped for lack of evidence, the scandal seemed to traumatize the young, exquisitely sensitive young man. Once an outgoing, fancily clad man-about-town, he became quite reclusive and dove into his human dissections in the nether regions of Santa Maria Novella Hospital. That his professional relationship and friendship (perhaps love) with the alchemically inclined Zoroastre began to grow during this period and last through many, many years, was perhaps a result of sharing that terrible experience.

  Later in life, Leonardo appeared asexual to me. While he adored having beautiful young men surrounding him as apprentices, he was so caught up in the “life of the mind” that sex may have become quite unimportant to him. Some of his writings suggest that he thought the sex act silly, the sex organs repulsive, and the only redeeming qualities the attractive faces of the participants—all that kept the human race from dying out. Even later in Leonardo’s life he carried on close friendships with several women, and it’s been suggested that any one of them might have been his lover.