The number of palle was fluid, not fixed, and the palle were said to represent either dents on the shield of the original Medici, a knight named Averardo who fought under Charlemagne and received the dents in a heroic fight against a giant terrorizing the peasants in the Tuscan countryside, or the round shape of pills or cupping glasses, as the Medici had originally been apothecaries. Some people said the palle represented coins. I thought the undefined shape was a brilliant ploy by the shrewd Medici. It allowed people to see in the balls what they wanted to see. The Medici knew how to engage the imagination, and thus the hearts, of their countrymen.
On a pedestal in the center of the courtyard stood Donatello’s sculpture of David. I admired its technical brilliance and its daring in being the first freestanding nude created since antiquity. However, the sculpture was unnecessarily erotic, with its sinuous, girlish hips and its strutting posture emphasized by teasing high boots. Why should David be so provocatively posed? Only to please those men who loved other men. I remembered all too well, wishing I could forget after so many decades, the patrons at Silvano’s. There was no surpassing or understanding the labyrinthine nature of desire.
My own desires lacked complexity. I simply enjoyed women, their soft skin and long silken hair. So I pursued my own simple desires and did not judge other men unnecessarily. My shadowed past and the dark deeds I had committed to survive made that imperative. Moreover, Donatello had been a good friend when he died, the same year that Piero was almost overthrown. Still, because of Silvano’s, I had difficulty being comfortable with men who loved other men.
I found the ever-ebullient Leonardo in a sunny corner of the courtyard, chatting with a scrivener who sat on a marble bench, taking advantage of the mellow weather to copy a manuscript outdoors. The Medici employed dozens of scriveners to copy their manuscripts, either to sell them for profit or to present them as gifts to foreign rulers and thus curry favor. It was impossible to visit the Palazzo Medici without tripping over one of these supercilious men.
“Professore!” Leonardo cried. “Isn’t this a manuscript you sent to Cosimo?”
“The Corpus Hermeticum?” said the scrivener, a narrow, thin-lipped man with ink-stained hands and a high, arched nose. He sniffed. “I don’t think so. This manuscript came into the Medici hands in ’61. Your professore with the big coarse muscles”—he rolled his eyes, finding it humorous that I would be a teacher—“would have been a young man your age!”
“I’m older than I look,” I said.
“And more discerning?” The scrivener smiled, looking down his nose at me, which was a feat, considering that he was seated and I was standing.
“I don’t know,” I said easily. “But I’m discerning enough to hope you have other skills, signore, than copying manuscripts. I hear there’s a new process for printing from movable type that will soon make your skills obsolete.”
“My skills will never be obsolete,” the man argued shrilly. “That is a vulgar process, practiced among barbarians in some German city. Real collectors like the Medici would be ashamed to own a printed book made by some gross mechanical process!”
“There are printing presses in Napoli and Roma. Soon there’ll be one in Florence. They make good sense; they turn out books cheaply and quickly. They’ll catch on,” I said. “You should learn a new trade, just to be on the safe side. Sheep-herding, maybe.”
“You have a low and common mind, signore,” the scrivener hissed. He gathered his manuscript to his chest and flounced off in a huff. I took his spot and sat down beside Leonardo.
“That was not kind to poor Armando,” Leonardo chastened me.
“I don’t like pretentious scribes.”
“I think you’re right about the printing press. You know that when I daydream, I feel as if I catch a glimpse of the future. I’ve seen things like the world full of books that are inexpensive and abundant, that everyone reads, because of the printing press.”
“An interesting world you see.”
“As did you; I often think of the vision you told me about, the very first day I met you. But something’s amiss. Luca, you have something to say, and you’re not happy about it,” the young man said suddenly. He wore a yellow and pink lucco that he’d shortened himself, whose flamboyant design he’d probably foisted on the ever-permissive Caterina, and ragged gray hose with holes in them. I knew he owned at least two pairs of fine, unblemished hose, because I myself had taken the grumbling Ser Piero to the tailor to purchase them. But Leonardo eschewed them for these torn old things; he had his own unique sartorial taste.
“You are too perceptive, ragazzo,” I said. “You read me like Armando’s manuscript.”
“Better than that, I hope.” Leonardo chuckled. “Armando copies Latin, and I’m terrible at reading Latin! I feel like I used to know it and don’t want to be bothered anymore.”
“Your father has apprenticed you to Verrocchio,” I said baldly, not to delay it more.
“But I do read you,” Leonardo murmured, as if I hadn’t spoken. “Sometimes it’s like a light pours forth from people, and I can just barely make it out. Your lights are like veils with torn places for the light to shine through, almost unwillingly. The holes in your lights aren’t empty, they’re full. Full of secrets. You harbor secrets, Luca Bastardo. Secret gifts, secret fears. And the hand of fate is upon you.”
“All men have secrets.”
“Not like you.” He shook his golden head. I looked into his finely sculpted face and noted that auburn stubble darkened his cheek and chin. His beard was coming in. I’d have to take him to a barber to be shaved and instruct him in caring for the beard. I should have done so before now. I had been remiss. I was turning him over to Verrocchio unfinished, like one of Leonardo’s own sketches. Part of me had known that Leonardo was entrusted to me for only a short time, but another part of me thought our time would continue without an end, as my own life seemed to. Despite the great spans I was unaccountably allotted, I did not understand time. There were things I had meant to teach my young charge, to say to him, and now I wouldn’t have the opportunity. I tore my eyes away and found my gaze resting on the David.
“You don’t like Donatello’s sculpture,” observed Leonardo.
“I liked the artist.”
“Why don’t you like it?” he asked.
“It’s not that I don’t like it,” I replied. I closed my eyes, seeking a greater honesty with him, now that we were parting. “Something from my childhood. It makes me uncomfortable to remember it.” I opened my eyes and the young man was gazing steadily at me.
“Your childhood. That was long ago, wasn’t it, Luca Bastardo? There’s an old panel that the nuns at San Giorgio own. There’s a boy in it, an onlooker, he has your face. I’ve studied it many times, to be sure. The coloring, the features, it could only be you, professore. I know this. What you said to the scrivener is true: you are much older than you look.”
I let my breath out slowly, nodded, turned my eyes up to the sky, remembered Giotto’s beautiful panel of St. John’s ascension, the infinite blue sky into which the saint so gracefully rose. I whispered, “Giotto painted that panel. He showed it to me without telling me he’d put my face in it, and then when I recognized myself, he laughed and told me that a man who knew himself would go far in life.” It was a relief to admit this to someone I could trust, someone who wouldn’t use my past as leverage against me. After more than a century of protecting my secret, of hiding the inescapable and alienating fact of my great age from other people, it gave me chills to speak it now, openly and without fear.
“Ficino says things like that,” Leonardo said in a neutral tone of voice. “Ficino likes to get his friends together at banquets and have discussions, and he talks about the immortal soul. What is the soul? Can it be known? Is it even a thing? Is it essence? Is it the same as spirit, incorporeal and invisible? I think soul is a quality or an amplitude, that it has to do with imagination and love and nature. I’m not much interested in talking
about it when there’s so much to explore in nature that isn’t nebulous.
“Ficino says the essence of each person originates as a star in the heavens. But what is a star, that’s the better question. What is the sun, what is the earth? By what rules do they operate? Any intelligent man who studies the night sky realizes that it is the earth that moves around the sun, not the other way around! Stars are natural objects; can they really determine human destiny? Ficino would refer you to a horoscope to understand your unusual longevity. He’s a brilliant man, but his astrology, so like necromancy, is supreme foolishness.” The boy shook his head. “Could a star grant you a life that stretches past a hundred years, professore mio?”
“There are men who say my long life and youth arise out of necromancy and enchantment,” I admitted.
“That’s the point,” Leonardo said, with some satisfaction. “Necromancy and enchantment don’t exist except in the minds of fools! There must be some natural reason for your long life span. Internal to your body, perhaps.” He perused me up and down, examining me as if I were some specimen on a table, as I used to see in Geber’s laboratory. “Too bad we can’t examine your parents to see if you inherited your gifts from them, as one inherits hair color or a particular shape of the nose, or if your longevity is yours alone. I remember you told me when we first met that your parents were attended by Cathars. Perhaps this longevity is the great secret which brought them together with Cathars, who are keepers of secrets.”
“I’ve looked for my parents. There are one or two small, insignificant questions I’d ask them,” I said, with humor and regret and a trace of the old longing.
“I know you looked for them.” Leonardo smiled. “You used to quiz me and my mother about the Cathars, and then the next day your agents would come to your cottage at the vineyard. I’d hide outside and eavesdrop on your instructions to them.”
“So naughty, poking into other people’s business!”
“You wouldn’t have it any other way.” He flashed his dimples at me in his old, boyish way, treating me to that smile like the sun coming out from behind the clouds. “There’s another Cathar legend. After Satan created the world through rebellion, God sent to earth an angel who had remained loyal. That angel was Adam, the direct ancestor of my mother’s people, the Cathars. But Adam was captured by Satan and forced to take human form. Since Adam lived in this form against his will, he was saved, with all his descendants. And Adam was the father of Seth, who in turn fathered a race of long-lived people. Perhaps you’re one of those sons of Seth.”
“Caterina told me about Seth, and I’ve always wondered about that,” I admitted. “But I don’t know for sure that the nobles who lost a son were my parents. I simply don’t know how to solve the riddle of my years. Perhaps my soul is too earthbound to free itself,” I offered, with both irony and whimsy. If I didn’t know my origins, at least I knew myself. I knew that I was not particularly soulful, in the way Giotto and Petrarca had been, and Leonardo and Ficino were, and even the magnificent, manipulative Lorenzo was, with his poetry and statesmanship and athleticism. I was literal, dogged, not particularly creative, though I revered creativity in other men. I could not paint, sculpt, or write in verse. My gift was something I could not claim credit for. I could only shrug it off as a rich joke for whichever God wanted the diversion.
“The Corpus Hermeticum would imply that you have an abundance of the fifth essence beyond the four physical elements; it would say that there’s something particular about your arcanum, that your arcanum is a larger receptacle of the celestial effluvia that pours down in a torrent through the souls of all species and all individuals. But I don’t think so.” Leonardo raised his golden-brown brows. “I think your longevity results from something that can be measured and examined in nature. Something about your organs renewing themselves, perhaps, or the structure of your organs, or the amount and healthfulness of your physical fluids. It’s an interesting question. I wish I knew more about organs; someday I shall make a great study of the mechanical structure of man, to reveal the inner mysteries. Then I will know about you, Luca. I believe that Ficino’s mystical soul will come back to merge with the body in some way. I don’t wish to be considered heretical, but I think”—he paused, his eyes alight—“that the soul resides in the seat of judgment, and the judgment resides in the place where all the senses meet, which is called the common sense; and the senses of hearing and vision and smell and touch pass through the body, the body is the vehicle….”
“You’re to start with Verrocchio soon. Maybe tomorrow. He was most impressed by your sketches and begged your father to let you start even today,” I said. “You will have a great career as an artist, ragazzo mio. The world will know of your genius. Fortune and fame are yours!”
“I will get old before you do, Bastardo,” Leonardo answered, with some sadness. He stared into me, as if he saw clearly the starlike essence that other men sensed but couldn’t quite perceive. In a musing voice, he said, “I don’t know if I will die before you, though…. I think you have other secrets, dangerous secrets that Lorenzo de’ Medici knows and uses to keep you tied to him. I see the way you look at him, with distrust and anger and respect.”
“I will always be your friend,” I said softly. He wasn’t going to discuss his apprenticeship and our parting. It was too close to his heart; he had, after all, chosen me as his teacher. I rose and stood in front of Leonardo.
“It will be a few years before I see you again, ragazzo. Apprentices work day and night to learn their craft. They are always at the beck and call of their master. Verrocchio will keep you busy, as he should.” I put my hand on Leonardo’s shoulder and was surprised to feel the consolamentum start, the soft lyrical flow of something, a transfer of spirit or whatever natural thing Leonardo would want to call it. It originated in the warm lucent percussion of my heart and moved into the young man seated on the marble bench in front of me. His face softened and he smiled, closed his eyes, and drank in the flow. The radiance around him which always made him seem more vital than other people seemed to expand and brighten. I waited until the flow of the consolamentum slowed, then I took my hand from Leonardo and placed it on my heart. “It has been my joy and my honor to spend time with you. You have enriched my life.”
Leonardo’s eyes were damp and he blinked rapidly and looked away. He could not answer and I finally walked out of the courtyard. “I will discover your secrets, professore,” he called after me. “And I will find a way to help you with them!”
SO LEONARDO PROGRESSED to a better teacher than me. It left more of my time available for Lorenzo’s use, and he took advantage of that. When he was nineteen, his mother, Lucrezia, chose the Roman aristocrat Clarice Orsini as a bride for him, which scandalized Florence. For him to marry outside Tuscany was tantamount to a betrayal, especially when Tuscan women were the most beautiful and intelligent in Christendom! But canny Lorenzo preferred to scandalize all of Florence rather than to anger particular families by choosing one Tuscan bride over another. He also liked the advantages of the alliance with a wealthy family of old nobility that had important ties to both Roma and Napoli.
In June 1469, the match was made.
A few months later, early in December, Piero the gouty died. Two days after Piero’s death, a solemn delegation from the city asked Lorenzo to assume its guidance. He accepted, though he was only twenty, and as vigorous and lusty as any newlywed twenty-year-old man. But Lorenzo immediately showed his perspicacity and his fitness for the position he’d inherited more from his grandfather Cosimo than from his sickly father, by appointing a council of seasoned men, myself included, to advise him. I remained in the background, though.
The Silvano clan was dispersed from Florence, but that might be temporary. And they had friends. The Confraternity of the Red Feather awaited a resurgence of the Inquisition and other instruments of the Church’s intolerance. Besides, other men might notice that I didn’t age as they did. Circumspection behooved me. So Lorenzo kept m
e busy with private errands, sensitive diplomatic missions, the carrying of secret messages to foreign ambassadors and princes, and the like. Sometimes I arranged for a woman to meet him; Lorenzo had an unquenchable appetite for the fairer sex, as I did, though I planned to be faithful when I married. I did not judge him for his adultery. I had committed too many dark acts to sit in judgment of other men, and besides, Florentine men of wealth deemed it their right to keep mistresses. Lorenzo considered himself first among Florentine men, with all accompanying privileges. He was on course to lead the city to greater glory, both for itself and for the Medici, when the path of history turned. Generous Pope Paul II, a good friend to Lorenzo, died in 1471, and the Franciscan Francesco della Rovere ascended to the papacy as Sixtus IV.
One fine summer day in June of 1472, Lorenzo summoned me. I thought it was to discuss another of the carnivals and pageants with which he entertained Florence, and which endeared him to pleasure-loving Florentines. I was strolling in the Mercato Vecchio with Sandro Filipepi, who inexplicably called himself by the name Botticelli, which was his brother’s nickname. We meandered through stalls of pink strawberries and red raspberries and cured ham and silver fish brought in from the sea and tables set with fresh game like grouse and deer. We joked and negotiated the price for a tondo of a Madonna and child that I wanted. It wasn’t for devotional reasons, or perhaps it was, considering how I felt about art. Sandro painted in a graceful style, depicting bodies that were at once ethereal and voluptuous; his female figures were celebrations of beauty and femininity, light and receptivity. I was intent on acquiring one of his works to place in my personal collection and accord the reverence it deserved.
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