Da Vinci's Tiger

by L. M. Elliott

  At that, my uncle had stood abruptly from his desk to tower over me. “Luigi is a friend. And the Niccolini family has a long history of serving as priori and gonfalonieri loyal to the Medici. I’ll hear no more about it.”

  It was the reference to Florence’s top lawmakers that finally made sense. Even though names were drawn from official lottery bags every two months—making it seem that any business-owning citizen had the chance to serve in the city’s governance—everyone knew that the pool of names dropped into a borsa was controlled and presorted in backroom agreements.

  I was being sold off for a better chance in a lottery.

  I could not stop what came out of my mouth next. “A fourteen-hundred-florin dowry is a high price to pay for merely improving the odds of your name being pulled out of a leather bag, don’t you think, uncle? Or perhaps it is in actuality . . . a well-priced bribe.”

  Uncle Bartolomeo’s eyes narrowed like a lizard’s. “Maybe I felt the amount was well worth it to rid this house of you and your insolence. And maybe it took that large a sum for any man to be willing to take you.”

  So I was married on a cold and sleety day. Few people stood on the street to view the traditional parade from the bride’s house to her new home. I rode the customary white horse but was bedraggled and wet to the bone when I arrived at Luigi’s house on via San Procolo—so much smaller and so inferior to my childhood’s palazzo.

  A few months later, Uncle Bartolomeo was selected to be one of the city’s all-important eight priori.

  “My lady.” Sancha interrupted my bitter memories. “Do you wish to check the wine barrels?”

  Hoisting my skirts, I followed Sancha down steep wooden stairs to the dank dark of the wine cellar. I felt moisture ooze into my slippers. Carefully, we held a torch up to each barrel, close enough to see if it leaked, far enough away that it didn’t catch fire.

  Through the floorboards came the drone of men above, bartering and cajoling for deals. My husband negotiated with all manner of craftsmen involved in the twenty-seven steps necessary to finishing wool—importers, carders, spinners, warpers, and weavers, all the way down to the men who worked the scalding, foul-smelling vats of dye and stretched the cloth out to dry afterward. Florence was a city where rich and poor were bound together in a trade, their fates the same in terms of the ups and downs of a good and its market. Even the humblest spinner might call my husband by his Christian name. Conversations were always animated, with little deference shown for rank.

  Their feet shuffled above me. Voices rose and fell like plainchant. Suddenly, I felt like I was in a crypt. Was this tedium all there would be to my life? My checking supplies while men in other rooms made the deals that ran our city?

  “The barrels are fine,” I snapped, hastily clambering back up the stairs to seek the sunny warmth of our courtyard garden. Later in the spring, it would be scented with sage, rosemary, mint, onions, and leeks. But now all plants were dry and cracked.

  How I missed the airiness, the colonnades and beautiful statuary of our large courtyard, the classically inspired lines of our Benci palazzo. To create it, my father had joined two large houses on via degli Alberti, one block from the Arno and one from the Piazza di Santa Croce. He constructed a beautiful Roman-like atrium in its center to match the Medici’s. But in truth, it wasn’t the no-nonsense simplicity of Luigi’s house that so bothered me. After all, I had spent years in the austerity of a nunnery. What disappointed me most was how barren of books it was. Luigi preferred his ledgers to any kind of poetry. Most of the books in our home were mine, smuggled in with my trousseau in the wedding chest all brides brought with them.

  The night before my nuptials, as I hid Dante’s Divine Comedy and Ovid’s Metamorphoses underneath my linen chemises, my brother Giovanni had entered my room. Seeing that I trembled with anxious anticipation and—truth be told—outrage at my fate, he had tried to calm me. “Do not be afraid, sister. Or angry. You will be just a five-minute saunter away. I will check on you every day if you wish. And Luigi will not mind if you visit home. Remember, he and Uncle Bartolomeo were great friends in their youth. Luigi was often at our dinner table.”

  My brother continued, using the same soothing voice with which he’d calmed the injured horse at the joust. “We know him, Ginevra. Why, I recall when I was very young, crashing into him as I chased a ball. He just laughed—unlike Uncle Bartolomeo, who might have cuffed me for it!” Giovanni took my hand and concluded with his earnest, boyish smile. “Luigi Niccolini is no brute.”

  At that, I nodded. Florence was a densely packed city, a gossipy commune. Had Luigi been unkind to his first wife, if he had beaten her or . . . well, we would all know.

  “Plus,” Giovanni said more lightheartedly, “Luigi will tolerate your book learning. You know, sister, some men might find your snare-quick mind a bit . . .”

  “What? Indecorous?” I couldn’t help sarcasm. “Unfeminine?”

  “Overwhelming,” he had said gently, and pinched my cheek playfully.

  “Ginevra? Did you know of this invitation?”

  Startled, I turned to find my husband in the doorway. He held a beautifully scripted parchment in his ink-stained hand. The Medici coat of arms was at its bottom. It had come! The invitation was real!

  “Oh yes, husband,” I said, breathless with excitement. “It is in honor of the new ambassador from Venice. Signor Bembo seems quite learned and distinguished.” Then—recognizing slight irritation on Luigi’s face, which suggested he didn’t like being surprised by such an important audience with the Medici or the fact that I knew something of a new ambassador he did not—I turned politic. “Isn’t Venice the port through which you ship your finished fabrics across the Adriatic Sea to the harems of Turkey?”

  “Yes,” he answered, drawing out the word.

  “And I have heard you say that the trade to Eastern markets is the most profitable part of your business.”

  “Yes.” He nodded. “They can afford the most expensive of my wares.”

  “Well then,” I said. “What better way for His Excellency the ambassador to learn of your cloth’s sumptuousness? I hear the wife of Venice’s doge is so extravagant she demands even her daytime overdress has no less than thirty braccia of fabric. For special events, her dresses are trimmed with peacock feathers and emeralds. What a sight she must be. Perhaps Ambassador Bembo can catch her ear for you.” I smiled. “If he comes to know you.”

  Again that slow consideration of me before Luigi responded. “Then we shall go. You will wear your wedding dress, the taffeta. It is our finest.”

  I was giddy. A night of music, high art, and philosophic debate among Florence’s most renowned and beautiful. A night I’d hear about all sorts of exotic things—like Venice, a city that lived on stilts in the sea. And the chance to share one of my own poems! Lord, which one should I bring?

  I ran upstairs and lifted the heavy lid of my wedding chest, the traditional Florentine cassone, painted with a scene to encourage a bride in her marital duties. Some were romantic scenes, but most were historical or biblical, representing women’s submission to the rule of husbands. For my chest, Uncle Bartolomeo had commissioned one of the most popular choices—the abduction of the Sabine women by Roman soldiers. I hated it.

  As I always did when I opened that chest, I simply closed my eyes to the scene. That day I nearly fell into it, rummaging for the poems hidden at its very bottom.

  5

  SEVERAL WEEKS LATER, ON A COOL, EARLY MARCH EVE, MY husband and I approached the Palazzo Medici for dinner. The sun was setting, yet a handful of petitioners still sat on the rough-hewn stone benches carved into its fortresslike walls. One of them held a squawking, squirming chicken, another a thick roll of parchments. In all probability, they had been waiting all day, inching their backsides toward the inner courtyard as the man nearest the portal was granted access, creating a ripple of shuffling bodies as the line slid forward.

  Every day dozens of citizens—merchants and craftsm
en, magistrates and farmers—waited to speak to the Magnifico, seeking Lorenzo’s help in resolving business arguments, brokering marriages, or securing a government post. The law courts of the Mercanzia might be where guild disputes were settled, and the Signoria where the gonfaloniere lived and the priori fashioned laws, but it was here at the Medici stronghold that the real business of Florence was done.

  Tucked in the sleeve of my gown I carried my own supplication of sorts, one of my poems, as invited by Lorenzo. Would I dare present it in this place of power and sway?

  A scribe emerged from the entrance’s enormous carved wooden doors, followed by another servant bearing a torch. “No more today, signori. Come back tomorrow.”

  The merchant closest to the hallowed gateway protested. “But I have been here all afternoon!”

  The scribe seemed to smile patiently, but even in the twilight I could see it was more a smirk. “Of course the Magnifico looks forward to speaking with you. But I suggest next time you return closer to dawn to be ahead of the line.”

  As he retreated inside, the merchant kicked the dirt with his soled turquoise hose and swore. “God’s wounds!”

  My husband caught the arm of the merchant as he stomped past in indignation. “Ludovico, what troubles you? Perhaps I can help? Is this a matter the guild can take up?”

  “Luigi? Forgive me, my friend, I did not see you in the dusk.” And as he said so, a Medici servant lit fire to the first in a series of torches held in iron rings along the palazzo. One after another, they cast a warm glow on us and long flickering shadows down via Larga and the houses facing it.

  As the men conversed, I marveled at the enormity of the formidable palace. Twenty dwellings had been knocked down to build this one. But of course, it never was meant to be just a home but a public forum of influence, carefully placed only one block away from the Duomo and Baptistery and on the major processional route for our feast days. The first-floor exterior consisted of taupe-brown unfinished boulders—nothing fancy or ostentatious to annoy the pragmatic Florentine business class. Simple, solid, strong. The second and third floors, in contrast, were elegant testaments to the Medici refinement—the stone smooth and cut in symmetrical blocks, punctuated with a parade of tall arched doubled windows. But one had to look up to see this.

  Of course, I knew the real beauty lay inside. I itched to enter.

  “Luigi,” I began, and reached to tug at his sleeve. But I was interrupted by two more men exiting the palazzo.

  “Master Verrocchio!” Luigi hailed the older of them.

  Verrocchio! Was it the artist who’d painted that exquisite pennant of the nymph and Cupid?

  “Signor Niccolini,” Verrocchio greeted my husband in return. He was a round, happy-looking fellow, with a broad smile.

  “What brings you here, lingering so late?”

  “Ah. I have the pleasure of repairing a pair of ancient sculptures the Medici brought from Rome and placed in their garden. Both portrayals of Marsyas.”

  I could tell my husband had no idea who Marsyas was and decided to help him. Full well knowing the answer, I asked, “Marsyas? Is that the satyr who was such an excellent flute player that he foolishly challenged the great Apollo?”

  “Indeed.” Verrocchio turned to me with surprise. “Protect your gentle heart as you look on them, signora. One shows Marsyas in a moment of absolute agony, when he is flayed for daring to compare himself to Apollo, the god of music and manly beauty. Poor Marsyas hangs from a tree by his bound hands, his ugly face a grimace of unspeakable pain.”

  “Oh,” I murmured. Such cruelty to capture forever in stone!

  “And what work have you been asked to do on such a . . . a mutilated figure?” Luigi asked. I had come to know my husband well enough to recognize that he was baffled by the Medici spending hard-earned florins to restore a work showing a half goat/half man being skinned alive. To him there was no reason for such expenditure. He wouldn’t understand that Marsyas was a powerful allegory, a warning against the dangers of hubris. His mind was set to ledgers and definable profits, black and white, simple tallies.

  “Right now I am working on its mate,” Verrocchio explained, “a very ancient work of Marsyas’s head and torso that Lorenzo has come into possession of. It is badly damaged. I have found red marble that matches the original and am working on legs and arms to replace those that were lost.” Verrocchio grew animated as he described his plans. “The red stone is laced with thin white veins. If I work carefully, I will be able to carve Marsyas’s new limbs in such a way that the stone’s natural white threads will look like a man’s underlying tendons as they appear after skin is torn away.”

  Luigi looked queasy. I was fascinated.

  But even as I hung on Verrocchio’s every word, I began to feel the eyes of his companion on me. Slowly, I turned my gaze toward him. He was veiled in dancing shadows. But I could tell from his form and the way he stood that he was young and athletic in build.

  “Signor.” I nodded at him.

  At that, the man stepped forward so torchlight spilled onto him. Tall and lithe, with broad shoulders and a small waist, he moved with a swordsman’s grace, even though clad in the typical plain smock of an artisan. His nose was prominent but finely boned, his face smooth, framed with a froth of tight, perfectly combed honey-colored curls that cascaded to his chest.

  But it was his eyes that so captivated—large, dark, and quizzical. I could not pull my own from them. I felt myself blush at his rather impertinent stare and my utter lack of decorum in not turning away from it.

  Verrocchio stopped chatting abruptly. “Donna Niccolini, forgive my lack of manners. I should have introduced Leonardo before. This is my former apprentice and now a dipintore and a member of the painters’ confraternity Compagnia di San Luca—Leonardo da Vinci.”

  Leonardo bowed, sweeping out a hand like a courtier. “My lady. I am honored.” It was a resonant, mellifluous voice.

  Verrocchio chuckled. “This one should have been born a noble,” he said. He put his hands on Leonardo’s shoulders, noting that Leonardo still stared. “But he was not. Were you, Leonardo?” He physically turned his former apprentice away from me and put his own arm over his shoulder. “We must go home now and let these good people pass. We have much work to begin in the morning.”

  Leonardo didn’t budge. “She would make an excellent subject, Andrea. Her hands are lovely. Did you see how she held them to her breast as you described Marsyas’s torture? Like a Madonna in her pity. You always say the hands convey the feelings of the heart. You should sculpt her. And her curls. Her curls look like swirling eddies under waterfalls—what a challenge they would be to paint!”

  “Yes, yes.” Verrocchio smiled and shrugged at me as if in apology for his former apprentice’s bluntness. “Come, Leonardo, we really must go now.”

  As they retreated down the street, Verrocchio kept talking. “Lest you forget, Leonardo, we live by our brush and our chisel. First we must be asked to do a work and then promised money to do it—before we ever do a single sketch. Tomorrow, we start on a commission that will pay for my . . .”

  His voice trailed off as Verrocchio and Leonardo disappeared into the dark mysteries of Florence’s night streets.

  I held up my hands in the darkness to consider them as oracles of human emotions. I had never really thought before of how much our gestures said of our feelings. Then my thoughts switched to Leonardo da Vinci, the illegitimate son of a notary, who hadn’t bothered to wait until he was out of my presence to analyze my appearance. What did that say about him?

  But there was little time for such musings. As Luigi and I prepared to step into the Medici stronghold, a deep voice boomed up the street. “Luigi! Wait! Let us enter together, brother.”

  I froze. I was so excited to see the Medici courtyard once again. I had not been in it or embraced by its art and patrician aura since my father died. The last person I wanted to share that delight with was my crass, calculating uncle. But I plastered a smo
oth smile on my face before turning toward him.

  Uncle Bartolomeo quickly closed the distance between us with his long, swinging stride. Lisabetta, his little pretty wife, scampered to keep up. His first spouse had died in childbirth while I was studying in Le Murate, and this new bride was kin to Lorenzo’s mother, Lucrezia Tornabuoni. As I said, calculating.

  Panting, Lisabetta reached for my arm to steady herself. Her face was ashen, her hand trembling. She was afraid, I realized. Poor lamb. I’d known timid girls like this at the convent. I took her hand, as I used to my younger sisters’ to help them learn to walk. Together, like children, behind our more important husbands, we walked through the portal into the magical world of the Medici.

  The inner courtyard was ablaze in torchlight. Fashioned after a Roman villa, the palace framed this large, vaulting square. Each floor of the palace’s three stories had views down into it from colonnaded balconies so that visitors and residents could look again and again at the sculpture centered at its heart—an almost-life-size bronze of David, the young shepherd who felled Goliath with his slingshot. Donatello had created this depiction of the Old Testament’s unlikely hero, the boy who won a battle against the Philistine army through cleverness rather than brawn.

  David was a much-loved symbol for Florence, the little republic that defied monarchs. Cosimo de’ Medici had commissioned this statue upon returning to Florence from political exile, having outlasted and outfoxed his foes. So David was also the perfect symbol for a family that ran things through charm and favors rather than armed intimidation.

  Raised on a pedestal, Donatello’s adolescent David stood triumphant, one foot on the severed head of the giant, one hand on his hip, the fingers still curled around a stone. The other hand grasped a sword that David seemed to lean on, causing his other hip to sway out jauntily. How many times had I seen my own brothers stand thus after winning a game of tag, with that self-satisfied look-what-I-can-do attitude? It was a powerful image of youth’s promise and bravado.