Da Vinci's Tiger

by L. M. Elliott

  How could I not? Florence had nearly a hundred public holidays during the year, but St. John’s Feast was its grandest—a two-day extravaganza celebrating both our material successes and our earnest piety. Another paradox, but Florentines explained away this contradiction by beginning the celebration with a government-ordered mostra—a lavish display of the city’s riches as homage to the blessings our patron saint bestowed upon us that resulted in such robust economic well-being. Festooning their shops with colorful banners, merchants put out their best merchandise—gold cloth, silver plates, painted panels, tapestry, jewelry, carved wood, embroidered leather.

  After a morning of everyone ogling such elegant wares, Florence’s clergy donned elaborately embroidered vestments and processed through the streets with Florence’s holy relics—a thorn of the Holy Crown, a nail of the cross, a finger bone of John the Baptist. Following them came the city’s secular dignitaries dressed as angels and biblical figures, with musicians of all sorts playing and singing.

  But the most important parade occurred the morning of the feast’s second day. The city’s guildsmen circled the Duomo cathedral to approach the ancient, octagonal Baptistery and its gates of paradise—huge bronze doors decorated with scenes of St. John’s life. Carrying painted candles, they slowly marched under blue canopies painted with stars and lilies that were stretched across the streets to replicate the night sky.

  All this pageantry was about to be capped off by the thrill of the palio.

  I breathed in the warm summer air, cooling now in the late afternoon with a breeze blowing off the Arno. I did not often venture to this side of Florence near the Ognissanti monastery. I caught the fragrances of clover, summer-supple grasses, and olive trees in bloom—foreign scents within the clogged city streets where I spent most of my time. With pleasure, I took in the fragrance as my eyes wandered along the cavorting horses, the distant hills of Antella where we Benci had a country villa and I had frolicked as a child, and finally back to Leonardo.

  He continued to sketch furiously, looking up at the horses and down at his drawing, up and down in rapid succession. With surprise, I noticed that he openly drew with his left hand. Con la sinistra. The Latin word for left, which had evolved to mean sinister, of the devil. Le Murate’s nuns would never have allowed us to write so. Such a proclivity was often used as evidence that a woman was a witch.

  As I watched, he stopped, mumbled to himself, flipped the page, and began anew on the paper’s reverse side. He looked up and surveyed his choices before fixing his eyes on one horse to draw. Another few minutes and he was done with that particular sketch and scanned the field again—this time coming to rest on me. I instinctively smiled and waved at him.

  Leonardo sat and stared in answer.

  The man was infuriating. I stamped my foot under my billowing dress and turned my gaze back to the horses. I ignored him. But then I realized he was still looking at me. And he was sketching.

  I am not sure which it was—vanity, curiosity, or fury—that propelled my legs. I marched myself toward him. Realizing what I was doing, Leonardo snapped out of his drawing daze and, appearing rather horrified, scrambled to fold up his sketches and pocket his chalk. In that fluster, he fell off his rock—just as I arrived at his side.

  There he lay, sprawled at my feet, like a beetle flipped on its back. For a moment Leonardo was aghast at the indignity of his position. I felt a strange sense of power, for once towering over a man, and then a flood of concern for an artist being reduced to such embarrassment. But I knew my helping him up would only worsen his consternation.

  I was frozen. So was he.

  Then suddenly that beautiful, sculpture-perfect face of Leonardo’s lit up with a smile. And he laughed. Laughed at himself—a rich, rolling belly laugh. I pressed my lips together, still uncertain what to do, trying to hold back a laugh myself. But then I giggled. And giggled. Our mirth harmonized and filled our little corner of the meadow, echoing the trumpetlike whinnying of the horses. We laughed so hard, we struggled to catch our breath.

  “Zounds, man!” Giovanni came across the grasses. Helping Leonardo to his feet, my brother began laughing himself. “What happened, signor, did you take my sister on in a game of checkers? I seem to recall her once punching me so hard after I beat her that I fell off my chair!”

  “Giovanni!” I couldn’t help punching him lightly to shut him up.

  “You see!” He threw his hands up in playful exasperation.

  Leonardo chortled, but clearly did not know what he should say next.

  “Giovanni,” I said, realizing that now I needed to direct the conversation, “this is Leonardo da Vinci, an artist once apprenticed to the great Verrocchio. Maestro, this is my brother, Giovanni de’ Benci.”

  The men bowed to each other.

  “Is that your horse?” Leonardo gestured to Zephyrus.

  “Indeed,” Giovanni said. “Is he not magnificent? I have great hopes for him today.”

  Without a word, Leonardo pulled out a sheet of paper and handed it to my brother. The others he hurriedly tucked into his satchel, including one that showed the beginning outlines of a woman. On the page Giovanni held were multiple images of the same horse—rearing, standing, lunging, and shaking its head. Those images were juxtaposed with close-up studies of legs and their flexing, bulging muscles.

  “Why, this is astounding!” Giovanni exclaimed. “This is my beautiful Zephyrus, is it not? The way you have captured his head, here”—he pointed—“is just the way he carries himself when he readies for a battle. I swear the horse loves to win. And look at the power of his hind legs—you have replicated it exactly.” He shook his head in amazement. “I have never seen anything like it before.”

  Leonardo beamed. He stepped forward so the two men were shoulder to shoulder. “I am trying to portray how the horse propels itself forward with such speed,” he explained. “I rode as a child, my uncle’s horses, but none moved as fast as these. I remember the power felt like it came from his hindquarters. Is that right?”

  Giovanni smiled. “Well, not exactly. A fine horse such as Zephyrus is a miracle of proportions. Every part of his body works together to produce his speed. He is a piece of art in his own right, maestro. See the angle of the shoulder here? The supple strength of his back? And the slope and stance of his hocks, knees, and hooves?”

  Leonardo persisted. “So then it is not one particular part of the animal but how all the parts are put together?”

  “Precisely! See, look at your drawing here . . .”

  As they talked, I noticed more rich and powerful men coming to speak with their jockeys—including Lorenzo the Magnificent. I knew he had a stable full of racehorses and a phalanx of grooms. But it was said that Lorenzo exercised his own four horses himself whenever he could in the cold morning air and that his most famous racehorse, il Morello, would refuse food from any hand but his. The horse nickered happily upon spotting Lorenzo.

  Then another figure caught my eye—Bernardo. He was talking to a jockey trying to calm a jittery chestnut just beyond il Morello. My heart began dancing like the horse’s feet. I had encountered Bernardo twice since seeing him at Verrocchio’s studio, each meeting bringing a brief, titillating exchange of banter and compliments from him, but no lingering conversation. Perhaps today, I thought as I watched him, surprised when I felt hope well up in me.

  “Sister? Daydreaming again?” Giovanni interrupted my thoughts. He smiled at Leonardo. “So often this one would almost bump into walls as she read some book while walking to dinner. Always her heart and head somewhere else.” He took my hand and threaded it through his arm. “We should probably make our way to the grandstand now, sister, to take our seats before the race begins.”

  Leonardo followed my gaze to Bernardo and the jockey. “Placing a bet,” he said to me, reading my curiosity yet again, just as he had at the studio. “Many lords have been here in the meadow to lay a wager.” Leonardo raised his eyebrow and shifted his gaze to another corner of t
he meadow, where a richly dressed merchant was glad-handing a jockey. “Or trying to bribe a jockey to hold back to fix the race.” He shook his head. “Florence is full of intrigue, even on a saint’s birthday.”

  He turned on his heel and walked away.

  13

  GIOVANNI AND I HAD PLANNED TO WATCH THE RACE WITH our mother, sisters, and younger brother, since Luigi would be sitting with city officials. But Lorenzo gathered us up at the meadow along with Bernardo to join him at the Medici’s grandstand at the palio’s finish line. On the way, we passed hundreds of citizens dressed in their most festive clothes, waving banners and flags, pushing and shoving one another for a space in front of the crowd along the race’s path. But they always parted to make way for the Magnifico. He and Giovanni talked excitedly about the horses entered in the race, while I walked behind with the ambassador.

  “Have you enjoyed the Feast of St. John, Your Excellency?” I asked.

  “Bernardo,” he corrected me. “Surely you must take pity on your most ardent admirer and call me by my Christian name.”

  I nodded.

  “Say it,” he insisted.

  “Bernardo,” I said, testing the word. The sound was sweet.

  “Yes, I have enjoyed the festivities, Ginevra. Is it permissible for me to call you Ginevra?”

  I didn’t know. So I sidestepped the question. “I would suppose surrounded by the sea as Venice is, you do not have races or many horses?”

  “Well, La Bencina.” He smiled and kept to the affectionate but more formal way of addressing me. “I actually enjoy nothing more than a good canter around my villa, near Padua. My favorite horse is named Pegasus. He is a gorgeous steed, much like your brother’s in temperament and markings. We cannot race horses in Venice, no, but we do have our own feast day, for St. Mark, and our own grand procession in Piazza San Marco—an enormous space, modeled after the imperial forum in Constantinople. There we parade in front of our basilica. It is adorned with many treasures from Byzantium, including the pride of Venice—four life-size gilded horses that look down from the basilica’s loggia onto the square below.”

  He drew in a deep breath and sighed a bit. It was obvious how much he loved his home city, and I could feel myself falling under its spell as he continued in his descriptions. “Our greatest ceremony is the Feast of the Ascension, when all the city’s boats are taken into the lagoon. Our head of state, the doge, sails out in the state barge to throw a gold ring into the sea to symbolize Venice’s marriage to the waters.”

  “Oh, how romantic,” I said. “Do the sea and Venice have a good and happy marriage?”

  He laughed. “Sometimes.”

  I had never traveled to the coastline of Italy to see the ocean wrapping around it. “Is the sea like the River Arno, just wider?”

  “No, no, my dear. It is a vast horizon of unpredictable gray-green, sometimes as placid and alluring as sleep, sometimes as terrifying as God’s wrath. It stretches and stretches, pulling your heart and your imagination with it, knowing that beyond where you can see are completely foreign lands, uncharted possibilities, and absolute freedom on the way there. There are no rules that man can make to tame the sea. He must brave it and ride it out, always alert for opportunity or threat. On the sea, man lives his fullest, his most alive.”

  “And what is Venice like?”

  “Ah, Venice is beautiful and as mysterious as its waters.” He stopped walking and closed his eyes. “It smells of brine and new boats and sails wet from sea winds. There is always the sound of unloading or loading cargo, ropes straining and sliding through winches and pulleys, fresh fish just dropped from nets and flopping on the decks. Men shout, berate, curse, and laugh, in a whirl of German, Turkish, Portuguese, Yiddish, as well as Italian. They smell of spice and sweat and sweet liquors, ripe fruits from the East packed in baskets, sitting in the sun, ready to devour.”

  He opened his eyes. “On the wharves, merchants and travelers, armed condottieri and beggars alike, all mingle together. They bring in exotic wares—ivory from Africa, furs from Mongolia, tea from China, slaves from Serbia. And such amazing animals are shipped in—monkeys, camels, giraffes.

  “Oh, and the most magnificent thing I ever saw,” he added, “a tiger from the Talysh Mountains just off the Caspian Sea. A sultan visiting the doge had hunted the beautiful creature down. He said that when his hounds cornered her, she did not panic and she did not show fear. She kept her ground with such dignity that he decided to keep her as a pet. He brought her to Venice as a gift for the doge.” Bernardo shook his head. “But in the end, the sultan could not part with her. There was something about that tiger’s eyes, her stare. I don’t think she blinked. Everyone in the court would circle her cage and try to imagine her past and her thoughts, listening to her rumbling breathing—half purr, half growl—as they looked into her amber-gold eyes. Poets wrote of her, musicians sang of her. . . .”

  “What happened to the mountain tiger?” I asked breathlessly, having hung on every word.

  “I don’t know.” Bernardo shrugged. “One day the sultan just disappeared. So did the tiger.”

  We had arrived at the Medici’s grandstand.

  “Ambassador!” The poet Cristoforo Landino strode toward us.

  But before the two men could truly greet each other, the great baritone bell in the tall tower of the Palazzo della Signoria tolled. One . . . two . . . three.

  “Quick, up into the seats, all of you!” Lorenzo shouted, over the deafening cheer of people lining the streets.

  The race was on!

  I found myself plopped down in the shade of a blue-fringed canopy beside Lorenzo’s mother and his wife, Clarice, on chairs covered with red satin. Behind me perched Simonetta and Lucrezia Donati, Lorenzo’s porcelain-fine Platonic love. Their husbands sat with Giuliano on the far side of the dais. The odd assemblage of women clapped and smiled, a happy unit, it seemed. I joined in, leaning forward to watch down via dell’Oriuolo toward the edge of the Duomo, which the horses would skirt in their dash.

  The race came to us in waves of sound. Within a minute of the old bell tolling, we could hear distant cheering, rippling louder and louder toward us with each passing second. Two minutes and we could catch individual shouts within the squall of voices, punctuated with collective gasps signaling that a rider had fallen and heartbreaking whinnies of pain from injured horses. Way down the street a rainbow of small pennants began to wave furiously. There was a shower of red flower petals hurled into the road, and the roar of excitement surged toward us.

  My heart began to beat faster, and I glanced toward Giovanni. Had we been together I would have held his hand to soothe him. I could tell he was about to bite a hole in his lower lip in anticipation.

  Now I could hear the torrent of hooves, pounding the hard-packed dirt of Florence’s streets.

  “There!” Simonetta pointed at the first horses rushing along the Duomo’s base. “They are coming!”

  Unable to contain their anticipation—or perhaps worried over their bets—many men scurried into the street, craning their necks to see which horses were in front. They pushed one another and pranced nervously, trying to time their exit from the race’s path before being run down. I noticed Leonardo across the way, watching them, strangely quiet and still amid the mayhem.

  “MOVE!” Lorenzo stood and bellowed, waving his arms at the men standing in the street. Somehow one man heard him over the cacophony or noticed his wild demeanor. He elbowed his neighbor, who elbowed his. The men scattered.

  Now I could see the leading horses, legs flying, dirt churned up and sprayed, jockeys hunched and clinging to handfuls of mane. They had little hope now of steering their mounts, frenzied by the competition, frantic at the mass of humanity and their guttural shouts of encouragement.

  Two were pulling ahead. I shielded my eyes from the sun and strained to identify them. They were so lathered with sweat it was hard to tell their coloring.

  Giovanni jumped up. Lorenzo started cheering.
>
  It was il Morello and Zephyrus! Lorenzo’s and Giovanni’s horses, neck and neck. And right behind them, snapping at their flanks, another three, jostling one another angrily, teeth bared, nostrils wide to suck in air.

  Out of the corner of my eye—as everyone on the dais jumped out of their seats to clap and urge the horses on—a few more men darted into and then out of the street. And then I saw a body dash across after them, stooping to gather something up. Was he mad? I followed the fool’s sprint and realized it was Leonardo. He threw himself out of the way just as the storm of horses crashed across the finish line.

  There was no time to wonder about Leonardo’s risky behavior. Which horse had won? I couldn’t tell. I looked to Giovanni, whose face was frozen in anticipation. Lorenzo was watching for a sign from the judges.

  Cheering drowned out the pronouncement, but Lorenzo turned to my brother and clapped him on the back. Zephyrus had won!

  The next hour was a blur of jubilation. Giovanni received the trophy—an enormous swath of the best scarlet velvet, in several parts stitched together with gold trimming as wide as a man’s palm, the whole thing lined with squirrel belly fur and edged with ermine. Zephyrus was wiped down with cooling water and then loaded onto a cart decorated with flower garlands and a carved lion on each corner. He would be paraded around the Duomo in triumph.

  Giovanni grabbed my hand so that I might walk behind the victory cart with him. Now, I thought, let’s see what Florence will have to say about the Six Hundred! Certainly it was clear that my brother had spent his florins well.

  Before our parade could begin, though, we had to wait for Lorenzo’s contingent to assemble behind us and then all other dignitaries like Luigi, as the feast’s organizer. My husband was beaming. He’d done good work—the feast was an obvious success. I watched Lorenzo congratulate him. Uncle Bartolomeo, of course, appeared out of the crowd in a great show of friendship with Luigi in order to join our little circle of victory.