Da Vinci's Tiger

by L. M. Elliott

I smiled and nodded. “Indeed, maestro.”

  Leonardo approached me, carrying a single dog rose. “Please hold this in your hand.” Taking my right hand, he lifted it and placed the sprig between my thumb and forefinger in front of my bodice, just as Verrocchio had me cradling flowers in his sculpture. He fussed for a few minutes to settle my hands the way he wanted them, his hand brushing against my breast several times. Leonardo seemed oblivious, his focus solely on getting the pose of my hands correct. I, however, cringed self-consciously, and my face flamed red.

  God love my brother. He knew me well and saved me with joking, “Ah yes, we must not forget to feature those Palladian hands!”

  Leonardo straightened up and turned to Giovanni. “Palladian hands?”

  “One of her many lovely qualities eulogized in a poem written by Landino. The ambassador commissioned it. According to him, my sister is the model of modesty for all Tuscan maids!” Giovanni’s voice was full of playful affection. I relaxed.

  Leonardo studied us for a moment. “I would have liked to enjoy the company of a sister,” he said.

  “Good Lord, you can take some of ours then, can’t he, Ginevra? We have a plethora, signor. Four more sisters to find marriages for! Plus a household of cousins.”

  But I heard the longing for family in Leonardo’s voice. “Do you not have siblings, maestro?”

  “Well, as you may know, my father did not marry my mother after siring me. I lived with his parents before coming here to Florence. My father is on his third wife now and has yet to produce a child other than me—although I hear she might be pregnant. Perhaps he should have married my mother after all! She has had five children by the man she wed after my father rejected her. She still lives in Vinci, but I was not allowed to really know my half siblings.”

  “Then you must spend time with us,” Giovanni said. “I will call you Leonardo from now on, as you will be a friend and part of the family. We have children and joyful noise aplenty here! Rarely is there a quiet moment.”

  As if on cue, a servant knocked on the door loudly. “You see?” Giovanni laughed and hurried to take what the man held.

  It was another poem by Landino, sent from Bernardo.

  “Oh, give it to me, brother,” I pleaded, exasperated to be frozen dutifully in the pose Leonardo had set.

  “No, no, you must remain positioned. I will read it to you. Hearing it might inspire Leonardo’s work as well.” He skimmed the page before beginning. “Oh my, sister, hark you this.

  “But if you should behold Ginevra’s neck and shoulders,

  by right, you will despise the shining snow.

  Purple flowers beam in springtime,

  but they are nothing compared to your mistress’s pretty lips.

  What shall I say about Bencia’s fair forehead and her ivory white teeth,

  and her dark eyes above her rosy cheeks?”

  He looked up at me, absolutely delighted. “There is more, something about your countenance being a mixture of lilies and roses. Shall I?”

  “No!” I exclaimed. At that, I could no longer sit still. I stood and tried to snatch the paper from him. Laughing, Giovanni pulled it from my reach and held it high above his head. I jumped up and down trying to grab it until he hugged me and swung me around. “Peace, sister. It is a sweet poem for a sweet lady. Here.” He handed it to me and put his arm around my shoulders.

  Looking to Leonardo, he kept the moment jovial. “It is a marvelous thing to be immortalized so, is it not?”

  Leonardo answered in similar good nature. “Yet I will do it better in painting than this poem does!”

  I laughed, enjoying the banter. “Nothing is better than poetry, signor.”

  “Nothing? Are you sure? A poet cannot do with the pen what the painter can with his brush.” Leonardo went back to mixing his colors as he spoke. “The poet addresses the ear, while the painter engages the eye. The eye is the nobler sense. It is as simple as comparing a puppet that has been torn apart and lies in pieces to a fully united body. A poet can only describe a human figure bit by bit, consecutively, and using a great many words. Neck, shoulders, lips, brow, teeth, eyes. That’s how Master Landino’s poem goes—only one thing at a time. While a painter”—his voice swelled deeper and louder as he spoke—“a painter can present all parts of a being simultaneously, as a whole. It is far less tedious than poetry.”

  My mouth popped open in indignation. “Tedious? You know, signor, that I am a poet? Well . . . I write poetry.”

  “You need not extend your modesty that way, sister. You are indeed a poet,” Giovanni said, “and a gifted one.”

  Leonardo looked at me matter-of-factly, one hand holding a pot of resin, the other a pot of walnut oil. “Yes, I know you are a poet.”

  “Did you mean to insult me?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “Simply stating a truth.”

  I stared at him.

  “I think people should be honest with one another,” he said. “I do like word games and puns. But in conversation, you can trust me to never say anything false—neither honeyed to seduce you nor critical solely for the purpose of hurting or manipulating you. Unlike many, I find no thrill in deceiving someone or getting away with a secret. I do not believe in such sport. I simply say what I mean.”

  I could see in his eyes that he was sincere. I started to quip that dealing with a completely honest man would be a novelty. But the jest stuck in my throat—his pledge held such promise, such freedom and such safety at the same time, a glorious paradox.

  He kept staring at me. And I did not turn away.

  Giovanni laughed. “Watch out, Leonardo. She always beat me in staring contests when we were children. I swear the girl never blinked. She was like a house cat watching a bird.”

  But neither I nor Leonardo responded to him. I couldn’t. I was transfixed.

  “Do you believe eyes are the window to the soul?” Leonardo asked in a hushed voice. “Yes, your physical features—those pretty lips, fair forehead, and ivory teeth, as the poet writes—are beautiful. But it is the eyes that let one into that sanctum, into a person’s essence.”

  Indeed, pulled in by those enormous, luminous eyes of his, I felt myself teetering at a threshold to something wondrous and disturbing. I did not break my gaze but still kept my foothold on safe terrain—books. “Cicero said something like that. And the Bible implies the same.”

  A glimmer of irritated disappointment clouded his face. “I know it from my own observation. Have you ever risked witnessing something yourself?” he challenged. “Not just read about it in a book?”

  Still we stared. Now I burned with defiance.

  “Yes, I have observed it, not just been convinced by someone else’s writing,” I snapped. And to prove it, guessing what Leonardo might hope from me, I answered before he asked to show my courage. “And yes.”

  “Yes, what?”

  “When I was at the Palazzo Medici, I observed a Flemish portrait Lorenzo had procured, in which a woman was not in profile but instead gazed out in a . . . mmm . . . three-quarter pose.” I turned my left shoulder back a bit so my torso shifted slightly but my gaze on him remained steady. “Like this.”

  “I have seen that portrait as well,” he said. “But even then she is not looking directly at the viewer. She looks away to the side.” A smile spread slowly upon Leonardo’s handsome face. “Verrocchio’s sculpture will have you posed as if the viewer has interrupted as you gather blossoms, and you turn to look at him—in reaction, in a kind of conversation. If you direct your gaze forward for my painting, you will become a living presence, not just”—he paused, searching for the right word—“a symbol, or an object. Signora, are you suggesting that . . . ?”

  I nodded.

  If that Flemish woman could turn outward, I could certainly dare to. And I could go one step further. I, the poet. I, the pronounced model for Tuscan maidens. I, the Platonic muse of an ambassador from one of the most powerful city-states in Europe. I, the educated protégé
e of a woman who changed her name to Scolastica and liberated the minds of cloistered women. I, who had the chance to make men listen—and see—what women had in their hearts and minds.

  As a bird in a gilded cage, singing? No, too limiting. A house cat watching a bird? No, too domesticated. I wanted a different, larger metaphor for myself. I searched my mind. Ahhhh. Rather I would look out and demand a return gaze like the Caspian tiger Bernardo had described, brought to the Venetian court by a sultan. My eyes would gaze unblinking to allow people to look into them and wonder about me. I, a mountain tiger, like the one that showed no fear when hunted, whose fierce dignity prompted imaginings about her soul and her courage—a creature with her own past and own story.

  “Yes,” I spoke once more, smiling with a strange new confidence.

  Leonardo clapped his hands together as if to break our trance. He could barely contain his excitement. “Please sit, then, Ginevra de’ Benci. I must sketch you anew!”

  19

  Il dado è tratto—A SAYING FROM CAESAR WHEN HE REBELLED against the Roman Senate—kept repeating in my mind. Our die was set. We had, like Caesar, crossed the Rubicon. There was no turning back in my insurrection with Leonardo. The fall and winter passed in a whirl of work, with a heady sense of doing something daring, forbidden even, something entirely new.

  Oh, we were so full of ourselves. We laughed. We debated. I tried to convince him of Plato’s metaphysical philosophies. He countered with his careful observations of the tangible world—the power of swirling water, for instance. “You know, I have found the remains of seashells up in the hills. I cannot help but think the seas were once much higher and then slowly receded, leaving them there,” Leonardo said.

  “Yes, in Noah’s flood,” I said.

  “You don’t believe the seas could carve mountains and leave behind its skeletons in a mere forty days and forty nights, do you?”

  I opened my mouth to respond but closed it again without saying anything. I hadn’t thought to question the biblical story before. He rattled my church teachings again when I patted the curls framing my face to make sure they covered my ears.

  When he reminded me to sit still and asked what I was fussing over, I explained that Sister Margaret had admonished me to always keep curls covering my ears, since the Virgin Mary was impregnated with baby Jesus when the Holy Spirit spoke in her ear. Leonardo looked at me with such bemusement I had to laugh. Maybe our Holy Mother could conceive through her ear, but a normal woman would not!

  Leonardo was full of such challenges and surprises. Constantly trying to expand his knowledge, he kept lists of words he wanted to add to his vocabulary. He had even recorded two dozen synonyms for a man’s private parts. “Want to hear a really funny one?” he asked me one afternoon as he mixed his paints.

  Taken aback, I frowned, unsure what to say. A virtuous woman would never admit being curious about such things. But of course, I did want to hear, particularly since he seemed so amused by it.

  He smiled mischievously and told me.

  As for me, I recognized that I could feed that intellectual hunger of his, at least in sharing knowledge I had gained from my reading. A few weeks into his painting, I asked, “Maestro, I know you struggle to read Latin. But do you know the content of Ovid’s Metamorphoses?”

  He put the brush he was using between his teeth and picked up another to put a dab of contrasting color to the panel. “No,” he mumbled.

  “Ovid opens with the line: ‘In nova fert animus . . .’” I quickly realized my rudeness in quoting a language Leonardo did not understand. “Ovid begins,” I corrected myself, “with ‘I will speak of forms changed into new entities.’”

  Leonardo peered around the propped-up board so I could see his face. Slurring around the brush in his mouth, he said, “Like we are doing right now! Tell me more. It suits our work.”

  Precisely the reason I had brought it up. So I shared the legends Ovid recounted in his long poem tracing the evolution of man. I repeated Ovid’s tales of human foibles like Narcissus’s destructive self-infatuation and Julius Caesar’s tragic fall from power because of his hubris.

  All the while, Leonardo grunted and nodded. He was particularly taken with the story of Pygmalion, a Greek sculptor who carved a beauteous female figure out of ivory. “Ovid says Pygmalion was so put off by the prostitutes of his city that he foreswore mortal women and fell in love with the statue he was creating, its purity of spirit. He sighed and longed for his statue to become real. Upon hearing this, Venus took pity on him. One night he kissed the statue’s lips, and they felt warm. He touched her breast and it softened from ivory to flesh under his hand. He embraced her waist and the figure melded to him.” I stopped abruptly, realizing Leonardo had ceased painting and was staring at me.

  “Go on.” His voice was raspy.

  “With his caresses, she became mortal. They loved. And had a child.” I stumbled over my words, suddenly embarrassed, feeling a tugging at my heart and, well, elsewhere.

  Leonardo seemed to shake himself and disappeared back behind the panel and into his painting.

  Some days we were mostly silent, as Leonardo struggled to work with the oil paint. He and Verrocchio’s other apprentices were well schooled in tempera. But Leonardo was one of the first in Florence to attempt using the oils preferred by northern painters in Flanders. Oil paints did provide subtler, more varied, and translucent tones but were difficult to mix evenly and to spread with the brush.

  A few afternoons, he threw away his paints with a curse, as they ran or hardened on his palette. He apologized repeatedly about the smell. Eventually, he determined that the best recipe was combining one part oil with two parts turpentine, then stirring in the powdered color pigment. He continued to experiment with which oils to use—nut, linseed, balsam, or mustard seed.

  Thus, he built my portrait, brushstroke upon brushstroke, color upon color, layer upon layer. He re-created the blush on my cheeks by blending rose hues with violet, the highlights of my hair with browns, golds, and whites. Several times, he had not waited long enough for the undercoat to dry before applying the next. The paint bubbled, wrinkling the surface, because the top layer dried faster being exposed to the air. Sometimes Leonardo used his fingertips to flatten the surface and better blend the two layers of color.

  He also found early evening light better illuminated the natural colors of my face and hair. “See,” he said to Giovanni one late afternoon, as my brother watched Leonardo paint, “how much more graceful and sweet her face appears in this gentler sun?”

  Always one to bring us back down to earth, Giovanni squinted in my direction. “Sweet?” He frowned. “If you say so, Leonardo!”

  We all laughed.

  Of course, Bernardo visited often. He and Leonardo discussed the portrait’s composition and the choices Leonardo made as he painted. Bernardo approved Leonardo’s decision to place me in front of a juniper bush ginepro, and to include the hint of a limpid pond, a distant town and hills beyond. Bernardo had described his own country villa near Padua, and Leonardo created a landscape that echoed Bernardo’s memories. They seemed to connect well over their enjoyment of nature and horses.

  Of the juniper, Bernardo had exclaimed, “Ah, perfetto! The ginepro is a well-known symbol of chastity. It will heighten the statement of your virtue, carissima.”

  “Its emerald foliage will also create a lush halo of green behind her head, Your Excellency, and provide a color contrast that will accentuate the gold of her hair and the paleness of her face,” Leonardo said.

  “Of course, of course. Your eye is as keen as a falcon’s, maestro,” Bernardo said. “The combination of colors will be extraordinary. And the placement of her in such a magnificent natural landscape . . .” Bernardo turned his attention to me. “It will make you, and all of us, immortal, my dear.”

  I smiled. “That is thanks to you, my lord.”

  “Is she not a sweet, pretty, gracious little thing, maestro?” Bernardo asked. He kissed my hand.


  I had learned that when Leonardo did not like a statement or a question he simply did not address it. And that is what he did now. “You’ll note, Your Excellency, that the ginepro is also a pun on her name, a way of identifying Ginevra de’ Benci for all eternity, as long as my painting survives.”

  “Indeed! Meaning upon meaning!” Bernardo beamed in appreciation. He circled the painting. “I have intended to ask you, maestro, how you will identify my patronage of your work? Master Verrocchio’s sculpture will feature my beloved holding the rose bouquet I brought her, which conveniently is the blossom contained in my coat of arms. But what shall we do with your painting?”

  Leonardo hesitated. His silence told me the thought of marking Bernardo’s ownership of my image had not occurred to him before. After all, the portrait he and I had conceived was intended to show me as my own being. Leonardo also had a rather large ego about his work being unique and better than that of his Florentine brother artisans and, therefore, immune to outside suggestion. Sharing credit for his ideas was not something he would do readily. This was a man who told me he wrote his thoughts and observations in backward script so that they could only be read in a mirror reflection—his way of preventing others from stealing his insights or designs. And despite Verrocchio’s teasing, Leonardo foolishly remained unconcerned with the niceties necessary to placate patrons and generate income from his art.

  Bernardo’s face clouded.

  I didn’t want Bernardo disappointed. But I also felt protective of Leonardo, not wanting one of his first patrons to find him lacking in deference or ideas. Such a reputation would discourage wealthy Florentines from giving him commissions in a city well stocked with thirty talented and more compliant master painters as well as fifty marble workshops with hungry workers to feed.

  I spoke up hastily. “We have been discussing that, my lord.”

  “Ah, and what have you discussed, my Bencina? Something poetic, I am sure.” Bernardo knelt and took my hand. “Perhaps you should hold one of my books, adding to our celebration of your exquisite mind. No, no”—he shifted his thoughts—“that would not do it clearly enough. You have books of your own.” He paused. “Perhaps the backdrop should be changed to the sea with a Venetian ship on it. Yes, that would do. The sea and a ship.”