Da Vinci's Tiger

by L. M. Elliott

  Their voices sounded far away. I felt myself sway and dip up and down as Leonardo climbed stairs and then the softness of my bed as he laid me down. I opened my eyes, but the room seemed to spin.

  “Here, my lady.” Sancha pressed a cool, wet cloth to my face.

  “Let me.” Leonardo took the cloth. “Get her some warm wine. That will revive her.”

  But the sound of his voice did that well enough. My vision cleared, the room stopped whirling. I focused on that excellent face, so finely chiseled.

  Leonardo pressed the cool cloth to my forehead, my face, and my throat. “You are a madwoman.”

  “Probably so.”

  We laughed.

  “Maestro,” I began.

  “For God’s sake, call me Leonardo. You just risked your life for me.” He stopped moving the cloth along my neck and stared in that intense, inquisitive way of his. “That gaze . . . that gaze of yours . . . it . . .” He paused.

  My heart began to skip.

  Leonardo took a deep breath. “Your gaze captivates . . . but . . .” He stopped again. “Do you understand?”

  Slowly I nodded. “We cannot tell our hearts who to love or what to feel.”

  “Ah. I recall your saying that before. You are indeed a poet, wise and beautiful.” He took my hand. “And what does your heart feel, Ginevra de’ Benci?”

  Should I tell him? Should I tell him that in my hours at the convent it was his face that sweetened my thoughts, our banter I remembered? That when I dreamed of love, it was his hand holding mine as it did now?

  I studied his expression a moment longer. I had thought when Leonardo stood up for me with Bernardo in the studio that day, when he changed the motto on my portrait to make the painting such a celebration of my person, that he must feel a stirring for me as well. But I could see no heat, no longing in his face—although there was a true fondness for me clearly etched there. And admiration—perhaps for my mind, perhaps because I had fought being, in essence, owned by Bernardo. Sweet Jesu, love is a bittersweet fruit indeed. Bernardo had wanted me, I wanted Leonardo, and he . . . well, the crucible, the hell-hot test of love was to give it whether returned or not.

  I smiled slightly. “What my heart feels is its own mystery.”

  He kept staring, as always. “I will remember that smile . . . for inspiration.”

  “Then I am to be your muse?”

  “You already have been. Any woman I paint in my future will have a spark of you in my depiction of her. Or”—he paused—“at least I will be searching for it.”

  I thought of Simonetta, of her saying that the inherent romance between a painter and a subject as he searched to find the noblest in her to immortalize was almost a sacred bond. Of Verrocchio calling that dialogue so intense, so complete, that the artist and his subject saw straight into each other’s hearts. It was a love few could understand and that could satisfy for a lifetime. They were right. How could I be disappointed in being a muse for Leonardo da Vinci? I had sung of the treasures in women’s hearts and minds and made men listen as Abbess Scolastica had implored. Leonardo had helped me do so.

  “Then it is well enough, maestro,” I said.

  “You overwhelm me, my lady.” Leonardo leaned forward and kissed me gently on the lips. Once. I knew it was in good-bye. And that was enough, too.

  Epilogue

  I beg your pardon. I am a mountain tiger.

  TIGERS ARE SOLITARY CREATURES. I KNOW SOME OF YOU might prefer to hear that Leonardo and I lived happily ever after, perhaps together. That was not our history. What mattered were our conversations as he painted me and what we created in my portrait. In it, he found his artistic voice, his vision. In it, I live on to speak to you, about myself, about the treasure inside women’s hearts and minds.

  Like the sultan who brought the Caspian mountain tiger to Venice and enchanted people of that city to look and wonder, write and sing, Leonardo and I made the people of our time realize there was much to be seen and learned about the person of a woman, behind her gaze—if you met and entered it. The outcome of such an exploration cannot be predefined or controlled. It is full of surprises, and yes, marvelous contradictions.

  I beg your pardon. I am a mountain tiger.

  Lorenzo de’ Medici did survive the Pazzi revolt. After days of horrendous violence in which scores of people were butchered by the mob, Florence calmed and seemed even more devoted to the Medici rule. Lorenzo continued to be the great arbiter of taste and culture in Florence until his death in 1492, the patron who nurtured one of the greatest, most productive periods in the history of art. So many legendary artists blossomed during the Medici family reign—Donatello, Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Verrocchio, Ghiberti, Pollaiuolo, Ghirlandaio, and, of course, Leonardo da Vinci.

  Sadly, though, Lorenzo’s interest in Leonardo faded, especially after Giuliano’s death. Other patrons employed him, but always distracted with a thousand new ideas all at the same time, Leonardo took too long to complete his paintings. Soon the commissions dried up like oil paint left out too long—there were so many other gifted artists in Florence willing to keep to a deadline and who were more, shall we say, agreeable to following directions.

  His truest friend and ally, Verrocchio, left for Venice to create an equestrian monument to General Bartolomeo Colleoni, thanks to Bernardo Bembo’s influence with the committee choosing the artist. And a young Michelangelo became the talk of Florence.

  Leonardo needed a new stage, a fresh start.

  He moved to Milan, arriving as a musician, an emissary of goodwill from Lorenzo the Magnificent, carrying a horse-head lyre Leonardo had carved himself. There he served primarily as an engineer. After showing Duke Ludovico Sforza his designs for war machines and water hydraulics, Leonardo embarked on one of his other great loves—inventing.

  From that his fame, and his artistic wings, grew.

  Leonardo did not depart Florence without leaving behind precious reminders for me. He entrusted my brother with the safekeeping of an unfinished Adoration of the Magi, astounding in its composition—thick with men crowding forward in amazement, horses nervous and agitated. Mary sits in the absolute center, calm, smiling down on her baby boy, who reaches gleefully for a jeweled chalice a Magi holds up toward him.

  “You know, sister,” Giovanni said one day, “I swear I see some of you in that Madonna’s face.”

  The loveliest part of the scene, however, was what I took to be Leonardo’s self-portrait—a youthful shepherd in the bottom right corner, his gaze turned outward to the viewer, while his inside arm points to Mary as if to say, “Look! Look what I can paint.”

  I would stand in front of it and remember it all, including that kiss.

  I continued to write and to come in and out of the sanctuary of Le Murate, relishing its quietude, which always seemed to open the floodgates of my verse, enjoying the conversation of women who did not hold back their opinions for fear of what men across the table might think. When I visited my brother and his children, I delighted in playing and reading with them, and encouraging their little souls to sing out—loudly.

  So where are my poems? There, too, I followed my mentor, Abbess Scolastica. I took them with me, as a reminder of this good earth, this miraculous life of ours. Just as I had tucked her embroidery into Scolastica’s coffin, Sancha, then old but still fiercely loyal, slipped them under my dress as I lay in state in my casket.

  Besides, I prefer you come to know me as Leonardo wanted, through the gaze he inspired and captured. And the one line of verse that remains says enough.

  I beg your pardon. I am a mountain tiger.

  Afterword

  The good painter paints two principal things—man and the intention of his mind. The first is easy and the second difficult.

  —LEONARDO DA VINCI

  EACH DAY, A STEADY STREAM OF VISITORS SEEK OUT THE PORTRAIT of Ginevra de’ Benci, hanging in Washington, DC’s National Gallery of Art. Many, clutching brochures and art books, rush straight for her on a pilg
rimage to see the only Leonardo on permanent display in America. Others notice her as they meander the museum’s airy marble halls.

  Inevitably, when they catch Ginevra’s gaze, they stop. They approach the double-sided display almost on tiptoe, captured by that intent, intelligent, slightly defiant look in her eyes. They circle, taking in her image and the motto on the back. They linger. As they finally pull themselves away—perhaps to find Verrocchio’s terra-cotta statue of Giuliano de’ Medici, resplendent in his jousting breastplate, housed in an adjacent room—her viewers glance back once more, as if bidding a reluctant adieu. She is that luminous.

  No, Ginevra de’ Benci is not smiling or as polished and impressive as Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. She is not as dramatic as his Last Supper, or as delighting as his Virgin and Child with Saint Anne. She is the astounding but still tentative work of a young artist, displaying a few technical immaturities, as Leonardo struggled to learn how to mix and apply oil paints and to perfect the proportion and perspective of the human face. Even so, Ginevra is haunting. In her portrait are glimmers of all that comes later in his masterworks. Some art historians even speculate that this small, intense poet-teenager sparked Leonardo’s ability to recognize, respect, and then convey female promise. His commitment to portraying women as strong, thinking, capable beings was a stunning novelty and daring innovation in fifteenth-century Italy.

  Da Vinci’s Tiger is fiction, my interpretation and dramatization of Ginevra de’ Benci’s life, rooted in fact, carefully researched. This is what historians know of her:

  She was the granddaughter and daughter of affluent bankers with close personal and financial ties to the Medici. She was educated at Le Murate convent, which her father and grandfather generously supported, and which was run by Abbess Scolastica Rondinelli. Possessing a worldly intellect and business acumen, Scolastica improved conditions at the convent and played the politics of the city well. Her lay-students not only “learned the virtues” but also how to read Latin. Ginevra did come and go from the convent throughout her life. The black scarf she wears in her portrait looks to be a scapular, a devotional ornament like a priest’s vestment, which would mark her as a conversa, a laysister of the order.

  At sixteen, Ginevra was married to Luigi Niccolini, a wool merchant twice her age and of lesser lineage, finances, and social standing. Her dowry was a rather staggering 1,400 florins. Because her father had died, her uncle Bartolomeo probably negotiated her betrothal. Given their ages, it’s plausible he and Luigi were friends. At the time of the nuptials, Luigi had not held significant office. But he was chosen to be Florence’s highest magistrate, the gonfaloniere, one month after the Pazzi assassination, when Lorenzo de’ Medici needed to consolidate support following the murder of his brother.

  When Venetian ambassador Bernardo Bembo came to Florence in time for the joust of 1475, he was smitten. Taking Ginevra as his Platonic love, he commissioned poems about her, including those by Cristoforo Landino quoted in this novel. By all accounts, Bembo was charismatic, handsome, well-read, and extravagant, but perhaps of dubious ethics. Clearly he was a nimble politician, serving the watery kingdom of Venice in many posts and in many capacities despite several controversies he stirred up.

  It makes sense that Bembo would choose Ginevra. Contemporaries praised her beauty, her virtue, the delicacy of her hands, her embroidery, plus her keen intellect and clever conversation. And her poems. Tragically, only one line of her poetry—about the mountain tiger—remains. But that was certainly enough to make me want to write about her! We know of the line because it is referenced in a letter from a court musician in Rome. He asks for a full copy of Ginevra’s verse to prove to Roman society the wit and sophistication of Florentine ladies. (The Petrarch-styled sonnet Ginevra is too shy to read at the Medici banquet was imagined and written for this novel by researcher and theater artist Megan Behm.)

  Exactly who commissioned Ginevra’s portrait has been debated for decades. Because she is not bejeweled in the typical way of betrothal and wedding portraits of the time, it’s unlikely that it was commissioned for either of those nuptial events. Most art historians now agree that Bernardo Bembo is its most logical patron, and, given Leonardo’s career timeline, that the Venetian commissioned the portrait during his first ambassadorship to Florence (1475–1476). No one knows for sure when Ginevra’s likeness was completed.

  Her portrait was a turning point in Italian Renaissance painting, representing many firsts. In addition to being Leonardo’s first portrait and probably his first solo commission, Ginevra de’ Benci is the first Italian portrait to turn a woman from profile to a three-quarter, forward-facing pose, looking toward her viewer. It is the first “psychological” portrait designed to reveal the sitter’s “motions of the mind,” as Leonardo termed it; the first portrait to integrate the sitter into an uninterrupted natural landscape; and one of the first Florentine paintings to be done in oils rather than tempera, the egg-based paint favored by Italian artists.

  The juniper, or ginepro, bush behind her was initially a vibrant, almost emerald green, providing a stunning color contrast and framing of Ginevra. But Leonardo was a novice in mixing colors with oil, and the evergreen bush has since faded to an olive-brown, clouding much of its original meticulous detail. Also, infrared study of the portrait revealed that Leonardo changed the verso’s motto to Virtutem Forma Decorat, “She adorns her virtue with beauty,” or “Beauty adorns virtue.” The original Virtus et Honor that lies beneath lends credence to the belief the portrait was commissioned by Bembo, since he used the motto himself. But it appears Bembo did not take Ginevra’s portrait with him when he returned to Venice. In fact, the location of her painted likeness was lost for centuries.

  As to the other real-life people and characters in my interpretation of Ginevra’s life? Her brother Giovanni and Leonardo da Vinci were obviously friends. The artist left several of his possessions with Giovanni when he departed for Milan, including his unfinished Adoration of the Magi. Giovanni was derided as “the Six Hundred” for the exorbitant price of his Barbary horse. (Footnotes are the best! They revealed “the Six Hundred” and the facts of Uncle Bartolomeo’s armeggeria and flaming-heart float.)

  Simonetta Vespucci was the Platonic idol of Giuliano de’ Medici—both of them much beloved by Florence. Art historians believe her face was Botticelli’s model for Venus in his famous Birth of Venus and Flora in his Primavera. He did indeed paint a banner of her as Pallas for the joust where she was Queen of Beauty. The artist was so enamored of La Bella Simonetta that he begged to be buried at her feet thirty-five years after her untimely death from what was probably tuberculosis. Historians also speculate Simonetta was the inspiration for Leonardo’s Madonna of the Carnation, mainly because of the Medici symbols included in the painting and the similarity of the Virgin Mary’s face and hair to the idealized females Verrocchio painted. I do not know for certain that she and Ginevra were friends, but a footnote in material about Le Murate indicates that Ginevra’s aunt was Simonetta’s mother-in-law, so surely they knew each other. They certainly shared a kinship born of being lauded throughout Florence as Platonic muses. By all accounts, Simonetta was well-read like Ginevra, kind, and a particularly graceful dancer.

  The basic details about the Medici are factual: Lorenzo’s Platonic love, Lucrezia Donati; the joust’s spectacular pomp; the urban legend of Lorenzo climbing convent walls; his horsemanship; the palio; his penning bawdy Carnival songs as well as the loftiest of sonnets; his circle of friends and their philosophies and sometimes controversial opinions regarding the church; the politics of Florence; the sumptuous pageantry of feast days and the Pazzi conspiracy’s violence.

  Fabric and clothing were critically important to Florentines, sometimes totaling 75 percent of their wealth.

  Sancha is the only major character to be completely fictitious. But she is reflective of the era.

  I have no direct information about the relationship between Leonardo da Vinci and Ginevra other than her portrait
itself. Clearly there was enormous respect and insight into her soul in its making, just as Simonetta and Verrocchio describe the almost sacred romance between an artist and his subject, a poet and her muse.

  After Bembo returned to Venice, Ginevra did live primarily at Le Murate. Some historians have seen that as sad. I like to believe it was a conscious, wise, and satisfying choice of self-definition on her part, in keeping with a number of other educated noblewomen and writers of Ginevra’s time who dared to protest the restrictions on women. Several of them remained cloistered so they could pursue their intellectual curiosity and dreams.

  Fifteenth-century Florence, under Cosimo and his grandson Lorenzo de’ Medici, is unparalleled in its pageantry, passion, and percolating new ideas. It’s hard to imagine one city producing so many artists within a few decades—Brunelleschi, Donatello, Luca della Robbia, Ghiberti, Botticelli, the Pollaiuolo brothers, Perugino, and Michelangelo, to name the most important. And of course, Andrea del Verrocchio and his apprentice, Leonardo da Vinci. Many of these artists were nurtured and employed by the Medici. A few even lived for a time at the Medici palazzo. With such fervent patronage from its political leaders, Florence became an artistic mecca that set in motion the Renaissance, liberating the hearts and creativity of an entire continent.

  Over the years, Verrocchio’s talents and accomplishments have been overshadowed by his most gifted student. But in the 1470s, Verrocchio was one of the most acclaimed and sought-after artists in the city, remarkable in his output and diversity, a goldsmith, engineer, sculptor, and painter. His influence on Leonardo was vast. Many scholars now speculate that several innovations once credited solely to Leonardo, such as the subtle blending of light and shade called sfumato, might actually have been Verrocchio’s idea first, or a joint discovery between them. Verrocchio’s sketch of a horse that included precise measurements of the steed’s limbs in relation to one another may slightly predate Leonardo’s famous Vitruvian Man—acclaimed for the figure’s perfect proportions. Clearly Leonardo emulated the charming and lovingly animated female faces Verrocchio drew.