by Rice, Anne
My mother was spirited and beautiful, with brown hair and very green eyes, and she adored country life, but she’d never known Florence except from the inside of a convent. She thought there was something seriously wrong with me that I wanted to read Dante’s poetry and write so much of my own.
She lived for nothing but receiving guests in gracious style, seeing to it that the floors were strewn with lavender and sweet-smelling herbs, and that the wine was properly spiced, and she led the dance herself with a great-uncle who was very good at it, because my father would have nothing to do with dancing.
All this to me, after Florence, was rather tame and slow. Bring on the war stories.
She must have been very young when she was married off to my father, because she was with child on the night she died. And the child died with her. I’ll come to that quickly. Well, as quickly as I can. I’m not so good at being quick.
My brother, Matteo, was four years younger than me, and an excellent student, though he had not been sent off anywhere as yet (would that he had), and my sister, Bartola, was born less than a year after me, so close in fact that I think my father was rather ashamed of it.
I thought them both—Matteo and Bartola—the most lovely and interesting people in the world. We had country fun and country freedom, running in the woods, picking blackberries, sitting at the feet of gypsy storytellers before they got caught and sent away. We loved one another. Matteo worshipped me too much because I could outtalk our father. He didn’t see our father’s quiet strength, or well-fashioned old manners. I was Matteo’s real teacher in all things, I suppose. As for Bartola, she was far too wild for my mother, who was in an eternal state of shock over the state of Bartola’s long hair, the hair being all full of twigs and petals and leaves and dirt from the woods where we’d been running.
Bartola was forced into plenty of embroidering, however; she knew her songs, her poetry and prayers. She was too exquisite and too rich to be rushed into anything she didn’t want. My father adored her, and more than once in very few words assured himself that I kept constant watch over her in all our woodland wanderings. I did. I would have killed anyone who touched her!
Ah. This is too much for me! I didn’t know how hard this was going to be! Bartola. Kill anyone who touched her! And now nightmares descend, as if they were winged spirits themselves, and threaten to shut out the tiny silent and ever drifting lights of Heaven.
Let me return to my train of thought.
My mother I never really understood, and probably misjudged, because everything seemed a matter of style and manners with her, and my father I found to be hysterically self-satirical and always funny.
He was, beneath all his jokes and snide stories, actually rather cynical, but at the same time kind; he saw through the pomp of others, and even his own pretensions. He looked upon the human situation as hopeless. War was comic to him, devoid of heroes and full of buffoons, and he would burst out laughing in the middle of his uncles’ harangues, or even in the middle of my poems when I went on too long, and I don’t think he ever deliberately spoke a civil word to my mother.
He was a big man, clean shaven and long-haired, and he had beautiful long tapering fingers, very unusual for his size, because all his elders had thicker hands. I have the same hands myself. All the beautiful rings he wore had belonged to his mother.
He dressed more sumptuously than he would have dared to do in Florence, in regal velvet stitched with pearls, and wore massive cloaks lined in ermine. His gloves were true gauntlets trimmed in fox, and he had large grave eyes, more deep-set than mine, and full of mockery, disbelief and sarcasm.
He was never mean, however, to anyone.
His only modern affectation was that he liked to drink from fine goblets of glass, rather than old cups of hardwood or gold or silver. And we had plenty of sparkling glass always on our long supper table.
My mother always smiled when she said such things to him as “My Lord, please get your feet off the table,” or “I’ll thank you not to touch me until you’ve washed your greasy hands,” or “Are you really coming into the house like that?” But beneath her charming exterior, I think she hated him.
The one time I ever heard her raise her voice in anger, it was to declare in no uncertain terms that half the children in our villages round had been sired by him, and that she herself had buried some eight tiny infants who had never lived to see the light, because he couldn’t restrain himself any better than a rampant stallion.
He was so amazed at this outburst—it was behind closed doors—that he emerged from the bedchamber looking pale and shocked, and said to me, “You know, Vittorio, your mother is nothing as stupid as I always thought. No, not at all. As a matter of fact, she’s just boring.”
He would never under normal circumstances have said anything so unkind about her. He was trembling.
As for her, when I tried to go in to her, she threw a silver pitcher at me. I said, “But Mother, it’s Vittorio!” and she threw herself into my arms. She cried bitterly for fifteen minutes.
We said nothing during this time. We sat together in her small stone bedroom, rather high up in the oldest tower of our house, with many pieces of gilded furniture, both ancient and new, and then she wiped her eyes and said, “He takes care of everyone, you know. He takes care of my aunts and my uncles, you know. And where would they be if it weren’t for him? And he’s never denied me anything.”
She went rambling on in her smooth convent-modulated voice. “Look at this house. It’s filled with elders whose wisdom has been so good for you children, and all this on account of your father, who is rich enough to have gone anywhere, I suppose, but he is too kind. Only, Vittorio! Vittorio, don’t … I mean … with the girls in the village.”
I almost said, in a spasm of desire to comfort her, that I had only fathered one bastard to my knowledge, and he was just fine, when I realized this would have been a perfect disaster. I said nothing.
That might have been the only conversation I ever had with my mother. But it’s not really a conversation because I didn’t say anything.
She was right, however. Three of her aunts and two of her uncles lived with us in our great high-walled compound, and these old people lived well, always sumptuously dressed in the latest fabrics from the city, and enjoying the purest courtly life imaginable. I couldn’t help but benefit from listening to them all the time, which I did, and they knew plenty of all the world.
It was the same with my father’s uncles, but of course it was their land, this, their family’s, and so they felt more entitled, I assume, as they had done most of the heroic fighting in the Holy Land, or so it seemed, and they quarreled with my father over anything and everything, from the taste of the meat tarts served at supper to the distractingly modern style of the painters he hired from Florence to decorate our little chapel.
That was another sort of modern thing he did, the matter of the painters, maybe the only modern thing other than liking things made of glass.
Our little chapel had for centuries been bare. It was, like the four towers of our castle and all the walls around, built of a blond stone which is common in Northern Tuscany. This is not the dark stone you see so much in Florence, which is gray and looks perpetually unclean. This northern stone is almost the color of the palest pink roses.
But my father had brought pupils up from Florence when I was very young, good painters who had studied with Piero della Francesca and other such, to cover these chapel walls with murals taken from the lovely stories of saints and Biblical giants in the books known as The Golden Legend.
Not being himself a terribly imaginative man, my father followed what he had seen in the churches of Florence in his design and instructed these men to tell the tales of John the Baptist, patron saint of the city and cousin of Our Lord, and so it was that during the last years of my life on earth, our chapel was enfolded with representations of St. Elizabeth, St. John, St. Anne, the Blessed Mother, Zachary and angels galore, all dressed—as w
as the way of the time—in their Florentine finest.
It was to this “modern” painting, so unlike the stiffer work of Giotto or Cimabue, that my elderly uncles and aunts objected. As for the villagers, I don’t think they exactly understood it all either, except they were so overawed in the main by the chapel at a wedding or baptism that it didn’t matter.
I myself of course was terrifically happy to see these paintings made, and to spend time with the artists, who were all gone by the time that my life was brought to a halt by demonic slaughter.
I’d seen plenty of the greatest painting in Florence and had a weakness for drifting about, looking at splendid visions of angels and saints in the rich dedicated chapels of the Cathedrals, and had even—on one of my trips to Florence with my father—in Cosimo’s house, glimpsed the tempestuous painter Filippo Lippi, who was at that time actually under lock and key there to make him finish a painting.
I was much taken with the plain yet compelling man, the way that he argued and schemed and did everything but throw a tantrum to get permission to leave the palazzo while lean, solemn and low-voiced Cosimo just smiled and talked him down more or less out of his hysteria, telling him to get back to work and that he would be happy when he was finished.
Filippo Lippi was a monk, but he was mad for women and everybody knew it. You could say that he was a favorite bad guy. It was for women that he wanted out of the palazzo, and it was even suggested later at the supper table of our hosts in Florence on that visit that Cosimo ought to lock a few women in the room with Filippo, and that maybe that would keep Filippo happy. I don’t think Cosimo did any such thing. If he had, his enemies would have made it the grand news of Florence.
Let me make note, for it is very important. I never forgot that glimpse of the genius Filippo, for that is what he was—and is—to me.
“So what did you so like about him?” my father asked me.
“He’s bad and good,” I said, “not just one or the other. I see a war going on inside of him! And I saw some of his work once, work he did with Fra Giovanni”—this was the man later called Fra Angelico by all the world—“and I tell you, I think he is brilliant. Why else would Cosimo put up with such a scene? Did you hear him!”
“And Fra Giovanni is a saint?” asked my father.
“Hmmmmm, yes. And that’s fine, you know, but did you see the torment in Fra Filippo? Hmmm, I liked it.”
My father raised his eyebrows.
On our next and very last trip to Florence, he took me to see all of Filippo’s paintings. I was amazed that he had remembered my interest in this man. We went from house to house to look at the loveliest works, and then to Filippo’s workshop.
There an altarpiece commissioned by Francesco Maringhi for a Florentine church—The Coronation of the Virgin—was well under way, and when I saw this work, I nearly fainted dead from shock and love of it.
I couldn’t leave it alone. I sighed and wept.
I had never seen anything as beautiful as this painting, with its immense crowd of still attentive faces, its splendid collection of angels and saints, its lithe and graceful feline women and willowy celestial men. I went crazy for it.
My father took me to see two more of his works, which were both paintings of the Annunciation.
Now, I have mentioned that as a child, I had played the Angel Gabriel coming to the Virgin to announce the Conception of Christ in her womb, and the way we played, he was supposed to be a pretty beguiling and virile angel, and Joseph would come in and, lo, find this overwhelming male with his pure ward, the Blessed Mary.
We were a worldly bunch, but you know, we gave the play a little spice. I mean we cooked it up a bit. I don’t think it says anything in scripture about St. Joseph happening on a tryst.
But that had been my favorite role, and I had particularly enjoyed paintings of the Annunciation.
Well, this last one I saw before I left Florence, done by Filippo sometime in the 1440s, was beyond anything I had beheld before.
The angel was truly unearthly yet physically perfect. Its wings were made of peacock feathers.
I was sick with devotion and covetousness. I wished we could buy this thing and take it back home. That wasn’t possible. No works of Filippo were on the market then. So my father finally dragged me away from this painting, and off we went home the next day or so.
Only later did I realize how quietly he listened to what I said as I ranted on and on about Fra Filippo:
“It’s delicate, it’s original, and yet it is commendable according to everybody’s rules, that’s the genius of it, to change, but not so much, to be inimitable, yet not beyond the common grasp, and that’s what he’s done, Father, I tell you.”
I was unstoppable.
“This is what I think about that man,” I said. “The carnality in him, the passion for women, the near beastly refusal to keep his vows is at war always with the priest, for look, he wears his robes, he is Fra Filippo. And out of that war, there comes into the faces he paints a look of utter surrender.”
My father listened.
“That’s it,” I said. “Those characters reflect his own continued compromise with the forces he cannot reconcile, and they are sad, and wise, and never innocent, and always soft, reflective of mute torment.”
On the way back home, as we were riding together through the forest, up a rather steep road, very casually my father asked me if the painters who had done our chapel were good.
“Father, you’re joking,” I said. “They were excellent.”
He smiled. “I didn’t know, you know,” he said. “I just hired the best.” He shrugged.
I smiled.
Then he laughed with good nature. I never asked him when and if I could leave home again to study. I think I figured I could make both of us happy.
We must have made twenty-five stops on that last journey home from Florence. We were wined and dined at one castle after another, and wandered in and out of the new villas, lavish and full of light, and given over to their abundant gardens. I clung to nothing in particular because I thought it was my life, all those arbors covered with purple wisteria, and the vineyards on the green slopes, and the sweet-cheeked girls beckoning to me in the loggias.
Florence was actually at war the year we made this journey. She had sided with the great and famous Francesco Sforza, to take over the city of Milan. The cities of Naples and Venice were on the side of Milan. It was a terrible war. But it didn’t touch us.
It was fought in other places and by hired men, and the rancor caused by it was heard in city streets, not on our mountain.
What I recall from it were two remarkable characters involved in the fray. The first of these was the Duke of Milan, Filippo Maria Visconti, a man who had been our enemy whether we liked it or not because he was the enemy of Florence.
But listen to what this man was like: he was hideously fat, it was said, and very dirty by nature, and sometimes would take off all his clothes and roll around naked in the dirt of his garden! He was terrified of the sight of a sword and would scream if he saw it unsheathed, and he was terrified too to have his portrait painted because he thought he was so ugly, which he was. But that was not all. This man’s weak little legs wouldn’t carry him, so his pages had to heft him about. Yet he had a sense of humor. To scare people, he would suddenly draw a snake out of his sleeve! Lovely, don’t you think?
Yet he ruled the Duchy of Milan for thirty-five years somehow, this man, and it was against Milan that his own mercenary, Francesco Sforza, turned in this war.
And that man I want to describe only briefly because he was colorful in an entirely different way, being the handsome strong brave son of a peasant—a peasant who, kidnapped as a child, had managed to become the commander of his band of kidnappers—and this Francesco became commander of the troop only when the peasant hero drowned in a stream trying to save a page boy. Such valor. Such purity! Such gifts.
I never laid eyes on Francesco Sforza until I was already dead to t
he world and a prowling vampire, but he was true to his descriptions, a man of heroic proportions and style, and believe it or not, it was to this bastard of a peasant and natural soldier that the weak-legged crazy Duke of Milan gave his own daughter in marriage, and this daughter, by the way, was not by the Duke’s wife, poor thing, for she was locked up, but by his mistress.
It was this marriage which led eventually to the war. First Francesco was fighting bravely for Duke Filippo Maria, and then when the weird unpredictable little Duke finally croaked, naturally his son-in-law, handsome Francesco, who had charmed everybody in Italy from the Pope to Cosimo, wanted to become the Duke of Milan!
It’s all true. Don’t you think it’s interesting? Look it up. I left out that the Duke Filippo Maria was also so scared of thunder that he was supposed to have built a soundproof room in his palace.
And there is more to it than that. Sforza more or less had to save Milan from other people who wanted to take it over, and Cosimo had to back him, or France would have come down on us, or worse.
It was all rather amusing, and as I have said, I was well prepared already at a young age to go into war or to court if it was ever required of me, but these wars and these two characters existed for me in dinner table talk, and every time someone railed about the crazy Duke Filippo Maria, and one of his insane tricks with a snake out of his sleeve, my father would wink at me and whisper in my ear, “Nothing like pure lordly blood, my son.” And then laugh.
As for the romantic and brave Francesco Sforza, my father had wisely nothing to say as long as the man was fighting for our enemy, the Duke, but once we had all turned together against Milan, then my father commended the bold self-made Francesco and his courageous peasant father.
There had been another great lunatic running around Italy during earlier times, a freebooter and ruffian named Sir John Hawkwood, who would lead his mercenaries against anybody, including the Florentines.
But he had ended up loyal to Florence, even became a citizen, and when he departed this earth, they gave him a splendid monument in the Cathedral! Ah, such an age!