Leonardo da Vinci: Renaissance Master

by Ann Hood

“How can she?” Maisie said.

  “It’s an adult thing, I think,” he admitted.

  “I thought after Agatha called off the wedding that Mom would see the chance to reunite with Dad.”

  “I guess they don’t want to get back together, Maisie. And I guess we have to understand that.”

  Tears sprang to Maisie’s eyes.

  “So you think they’re divorced forever?” she asked.

  “I do.”

  “Well,” Maisie said, wiping the tears from her face with the back of her hand, “I don’t have to like it.”

  Felix smiled at her. “No,” he said. “You don’t.”

  Together they walked through the front doors of the Palazzo Medici and into the courtyard.

  The banquet table was practically drooping from the platters of meat and pasta and vegetables, the jugs of wine, the cheeses and fruits.

  But Maisie led Felix away from the table, across the courtyard toward the terra-cotta urn.

  Abruptly, she stopped.

  “What now?” he asked her.

  “The urn was right over there,” Maisie said, pointing to an empty corner.

  “Oh no,” Felix groaned.

  Maisie’s gaze flitted from one corner to the next until she’d determined that the urn was indeed gone.

  Clarice appeared in front of them, a quizzical expression on her face.

  “There’s food, and soon Leonardo will sing a song he wrote especially for Carnival,” she said.

  “Thanks,” Felix remembered to say, despite his growing anxiety. Without that urn, the seal was missing. And without that seal, they would never go back home to Newport and their parents.

  “What’s the matter?” Clarice asked them.

  “Nothing,” Maisie said quickly.

  She forced a laugh. “You know,” she continued, “the other night I thought there was this big urn over there.”

  She pointed to the empty corner.

  “There was,” Clarice said. “Those terrible Pazzis smashed it. Lorenzo has commissioned something even better, more beautiful. In fact, we’ll have a sculpture in every corner!”

  “They smashed it?” Felix said, his stomach sinking.

  “To smithereens. It was unsalvageable. We had to throw every piece away,” Clarice said. “And that was an antiquity. Irreplacable!” She added under her breath, “Those Pazzis!”

  “How terrible,” Maisie managed to say.

  “Where did you say you threw those pieces?” Felix asked hopefully.

  Clarice laughed. “I have no idea. The servants take care of things like that.”

  She studied their faces in that serious unnerving way she had.

  “Why are you two so concerned with a broken urn, anyway?” she asked them.

  “I just . . . um . . . admire antiquities,” Maisie stammered.

  “O-kay,” Clarice said doubtfully.

  Felix and Maisie looked at her as innocently as they could, holding her gaze until she finally said, “Well, then, come and eat.”

  “Great,” Felix said.

  “Oh, by the way,” Maisie said, trying to keep her voice light. “In all the excitement the other night, what with the Pazzis breaking everything and me hiding, I lost the seal I use on my letters.”

  Clarice’s thin eyebrows arched.

  “Really?”

  “It’s gold? With the giglio on it?” Maisie continued.

  “Hmmm,” Clarice said.

  “I think I dropped it”—Maisie giggled—“in that urn.”

  “You dropped it in the urn?” Clarice repeated.

  Leonardo had made his way over to the three of them, his lute beneath his arm.

  “I’m about to play,” he told them.

  “One minute, Leonardo,” Clarice said.

  She motioned to one of the servants, who scurried over to them.

  “Madame?” he said.

  “Aren’t you the one who took care of the urn the Pazzis destroyed?” she asked.

  “Yes, madame.”

  “Was there anything in it?”

  “Yes, madame,” he said. “I gave it to Signor Medici.”

  “A gold seal?” Maisie blurted.

  The servant looked at her sternly. “Yes, miss,” he said.

  “Great!” Maisie said happily. “I’ll just get it from Lorenzo.”

  Leonardo grabbed Felix’s arm.

  “That’s the object?” he asked. “When you give that to me, you’ll return to the twenty-first century?”

  “Yes,” Felix said.

  Leonardo nodded solemnly.

  “I understand that you need to go back,” he said.

  “Understanding is the noblest joy,” Felix said.

  Lorenzo had retired to his chambers. That’s what Clarice told Maisie when she went looking for him. And the seal.

  “Um,” Maisie said, “I kind of need to see him.”

  Clarice smiled, revealing her small and slightly crooked teeth. “When he is rested,” she said.

  “When will that be?” Maisie asked.

  Clarice smiled again, and shrugged.

  “And,” Clarice added, “I think I need some rest, too. What a marvelous day it’s been!”

  Maisie watched Clarice walk away, climbing the staircase to the family’s private quarters.

  Well, Maisie thought, I’ll just have to wake up Lorenzo.

  She gave Clarice time to get upstairs before she followed.

  Maisie had not been up to the private quarters before, and the first thing she noticed was how much art they had. Paintings hung crowded together on every wall, leaving almost no blank space at all. Sculptures stood by doorways and in corners, some of them with arms broken off or pieces missing, others shiny white marble. She paused in front of two portraits, one of Lorenzo and one of Clarice, both of them dressed in formal clothes. She tried to imagine having to sit for a painter to get a portrait done. How did Clarice manage to do so many adult things, even though she was just a teenager? There’s a good reason to live in the twenty-first century, Maisie decided as she continued down the long high-ceilinged hall.

  Everywhere she looked she saw gold glittering back at her, or people in paintings staring at her. And doors. Closed doors to more rooms than Elm Medona had. Maisie had no choice. She stopped at each one and pushed it open carefully, just enough to peer inside. The first appeared to be a study filled with floor-to-ceiling books, and of course more sculptures and paintings. The next looked like a living room, all velvet furniture and giant tapestries covering the long stretch of walls. The tapestries were faded and showed scenes of what looked at a glance like rural life. Not the room she needed, so she quietly shut the door and continued past marble benches with mosaic scenes embedded in them, to still more doors that, when opened, revealed more studies and living rooms.

  Finally, she glimpsed a room beyond one of the living rooms, and in that second room was a fireplace with a crackling fire burning and a narrow high bed covered in heavy red linens. The bed had four tall, intricately carved posts and a red canopy with fringe dangling from it. And in that bed lay Lorenzo the Magnificent.

  Maisie stepped inside the first room, walking heavily to try to wake him and closing the door with a firm bang.

  It worked.

  Lorenzo sat upright and grabbed a large shiny knife from beside him.

  “Put that down!” Maisie said. “It’s only me, Maisie Robbins.”

  Lorenzo’s face had gone pale, and color did not return immediately.

  “What are you doing in my private chambers?” he said, his voice regal.

  “I’m sorry,” Maisie said. “But I think you have something of mine.”

  “Do you realize that I could have you thrown in prison? With the Pazzis’ assassination threats, anyon
e who breaks in—”

  “Actually,” Maisie said, “I didn’t break in. I was downstairs and—”

  “Silence!” Lorenzo ordered.

  How can a man in a red canopy bed, wearing a weird off-white nightgown, be so scary? Maisie wondered. Because Lorenzo, his cheeks now bright red, was indeed terrifying.

  “Now I want you to turn around and leave my quarters.”

  “But—”

  “Do you understand?” Lorenzo said, his dark eyes ablaze.

  “I do,” Maisie said, taking a few steps backward toward the door. “But I—”

  “Prison is a very unpleasant place,” Lorenzo said.

  “Okay, okay,” Maisie said. “But I need my gold seal back,” she finished quickly as she rushed out the door.

  Once back in the corridor, she leaned against a wall, trying to calm down. Behind her, she felt a picture go crooked. Maisie turned and straightened it, the saint with his gold halo and sad droopy eyes staring back at her.

  “Miss Robbins,” a deep voice called, startling her enough to make her send the painting back to a crooked angle.

  A servant walked slowly toward her, holding a small yellow satin pillow.

  “Yes?” Maisie asked, her voice little more than a squeak.

  “Signor Medici believes this belongs to you.”

  There, sitting right in the middle of the pillow, the gold seal shone.

  “Yes!” Maisie said with relief. “Yes!”

  With that, Maisie returned, breathless, to the courtyard, waving the seal in the air.

  Felix looked at Maisie. Leonardo did, too.

  Leonardo put out his hand.

  And Maisie placed the seal in his waiting palm.

  The next morning, Maisie woke up to the sound of Great-Uncle Thorne’s loud, boisterous voice echoing through the hall.

  “Up! Up, you two rapscallions!” he shouted. “Awaken and greet the new day!”

  Quieter, as if he were speaking to himself, he added, “I certainly have.”

  Maisie burst into a big grin. Great-Uncle Thorne was not at death’s door, that terrible phrase her mother had used. He was alive! And he was here!

  Quickly, she pulled on an old faded concert T-shirt of her father’s and her fleece vest, slipped her feet into her sneakers, and without even bothering to tie the laces, ran out into the hall.

  Her mother hovered behind Great-Uncle Thorne, mystified.

  “I got a call from the hospital,” she explained, “saying he woke up, then got up, and then demanded to come home right away.”

  “A miracle,” Felix said from the doorway of his room, his eyes twinkling.

  “Jennifer,” Great-Uncle Thorne ordered, turning his gaze onto their mother, “tell Cook I would like an omelette aux fines herbes, a pot of café au lait, and some melon.”

  “All right,” their mother said.

  “Tout de suite,” Great-Uncle Thorne added.

  With that, their mother scurried off to the Kitchen.

  As soon as she was gone, Great-Uncle Thorne turned his attention to Maisie and Felix.

  “Let’s go,” he said to them.

  “Go?” Maisie said. “Go where?”

  He pointed a gnarled finger toward the door.

  What choice did they have? Maisie and Felix let him lead the way out, down the stairs, and into the hallway, the wall closing behind them.

  “Have you two ever been in the Fairy Room?” Great-Uncle Thorne asked them.

  “Where’s that?” Maisie asked.

  “You’ll see,” he said.

  They went down the Grand Staircase, across the foyer, through the West Rotunda with its glass-domed ceiling that revealed the full moon still in the sky above them, and into the Ladies’ Drawing Room.

  The Ladies’ Drawing Room had pink moiré silk walls with twenty-four-carat-gold trim and a ceiling covered with murals of some Greek myth. Maisie and Felix hardly ever came in here. Everything was dainty and fragile-looking, from the desk with the spindly legs to the deep-pink fainting couch.

  Great-Uncle Thorne paused.

  “It’s said that my mother loved this room,” he said wistfully.

  Maisie glanced around it. A harp stood in one corner with a music stand in front of it.

  “Did you know that every harp has a twin, cut from the same piece of wood?” Great-Uncle Thorne asked them.

  But it seemed to Felix to be a rhetorical question, so he didn’t respond.

  “Hey!” Maisie said, pointing to an oval painting on the south wall. “That’s from the Palazzo Medici!”

  “So it is,” Great-Uncle Thorne said with a chuckle. “My sister would be pleased that you are finally learning some culture.”

  He moved slowly to the opposite wall.

  On it were four large jewels.

  “Are those real?” Maisie asked him.

  Great-Uncle Thorne touched them in turn, saying what each was as he did.

  “Emerald. Ruby. Sapphire. Diamond.”

  He kept his hand on the diamond and gently turned it until that part of the wall creaked open.

  “It’s a door!” Felix said.

  “The door to the Fairy Room,” Great-Uncle Thorne said, stepping inside.

  Maise and Felix followed him, gasping as they entered.

  The room was tiny, its walls covered with real ivy and pink and blue morning glories. The ceiling was covered in angel hair dotted with tiny twinkling white lights.

  “The floor is made of grass!” Maisie exclaimed.

  All of the furniture—which wasn’t very much—glittered with gold.

  There was a small love seat, and on that love seat sat the Ziff twins.

  Rayne and Hadley jumped to their feet as soon as they saw Maisie and Felix.

  “Isn’t this room the most wonderful place you’ve ever seen?” Rayne said, giddy.

  “My mother built this for the fairies,” Great-Uncle Thorne explained.

  “Fairies,” Maisie said.

  “Yes,” Great-Uncle Thorne explained. “In Victorian times, people—including my mother—were fascinated with fairies and their lore. Some—also perhaps including my mother—claimed to see them. She built this room for them, putting all of their favorite things in it.”

  “So they just flap their wings and fly in and out of here?” Maisie said sarcastically.

  “Actually,” Great-Uncle Thorne said, “fairies don’t have wings. They fly by magic. That is, if you believe in that sort of thing. As I said, many people in the Victorian era did.”

  “Is that why we’re all here?” Felix asked.

  “Not at all,” Great-Uncle Thorne said. “I just wanted the most private place for us to meet and finally let the Ziff twins, here, tell us what happened when they found Amy Pickworth.”

  Hadley began to talk right away.

  “We saw her that very next day. She had on real bush gear. You know, khaki pants and a jacket with all these pockets and a big hat with, like, a veil over her face.”

  “To keep out the mosquitoes,” Rayne explained.

  “As we approached, she looked up from her work—”

  “She was very engrossed in it, drawing a map of some kind—”

  “—and she said, simply, ‘You’ve come.’”

  “We didn’t know what to answer,” Rayne said.

  “She did ask us what year we’d come from—”

  “—and when we told her, she got so excited!”

  “She couldn’t believe it was the twenty-first century,” Hadley added.

  “She asked about her children, and about Phinneas, and about history, too,” Rayne said, her words spilling out rapidly.

  “Who was president and what had happened in a lot of countries and with a lot of people I’d never heard of,” Hadley
continued.

  “And then she said, ‘It’s time.’”

  Maisie frowned. “It’s time? That was her message?”

  Rayne shook her head. “No. I asked her, ‘Time for what?’”

  “And she said,” Hadley finished, “‘Why, time to open the egg.’”

  “The missing egg!” Felix said.

  “She took the map we had, the one from The Treasure Chest, and then we were back,” Rayne explained.

  Maisie and Felix looked at Great-Uncle Thorne.

  He stood tall, not at all bent or crooked, his eyes gleaming.

  “Children,” he said, “it’s time to open the egg.”

  LEONARDO DA VINCI

  Born: April 15, 1452

  Died: May 2, 1519

  Leonardo da Vinci was born in the town of Vinci in the Republic of Florence, which is now part of the country of Italy. At the time, Italy was not united and was made up of many city-states, or republics. It was customary for people to take the name of their birth city, which is why Leonardo was known as da Vinci—Leonardo from Vinci. Little is known of Leonardo’s early life. His parents never married because they were from different economic and social classes. His mother was a peasant, possibly even a servant (though no one knows for sure). His father was a notary, which was similar to a lawyer. Leonardo lived with his mother until he was five and then moved to his father’s family farm. Eventually, both of his parents married other people and had other children, giving Leonardo seventeen half brothers and sisters!

  Leonardo did not have a formal education. But he began to draw the Tuscan landscape as well as the natural world around him on the farm at a very early age. He loved to read, and his grandfather taught him math and science. Through his love of observation, he taught himself astronomy, anatomy, and physics.

  In 1468, Leonardo’s family moved to Florence. At that time—now called the Renaissance—art was flourishing there. Leonardo’s father helped get him an apprenticeship with Andrea del Verrocchio, a painter, sculptor, and goldsmith who took many apprentices, including Sandro Botticelli. Artists were valued in Renaissance Florence, and the wealthy people there became their patrons, securing commissions for them and welcoming them into their homes.

  An artist’s apprenticeship followed a rigorous program. In addition to studying the fundamentals of painting, he studied color theory, sculpting, and metalwork. Leonardo studied with Verrocchio until 1472, when he was admitted to Florence’s painters’ guild. This gave him credibility and visibility to wealthy patrons. After five years with the guild, Leonardo opened his own studio, where he worked mostly with oil paints. At that time in Florence, the Medicis were the most important political family, and Lorenzo de’ Medici became Leonardo’s patron (he was also Michelangelo’s and Botticelli’s patron). However, Leonardo had a habit of not finishing work he’d begun, and soon Lorenzo ended his patronage.