by Giulio Leoni
‘Perhaps Messer Cavalcanti felt the desire to own a family chapel before dying. But it was abandoned, now that his son Guido, the ruffian, has been exiled for factionalism,’ Messer Duccio went on.
Dante merely nodded. He himself had signed the banning order. And his heart was still trapped in a vice of suffering.
INSIDE THE church a crowd of men and women thronged into the nave, crushed against the pillars and the unadorned stone walls by the pressure of the people still pouring in. Between the two last pillars an iron chain had been hung, which cut the space, preventing anyone from passing beyond it to the altar. Behind the plain marble table a little wall closed off the space of the choir, obstructing the view from the apse like the wings of a theatre.
Beyond the chain, beside the altar, a wooden chest had been placed, almost as tall as a man, covered by a white linen sheet embroidered with a large scarlet cross. Dante had the sense of having seen that strange object before. He was trying to remember where when he was pushed towards the barrier by a shove from behind. Next to him, a young man wearing student clothes had forced his way to the front, and came and stood next to Dante with a swift word of apology.
Dante turned back in search of Messer Duccio, but the man had disappeared behind the sea of heads. He heard a hum of voices starting up among the crowd.
Another figure had appeared from behind the altar, dressed from head to toe in the coarse cloth tunic of the Holy Land pilgrims, tied around his waist by a hempen rope that held a big wooden cross. All that was could be seen of the man was the part of his face left uncovered by his hood, with a flowing, jet-black beard that reached halfway down his chest. His hands were hidden by the wide sleeves.
He was the monk seen at the head of the unusual crowd of pilgrims, at the city gate. Dante was sure of it. And the chest was the same one he had seen at the Porta al Prato. But now, standing before the altar, the monk’s face had nothing of the gaunt obsessiveness that had appeared before Dante in the uncertain light of dawn.
With a dramatic gesture the man threw back his hood, uncovering a completely bald skull and a majestic brow. It looked as if the marble statue of an ancient Roman had emerged from the earth to walk again among men. There was nothing humble about him, Dante thought, observing him carefully. He represented the perfect icon of the warrior monk, with his big wrestler’s shoulders, his imposing stature and, above all, the erect position of someone who comes more to challenge than to ask.
Without a word the man approached the chest and pulled away the cloth, revealing a richly decorated aedicule, like those little portable chapels that Dante had seen being used by itinerant preachers. Then he opened its doors.
Inside, on a table with a central pediment, lay a bronze reliquary almost three feet high. The image, finely chiselled and decorated with a large number of multicoloured stones, reproduced the bust of a woman. The poet had seen something similar before, works of art born to preserve the remains of saints. Coverings for legs, hands, sometimes heads. But this one was big enough to hold an entire human bust.
The strangeness of the face that was represented disconcerted him. The artist had bestowed upon it lineaments of the most unbridled lust and perfidy. Along with an intense pain, in the twisted mouth from which mother-of-pearl teeth gleamed. The hand that carved this must have been extraordinarily skilful, to have evoked so perfectly in metal a goddess from hell. Dante looked round, studying the reaction of the crowd, but it seemed that no one around him was shocked by this indecent object in a holy place.
After waiting for the crowd to absorb the emotion of the moment, the monk approached the reliquary, touching it with his hands as if to warm the cold bronze. First he appeared to undo a buckle that must have secured the base to the bust. Then, manipulating invisible fastenings, he opened an orifice in the head, making part of the sculpted head vibrate. Inside the cavity something white gleamed. The skull of some saint or martyr, Dante thought, irritably. He had never appreciated that custom of breaking bodies apart, rather than leaving them to wait in their entirety for the trump of the Day of Judgement. But perhaps it was only an ivory statue, like those of ancient gods.
Meanwhile the monk had stretched out his arms, to ask the crowd for silence. Then he brought his hand to the reliquary, activating a kind of little handle that protruded from the bust. He drew it to himself, opening it up and putting its contents in full view.
It looked like the torso of a young adolescent girl, cut at waist-height. The beautiful, impassive face seemed covered by a thin layer of translucent material, paler than ivory, which sealed the girl’s eyes in tranquil sleep. The head was enclosed in an embroidered bonnet of pearls and gold threads that revealed barely a strip of the gently rounded forehead. The hands, crossed on the chest in the same position reproduced on the reliquary, closed to conceal the sweetness of the little bosom. A statue in wax, to judge by the pallid colour of the complexion and the fixity of the expression.
‘Look, the relic!’ he heard several voices exclaiming around him.
‘The prophet!’ cried others.
Dante began to observe the naked bust more closely, this time with a sense of annoyance. Like this, it wasn’t a statue, but a bit of mummified body, he thought with disgust. And the stretched skin of the face, the fullness of the cheeks and the eyeballs that he imagined under the closed lids gave it a living appearance quite at odds with the chiselled horrors that were displayed more and more often in churches.
A passage opened up in the mass of people, leading to the chain. A few feet away from him the prophet, as the crowd had called him, had spread his arms, face raised to the sky.
‘Behold the Virgin of Antioch crying vengeance for the unhappy Holy Land!’ he exclaimed in an inspired tone. He had a deep voice, run through with notes of roughness that revealed his southern origins. ‘She is here, a warning to your consciences!’
A pause for effect followed, as if the man wanted to collect all his forces.
‘When the pagans, having broken down our defences, burst into our streets and houses, the horrendous slaughter began. And the terrible wrongs. This young saint had hidden in her house, but when the pagans invaded it, it was her father himself who rescued her from the torments that the demons would have inflicted upon her. With a blow of his sword he divided her virgin body in two. And then the miracle occurred, blinding her assailants. Witness the power of God!’
All of a sudden the preacher lowered his arms, pointing the right one towards the statue. After a moment Dante clearly saw the Virgin’s eyelids open, their irises illuminated by a glaring light.
A startled silence had frozen the hundreds of people crowding into the nave. Then a rumble overwhelmed everything, joining all the voices in a single exclamation of wonder.
Even the poet had murmured something, surprised, fascinated by the relic, which continued to move. After opening its eyes completely and looking around, it relaxed the grip of its hands with a fluid motion, raising its right hand in the act of blessing those present. The delicate chest, the breasts barely prominent, seemed to be moving rhythmically.
‘It breathes … it’s alive!’ he heard someone shouting beside him, among the thousand other exclamations exploding all around. The relic had begun to turn its head, studying with its motionless eyes the space in front of it, as if in search of someone. It really was alive, however incredible that might have seemed.
The first rows had fallen to their feet, overwhelmed by the crowd of people pushing violently forward, stretching their necks to get a better view.
‘The blade cut through her body at the level of her loins. And yet she went on living, through God’s will! She uttered terrible words against the pagans, shattering their blind arrogance, confusing them in their terror. And as they groped their way through the darkness, the few who had escaped were able to reach safety, carrying her with them to lands lit by the grace of God!’
The Virgin continued to scan the crowd with her icy gaze. The blue of her irises was so pale
as to appear almost white. When her eyes met Dante’s, for a moment the poet had a sense that they were looking for him, out of everyone.
‘She will lead us to recapture the lost East. We will go back there to free the Sepulchre and make ours once more all the wealth that the pagans stole from our brothers. Listen to her words, when they are announced to you! And meanwhile help her cause with the contributions that each one of you can give,’ Brandano went on, pointing at a low, squat figure covered down to his feet by a habit similar to his own, which hid him completely from view.
For some moments the newcomer had begun to move around the crowd, waving a bag in which he was collecting the money that so many hurried to give him. Dante noticed that the figure was keeping his distance from him, head plunged deep in its hood, as if afraid to meet his eye. Perhaps because one could clearly read on his face all the perplexity that stirred within him, Dante thought.
Meanwhile the ritual of the exhibition of the Virgin seemed to be reaching an end. The relic slowly closed its eyes, and once more pressed its hands against its chest. It seemed to have returned to its endless sleep, lost once more in its dreams of Gloria and justice. After closing the doors and securing the belts that held together the various bits of battered marble, the monk Brandano turned to face the still-agitated crowd, pulling behind him the door that closed the aedicule, and covered the miraculous chest once more with the embroidered cloth.
Dante was disconcerted. But he did not share the stupid astonishment of the ecstatic crowd around him. At fairgrounds he had seen maimed and deformed creatures so many times before, apparent insults to life itself. There must be some explanation that reason could – and had to – find.
And yet the Virgin really did seem to be a triumph of the impossible. How could a body survive without half its vital organs, its most intimate fibres slashed to pieces? And breathe without contorting in the most dreadful pain? How could that creature feed itself, unless the hand of God really did intervene at every moment of its deformed life?
The ancients too had confronted wonders, and even Aristotle had admitted that, in the face of the supernatural, reasons for believing and reasons for denying were equivalent to one another.
But why would a superior power choose that mode in which to manifest itself? His mind refused to accept it. Could God’s majesty really reveal itself in those convulsive ways, in the horrendous mutilation of the flesh? In the form of an acrobatic spectacle? All to rouse the rabble to an enterprise that should instead have prompted ardour and virtue? Did God really need this, to free the birthplace of the Son from his enemies? ‘It brings misfortune … it’s cursed,’ someone murmured behind him.
Dante turned round in search of the source of the voice. Those words gave form to the sense of unease to which he had fallen prey since seeing the relic. It was an old man, bent double with his years, dressed in modest but not plebeian clothes. ‘The Virgin? Why is she cursed?’ he enquired.
The old man was staring at the passage along which the two men had vanished with the reliquary. ‘Not the Virgin of Antioch … whoever she might be, but the obscene wrapping in which she is kept. I have seen that form before, in the days of my youth. I know the hand that carved that face. I saw it more than half a century ago, at the workshop of Maestro Andrea the bell-maker, where we learned the art of casting metal, he and I.’
‘Who was he?’
‘Guido Bigarelli. Magister summus. Magister figurae mortis.’
‘Guido Bigarelli? Architect to Frederick the Second? The great Bigarelli?’
‘Oh, great, certainly … at designing evil. That reliquary – I know how he made it …’
The old man shook his head from side to side. Dante was perplexed: perhaps the man’s mind had reached its twilight, or already descended into darkness. But that name, Guido Bigarelli, echoed like distant bells.
The Emperor’s architect, Frederick’s right-hand man in all his most perverse dreams. Bigarelli was said to have decorated his secret chapel in Palermo, after the Swabian had returned from across the sea. Dante had known him too, when for a brief period the sculptor had worked for the friars of Santa Croce. In those days the poet was barely a boy, first getting to grips with the verbal arts. But he clearly remembered the broken nose and unruly beard that gave the man the air of a satyr, his eyes lost in troubled images.
‘Master of the face of death … why?’ Dante asked again. He no longer heard anything of the hubbub around them, gripped solely by that single question.
‘I know how he did it,’ the old man repeated. ‘He cast it from the body of his dead lover. Lost flesh rather than wax … I saw it.’
AT THAT moment some people moved between them, pushed by others who were pressing forward, shouting behind them. The prior noticed the young student who had bumped into him before. He was staring at them as if he had been listening carefully to the speech of the old man, who was now disappearing into the crowd. There were other things Dante would have liked to ask him, but he refrained from following the old man when he heard his own name called out.
He turned round, trying to look beyond the throng, and gave a start. The man who had called him, and who was staring at him with his dark eyes, stood out a good six inches above the heads of the crowd. Dante moved in his direction until he finally reached him.
‘Messer Alighieri, you too at the court of miracles?’ the man asked with a smile, as they both went and stood in the shelter of a pillar.
Dante had half-closed his mouth in surprise. ‘Yes … like you, incidentally,’ he murmured, unable to think of anything better.
The other man went on smiling, shaking from his face the mass of still-black hair that was beginning to be veined with whitish stripes, in curious contrast to his beard, which was as white as snow. He moved towards Dante, dragging his right leg, which was slightly shorter than its fellow. ‘Curiosity is the first foundation of all science. You should know that: you too have tried to penetrate the secrets of nature, when we knew one another in Paris.’
Images of that brief period at the Faculty of Arts quickly passed through the poet’s mind. And amongst those the face of this man, Arrigo da Jesi, who had in those days held the chair of natural philosophy.
‘How long ago did you leave Paris?’ asked the poet.
‘Times have changed in the lands of France. After the attacks by the Pope’s followers, it became impossible to teach in peace. So I crossed the Alps and stayed for some time in various cities in the North. Most recently I taught in Toulouse.’
Dante’s initial surprise was melting away as the man’s paternal image required consistency in his memory. Arrigo had been the teacher who had struck him the most, in those days, by the lucidity with which he expounded the theses of the great ancient philosophers.
‘Why did you not look for me, Maestro?’ the poet affectionately rebuked him. ‘I would have welcomed you with the respect that you deserve, allowing for my modest means.’
Arrigo smiled again and cordially slapped his shoulder. ‘Thank you, but you mustn’t see me as an unhappy exile. I have sufficient resources to live, and from time to time I still give lectures. In fact I hoped to meet you at one of them, and thus renew our acquaintance in the space of words, the only space worthy of the wise man. His only kingdom,’ he concluded after a brief pause, looking at the chaos around them.
‘Public service has kept me from that kingdom. But I certainly haven’t forgotten the lesson you taught me. As I see that you haven’t forgotten my name.’
‘Could I have forgotten my most brilliant pupil?’
‘It seems that your attention does not turn solely to the mysteries of nature and of God,’ Dante went on, nodding at the spectacle behind them.
‘Knowledge is the wise man’s mission. And knowing everything is his most noble ambition,’ the philosopher replied after a moment.
‘Knowing everything is another name for omniscience. And omniscience is the attribute of God alone, as Thomas Aquinas and Saint Bonaventura teac
h, amongst many others,’ the poet replied. Without noticing, he had begun to cross minds with his former teacher, returning to an interrupted challenge.
‘There are also other teachers to lighten our darkness. Others have sought and continue to seek the light, besides the great men to whom you have just alluded. We spoke of some of them, back then. But others it was not wise to mention, not even in the lands of France.’
‘And here in Florence?’
‘Perhaps.’
Dante felt that he had stepped on to a slippery slope. ‘So what do you think about what we just saw?’ he asked, changing the subject.
‘What we saw … Are you sure we both saw the same thing?’
‘Certainly our eyes are different, as are our hands and our noses. But essentially the image that our minds draw, from what our senses convey to them, must be the same: because our mind is the mirror of God’s, which is one.’
‘And what if there were no God?’ replied Arrigo, calmly.
‘You blaspheme, Arrigo!’ Dante raised a threatening finger, and there was a chuckle in his voice. He didn’t believe that a man with a chair in the Faculty of Theology could really nurture such a doubt. But the other man didn’t share his hilarity. ‘I mean, if there were not a single God. If, as with light and shade, the divine principle were also divided into a realm of goodness and its opposite? If that were the case, which of the two dominions would what we have just witnessed belong to?’
Arrigo shrugged. ‘Forgive me, Messer Alighieri. It is the continuous use of doubt that may easily become a habit of mind in anyone who, like me, uses it for the investigation of nature. But let us return to the monstrous spectacle that has been presented to us. It seems that God has suspended his laws. Never in my study of the phenomena of nature have I encountered a creature that could survive without half of its organs.’
‘Are you, as I am, thinking in terms of a doll, with some sort of mechanism to bring it to life?’ asked Dante.