The Botticelli Secret

by Marina Fiorato

  I looked about me, in case someone had entered the room behind us. “Me?” It was the bray of an ass.

  Brother Guido turned his blue gaze on me.

  “You,” repeated the herbalist. “You are the model for Flora, are you not?”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “Then you may hold the secret; you may have been chosen for a reason.”

  “I think we may discount that,” put in Brother Guido quickly. “Signorina Vetra was chosen through her . . . association with a wealthy friend of Botticelli’s.”

  “Ah, yes. Signor Benvolio, God rest his soul.” The herbalist’s benediction was not entirely sincere, and I suspected that somewhat of Bembo’s reputation had penetrated even these hallowed walls.

  “Very well,” continued Brother Nicodemus. “I think, then, we may concentrate our efforts on the figure of Flora. She is clearly the most floral of characters. Chloris is perhaps the next most adorned, as flowers drop like truths from her mouth. She reaches for Flora’s sleeve—see? I think we may assume that Chloris and Flora are intimately connected.”

  “Perhaps Chloris is a city very close to Florence?” suggested Brother Guido.

  “I think so—perhaps Prato, maybe Imola.”

  I had no opinion on this, since before last month, I had never been outside the city, unless you count coming from Venice as a baby in a bottle.

  “But to Flora,” urged the herbalist. “What can we say of the figure, aside from the flowers? For they are her major feature, but before we focus on them, perhaps we should consider her other characteristics.”

  I shared a look with Brother Guido—our two half-smiles made a whole, for this was exactly how we were used to proceeding.

  “She is the primum mobile of the whole scene.” Typical of my learned companion to begin with something Latin which left me behind completely. Luckily he knew me well enough to translate without prompting. “She is the ‘first to move.’ ”

  I saw what he meant. “She is the farthest forward of all the figures in the scene—she leads the way.”

  “Which fits my hypothesis that Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, of Flora’s city Florence, is the originator of the plot—the root of all,” put in the herbalist. “Also, she looks directly at the viewer.”

  “Her dress flares like angel wings.” This devotional last from Brother Guido.

  “She has fishy sleeves.” This was me.

  Both brothers shot me a look.

  I explained. “I mean—her foresleeves are covered in, well, fish skin.”

  This they could not deny, nonsensical though it sounded, for it was plain for all to see.

  “Hmmm. Perhaps this indicates a maritime connection, possibly to the three Graces,” mused my friend.

  “She wears their color too,” noted Brother Nicodemus. “Or rather, their lack of color. The body of her gown is white, like theirs.”

  “But I am not dead!” I blurted, referring to our conversation on the Muda’s flagship, when we deduced that the Graces were dead ladies: Simonetta Cattaneo and Maria d’Aquino, “Fiammetta.”

  “I think the presence of the flowers, such living, vital things, mark you out from their number, as a living, breathing . . . person.”

  I knew the herbalist wanted to say “lady” but could not quite bring himself to use that word in connection with me.

  “Let us begin by identifying the blossoms that adorn Flora,” he went on hurriedly, “and see what we may find.”

  He then reached for an interesting contraption: two twin circles of glass within lead circles, which he clipped to his nose. When he turned back to Brother Guido his eyes seemed enormous behind the glass, as if magnified by the bottoms of twin bottles. I almost laughed, but my mirth died when I soon realized that he could see with such aids much better than Brother Guido or I, even though we had a good fifty years on him.

  “Shall we begin with the headdress? In the center, on the brow”—he peered close with his eyeglasses—“the humble violet, Viola odorata. Let us have some method to this,” added the old monk. He stood on a stool, for only with such assistance could he reach high enough, and pulled at a purple bloom from the flowery field above our heads. He held it at our eyes and noses. “There: a violet,” he said of the fragrant bloom. Then he turned back to us and said one word more. “Next.”

  And so we worked as the sky clotted intonight outside. Working first around Flora’s headdress, down to the garland around her neck. The names fell from the herbalist’s lips like the blooms from Chloris and echoed from the walls of the crypt: a pagan, not a Christian, litany. Cornflower, daisy, hellebore, lily of the valley, myosotis, myrtle, occhiocento, pomegranate. Violet again.

  I looked on and helped take the flowers down when they proved too high for the herbalist, the smells and sights mingling to take me back to that fateful day in Botticelli’s studio; remembering the chaplet that had pricked at my forehead, the wreath that had scratched my throat. The treacherous bell of the Pazzi Chapel—cast by murderers and giving tongue to their memorial—rang twice before we had all the flowers taken down, and Brother Nicodemus marked time with a floral clock of his own. All the blooms were found and identified and fore long a veritable garden sat before us.

  At last we were done with the head and neck, but there could be no respite.

  “The gown,” commanded Brother Guido. “Much easier,” said the herbalist. He pulled just two blooms from their twines. “Cornflower and carnation. All over. And round her waist a girdle of roses.” He pulled down a pliant branch, black thorned and beautiful, with a dozen pink roses riding the glossy green leaves. I remembered this detail—the thorns piercing the fabric of my dress to prick my skin.

  “And in her hands?”

  “Well, I can tell you that,” said I. I remembered well the fragrant flower heads that were poured into my skirts that day, for me to cradle and cast upon the ground. “I was holding roses.”

  Brother Guido’s head snapped up. “Say it again.”

  Puzzled, I repeated myself. “I was holding roses.”

  “Flora was holding roses.” He almost whispered the words, like a man in a dream. Then he began to smile, and with a sudden action swept all other carefully collected blooms aside to fall to the floor in a fragrant mass.

  We regarded him as if he’d become a lunatic.

  “We’ve been wasting our time,” he crowed. “Naming all the flowers, classifying them, taking them down.” He capered about the room, playing a pantomime of our actions for the last hour. He hooted with laughter for the first time since Rome. “We are asses all! Flora holds the secret! Roses! That is all we needed to know! She is holding them in her hands! She is the only figure holding flowers! Such humble blooms that grow in every garden and hedgerow! We could have named them ourselves!”

  Brother Nicodemus sank down onto the milking stool, took off his eyeglasses, and passed his hand before his eyes; when he took the hand away he revealed a toothless smile.

  “You are right,” he said, “and had we been true scholars the Latin would have told us; the riddle was ‘Flora manus secretum.’ Manus means to hold in the hand, from the root mano—hand. If Flora had held the secret in a metaphorical sense, like a guardian, Pope Sixtus would have used the verb custodia, ‘Flora custodia secretum.’ “ He turned to me. “Child, you did hold the secret after all, in the most literal sense, when you modeled for Botticelli that day.” The dust-dry chuckle came again.

  I began to feel a little annoyed. I didn’t see what there was to smile about. We’d just spent from Vespers till Compline naming flowers, and yet finding the actual answer was the work of a moment. I felt rather disappointed. We did not need to be here at all. Roses. We could have named that frigging flower in the carriage on the way up from Rome in the time it takes to fart, if Brother Guido had not been sulking in the seventh circle of his personal hell. A child could have done it; we didn’t need the old monk after all. I began to think about dinner, while Brother Guido apologized to the herbalist.


  “I’m sorry, Brother. We did not need to trouble you after all.”

  “You did, my son. For you still do not know the meaning of the roses. Or how they may conceal anything.”

  This was true; we were no further forward.

  “Since we are here, then,” said Brother Guido, “we must use the resource we have for this night—namely, Brother Nicodemus’s extraordinary knowledge of botany. Besides, I think the codes of the Primavera are too clever to have a direct appearance. Botticelli has been cleverer than that so far—all the puzzles have been oblique, and have clarity only to the Seven. We must look for something clever. I think the type of flower is important; perhaps its properties too. Let us spend a little time in colloquy and consider all we know of the queen of flowers, the rose.”

  Brother Nicodemus then took a rose from his collection, the pale pink of a shell, and another of blushing coral, exactly the two hues that were bundled into my arms in the painting. We all sat at the table now, gazing at the two perfect flowers as if we expected them to speak.

  “Rose; Rosa centifolia,” mused Brother Nicodemus. “As you have well said, she is known as the queen of flowers. Roman brides and bridegrooms were crowned with roses, so too were the images of Cupid and Venus and Bacchus. Such a headdress was much favored by poets too—Anacreon’s odes speak of poets sporting rose crowns at their feasts of Flora and Hymen.”

  I didn’t see what a bunch of fey poets could have to do with this—the bridal theme seemed much more relevant—but Brother Guido pounced on the poetic thread.

  “I think that is significant. Poliziano, the Medici court poet and the very man who wrote the Stanze, the verses upon which the Primavera is based, has written many times on the beauties of the rose. In fact”—he brought his hand down on the table with a crash—“the Stanze themselves, if memory serves, contain a very specific couplet on flowers, ‘Ma vie più lieta, più ridente a bella / ardisce aprire il seno al sol la rosa . . .’ which expresses that the rose is more daring than the humble violet!”

  Brother Nicodemus sat a little straighter. “Violet is the flower that crowns Flora’s headdress—it sits full in the center, at the forehead!”

  “Perhaps the poet, and thus the painting, is saying that we must not use our heads to find the secret, but our—”

  “Our what? Our stomachs?” I began to laugh at the downcast faces of the monks, as their theory fell flat.

  “Wait, though—isn’t Flora with child? Did not Signor Benvolio say as much to you when he urged you to model for his friend?” Brother Guido demanded of me. “That she bears the fruits of the coming season?”

  “That’s true!” I confirmed eagerly. “I was supposed to be up the stick.” The elderly monk winced a little at my indelicacy but I didn’t care—we were on to something. “Maybe the ‘secret’ has something to do with a baby or a child? Perhaps someone is with child? Perhaps Semiramide Appiani is pregnant, and the brat will be heir to the Medici fortune when Lorenzo the Magnificent is dead!”

  “Signorina!” thundered Brother Nicodemus. “I will grant you that the Medici family are not without sin, but Signorina Appiani is reputed to be a virtuous maid, chaste as the first snow.”

  “All right.” I sat back on the bench with a skeptical look. “But you must admit, it would suit Don Ferrente to have his niece the mother of the Medici heir. And Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco too—that’s two of the Seven happy.”

  “And it is true that roses have many connections to Venus,” added Brother Guido in my defense. “It is her own flower, and she wore a chaplet of roses at the Judgment of Paris—according to the rhetor Libanis—the very contest that is represented in the Primavera by the appearance of the three Graces.”

  “And Greek legend dictates that the rose originated at the birth of Venus, according to Anacreon,” agreed the herbalist. “ ‘A tender rosebush sprang up from the earth when Venus rose from the sea, and a sprinkling of nectar from the gods made the bush burst into flower.’ ”

  “I think we have strayed from the theme somewhat,” asserted Brother Guido gently.

  I agreed—all the fucking poetry was holding things up, is how I’d express it.

  “After all, in the Primavera it is Flora not Venus who holds the secret. Flora who is pregnant, not Venus.” Shyly he looked askance at me.

  I answered his unasked question. “Not likely.” I was too smart to be caught that way; for a working girl it could be the end of your career—a baby was worse than the pox. I thought of the waxed cotton squares where they sat snug and useless at the neck of my womb, replaced after each monthly bleeding. As for the last month—chance would be a fine thing, for I had not had a jump since Bembo. Venus, though—Miss Appiani—was a different matter. Many a Florentine maid had been tumbled by her betrothed—and if a baby was born a few months early, where’s the harm? “Look at her dress,” I urged. “You could easily hide your bump under there if you were graveled with a brat.”

  “Hmmm. I think that is the, er . . . Romanesque style,” suggested Brother Guido. I snorted through my nose for I knew more of the world than these two, that’s for damn sure. “It’s a thought,” he conceded “and this theorem would certainly be given credence by the fact that tomorrow’s wedding date—July 19—is the eve of the feast of Saint Margaret, patron saint of pregnant women; but perhaps we are missing something more obvious.”

  This I agreed with. “All this cant about Venus and yet you’re missing the main point—it’s a as clear as the cock on the David. The obvious to me is that roses are given to women by men who want to fuck them,” I blurted, irritated by the whole debate and not caring if I shocked the old booby. But he surprised me.

  “She is right, ‘tis true,” said the herbalist calmly. “They are gifts of love. And the poet Boiardo said that roses were scattered to celebrate joy in love.”

  Datime a piena mano rose e zigli

  spargete intorno a me viole e fiori . . .

  Di mia leticia meco il frutto pigli!

  “Flora is scattering roses in this picture—in Roman times roses were scattered at feasts of Flora and Hymen, in the paths of victors, or beneath their chariot wheels, or adorned the prows of their war vessels.”

  Brother Guido’s attention was caught on a baited hook. “In the paths of victors,” he repeated. “This must be relevant. For this whole conspiracy revolves around the waging of war and hundreds upon thousands of warships which we have seen with our own eyes.”

  “Perhaps,” agreed Brother Nicodemus. “But I would not at once think of this rose in connection with war, but with healing. I use it again and again in my work here.”

  “For which maladies?” questioned Brother Guido quickly.

  “It strengtheneth the heart, the stomach, the liver, and the retentive faculty; is good against all kinds of fluxes, prevents vomiting, stops tickling coughs, and is of service in consumption. Of course, I use many classes of the rose here in the herbarium, usually in the distillation of rose water for these treatments—the properties I mention are not specific to this type, the Rosa centifolia.”

  “Rosa centifolia,” Brother Guido mused. “ ‘The rose of a hundred leaves.’ “ He translated for my benefit. “Perhaps the name of the rose is telling us to look for a number. Codes and cryptograms are oft writ in numbers, perhaps that is the answer that lies within the roses. If we find a number, we may find a date, or some such.”

  “But, Brother, the classification centifolia is not to be taken literally,” warned the herbalist. “These roses have any number of leaves, varying each time from bloom to bloom.”

  “So much for the leaves—how many petals does the rose have?”

  We looked at the two flowers before us—even those two seemed to differ in the number of petals. “Again,” confirmed the herbalist, “different in every case. Perhaps it is the number Flora holds which has some significance.”

  “And the number she casts away,” added Brother Guido.

  I could swear I had said someth
ing like this about two hours ago, but I held my tongue as we crowded round to count the roses in Flora’s arms. The task was nigh on impossible, even when Brother Nicodemus donned his eyeglasses once more.

  We argued hotly about whether to count whole blooms or partial petals, and whether there would be more blossoms lying in layers underneath. But at the end we came to a number of thirty-one. Our greatest debate sprang from the rose between Flora and Venus. It was exactly the same type as the ones in Flora’s arms, but it was impossible to tell from the cartone whether it grew from the ground, and thus could not be counted as part of the bundle, or whether it fell from Flora’s arms, and as such was one of “her” roses. We could not see whether the stalk of the flower was above the petals, indicating a fall, or below, growing from the ground.

  “Does it matter?” I asked helpfully.

  Brother Guido stroked his chin. “I think yes. Botticelli does nothing by accident.”

  We both turned to the herbalist, where he bent almost double above the painting. We held our breath, hoping that he would have an answer. He did, but not the one we wished. Brother Nicodemus rubbed the white frill of his hair where it cleared his cowl at the back of his neck. “Well, and now we have an obstacle. I cannot tell because the cartone is too small to see the detail. The code is designed to be read from the real panel painting of the Primavera, which is a hundred times bigger than this parchment, which has, if I am not mistaken, seen some adventures of its own.”

  He was right. Shipwrecked and sweated upon for longer than a month, the cartone had seen better days, and the paint between Flora and Venus, where the crucial rose grew or fell, was beginning to crack and fade.