Portrait of a Conspiracy

by Donna Russo Morin

  Viviana turned to catch a glimpse of her own work. But her gaze got stuck, caught on Isabetta’s face. While the others perused Mattea’s work, Isabetta perused Leonardo, brightly, as the thief craves his prize.

  Viviana almost groaned aloud; as thrilled as she was to have the Leonardo da Vinci as an honorary member of their group, clouds scudded across the joy of his tutelage. Isabetta’s desire could bring them trouble, could only bring her friend heartache.

  As the man traversed the room, Viviana kept to his side, kept insinuating herself between Isabetta and the handsome artist, but she soon lost herself to his thoughts and opinions, as he had something distinctive and unique to say about each of their styles and accomplishments.

  Leonardo exclaimed brightly over the fine rooms Fiammetta preferred to capture. He blushed at the deeply romantic tones of Natasia’s work, at the flesh so perfectly rendered, the brush of hands upon faces, lips upon lips. Leonardo offered his congratulations at the news of her betrothal and Viviana smiled at the girl’s passionate whimsy.

  “Are you truly convinced this is wise?” Fiammetta hissed in Viviana’s ear.

  Viviana held her tongue, but only for a moment. The right and wrong came quick and clear.

  “Yes, Fiammetta, I do,” she whispered back, fearing to offend the man least he overhear. “I can well appreciate the risk we take by bringing him into our confidence, but we have great need of him, of his knowledge and expertise, for Lapaccia’s sake as well as our own.”

  Fiammetta pursed her lips, nostrils flaring. “But he is a sodomite.”

  It was a nasty condemnation spoken with a nasty, hard edge. It was a damnation by its very vociferation. Viviana had never felt such impatience with her friend.

  “It was never proved and you know it.” Viviana snipped, a verbal push back.

  Fiammetta threw her hands up, no longer attempting to keep their private conversation private, though she leaned in and hissed at the woman standing beside her.

  “Not one, but two accusations.” She held up two fingers in front of Viviana’s eyes as if she spoke to an uncomprehending child. It served only to hinder her case.

  “Accusations,” Viviana laughed the word quietly. “Accusations such as these are made every other day.”

  Fiammetta could not refute this truth. The tamburo at the Palazzo della Signoria sometimes overflowed with denunciations. In this letterbox, one citizen could make a claim of wrongdoing against another. Created as a form of justice, such contentions had become contorted, a vehicle for vengeance, for rivalries to further elicit harm on one another.

  Two such allegations had been made against Leonardo, that he and two other men, a goldsmith and a male prostitute—such as were often used as artist’s models—had been party to wretched affairs and to pleasuring, each to the other, who requested such wickedness of him.

  “And you know well, for it was you who told me,” Viviana continued her defense as if she were da Vinci’s consigliore, “these claims came at the same time as he began to gain notoriety with his brush, to outshine his master. Such envy incites the most false of denunciations.”

  “He knew the men, it was proved,” Fiammetta countered.

  “It was the only thing proved.” Viviana entwined a stiff arm round the woman’s arm, stiff as a branch in winter though it was, and walked her a few steps away. She hissed softly, “It is a discussion long since over. The charges were dismissed for no signature was writ upon them.”

  “But…” Fiammetta began, scrambling to counter, without a hold. Accusations could be made secretly, but not anonymously.

  “Would Il Magnifico take a sodomite into his home? Into his life?”

  Fiammetta’s lips thinned into a slim line of fury, her angry gaze lingering upon Viviana’s face. She mumbled as she withdrew—one word quite clear, spoken on fetid breath, “Medici.”

  Viviana would ask of it, but she had not the moment.

  Leonardo and the others came to Viviana’s table, finding no work in progress, for she had just finished her last. It stood propped against the wall drying. Leonardo regarded it silently for a time—too long to Viviana’s mind. She saw it through the eyes of another for the first time.

  The palazzo stood atop a rocky hill, alone, without neighbors. Its stone dark, its portals devoid of any light shining from within, the sky above gray and bleak with a coming storm.

  “Your clouds,” Leonardo said.

  Viviana waited, breath baited.

  He turned from the painting to drop his probing glare upon her. “They frighten me with their premonition.”

  “I—” she began, but to say more could only reveal more. This gallant man saved her.

  “Your use of shadow and light without color is masterful,” he patted her hand with the softest of touch.

  All thoughts of her artistic mystery fell by the wayside; Leonardo da Vinci had used the word masterful in speaking of her work. She would live off the notion for a lifetime.

  As he stood before Isabetta’s endeavors, his handsome face darkened. His smooth skin crumpled. “This is not what I would have expected. Is it in response to the strife of the city?”

  “No,” Isabetta replied flatly. “This last was finished…before. It is part of a series.”

  Leonardo followed her pointing finger to the paintings leaning upon the walls; they were a series of nightmares, shades of gray and darkness, set to paint. Viviana almost nudged Isabetta, hoping she would tell the artist of her husband and the tribulations of the last few years. But she did not. Leonardo looked at Isabetta differently than when they had entered the chamber.

  “So now.” He opened his arms. “To the crux of the matter. To the Feast of Herod.”

  They led him to the two tables made into one and the sketches upon them.

  “Ah yes, Isabetta,” Leonardo nodded as he taped a tapered finger on his lips. “You spoke true. I do remember this work. It was quite the talk among the guilds, most particularly as no one took credit for it.”

  “Even in the taverns?” Mattea queried, finding it as strange as the others. “It seems too fine a work for no man to desire the accolades of its creation.”

  The women twittered, trying their best to not. But Leonardo joined them.

  “Too true, mistress,” he chuckled. “There is nothing so large as a man’s assurance of his own prowess.”

  “But to take credit would be to take incrimination,” Isabetta whispered harshly with dawning realization. They held a moment in the horrid truth of it. An artist was part of the despicable conspiracy.

  “What if we…” he muttered, and with sure hands, moved the sketches about, using particular ones to elucidate different parts of the whole. Soon they saw his intent. Hands and parchment flew, put in place, discarded and replaced.

  The rustling slowed, their dance about the table stilled, then…stopped.

  There it was. The painting lived upon the table, a haphazard rendering, true, but a wholly conceived one, one they could reproduce.

  “Are you absolutely sure this is what you intend to do?” Leonardo asked.

  He saw what they all did, the signs proclaiming the intentions of the men in the group portrait, the portent of what was to come. Many faces were unmasked. Together, the group knew almost all of them, almost. Nor were all dead, some not even captured.

  “It is.” Viviana spoke softly.

  “It is well,” he said, and they heard that he did indeed think it so. “Then the first thing you must do is decide whether just one of you will paint it or all?”

  Mattea spoke, her voice quivering. “All. For if any one of us is asked, ‘did you paint this painting?’ we could all answer, in a truth of sorts, ‘no, I did not.’”

  Leonardo barked a laugh, took Mattea by her rounded chin, giving it an affectionate tweak. She blushed with pleasure.

  The group knew the brilliance of it the moment they heard it. They would succeed or fail, together. It had always been their way.

  “Then you must
all decide on a technique all can replicate.” Leonardo rubbed his hands together, rushed to a worktable and grabbed a piece of charcoal. Gently moving aside some drying paintings, he made the largest wall of the chamber his teaching canvas.

  He made the simplest sketch, explaining the mathematical basis of dimensionality and depth, of the shortening of lines, of lines drawn closer together to give the illusion of distance, of diminishing perspective. Viviana watched every move, how he held the charcoal, how his arm moved. With every revelation, her breath quickened. How quickly and with such ease he designed. Apprenticed late, at fourteen, Leonardo had spent only six years under a master’s tutelage and yet he spoke with utmost authority, moved without hesitation, created with the same ease with which he breathed.

  Her wonder became a craving, as a starving man looks upon a rich man’s table scraps. Leonardo moved by pure instinct. Viviana had such moments, remembered them with the clarity of a blazing fire, but they were not the norm. Too often she found herself struggling with her craft. But she knew too only more work could bring those blazing moments more frequently, a vow hard to keep when one was forced to work sporadically and secretly, hard to do when one was a woman forced to pretend her talent was nothing more than a hobby.

  “You must learn to see through the same eye,” Leonardo turned from the jumble of drawings upon the wall, pointing around the chamber to their individual works. “Look, see how each of you sees differently. What one notices the other doesn’t—forms, shapes, shadows, light, lack of light, color, lack of color. Each viewpoint is, in a way, a reflection of the life of each woman.”

  Viviana suddenly worried if her work showed too much, exposed all she tried so hard to keep hidden.

  Leonardo offered a knowing look as he continued. “A bird cannot fly if it carries too much weight. As you begin your work, you must study the others, and you must make your decision and learn cohesively from there. You should look at certain walls stained with dampness, or at stones of uneven color. If you have to invent some backgrounds you will be able to see in these the likeness of divine landscapes, adorned with mountains, ruins, rocks, woods, great plains, hills, and valleys in great variety. You will see expressions of faces and clothes and an infinity of things which you will be able to reduce to their complete and proper forms. In such walls the same thing happens as in the sound of bells, in whose stroke you may find every note imaginable.”

  The women began to murmur, the artist’s enthusiasm infectious.

  “May I ask a question?” Mattea held her hand up like a schoolchild, head buried between scrunched shoulders.

  Leonardo bequeathed her with a most tender of smiles; Viviana found love for him, not the artist, but the man, in that smile.

  “You may ask me anything, cara,” he told the shy girl.

  “What you have done here, could you explain it again, please?”

  “Of course, of course,” Leonardo replied gladly. This time putting the charcoal in her hand, instructing her to do it as he informed. “The true, scientific principles of painting…well, they are grasped by the mind alone, without recourse to any manual effort.” The rest of the women crowded round, the questions coming fast and quick.

  Viviana whirled round to find Isabetta beckoning her aside. Viviana went gladly, something of her own to say.

  “You took a grave chance,” she chided Isabetta with equal parts censure and admiration.

  Isabetta shook her head, waved her hand before her friend’s face in dismissal. “I know, but you are thrilled I did so.”

  Viviana waggled her head; she could not deny the truth of it.

  Isabetta smiled conspiratorially, a child who won the toy. “There is another chance to take, one we must take together. I cannot do it alone and you are the only other among us who may.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “Depravity ignited is impossible to extinguish.”

  It had been a good day. They all felt it, the coming together of their talents, merging them as one. It didn’t matter if today was the second of May, there would be no Calendimaggio, no May Day Feast, for the entire republic was still in a state of civic mourning, its citizenry still suffocated in grief as well as fear. The news of the soldier’s confession, Montesecco by name, had spread far and wide. The Eight still broke down doors, pulling men from their homes. The men of the black cloaks still chaperoned them on their path of doom. The bodies of the condemned still littered the streets.

  Yet in their cohesion, these women had found not only solace but the strength and the spirit to move their brushes faster and with skill and finesse for the sake of their missing comrade. As long as the Neri brought people to their death, these women would give every possible moment to finding and protecting their Lapaccia.

  Together they stretched and mounted the canvas on the oak frame Leonardo had made for them, the very size of it daunting, but not enough. Together they sized the canvas with rabbit skin glue; the concoction provided a smoother surface and protection upon the canvas fibers from the degrading force of the linoleic acid of the linseed oil, the basis for all paint mixtures.

  He watched them scatter like fall leaves on a tender breeze, with grace and loveliness, each with their own peculiarity. He watched them until he could see them no more.

  Leonardo made his way slowly down the Via del Gelsumino, crossing into the heart of the city via the Ponte Trinita. His feet knew his destination long before he did. So preoccupied with thinking, he allowed free reign to guide his body.

  The artist’s mind whirled with thoughts of what had transpired…no, what he had experienced, for meeting these women, agreeing to help them as he had was a wondrous and frightening experience.

  Leonardo shook his head at himself, scruffling long fingers absently through his thick beard. Did he dare to associate himself with such an undertaking, one whose consequences could be damning in so many ways? An unmarried man with all these women, forging a painting that belonged to the government, a government that still looked a bit unkindly in his direction, assisting them in finding a woman who may be an enemy of his friend, and friends like the Medici—especially Lorenzo, especially in this moment—could be a fatal undertaking.

  And yet, how could he not help them? His admiration for what they dared to do, not only in their efforts to find and save their colleague, but also in the very existence of their group and the work they carried out in secret, eclipsed anything he had ever felt toward the feminine gender, save that for the mother who died young. How could he not, having seen the joy, the passion, the obsession for their craft, one of his own beloved demons, writ on each and every face, even those with puckered expressions at his presence among them?

  We can learn from every journey. Leonardo raised his head, his mind in harmony with his body and its target. Am I not a disciple of experience?

  He stood almost at the mid-point of the bridge, the Arno churning with gentle gurgles below him, its mossy scent wafting up to him. A wave of grief struck him, unexpected, unprepared for.

  Leonardo turned, grasping the stone edge of the bridge wall, to drop his head into the cleft between shoulders and arms. He had held it off—held it away—as much as he could, but even he could not control his heart completely.

  The grief he felt for Giuliano’s passing was a felling blow, it struck him deep in his gut and he bent further over the rough rocks of the barrier. He moaned low and guttural with the kick of it. The loss of love, unrequited though it may be, was the worst loss a man could suffer.

  A memory flashed, his head popped up, eyes wide to the sun, and he laughed.

  Giuliano knew, Leonardo was as sure of it as he was anything else in science and nature which could be proven as truth. Giuliano knew Leonardo loved him, loved him in a way no man should love another. And yet Giuliano loved him still, loved Leonardo with an unbreakable bond of friendship. It was all Giuliano could do for him, it was the best Giuliano did for him. For in that friendship was complete lack of judgment. Such love was true.

/>   Leonardo began to walk again, steps more purposeful than ever.

  If what I do with these women, with the forging of the painting, brings any of my dear Giuliano’s assassins to meet their deserved end, then all the better for it.

  It was the last time he would question the rightness of his actions.

  • • •

  He turned onto the Via Calzaiuoli and traversed the few blocks to the delicately effaced Palazzo Cavalcanti. Nestled between the churches of San Pier Coelorum and San Cristofano, it was splendid with the understated opulence only Leon Battista Alberti could design. Leonardo gave a silent nod to his colleague, an absent gesture of respect. The palazzo boasted the best in newer concepts of architecture. The grid-like façade of pale gray stone gave contrast to the rounded arched windows in the top two of the three floors, each arch using the innovative vertical keystones at center position.

  Leonardo straightened himself, flicking stray brush strands from his tunic as he approached the door off-center on the street-front wall, then knocked upon it. There was a small place in his mind which niggled at him, needed him to ascertain for himself the lady’s absence. Not that he questioned the women’s veracity, merely to appease his own curiosity. He knocked once more with the same effect.

  Could the servants be gone as well? He stepped back, raising a hand to shield his eyes, though the encroaching clouds maligned the sun. He scanned the windows for any sign of life.

  “If no servants are in attendance as well, perhaps the lady has simply left the city,” he muttered to himself as he would when devising a new technique or conducting a new experiment. He shook his head in answer to his own question. “No, she would not do so without telling her son.”

  Though he knew not Andreano Cavalcanti, he knew from the women how close mother and son were. He lifted his hand to knock one last time. The door cracked open, no more than a few inches. An elderly man’s face appeared ghostly in the shadowy space.