by Linda Proud
‘I have been thinking much about schoolmasters,’ he began, surprising us all. ‘It is commonly thought that, in order to learn, children must be beaten, tenderised by the rod and made receptive.’ I blanched and kept my head down. ‘It is not necessary to beat a child. If a man loves his learning and loves his pupils, he can communicate by love,’ he said. ‘Higher love, love of God, does not mean spending hours on your knees in a chapel. It means loving all creatures, as if they were God.’ Colet’s voice rose, became oratorical as if he were addressing his congregation; in his small, panelled chamber in the deanery, the effect was magnified. Satisfied that he was not criticising me, but using my experience as a guide, I dared at last to look up and found him smiling at me.
‘Love,’ he said, ‘is a practical matter, not a theory. Do you agree, Tommaso?’
‘Of course.’
He looked me gravely and over-long in the eye. To my relief, Thomas Linacre stood up and invited us all to raise our glasses to Dean Colet, Plato and God.
‘And missing friends,’ Colet added, raising his own glass to the empty chair.
London, November 9th, 1505
In the mirror I see a face that is mine and not mine – a sitter for a portrait in the manner of Flemish painters. The last time I studied my own features was nearly thirty years ago, when Sandro Botticelli made a picture of me. It was the time when I was grieving over my brother’s death and Sandro caught the image of a reflective youth in a brown jacket and red cap. Now that grief is etched in lines, lines beneath the eyes, lines running from nose to mouth. And my pupil was right, there is indeed a frown puckering the forehead, a frown so habitual that it’s nigh impossible to relax those muscles. Here is the portrait of an angry man, a failed philosopher. The healthy brown complexion of a Florentine has become sallow, almost grey, and a black English cap covers hair as dull as a dry conker. It never really recovered from the shaving. I want to step back, out of the mirror, for all I can think is, ‘That is not me!’ But I must confront the image if I would know myself. I can hear Ficino laughing, saying, ‘A man who would know himself does not look in mirrors!’ But I must, for there is something to be seen here. There is a film over the man in the mirror, perhaps the effect of candle smoke, but this ghostly image of anger stares back at me. Anger is the flame; melancholy is the smoke. This is a portrait of misery.
And worse. This is the portrait of a man who looks for love in books; a man who beats a young boy for not being interested in learning; a man who teaches that which he himself has forgotten.
The man in the mirror is a hypocrite.
Though I have read the Dialogues of Plato and know several by heart; though I have read all the Enneads of Plotinus; though I can elucidate Porphyry’s text on the Cave of the Nymphs and can interpret Iamblichus; though I know the plays of Aeschylus, of Euripides and Sophocles, and have played Orestes more than once; without love, I am nothing. Where is Erasmus?
London, November 12th, 1505
He lies in no French ditch, his bones whitened by crows, but is alive in Holland! I received a letter today, sent care of St Paul’s. The dean himself brought it to me, his slender hand trembling with excitement. ‘I know this crabbed handwriting! And this doodle-portrait on the back – who else could it be?’
‘Oh, John, John – he’s alive?’ I tore the letter open and read it out loud.
Dearest Tommaso, have you ever felt shame? It has taken me four years to summon courage to write this letter, and even now I cannot write to Colet direct but must go through that friend who, above all others, may understand how I feel. Have you ever felt shame? Yes, I believe you have. I think you know what it is like to live with a sense of failure. There, I have insulted you. It was not my intention.
Let me start again, this time at the beginning. Those funds you all donated so generously to pay for my journey to Italy were stolen. I never reached further than Holland, where I have been hiding for the past four years, too ashamed to tell you all what had happened. For a man who loses what his friends have given him is no friend. He is a failure and, with his cowl up at all times, hides amongst monks.
But Tommaso, you understand the whims of fortune better than most. I charge you to tell our friends my story and then judge if they would welcome me back. When I left London it was with a purse full of gold coin but at Dover I was intercepted by officers of His Majesty’s customs. The king had revived an old law which states that no precious metal may be taken out of England. Your gold was confiscated by His Majesty’s Exchequer! What kind of law is that? Not one of God’s, to be sure.
I was put on the boat for France not as a happy pilgrim but as a beggar being deported. I made my way as far as Paris and there I stayed, sick in body and soul, making what living I could by tutoring. Once I had sufficiently recovered my spirits, I came to Holland, not daring to contact my English friends to say what had happened. What did I fear? Not your wrath – you are too generous for that. No, you would have railed against the king and found me blameless. What I feared, and still fear, is your further generosity when I have cost you all too much already. But worse than that, I fear appearing weak in your eyes. Better you think me dead and keep your good opinion of me. There, it is said. Is shame not shameful? But four years is a long time to live with a falsehood, and it is working its way out of me like a thorn. I am now about to leave for Paris, wanting to put everything right, for a man at odds with his friends is at odds with himself. I wish to return to England, to be with Colet, More, Grocyn, Linacre and Lily again, to grow in their company.
Although it remains my ambition to visit your Italy, I will not try again unless God wills it. I hope that you have spent these past years anticipating this moment and writing out the rest of your history. If not, if my disappearance silenced your muse, then cut your quill at once. You have told me very little of Pico della Mirandola and I would know more about Savonarola. Many believe him to have been a true prophet of God but whenever we discussed him in Oxford, you fell quiet and would not speak, as if you dared not voice an opinion contrary to that of others. Tell me the truth, Tommaso, since you were in Florence at the time and knew these figures who, in death, have become legends.
Meanwhile tell me if the weather is set fair for my return to London, or if I will be met with that penetrating damp that is English disdain.
Il tuo Desiderio Erasmo.
I looked up at John to find he had tears in his eyes. ‘Only an innocent man,’ he began, but had to clear his throat. ‘Only an innocent man would let his soul be stained by the sins of another. Blessed are the meek… Reply at once and tell him the weather is heavenly.’
Have I kept up my writing? No, I have not! Whether it is the lack of my reader, or the want of energy, I do not know. The story is unresolved. It is a chronicle of death with no resurrection. I must sharpen my wits as well as my quill.
London, November 13th, 1505
Thomas More bounced in this morning and thrust a roll of papers at me tied up with ribbon. ‘My translation of The Life of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola,’ he announced. ‘I would be grateful if you would read it and give your opinion. You’ll notice I made a few cuts – don’t get on your high horse! – I had to. I thought, pared to its essence, it would make a perfect spiritual handbook for nuns.’
He left me stunned. What could there be in the life of my friend, Pico, that would inspire nuns? I opened the roll of papers, weighted them down on the desk and began to read, not a little regretful that I had not read the original before I gave it to Thomas. As he has not returned it, I have nothing with which to compare this ‘translation’ and cannot determine what are the lies of the author and what the distortions of the translator. It begins with three letters which Pico wrote to his nephew, Gianfrancesco, praising him copiously. They, obviously, are Gianfrancesco’s own forgeries. The rest of the book is hagiography, for Gianfrancesco would have us believe that his uncle was a saint. Forlornly I rea
d the section entitled Twelve Rules Directing a Man in Spiritual Battle. There is nothing cut here – it is all addition. A pithy original statement by Pico has been elaborated in rhyme royal into a sermon about sorrow, adversity, grief and pain. This has the sound of More in his breast-beating humour. After all, he would be a Carthusian monk by now if Colet had not intervened and encouraged him to marry. Perhaps he is enjoying the marriage bed too much and wants to put his hair shirt back on, if only in his choice of literary work.
This adulteration of words, the cuts and additions of editors and translators for their own purpose, it is a kind of rape. Who could know Pico della Mirandola from this book? Worse, those who read it will think they do know him. They will read about the saint of the nephew’s imagination in the pious translation of More and consider themselves informed. Worse still, they will believe that Pico della Mirandola was a saint! These earnest men of religion – have they no respect for simple honesty?
When More called in later to see if I had read it, I listened to myself telling him how fine a work it is and what a blessed service he has done for nuns. What else could I say, that would not have crushed him? I have obviously picked up the English habit of not telling a man to his face what you think. But now, by the virtue of Erasmus and the vice of More, I am driven to set down the truth about Pico, in so far as I know what the truth is.
1
THE HEART IN A PRESS
1482
‘TELL ME,’ I SAID TO MARSILIO FICINO, ‘ABOUT THE HIGHER and lower Venus. Are we talking about one Venus or two?’
‘The higher Venus was born of Uranus, the sky, and the lower one of Jupiter and Juno.’
‘Two, then.’
‘Will you never understand?’ Ficino was plucking at thyme, rosemary and lavender, tearing leaves from the shrubs and sprinkling them over me where I lay on my back in a bed of camomile. ‘Keep inhaling and concentrate on the sky.’
I gazed up into the blue empyrean. Happiness groaned in its chains. ‘Stop this!’ I said, coming to my feet. ‘Stop showering me with pungent weeds!’ I went back inside his house to my desk in a gloomy corner.
After the murder of Giuliano, the hanging of the conspirators, the resulting war with Rome; after the death of my wife, I was living like a recluse in Ficino’s villa at Careggi. His usually potent cures for melancholy were failing to work. I found interest in nothing. It was as if only my body were alive, as if my spirit were not so much melancholy as dead. I had achieved all I had ever wanted: I’d had a house, work that fed my soul as well as my body and a wife who completed me. Losing her, I had lost everything; all thoughts in my mind had dissolved into the sound of one long, continuous scream. I woke to it every morning and lived with it through each day, as if all sounds had been reduced to this single, horrible screech of discord. It was the soul’s response to a mind which said, ‘I have had everything I have ever wanted, and I have lost it. What do I want now? To repeat it, only to lose it again? No. Therefore I want nothing.’ It was the mortal scream of dying ambition. I was an automaton. Only my body was alive.
‘Let go of the past and live in the present,’ Ficino had often counselled me, but one may as well tell a man not to put his tongue in the warm and bloody cavity where his tooth has been. He tried to restore my spirit by invoking the planetary influence of Jupiter, but his fine wines and golden honey, his heliotropes and sweet, Jovial music – none of these things could remove the weight of Saturn from my soul.
He followed me in, bearing rose-oil in a little dish which he placed on my desk. ‘Rub this over your heart,’ he said.
Obediently I unlaced my shirt and rubbed in the warm oil. Its scent, reminding me of Elena, nearly made my heart crack. ‘This is no good,’ I said. ‘Nothing works, nothing will work.’
‘Not while your will is opposed to recovery.’
‘It is not my will, it is fate. This terrible fate which brings death to anyone I love.’
‘Do not be shackled by such illusions. That belief is of your lower nature. You must rise and transcend the stars.’
‘But how?’
‘By willing it.’ He returned to his own desk and left me to my work, which was a fair transcription of his book The Platonic Theology – concerning the immortality of the soul. Work was my only relief. I concentrated on rendering fine words in fine letters, listening to my nib telling the page what to say. To calm my troubled spirits I applied my attention to constructing a particularly fine capital letter at the head of a chapter. Two hours later, Ficino smacked me on the back of the head and told me off for wasting time. ‘This is only for the printer! All that is required of you is legibility!’
In no mood to sacrifice my art and dismayed that he should embrace the new invention so readily, I let fly. ‘How can you of all men, the high priest of Beauty, ask me, Tommaso de’ Maffei, to cripple my art in the cause of haste? Truth is in Beauty and God is in Truth – is that not what you teach us? But now you want me to dash off a manuscript so that you can take it to a printer who will, with all his might, turn it into a book as ugly as the befana. How could you? How could you betray Beauty?’
‘Surely by now you understand Plato’s Symposium?’
‘Of course I do. I’ve written it out twice. I’ve even written out your commentary on it.’
‘Yet you know nothing. What are beautiful letters if you do not connect with their meaning?’
Ficino could always identify a man’s blind spot. I said nothing and sat there with an expression of petulance unbecoming to a member of the Platonic Academy.
‘On the seven steps of Love, what is the second step?’ he asked.
‘To appreciate the beauty of fair ideas.’
‘And the first step?’
‘Fair forms.’
‘So you are still on the first step. The beauty of Plato is the beauty of fair ideas. My book is devoted to those fair ideas. Why should it be adorned with flowery margins and little cupids? It is the ideas that are beautiful, and the printing press, that marvellous invention, allows us to reproduce that beauty and broadcast it across the world.’
He was right, of course. Beauty of ideas does not require beauty of form, or else Socrates would have been a good-looking man. But I had trained for years to become a scribe, striving always for the elusive beauty, and I could not give it up, not at once.
‘Allow me this much at least,’ I said. ‘Allow me to find for you a printer who has some idea of harmony and proportion in letters.’
To my relief, Ficino agreed.
To many the Platonic Academy was a meeting of eruditi interested in discussing matters of philosophy, theology and literature. It could take place anywhere, sometimes at Santa Maria degli Angeli in Florence, sometimes at the Badia on Fiesole, sometimes at San Marco monastery; but it was because it often took place in villas of the Medici that many wished to attend, affecting an interest in philosophy so as to keep company with Lorenzo, to be seen with him, to be one of his intimate circle. That was the attraction for many.
For some, the attraction was intellectual. The ideas and insights that abounded at such meetings excited them and they gathered up the seeds of knowledge like eager sparrows, chirping and squabbling amongst themselves. These men were impressive in discussion, citing ancient authors and myths in dazzling profusion. Others, musicians, painters and poets, found our Platonic evenings plucked the strings of their souls and inspired them with fine words and mysterious images. Ficino fed everyone, casting out handfuls of seeds, nuts and bread to suit every need and taste.
But for a few there was another, inner academy of men who sought to make the teachings of Plato a living reality, thereby to transform their lives and make the ascent of the soul. For them, to sing an Orphic hymn was not to entertain others but was for the soul alone and a daily ritual; they were unlikely to hold a debate, challenging all-comers with logical arguments, but they could recite long passages of Pla
to, memorised by heart. That I was not one of these was an aggravation and a puzzle. Was I not ready to shun the world of the body? Grief, Ficino said, had opened the doors for me, so why had I not been invited in? I wanted nothing now from this mortal life. The liberation of my soul was my only desire. Or so I persuaded myself, as a drowning man with lead weights tied to his feet thinks, I will rise, I will rise.
Among the printers in Florence, I chose Antonio Miscomini to publish The Platonic Theology. He had printed the edition of Homer and was a man sensitive to our intentions. He also, I discovered, used a type fount somewhat similar to my own script. It had been less than a decade since the first printer set up shop in Florence, yet already there was a street of them, close to the Palazzo del Podestà. I would rather have traversed Dante’s Inferno than walk that street, yet sometimes duty called me to it, as on one hot day as the city was beginning to empty for the summer, when I took Ficino to see Miscomini.
I had always supposed printing to be a noisy affair as loud as a forge with the great presses stamping out books. In fact it is an almost silent occupation with each man in the shop intent on his work, the only sounds that of the tamping of the ink dabbers, the tapping of hammers on formes, the screw of the press as it is turned. I looked around me in disdain. Compositors arranged letters on a ‘stick’ while others were engaged in cutting new type, setting pages, making up galleys or inking at the press. Ficino looked on it all as a wonder of the world and a gift from God.
‘It takes us less than a day to do a page,’ said Miscomini proudly.
‘Pah! It takes me only an hour or two,’ I said.
‘And if you had to copy that page again, how long would that take?’
‘An hour or two…’ I said, fully aware of the trap I had entered so stupidly.
‘I can give you a hundred copies of that page in two days, two hundred in three days.’