The Rebirth of Venus

by Linda Proud

  ‘Look at the picture,’ said Ficino softly. ‘Look on the goddess.’

  I could see it was full of significance; I could consider its symbolic meaning; what I could not do was feel it. It was like having a cold: the senses of the soul were blocked. When Scala had finally stopped speaking, Ficino began to explain the myth and I heard his voice as if through a seashell held to my ear, muffled and distant. ‘And the sea is the soul and thus fertilized by Uranus it creates Beauty within itself. This conversion into Beauty and its birth from the soul is called Venus.’

  Memories. Images. Understanding. Sandro’s paintings, like Poliziano’s great but unfinished epic on Giuliano’s Joust, telling the same story: the ascent of the soul through Love to God. And Love is Beauty. Beauty…

  ‘I notice,’ said Angelo Poliziano, ‘that Sandro modestly avoids showing the castration of Uranus and the actual birth of the goddess from his foamy semen.’

  ‘Boys!’ said il Magnifico to his sons. ‘Go and play outside.’

  ‘Unless,’ Poliziano said thoughtfully, ‘that is what the spume-flecked waves signify.’

  Botticelli, staring at his picture, said nothing but smiled.

  ‘It is an important part of the myth,’ Poliziano continued, ‘but I’ve never understood it. Marsilio, will you elucidate it for us?’

  ‘Plato forbids it,’ said Ficino. ‘You do not need to dwell on it to enjoy the picture. It is often said that there are two Venuses, but in fact there is only one, in two aspects. One governs human, reproductive love, the other, the love of the Divine. The lower is represented as clothed, the higher as naked. Here we see the higher Venus being wafted to the shores of earthly life by the gentle west wind, and waiting for her is an Hour, representing time and temporality. She will clothe the goddess in a mantle. Thus, what Sandro shows so admirably is both aspects in one. What we are to understand is that human love is divine love, cloaked. That is to say, any man who loves is capable of loving God – he just has to remove the covers on his soul.’

  Whatever its neoplatonic themes, this was a painting with a specific purpose, I thought, a painting to soften a bride and warm her frigidity, a painting to unlock a girl and free the woman. I gazed at Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, just married, and envied him so fiercely that my throat filled with bile. I followed Girolamo Benivieni outside, but there was no sign of him in the street, although Lorenzo’s sons were playing knucklebones close by, Giovanni asking Piero what ‘castration’ meant and being told he was too young to know.

  ‘It means having your cock cut off,’ said Giovanni di Pierfrancesco, standing over them, his arms folded. Seeing me, this fair-haired youth as beautiful as a girl smiled disarmingly and walked back into the workshop. Piero de’ Medici pulled a face at the retreating figure, which Abbot Giovanni imitated.

  ‘He stinks!’ said Piero.

  ‘He really stinks!’ said Giovanni.

  I turned away to look on the daily life of Ognissanti, the bright cloth of the dyers stretched along the streets to dry: crimson, damson, saffron. Everywhere in the city there was a fever of building and the stone dust that hung in the air like a cloud settled on the new cloth. Men leading mules back from market, laden with supplies for their households, stopped whenever they met a friend, to stand awhile, cough and complain. The building of the Strozzi palace alone was causing much resentment, and men moaned about their taxes and the price of staple foods. That Lorenzo had saved Florence from becoming a papal state kept him high in people’s esteem, and it was other rich families that took the brunt of popular displeasure. Inside the workshop the few, discussing philosophy, outside the many, discussing the trials of life. Who here among the artisans and grocers knew anything about the higher Venus? Not one. They went to church regularly to petition God for good health, for wealth, for acts of revenge against those who had done them harm. And sometimes they wondered if He was deaf. But love God? – that was the preserve of a few old crones who had lost everything else in life and had nothing left to love but the Virgin and the baby Jesus.

  Filippino Lippi joined me. Since receiving the commission to complete the frescoes of Masaccio in the Brancacci Chapel at Santa Maria del Carmine, he had grown in confidence and stature. After saying something about the noise and dust of palace building, he asked how I was and I replied with a sigh.

  He leant against the wall of the workshop contentedly. ‘God be praised for Lorenzino.’

  ‘Why so?’

  ‘He commissions us where il Magnifico does not.’

  ‘Lorenzo cannot afford it.’

  ‘How come? Has he not stolen a million florins from his cousins?’

  ‘You exaggerate! It is a large amount but not that large, and it was used to pay the debts incurred by the war. He has given them his villa at Cafaggiolo to compensate.’

  ‘Chicken feed!’

  The thought of that large fortress and great estate being called chicken feed made me smile. ‘Even with the loss of half their wealth, they are still richer than Lorenzo by far, rich enough to commission a painting. Francesco Sassetti said that the total amount spent by Lorenzo in Naples to buy our freedom was so vast that he could not bring himself to write it down.’

  ‘Think of how many commissions that could have been.’

  ‘Do you ever think of anything else?’

  Filippino’s wide mouth curved in a lascivious smile. ‘Of course.’

  I struck out at him. ‘Ficino is wrong: there are three Venuses. The higher, who governs divine love, the middle, who governs human love, and then that voluptuous siren who inspires lust.’

  ‘My goddess. Have you seen Lorenzino’s wife?’ Filippino made a thrusting gesture to show in his alleycat way what he thought of Semiramide. ‘Did you know she is the niece of Simonetta Vespucci? She has the same beauty: that Venus in there is her portrait. And poor Giovanni di Pierfrancesco – betrothed to il Magnifico’s Luigia, only four years old and with the figure of a spindle. It’s a long time to wait until she’s nubile.’

  ‘He’s hardly nubile himself yet.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it. Can men be nubile? Well, if so, that one can and already is. Like Ganymede he’s being seduced by every woman and every man with a taste for boys, all of them intent on either keeping him straight or bending him. Who would not be the prize in such a contest? It’s hardly surprising if he’s not very keen on being betrothed to whey-faced Luigia.’

  ‘It’s a matter of duty, not taste. Lorenzo wants to heal the rift in the family. The betrothal is his masterstroke to make the two one.’

  ‘It will get rid of a daughter without payment of a dowry.’

  ‘Cynic!’

  ‘Realist. You philosophers, you are so busy looking for the causes that you don’t notice the effects.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Don’t ask me!’ Filippino laughed in that infectious way of his that dissolved all disagreements. And then he sobered, in the quick and changeable weather that was Filippino Lippi. ‘It is good to see you smiling, Tommaso.’

  ‘You have been avoiding me.’

  ‘It is true. Forgive me. I haven’t known what to say since it happened. You know how I struggle with words. Forgive me if I seem to have avoided you. Wait – I have something that will speak for me.’ So saying, he went back inside the workshop.

  I could hear Angelo Poliziano within, quoting the lines from his poem on Giuliano’s Joust which had informed the painter.

  ‘You would call the foam real, the sea real, real the shell and real the blowing wind; you would see the lightning in the goddess’s eyes, the sky and the elements laughing about her.’

  When Filippino returned he handed me a piece of folded parchment, inside of which was a loose sheet with a drawing of Elena that he had made from memory. He had captured her likeness perfectly and I gazed on the lovely face of my wife, her eyes lowered, her hair falling s
oftly over her shoulders.

  ‘I wish I could have drawn her smile, but it was beyond me.’

  Tears welled.

  ‘You know, you should marry again.’

  ‘And suffer loss again? I could not bear it. No, I shall never marry.’

  ‘When you fall off your horse, get straight back on it, that’s what I say.’

  It was an unfortunate analogy and, realising it, Filippino coloured.

  ‘Oh God… I’m sorry… I wasn’t thinking. Elena… horse…’

  ‘You are right, Pippo, your pictures are more eloquent.’

  Filippino stared at the ground, his mouth open and slack. I squeezed his shoulder, thanked him for the picture and told him to keep practising with words.

  ‘Meet me for chess sometime,’ he said. ‘I have a new piece. A bishop by Ghirlandaio.’

  Somehow Filippino was persuading every major artist of the time to carve a chess piece for him. Perhaps it was the air of competition, following the knight Leonardo had carved for him as a gift, that made all comply with his odd wish. I agreed to meet for a game, and he went off muttering that he had to go and see Piero di Cosimo about carving a queen.

  When I was alone again, I felt as Orpheus must have felt when he saw Eurydice in Hades. How greedy his eyes. How unobtainable their object. I kept opening and closing the fold of parchment, feeding on its contents, until at last I put it inside my jacket, next to my heart.

  3

  THE WRONG LOVE

  1482

  RETURNING TO THE PALAZZO DE’ MEDICI, LORENZO IL Magnifico walked at the head of the long train that was his family and companions. The Pierfranceschi brothers went arm-in-arm behind him, Lorenzino staring straight ahead while his silky-haired brother smiled at the people doffing their caps, drawing the gazes of the lascivious and the envious.

  A friar coming out of San Lorenzo halted to let the party pass, which it did, oblivious to him. I stopped to let him go on his way and his look of indignation softened as he thanked me. I caught up with Angelo Poliziano and Ficino.

  ‘Wasn’t that the Dominican who has been driving people from the church?’ Angelo asked. ‘What is his name? I can’t remember but I hear that San Lorenzo is lucky to draw two score these days, and most of those women and children. It’s not surprising: he has the face of Nemesis. Marsilio,’ he said, turning to the philosopher, ‘while I have you to myself, tell me about the castration of Uranus because I do not understand its meaning, other than literal. If all myth has deeper significance, if the stories of the gods are for our self-understanding…’

  ‘More than that, my Angelo. They convey the deepest mysteries.’

  ‘And often one can discover them for oneself with reflection, experience and a flash of insight. But this one… I need your guidance.’

  ‘It is a violent myth about the divorce of heaven and earth. We could understand the earth to represent our physical body, and heaven our divine essence. Once upon a time men lived in heaven here on earth. As Hesiod tells us, every night Uranus covered Gaia. So men hunted by day but at night they rested under the starry sky and remembered themselves. Re-membered themselves. These roofs, these houses,’ Ficino pointed to the jutting cornices above us, ‘what are they but the sickle blade, cutting off heaven? In protecting ourselves against the sun and the elements, we become divorced from them, forget who we are and mourn for the golden age. But from the genitals of his father that Saturn cast into the sea Venus was born. She provides our route of return to our true source; love is the way in which we may become whole. Because that is what Man is, potentially: the union of heaven and earth.’

  His words made me curl up over my wound and I fell out of step with my friends. Love. She might have been born from castration, but castration may also be born from Love. I had dared to surrender utterly to Aphrodite and I had been left a cripple with a wound that would not heal. While the rest of the party turned into the Palazzo de’ Medici, I veered away, unable suddenly to bear their cheerfulness. In the courtyard, Angelo’s voice lifted in a song and other voices joined in chorus, making the fine vaulted arcade and galleries of the courtyard echo with their harmonies. The notes of the hymn fluttered like the rose petals that were raining on the gentle sea in Botticelli’s painting.

  Roses… I remembered a rose falling from a window in the Palazzo de’ Pazzi, the sign from a young girl that she loved me – and suddenly the roses were all thorns raining on me like daggers. Gouts of pain were coming now, pounding in my heart as memories of a lost wife became as tangible as the massive wall of the palazzo I was leaning against. I let the darkness wash over me. It seemed then that nothing could reach me, nothing could pull me back to this world, but that I must journey on to the depths of Hades as I had done so often since Elena died. I let the images come, of her brown hair waving across the pillows on the night we were married; of her rounded belly filling with our child; of her frequent laughter at my foolishness; of her wisdom as she explained the mysteries of womankind to me. I see the stillborn boy covered in afterbirth, and Elena drained and exhausted by the trials she had suffered. I see Lorenzo’s infant son, born at the same time, suckling at her full breasts.

  I used to spend many hours in copying Plato. It was my leisure, my meditation, my income. Each copy was my attempt at perfection, perfection not only of handwriting and page design, but of myself. It was my via sacra. I would sit at my desk by the window and, each time I needed to sit back and stretch, my gaze would fall on my wife, her head bowed over her needlework, her lustrous hair tucked behind her ears – for at home I forbade the netting, the snood, the linen veil of the married woman, as I forbade all cosmetics and jewellery. I would sit back and gaze on the untainted beauty, the perfection of my wife. And then I was content. Sometimes she accused me of neglecting her. Once she said that if she were to fall out of the window the same time as my Plato, she would stand small chance of being saved. That stung and for a week I gave up my copying. Then she asked me to return to it, saying that she preferred being neglected to living with an irritable bear with fleas in its fur.

  My breath is short now and I am panting, unable to face any more memories. Tears course down my face.

  ‘My son?’

  I opened my eyes to the young Dominican friar, his chin blue with stubble, his eyes black under the cowl, his face overshadowed by a great hooked nose. Girolamo Savonarola, that was his name. I remembered now. His mission to speak bluntly of holy things in the church patronised by the Medici, where the very stone had been polished to a high sheen by the cadences of the most eloquent preachers of our time, had been a disaster. Men of highly-wrought sensibility had been offended by his tearful exhortations to study scripture and complained that his voice grated on their cultured ears. Lorenzo, who had said that the friar’s inelegant sermons were causing great distress to the corpse of his grandfather, which was trying to rest under the floor before the altar, was negotiating with the prior of San Marco to have the young man transferred elsewhere.

  ‘What ails you?’ Fra Girolamo asked, laying his hands gently on my tense shoulders. His piercing eyes were the colour of gun metal. ‘The pain of the world is insignificant compared to the suffering of Christ.’

  ‘I know, frate.’

  He brought his powerful face close to mine. His breath smelt stale, as it does after a fast. ‘The love you love,’ he said, ‘is the wrong love.’

  That was what he said before he turned and went north up the street towards the monastery of San Marco. Dominicans are the learned friars; it is the Franciscans who speak of love. I gazed after him, wondering how he had known the content of my heart, and what his words had meant.

  4

  THE NIGHT THE SKY CAUGHT FIRE

  1482

  LATE ONE EVENING AFTER A DAY’S LABOUR AT THE DESK IN Ficino’s villa, I went for a long walk up the hill above Careggi and into the wilder parts, but the smell of the woods, of pine and che
stnuts, conjured up the image of Giuliano the hunter so vividly that the pain of his loss made me veer away and take a track down to where the Villa Medici lay below. Almost abandoned since Lorenzo’s mother had died in March of that year, it stood in a pool of sadness. Lorenzo visited it occasionally but only briefly. It was getting dark, the villa was deserted and there was no one to be seen in the fields. At the place where my wife had fallen from her horse in wild flight from our enemies I laid face down with my arms outstretched as if to embrace her. And then I began to cry and as I cried I felt my tears run into the soil and I prayed that they might nourish her spirit in Hades. You see, even in grief the Christian in me was contradicted. I had read too much literature of the ancients and was ready to feed the earth with my blood if it would give the spirit of my wife some substance. But none of this gave comfort, only deepened the sense of loss.

  When I returned to the villa, a crescent Moon had appeared in the west, attended by bright Venus. I found Ficino on the terrace staring up at the sky through a sextant. ‘Make a note, Tommaso. The Moon is newborn, has just entered Taurus, and is eighteen degrees below Venus.’

  I went indoors to fetch my notebook. I had become adept at writing by starlight and had the eyes of an owl.

  ‘And bring your figure,’ he called after me. ‘This is a most propitious time for the operation.’

  We had been making it for a month, a cross cast in silver and bearing Ficino’s design of the sign and symbols of Venus which I had engraved myself. A talisman to restore me to gaiety and health, neither of which, at that moment, I particularly wanted. He placed it in a flowerbed and directed it towards Venus, cupped as she was by the Moon, to be impregnated by her influence.