The Rebirth of Venus

by Linda Proud

  Was it the countering, negative influence within me that made the horizon bloom red? I thought so at the time. Waves of red light suddenly arose where the sun had set an hour or more earlier. As we both stood there, silent and transfixed, flames began to belch into the sky as if the sun itself were being consumed and would never rise again. We Italians are short in stature but Marsilio Ficino was shorter than most, almost dwarfish. He had fair hair falling in waves and a face wrinkled with many lines and furrows, and yet he was a handsome man, his features open and his eyes frank. He had a way of staring into the air as if communing with subtle spirits. He stood there now, facing west, his arms upraised to the sky as if to receive the cosmos and its message. I dared say nothing to disturb him and had to restrain any expression of the terror I felt. At last, coming back to himself, he turned to face me, the side of his face illuminated by the red light in the sky.

  ‘Tommaso,’ he said, weakly, almost gasping. ‘This is a sign of the antichrist. This is where the end begins.’ Possessed by the god, he was predicting the future as soundly as blind Tiresias.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It is to end in fire.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Our work. Our truth. Our philosophy. Our age. It will burn to ash. But you, you will take the seeds of our work north and plant them in new ground.’ He picked up the silver talisman. ‘Destroy it. You do not want the influences that have gone into this metal.’

  It had cost me too much to throw it away. I stored it until the next time I went into the city and could visit the silversmith and have it melted down. But of course I forgot, and having worked its way to the bottom of my clothes chest, it stayed there for the next twelve years. By the time I came across it again, Ficino’s prophecy was in the dawn of its fulfilment. Then I remembered that night, and knew that it had all begun in 1482, the year when The Platonic Theology was published, the year that Sandro unveiled his Venus, the year when Savonarola first came to Florence and preached to an empty church at San Lorenzo, the year the sky caught fire.

  London, November 23rd, 1505

  He has the face of a friendly, trusting rat, if there is such a thing. How fine to hold those sharp cheekbones in my hands again, and stare into those small, bright eyes, to push my soft, Italian nose against that pointed Dutch one. Of course, Thomas More possesses him. It is good to see them walking together again, arm-in-arm along Bucklersbury. Am I envious? A little. I would have Erasmus for my own, as would Colet and every other man in the circle. He has a facet for each of us. But for More – watching those two together, I see again Angelo Poliziano and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: two men whose love for one another transcends common friendship and strays nowhere near that other common relationship between men. Platonic. The only word for it: Platonic love. The ecstasy of good company.

  More, more – so often on Erasmus’s lips. ‘Tommaso, have you kept up your writing? I want more of it.’

  No, I have not kept it up, and now that my reader is back, I am dashing it off in a frenzy.

  ‘I want to hear more about Poliziano.’

  ‘More wants to hear more about Pico della Mirandola; Colet is only interested in Marsilio Ficino and Savonarola. It will be a long book, and one ending in multiple deaths.’

  ‘A tragedy, then.’

  ‘It is not in me, I think, to write a divine comedy.’

  Erasmus looked at me askance. ‘Why not? Tragedy is only unresolved comedy. Has it occurred to you that your story did not stop in 1499?’

  5

  PLATO RESTORED

  1483

  AFTER THE PUBLICATION OF THE PLATONIC THEOLOGY MY task had been to go through a copy of the book and correct every mistake the printers had made.

  ‘Printers?’ Ficino had cried in despair when he saw what a pottage of error Miscomini had made of his book. ‘Mis-printers, more like! It is your fault, Tommaso. You are to blame for this. You should never have made the choice on appearance alone. The print may be beautiful as print goes, but it is useless if it is not accurate!’

  The correction of this book, in preparation for another printing, delayed completion of Ficino’s translation of all Plato’s writings from Greek into Latin. With his faith in Florentine printers destroyed, when the great work, his life’s work, was finished, he decided it should be published in Venice, but he could not allow his work to make such a journey without some safeguard. ‘Tommaso,’ he told me, ‘I need you to make a copy.’

  The complete works of Plato and all Ficino’s commentaries.

  ‘What else have you got to do?’ he asked, to which there was no answer, and I went to the city to buy fresh stocks of parchment and quills. This served me in two ways. Firstly, it gave the opportunity to spend an hour with my old friend and master, the bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci, and listen to him growl and grumble about the decline of civilisation with the invention of printing. Secondly, it gave me another taste of city life, a taste so disgusting that when I returned to Careggi it was with a new sense of gratitude for the task ahead of me. If work was to be my therapy, with such a weight of it there was some hope of a cure. What I did not do, could not do, was to look further, beyond the work. Nor, I think, could Ficino. He had, after all, dedicated his life to the task; who could blame him for delaying its end? The future after Plato was a black void.

  Whenever I could, I asked my philosopher questions, a few of them profound but many of them stemming from mere curiosity, such as the one about the history of the Platonic Academy. Rumours were abounding of it being a secret society of great antiquity.

  ‘I have heard the story,’ he said, ‘that after Plato’s Academy was closed by the Emperor Justinian its members went to Persia, were there at the birth of Islam, were behind the Greek learning of the Arabs and the rise of the universities; that many generations later they returned to Greece, to Mistra, and counted Michael Psellus amongst their number and, later, in our own time, George Gemistos Plethon. I have heard that Cardinal Bessarion himself was a member, that the order was put under the protection of Cosimo de’ Medici and that I am its current leader.’

  ‘Is it true?’ I asked breathlessly.

  In his customary way, he answered with a question. ‘Why do you want it to be true?’

  Why indeed. Because it thrilled me to be a part of a line of souls, quite possibly transmigrating souls, that spanned history; I wished to be authenticated by the past, made real and purposeful. I wanted to know that my forebears had been there in Egypt, in Athens, in Arabia, in Mistra.

  ‘You were there,’ said Ficino, reading my mind.

  ‘So the soul does transmigrate?’

  ‘That is not my meaning. There are two ways, Tommaso, the way of the sun and the way of the moon. Women see clearly by the light of the moon, men do not – that is why Theseus could only enter the labyrinth with the aid and foresight of Ariadne. The way of the moon is dark and mysterious, full of ciphers and symbols, secrets and initiations. It leads through twisting tunnels and what do you get at the end? A minotaur!’

  ‘To be slain.’

  ‘Indeed. It is a valid way, but long and arduous and littered with the bones of seekers. Or at least, the bones of their wits.’ He chuckled. ‘The way of the sun, of Apollo and not Dionysus, is not so appealing, often arid and harsh, full of discipline and austerity. On this path you do not accumulate knowledge but surrender what you know. It is a hard route but a quicker one. I am telling you this, Tommaso, to warn you not to go wandering off down tempting byways such as enquiring after the history of the Platonic Academy. In the heavens he hath set a tabernacle for the sun.’

  ‘I am that tabernacle.’

  ‘No. This is the point: you are that sun. That’s the very crux of it. When you become one with God, who then is Pythagoras, Hermes or Plato? Merely embodiments of yourself. If the soul transmigrates it is because it is still lost, still does not realise who it is in t
ruth. The way of the sun is to know yourself through reason, through self-examination, by discriminating between the true and the false within yourself.’ He stared at me, expectantly.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘That was it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I have told you the heart of the mystery. That was your initiation.’

  ‘What, no rites or ceremonies of which I may not speak?’

  ‘You will hold your own; when the time comes that you understand my words as a living reality, you will fall to your knees in the light of your own Sun.’

  In the spring there was an eclipse of the full moon, which Ficino and I watched from the terrace of his villa. The following day Angelo Poliziano arrived and told us of many strange things that had happened in the city, including a few sudden and unaccountable deaths. He did not himself believe there was any connection between them and the eclipse but he enjoyed a good story, and even more he enjoyed teasing Ficino with curiosities, for Ficino took such things very seriously. Divine Providence, said the philosopher, shows itself by natural signs. Poliziano grunted. Since having become a professor he had grown sceptical of our mystery religion. I had lived with him long enough to know the cause, and it was in language. When the philosophers spoke in abstractions about things without form, the brilliant scholar simply did not understand. His brain lost the structure of understanding and floundered. He thought – and wrote – in images, and when there were no images he struggled as if in mud.

  I sat between the two of them, believing with Ficino or scoffing with Poliziano, depending on which of them I faced at any time. I have to record, however, that for a month after the eclipse it rained steadily and did not stop raining until the Florentines brought the miracle-working statue of Our Lady from Imprunetta to the city. Then the rain stopped. And the King of France died and was succeeded by Charles, eighth of that name.

  Around the same time, Angelo’s brother also died and Angelo brought his widowed sister-in-law and two nephews to live with him in Florence. He did not intend for the cruel custom of tornata, according to which Cammilla should have abandoned her sons and returned to her own family, to make orphans of his nephews, so he took the family into his house on the Via de’ Fossi. But it is never easy to fly in the face of custom, and as the rumours began to spread of the scholar’s bordello and the infamous practices he indulged not only with his sister-in-law but with his nephews, Angelo fled to Fiesole and the villa that Lorenzo had given him, taking his sister Maria for company.

  ‘What will you do when you have finished the Plato?’ he asked me one day at Careggi.

  ‘Will I ever finish? I am like Sisyphus – every time I reach the summit of the mountain with my boulder, I lose hold of it and it rolls to the foot again. I sometimes think,’ I confided in him, ‘that Ficino hesitates to finish his life’s work lest his life ends with it.’

  Angelo looked at my copy. ‘What a labour of love.’

  ‘Especially when you know it’s going to end on the fire. Once the printers have torn out its pages and spattered them with ink, the fire is its certain fate. But it is the ideas which are important.’

  ‘Should the day ever dawn when you get your boulder to the top of the mountain, I’d like you to come and live with me in my villa. It is nothing grand – very small in fact, as small as this place of Ficino’s – but it is my own home and you are welcome to share it. My duties in the university are ever-increasing and there is too much work for me to concentrate on my own studies. When Ficino has no further need of you, I could do with your help and I can afford to employ you. Speed up.’

  To my surprise, the offer was appealing. I don’t think at that time I confessed even to myself the nature of the attraction, and I shrink from confessing it now. Put it this way – apart from Ficino’s mother and nieces, who lived in his town house, I had not spoken to a woman in a year. It was not that I wished for a new wife or anything of that kind; just that, in the seat of my soul, I needed female company. It was not Angelo I wished to live with, it was Maria.

  Throughout Elena’s travail, Maria had been there; she had helped me bury my stillborn son; she had stood by me as I buried my wife. Maria was as much my sister as Angelo’s, and in her company there was some cure against becoming a ghost myself. Maria did not philosophise about bereavement. In those grey times when I was being sucked down into despair, she put her arms around me and warmed my soul back into life by mere touch.

  All things do come to an end, even if it is in a petering fashion. With each passing day there were fewer pages of the Plato to copy than the day before. In late summer I passed the middle of the book and thereafter there was more weight on the left of it than on the right. The work drew to its close with the year and by the Feast of the Nativity I had completed my copy. But as I put down my quill with a great inward cry of thanks to God, Ficino told me to read the copy through from the beginning to check for mistakes. He was becoming a Penelope, each night unravelling what she had woven during the day so as to delay her suitors.

  The publication of the Plato was being paid for by a young merchant of patrician family called Filippo Valori; during Epiphany he arranged for the printing to be done by Lorenzo Francisco de Alopa in Venice and had a contract drawn up.

  ‘What kind of type fount does he use?’ I asked.

  ‘I am not sure,’ said Valori. ‘Does it matter? The important thing is that Francisco is known for his accuracy.’

  ‘That is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. There is no such thing as an accurate printer,’ I said.

  Valori smiled. ‘How can there be? Is printing not the devil’s invention? The work is bound to be attended by imps.’

  I liked Valori. As the new year of 1484 opened up into spring, I think he began to despair himself of ever seeing the Plato completed. He took Ficino away to his own estate at Maiano to make the final revision ‘in peace’, by which I think he meant, ‘where I can keep an eye on you.’

  ‘I set you free,’ Ficino told me with a smile as he set off with his burden for Maiano.

  6

  THE VILLA BRUSCOLI

  1483

  I TOOK THE ROAD FROM CAREGGI TO FIESOLE, CROSSING the valley between the hills and going up to the Badia, where Angelo was waiting for me. Together we rode up a lane, so small and hidden I had never noticed it before, ascending Fiesole on its darkest side.

  ‘There are witches here,’ Angelo told me. ‘They live upstream a little, in the shadows among the rocks, but on my property.’

  Now all men love their villas, but where most extol their vineyards and olive groves, he boasted about his ‘nest’ of witches. I looked to see if he were smiling, but he was not; he was quite serious. The villa was small and on that cold, windy, forested side of Fiesole where few live. Under the previous tenant the estate had fallen into ruin and the terraces had disappeared under scrub, yet Angelo loved the place, relishing all its quirks and peculiarities, for it was home and, to one born when the sun was in Cancer, one who had been orphaned young, home meant more than heaven.

  Apart from the witches, the Villa Bruscoli had another attraction. Behind the house and down the hill a few paces was a natural grotto. A spring issued from the rock to run through crevices filled with hound’s tooth fern and trefoil, pouring in a little waterfall into a stone basin. A statue of the Virgin had been placed at the spring’s head, which Angelo explained as ‘a Christian conversion of an element of nature’. This site, he said, had once been dedicated to the Muses and was becoming for him a constant source of inspiration.

  ‘It is called Fontelucente. I come here often, to compose a piece of prose or verse in my mind before I cut my quills.’ In his own estimation, since moving to the villa he had written his best work yet. It was small wonder that Poliziano was happy to have witches and Helicon’s fount where other men only have statues and fishponds.

  Just approaching his vill
a made me feel better. Though so close, Fiesole is very different in nature from Careggi and her open meadows on bare rock. The hill of Fiesole, surely Dante’s model for Purgatory, is a conical mound carved with terraces where the ascending paths wind under the retaining walls of villa gardens. Between the stones of those walls lie miniature landscapes, little caves at eye-level in which grow ferns, harebells and mosses. It was raining as we arrived and I did not care. The beauty of the place deepened in the mist, while the dripping water gathered into little streams that shared our path.

  The first time I had met Maria had been during the great flood of Florence, when Poliziano was away and I was charged with looking after his house. I had rowed in a boat with Botticelli and Filippino to check on its welfare and had seen what appeared to be the ghost of Angelo at an upper window. Unbeknownst to Angelo, his little sister had run away from Montepulciano and was now squatting in his house along with his cousin. When I mounted the stairs and met her face to face, she had stared at me with an expression of surprise. The shock of familiarity. I suffered it, too, but then I had good cause, for she was the image of her brother. But who did I remind her of? She never said.

  When I arrived at the Villa Bruscoli, she wore the same kind of look, even though she was expecting me. She gazed at me, her mouth slightly open, her eyes moist seemingly with wonder, and then she grew flustered as if embarrassed. I cut through any awkwardness by embracing her fondly as my sister. She returned my embrace, grateful and relieved. Her hair had been washed in rosemary and lavender. It smelt of woman. I inhaled.

  I had lived with Poliziano as his scribe and companion when he himself had lived with the Medici. I had lived with Maria before, having taken her in to my own house during Angelo’s exile from Florence. I had never lived with them both together and under their own roof. It was quite different. In each other’s company they regressed in years and reverted to childhood. They took me inside as if into their secret den, glowing with pleasure as they showed me, their first guest, my room. Maria, whose worldly duty was housekeeping for her brother, had put there a vase of sprawling flowers she had picked from the kitchen garden.