The Rebirth of Venus

by Linda Proud

  ‘She’s becoming a witch herself,’ Angelo remarked affectionately. ‘How often I find her bent double in the herb patch, muttering to her plants.’

  Assiduous in her studies, Maria was fast becoming a learned lady, able now to read and write in Greek as well as she could in Latin. But she bore the air of the Cumean Sibyl and seemed able to see things obscure to the rest of us. Under her brother’s protection and with his encouragement she lived a life denied to most women outside of a convent’s walls, a life of study and contemplation. Though she was obedient to Angelo, she was completely free. This most rare quality in a woman made her both attractive and remote. My heart had stirred at seeing her as it may stir at seeing one’s native home after a long journey in foreign lands. Her black hair burnt brown by the sun, her round eyes, deeply lidded, her aquiline nose, her large, strong teeth: these were not the classical elements of beauty, and yet they were the features best suited to her nature, which was open, friendly and generous. Maria listened; Maria laughed; Maria was simpatica.

  Friendship between man and woman is so rare that even the ancient writers do not to my knowledge discuss it, except in elevated terms such as the story of Socrates’s instruction in love by Diotima. Certainly I have not met any contemporary of mine who has experienced it, but such friendship is as capable of profundity as that between man and man, perhaps more so. Even brothers and sisters do not, so far as I know, experience the same level of love and honesty that Maria and I achieved. Therefore let it be said here that a man may love a woman who is neither his wife nor his sister but simply his friend, and turn to her, talk to her, be pleased to come home to her, without ever desiring her in his bed, since such a desire would dishonour her. Convert the object of beauty into an idea of beauty, Ficino had taught me. Reflect that the body in which beauty shines is not the source from which it springs. In your appreciation of beauty, restrict yourself to the sense of sight and of hearing. These two faculties are servants of reason, unlike touch and taste. This way you may feed your soul with beauty without being prey to the miseries that attend sensual love. I had loved once as a man loves a woman, desiring to beget children, and the misery of loss will haunt me forever. I had no intention of repeating that step on the ladder of ascent. So with Maria I learnt to love the qualities of nature, to appreciate her beauty through the mind and the faculty of reason.

  One evening in May we dined outside in the garden for the first time in the year. Little moths sizzled in the flames of lanterns, the shadows were fragrant with herbs, and the crickets made a carpet of sound over the Arno valley. I became aware of Maria staring at me, but she was not looking at me so much as into me.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  She blinked and now regarded me in the usual way that one human being looks at another. ‘I see children all about you, many children.’

  My wife had died without issue other than a stillborn. As I had no intention of remarrying, I greeted her words cynically. ‘What are you saying?’

  She studied me with that penetrating stare again. ‘You will have many children, who you will raise in truth and they will found a new nation.’

  I looked to Angelo for help. He was grinning at his sister. ‘O Sibyl of treeless Avernus: your meaning is obscure. Repeat your prophecy.’

  ‘Do not mock me, brother,’ said Maria tartly. ‘You think you are learned because you have read all the books in the world. But you see nothing and know less!’

  I was impressed. I had never heard anyone speak to Poliziano that way; and I had never heard a woman speak thus to any man.

  At the university, Poliziano was introducing his students to the ancient poetry of Greece. Sometimes, after a long day, he did not return at night. Maria said nothing about it except that ‘he will be staying at the city house’. I wanted to ask her about Cammilla but did not wish to offend with mere curiosity. Besides, there was no need. Within the walls of this home, the truth was both obvious and unsurprising. Angelo’s mind was so fully occupied with ancient Greece and Rome that ancient morals had become more natural to him than Judaeo-Christian ones, such as the Levitican law which states that a man must not marry his dead brother’s wife. If some of the rumours were true and Angelo was in love with Cammilla, the only thing preventing him making a legal match would be Christian custom, that and his being a priest. But where he could buy himself out of the priesthood, he could not buy himself out from custom, not this time. So we lived our lives under the protection of Lorenzo and the common law. In Angelo’s frequent absence, I looked after Maria.

  While we men fretted over right and wrong, in Maria the disparate worlds of pagan and Christian met in harmony. Each day she would go to the spring’s head at Fontelucente with a prayer for the Virgin and flowers for the Muses. She also went down in to the valley with gifts for the witches. Angelo firmly prohibited this, but she went when he was absent from the house, and begged forgiveness of God for the disobedience which came to her as naturally as obedience.

  ‘Angelo quotes Plutarch,’ she told me, ‘and says that witches have artificial eyes which they can put in and take out at their pleasure, just as old people do with their spectacles and false teeth. He says they put their eyes in when they go to the city, and take them out at home.’

  ‘It is a metaphor for busybodies,’ I explained, ‘people who only have eyes for other people’s business and are senseless with regard to their own.’

  ‘He says a witch has the eyes of an owl or a spy and can find out a grain of sand, and bury herself in the smallest cranny. But as soon as she gets home, she takes out her eyes and puts them in her pocket. Then she sits there spinning yarn and humming a little song to herself.’

  ‘He’s just trying to frighten you.’

  Maria loved her brother’s stories, culled from the ancient poets and not from the lives of saints, told to her of a summer evening in the olive grove, or of a winter’s night by the fireside, as if she were five years old. This brother and sister, who had been parted by fate and custom for fifteen years, had since their reunion been enjoying a belated childhood together. At home the Professor of Latin and Greek was as likely to be chasing his squealing sister round the house as making ready a lecture on Homer. When it was cool in the evening and we gathered at the hearth, Angelo dismissed the servants and sat on a low stool, possessive of the log basket and his function as fuel-provider, grudgingly allowing Maria to feed the fire with kindling and pine cones. They treated fire-feeding as ritual and not as labour, and between them always got a roaring blaze going. Then, after an invocation to Hestia, the stories would begin.

  ‘I think what Angelo is trying to tell you,’ I said to her, ‘is that the women in the valley are busybodies and gossips, and that you should not be too familiar with them.’

  ‘The trouble with men is that you sit in towers and theorise,’ she said. ‘You have lost touch with the world.’

  London, November 27th, 1505

  Gathered in St Paul’s this evening was a large and mixed congregation, a motley throng of lawyers, guildsmen of the city companies, merchants, artisans, canons of the cathedral and divines. Most were there, of course, out of curiosity. The word has spread through London that the son of the old mayor, Sir Henry Colet, has returned from Oxford to take up one of the highest clerical posts in the land. John Colet is a literary man, a Master of Arts who studied grammar and rhetoric at Oxford. How does he have the audacity to stand in the pulpit of London’s cathedral and preach? So they came to hear what he has to say, and found themselves pinned by the ears. Colet is using all his literary skills to understand and expound the Gospels, stripping them of centuries of accumulated idea and opinion. He stood erect in the pulpit and, in a ringing voice that has been trained on the precepts of Cicero, addressed the Londoners as if they were the Corinthians and he St Paul himself.

  He accused them of being divided and factional, of being carnal and not spiritual, of praying to martyrs and s
aints and not to Christ. ‘Look at this Church,’ he cried, ‘festooned with the tawdry baubles of superstition.’ He threw out his arm to indicate the chapels, the carved wooden screens, the tapers, the images. From the ceiling hang standards, some richly hued, others torn and colourless with age; in the little chantry chapels are a host of images of saints, each of them venerated by candles; everywhere tombs of dead crusaders with their trophies and arms hanging above. You cannot move in St Paul’s without stumbling on such memorials and a hundred little sanctuaries to private saints made in the patron’s memory. The cathedral is like the city, a barnacle heap of one thing on top of another, a very encrustation of life which, as it grows, becomes harder and more fixed. Colet has already cleared the place of the vendors and money-lenders, but these more superstitious and sentimental fixtures are harder to sweep out.

  ‘As the Church, so the hearts of men,’ Colet cried. ‘Our hearts and minds are stuffed with half-understood opinions of half- learned men, and we shuffle from one holy day to the next, as if following the Calendar year is all it takes to be a Christian. It does not. It takes more. And before we begin we must strip out all this stuff and cleanse the inner sanctum. We are not Christians until we are practising Christians, and by practising Christians I do not mean the practice of ritual observance. I would have you be the kind of men who love their neighbours, and if you would be that kind of men, then listen now to the words of St Paul.

  ‘In this work, we work with God. You are like a house being built to his plan. I, like a master-builder who knows his job, by the grace God has given me, lay the foundation; someone else builds upon it. I only say this, let the builder be careful how he builds! The foundation is laid already, and no one can lay another, for it is Jesus Christ himself. But any man who builds on the foundation using as his material gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay or straw, must know that each man’s work will one day be shown for what it is. The day will show it plainly enough, for the day will arise in a blaze of fire… ’

  Suddenly there was a sense of blockage in my ears and that sudden high ringing sound which is troubling me more and more these days. I closed my nose and snorted to clear the passages, but the ringing persisted. I missed the rest of the sermon until suddenly Colet’s voice was very clear indeed: ‘Don’t you realise that you yourselves are the temple of God, and that God’s Spirit lives in you?’

  Feeling less like a temple of God than His bell tower, I thought about what John was saying. What Ficino had said to me – ‘You are that Sun’ – John also knew: the essential innermost unity of Man and God. But Colet could hardly declare that truth from the pulpit, especially in the presence of the bishop, who is such an enthusiastic hunter after heretics.

  The sermon continued for over an hour, with Colet expounding the virtues of the true Christian life, a life which seems to others to be folly – what St Paul calls ‘the folly of the Cross’. No one is in any doubt as to Colet’s intention: he and the Apostle together are going to clear this Church of its accumulations of sin and false doctrine. All the musty tomes of learned opinion shall be dust before his broom; centuries of superstition and corruption shall be scrubbed off the good, bare wood that is Christ’s church. I swear the very cobwebs in the cathedral shrank back, knowing their end is nigh.

  And now everyone knows it, that if the new dean has studied theology privately and not in the Schools, it is so that he may keep clear of theologians. Colet is a literary man, and he has come to know God through the Word. Naturally this enflames those who have spent their lives in the formal study of scripture, and who are advancing their careers in the usual, elbow-bruising fashion. They resent this upstart who has gained his benefice by the preferment of the king.

  My skin began to prickle and I glanced about. Sometimes you know you are being stared at without seeing the eyes. The cowled head of a blackfriar was turned in my direction; his face deep in shadow, I was being watched by an empty space. A Dominican – Domini-cane, hound of the Lord – is on my scent.

  When Colet descended from the pulpit we, his companions, gathered protectively about him, needing to shield him from both well-wishers and critics; but we were too few to form a tight circle and, besides, we had to step back when the bishop approached.

  ‘I congratulate you, Dean, on an interesting sermon, yes, most interesting and illuminating; but I have to say that I am in awe of your temerity, that you should find within yourself the authority to speak directly from the Gospels. That is not usually done for the laity.’

  ‘Authority comes from God,’ said Colet, hoarse after his sermon. ‘The disciples had only Jesus as a master, and I would be a disciple of the Lord himself, not of his interpreters.’

  The bishop’s feigned affability vanished, revealing fury. Here was the face of a Church that does not wish its ways to be disturbed.

  ‘What gives you –’ he began, but Erasmus intervened bodily and hustled the dean out of the church.

  I kept close to the group. When I glanced back at the cathedral, the blackfriar was still watching me but now he had his cowl thrown back. He is not an English Dominican but an Italian one, I am sure of it.

  7

  THE SECRET OF GOOD GOVERNMENT

  1484

  LORENZO DE’ MEDICI LOOKED AT ME WITH A DOCTOR’S EYES, detached and yet compassionate. He sat comfortably in his chair, father of his city, father of us all, and let me speak without limit of time. And I spoke in a rambling fashion, now choking on grief, now taking command of myself, answering my own questions, prescribing my own therapies.

  ‘According to St Paul,’ he said, cutting across my fumbling speech, ‘if you are bound to a wife, do not seek to be loosened. But if you are loosened, do not seek to be bound.’

  ‘I thought you had called me here to say you had found a new wife for me.’

  ‘For any other man, that would be my solution, but not for you.

  What do you want, Tommaso, apart from the impossible?’

  ‘I want work, but not of the kind I’m having to do now that the Plato’s finished, bits of this and that in exchange for accommodation. I want steady craft, my craft. I want to wake each morning with a sense of purpose; I want to finish each day with a sense of completion. I want to copy books. Not the romances and histories that most men want, but books I may learn from, although preferably not Plato. Not for a while.’

  He nodded, understanding. ‘Tommaso, you know I cannot afford such luxuries now, not at the moment. My wealth was exhausted by the war.’

  I was disappointed and it showed. ‘Then why did you send for me, Magnifico?’

  He leant forward and gazed into my eyes. ‘Angelo tells me you cry in the night. Tommaso, what can I say? You must learn to transmute grief into joy.’

  ‘Have you succeeded in that alchemy?’

  ‘Ficino once said that Giuliano and I were one soul in two bodies. Now we share one body. There is no need to grieve. If this philosophy of Plato is true, if our Christian faith is true, there is no need to grieve.’

  ‘It would help if I had something to concentrate on.’

  ‘Go and see my cousin, Lorenzino. He is commissioning manuscripts.’

  In the summer months, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici lived in a newly built villa called Castello, about ten miles north of the city, beyond Careggi. There this young man, barely twenty at the time, often held symposia and I went to one with Botticelli. I knew everyone there – all familiar faces from the Platonic Academy, including Ficino himself.

  The topic of discussion was good government. The company was in agreement that tyranny – benign or otherwise – is not good; that good government depends on a council of the wise. But how do you find wise men? And, having found them, how do you get the people to recognise them as such? And obey them? Lorenzino was of the opinion that they needed to be well-born and well-educated but Ficino disagreed, saying that children of the city should be selected f
or their merits and then trained up for the task of government.

  On the wall of the chamber was the Venus. I gazed at the goddess and she gazed back at me with that quiet smile that offered so much and gave nothing. Now sixteen, Giovanni di Pierfrancesco, with his high, clear brow and large eyes, did more of the talking than his elder brother, was animated while the more reflective Lorenzino remained quiet. These two seemed to be a re-cast of Lorenzo and Giuliano, with everyone captivated by the younger one and deferential to the elder.

  ‘Are we boring you, Tommaso?’ Giovanni asked, snatching my attention from naked Love. ‘What do you consider to be the secret of good government?’

  Caught dreaming, I grasped the first idea that came to mind. ‘The secret of good government begins with the individual. Men must learn self-discipline before they put themselves forward to govern others, learn to curb their appetites, to develop reason, to act for the greater good and not their own self-interest. Therefore, the secret of good government is education in virtue. It is our duty, as educators, to raise the governors of tomorrow.’

  ‘Bravo!’ Ficino exclaimed, smiling on me with approval, he, my own educator. There was general appreciation for what I had said, but Giovanni stared at me with no smile on his lovely face. A watchful seraph; a recording angel.

  ‘I see you do not just copy out Plato’s words but read them with understanding,’ said Lorenzino.

  ‘I have several of the dialogues by heart,’ I replied, looking into his light-dark eyes.

  ‘And do you yourself have this virtue you would teach others?’ Giovanni asked, at which the company dissolved in laughter, each man vying with another to list my faults. It was true enough: I am not patient and do not practise forbearance. They did agree I have fortitude, but only when it comes to copying Plato for years on end. At this even Ficino laughed.