by Linda Proud
‘Touch me not, woman!’
Her arms encircled my waist and her mouth was against my ear. ‘Your philosophy has no seed.’
When she touched my right arm, my hand tingled as if stung by nettles.
‘So what have we learned?’ Pico asked cheerfully as we made our way back through the woods. ‘Nothing, except to fear the month of May.’
‘Why May?’
‘The time of the lilies.’
‘Oh, I see.’
‘Soothsayers of their kind are dangerous. A few ambiguous pronouncements made darkly by someone with bad breath and we are all a-shiver with mortal dread. They pretend to know the future, and their victims are those who would know the future, but the future is best left to God. For what would we do if we knew the future but strive to change it?’
‘Is it then inexorable?’
‘Ah…’ he said, and as we made our way slowly back up the hill, Pico della Mirandola expounded on his ideas about free will and predestination. Maria absorbed every word.
12
PLATO IS PUBLISHED
1484
A TRAIN OF WAGONS ARRIVING FROM VENICE LOADED WITH merchandise made its way through the city to the Palazzo de’ Valori. Several of us were there, not for the fabrics, the crystal cups or the spices imported from the East, but for several large wooden crates which held five hundred copies of the Plato Opera. We were like children, each of us eager to take a copy of the book, but we held back so that Ficino should be the first. On instruction from Valori, a servant prised open one of the crates. So many books and all identical! But they were not as we had expected, handsomely bound in Moroccan leather. For cheapness and expediency it had been decided to have the books bound in Florence, so what we received were the unbound quires loosely sewn together. Ficino stood with a copy in his hands.
‘Open it,’ said Bartolommeo Scala, as if in charge of the event.
But such was his anxiety of what he would find within that Ficino stood with it clutched tightly under his arm. Giovanni di Pierfrancesco stepped forward and took another copy out of the crate. We all gathered about him as he held the book open and towards us as if he were a lectern. My heart sank at the sight of the title page. With a slightly unsteady hand, Valori reached forward and turned the page and then we saw the text for the first time.
The type was Germanic black letter. What an abomination! Oh, dear God! A hundred years of Italian advance in calligraphic beauty undone in the hour! Lines of letters stabbed down like daggers on the lines below, and the capitals had so many strokes they were unreadable. Oh, the shades of Poggio Bracciolini, of Niccolò Niccoli, of all our most worthy scribes rose up in horror, and that of Cosimo de’ Medici ran shrieking away.
I am not sure what I said out loud, but Filippo Valori said I was giving fine rhetorical expression to everyone’s silent thoughts while Bartolommeo Scala accused me of over-reacting.
‘It is the ideas which matter!’ said Ficino forcefully, opening his copy at last. Scala read the page over his shoulder and then pointed a long, tapering finger to a particular line.
‘There’s a mistake,’ he said.
At that, Ficino trembled and had to put the book down. But Giovanni di Pierfrancesco, back at the crate, was handing out copies. As we all glanced through the book, we found many more mistakes, each of them made by the careless, inadequate printer. After a few minutes, Filippo Valori said that the mistakes on their own would have filled a crate.
Later, when he had recovered, Ficino told us that when a man is let out of prison he is bound to be filthy and emaciated. ‘But Plato is now free,’ he said. ‘Let Phoebus, the Sun, shine on him.’
13
PREDICTIONS AND PROPHECIES
1484
CRISTOFORO LANDINO, THE HEAD OF THE FACULTY OF poetry at the university, had studied the recent conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter marking the completion of an astrological Great Year and said that a great religious reform would commence on the 25th day of November. As I rode with Poliziano from the city to Fiesole on the evening of the 26th, we spoke of portents and prophecies, speculating on Landino’s strange astrological prediction. Had the reform taken place, Poliziano wondered? What was it? Where was it?
‘Clearly it refers to the publication of Plato,’ I said. ‘Once the Platonic teachings are disseminated, and men understand the imminence of the divine and the immortality of the soul, they will take much greater care in how they live life. Then everything will be renewed.’
‘That is a subtle renewal which will take years to come about. We need something more drastic. With the nature of the modern papacy and the corruption of the curia, I find it increasingly difficult to be a Christian at all. Some say the Book of Revelation is about to be fulfilled, that the Apocalypse is nigh. Sometimes, when I see the degradation of men’s souls, I hope it is true and that I live to see this city of ours quite flattened by Divine Wrath.’
‘You do not mean it!’
‘Only sometimes. Other times I love Florence as my mother.’
Over the following year nothing appeared to happen to renew Christianity. The death of Sixtus IV had merely brought us Innocent VIII. As popes go, he was better than most, but not one to inspire men to the spiritual life. Lorenzo, however, found he was someone he could do business with, and not just the business of the Medici bank. So far as Lorenzo was concerned, no renewal of the Church could take place until the Medici were in the Vatican. Thus he began to negotiate for a cardinal’s hat for his son Giovanni. He wanted him to become a cardinal as soon as possible. Age notwithstanding. By the time the boy was ten, he had been an abbot for four years, a priest for three and a canon of the Cathedral for two.
There were many other predictions coming from astrologers. Ficino refuted them, saying that the astrology which looks for causes in the stars is false: the stars are guides, not causes. But even he, studying his ephemerides, became apprehensive. The patterns of the skies told of great changes ahead, cataclysmic changes. The sidereal message was that our world was about to be destroyed.
14
PICO LEAVES WITHOUT SAYING GOODBYE
1485
IT WAS A PEACEFUL SUMMER SPENT AT THE VILLA BRUSCOLI. Into the copy of Hermes for Lorenzino I poured all my art and talent, rendering beautiful ideas in a beautiful form, so beautiful, I hoped, that men would be inspired to ignore the printing press.
Maria was content under her brother’s protection, spending each idyllic day either in study and composition or in transmogrifying the kitchen and so tidying the house – throwing anything left lying about into the nearest chest – that nothing could ever be found again.
Pico had been studying with Ficino about a year when we met in the city by chance one day in July and he told me that he was departing for Paris on the next. I was shocked and wanted to know the reason. He would not say, although I heard later that he had had a disagreement with Ficino on the subject of Love. ‘Pico,’ my informant told me, ‘thinks that Marsilio does not understand Plato properly.’ What hubris! I could only imagine the heated exchange.
‘Does Angelo know that you are leaving? Or Maria?’ I asked him.
‘No. Nor shall I tell them. I’ll be back soon enough.’ His was a free spirit demanding of his friends that they love him utterly without any claim. ‘Love me and let me go,’ should have been his motto.
I took the news of his departure to the Villa Bruscoli.
‘Gone?’ Angelo stared at me, looking like a man who had been robbed of his soul. Maria left us abruptly to go to her room. Later, as I passed her door, I heard her pen scratching: the sound of a woman writing poetry. What kind of poetry does a woman write? Like that of Sappho? If so, verses of love and grief were being written by candlelight in the room of our housekeeper. Since the arrival of Pico, I had watched her fight against his attraction and lose. He was her Charybdis, drawing her down in the whirlpool of his self-absorption.
Whatever she was doing, Pico would want to be involved. He would as readily discuss her studies with her as techniques of pickling. He had a way of making it seem that she was the lodestone and he the helpless piece of iron, when in fact it was the other way around. It was cruel of him to give her so much attention, always complimenting her intelligence and caressing her with his adoring eyes. But it was the way a child looks at his mother. He sometimes sought her out when she was alone at the villa because, he said, he enjoyed her company above that of any other woman, and then he would talk energetically about divine love and celibacy. The philosophical journey, the ascent of the soul to God, he said, required a man to be pure, and Maria was an aid rather than an obstacle in that.
‘Women are fickle, vain and pleasure-loving,’ he once told her. ‘I have never seen the point of engaging any of them in conversation. But you, you are so different. La mia unica Maria. Earthly love between man and woman always tends towards coitus,
an unseemly act. Divine love occurs between man and man since such love does not involve coitus. Can there be divine love between man and woman? I thought it was impossible until I met you, my wise woman, my Diotima.’
‘What form does divine love take between man and man?’ she asked.
‘The closest one may come physically to the beloved is the kiss.’
‘Have you ever…’ she blushed and cleared her throat. ‘You and my brother?’
Pico nodded. ‘In the kiss, souls meet in union, so perfectly joined together that they are at the same two souls, and one. The most perfect and intimate union which the lover can have with the heavenly beloved is represented by the union of a kiss.’
‘Is it, you know, a long, passionate kiss or a peck of affection?’ Pico looked at her, hesitated, then overcoming any restraint he might have had, pulled her to him and kissed her on the mouth until she went limp in his arms. This is how he treated a young woman barely out of the convent! A young woman who, as she passed marrying age, was working so hard to convince herself that she wanted no husband.
‘I hope you did not mind me doing that. Example is always the best way to teach.’
Maria was unable to reply.
‘I love you as I love your brother, Maria,’ Pico said. He meant it as the highest compliment, but it destroyed Maria’s equilibrium. She told me about it in confidence, after swearing me to secrecy, but as soon as I heard the story I felt as tense as a drawn bow and wanted to go and have the matter out with Pico, this man who, under the aegis of philosophy, had violated my sister. That was how it felt – a violation – but Maria laughed and said, had she been violated, she was perfectly capable of defending herself. She brought her arms up as if holding an imaginary sword with both hands and, saying swissshhh, swiped it through the air to remove his imaginary head. She was overly fond, I thought, of the story of Judith and Holofernes.
‘You do not understand him. He is not of this earth, Tommaso. The laws do not apply to him. Kissing Pico is as lustful as kissing Saint Thomas Aquinas.’
Yet when Pico left Florence, she translated her grief into poetry and mourned like a nightingale.
Angelo, however, once he had recovered himself, grew angry. He went out to chop wood in such a mood that I pitied the logs splintering under his blows. Naturally we had servants to do such work, which, besides, is the work of autumn, not high summer, but log-chopping had become Poliziano’s regular exercise, especially when he needed to free his brains from his emotions.
15
THE CASA VECCHIA
1485
WHEN THE MEDICI FIRST CAME DOWN FROM THE HILLS to live and thrive in the city, they built a house on the Via Larga which still stands, beside the new palazzo built by Cosimo. The old house was given to the Pierfranceschi. While they were young, the sons of Pierfrancesco were much a part of the main household, the house of their guardian, present at meals, at lessons and other family events, but now that they had grown, and Lorenzino had come of age, they kept to the Casa Vecchia, establishing in that house of only two storeys a home to rival that of il Magnifico.
After I had completed the Hermes and had had it delivered, I was invited to visit. Crossing its threshold for the first time, I walked into an aesthetic haven of good taste. From the very entry of the building, up its staircase, through its sala to an antechamber decorated with scenes from the life of Bacchus, the house shone with the attention of a man of exquisite sensibility. Where il Magnifico, inheriting a house of three generations, had merely added to its contents, Lorenzino had swept out his forefathers and brought in the upholsterers, the fabric merchants, the furniture- builders and wall-decorators to create an harmonious whole. I did not turn my head from side to side like the vulgar curious, but even with my gaze downcast I could take in the blue leather, the marble, the wood intarsia, and the merest glance showed the perfection of placing, whether it was the bust of a father on the cabinet, the chair beside the hearth, the candelabra. Sconces on the wall either side of a tondo of the Madonna and Child were a hymn to symmetry.
In the chamber where I met him, however, my attention was divided between my host and the large painting above the lettuccio, that painting done by Botticelli of Venus, the Graces and Mercury.
‘Beautiful, no?’ said Lorenzino, following my gaze.
‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘beautiful.’ I said nothing about having been locked up with it in the cellar at the Medici palace while the mob in the street was howling for those who had murdered Giuliano. Nothing about having been carried into the angelic realm by the song of this octave of figures. ‘Very beautiful.’
Lorenzino was dressed simply in doublet and hose, a man as much at home in himself as in his house. He apologized for his appearance. ‘Some recommend that a man should wear his Sunday best when he studies, but I approach my books as an artisan, not an ambassador, and I like to be comfortable while I work.’ On a table was a pile of open books: I had interrupted him in his study of Plato in the original Greek. In the centre of the room on a lectern was my Hermes, open for reading, the light falling on its gilded capitals and making them shine.
‘I had to thank you in person,’ Lorenzino said, smiling. ‘It is even better than I had hoped and asked for. With all due respect – I’m sure you will understand what I say – I could have commis- sioned a scribe with a finer hand…’
I swallowed my outrage and returned his smile.
‘… but when a scribe understands his text, when he is at one with his text, the beauty he achieves is sublime and far deeper than mere outward appearance. Not that,’ he added hurriedly, ‘it is not outwardly beautiful. It is. Most will recognise it as a work of outstanding beauty, particularly in its proportions, but I am afflicted with senses more acute than those of most men, and I can see the shaky descender on this p, or the untrue angle of that o…’
‘Tommaso,’ said Giovanni di Pierfrancesco, walking in, ‘take no notice of him. He would find a pimple on the Virgin’s cheek. This,’ he said, joining us in front of the book, ‘is bellissima, and if my brother finds he cannot live with its imperceptible faults then I shall have it.’
‘Forgive me,’ said Lorenzino. ‘Have I hurt you, being truthful and forthright?’
‘Not at all,’ I lied pleasantly.
‘Only I judge you to be a man who values Truth, worships her, indeed.’
‘I would like to be considered so, and I would be the first to criticise my own achievements.’ First and only, preferably.
‘I have upset you,’ said Lorenzino. I assured him he had not but knew it was hopeless. No one could feign anything before those penetrating, hooded eyes. He took my right hand in both of his, caressed it, raised it to his lips and kissed it. ‘There – that is what I wanted to do when I saw my book. Let my actions sound louder than my words.’ Releasing my hand, he returned to the book, turning its pages reverentially. ‘Beauty,’ he said, ‘opens the heart. When I read here, the words of Hermes go stra
ight into my soul.’ He read from the book: This is life, my beloved; this is beauty, this is the Supreme Good, this is God.
I would have liked to concentrate on the words being spoken in his melodious voice, but I was being stared at by Giovanni, who had thrown himself into a chair and had one leg dangling over its arm. I believe he was pitting himself against Hermes Trismegistus to see who would get my attention. When I glanced at him and his boyish face, so sweet and disingenuous, I felt badly about having such a thought, but as I turned back to the book, he interrupted.
‘Is it true about Poliziano?’
‘What?’
‘That he’s buggering his nephews.’
‘Of course not!’
Lorenzino looked pained. ‘Giovanino, this is my study – a holy place.’
‘Sorry. I was just curious. But you live with him and his sister,’ he persisted. ‘What’s the arrangement in the house? Sorry, sorry! Just curious. I’ll go.’
Bringing his legs back together again, he sprang out of the chair and went whistling away into the adjoining chamber. Watching him go, I noticed another Botticelli painting, this one showing Pallas Athene with a centaur, hanging above the door to the antechamber. Lorenzino was a man who knew how to spend his wealth.