by Linda Proud
‘I apologise for my brother,’ he said. ‘He’s very young. Sit, talk to me awhile. I, too, am curious, though not about rumours. You are a Volterrano, correct? And yet you are very close to my cousin, even saved his life when he was attacked. How is that? Have you no feeling for your patria?’
Lorenzino was easy to talk to. I told him how much I had hated Lorenzo after he had brought about my city’s downfall – Lorenzino nodding all the while, understanding and sympathetic – and how I could not learn to love Lorenzo even when I eventually came to live in his household. ‘It was during the attack by the Pazzi. When I turned to see my brother’s dagger raised to stab Lorenzo, I acted without thinking. Hatred, Ficino once told me, is merely a corruption of love. You cannot hate without having first loved. With that involuntary action of mine, the hatred dissolved. Lorenzo has been very good to me ever since.’
‘In what way?’
I listed all the things Lorenzo had done for me.
‘Forgive me, but do you not see he is buying you? Through you he is absolving his sins, in the eyes of himself if not of heaven. Be wary of my cousin, Tommaso. Once he feels sufficiently absolved, he will forget you.’
I shifted uncomfortably, remembering the interview with Lorenzo when I had asked for a commission and been refused. Was il Magnifico as poor as he claimed, or merely tiring of me?
Lorenzino’s gaze had turned to his desk. Suddenly he rose from his chair decisively. The meeting was over. ‘Thank you for coming,’ he said, grasping both my hands. ‘I have enjoyed our conversation. My bursar will give you something on the way out, for I think your fee for this work was too low. If ever I can help you in any way, Tommaso, you will come to me, won’t you? Promise?’
I promised.
The bursar, waiting for me in the sala with a purse of five gold florins, was Amerigo Vespucci, yes, that same Amerigo Vespucci whose recent exploration of the lands discovered by Columbus have convinced him that they are not Asia but a new continent: the man who has changed the map.
On the way out through the serene Casa Vecchia, down the Via Larga, all the way to the Cathedral, I floated on a sense of well-being. Then I saw Lorenzo il Magnifico riding by with his entourage, and he called out in greeting to me, ‘Salve, Tommaso!’ Suddenly I knew, deep in the soul, that in the Casa Vecchia I had been deliberately seeded with suspicion. Here was the man I could trust without doubt.
‘Salve, Lorenzo!’ I called back, as if to a fellow student or close friend.
16
AT THE HEARTH
1485
LORENZO HAD DIVIDED THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORENCE into two parts. The older, nobler parts of the curriculum – theology and law – he transferred to Pisa. Ostensibly he had given the university to the port town in our dominions, but in reserving for Florence the faculty of poetry, Lorenzo had elevated that subject by isolating it. No longer were the professors of poetry overshadowed by lofty theologians sweeping through halls and cloisters. Now they had the place to themselves. The head of the faculty, Cristoforo Landino, was the author of the tremendous commentary on Dante, and the lecturers and professors included the best poets of our time and place. This was the heart of Lorenzo’s work, to educate Florentines in ancient literature and to raise the vulgar tongue, to make Tuscan as good as the ancient languages in the expression of truth and beauty. For Lorenzo saw Italian literature as an education in virtù and a powerful force for the advancement of mankind.
These were inspiring ideals, but the daily reality was of facing dull students having trouble with their Latin and Greek. They filled Angelo’s town house, either visiting for tutorials or staying in the house, as was the custom. Instead of writing poetry or reading the ancients, the poet was compelled to read a growing stack of mediocre essays.
To quell gossip, whenever we were resident at the house on the Via de’ Fossi, Angelo’s sister-in-law and nephews lived in the villa. But in December of 1485, the wind suddenly turned hot. Animals came out of hibernation and we walked abroad without our coats on. Indeed, it was so hot that the walls of the house began to sweat. Angelo told the servants to pack. ‘If it is going to be this hot,’ he said, ‘we may as well return to the villa.’ Florence had become for him a torment of distractions. He could not walk down the street without being stopped by men wanting his opinion on their poetry, or wanting him to compose love letters or mottoes for them. If fame is honey then people are bears. ‘I am tired of the city,’ Angelo said. ‘We shall winter in the country.’ We would spend Advent on Fiesole, just the three of us, while Cammilla and the boys returned to Florence.
As soon as we were back at the villa, my dear friend stopped sighing and found peace. His Muse had begun to speak again, and though the hot wind was soon displaced by an icy one, which whistled along the valley and rattled our doors, we had found such bliss in our rustic life that we decided to continue with it.
Maria spent her time searching Roman and Greek authors for mention of household gods – lares and penates – and became increasingly convinced that our villa was populated by benign, domestic spirits. She wanted to know the correct procedure for libation and sacrifice to such gods. Angelo said they were too lowly and needed no sacrifice or libation: one simply has to acknowledge their presence and live with them. Maria was not satisfied.
One evening as she and her brother fed and stoked the fire, each of us lost to private reflections, and Maria’s lips working on a silent hymn, she suddenly picked up Angelo’s glass and flung its contents on the fire. ‘To Hestia!’ she said, and the flames roared up, sizzling, to grasp the sacrifice.
Angelo was outraged. It was his best wine. He was so angry he chastised Maria, telling her that what she had done was wrong. It was impulsive. It was womanly and wasteful. Sacrifices require planning and careful ritual. They should be taken seriously.
‘Oh, you are just upset about the loss of your wine,’ she said cheerfully. She turned to me. ‘He always justifies his personal will with grand principles of universal law.’
This set off a storm of ill temper in Angelo which even Maria could not ride. She struggled, listing badly, to the safe harbour of her own room.
I have nothing of Maria’s poetry but only this, on a piece of yellowing parchment, cracked where it has been folded and tucked into my journal.
How to kindle a fire
by Maria Poliziana
Find dry twigs that snap easily. Break them in quick short snaps to attract the fiery demons. Place them in the hearth end up so that they form a kind of pyre.
Take a poem, your favourite, the one you have just completed, crumple it and place it in the middle of the structure. The fragrance of this sacrifice will attract the gods.
Strike a spark from the tinder box to catch the kindling. Once alight, add more twigs and small logs.
To please the gods, once the fire is ablaze throw in pine cones and resinous branches of pine or yew, apple or olive.
When all is as you would wish it, take your brother’s glass of wine and throw its contents on the fire as an oblation to Hestia, the goddess of the hearth.
More poems may be added, but take care they are not your brother’s, for his mood will already be grim at the loss of his wine.
Left alone by the fire, and the storm now passed, Angelo confessed to me that he had received a proposal of marriage for his sister from the Bardi family.
‘The Bardi?’ I gasped, suddenly choking on an olive. ‘A good family!’
‘But a poor branch of it. I sent the fellow away.’
The olive came free in my throat.
‘Was it remiss of me to make my own mind up without consulting her? Perhaps I was just being selfish. Do you think she may want to marry, no matter how much she protests to the contrary?’
‘I think she does not. She is happy here.’
‘Tommaso, do you think she is in love with Giovanni Pico?’
; ‘Who is not? More to the point, is he in love with her?’
‘He has a fine taste in women,’ Angelo said, ‘and finds them a pleasant distraction. But Maria, I believe, he looks upon as his own sister. As for marriage, he has no intention of it. To lead the kind of life he wants to live, he needs to be free. Free to wander…’ Angelo sighed and poked at the fire.
‘I want to apologise about the wine,’ Maria said softly behind us.
Angelo swung round. ‘How long have you been standing there?’
‘You need not be concerned: I would have refused marriage to a Bardi, whatever his fortune.’ She gave Angelo the list of instructions she had just written on how to kindle a fire. He read it, groaned with remorse and handed it to me.
‘Maria, I do everything out of love for you. Am I growing selfish? You have a right to your own happiness.’
Maria declared that she enjoyed more happiness than anyone had a right to, and that she did not wish to try for that which fate had put beyond her reach. She settled herself by the fire again, and we stayed up long into the night, telling stories. While Maria enjoyed the myths her brother recounted, what she loved were stories about women, women of strength which our times were beginning to throw up in profusion. There was Anne of Brittany who, since the accession of her little brother, Charles, to the throne, had become regent of France. There was Isabella d’Este, who often seemed more the Marquis of Mantua than her husband; and her sister, Beatrice, powerful wife of Ludovico Sforza of Milan. And then there was Sforza’s niece, Caterina, a young woman of Maria’s own age. Caterina combined everything that Maria declared to be ‘the ideal woman’ – she was beautiful, slender, well-spoken, and extremely well-educated. Since her marriage to Girolamo Riario, she had borne him a child each year.
Angelo did not want to discuss anything related to Riario, the nephew of Pope Sixtus and prime instigator in the plot to murder the Medici in 1478.
‘The man is a monster,’ Maria agreed. ‘But that is what is special about Caterina. She is so loyal to him. The people of Imola love her absolutely. She is their queen.’
‘I met her once,’ I said.
Maria yelped. I might have said I had met the Queen of Sheba.
I regretted saying it, for I did not want to talk about that time when I was called to present myself to Girolamo Riario, and his haughty young wife sitting there beside him, the time when I was examined to see if I were fit to join the conspiracy that was to lead to the death of Giuliano. By the grace of God I had failed the test; nonetheless I still felt tainted by my closeness to the conspiracy.
‘So what is she like in the flesh?’ Maria asked.
‘I saw her at a distance and did not speak to her. But, yes, she is beautiful.’
Just the name ‘Imola’ and ‘Riario’ brought both Angelo and me out in a sweat, for the whole conspiracy had blown up from the desire of Pope Sixtus to buy that fortress town for his nephew, but Maria continued to chirrup about this object of her fascination, Riario’s wife. While we were still celebrating the death of Sixtus in the previous year, here was Maria feeling sorry for Caterina Sforza who, no longer the recipient of papal monies, was now dependent on her own resourcefulness.
‘Her own. That stupid husband of hers is incapable of anything but losing money in the gaming house.’
‘That and a little bit of killing,’ said Angelo sourly.
Such was Caterina’s resourcefulness that she had inspired the Riario family to take up arms in the fight to get their candidate elected as the next pope.
‘All the Riario menfolk are inept,’ said Maria. ‘It was Caterina who belted on a curved sword and rode to take over the Castel Sant’ Angelo.’
‘She is quite inept herself. The coup failed.’
Indeed it had, and the new pope, Innocent VIII, was a friend of the Medici and not of the Riario. Girolamo and his wife had retreated to their castles in the Romagna, sometimes at Imola, sometimes at Forlì, and were living on the only resources available to despots: taxation raised on the people of those unfortunate towns.
‘She is no Saint Joan, I grant you,’ said Maria. ‘But her strength of character is impressive, you must agree.’
Angelo said that powerful women are aberrations of nature and that the image of a woman brandishing a sword was going to give him nightmares. For that reason he made us stay up late and by midnight we had fallen to confessing to what we loved and wanted for ourselves. For Angelo it was a woman of his own imagination, a Venus who threw all mortal women into the shade, but a Minerva also, for his ideal woman had to have a knowledge of Latin and Greek as sweet as the curve of her breasts. For me it was Elena, my Eurydice. ‘I wish the impossible, long for it with a longing that hurts, strain for it, challenge God for it, shouting at him: Give her back to me! I cannot understand why God gives only to take away again. What I want is Elena, more than my life’s breath.’
‘She is closer than you think, Tommaso,’ said Maria. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Everything we seek is closer than we think. There is no time and space in love.’
‘And you,’ Angelo asked her gently. ‘Tell us, do you long for Giovanni Pico?’
‘Of course, but not, as you think, to become my husband.’
‘Lover, then?’
‘Of a kind.’
‘What kind is that?’
‘The noblest,’ she said simply. ‘Platonic lover.’ Her words made us both abashed, but she had more to teach us, this young woman. ‘What we have spoken of,’ she said, ‘is desire for the impossible: neither your Venus-Minerva nor your Elena are attainable.’ She turned her gaze on me, a lingering, mellow-eyed look that was both love and compassion, and something else. ‘What unites all three of us is this frustration of our desires. That is the fire in which we burn, and it will turn us into gold.’
London, January 4th, 1506
Erasmus is ecstatic, having received a papal dispensation which more or less declares him legitimate. We did not know he was illegitimate, born of parents who loved each other but were not married. He has lived well enough with his illegitimacy, as have I, but he needs ecclesiastical benefices. Now with this dispensation he may gain them and make his life as a scholar secure.
‘Was it that easy?’ I asked. ‘You wrote to the pope and he granted your request?’
‘I had many influential men write on my behalf but, yes, it was easier than I supposed, but then Julius the Second is a good pope.’
Now there’s an oxymoron: a good pope.
Pope Julius is a della Rovere, another nephew of Sixtus IV. Inspired by his kinswoman, Caterina Sforza, he tried to oust the previous pope by the sword but failed and had to wait for him to die in God’s good time. A man of more than sixty, Julius is trying to free my homeland from the monster that is Cesare Borgia. That is a good thing. It is also good that he plans to rebuild St Peter’s basilica. But the news that reaches us, of Julius outlawing the practices of simony and nepotism, well, that is the usual hypocrisy. He is just a man who, having reached the roof, draws up the ladder so that none may follow.
Erasmus is lodging at More’s house and they spend their evenings reading Lucian in the Greek. When I took the book to Erasmus and More, it was to show them the beauty of printed Greek as done by Aldus Manutius of Venice, but they were too struck by the text itself to notice the beauty of its letters. Captivated by the mordant wit of Lucian, they took it from me and began at once to translate it into Latin. The winter is now being warmed and spiced with
Lucianic jokes, and often one walks down Bucklersbury to hear the laughter of the two friends ringing from an upper window in the Old Barge.
Colet objects. He tells them that they should be spending their time on Holy Scripture, or translating the works of the Fathers, but Erasmus argues that, to do so, he must perfect his Greek, and how better than by keeping company with one of its most eloquent writers?
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It is increasingly difficult to remember that Erasmus is a monk raised by the Brethren of the Common Life. He often stays at Greenwich with Lord Mountjoy and is learning to ride and hunt.
‘Practising for my journey!’ he declares. ‘Our journey,’ he corrects himself and throws his arms about me and kisses me on both cheeks in the fashion of the English, something we Dutch and Italians find akin to being tickled.
I resist his assumption that I am going with him as I resist Colet’s command. It is not possible for me to return home. Ficino set me a task here which I have yet to fulfil. Besides which, to go home would be folly. What no one understands here, since I have not told them, is that I am on the run, an outlaw. I saw that friar again, yesterday… Perhaps I should move on. Perhaps it is time for me to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but to do that I would have to go through Italy… I am too ill for all this. I have hardly slept since John gave me that command. Just as sleep comes, my breathing seems to stop and I wake up in panic. And the chilblains are making furnaces of my toes. I must go and see Linacre.
17
INVOKING ANGELS
1486
WHEN PICO RETURNED FROM PARIS, THERE WAS AN EXOTIC crowd of scholars riding in his train: bearded Byzantines, handsome Arabs and some heavy-eyed Spanish Jews. One Italian wearing a bizarre costume emblazoned with the Greek letter, Tau, had a face looking as if it had been clawed by the devil. Behind this procession followed a mule train laden with book chests. Pico’s hair, crimped in the latest French style, hung in tight ringlets down to the middle of his back and he wore an apple green hat with a long and severe point. Arriving at the Palazzo de’ Medici, he called Lorenzo out of a meeting and had him send for Ficino and Poliziano at once.
Angelo, about to deliver a lecture, was torn. He affected anger. ‘For the Count of Concordia, things are either urgent or of no interest. There’s nothing in between. Tell him,’ he said, prodding the Medici servant, ‘that I am unable to attend him.’ The servant nodded and was about to depart when Angelo stopped him. ‘Tell him instead to attend me, at my villa this evening. There…’ he brushed his hands of the matter. ‘Counts! Nobles! They come, they go, they give orders.’ He went to the window and looked out. ‘I wonder what’s so urgent?’