by Linda Proud
Before dawn the footmen set off on the road south. We followed a few hours later, leaving Arezzo at a nonchalant walking pace, telling everyone we were making for Cortona and thence to Rome. It was a fine day and we looked like a travelling party without any cares, talking amongst ourselves as our horses ambled towards the great gates. Beyond the gates, the open road. Beyond the gates, a small church from which the lady Margarita emerged as we passed. In one swift movement, Pico lifted her up and put her behind the saddle of his secretary. For that short while of leaving the city, he had carried us all in his belief that he was beloved of the gods, above the law, that he could take what he wanted from creation. But as soon as he had picked up Margarita, and was seen doing so, reality returned, along with the operation of that divine law that we should covet no man’s property. At once the city bell was ringing in alarm and the militia of Arezzo was pouring out of the gates to chase our party down the Chiana valley.
Pico shouted to Cristoforo to abandon the woman. ‘Run, men!’ he cried. We galloped down the valley and crossed the river at the bridge leading to Monte San Savino. There we caught up with our footmen, whom Pico commanded to scatter, telling them that each man should make his own way to Siena and meet us there.
When the Aretines came to the bridge half of them went off in pursuit of the hapless footmen, the rest came after us. Pico raced on. The scholar who had been raised as a knight in the court of Mirandola could ride at an incredible speed. Cristoforo kept up with him but I began to fall behind. I willed Pico to turn and meet his pursuers in battle, as a true knight of old, but he opted to escape. The last I saw of him as crossbow bolts began to whistle past my ears was a cloud of dust making for the village of Marciano. When a man riding near me reared screaming in his saddle with a bolt piercing his body, I reigned in at once and slid from my horse to give myself up, terrified of losing my life in such a stupid escapade as this, for what fate then would befall my soul? Better to spend my days in an Arezzo gaol and die reconciled to my God. But the pursuers were not interested in any prisoners except one, Pico himself, and they were slaying our men whether they surrendered or not. The last I knew was a broad sword coming down on me, and me raising my arm against it.
They left me for dead, not caring one way or another.
When the pursuit was over, Pico and Cristoforo captured at Marciano, the local people came out to see what was to be done. They made a pile of the dead and set light to it. The injured they helped as best they could. I was taken to a local apothecary who stanched the flow of blood while I thrashed in pain. ‘I can’t move my fingers,’ I cried.
‘Only time will heal that, my friend, time and prayer.’ The apothecary put a sponge to my nose and, inhaling an infusion of poppy, mandrake and hemlock, I passed from pain and fright into sleep. When I awoke it was in bed in an inn. Gingerly I tried flexing my fingers again but none would respond. I stared at my hand, its brown skin, its fingers blackened by a lifetime’s companionship with ink, its nails well-shaped but grimy, its lines and contours. My hand – the hand that had been kissed by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco – such a devoted yet neglected servant. If it were a horse, it would have had to be put down, for it no longer worked and had outlived its usefulness.
I saw books in my imagination, the most beautiful books with exquisite illumination, borders of ivy, irises and putti, great capital letters and a script that in its harmony and clarity served the sacred word; books that I had copied, books that I intended to copy. My left hand, like a second son, youthful, indolent and suddenly promoted through the death of the firstborn, was completely inadequate to the skills required, the skills of the right. They say you can train your left hand but it is like training a mule to run the palio. It cannot compete. As the effects of the soporific sponge wore off, so did the indifference, the curiosity, and any vestige of hope. My life as a scribe, a true scribe, an initiate into the laws of beauty, was finished.
21
HOW TO FORGIVE
1486
MYSTERIOUS ARE THE WAYS OF THE MEDICI. BY THE TIME I arrived home, Lorenzo, far from expressing outrage at what had happened to his relation’s wife, had negotiated Pico’s freedom. The scholars of Florence considered the affair a huge joke – the young upstart had tripped on a woman! – although Poliziano treated the wound to my arm seriously enough. It was now festering and when he tried to remove the bandage I turned into a wild and cornered animal. In the end he and a servant held me down while Maria, with appalling indifference to my cries, tried to free the stuck bandage so that she could peer into the wound.
‘Nasty…’ she muttered. ‘It stinks.’
‘Maria…’ I pleaded, but as her eyes met mine, even as she smiled at me, she yanked the bandage off with one deft movement.
When I came round, brother and sister were heads down in conference over my arm. The treatment they decided upon was three parts Galen to two parts the herbal lore of witches, or so I thought until Angelo told me it was all from the materia medica of Dioscorides.
‘Maria has a way with herbs, that is all, and somehow gets the measure right when the book is silent.’
‘I am an experiment?’ I struggled to sit up.
‘You are a beneficiary of the restored knowledge of the ancients,’ Angelo replied, pinning me down harder.
And so I was treated with many things, including drops of the juice of comfrey and an infusion of lavender in a hot poultice. The wound was clean and healing after three days and the fingers of my right hand began to move again but were given to sudden bouts of numbness. Any attempt to hold a quill ended with it falling to the floor. I began to practise writing with my left hand.
‘Pico is in Perugia,’ Angelo told me, having received a letter. ‘He enquires after you and your health. He thanks God for his own survival and that of his secretary, but is stricken with guilt and remorse at the loss of his men. He says Mithridates is translating Hebrew works into Latin at a rate of a thousand pages a month.’
I did a quick mental calculation on the average amount of words to a line and lines to a page and discovered that this was equal to three times the length of Virgil’s Aeneid – each month!
‘I do not trust Mithridates,’ Angelo said. ‘He says he reads Arabic, but how do we know it is true? He could be writing down all manner of nonsense and none of us would be any the wiser. He says he has the Chaldean Oracles in the original Chaldean. How do we know that for sure? How much is Pico paying him for these books pouring in from the East?’ He busied himself at his desk, muttering about forgeries and impostors. ‘I presume you have realised,’ he said, raising his head again momentarily, ‘that Mithridates is in love with Pico and rejected? Are rejected lovers to be trusted?’
I agreed that they are not.
Pico’s initiation had taken place at the hour originally planned, but in Umbria rather than in Rome. He stayed in Umbria for five months, and it was in that time that Mithridates performed his astonishing feat of translating six thousand pages of Hebrew, and esoteric Hebrew at that, into Latin. Rumour had it that the Count of Concordia had exhausted his fortune on Cabalistic books and that he was now paying Mithridates by supplying him with boys.
‘God save me from magic,’ Angelo complained. ‘There is knowledge enough in history, and even more in literature, without having to burrow in dung heaps for it. I wish Pico would come home.’
Whenever Pico was discussed, Maria became silent and sullen. She alone had found nothing amusing in the abduction of Margarita. The man she loved, the man who claimed to be on the return path, abjuring sensual love for the divine, had run off with a woman in a frenzy of lust. Her Apollo had revealed himself as Bacchus.
‘Pico’s scholarly reputation is in shreds,’ I said to Angelo. ‘He is now considered an impetuous adulterer. I feel as rancorous as Maria does, and yet you seem completely unmoved.’
Angelo looked at me, his brown eyes merry. ‘I cannot tell you how delighted
I am to have discovered human weakness in our friend. It makes me feel so much better!’
‘Well, I am glad of that,’ I replied petulantly. ‘What am I supposed to do now?’
‘You can still write, albeit with the grace of a drunken monkey. I have more than enough work for you to do.’
I should have felt grateful; indeed, I did feel grateful, at least towards Poliziano, but for Pico and for Providence I felt only gall. All those years of training and practice, killed stone dead in a moment’s recklessness – and that the recklessness of another. Naturally, indulging myself in this bitterness, I avoided Ficino, who would surely remind me I had only myself to blame; that, given a choice, I had chosen unwisely. It was a matter of pride that I blame Pico.
Angelo looked at me sternly from under his thick eyebrows. ‘Pico has asked that you forgive him, and you have not done so.’
‘What is the nature of forgiveness? How is it made?’
‘You of all people ask me that? You, who forgave Lorenzo his crimes against your native city? You tell me how it is made.’
‘Through love,’ I said grudgingly.
‘Then turn your mind to that, and no more bitterness from you.’
Bitterness on bitterness. Whom did I blame in the end but Almighty God, who had taken away my wife and now the one thing I had left – my art. I felt like a man being dismembered before a crowd curious to see how much he may suffer before he yields up his spirit. But did I hate Pico? Not really. As more and more tales of heroic scholarship came out of Umbria, my admiration of him began to revive. And when I received a letter myself, eloquent in its expression of guilt and remorse and begging me to rejoin him, I decided to accept, though I did not give him the pleasure of knowing my decision for at least two weeks. When Ficino called for me to visit him, I did not go.
22
POETIC THEOLOGY
1486
AFTER YEARS OF DISCUSSION WITH LORENZO, POLIZIANO was now setting down the line of poets beginning with Apollo, son of Zeus. Just as the philosophers have a line of teachers to revere, and the priests a line of learned doctors and Church Fathers, so the poets are the inheritors of inspiration, one from another, over a tremendous span of time. ‘Lorenzo,’ he told me, ‘has been inspired throughout his life by Dante. He talks to Dante – did you know that? Each time he sits down to write poetry, he lights a candle in the memory of Dante. Dante himself had the same relationship with Virgil, Virgil with Homer, and so it goes on back and back.’
The line to the source – whether Apollo or Zeus – passes through names both familiar and obscure, some mythic, some biblical, through prophets and muses, sirens and oracles, touching Orpheus and David on the way to Bacchus, Pan, Prometheus and Apollo. As Angelo, with head tilted back and his eyes closed, recited his litany of names, I heard a sound behind the words, informing the words, a wild and ancient lament, the sound of the poetic soul cast out of Eden.
He was writing a poem he called Nutricia. ‘Nutricia’, a Latin term denoting a fee paid to a wet-nurse. The poem was Poliziano’s fee to that which had nursed his education, his culture, his erudition: poetry. In about eight hundred lines he mentioned everyone on his tree of poetic inspiration, and it was to serve as a reading programme for his students in the next academic year: Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Cavalcanti, Propertius, Ovid, Horace, Virgil, Claudian, Homer, Hesiod, Orphic hymns, Psalms of David, the books of Moses.
‘And you,’ I said. ‘Who inspires you?’
If the answer surprised me so much, it was because I had always assumed it was Homer, the loftiest of lofty ancients.
‘Boccaccio,’ he said, and left me stunned.
But now that he had mentioned the name, it was as if a stopper had come out of him and there was a flood of enthusiasm for his master who, above all men, truly understood poetic theology.
‘When I was a boy and living in poverty with my uncle, I needed books. I had been brought up on books and now I was starved. Food I could do without, but books? – I was craving. I used to go to church at Santo Spirito and one day I had a conversation with one of the monks and learnt that the church was the repository of the library of Giovanni Boccaccio. It was kept in a beautiful cabinet and, as soon as they learnt to trust me, they let me have the key so that I could help myself. I read it all. It was sparse, but it did have some of the ancient poets. It also had some autograph manuscripts of Boccaccio’s. And so I read his works in his own hand, and his spirit came, embraced mine and led me to the next step – the translation of Homer.’
He gazed at me, assessed my credulity, decided to continue. ‘There is in poetry – perhaps in all arts – a sense of immortality. Once you get to the heart, there is no time, no sense of transience. You walk in a living stream. You become part of it. While I was studying late one evening in Santo Spirito, I fell asleep over my book and I dreamed I was rowing a boat on a river in Greece. It was dark; it was night time. There was war in the land and the banks of the river were high – I had to keep rowing. But then I saw a break in the defences and had a view over a vast plain. Two figures were walking towards me. One was Homer, the other was his wife. Madonna Homer! For that element I have no explanation. But they came to welcome me to their province. And as I climbed out of the boat and up the bank to enter their land, I woke up, knowing that I was accepted. I was accepted by the realm of poets. It was then that I began the translation of Homer, with more confidence than a boy of my age could rightfully expect to have.’
Having satisfied himself that his most private, secret story was not making me laugh, but that I believed him, he continued and spoke of Boccaccio’s work and aims. I listened in wonder, as if on a hillside listening to the pipes of Pan. ‘Theology’, literally, the Word of God, has come to mean rational analysis of scripture and doctrine. Here in Arcadia it had cloven feet, shaggy legs and horns. This was the Ancient of Days, the oldest god, prelapsarian and free. Something in me began to quiver; I was a lion drawn by the lyre of Orpheus; I was a stone rolled by the music of Amphion. This was the Word of God spoken direct into the ear. Theologians as we understand them study the Word as revealed to someone else, a saint or an apostle. Poetic theologians hear it for themselves. The difference is that they do not always understand what it is that they have heard.
We were out in the garden, sitting in the area that had a view through the trees of Florence below in the valley. The late summer sun was dappling the orchard and a bird was bathing itself in Maria’s bird bath, its fluttering wings sending up sprays of droplets. Maria herself had joined us, sitting on the grass and leaning against my knees. While we listened to Angelo, I idly let down her hair and began to plait a strand of it. She took no notice, captivated as she was by her brother’s discourse.
‘Will you give us the poem, Angelo?’ she asked.
And thus, in the groves of Fiesole, looking down on our city, we heard Nutricia for the first time. This was the fourth of four poems he called Sylvae, each one written to outline a term’s work, each one composed in one of Lorenzo’s villas – except this one, which was composed in his own. I continued plaiting Maria’s hair while we listened to the Latin hexameters dancing in the air.
The poem began with the story of Prometheus and his discovery of poetry, by which the mind of man may come to understand the thoughts of the gods.
Just placed on earth in the freshness of the world, through God’s care, was this new kind of animal which would raise its eyes to the heavens, and with its sharp mind would survey all Nature’s handiwork, and would tease out the hidden causes of things, and would grasp the existence of the artificer of eternity…
The afternoon had become evening, with the moon in the sky before the sun had set, when Angelo came to the end. Maria was looking like Medusa with a hundred plaits snaking from her head. The poem had introduced me to all the poets and dramatists of antiquity, along with a survey of history and the tutelary divinities of poetry. Truly I had spen
t the afternoon in that Arcadia which exists forever in the mind of poets. The poem ended with a description of the works of the last in the line: our own Lorenzo.
– If praise of mine can charm thy cultur’d ear;
For once, the lonely woods and vales among,
A mountain-goddess caught thy soothing song,
As swelled the notes, she pierc’d the winding dell,
And sat beside thee in thy secret cell;
I saw her hands the laurel chaplet twine,
Whilst with attentive ear she drank the sounds divine.
Whether thy nymph to Dian’s train allied,
But sure no quiver rattled at her side;
Or from th’ Aonian mount, a stranger guest,
She chose awhile in these green woods to rest –
Thro’ all thy frame while softer passions breathe,
Around thy brows she bound the laureate wreathe;
– And still – as other themes engaged thy song,
She with unrivall’d sweetness touch’d thy tongue…
Angelo had been trance-like in recitation: now he woke up with a start to see his Gorgon sister staring at him.
‘Are you going to recite that at the university?’ I asked.
‘What, and find myself being tried as a pagan heretic? No, it is for private ears only.’
I went to the inaugural lecture of the new term, filing into the university hall with a stream of men, some of them young students as you would expect, many of them much older. There were men of the guilds, priests, bishops and bankers, the most notable scholars of the day and, of course, the poets.
The Pierfrancesco brothers were there, both in discussion with Amerigo Vespucci and his uncle Giorgio Antonio. There was no more pretence of familial relations between the two branches of the Medici since the Pierfranceschi had resorted to law to get il Magnifico to pay his debt. The case was continuing, with Lorenzo claiming he could not pay, and Bartolommeo Scala running between both parties trying to find an agreement. On this day in the hall, they stood well apart and men were having to choose which group to stand with. The Pierfranceschi had the Vespucci with them, the Greek scholars and Ficino. With Lorenzo il Magnifico were the poets, Naldo Naldi and Cristoforo Landino, Girolamo and Antonio Benivieni, and the young Lorenzo Tornabuoni. I hesitated, aware that Lorenzino was watching me. Then I made my decision and joined neither party but stood alone. Lorenzo’s son, Piero, fifteen years old and an able student himself in the faculty of poetry, now stood with his father as the undisputed heir. His rotund brother, Abbot Giovanni, gazed about the company to satisfy himself that there was no one else present who was only ten.