The Rebirth of Venus

by Linda Proud

‘Heaven is beyond time and space – there is no vanishing point there. You may as well treat a panel as it is – two dimensional – than try and fool people with a third dimension. Pictures are to remind us about God, not to make us breathless at the achievements of men. The Byzantines knew all about it.’

  ‘You are not proposing we ignore everything we have learned and retreat to the past?’

  He shrugged. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Another one of your jokes.’

  ‘To serve God you have to work from the heart,’ he said, striking himself forcefully on the chest. ‘Everything else is vanity.’

  His turn of mind, his frequent mentions of God, I put down to the influence of Savonarola and his friars. When I said as much, Sandro laughed scornfully. ‘I have my own prophet, thank you. He is called Dante Alighieri.’ He took me across to a portfolio that contained hundreds of drawings in various stages of completion. He had spent ten years or more illustrating The Divine Comedy in his spare time. It had been inspired by a commission to illustrate Cristoforo Landino’s masterly commentary on Dante’s great work, but when it was done he had continued the project for himself, intending to illustrate every episode in the Commedia. Each sheet was of uniform size and was fine quality parchment made from sheepskin. He took out the first, a scene from L’Inferno, for me to look at.

  People say of Botticelli that he was a dreamer who painted dreams, that his figures and landscapes had little to do with the world as we see it. They should look into those drawings with a polished lens. Sandro gave me such a lens so that I could magnify the figures that he himself drew with the naked eye. The sheets were large but the figures were tiny, drafted with a stylus and later drawn carefully with a pen. The pages boiled with figures, most of them nudes, and with a fine nib and brown ink, working entirely in outline and in miniature, Sandro Botticelli showed that he knew as much about human anatomy as Michelangelo, and considerably more than Domenico Ghirlandaio. I stared through the lens at these tiny naked figures, at the linear details so extraordinary that they made me dizzy with admiration. Devils and demons – most of them smiling – scampered about like satyrs, waving torches and jumping out of the towers that punctuated our own city walls. The Styx, across which Virgil and the terrified Dante were being rowed by a bat-winged ferryman, was clearly the Arno. Every single detail was its own perfection. This was Dante in pictures, with several episodes in one composition, so that in the one I was studying there were two figures of Virgil in the boat, one fending off Filippo Argenti who, rising from the mire, was trying to board, the other comforting Dante. The devils were familiar: ancient dramatic masks were their model. Sandro, like Filippino, must have made studies in the Golden House of Nero while he was in Rome working on the Vatican walls. But his anatomies – where had he got those? Looking through the lens so intently that it steamed up, I knew for the first time what old women look like without their clothes on. But how did Sandro know? What labour of study had gone into such miniature detail?

  I turned through the collection, page by page. Pick any portion and you would find exactitude – the way a cart was harnessed to a griffin, the fruit in an upside-down tree, a soldier’s pike, chains. This man Sandro never went out but that he had his eyes open. And as for the figures – hundreds, nay, thousands writhed on these pages, and I never saw one posture repeated. Some sheets were coloured, and with colour came a sense of depth in the pictures, but the exquisite detail of the pen-work was lost; preferring the pen drawings, I looked on the calligraphy of images with a scribe’s eye and, as I say, felt faint with admiration.

  Sandro turned the leaves, advancing us rapidly through the punishment of sodomites, panderers, seducers, flatterers and hypocrites. ‘Everyone,’ he says, ‘finds himself somewhere in these pages. Where are you?’

  I simultaneously blanched and grew hot, told him I would have to think about it.

  ‘It should be clear enough. Here, this is where I am…’ He pulled out a drawing of Canto XI in Purgatorio showing three figures bent under huge boulders. In one part Virgil and Dante were in discussion of these figures, in another Dante was stooping to look under the boulder at the penitent illuminator, Oderisi, crouched under his terrible burden. ‘My heart was set on the desire to excel,’ Sandro muttered. ‘For such pride we must pay the fee. Here we are, you and I, amongst the proud.’

  ‘Proud? You? I can believe it in myself, but not you. It is not a proud man who would work on something so small, so fine, so private.’

  ‘This work is the expiation of my sin, my burden. Each morning I awake with a pain gnawing at me, that I am not decorating some great chapel, with apprentices running up and down scaffolding to my direction. When I was in Rome, I worked side-by-side with Domenico Ghirlandaio. After that, I could no longer deceive myself. The man is a genius. It gnaws me, as the eagle pecks all day at the liver of Prometheus. The liver grows back overnight, to be pecked at anew the next day. I am in a very fever of rage and envy.’ He said this placidly, almost off-hand.

  ‘But envy is not pride.’

  ‘No, it is not. The thing is, I believe myself to be great, and it surprises me that no one else thinks so, too. The crowds pay court to Ghirlandaio. Me they ignore and I have to scrape for a living. Now is not the desire for recognition, for hosannahs, is that not pride? For behind it is the belief, nay, the conviction, that I am a great artificer. And what do these hosannahs of the mob amount to? Nothing. Non è il mondan rumore altro ch’ un fiato di vento, ch’or vien quinci e or vien quindi, e muta nome perchè muta lato. “The world’s noise is but a breath of wind which comes now this way and now that, changing its name as it changes its quarter.” Dante himself is intimately involved in this canto – this is where he sees himself. We have three figures: the man proud of his birth, the man proud of his power and the man proud of his art. Here, with the third figure, Dante stoops…’

  Sandro had depicted Dante’s words precisely: Dante stooped. But he had illuminated its meaning.

  ‘Oh, I see! Dante stoops – as if he were carrying a boulder.’

  ‘The stoop of a man who will have a rock on his own back for eternity if he is not careful. And who is he talking to? Oderisi of Gubbio, the scribe and illuminator.’ Botticelli peered at me to make sure I was getting the point.

  ‘The scribe and illuminator…’ I repeated.

  ‘Who has been eclipsed by Franco of Bologna.’

  ‘Eclipsed…’ I thought miserably of Bartolommeo Sanvito and the perfection of his hand.

  ‘The scribe tells Dante how the painter Giotto is dimming the reputation of Cimabue.’

  ‘Dimming…’

  ‘That’s right. And then he mentions the poets who are about to be superseded by “another” – Dante himself. It’s all about professional jealousy. Was Dante being vain? No. See – he stoops. Dante knew his own greatness, but he also knew his own pride, and in this scene he depicted himself, as he would be if he did not take great care. We are all three here in this little section, Maso: you the scribe, me the painter, and Dante the poet. Marvellous…’

  I was not so sure. ‘It may have been true a few years back, but now… What do I have to be proud of?’

  ‘Ho! You blame your wound for your eclipse, and keep your vanity intact!’

  I shrank wincing in the sudden glare of self-illumination.

  ‘That’s my Dante! If he can make you feel that uncomfortable, he has done his work.’ He took hold of my right hand. ‘Why do these fingers go numb? Is it really the result of a physical wound?’

  ‘Of course – what else?’

  He looked into my hand like a fortune teller. ‘Whose work is it that makes your fingers go dead?’

  Bartolommeo Sanvito, I thought, but refused to admit that this was the cause. Ridiculous! It was a sword blade that had done the injury, not envy. But I understood, suddenly and in the anagogic manner, how it must have felt for Botticelli to work side-b
y-side with Ghirlandaio.

  ‘Read the whole canto to me, please,’ said Sandro.

  I did so, and afterwards Sandro recited it without referring to the book, word perfect in each line and stanza. Why had it never struck me before? I had discovered the same fact about Filippino long ago, but Sandro? He, so sophisticated that he could hold conversations with Poliziano and Landino as a man of equal learning, he who consulted professors for details about his figures, he who had such a profound way of layering his symbolic references that celebrated scholars took days to unravel them, he was illiterate.

  ‘You know Dante by heart,’ I said tentatively, ‘and only by heart?’

  ‘Of course not – I can read as well as you. But for a poem to mean anything it must be stored in memory. The wise memorise. Reading is a pastime for the ignorant.’

  I looked at the drawings again, how each episode was so carefully included. These sheets were a memory chart of Dante’s journey through the afterlife. Sandro had only to look at them and he could recite the verses. Rooted in the heart, it was indeed a way of knowing that was deeper and more fruitful than merely reading the text. I had read The Divine Comedy many times but apart from a few dramatic details could never remember much about it. And I had certainly never identified myself amongst the sinners, let alone suffer that blaze of understanding. Sandro was ten times the student of Dante that I was.

  Later we went for a walk through Ognissanti, past the palazzi of the Vespucci and the Spini to the river. The night sky was radiant with stars; starlight lit our way along the bank. Ahead the Old Bridge and, beyond that, San Miniato on its hill, all seen in silhouette. There too the city walls and the towers from which torches hung innocently in sconces without a devil in view. The summer night was velvet and serene and we walked in silence under the paradise of stars. Sandro gazed heavenward, identifying figures of the zodiac and pointing out the Milky Way. To gaze with him was to feel infinitesimal and infinite all at once.

  The river was smooth and, this side of the weir, quiet. My friend was filthy. Fumes of his odour kept assaulting my nostrils. He was looking for Leo when I pushed him into the Arno, to launder his clothes, bathe his body and wash his hair. I did it in the spirit of Dante. He came thrashing and struggling to the surface.

  ‘Aiuto! Madonna! Aiutami!’ He gulped, sank, came up again. ‘Tommaso, you bastard! I cannot swim!’

  ‘Swimming? It’s a pastime for the ignorant. Try walking on water.’

  He spluttered, swore and sank again. I jumped into the spangled river to save from drowning the greatest artificer of our age.

  ‘Cleanliness,’ I told him as we surfaced, gasping, ‘is next to godliness. Surely Dante has taught you that?’

  57

  LORENZO LONGS FOR EASE

  1492

  IT WAS THE YEAR WHICH SAW SPAIN RE CAPTURE GRANADA from the Moors, the year when Cristoforo Columbo first sailed west to find a new route to India. During Epiphany of that year, Lorenzo de’ Medici disappeared from public view. Naturally the city grew agitated, given that Savonarola was now predicting from the pulpit the imminent death of Pope Innocent, the King of Naples and Lorenzo. Great times are ahead!

  ‘It is gout, that is all,’ the Chancellor of Florence assured us. ‘Lorenzo needs to rest.’

  Almost everyone who was seeking an appointment with him was turned away. The priors of the government could see him, and the manager of the bank, and his closest companions, but the rest of us seemed to be in a permanent ante-chamber.

  Botticelli waited impatiently for Lorenzo’s recovery, wanting him to visit his workshop, as he sometimes did, to discuss Dante with him and study his drawings with a pair of lenses clamped to his nose. This was the Lorenzo that few knew, who walked alone in the city at night to call on a painter in a squalid workshop in Ognissanti. ‘When they are done,’ he had often told Botticelli, ‘sell them to no one before you’ve offered them to me.’ Sandro always told him that they were not for sale.

  Michelangelo was desperate for Lorenzo’s opinion of his marble relief showing the Battle of the Centaurs, too large and heavy to transport into Lorenzo’s chamber. He sometimes gained entry himself and took in sketches, but he wanted Lorenzo to feel the marble and its figures in relief, to see them with his eyes.

  Pico della Mirandola was anxious to discuss the collection of books Lorenzo was building for him to replace those burnt in Savoy, but he stayed away; not wanting to trouble the sick man, he did not even make a request to see him.

  As for me, I was anxious to speak to him about my ideas for a printing shop dedicated to the translations and original writings of Ficino, Pico, Poliziano and others, a shop fumigated daily against printers’ devils, where I would sit at a high desk overseeing everything whilst I designed a new alphabet, a type based on the script of Bartolommeo Sanvito, of such surpassing beauty that even the most discerning men would drop their prejudice against printing and strive to obtain my books. I would print in Greek so that men might read the words of Plato and Aristotle – as well as those of the New Testament, of course – in the original language. And Hebrew, I would print in that, too. Perhaps one day a Bible in all its original languages, three columns of text per page…

  But Lorenzo was too ill to see me.

  There was no woman of the house. Lorenzo’s sisters, Nana and Bianca, tried to fulfil the role, but they had their own households to look after. His youngest daughter, Contessina, betrothed but not yet married, did her best to emulate her mother and grandmother, but she was too young. There was Alfonsina, Piero’s imperious young wife of the Orsini family, but Lorenzo contrived always to be in a different house from his daughter-in-law. Despite all the men milling around, concerned for his welfare and wanting to see him, Lorenzo’s chamber emanated a weary air of loneliness. With his brother, mother and wife dead before him, he had only his children left.

  Angelo neglected other duties to be in attendance as often as he could. Sometimes one heard laughter from the chamber, but mostly it was only Angelo’s, Lorenzo too exhausted to do anything more than raise a wan smile. More often one heard song, with Poliziano’s voice rising and falling, solo or in duet with Baccio Ugolini; musicians were often brought in, a consort of viols and other instruments, to entertain il Magnifico and distract him from his pain, pain so severe that sometimes you could hear Lorenzo bellowing like the Minotaur. Servants attended him with trepidation, never knowing what his mood would be.

  Since his arrival in Florence, Pier Leone had established himself as chief of Lorenzo’s physicians. He had been trained at Padua and for a while he had been professor of medicine at Pisa, at which time he had befriended Lorenzo. A handsome man in his mid-fifties, spare of build, intelligent and very energetic, he was a living recommendation of his own doctrine and regimes. Medicine is as prone as any other discipline to a variety of opinions, but Pier Leone held to his own and never wavered. His lack of self-doubt cut a swathe through his rivals and soon all physicians vying to treat Lorenzo had to consult Pier Leone first.

  He fussed over Lorenzo’s diet, excluding all foods that would aggravate the inflammation of his limbs. The pain fluctuated and some days were better than others. Pier Leone’s system, based on his orthodox training and his reading of ancient Greek texts, put into order and harmonised by his own common sense, was strikingly reasonable, apart from his obsession with water. He blamed all our ills on water and insisted on analysing our urine frequently. On those occasions when Lorenzo was fit enough for the journey to the Volterrana, he would go to the sulphur baths and gain for himself a week of relief. Pier Leone went with him so as to test the water of the baths. His remedy for Lorenzo’s current ills was that he be kept warm and dry. Once Ficino, overhearing me tell a friend that it was a sign of the law of correspondences that Pier Leone’s name began with a pee, accused me of being juvenile.

  ‘If my dear friend fears water,’ Ficino told me stoutly, ‘it is for good reason. All
men fear their own death, but it is not granted to many to know what will cause it.’

  ‘Are you predicting his death by water?’

  ‘I have seen it before, the prescience of a soul made manifest by an irrational aversion.’

  When I repeated that to Filippino Lippi, he laughed till his jaw ached, and henceforward never missed an opportunity to mention either dropsy or the threat of flooding in the physician’s presence. That Pier Leone invariably flinched was a great test for me to keep my face straight. Once Filippino even told him that the cure for water on the brain is a tap on the neck.

  ‘Most amusing,’ said Pier Leone without a smile. He weathered our affectionate jibes, which were without malice, and, for certain, we were glad of his water or drought cures when we suffered our own minor ailments.

  One evening, when Lorenzo was enjoying a respite from pain, he had supper with Poliziano, Pico and Ficino in his study. I was not present but Angelo told me later how those few blessed hours had been devoted to philosophy and literature and, at the end, how Lorenzo had declared his intention to retire from public life in order to devote his days to study.

  ‘He is going to promote Piero to head of the family.’

  ‘Piero? He is too young!’

  ‘That is what I said, but Lorenzo reminded us that he had been the same age when he took over from his father.’

  ‘But his father was dead: there was no option.’

  ‘It won’t happen: no one will allow it. Poor Lorenzo – how he craves to be himself and not il Magnifico.’

  When the first trees were in blossom and bulbs beginning to flower, Lorenzo had himself carried on a litter to his villa at Poggio a Caiano. The villa, standing out bravely on its hill near Prato, was visible for miles but its walled gardens were private, whispering places, dedicated to Ambra, the nymph beloved of the river Ombrone that embraced the estate. The villa in its architecture, the estate in its agricultural principles, Poggio a Caiano was Lorenzo’s vision of the life made good by culture and work. On that day, arriving in a litter, he was overcome by a grief, not his own, but one that runs like a river through the history of man, grief at the apparent transience of virtue, that all heroes must be killed by villains, all great works vanquished if not by vandals then by time, everything good from the past surviving in a state ruinous and fragmented, as if the truth can only be heard hiccoughing in history, as if the only things that are eternal and not transient are human poverty, misery, injustice. Tears ran unchecked down his tired, sallow face. Such an effort to be good, so easy to be evil… Thinking upon Atlas and Hercules and drawing what strength he could, he raised himself up in his litter and called for the gardeners to discuss the planting of trees that would not be fully mature until the middle of the next century.