The Rebirth of Venus

by Linda Proud

  ‘Oh, Angelo! Are you here?’

  ‘I’ve been here all along, Magnifico.’

  Lorenzo grasped Poliziano’s hand, wanting to speak to him, but Angelo’s feelings, pent up in a heart that had been frozen for days, were suddenly released. He rushed blindly back into the studiolo where he fell on to the bed. I closed the door behind him.

  ‘I can’t let him see me like this,’ he stuttered. ‘Oh, God, do not take him from me!’

  Like anything that has been imprisoned too long, once freed his grief was loud and violent. I was glad nothing could be heard of it in the chamber. It was nearly an hour before he could venture out again and this time he sat on Lorenzo’s bed and calmly conversed with him. Lorenzo wanted to know where Pico was.

  ‘He is at San Marco. He does not wish to intrude.’

  ‘Send for him. If he will come, I would see him.’

  And so it was that, in the evening, Poliziano and Pico sat with Lorenzo, talking, even joking, but the air in the room was a melancholy one, the air of leave-taking. Angelo lay on the bed beside Lorenzo so that he could hear him better.

  ‘That one sentence…’ Lorenzo said hoarsely.

  ‘What leads us away from God is desire.’

  ‘That is true. Is that your sentence?’

  ‘No, it is my preamble. Savonarola calls on us to long for God, to be quick with eagerness. But if desire leads us away, then even the desire for God will not take us to God. It could even be the greatest obstruction.’

  ‘Is that your sentence?’

  ‘No. It is this: beware the false self that longs for the true one.

  The greatest vanity of all is spiritual. That is the antichrist.’

  ‘That was three sentences.’ Lorenzo laughed, and coughed up blood.

  His frightened companions were ousted by anxious doctors. When Angelo returned to the studiolo, I asked him what the remedy of powdered gems had been.

  ‘It was an epithema,’ he replied.

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘Is your Greek so poor?’

  ‘Epithema means “to lay on”,’ I replied, stung.

  ‘It is a poultice.’ Then he lifted his head, as an animal does to the wind.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  There came a sound of someone entering the chamber, an entry which caused a hush amongst the servants and attendants. Angelo went and put his ear to the door.

  ‘Magnifico,’ said a dread and familiar voice that carried easily into the studiolo.

  Angelo turned and stared at me in disbelief. ‘Fra Girolamo!’

  It was all I could do to refrain from going out to have my eyes confirm what my ears knew, that in the chamber was Savonarola. Angelo stared at the door with his mouth open.

  ‘Magnifico,’ Savonarola continued, ‘should it be granted by God that you live, you must be firm in the faith and free from crime.’

  ‘And if it is His will that I die?’

  ‘Accept it willingly.’

  ‘I do accept it, Frate. Nothing will be sweeter to me than death, if it be the Will of my Father. But if it is His will that I live, then my life will always be guided by my religion. As it always has been.’

  ‘You have erred.’

  ‘Who does not? But give me your blessing, Fra Girolamo.’

  In a gentler voice, Savonarola gave Lorenzo de’ Medici his benediction.

  I stared at Angelo. ‘Was he invited?’

  ‘Pico. Pico must have persuaded him to come!’

  It was a fine, sweet resolution to the years of hostility, brought about by the Count of Concordia.

  Savonarola’s was the last visit. After that Lorenzo began to bleed from mouth and nose and soon was in a coma so deep that we only knew he lived when someone held a mirror to his mouth and we saw the mist form that is the breath of life.

  63

  THE DEATH OF LORENZO

  1492

  DURING THE NIGHT, LORENZO REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS. Piero was with him, alone except for two servants and a priest who was reciting psalms.

  Judge me, O God, and plead my cause against an ungodly nation.

  Disturbed by Savonarola’s visit, Angelo walked in tight circles in the studiolo, having a dialogue with himself, saying that it is the man who understands his own nature who is close to God. ‘Reform starts here,’ he said, patting himself on the chest.

  O send out thy light and thy truth; let them lead me; let them bring me unto thy holy hill, and to thy tabernacles.

  ‘Get this right and then worry about the rest of the world,’ Angelo told himself. ‘Those who preach – they want the world to change before they do. It is the wrong way round.’

  Yea upon the harp will I praise thee, O God my God.

  I went into the upper loggia overlooking the garden, which was as beautiful in moonlight as it was by day, and became lost in my own reflections.

  Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me?

  A light breeze ruffled the new leaves in the garden. The day before last it had rained on warm earth and I could smell the rush of greenness in the land and in the mild night air. A nightingale in the holly tree sang of exquisite longing in the soft darkness. In the sky Venus seemed even brighter than usual.

  Hope in God…

  No, it was not Venus. Planets do not fall, as this star fell, in a shower of light. As I stood staring at heaven there came a silence, a silence so profound that it woke me from my reveries, a silence that is not an absence of sound but the presence of the Divine. The cantor had stopped mid-sentence and everything in the house had become still. Silence descended, as before rain in a wood, except for those liquid trills of the nightingale.

  Lorenzo was gone…

  Then came another sound, as if in duet with the bird. A sound Greek, ancient, oh, of such fathomless antiquity, an Orphic sound, of pure grief finding its voice. In a mythic keening that seemed to tear the very veils of reality, Angelo Poliziano lamented his lost god.

  64

  WHERE WAS FICINO?

  1492

  I AM OFTEN ASKED WHY FICINO WAS NOT AT LORENZO’S deathbed. Angelo Poliziano was there, Pico della Mirandola was there, even Savonarola was there, briefly. But Ficino? He was in his villa higher up the hill of Careggi. As Lorenzo died, Ficino was sitting on his terrace, looking down in sorrow at the Villa Medici below. Circumstances had forced him to find a patron in Lorenzino, and ‘all the creatures’ of the Pierfranceschi had been banished from Lorenzo’s presence.

  I do not believe Lorenzo included Ficino in his proclamation, made in acute pain, but Ficino was not sufficiently confident to put it to the test. Theirs had been a touchy relationship, Lorenzo often blasting Ficino for telling him the truth, that the real life is one of contemplation. Lorenzo had a city to run; and though he would have preferred to have been a hermit – or so he said – he was conscientious of the needs of others, which is surely a virtue. ‘It is my duty!’ Lorenzo had raged at his philosopher.

  ‘It is your desire,’ the philosopher had returned.

  I believe that Lorenzo wanted Ficino more than anyone at his deathbed, to assure him of the afterlife, of the transmigration of souls. But the constant refrain that came from Lorenzo in his last days was that he wished to cause no trouble to anyone. He took all that was offered and asked for nothing.

  65

  A DEATH BY DROWNING

  1492

  I WENT TO THE STABLES AT DAWN, HAVING BEEN GIVEN several messages to deliver in the city. There were several horses steaming under their blankets, the head groom was putting a salve on the scratched flanks of one of them, his assistants cleaning mud off the hooves of the rest. These horses had been ridden in the dark. One of them was Piero’s. By the time I returned, a few hours later, I had forgotten about it.

  Lorenzo’s bo
dy had been laid out in his chamber, where a sculptor was applying layers of plaster to the face to make a death mask. I stared down at the corpse and knew that, whatever had constituted Lorenzo, it was not here: it had nothing to do with the body, with that white, frozen face. While priests intoned their prayers, I said a silent, Orphic prayer to aid the travelling soul.

  Angelo was with Piero de’ Medici, helping to arrange the funeral. All the physicians had left. ‘Scuttled away,’ said Angelo. ‘All of them blaming Pier Leone, who cannot be found.’

  ‘Only the guilty run away,’ said Piero. Angelo shot a glance at him but said nothing.

  Wherever I went there was whispering, in the kitchen and stables, the garden rooms and cellars; and the word that was passed from man to man was murder. Lorenzo, they were saying, had been murdered by his chief physician. That Pier Leone had fled only proved it. I tried to counter the gossip with reason, telling them that there was no point in murdering a man who was dying anyway. They said that the poisoning had been going on for weeks.

  Then a man rode into the villa and jumped from his horse, calling for Piero. The physician had been found dead in the well of a villa at San Gervasio. ‘It seems he took his own life,’ the messenger told Piero, who nodded in silence. The story was that a servant going out to the well to draw water at dawn had found the bucket impeded by something. Getting help and some flaming brands from the fire, she had returned to the well and peered in to see the slippered feet of a drowned man.

  When I spoke to Angelo about it, he said that obviously Pier Leone had been unable to live with such an overpowering sense of failure.

  I looked at him doubtfully. ‘Pier Leone? Killed himself by diving head first into a well? Angelo, that is difficult to believe.’

  ‘Suicide,’ Angelo repeated, his eyes dilating as if daring me to contradict him.

  It was the first time, the only time, I ever heard Poliziano lie.

  Then I remembered the sweating horses I’d seen at dawn, and

  I made my own assumptions. At the time, everything was such a muddle of rumour and report. I could not work out the whole story of Lorenzo’s death to my satisfaction – was it murder? A curse fulfilled? Or was it natural? But I was certain that Pier Leone had been murdered by Lorenzo’s son, presumably in revenge for his failure.

  Now that I am writing the story down, however, I am troubled once again by the manner of Lorenzo’s dying, and I am thinking about that epithema of powdered gems. They say that Lorenzo died of gout, but he did not; he clearly died of a haemorrhage. That poultice, I am certain, was administered internally. Through ignorance or design? Whichever it was, it was the remedy not of Pier Leone but of the physician from Milan. Milan. The physician of Ludovico Sforza. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and I know now what I did not know then, that Sforza was in league with the King of France who wished to assert his right to Naples. This Lorenzo would have opposed, forcefully and successfully. It was in the interests of Milan that Lorenzo be removed. What queers that theory is that Lorenzo was dying anyway. Or was he? There were signs of recovery in those last days. But then that long fever, which the servants believed was poison, that would surely have taken him.

  But let us say that Pier Leone was killed because he knew the truth. If that is so, then he was not killed by Piero de’ Medici. Let us say that the assumption I made at the time was false. There could have been other reasons why Piero had been out riding in the night. He could have been trying to outrun his emotions. Or perhaps he had been racing to deliver the news to relatives, or to the Signoria. As I remember, the villa at San Gervasio where Pier Leone was murdered belonged to friends of Lorenzo and Giovanni di Pierfrancesco. ‘Ah,’ you say, ‘you have got me believing the murderer was the Duke of Milan. Now you are casting suspicion on the Pierfranceschi. Were they, then, in league with Milan?’ Possibly. They were certainly in league with France. And they stood to gain Florence.

  The truth is, Erasmo, I do not know. What I am certain of, however, having relived these days, is that someone did murder Lorenzo. But who would kill a dying man? And why?

  66

  THE FUNERAL OF MAGNIFICENCE

  1492

  IT WAS AN HOUR AFTER SUNSET AND THE AIR WAS SWEET with the scent of new herbs springing up in the grass. Silent but for their tread on the path came the Company of Zampillo, hooded and robed in white with many torches and tapers, bearing the coffin of Lorenzo the Magnificent. The way from the villa into the city was lined by citizens in black robes come to do Lorenzo honour. The black, the white, the silence, the simplicity, this was the funeral of il Magnifico. The coffin was carried all the way on the shoulders of his spiritual companions to the Church of San Marco, there to rest for the night before the funeral on the morrow at San Lorenzo. And as if God thought we were being too sombre, in the dark sky to the north strange lights began to swell on the horizon, waves of pink, purple, blue and green rising and falling, swaying behind the mountains. Those who believed Savonarola’s prophecies hunched into themselves in fear; those who did not gazed at the sky in wonder.

  ‘It’s the Aurora Borealis!’ said Angelo, familiar with the heavenly phenomenon only from books. ‘Here. Now. In Italy! What a miracle! Heaven is weeping light for Lorenzo.’

  With the angelic display pulsing in the sky above, the cortege continued its way, each man somewhat diminished in his own esteem by this reminder of the power and splendour of the Cosmos.

  As was customary with the Medici, the funeral on the following day took place without much pomp. But what the ceremony lacked in visual splendour, it made up for in music. Plainchant filled the nave and chapels of San Lorenzo as the choir performed a mass by Dufay, interspersed with hymns of Lorenzo’s own composition.

  The family was led by Piero de’ Medici. His pale skin and light brown hair stood out against the black of his costume, making him even more handsome than usual, and magnificent in his solemn dignity. His wife, Alfonsina, was absent, being in confinement. Following Piero was Cardinal Giovanni and their cousin Giulio, along with Lorenzo’s youngest son, fourteen- year-old Giuliano, he who had been fed on the milk of my wife. Fourteen years, and it seemed like yesterday. These young men walked with the poise of those who have been trained to dance a pavan. I had known them as boisterous children always ready to play a prank, prone to tantrums, scrapping with each other. But on this day the sons of Lorenzo walked like knights.

  The choir began to sing a new piece, a specially-composed elegy. The music began simply with two lines weaving, but then more lines entered and the sound began to billow through the church. I did not notice him at first, that fine tenor within the choir, but then his voice began to rise, to leave the swelling music and follow its own line, standing out against the rest as a bird in a blue sky, floating on the up-draught of grief. As lonely as Orpheus mourning his lost wife, Angelo Poliziano sang his elegy to Lorenzo, set to music by the Flemish master, Heinrich Isaacs. If he had borrowed the strange metrical scheme from the ancients, I know not from what source. I had never heard its like before. I believe, for once, he sang from the heart as moved, unconcerned about antique models, and the song was the song of fountains and waterfalls, of lonely hillside streams trickling over rocks, of rain on city pavements and the sea washing on the shore. It was a song of tears, and Poliziano wept as he sang.

  The laurel tree lies struck by lightning. The lyre and voice of Phoebus, which once rang out sweetly, have now grown silent.

  The climax of his passion was in that last line: the lyre and voice of Phoebus have now grown silent. In accordance with the Laws of Poetry, his meaning was neither literal, allegorical nor symbolic, but all three together. He referred to Lorenzo, of course, but most of all to the death of poetry itself. And in realizing this, I suffered the anagogic meaning – the highest level of meaning which trembles in your sinews and becomes part of your being. I put my face in my hands and wept. This was too great a death to bear.

&nb
sp; Thus Magnificence was buried to a song of ravishing sadness.

  67

  HOW TO BE A SYCOPHANT

  1492

  WITHIN THE CITY WE HAD TO ACCUSTOM OURSELVES to referring to a twenty-one-year-old for our authority. The government had hastily declared Piero de’ Medici to be one of the Council of Seventy in his father’s place and eligible for all offices. Obviously this was arranged by the Medici party, but the other factions – and there were many of them – began to wax in strength, and it would not be true to say that grief at Lorenzo’s death was universal. Not then, at that time. Too many saw it as an opportunity for power. Almost at once enemies of the Medici such as the Pazzi were seen walking abroad again, trailing their ambition like fine gowns.

  After a few weeks had passed and Piero had settled in, I went to see him about my plans to set up a printing press. In the sala, in Lorenzo’s chair, at Lorenzo’s table, sat the son who had been born with a look of disdain, the watermark of his mother’s family, the Orsini, visible through the weave of his nature.

  ‘What can I do for you, Tommaso?’ he asked, not as Lorenzo would have asked, leaning forward, interested and concerned. ‘What can I do for you?’ he asked, making it clear by his tone that I was interrupting him. My long-rehearsed argument for a reliable printer in Florence died within me, shrivelling to nothing.

  ‘I came to ask, Magnifico,’ I said to this man ten years my junior, ‘what I can do for you.’

  His eyes narrowed as he smiled, gratified by my question. ‘What did you do for my father? I always wondered.’