The Rebirth of Venus

by Linda Proud

  ‘Oh, anything he needed that I was capable of: carrying messages, reporting…’

  ‘Your wife was my brother Giuliano’s wetnurse.’

  He said this as if it confirmed my status as a contadino, someone from a village who hung about the palazzo like a fly, forgetting that my Pazzi wife had been called upon at the direst hour when no suitable village woman could be found. I had allowed it because Elena wanted it, distraught as she was at the stillbirth of our son; because Lorenzo had begged it of me. I had allowed it because of my love for them both.

  ‘She was, Magnifico.’

  This boy whom I had helped Angelo to raise and educate seemed not to know me but for this one fact: or was he uncomfortable in the presence of one who had watched him grow through a troubled childhood, not always behaving in a way he would like to be remembered?

  ‘I have no need of a wetnurse,’ he said. His secretary and page both laughed.

  ‘I have no wife to offer the service.’

  ‘I believe you are unable to write following an injury to your arm.’

  ‘I can write, but not with the beauty of a scribe.’

  ‘So, a crippled widower. I’ll let you know if I need anything from you.’

  I left the sala to the sound of laughter, vowing I would never serve Piero de’ Medici in any capacity whatsoever if I could help it.

  I returned to work at Miscomini’s. The printing of Ficino’s translation of Plotinus was almost complete when Ficino came into the shop with a new version of the preface, revised to include an address to Piero de’ Medici which implored him to be a rock-like support to Plato and Plotinus as they came into the light. Did Jesus name the apostle Peter after a rock with a sense of irony? Did Lorenzo name his son from a similar intuition? Piero de’ Medici was as rock-like, as trustworthy as quicksand.

  Having read Ficino’s new preface in his presence, I looked at him with raised eyebrows. He shrugged. That was how it was then, amongst members of the Platonic Academy: raised eyebrows, shrugs, glances exchanged, all in silence. Each man kept his doubts and fears to himself. It was not safe to do otherwise.

  The exception was Poliziano, who somehow had persuaded himself that Piero, being the product of his education, was not only a man in whom we could all have faith, but one who was tantamount to being his own son. He attended Piero like a doting father and missed no opportunity to offer him advice, the kind of advice Lorenzo would have given him himself.

  Piero rejected his advice in favour of that of friends of his own age. Things would have slipped into decadence had not God intervened. Fra Girolamo Savonarola, he whom Piero had once asked Lorenzo to banish, he who had refused to visit the Palazzo de’ Medici, now came frequently to offer Piero the paternal support he lacked. And Piero accepted it. It was a strange sight, the pale young man beside the hook-nosed friar with skin the colour of figs. But it became a familiar sight, and Angelo looked on in horror. This association between the Friar and Piero could not be allowed. Piero was heir to his father, to the work of the Platonic Academy and to the School of Poetry. He must not be swayed from that. Angelo, alone among us, gave voice to his fears. Savonarola, he said, was the antichrist who would destroy everything we had worked for. Since Angelo was deluded in his opinion of Piero, we considered him deluded in this, also. After all, when in August of that year Pope Innocent died, why would anyone listen to a university professor while we had a prophet in our midst? Savonarola had predicted the death of the Pope, the King and Lorenzo himself. Two out of three was enough to prove this man’s powers of foreknowledge. That King Ferrante did not die for another two years was a fact we all overlooked, too distracted now by a rising crescendo of prophecies being shouted from the pulpit of San Marco.

  68

  THE IMMORTAL SOUL PACKS A PUNCH

  1492

  THERE WAS A MUSICIAN CALLED CARDIERE, A FAVOURITE of Lorenzo who had often entertained him by singing to the lute. One day he came to see Angelo in great agitation.

  ‘I have seen il Magnifico,’ he said. ‘In a dream I saw his ghost. He was naked but for a ragged black mantle thrown over his body and he ordered me to warn his son that in a short time he will be banished from Florence, never to return.’

  Angelo and I glanced at each other. There was something compelling in Cardiere’s story, and to see the genuine fright in the man was to believe him.

  ‘You must go to Piero at once,’ said Angelo.

  But the poor man seemed more scared of the living than the dead. He went away, saying he would do as Angelo had advised, but he did not look as if he had the courage. Sure enough, a few days later Cardiere returned, this time with a bruise on his ashen face the size and colour of a kidney. Had he been in a street fight? Set upon by bandits? He shook his head, his chin trembling.

  ‘At midnight the ghost came to me again. Lorenzo himself, I assure you, though dressed as he was never dressed in life. Naked, but for a ragged mantle. But it was Lorenzo, with that stern, watchful face. And… And… I was not asleep when he entered my chamber.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘I put my hand into the candle flame and burned it. Look…’ He showed us the red weal.

  ‘How did Lorenzo enter? Did he open the door or pass through it?’

  ‘Opened it. I heard its usual creak. Heard his footsteps on the floor. Lorenzo himself. I felt his breath on my face. As real, as physical, as you. “Cardiere!” he said, “you have failed me. You have not done as I asked!” I was shrinking backwards, trying to escape him, but he caught hold of my night shirt and pulled me from the bed so that I stood before him. Oh…!’ Here the poor man, shaking like an aspen, had to be steadied by us and encouraged to continue.

  ‘He shouted at me to do as I’d been told, to go to Piero. And then he struck me. Look! See that bruise? It’s from the hand of Lorenzo. His hand, I tell you, hard and stinging. Whack! Round the face. I fell backwards, stunned. When I opened my eyes again, he had gone.’

  At this wonder, Angelo explored the man’s bruise with his fingers. It was livid and tender and Cardiere winced with the pain. Of all the tales we had heard in our lives, none was as strange as this, that a ghost could strike flesh and bruise it.

  ‘A vision most physical – and not much in keeping with the nature of Lorenzo,’ Angelo said, ‘and yet I trust you and therefore must believe you. You have to do as you’ve been instructed. Go to Piero at once. He’s at the villa at Careggi.’

  Whimpering yet nodding, Cardiere left us to go to Careggi. As it happened, he met Piero on the road, so he stopped the entourage and told his patron as boldly as he could what had occurred. Piero de’ Medici looked shocked at first but then broke out in laughter. His derision was taken up by his entourage, who scorned and mocked poor Cardiere. Piero’s chancellor, Pietro Dovizi, demanded to know why Lorenzo should appear to a lute player and not to his son himself – a reasonable question, though not the manner of its asking. One thing you could say truly of Lorenzo was that, though he had power, he used it carefully and with respect. Piero was acting like the spoilt scion of any great family. He seemed to have forgotten everything he had been taught from the ancient authors.

  69

  POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY UNDER THREAT

  1492

  WE WERE SITTING IN THE SHADE OF THE LOGGIA IN THE walled garden of the Rucellai on a drowsy afternoon. I was watching lizards, not too interested in the discussion Poliziano was having with Ficino while we waited for other members of the Platonic Academy to arrive. Whether ecphrasis means a literal description of a picture in words, or a literal interpretation of words in pictures was not something Ficino could answer. He thought perhaps it could be interpreted both ways. Angelo agreed and told him that just as we know about the works of Apelles by full descriptions in certain books, so pictures could be used to illustrate the words of authors and, perhaps one day, be all that is left of them.

  My eyelids be
gan to droop. On the threshold of dreams, the tread of feet on the gravel path became the march of approaching soldiers, but then Lorenzino’s greyhound laid its paws on my lap and thumped its tail against my legs. I woke up to see the Pierfranceschi arriving through the laurel hedges with several men in their train, recognising the round, pink face of Amerigo Vespucci, the slight figure of Zenobio Acciaiuoli, and the tanned complexion and coarse hair of Michele Marullus. I made room on my bench for my friend Zenobio who had been a fellow student of mine at some of Angelo’s classes. He had been in Rome and we had not seen each other for a year or more.

  ‘Salve,’ he said, settling down beside me and declining a glass of wine from a Rucellai servant. ‘Are you well, Tommaso?’ he asked, while everyone else was greeting the Pierfranceschi.

  ‘As well as can be expected, given the times.’

  ‘Better times are ahead, believe me,’ he said. He exchanged a smile of greeting with Poliziano. ‘Angelo seems recovered.’

  My friend was not a factional man and, despite being a cousin of the Pierfranceschi and living in the villa of Lorenzino, was quite able to sympathise with anyone bereaved by the loss of il Magnifico, especially if he were a favourite tutor of his.

  ‘Why, what lies ahead?’ I asked.

  In reply, Zenobio inclined his head slightly towards Lorenzino. ‘Rule by the just,’ he whispered.

  ‘Come away, Mithras,’ said Giovanni di Pierfrancesco, tugging on the collar of the greyhound which now had its head in my lap. ‘Sorry,’ he said to me, and smiled in a way that made my heart leap even though I have no inclinations of that kind. Twenty-five years old now, he had lost none of his boyish beauty, whereas his brother was beginning to thicken at the waist and neck.

  Angelo, relaxed on this day, was greeting everyone affably, even Marullus. Marullus, however, returned the greeting without a smile. He may have been born in Constantinople but he was brought up in Ragusa where, I have heard, revenge is a sacred and ancestral custom. When Poliziano had told him his poetry stank, and did so without having read it, he had seeded a complaint in Marullus that he would pass on to his great-grandsons if needs be. Poliziano had since read his poems and modified his opinion. ‘They are technically very competent but without heart,’ he said, although not to Marullus.

  Ficino took up his lyre and struck a chord in the Dorian mode that shook the drowsiness from me. The notes and his soaring voice, amplified and returned by the gentle vaulting of the loggia, called on the Sun to bring health and harmony to the soul. The slumbering garden came to life. The lizards that had darted away with the arrival of the men now came out again. Sparrows hopped towards the singer and stood there, heads cocked to one side. As Ficino sang, the words seemed even to bring the statues in the arbours to life, and the marble Apollo at the end of the cobbled path glowed in the light of that Sun. All enmity must surely vanish, cleansed away by such sweet and plaintive singing. But not for a Dalmatian who considered himself a Greek.

  The topic for the day was to be Plato’s Myth of the Cave and Marullus offered to recite it for us in the original tongue. Ficino, knowing nothing of the enmity between him and Poliziano, accepted readily. Marullus stood to his full, tall height and, tucking his mass of hair behind his ears, cleared his throat. He stared down at the ground for a little then raised his head, opened his arms, palms upwards, and from memory gave us Plato’s words in Plato’s language. We listened to the beautifully crisp, percussive rhythms as if we were sitting in the Agora itself.

  ‘Well,’ said Ficino appreciatively when Marullus had finished, ‘I believe Plato himself has been with us.’

  Marullus glanced at Poliziano, as if challenging him, a mere Italian, to match his achievement. Angelo, outdone, looked away.

  It was not a contest between equals. In intellect and scholarship no one would have claimed that Marullus was a match for the great Poliziano, not even Marullus himself. But both had their Achilles’ heel. Marullus suffered as all refugees from Greece suffered, feeling foreign in their adopted land and, for a soldier such as he, ashamed to have lost their patria to the Turks. His own family deserved no shame; his father and uncles had fought on for ten years after the fall of Constantinople and had died in the last battle. Nevertheless, he felt as all Greek scholars felt, looked down upon and scorned by the Italians. No Greek can abide being a recipient of charity, especially that of the errant Latin Church. Marullus and his fellow Greeks were querulous, proud, uncomfortable guests in our land.

  For his part, Angelo was aware that, while his opponent could trace his ancestry back to Argive kings, he himself came from a line of haberdashers and cobblers. He had not studied at a university – in the eyes of Marullus, the Studio at Florence did not count as a university – and had taught himself Greek. Having inherited the pacifist nature of his father, he carried no weapon, while Marullus was trained to take the head off an enemy with one clean swipe of his sword. In his own eyes, the contest was unequal and, no matter how great his intelligence, he was not and never could be a match for this olive-eyed son of Mycenae who had the blood of kings in his veins. Apart from anything else, Marullus was muscular and handsome, while Poliziano had lost his shape to a sedentary life and the heavy wine of his own vineyard.

  Ficino began to expound the Myth of the Cave, saying that life is a delusion, a play of shadows on a wall, and that when men begin to comprehend the truth, they find its light painful and prefer the shadows.

  ‘One cannot even look on the physical sun without being blinded,’ said Lorenzino.

  ‘That is because we look with eyes made of earth. To look on the sun we must become the Sun and gaze with solar eyes.’

  Lorenzino once said that he was the Lorenzo Lorenzo wanted to be, meaning that he had the life of leisure and study that Lorenzo had so craved. Now he was keen to become the Lorenzo he wanted to be: the true successor to il Magnifico. It was like having Lorenzo in our midst again, appreciating what Ficino had to say and asking intelligent questions, but the afternoon was spoiled by the tension between Poliziano and Marullus. When Ficino finished expounding the myth, Marullus said that Plato’s cave was an apt metaphor for ‘those Florentines who wish to stay in the dark, under the rule of Piero.’ This made Angelo jump as if pricked. The eyes of everyone avoided the embarrassed Poliziano, apart from those of Marullus, who watched him closely. I thought he must have been the kind of boy who dismembered animals out of mere curiosity.

  Since the death of Lorenzo, we had taken to meeting here in the Rucellai garden and were finding it increasingly difficult to keep our minds on philosophy. With men such as Bernardo Rucellai, Bernardo del Nero and Lorenzo Tornabuoni gathered together, the temptation to discuss matters of government was often too great. Feeling that the Myth of the Cave had been explained to everyone’s satisfaction, Lorenzino asked Bernardo Rucellai how Piero was faring in Rome, where he had gone with his brothers in an extravagant and glorious cavalcade to greet the new pope.

  ‘How does he find Borgia?’ he asked.

  ‘Do you mean His Holiness Alexander VI?’

  ‘Yes, Borgia.’

  We all laughed. Any man of reason, knowing Borgia’s reputation, and the story of how he had swung himself into the papal chair after the death of Innocent, gagged on his official name.

  ‘I fear for Piero, and for Cardinal Giovanni,’ said Bernardo del Nero, ‘both of them so young.’

  Lorenzo Tornabuoni flashed an affectionate smile at this man over seventy.

  ‘You think everyone seems young to me?’ asked del Nero. ‘Well, perhaps it is true. But those two are unseasonably young. Too young for the times, too young for the task, which is to keep Florence safe.’

  In the narrow glance of Lorenzino you could see that he did not so much fear for his cousin, Piero, as hope for his failure. ‘I hear he has upset Ludovico Sforza. It is madness,’ he said, his voice rising in irritation, ‘utter madness to alienate Milan.’

/>   Sforza had wished all the heads of states to present themselves to the new pope simultaneously, but Florence, supported by Naples, had insisted on individual presentations. It was a small matter of vanity, but to upset Milan was to upset the alliance, not something anyone with a modicum of statecraft would have contemplated. Lorenzino suffered the hot iron of frustration, that he could see so clearly what was to be done and had not the power to do it.

  Angelo sat forlornly with his chin in his hands. He had been surprised and alarmed when Piero had left him behind, and not taken him as his counsellor and advisor in the embassy to Rome. Now Piero was falling prey to the very people Angelo would have warned him against: his Orsini relations, allies of Naples.

  Every Florentine shared the delusion that a new pope was bound to be an improvement on his predecessor, but a month after the accession of Borgia, who to win the election had indulged in blatant and incredible acts of simony, we were sore pressed to maintain this fantasy. Indeed, we almost grieved the passing of that rogue, Innocent. For all his faults, he had at least been recognisably human. In Rodrigo Borgia we seemed to have been plunged back into the days of the Emperor Nero, if not Caligula. Tales had come from Rome of mules laden with bullion going through the city to buy the votes of cardinals, and even if such tales were not true, we could be certain that this election had not been won by spiritual merit. It troubled us that our young Giovanni’s first duty as a cardinal had been to vote for the new pope. He was just a boy tossed in a tempest of scheming. Despite imperative messages from his brother in Florence, Giovanni had given his allegiance to Ascanio Sforza. Then he changed his mind and opted for Piero’s choice. Then he changed it again and gave his backing to Rodrigo Borgia. Piero had written to him in anger and despair. Giovanni had replied in wretchedness, saying he wanted to be out of Rome. Now Piero was in Rome with him, doing his best to establish good relations with Pope Alexander and trying to steady his unsettled brother.