The Rebirth of Venus

by Linda Proud

  Lorenzino, however, considered that Borgia had virtues as well as vices, and that magnanimity was one of them. ‘Let us make the best of it,’ he said. ‘I have heard that he intends to decorate his apartments with scenes of ancient Egyptian wisdom.’

  ‘Is that true?’ Ficino, who could only equate such artistic taste with philosophical awareness, was intrigued.

  ‘Obviously he does not share the rigorous orthodoxy of Innocent. As for the Inquisition – well, he is a Spaniard himself and has it under his control. We should apply to him to release Giovanni Pico from the charge of heresy.’

  This idea was well received by all of us. ‘Angelo?’ said Lorenzino. ‘Do you agree?’

  Poliziano, who was lost in thought, came out of his reverie. ‘What? Oh yes, of course. An excellent idea.’ As the idea penetrated, he woke up to it fully. ‘Really, a most excellent idea. Will you write to His Holiness?’

  ‘Would it not be better coming from Piero? He is, after all, our first citizen.’

  Increasingly prone to indwelling, Angelo was oblivious to the test he was undergoing, but passed it anyway. ‘No, it would be better coming from you.’

  Lorenzino smiled gratefully at this expression of confidence. Angelo lapsed back into private thought, and as the conversation returned to the new pope and the intrigues of Rome, he stared vacantly at the ground.

  ‘Since the death of Lorenzo,’ said Bernardo Rucellai, ‘the country has become unstable. If the triple alliance should break, if, as it seems, Piero will form a new alliance with Naples and break from Milan… You do not have to be a prophet to see the future.’

  ‘France will move on Naples,’ said Lorenzo Tornabuoni, ‘unopposed except by us.’

  The company murmured in alarm. For several months Savonarola had been prophesying that the King of France was going to come like a new Charlemagne; recently he had given a terrifying sermon in which he had predicted the destruction of Italy, with especially severe punishment for Tuscany. Now it was coming to pass, and we puny fellows discussed ways to avert the terrible force of fate.

  ‘We must not oppose the French,’ said Lorenzino simply. ‘Why oppose them? Embrace them, make them welcome and send them on their way. This is Naples’s war, not ours.’

  There was wisdom in this but such an action would require us to overrule, even depose Piero. It seemed that all men of power, both within the city and without, were looking for ways to unseat the new rider of Florence who, having got into the saddle earlier than expected, now seemed to be bouncing about and losing control of the horse. To the Pierfranceschi and those around them, it seemed preferable and right that their Lorenzino and not Piero be in charge of Florence. For the academy, after all, it would be an advantage to have one of our own good men as civic leader and principal citizen. But to maintain goodness and not be hypocrites, we could only hope that Piero fell from his horse by himself and did not require a push. That was the view of most of us, held privately and certainly not expressed out loud in a meeting of the Academy, but it was not that of Angelo, who stayed loyal to Piero.

  ‘I will speak to him on his return,’ he said, ‘and see if I cannot get him to change his mind. It is of course the Orsini behind all this. Rome is a pit of scorpions.’

  Ficino, unhappy at the direction the meeting was taking, compromised and switched the discussion to Plato’s Republic. The men grew animated in argument as to the best form of government. It was of course generally agreed that Plato’s own preference for government by the wise was our own, and it went without saying that we were the wise. But how, in practical terms, that could be applied to Florence occupied us for an hour or more. Government by the people was out of the question, since they never lift their noses from the trough. No, it had to be a council of the wise, but should it defer ultimately to one man? A man, say, such as Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco? This was not openly proposed: it did not have to be.

  I gazed at Lorenzino, wondering what he would be like at the helm. That he would be preferable to Piero, I had no doubt, but a man tends to change once vested with power. I could easily imagine his irascible nature translating into tyrannical fury. The skin of his face was folding with time and over-indulgence, his eyes disappearing under heavy lids, but with Giovanni by his side, sweetening his mood and captivating both the people and foreign potentates: it could work. But would Lorenzino consult his council of the wise wisely? Even if its decisions contradicted his own? I doubted it. The best we could hope for in Lorenzino was the Lorenzo he wanted to be: the new Magnifico.

  ‘There is another way, one never open to Plato,’ said Ficino gently. He showed us a recent publication of Savonarola, a manifesto for the establishment of a Christian state. It read well, if you read it only in part, which Ficino did.

  ‘A theocracy,’ said Lorenzino. ‘Plato did cover that.’

  ‘But not a Christian one: that was beyond his imagination.’

  ‘I’ve read this,’ said Angelo, taking the pamphlet. He thumbed through it and, finding the passage he was looking for, he stood to read it out loud, in such a good imitation of Savonarola’s rhetorical gracelessness that we were laughing even as we shrank inwardly from the meaning of the words.

  ‘I call upon the leaders of the city to drive the poets away and burn their books!’ he cried, thumping the back of his chair and then shaking his finger at us. ‘Anyone trained in pagan poetics is damned to perdition. Perdition, I tell you! They will burn in hell for all eternity. For poetry is evil, and the source of its evil is that very beauty which poets adore.’

  ‘That’s not in there,’ said Zenobio, taking the pamphlet from him. His face paled as he read the words Poliziano was dramatising.

  ‘And what is worse than poetry but philosophy?’ Angelo cried, still acting the part of the vehement friar. ‘The one among them that is chief of this age, who sings so sweetly of divine love, is guilty of moral abuse and the spread of paganism.’ Here Angelo bent down and frowned into the face of Marsilio Ficino. Ficino took the pamphlet from Zenobio and re-read the passage which he had not previously supposed to refer to himself.

  ‘This,’ said Angelo, subsiding back into his chair, ‘is the friar who has the ear of Piero. We cannot be complacent.’

  Ficino swallowed. ‘Moral abuse? Does he mean me?’

  ‘A corrupter of boys, O Socrates.’

  Ficino read the passage again, breathing heavily. ‘The Frate is a good man,’ he said at last. ‘I have no doubt that all his thoughts are directed towards the good. But there are things he does not understand, poetry and philosophy chief amongst them. If Giovanni Pico is not with us today, it is because he is with Savonarola, trying to correct these very faults. All will be well.’

  ‘So you would appreciate government of the city by such a man?’ Lorenzino asked guardedly.

  ‘Of course not! I would appreciate a state governed according to Christian principles, but not by a preacher. A man should keep to his role.’ To quieten his own spirits as well as ours, Ficino took up his lyre again and re-tuned it to the Hypolydian mode. As he sang an invocation to Venus, I gazed out at the peaceful garden, its hedges of laurel and myrtle, its rose bushes all humming in the heat of late summer. I gazed on it and listened to the voice of Ficino, our Apollo, singing an Orphic hymn, ancient, pristine, a holy hymn prefiguring Christ. This wide view of Christianity as a faith spanning all history thrilled as it always thrilled, making the heart pulse with glory. Moral abuse! Who could say such a thing of our Ficino? Only a man who did not understand.

  Savonarola’s views on poetry and poets were circulating widely. People of simple faith, unable or unwilling to think for themselves, gained much strength from them. I had seen Poliziano challenged in the street by a fruit seller who told him his work was godless. ‘What do you know of my work?’ asked the surprised professor. ‘That it is godless!’ replied the hard-faced, self-assured man who wore a crucifix over his apron. The beaut
iful, open mind of the city that had fostered so much talent was closing. There was no argument with these followers of the Friar: they had the holy book as their authority, and that was that.

  Angelo was disturbed. He wanted to do battle but, without Lorenzo, felt too vulnerable for the task. Nonetheless he fought back from the podium at the university. In his introduction to the new academic year, he argued on behalf of the philosophers and poets, of whom, he said, he was neither. ‘I am merely a grammarian, a philologist, and therefore am not defending myself.’ These people, he said, who go about looking into other people’s business are like the witches in his grandmother’s folk tales, who wear their eyes when they are out and about but when at home remove them. ‘They see very well what is wrong with me while being blind to their own faults.’

  Philosophy is the wise contemplation of truth, and happy and blessed are the men who practise such contemplation. They behave according to the highest standards and do not pry into the lives of other men. Life is but an empty dream, he said, and all its pleasures transient. All that is immortal of us is our soul, which we must worship since God is our soul. ‘God is the mind of man, and mind orders the Universe.’

  He told the story of Plato’s cave to say that it was natural for those suddenly introduced to the true light beyond the cave to want to rush back into the dark. The course he was introducing was going to be on Aristotle, not the Aristotle of the schools or the Dominicans, the old, mistranslated, misunderstood Aristotle on which so much Christian dogma was founded, but the new Aristotle excavated from the texts by philologists such as Poliziano, Pico and Barbaro.

  His introduction was published by us in the Miscomini printing house.

  Lyons, August 25th, 1506

  We are staying at an inn seemingly full of lively girls, daughters of the inn-keeper. Our young pupils – Boerio’s sons – are fascinated by their company and are becoming unruly. While Clyfton averts his head whenever the girls are around, as if by not looking at them he will maintain his vows, Erasmus has assumed the manner of an old uncle and delights in their frivolity. He frequently mentions his age, as if being forty places him beyond desire. ‘There, my darling,’ he says, ‘there, my sweet,’ and chucks a pert little chin. The courier stands in the shadows, the light just catching his royal insignia, and watches the girls like a fox.

  I go out for a walk in the city of two rivers.

  And see the ghost again.

  It was him, as he was, twenty-four years old, tall, dark, slender. On foot this time, walking alone and dressed in black, he was making his way through the lane of shops over one of the bridges; intent on some business and not distracted by any of the goods on sale, he shouldered his way through the milling Lyonese. I did my best to catch up with him, expecting him to vanish before my eyes, but the closer I came, the more real and tangible he was. My faculty of reason grew hoarse in protest: this could not be Giuliano de’ Medici. But my soul, believing in miracles, hastened me on until I had only to reach out to touch him. His shoulder was robed in linen, and the flesh beneath it was warm. He stopped, turned. ‘You! Tommaso!’ His lovely eyes stared at me with that familiar expression. Simpatico. Yet I had seen him in a pool of his own blood, rent by twenty-nine thrusts of a dagger. But here he was, whole, resurrected, with no wound at all, and no addition of years.

  ‘Giuliano?’ Every fibre in me was shaking.

  ‘Giulio,’ he said with a smile. ‘His son.’

  ‘Oh! Forgive me. Oh! You have grown into his very image.’ The slender one, the prime digit always in company with the big ‘O’; one half of the number ten.

  He grasped me by the shoulders. ‘Tommaso de’ Maffei! God has answered our prayers. We thought you were dead. Come, come with me. Come and see Giovanni.’

  He took me back to the bishop’s palace, where he and his cousin are staying, telling me on the way that Cardinal Giovanni is the papal legate in France and, yes, they had been in Bruges ten days ago. I looked askance at his unostentatious dress. He smiled, reading my thoughts. ‘It’s better that men do not know who I am.’ In the matter of the war between France and Spain, Giulio de’ Medici is a spy for Rome.

  Cardinal Giovanni, too, has grown into a full adult, but in the image of whom I am not sure. Any family likeness is lost in the fat. He was as surprised as his cousin at what fate has put in their path by our chance encounter. We discussed the many things that have occurred since we last met. I asked about Piero since I had heard nothing of him since his failed attempts to retake Florence. The Cardinal told me that his brother, after a period of dissolution in Rome, had become what he had been born to be: a condottiere. ‘A soldier, not a banker,’ he said. ‘He died three years ago, fighting for France, but not in battle. He fell off his horse in a river and drowned.’ He appeared unmoved by his brother’s early death. In the fourteen years since Lorenzo died, Italy has become a carcass torn apart by contending wolves. While France and Spain battle for her possession, state wars with state, city with city, and even families are riven. The Medici brothers had been fighting on opposite sides.

  In the Battle of Ravenna, the Cardinal and Giulio had been captured and imprisoned but had escaped. Loathing the Borgia pope, they had kept away from Rome and spent their time wandering in Germany, but now they are finding in Pope Julius someone more favourable to them and have gained favour; at least, Cardinal Giovanni has. Giulio seems fated to be his shadow, prevented from office by his illegitimacy. And that is what has made them so excited to have found me.

  ‘Tell me,’ Giulio said, ‘what you know of my birth. Once my uncle Lorenzo told me that, if it had not been for you, I would have grown up in the foundling hospital. What did he mean?’

  Ah, the Mercurial mind, how swiftly it acts. Even before he had finished his question, I had my story in place. Truth? Of course I believe in it. Would I die for it? Obviously not. I could see their intentions and their need. For Giulio to advance in a career of his own, he needs to be legitimised, and he cannot gain it by the good will of Pope Julius alone: he needs proof, witnesses.

  So, knowing the truth as I do, the unequivocal truth of his illegitimacy, I bent the facts a little. I told them the story, and it took an hour or more, for I told them the story as fully as I could without taking all night. I went back to that day in Pisa, when we heard that the lady Simonetta was dying, telling them how Giuliano had argued ferociously with Lorenzo, demanding he be allowed to return to Florence, how I had aided his escape by making horses ready, how I had ridden with him through the night. ‘And then, when we stopped to rest and water the horses, we lay together under the stars, and your father confessed to me what no one, not even his own brother, knew, which was that he had married in secret and that his wife was expecting a child.’

  My breath shortened with this portentous moment as I faced that child, now a man.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Giulio asked. ‘Giuliano married in secret. Are you certain?’

  ‘In so far as I believed what he told me himself, yes. He had no reason to lie about such a thing.’

  ‘We have enemies in Rome and my illegitimacy is their main weapon against me. It keeps me from gaining any benefice and so I depend always on Giovanni. If you were to tell the Pope what you know, it would change my life and my fortunes. You would be very well rewarded. I promise you, Tommaso, very well rewarded.’

  Cardinal Giovanni’s protuberant eyes were staring at me. ‘We were always told that Giuliano was in love with Simonetta, a romantic story full of tears and sighs.’

  ‘It was a smoke screen. Giulio’s mother was of very humble birth and Lorenzo would not have countenanced your father’s choice of bride. I am not saying that Giuliano pretended to love Simonetta. He did love her, sincerely, but she of course was married and never meant to be obtainable. She was his lesson in love, arranged by the Platonists to cure him of a cold heart. What they did not know was that he did not have a cold heart. That was the preten
ce.’

  ‘The truth is better than the story,’ said Giulio. ‘But how did Lorenzo come to learn of me?’

  I told them then of my interview with Lorenzo, the night of the day that Giuliano was murdered, how I delivered this fatal blow to a man already half-dead from grief, that his brother had deceived him and was father of a new-born son. ‘There is a son, Lorenzo,’ I had said, and Lorenzo had cried out in a grief that was also hope, simultaneously felled and restored by this revelation.

  ‘He took you into the family the next day,’ I told Giulio.

  ‘And my mother?’

  I shook my head. ‘I do not know. I presume her family was paid handsomely to keep the secret, and the secret was kept.’

  Giulio sat back in relief and joy, but the Cardinal still leaned towards me.

  ‘Now what of you? How are you here, and in layman’s clothes?

  What became of you after San Marco was sacked?’

  Could I tell him, the papal legate? But as I stared at him, unable to speak, I did detect a family likeness. It was in his manner, the sound of his voice. A papal legate, perhaps, but this was the son, the trustworthy son of Lorenzo de’ Medici.

  ‘I ran away,’ I confessed to him. ‘I went to Venice and thence to England, teaching Greek.’

  The Cardinal’s eyes glowed appreciatively. He remains a disciple of learning. ‘But you are still a Dominican?’

  I blushed. ‘In the eyes of God and the Pope.’

  Cardinal Giovanni nodded briefly, rose and went away with his secretary to a private room. When he returned, it was with two letters sealed and impressed with his insignia and addressed to His Holiness Pope Julius the Second. He handed them to me to be delivered in person.

  I laughed in fright. ‘I cannot go to the Pope!’

  ‘The truth will set you free,’ said Cardinal Giovanni. ‘For the love you bore my uncle Giuliano, do this for his son, and it will set you free.’ He took hold of me. ‘You have done our family great service over the years.’