The Rebirth of Venus

by Linda Proud

  Now it was my turn to stare at him, uncomprehending. ‘Consider his mind, how vigorous it is, shrewd, perspicacious, prudent, grave, strong…’

  ‘Feeble and misguided in my opinion, if he thinks Florence can resist the French.’

  ‘You don’t know him. He is utterly determined to maintain our liberty.’

  ‘When a big wave comes, it is better to let it wash over you.’

  Poliziano rubbed his face, tired of trying to convince himself, let alone others, of Piero’s virtues. ‘I am growing old. All I want is a quiet life in which to pursue my studies and to write. Piero can give me that.’

  ‘Old? – you are usually the first to deny it.’

  ‘In one month I shall be forty. Lorenzo was dead at forty-two.’

  ‘But he did not die of old age.’

  There was a flicker on Angelo’s face as I said this.

  ‘You are hiding something,’ I accused him. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Tommaso, I promise you, if I were to be open and speak the truth I would be dead before I was forty.’ What truth? ‘We are alone, Angelo. Speak.’

  ‘And burden you with knowledge? Be blissful in your ignorance, Tommaso.’

  ‘It was Piero, wasn’t it?’ I whispered.

  Angelo flinched, alarmed, then recovered. ‘What, kill his father?’ He laughed then.

  ‘Patricide. It is not without precedent.’

  ‘You idiot! You could not be further from the truth. Listen!’ he shouted, suddenly thumping the desk with his fist. ‘The French are on their way to the Alps. Do you understand? Forty thousand men-at-arms with a weapon that can do in hours what takes our bombards weeks. Great slaughter is on its way. Do you know what this young King of France does? When he comes to a small town close to a city he sacks it with such malevolence that the city itself surrenders without a struggle. They know how to fight wars in the north.

  ‘For all our talk in religion and philosophy, there is only one belief I hold, which is that I am going to die; that there will come a moment when I shall cease to be. It fills me with more terror than any thought of a tyrant, real or imaginary. What am I doing? I shall tell you.’ His voice was booming. He was telling everyone in the city. ‘I am trying to survive! I am trying to protect my family! Have you no idea of how precarious the times are?’ He gazed scornfully at my expression of offence for a moment then subsided. ‘Listen, I agree that Piero is a cracked pot. The crack did not show while the pot was empty but now, now that he is filled with power, it is becoming all too visible. The trouble is, it is a pot of my own making.’

  ‘And a very beautiful pot it would have been,’ I replied, ‘had you not used inferior clay.’

  ‘Even so, he is mine and I cannot abandon him.’

  And then I understood. Poliziano was being, as ever, loyal, even when his own reason began to object. Born under the sign of the Crab, Angelo Poliziano held faster in loyalty than any man I have known. I trust God rewards such virtue.

  ‘How is Maria?’ I asked, the moment seeming right.

  ‘I cannot tell you, Tommaso, how disappointed I am in you. When I heard about your decision, it came as a double slap, one, that you had made such a decision, the other that you had not told me about it yourself, or even discussed it. Maria? She won’t hear your name mentioned. She says you’re a hypocrite who has deceived us all.’

  I swallowed hard, longing to tell him the truth. ‘I trust that, by the grace of God, she will forgive me one day. So, where is she staying?’

  ‘With Cammilla and the boys, who I’m sending back to Montepulciano. I haven’t yet made arrangements for Maria.’

  ‘What arrangements?’

  ‘She cannot stay with me any more. The thirst for law and righteousness that now afflicts this city will not allow it. No, she must either return home to Montepulciano or go into a convent, but I cannot decide which.’

  Images rose up, of Maria happy in her brother’s house, in her garden, in whatever company she found herself, whether it be witches or scholars. I realised then that I had killed her.

  ‘Perhaps Pico…’ I began hoarsely.

  ‘Is that not your bell calling you to prayer? Time to lope back to your kennel, you hound of God.’

  The rough wool of my habit itched as it had never itched before.

  ‘We need those books back in a month,’ I said feebly.

  ‘Phfff,’ said Angelo Poliziano.

  83

  POETRY COMES FROM GOD

  1494

  IN THE MONASTERY WE HEARD THE NEWS ON THE SEVENTH, that the French had crossed the Alps. But it was on the eighth day of September, 1494, that all the bells of Florence began to toll, calling people to the churches to hear the news. In San Marco we hurried to our places in the choir stalls, ready to receive the frightened people pouring in through the doors, to still their hearts and minds with our prayers.

  A week later, even as the hordes of Charles VIII set up camp near Milan, we heard of the death of its duke, Gian Galeazzo. Rumour tried to persuade us that he had died of an excess of coitus; many in Italy may have believed that; we in Florence did not. What convenient timing for the death of the nephew who stood between Ludovico Sforza and his ambitions! As soon as he had assumed the title of Duke of Milan, Sforza began to encourage the French either to move on or to go home. He had, it seemed, fulfilled his intention of having invited them in the first place. After some hesitation, the French moved on.

  As the great army approached the Appenines, Piero de’ Medici rode out to arrange the defences of the fortresses on our Tuscan borders, and Lorenzo and Giovanni di Pierfrancesco escaped from house arrest and went to join the King.

  My own response to the coming tide of invasion was to think only of the library. I was out in the city, visiting everyone who had books on loan, trying to get them back. I went to Lorenzo’s garden to retrieve from Angelo the books on Africa, now two months overdue. Outside, by the gate, I came across what I took to be a pile of rubbish but then I saw a claw-like hand protruding from the carapace of oily rags: a beggar on his knees, his forehead on the ground. The palm was held upwards in a silent plea – plea or demand – for alms. I stooped and lifted the rags and found it to be a woman. She looked up at me with a radiant smile on her battered face. A clump of whiskers sprouting from her chin curled upwards in a beard.

  ‘Give,’ she said. ‘Give.’

  ‘Come, mother, let me take you to the hospice where we can find food.’

  ‘I don’t want food. I want you.’ And then she laughed and ran her hand up my leg. I jumped back and kicked out simultaneously, sending the heap of rags rolling.

  Being a Christian is the most difficult thing I have ever attempted. I was not in a good mood when I went to see Poliziano.

  ‘We need our books back.’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Today. Now.’

  ‘What is the matter with you?’

  ‘Perhaps you have not heard it here in your hermitage but the French army is on its way across the mountains.’

  ‘Yes, of course I have heard that.’ Urged on by Piero de’ Medici, Angelo had spent the summer collecting and collating his letters. He was now tapping the papers into a neat stack held between boards and tying it with ribbon. ‘Would you have time, amidst all your sacred duties, to read through these and check for any mistakes?’

  ‘No, I would not.’

  He peered at me. ‘Why is it that the more ardent a man grows in his religion, the frostier he becomes with his friends?’

  I shuddered suddenly, reached inside my habit and scratched my back.

  ‘It is itchy, isn’t it?’

  ‘Only when I am with you.’

  ‘Tommaso, sit down. I need to speak to you. No more sparring.’

  I brought a chair and sat beside him at his desk, fixed to which was a neat page of his writing with
a wide margin he had left to make it easy to write additions or corrections later. This was a page going straight to the printer – no scribe required as an intermediary. It was headed ‘On Recognising and Defeating the Antichrist’.

  ‘If Savonarola is to be believed,’ he said, ‘Death is pounding towards us. I am trying to get everything finished before she arrives. I have a favour to ask of you. I wish you to be my literary executor.’

  ‘Of course, I’d be honoured, provided I do not die with you.’ The pressure of the French on the mind was making any thought of the future seem vain.

  ‘I need these books a few days longer, until I’ve completed what I’m writing on pygmies.’

  ‘Pygmies? Angelo, these may be our final hours. If you must write, write about God, not pygmies. Or better still, come with me to San Marco.’

  ‘Should God spare my life I mean to devote myself entirely to philosophy.’

  ‘How many times have you said that?’

  ‘As soon as I’ve completed my new Miscellanea – and I only have forty-four chapters to go –’

  ‘Do it now. Then you could have at least forty-four chapters with something interesting to say.’

  ‘Pygmies are interesting. Can you imagine what they are like, those diminutive men living in African forests? Even as we speak, there they are, a world away, sharpening their arrows, ignorant of theology, and certainly not worried about where the French are. Isn’t that interesting? According to Ovid, they were made dwarfish by Juno, angry that they prayed to other goddesses. Now that is interesting.’

  ‘It is trivial!’

  ‘If you were less on your knees and more often at your philosophical studies, you would know by now that God is in all things.’

  ‘Of course I know that.’

  ‘Only in theory. I know it in pygmies.’

  He told me that he had invited friends to dine with him that evening and asked me to join them. I said I would be retiring early to my hard bed.

  ‘Do you not want to come?’

  ‘Of course I do, you evil tempter.’

  ‘Then ask permission of the Frate. Tell him, tell him the Platonic Academy is meeting here and you have been invited. I’ll wager he’ll allow you to come.’

  And so it was. ‘You may go,’ said my spiritual father. ‘Tell me everything that is discussed.’ He stipulated one thing, that I be accompanied by another friar, and the one he chose was Fra Roberto.

  Angelo’s guests that evening included Pico della Mirandola, Bernardo Dovizi, Michelangelo, Amerigo Vespucci, Girolamo Benivieni and other poets. We dined outside. It was a honeyed September night and a table had been set in the loggia. Moths with wings like dead leaves clung to the back wall and soporific hornets fell into lamps. Out in the garden, where an owl hooted in a tall chestnut, a lone firefly winked amongst the shrubs in forlorn hope of finding love. It was a night to breathe in and hold in the heart; a night when it was impossible to believe in imminent destruction.

  One guest, arriving late, plunged us into an embarrassed silence. Zenobio Acciaiuoli limped in on a crutch, trying to be inconspicuous, trying to put his old life back together, seamlessly. On the release of the Pierfranceschi, he had been left behind in prison. He winced as he sat down and rubbed his knee.

  ‘Salve, Tommaso,’ he said, sitting beside me. ‘Oh, Zenobio, what did they do to you?’

  Angelo, staunch supporter of Piero de’ Medici, looked on Zenobio with eyes that commanded his silence. Bernardo Dovizi, who was Cardinal Giovanni’s secretary, shifted in his chair. To change the subject, Angelo asked Zenobio if he had written any poetry in prison.

  Zenobio stared at him as if he were mad. ‘No, I did not.’

  ‘I have written a hymn,’ said Girolamo Benivieni quickly.

  ‘Then sing it for us if you would.’

  Benivieni complied, came to his feet and sang his hymn. Savonarola was encouraging poets to use their talent in service to God, and it was resulting in a fine crop of new hymns for the laity. I thought this was a good example, but Angelo listened with a deepening grimace. ‘Is it true that you have burnt your earlier work?’ he asked once Benivieni had finished.

  ‘That which is unworthy.’

  ‘All those lovely lyrics?’

  ‘As I watched them turn to ash, a burden lifted from my soul.’ Benivieni looked at Poliziano uncertainly, knowing full well what that expression on the professor’s face meant.

  ‘What kind of burden?’

  ‘The burden of pride, of competitiveness,’ Benivieni replied, borrowing words from Savonarola and trying to draw strength from them. ‘Have I ever written a poem and not wondered what it would bring me by way of recognition? Surrender of worldly ambition, Maestro, is the greatest relief to the soul.’

  Zenobio followed the discussion closely. ‘Do you have no regrets?’ he asked.

  ‘About burning them? No, none,’ said Benivieni.

  ‘Well, I regret it,’ said Angelo. ‘A strange thing happens when a man burns his work: he loses his talent.’

  A frisson of shock went through the company and all eyes turned to Benivieni. Pico leapt to his defence but Poliziano weathered the storm he had created and continued to gaze at Benivieni. ‘Don’t sit there sucking lemons, man,’ he said. ‘Get angry.’

  ‘I have transcended the passions,’ said Benivieni.

  ‘Oh, have you? Then you have transcended humanity. Poetry,’ said Poliziano, addressing us all, ‘comes from a man’s soul: we call it the Muse, though it is no external power but an inward one. To hear the Muse you must still the mind, and when she speaks you write down her words faithfully, even if it is as hard as recalling a dream. Everyone here knows what I am talking about. When you give that up with some lofty intention to write in praise of God, what happens? The Muse is silent. Why? Because you are forbidding her to speak.’

  ‘The rational part of the mind does sit in judgement over the imagination,’ agreed Pico.

  ‘Precisely. And what takes the place of the voice of the soul? The words of the mind. These hymns are the product not of inspiration but of thought. That is why they sound dead.’

  ‘Ridiculous!’ Girolamo Benivieni protested. ‘Dead? They are full of my love of God.’

  ‘Sentiment, Girolamo, mere sentiment dressed up as devotion.’

  ‘Savonarola says it is the poet’s duty to write holy things.’

  ‘I say it is our duty to write as inspired. It is not the function of the poet to be a priest. He must stay true to his Muse and no other.’

  ‘The Muse is a bawd,’ Benivieni retorted. ‘A wanton. She encourages men in licentiousness.’

  ‘Sometimes that is true. But it is the function of poetry to civilise men, and a civilised man is one who may discipline his own mind and measure his own passions. He is a free man. Poetry is the mother, theology the father: they have different roles. The mother is not so fierce: she allows for passion, she allows her child to err, but always under her watchful gaze. It is for the father to lay down the rules.’

  ‘Dionysus and Apollo,’ said Pico, ‘the two gods who men see as opposed to one another, the god of wine and the god of reason. In fact there is good evidence to show that these are two names for one god, that Dionysus and Apollo were the same: the complete man.’ Pico was championing Angelo’s point of view, and Angelo gazed on him fondly. Although Pico went so often to San Marco, and had tempered his life accordingly, his intellect was still his own.

  ‘Savonarola says…’ Benivieni began.

  ‘I had a private audience with the Frate myself yesterday,’ Angelo interjected.

  I glanced up at him, surprised.

  ‘I tried with all my wit and all my skill to temper his opinion with regard to poetry. I tried everything. I have never argued so well.’

  ‘Did it work?’ Pico asked, the rising moon shining in his face and silver
ing his hair.

  ‘He listened to me patiently and, at the end, he smiled and said, “Angelo Poliziano, take the habit. We need you in San Marco.”’ Angelo sat back and laughed uproariously. ‘Can you imagine me dressed like a magpie? No offence, Fra Tommaso, Fra Roberto.’

  As the night advanced, the company grew more animated. Wit and eloquence danced with the spindly, fragile craneflies. Bernardo Dovizi was an intellectual jester; our laughter at his obscene jokes, fuelled by the new wine he had brought from the Medici estate at Careggi, was so loud I wondered if it could be heard at San Marco.

  Fra Roberto leant over and put his mouth to my ear. ‘We should go back.’

  Michelangelo had just been invited to recite some of his poetry. I shook my head. ‘You go. I will follow shortly.’

  ‘Brother…’

  ‘Shortly, Fra Roberto, I promise.’

  I watched him leave, wanting to follow him in his simplicity and single-mindedness, but I did not know how long it would be before once again I could enjoy this kind of company. I settled back to listen to Michelangelo. He was a centaur, half stonemason, half poet, and his verses rang with that sound of the Muse that Angelo had been speaking of. Were they better than Benivieni’s hymns? Yes, incomparably so, and I was in full agreement with Poliziano, but I wished he had not humiliated Benivieni who did not deserve it. It was – it is – a mystery, that secular verses can be more divine than holy ones. I sat with my chin in my hands, reflecting on it.

  ‘Tommaso?’ Angelo asked. ‘What are you puzzling over?’

  ‘Why are holy hymns sentimental at best, dead at worst?’

  ‘Poetry comes from God, yes?’

  ‘So you say.’

  ‘Believe me, it is true. The best poets are those that interfere least with the song of the soul. Every creative act springs from the Creator. It has to. But those who write or sing in devotion have an image in mind that they are devoted to, and it is not their own creative source. Therefore their words are, as it were, man-made.’

  ‘Man-made,’ Pico reiterated, ‘and stemming from the idea of unworthiness. Hymns are the poetry of men who believe themselves to be worms.’