by Linda Proud
Girolamo Benivieni flinched at this. ‘All hymns?’
‘No, there are some mighty exceptions, the hymns of God singing to Himself, but I have not heard any in Florence – apart from yours, my friend. It all comes down to this: who do we believe we are, in essence? A ray of the Divine or a miserable sinner?’
The company murmured in approval.
‘I know the answer when I look on you,’ said Angelo.
‘I am your mirror,’ said Pico. ‘You are looking on yourself.’
Not since the death of Lorenzo had I seen Angelo this content. The moment was suspended in time, all thoughts of the French put aside. With his arm thrown across Pico’s shoulders, he announced his intention to tell us about pygmies.
‘From the sublime to the ridiculous!’ said Bernardo Dovizi.
‘On the contrary. If what Pico says is true, it applies to pygmies as much as to us.’ He told us at length about the little men of Africa, striving to instil in us his own wonder at the great, overwhelmingly great, diversity of God’s creation. He questioned Amerigo Vespucci about the discoveries of his friend, Cristoforo Columbo, and we heard about the islands far to the west and the naked people dressed only in paint who wear pieces of gold implanted in the nose. Angelo took notes, planning further chapters in his second Miscellanea. Although he was a fund of knowledge and, it seemed, could answer anything we asked of him, he himself was only too aware of his ignorance when every day new stories came in from ever more remote places. I stayed to the end, refreshed and stimulated by the evening. Finally, with my way illuminated by the harvest moon, high and huge over Florence, I departed for the monastery, unaware that this was the last time I was to see Angelo Poliziano.
Zenobio walked with me, limping painfully as he made his way on his crutch.
‘I hear they tried to get you to accuse the Pierfranceschi of conspiring in the downfall of Piero but you said nothing.’
Zenobio blew through his teeth. ‘I had nothing to say. I knew nothing of any conspiracy.’
‘Still, a lesser man would have said whatever they wanted him to say.’
‘I would not betray my own cousins.’
My heart expanded at his words. His was the voice of the old republic, virtuous and uncompromising.
‘So how did you feel,’ I asked, ‘when the Pierfranceschi went to join the French?’
‘Betrayed,’ he said grimly. He looked up at the monastery gates. ‘I admire your decision, Tommaso, and wish I could make it myself. But is it right to join an Order just because you have lost your faith in men?’
‘Go and speak to the Cardinal,’ I told him. ‘Tell him I sent you.’ Two months later, Zenobio took the habit and joined me in San
Marco as a librarista.
84
FEBRIS
1494
RAIN THAT HAD BEGUN IN THE NIGHT WAS BY MORNING teeming from a leaden sky, cascading down tiled roofs, crashing out of wooden gutters. I woke to the sound of the Matins bell, my head thudding with the effects of the deceptive, Medici wine of the night before. As I groped my way into the chapel, Pico ran in, dripping.
‘Angelo’s sick – taken ill during the night. A fever. We need the physician.’
Under the stern gaze of Fra Domenico, who was at the altar and staring at us disapprovingly, I told Pico where to find Antonio Benivieni, the house physician at San Marco. I had no concentration on my prayers that morning.
When I asked permission later to visit Poliziano, I was told he had been put under quarantine, besides which I was confined to the monastery for two weeks for my sin of staying out late.
‘Is it plague?’
‘We do not know yet.’
Over the following days, each time I asked permission it was refused. Brothers were visiting him, I was told, men more senior than I, more able to save a soul. Stories circulated, brought back by these visiting brothers, of how the great man held conversations out loud all night long, mostly with the dead. They listened avidly to his wanderings and decided he was locked in mortal combat with his conscience. I paced my cell in frustration.
I heard that when Piero de’ Medici visited his sickbed, Poliziano was muttering restlessly in his sleep but, when Piero woke him, he started in terror, drew his sheets over his head and whimpered. ‘He mistook Piero for the devil,’ I was told. But when Pico della Mirandola was with him, Poliziano’s eyes melted in wonder as he looked upon St Peter. Those were the stories we heard in the cloisters of San Marco. It was not plague, they said, it was fever of the brain. Nothing contagious.
For sure, poison is not contagious.
‘Poison?’ you ask. ‘First you would have me believe that Lorenzo was murdered; now Poliziano?’
Aye, and Barbaro. And in that month of September, the Medici chaplain, Matteo Franco, the musician, Baccio Ugolini and the painter, Domenico Ghirlandaio. The scythe of death came in advance of the French.
Savonarola had been giving a series of sermons on Genesis during Lent and Advent of each year, not the mystical scripture as expounded by Pico, but a terrifying one – the book in which God renovated the earth by destroying most of its creatures in a flood. Each sermon followed and built on the last: Savonarola was creating a mystical Ark for the Florentines, a raft of salvation. Lent – Advent – Lent – Advent: year by year the Florentines had been worked to a pitch of terror as Savonarola revealed Genesis not as a story of the past but a prediction of tomorrow. In September, 1494, neither Lent nor Advent, he gave a sermon on Genesis to announce imminent destruction at the very time when the French surrounded us. I stood in the Duomo on that day, chilled and terrified by the voice of God. For behold, I do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life; and every thing that is in the earth shall die.
‘Italy!’ Savonarola thundered, his voice carrying the length and height of the Duomo, echoing in chapels and cupolas: Italy – Italy – Italy.
People stared up at the cupola, scared that the dome would fall on them, its innovative, uncertain structure shattered by so much noise and the wrath of God.
‘Italy! ’ Savonarola cried again. Italy – Italy – Italy. ‘These adversities have come to you because of your sins, O Florence, these adversities have come to you because of your sins, O clergy, this tempest has arisen on your account. You will be destroyed, Italy. Rome will be destroyed. O nobles, O wise men, O humble folk, the mighty hand of God is upon you!’
These sermons had the power of the surgeon’s knife: by the greater pain one forgets the lesser. That is to say, when threatened with eternal damnation and the direst tortures of hell, the French seemed less frightening. It was perfectly clear that Savonarola welcomed the invasion. As the outward show of divine justice? I think not. I believe he saw a saviour in Charles VIII of a wholly political kind. The antichrist he warned us of was the pope, Rodrigo Borgia. Savonarola was encouraging King Charles to call a Grand Council to depose him.
These were the concerns of the Florentines as Poliziano lay dying. I prowled the walls of the monastery like a caged beast. Where was Maria? Who could I ask, who would tell me the truth and not some story for my edification? I sent out a note to Michelangelo, to ask him what was really happening, and to find out where Maria Poliziana was. In his reply he told me that Poliziano was bed-ridden, that he was incapable of performing any bodily function without help, that day and night he talked with ghosts, mostly Lorenzo. Maria was in constant attendance at his bedside and did for her brother what he could not do for himself.
I remembered what Pico said, about Angelo being humiliated to death. Whoever poisoned him during that supper with friends had chosen a tincture that worked slowly and ate away the dignity of a man. Who did it? I suspected Dovizi, at the behest of Piero de’ Medici. For what reason? Angelo had appointed himself as Piero’s counsellor, was counselling him with the good, sound sense of his father to make peace with th
e French, and Piero did not want anyone around reminding him of Lorenzo. Is that plausible? Not really. Who, then? The answer, the real answer, is too terrible for me to put into writing. Draw your own conclusions and tremble at them.
85
MARIA’S REQUEST
1494
THEY BROUGHT POLIZIANO INTO THE MONASTERY AND PUT him in a private room in the infirmary. I was still not allowed to see him.
‘He cannot be disturbed while he is making his peace with God,’ Fra Domenico told me. ‘Fra Girolamo is with him, preparing him to be received into our Order.’ He painted a picture of a man lying quietly in bed reflecting on his soul, and I knew it wasn’t true. If Angelo was quiet it was because he was unconscious.
Pico met me in the cloisters, ashen and distraught. ‘Any news?’
‘Not that I have heard.’
‘It can only be days if not hours. He was barely alive when they took him.’
‘Sometimes I think I will go and break down that door and knock out any friar who stands in my way. In truth, I am scared of what I will find. But I should be with him.’
‘He never found your company easy since you took the habit.’
I should have told Angelo why I had done it, but Cardinal Giovanni had sworn me to absolute secrecy: ‘Tell no one, not even Poliziano, why you are joining the Order.’ But I should have broken that. This was an unclean parting, tainted with guilt and separation. ‘He was so good to me,’ I began, haltingly. ‘But all I ever did was repay him with lack of loyalty. And he so loyal himself…’
‘Don’t lose your own dignity,’ Pico said sharply, handing me a parcel. ‘Maria asked me to give you this and said you were to let no one see you open it.’
‘What is it?’
‘You will see soon enough, and understand.’
‘How is she?’
Here Pico stared at me as at one who had abrogated his duty. ‘Why did you come in here?’
‘Surely you, above all men, would approve of my decision.’
‘How little you know.’
I went to my cell and opened the parcel to discover within Angelo’s finest suit of clothes, an apple-green jacket, blue hose, a fine linen shirt embroidered by Maria herself, a woollen over-gown in the dark red of a scholar. Burying my face in them, I heard the crackle of a letter.
Tommaso mio, believe nothing you are told. They have taken him not against his will because he has no will left, but had he been conscious he would have refused. Angelo has expressed no desire to take the habit in his final hours, nor to be buried in San Marco monastery. I was not strong enough alone to resist them. Tommaso, if you can, dress his body to make him fit to meet his King as he would wish. God alone knows the purity of his heart. How often did Angelo say a white habit will not get you to heaven? If they will use his death to propagate the faith, so be it, there is nothing that can be done, but dress him as he would be dressed. Your Maria.
Even as I was reading the letter, the chapel bell began to toll and I fell, crumpled to my knees, hugging the clothes of the one who had gone. In the refectory we were told how Angelo Poliziano, Fra Angelo Poliziano, had been received into the Order at his request in his final hour, having confessed his sins and renounced poetry, so that he might die as he should have lived, at one with God. If they will use his death to propagate the faith, so be it, there is nothing that can be done, but dress him as he would be dressed.
That night, I crept from my cell to the mortuary. The coffin was due to be interred in the wall of the secular cloister on the morrow but its lid had not yet been nailed down. As I lifted it, I tried to steel my nerves by thinking of what Michaelangelo did at nights, not only unshrouding the dead, but cutting them open. My work was easy in comparison. I was able to remove the shroud and the habit, even though the body was heavy and unco-operative. This was an intimacy I wished with no one alive, let alone dead! But for the sake of Maria and of Angelo I did the work and dressed him in his finest clothes, and laid him back in the coffin. Then I reached in and kissed him. ‘May God take and keep you, and if He loves you half as much as I do, you are destined for the highest heaven.’ I laid his hands one on top of the other on his chest and replaced the crucifix. Looking down for the last time on the Professor of Greek and Latin, dressed in his best, I recovered him with the shroud and slid the lid of the coffin back into place.
In the morning, the coffin was interred. In the afternoon, I threw a parcel containing a Dominican habit on a bonfire that had been lit in the kitchen garden.
‘What is that?’ the brother in charge asked.
‘A vanity,’ I said.
86
SAVING THE BOOKS
1494
IN ITALY WE STAGED WARS LIKE PAGEANTS. SMALL ARMIES in resplendent colours under private captains, hired by cities and states, would move out to present themselves to each other. Sometimes there was fighting, of course. It was theatre, after all, and not unusual for people to go and watch these spectacles from surrounding hillsides. Now we heard that the French – forty thousand men under one commander – had taken Fivizzano; ‘taken’ not in the usual way of paying gatekeepers to open the gates; no, ‘taken’ by smashing down the walls of that stronghold with their cannon and slaughtering the entire garrison. They were worse than the Turks!
Piero de’ Medici was riding from fortress to fortress in a defence of the borders seen as heroic by some, vain by others. The days passed and the oppressive, stifling fear of the French created a deadly inertia. News of atrocities reached us in advance of the army and with each new tale of massacre, rape and burnings, we became more rabbit-like, frozen and incapable of action. But there was movement of a kind in the city. Underground snakings of the currents of power. Shiftings. Realignments. New deals made behind closed doors, favours granted, promises made. Savonarola might be saying that it was God bringing this scourge, but most blamed Piero and his stupid alliance with Naples. To be rid of the French, we needed to be rid of the Medici.
Pico had stopped visiting the monastery. In desperation I sent letters to Maria. Each was returned with the message that the recipient could not be located. There was a rumour that she was living alone in her brother’s villa on Fiesole; another that she had become the concubine of Pico della Mirandola. Letters to both addresses failed to be delivered. Since the massive army of the French was now at our borders, everyone was distracted and it was impossible to know whether the couriers could be trusted or were merely sitting on the letters for a few days before giving them back and keeping the fee.
I went to Fra Girolamo and told him that there were thirty books out on loan to Poliziano which had not been returned at his death and that they were at the villa on Fiesole. Would he permit me to go there and retrieve them? Permission was granted, although Savonarola looked as if he were not quite sure if he could trust me. He instructed me firmly to be back in the monastery by Vespers.
The villa slumbered like a cat curled up in a patch of autumn sunlight. The lemon trees bore green fruit and from the woods came the call of hunters out to catch the wild boar. Wood smoke curled in the still air. As I unlocked the door, it seemed possible that I should find Angelo and his sister within, reading at their desks, but the place was empty, the acrid hearth cold.
Angelo’s desk was as he had left it, clear and tidy. He never owned many books but always borrowed them and several piled on the shelves were from the private library of Lorenzo. I packed them in chests, uncertain whether to send everything to the Palazzo de’ Medici or to San Marco. I needed instruction from Cardinal Giovanni before I did anything. What I was clear about was my own possessions which filled a small chest: my copy of Plato’s Dialogues, my journals, two bronze medals – one of Giuliano de’ Medici, the other of Poliziano and his sister – Elena’s betrothal ring, her Book of Hours, a comb, a drawing of her made by Filippino Lippi, some lacework of Maria. At the bottom of the chest I found a piece of blackened silver,
the talisman I had forged under a malignant sky. Would history have been different had I destroyed it, as Ficino told me to? I thought not. At the same time, I knew that my melancholy was somehow locked into this ore of disobed- ience. Resolving this time to have it melted down, and to give the proceeds to the poor, I took the chest and strapped it to my saddle. I arranged with Matteo, the chief contadino of the estate, for it to be delivered to the city when he received my advice. I asked him if he had seen anything of Maria, and he shook his head miserably.
‘My wife says that she’s been seen in the village, but it’s just a rumour. The Poliziani have gone.’ Now tears came into his eyes. ‘And the French are coming…’ He looked down the terraces, restored in the last few years, the vines recently picked and pruned, the regenerated olives bearing fruit. His tears spilled, tears for his lost master, tears for his wasted efforts. ‘The master’s sister,’ he gulped. ‘I don’t know where she is.’
I went up to Pico’s villa but found it closed. A servant told me that Pico was in his city house. And Maria Poliziana? The servant shrugged, as if he had never heard of her. I went about Fiesole asking my question and heard that Maria was dead, that she had gone into a convent, that she lived wild in the woods, but no one had seen her. I had spent too long making my enquiries and had to hurry back to the city. As I came to the monastery, the Vespers bell began to sound. I would collect the books and papers from the casino another day – it was so close that I could slip out any time. Meanwhile I must contact the Cardinal.
The following morning news arrived that Piero had abandoned his attempt to defend Florence, had gone to the French camp and thrown himself at the feet of the King.
‘We’ve surrendered!’ went the cry round the city. Those of us old enough to remember how Lorenzo had saved Florence by surrendering to the King of Naples realised that, in desperation, Piero was copying his father, but it was a botched attempt. He had given up all our fortresses, our seaport of Pisa, and a considerable fortune in gold coin. But what exercised everyone was that Piero was only a citizen, one of many, and had acted without the authority of the Signoria. Hastily the government sent out an official deputation to parley with the King, this one including Savonarola.