The Rebirth of Venus

by Linda Proud

  ‘Tommaso!’ I heard my name hissed from the shadows of the cloisters. Michelangelo was concealed in a doorway. ‘Come here.’

  ‘Have you heard the news?’ I asked him.

  ‘If you were deaf, dumb and blind you would have heard the news today. It isn’t true, what they are saying about Piero. Yes, he abased himself and lost his dignity, lying prone in front of that midget king and being mocked by the French, but he has bought the peace of Florence. We’re saved!’

  ‘But a second deputation has gone out. Savonarola has just left.’

  ‘For what reason? It’s not necessary. We’re saved and Piero is returning in triumph.’

  ‘He’s returning to his doom. The city will lynch him. Michelangelo, I need to speak to the Cardinal urgently. We need to get Angelo’s books from the villa, and from the casino.’

  ‘That’s what I came to tell you. The casino’s been looted.’

  My knees went weak and I had to lean against the cloister wall.

  ‘What is missing?’

  ‘Everything of value – all books and papers.’

  My knees gave way and I had to sit down. It was as if Angelo had just died again. Poliziano, the greatest scholar of our age, had just been erased from history. ‘Who did it?’

  Michelangelo shrugged. ‘Could have been anybody. The city’s in such a flux. By tonight, the Medici will be gone. I’m leaving for Bologna. Come with me.’

  ‘How can I?’ I wailed. ‘I’m not leaving now. This is the hour of my duty!’

  I went back to the library. Trembling, I looked at the books, the Medici books, and was dismayed. I cared not who ruled Florence, so long as the books were safe. I had failed Angelo – the thought made me want to vomit – but I must not fail the Medici. I arranged for a train of mules to go at once to Fiesole and bring the chests back to San Marco. Having done so, I sat at my desk with my head in my hands, trying to recall everything that had been at the casino: the letters in manuscript, the second Miscellanea, piles of notebooks, his revised account of the Pazzi conspiracy. Hotze la’or – I realised now what that mysterious spill of cards had been telling me: not that I should become a printer, but that the works on Angelo’s desk that day, works that had fallen to the floor with the cards, should be published. And then I sat up as if jerked by strings, knowing who the culprits were. Yes, it could have been simple thieves, or even literary opportunists, but I felt certain that the Pazzi family wanted that document which condemned them for posterity. But there were copies. I began to make lists, lists of works, lists of friends, of Poliziano’s students and correspondents, anyone who might have a copy of anything. Orpheus had been dismembered: I would put him back together again. Hotze la’or. It was the least I could do.

  What had been irreplaceably lost were the thirty books on loan from San Marco. What kind of librarian was I? If, instead of being duplicitous with Savonarola, I had gone to retrieve the books the previous day, I’d have gone to the casino, not to Fiesole, and retrieved everything. I went to the chapel to find a confessor and somehow make my peace with God. And Angelo.

  In the refectory that evening, an evening filled with the sound of tolling bells, we were told that, when Savonarola had entered the King’s tent, Charles VIII had fallen to his knees before this man of God and promised, as Savonarola requested, to enter the city and then pass on without doing any damage. About the same time we heard the fanfares of Piero’s return, his procession from the Porto San Gallo along the Via Larga to his house.

  The following morning I was in the library and making my lists with the help of Zenobio when there came a very fat Franciscan friar. We gazed uncomprehending at this apparition, who was whispering urgently about the danger of the hour. He pulled his cowl back sufficiently for us to see his bulbous eyes

  I gasped with relief and told the Cardinal that the Medici books I had found at Angelo’s villa were on their way to the monastery. ‘You were right not to send them to the palazzo,’ he assured me. ‘My brother is not being received well in the city. They are barring his entry to the Palazzo della Signoria. It is time to act. There are about a hundred books in the palazzo. We need to get them out and bring them here.’ The Company of the Library was being called to action.

  He reassured us that he had Savonarola’s permission and blessing: he was only in disguise because of the job to be done. When we went down the Via Larga with a small mule train, there were few people about, for everyone was gathering in the centre of the city, forming into a mob to jeer at Piero. We gained entry into the palazzo easily, loaded the mules with chests and took them back to San Marco. Three times we made this journey, but matters were developing around the Palazzo della Signoria and the people were arming themselves. By the time we made the fourth journey, the Via Larga was filling with a hostile mob shouting for the Medici to go. We reached the palazzo through various secret doors and corridors in adjoining houses.

  On our fifth and last trip, we found that Piero had returned and was arming himself. ‘What are you doing?’ he shouted at his brother.

  ‘Saving the books.’

  ‘Try saving yourself! God help us. Books? Get yourself into armour, Giovanni.’

  Zenobio and I left by secret doors, sick at heart at what we were leaving behind. Zenobio returned to the monastery but I remained in the Via Larga to do my Dominican duty and call on the people to be peaceful. Someone punched me in the face and I fell back into a doorway on the far side of the street. The mob battered on the gates, screaming for the Medici to come out. At last the gates opened to an impressively martial party – all the young men of the family in full armour and mounted. While the crowd drew back, cowed, the Cardinal rode out waving his sword and rode hard towards the cathedral, shouting palle! palle! – the old familiar cry to rally the people. But no one responded other than to pelt him and scream abuse.

  Piero and the rest followed him out, but they turned left and galloped up the Via Larga towards the Porto San Gallo, towards Bologna and exile. I remained where I was and watched. I saw the mob burst in, saw through upper windows how they ran through the house, watched them come out, staggering under the weight of statues, heavy tables, tapestries. I saw one man holding aloft a trophy: an agate vase inscribed LAUR.MED. I saw others waving books in the air. The guard of the Signoria soon arrived and enforced order: after that, the State confiscated all Medici property. The following day, Cardinal Giovanni escaped the city and followed his brother into exile.

  87

  THE DEATH OF THE KISS

  1494

  THERE WERE A LOT OF BOOKS IN THOSE MEDICI CHESTS, all needing to be inventoried, a task which took me about six weeks. In those weeks the French surged into the city, teeming in our streets and filling our squares. I was in urgent communication with all friends, students and correspondents of Angelo, feverishly trying to put dismembered Orpheus back together again. Books began to arrive, lecture notes, copies of letters. Pico, who I knew would have a great quantity of material, did not reply to my messages. I sent to Matteo to have the chests delivered from Angelo’s villa but they never arrived.

  I asked to return to Fiesole, saying that the villa had to be protected against French looters. Permission was again granted. In the monastery the ‘invasion’ of the French made no impact, but it was different in the streets. Florence was having to accommodate forty thousand men. Most were in camp outside the walls, but they spent their days in our taverns and brothels. The King had taken up residence in the Palazzo de’ Medici and was stripping it of anything the State had left behind for his comfort. His soldiers, meanwhile, helped themselves to anything they fancied in the city. Out in the piazza San Marco, I stood blinking at what seemed to be a swarming square in Paris. French, not Tuscan, was the language of Florence now, and the Florentines practised saying Oui! and Merci! to the occupiers, and receiving a blow to the head for their troubles.

  I went hastily to the Porto San Gallo – t
he Medici gate which Lorenzo and his forefathers had developed and protected against the day when the family had to leave quickly. That day had now passed. I’d heard that Piero was now in Venice.

  I was half way up the hill of Fiesole when I saw the smoke coiling up from the Medici villa and, behind it, on the left shoulder of the hill and within trees, another, smaller plume of smoke. I did not go too close to the Villa Bruscoli but took on the guise of a Dominican passing by on his way to Fontalucente, a curious Dominican who stopped to stare for a moment. Our home was ablaze, and the men silhouetted in the fire’s light were not French. They were Italian. Nor were they contadini enjoying the destruction of the master’s property. Although I could not recognise them, I could see that they were young men of good families, firing the villa for what reason I could not tell, whether anger or mere entertainment. Angelo’s books – had they stolen them or merely destroyed them? Was it my fate to be so ineffectual in the face of Poliziano’s annihilation?

  From Fontalucente I went up the lane to Pico’s villa. I had not seen Pico for weeks. He came very rarely these days to San Marco, and then only to have private conversation with Savonarola. At the gate I was told that the master was at home but very sick and seeing no one.

  ‘Savonarola has sent me to comfort him,’ I lied.

  The servant admitted me, muttering something about a stream of friars. Sure enough, within Pico’s chamber I found several of my brethren saying prayers. I suppose they must have glanced at me, surprised, but I did not care. I would take the consequences later. For what concerned me now was the man in the bed and the woman at the bedside.

  ‘Tommaso,’ Maria grasped my hand. ‘Thank God you have come.’

  Candles flickered in the chill draughts. Pico lay on his pillows, his eyes moving behind closed lids, his face pallid and damp, tendrils of his hair stuck to his brow.

  ‘What ails him?’

  ‘A fever,’ said Maria cautiously. ‘The same kind that took Angelo.’

  I glanced around the room to see who it was she did not trust. Apart from the friars, Pico’s secretary was there, his nephew, Alberto Pio, and two physicians from the court of King Charles.

  Seeing my surprise, Maria explained that His Majesty had sent them as soon as he had heard of Pico’s distress. ‘He values him very highly as a man of wisdom.’

  Pico’s eyes opened and slowly filled with a conscious light, a calm radiance as if he looked on that which he had sought his life long, as if what he had intended to seek as a pilgrim he now found right here at home. We held our breath, not wanting to disturb this silent communion, but he became aware of us, turned his gaze on us, now on Maria, now on me, and the light in his eye did not change. I felt then as if I were dying too, as if everything in me gross and material was falling away: held in that deep gaze, I knew my own divinity, the essence of God within all men.

  The moment was broken by a new rush of delirium in him. Maria wiped away runnels of sweat, whispering words of comfort, but as she moved, she glanced at me, and I knew that she too had been momentarily elevated from this world of shadows to divine reality. She smiled, acknowledging our mutual understanding. How quickly the mundane sweeps back in. A blink of an eye, a swift smile exchanged and then we returned to anxiety, to ineptitude, to vomit and sweat. Pico cried out in agony.

  ‘Hush, hush, my lord,’ said Maria.

  When he was quiet again and sleeping we went outside to look down on the smoke still rising from the Villa Bruscoli. Maria began to sob. I took her in my arms and held her tightly.

  ‘It is not the French,’ I said. ‘They are Florentines. Looting or just destroying. I left Angelo’s books there in chests. Maria – the casino was looted. Everything of his has gone.’ I sank to my knees, overcome by failure.

  ‘We have them here,’ she said, ‘the chests. The family came last week and took away anything moveable. I got there before them. I wasn’t going to let those philistines have his books. But our home… Oh, Tommaso!’ A welter of grief took her and I came to my feet quickly to embrace her again. Together we stood looking down through our tears on the valley of the Arno filled with the tents and pavilions, the fluttering French pennants bearing the fleur-de-lis.

  ‘It’s the time of the lilies,’ she whispered.

  ‘Who has poisoned Pico?’ I asked.

  Maria did not know. ‘He drank the first pressing of the olives and went straight into spasm,’ she said. ‘Someone wants them all dead, all Lorenzo’s friends. The light is being snuffed out.’

  She showed me something Pico had given her, a medal. On one side it had his emblem of the Three Graces; on the obverse, a portrait of Maria herself, the same sweet profile that was on Poliziano’s own medal. Pico had made a trinity of himself and the Poliziani. Her hand trembled as she held it.

  ‘When did he have this made? How long has he had it?’

  ‘He says years, that he has always kept it close to his heart.’ Stung by jealousy for a dying man, I could hardly look at it. ‘Where have you been staying?’ I asked her.

  ‘What do you care?’

  ‘Maria, please, believe me, my love for you is more than an image in bronze.’

  ‘Yes, you can say that now, can’t you, now that you are in that.’ She jabbed at my habit. ‘You deserted us, Tommaso. I cannot forgive you.’

  ‘Where have you been?’ I asked again.

  ‘With my friends in the woods.’

  ‘The witches?’

  She smiled then. ‘As you said yourself, there is no such thing as witches. Where else could I go? Home to Montepulciano? To live life sewing shirts for my brother-in-law? With no one to speak to on any subject other than the trivial, the mundane, the gossip of small lives? I would rather be a vagrant.’

  ‘This cannot continue, Maria. You must enter the convent of San Marco. Be Clare to my Francis, if you would.’

  Maria laughed.

  ‘I am serious,’ I said irritably. ‘What other choice is there? It is not as you think within the Order. Each of us is put to a task in accord with his nature. Fra Girolamo has founded a scriptorium, where the scribes are at work; there are artists painting, sculptors sculpting. In San Marco he is building an ark to protect civilisation until the flood of barbarism subsides.’

  ‘Your brain has been addled by prayers.’

  ‘Even the nuns are put to the work for which they are best fitted.’

  ‘So, I would be allowed to study Greek and write poetry?’

  ‘Your medical knowledge and skill would be of great use in the pharmacy or the infirmary.’

  ‘You may be able to live a double, hypocritical life. I cannot.’

  ‘Maria, let’s not argue.’

  She subsided, looked up at me with soft, affectionate eyes, squeezed my arm and apologised.

  ‘I am trying to put everything back together again,’ I told her. ‘Most of Angelo’s work exists in copies. I believe I can find it, and then we’ll have it published. I’ll take it to Aldo in Venice, I promise you.’

  ‘I don’t know who looted the casino or why –’ she said. ‘The Pazzi family, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘– but they wouldn’t have found much. When they took Angelo away, the friars, they took his books and papers, some of them, saying they would be safe in San Marco.’

  ‘What? Nothing came into the library!’

  Before she could answer, a servant hurried out to us. The master was gasping for breath and seemed to be fast declining. We rushed back to the chamber, where Maria fell on her knees at the bedside and grasped Pico’s pale, trembling hands. One of the friars took me aside. ‘What are you doing here, Fra Tommaso?’

  ‘Fra Girolamo sent me to collect books on loan. What are you doing here, Fra Roberto?’

  ‘Saying prayers for the Count’s soul and waiting for him to recover enough to be moved. He has expressed a wish to join the Order.’


  ‘He has not!’ Maria jumped to her feet. ‘I have been here nearly two weeks and he has expressed no such thing. Tommaso! Listen to me! Don’t let them take him. Don’t let it happen again. Do something. For once in your life, act, and in accordance with your heart.’

  That was not fair. I had not spent my life in dithering inaction. Far from it. Who was it who had once saved Lorenzo de’ Medici, at the cost of his own brother’s life? And that an act of the heart.

  Pico drew an agonising breath.

  ‘My lord,’ said Maria urgently, shaking him. ‘Is it your wish to be received into the Dominican Order?’

  ‘Madonna!’ he gasped. He, too, was having visions, as Angelo had done. His lips worked in a silent conversation with the Holy Mother, then he lapsed back into unconciousness, without having answered the question.

  ‘God has displayed his will,’ said Fra Roberto, satisfied.

  To convince the brethren of the purpose of my visit, I went through Pico’s library, removing those books which belonged to San Marco and, with them, anything of Poliziano’s, including one or two manuscripts that I knew that no one else would have had. Another manuscript I came across was Lorenzo de’ Medici’s commentary upon four of his sonnets, written in his own hand, and I caressed it as a survivor. I turned its pages, reading what Lorenzo had written on the mystic death, and came across a paragraph I had forgotten, a personal, poignant note of the author:

  ‘My persecutors were very powerful men, of great authority and ingenuity, and firmly resolved upon my total ruin and desolation, as to try every possible way to harm me. I was a private young man and without any counsel or help other than that divine goodness and clemency which was shown to me. I was reduced in the soul by excommunication, in property by theft, in the State by diverse conspiracies, in the family and children by plots and distractions, in the life by frequently hidden persecutions, so that death would have been no small grace and a lot less unappetising than all these other things.’