The Rebirth of Venus

by Linda Proud

  I looked into the centre of the tiny house leek, saw the spirals and rhythms of its perfect geometry.

  This was years earlier, before I was a Dominican friar. It was a prediction of things to come, and my instruction as to what to do when it happened.

  In Venice I received a letter from him.

  Marsilio Ficino to Tommaso de’ Maffei, most devoted of Platonists.

  Why did you not come to see me before you left Florence? I hear you are in Venice, working for Aldus Manutius in making divine work of the devil’s invention. Please oversee the publication of my letters, which are with Matthias Capcassa in that city. I suspect there are many faults in the original since my eyesight is now failing badly and I am almost blind.

  Have you abandoned your Marsilio, along with your mother city? I trust that, in casting away the husks you have kept the seeds. Take the Platonic teaching north, Tommaso. Sow the seeds in the north. Go to England, if you can. Plant Plato there and help John Colet cultivate that barbarous country.’

  Ficino was nearly blind? I remembered and relived the moment in the Duomo when he’d turned his back on me. Of course, he had seen only a Dominican.

  I thrived in Venice. Once my tonsure had grown over, I could take my cap off and convince even myself that I was a layman again. The serene city was like heaven after the hell of the New Jerusalem and, following Ficino’s dictum, I cast off the past and rejoiced in the present. In the printing house under the sign of the Dolphin and Anchor, I worked with Aldo on the task of producing beauty by machine. I gave freely of my knowledge to his engravers and compositors and set out the proportions of harmony they should follow. I looked after the publication of Ficino’s letters as requested, and corresponded with him several times. I wanted to return to see him, but the publication by the Aldine Press of the Opera Omnia of Poliziano kept me busy. Sarzi was there, acting as editor, and I had to hold both my temper and my tongue, pretend to co-operate and work at night to repair what I could. As proof-reader, I was the last to see a page before it was printed, and therefore he was oblivious to my restorations, but I did not catch all his outrageous additions and deletions. And then there was the mysterious and cryptic Hypnerotomachia Polifoli, that strange, erotic book written in cipher, with which I became insanely fascinated. It drew out of me such inspiration on the design of founts and placing of pictures in text that the inkers and compositors gave me a wide berth, saying I had sold my soul to the devil.

  The inner voice, the voice of my soul, nagged at me but there was always such good reason why I could not put down my work long enough to visit Ficino in Florence. Then, a year later, a letter came to tell me that he had died. Born in 1433, he died in 1499 at the age of sixty-six. Only God can paint such patterns. I went up the great campanile and stood looking south-west, as at a stage that is empty after the actors have gone. Ficino had drawn the curtains across the old century and the Platonic Academy of Florence. The parent plant had died. Now it was for the offshoots to establish themselves in new ground.

  But if I thought to do that in Venice, I failed. For one thing, it already had a flourishing academy set up Aldo himself, and patronised by two fine Platonists in Bernardo Bembo and his son Pietro. For another, keeping my temper with Sarzi proved to be a Herculean labour of which I was incapable. Two months after the death of Ficino I was on the run again, this time to England.

  Turin, September 4th, 1506

  As I could not say goodbye to Erasmus without speaking to him, we made peace of a kind for the sake of saying farewell. I tried to tempt him to come with me to Venice.

  ‘You would love that fair city,’ I said, ‘a city of a hundred islands set in a lagoon, each linked by little bridges. The shops sell all that the heart could desire; long, crooked, narrow streets full of bright things: jewellery of gold and lapis lazuli, coral and topaz; fabrics – silks, damascene, brocade, shirts of the finest linen and capes of sable, gloves perfumed with ambergris and musk. Iron ware – the most marvellous lamps of oriental design. And glass of course, Venetian glass.’

  ‘Let the earth retain its treasures undisturbed,’ he said.

  I changed tack. ‘Sweets! Such sweets! Marzipan and pine kernels. Little cakes that are works of art. And then there is the fish, fish of every shape and size – flat and round, small and rainbow- coloured. Squid – you can have pasta blackened by its ink. Octopus. Tiny little octopuses, smaller than your hand. In Venice you can eat fish every day of the week. And then there are the calli to wander, just looking at the shops or the great palaces, each narrow alley leading to a canal, or a campo where the people gather. Churches – so many churches. San Marco’s cathedral! Oh, you would love that. All a soft, subtle gold mosaic that shimmers – it seems the very door to heaven.’

  ‘All looted from poor Constantinople,’ he replied. ‘Nothing of what you say attracts me.’

  ‘Not even the sweets? It is not just a worldly city like any other. How can I describe it? It is founded on water. Water is everywhere, reflecting off everything in a thousand subtle colours, and it makes a difference. Everything is slower in Venice. You cannot cross a street, you have to take a ferry. There is not so much bustle in the lanes, and everyone is so elegant, so very well dressed.’

  ‘They can afford to be, given what they charge poor pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem. Tommaso, listen to me, the very name of Venice is the sound of money sliding into a purse of the finest, softest leather. Mention it no more. As soon as it is safe for me to travel south, I am for Bologna.’

  ‘The bells…’

  ‘Bologna has bells.’

  ‘So have cows, but the bells of Venice sing songs. Oh, the sound of bells across water…’

  ‘No more!’

  ‘And then, of course, Venice is the city of printers, and the finest of them is Aldo Manuzio, or “Aldus Manutius” since he publishes under his Latin name.’

  Erasmus gave a grunt as if I had winded him. ‘Bologna has printers,’ he said, but weakly.

  ‘Rogues and knaves! Pirates! You would think that a book printed by a Bolognese had been written by him, for you will not find the name of its author.’

  ‘I am sure that is not true of all of them.’

  Although I had argued in vain with Erasmus I could almost taste the sardines and calimari, the cured hams, the wines of the Veneto. Waves lapped at my heart and called me there. Erasmus will not be persuaded to divert to Venice; therefore I took my leave of him.

  ‘Our journey together ends here, my friend. As soon as you have done your duty to these boys, instructed them in Bologna and visited Rome, join me in Venice.’

  ‘When Colet sent you home, I presumed he meant Florence.’

  ‘I shall make a brief visit at some point to measure the hospital, but there is nothing left in that city. I want to spend my time with Aldo. You will find me at his printing house.’

  ‘Manutius! I would not dare come near the man. He publishes real writers.’

  I embraced him affectionately. Erasmus is pride floating in humility – the two liquids never mixing but forever separate, one held in suspension in the other. To my relief, he returned my affectionate embrace, saying with his arms what his face refused to admit.

  ‘Make things right with God,’ he muttered gruffly, walking away.

  ‘I’ll leave my book with you. I’ve come to its end.’

  ‘I am too old to read fiction!’

  ‘It is history,’ I replied, stung.

  ‘That is fiction. I must devote my time to holy books.’

  ‘Liar!’ I called to his back as he strode off.

  I heard him chuckle.

  Venice, September 7th, 1506.

  One leaves all nature behind on the mainland, clothed in bright fruit, and goes to the water-bound city of stone where nothing grows but men’s fortunes and their vanity. The last time I came here it was as a Florentine, up the Brenta ca
nal and over the lagoon to enter the city between the twin pillars leading to the piazzetta San Marco. Now it is as an Englishman, one of a herd of pilgrims corralled on the mainland to be shipped efficiently and expensively across to the islands on a barge. And we entered not through the gate of the Doges but on a back route. I told the officer in charge that I was not on my way to Jerusalem but to San Polo and paid an extra fee for the barge to make a special stop and put me down near Campo Sant’ Aponal.

  As we approached the Rialto bridge I saw that the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, that great warehouse and commercial centre of the German colony, has burnt down and is being rebuilt. As we passed, however, the gangs of masons and builders were scurrying for shelter for the weather that has been grey now became suddenly black and rain was beginning to lash down. As the Venetians pulled oilskins over the barge to cover the pilgrims, I disembarked and was left to find a gondolier to take me into the narrow canals leading to Sant’ Agostino. None were to be seen. I stood alone in the rain. At last an old ferryman hobbled from an inn to tell me that he was willing to travel in a rainstorm – at the right price. I had put on my best clothes to greet my adopted city but now they hung around me like something out of a dyer’s vat. My hose had so stretched that they gathered in folds at my ankles.

  ‘You go Jerusalem? Want to see the cathedral?’ The old ferryman, unmooring his boat, spoke to me in broken English.

  ‘No, I want the house of Aldo Manuzio,’ I told him in his own dialect. I was surprised that the man did not beam with recognition at the name. Instead, he stood waiting for some more detailed direction.

  ‘At the Campo Sant’ Agostino – he has a printing house – you must know it.’

  As we rowed through ever-narrowing rios, under bridges and round corners, we left the grandeur of the Grand Canal and entered a Venice as melancholy as I was. Shutters flapped on abandoned houses. A costly window hung from one hinge. Great slabs of stucco had fallen from walls, leaving gaping patches of bare brick and lath.

  ‘What’s happened here?’ I asked the ferryman.

  ‘Plague in ’99. And now that they go to India by sea, where’s the trade for us? It’s all gone to Portugal. Lisbon – that’s the place to be these days. Who’s going to come through Venice? The merchants have gone, more or less. All we get is miserable pilgrims now, pleading poverty.’

  ‘If they are not poor by the time they arrive, they are certainly poor by the time they leave.’

  ‘They don’t leave us boatmen any richer – there are too many of us.’

  The rain by now was running down my neck, and my misery, I would have thought, was complete; but no, worse was to come. Having paid off the ferryman and struggled across the campo with my baggage, I discovered that the house of Aldo, a once pretty, gabled house and a very monument to industry, is dark and empty, the printer’s sign missing from its hook. Aldo is famous for his mottoes, one of which is studio!, warning everyone ‘I am working’. Some wit has daubed on the shuttered door, non studiamo, ‘we are not working’. In despair I crossed to the church and found its priest, who remembers me. To my relief he could tell me that Aldo is not dead or out of business. He has simply removed to the Rialto island and the family house of his partner, Torresani. I had to squelch back to a main canal to find a boat.

  Venice is a city of lacework, its tiny islands linked by formal bridges and informal planks. But today, my heart heavy with the loss of the company of Erasmus, it seems like lace gone dark with age and accumulated filth. The smell from a local fish market woke me out of my reveries and as we glided past on a canal bobbing with detritus I looked into the arcaded market to see nothing but the relics of a once-thriving trade.

  At San Paternian by a canal dark and narrow, bordered by tenements seven storeys high, I found the old, familiar sign of the Dolphin and Anchor now swinging over an open-fronted shop and an empty stall bearing only puddles. The stock had been taken in, out of the rain. Now in his fifty-fourth year, Aldo welcomed me with delight. We were both embarrassed about our parting in 1499 and quickly apologised to each other.

  ‘I was galled,’ he said, ‘that you had deceived me, that you were a Dominican, a runaway friar living and working in my house. And I was already upset by your accusations about my editor. One thing a publisher rarely has time for is to read his books once published, especially those he has already read in manuscript. After you left, I read the Opera Omnia of Poliziano and found that you were right. Sarzi had made changes which had not been authorised.’

  ‘There was a letter in which Poliziano praised Pico’s secretary, Cristoforo. I caught Sarzi deleting that line, scratching out the original before passing it to the compositor. Then I knew that Sarzi was working together with Gianfrancesco Pico.’

  ‘But to accuse me of colluding with them!’

  ‘I’m not going to say any more about it, Aldo. The truth will work its way out like a thorn one day. I apologise to you, but I shall never apologise to Sarzi. When I caught him in that act of barbarism, I could not restrain myself.’

  ‘Some would say that attempting to strangle a man is an act of barbarism.’

  I smiled. ‘I was just trying to frighten him.’

  ‘You succeeded.’

  Aldo said that he wished he could print a revised edition of the Opera Omnia and hire me as the editor. ‘But we can’t afford to print anything these days. No one wants works of scholarship and there is no money in translations from the Greek.’ He led me through the bookshop to the printing house. The great presses lie still, the cases where the compositors once laboured idle in dust, the drying lines hang empty. The quietness of the place – it was as strange as coming upon hell in a state of desuetude.

  These were the presses that had printed the Aristotle, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the Opera Omnia of Poliziano, Ficino’s translations of the neoplatonists. On these presses Aldo had made the ‘libri portatiles’, little books or ‘hand books’ made from sheets of paper folded into eight, with a fount based on the flowing script of Bartolommeo Sanvito that brought authors such as Virgil, Dante and Petrarch to an eager public. My eyes misted over at what we have lost. Those were the great days, the heady days of success, but then came the new century and its terrible darkness: the ravages of Cesare Borgia, the war between France and Spain for the possession of Italy, the blockading of Venice, the death of trade. Aldo has been forced to leave the pretty house that saw the formation of his Greek Academy and move to these seedy premises. Now, pinched in the face and bowed in the back, he moves silently through the printing house, picking up a book on the way and handing it to me.

  ‘Last thing of note that we printed: Gli Asolani by Pietro Bembo.’

  To Aldo at the moment the book just represents debt, with the stock piled up in the warehouse moving too slowly. When I began to read it later, I saw what he would have seen when he initially agreed to publish it: a book to change Italy. It is a dialogue on Platonic love worthy of Ficino, and it is written in the Tuscan language of Petrarch. Bembo has revealed himself as a true son of the Platonic Academy. Here is a Venetian saying to his country that Tuscan is the language to unite the nation. It is like standing in a forest destroyed by fire and seeing the first unfurling stem of new life. The great work is not dead, not while Bembo lives. I was startled to discover that the book is dedicated to the Duchess of Ferrara. Lucrezia Borgia, daughter of Pope Alexander, is not a lady who springs readily to mind when speaking of Platonic love.

  Aldo took me to the living quarters above that are inhabited by his large and sprawling family and staff. In the years since I left, he has married the young daughter of Torresani and has a son of his own. Both families live together. Although there is no work here, he has offered to accommodate me and I have agreed to the arrangement since I would rather save on the price of a hostelry than have its dubious comfort. Aldo showed me to the room I am to share with five others.

  We met together alone after
a supper which, as a result of Aldo’s new asceticism combined with Torresani’s miserliness, was not the most convivial affair. I told him I had heard that he had caught the plague and had recovered and that I thanked God for it. ‘I also heard that you had promised God that, if you were spared death, you would retire to a monastery.’

  ‘The Lord made it clear that I am to fulfil my purpose in printing.’

  ‘How?’ I asked. ‘How did He make it clear?’

  Aldo gazed at me queerly, as if having second thoughts at being happy to see me again. ‘I had forgotten your questions, Tommaso, and how aggravating they can be, irritating, exasperating, a very provocation to the soul. I had quite forgotten. I was absolved from my vow by the Pope. There, does that satisfy?’

  This interested me. ‘How much did it cost?’ I asked.

  ‘God save me from Florentines!’ he cried.

  ‘I am not being cynical. I want to know.’

  Aldo smiled suddenly. ‘There was a price for everything with Pope Alexander.’

  ‘Oh, you were absolved by Pope Alexander?’ I wanted to know if Aldo thought he would have got absolution as easily from Pope Julius but Torresani interrupted.

  ‘He’s marching on Bologna,’ he said, sucking on a bone. ‘Heard it today.’

  ‘Bologna?’ I thought of Erasmus with alarm, even now travelling on his way south. Erasmus – how many dreams are going to be stripped from him on this journey? That Julius is a ‘good’ pope will be torn from him as skin from a living animal when he meets the papal army besieging Bologna.