by Linda Proud
‘Why,’ he asked me, ‘do the Venetians hate me so much? Do you know?’
‘They think you are angry not to have got the commission for the Fondaco.’
‘Ach! Fresco? It is the medium of artisans. The burin is nobler than the brush, and the brush nobler than the plaster trowel. You must see my altarpiece.’
‘They say it is your intention to conquer Italian art.’
‘Is that what they are saying? No wonder they despise me. Conquer Italian art? I am more prone to fall to my knees weeping, as indeed I do before Bellini’s Madonna, at least once a week. Have you seen it? You must see it! Tomorrow I will take you. His genius freezes mine. I have laboured all summer on my altarpiece and every time I pick up the brush I am fixed, crippled, paralysed by the belief that Bellini can only be imitated, never surpassed.’ He looked crestfallen and from behind the dark clouds of arrogance came the lovely sun of his nature. With his hazel eyes, rosy lips and terracotta hair, Dürer is every inch a German, a heathen from the forest. If he is arrogant, that only serves to make his humility the more devastating.
Venice, September 10th, 1506
Late last night I went for a walk in the city, making my careful way beside dark canals and over little bridges, aware that I was sure to get lost but not minding. One never does mind in Venice. Caged nightingales hanging outside shops filled the calli with their plaintive songs of yearning. Torch-lit gondolas slipped along the canals, the serenades of the gondoliers echoing under arches, sometimes singing in a choir with other gondoliers close by or even with those distant and out of sight.
Out in the lagoon were water parties, their distant music and laughter floating back to the city over the water. Gondolas with cabins, moored at the quayside, bobbed out of time with the tide while the discreet gondoliers stood on the quay nonchalantly exchanging bets and arguments. Their hose, parti-coloured or striped, and wasp-waisted jackets make their shapely legs seem unnaturally long and tapering. With their artfully crimped hair topped by a jaunty red cap and floating plume, these peacocks belong to an exclusive club, an Academy of Manly Beauty, in which novices are trained to capture maximum attention while affecting indifference. A negro has stepped from slavery into this Guild of Adonis and while the rest mock him gently within their own company for his tight hair and black skin, in public they defend his honour as their own and do not mind that he commands the largest fee of them all. Everyone wants the Black Gondolier. On this evening he is leaning idly against a wall, watching others play dice while picking meat out of his teeth. He reminds me of the first negro I ever saw, in attendance on a young girl of the Pazzi family walking down the street of booksellers to the church, my Elena. Maximo, I think his name was. He had the same air of dignity as this fellow, and shared his indifference to the stares of the curious, such as me. Every man wishes he were a gondolier. I walked along the quayside watching these evanescent parties, feeling that ache in the soul so constant that mostly I am unaware of it, until nights such as this.
All beauty reminds me of one beauty, which is Elena. Though long ago I had the soul ripped from me, I have continued to live, looking through a window on a world inhabited by others. I look in as a leper looks at the altar through a squint in the church wall. I stood staring into the waters of Venice until, one by one, all the torches died, leaving the lagoon and the canals as black as Lethe.
Where am I to go? What am I to do? I should be with Erasmus. I was asked to accompany him to Italy and commissioned to meas- ure the hospital. Why do I always step off the prescribed path, the straight and narrow way? Deflected, always deflected, by my own errant will. Is it possible that I could forget the past and start again, here, now? I only came to Venice to make my peace with Aldo, but he says I am renovating him and his academy. He is taken with the idea of printing Erasmus’s translation of the plays of Euripides, whatever his partner might think about it. So, I shall stay then. We will write to Erasmus and draw him here, publish his book and then he and I shall return to England. Simple. I’ll commission someone else to measure the hospital, for it is impossible to travel to Florence without meeting the Roman army on the way.
My eye falls on the letters of Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, addressed to the Pope. You coward, Tommaso de’ Maffei. Stay here? Was Odysseus able to row around Charybdis, gazing into the sucking centre of the whirlpool? No, you must go forward and hope for a tree to cling to, even as your boat is wrecked.
Venice, September 15th, 1506
Albrecht is very fond of the Tarocchi cards. This afternoon he made me choose one at random, having dealt out the deck face down. I turned up the card of Venus, showing her being born from the foamy waves.
‘Ah, so, what do we have? Love, yes. You must be guided by Love. You must overcome your fears, my friend, to find love. So you will come south with me.’
‘You are going south?’
‘I want to go to Mantua to meet Bellini’s brother-in-law, Andrea Mantegna. A great artist, a very great artist. I wish to learn the art of perspective from him.’
‘Diviners divine what they wish to divine.’
‘No, no! It is here in the cards, as clear as day. What are you frightened of?’
I turned the cards the right way up and arranged them in their five orders: the classes of men, the Muses, the liberal arts, the virtues, the heavenly spheres – a programme of the ascent of the soul in woodcuts. ‘Now these are crudely drawn.’
‘What are you frightened of?’
‘Failure, Albrecht. Failure.’
‘In what?’
‘In the matter of my soul. I’m afraid I will get to Florence and find nothing. John Colet told me to come home to find what I have lost, but what I have lost is gone forever and cannot be found in this world.’
‘Have you seen Bellini’s Madonna yet?’
‘No. You said you would take me.’
‘Incredible. How long have you been in Venice?’
‘A week.’
‘A week! And you have not seen the Madonna yet? Incredible.’
Dürer took me to the church of San Zaccaria. Bellini’s altarpiece is vast and so new that there was a crowd around it. The scene shows the Madonna on a marble throne in a vaulted chapel, the holy infant standing on her knees, with four attendant saints.
‘They are calling it “The Sacred Conversation”.’
‘Why? Each figure has its mouth firmly sealed.’
Dürer glanced sideways at me and smiled.
‘What is it?’
‘No. You look. Just look.’
I gazed at the saints and the architecture and marvelled at their reality, at the suffusion of light, the exquisite harmony of colour and form.
‘It is most beautiful,’ I said.
‘No. Look again. Just look. I will leave you. Perhaps an hour.’
An hour?
‘Keep looking. And, when you have seen, then listen. It is magic my friend, believe me, pure magic. An hour, then.’
I looked again at the forms and colours. The whispering crowd about me moved, changed, came and went as I stood still before the altarpiece. I could see on two levels. I could see paint on panel creating the illusion of figures; I could enter the illusion and forget about the paint. Then a word punched my heart, and the word was believe. I gasped in shock. For now there was no painting and no illusion. I was alone with the Madonna.
Look on me.
I realised that my eye had been avoiding the Madonna. Why do I have to steel myself to look on purity? I took command of myself and gazed on Our Lady and the Child, and my breath slowed, quietened, stopped altogether. Or it seemed to. I was held in a hush. I was on my knees. And weeping? Yes, I was weeping.
The Madonna smiled, softly, indulgently. ‘Do not fear,’ she said. ‘I shall look after you, you who would bring the truth to others and have not brought it to yourself. Your wounded heart allows no light
. To find the truth you must return to Florence.’
‘I cannot go to Florence!’ I said, whether out loud or not I do not know.
‘Tommaso, you are allowed to love.’
Allowed to love. That was what she said, the Mother, and then the weeping knew no bounds. Heedless of anyone around me, I cried out my soul on the floor of San Zaccaria.
Firm German arms came about me, drew me up, a broken doll brought to its feet. I wept into Dürer’s shoulder.
‘Magic, no?’ he said.
Padua, October 10th, 1506
I have spent this evening with Pietro Bembo, who is here at his father’s house in Padua. I am glad of the diversion since Albrecht is at the Scrovegni chapel, where he went this morning to see the paintings of Giotto and will not be drawn away. He intends to spend the night there, saying that he wishes to sleep with the greatest art in the world.
When I reminded him that only yesterday he considered Bellini’s art to be the greatest in the world, he told me without the blink of an eyelid that Giotto and Bellini are the same. I laughed. How can that be? With over a hundred years and the discovery of the art of perspective between them, how can they be considered the same?
‘Ach, scholars! When are you going to stop reading philosophy and begin to see? It is the quality that is the same. The Madonna by Giotto or by Bellini – the same Madonna.’ I gazed on the nativity scene in the chapel and I did see what he meant. The purity was the same.
Dürer turned me round to look at the Last Judgement on the west wall. ‘I have heard that Giotto’s friend Dante used to visit him while he painted that. Imagine… Right here, where we stand!’
I gazed at the devils and the torments of hell, at the angels drawing the good to heaven. ‘It is very out of fashion, the Last Judgement. We do not paint that scene any more.’
‘We should. If we believed in hell, we might behave better. If the popes believed in it… imagine that.’
‘Do you believe in hell?’
‘Enough to want to spend the night here, for the good of my soul.’
At his father’s house, Pietro Bembo paced up and down the sala, trying to tell me about the beautiful court of Urbino and its people, the duchess who rules on behalf of her invalid husband, his friends Baldassare Castiglione, Bernardo Dovizi and Giuliano de’ Medici. The youngest son of Lorenzo, who is now twenty- eight years old, is spending his time of exile as a courtier. But I could tell that Pietro’s mind was not on Urbino.
‘What is it, my friend?’
‘This.’ He sat down and handed me a letter from a ‘well-wisher’ informing him, with a callous disregard for his feelings, that Lucrezia Borgia is in love with Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua.
‘And why should she not be?’ Pietro said hopelessly. ‘She the Duchess of Ferrara; he, the handsome Marquis.’ He got up again and resumed his pacing. ‘What am I but a poor poet? What could I give her? Oh, Lucrezia, Lucrezia…’ He sat down again. ‘Have you ever seen her?’
‘No, never, but I hear she is very beautiful.’
‘Beauty! Beauty of form, beauty of nature, beauty of conduct, beauty of intellect. She is a ladder to God. You look doubtful. You have heard the gossip, that she has murdered husbands and lovers.’
‘We heard that even in England.’
‘Well, do not listen!’ Pietro thumped a table with his fist. ‘Her father murdered them, he or her brother, Cesare. Always wanting her to be free to marry someone else of their choice, the latest pawn in their game.’ He sighed. ‘Oh my poor Lucrezia. Do you know what it is that people hate about her? That she survives, that she recovers from each new tragedy. But not with me. With me she wept. She laid her head on my shoulder – those golden filaments of her hair in my hands! – and she wept. She said I was the only man she could love without fear. But now I am informed that she loves another.’
‘When did you last see her?’
‘A year ago. Tommaso, we are poor, but I cannot accept any Venetian office, cannot be an administrator,’ (he said this with great distaste) ‘a secretary of the Serene Republic. With no time for literary study I would die! So I went to Rome and Urbino to find my fortune and she… she could not wait.’
‘Have you had other mistresses since?’
‘Yes, but not pure love, not as I had with Lucrezia.’
‘She is your Laura.’
‘She is my Laura, and I her Petrarca.’ So saying, he recited some verses he had composed. I sat back to listen, expecting to hear the usual verses that come from lovesick (and fickle) poets, but this was Pietro Bembo. Lucrezia Borgia’s Petrarch, he sang like a nightingale. Pietro succeeds where I fail: for him human love is a divine matter. Lucrezia is his ideal of perfection to which his soul aspires. In the crucible of his heart, he transforms base love into pure love, and he does it through poetry, as Petrarch for Laura and Dante for Beatrice. Could I not do this, too? Turn pain into beauty? I have tried, tried to write poems about Elena, but they are the wooden conceits of incompetence.
As I listened to his songs of grief, I realised they were songs of pain and surrender. He was letting Lucrezia go. I began to grow agitated, remembering how, when I was first married, I would lie awake at night just to see Elena’s profile in the moonlight, and sometimes… I confess, at last I confess… sometimes, once or twice, I wished her dead so that I could possess her utterly and forever. God in your mercy forgive me. But it was the kind of love that is a rapacious appetite that will not be satisfied, that can never be fulfilled. I suffocated her with my love.
The love you love is the wrong love.
Padua, October 11th, 1506
I have heard a story from Pietro Bembo that may not be generally known. Certainly we heard nothing of it in England. In 1500, the year of Jubilee, the one and a half time, God struck the antichrist, if, as I believe, the antichrist was Pope Alexander. He struck him twice. The first time was during a mass when he suddenly fell to the floor as if dead in some kind of seizure, the kind that is usually fatal, but he survived. The second time was with a thunderbolt hurled at the Vatican palace which sent the ceiling of the audience room down. The pope on his throne disappeared in a tremendous fall of rubble and a great cloud of dust. They dug him out with shovels, pulled away with their hands blocks of stone, plaster, fallen hangings, and came at last to the holy pontiff, still sitting on his throne, dazed. Alive.
It was three years later when the pope finally died, ‘peacefully in his sleep’ the official announcement had said.
‘He was poisoned,’ Pietro told me. ‘No one knows who did it; in daring and aptitude whoever it was matched Pope Alexander Borgia himself. A servant perhaps, a human instrument of Divine Will.’ Pietro sat back and stretched out his thin legs. ‘That man, that man, he was a monster. Impossible to believe he was the father of my beloved.’
‘Pope Julius, then, is an improvement.’
Pietro laughed acidly. ‘I am going back to Urbino,’ he said at last. ‘Nothing will tempt me near Rome, not while Julius reigns. But in Urbino we have a court that is a sunny glade in a dark forest, where we entertain ourselves with music and discussion. Everyone has something to say, usually misguided. It is my function to inspire them with reason.’
He told me of a recent discussion on the subject of love, and recited his part of it, a speech on love as the ladder to God. It was Ficino’s own Platonic teaching turned into poetry, and there was something in it that made my skin prickle, a modification of the divine theory. For Plato and Ficino both, the lover and the beloved are both male, for male love is chaste and unconfused by sensual desire. That is the pure love. Pietro Bembo has modified it. For him the beloved is a woman.
I quickened. ‘Do you believe it?’ I asked him. ‘That it is possible for a man to love a woman platonically?’
‘I am the living evidence,’ said the lover of Lucrezia Borgia.
‘But does that mean
you have no desire?’
‘No. It means that desire is curbed, is not carried into action.’
‘Chivalrous love, then.’
‘Yes, that is it: the love of the knight for his lady.’ He sighed.
An inn near Mantua, October 17th, 1506
With the papal forces encamped outside the walls of Bologna, the way south to Mantua was clear. Dürer and I spent the tedious ride across the Lombard plain discussing many things: the best medium for painting, whether oil or tempera; the virtue of engraving; the quest for absolute beauty; the corruption of the church; Savonarola; reform; the nature of the world and the discovery of new lands; the mortality of bodies and the immortality of the soul; whether the cosmic model of Ptolemy is true, or whether the heresies being whispered in the universities could be possible. Above all, we discussed proportion, the secrets of which Albrecht desires to know and is travelling to Mantua to learn from its greatest living adept, Mantegna.
And we discussed melancholy, the humour which Dürer assumes to predominate in his own being. His bright eyes and healthy complexion contradict his own analysis, and yet he insists that he is melancholic. And as is common with those of that disposition, he cannot resist joking.
‘I am not naturally melancholic, no. By nature I am a sanguine man. It is my wife. She makes me melancholic – irritable, spiteful and bad tempered. I thought I loved all humankind until I met my wife. She is my – what was the name of the wife of Socrates? – Xanthippe, my gadfly.’
‘According to Ficino,’ I told him, ‘Melancholy arises from too much thinking, from the sterile quest of worldly knowledge to attain the divine. He said that the best cure for it is music.’
‘Nonsense. Melancholy arises from nature, and in Germany the cure is flogging. But I like the ideas of your Ficino. Yes. I will adopt them. I will listen to the music of sweet lutes as I have my wife flogged. One must deal with causes and not symptoms, no?’
He told an unhappy story, of a woman who fills his house with the smell of boiled cabbage, whose beauty is only skin deep, who cannot understand why he would rather be an engraver than a goldsmith – but if he must be an engraver why must he do those dreadful images of the Apocalypse no one wants when he could be doing the Madonna? A wife who is uncooperative in bed and would rather sleep than suffer his attentions. ‘And all the time she wants to talk about our neighbours, the very very dull details of their lives. I tell you, my friend, she is as superficial as – what do you call them? – do you have them? Water boatmen? Little beetles with long legs which walk over ponds. She is like them, walking tippy toes on the surface of life. She is scared, that it is my opinion, scared of anything which will make her think. She does not want to think. As when you are alone in a haunted house. You try not to think. The world, my friend, this great starry cosmos, is just a haunted house to women like my wife. And they would rather not think about it.’