by Linda Proud
‘So she is not melancholic herself, then.’
‘Choleric, pure and simple.’
Dürer asked more about Ficino and his Platonic philosophy, attracted by a man who could turn the dominance of the planet Saturn into a virtue. I told him all I could remember, of the villa at Careggi where, with his herbs and fragrances, his chants and prayers, Ficino could put a man’s humours back into balance, alleviating the malign effects of one dominant planet by invoking the aid of another.
In turn, Dürer told me about the ideas of the philosopher Henry of Ghent, according to whom there are two kinds of thinkers. Firstly there are the philosophical kind who have no trouble with metaphysical abstractions, and then there are those whose imaginations are stronger than their reasoning powers, who can accept a demonstration only to the extent that their imagination can keep step with it. Familiar! Such men, he said, cannot extend their thought beyond time and space but can only think in relation to objects. That is to say, some men can think without images, others cannot.
‘Like geometers,’ Dürer said, ‘who must make shapes out of numbers. And these are the architects, artists and poets. It seems to me that this is the essence of melancholy: to such men, to us, the beloved is out of reach. However much we strive we cannot attain the divine because it is beyond any image.’
Suddenly I went so limp in the saddle that my mount came to a standstill.
‘My friend! What is the matter?’
I struggled to speak but all I could say, and that with great effort, was ‘Elena.’
Dürer dismounted quickly to catch me as I fell near senseless from my horse.
‘She died,’ I said, hiccoughing into the chest of the man embracing me. My grief at San Zaccaria, which I had considered profound, had been just a warning, the tremor before the quake.
‘You were married? Had a wife? She died? Ah,’ Dürer said, slapping me on the back heartily as if I were a baby with wind, ‘that is a great tragedy which befalls many women. Unfortunately it has not befallen mine.’
‘She did not die in childbirth,’ I told him, offended by his breezy, Germanic responses. ‘She fell from her horse, riding in the night.’
‘Why was she riding in the night?’
‘She was trying to reach the Medici and safety. I had deserted her. Left her alone. I thought… I thought…’
‘Yes?’
‘I thought if I did my duty… It was to be with Ficino, and he had left the city. And I thought… I believed, it was right to go with him, and God… God would protect her.’ The truth was haemorrhaging now. ‘They said I was uxurious, too fond of my wife. Not manly. I did my duty. And God didn’t…’
My whole frame began to vibrate involuntarily. It was an admission of doubt, of loss of faith, coming in a deluge of grief, a dissolution of self. I fell to my knees on the dusty road to Mantua. Like the good Samaritan, Dürer lifted me up. Reduced by his own extremity to speaking in German, he called me back from Hades not with meaning but with sound, the sound of humanity in his voice. My soul harkened to it and turned around.
Ficino and Savonarola had both brought me to the edge of total surrender but it has taken a young German engraver to perform the necessary operation on my soul. Because of Dürer’s simple command of the language, I had not been able to be subtle with him, had not hidden my emotions behind a hedge of ambiguous phrases. I had told him direct: in not following my intuition, I had murdered my beauty. Me. I was the sinner, not Ficino, not God.
‘Please, please,’ Dürer said, in Tuscan again, ‘do not die on the road! I hear that Italians can die of broken hearts, but I do not believe it till now.’ I lay in his arms like a dead thing but slowly became aware of the sky, the bright blue sky behind my friend’s auburn head.
I remembered the mystic death that Lorenzo and Pico had discussed so often. To see God you must die to this life. Was this it? This corpse-like inability to move; this conviction that there is nothing in life that is true and worthwhile; the torpid acceptance of death. Was this it? Everything past and future had lost its savour; everyone past and future had turned into ghosts; all beings merely cicada skins clinging to trees, empty of essence. All effort was futile, and no goal was worth obtaining. Yes, this was it. This was the death of the spirit.
At that point the blackness came like a swirling night fog and sucked the colour out of the blue sky and the autumn hair.
I had a dream in which I was lost in a dark wood, dense with brambles and thickets. In the crackling dark full of wild beasts, I discerned a light in the distance which, when I came to it, was a candle burning in the cellar of a black castle, the barred window of which was at ground level. Kneeling down, I reached towards the hand thrust out from between the bars of the dungeon. I knew that hand so well. It was my wife who was the prisoner there, but when I asked her who had done this to her, when she spoke my name, I sprang awake.
I found myself in a bed in this inn. I lay listening to the faint voice of Elena, calling me to let her go, to let her return to God. Before I opened my eyes, and to the sound of prayers being recited by Dürer, I performed that sacrifice, begged her forgiveness and released my wife from my heart.
The sun was streaming in through the window. I propped myself up on my elbows. Albrecht was at prayer with his hair apparently aflame in a mystic fire. There was a small majolica dish on the windowsill containing fruit; Albrecht’s sketches of it were on the table. The breeze that lightly moved the linen curtains played over my skin, and the air was fresh. Lovely. You are allowed to love. I blinked and looked about me: there was nothing that was not beautiful and full of life, as if the world has been reinvested with spirit.
Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae, Dürer intoned with that sweetness of a man at prayer.
‘Amen,’ I said. ‘Grazie, Madonna, grazie Deo.
‘You are awake, my friend?’
‘Fully.’
Modena, October 21st, 1506
That inn near Mantua had a walled enclosure containing stables and a garden. We were collecting our horses from where they were tethered by a trough set in a wall made of great blocks of stone as old as time, piled up in courses with dying ferns and grasses rooted in every crack and crevice. Ivy scrabbled over the place in that artless perfection of design that only nature can achieve. Dürer was looking at a snail crawling along a ledge, pale yellow and banded brown, the common snail, the kind which, when boiled, you can shell easily and pop in your mouth.
When Dürer says ‘Look!’ he gives you the eyes to see. I saw light, light in the form of a snail. The creature glistened like the rock with moisture and light, its feelers sensitive, touching the air. The air. The air that touched me touched the snail. The light shining in it and around it was the light by which I saw it. I traced the spiral of it back to the point where it began, the point where the light had entered, had become form, the form of a snail or, in my case, a man. The same light. The consciousness of the Creator.
‘What do you see?’ Albrecht asked me softly.
‘I see love,’ I replied.
‘Then you are an artist.’
I laughed. The sound of a fountain in a desert.
‘It is good to see you laugh, my friend,’ said Dürer. ‘It is good.’
You are allowed to love. I turned my gaze on him and found that the vision of love need not be confined to a snail, may include a fellow human being. How often can we look another in the eyes and find nothing between us? No idea, no thought, no sense of me and you. That Albrecht so resembles Jesus made the moment that much more profound and I lost all sense of my limits, of being in a body at all. I gazed on God and God gazed back at himself.
‘Very good,’ he said. ‘I just draw this fellow and then we go.’
While Albrecht made his drawing, I stared into a clump of grass on the top of the wall, at eye height. The grass w
as home to life, little beetles for whom this clump was a vast city. The sense of wonder was not diminishing but increasing. I had had this sense of transcendence once before. Was this what I had lost? One glimpse of God, as the one I had had all those years ago in a bunch of grapes in Ficino’s vineyard, and then you spend your life thinking about it and never experiencing it again. The aridity that is theology or philosophy when it loses touch with its object! The veils of thought and opinion that cover our senses! The gloomy, monochromatic wash over life that is the view of the miserable, closed heart.
I had sought my wife everywhere while all the time I had her locked up within. I had sought God everywhere, only to find Him in a snail on a stone ledge. The temptation to keep the snail was enormous, but beauty captured is beauty lost.
‘How does one keep contact with the ineffable moment?’ I wondered out loud.
‘Stop thinking about it,’ Albrecht answered. ‘Keep looking.’
The ostler approached us to receive his fee. ‘Where are you bound?’ he asked conversationally.
‘Mantua, to see the greatest artist in the world,’ said Dürer.
‘Andrea Mantegna? He died yesterday.’
Dürer took it stoically. ‘Ach, it is the will of God,’ he said, ‘and I always accept the will of God. It is so much more interesting than my own.’
‘Where shall we go?’
‘To Bologna. There is another man who can teach me the secrets of proportion: a mathematician called Luca Pacioli.’
I longed to tell him that I knew those secrets myself, but if he did not ask, I could not tell him. It isn’t only the rest of us who are blind to what is under our noses. ‘Albrecht, the city is under siege.’
‘Those letters you carry will safeguard us.’
Now we are in Modena, the last stage before Bologna, and we pick up news as bees pick up pollen. Some say the pope celebrates mass in tents; others that, when he catches any spies, he has them roasted on spits. Milan is sending the pope reinforcements five times the size of the army he already has and the Modenese are frantic, knowing that the Milanese will cross their lands like locusts. Their barns will be stripped to the ribs this winter.
I look out at the Appenines, rising in the south, and am so drawn to them that I am sure I will walk there in my sleep tonight, south and into the mountains. For beyond those forests and crags lies Tuscany.
Modena, October 24th, 1506
I had another dream last night, as vivid and terrible as the other one. Many things were happening which I forget, but Albrecht was there, as too was Erasmus, both encouraging me although I could not move. Then the papal guard came and dragged me into the presence of the Pope and threw me on the ground before him. I lay down and could not rise when he commanded it. Rough hands took hold of me again and hauled me to my feet. Then I saw His Holiness, a gigantic knight in armour standing before ranks of spears and fluttering pennants bearing the crossed keys of St Peter. I realised that I was standing out in front of an opposing army and had been chosen to do single combat. Me, a David to this Goliath in his dazzling armour and lowered visor. I tried to move back into the ranks but I was pushed forward.
‘Draw your sword!’ I was told from behind.
Sure enough, I had one in the sheath on my belt and I drew it out, for if I could not go back I could only go forward, and die in the attempt if necessary.
My enemy’s helm was in the form of the triple tiara. I stepped forward, both myself and not myself. I shook with fear and had courage. I was a man in his fifties and I was a youth. I was clothed and I was naked.
The Pope raised his sword with both hands, then, with a roar, lunged forward. I blocked his strike with my sword. The impact jarred every bone. He struck again, again I parried, our swords clashing. Clash after clash, blow and parry, blow and parry, he always having the advantage but never quite overcoming me. It seemed this match would last forever but then he doubled his effort, sent me down on my back and raised his sword for the death blow. I had one option. It was not lawful, but I took it. I thrust my sword upwards, under his iron skirt and between his thighs. The Pope stumbled, roaring in agony. In the rage of death, he drew himself up and, grasping his sword with both hands, drove it down into my unprotected heart. And then it was as if I were the giant. From a lofty perspective I saw a shower of roses falling gently on the ground, red and white. The roses became blood and semen flowing in clear rivers in a lovely land of green meadows, forested in the south and the north by the two armies which had become trees.
Now, what does all that mean?
Bologna, November 9th, 1506
Laying siege to the red and solid stone of Bologna are some wind- flapped tents, striped in the papal colours. The city of many towers huddles within its walls like a cat shrinking from a mouse. The crack of iron shot sounds now and then, a lazy sound, as if the troops are firing at the walls only to remind the inhabitants that they are there. They say the city is on the point of surrender.
My letters gave us easy passage through every control post on the road and soon, too soon, the papal pavilion bearing the arms of the delle Rovere was before us.
‘This is a joke army and a toy battle,’ Albrecht observed. ‘Was it to this that Perugia surrendered without a fight?’
‘This is the Pope,’ I said, breathless, my skin crawling with the memory of my dream.
We presented ourselves to the guards and waited. The letters were growing waxy in my hands. I knew the contents of one – what were the contents of the other? Could I trust Cardinal Giovanni?
‘Do not be afraid,’ Albrecht said. ‘Forget all you have heard and speak to the Pope as the Vicar of Christ. Speak to the role, not to the man. If you can see God in a snail, you can see him in Pope Julius, can you not? All things are possible.’
A servant came for me. Life began to pound in my ears and my knees suddenly lost their power. Albrecht pushed me forward and I entered a tent filled with cardinals, a sea of red that parted to allow my approach to the throne. Yes, Julius did sit on a throne, but he was not in armour and held no sword. He was an old man sitting with his shoulders up round his ears and his gnarled hands resting on the arms of the ornate, gilded chair. His long, white beard mingled with the ermine border of his scarlet robes and his old eyes were watery. He did not smile nor did he speak but waited for me to state my business. I took a deep breath.
‘Your Holiness,’ I said, sweeping down in a bow and proffering the letters. ‘I was asked to give you these in person.’
Someone took them from me, broke the seals and handed them to the Pope. He read them without hurry.
‘Do you know their contents?’
‘Only of one of them, Your Holiness.’
‘Is it true, about the legitimacy of Giulio de’ Medici?’
I grew hot but my skin went cold. ‘It is true, Your Holiness.’
‘Speak up, Maffei, I can’t hear you.’
‘It is true, Your Holiness. I was a friend as well as a servant of Giuliano de’ Medici. He told me himself, in confidence, of his marriage to his mistress and the birth of his son. I was the only one to know. When Giuliano was… When he died –’
‘When he was murdered.’
‘When he was murdered, I myself gave the news to Lorenzo, that there was a son.’
‘That assassination brought the papacy low. An execrable affair, execrable. So that is the letter of which you know the contents. Can you guess what is in the other?’
‘I believe I can.’ Now my throat was lined with sand.
‘Cardinal Giovanni informs me that in 1494 the bearer of this letter entered the Dominican Order and took the vows, but four years later left the monastery of San Marco without permission and went into voluntary exile. True?’
Is that all that it said? Then I was betrayed! I could hardly keep my feet.
‘It is true, Your Holiness,’ I said in
a scraping, hoarse voice.
‘Look at me.’
I dared to look up at him and was fixed in the gaze of rheumy blue eyes in a face of tired, stretched skin.
‘That was an abhorrent act, abhorrent. The act of a coward. You must return at once to the monastery. The punishment is at my discretion, but I am content to leave the matter to the Vicar General. You can be assured, however, that you will never again have pleasant duties but will scrub latrines until you learn to love it.’
‘Your Holiness, I would be absolved from my vows.’
‘Of course you would, but on what grounds?’
‘I was deceived by Girolamo Savonarola.’
‘Yes, many were. Nevertheless, you were not forced to become a friar. What was the reason?’
‘I was in a low state and felt I had done with the world.’
‘Was there no other reason?’
‘No, Your Holiness.’
He leant forwards, the knuckles standing out on his hands grasping the arms of the chair. ‘Tell me the truth. The truth, Maffei.’
Glancing about nervously, I suddenly recognised a man towards the back of the tent, his face in the shadow of the men in front of him: my second-row brother, Rafaello, staring at me, encouraging me with his eyes, willing me to speak.