by Linda Proud
‘It is as my friend says, and it is more.’ Botticelli smiled at his painting as if sharing a secret with it. ‘They call it The Realm of Venus. I call it La Primavera.’
‘Yes, I can see why you would. This figure here – Flora, did you say? – she is the spring. Dancing in the realm of Venus, this lovely orange grove.’
‘It is the Earthly Paradise, Madonna. While Ficino and Poliziano were giving me so many lectures and notes about what the picture should contain, I was referring to a book no one seems to understand properly. Do you know your Dante, Madonna?’
‘Well, of course I do.’
‘Reading it does not equate to knowing it. I have it within me, heart and soul. I painted the picture they wanted, but behind it is a picture of my own. This lady in the middle is not Venus: it is Beatrice, the one men do not notice. “Flora” is Matilda who, you will remember, first appears in canto twenty-eight of Il Purgatorio. Prima verra – she who comes first. Her earthly model was Giovanna, Beatrice’s friend, so beautiful that she was called Primavera. When Dante met her in the street, it was a prelude to his seeing Beatrice. Beauty leads to love, as Plato teaches us, but it is a Christian painting, Madonna, for those with the eyes to see.’ Glancing at me and my expression, he chuckled. ‘One thing on top of another.’
I gazed now in awe. The painting is a fusion, a harmonisation of Christianity and Platonism. A painter has succeeded where the philosophers continue to struggle. One thing on top of another. The Platonic mysteries shining through the Christian faith. It reminded me, suddenly, of John Colet, he who fuses both within himself, as Sandro Botticelli has done.
Now that it had been pointed out, it was hard not to see Beatrice and Matilda, Adam and Eve, the three Virtues – Faith, Hope and Charity.
‘It is the story,’ Botticelli said, ‘of our redemption after the Fall. Our way back to paradise is through Love. Ah, Matilda…’ he stared adoringly at that fine-stepping, flower-bedecked figure of Spring. ‘O thou dost put me to remembering of who and what were lost…’
‘Did no one suspect?’ I asked.
‘Lorenzo il Magnifico, of course, recognised it at once, the subject behind the subject. Lorenzo knew Dante as I know Dante, as a living guide and teacher.’
Caterina Sforza quickened at the sound of Lorenzo’s name; her bright, cruel eyes watching it form on Botticelli’s lips, but her attention was distracted by a boy of about seven or eight years running in to join her.
‘Ah, Giovanni,’ she said, looking on him devotedly. ‘Come and meet the man who painted these funny paintings!’
The son of Giovanni di Pierfrancesco has inherited his father’s beauty. It was like seeing Giovanni himself, all those years ago, running about in the Palazzo de’ Medici. While Botticelli was giving his explanations all over again, I was drawn to a pile of books that had come out of an open chest, presumably also recently delivered from the Casa Vecchia. Lorenzino had amassed a fine collection, among them a familiar, battered old book that made me catch my breath: Ficino’s original copy of Plato’s Dialogues. Beneath it was the copy of the works of Hermes Trismegistus in my own hand. The death of my art, just one death amidst so many. I heard Botticelli telling the boy that the dream of the Golden Age is that longing within us for the paradise of innocence.
‘That is a handsome book,’ said Donna Caterina beside me, ‘unlike that old thing.’ She waved dismissively at the Dialogues.
‘It may not seem so, Madonna, but this is your greatest treasure. It must have been bequeathed to Lorenzino by Marsilio Ficino.’
She looked surprised. ‘It has value?’
‘Indeed it does – it is the book that brought Plato to the West.’
‘But I prefer this one.’ She opened the Hermes and turned its glowing pages.
When I told her it was my own work, she wanted to know my name.‘Maffei?’ A fleeting gleam came into her eyes. ‘Ah, yes, I remember: you worked for Poliziano. And you have a brother in the Curia.’
It was disconcerting that she knew such things.
‘A man of Lorenzo’s circle. A rare survivor of the Golden Age.’ She laughed. ‘So, you read Greek?’
‘I read and write in it, Madonna, and teach it.’
She gazed at me and laid her hand on my arm. ‘I have been looking for someone to teach Greek to my son, to read to him from these books which are closed to me. It is very hard to find a good man…’
I understood what she was suggesting and it was tempting. A full-bodied, warm woman who is ageing like fine wine. I felt inexplicably drawn to this Circe. A life of leisure in a villa, reading Greek and making love… It could delay my journey to Ithaca for years.
‘He died in such agony,’ she said softly, as if to the book in her hands.
‘Who?’
‘Lorenzo…’ And she turned her head away as she said this, to hide her smile. Her smile… She was enjoying the thought of Lorenzo’s death. Lorenzo himself used to smile like that, trying to hide it, whenever anyone mentioned the death of Caterina’s first husband, Girolamo Riario. And why? Because it was the smile of satisfaction in an act of vengeance well-conceived and executed. Lorenzo had assassinated Riario by proxy, had paid someone to throw the wretch out of a window in his castle at Forlì. I knew that much. Riario was such a devil in my eyes that it had never occurred to me that someone may have loved him, but what if his wife had? Suddenly all those adventures of Caterina Sforza I’d heard about were the desperate acts of a very faithful wife. Even as I realised this, I realised it all. One moment I was in ignorance, in the next, I knew. I just knew. It was so obvious. It has always been obvious, except to the blind.
For a long time I suspected Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco but then I had begun to suspect and with better reason his brother, Giovanni. He of the blameless features had had a restless spirit and a dark heart. When Giovanni had gone to Caterina’s court, like had gone to like. No wonder they had become lovers. I saw them now, lying together at night, plotting Lorenzo’s death and the overthrow of Florence, perhaps even hatching the conspiracy that had taken good men to their deaths. Who knows? But of this much I was certain: this woman who poisoned from a distance was the one who had murdered a dying man.
It had been the Milanese physician who had given Lorenzo powdered gems as a drink rather than a poultice, and because of that I had suspected Ludovico Sforza. Now I was facing Sforza’s niece, realising the truth even as she gazed at me. In that moment I excelled myself in hypocrisy, hiding my thoughts, smiling, accepting the position she was offering.
‘Return to me next week,’ she said. ‘You will be well rewarded.’
I bowed. ‘I will, Madonna, and I thank you.’
Back at the hospital, I spoke to Antonio Benivieni. It seemed that my suspicions were no revelation to him: he had worked out the mystery of Lorenzo’s death for himself years ago.
‘Does she realise you suspect her?’ he asked.
‘I think not.’
‘Then you are safe enough, especially here.’
I shook my head. ‘Thirty years ago Girolamo Riario tried to assassinate the Medici. He was, as you know, behind the Pazzi conspiracy. The plan to murder the brothers only partly succeeded, and we lost our Giuliano. But Lorenzo was saved…’
Benivieni’s eyes widened. ‘Thanks to you, as I remember.’
‘Yes, and she knows that. I saw it in her eyes when I told her my name. As soon as that sorceress realises that I am not taking her position she will make arrangements for my dispatch.’
‘Nonsense. Does she know you are here? No. And how would she find out?’
‘She will find out. If I would continue to be a rare survivor of the Golden Age I must go, quit Florence and fly back to England. Could you find someone to finish my plans? I’ve done everything apart from the central building.’
He looked surprised. ‘All work begins at the centre, surely.’
‘Tommaso, stay one more day.’
But that force was alive within me, that Mercurial impulse to fly that has sent me hither and thither my life long. ‘I cannot.’
Benivieni seemed in two minds, as if there were something he wanted to say. Then he shook his head sadly. ‘Very well.’
Tomorrow, therefore, I shall say goodbye to Florence.
Florence, December 5th, 1506
Ten days have passed, and I am still in Santa Maria Nuova. Ten days as a patient, spent in a bed in the main ward. According to Benivieni, God was moved to drastic action to make me stay. I have this morning been given a private cell with a desk, for Benivieni insists I write everything down.
‘A servant of Caterina Sforza came yesterday,’ he told me, ‘making enquiries.’
‘What did you say?’
‘That you had had a terrible accident and died ten days ago.’
‘I think that’s true enough.’
‘No need to mention that you came back to life.’
‘No, none.’
He handed me my journal. ‘Set it down, Tommaso, as you told it to me – the best story I’ve heard from a living man.’
‘You said I wasn’t to strain my eyes.’
‘Set it down, but in daylight. No writing at night.’
So, ten days ago I went round the city to pay homage to the past before I left Florence forever. I went to the cathedral and said prayers on the spot where Giuliano died all those years ago, directly under the great cupola of the mighty dome. The sound of people talking and walking through that vast space echoed with indifference, the sound of people mindless to history, concerned with their own affairs and their own little lives, Florentines of the sixteenth century.
I passed the Palazzo de’ Medici on the Via Larga and heard no bustle of the bank, no sweet airs of a lutenist or singer. San Marco, too, was quiet, a Dominican monastery trying to forget its tumultuous past and continue with the simple business of preaching sermons to the few. I recognised hardly anyone in the monastery and was recognised by none apart from the librarian. It was as if the old century had swept all those fervent friars away. The scholars who study in the library now are broadly distributed and not all crowded together in the theology section. I walked the aisles and saw men reading books I had catalogued, books I had copied, books I had helped save. The sense of excitement has gone from the place, but it will come back in due course and, when it does, the books will be there, ready to give up their treasures of knowledge, wisdom and inspiration. On the way out I saw above the door an escutcheon of the Medici arms with the Cardinal’s hat above. If ever an escutcheon was rightfully placed, this was it.
In the secular cloister I prayed by the simple tomb shared by Pico and Poliziano set in the wall. Someone had laid a posy of evergreens at its foot. A friar came along with a vase filled with water and, picking up the holly, ivy and twigs of olive, arranged them in it. I looked askance at him.
He shrugged. ‘We never know who leaves them, but we find something here at least once a month, once a week in the time of the lilies and the cornflowers.’
‘They should have proper tombs, these two great men.’
‘Friars do not have tombs.’
‘Were they friars?’
‘Both took the habit in the days before they died. I was not here myself at the time, but I have heard the story from those who were.’
When he had gone, I completed my prayers, folding my hands over my heart and the memory of my friends. Inwardly I spoke to them and said my farewells, telling them that I must go back to England and this time leave the past behind me, but that I would carry their memory with me for as long as I live and spread their fame abroad. Outside the monastery, in the bright piazza of San Marco, I looked across to the sculpture garden where the gate was closed and from whence came no sound of chisels on marble. The garden seemed empty; indeed, the city seemed empty without Lorenzo.
I went to the Camaldolese monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli with its little dome by Brunelleschi. Here it had begun, the Platonic Academy, in the person of Ambrogio Traversari, the spiritual mentor of old Cosimo, who made the first translations of Plato and recognised in the ancient Greek the great truth exemplified by Christ – the divinity of the soul, the kingdom that is within. Here those wise men met who knew the influence of Plato on the Greek Fathers and desert hermits, who knew that the original Platonic Academy was the seed of monasticism, who knew that the only way forward for our troubled Christian religion is a united Church founded as much on reason as on faith. Here they planned the Great Council seeking to reconcile East and West, a vision which failed in its intent but which nonetheless gave rise to the new Platonic Academy of Marsilio Ficino. Here Ficino gave lectures himself as a young man. Close by was the house where Ficino once lived and I recalled going there as a boy with my beloved guardian, Bishop Antonio degli Agli, and how I had been frightened to meet a Platonist in a house lit by a thousand candles.
‘Tommaso! Stop dreaming!’ The voice of Ficino resounded so clearly and forcefully it seemed I heard it with my ears. I flinched like a boy caught by his teacher in the act of doing nothing useful.
‘You have always dreamt of philosophy but never practised it.’ The voice was as loving as it was stern, and the truth of what it said went home painfully. ‘What have you forgotten?’
‘I do not know! What have I forgotten?’
‘Why did you come back?’
‘To find that which I have lost.’
‘And have you found it?’
‘Yes, perhaps. I don’t know. I have found peace of a kind.’
‘Where are you going now?’
‘I am on my way to the Via del Proconsolo and the Palazzo dei Pazzi, there to say goodbye to my memories of a little girl called Elena.’
‘More nostalgia! Follow me.’
I went through the city on the heels of a diminutive shade in a scarlet cap who led me to the piazza Santa Croce. It was almost noontide and cold and the piazza was empty apart from pigeons. I stood, held enchanted by memories coming from so long ago, of the aftermath of a joust when all the crowds had departed except for small boys, collecting shards of lances and charging at each other with them, their shouts bouncing off the walls of the surrounding houses. That day I had had a vision of the joust as if I myself were a god. I had been in the stands when suddenly I found myself looking down on it all from the sky above. I wondered how it is that I could see things aright in my raw youth when, after a lifetime’s study, I can see only this drab world we call reality.
‘It’s because you are asleep,’ said Ficino. ‘Time to wake up, Tommaso.’
He led me to the cloisters next to the church of Santa Croce in which is a chapel that had been built by Brunelleschi as a commission from the Pazzi family. So long ago. I had only visited it once before, when I was an apprentice scribe and had come to Florence with my master, Piero Strozzi. He had taken me there to introduce me to the new wonders of the city. The chapel, almost twice as wide as it is deep, is a strange, uncomfortable space for those who are ignorant of the new architecture. The interior is overwhelmingly white and grey, the circles and lines of its geometry visible in grooved pietra serena, the only colour being in the glazed terracotta roundels by Donatello and della Robbia. The main cupola over the chapel is the dome of the cathedral in miniature, illuminated by a circle of small round windows. It is decorated with a picture of the night sky and its constellations in the form of animals. Such is the Pazzi chapel seen through the eyes.
A stone mason and his assistant were up a scaffold, struggling to fix a stone escutcheon to the wall, a scrolled shield showing three dolphins and daggers
, the emblem of the Pazzi family being returned to its rightful place after being hacked down in the 1470s. I regretted their presence, for I wanted to do as I had done as a boy and sing: that is the better way to appreciate architecture – through the ears and not the eyes. But that part of me who would be a dignified, sober man, had no wish to appear the fool. ‘Keep quiet and leave now,’ I told myself.
‘Wake up, Tommaso,’ whispered Ficino.
The bell of Santa Croce began to ring the angelus, its great booms reverberating and answered by the angelus bells of the other churches of the city. Then something bubbled up within me, some boyish energy long suppressed. I knew I should never come here again. Be bold, I thought. Be reckless. Just this once.
The sound I made was a dry, husky squawk. That part of me wishing to retain dignity rose up in protest, ordering me to leave now. But I cleared my throat and tried again. Then came a good, clear sound on a single note, and as it continued it purified. It was answered, as I had hoped and expected, by a harmonic note resounding in the cupola. The voice of angels, the Bishop used to say of harmonics, when he taught me the principles of music in my boyhood. Running out of breath, I inhaled and let the sound come again. Again it was answered. Harmonics? This was no echo of my own voice. Tears welled in my eyes, but I concentrated on the sound, and the answering sound, which was the voice of a lady.
I sounded the note again and then began to sing the sol-fa scale.