by Linda Proud
Throughout my life I have sought the divine world in books, in the words of books, but this picture, seen so many years ago but never forgotten, is the nearest a book has come to showing me the truth. Where is the divine world? At the end of a ladder of ascent from the material to the spiritual? No. Is it a heaven to be attained after death by the pure? No. It is here, now. One thing on top of another. The world we see that beguiles us and frightens us in equal measure, the world of the senses and daily concerns, has been written over the divine world. You can look at your wife as another being, someone who shares your space and with whom you must learn not to collide, and your marriage will depend on one thing only: your ability to co-habit in harmony. Love? It is stored away with the important documents of your life, your legal contracts, always operating but never referred to. Stand back and look again and the wife will reveal herself in her glory as the Aphrodite of your soul. Love? It will tingle in your pores.
The divine world is here, now, but we clothe it in temporality, in desire, in misery and know it not.
For those with the eyes to see, see.
Volterra, May, 1507
I have heard from Erasmus in Bologna that he is being driven mad with tedium. He wants to go to Venice and have his book published by Aldo. I have agreed to go with him, but first I have come to my native city to clear up family matters and put my affairs in order. Rafaello has a fine house in this high city. From the loggia on the roof you can look out on one of the most beautiful views in the world, a green sea of rolling hills capped with a castle, a monastery or a little village made out of rock. A mineral land of mines and sulphur baths. A land of great wealth and poor people. My land. Home.
‘Of course, there is no need for you to return to England,’ Rafaello said at dinner last evening. ‘This is too large a house for me, and besides I am rarely here.’
Now I look out on the Volterrana and my heart is squeezed with longing. Home at last with my beloved hills and my wife: why should I travel any further? As the sun rises and kisses the fields and vineyards, resurrecting the land for another day, dark, musty, ignorant England seems a place of dreams.
Rafaello told us something remarkable last night. A year or so ago he went to a lecture given by a young Polish astronomer called Nicholaus Copernicus who spent his youth in service to a disciple of Pomponio Leto. Although the speaker was careful of what he said at the lectern, Rafaello had private conversation with him afterwards – ‘very private conversation’ – and was told by Copernicus that he believes he can prove that the Sun is not only the symbolic centre of the universe but the literal one. I watch the sun setting and rising and must doubt this by the evidence of my eyes. Sun rises, sun sets, and there’s an end to it. Rafaello says that this is an illusion caused by the earth turning. I look at the land and it is still. But the theory resonates wonderfully with the symbol; I think back to Lorenzo’s Triumph of the Seven Planets and his re-ordering of them with the glittering, gilded Sun coming first. Sometimes – always? – the imagination knows things which are only proved later by scholars.
Rafaello is as excited by new discoveries in the earth as in the heavens. Quarrying in the Baths of Titus, they have found a statue of Laocoön; Rafaello tried to describe to us the wonder of this great sculpture, carved in ancient Greece from a single block of marble, in which Laocoön, the son of Priam of Troy, is shown with his own two sons in a group of agony, being squeezed to death by serpents. ‘Now Michelangelo really does have a contest with the past,’ Rafaello said, laughing. ‘Nothing he may do will ever surpass this.’
‘Are the achievements of the past always greater than those of the present?’ I wondered.
‘Everything we discover about the ancients rather gives credence to the concept of the Golden Age.’
‘But clearly Homer believed that the Golden Age was somewhere in what he called “antiquity”, that whatever age he was in it was not the golden one,’ said Maria. ‘So somewhere, perhaps lost to us forever, is there a statue that would make the sculptor of the Laocoön faint with admiration?’
This tipped us into a long discussion of Plato and the theory of ideals. I told Rafaello that Ficino had once said that the Golden Age was not somewhere in the past; it could be here, now, and required only men of golden minds.
‘The notion that truth and beauty are out of reach, either in the remote past or the highest heaven, is a strong habit of mind I seem unable to rid myself of,’ he said. ‘How long have we spent this evening talking about antiquity?’
‘About two hours.’
‘Two hours spent in oblivion. What was happening here and now?’
‘The sun was going down, throwing long shadows over the Volterrana and its hills, all at peace,’ said Maria. ‘And yet I do believe that such discussions are the very mark of men of golden minds.’
Rafaello looked fondly at my wife. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘how did he propose?’ Maria gave her version, of how in the middle of one of our many long conversations I suddenly dropped to my knees and asked her if she would marry me even if it meant her certain death.
She and my brother laughed heartily.
I looked down on the main square of Volterra below us. ‘It was there, right there on those steps, that I met that gipsy from Constantinople who cursed my life with his prophecy. He predicted our brother’s death, and told me that all who I love shall die before me.’
‘I told him,’ Maria said to Rafaello, ‘that I am forty-six years old and have had double the span of most women. Death is always certain. It’s our only certainty.’
‘I had been trying not to ask her,’ I explained. ‘But then, as we were discussing something or other –’
‘Carrots.’
‘Carrots?’
‘Whether they are best cooked or raw.’
‘Oh, yes. As we discussed the medicinal properties of the carrot, the dam broke and I found myself on my knees and offering Maria her doom.’
Rafaello was mopping at his eyes. ‘Not quite Romeo and Giulietta, is it?’
‘A comedy, not a tragedy,’ said Maria. ‘I accepted at once.’
‘The gipsy’s prophecy does not frighten you?’ Rafaello asked her.
‘I would rather have one day with my husband than all my days without him, especially,’ and here she looked at me darkly, ‘if I have to spend those days in a convent.’
I gazed on her, this woman who has loved me all her life and I knew it not. All her life? That is what she claims. She says that when she first met me, when Filippino and I discovered her in Poliziano’s flooded house in 1478, she recognised me. ‘That’s what love is,’ she says, ‘recognition.’
Rafaello asked me if I remembered the Greek mercenary, Michele Marullus.
‘Of course. He was in Florence for a year or two. Married Alessandra Scala. Now drowned, I believe.’
‘In the Cecina.’
‘Really? Close to here?’
‘He was my guest – slept in the very bed you are using. The day he left, eager to go to war against Cesare Borgia, the rain was torrential. I begged him not to go, to delay a day or two more, but he was on a crusade against the Borgias and dedicated to ridding the world of Cesare. It was just before Easter. The Cecina, swollen with rain and the melting snows from the mountains, was almost bursting its banks as it rushed along. Peasants standing near the river cried out to him not to be a fool, saying that it was madness to try and cross, but Michele told them he was not frightened. When he was a boy, a gipsy had told him that it was Mars, not Neptune, he should fear. So he spurred his horse into the river. For a little while the horse withstood the force of the current but then it lost its footing. Michele was carried away on the surging water, cursing the gods as he went. They found his body downstream the next day.’
‘He was your friend, Rafaello, but do not ask me to mourn him. He was very cruel to Angelo.’
‘His poor,
abandoned wife, Alessandra Scala, entered the convent of San Piero Maggiore,’ Maria told us with a sigh.
I grew reflective. ‘I wonder if it was the same gipsy?’
‘I think it must have been,’ said Maria, ‘for he was just as wrong about Marullus’s future as he was about yours.’
A letter has come from Cardinal Giovanni. He wants me to go to Florence and oversee the transportation of his father’s library from San Marco to his house in Rome, where he is now residing. He says the position of custodian will be a permanent one, should I desire it.
A house in Volterra, work in Rome, a wife. I am offered all that I have ever wanted, more than I ever dared hope for. The sun is rising – or, rather, the earth is turning – and the city is flooding with warmth. I hear my language being shouted in the streets below and look down on colourful awnings and the flags of our contrada. England seems like Hades, a misty place of shades and shadows. Stay then, I think. You are bound by no contract to return. And then it came, the scent of roses. No physical perfume, but the memory of it, all combined in one moment of ethereal scent, Elena, Ficino, Botticelli – and a street in London called Bucklersbury.
When Dante met him in hell, Odysseus told him how, after arriving home at Ithaca, he had only stayed awhile before moving on and leaving his faithful wife, Penelope, once again to continue his restless wanderings, even beyond the pillars of Hercules. Terrible, isn’t it? I have never liked that version. It is unresolved – poor Penelope! Still, this is my story, not that of Odysseus. Maria will be coming with me.
I look out on the Volterrana and see a hawk stationary in the sky, high above its prey. I stand back and look again and see my land for what it is: Beauty. It shimmers with that iridescent radiance that is in and around all things, if you see them aright. I am free. I can move on, for I have found that which I had lost, and it is a portable thing: the courage to love.
The test, of course, will be a class of children in a London school.
Those who immerse themselves in their work become confined to a narrow space. As Pythagoras said, ‘Take care not to get boxed-in so that there is no more sky for you.’ O, my friends, live happily and do not be boxed-in. Live happy. You were created by the happiness of heaven; you were declared by heaven with laughter. Live every day happy in the present moment. If you spend the present in worry, you will lose the present and the future, too. I implore you, again and again, live happily!
The fates allow this, so long as you live without care.
To live without care, do not allow one single care.
Never worry about anything.
Live in the present.
Live now. Be happy.
MARSILIO FICINO.
HISTORICAL NOTES
In writing historical fiction, one uses facts to create a story. Story is the novelist’s prime consideration, and it is usual to let fiction have dominance over fact. I have not gone that way, however. Early on in the project, which began in 1974, I decided to stick to the facts. Sometimes they were awkward and annoying, but I found that, when I stuck to them, even though it meant much re-writing, the story grew richer and deeper. But, of course, the imagination was constantly in play, either to plug holes in the documentary evidence (which is particularly thin with regard to the women), or to interpret the facts in such a way that a plausible story was created.
Many of the so-called ‘facts’ are a bit dubious: so much is received opinion, transmitted over the ages. Current ideas about the character of Poliziano, for example, stem from slanders put about by those probably responsible for his death. Using the story- teller’s instinct for what is true and what is not, I have picked my way through nearly five hundred books and learned papers, trying to reconstruct a world and its characters to the best of my ability.
As a novelist, you must consistently imagine yourself as a particular character in a particular place and time. You have to be there. This use of the imagination nearly always has surprising results, reconciling apparent contradictions, providing solutions to nagging questions. ‘Facts’ may be true in an empirical manner, but the imagination – and storytelling – often lead to a psychological truth which the facts alone cannot supply. It is the imagination which can make the facts ‘add up’.
Almost everything about Maria is pure fiction, as it had to be. All we know is that she lived with her brother and features on the obverse on two medals of Poliziano and one of Pico della Mirandola. Not an ordinary sister, then, but one valued and esteemed by two of the greatest minds of the time, unless, of course, she had the medals struck herself.
To look in the catalogues of the great libraries and see all Poliziano’s works neatly listed, it is natural to suppose that their fate has been orderly, that publication was arranged during his lifetime, since when the books have passed unchanged through various editions. In fact, when Poliziano died his only surviving work was his boyhood notebook which included his Greek epigrams (including some which have blighted his moral reputation ever since – proof that all poets should burn their early work). For the Opera Omnia everything was collected together by friends. Aldus states his regret in the preface that he could not include works which he heard were hidden in Florence, one of which would have been the Account of the Pazzi Conspiracy. The Second Miscellanea was for centuries believed to be irretrievably lost. In fact it was passing through private hands and it was only on the death of its last owner, when it went to a library in Venice, that it ‘came to light’. Acquired in 1961 as a battered old book containing pages neatly written in Poliziano’s own hand, it was first published in 1972. We do not know what happened to it on Poliziano’s death, who acquired it and how, but its re-emergence gives us hope that more works will appear in the future.
The shared tomb of Pico and Poliziano was last opened in 1940 and the contents viewed by H. C. Bodman.1 The body of Poliziano was reduced to a few fragments of bone, but Pico’s was well preserved ‘in as perfect condition as an Egyptian mummy’. That he was dressed in brocade contradicts absolutely the Dominican claim that the Count of Concordia took the habit in his final hours. It seemed so odd that Pico wasn’t buried in a habit, whether he had converted or not, that I created the scenes of Tommaso re-clothing the corpses of both Pico and Poliziano. No doubt more will be revealed by the scientific tests currently being done in the latest exhumation by a team from the University of Bologna, led by Professor Giorgio Gruppioni, which was announced as I was making this book ready for publication. Modern forensic techniques may finally establish the cause of their deaths.
The general view up to now has been that Pico was murdered by his secretary, Poliziano died of some affliction of love (either syphilis or falling downstairs in rapture) and Lorenzo of gout. It was Juliana Hill Cotton in her seminal paper Death and Politian (1954) who drew attention to the large number of deaths of friends of Lorenzo in 1494. She did not, however, question Lorenzo’s own death. And yet the storyteller intuitively felt that Lorenzo died in mysterious circumstances.
What the ‘gout’ was, was solved with the exhumation of four generations of the Medici in 1955. Lorenzo’s grandfather, Cosimo, and father, Piero, both showed evidence of ankylosing spondylitis, an hereditary and crippling form of arthritis. Lorenzo, however, did not. What skeletal abnormalities there were in his body indicated another form of arthritis.2 It is unlikely to have been a cause of death – much more lethal were the remedies he was prescribed.
Although the material rather suggested I should write a murder mystery, I was shy of accusing the dead and in the end stayed more realistic; while pointing fingers at suspects, I allowed Tommaso to be as I am: ignorant of the truth. But then certain things came to my attention in the last year of writing, all rather in the nature of a revelation, which caused a great deal of revision to the end of the story.
I was told several years ago that the three great paintings of Botticelli which have inspired each volume of this trilogy were hung together at
the Villa Castello. When I looked into it, I found to my amazement that it was true: La Primavera, Pallas and the Centaur and The Birth of Venus were hung together, but not until 1506, which made it seem irrelevant to my plot. Tommaso would not have seen them there, not unless he visited Castello in 1506 – but why would he do that? Then, in 2006, I read Carol Kidwell’s biography of Marullus, which told me much more than I had previously known about certain characters, not only Marullus himself, but also the Pierfranceschi and Caterina Sforza. Suddenly I had a suspect for at least one of the deaths who I was not shy of accusing, and this feeling was somewhat heightened when I discovered, after five minutes browsing the internet, that in 1506 the Villa Castello came into Caterina’s possession and it was she who hung the three paintings together. So now I had both a suspect and an excuse for Tommaso’s visit to Castello. It all fitted together so plausibly that I really wouldn’t be surprised if it proved to be true, that if Lorenzo was murdered, then Caterina is the prime suspect.
It was in the same book on Marullus that I discovered that one of the first accounts mentioning Copernicus was written by none other than Rafaello Maffei. It was this that inspired the return of Tommaso to Volterra at the end of the trilogy, back to where he had begun.
All the words of Pico della Mirandola have been drawn from his works, most notably Heptaplus and the Oration On the Dignity of Man,3 where he does indeed refer to the sacred sentence of Eastern mysticism, ‘That Thou Art’, as well as say that the western tradition derives from the east. These supremely important works did not appear in the Opera Omnia compiled and edited by Gianfrancesco. Pico is often referred to as the man who destroyed astrology, but his refutation of astrology needs to be analysed, given that the manuscript remained with Savonarola after Pico’s death and seems to have been reworked.4
Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici became Pope Leo X in 1513, before he was thirty; his cousin Giulio, who reigned as Clement VII from 1523, was the pope who refused to sanction the divorce of Henry VIII. Giovanni, the son of Caterina Sforza, grew up to be Giovanni delle Bande Nere, the sire of the Grand Dukes of Tuscany, and laid out the grounds of Castello as one of the first and finest of the great Italian gardens.