Tuscan Daughter

by Lisa Rochon

  The prior stepped around a young monk who was sweeping a pile of dirt into a corner. “We have been waiting a long time for a new altarpiece, the great sacred themes, double-sided,” he said, turning to Leonardo.

  A painting. Sketching, drawing—he would happily abandon them all. Flight was what excited him now. But he had just arrived, must not speak his mind.

  “Prior, I aspire to your expectations,” Leonardo answered, returning his gaze, cradling the empty birdcage in his arms.

  “I only ask that you bring your utmost attention to this commission,” continued the prior, driving home his point. “Your time will be monopolized by the wealthy in this city. They are greedy and ambitious. They all want something—”

  “And none will interfere with your commission.”

  “I look forward to seeing the altarpiece come springtime.” The prior clapped a firm hand on Leonardo’s shoulder as he moved to leave them at their new lodgings.

  Leonardo set the cage down and leaned against the doorframe. “An altarpiece,” he sighed. “Two sides. By spring.”

  Back in Milan, he had no deadlines. He attended to the challenges of the day as if they were flowers brimming with nectar. He would create decorations for a castle ball, then work in isolation to conquer a mathematical equation. As chief military engineer, fire-throwing machines had absorbed him, though his patron never manufactured his weapons of mass destruction. Sometimes he’d paint a royal portrait and, even—oh God—figure out a way to flow hot water to the bath of the duchess. In the Sforza court, there were no clients to haggle with, no fees to negotiate. When inspiration eluded him, he would settle into a velvet chair next to a roaring fire and play his silver lyre for the entertainment of the court. He and his retinue had been clothed and fed. The duke had given him the gift of time to explore whatever fancy floated into his mind.

  And now?

  Salaì threw a leather satchel on a straw mattress in the corner of a room. “In Milan they looked after us.”

  “Until the French invaded.” Leonardo turned and carefully set the carafe of olive oil on a long oak table. He was not content with any kind of religion, did not believe in the wealth or the words spouted by the clerics—all their threats of Hell or promises of Paradise. But he was grateful for the free space, the ample natural light in the room.

  Looking up, he surmised that the timber ceiling was of sound construction. No rain would damage his work. “When are the others expected?”

  Salaì was pulling silk stockings and big-sleeved linen blousons from his bag. “Paolo should be here shortly. The others, day after tomorrow. Ferrando and Giovanni packed too many brushes and pigments and will blame their delay on lame horses.”

  Leonardo scoffed and Salaì waved a feathered cap in the air, caressing the long peacock feather back into shape. “Or frequent stops at taverns. Zoroastro and Raffaello will likely be even later. They could sleep past any invasion.”

  “Did you notice, as we rode past the Palazzo Vecchio, the copper ball atop the lantern of Santa Maria del Fiore, the Virgin of the Flower?”

  “You mean the Duomo? Careful, Maestro, old names serve old men. You have told me this story many times.” Salaì crossed the room and unlatched the deeply recessed oak windows. He kicked at a pile of ashes left behind in the room’s modest hearth.

  “It was too massive to be handled at the forgers. I was a youth at the time. A hot-blooded giovane, game for anything. My teacher, Andrea del Verrocchio, reined me in, taught me to bend sheets of copper into segments, sealing each of the seams with hot welds, using concave mirrors to catch the rays of the sun. We were working to Brunelleschi’s design. I remember it like it was yesterday; we soldered together the ball of the Santa Maria del Fiore, the two of us. Verrocchio was from the old school, an artist, a sculptor, a goldsmith. He was my master.”

  Salaì turned from the hearth, agitated. “You promised there was money here, a city of wealthy patrons, but the Duomo’s facade is still unfinished, and it smells”—he waved his hand toward his nose—“like everybody pisses in the river.”

  “Florence is a village of fifty thousand souls with big-city ambitions.” Leonardo picked up the basket and set it in the middle of the empty room. “There is beauty below the roughness. Like that girl with the olive oil. She smelled of rotten eggs, but what a face! Let’s see what we can create here. As I used to.”

  They might have gone to Venice, he thought, to that splendid Byzantine city of islands; Salaì wanted to, but Florence pulled on Leonardo’s emotions. There he had grown from a boy to a youth; there his father still lived, or was very nearly dead.

  Ser Piero, grown feeble in his mansion on Via Ghibellina, could read any legal document in Latin, but he had never impressed much of anything on his son except for his illegitimacy. It was Verrocchio, not his father, who had taught him to sit with a problem, refine the answer through many tests, to fail and fail again before finding the satisfaction of a solution. It was because of Verrocchio that he had learned how to still his mind and focus, how to harness the energy of the sun, how to catch the rays and feel the pleasure of invention.

  “And now we are here, it is incumbent on us to create a new social order. We will invite artists to gather—”

  “No loggia for our parties,” interrupted Salaì, sticking his head out the window. “How do you expect Ferrando and Giovanni to enchant pretty boys and the rich lovelies of the ottimati?”

  “In the monastery courtyard, then. We shall invite Lippi, Rustici, Botticelli—”

  “It feels airless. My God, I will suffocate in Florence.”

  “Here, take these coins, dear boy,” said Leonardo, handing him a dozen quattrini. It was what a female silk weaver might make in three days. Salaì flipped them into his purse, looking disappointed. “Go to the market and buy us some bread and sweet cheese. Some wine,” instructed Leonardo. “I have missed the bounty of Chianti all these years.”

  With Salaì gone, he allowed himself to close the studio door and lean heavily on the table. Had it been a mistake to come back to Florence? This Michelangelo—his star power was everywhere. He felt it in his gut, saw it now out of the edge of his eye. Seventeen years he had been away. He was nearly fifty years old. The commission for the sculpture of the David had been given to the young Michelangelo, not him. A hand drifted to his stomach, not for consolation, but to check whether he was running to fat. Still, he longed for a wedge of unsalted Tuscan bread and that girl’s olive oil to sweeten his arrival back home.

  Chapter 5

  Snarl,” said the servant girl. “Like a dog.”

  The girl leaned forward to inspect her work, the painting of her signora’s teeth in lead white to prepare her for another round of society parties. The adornment required precision and careful drying time or risked being ruined. Servant and mistress understood that adherence to the rules mattered. Artifice was a sign of status, a way to garner invitations to grand events thrown by the oldest and wealthiest families. No kindness was to be indulged. “Three coats on each tooth,” hissed the girl. “Now for the second. Stay still. No crying.”

  They had started after breakfast with the sprinkling of rosewater into Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo’s hair. Adornments were necessary evils, something you agreed to when you married into wealth: a woman’s public face was the measure of her husband’s worth. Francesco del Giocondo was fourteen years his wife’s elder. His temperament was often brutal but, because of him, she had escaped a lifetime in a convent among all the unmarried girls. God have pity on them and the women forced to work in the brothels.

  Instead, fortune had smiled down on Madonna Lisa! She would do whatever it took: paint her teeth with yellow, pink and blue paint, powder her eyes with crushed gold—she could manage, with aplomb, whatever Florentine society required. If she suffered, she would do so in silence. Francesco expected an obedient wife. Tuscan law required as much: compliance and a payment after a satisfying wedding night. Pay extra to show your appreciation for the gift of
virginity.

  Agnella della Francesca stood in the corner of the bedroom, observing. She could tell that Madonna Lisa hated this, the decoration of her teeth, her servant’s face unbearably close, hot breath poisoning the air between them. She imagined the pain that would be shooting up from the signora’s jaw to her temple, the throbbing of her jaw muscles. Feeling the sensations of others came naturally to Agnella. Her job as a healer required it. She could fix broken bones and stitch gashes, but often her work required going inside the pain of her clients. The wealthy required plenty of that kind of healing. She watched as the servant girl narrowed her eyes and dipped the brush into the pot of white lead paint. The room suddenly darkened, and Agnella felt the clouds sitting down on the sky. Lisa was gripping the wooden sides of her chair with both hands. It would be impossible for her to eat until tomorrow. Agnella said a prayer for all the women who had tossed their pearls in front of swine.

  Lisa’s family owned land in Chianti, and Gherardini was an old, honorable name. She had been fifteen and unsullied—handsome enough, too—when she and Francesco had walked through the city for their wedding parade. She told Agnella it had felt as if she were the belle of Florence. Agnella had seen it countless times: how everybody lined the streets, bowing to the newlyweds, even old women waving olive branches from their windows.

  From the steps of San Lorenzo church, Agnella could hear the troubadours: she strained to pick out a flute, a viola and somebody thrumming on a hand drum. The cool, wintry breeze caught and banged a shutter against the marble wall and brought her thoughts sharply back to the room.

  “Can I close?” Lisa asked, sounding the words at the back of her throat.

  The servant girl considered, then leaned forward and delicately pressed a finger to the signora’s front teeth. “Seems dry,” she said, wiping her nose on the back of her arm.

  Lisa bowed her head and quietly moaned her thanks. Agnella moved deftly to her side and rubbed the signora’s temples gently with her fingers to ease what she diagnosed as a throbbing headache. “Va bene,” she soothed, moving closer, smelling Lisa’s breath, like cheese forgotten in the cupboard. Laudanum would ease the pain and send her floating. But it would spoil her teeth, so Agnella would instead have to help her endure the suffering.

  “Now for the easy part,” she encouraged, nodding at the servant girl.

  She knew that Lisa enjoyed the caress of the horsehair brush, the feel of the bristles, the strangely sensuous sensation when the wet paste was applied over her shoulders and down to her breasts. While her olive skin was transformed to bright white, she would drift off and listen to the musicians in the street. The paste reeked of vinegar, powerful enough to kill the roots of hair. Agnella would never submit to such abuse. But among these ottimati women, following the styles of Milan required strict devotion. She had witnessed servants use the sharpest blades to prune the roots of hairs and enhance a woman’s high, shiny forehead. Lisa did not go to such extreme measures, but she agreed to the shaving of her eyebrows, to please her husband.

  The servant began unlacing the signora’s silk dressing gown. Agnella stepped forward to inspect her body, running her fingers over Lisa’s shoulders and down her back, looking for lesions and signs of poor fluid flow that might discolor the skin. In spite of the burden of carrying multiple children, Lisa possessed a fine, athletic figure. Agnella knew that her client had spent years playing with wooden horses and chasing balls through the back lanes of Oltrarno, on the south side of the river. Unlike the Medici and the Rucellai, or even the Pazzi women, she had known more freedom than the pedigreed girls who sat quietly at home, stitching tombolo and plucking at harps and lutes.

  The dressing gown slid to the ground. “Hurry up, girl,” Lisa snapped, not willing to flaunt her immodesty. “Be quick.”

  Holding the clay bowl of paste, lips set against the toxic odor of the lead paint, the girl slid the brush down Lisa’s nose and across the high planes of her cheeks. She covered her mistress’s neck in a few deft strokes and set the brush back in its bowl. The clouds had cleared, and the room glowed golden. Quiet suffused the room. Lisa looked cut in two. Above her breasts, the painted skin took on the gray sheen of a Greek sculpture. Below, she looked like a peasant drying in the sun after bathing naked in the river. The girl lowered her eyes and looked at her signora’s wide, serviceable feet. Made for foraging in the forest, Agnella reflected, watching the girl’s glance. A patchwork of dark bruises darkened the toes, which explained why Lisa howled her thanks to God every time her narrow leather shoes were pried from her feet.

  The other servants whispered to Agnella about Madonna Lisa: that she had grown up rough and dirty across the River Arno, and had only a tumbled-down manor in Chianti for her dowry. They could not know for sure; two of them were Moors from North Africa, bought by Francesco to serve as household slaves. Still, they gossiped. About how she loved to dance. How she had cried in the birthing bed when the nursemaid took her babies away to breastfeed.

  Agnella watched Lisa jiggle her feet to the sounds of the street musicians, lifting her heels instinctively as if to spin across the floor. The servant cleaned the paintbrushes with almond oil and set them back on the toiletry tray. The signora had been blessed with five children: Piero, a strong lad; Marietta and Camilla, her three- and four-year-olds; her bambolina, Piera, just two; and a new baby son, Andrea. An experienced midwife, Agnella had been at her side to deliver all of the babies. Bartolomeo, Lisa’s stepson, was a big brother to the others, though he was too rough whenever they were allowed to play at horseback in the courtyard.

  “Go fetch Piera,” said Lisa. “I need to kiss her rosebud cheeks.” The words surprised Agnella. Piera’s rosy complexion had become dangerously sallow these last days, and she was better left in the nursery to rest.

  “She is still coughing, Madonna Lisa. Let her enjoy her riposo,” Agnella advised.

  When she had lifted Piera into the light at her birth, her complexion had bloomed like the most delicate pink rose; everybody had agreed the newborn bore a resemblance to the luminous angel painted by Leonardo da Vinci in Verrocchio’s Annunciation. The baby had been bathed in warm white wine and swaddled in linen starched with rosewater. That was the tradition. Though there were plenty of other children in the mansion, Lisa and Piera had formed a unique bond. During the afternoon riposo, the signora would insist that the little girl be brought to her so that they could sleep together, Piera’s body draped over her mother’s chest, her blond curls interlaced with Lisa’s long brunette tresses. Long after the other children were dressed for the evening meal, the two could be overheard playing games with finger puppets stitched from scraps of silk and wool.

  The signora clapped her hands sharply. “Bring my sweet bambolina to me.” It was as if she were addicted to her child and needed her badly, many times a day, to feel whole. Agnella stepped back, understanding that, when it came to Piera, her advice was not welcome. She watched as Lisa recovered her gown and tied the ribbons around her waist with resolve. “And some chestnut pie. Make sure it’s thick with honey.”

  As the servant rushed from the room, Lisa, with deference to her friend and sage, said: “Agnella, come, hold my hand, give me strength.”

  The healer drew near and together the women looked into a hand-blown glass that Lisa had raised in front of them. Their reflections wobbled and then sharpened. Lisa opened her mouth and saw her chalky white teeth. Something to deploy along with her starch-white bust when her friends gathered later today in her salon, thought Agnella. They had been invited—Tomasia, Nannina, Lucrezia—to admire Lisa’s new bowls, the ones crafted in Venice and galloped by courier just days ago. Agnella had seen the vessels, appreciated them, too. Each with a portrait painted on the opaque white glass; tiny dots of gold making a circle around each child’s face at the bottom of the dish. The women would be sure to admire the ceramic, yodeling their approval like river birds. Lisa had told Agnella that the women had gathered at Lucrezia’s villa to coo over her fine
turquoise goblets, also from Venice—though Lisa thought they tainted the taste of the afternoon wine.

  “I know you must be in pain from the painting,” said Agnella.

  Lisa nodded. She looked off into the distance, as if wanting to escape her bedroom.

  “Would you like me to speak to the doctor about Piera?”

  A sharp shake of the head. “She has a fever, is all. And I need all of your attention.”

  Agnella touched her fingers to Lisa’s temples and made tiny circular motions to soothe the woman.

  A long silence fell between them.

  “Remind me why I am doing this?”

  “Doing this?”

  “Yes, this.” Lisa gestured to her painted self and rolled her eyes.

  “Oh, that,” said Agnella, allowing her many jeweled bracelets to slide down her arm. “So that none of your friends can accuse you of being from the wrong side of the river.”

  “Yes, my darling, beloved friends. All of us with frescoed teeth.” Saying this, Lisa smiled wide and started giggling.

  “No. Don’t,” warned Agnella. “You’ll crack the paint.”

  “I can’t help it.” Lisa was laughing loudly now, pointing at her teeth, her face and her neck. She wrapped her arms around her stomach to quiet her outburst. Recovering, she said, “I married a silk merchant for a husband. We have six children. A grand palazzo to call home. I’m adored and pedigreed!” She looked with admiration at Agnella. “Yet you possess all the elegance in the world. Just look at you. Your natural beauty, your ornaments, your wisdom.”

  “Well, I’m sure the elite ottimati wouldn’t have me, even if I aspired to it.”