by Lisa Rochon
Granacci rose to move around the studio, cleaning. He threw the chicken into a pail, along with mildewed cheese and figs. Beatrice picked up a large jug and held it up in front of Michelangelo. “Wine?”
Michelangelo shook his head, dragged a hand through his hair. He stepped toward the David and touched the right, forward leg. Beatrice drank, wiped her mouth on her sleeve and drank some more. It was a strong, full-bodied red, the kind she could not afford. She noted David’s piercing gaze, as if he were greeting an Olympian. She wished Michelangelo would look at her that way.
“I can see you’re letting your David move forward out of the stone.”
“I started by defining the high planes first, the nose, the forehead.”
“Why is movement so important to you?” She was still sitting with her back against the wall, trying to ignore her hunger.
“Remember when you were drawing your mother in the toga? On the fountain outside my studio?”
Beatrice looked at the stone floor. “I never said it was my mother.”
“Allora, va bene. I thought it might have been her. As a memory.”
“I asked you about movement.”
Michelangelo jumped from the scaffold and sat down beside her. “To show that life evolves. That we can change ourselves. That humans can own ideas and their beautiful, God-created bodies.”
“I’d sell my ideas if I could earn a florin.”
“Beatrice,” he flirted, “you’re on to me.”
“There have been some arrests,” Granacci interjected, holding tight to a broom. “The Office of the Night brought in some men, apparently sodomizers.”
Ignoring him, Michelangelo unwrapped a packet of food and bit down on some spinach and anchovies heaped on Tuscan bread. Beatrice walked over to the David. She longed to be alone with Michelangelo, just the two of them in this darkened hall.
“Michelangelo, you have to listen,” continued Granacci. “Two men, a jeweler and a goldsmith, were arrested last night while leaving the Buco. Drunk, of course, loud—and the sbirri were waiting to crack their skulls. Machiavelli is getting ideas from Duke Borgia and his sick love of discipline among his men.”
“I don’t go to the Buco. You think this place stinks?”
“Nobody is accusing you of anything,” said Granacci. “But don’t you see?” Panic etched his face. “This beautiful creature, this naked man—”
“This is not some kind of sickness, if that’s what you mean, Granacci. Some call me Il Divino. But here you are, my friend, thinking less of me.”
“Michelangelo, I’m worried somebody will denounce you. Go to Settignano, take some rest, until this passes.”
“Remember those days at the Medici Academy?” said Michelangelo, his face darkening. “You were always trying to protect me. I don’t need it. I don’t want it. Get out!”
Beatrice stood up. The Angelus bells announcing sundown were ringing loudly. Walking past Michelangelo, she hesitated. “Your David is . . .” She was looking for the right word. “He is courage.”
Granacci took his leave, closing the door softly behind him.
“Beatrice,” said Michelangelo, looking over at her. “I forget myself when I am working.”
“I know that.”
He handed her some bread and anchovies. “Please stay. I need . . .” It was as if he was incapable of finding the words. His eyes moved all around the cavernous studio and back to her. “You are a lark escaped from its cage. I need your spirit to help me through.”
“Well, then,” she said, looking from him to a pile of rag paper on one of the studio tables. “You sculpt. I’ll draw.” She reached for a sheet and paused. Here she was, sitting beside Michelangelo. And now there was something other than a wall for her to draw on. With paper, she could practice telling the truth about what many suffered during their lives. More and more these days, when she drew a childlike putto or a person, she tried to evoke emotion, even if it meant disfiguring their angel wings or hanging rags of pain across their faces. Give her the kind of luscious oil paints that Leonardo used and she would color the face of Madonna Lisa with streaks of purple and red, like a warrior.
“Try this,” he said, handing her a piece of sanguigna. “It’s the color of flesh.”
Without speaking, she set the chalk aside and took his hands. She felt their rough, dry texture, his palms turned hard from gripping cold chisels and receiving the shock from the mallet. She saw that his fingertips were as smooth as glass from testing the surface of his marble sculpture when the light went bad and his eyes no longer served. She turned his hands over and bent to slowly kiss his knuckles, every one of them swollen and enlarged.
She picked up the reddish-brown chalk in her hand. “Looks to me like dried blood.” And her heart leapt at the gift from Michelangelo.
Chapter 22
Salaì watched from the monastery as the woman stepped from the carriage, wrapped in a heavy black dress. She brushed away the outstretched hand of the driver. A dry wind lifted her veil off her shoulders, and still she stood like a tree in winter. He glanced at Leonardo, hunched over his drawings of horses’ heads, a heating brazier set for his comfort below the worktable.
“Madonna! Madonna!” shouted Salaì, leaning dramatically out the window. He beckoned to her with both hands.
Leonardo was already at his side. “Is that her?” He turned away from the window. “Paolo! Paolo!” he called. “What is her name again? Her name?” he hissed as his studio manager rushed into the room. He gestured to the window, and Paolo pushed in next to Salaì.
“She is Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo, of Gherardini nobility. Madonna Lisa—vieni!” Paolo called, daring to address her with a term of familiarity.
From beneath her black silk, Lisa raised an arm tentatively. A flash of white—her hand. Then another figure emerged from the carriage, someone moving with a muscular grace. A servant? No, it was Beatrice. She leapt to Lisa’s side and took her arm. Bending to the woman, the girl seemed to be providing counsel. The woman listened, waited and gave her approval. Then, as if pulled by a string, they walked with deliberate, stoic steps toward the studio.
Leonardo hustled down the hallway toward the side entrance. Blocking his way was a jester in garish stripes with a monkey sitting on his shoulder—the animal wearing the striped uniform of a sentry and nibbling a large apricot—and a second jester with a baby monkey clinging to his arms. Paolo often hired jesters to entertain clients during portrait sittings; it always put them at ease, relaxed their shoulders, brought a smile to their eyes.
“Paolo,” scolded Leonardo. “Her little girl died. A messenger informed me. She’s in mourning. No jesters today.”
He could see that grief had robbed the woman of her vital spirit. It was as if her red, sinewy insides had been replaced by wool batting.
The jesters pulled sad faces at Leonardo, stretching their mouths with their fingers into ridiculous frowns.
“Va bene,” replied Paolo as he motioned the jesters away down the hall.
The troupe started a charade of bawling. The baby monkey escaped with high-pitched squeals, and his mother leapt from her perch and followed at a gallop.
Leonardo waved his hands at the scene, willing it into oblivion. Then he descended the stairs to greet Lisa Gherardini and her companion. At the second-floor landing, he slowed his pace and offered both women a deep bow. He kissed Lisa’s hand, icy to the touch, barely brushing it with his lips. Her skin had the sickly pale patina that comes from being shut inside for too long.
“Maestro. It is a pleasure to meet you.”
“Signora Gherardini, I am honored to receive you. Please accept my deepest condolences. I am entirely at your disposal if the tragic circumstances are—”
“She is well enough, though still grieving deeply,” interrupted Beatrice, stepping forward. “We will proceed with caution, as pleases the signora.”
“I see you are in good hands with our wise Beatrice.”
“My husband spea
ks often of your reputation,” said Lisa stiffly, a mix of formal speech and informal volgare. She pulled her hand away from Leonardo and back to Beatrice’s grasp. Her breath shallow, she added: “I have not seen The Last Supper. He describes it as a work of great devotion and—”
“Humanity. That was my intention, signora.”
Her brown eyes flickered briefly to life. He gestured toward the next flight of stairs. She leaned against Beatrice and walked cautiously, as if on borrowed legs.
“You are living here with the Servites,” she said, a statement rather than a question.
“Yes, with the grace befitting the Servants of Mary. These private rooms are given to my assistants and me.”
“How many assistants do you have?”
“Five. And Paolo, our studio manager and cook, who tries to manage our many appetites. We are all busy enough. I’m painting for the Servites. An altarpiece.” He nodded along with his words, as if to emphasize his enthusiasm.
“One painting in exchange for five rooms?”
“Correct.”
“Well, then,” she said. Leonardo watched how she stopped to catch her breath, as if she were an old woman. “The Servites are property-rich.”
Weak of body, he thought, though there is still a boldness about her mind. He bent his head and watched her from the corner of his eye. She betrayed nothing. Her teeth appeared to be without lead paint, though it was difficult to know for sure because she spoke without fully opening her lips. Her eyebrows were plucked clean, with a thin line of something arching mid-forehead—likely mouse hair, he decided. Sorrow darkened the curve of her neck. She stared down the corridor and then at him, her eyes solemn, seeing him with unblinking intensity. They passed one of the studios, walking so slowly he became acutely aware of every step, every burst of color that greeted their passage: a crabapple tossed in the hallway, a shard of late-afternoon winter light streaming across the wooden floors.
“Buon giorno,” said Ferrando, his youngest assistant, looking up from his work. He was holding a piece of sapling over a pot of steaming water, bending it slowly.
“My assistant from Spain. Ferrando, please make the acquaintance of Signora Gherardini del Giocondo.”
Ferrando de Llanos stepped forward and made a short, athletic bow graced by a wave of his right arm, as befitted a gifted artist from Madrid.
“Of course, you are already acquainted with Beatrice.”
“Salve, Beatrice! Come visit me and I’ll show you my experiment with wood.”
Paolo reappeared from the kitchen, holding a tray of exquisitely prepared stuffed Damascene dates. He followed them toward the studio Leonardo had decided Lisa would pose in. An ink map of Imola, a fortified town that he had personally walked and measured, the better for ambitious usurpers to attack and conquer it, hung from the wall. He had been to war. Sinking in mud up to his knees, breathing in the stench of rotten grapes, their juice mixing with blood on the ground. As Duke Borgia’s military engineer, he had witnessed carnage with his own eyes—“Ah, yes, the pazzia bestialissima,” Borgia had said to him, his face masked to hide the ravages of syphilis, sweat-slicked and grinning: horror tickled his fancy. A stone-walled villa outside Imola had become the invaders’ headquarters; Leonardo remembered the massive circular towers, but also the violations by the thugs, their crimson and yellow uniforms stained in blood. What did the duke call him back then? “Family architect and general engineer.” How quaint, he’d thought, but not nearly as quaint as the duke’s own nickname, Il Valentino.
At the threshold, Madonna Lisa and Beatrice stopped abruptly. To Leonardo, it was as if they had planned their choreography from within the plush confines of the carriage.
“We are taking a moment,” said Beatrice, eyes surveying the room as if she were seeing it for the first time. “Tincture?” she inquired of the signora, holding aloft a small jar of green liquid produced from a pocket inside her jacket.
Lisa nodded and swigged from the bottle. “Grazie, Beatrice. Yes, that feels very helpful.”
“With your permission, signora, I shall leave you to make the acquaintance of the great Master of Arts,” said Beatrice, speaking with an eloquence and formality that surprised Leonardo. “I’ll be in Ferrando’s studio if you need me for anything at all.”
Leonardo took Madonna Lisa’s hand. She was not pretty. She could not be depicted like Cecilia, the young mistress of the duke of Milan, who was as lithe and watchful as the ermine he’d painted her cradling. But still, there was something about this Lisa Gherardini. Something about the lift of her chin, the pride in her shoulders. She personified a greatness that did not end with the city but began with the earth. He had anticipated that the merchant’s wife would be a lady of the ottimati class. He’d imagined she would require a phalanx of servants to accompany her to his studio. But she had caught him off guard. Perhaps, he thought, this signora was not so very different from himself. And how her body shifted with uncertainty, how heavy with sorrow she appeared! As she slid the black veil slowly from her head and arranged her dress, he wondered if the weight of her grief would sink them together. He was troubled by loss, too: of his reputation, of his youth, of his status in Florence.
Leonardo looked at her sideways. The layers of black—the brocaded overgown, the bodice stitched with shiny beads, the diaphanous head veil—all of it clothing to indicate the depths of a person’s virtù as well as grief. There were times when he grieved a little for his own failings, for what he had become. He wore purple capes and boots to show off the curve of his legs. But more and more, when he dressed in the morning, he felt that his flamboyance was a disguise.
“Madonna Gherardini—”
There came the sound of paws pounding and an unholy shriek. The two monkeys hurled themselves down the hallway, screaming with wild abandon.
“Our monkeys!” The jesters appeared, wild-eyed, then ran after them.
“Delicacies for the monkeys!” yelled Paolo, chasing the group with the tray of dates held aloft.
Turning, Lisa watched the departing monkeys as if hypnotized. The owner clicked his tongue and beckoned to them. The larger of the two nibbled tenderly from his hand. The baby scrambled up her mother’s back and reached for a date, resulting in a small shift of Lisa’s mouth—the suggestion of a smile. Leonardo was stifling laughter, a hand clapped against his mouth, tears springing to his eyes. It was all too much, the cavorting monkeys in sharp contrast to his client’s deep grief. He wondered why she had turned up, yet he admired her formidable strength.
Her hand grazed his elbow. “Later, with time, I will laugh along with you,” she said, nodding at him, providing reassurance, acknowledging his face gone red from suppressed laughter.
They went into his studio, past the indigo-blue velvet curtains that fell from the oak rafters, hiding the bed where he slept with Salaì, past the long wooden table heaped with his notebooks and sketches, to a heavy wooden chair, arms of thick oak, cushioned at the seat. He suggested with the wave of an arm that the signora should sit. She stood next to the chair, looked to the window as if searching for an escape, then finally nodded and sat. It was chilly in the studio. The fireplace heaped with oak logs managed only to take the bite out of the winter air held in by the stone walls of the monastery.
Leonardo pulled his heavy velvet cloak around his chin and stepped several paces away to an easel that held a poplar board. The easel provided a safe haven for him and, hidden from her gaze, he rubbed his cold hands together, curling and uncurling his fingers. He felt stiff as a runner after too long away from training. Painting? For years, he’d been sketching and making engineering calculations; mostly he’d been managing the affairs of his studio in Florence. But the poplar board helped to steady his mind. It was cut from the heart of one of the great trees that grew fast and high in Lombardy, near Milan, and it had dried to perfection over years in storage, waiting for the right commission. All these years later, it still smelled like the freshwater springs of verdant valleys. True, at
30 by 21 inches, it was large for a portrait, and he’d known he was taking a risk when he set it on his easel that morning.
He looked over at Lisa, sitting rigidly in the chair, though her eyes flitted like restless moths over every object in the studio. A jar of lead white sat on a mixing table next to him, prepared as instructed by his most reliable assistant, Giovanni. He dipped a thick brush into the jar and began spreading a thick primer coat onto the board. He moved slowly and felt a moment of regret that the tight grain of the poplar was being erased. With half the plank painted white, he looked again at the signora, observing, making notes in his mind, with no intention of beginning her portrait.
“Would you look directly at me?”
“Are you painting already?” she asked, her eyes sliding over to him, down to the floor and back to the window.
“Not yet,” he said, smiling at her, thinking he would start by sketching with paper and pen after she had gone.
“Permesso. May I?” Beatrice was at the door of the studio, sending a reassuring smile across the room to Madonna Lisa. Leonardo waved her inside, “Avanti,” but she had already stepped to Lisa’s side.
“Is that enough?” inquired Beatrice, easing Lisa to standing.
“For today, certainly,” said Leonardo, setting his brush down, glad the session had come to an end. “We can meet again at your leisure.”
“Will I always have to sit?” said Lisa, her voice tired and querulous.
“On the contrary,” said Leonardo. “My portrait depends on you not always sitting down, but moving around, both of us. With time, we will come to know each other, to listen to each other’s stories, to see each other truly. Only then can I begin to paint in earnest.”
Chapter 23
Inside the massive studio, standing on the edge of his scaffold, Michelangelo dropped the buffing pad and picked out a rounded pumice stone. He pressed his chest lightly against the sculpture, a reluctant lover, and rubbed gently into the curve of the neck, coaxing with careful strokes. Running his fingers over the fossetta, he selected a pad layered with abrasive emery from his pocket to heighten the polish. He wanted to work the marble to the point of porcelain transparency, that people might imagine a pulse beating in the hollow of David’s neck.