Tuscan Daughter

by Lisa Rochon

  “A pain in the ass?”

  Leonardo smiled. “In a pleasurable kind of way.”

  There, he had dared to speak the truth. No rehearsing of the words. But there was more that he needed to add. “Michelangelo, your David astounds me. It dazzles me. To be honest, it makes me jealous. But, my brother,” he said, remembering Beatrice’s wise words, “we are all cut from the same juniper bush.”

  Chapter 47

  Sweetbriars in a vase; wicked thorns and tender pink blossoms. A table piled high with sketches and leather notebooks. A purple scarf thrown over a chair. It had been many months since she had last sat for him. Now she was alone in the studio, late-afternoon light falling over the wooden floors. All the dust exposed, coating the furniture in white, adding an extra dimension.

  Lisa picked up the scarf and wrapped it around her neck. Walked behind the easel, where he always stood, assuming the position of artist. “Twist a little to the right, chin down, up again, look at me,” she heard his voice from a faraway place. “Trust me, tell me about your life, your loss, your sorrows, your beliefs.” She had been a willing captive, granting permission for him to do with her what he wanted, holding still on the chair, breathing through her nose, learning his words: “Contrapposto, sfumato, cross right hand over the left, a little more, that’s fine.”

  She touched her hand to the naked skin of her neck. Cool—though it was a warm day, the winds becalmed, blue skies wrapped around the city. She had become one of his painted women, Ginevra, Cecilia, Mary, Saint Anne. See me, feel me, touch me, I am all yours. She looked at the board propped on the easel.

  “There you are, Madonna Gherardini.”

  Leonardo strode athletically across the studio. “Riddle me this.” Gripping her hands, kissing them gently. “Those who give light for divine service will be destroyed.”

  She tilted her head to one side, removed her hands, bristling at the formality with which he had addressed her. Did all their friendship amount to anything?

  “Fireflies when day breaks,” she said at last.

  “Could be, though I had something else in mind.” Eyebrows lifted, urging her on.

  “The stars every morn.”

  “Intriguing. What else?”

  “Leonardo, I cannot stay for long. We should discuss the portrait. My husband has been asking . . .” It wasn’t exactly anger she felt. Or rather, she wouldn’t allow that, knowing that Francesco’s anger always ended in shame. She felt restless, yet pulled to this man; he transported her every time they met.

  “The bees who make the wax for candles.” He clapped his hands in delight, proud of his riddle. She noticed the wrinkles around his eyes, intelligent, curious, deep river waters.

  “I’ll remember that one,” said Lisa, nodding, returning a smile. “I’m sure the children will be delighted.” She looked at him and felt it again: the transparent glaze of walnut oil down her cheek. Horse hair, silky and strong, caressing her skin. She had memorized his every move, dipping the paintbrush into the translucent gold paint, then facing the board again. One stroke. Another, then another.

  There was a sudden scampering, the sound of something bounding across the floor. A baby monkey dressed in a lacy white dress pounced onto the chair and sat very still, its enormous brown eyes staring intensely at the humans.

  “Portrait of a lady, una donna vera,” said Lisa. “Signed Leonardo da Vinci.”

  “I have something to show you,” he said, laughing, sweeping her toward the door. She thought of the first time they had met at the studio, the weight of his hand on her arm, feeling they might sink together.

  Into the moody shadows of the monastery stable, past the arched stone entrance, all sounds muffled by the straw on the ground. Leonardo clicked his tongue, calling gently to his horses, smiling at their snorted replies, the sound of hooves pawing heavy as iron against the ground. “Lisa, I’ve been called away to Milan,” he said abruptly, turning to her. “I expect to be spending much time there.”

  And so this was happening, she thought. He was leaving behind the people who mattered. “What of your unfinished work, all that is still to be done here, the battle scene, my portrait?” She rattled off the list as if duty required it. Who was she, a poorly paid assistant to the governor? Besides, he was not listening—his head was lifted, mouth curled, and he was calling again to his horses.

  The stable boy emerged from the darkness with a horse trailing behind him. It was the gray Andalusian, its silver mane wild and curly, a long forelock sweeping low over its face. The horse stepped forward, knocked its massive head against Leonardo.

  “As you are a rider, with experience in the hills of Caprese, I am entrusting you with this noble creature,” he said, wrapping his arms around the neck of the great beast. “Please indulge him. Take him for long rides in Tuscany or even here in the city. My understanding is that the governor has reopened the greenway near Porta alla Croce for all people—and riders such as yourself.”

  “Leonardo—” She started to speak, but was unsure as to how to respond. For how could he possibly conceive of a woman riding bareback in the city? He expected so much from her, had pushed her to think for herself, requiring her to stretch her brain in unseemly ways.

  The horse snorted loudly and shifted on its feet. “He will require your devout attention,” Leonardo said, producing a carrot from his satchel and feeding it from his hand.

  Just then another stable boy emerged, leading the Caspian horse. It was not as tall as the other, but had filled out to a healthy size, treated well by the Dominicans within the Florentine stables.

  “This one is for Beatrice,” said Leonardo. He rubbed his hand down the flank of its neck. “Better behaved, and loyal to a fault. She’ll transport the girl easily from Florence to Settignano whenever she needs to visit.”

  “Is this your way of saying my portrait is not yet finished?”

  Leonardo looked up at the sky. Was he praying? “You, Madonna, are a woman of shifting light and darkness. To capture your being, I discovered, is more difficult even than solving the problem of flight.” He looked over at her, hoping for a smile. “I am required to ask for your continued patience.”

  She sighed and stepped away from the horses.

  “Lisa, indulge me. I have dedicated a lifetime to studying how to truly see things. My notebooks are my attempt to record my drawings and discoveries, to patiently, carefully use my eyes, knowing how to see, saper vedere. I have discovered the golden waters on the moon, how to engineer a canal and map towns, how to breathe underwater with my apparatus. But I cannot yet say with satisfaction that I know how to complete a portrait worthy of you.”

  “Leonardo, please.” She refused to address him formally, raised a hand in gentle protest. “Do not think of me as an impatient housewife, waiting breathlessly to hang my image on the wall of our salon.”

  “We’ll leave that to your husband.”

  “Do you not know the rules?” she asked, impatience rising in her throat. “That ice will melt, that fire is hot, that women of the grandi class have no right to ride bareback through the city? You are oblivious to it all, the real world. This”—throwing her hands up into the air—“this is not some kind of fantasy.”

  “Start something new,” he said blithely. “Rules are not to be feared, only blind obedience of them.”

  “You abandon Florence for Milan once again.”

  “The new governor has summoned me there.” He shrugged. “It seems I am obliged. Milan has been good to me. I have been told that the French king would like to remove The Last Supper from its wall and haul it to France. Perhaps I will distract him by producing a new work.”

  “You abandon the people who love you here.” She bowed her head, hiding her hands within the mane of the Andalusian. Her voice felt broken, and she could not bear the thought of being in the city without him.

  “Allora, this is true,” he said, finding her hands and gripping them tightly. “For my entire life, I have studied.” He looke
d at her as if trying to piece together how to say what was necessary. “But mostly, I have been ignorant when it comes to knowing myself. I never had a teacher such as you.”

  “Will I see you again?”

  “Madonna, I would be honored to see you at my exhibition. It will be open to all people, from both sides of the river.”

  “Beatrice?”

  “She inspired it all.”

  Chapter 48

  She arrived at the exhibition predawn, before the crowds started to arrive. Inside the walls of the Santissima Annunziata monastery, within a billowing tent of linen, Beatrice stared obsessively at Leonardo’s drawing. It was the preparatory cartoon of the Virgin Mary, the Child, Saint Anne and Saint John. At first, the work seemed horrible, all black and dark; it smashed into her eyes like a fist. She knew it was unfinished, and yet it carried a terrible and raw beauty. Charcoal pressed hard into the paper, the figures surrounded by dark shadows, light shimmering from their faces. It felt timeless, as if it had found her after traveling for thousands of years.

  The more she examined Leonardo’s drawing, the more the streaks of white became blazes of light. She felt drawn—no, lured—into the picture. Mary and Anne seemed as authentic as women in Beatrice’s village, supportive of each other while tenderly holding an infant child. It was as if Leonardo were revealing a path to the spiritual world and a human empathy that she had never imagined from him.

  She felt an arm brush against her. “Allora?” she said, annoyed that her time alone in the tent had come to an end.

  “Pleased to meet you,” said an old man. “I am Sandro Botticelli.” He tapped her arm with his knuckles. “I have lived a long life, but I’ve never seen anything like this.” He bent toward the drawing.

  She looked over at him, this aging man in fanciful silks and velvets. Lippi had once told her all about being apprenticed to him. “I wish I could draw even half as well as Leonardo,” she said.

  “You draw?” He looked quizzically at her, his eyes bright with intelligence.

  Beatrice understood his disbelief; she was only a peasant, dressed in a rough linen tunic and a borrowed cape. A poor girl who had no right to art. Neither to view it, nor to make it.

  “It’s so real, the sweetness between mother and child,” she whispered, ignoring his question. She saw pure love in the way Anne looked at her daughter, but also in the rings of charcoal around Anne’s eyes, her passage from a life that was once carefree. Something caught in Beatrice’s throat. She felt the absence of her own mother all over again, the way their love for each other had been chopped into ugly bits. “I used to sit on my mother’s lap.”

  Her candor caught Botticelli’s attention, and he poked her arm with a bony finger. “That’s what happens. And then we all grow up and the troubles begin. Why do you think I paint worlds of fantasy? So that everybody can escape!”

  She heard shouting and turned to see what the commotion was about. Hundreds of people were crowded outside the monastery, some of them waiting solemnly to enter the public exhibition, others growing impatient to get inside. Standing on tiptoes, she could see that the line now snaked its way along the wall of the monastery, turned a corner and disappeared toward the Duomo. The maccheroni vendors had lit their charcoal fires and set their pots to boil. A group of nuns—wealthy girls who had lost their freedom but not their florins—headed for the food carts, laughing as they pulled strands of goat cheese apart with their hands.

  Beatrice waved at the women, beckoning to them and throwing some copper coins through the air, and a plate of maccheroni was handed across a dozen people to her. “Look at all of them,” she said, laughing out loud. The crowd continue to swell. She saw passengers fling open their carriage doors and start arguing with the monks for line privileges. Two men dressed in double-breasted gambesons started pushing at each other. Monks stepped in to restore order.

  “You’ll have to wait,” said the monk at the entrance. “We’re at capacity.”

  “I’m the governor!”

  “Art for all. First-come basis,” replied the monk. “Salaì’s orders.”

  “These people,” protested Soderini, “eat pasta with their hands. Clear them out so we can have a look.”

  Another monk, bigger than the others, switched from Latin to volgare. “You. Wait in line,” he said, crossing his arms across a vast chest.

  Three women drifted past, their necks adorned with long garlands of lavender and orange blossoms. A heavily muscled man walked by with a pair of monkeys. The women offered a garland to Beatrice and bowed, hands pressed together in prayer.

  “Making friends wherever you go.”

  Beatrice turned to see Michelangelo standing in front of her. “It’s a carnevale!” she said into his ear, eating another mouthful of cheesy pasta.

  Over the roar of the party, it was nearly impossible for her to hear Michelangelo’s response. She thought he said something like “Can I have you for myself?” and she felt his hand around her waist, leading her away from the crowd. They walked together to a shadowed corner of the monastery, beyond the lemon trees. She jostled next to him, eating with wild delight, allowing her hands to fly through the air rather than keeping them pressed together primly like other women at fancy parties.

  “Did you see all the people lined up on the street?” She put her lips against his ear—as much for her own pleasure as to see if it might trigger a vibration below his belly. Leaning closer, she inhaled his musky scent, the red wine on his tongue, and she moved to press a breast against his arm. She cherished his company, even if there was no hope for a love match. Not even to satisfy Agnella. Not even to keep him safe from the Office of the Night. But she could bring him food. Draw and paint next to him. Make him laugh when he grew too serious.

  He stepped forward, caught her by the small of her back and traced his fingers lightly over her lips. “I like you,” he said. “And I like that.”

  The blare of a trumpet pierced the air and interrupted their intimacy. Leonardo appeared, and the crowd parted to make room for him and Salaì. Salaì wore a pair of wooden wings on his back. They were wider than he was tall, and each was detailed with feathers individually dipped in silver and gold.

  “Look at his hair,” said Beatrice, elbowing Michelangelo hard in the ribs, amazed by the way Salaì had streaked his face and hair with some glittering precious metal. He glowed like mirrors catching sunlight.

  “Officials are arriving,” said Michelangelo. “Too bad.” He gestured to the main gates, where monks were lifting the male guests’ leather jerkins, doublets and gambeson jackets, checking for weapons. It was Machiavelli and Soderini, with their entourage.

  Beatrice drifted to the long walnut tables with wooden benches. By midday, guests were feasting with abandon at the banquet, their heads bowed over pewter bowls of fish stew or veal pies. Some dipped bread into aromatic soup. How strange and wonderful it was to see men and women, wealthy and poor, not divided but eating together, sharing platters of food, passing goblets and plates to each other.

  Two women dressed in emerald-green caftans stepped toward the tables, black hair pulled into glistening braids. Platters of fruit stacked high on gold pedestals sat on top of their heads. A man in a silk turban approached and set a large clay jar on the ground. He gestured to his leather holster fitted with tiny porcelain teacups.

  “This is a lovely surprise,” said Soderini, admiring the women.

  Beatrice chose a bowl of fish stew and stepped closer to the distinguished guests to listen to their conversation.

  “Orientals,” said Machiavelli. “Possibly from Java? I hear Magellan is hoping to make an expedition there. If Charles of Spain will indulge him.”

  Soderini shot him a defensive look; without the Medici, the Florentine Republic no longer had the funds to finance large expeditions abroad.

  The men turned their attention to the large tent next to the lemon trees. Its walls of white linen breathed in and out. People inside were staring with feverish intensi
ty at Leonardo’s small drawing.

  Beatrice caught a glimpse of Leonardo holding court the way he liked to, with a group of admirers fanned around him. His face was more handsome today than she remembered, his skin smooth and burnished. A man handed him a carafe of Chianti, and he bowed in dramatic gratitude, swirling a crimson velvet cape cut short to reveal his athletic legs. He drank, spilling some of the red wine onto his cloak.

  A look of discomfort spread over Leonardo’s face as the governor approached with his entourage. Soderini was talking loudly and gesturing with considerable bravado. She heard: “We need to insist on its completion—isn’t that right, Machiavelli?”

  She saw Machiavelli press his fingers on the artist’s arm. “The Battle of Anghiari is a work of major significance for the republic. You must see it through to completion. Choose a less humid day and make the repairs.” He crossed his arms and held steady.

  Beatrice watched for Leonardo’s reaction to the bullying. He seemed to be attempting to smile, but it looked more like a wince. She doubted he would give in to the harassment of these powerful patrons. Finishing did not interest him. Starting did.

  She spotted Madonna Lisa in a corner of the billowing tent. Lisa was magnificent in a long cinnabar-red gown with billowing sleeves of bright-blue damask, a red cap pulled over her forehead as a man would wear it. Like everyone else in the crowd, she was sipping from an earthenware cup—thick, unrefined pottery, not at all like the fine porcelain Beatrice had seen at her mansion. She waved at Beatrice and smiled, showing naturally white teeth, none of them painted. Gone were the fussy adornments of her society friends. This woman once whipped by grief, who had crumpled to her knees and come back to stand as tall and straight as the Campanile. Her face shone with dignity and strength, and Beatrice thought of her as an entire being, whose beauty coursed through her like a mighty river.