by Lisa Rochon
As Beatrice made her way to Lisa’s side, she was distracted by the sight of Michelangelo approaching the illustrious group, his black cap pulled low. He embraced the governor with both arms, then shook Machiavelli’s hand, pumping it hard. Beatrice watched as Leonardo bowed to Michelangelo and the young artist bowed lower to the master. They seemed to have made an uneasy peace, which pleased her.
She turned sideways to allow room for Paolo and his undercooks to parade past with trays of food raised high above their heads. She had never seen such quantity and variety before: basins of olives, platters of roasted capons and pheasants dressed in herbs, baskets of tarts decorated with mint leaves and pomegranate seeds. The tables had been reset with fresh layers of white linen, candles set to glowing. Guests began seating themselves on the long wooden benches, ready to pour wine for each other and enjoy a formal dinner. Beatrice knew she should sit and pull out her cutlery case—the tiny fork and spoon everybody else seemed to have brought with them—but she had not thought to bring her own tableware. Instead, feeling bold and irreverent, she grabbed two tarts and pocketed some sugared nuts to take to her mother.
Ferrando angled by her, carrying a wooden cask of wine on each shoulder. “Gifts from patrons,” he said, winking at her. “Meat at last, not just Leonardo’s vegetables!”
There was barely enough room for her to extend an arm and find Lisa’s hand. Together, they squeezed through the crowd to stand at Leonardo’s side. Beatrice reached out to Michelangelo and linked an arm through his. Her cheeks glowed hot, and she felt giddy and loved. Leonardo looked kindly at her, then rested his eyes on others who had joined their circle.
Soderini’s wife, chin lifted, gestured toward Leonardo with a long peacock feather. “Master of Arts,” she said, curtsying deeply, “your fresco will pay tribute to the greatness of the Florentine people. You must return and complete it.”
“You should try this—it’s really, really delicious,” interrupted Beatrice, her mouth stuffed with a generous portion of mushroom tart.
“May I present Beatrice, a good friend,” said Leonardo, hugging her to his side. “And not merely an olive oil girl,” he added.
“A fine artist, too,” said Michelangelo.
“Exactly right.” Leonardo nodded. “Plenty of talent and lots to teach all of us.”
“Our Tuscan daughter,” said Lisa.
There was an appreciative pause, and then, as if he had forgotten himself, Leonardo spoke with gladness: “Honored guests, may I present Madonna Gherardini del Giocondo. My dear, wise friend.”
The governor and his wife hesitated and finally bowed to the women, then Soderini stepped toward Leonardo to insist again on the completion of the fresco.
God watch over you, thought Beatrice, and squeezed Leonardo’s hand to steady his heart.
The blare of a trumpet pierced the air. In the courtyard, a group of musicians stepped forward playing viols, followed by others holding wooden cornetti to their lips. Monks lit candles within giant white lanterns—designed by Leonardo, she knew, and made by Salaì out of flax paper—and set them like moons touching the ground. Flowing from the exhibition tent, the crowd gathered to watch and be enthralled. A musician started playing a slow ballad on his lute and Salaì appeared, slightly stooped under the weight of his large wooden wings. They seemed too heavy to allow even the most modest flight, but Beatrice appreciated the spectacle—he looked like a silver and gold butterfly—and joined in the riotous applause. He lifted his arms and monks appeared in the fading light, carrying pillows covered in bright swaths of silk and inviting the elderly and women to sit upon them.
Beatrice stood up on her toes, the better to see the depth of the crowd. She had been at the exhibition all day, and still the entrance line showed no sign of ending. It looked like the party would go on all night. More long tables were being set up with shimmering lengths of linen and endless tallows.
Her head felt light from the wine she had drunk, and she wanted to share the strangeness of the moment, the lavender sky kissing the darkness of the earth. She wove through the crowd and found Michelangelo alone in the white tent, crouching in front of Leonardo’s drawing. He had lit the tallow on his leather head strap and was peering at the sketch, one section at a time, sweeping the light slowly in front of the work. His hand reached forward and she thought—she feared—he might rip the paper from its frame. But what he did surprised her: he had curled his fingers together and was drawing in the air, tracing Leonardo’s lines: delicate movements for Mary’s face, followed by a fury of movement where the drapery of the women fell to the earth. Was he pretending to be Leonardo? Her heart went out to him then, and she loved him for his pure, unpolished heart.
“I have some charcoal,” she joked, making to fish through her leather pouch. “In case you are planning on offering some improvements?”
Michelangelo stepped away from the work. “Not a chance. He’s the Great One.”
“Leonardo calls it humanity.”
“He’s making emotions real.”
“If you like that kind of thing.”
“I’d like to learn from him, think of him as my mentor. Do you think Leonardo can be trusted?”
“I do.” She reached forward, drew her fingers lightly across Michelangelo’s knuckles. With her other hand, she widened the leather pulls on his gambeson and pressed the charcoal stick against his skin, drawing the outline of an angel—face lifted, wings spread wide, the way she wanted him to feel. She breathed in his smell of damp wool and liked it all over again.
“Will you come with me back to the studio?” he asked.
“To do what?” She was thinking dark, sexual thoughts. Didn’t everybody?
“We could be together and you could paint with me.” He caught her in his arms and lifted her off the ground.
“I might, or I might not,” she said, lifting her head to him, allowing the dark lengths of her hair to fall down past her neck. She pressed her mouth against his neck and kissed him lightly, tasting the salt of his skin, and the tent whispered behind her in the evening wind. Her wish was to touch this maker of beauty, who had made David a hero for the city.
“Allora,” he said, bowing his head, gently setting her back down on the ground. They stood with their foreheads pressed together. Their flirting was no good. A white wedding—unconsummated, without sex—was a lie they could not bear to live.
He reached for her face and smoothed her brow with his rough, calloused fingers. She saw the apology in his eyes.
“Even if this . . .” He looked from her face to the deep-purple sky. “Promise me you’ll keep working on your art,” he said.
She nodded. Let the confusion between them be gone. Going forward, she would pursue clarity. She was nearly ready to take up Agnella’s offer to exhibit her drawings in the hospice of Santa Caterina. She could imagine them in that place of healing, her cherubs and wild-eyed angels, her portraits of the leather-skinned village vendors who stood hunched outside the city gates.
Outside the tent, under the stars, monks and artists swirled together. Some of the artists were wearing colorful headdresses fashioned to look like swans and serpents, with patches of silk fabric for scales. The crowd let out a roar and the headdresses were removed and sent flying like kites into the air. The players were revealed: Benedetto! Gherardo! Giovanni! Dante! Arrigo! Bartolomeo! Ferrando! Each stepped forward and shouted out his name: they all worked in Leonardo’s studio.
Salaì gestured and Leonardo stepped into the courtyard. He removed his white headdress, which curled like the horns of a ram. With a quick jerk, he hurled it into the air and the horns unfurled like a long white veil. Beatrice watched, mesmerized. She understood what was happening. This was Leonardo’s way of saying goodbye.
The crowd surged and Beatrice was nearly knocked off her feet. She was reminded of swimming in the gentle current of the River Arno. Leonardo’s sketch of mother, daughter and child had shown her that tenderness was possible for both the lowest and ho
liest of humans. Wait a minute, she thought, holding a plate of iced pears in one hand, a stick of charcoal in the other. I am feeling again. For Michelangelo. For Leonardo. For Agnella and Mona Lisa. For my mother. She wanted to take all of her emotions and throw them in a ball up high so they could stay, untouched, in Heaven. Maybe that was where enlightenment was found, right next to love and forgiveness.
There was something moving through the air. She felt a warm breeze and directed her gaze above the hundreds, possibly even thousands, who had gathered within the vast courtyard. The roar of the crowd disappeared. Beatrice looked up and trusted her eyes. Saper vedere is what Leonardo called it. Larks, nightingales, white parrots—it could be another exhibition—a flock of birds lifting off. She saw them clearly. Ascending.
Epilogue
1509
A cockleshell!”
“Sketched on the paper?”
“Instead of your portrait you saw shells?”
“Just one.”
“Long live the cockleshell!” said Agnella, raising her cup of mead and banging it hard against Lisa’s.
“May it live on, that tiny sketch,” said Beatrice, laughing, spilling some of her drink.
“As my portrait never will,” said Lisa, setting her drink down.
They never tired of her story, the one where she was alone in Leonardo da Vinci’s studio, just before he traded Florence for fresh fortune in Milan. She had walked over to the easel to finally glimpse the portrait he had never allowed her the privilege of seeing. But the wood panel was gone, replaced by a single sheet tacked to a fresh board. Then the monkey arrived and took up its chair—or did Leonardo bound into the room first? Master and animal caught in a fantasy world where everybody dressed up in fancy clothes and snacked on dates and bananas.
“All these years gone by and I have only seen him once,” said Lisa, resting her hands on the table the way Agnella did. Beatrice knew she admired the way the healer arranged herself naturally, curved into space, rather than holding herself rigid as a measuring stick. “Francesco fixed a meeting at the Palazzo Vecchio in advance of Leonardo’s legal hearing with the governor and his advisors. For quitting the battle commission, refusing to do it all over again. There he was, the great Leonardo, standing on the steps of the palazzo and caught by Francesco, who pressed him for details about when my portrait might be delivered. Naturally, he waxed on like the moon, avoiding anything real or specific.”
“He was paid for his troubles?” Beatrice served herself a large piece of chestnut pie and put half of it into her mouth. Lisa handed her a linen napkin and took another sip of the honey wine.
“Francesco paid him from our first meeting in his bottega.”
“I loved him from the moment I saw him, releasing that white parrot into the sky,” said Beatrice, eyes shining. She felt shot through with elation, the way she had that day in the lineup outside the city gates. One of her drawings in the Santa Caterina exhibition showed a white bird racing for the sky, moving with such speed that some of its feathers ripped into the sky. That one was dedicated to Leonardo.
“You say it with such ease,” said Lisa.
“What?”
“Love.”
“Oh, that. Yes. Might as well. I was in love with Michelangelo. And he loved me, too, but not entirely, not that way. He loved his art even more.” Her words galloped ahead of her. “I’m in love right now.”
“Careful,” advised Agnella.
“Iacopo—he came back from Romagna. Mercenary soldier no longer. He scolded me, though, for stealing eggs from his mother’s hens.” She stuffed the rest of the pie in her mouth.
Agnella and Lisa looked across at each other, absorbing the revelation, plainly thinking, Such a beautiful girl, still given to a wild spirit.
“Are you making plans?” asked Lisa nonchalantly.
“Basta,” Beatrice warned. “That’s enough.” She defiantly lifted her chin. “Maybe we are, maybe we aren’t.”
“Beatrice, don’t dump all of your apples out of your cart. You need time for yourself, and you have your new exhibition to prepare for.”
Nodding in agreement, growing serious, Beatrice considered the women she adored looking back at her. It was true that, after seeing her exhibition of bird drawings, Prior Bichiellini had requested that she display ten of her charcoal drawings in the Santo Spirito library. She had completed a series of cypress trees, black and thin, glinting like swords. And one other work, the most difficult: a portrait of Il Papa, her beloved rooster.
All their wisdom and kindness, given to her as gifts. Better than myrrh or frankincense.
“Iacopo is an honorable man,” she said. She lifted red apples from the basket. “Can I give these to the horses?” They were roped outside, the Andalusian and the Caspian, chickens pecking at a safe distance in the yard. She stood to go outside, glad to escape the conversation.
* * *
“Va bene. She’s all right,” said Agnella, after Beatrice had departed. “Learning well at the convent. Nearly finished her training as a midwife. Transforms herself the moment she walks into a patient’s room. All efficiency and expertise.”
“She keeps long hours there—I think she likes it—and never seems too tired to dance in the courtyard when she comes home to Via della Stufa at night.” Lisa looked around the room, at its whitewashed walls, gilliflowers spilling from clay pots near the window. Agnella’s house was a refuge, simple and primitive, of the type favored by Savonarola for its honest construction, without gold or silver embellishments or even the brightly painted terracotta rondels so commonly found in Florence. On the wall was a single artwork, a carving of the Virgin and Child. Lisa studied the way Mary cupped the feet of baby Jesus in the palm of her hands, as a real mother would.
Agnella followed her admiring gaze. “That was made decades ago by one of my neighbors, a sculptor by the name of Rossellino. I like it, though it’s growing old and dusty.”
“I find your home an oasis,” said Lisa.
Before he moved away to Rome, thought Agnella, this home was Michelangelo’s oasis, where he could clear his mind and collapse into her caring. Each month, a young moon etched in the sky reminded him it was time to visit Settignano. Ever faithful, he had come back a year ago to tell her the news of an important commission to paint the Sistine Chapel for Pope Julius.
Beatrice came clattering back into the kitchen. “Horses are settled now. Shall we go? I want to see Leda before the sun goes down.”
She called her mother by her first name these days; it seemed easier that way.
“Leda is an old Greek name,” said Lisa.
“It means—” added Agnella, but Beatrice interrupted her.
“I know. Leda means happy.”
“I believe Leonardo painted Leda with a swan. Beautiful, no doubt. Your mother suits her name more than ever these days,” said Agnella.
“The goose bumps on her arms have been gone a long time. I think I’m learning to trust her again.”
“Before you take your leave . . . Beatrice, Lisa, have you seen this?” Agnella rose from the wooden bench and walked to the fireplace. Sketched above the mantle was the figure of a man twisting head and body in contrapposto toward them. She remembered how Michelangelo had pulled a stub of charcoal from the fire, honed its edge to a fine point with his knife. This was when he was completing the David. She had been ladling soup into terracotta bowls. “I asked him whether there was a demon—somebody he feared.” She saw in her mind how he’d traced the male figure, working with tiny movements of the hand, darkening the hatching on the wall to reveal a noble bearded face. The right arm of the man reached out, a billowing cloak floating grandly behind his torso.
“What did he say?” asked Beatrice.
“Of course he was reluctant to tell me. Finally, he said: ‘The giant I face is older than I, and more talented. He’s known by princes and paupers across the land.’”
“Leonardo,” said Lisa.
“Yes,” said Agnella,
looking up at the sketch. “He said, ‘My nemesis is the one I most admire.’”
“Dio mio, sounds like the Michelangelo I know,” said Beatrice. “Obsessed and obsessive.” She remembered the marble dust he left on her hands, the sound of the new word on her tongue: scultore. “I miss him. What he taught me.” She hesitated, then lifted her gaze to look directly at the women at the table. “What we gave each other.”
Author’s Note
I never planned to write a novel about Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. The idea emerged slowly during the time when I was an architecture critic writing about starchitects and powerful public artists who were rebranding twenty-first-century cities around the world. Turns out the trend didn’t start with Frank Gehry or I. M. Pei, but hundreds of years ago in Florence. But that’s not what hooked me. It was discovering that even superstars struggle with their own personal demons and harsh judgment. Then Beatrice showed up in my mind as an olive oil girl sent down from the hills to the city like a wise talisman. At that point, I couldn’t let the story go.
Tuscan Daughter is my attempt at drawing back the curtain to reconsider history through a female gaze. As much as I was intrigued by an epic clash of titans, I felt compelled to give voice to strong female characters who were never given a chance to be seen or heard. How brave are the outsiders: artists, gays, women who had no rights and who claimed their own power outside the rules.
Writing a historic novel featuring two of the world’s greatest art geniuses has been extraordinarily humbling and often overwhelming. It required years of heavy research and the courage to let much of the investigation go. In many ways, I needed to add layer upon layer of understanding, something that Leonardo called the process of addition per via di porre, but, ultimately, take away, something Michelangelo called per forza di levare. With the help of many, I learned that this was the only way to reveal the emotional track playing inside the heads of my characters. I had already imagined and written much of the character of Beatrice and her complex relationship with Michelangelo when I read in one of Charles de Tolnay’s renowned biographies on Michelangelo that the artist did, in fact, mentor at least one female artist during his lifetime. She was Sofonisba Anguissola, who became a court painter and lady-in-waiting to the queen of Spain, and lived to the grand age of ninety-seven years old. At the same time, Leonardo painted women not in demure profile but gazing directly out into the world. I like to think of both Leonardo and Michelangelo as feminists ahead of their time.