The Birth of Venus (27 page)

“He is fine. You haven’t seen him?”

“No. But as you see I’m not fair company anymore.”

I looked at him. I could detect the fear in his fury. How strange for a man to have been so loved and not have grown any tenderness as a result of it. “You know, Tomaso,” I said, “I don’t think your friendship was just about your beauty.” And for a second I dropped my guard. “If it’s any consolation, I do not see much of him either. He is busy these days with other matters.”

“Yes, I’m sure he is.” One could almost
touch
the open wound in his arrogance. I wondered for a moment if he was going to cry. “Well,” he said briskly, “you and I will no doubt talk more another time. For now I have kept you occupied long enough.” He gestured to the almost finished fresco. “Please. Go back to . . . whatever it was you were doing before I disturbed you.”

We stood and watched him hobble away. When the boils burst, how much of his bitterness might drain away with their liquid? I wondered. No doubt that would depend on how disfiguring were the scars left behind. As to what he would do with his suspicions—well, worrying about that would simply make me weaker if and when it came to a fight.

I turned to the painter. How could he begin to understand what he had stumbled into? I didn’t have the words, much less the stomach, to tell him.

“I should finish her skirt,” I said harshly.

“No. I need—”

“Please . . . please, don’t ask me anything. You are well, the chapel is finished, I am with child. There is much to be grateful for.”

And this time it was I who ended the look. I picked up the brush and moved back to the wall.

“Alessandra!”

His voice stopped my hand. I don’t think in all the time we had known each other that he had ever used my name. I turned.

“It cannot be left like this. You know it.”

“No! What I know is that my brother is too dangerous to cross and we are both at his mercy. Don’t you see? We must be strangers now. You are the painter; I am the married daughter. It is the only way we can save ourselves.”

I turned back to the wall, only my brush was shaking too much to make the first stroke. I tightened my grip on it and willed my hand to be steady, steadier than my heart. His desire was all around me. All I had to do was turn back into it and let it envelop me. I put the brush to the wall and gave my longing to the paint.

After a while he joined me, and when my mother returned to the chapel to collect me, she found us painting side by side.

Though she did not say anything, that night she sent Erila to the servants’ quarters and slept with me herself in my old bedroom, where she was so evidently restless that even I, who in the past had had so much courage for night walking, would not have dared to risk her half-open eye.

Thirty-seven

T
HE CONSECRATION WAS DONE BY THE BISHOP, WHO
stayed for the shortest time, ate and drank liberally, and walked away with some splendid bolts of cloth and a silver communion chalice. Presumably he had somewhere to hide it all, since if the Angels got to hear of such gifts they would have had them out of his palace and on their carts before he could say Hail Mary.

The priest who took mass afterward was Tomaso’s confessor. He had been a friend of my mother’s family for a long time and had tutored me through my early catechism and heard my youngest confessions. God knows what sins I had embroidered for his delectation then. I had had an early penchant for drama and had sometimes wanted to appear guiltier than I really was because I thought my absolution might take up more of God’s attention. Since I never quite got around to confessing to my confessions, there is an argument for saying I have been damned since childhood, but then the God that I grew up with had always been more benevolent than vengeful and I had been loved enough to believe he would continue that way. How many other families must there be in the city who now found themselves likewise wrong-footed by this new severity? Though watching the bishop pocket his rewards for doing what was, after all, God’s work, it was easy to see how the battle lines had been drawn.

The service was simple: a short sermon on the grace and courage of Santa Caterina, the power of prayer, the richness of the frescoes, and the joy of the Word made paint, though the priest’s ardor was mediated by the presence of Luca, who sat in the second pew like a lump of sourdough. My brother had grown fatter in the friar’s service—I had heard a rumor that the threat of famine had seen a new wave of recruits to God’s militia in the last few weeks—with an expanded sense of his own importance. Our conversation had been cordial, if banal, until I broached the subject of the pope’s ban and the confusion it must bring to his followers, at which point Luca exploded with rage, claiming that Savonarola was the champion of the people, which meant only God had the right to exclude him from the pulpit, and he would preach again if and when he chose, regardless of any orders from Rome’s wealthiest brothel keeper.

Indeed, my brother’s rhetoric on the corruption of the established church was now so extreme and reasoned with such clear and fervent logic—in itself a tribute to the man who had taught him—that it seemed impossible for any compromise to be reached between the two sides. Yet if Savonarola did preach again, the pope could hardly countenance such a threat to his authority. Would he use force to crush it? Surely not. In which case would we end up with some kind of schism? While I could not bear the idea of a church that denounced art and beauty, did this really mean I approved of one that sold salvation and let its bishops and popes siphon off church wealth into the pockets of their illegitimate children? Yet schism was unthinkable. One of them would have to submit.

I glanced around at the rest of my family. My mother and father sat in the front pew, her straight back pulling him straighter. This was the moment he had dreamed about. While our wealth might be waning our heads were held high—apart, that is, from Tomaso, who sat alone, consumed by self-pity, even more self-conscious in his ugliness than he had been in his beauty. Next to him came Plautilla and Maurizio, sturdy and dull, and then my husband and me. An ordinary Florentine family. Ha! If you listened carefully you could hear the chorus of our sins and hypocrisies hissing up from our souls below.

The painter stood at the back, and I could feel his eyes upon me. We had spent the morning moving around each other like two tide pools in a river, drawn constantly close without ever seeming to merge. Tomaso watched us with hawk eyes but forgot us the instant Cristoforo appeared. The two of them met briefly in the courtyard over a groaning refreshment table, both of them as tense as racehorses, my mother and I pretending not to notice. They barely spoke to each other, and when we were called to the chapel Tomaso broke free and turned on his heel, a clear flounce to his movement. I chose not to catch my husband’s eye, but I could not help noticing Luca’s face as they walked passed him. I remember my mother’s comment about Tomaso all that time ago: Blood is thicker than water. But was it thicker than belief?

“
YOU WERE RIGHT ABOUT YOUR PAINTER.
”
BACK HOME IN MY
husband’s house, we sat in his neglected garden courtyard watching the dusk fall, both of us a little nervous as to what to tell. “He has talent. Though given the atmosphere of the city he would do better to go to Rome or Venice to find his next commissions.” He paused. “It’s as well your spirit doesn’t suffer from vertigo. How long did you sit for him?”

“A few afternoons,” I said, “but it was a long time ago.”

“Then I applaud him even more. He has caught both the child and the change in you. What happened to make such a man disfigure himself in so brutal a way?”

No, my husband does not miss much. “For a while he lost his belief,” I said quietly.

“Ah, poor soul. And you helped him find it again? Well, you have saved something there, Alessandra. There is great sweetness to him. He’s lucky the city has not corrupted him more.” He paused. “There is something we must talk of now—if you do not know it already. The infection that Tomaso has . . . it is contagious.”

“Are you telling me you are ill?” I felt my stomach turn with fear.

“No. I am telling you we both might be.”

“In which case, where did
he
get it from?” I asked bluntly.

He laughed, though there was not much humor to it. “My dear, there would not be a lot of point in asking. I have been a fool for love when it comes to your brother, ever since I first set eyes on him in the back of a gambling haunt near the old bridge four years ago. He was fifteen years old then and brash as a young colt. It was perhaps unwise of me to expect that such an infatuation could ever be mutual.”

“Well, I could have told you that,” I said. “How long until we know for sure?”

He shrugged. “The disease is new to us all. The only hope is that people do not seem to die from it. Other than that, there are no rules and no medicines that apply. Tomaso has fallen fast, but it may just be that he contracted it early. No one knows.”

I thought of the pimp hanging from Ponte Santa Trinità with his innards unraveling onto the ground, and how this had been punishment for, among other things, procuring for the French everything they desired. And it made me wonder again about the murderer. What force of rectitude must be inside him and what fury!

“But there is worse,” he said softly. “Another contagion is arrived in the city.”

I looked at him, and he dropped his eyes. “Oh, sweet Jesus, no. When?”

“A week, maybe longer. The first cases came to the morgue a few days ago. The authorities will try to keep it quiet for as long as they can, but it will out soon enough.”

And though neither of us had said it, the word was already loose in the air, sliding under doors, out between the window frames into the streets, into each and every house between here and the city walls, the fear of it more infectious than the disease itself. Either God was so impressed by Florentine piety that he had chosen to call the godly to him directly, or—well, the
or
did not bear thinking about.

Thirty-eight

T
HE PLAGUE ARRIVED AS IT ALWAYS DID, WITH NO RHYME
or reason, no forewarning, and no hint of the level of damage it might cause or how long it would rage. It was like a fire that could destroy five houses or five thousand, depending on which way the wind blew. The city still bore the scars of the great purge of a century and a half before, when it had wiped out almost half the population. So many monks had died then, toppling like tenpins in their cells, that it had caused its own crisis of faith among those left behind, and the churches and convents were still littered with paintings from that time, all of them obsessed by the Last Judgment and the closeness of hell.

Yet surely Florence was different now. While the boils could be seen as a scourge worthy of sinners, even a public confession of fornication, the plague was another matter. If this was indeed God’s punishment, what had we done to deserve it? It was a question Savonarola must answer.

THE NEWS OF HIS RETURN TO THE PULPIT TRAVELED AS
FAST AS THE
disease. I would have given anything to hear him preach, but while plague was indeed the great leveler, it had a proven fondness for those who were weak already. Had it just been me, I might have risked it for the sake of my insatiable curiosity, but I had to think for two now and in the end I compromised, accompanying Cristoforo in the carriage as far as the church to witness the throng, then going home while he went inside.

That the crowd was smaller was obvious to everyone. Of course there were good reasons for that—fear of contagion or the illness itself. It would be a reckless man who diagnosed waning influence from the attendance for one sermon. Once inside, my husband said, Savonarola’s passion was undimmed, and no doubt all who heard him felt the fire of God in their bellies again. But on the streets, where his voice didn’t reach, not all the people were ill. Some seemed just weary, their bellies suffering other pains, this time from hunger, so that after a while it might become hard to tell one ache from another.

The truth was that while the city still loved the friar and applauded his courage and her own closeness to God, she also wanted to be fed. Or at least be made to feel a little less miserable.

My husband’s analysis on this topic was an elegant one. When the Medici had been in power, he said, because they had no more of a lifeline to God than anyone else (though a good deal more money), they had adopted a simple strategy to win the people. If they couldn’t offer salvation they could at least offer spectacle, something to make even the poorest feel better, proud of their city and proud of its vision, even if that vision only extended as far as celebration. Not that such events were godless. Far from it; they were conceived in praise and gratitude to God. It was there in all of them—the jousting, the tournaments, and the parades—it was just that they wore a happy, noisy, even profligate face. And whatever might take place during the festivities, there was always the option of confession the day after. In this way for a brief period people forgot what they didn’t have, and as long as things got better in the long run (or as long as they didn’t get any worse), that seemed enough. Such was the color and confidence of their reign that people felt as if they had
lived
under the Medici, which was a different feeling from simply preparing to die.

Such secular celebrations, of course, were not within Savonarola’s creed. There could be no carnivals or jousts in the New Jerusalem, and though he spoke passionately enough of joy when it came to God, his God was such a hard taskmaster that they were both becoming more associated with suffering. And while suffering cleanses, it can also get dreary after a time.

What better way to banish
dreary
then, than by a religious spectacle, an event that spoke of God but also served to light up one’s everyday harsh existence? To make it—well, less
dreary.

I MUST SAY THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES WAS AN
INSPIRED IDEA.
And the way Savonarola told it from the pulpit was irresistible: If Florence was suffering, it was because God had chosen her above all others and her journey had become a matter for His personal attention. As he, Savonarola, scourged and starved his body to make himself the perfect vessel for the Lord, so the city must show herself willing to make the sacrifices worthy of His great love. From the relinquishing of unnecessary wealth came exquisite blessing. What need did we have for such fripperies anyway? Cosmetics and perfumes, pagan texts, games, indecent art—all such objects and artifacts only distracted our attention and muddied our devotion to God. Give them up to the flames. Let our vanity and our resistance burn into nothing and disappear with the smoke. Into the space left would come grace. And while I am sure the friar himself never considered this, such a purging would also help ease the pain of the poor: for as well as bringing humility to those who had too much, for those with nothing, it offered the comfort that no one else would have it either.

Over the coming weeks, the vanities collected by the Angels rose up into a great eight-sided pyre in the middle of the Piazza della Signoria. Erila and I watched it grow with a mixture of awe and horror. You couldn’t deny that the city felt alive again. The building of it provided work for people who would otherwise have grown weak from starvation. People had something to talk about, a focus for gossip and excitement. Men and women went through their wardrobes, children through their toys. Where once we had flaunted ownership, now we explored the attractions of sacrifice.

Of course, not everyone was enthusiastic to the same degree. There were many people who, had they been left to their own devices, might have chosen not to participate. This was where the Angels came in, a clever move in itself because God’s young army had been somewhat underemployed of late, idle in a city brought low by famine and illness. Some were more persuasive than others. Savonarola had inspired certain young souls to great rhetoric during his reign; there were a few whose words glittered like the gold lacquer from Gabriel’s mouth in the Annunciation. I once saw one of them talk an elegant young woman into giving up her concealed bangle and admitting to a hidden switch of false hair. They had both parted shining from the encounter.

The Angels rolled carts through the streets, the leading one carrying Donatello’s sweet statue of the boy Jesus at its head. They sang Laudate and hymns and visited each house or institution in turn, asking what they would like to give up. In some places it became almost a new snobbery, as one household vied to outdo another. In others the visits took on the edge of the Inquisition. The Angels had done their homework, seeking out the richer families first to set a good example. If enough was given, they thanked them and went on their way. If not, they invited themselves in to look around. Of course the giving was voluntary, but adolescent boys can be awfully clumsy when they are in a hurry, and it only took a few tales of smashed Murano glass or torn tapestries to bring out in many families a generosity born of fear. Even when Florence had been invaded, our enemies had behaved with more gentility, though it would have taken a brave man to use the word
looting
in the Angels’ presence.

The morning they came to our house I was sitting at an upstairs window observing their progress down the street, their raucous singing—too many broken voices muddying the angelic ones—laid over the percussion of the cart wheels. The rules on indecent art were well known. There should be no images of naked men and women in houses where there were young girls. Since most houses had young women, even if they were servants, this could be more or less ruthlessly applied. By these standards my husband’s sculpture gallery would be considered obscene. It was now behind locked doors, the key on his person, while in the courtyard a box of offerings was ready: some rich out-of-fashion clothing, some playing cards, various trinkets and fans, and a great ugly gilt mirror, which spoke more of bad taste than bad faith. I had been fearful that it wouldn’t be enough (my pregnancy was making me more anxious than before), but Cristoforo was phlegmatic: While there were those in power who would almost certainly know about such collections as his, he argued, they would be careful whom they betrayed. Fortunes change quickly in a climate as volatile as the present one, he said, and clever politicians could smell dissent on a fair wind.

When they arrived at our house, we flung open the gates to them and Erila brought out a tray of refreshments while Filippo carried out the boxes.

There was a boy, maybe seventeen or eighteen, on the top of the cart, knee-deep in books and costumes, arranging the treasures to make room for new arrivals. I watched as he flung a wood panel painting of naked nymphs and satyrs to one side, the surface cracking and flaking as he manhandled it.

There were rumors that it wasn’t only the patrons who were giving up their art but also the artists themselves, with Fra Bartolommeo and Sandro Botticelli leading the throng. Of course Botticelli was an old man now, more in need of the love of God than of any patron, though my husband hinted that if he had his eyes on paradise he would do better to confess to something other than sins of female flesh. For my part I couldn’t help remembering Cristoforo’s description of his Venus being born from the sea, and it made me glad that such paintings were locked away in the country. At least our cart’s nymphs and satyrs would not be missed by history; the women’s legs were entirely too short for their bodies and their flesh looked like dough before the oven.

“Hi, pretty lady. Have you anything for the flames? Any coral beads or feathered fans?”

He was a good-looking boy and had taken some trouble with his robe and haircut. In another Florence he could have been serenading me from below after a drunken night on the town. Especially since from his angle of vision there was no way he could know the size of my belly.

I shook my head, but I couldn’t help smiling. Maybe it was nerves.

“What about those combs in your hair? Aren’t those pearls I see on the edges?”

I felt the top of my head. Erila had braided me that morning, though with which headdress I couldn’t remember. It would hardly have been ostentatious. Nevertheless I pulled them out. As I did so a section of my hair tumbled down my back. He watched it fall and grinned at me. His smile was infectious. Maybe even the Angels were getting tired of goodness. I threw the combs down to him and he caught them with a flourish.

Down below, his companions were discussing whether or not to go inside to look for more.

“Come on,” he shouted, flashing me another fast smile. “If we waste time on every house we’ll miss the flames.” And as the cart rolled away, I swear I saw him slip the combs into his pocket.

By next morning the pyre was as big as a house. They lit the surrounding faggots at noon, and the moment could be heard all over the city, played in by a fanfare of trumpets and church bells and a swell of chanting from the great crowd gathered there. But not everyone’s voice lifted up to heaven. While the piazza was full, there were some, like us, who came to watch the watchers as much as celebrate the deed.

As we stood there jostled by the throng, Erila and I saw things that made us despair. A few days before, a Venetian collector had sent a message to the Signoria, offering the fortune of 20,000 florins to save the art from the flames. His answer now came in the form of his own effigy, placed at the very top of the pyre. They had dressed him in the finest clothes, covered his head with a dozen switches of women’s false hair, and placed firecrackers inside his stuffing. As the flames reached him, the crackers exploded and the effigy jiggled and yelped as the crowd roared and cheered. I later heard people swearing that they could smell singed hair, and such was the excitement and merriment that you felt it would be only a matter of time before it was human flesh we were roasting.

The chanting and prayers continued all day, led by the Dominicans and the Angels. But anyone with eyes could see there was one element of the church not represented. The Franciscans, who were feeling the cold winds of favoritism erode their traditional support among the poor, had begun to question Savonarola’s great power. But they could not dent his triumph. The bonfire burned long into the night. For days to come the ashes of our luxuries rained gray snow over the city, coating our window ledges, dusting our clothes, and filling our nostrils with the sad smell of incinerated art.

And this time, when he heard, the pope excommunicated the friar.