The Birth of Venus (32 page)

She fell silent. I waited. Even the air seemed still around us.

“My brother had such grand friends,” she said at last, and her smile was wry. “The court was filled with men of such depth and cleverness. For a girl who had been taught to think and speak her mind it was heaven before Judgment Day. And while the Platonic notion did not allow for us women to join in their deliberations, they were
Florentine
Platonists and thus of course even the greatest of them could be beguiled by beauty when it came with an equal talent for learning. Which, like you, I had. Though, like you, it was both my glory and my burden.

“My brother, who understood the dangers within such perfect purity, had made it his business to see that I was married off to avoid further risk. But even he did not have the power to prevent my being called back.

“Lorenzo and his court spent the early summer of 1477 at his villa at Careggi. I was one of a few invited visitors. . . . It was a long time ago.” She stopped again, and for a moment I thought she might not go on, that she had indeed trained herself to forget it. She took a breath. “There was music, talk, art, and nature—the gardens alone were an earthly paradise. The beauty of the body was as much a subject for discussion as the beauty of the mind. Both were seen as stepping-stones on the road to God’s love. I was not brought up to be coquettish. I was as serious and in some ways as innocent as you. But like you I was impressed by intelligence and study and art. And while I had resisted it once, by that summer I had been in love for too many years to know how to stop.”

I saw again her tears over the body of Lorenzo in the chapel of San Marco so long ago. What had been Tomaso’s words in my ear that day? That despite his ugliness, his love poetry could ignite the coldest of hearts. I sighed, looking down at the radiantly tranquil little face in my arms. It was hard to know how blunt the nose might be as she grew older, or how sharp the chin. No doubt that would also depend on her own father. Whoever he was. “Well, at least I know why I am ugly,” I said quietly.

“Oh, Alessandra, you are not ugly. You have such beauty you almost turned the head of a sodomite.”

And of course I was entranced by the way the word held as much pleasure in its transgression for her as it had done for me. So we sat together for a while in that faded unfashionable room, the afternoon silence broken only by my daughter’s fast sweet breathing, in the peace of the knowledge that there were no more secrets left to tell.

“So,” I said eventually. “What happens now?”

She sat for a moment. “You know the choice as well as I.”

“I will not marry again,” I said firmly. “A second marriage would disenfranchise the child, and I will not do that.”

“That is true,” she said calmly.

“And I cannot come home. I must have my own life now. So I suppose that I must set up house alone.”

“Alessandra, I think that would be most unwise. Our city is cruel to widows. Both you and the child would find yourselves outcasts, lonely and spurned.”

“We would still have you.”

“Not forever.”

The thought was cold frost to me. “Then what can I do?”

“There is one alternative we have not discussed.” Her voice was steady. “To marry yourself to God.”

“Marry myself to God? Me? A widow with a paintbrush, a black slave, and a child. Which convent, pray, Mama, do you think would ever take us?”

I watched as a sly slow smile crept over her face.

“Why, the one you always dreamed about, of course, Alessandra.”

Forty-six

W
E LEFT THE CITY
—
THIS WIDOW WITH HER PAINTBRUSH,
black servant, and child—on 10 May in the year of Our Lord 1498.

Ours was not the only farewell that day. In the great square of the Signoria another pyre had been built over the last few weeks: Savonarola and his two faithful Dominicans were to be garroted and burned. Finally Florence was to get her smell of roasting human flesh.

My Erila had been keen to stand witness, if only to complete the history of it all, but I forbade it. The world was so bright and new for my daughter that I did not want even the scent of suffering near her. We rode out, passing rivers of people moving toward the square, but there was little sense of carnival to them. Though he had been hated, he had also been loved, and in the violence unleashed after his arrest I think many had begun to regret the passing of the New Jerusalem, even if it had shone brighter in intention than reality.

Still, his enemies had stood firm against him. In the days leading up to the trial, further rumors of perfidy passed through the city like acrid smoke in the wind. In particular a story circulated out from the jail that his most faithful accomplice, Father Brunetto Datto, the monk who had fought with such bloodlust in the final battle and who was to die with him that day at the stake, had been found to be mad with piety and that during his torture he had confessed to all manner of sins: the skewering of a young girl found on the streets after dark and the taste of her flesh between his teeth, the harvesting of genitals of prostitutes and their clients in the church of Santo Spírito, even the buggery of a young sodomite on the thrust of his own sword. But the real terror came not from the confessions but from the glee with which he admitted them, boasting of the ways that God had used him as a divine messenger to bring back sinners to the true path. Until at last his torturers had become disgusted, stuffed a rag into his open mouth, and threatened to set fire to it unless he stopped his blasphemies.

The day Erila brought these stories back to me was the first and only time I have seen her undermined by gossip. As she sat on the edge of the bed, the baby lying next to her staring up with solemn eyes, she told of how Father Datto, before they finally silenced him, had given directions as to where they could find one final body: that of a young prostitute with her breasts sliced off, left to rot in the crypt of Santi Apostoli.

So it was I remembered the dark voice that had chased me from the loggia the night before my marriage, and the great bear of a friar waving us down in the street with his bloodied hands, and I began to understand that while I might sometimes have felt excluded from God’s grace, I had in fact been mightily protected. And in its way that knowledge brought me back into a more tender relationship with Our Lord.

However, that afternoon in my bedroom with Erila we did not dwell on such things. Instead, together we set about packing up the marriage chest for a second time, filling it with drawings and books and, best of all, the thick unbound manuscript recovered from my husband’s closet and hidden carefully away in a mound of colorful shifts and velvet cloths.

Not long before we left, we visited my family in the old house in Sant’ Ambrogio. Luca, whose Angel face was still bruised from the glorious final skirmishes of his army days, was sullen and displaced (not so different, in fact, from earlier times), but he managed to wish me well before he slouched off to his room. Plautilla, now huge with child, cried until her husband reprimanded her so sternly that it shocked her into silence. And my father . . . well, my father gave me a bolt of his favorite scarlet cloth to make up into dresses in my new home. I kissed him and wished him well and did nothing to disabuse him of his ignorance, and then he took my mother’s hand and let her lead him back to his ledgers. The last I saw of them was as they went together into his study, her clean, clear gaze disappearing behind the closing door.

So that May day we rode out of the city with my husband’s groom and two of his slaves as guide and carriers, spurred on by the promise of their freedom at the end of the journey. The morning was warm and sunny, the air hazy with the threat of greater heat.

We had made our way out through the Porta di Giustizia and were leaving the city precincts when we heard a great crack of thunder. It was the sound of gunpowder igniting the fire in the square, which meant that the hangman had done his work and the trio of monks had been garroted ready for the flames. We crossed ourselves and said a prayer for those now brought to God, calling upon His mercy for all sinners, dead and alive.

And as we made the slow climb out of the valley floor into the hills beyond, we could see from miles away the pillar of smoke, rising up from the sea of rooftops and dispersing into the balmy spring air.

PART IV

Forty-seven

M
Y SECOND MARRIAGE
—
THE MARRIAGE OF SISTER
L
UCREZIA
to God—though legally bigamous, proved much more successful than my first.

What can I tell you of this place?

When we first came here it was indeed heaven on earth. The convent of Santa Vitella is set in deep Tuscan countryside far to the east of Florence, the rolling wooded hills graduating into gentler vines and olive slopes, and views to make you understand God as the first and finest artist of all. Inside its fortress walls at that time was a thriving community: two cloisters (the larger with its arches decorated by Luca Della Robbia, thirty-two blue-and-white ceramic heads of saints, each one subtly, marvelously different from the last); generous gardens, practical as well as glorious since they provided most of our food; and the refectory and the chapel, small when I arrived but to grow bigger and more gracious in the years to come. And all of it run by women. A republic built if not on virtue then on female creativity.

There were, you see, so many of us: the women who did not fit in. The women who loved life as much as they loved God yet found themselves removed from it, incarcerated within convent walls. The new prosperity of the cities had bred us (the larger the dowries, the fewer the families who could afford them), and the new freedom of learning had encouraged us. But the world was not ready for us, so many of us ended up in places like Santa Vitella. And while we would not be considered wealthy, our dowries, when added together, were ample enough to fund our freedom. In the end it was simple mathematics: the numbers started to overwhelm the rules. Erila and I were lucky. We came well after that moment had been reached.

Each one of us arrived already formed. Some came with memories of the gowns we had worn, or the books we had read, or the young men we had kissed or at least yearned to. Behind closed doors, though we honored God and prayed to Him often, our imaginations moved in a hundred different ways. Of course some were more superficial than others. There were those who turned their cells into would-be beauty parlors, using their free time to twitter over their toilette or refashion their habits to show a little coiffured hair or a glimpse of ankle. Their greatest pleasures were to hear the sound of their own voices raised in the chapel choir and to cultivate the art of entertainment, and though the walls were high and the gates were locked, on certain nights you could still hear their laughter mingled with deeper male voices echoing round the cloisters.

But not all our sins were of the flesh. There was the woman from Verona who was so passionate about words that she sat all day writing plays, stories shining with morality and martyrdom with a hint of unrequited love and romance in between. We put them on inside the convent, the better seamstresses making the costumes and the more exhibitionist of us playing all the parts (male as well as female). Then there was the nun from Padua, whose love of learning had been even greater than mine and who had spent years defying her parents and refusing to marry. When at last they realized her devotion couldn’t be beaten out of her, they brought her studies to us. Unlike her parents, we took great care of her. Her cell became our library and her mind one of our greatest treasures. During the early years after my arrival I spent many evenings debating God and Plato and the journey of humanity to divinity with her, and there were times when she made me think more deeply than my childhood tutors. She was our very own scholar and, as Plautilla grew, she—together with me—became her teacher.

PLAUTILLA
.
.
.

For the first month my daughter had no name. But when the news came from Florence that my sister had died giving birth to a strapping son, first I wept and then I christened my child. So in this way I managed to keep memories of my family around me.

Of course she was the darling of the nunnery. Everyone loved her. For the first few years she wandered round like a wild child, petted and spoiled. But as soon as she was of age we began her education, a process fit for a Renaissance princess. By the time she was twelve she knew how to read and write in three languages, embroider, play music, act, and of course pray. Inevitably, she grew up with a certain adult gravity because of the dearth of other children, but she wore it well and as soon as the facility between her eye and her hand began to show, I took my old copy of Cennini from my dowry chest, sharpened a fat pebble of black chalk, and prepared a boxwood panel with ground bone and spittle ready for her to scratch her first attempts at silverpoint. And because there was no one to make her self-conscious about her talent, she took to it instantly, so that long before I spotted her father’s gray-green cat stare I knew whose child she was.

Erila also flourished. The job of conversa, a post designed specifically for slaves, was traditionally a menial one—serving the servers of God—but since ours was not a traditional nunnery I paid for her release and she soon created another role for herself; doing errands, moving gossip, and running a postal service for the nuns between the convent and the local town (with which we had a lively trade of forbidden luxuries) in a way that earned her a tidy fortune. Before long she was feared and adored in equal proportions, and thus she became a free woman at last—though by then she was so essential to the sisters and so much a family to Plautilla and me that she chose to stay with us as a way of enjoying it.

As for me—well, the winter after we arrived, our convent began building work on a new chapel and with it came the commission of my life. The Reverend Mother was a shrewd woman who, had she not fallen for the charms of a rich married neighbor, might have risen to run a noble family in Milan. In some ways she ran a more satisfying one here. Mindful of mixing our transgressions with our achievements, she managed the finances of the convent with more acumen than the Medici bankers and soon had enough to endow a new chapel. The bishop, who was less charming and more venial than she was—the skinny arm of Savonarola had never reached this far into the country—visited two or three times a year. In return for our superior hospitality (the refined pleasures of the palate were one of many unorthodox ways we celebrated God), Bishop Salvetti brought artistic gossip from the big cities and gave his blessing to the new plans, which, because she had a talent for architecture, were largely of the Reverend Mother’s own making. But while she could see the light and space of classical proportions in her mind, the walls when they were finally finished were bare.

And so at last I got my chapel to paint.

The summer before I started, I sat in my cell working on the designs as Plautilla made flower chains in the orchards surrounded by a group of giggling young novices who saw her as their greatest plaything. My subjects would be the life of John the Baptist and the Virgin Mary. With only my memories and no master to help me, I used Botticelli’s illustrations as my teacher, studying the way his liquid pen animated a thousand different human figures in heaven and hell with barely a dozen strokes each, creating complex stories of despair and joy.

The painting of the frescoes took a small lifetime. Plautilla was almost seven when I started. At first there had been little I could teach her because I knew so little myself: A lifetime of books and the skirts of Santa Caterina hardly made an expert. But Erila used her connections and in the city of Verona found a young man recently graduated from his master’s studio who was, she deemed, dedicated and discreet enough to spend his days in the company of worldly nuns without being either overwhelmed or corrupted. So he taught and we learned. And by the time he left twenty months later the scaffolding was built, I could apply my own screed plaster to the walls, and Plautilla could grind and mix many of the pigments. It was only a matter of time until she began to add touches of her own.

As the chapel grew crowded with saints and sinners, the bishop’s visits spurred me on with talk of outside genius. He came often from Rome, and though he could tell me nothing of my painter, he had much to say about that city’s greatness and how it had overtaken Florence in matters of art. He talked of how much of that brilliance came from the hands of a belligerent young Florentine, an artist so intense in his own connection with God that even the pope could not command him. His most recent work, commissioned by his native city, was a giant sculpture of David hewn from a single block of flawed marble, so majestic and so virile in its humanity that the poor beleaguered Florentines did not know quite what to do with it. They had to take down arches and destroy houses to move it from the workshop to the Piazza della Signoria. It stood now, he said, at the entrance to the Palazzo, David’s readiness to smite Goliath a constant reminder to all those who would threaten the city’s Republic. And while its proportions dazzled the eye of all who saw it, my bishop said there were others who spoke equally warmly of a much earlier work executed when he was still a teenager: a life-size white cedar crucifix in the church of Santo Spírito where the body of Jesus was so young and so perfect it brought tears to the eyes of all who saw it.

Now, after many years, I finally learned the name of Michelangelo Buonarroti, and I wondered at the way fate had taken both my painter and his nemesis to the same city. But though such stories whetted my curiosity, I did not dwell on them. Though the poets might tell you differently, it is not possible to hold on to passion when there is nothing to keep it alive. Or maybe it was proof of God’s further mercy to me that since Plautilla’s birth he had released me from the grip of longing for that which I could not have. And so, like color in the sun, my memories of the painter faded.

In their place grew a certain pleasure from ritual and order. My days were simple: rising at dawn for prayer, then spending the first hours applying the screed plaster to the area of wall I would work on that day. A break for morning food—in summer, cold meats with fried zucchini flowers and vegetable jams; in winter, cured hams and spiced pies and broth—then filling in the paint before the plaster dried or the sunlight fell below the window, making the light too dim for my brush. Where once I had yearned for the world outside, now my vision was reduced to the transformation of a damp square of plaster into a set of shapes and colors that could only be understood once the whole was completed.

Thus, after so many years, Alessandra Cecchi finally learned the virtue of patience, and each twilight as she put aside the brushes and walked back across the cloisters to her cell, I think you could say that she was content.

And this feeling lasted for many years, until the spring of 1512.