The Birth of Venus (6 page)

Seven

P
LAUTILLA
’
S WEDDING, WHEN IT FINALLY TOOK PLACE,
was a testament to my father’s cloth and our family fortune. When I think of her it is always on this day. She is seated in the receiving room, dressed for the ceremony. It is early, the light tender and sweet, and the painter has been called in for a last sitting to capture her for the future decoration of our walls. She ought to be tired (she has been awake most of the night, despite the sleeping draft my mother gave her), but she looks as if she has just risen from the Elysian fields. Her face is full and soft, her skin fabulously pale, though with the rouge of excitement lighting up the cheeks. Her eyes are clear, their inner edges shining and red like a pomegranate seed against the white, her eyelashes neither too thick nor too dark—no box hedges here—and her brows full in the middle, then tapered like a painter’s line toward the nose and the ears. Her mouth is small and pouty like a Cupid’s bow, and her hair—what can be seen of it under the flowers and the jewels—reflects her admirable commitment to indolence and a host of afternoons spent staked out in the sun.

Her dress is in the latest fashion: the neckline scalloped, showing off her plump flesh and my father’s cunning Flemish lawn, already madly in demand; her underskirts soft and full as angels’ wings so that when she glides past you can hear the material sighing across the floor. But it is the overdress that makes you want to weep for its beauty. It is made of the finest yellow silk, the shade of the brightest crocuses grown especially for their dye in the fields around San Gimignano, and its skirt is embroidered, not grossly like some of the dresses you see in church, which try to compete with the altar cloth, but subtly so that the flowers and the birds seem to entwine through the stitching.

In such a garment my sister is so lovely that, if Plato is to be believed, one would expect her to be shining with goodness, and certainly she is nicer than usual this morning, almost floaty with excitement. But while she wants her likeness recorded, she is far too impatient to be sitting for long. With everyone else in the house occupied I am brought in as companion and chaperone to amuse her, while on the other side of the room our painter’s hands move steadily on the page.

Of course, I am as much interested in him as in her. Everyone in the house has been given new robes in celebration of the day, and he looks handsome though not particularly comfortable in his. It is weeks since I sent him the Alberti, but I have heard nothing from him. He is fatter (our kitchen is renowned) and is it my imagination or does he hold his head a little higher? Our eyes meet as I come in and I think there might even be a smile there, but on this of all days he must also practice humility. The only thing that has not changed is his hand, as concentrated as ever, each line bringing her more alive, then marking the fabrics with numbers so he can tell which colors to add later.

What he does on his nights away I still have no idea. Even my queen of gossip has nothing to tell me. In the house he is still a loner, shunning the company of others, only now they see him as snobbish rather than sick, placing himself above them, which given his status as the family artist is of course fitting. It is only much later I realize it is less snobbery that stops him from talking than the fact that he does not know what to say. Children brought up in a monastery, in the company of adults, learn better than most the power of solitude and the pure but harsh discipline of speaking only to Our Lord.

I catch his eye and realize that his hand has moved on to me. But my likeness is not within his instructions and his attention makes me blush. As the younger sister, it is important I do not outshine the bride, though there is little enough chance of that. Despite all my mother’s ointments, my skin is as dark as my sister’s is fair, and recently my giraffe body has begun to sprout in ways that all of Erila’s skills with lacing and the thick box pleats of the tailor’s design cannot hide. He has no time to finish me. The room is suddenly awash with people, and we are being bustled out. In the courtyard below, the main gates are open and Erila and I watch as Plautilla is hoisted onto the white horse, her dress arranged so it flows like a golden lake around her, and the wedding chest is lifted to the shoulders of the grooms (Erila says it takes as many men to carry as Lorenzo’s coffin), and so the procession to the house of her in-laws begins.

As we parade through the streets a crowd gathers, which gives my father particular pleasure, but then he knows that our fortune grows from spinning women’s desire into fabric and that waiting to greet us at Maurizio’s house are dozens of Florence’s more affluent families, each with an appetite for fine cloth.

The façade of their palazzo is hung with ornate tapestries especially hired for the occasion. Inside, the wedding banquet is laid out on long trestle tables in the courtyard. If my father is the master of the cloth, his in-laws rival him with the food. There is not an animal within hunting distance of Florence that hasn’t lost at least one member of its family to the oven that day. The greatest delicacy is the roasted peacocks’ tongues, though given the screeching of their cousins at our house I can’t bring myself to pity them too much. I feel more sorry for the turtledove and the chamois deer, both of which are much less glorious dead than alive, though the smell of their spiced flesh is enough to make the old men dribble over their velvet jerkins. Along with the game there is poultry—boiled capon and chicken—followed by veal, a whole roasted kid, and a great fish pie flavored with oranges, nutmegs, saffron, and dates. There are so many courses that after a while you can smell the belches as much as the food. Of course, such culinary excess is officially frowned upon. Florence, like all good Christian cities, has laws to limit luxury. But just as everyone knows that a woman’s marriage chest is a way to hide her excess jewels and rich fabrics from the authorities, so the feast that follows the ceremony is a private affair. Indeed, it’s not unknown to see the very people whose job it is to police the law stuffing their faces with the rest of the gluttons, though what the pious new prior of San Marco would make of such hypocrisy and decadence doesn’t bear thinking about.

After the food comes the dancing. Plautilla is the true bride at this moment, turning a sweep of her hand into an invitation of such subtle coquetry that it makes me despair anew at my own clumsiness. When she and Maurizio lead the “Bassa Danza Lauro,” Lorenzo’s own composition (and its own statement of allegiance danced so soon after his death), it is impossible to take one’s eyes off her.

I, in contrast, am all left feet. On one of the more complex turning moves I lose my place completely and am only saved when my partner of the moment whispers the next steps in my ear as we pass. As I recover, my rescuer, a man of older years, holds my eye firmly during the next move, steering me through, and as we interlace for the last time—with a certain elegance, I am proud to say—he bows his head toward me again and says quietly, “So tell me—is it better to excel at Greek or at dancing?” before turning on his heel in time to pay court to the girl standing next to me.

Since it is only my family who are so intimately acquainted with my failings, and my brothers in particular who would be spiteful enough to use them as gossip, I feel myself flush with sudden shame. My mother, of course, has been following the whole encounter like a hawk. I anticipate a rebuke in her eyes, but she simply looks at me for a moment, then glances away.

The festivities last far into the night. People eat until they can hardly walk, and the wine flows like the Arno in flood so that many of the men become quite rude on it. But what they say to each other I cannot tell you, because by now I am banished to one of the upper rooms with two fat chaperones and a dozen girls of my own age for company. The segregation of unmarried young women at these moments is accepted custom (flowers still in bud must be protected from any forced advent of summer), but recently the gap between the other girls and me feels wider than our age, and as I looked down on the party that night, I vowed that this would be the last time I would be an observer rather than a participant.

And I was right, though I was yet to understand the cost.

TO MY SURPRISE I MISSED PLAUTILLA. AT FIRST THE EXPANSE
OF
white linen and my undisputed sovereignty over what had been our room gave me pleasure. But after a while the bed began to feel too big without her. I would no longer hear her snoring or grow tired of her chatter. Her babble of words, however trivial or annoying, had been a backdrop to my life for so long that I could not imagine what the silence would be like. The house began to echo around me. My father went abroad again, and with his absence my brothers took more often to the streets. Even the painter was gone, to a workshop near Santa Croce where he could practice the art of fresco, which he would need for the altar. With the right teacher and with my father’s purse behind him, he would buy himself entrance into the Doctors and Apothecaries Guild, without which no painter could work officially in the city. Just the thought of such elevation made me ache with longing.

When it came to my own future, my mother proved as good as her word and there was no immediate talk of marriage negotiations. My father’s mind when he returned was on other things. Even I could see that in the wake of Lorenzo’s death the geometry of influence in the city had begun to shift. Florence was noisy with speculation as to how far Piero de’ Medici could fill his father’s shoes and, if not, whether the family’s enemies would, after so many years of suppression, gain enough support to tip the balance. While I knew little of politics at that time, it was impossible to miss the venom now spurting forth from the pulpit of Santa Maria del Fiore. Prior Savonarola had recently outgrown his church at San Marco and now delivered his weekly sermons to an increasingly packed cathedral. The holy friar, it seemed, was in direct contact with God, and when they looked down together on Florence they saw a city corrupted by privilege and intellectual vanity. After so many years spent daydreaming my way through sermons full of scriptures but no fire, I found his lava flow of words spellbinding. When he railed against Aristotle or Plato as pagans whose works undermined the true church while their souls rotted in eternal fire, there were arguments I could find to defend them, but only afterward, when his voice was no longer ringing in my ears. He had a passion that felt like possession, and he painted pictures of hell that curdled one’s insides with the smell of sulfur.

What all this meant for my future marriage plans was hard to tell, though married I must clearly be. In Savonarola’s vision of this bleak, stained city, virgins were more at risk than ever before—just think of that poor girl whose body had been destroyed by lust and left for the dogs to ravage on the banks of the Arno. My brothers, who would remain single till their thirties, at which point they would be deemed sober enough to become husbands, having ruined God knows how many virgin servants on the way, made it their business to taunt me about the whole marriage business.

I REMEMBER ONE ENCOUNTER IN PARTICULAR THAT TOOK PLACE IN
the summer of 1494. The house was full again, my father busy with the affairs of another journey and the painter, recently arrived home from his apprenticeship, barricaded in his room intent on completing the designs for the chapel. I was sitting in my room, a book open on my lap, my mind filled with schemes as to how I might visit him, when Tomaso and Luca swaggered past me on their way out. They were dressed for pleasure, though the new cut of the tunic high up the thigh did more for Tomaso’s leg than for Luca, who wore my father’s cloth with all the elegance of a bullock cart. Tomaso, in contrast, had a fast eye for fashion and from an early age had walked as if the world were watching him and approving what it saw. His vanity was so naked it made me want to laugh, but I knew better than to make fun of him. He had bloodied me too many times in the past.

“Alessandra, dearest,” he said, sweeping me a mocking wide bow. “Look, Luca, our sister is reading another book! How charming. And such a modest pose. You had better be careful, though. While husbands like meek wives who keep their heads down, you will have to lift your eyes up to them sometimes.”

“I’m sorry? What was that you said?”

“I said you’re going to be next. Isn’t she, Luca?”

“Next for what?”

“Shall I tell her or will you?”

Luca shrugged. “Rolling and plucking,” he said, making it sound like something the cook does in the kitchen. While they might be slow at Greek grammar, my brothers had a talent for the most recent street slang, which they used whenever my mother was out of earshot.

“Rolling and plucking? And what is that, pray, Luca?”

“It’s what Plautilla’s been doing.” He grinned, referring to the fact that our sister had recently set the household alight with the announcement of her pregnancy and the promise of a male heir.

“Poor little sister.” Tomaso’s sympathy is worse than his spite. “Didn’t
she
tell you what it is like? Well, let’s see. I can only speak for the man. With a ripe one, it would be—like the first suck of a juicy watermelon.”

“And what do you do with the skin?”

He laughed. “Depends how long you want it to last. Though maybe you should ask your precious painter the same question.”

“What’s he got to do with it?”

“You don’t know? Oh, dear Alessandra, I thought you knew everything. That’s what the tutors always tell us.”

“They only mean it in comparison to you,” I retorted, before I could stop myself. “What are you saying about the painter?”

But I am too eager, which gives him an advantage.

He makes me wait. “What I’m saying is that our apparently devout little artist has been spending his nights poking around the Florentine slums. And he’s not there to paint pictures. Isn’t that right, Luca?”

My elder brother nods, his face fat with a silly grin.

“How do you know?”