Signora Da Vinci (47 page)

Papa did not look in my direction, but I knew that his strength and love, like two swift arrows, were aimed directly at my own breaking heart.

He smiled at Leonardo. “I wish you could have done her portrait. In the East they do not often paint pictures of mortal men and women. Only their gods—with eight arms, or elephant trunks, or feet stomping upon human skulls.” He chuckled. “I think you would like India very much, Leonardo.”

I found I was suddenly near tears, so I offered to take my turn next in the studio. What I saw depressed me further. While the body was whole, the face had begun decomposing. The man’s lips were shriveling back in a grim rictus of a smile, and the skin around the bony part of the nose was falling away. I was no expert, but even I could see that too many hours were yet left of exposure in the bright sunlight for success.

I returned to the dining room and made my report.

Zoroastre stood. “I’ll pull the linen out.”

“No,” Leonardo said in a decisive tone. That mind of his was churning.

He rushed from the dining room and we all followed him into the studio. He had climbed to the top of the
camera obscura
and was very carefully peering inside.

“I don’t believe any chemical change has occurred on the linen yet. Zoroastre, bring me a piece of cloth two feet by two feet. Quickly.”

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

“We will use the front of this body, but not the front of the head.”

Horrible visions swam before my eyes. Puncturing and flaying a corpse was one thing. Beheading it was something else again.

“Son,” I whispered to him urgently as he descended the ladder. “You cannot . . .”

“Don’t worry, Mama. I may be a ghoul, but I am not a monster.” He set the square cloth atop the linen where the face would appear.

As we had been the night before, we were rewarded by a perfect image of the corpse’s front, the chest and arms dark with laceration marks, the torso, rounded thighs, and calves ghostly shadows on the light linen. Where the face should have been was blank. Leonardo had been correct. The solution had not yet reacted to light, and washed out completely in the boiling water.

But everyone was more than curious to hear how Leonardo planned to add the face to the nearly completed shroud image.

“I will use myself as the model,” he said.

We all stared at him in uncomprehending silence.

“A place on the shroud is waiting for Jesus’s face. Whose better than
mine
?”

“Could anything be more sacrilegious?” I said.

“A perfect blasphemy,” Papa added.

“A better practical joke than a stinkball,” said Zoroastre.

“You could be caught, Leonardo,” I said, bringing an end to the levity. “They would burn you at the stake.”

“I will not be recognized,” he assured me. “Look at what we have so far.” He led me to the wall where the shroud was tacked up to dry. “The high places that appear to touch the winding sheet appear the darkest. The image of my face that will be seen by the pilgrims as they pass will be the line of my nose, my forehead with its bloody thorn holes, my mustache, beard, and cheekbones. I believe the entire area of my eye sockets will be light. Without sight of that part of my face, I will not be recognizable. But of course we must do several trials first. We cannot afford to ruin the work we’ve already done.”

I was unconvinced, too worried as a mother to listen to sense, but there was nothing to do but try.

 

The next day we positioned a powdered Leonardo on the table, placing the square of treated cloth in the
camera
where it would fit on the shroud. Before Zoroastre fixed the mirrors on him, Leonardo told us, “The most difficult part of this is lying still for eight hours. Not moving a muscle.”

He was right. Two hours into the first trial some of the powder strayed into a nostril. He sneezed so violently he nearly came off the table.

The next sunny day we were more careful with the powder. Papa spoke to Leonardo quietly, telling him how the great mystics of India were able to slow their breathing so extremely that they appeared, for all intents and purposes, dead to the world. For hours he sat as close as he was able, guiding Leonardo through breath after shallow breath. We had made it through six hours when a stray cat who’d found its way into the villa, slipping past everyone’s notice, leapt onto Leonardo’s stomach.

Such a rude awakening from a near trance caused a terrible shriek, which made us all scream and then fall about in gales of laughter . . . and no little frustration.

This was, in fact, the first time I had seen Leonardo give in to despair. For the days were getting shorter, the hours of full light less and less, and fewer without gray skies and rain.

I watched him as he stood over a bowl of water to wash the powder off his face and hair. He stared at his reflection and sighed deeply. The consternation was palpable in his expression. He was altogether unused to failure. There was always a solution to be had. Always another experiment.

Finally he leaned down and splashed his face with water. But as I watched, I saw him freeze in that position, stay still as a statue for the longest moment. Then he straightened slowly and stared at his own image in the looking glass. His face was still white with powder, but rivulets of water dripped down his cheeks and through his beard.

“Bring me the powder,” he whispered. Only I had heard him.

“Zoroastre,” I said, “will you bring Leonardo the bowl of powder?”

He rushed away and was back moments later with the bowl, which he set before my son.

Leonardo looked down and, splashing his cheeks and nose and forehead once more with water, thrust his hands into the powder bowl, then brought them to his face. He pressed them into the wetness till it caked there, thick—like plaster.

I gasped quietly, for I knew his thinking.

That divine mind,
I thought.

“Death mask,” he said quietly. “A living man’s death mask.”

He turned and smiled at me, the thick wet powder cracking his face.

“A white plaster cast of my face!” he fairly shouted at Papa and Zoroastre. “It cannot move. It will not need to breathe. And we shall lock all the doors against cats!” He laughed joyously. “How did I not think of this before?”

He hugged Papa, then Zoroastre, then me.

“We must work quickly. We cannot be sure of the sun much longer.” To Zoroastre he said, “Drive into Pavia now. To Bellmonte’s bottega. Get us a barrel of plaster.

The boy was gone in an instant.

“If this works, we shall have our forgery. The perfect holy relic. The Lirey Shroud with the face of Our Lord . . .” He grinned at Papa and me. “. . . Leonardo da Vinci.”

 

Of course it worked perfectly. On the last full day of sun in November 1491 the
camera obscura
, using our refined fixative, captured the image of my son’s face from the plaster death mask, perfectly aligned with the body of the Milanese corpse. A straight dark slash at the neck separated the two parts, though otherwise it appeared a flawless match.

There were several anomalies—a foreshortened forehead, and eyes a bit too high on the face. With more of the fixative on a paintbrush and another full day of exposure, Leonardo added the long hair, and dabbing a mixture of his own blood and reddish pigment at the line of the crown of thorns, the centurion’s spear wound, the wrist and foot holes, he added droplets and rivulets where, with his precise knowledge of anatomy, he knew blood would likely have appeared.

The new Lirey Shroud was perfect.

CHAPTER 35

We’d barely had time for celebration when a letter arrived from Lorenzo asking me to come home. The messenger he’d sent was, in fact, one of his fiercest
conditores
, so that my journey to Florence would not be without protection.

I remember very little of that hard ride, except gratitude for my male disguise. I had become a proficient “horseman” over the years, and had I been a lady in a carriage, the week traveling would have stretched into two.

This time the sight of beloved Florence filled me as much with dread as with joy. Once within the city walls I could feel a kind of foreboding in the streets, for it was well known that Lorenzo was dying. Most Florentines now outwardly cleaved to Savonarola’s austere principles and practices, but still wondered if it was enough to protect them from an eternity of fire and brimstone.

I overheard two men whispering that two of the lions at the Via de Leone, always quite peaceable, had the night before fought so violently they had mauled each other to death. A woman went mad during mass at Santa Maria Novella the day before and began shrieking about a raging bull with flaming horns that was pulling down the church. She-wolves were said to be howling at night. All these were ominous portents.

I found streets teeming with sinister activity. A steady stream of monks scurried from the San Marco Monastery in through the front door of Palazzo Medici with no guards in sight. My heart sank to see more of them exiting, their arms piled high with books. One carried Lorenzo’s much-prized ninth-century
Tragedies of Sophocles
, that ancient volume he had proudly shown me on my first visit to his home.

I entered unmolested to find a small contingent of guards at the stairs to the upper floors and at the door to the garden; the colonnaded courtyard had been invaded by brown-robed clergy. Someone had thrown sheeting over Donatello’s
David
. Surely Savonarola’s work. Had he desired to spare his minions so disgusting a display of sensuality, I wondered, or was he afraid it might arouse them? Doors to the
banco
were shut tight, and I could see that Lorenzo’s magnificent library had been all but emptied.

I approached a stony-faced guard at the stairs, a man that I recognized. “Where is the family?” I said.

“They have gone to Careggi.” His voice was as lifeless as his eyes.

“Who is in charge?” I asked.

“Piero.” His face suddenly twisted in agony. “
Il Magnifico
. . . I pray for him, but these maggots,” he whispered, sneering at the San Marco monks, “they desecrate the man’s home before he is even dead.”

I knew I must leave at once.

The whole perimeter of the country estate was heavily guarded, though I had no difficulty reaching the villa. The ground floor was a hive of activity—the salon Piero’s makeshift command center. As I climbed the staircase I heard loud arguing and caught sight of Lorenzo’s heir surrounded by
conditores
, a new circle of young
consiglieres
, and several elder members of the Signoria, shouting and waving their hands, all demanding attention. Utter chaos reigned where perfect order had once prevailed
. Day and night, it is. Heaven and hell
.

I forced my thoughts from Careggi’s back garden—the Temple of Truth, the ancient tree under whose bowers the Academy had searched and debated the far limits of understanding.

Our Great Conspiracy is Savonarola’s own Pandora’s Box
, I mused as I climbed to the first floor
, but the key that unlocked it was the death of the man I loved
.

Here, above, was chaos of a different nature. I saw physicians streaming in and out of Lorenzo’s bedroom. There was the family’s foremost doctor, who had stalwartly refused to believe Lorenzo’s illness was fatal, instructing him that all would be well if he refrained from eating grape pits and pears, and made sure to keep his feet warm and dry. Lucrezia the Elder sat weeping on a hall bench with her namesake daughter trying to console her. Pico Mirandola, himself distraught, was beleaguering a hapless page trying to explain how Savonarola’s monks had gained entrance into the palazzo.

“Then the library is lost!” I heard Pico cry.

“It is,” I said, rescuing the poor boy, giving him leave to go and turning to Pico. “We can only hope the Prior of San Marco has enough sanity left not to burn the books.”

He and I embraced. “Silio is barricaded in his rooms claiming that ghostly giants are fighting and screeching in his garden. Angelo is in there,” he said, looking at the bedroom door, “arguing with a specialist from Pavia, who is insisting that Lorenzo drink a concoction made of ground-up diamonds and pearls.” He shook his head in disbelief. My heart went out to Angelo Poliziano, who, of all the men who had surrounded Lorenzo, loved him most deeply.

“Is he in terrible pain?” I asked Pico.

“It is unimaginable. For no reason he bleeds through the skin of his hands and arms. He aches in the very marrow of his bones. He is so tormented he gets no rest whatsoever, and yet . . .” Pico laughed ruefully. “. . . Lorenzo seems more concerned to soothe his physicians’ feelings than to alleviate his own suffering.”

“I would like to see him,” I told my friend.

“Go in,” Pico said. “Perhaps you can save him from that mad Pavian and his crushed pearls.”

I steeled myself as best as I could, attempting if not a smile, then a pleasant expression, when all I could feel was crushing grief.

The sight of Lorenzo, close as he was to the end, was so joyous a vision that I had to restrain myself rushing into his arms. Angelo Poliziano stood in one corner haranguing a haughty-looking man in dark robes I assumed was the physician.

Lorenzo saw me at once, and his face, though racked with pain, lit like the sun moving out from behind a storm cloud.

“Angelo,” he said with the greatest affection, “would you show the good doctor out for now?”

“Gladly,”
Poliziano replied and, nodding a respectful greeting to me, steered the man to the door, closing it behind them.

“Lock the door, Caterina,” he told me, and as I approached the bed he whispered, “Lie down here next to me.”

I did, and marveled at how safe I felt in the arms of a man so close to dying.

“Tell me of our
pittura del sole
,” he said.