The Rule of Four (36 page)

In our partnership, it occurs to me, the only thing I ever had that could compare to the speed of Paul’s reasoning was my intuition—luck, dreams, chance associations. It hardly seems fair to him that we worked together as equals.

Paul folds the sheet of paper and places it in the trash can. For a second he looks around the carrel, then lifts a stack of books and places it in the crook of my arm, followed by a stack for himself. The painkiller must still be working, because my shoulder doesn’t buckle under the heft.

“I’m amazed you figured it out,” I tell him. “What did it say?”

“Help me put these away back on the shelves first,” he answers. “I want to empty this place out.”

“Why?”

“Just to be safe.”

“From what?”

He half-smiles at me. “Library fines?”

We exit the carrel and Paul guides me toward a long corridor extending far into the darkness. There are bookshelves on either side, branching off into aisles of their own, dead ends begetting dead ends. We are in a corner of the library visited so rarely that the librarians keep the lights off, letting visitors flick the switch on each shelf when they come.

“I couldn’t believe it, when I finished,” he says. “Even before I was through decoding, I was shaking. It was done. After all this time,
done
.”

He stops at one of the rearmost shelves, and I can make out only the silhouette of his face.

“And it was worth it, Tom. I never even saw it coming, what was in the second half of the book. Remember what we saw in Bill’s letter?”

“Yes.”

“Most of that letter was a lie. You know that work is mine, Tom. The most Bill ever did was translate a few Arabic characters. He made some copies and checked out some books. Everything else I did on my own.”

“I know,” I say.

Paul covers his mouth with his hand for a second.

“That’s not true. Without everything your father and Richard found, and everything the rest of you solved—you, especially—I couldn’t have done it. I didn’t do it all on my own. The rest of you showed me the way.”

Paul invokes my father’s name, and Richard Curry’s, as if they are a pair of saints, two martyrs from the paintings in Taft’s lecture. For a moment I feel like Sancho Panza, listening to Don Quixote. The giants he sees are nothing but windmills, I know, and yet he’s the one who sees clearly in the dark, and I’m the one doubting my eyes. Maybe that’s been the rub all along, I think: we are animals of imagination. Only a man who sees giants can ever stand upon their shoulders.

“But Bill was right about one thing,” Paul says. “The results
will
cast a shadow over everything else in historical studies. For a long time.”

He takes the stack of books from my hands, and suddenly I feel weightless. The corridor behind us extends toward a light in the distance, open aisles verging off into space on each side. Even in the darkness, I can see the way Paul smiles.

Chapter 22
                           

We begin making trips back and forth from the carrel, replacing dozens of books, most of them on shelves where they don’t belong. Paul only seems to care that they’re out of sight.

“Do you remember what was going on in Italy just before the
Hypnerotomachia
was published?” he asks.

“Just what was in the Vatican tour book.”

Paul lifts another pile of books into my arms as we walk back into the darkness.

“The intellectual life of Italy during Francesco’s day revolves around a single city,” he says.

“Rome.”

But Paul shakes his head. “Smaller than that. The size of Princeton—the campus, not the town.”

I see how enchanted he is by what he’s found, how real it’s become for him already.

“In that town,” he says, “you’ve got more intellectuals than anyone knows what to do with. Geniuses. Polymaths. Thinkers who are gunning for the big answers to the big questions. Autodidacts who have taught themselves ancient languages no one else knows. Philosophers who are combining religious points from the Bible with ideas from Greek and Roman texts, Egyptian mysticism, Persian manuscripts so old nobody knows how to date them. The absolute cutting edge of humanism. Think of the riddles. University professors playing Rithmomachia. Translators interpreting Horapollo. Anatomists revising Galen.”

In my mind’s eye the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore comes into focus. My father liked to call it the mother city of modern scholarship. “Florence,” I say.

“Right. But that’s only the beginning. In every other discipline, you’ve got the biggest names in Europe. In architecture you’ve got Brunelleschi, who engineered the largest cathedral dome in a thousand years. In sculpture you’ve got Ghiberti, who created a set of reliefs so beautiful that they’re known as the doors of paradise. And you’ve got Ghiberti’s assistant, who grows up to become the father of modern sculpture—Donatello.”

“The painters weren’t bad either,” I remind him.

Paul smiles. “The single greatest concentration of genius in the history of Western art, all in this little town. Applying new techniques, inventing new theories of perspective, transforming painting from a craft into a science and an art. There must’ve been three dozen of them, like Alberti, who would’ve been considered first-class anywhere else in the world. But in this town, they’re second-rate. That’s because they’re competing with the giants. Masaccio. Botticelli. Michelangelo.”

As the momentum of his ideas increases, his feet move faster down the dark hallways.

“You want scientists?” he says. “How about Leonardo da Vinci. You want politicians? Machiavelli. Poets? Boccaccio and Dante. And a lot of these guys were contemporaries. On top of it all, you have the Medici, a family so rich it could afford to patronize as many artists and intellectuals as the town could produce.

“All of them, together, in the same small city, at basically the same time. The greatest cultural heroes in all of Western history, crossing each other in the streets, knowing each other on a first-name basis, talking to each other, working together, competing, influencing and pushing each other to go further than they could’ve gone alone. All in a place where beauty and truth are king, where leading families fight over who can commission the greatest art, who can subsidize the most brilliant thinkers, who can own the biggest library. Imagine that. All of that. It’s like a dream. An impossibility.”

We return to his carrel and he finally takes a seat.

“Then, in the last few years of the fifteenth century, just before the
Hypnerotomachia
is written, something even more amazing happens. Something that every Renaissance scholar knows about, but that no one has ever connected with the book. Francesco’s riddle kept talking about a powerful preacher in the land of his brethren. I just couldn’t figure out what the connection could be.”

“I thought Luther wasn’t until 1517. Colonna was writing in the 1490s.”

“Not Luther,” he says. “In the late 1400s, a Dominican monk was sent to Florence to join a monastery called San Marco.”

Suddenly it dawns on me. “Savonarola.”

The great evangelical preacher, who galvanized Florence at the turn of the century, trying to restore the city’s faith at any cost.

“Exactly,” Paul says. “Savonarola’s a straight arrow—the straightest you’d ever meet. And when he gets to Florence, he begins to preach. He tells people that their behavior is wicked, their culture and art are profane, their government is unjust. He says God looks unkindly on them. He tells them to repent.”

I shake my head.

“I know how it sounds,” Paul goes on, “but he’s
right.
In a way, the Renaissance
is
a godless time. The Church is corrupt. The pope’s a political appointee. Prospero Colonna, Francesco’s uncle, allegedly dies of gout, and some people think Pope Alexander poisoned him because he came from a rival family. That’s the kind of world it is, where people suspect the pope of murder. And that was only the beginning—they suspected him of sadism, incest, you name it.

“Meanwhile, for all of its cutting-edge art and scholarship, Florence is in constant upheaval. Factions fight each other in the streets, prominent families plot against each other to gain power, and even though the city is supposedly a republic, the Medici control everything. Death is common, extortion and coercion are even more common, injustice and inequality are a rule of life. It’s a pretty disturbing place, considering all the beautiful things that come out of it.

“So Savonarola arrives in Florence and sees evil wherever he looks. He urges the citizens to clean up their lives, to stop gambling, to start reading the Bible, to help the poor and feed the hungry. At San Marco he begins to gain a following. Even some of the leading humanists admire him. They realize he’s well read and conversant about philosophy. Little by little, Savonarola’s on the rise.”

I stop him. “I thought this was still while the Medici controlled the city.”

Paul shakes his head. “Unfortunately for them, their newest heir, Piero, was a fool. He couldn’t run the city. The people began to clamor for liberty, a hallowed cry in Florence, and finally the Medici were expelled. Remember the forty-eighth woodcut? The child in the chariot, butchering the two women?”

“The one Taft showed in his lecture.”

“Right. That’s how Vincent always interpreted it. The punishment was supposed to be for treason. Did he say what he thought it meant?”

“No. He wanted the audience to solve it.”

“But he asked about the child in it. Why does he have a sword—something like that?”

I can picture Taft standing beneath the image, his shadow cast onto the screen. “
Why does he make the women pull his chariot through the forest, then kill them that way
?” I say.

“Vincent’s theory was that the Cupid figure was supposed to be Piero, the new Medici heir. Piero behaved like a child, so that’s how the artist represented him. Because of him, the Medici lost their hold on Florence and were thrown out. So the woodcuts show him retreating through the woods.”

“So who are the women?”

“Florence and Italy, Vincent says. By acting like a child, Piero destroyed them both.”

“Seems possible.”

“It’s a decent interpretation,” Paul agrees, patting his hand on the underside of his desk, searching for something. “Just not the right one. Vincent refused to accept that the acrostic rule was the key. He would never believe that the first of those images was the important one. He could only see things his way.

“The point is, when the Medici were expelled, the other leading families met to discuss a new government in Florence. The only problem was, no one trusted anyone else. In the end they agreed to let Savonarola take a place of authority. He was the one man everyone knew was incorruptible.

“So Savonarola’s popularity grows even more. People begin to take his sermons to heart. Shopkeepers start reading the Bible in their spare time. Gamblers aren’t as open about their card games. Drinking and disorder seem to be on the decline. But Savonarola sees that the evils persist. So he steps up his program for civic and spiritual improvement.”

Paul reaches even farther beneath his desk. With the sound of tape peeling, he produces a single manila envelope. Inside is a calendar he has drawn up in his own hand. When he flips through the pages, I can see unfamiliar religious holidays marked in red pen—saint’s days, feast days—and in black a series of notes I can’t make out.

“It’s February of 1497,” he says, pointing at that month, “two years before the
Hypnerotomachia
is published, and Lent is approaching. Now, the tradition was this: since Lent was a period of fasting and self-denial, the days leading up to it were a period of celebration, a huge festival, so people could enjoy themselves before Lent started. Just like today, that period was called Carnival. Since the forty days of Lent always start on Ash Wednesday, Carnival always culminates the day before—on Fat Tuesday, or Mardi Gras.”

Flashes of what he’s telling me seem familiar. My father must have told me some of this once, before he gave up on me, or I gave up on him. Or maybe it’s just what little I learned in church, before I was old enough to choose how I spent my Sunday mornings.

Paul unearths another diagram. The title reads
FLORENCE,
1500
.

“Carnival in Florence was a period of huge disorder, drunkenness, debauchery. Gangs of young men would bar street entrances and force people to pay a toll for safe passage. Then they would spend the money on alcohol and gambling.”

He points at a large space in the middle of the drawing.

“When they were all completely drunk, they would camp out around fires in the main square and finish the night in a huge brawl, each group throwing stones at the other. Every year people were hurt, even killed.

“Savonarola, of course, is Carnival’s most vocal opponent. In his eyes, a challenge has risen against Christianity, leading the people of Florence into temptation. And he recognizes that there’s one force, more powerful than the others, contributing to the city’s corruption. It teaches men that pagan authorities can rival the Bible, that wisdom and beauty should be worshiped in unchristian things. It leads men to believe that human life is a quest for earthly knowledge and satisfaction, distracting them from the only object that matters: salvation. The force is humanism. And its greatest advocates are the leading intellectuals of the city, the humanists.

“That’s when Savonarola comes up with the idea that’s probably his greatest legacy to history. He decides that on Shrove Tuesday, the culminating day of Carnival, he will stage a huge event—something that will show the progress and transformation of the city, but at the same time remind the Florentines of their sinfulness. He lets the gangs of young men roam the city, but now he gives them a purpose. He tells them to collect unchristian objects from every neighborhood and bring them back to the main square. He puts all of the objects in a huge pyramid. And on that day, Shrove Tuesday, when the street gangs would usually be sitting around fires and fighting each other with stones, Savonarola has them building another kind of fire.” Paul looks at his map, then fixes his eyes on me.