Leonardo's Swans (34 page)

Charles responded at once, not only to her words, Beatrice was sure, but to her charms. “I am weary of it all, Your Excellency,” he replied, smiling at her. “My wife informs me that there are no French reinforcements left, only widows mourning the whitening bones of their husbands that cover the Italian countryside.”

He concluded the negotiations at once, urging that all papers of agreement be drawn up immediately, both in French and Italian, before he had cause to change his mind.

Beatrice’s triumph was not even spoiled when, later, she overheard the French king asking one of the ambassadors from Ferrara about Isabella. Was it true, he asked, that there was another Este sister who might resemble the lovely Beatrice in looks and charm and grace?

“Is it even possible that there are two such creatures on earth?” the king asked, to Beatrice’s delight.

The ambassador replied that in truth, the marchesa was even more beautiful than the duchess, surpassing all ladies in education, wit, and charm. He went on for a very long time describing Isabella in great detail, down to her figure, and the dresses, jewels, and sleeves that adorned it. Then he extolled her intellect. “She has governed Mantua through this war, and with wisdom and compassion, they say, all the while learning new languages and beautifying her city. She is the inspiration of artists and poets throughout Italy. She speaks perfect Latin, and plays the lute as well as the finest musician. She sings angelically, I might add.”

“She is not too tall?” asked the diminutive Charles.

“No, she is taller than her sister, but of normal height for a woman,” the ambassador replied.

“Thank God for that,” the king said.

“The courtiers of Italy call her the first lady in all the world.”

“She sounds like a vision of perfection.”

“Why, Your Majesty, I do believe you are in love with her very description.”

It was true, Beatrice thought. Isabella was more beautiful and more brilliant than she. But those facts—and the French king’s possession of them—could not alter her present happiness. Not only had peace been achieved but her husband would be known as the prince who ran the French out of Italy. And that prince was once again in love with his wife. She sloughed off his rough demeanor of months before as a result of his illness. He was kind and attentive again. As a reward for her strength when he lay ill, Ludovico had commissioned Magistro Leonardo and Donato Bramante to refurbish her apartments in the Castello. Both she and the duke were anxious to return to Milan to see the results of this collaboration between the two brilliant talents, to cover their little boys with kisses, and to proclaim the peace they had achieved on behalf of their people.

In addition to all of this, Beatrice was pregnant again. Her time with Ludovico at Vigevano had been more fruitful than she’d imagined. She tells him on the night before they leave, and he is thrilled.

“What is your best guess, my darling? Boy or girl?” he asks.

“You do not even have to consult the astrologer, my dear. I know it in my bones. Our two sons will have another brother.”

Ludovico does not look as pleased as Beatrice would like. “Boys grow up to be envious of their father’s power. Girls love their father forever,” he says.

“But you already have one perfect daughter in Bianca Giovanna,” Beatrice replies.

“Yes, but her handsome husband has supplanted me in her heart, as it should be. It would be nice to have another daughter to love me into my old age.”

“That is what I am here for, my lord,” Beatrice replies.

With the peace signed, Francesco and Galeazz and their troops open the gates of Novara to escort the French out of the city. Beatrice and Ludovico ride in their wake, slowly becoming cognizant of the horror they are to witness as they overtake the fallen army. The French soldiers have no horses. “All were eaten during the siege,” Galeazz tells Beatrice when she asks him why they are being made to walk to the border. She estimates that few will actually live to see their homeland. A band of fifty or so, dressed in rags, lingers by the road, leaning on one another to sit upright. Beatrice is astonished to see the ambassador Commines helping his staff to feed a clear broth to the soldiers. She sees that most of them are too weak to swallow, broth trickling down their slack mouths, and she turns away. But the view ahead is not pleasant. Dozens, finally in possession of some food given them by Charles’s staff, simultaneously gorge and retch. Starved for so long, Beatrice imagines their bellies are rebelling against the nourishment. Young men drop as they walk, their companions too weak to look back at them much less help them along. Finally Beatrice’s party passes the entirety of the French army. As they ride away, she can hear the sounds of the men—crying, sobbing, heaving, gagging—linger in her wake.

B
EATRICE
’
S
eyes trace the whirring path of looping golden rope twined through boughs and boughs of branches that make a painted canopy of jungle on the ceiling of her drawing room. A bower for my bower, she thinks, smiling at her own cleverness, then realizing that the Magistro had probably conceived and executed the little joke for her pleasure. Massive tree trunks shoot up from the arched curves of the walls, roots upending the layers of rocks that try to confine them, as if to say that the outbursts of nature cannot be contained. The greenery spreads like an eternal summer, sheltering the entire room in one endless grove. Each leaf, indeed, each vein in each leaf, is painstakingly delineated with precise, delicate lines. The branches, like the gold ribbon that winds through them, writhe together in an everlasting pattern like an orgy of snakes. Bits of sky—blue, violet, pink, white, gray—made with swirling brushstrokes that mimic the movement of clouds gleam through the tangle. But it’s the plaited gold ribbon that puzzles. Unending, unbroken, elusive, it slips through the vividly painted leaves, around thick bark, and then loops and loops around itself in eternal, tortuous twists. Just when Beatrice thinks that the meaning of the mural is eternity itself, the entire landscape comes to a conclusion where, it appears, the painter put down his brush.

“It is spectacular,” Beatrice says. “Monumental. Overwhelming. But it is unfinished.”

“Ah yes, the specialty of the Magistro,” replies Ludovico. “Another unfinished spectacle.”

Messer Gualtieri, the treasurer, comes with the letter and the bad news. Like the boisterous roots in his mural, the Magistro has had an outburst.

“He was standing on the scaffold,” Gualtieri begins, “touching up a portion of sky, when someone from his household arrived. I believe the boy asked for money. The Magistro threw his brush into the air and started screaming that he was not a bank, that he had creditors chasing him, and that the boy should get used to wearing woolen breeches instead of leather because they were all going to have to start economizing.”

Gualtieri pauses. “Well. He called for some paper and wrote this.”

Gualtieri hands Ludovico a letter on folded parchment. “He struggled over the words, Your Excellency. He wrote slowly, as if in great pain.”

Ludovico mumbles as he reads the Magistro’s words. Beatrice leans over to read the contents for herself.

To Your Lordship,

I regret being in need at this time because it prevents me from obeying your every whim and desire, which has always been my greatest pleasure. I regret very much that, having called upon my skills, you find me in need of the funds of which you have promised me. And I regret, further, that because these funds have not been delivered, I must leave your service and find other means of feeding myself and my household, which at this time numbers six mouths. In the last fifty-six months, I have received from your treasury only fifty ducats. Some creditors may be put off with the usual excuses, but I had to advance the money to the priest and the processioners and the gravediggers to see my dear mother put to eternal rest in hallowed ground and with the proper rituals and holy sacraments.

Therefore I must leave Your Lordship’s service for a time—a very sad time for me, I assure you, to be separated from my greatest desire, which is to serve you—so that I might commence to raise the money necessary to keep my household fed and in breeches. I hope and trust that this period will soon come to an end so that we might finish the projects we began in earnest. I especially look forward to executing the murals I designed of you portrayed as Fortune’s Son, driving out the decrepit hag, Poverty, with your golden wand; of your personage representing Wisdom, wearing magical spectacles that enable you to see through all lies and deceit; and of Your Excellency wearing judicial robes and pronouncing sentence on Envy. I believe that this series will present Your Lordship to his people in the manner in which his benevolence toward them and his desire for naught but their happiness and prosperity should already convey. Your Excellency is familiar with my sorrow over the fact that Bramante has been given the time and funds to complete his series of frescoes of you administering justice, whereas I have yet to have the tools of time and money delivered to me. Further, I am anxious to test the designs for the canal locks. As you know I have devoted many years to the study of the flow of water and I am completely certain of this new system of control. As for the mural of the Last Supper, I would like to finish it, but as you know, I have not been able to find an appropriate model for the face of Judas, nor have I received the compensation to resume work. I will finish this, and the portrait of your illustrious family, when the finances I raise from other commissions enable me to return to your service. At that time, I pray that the duchess will sit for me, as I wish only to work from the subject and not from another artist’s rendering.

Of the casting of the horse, I will say nothing, knowing what circumstances are at this time. One does wish, however, to someday complete one’s grand opus.

Forgive me for removing myself from my greatest happiness, which is to serve and obey you.

—Leonardo

Ludovico throws the letter into the air. “Does he think he’s the only artist in Italy?” he screams at Gualtieri. “Where is Pietro Perugino working? Send him a letter immediately. Write to my sister-in-law and have her send old Mantegna at once. Send to all the states and find out who is available. I will not have my ambitions held hostage by the Magistro!”

“But my Lord, why can we not simply give him the money he requires to return to our service?” Beatrice asks. It seems a simple enough request—the money to feed and clothe oneself and one’s dependents. “Why wait for another artist to travel to Milan when, for just a little money, we can persuade the Magistro to finish my rooms?”

Ludovico’s cheeks puff wide as if he is about to blow some huge thing from his mouth. The vein, which Beatrice has seen before, jagged as a lightning bolt, appears abruptly across his brow. Beatrice wonders if he, like angry Zeus, will pull it right out of his head and throw it at her. “What? And play into his hands? This is exactly what he wants. More money so that he can procrastinate until Judgment Day and not have to finish a single thing!”

She prays that her husband does not fall into another fit over this, but she feels she must remind him of certain realities. “I do not understand how paying the man is playing into his hands. You sound as if you are talking about a conniving lover and not a man in your service!” She has long likened the two of them to a married pair. Would the analogy never wear itself out?

His fury is undeterred. “Do not think that you are innocent, madame,” he says. “If you had not been playing silly games with your sister over the Magistro’s attention, you might have sat for the family portrait long ago, and we would have at least one finished work for all our money. One that would bring glory to the family at that.”

“If it pleases Your Excellency, I will sit for the Magistro immediately. I am sure that he can hide my condition. It is not yet so pronounced.” Whatever will calm her husband Beatrice will agree to at this moment, when she fears he is aggravated enough to evoke a fit, and she, pregnant, will have to govern the kingdom at a time when peace with France is fresh and tenuous.

“How convenient. Now that you are willing, he is unavailable.”

Was she wrong to have tried to beat Isabella at her own game? “My sister wanted the attention of my husband. If it had merely been a question of being painted by the Magistro, of course, I would never have stopped her. But my husband reserves the talents of the Magistro for painting the women he loves. I could not allow my sister to join those ranks. Not when court gossip and my own intuition whispered to me to prevent it. A strong family silences the tongues of its detractors. Don’t you see, my lord? Everything I have done since coming to this court, I have done for you.”

She says it tenderly, waiting for the simple truth to wash over him. She would like to add
and to make you love me
. But she is glad that she refrained because her words do not soothe him at all. Rather, he looks at her strangely before turning away and continuing his tirade.

“Oh, he is maddening,” Ludovico says, as if talking to the trees Leonardo painted on the walls. “Who has fed him and kept him in his fancy brocades and velvets all these years? Am I to receive no gratitude? From anyone?”