Painting Mona Lisa. Jeanne Kalogridis

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      It was agreed that Lorenzo would pay Leonardo a token sum for a ‘commission’ – the sketch of Bernardo Baroncelli hanged, with the possibility that such a sketch might become a portrait. Thus Leonardo could honestly answer that he was in the Piazza della Signoria because Lorenzo de’ Medici wanted a drawing; he was a very bad liar, and prevarication did not suit him.

      As he stood in the square on the cold December morning of Baroncelli’s death, staring intently at the face of each man who passed, he puzzled over il Magnifico’s words.

       They mean to destroy us …

PART II LISA

       XI

      I will always remember the day my mother told me the story of Giuliano de’ Medici’s murder.

      It was a December day more than thirteen and a half years after the event; I was twelve. For the first time in my life, I stood inside the great Duomo, my head thrown back as I marvelled at the magnificence of Brunelleschi’s cupola while my mother, her hands folded in prayer, whispered the gruesome tale to me.

      Midweek after morning Mass, the cathedral was nearly deserted, save for a sobbing widow on her knees just beyond the entry, and a priest replacing the tapers on the altar’s candelabra. We had stopped directly in front of the high altar, where the events of the assassination had taken place. I loved tales of adventure, and tried to picture a young Lorenzo de’ Medici, his sword drawn, leaping into the choir and running past the priests to safety.

      I turned to look at my mother, Lucrezia, and tugged at her embroidered brocade sleeve. ‘What happened after Lorenzo escaped?’ I hissed. ‘What became of Giuliano?’

      My mother’s eyes had filled with tears. She was, as my father often said, easily moved. ‘He died of his terrible wounds,’ she said, and sighed. ‘And the executions of the conspirators were horribly brutal … It was a horrible time for Florence.’

      Zalumma, who stood on her other side, leaned forward to scowl a warning at me.

      ‘Didn’t anyone try to help Giuliano?’ I asked. ‘Or was he already dead? I would have at least gone to see if he was still alive.’

      ‘Hush,’ Zalumma warned me. ‘Can’t you see she is becoming upset?’

      This was indeed cause for concern. My mother was not well, and agitation worsened her condition.

      ‘She was the one who told the story,’ I countered. ‘I did not ask for it.’

      ‘Quiet!’ Zalumma ordered. I was stubborn, but she was more so. She took my mother’s elbow and in a sweeter tone, said, ‘Madonna, it’s time to leave. We must get home before your absence is discovered.’

      She referred to my father, who had spent that day, like most others, tending his business. He would be aghast if he returned to find his wife gone; this was the first time in years she had dared venture out so far and for so long.

      We had secretly planned this outing for some time. I had never seen the Duomo, even though I had grown up looking at its great brick cupola from the opposite side of the Arno, from our house on the Via Maggio. All my life, I had attended our local church of Santo Spirito, with its interior classical columns and arches made of pietra serena, a fine, pale grey stone. Our main altar was also centred beneath a cupola designed by the great Brunelleschi, his final achievement; I had thought Santo Spirito, with its thirty-eight side altars impossibly grand, impossibly large – until I stood inside the great Duomo. The great cupola challenged the imagination. Gazing on it, I understood why, when it was first constructed, people were reluctant to stand beneath it. I understood, too, why some of those who had heard the shouting on the day of Giuliano’s murder had rushed outside, believing the great dome was finally collapsing.

      Magic it was, for something so vast to rise into the air without visible support.

      My mother had brought me to the Piazza del Duomo not just to marvel at the cupola, but to slake my yearning for art – and hers. She was well-born and well-educated; she adored poetry, which she read in Italian and Latin (both of which she had insisted on teaching me). She had passionately acquired a wealth of knowledge about the city’s cultural treasures – and had long been troubled by the fact that her illness had prevented her from sharing them with me. So when the opportunity arose, on that bright December day, we took a carriage east, and headed across the Ponte Vecchio, into the heart of Florence.

      It would have been more efficient to head straight down the Via Maggio to the nearest bridge, the Ponte Santa Trinita, but that would have denied me a visual treat. The Ponte Vecchio was lined with the botteghe of goldsmiths and artists. Each bottega opened directly onto the street, with the owner’s wares prominently displayed in front of the shop. We all wore our best fur-lined capes to protect us from the chilly air, and Zalumma had tucked several thick woollen blankets around my mother. But I was too elated to feel cold; I stuck my head outside the carriage to gape at golden plaques, statuettes, belts, bracelets and Carnival masks. I gazed on chiselled marble busts of wealthy Florentines, on portraits in progress. In the early days, my mother said, the bridge was home to the tanners and fabric dyers, who used to dump their noxious-smelling chemicals directly into the Arno. The Medici had objected: The river was cleaner now than it had ever been, and the tanners and dyers worked in specified areas of the city.

      On our way to the Duomo, our carriage paused in the vast piazza, in front of the imposing fortress known as the Palazzo della Signoria, where the Lord Priors of Florence met. On the wall of an adjacent building was a grotesque mural: paintings of hanged men. I knew nothing of them save that they were known as the Pazzi conspirators, and that they were evil. One of the conspirators, a small naked man, stared wide-eyed and sightless back at me; the effect was unnerving. But what intrigued me most was the portrait of the last hanging body. His form differed from the others, was more delicately portrayed, more assured; its subtle shadings poignantly evoked the grief and remorse of a troubled soul. And it did not seem to float, as the others did, but possessed the shadow and depth of reality. I felt as though I could reach into the wall and touch Baroncelli’s cooling flesh.

      I turned to my mother. She was watching me carefully, though she said not a word about the mural, nor the reason we had lingered there. It was the first time I had stayed for any length of time in the Piazza, the first time I had been allowed such a close view of the famous hanged men. ‘The last one was done by a different artist,’ I said.

      ‘Yes. He has an amazing refinement, doesn’t he? He is like God, breathing life into stone.’ She nodded, clearly pleased by my discernment, and waved for the driver to move on.

      We made our way north to the Piazza del Duomo.

      Before entering the cathedral, I had examined Ghiberti’s bas relief panels on the doors of the nearby octagonal Baptistery. Here, near the public entry at the southern end of the building, scenes of Florence’s patron saint, John the Baptist covered the walls, but what truly tantalized me was the Door of Paradise on the northern side. There, in fine gilded bronze, the Old Testament came to life in vivid detail. I stood on tiptoe to finger the sweeping curve of an angel’s wing as he announced to Abraham that God desired Isaac as a sacrifice; I bent down to marvel at Moses receiving the tablets from the divine hand while, at the foot of the mountain, the Israelites looked on in СКАЧАТЬ