Leonardo's Swans (13 page)

L
UDOVICO
had given the Magistro elaborate quarters in the Corte Vecchio, the old ducal palace, for himself, his household, and his workshop. Il Moro set him up there so that he could use the immense courtyard to work on his colossal equestrian sculpture that was to be a tribute to Ludovico’s father, Francesco Sforza, the great condottiere who won the duchy of Milan by the sword.

“Yet you will see, upon entering the courtyard, that there is no horse in sight!” Galeazz says. “Thus adding to the duke’s great frustration with the Magistro’s stubborn procrastination in all things.”

Galeazz fills Isabella in on this and other odd details of the Magistro as he escorts her to the studio in his chariot. They include: The Magistro does not eat meat of any kind because he refuses to let his body be “a tomb for other animals.” He is so empathetic toward all of God’s creatures that when he passes caged birds for sale in the marketplace, he buys them and then sets them free. When he was a youth, a rustic from the hills of Tuscany—some tiny dot on the map called Vinci—he was apprenticed to the great Florentine sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio. It is said that after the first time Verrocchio allowed Leonardo to paint an entire figure, an angel in the master’s version of
The Baptism of Christ
, Verrocchio took one look at it and quit painting. The apprentice had already exceeded the master to the extent that he put down the brush and would only sculpt thereafter. Further, Isabella must not expect for him to treat her like some courtier would do. “Though he is unrivaled for painting the female face, as you saw with the portrait of la Gallerani, he demonstrates no interest in the company of women. In Florence, as a young man, he was arrested and tried on sodomy charges for consorting with a male prostitute. That may be one reason why he chose to leave the city, for there is no better place for evil gossip than Florence, with the possible exception of Venice.

“Now, he is followed around by a twelve-year-old beauty of a youth who steals and makes trouble. He even stole from the purse of one of my own cavaliers as the man was being fitted for his costume. Leonardo treats the little demon like a son, though he calls him Salai, which I believe is the Tuscan expression for ‘limb of the devil.’ He dresses the scamp in the height of fashion and parades him around like a prize. Everyone suspects that the relationship is sexual. Everyone talks—and not in a positive fashion—about the fact that Leonardo has better-dressed servants than the nobility.”

He is a mass of contradictions, Galeazz explains. “As gentle as a dove, but strong as an ox. He can bend a horseshoe with his left hand, the hand with which he paints and writes.”

Isabella’s head is swimming with facts about the man, so many that she cannot decide upon the attitude with which she will greet him. But it does not matter because when they arrive, an apprentice informs them that the Magistro is not to be found in his quarters.

“He may not return for some time,” says the thin, stringy-haired boy. The boy is probably about Isabella’s age, but his thinness and simple wool robe set against her grandeur make the gap between them seem more than a generation. He appears nervous, but at the same time eager to represent his master to these illustrious visitors, even to appear knowledgeable about him. “We never know when he is going to come or go.”

“And where might he be?” asks Isabella.

“He could be anywhere, searching the city for models for his paintings, or visiting with metallurgists to discuss the nature of bronze, or perhaps he is wandering in the woods behind the Castello. He loves to lose himself in those woods, he says, communing with the very essence of things.”

The apprentice invites them to come into the studio, apologizing for its chaotic condition. They have so many projects, and of such magnitude, that it is difficult to keep order. He tries to find Isabella an appropriate chair, but she assures him that she does not want to sit. Cats and chickens wander in and out of the large, open door, ignoring one another, or perhaps the cold weather makes them indifferent to their natures. Another boy, even younger, lazily plays a lute in the corner, fingertips cut out of his well-worn gloves. When he sees the visitors, he stops, but Isabella encourages him to continue. A younger apprentice stokes a furnace. “For baking pots and shaping metal,” the chatty apprentice offers. “It also has the very practical use of keeping us warm.”

Windows have been cut, the apprentice says, gesturing above, so that the light falls at the perfect forty-five-degree angle the Magistro insists is correct for capturing a subject. The loft above, she thinks, must be where the apprentices make their beds. Big clay molds of what appear to be horses’ parts lie about in bizarre arrangements—a flank here, a head there. The walls are covered with drawings of every kind, some of which Isabella cannot identify the subject, but she is excited when she sees the renderings for the costumes that the Magistro designed for Galeazz’s jousting match. The drawings look even more savage than the men had appeared. Otherwise, she is not certain of what she is looking at in his renderings—men with wings; sketches of dozens of types of legs and arms; a huge page of a variety of types of noses and another of ears; and many mechanical drawings for machines that she cannot identify. Mathematical equations cover the margins of every sketch.

“The Magistro is also a mathematician?” she asks the boy.

“Oh yes, Your Excellency, the Magistro believes that the artist must know all subjects, as well as every creature and phenomenon of nature firsthand, as if he is the very thing itself. An artist must be one with the very motion and rhythm of the universe. Mathematics is a great part of the knowledge. Without mathematics, there is no perspective, and the Magistro is a fiend on the subject of perspective. I am made to study mathematics late into the evenings after we have finished our work.”

“Rigorous, indeed,” says Isabella, strolling to the one large, coherent work in the studio, a painting on wood, which leans casually against a white wall, the light falling upon it, illuminating the faces and highlighting the Magistro’s play of shadows upon radiance. The panel rests against the wall, almost as if someone had discarded it. It is the simplest of mother-and-child scenarios, but it happens to be a painting of the Blessed Virgin with the baby Jesus in her lap, holding a flower that the two of them examine. Isabella does not think she has ever seen the two portrayed in such a manner, so casual and uncomplicated. No marble thrones, elaborate columns, cherubs, angels on high, or soaring doves of peace clutter the scene. The identities of the subjects are given away only by delicate halos. The Madonna looks like a toothless Italian peasant girl, and the baby, her chubby son. Isabella wonders what the Magistro is trying to accomplish with this painting: Is the girl some Tuscan rustic he knew in his youth? His own mother, perhaps? It’s an odd picture. The Madonna looks very young, as childlike in appearance as Beatrice, yet her hairline recedes like an old man’s. Artists inevitably model the Madonna after the goddess Venus, or at least after the most beautiful, virtuous-looking women in Italy, or the pallid, ethereal women from the land of the Flemish.

“If this was a commissioned work,” Isabella whispers to Galeazz, “I imagine it was rejected.”

“It is almost sacrilege to portray the Blessed Virgin so pitifully,” Galeazz says. “Like a coarse girl.”

“I thought the same,” Isabella says. “Though her dress is lovely enough, and she wears a nice jewel at the chest. And what attention the Magistro has given to the folds and drapes of her skirts. Look at this velvet; it is as if you can touch it and feel the soft texture.”

“But there is a lack of elegance to the face, is there not? Why make the Blessed Virgin look like an ugly, toothless girl losing her hair.”

Yet there is beauty to it, she wants to say, but she does not want to argue. Not the kind of beauty the Magistro had given to Cecilia Gallerani. This is just a mother and baby, in a simple setting, much as the Virgin Mary must have inhabited. Surely she and Joseph did not live with thrones in their houses and cherubs flying over their heads, as she is customarily portrayed. With all the magisterial symbols absent, it is as if the artist is saying that the act of a mother playing so gently with her child is in itself Divine. All the traditional signs of glory are replaced by the simple feeling between the two.

There is something Platonic about both of the paintings, Isabella thinks; some quest of Leonardo’s to arrive at a kind of pure feeling, some absolute truth about feeling, rather than the sloppy and specific human emotions laid bare for all to see. It is as if he is attempting to surpass ordinary and commonplace feeling for the essence of Feeling. Is the expression of that essence a mortal attempt to evoke the Divine? All the religious painting in Italy represents the sacred as separate from humanity. Leonardo, it seems to Isabella, is expressing the impersonal sacredness within the mortal form.

There again, too, is the mysterious illuminated opening in the corner of the picture.

“Look, Galeazz, how as in Cecilia’s portrait, there is the window in the background, which has no landscape behind it, but only light.”

“Perhaps it is unfinished,” Galeazz says. “Perhaps the teeth and the grounds outside the window and the rest of the Virgin’s hair are yet to come.”

“Let us not insult him by suggesting it,” Isabella warns. She walks away from the panel both comforted and disquieted by it.

“What are those sketches on the table?” she asks the apprentice, pointing to a sheave of pages strewn about a workbench. All she sees are wings, spreading, flapping, and jutting about, some wrapping themselves around nude female forms.

“These are the Magistro’s swans,” says the apprentice. He spreads out the pages so that Isabella can see the many renderings of the creature. There are black swans, white ones, swans large and tiny, swans with their wings spread as if in attack mode, swans sliding peacefully on the water, and several sketches of swans copulating with naked women.

“He is preparing for a painting of the legend of Leda and the swan,” the boy says. So that explains the odd cracked eggs at the naked woman’s feet. Isabella has always loved the story because of its bizarre elements. Zeus, god of gods, possessed of epic sexual urges, in his untamable desire for Leda, the mortal queen of Sparta, turned himself into a swan in order to appear less threatening to her, for he knew that young girls were enchanted by the creatures. The two coupled—thanks to the god’s inimitable trickery. But instead of having children the normal way, poor Leda laid two eggs. All was put well again when the issue turned out to be two pairs of twins, Castor and Clytemnestra, and Pollux and Helen, of Trojan fame.

Isabella is riveted to these renderings, though she cannot rationally figure what is erotic in coupling with a swan. Perhaps the priests are right in their condemnation of the old myths as vulgar and perverse.

Still, there is something irresistible about these swans, particularly the way that Leonardo has drawn them. The god-bird copulating with the vulnerable Leda, who looked stunned to have this gigantic and seemingly gentle bird suddenly taking her from behind, draws Isabella into the picture, though she knows that she should look away. She is embarrassed to be so captivated by it in the presence of Galeazz, but it seems to have captured his attention as well.

“It must have been nice to have been one of the Olympian gods,” he says. “Imagine the possibilities.”

“Blasphemer,” Isabella says lightly. “Besides, I think you are probably gifted enough in this arena. I loathe to see you with a god’s edge.”

“The Magistro tells us that the painter must create as if he were a god,” the apprentice offers. He is an earnest boy, Isabella thinks, quoting his master frequently. She wonders if he has any talent of his own.

“Not as if he were being
inspired
by God?” she asks.

“No. He says that painting is an act of creation, and the painter must be God-like in his ability to imagine.”

“No wonder he left Florence,” Galeazz says. “Fra Girolamo Savonarola and his agents of condemnation would have his head on a stick for likening a painter to God.”

“Sandro Botticelli is right now doing penance with the priest for painting his fantastical nude goddesses,” says Isabella. “I believe he is saying twenty-five rosaries a day and submitting to the lash every evening because his paintings make one yearn for that time when beautiful gods walked the earth and mingled with the mortals.”

“Oh, the Magistro does not admire Maestro Botticelli,” the apprentice says, ever eager to share his knowledge of his master’s mind. “He says he is a nice man, but he floats his subjects in space as if perspective did not exist. The Magistro attributes it to laziness. He doesn’t condone any painting ignorant of the laws of mathematics. ‘Perspective is the bridle and the rudder of painting,’ he always says.”

“Whom does he admire?” Isabella asks.

“Your Excellency, he does not care to look at the work of other painters. ‘He who paints from others is creating something false.’ That is another of his favorite sayings.”

“I must admit that I am growing fearful of meeting a man who holds so many powerful opinions on such a variety of subjects,” Isabella says. “It would be rather like an encounter with my father, who can seem daunting.”

“No, Isabella, he is the essence of charm,” replies Galeazz, taking the opportunity to put his arm about her shoulder as if he thought she truly was afraid. “You shall see.”

“Your Excellency is too kind.”

The voice is low in register, knowing in tone, and inscrutable.

His scent of lavender and poppies reaches her nose just as she turns around. How long has he been standing there? She sees a mature man of beauty and detached amusement. What strikes her first is his clothing, so elegant that he must design it himself. Despite the cold, he wears a short, rose-colored garment, probably to show off his fine calf, easily discernable beneath black hose. His vest is of gold brocade, trimmed with rosy stones, dusted at the collar by his long, curly hair, worn in the manner of a Greek youth.