She smiled at me. “Thank you,” she said softly. She crossed the garden to Lorenzo, and I saw her smile, saw the coquettish tilt of her head as she slipped her arm through her husband’s, neatly inserting herself into his conversation.
I was not alone in my corner for long, however. I was just about to rejoin the party—and keep an eye on my husband and Lucrezia Donati, just in case—when I heard a familiar voice. “Madonna Vespucci.” I looked around to find Sandro Botticelli standing there, the setting sunlight creating a golden halo of his blond hair. “I confess I hoped to have the chance to speak with you this evening. May I join you?”
The smile on my face was genuine. “Why, of course,” I said. “I confess that I hoped we might be able to converse as well.”
“You honor me, Madonna. And now we have both made our confessions for the week.”
I laughed. “Indeed. And my confessions to my priest of late have not been much more interesting, I’m afraid. This business of adjusting to married life has left me very little time or opportunity to sin.”
“Brava, Madonna. Spoken like a true debauched Florentine.”
I smiled. “In truth, I was a bit shocked when I first arrived here, at what seemed to me then to be rather bawdy and impious speech. Yet I have come to see it is not that at all. The people of Florence—those I have met, anyway—simply wish to enjoy life, and this world God has fashioned and that mankind has fashioned with His help. And so I cannot imagine that He shall fault us for that.”
“Well said,” Botticelli said, the natural intensity of his gaze seeming to focus on me more sharply. “You embody the spirit of this new age of ours well, I think.”
“What new age might this be, signore?”
“An age where there is room for all wisdom, not just that of the Church,” he said. “We have much to learn from the ancients, the great thinkers of Greece and Rome who, though they did not know Christ, still devoted themselves to enlightenment and learning.”
“Indeed,” I said. “But does the Church not censure those who wish to partake of such wisdom?”
“Holy Mother Church does indeed, though soon, we hope, she will not,” he said. “It is part of the work Lorenzo is doing here, in gathering so many scholars and writers and artists about him. Great men like him seek to change the world.”
“And these Greek and Roman thinkers you speak of, signore,” I said. “If one wished to learn from their wisdom, where would one begin?”
He smiled at me, and the expression transformed his face. “In the Medici library, of course.”
“Indeed.” I considered this. What Signor Botticelli spoke of sounded dangerous, and yet exciting. “Perhaps I will soon have more exciting sins for the confessional, after all.”
“And perhaps, as you say, God would not fault you for making use of the mind He has given you.”
“I hope you are right, signore. Though if you are, it may be that we mistake the nature of sin altogether.”
“It would not surprise me to learn that we do,” Botticelli said. “For must God and His ways, by His very nature, be beyond the comprehension of mere humans?”
This was heresy, and I knew it, but I could not bring myself to pull away from these words, dancing like a beautiful flame before me, warming me even as it threatened to burn me. “A churchman would say that you are wrong; that God has revealed His ways to us through Holy Scripture, and there can be no mistaking them,” I said.
“Certainly. But you are not a churchman, Madonna Vespucci,” he said. “So what do you say?”
“And how can what I say possibly matter against the teachings of Holy Mother Church?”
He met my eyes unflinchingly. “It matters to me.”
I held his gaze, feeling another strange moment of understanding pass between us, just as I had on that evening when we were first introduced. “I agree with you, Signor Botticelli. Or at least, I hope that you are right.”
He did not look away. “I have always thought that it is important for one to know one’s own heart,” he said quietly, leaning forward. “And not have it be simply what others would make it.”
I found myself drawing closer, spellbound by his words. They were so contrary to everything I had ever been taught—that one should learn, yes, but accept the wisdom and teachings of those who had gone before, and especially that of the Church. Yet what Signor Botticelli advocated here was making up one’s own mind, deciding for oneself what to believe, taking what you had learned and thinking on it, rather than merely accepting it.
I shivered slightly. “You must mind in what company you say such things, signore,” I said. “There are many who would take issue with such ideas.”
“It is ever thus,” he said. “And that is why I say such things here, in the company of like-minded people.”
I warmed at the thought that this man, who was clearly intelligent and learned in a way I was not, considered me to be “like-minded.”
“Perhaps beauty is the only truth we need,” he went on. “And it is to be found everywhere: in nature, in learning, in the Church, and in the accomplishments of man: the written word, the painted canvas.”
“Beauty means something very different to me, signore,” I said. “I have always been told that beauty is the means to an end, not the end in and of itself.”
“But that is wrong,” he said earnestly. “The creation of beauty can be the end, the goal. For what other purpose did Dante write his verses?”
I smiled. “There you have me. I fear I cannot mount a defense against such a point, though you will devalue my whole life.”
“Never say that,” he said. “You add to the beauty of the world, Madonna Vespucci. And you can help me do the same.”
“Oh, I can?” I said. “How?”
“Pose for me.”
“Aha,” I said, my smile hardening slightly. “I see what is happening here, signore. You have engaged with me and flattered me so as to obtain a commission.”
“I am not so mercenary as that,” he said. “I engage with you because you have a clever and agile mind, and it pleases me to converse with you. And how have I flattered you?”
“By—by doing just that,” I sputtered, beginning to feel off-balance. “By acting as though my intellect is worthy.”
“It is worthy, and treating you as an intelligent woman is not flattery. I am merely stating facts.” He stepped closer to me. “It is a fact that your mind is as beautiful as your face, Madonna. I recall saying something similar to you when first we were introduced.”
I was silent for a moment as I struggled beneath the onslaught of his words, beneath the torrent of feelings they unleashed in me. “Forgive me,” I said at last. “I am hardly used to such frank speech, I find.”
“You are used to accepting statements of your beauty as fact, but not those of the worthiness of your mind,” he said. “It is what the world expects of you.”
“You have quite flustered me, signore,” I said, startled even as I spoke the words that I would admit such a thing. “You have given me more to think about than I have had in some time.”
“The basis of a good friendship, I think.”
“Are we friends?”