This time, posing when I was finally fully aware of my feelings for him, I felt as though the air in the room around us had changed, grown more alive. I wondered if he could see it on my face, read it in my eyes, as he studied me so closely, as he drew me into being on a blank piece of parchment. Wearing not a scrap of clothing, I ached for him to touch me, craved his hands on my body, burned for him to help me down from my pedestal and lead me up the stairs to his bed. As I studied him and, in turn, let him study me, I imagined what it would be like to lie with him, to have him make love to me, to make love to him, to have him inside me and to move with him. Could he see all this on my face, as well? Could he see the lust etched in each soft curve of my body, see how my very being yearned for him?
Perhaps it was just as well. The Church would censure and punish me for such thoughts, for my lust, for committing adultery in my mind. Yet, sin or no, I had somehow ceased to feel guilt for such desires. And were not such thoughts, such longings, perfect for a pagan goddess? Should not Venus be painted with desire in her very form, with lust for this new world into which she was being born?
When we were finished for the day, he gave me one of the sketches for my own. I gasped when I saw it. He had only told me bits and pieces of his vision up to that point, and when I saw the whole together, even without color, I was astounded at the scope, at the grandeur, at how it retained a simple, primal beauty even so.
Venus—I—was in the center, standing in a great clamshell that bore her to shore from the waves that had conceived and given birth to her. The winds—personified—blew her in to shore, flowers tumbling about her in their wake, the breeze catching her hair and making it dance. A maid waited at the shore with a robe to cover her, both the robe and the maid’s dress fluttering in the wind.
What most astounded me, perhaps, was how Sandro had been able to capture motion, even in so simple a sketch. The whole tableau looked as though it was moving before my eyes, as though this bit of parchment was a window into some other active, living, breathing world.
“What do you think?” Sandro asked nervously, and I realized that I had not spoken for some time as I took it all in.
I looked up at him, vaguely aware that there were tears in my eyes. “Oh, Sandro, it is beautiful beyond words,” I said. “More so than I had dared to dream.”
He smiled, and I could hear his relieved sigh, nearly silent though it was. “I am glad you think so,” he said. “I do not think I could carry on with it if you did not.” He chuckled. “And that is just a simple drawing. Wait until the painting is finished. If I can capture it in just the way I intend, that is…”
“Why, it shall rob me of all speech, of all reason,” I said. “It shall be too incredible to take in.”
His eyes bored into me as he brought one hand up to my cheek, and for a moment, I thought he was going to lean in and kiss me. “Then I will know that I have succeeded. When its beholders react in precisely that way,” he said, releasing me.
*
After that day, we were not able to meet again for some time. He had other works to attend to—most notably his commission for the great church of Santa Maria Novella—and the shift to cold, damp winter weather brought with it a return of my cough, though thankfully nothing so severe as my last attack of illness. Nevertheless, Marco was so concerned that he begged me to remain in bed, which I did only to appease him. In reality, other than coughing, I felt quite fine, but knew that it would not be worth the trouble it would surely bring me to push the issue of my returning to Sandro’s workshop. So I obeyed Marco’s wishes, for the time being.
Yet even once I was recovered again to the point where Marco could no longer keep me in bed, Sandro was much occupied with another project that had most of the city’s finest artists and craftsmen busy as well. The Medici family was planning a magnificent joust to be held in the Piazza Santa Croce at the end of January, in celebration of a recently signed and sealed treaty with the Republic of Venice and the duchy of Milan. As Florence’s Signoria—and the Medici bank—had recently gotten into a spot of trouble with Pope Sixtus in Rome over the appointment of the new archbishop of Pisa, having the fabulously wealthy Venice and the militaristic Milan as allies was indeed something worth celebrating for all Florentines. As such, artists were needed to paint flags and banners and decorations for the event, and craftsmen were needed to build lists and viewing galleries.
December and most of January passed without my seeing Sandro once, even as he consumed most of my thoughts. Yet though this caused me to grind my teeth in frustration and impatience, somehow it was different from when we had been separated for long periods before. I knew, now, that it was not because he did not wish to see me; it was not because he did not wish me to continue posing for him. It was circumstance keeping us apart, and nothing more; I was at last confident in that knowledge.
At times I took the sketch he had given me out of the locked drawer where I kept it—I could not bring myself to burn it, or even give it back to Sandro for safekeeping, though I did not want to contemplate what would happen should Marco discover it—and studied it, marveling at it anew. Much as I wished the painting might be done quickly so that I could see the finished product, I knew that once it was, I would no longer have a reason to spend time with Sandro. And so I came to see that these delays were perhaps for the best—for me, at least.
30
The day of the joust dawned bright and clear, if cold—“What are they thinking, really, holding a joust in January?” I grumbled to myself as Chiara dressed me in my warmest fur-trimmed gown and bundled me into my thickest cloak. Marco had already left; he would be riding as a part of Giuliano’s entourage. The joust was very much Giuliano’s affair: Lorenzo had intended for it to be a means of formally debuting his younger brother before the Florentine people, as he had with a joust of his own some years ago. The fact that the Florentine people already knew Giuliano, and loved him well, seemed scarcely to matter.
Giuliano had—or so Marco told me—been seeing to every detail of the day, from the decorations to the costumes to the banners to the feast being served at the Medici palazzo afterward for the members of Florentine high society. He did love to be the center of attention—yet he understood, as his brother did, the many ways in which spectacle could win the hearts of the common people.
I frowned at my reflection in the mirror as a thought struck me. I had not even heard Marco leave this morning—he had not woken me so that I might give him a favor, which would have been customary, even though he himself was not jousting. Perhaps he had forgotten, or perhaps I might still give him a ribbon or some such thing at the field.
“Is something amiss, Madonna?” Chiara asked me.
I shook off my thoughts. Surely it was nothing. “No, everything is fine, Chiara,” I said. “Are you ready to go? Will you be warm enough? Good; then let us be off.”
Chiara and I made our way to Piazza Santa Croce; once there, she went off to join the crowds of common people, while I was escorted by one of the liveried Medici servants—a veritable legion of them had been hired for this day—to my privileged spot in the stands beside Clarice.