“You will do, Monna Trovato,” he said. “Return tomorrow after Prime.” And with that, he left, Egidio trailing behind him.
I stood in the middle of the scriptorium, stunned by my success. I’d just succeeded in landing my first medieval job, a symbol of permanence and stability in a place I wasn’t sure I wanted to remain. I rinsed what ink I could off my hands and sleeve, ruminating. I’d been dismissed, but I wasn’t ready to go back to my room yet.
I was surrounded by primary sources—thousands of books—sitting on the shelves waiting for me to pull them down and read. What if the answers to Ben’s questions were in one of those books? I’d found that letter among Ben’s papers from Immacolata de’ Medici, mourning her husband’s death, but found no way to connect it to Siena’s downfall. Maybe there was something useful about the Medicis here.
I started looking at the spines of the books lined up along the long walls, but most had no words. I pulled out, inspected, and returned at least thirty books, climbing ladders to reach the highest. I’d settle for anything Florentine I could find, though it was even more of a long shot in a medieval Sienese library than it had been in the modern one. Then I got lucky.
It was a thin, bound transcript of the procedings of the city council, with the date, 1342, on the frontispiece. I looked through the pages. Walter of Brienne, Duke of Athens, who had briefly been the head of the Signoria of Florence, had visited Siena that year. He’d been received with a lavish banquet, which included a flaky pie of live songbirds that flew out during the party. The guests were listed too, and interestingly, Signoretti’s name came up again, and later in the list, a Ser de’ Medici, also visiting from Florence.
I stopped reading to think. Was this the same Medici—the executed Medici—mentioned in Immacolata’s letter? This visit had happened five years earlier—if it was the same Medici, had he been going to Siena for all those years? Doing what? And if it was the same Medici, he’d been in the same room with Signoretti, the wealthy Sienese nobleman, at least once. I felt a strange chill looking at those names together: Signoretti and Medici, one from Siena, the other from her rival commune, both at this party with the head of the Florentine government. Had they met then? When I put it back on the shelf, my fingers were tingling, but I didn’t know how to interpret what I’d seen. I wished I could have asked Ben what he thought.
After that, there was nothing else directly relevant to my questions. I spent some time poring over a gorgeous illustrated copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and what looked like a mathematical treatise in Arabic before I gave up. Exhausted and starving, I made my way back to my room. There I found a savory pie waiting for me, still warm and smelling of saffron. When I bit into it, cheese, cinnamon, and raisins filled my mouth. I silently blessed Clara as I chewed, and washed the pie down with wine. I climbed onto the bed without getting undressed, and when I closed my eyes, I could see little black letters wavering under my eyelids.
*
July 7, 1347
Just after dawn, Gabriele started to climb the scaffolding in the Signoretti Chapel, his breath quickening from effort and anticipation. On the high platform he mixed fresh plaster for the intonaco, and with a trowel began laying down a thin layer at the seam he’d left the night before. The line of Anna’s bed, where the plaid coverlet met with the border of the wooden chest alongside it, had made a natural stopping place, and the division between the dried plaster and fresh intonaco would vanish easily in the final painting. Once the plaster was firm enough, Gabriele polished the surface to an even smoothness.
The first hours of the giornata, a day’s work for the fresco painter, set the whole day’s work in motion. A calm beginning let the work roll forward with a sweet, measured cadence. Gabriele laid out the bags of spolvero—he would use this soot to mark the drawing’s outline—and the jars of pigment he’d prepared. The bedside chest took shape under his brush as he worked. Some painters from Simone’s workshop complained about painting inanimate objects in their eagerness to depict the human form, but for Gabriele it all pulsed with the same life and beauty—a line of inlay, a metal lock, the intricate geometric pattern of the carpet—all as worthy of attention as the Virgin’s curving fingers, or the lines on Gioacchino’s anxious face.
At the beginning of the day when the plaster was still damp the pigment absorbed slowly, as if the wall and the paint were shy lovers, but at the end of each day, as the angle of the sun sharpened, the wall avidly embraced the colors. Gabriele worked rapidly, aware of the urgency of drying plaster. He leaned back to examine the red of the nursemaid’s robe against the rose of the infant Virgin, her right hand raised in a baby’s first salute. The juxtaposition was just as he’d imagined it. He put his brush down reluctantly; soon it would be too dark to paint. He headed out into the busy streets as the light was just beginning to fade.
On the way home, Gabriele stopped to listen to a trovatore singing Dante’s Paradiso. A small crowd had gathered in appreciation—an elderly cleric next to a restless young son of a nobleman, and a few scruffy-looking children. The singer’s sweet voice held them all entranced.
Quando Beatrice in sul sinistro fianco
Vidi rivolta, e riguardar nel sole
Aquila sì non gli s’affisse unquanco.
E sì come secondo raggio suole
Uscir del primo, e risalire in suso,
Pur come peregrin che tornar vuole;
Così dell’ atto suo, per gli occhi infuso
Nell’ imagine mia, il mio sì fece,
E fissi gli occhi al sole oltre a nostr’ uso.
When I beheld Beatrice turned to her left and gazing on the sun
Never did eagle so fix himself thereon.
And even as a second ray is wont to issue from the first and re-ascend
(like a pilgrim whose will is to return);
So from her gesture, through her eyes infused in my imagination, did mine own take shape;
and I fixed mine eyes upon the sun, transcending our wont.
Like an artist’s muse, Gabriele thought. The singer had chosen one of Gabriele’s favorite passages. He had a brief vision of his late wife Paola’s face, but to his dismay, her features would not come into focus. She had been a timid almost-child when they wed; but a good match for Gabriele, fatherless and motherless, with only the painter’s trade to support a new family. Gabriele had been inspired to protectiveness and in time, affection, though not passion.