Chapter II: Book I: The White She-Devil--1494 (2)

'To the field; to my work.'

'God go with you! And I'll to the vineyard.'

At this all the fury of the priest was let loose on his parishioners.

'Infidel dogs, abortions of Cain! would you abandon your pastor? Know ye not, spawn of Satan, that did I not pray for you day and night, and beat my breast with weeping and fasting, your whole sinful village would long ere this have been sunk into the earth? But it is ended! I leave you, shaking off the dust from my feet. Cursed be the land! Cursed the corn and the water and the flocks; and your sons and your sons' sons. I am your father, your shepherd no more. I renounce you! Anathema!'

VII

In the restored calm of the villa, where the goddess lay on her golden bed, Giorgio Merula went up to the stranger who was still measuring.

'You are studying the proportions of divinity?' said the scholar patronisingly: 'You would reduce beauty to mathematics?'

The other raised his eyes for an instant; then silently, as if he had not heard the question, continued his work. The compasses contracted and expanded, describing geometrical figures; quietly and firmly the stranger put the angle measure to the fair lips of Aphrodite--lips whose smile had struck terror into Giovanni's heart--reckoned the result, and set it in a note-book.

'Pardon my curiosity,' insisted Merula, 'how many divisions are there?'

'This is a rough measurement,' said the unknown, unwillingly; 'generally I divide the human face into degrees, minutes, seconds and thirds, each division being the twelfth part of the preceding one.'

'Say you so?' cried Merula, 'meseems the last subdivision must be less than the finest hair.'

'A third,' explained the other still grudgingly, 'is 1/48823 of the whole face.'

Merula lifted his eyebrows with an incredulous smile. 'Well, we live and learn. I never thought it were possible to reach such accuracy.'

'The more accurate the better,' returned his companion.

'Truly it may be so; yet, you know, in Art, in Beauty, all these mathematical calculations--What artist in the glow of enthusiasm, of fiery inspiration, breathed upon by God----'

'Yes, yes,' assented the unknown, evidently wearied; 'none the less I am anxious to know----'

And stooping he measured the distance from the roots of the hair to the chin.

'To know?' thought Giovanni. 'Can one _know_ these matters? Folly! Does he not _feel_? understand?'

Merula, anxious to probe the other to the quick, talked on of the ancients, and how they should be imitated. The stranger waited till he had concluded, then said, smiling into his long golden beard:--

'He who can drink from the fountain will not drink from the cup.'

'By your leave!' shouted the scholar, 'if you call the ancients a cup, whom do you call the fountain?'

'Nature,' said the unknown quietly.

And Merula presumptuously and provokingly continuing to prate, he disputed no further, but assented with evasive politeness. Only in his cold eyes weariness and reserve became more manifest. At last Messer Giorgio, having come to the end of his argument, was reduced to silence. Then the other pointed out certain depressions in the marble, which in no light could be detected by the sight, yet were plain to the touch as the hand moved over the smooth surface. '_Moltissime dolcezze_,' he called them; and then his eye travelled over the figure, as if in one look he would possess himself of its sum.

'And I who thought he did not feel!' said Giovanni to himself. 'Yet if he feels, how can he measure and split it up into numbers? Who is he, Messer Giorgio?' he whispered; 'tell me the name of this man?'

'Ha, little monk! is it you?' said Merula turning round; 'I had forgot you. Nay, but it is your idol: can it be that you knew him not? It is Messer Leonardo da Vinci.'

And the historian presented Giovanni to the Master.

VIII

Through the perfect stillness of early morning in the early spring, when the grass shone emerald between the black olive-roots and the blue iris-flowers were motionless on their slender stems, Giovanni and Leonardo, he on horseback, the lad on foot, returned together to Florence.

'Is this really he?' thought Giovanni, watching him and finding his minutest gesture interesting.

He was over forty. When silent and pensive his small, keen, pale-blue eyes, under overhanging golden eyebrows, seemed cold and piercing; yet when he talked they took an expression of great good nature. The long, fair beard and curling and luxuriant hair gave him an air of majesty. He was tall and powerful in build, yet his face had a subtle charm which was almost feminine, and his thin high voice, though pleasant, was not manly. His hand, reining a restive steed, was very strong, yet it also was delicate, with long, slender fingers like a woman's.

They were nearing the town walls; and the misty morning sun shone upon the dome of the cathedral, and the quaint tower of the Palazzo Vecchio.

'This is my opportunity,' thought Boltraffio. 'I must tell him I would fain enter his studio as a pupil.'

Just then Leonardo checked his horse and fixed his eyes on a young falcon circling slowly and easily in the air above its quarry--some duck or heron in the reeds of the Mugnone's bank. Presently, with a short cry, it dropped headlong, like a stone, swooping down from the height and disappearing behind the trees. Leonardo had followed it with his gaze, not losing a single turn, a movement, a flap of the strong wings; then he took his note-book from his girdle and jotted down the result of his observation.

Boltraffio noticed that he held the pencil in his left hand; and remembered strange tales he had heard of his writing in a mysterious reversed hand only to be read in a mirror, from right to left, as men write in the East. Some said he wrote thus to make an enigma of his wicked heretical opinions about nature and about God.

'Now or never!' Giovanni was saying to himself; but all at once Antonio's harsh words flashed across his mind: '"Go to him if you would lose your soul: he is a sinner and an atheist."'

Smiling, Leonardo drew his attention to an almond-tree, on the crest of a bare, wind-swept hill, very small, very feeble, very solitary, yet already hopeful and joyous, and decking itself with pale blossoms, which gleamed and glistened against the azure of the sunlit sky.

Boltraffio could not admire it, for his heart was heavy and perplexed. Then Leonardo, as if guessing at his disquietude, spoke gentle words which the young man remembered long afterwards.

'If you wish to be an artist, put away all grief and care from your mind, save that for art itself. Let your soul be as a mirror reflecting all objects, all colours, all movements, but itself remaining ever clear and unmoved.'

They passed in through the gates of Florence.

IX

Boltraffio went to the cathedral, where that morning Fra Girolamo Savonarola was to preach. As he entered, the last notes of the organ were dying away under the resounding arches of Santa Maria del Fiore. The throng had filled the church with suffocating heat and with the low rustlings of unceasing small movements. Men, women, and children were separated from each other by drawn curtains. Under the arches, slender and narrow like arrow-heads, deep gloom and mystery reigned as in a sleeping forest. The rays of sunlight, refracted by brilliantly coloured glass, fell in rainbow hues upon the congregation and upon the grey marble of the pillars. The semi-darkness surrounding the altar was broken by the glare of candles. Mass was over and the crowd was awaiting the preacher. All looks were fixed on the wooden pulpit.

Giovanni found a place in the crowd and listened to the whisperings of his neighbours.

'Will he come soon?' was asked impatiently by a carpenter of low stature, with a pale perspiring face and lank hair bound by a fillet.

'God knows!' responded a tinker, big and red-faced, but asthmatic. 'He has with him at San Marco a certain little brother named Marufi, with a hunchback and a stammering tongue, and 'tis he chooses the hour for his coming. We waited four hours once, and had thought there would be no preaching, yet in the end he came.'

'_Santo Dio Benedetto!_ And I have waited since midnight! I am blind for sleep and for want of a crumb in my mouth. I could sit down upon knives!'

'Did I not tell thee, Damiano, 'twas matter of patience? Even now we are so far from the pulpit we shall hear naught.'

'Eh! We shall hear well enough. When he falls to at his shouting and his thundering, not the deaf only but the very dead must needs hear.'

'They say now, that he prophesies.'

'Not yet! Not till he has built Noah's Ark.'

'He has built it; to the last plank. Yea, and made a parabolic description thereof. Its length, Faith; its breadth; Charity; its altitude, Hope. Haste, he says, haste to the Ark of Salvation, while the doors stand wide. The day cometh when the doors will be put to, and then many shall weep that they have not repented and have not come in time to enter within. To-day he preaches of the Flood, the seventeenth verse of the sixth chapter of the book of Genesis.'

'They say he has had another vision, War, Pestilence!'

'The horsedealer in Vallombrosa said that a night or two agone great hosts fought in the sky over the city, and one could hear the clash of swords and the dinting of armour.'

'And it is a certainty, good folk, that on the _Nunziata_ in the Chiesa dei Servi has been seen a bloody sweat.'

'Go to! And tears run nightly from the Madonna on the Rubaconte bridge. Lucia, my aunt, saw it herself!'

'And it means no good, rest assured. The Lord have mercy on us, miserable sinners!'

Meanwhile, among the women, there was a disturbance. An old woman fainted, and when lifted up, still did not recover her senses. The whole multitude indeed was worn by the interminable waiting; the pale carpenter seemed unable to sustain himself longer.

But suddenly a wave stirred the sea of heads, and a whisper ran through the church.

'He is coming!'

'Nay, 'tis not he, 'tis Fra Domenico da Pescia.'

'I tell you, yea, 'tis he! He has come.'

Giovanni saw a man in the black and white Dominican habit girdled with a rope, who slowly ascended the pulpit-stair and removed his cowl. His face was emaciated and yellow as wax, his lips thick, his nose aquiline, his forehead low. His left hand fell weakly on the desk, his right he raised clutching the crucifix; and silently with burning eyes he looked upon the trembling and expectant crowd. Profound silence reigned, in which each man could hear the beating of his own heart. The eyes of the monk glowed increasingly, till they were like fiery coals; but he still kept silence, and the strain of waiting became unendurable. It seemed that in another moment the crowd would burst into screams.

Yet the calm became deeper, more awful; till suddenly, rending the silence, came the terrible, lacerating, superhuman cry of the friar:--

'_Ecce ego adduco aquas super terram_, Behold I bring a Flood upon the earth!'

A shudder passed through the crowd, raising the hair from the head. Giovanni paled; he fancied the earth quaking, the cathedral arches about to fall. Beside him the stalwart tinker was shaking like a leaf, his teeth chattering. The head of the feeble carpenter had sunk backward on his shoulders as if he had received a blow, his face was shrivelled, his eyelids closed.

What followed was not a sermon but a delirium, which took hold of these thousands of people and shook them as a storm shakes the withered leaves. Giovanni listened, scarcely understanding. Detached phrases reached his ear:--

'See ye, see how the heavens have already darkened; the sun is purple, like clotted blood. Flee! Hide yourselves! There cometh even now a rain of brimstone and fire; a hail of fiery stones and thunderbolts. _Fuge O Sion quae habitas apud filiam Babylonis!_ O Italy, chastisement cometh upon chastisement. After pestilence, war; and hunger after war! Judgment is here, judgment is there! Everywhere there is judgment. Among you the living suffice not to carry the dead. The dead in your houses shall be so many that the grave-diggers shall call to you to throw them out, and shall heap them on carts, yea, to the very necks of the horses, and shall throw them one upon the other and burn them. And then again they shall go through the streets and cry, "Who has any dead? Who has any dead?" And you will answer them: "I throw to you my son, I throw to you my brother, I throw to you my husband!" And then they shall go further, and always they shall cry: "Bring forth your dead! bring forth your dead!" O Florence! O Rome! O Italy! Past is the time of songs and of feasting; ye are sickened unto death. Lord, Thou art witness, that with my words I would have averted this ruin! But I can no more. I have no words more. I can but weep, and run over with my tears. Mercy! Mercy! O merciful Lord! Alas! my poor people! Alas! my Florence!'

He opened his arms, and the last words had sunk to a scarcely audible whisper. They passed over the crowd and died away, like the rustle of wind in the leaves--a sigh of infinite pity.

Pressing his white lips on the crucifix, he knelt and burst into sobs. The sermon was ended. The slow, heavy organ-notes rolled out, persuasive and immense, increasingly solemn and terrible, like the sound of the mighty ocean.

A woman's voice cried _'Misericordia!_'

And thousands of voices answered, calling one to another; and like corn stalks bowing before the wind, the people fell upon their knees, line upon line, wave upon wave, crowding upon, striking against each other, like a flock of sheep panic-struck at the advance of a storm; and the long, agonising wail of penitents upon whom pressed the terror of immediate ruin, rose to Heaven, mingling with the pealing of music, shaking the ground, the marble pillars, and the vaults of the cathedral.

'_Misericordia! Misericordia!_'

Giovanni also sank to his knees, sobbing. The tall tinker rolled against him, breathing hard; the pale carpenter caught his breath and cried like a child, moaning--

'_Misericordia!_'

And Boltraffio remembered his pride, and his love of life, his desire to escape from Fra Benedetto, and to give himself up to the dangerous arts of Messer Leonardo, the enemy of God; he recalled the past fearful night on the Hill of the Mill, the recovered Venus, his sinful enthusiasm for the heathen beauty of the 'White She-devil'; stretching forth his hands to heaven, he mingled his voice with that of the despairing crowd, and cried--

'Lord! Lord! have compassion on me! I have sinned before thee. Pardon, and have mercy.'

At that moment, raising his face, wet with tears, he saw at his side the tall, upright form of Leonardo da Vinci. The artist, leaning carelessly against a column, held in his right hand his unfailing sketch-book; with his left he was drawing; now and then he glanced at the pulpit as if hoping to see once more the head of the preacher.

A stranger, and surrounded by the terrified crowd, Leonardo maintained a superb composure. In his cool, blue eyes, on his thin lips, tightly compressed like those of a man of minute observation, there was the same aloofness and curiosity with which he had mathematically measured the body of the Aphrodite. At sight of him the tears dried in Giovanni's eyes, and the prayer was silenced upon his lips.

Leaving the church he followed the artist and asked permission to see his sketch. Leonardo demurred, but presently handed the boy his sketch-book. And Giovanni saw a frightful caricature; not Savonarola, but an old and hideous devil in the dress of a monk, like the preacher indeed, but as if disfigured by self-inflicted and torturing penance, his pride and his desires still unsubdued. The lower jaw protruded, wrinkles intersected the cheek, the neck was twisted and black as a mummy's, the bushy, beetling brows, the rabid glance scarce preserved a semblance of humanity. All that was dark, terrible, and superstitious, all which gave Savonarola into the power of the deformed, tongue-tied visionary Marufi, was expressed by Leonardo in this sketch; brought out with neither anger nor pity, but with an imperturbable and impartial clear-sightedness.

And Giovanni remembered his words: '_L'ingegno dell' pittore vuol essere a similitudine dello specchio_. The genius of the painter should be as a mirror, reflecting all objects, and colours, and movements, itself ever transparent and serene.'

The pupil of Benedetto raised his eyes to the artist's face, and felt that though threatened by eternal damnation, though he were to find in Messer Leonardo a veritable servant of Antichrist, yet to leave him had become impossible; an irresistible force was drawing him to this man; woe unto him if he failed to penetrate into the very depths of this being and of his art.

X

Two days later, Messer Cipriano having been detained by affairs in Florence, and unable to arrange for the transport of the Venus, Grillo burst in upon him with most unwelcome tidings. Don Faustino, it seemed, had left San Gervaso and betaken himself to San Maurizio, the neighbouring village. Here, having terrified the people with talk of the chastisement of Heaven, he had collected a party by night, besieged the villa, broken in the doors, thrashed Strocco the gardener, who had been left in charge of the statue, and bound him hand and foot. Then the priest had recited over the goddess an ancient prayer called '_Oratio super effigies vasaque in loco antiqua reperta_,' in which the servant of the Church asks God to purify all statuary, vessels, and other objects dug out of the ground, and to convert them to the profit of Christian souls, to the glory of the Trinity, '_ut, omni immunditia depulsa, sint fidelibus tuis utenda per Christum dominum nostrum_.' Then they broke up the statue of the goddess, cast the fragments into a furnace, made of them a cement, and with it daubed the new-raised wall of the village cemetery.

As he told this tale the old man wept for grief. But the event helped Giovanni Boltraffio to a decision. That very day he presented himself before Messer Leonardo and begged to be received as a pupil. Leonardo accepted him.

A little later, tidings were brought to Florence that Charles VIII., Most Christian King of France, had taken the field with a countless host for the conquering of the Two Sicilies, and probably also of Rome and Florence. Panic spread among the citizens. They perceived that the prophecy of Savonarola was being fulfilled. Punishment was at their door! The sword of the Lord was drawn upon Italy!