That evening they told of the day’s happening, Salai miming both the role of buyer and seller and San Severino narrating.
Craftsmen, poets, artists soon flooded to the court of Milan. Those who came because of money stayed because they were enchanted. Money alone could not explain why the clavichord, all ebony and ivory, that Lorenzo da Pavia built for Beatrice was the most beautiful in the world. Nor could it explain why Master Sorba, the Spanish embroiderer, designed gowns and capes for her that were finer than any he had done for other duchesses, including Beatrice’s own mother. And the goldsmith Carodosso had been employed by Il Moro before, but it was after he met Beatrice that he designed the famous rope of pearls and diamonds to which he added the priceless ruby known as El Spigo. All produced their finest works, for the young Duchess of Milan had an invisible measuring rod in her head. Everyone employed by her knew that he was not in competition with other craftsmen; he was in competition with perfection.
Salai, too, offered the young duchess the best fruits of his labors. He stole a Turkish hide from Leonardo and instead of giving it to his father as he had planned, sold it, and with the money he purchased the very finest anise comfits and gave them to Beatrice.
There was no one more alive to beauty than Beatrice, and there was no one more alive to Beatrice than Salai.
TIME AND AGAIN when Il Moro sought Leonardo to ask his advice about engineering or war machines or the design of the castle walls, he found the master with Beatrice discussing art or playing his lute and singing for her. Il Moro came to his wife’s chambers seeking Leonardo, but he stayed because he, too, became enchanted. Smart, happy talk and laughter permeated the air. Surely if this small dark thing could interest a giant intellect like Leonardo, surely if this young plain girl could inspire men to lift their crafts into the realm of art, then surely there must be something there that he had not seen. So Il Moro, who had used
Leonardo’s eyes to investigate the course of rivers and to improve the plan of cities, now used Leonardo’s eyes to discover his very own wife.
II Moro decided to accompany Beatrice to Vigevano, her favorite country home. Leonardo had gone there to develop some plans he had for improving the vineyards and for irrigating the land. After he arrived, the duke set Leonardo to begin construction of a model village. Work began to spill over into the evenings. Salai resented having chores that kept him from Beatrice. “What has happened to II Moro?” he asked. “He has us working on a dozen things all at once. What’s wrong with having only the usual half a dozen? What is wrong with that guy?”
“There’s nothing wrong with Ludovico,” Leonardo answered. “He is in love. Love makes a lazy man lazier and an ambitious one even more ambitious.”
“Well, who is our dear duke in love with this time?” Salai asked.
“Our dear duke is in love with our dear duchess.”
Salai swallowed hard. He knew who the duke was in love with this time. He had seen the duke’s love happen. “Yeah?” he said, “Who does he think he is, falling in love with his wife. We discovered her first.”
One evening during their stay at Vigevano Leonardo was called to the duke’s chambers. Duchess Beatrice was there too. Salai accompanied Leonardo, hoping for an evening of talk and games, but II Moro wanted to discuss business. They finished discussing plans for the model farm when Ludovico cleared his throat, a well-known mark of punctuation at the court of Milan. “Master Leonardo,” he began, “I would like you to do a portrait of my beloved wife. Only you can capture her beauty and put it down properly. I would like you to begin it tomorrow, here at Vigevano. From our ride over the grounds today, I can see that your work on the vineyards and the farm has progressed enough to allow time for this work of art.”
Salai, deprived of his games and his time with Beatrice, thought, what does he expect Leonardo to do? Grow a tail and paint with that? The duke had already given him enough work for both hands. But, Salai thought, if Leonardo does begin to paint Beatrice, it would give them many hours when she could sit, and he, Salai, could look at her, talk to her and keep her amused.
Salai’s thoughts were just beginning to brighten when he heard Beatrice say, “But certainly, my husband, Master Leonardo cannot begin to paint in Vigevano when all of his tools are in Milan.”
“I will send for them,” II Moro said. “Make me a list, Master Leonardo. They will be here the day after tomorrow. You may begin then.”
“Dear husband,” Beatrice said, “I know why you want me to sit for my portrait. I am becoming such an excellent horsewoman and so superb at falconing that you are getting extremely jealous. You want nothing more than for me to stop improving my horsemanship and sit still. Ill tell you what. I will have my portrait done by Master Leonardo only if you allow me to be painted astride my horse.”
“But, Beatrice, dear wife, no lady is ever portrayed in such manner. Sitting upon a horse is suitable for conquering warriors, not for gentle and sweet wives.”
“Are you worried, dear Moro, that people looking at my portrait will not know which is the horse and which is the wife?”
“Now, now, Beatrice, you are making sport with me.”
“Not at all. If Master Leonardo can do a portrait of an ermine with the same pose as Madonna Cecilia Gallerani, I thought that he could do a portrait of a horse with the same pose as me. A horse suits me better.”
There was a pause, a long pause. II Moro looked from his wife to Leonardo and then to the floor. “You are too much of a tease,” he said.
Beatrice advanced toward her husband. “Look at me, Ludovico,” she said. He raised his eyes from the floor. When their eyes met, Beatrice began to laugh. She threw her head back and laughed until ripples of sound crisscrossed the room. II Moro looked first confused and then relaxed and then he, too, started to laugh. Salai, taking his cue from his duke and duchess, tried to force great guffaws from his throat, but he could not. He had heard Beatrice’s genuine laughter so often that he knew this was mere sound. Leonardo remained solemn.
Beatrice stopped laughing suddenly, suddenly before II Moro realized that she had done so; his continuing laughter rang hollow and harsh. Then he, too, stopped, and Leonardo tugged at Salai’s collar as a signal for them to leave. Salai recognized the look, frozen and withdrawn, on his master’s face. It was the look he always wore when human emotions became too intense or too raw.
Salai never learned what Beatrice said to Ludovico after they left, but he noticed that Leonardo’s paints were not sent for the next day or the next. He also noticed that when they returned to Milan, Cecilia Gallerani had gotten married to Count Bergamini and left the castle, taking her portrait with her.
LATE in the month of their third January together, Beatrice gave birth to their first baby. The child was as little and as much as Ludovico had wanted: a boy. In celebration he caused the bells to ring for six days, and he set free all the people who were in prison for debts. They first called their little boy Ercole, after Beatrice’s father, and Beatrice’s father was proud. But they changed the young man’s name to Maximilian, after the Holy Roman Emperor; that made the Emperor Maximilian proud. And that was better politically.
Ludovico could not cease praising his wife. He displayed his affection for her openly, and Beatrice blossomed. Watching her flowering within these few years was as dramatic as seeing the whole of a lifetime condensed into a few hours upon a stage. There was not a person in the court of Milan who was not in love with the young, vivacious duchess. And there was not a person more in love with her than the thirteen-year-old Salai. Beatrice was now in full control as wife, mother and duchess. Her duties occupied many hours, but her free time was always available to Salai. He had moved from full-time to part-time occupant in her life. But the hours that they shared together were shared completely.
Everything he saw he examined for some way to gain Beatrice’s attention. When he saw Leonardo turn an idle doodle into a pattern and then a design, Salai took the page and presented it to Beatrice. “I thoug
ht,” he said, “that you might like this design to decorate a sleeve, my lady.”
“Is this your work, Salai?”
“I commissioned it from Master Leonardo.”
Beatrice studied the page. She turned it over and upside down and sideways. “Thank you very much, Salai. But are you certain that Leonardo does not need the drawing of the horse that is here on the left?”
“I am sick of the horse, my lady.”
“Did you steal this design from Master Leonardo, Salai?” Beatrice asked.
“I never steal, my lady. Do you consider it stealing to take milk from a cow in order to make a pudding?”
“All right, Salai,” Beatrice said. “I shall make a pudding.” She gave the design to Sorba, the Spanish embroiderer, and Sorba used it on the sleeve of her gown.
The Duchess Isabella came to visit her sister and her new nephew in March. “Oh, Beatrice, dear sister,” Isabella exclaimed, “how you have ripened like a good Milano cheese.”
“Thank you, Isabella. And you, dear sister, have polished your glow. You are even more lovely.”
“Perhaps she is more lovely because there is more,” Salai suggested. He noticed that Isabella was getting fat.
Isabella made her way to the nursery, where she saw Maximilian in his cradle. “Oh!” she said, and then followed it with “Aaaah! It is taking all my strength of will not to reach into that cradle and pick him up in my arms,” she said.
“Oh, sister, please do,” Beatrice urged. She herself reached into the covers and lifted up her son and gently handed him over to Isabella.
“Aaaah!” Isabella said. “One feels close to God when one holds an infant.” Whereupon she immediately handed him over to his nurse, saying, “They always spit up on me.”
“I thought you liked good Milano cheese,” Salai said.
“Who is this young man?” Isabella asked her sister.
“Salai,” Beatrice answered. “He is assistant to Master Leonardo da Vinci.”
“Oh, so the master is still with you. I wondered if he still were. I have received no word about a work I had asked for. I wondered what happened to my bust of the young Christ.”
“The model developed a nasty tongue and the beginnings of a beard,” Salai said.
Isabella squinted at Salai.
Beatrice broke into the awkwardness of the moment, saying, “Salai, why don’t you show Duchess Isabella about the castle. Show her the theater we have had built.”
Salai was happy to do as Beatrice had asked.
What a strange thing is a sister, he thought. He had a sister, but his Dorotea was as different from Isabella as plain is different from fancy. Dorotea could never have what he had, yet the more fortune smiled upon him, the more Dorotea did too. She never stopped bragging to her friends about her beautiful brother. And Salai never stopped trying to do for her. He stole a silverpoint from Boltraffio and gave her the money he got for it. He brought her bits of cloth and gossip, and with these she purchased prestige among her friends. Theirs was an exchange, not a competition.
Salai knew that showing Isabella around the castle would provide him with a wonderful chance to tease. He also knew that to make the teasing stick, he must first flatter. Like applying sizing to a canvas to make it accept the paint. “Master Leonardo himself,” he began, “wanted to escort the Duchess Isabella. He regrets that he cannot. So he sent me—poor excuse for a guide though I am—instead. I shall attend to you and show you everything, or I shall have Master Leonardo to answer to. The master remembers with joy your last visit to his studio. He has told me that since you made an appearance there the light from the north window is brighter and clearer.”
Isabella linked her arm through Salai’s. “As we walk you may tell me what else Master Leonardo has said.”
Salai took Isabella first to the theater that II Moro had built for his wife. Then to the room of the baby gifts, where two soldiers stood guard day and night. Then to the room where Beatrice displayed her collections: one cabinet full of Murano glass and another full of ivories, another of swords inlaid with gold and jewels. Then to the room of musical instruments. “It is very much,” Isabella muttered. She walked over to the clavichord on which Lorenzo da Pavia had lavished love and talent and skill. All around it were mottoes in Greek and Latin, ivory-inlaid into the ebony. The clavichord was so beautiful that Isabella stopped short and caught her breath before she said, most coolly, “It pays to be plain. My sister is as a blank sheet of parchment to works of art. Everyone chooses to add a stroke of decoration.”
When Salai showed her the wardrobes of gowns, she said, “One would think she is in a vestry looking at the robes of the Pope and his bishops. I’ve never seen so many gowns.”
Salai pulled out the dress with the braid on the sleeve, the braid done from the design of Leonardo. “The master designed this sleeve for our duchess.”
“Master Leonardo da Vinci?”
Salai nodded. “The same.”
Salai next guided Isabella to the bathroom. He opened the door and exclaimed, “Behold!”
“I shall not enter,” Isabella declared.
“You must, my lady,” Salai implored. “Come see. The master did this, too. He engineered the whole thing. It was our gift to our duchess.”
“How quaint.”
“No, not quaint. Practical. Come see.” He pushed Isabella toward the center of the room.
“Warm in here,” she said, fanning herself with her hand.
Salai clapped his hands. “That’s it! That’s it! Master Leonardo designed it. The heat comes from a hidden closet and is piped all over the room, so our duchess will not catch a chill when she gets out of her bath. The master designed it, and I have named it. I call it central heating.”
Isabella turned to Salai with a furious look on her face.
“Take me to Master Leonardo,” she demanded.
“He is at work on the horse.”
“My sister has the talent of all of Italy at her call, and she uses that of Leonardo da Vinci for bathrooms and dress sleeves. What a waste,” Isabella moaned. “There is certainly in Italy some subject more fit for Master Leonardo’s talents than designing braid and bathrooms. I can think of a very good subject for his brush,” she said, lifting her chin and gazing off into the distance, posing.
“Oh,” Salai explained. “Duchess Beatrice does not choose to have her portrait painted by Leonardo.”
“Beatrice is not who I had in mind,” Isabella said. She lifted her chin and posed again. “Beatrice is not who I had in mind at all,” she repeated. That ended the tour.
There were many people at the court of Milan who thought that Isabella was brilliant; she was clever, and she was spoiled, and she was titled, and to the many people who depended on court patronage, that passed for brilliance. Isabella, who for years had been the family star, the beloved bride, the cultured leader of Mantua, suffered for attention in Milan. There were those fawning courtiers, the grackles, the Francesco crowd, always willing to flatter, but it was not they whom she wanted to attract. It was the intellectuals, the gifted, the skilled craftsmen whose favor she wanted; the very elements who were drawn naturally to Beatrice, the small, dark, accepting sister, the one with the invisible but true measuring rod in her head, the sister who collected, not the sister who accumulated.
One evening in April, in that year 1493 when Isabella’s stay was already a month old, she made another attempt to capture the minds of the intellects. She read to the small group gathered in her sister’s chambers a letter that had been forwarded to her from Mantua. She said that it had been written by Ponzone, a scholar friend of hers. Had no one ever heard of Ponzone? Why! in Mantua he was consulted about everything from childbirth to menus. “Oh,” Salai said, “our duke has an astrologer too.” “Master Ponzone reads books, not bird droppings,” Isabella said scornfully as she unfolded the paper and read it out:
I hear that a man named Columbus lately discovered an island for the King of Spain, on which are
men of our height but of copper-colored skin, with noses like apes. The chiefs wear a plate of gold in their nostrils which covers the mouth, the men and women alike. Twelve men and four women have been brought back to the King of Spain, but they are so weakly that two of them fell ill of some sickness which the doctors do not understand, and they had no pulse and are dead. The others have been clothed, and if they see any one who is richly clad they stroke him with their hands and kiss his hands to show how much they admire him. They seem intelligent, and are very tame and gentle. No one can understand their language. They eat of everything at table, but are not given wine. In their own country they eat the roots of trees and some big kind of nut which is like pepper but yields good food, and on this they live.”
“That is very interesting,” Salai said. “I would like very much to take the letter to Master Leonardo. He is interested in such things and likes to copy them into his notebooks.”
Isabella was pleased that Leonardo would be interested in something that she had brought to his attention. That had been the purpose of her reading. She lent the letter to Salai after again listing Ponzones credentials and after Salai gave her many reassurances that the letter would be returned whole and unblemished. “I will make certain that Master Leonardo does not make any of his famous scribbles on it.”
“Oh?” Isabella said, “If the master chooses to scribble, as you call it, don’t stop him.”
“Oh, my lady, I will. I would not want your famous Ponzone’s letter all cluttered with heads of the Virgin or some of the master’s studies of nudes. Such things are not fit for the duchess’ fair eyes.”
“You let me be the judge of what is fit for my eyes.”
“Your famous Ponzone’s letter will be returned unblemished. There will be no studies of horses or of hands or of the infant Christ in the margins.”
Isabella forced a smile. “Just see that the letter is returned to me, Salai.”
Salai carried the letter to Leonardo, laughing. “Hey, boss!” he said. “Look what Isabella has done this time. She has invented a whole new world and someone named Columbus to discover it, and someone named Ponzone to write her about it.”