Imaginary LIves (6 page)

They decided at last to go, but when they reached the river bank not a sign of the entrance to the mysterious court remained behind them. The opening in the wall had vanished. Until Dolcino found the basket they believed it had all been a vision or a necromancy. But there lay the basket filled with bread – bread so white that Jesus Himself might have given it out of His own hands.

Thus was the miracle of begging revealed to Dolcino. He took no holy orders after that, having conceived a stranger, loftier ideal. The brethren carried him over the roads of Italy from one convent to another, from Bologna to Modena, to Parma, to Cremona, to Pistoja and to Lucques. At Pisa he had his great revelation of the true faith. As he slept one night atop the wall of the Episcopal palace, he was awakened by the sound of a drum. A host of children carrying lighted tapers were circling around a savage man who blew on a brazen trumpet. Dolcino believed this man he saw must be John the Divine, for he wore a long black beard and a rough haircloth garment marked from collar to hem with a large red cross. The pelt of a wild beast was around his waist.

In a loud, terrible voice he exclaimed: “
Laudato et
benedetto et glorificato sio lo Patre,
” and all the children repeated his words. Then he cried
“sia lo
Fijo”
and the children repeated that. When he chanted “
sia lo Spiritu Sancto
” they said the words after him. Together they ended with the cry: “
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!
” and after a huge blast of his trumpet he began to preach. His words were harsh as mountain wine but they held Dolcino, most of all, when the man in haircloth thumped the drum. Admiration and envy filled Dolcino’s soul.

This man was ignorant and violent – he knew no Latin (he pronounced the penitence “penitenza”) but he repeated sinister predictions of Merlin and Sibyl and Joachim of Floris, all in the Book of Figures. He prophesied the Anti-Christ in the person of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa whose ruin would be complete until the seven orders were taken from him according to the Writings. Dolcino followed the strange man all the way to Parma where the full understanding came to him.

The announcer shall proceed the founder of the seven orders, Dolcino was given to know. So there at Parma, on the ancient stone from which the magistrates addressed the people, he proclaimed his new faith. Its followers must dress, he said, with little white capes over their shoulders like the apostles on the lamp shade in the refectory of the Franciscans. Baptism was not enough, he declared.

True believers must return to the complete innocence of children. He made a cradle and got in it, calling for the breast of some pious woman who cried with pity. To test his chastity he persuaded a woman to have her daughter come naked to his bed.

He begged a sack of money, distributing it among the poor, to thieves and to women of the streets.

Work must cease, he cried, for all could live like the beasts of the fields. Robert, the convent cook, ran away to follow Dolcino, feeding his new leader out of a bowl stolen from the poor brethren. Folk believed the days of Gerardino Secarelli, the mad vagabond, and his Chevaliers of Jesus, had come back out of the past. Blissfully they followed Dolcino, murmuring: “Father, father, father!”

The monks of Parma finally drove him out of the city. Margherita, a girl of noble family, ran down the road after him, joining him on his march to Plaisance. He caught up a sack marked with the red cross and threw it over her and took her with him.

Swineherds and drovers saw them sleeping in the fields. Many left their flocks to follow. Captive women whom the men of Cremona had cruelly mutilated by cutting off their noses, implored them and came with them, hiding their faces behind white shrouds. Margherita instructed them in the new faith. On a wooded mountain not far from Novara they established themselves for a communal life, though Dolcino set up neither rule nor order: according to his doctrines all would be found in charity. Those who wished fed on berries and herbs. Others begged in the towns and some stole cattle.

The life of Dolcino and Margherita was free under the sky, but the people of Novara could not understand. When the peasants complained of thieving and scandal, soldiery was sent to clear the mountain and the apostles were driven away. As for Dolcino and Margherita, they were tied to the back of an ass, facing tailward, and led into Novara where they were burned in the market place,b o t h on the same pyre by order of the law. Dolcino made only one request. He asked that they should not be stripped, but burned in their white mantles, like the apostles on the lamp shade in the refectory of the Franciscans.

CECCO ANGIOLIERI

Poet of Hate

Cecco Angiolieri was born hateful. His birth at Sienna coincided to the very day with the birth of Dante Alaghieri at Florence. Cecco’s father was a rich wool merchant whose sympathies inclined toward the empire. From his earliest childhood the boy muttered scornful, jealous things against his sire. In those days many of the nobles had reached a point where they were no longer willing to serve the Pope, the Ghibellines having already rebelled while even the Guelphes were divided into factions designated as the Whites and the Blacks. Imperial intervention was not distasteful to the Whites, but the Blacks remained staunchly loyal to Rome and the Holy See. Cecco felt instinctively Black, perhaps because his father was a White.

He hated his father almost from the first breath he drew. When he was fifteen he called for his share of the family fortune just as if old Angiolieri were dead. At the refusal of this request he left the paternal house in a furious wrath, complaining of his wrongs to high heaven and all the world, as he walked the roads to Florence where the Whites were again in power after routing the Ghibellines. Cecco begged bread, told of his father’s cruelty, and settled down finally in a cobbler’s hut.

The cobbler had a daughter named Becchina with whom Cecco at once considered himself in love.

He was a simple man, this cobbler, a constant worshipper of the Virgin, whose image he always wore, persuaded that his devotion gave him the right to mend boots with bad leather. Evenings before bedtime, he would sit with Cecco in the candlelight, chatting about the saints and their goodness while Becchina washed the dishes, her hair in an everlasting tangle as she made fun of Cecco for the crooked mouth he had.

About that time all Florence began to talk of Dante’s wild love for Beatrice, daughter of Folco Ricovero de Portinari, lettered folk having discovered the secret in the songs the poet wrote to his lady. Cecco heard these songs and scoffed at them.

“Oh, Cecco,” said Becchina, “you mock Dante but you cannot write such pretty verses for me.”

“We shall see,” replied young Angiolieri with a sneer. First he set about composing a sonnet in which he criticized the measure and the sentiment of Dante’s songs. Then he wrote his verses to Becchina. She could not read a word of them, but she shrieked with laughter at the amorous contortions of his mouth when he read them to her.

Poor and bare as a stone in a church, Cecco loved the Mother of God with a true fervor that won the cobbler’s heart. Together they yearned for shabby sacred relics peddled by the bankrupt Blacks. Fired as he was with ardent devotion, Cecco looked like a promising customer at first, but he had no money. And in spite of Cecco’s admirable piety the cobbler betrothed his daughter to a fat neighbour named Barberino, a vender of oils. “Holy oils, perhaps,” explained the cobbler by way of excuse to Cecco. The wedding took place about the same time Beatrice married Simone de Bardi, and Cecco imitated Dante’s woe.

But Becchina did not pine away and die. On June the ninth, 1291, Dante sat idly tracing a picture on a tablet. It was the first anniversary of the death of Beatrice. Gazing at the tablet the poet saw he had drawn the figure of an angel whose face resembled his beloved. On June the twentieth, eleven days later (Barberino being busy among his vats), Cecco Angiolieri obtained from Becchina the favor of a kiss on the mouth and wrote a burning sonnet.

Hatred sat undiminished in his heart, for now he wanted money with his love and he could not get it from the money lenders. Hoping to wheedle some from his father, he departed for Sienna. Old Angiolieri refused him even so much as a glass of sour wine, leaving him perched on the road in front of the house.

While in his father’s rooms Cecco had seen a sack full of new-struck florins, revenue from their estates in Montegiovi and Arcidosso. Here was he, perishing of thirst and hunger, his clothes in tatters, his shirt dripping! Back he tramped to Florence, arriving so completely worn and disreputable that Barberino put him out of his shop for his raggedness.

So Cecco returned that night to the hut of the cobbler whom he found sitting in the candlelight singing a docile song to the Virgin Mary.

They wept and embraced and Cecco told the cobbler how desperately he hated his father – that old man who threatened to live as long as Botadeo the Wandering Jew. A friar who came for alms persuaded Cecco to await his deliverance in the monastic state, so young Angiolieri followed the pious man to the abbey where they gave him a cell and an old robe, and the prior named him Fra Henri. In the choir at evensong he would touch the bare stones under him, as cold and grim as himself.

Rage choked him when he thought of his father’s wealth. It seemed to him as if the sea would surely go dry before that old man died. There were moments when he even envied the kitchen scullions.

At other times he indulged his pride grandly.

“If I were fire,” he thought, “I would burn up the world. Were I the wind I’d smother it with hurricanes. If I were water I’d drown it in a deluge; were I God I’d hurl it into space. If I were the Pope there would be no more peace under the sun; were I the Emperor I’d cut off heads all around. If I were Death I’d find my father, and were I Cecco ... No, there is all my wish!” But he was only Fra Henri.

Then he remembered his other hate.

Procuring a copy of Dante’s songs to Beatrice he compared them diligently to his own verses written for Becchina. When a wandering monk told him how Dante had spoken of him disdainfully he set about searching for some revenge. To him the superiority of his sonnets appeared most evident. The songs to
Bice
(he gave her that vulgar name) were abstract and white while his songs were strong and colourful.

First he sent his insulting verses to Dante, then imagined himself denouncing that poet before the good King Charles, Count of Provence. Finally, when neither letters nor poems consoled him, he threw off his holy garb, put on his old shirt, his worn jacket and weatherbeaten cape and left the monastery, returning to Florence and the Black cause.

A great joy awaited him there. Dante was exiled and only a few of the great poet’s followers were left. Cecco found the cobbler whispering humbly to the Virgin of the next Black triumph and young Angiolieri forgot Becchina in his gratification.

Eating dry crusts, he walked the streets all day or ran behind the Church messengers on their way to or from Rome. When the violent Black chief, Corso Donati, became a power in Florence he employed Cecco among others. On the night of June the tenth a mob of cooks, blacksmiths, friars and beggars invaded the aristocratic section of the city where the fine palaces of the Whites were. While the cobbler followed at a distance, admiring the holy sight, Cecco brandished a torch. They burned all. Cecco himself set fire to the wooden balconies on the palace of the Cavalcanti, who had been Dante’s friends. That night he fed his hate with fire and the next day sent his insulting verses to Dante “the Lombard” at the court of Verona where he had taken refuge. During the same day he became at last the Cecco of his heart’s desire. Old as Eli or Enoch, his father finally died.

Speeding to Sienna Cecco threw open the coffers, plunging his hands deep into bags of new struck florins, repeating a hundred times over now he was no more Fra Henri but Lord of Arcidosso and Montegiovi, richer than Dante and a better poet.

Then the sin of having desired his father’s death beset him so he repented. There in the fields he scribbled a sonnet demanding a Pope’s crusade against all who should henceforth insult their parents so. Eager for confession, he returned in haste to Florence and besought the cobbler to intercede in his behalf with the Virgin.

From a dealer in holy waxes he bought a tall taper which the cobbler lighted unctuously. Together they wept over their prayers to Their Lady. Until a very late hour the voice of the cobbler was heard singing songs of praise and rejoicing in his fine candle, as he wiped away his friend’s tears.

PAOLO UCCELLO

Painter

His real name was Paolo di Dono, but the Florentines called him Uccelli or Paul of the Birds because of the many bird figures and painted beasts in his house, for he was too poor to feed live animals or to obtain those strange species he did not know.

At Padua he was said to have executed a fresco of the four elements, with an image of a chameleon representing the air. He had never seen one, so he made it a sort of pot bellied camel with a gaping snout (while the chameleon, explains Vasari, resembles a small dry lizard and the camel is a great humped beast). Uccello was not concerned with the reality of things but in their multiplicity and the infinity of their lines. He made fields blue, cities red, and cavaliers in black armour on ebony horses with blazing mouths, the lances of the riders radiating toward every quarter of the heavens. He had a fancy for drawing the
mazocchio
, a headdress made of wooden hoops so covered that the cloth fell down in pleats all about the wearer’s face. Uccello drew pointed ones and square ones and others in pyramids and cones, following every intricacy of their perspectives so studiously as to find a world of combinations in their folds. The sculptor Donatello used to say to him: “Ah, Paolo, you leave the substance for the shadow.”