Leonardo's Swans (3 page)
Duke Ercole’s sentries on the walls’ top tier anticipate the runaway rider, ready to apprehend the unruly person, until they recognize the duke’s daughter. Everyone knows that she spent too many years with her indulgent grandfather in faraway Naples. Without the watchful eye of her mother to restrain her, the girl was allowed to run wild, much to the king’s amusement. It was said everywhere that the mean old man encouraged the girl in her antics, much the way that little boys tease their dogs until they bite. So that when the sentries realize it is just Beatrice, they shake their heads and jump out of her way, one even bowing as she rides by as if inviting her passage. Isabella knows that they assume, as does Francesco, that Beatrice will give a little performance for her companions below and then come down. Isabella knows her sister better.
Beatrice looks down at the astonished Francesco, taunting him by taking off her little cap and tossing it in his direction. “Remember me!” she cries. Then she cracks her leather whip on the horse’s flank and is gone. When the sentries realize where she is headed and at what breakneck speed, they abandon their posts, futilely running after her on foot.
“Beatrice! Stop!” calls Isabella. The girl hears her, she is sure, but only looks down once with a fast and gloating glance to see that she is leaving the others behind. Isabella kicks her own beast, racing along the walls to catch up with Beatrice.
Isabella imagines her sister’s big, round laugh freezing into a circle of panic when the girl sees what is ahead. The wall comes to an end, dropping off many feet below where a few bricklayers work lazily in the cold from wooden scaffolds. Perhaps ten feet of empty space separates the new path from the old. Isabella anticipates the calamity, and prays that her sister has seen the danger. She does not quite like or understand this untamed creature, spoiled by too many years of Neapolitan splendor, untempered by parental discipline, but she does not want to see her hurt.
Beatrice, long brown plait flying behind her like a kite, makes no motion to pull in the beast, but pushes him on, faster and faster, toward the crevasse. Francesco and Isabella both scream madly for her to stop, but the girl either no longer hears them over the sound of her horse’s hooves on the uneven bricks, or she does hear but is out of her mind, possessed by some demon that causes mental disease—something Isabella has considered about her before. The desperate sentries chase after the duke’s daughter, and the others keep yelling her name louder and with increasing horror.
Beatrice’s elbows pump wildly as if she believes she can take flight over the great gap in the wall. Like a creature in a fairy tale suddenly transforming into a bird, she leaps into the air on her animal’s back, and he, like Pegasus, flies beneath her. Her body is aloft, high above the seat, as the horse stretches its length, trying to please the will of its rider.
The animal’s natural stride is impossibly short to gap the distance, and Isabella wants to turn her eyes away to avoid seeing Beatrice tumble down the wall, the horse falling upon her and crushing her to death. But something about the way that her sister seems to float above the animal, relieving it of her weight, forces her to keep watching.
Francesco is now making the sign of the cross with the heavy silver crucifix he wears at his neck in utter earnestness and is calling upon his God. But Beatrice does not need Divine intervention. The horse’s front legs close the distance, hitting hard the bricks of the old pathway. Before Isabella can feel any relief, she sees that the animal’s back legs are slipping down the gap. The horse scrambles to achieve balance, his hinds churning as if he is trying to turn them into wheels. It looks for a moment as if animal and girl might careen backward down the wall and onto the bricklayers who, instead of leaping from the scaffolds to their own deaths, or at least to broken bones, hunch over, hands on heads, to try to protect themselves from the inevitable. But Beatrice, unfazed, yells, “Oh, come on!” and pushes the animal, against all laws of motion, up the craggy wall and onto the footpath. Triumphant, laughing, she looks back at her two companions, gives a little cock of the head, and rides away.
Isabella, breathless, heart pounding, turns to Francesco expecting him to share in her anger. Instead, he does not even try to hide an admiring smile.
“Fearless,” he says, watching the girl gallop toward the palace.
“I
F
your father had waited a mere month to send his ambassadors to Ferrara, Beatrice would have been yours, and I would have been marrying Ludovico of Milan.” Then Isabella adds coquettishly, though not without trepidation: “Would you have liked that?”
Isabella and Francesco are standing in a small parlor in the Castello where two portraits of the sisters are displayed side by side, waiting for Francesco’s servants to pack Isabella’s image in layers and layers of cloth for safekeeping through the journey back to Mantua. Isabella is scrutinizing Beatrice’s portrait to see if there is anything Francesco might find more pleasing to his eye than in hers.
“Only if I had a taste for plump little boys instead of exquisite beauties.”
Isabella is certain that Francesco should not be saying these kinds of things to her before they are married, nor should she allow him to pass such an unflattering remark about her sister, but his words make a flutter in her stomach, erasing all feelings of impropriety. Besides, she had nothing to complain over. Her betrothed—this manly figure who is to inherit the title of Marquis of Mantua from his father—is here in Ferrara courting her while Beatrice’s affianced, Ludovico Sforza, who isn’t even Duke of Milan, but regent to his young nephew, shows nothing but disinterest in their pending marriage.
One of the purposes of Francesco’s visit, besides enjoying the renowned Christmas pageants, was to bring to Isabella’s mother a painting she craved by Andrea Mantegna, Mantua’s court painter, and to collect the betrothal portrait by Cosimo Tura of the lovely Isabella. Cosimo had been commissioned to paint betrothal portraits of both sisters, though Ludovico has been too busy with his latest mistress to send an emissary to pick up the one of Beatrice. This, after Messer Giacomo Trotti, Ferrara’s ambassador to Milan, had to embarrass him into commissioning the piece in the first place. Other gossip circulating Ferrara’s court is that Ludovico had to be invoiced three times for the four florins owed the artist before he finally paid.
Isabella had loved being painted, loved how the maestro’s brushstrokes replicated her very existence. She loved being frozen in time at this precious moment, when her maidenhood was rapidly coming to an end. What magic it was to be able to halt fleeting time! Forever she would be remembered at this age, with her face and body and countenance in this state. That a portraitist could reproduce not only a physical being but a singular moment—in this case, one in which she turned her face slightly to the left but cast her eyes directly at the artist as if answering a question—was miraculous to her. If she could, she would be painted every day of her life to record her progress.
She had prepared arduously for the sitting. Cosimo was an old man now, but famous for having painted the exquisite altarpiece at San Giorgio in which the serene Blessed Virgin holds a sleeping Christ on her lap. Her eyes gaze gently downward at the angelic musicians playing celestial music for her pleasure. For Isabella, the painting had mysterious powers. Every time she attended Mass at the church with her family, her eyes remained riveted not to Our Lady or to the winsome child, but to the color green that seemed to jump out of the painting and animate the wooden panel to life.
“The road to achieving all perfection in womanhood on earth, and eternal bliss in Heaven, is paved by meditation on the sweet face of Our Lady,” her mother assured her time and again, pleased that her daughter could not remove her eyes from the religious scene. But it was the composition and color scheme of the piece that intrigued Isabella. When she looked at the panel, she felt as if her ears were miraculously filled with saintly music. She could hear the lutes, trumpets, and chorus of voices, and she attributed this phenomenon to the life-giving powers of that strange green, which had not the verdant color of nature but the radiance of jewels.
Convinced of the color’s magical properties, she had asked her mother to have their favorite Venetian silk dyer replicate it in the dress she would wear to sit for Cosimo Tura’s portrait. There is no need, Leonora had replied. The painter already knows how to produce the color. But Isabella argued until her mother went to her parsimonious father with the request, and their Venetian agent was sent a color sample, a small block of wood with a swash of the paint placed upon it by Cosimo himself, and the fabric was produced and procured. Isabella had sat for Cosimo wearing the gown, which she accented with a brocade vest in the pinkish color also found in the upper reaches of the altarpiece because she had so loved the contrast of the two colors. Her parents complained of her exacting tastes, but what did they expect? “It is because I have been raised by two connoisseurs,” she countered.
The portraits further contrasted the sisters. Leonora had insisted that both girls wear their hair loose about the shoulders like Neapolitan princesses, a look that was most attractive to men of all ages. But the coif only suited Isabella, whose blond curls danced about her shoulders in springy coils. “Like little golden snakes,” her father had said, curling one golden lock about his finger. “It is as if Our Lord, to make up for the sins and cruelty of the pagan gods, has re-created Medusa as an angel.” Beatrice’s dark hair, let loose from its plait, looked limp. She had sat for her portrait in a royal blue gown with tiny pearls sewn in crisscross patterns across the bodice. Her puffed sleeves were of an unusual scarlet, embroidered with blue roses that matched the body of the dress. Isabella had to admit that her sister, despite all her other oddities, did have nice taste in clothing, and was as meticulous about her dressmaking as Isabella herself. Yet the rest of her toilette lacked style, and her natural appearance was not the most impressive, at least not at this age. Luckily, the two sisters were not painted together, where their differences would be in sharp relief.
“I am going to take this beautiful picture back with me to Mantua,” Francesco tells Isabella, reaching for her hand. “But I cannot decide whether to hang it in a place of great prominence, so that everyone can admire your beauty, or whether I will put it in a private place, where I alone might meditate upon it. It is only one year until our wedding, but for me, it will seem painfully long.”
It is thrilling for Isabella to hear these words, which reflect her own thoughts, though she cannot resist interjecting her opinion: “If I were you, I would hang it where others can admire it as well. That should add to your meditations, not detract.”
Why hide a thing of beauty?
To think that he can take a piece of her back with him to his Castello, which she will soon occupy. Isabella is grateful that in less than one year the portrait will soon be back in her possession. She adores collecting beautiful things, and would hate to have a portrait done by a master of painting lost to her. All that she has collected thus far she will be allowed to take with her into her marriage—the many cameos, the intaglios cut so delicately by Ferrara’s jewelers, the trunks painted by famous artists that hold her wardrobe, and the necklaces and belts that she designed with the smiths. Of these she is most proud because they are expressions of herself.
“Of course,” Francesco concedes to the request to display her portrait. “Why should I have all the pleasure of looking at you myself?”
Exactly.
He has been, thus far, the most delightful of potential husbands. Though he is twenty-three years to her fifteen, and possessed of superior maturity, over the years of their engagement, he has written her at least one letter per season, assuring her that he lives for the day when they will be husband and wife. If word reached him that she was ill, he always sent a fine gift in the form of a perfect pearl pendant, a foggy miniature landscape by a new Flemish painter, or once, when a high fever had held her too long in its grip, a tiny Spaniel puppy that licked the fever from her face, or so she believed.
“So one month might have changed our destinies?” Francesco asks. “Tell me the story of how I almost was made to live out my life in utter misery, without your companionship.”
So she tells him how, many years ago, when Isabella was only six years old, Ludovico Sforza had sent an ambassador to Ferrara to ask for the hand of Duke Ercole’s eldest daughter. Ludovico was a rising star in Italian politics. Already the Duke of Bari and the regent to his nephew, Gian Galeazzo, Duke of Milan, Ludovico was thought by many to be the most illustrious young ruler of his day. He did, however, have a reputation for a certain wickedness. But, as Fortuna had it, one month prior, the Gonzagas of Mantua, important because of its geographic location between the powerful city-state of Milan and the Most Serene Republic of Venice, had sent their own emissary to ask for the hand of Isabella. And because an alliance with Mantua was crucial for the welfare and safety of Ferrara, Duke Ercole happily concluded negotiations for Isabella to marry Francesco Gonzaga, who would become marquis upon the death of his father. The Milanese messenger had to return to Ludovico to ask if the second daughter of Ercole d’Este would do. And the answer came with great swiftness—yes. Later it was discovered that Ludovico did not mind that Beatrice was only five years old and would not be ready for marriage for at least ten years. He was a supreme ladies’ man, and was in no hurry—and indeed, perhaps had no particular intention—to settle down.
“I shudder to think how Fortuna might have played her cards differently, and I could have been saddled with an old man like Ludovico, who—goodness!—is already almost forty,” she says boldly to Francesco. He looks at Beatrice’s portrait and Isabella’s portrait and does the thing that he must know makes her whole body quiver, which is to kiss her hand, letting his lips linger two seconds or three past propriety. “I shudder too,” he says.
