Quattrocento Read online

  “That’s pretty cold and calculating. You think she knows that?”

  “What makes you think she doesn’t have aims of her own?” Rodrigo asked. “Being the Duchess of Urbino would mark a huge advancement for her family. And I doubt Leandro will stop there. He’s nothing if not ambitious. Do you know what he sleeps with as a pillow?” Rodrigo asked.

  “The Iliad,” Matt replied as a wild guess. It was a part of the myth of Alexander the Great that he had slept on his copy of Homer.

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “I didn’t. I was just joking. Are you serious?”

  “Alexander is his idol. The young warrior who swept out of the black hills and conquered the world. I am always suspicious of the obvious parallel. More often than not it’s an attempt to make anything new fit in the Procrustean bed of experience. A philosopher’s stone in reverse, you might say, transmuting the gold of the strange and new into the dross of the familiar. But Leandro makes me think of Alexander, and Constantinople.”

  “Constantinople?” Matt asked. “I wasn’t aware that Alexander had ever been there.”

  “How could he have been?” Rodrigo asked, giving Matt a strange look. “There was no Constantinople in those days.”

  “I know,” Matt said, relieved that history, at least in the main, was as he remembered it.

  “I was thinking of the fall of the city.”

  “How so?” Matt asked. Holiest of holies, center of the empire since time immemorial, he remembered that the city had fallen to the Turks only decades before.

  “The city was thought to be impregnable, but the sultan’s cannon reduced it in only a month. The days of the fortified city ended right there. Wars are won on the battlefield. Taking the city is now just forcing open the strongbox to get the treasure. Everybody knows it. Federico does—he was thirty-one that year. But Leandro was born a year after the city fell. And that’s the difference. For him, it’s the way it’s always been. Did you hear them today? The duke saw the cannon and immediately thought about whether it would be effective against fortifications. You see, he can’t help thinking that way. But it didn’t even occur to Leandro. He saw the cannon and thought of how it would affect a battle. How did Alexander succeed? Mobility. It was on the field at Issus and Gaugamela that he defeated Darius, long before he reached the walls of Susa and Persepolis. Leandro understands this innately. It’s not something he’s had to learn, it’s the way his world is.”

  “There’s another similarity that I can see. Alexander had a worldview that extended far beyond the confines of Greece. It was interesting to me that Leandro sees Louis as the primary threat. Not Milan, or Venice.”

  “That’s true,” Rodrigo said. “What is it?” he asked after a few moments of silence.

  “Nothing,” Matt replied.

  “Something’s on your mind.”

  “Alexander conquered the world, but at what price?” Matt asked. “Great cities leveled, civilizations destroyed, and nothing left in their place. And if I remember correctly, the first thing Mohammed did after overrunning Constantinople was to drown his younger brother and marry his mother to a slave. He’s still sultan, isn’t he?”

  “Yes,” Rodrigo replied. The two men halted for a brief rest as the villa came back into view far below. Rodrigo drank from a leather bag and then passed it over. The wine, greatly diluted and mixed with honey, had a sweetly pungent tang that Matt found refreshing in spite of its warmth. The sun was directly overhead, washing all color from the deserted buildings and fields, blanketing them in a white haze of dry heat.

  “It was always rumored that Federico had a hand in the death of his brother,” Matt remarked.

  Rodrigo glanced back at their escort, but the soldiers were well out of earshot. “His brother was an animal,” he replied. “Raping and stealing from his own people. The citizens of Urbino killed him after six months. Federico had nothing to do with it. They wouldn’t open the gates of the city when he arrived until he promised that no one involved would come to any harm.”

  “The count’s estate devolves on Orlando, doesn’t it?”

  “That is indeed correct. The count has no family or other children.”

  “But if something were to happen to Orlando, the fortune would go to Anna.”

  “It would take papal intervention, but that could be had at a price.”

  “And then to Anna’s children. And Leandro’s. Not a stepson.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Like father like son? Do you have that expression in these parts?”

  “Careful, my friend,” Rodrigo said. “Speculation such as this will lead you nowhere but trouble.”

  Matt leaned forward, his attention suddenly diverted by a bright flash of color below. “That was the contessa,” he exclaimed.

  “Where?”

  “Down there.”

  “I don’t see anything,” Rodrigo said.

  “She’s gone now. You didn’t see them? Francesca was with her.” Blue and green—the dresses he had seen them in this morning. Where could they be going? It was siesta, no one would be about. That was just the point, he thought, his heart filling with a sudden unreasoning rush of jealousy as he remembered Leandro, in such a hurry to rejoin the hunt.

  “They didn’t have an escort,” Matt said. “What about bandits?”

  “No one would even contemplate interfering with them on the count’s own lands,” Rodrigo said.

  “It’s not safe,” Matt protested. “Where are they going at this hour?”

  “Are you a complete fool?” Rodrigo snapped. “Leave it alone!” With a slap of his reins he spurred his horse on.

  chapter 13

  “A perfect day,” Leandro announced. Perched on his glove was a large falcon with the distinctive gray and white banding of a peregrine. He carried the twenty-pound weight of the mature bird as lightly as Matt might have worn a watch.

  I can’t argue with that, Matt thought; it is a perfect day. Nothing is lacking. And what a glorious country. It had seeped into him like the summer heat, dry and penetrating, becoming a part of him. These were his clouds, his fields of grain, rippling green and silver under the sun; his horse, sweaty, shaking its head and tugging the reins as it reached for the long grass. These are my hands, he thought, and this light that molds them, mine, too. It was a land of infinite possibility, and there was nowhere else in this world or any other that he would rather be than right here, sitting astride this horse, in this field, under this sun.

  “She’s magnificent,” Matt said, looking at the hawk.

  “The best hunter I’ve ever had,” Leandro replied, lightly stroking the falcon’s ruffled chest with the side of his forefinger. “Athena is her name.”

  “A haggard,” Matt ventured. Although he had never been hawking, his studies over the years had left him well versed in the most popular sport of the time. The haggard, a fully grown falcon trapped in the wild, had a style and ferocity that a bird hatched from an egg or taken from the nest could never equal. Training one took infinitely more skill and patience, and the bird often disappeared when at last set free, but Matt had seen enough of Leandro to know that he would never have flown anything else but a haggard.

  “Yes. It took me three weeks to break her, but it was worth every minute. Last week she brought down a heron all by herself.” The tufted plume of feathers on the falcon’s hood tossed as she cocked her head this way and that. “What do you hunt?” Leandro asked Matt.

  “I don’t,” Matt replied.

  “You don’t hawk?” Leandro asked in astonishment.

  “In my country it’s just not done.”

  “Then what do you do?”

  “For sport?”

  “Yes.”

  “We golf.”

  “Golf?” Anna asked, shifting her gaze to Matt from the thicket where the servants had disappeared with their guns to flush the game. She sat next to Leandro on a mare as pale as milk with a small gray hawk, a rare kestrel, resting lightl
y on the thick yellow glove that protected her arm. Her cape, a shade of blue verging on violet that made Matt think of Mantegna and the frescoes in Mantua, was thrown back on her shoulders. With no belt under the bodice, her dark red dress fell in open folds from the square neck, the sleeves slashed and tied to show the white chemise underneath. “I’ve never heard of golf. What is the quarry?”

  “There isn’t any. You use a club to hit a ball around a course of holes. Each person has their own ball and set of clubs. The one who uses the least number of strokes to get his ball in the holes wins.”

  “That’s a sport?” Leandro asked.

  “How far apart are the holes?” Anna asked.

  “About the width of this field, sometimes more. There are eighteen of them.”

  “Why eighteen?”

  “I don’t know,” Matt replied. “Tradition.”

  “Which is saying the same thing twice,” Anna said. “Like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly—when does the humble ‘I don’t know’ metamorphose into the much grander and infinitely more respectable ‘tradition’? Do women play?”

  “It’s a game that requires patience, concentration, finesse, and extraordinary physical poise and control. Women excel at it.”

  “I’d like to try,” Anna said.

  “It sounds like a pleasant diversion, well suited to women,” Leandro said.

  Their horses stood in a large field that had been left fallow, the grass long and patched with wildflowers. The duke, on the other side of Anna, listened to the man on the horse next to him, who gestured with one hand as he spoke. Hair falling straight and black to his shoulders, the man also had a pointed beard, which accentuated his narrow aquiline features. His hat was a coiled satin snake, bands of brilliant red and blue topped by a gold tassel. Dressed in the flowing long white robes of an Arab prince, Kamal al-Rashidiyah, as Rodrigo had explained to Matt, was an emissary from the king of Persia to the pope. He had stopped in Urbino to confer with the duke before continuing on his journey to Rome. Behind the duke sat his honor guard, pennons stirring fitfully from the points of their silver lances in the light breeze.

  As a series of bangs erupted from the nearby wood a bright bundle of feathers burst from the copse. The thrumming of a pheasant’s wings could be heard from where they sat as it began to rise into the air. The duke quickly swept the hood from the massive bird resting on his glove and unhooked the leash. A gyrfalcon, largest of the species, the hawk blinked its huge eyes, a bottomless yellow, as it arched its wings. With a powerful stroke it was airborne, pushing away from the duke’s extended arm. Leather jesses dangling from its feet, it rose slowly at first and then with increasing speed circled higher and higher, in seconds a mere speck against the sky.

  The pheasant was halfway across the field, heading away from the group that sat still upon their mounts, watching the sky intently, their hands shielding their eyes. Just as Matt found the gyrfalcon, pivoting in a tight circle around one feathered wingtip, the bird folded its wings and began its stoop. Faster and faster, growing larger as they watched, it plummeted like an avenging angel toward the pheasant winging desperately for the safety of the far wood. The hawk hit with a slam that they could hear from where they sat, streaking past in a flash of white and then pulling immediately up. Its strong wings pulled it skyward as the pheasant tumbled out of control toward the green field, a few loose feathers drifting behind. And then, before they could even blink, the gyrfalcon hit it again, a death blow that caused the pheasant to drop like a stone, its bright feathers vanishing into the wildflowers. One of the servants ran to retrieve the fallen bird.

  “Rodrigo tells me you are an artist,” Federico said to Matt.

  “No, Your Excellence,” Matt replied. “I have a love of art, but that’s a far cry from being an artist.”

  “Have you traveled in the Low Countries?” the duke asked.

  “Some.”

  “Are you familiar with the paintings of Van Eyck?”

  “Very much so,” Matt said. “The one you have in your library in Gubbio is the finest I have seen.”

  “Look,” one of the ladies next to Anna exclaimed, pointing up at the sky. “There it is again.”

  “It’s that damned kite,” Leandro growled, looking up as a low murmur spread through the group.

  Matt searched the sky. The gyrfalcon had circled higher and higher until it was once again a tiny crescent far overhead. But a second bird, even higher, was circling above the hawk. Huge and black, with long, drooping wings, it rode the updraft with a lazy menace.

  “I am fascinated by the amazing depth of his colors,” the duke said, watching the sky. The gyrfalcon was climbing, trying to gain height on the other bird.

  “A gorgeous bird,” Leandro agreed.

  “I meant Van Eyck,” the duke said. “His pigments. I would love to know where he got them, but I am afraid the secret died with him.”

  “There’s no secret,” Matt replied. “He used only the finest quality, but it’s the same ultramarine or vermilion you can find here.”

  The two tiny shapes far overhead merged, only to spring apart immediately, one of them wobbling slightly. Feet extended, wings widely arched, they fell through the sky, together and apart. Steep short dives, not at all like the headlong, unbroken plummet into the pheasant, were followed by a quick beating of powerful wings as each bird clawed its way to the higher ground.

  “I find that impossible to believe,” the duke said.

  “Piero uses them liberally,” Matt said, referring to the duke’s court painter, Piero della Francesca. “But Your Excellence would know that, since after all you were the one that paid for his materials.”

  “True enough,” the duke replied with a deep laugh. “The bill for ultramarine was outrageous. More than gold leaf, ounce for ounce. I refused to pay it. But Piero’s blue has nowhere near the clarity or glow of Van Eyck’s. None of his colors do, in fact. How did he achieve that?”

  “It was in application,” Matt said.

  “How so?” Anna asked. “What did he do?”

  “It wasn’t just one thing. It was everything. The oil, the glazes, the ground—every step.”

  The larger bird rose more and more frequently, striking the other with a growing audacity. Quiet now reigned, the group engrossed in the struggle far overhead. The kite hit the gyrfalcon a quick series of strikes. The last was enough; the white bird rolled over, wings spread wide, and cartwheeled toward the distant meadow. It grew and grew as they watched, picking up speed as it fell, pushed along by one last violent slam from the other bird. The gyrfalcon crashed to the earth, a crumpled heap of white feathers that lay motionless in the bright green grass. The kite sailed overhead, tilting almost contemptuously on one wing before lazily pumping itself back skyward.

  “Please go on,” the duke said, to all appearances unperturbed by the loss of his bird.

  Hearing the jingle of hawk bells, Matt looked over just in time to see Athena lift away from Leandro’s arm. The graceful wings drew, lifting her higher and higher toward the distant comma of the kite, circling idly far overhead.

  “You have to think of how the light strikes the painting,” Matt said. “Tempera is opaque. The light illuminates the color and bounces off. What you see is what you get. Oil, though, is like a glass prism. Light passes through the oil and then refracts back, breaking into a rainbow of colors. It’s like the difference between a single note and a chord.”

  “But Piero uses oil,” the duke said, “and his paintings look nothing like Van Eyck.”

  By now the peregrine had reached the other bird. Wasting no time, the falcon engaged the much larger kite immediately, a first strike and then a quick dive. The kite recovered and followed, and the two danced through the sky, trading the lead back and forth. The peregrine exploited her greater agility, hitting the larger bird and darting away, staying close inside as the kite tried to find her. The crowd cheered, anticipating a kill.

  “That’s because he’s a tempera pain
ter. Like Botticelli, or Lippi, or Ghirlandaio. All of them use oil, but they’re tempera painters at heart. They model a figure and then use color to fill in the outlines. Van Eyck models with his glazes. With his ground. You know how bright Piero’s figures are? Or Botticelli? They leave the ground bone white and pile on the color. Van Eyck, though, colors the ground. He then layers the glazes, builds them, makes a figure out of shadow and light.”

  The kite had broken off and sailed free, the peregrine following at a close distance. Suddenly the black bird thrust its wings, stalling, and wheeled on one wingtip. The peregrine, taken unawares, was on top of him, unable to stop, and the kite fell on her with all his fury. A second later the kite was circling, alone in the sky, as the tiny bundle that had been the peregrine spun earthward.

  Matt glanced at Leandro. Expressionless, he watched the bird fall until it hit the ground, disappearing in the long grass on the other side of the field.

  “A shame,” Anna said. “She put up a good fight.”

  “Indeed,” Leandro replied, acknowledging her remark with a slight bow.

  Al-Rashidiyah leaned forward and spoke to the duke, who nodded. Turning to his assistant, the Arab snapped his fingers.

  The man ran to the covered cadge and fetched a bird, bringing it back and handing it up. The falcon settled on the man’s arm, and he spoke to it soothingly as he drew off its hood. Almost as large as the gyrfalcon, it was a speckled dark brown, banded with black, with piercing eyes that glared around the assembled company, searching for prey.

  “A sacre,” Orlando exclaimed. Matt turned to the boy, seated with his friend Cosimo on their smaller mounts behind the main group. Both boys were wide-eyed, their faces shining with excitement. Orlando held a small goshawk, hooded and quiet on his wrist. “The great desert falcon,” he explained to Matt, proud to display his knowledge.

  “I’ve always wanted to see one,” Matt replied, careful not to let on that he had already known what a sacre was. Turning back, he saw Leandro’s gaze also on the boy. Leandro, sensing Matt’s eyes on him, shifted his gaze to meet his, smiling at the boy’s naïve enthusiasm, but not before Matt had had a glimpse of what had been in his face. He had looked just like the sacre, sizing up his prey.