Imaginary LIves Read online

  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 th
e 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.”

  The Bird continued his patient work, assembling circles, dividing angles, examining all creatures under all their aspects. From his friend Giovanni Manetti, the mathematician, he learned of the problems of Euclid, then shut himself up to cover panels and parchments with points and curves. Aided by Filippo Brunelleschi, he perpetually employed himself at the study of architecture, but he had no intention to build. He wanted only to know the directions of lines from foundation to cornice, the convergences of parallels together with their intersections, the manner in which vaulting turns upon its keys and the perspective of ceiling beams as they appear to unite at the ends of long rooms. He drew all beasts, all their movements and all the gestures of men, reducing these things to simple lines.

  Then like an alchemist who mixes ores and metals in his furnace, watching their fusion in hope of finding the secret of gold, Uccello would throw all his forms into a crucible, mix them, mingle them and melt them, striving to transmute them into one ideal form containing all. That was why Paolo Uccello lived like an alchemist at the back of his little house. He believed he might find the knowledge to merge all lines into a single aspect; he wanted to see the universe as it should be reflected in the eye of God, all figures springing from one complex centre. Near him lived Ghiberti, della Robbia, Brunelleschi and Donatello, each one proud and a master of his art. They railed at poor Uccello for his folly of perspectives, with his house full of cobwebs empty of provisions. But Uccello was prouder than they. At each new combination of lines he imagined he had discovered the way. It was not imitation he sought, but the sovereign power to create all things, and his strange drawings of pleated hats were to him more revealing than magnificent marble figures by the great Donatello.

  That was how The Bird lived: like a hermit, with his musing head wrapped in his cape, noting neither what he ate nor what he drank.

  One day along a meadow, near a ring of old stones deep in the grass, he saw a laughing girl with a garland on her head. She wore a thin dress held to her hips by a pale ribbon and her movements were supple as the reeds she gathered. Her name was Selvaggia. She smiled at Uccello. Noting the flexion of her smile when she looked at him, he saw the little lines of her lashes, the patterned circles of the iris, the curve of her lids and all the minute interlacements of her hair. Considering the garland across her forehead, he described it to himself in a multitude of geometric postures, but Selvaggia knew nothing of all that, for she was only thirteen.

  She took Uccello by the hand and he loved her. She was the daughter of a Florentine dyer, her mother was dead and another woman had come to her father’s house and had beaten her. Uccello took her home with him. Selvaggia used to kneel all day by the wall whereon Uccello traced his universal forms.

  She never understood why he preferred to regard those straight and arched lines instead of the tender face she raised to him. At night, when Manetti or Brunelleschi came to work with Uccello, she would sleep at the foot of the scaffolding, in the circle of shadow beyond the lamplight. In the morning she arose before him, rejoicing because she was surrounded by painted birds and coloured beasts.

  Uccello drew her lips, her eyes, her hair, her hands; he recorded all the attitudes of her body but he never made her portrait as did other painters when they loved a woman. For The Bird had no pleasure imitating individuals. He never dwelt in the one place – he tried to soar over all places in his flight.

  So Selvaggia’s forms were tossed into his crucible along with the movements of beasts, the lines of plants and stones, rays of light, billowings of clouds above the earth and the rippling of sea waves.

  Without thought for the girl, he lived in eternal meditation upon his crucible of forms.

  There came a time when nothing remained to eat in Uccello’s house. Selvaggia did not speak of this to Donatello or the others; she kept her silence and died. Uccello drew the stiffening lines of her body, the union of her thin little hands, her closed eyes. He no more realized she was dead than he had ever realized she was alive. But he threw these new forms among all the others he had gathered.

  The Bird grew old. His pictures were no longer understood by men, who recognized in them neither earth nor plant nor animal, seeing only a confusion of curves. For many years he had been working on his supreme masterpiece which he hid from all eyes. It was to embrace all his research and all the images he had ever conceived. The subject was Saint Thomas, incredulous, tempting the wrath of Christ. Uccello completed this work when he was eighty. Calling Donatello to his house he uncovered it piously before him and Donatello said: “Oh, Paolo, cover your picture!” Though The Bird questioned him, the great sculptor would say no more, then Uccello knew he had accomplished a miracle. But Donatello had seen only a mass of lines.

  A few years later they found Paolo Uccello dead in his bed, worn out with age. His face was covered with wrinkles, his eyes fixed on some mysterious revelation. Tight in his rigid hand he clutched a little parchment disc on which a network of lines ran from the centre to the circumference and returned from the circumference to the centre.

  NICOLAS LOYSELEUR

  Judge

  Born on Ascension Day, he was dedicated to the Virgin, whose aid he invoked at all times during his life until he could not hear her name without his eyes filling with tears. He was first schooled by a lean man in a little loft on the rue Saint Jacques, where, after learning his psalms, donats and penitences with three other children, he laboriously acquired the logic of Okam. He soon became bachelor and master of the arts, for the venerable instructors found his gentle nature charmingly unctuous, as sweet words of adoration slipped easily from his fat lips. No sooner had he obtained his baccalaureate than the Church had its eye on him.

  He served first in the diocese of the Bishop of Beauvais who recognized his talent, using it to inform the English before Chartres how certain French captains were deploying.

  When he was about thirty-five years old they made him a canon of the Cathedral of Rouen, where he struck up a friendship with another canon and chorister, Jean Bruillot, with whom he psalmed fine litanies in honor of Mary.

  Now and again he saw fit to remonstrate with Nicole Coppequesne, one of the monks of his chapel, taking that brother gently to task for his unseemly devotion to Saint Anastasia. Transported at the thought of a clever girl so beguiling a Roman magistrate, Nicole Coppequesne had a habit of carrying his ecstasies to the kitchen, flinging himself upon the pots and pans until his ardent embraces left him black in the face and smudgy as a demon. But Nicolas Loyseleur showed Nicole Coppequesne how much brighter was the power and the glory of Mary when she chose to resuscitate a drowned friar – a lewd friar surely, whose only salvation lay in his reverence to the Virgin. One night as Nicole Coppequesne left his cell bent on celebrating one of his odious kitchen orgies, his course led him past the altar of the Blessed Lady, where he paused perforce in pious genuflection. And that night his lubricity was drowned in the river.

  The evil spirits who threw him in did not return to rescue him, but when the monks hauled his body out of the water the following day he opened his eyes after a time, revived by the grace of Mary. “Ah, what a choice remedy is such devotion!” breathed canon Nicolas Loyseleur. “How venerable, Coppequesne, and how discreet. Surely from this day you will renounce your Anastasia!”

  When the Bishop of Beauvais opened the trial against Jeanne la Lorraine at Rouen, the graceful persuasiveness of Nicolas Loyseleur was not forgotten. Dressed as a layman, his shaven pate covered by a hood, Nicolas entered the small circular cell under the staircase where the prisoner was confined.

  “Jeannette,” he began, drawing back well into the shadows, “Sainte Katherine has sent me to you, Jea
nnette.”

  “And you,” said Jeanne, “in God’s name who are you?”

  “I am a poor cobbler from Greu,” Nicolas replied. “Alas for our unhappy country! The ‘Godons’ have taken me, too, my girl.. I know you well, Jeanne. How many, many times have I seen you kneeling before the Holy Mother of God in the Church of Sainte Marie of Bermont! I have often sat there with you while our good curé, Guillaume Front, has said the mass. Do you remember Jean Moreau and Jean Barré of Neufchâteau, Jeanne? They were my comrades.”

  Jeanne wept.

  “Trust me, Jeannette,” urged Nicolas. “They made me a priest years ago. See? See my shaven head? Confess yourself to me, my child. Confess freely. Our gracious King Charles is my friend.”

  “I will confess to you gladly,” said Jeanne.

  A small hole had been secretly cut in the wall beforehand. Outside the cell Guillaume Manchon and Bois-Guillaume prepared to write down the confession as Nicolas Loyseleur whispered:

  “Jeannette, tell me the truth. Tell me all... the English will not dare to harm you.” On the following day Jeanne was taken before her judges. Hidden by a thick serge curtain Nicolas Loyseleur sat with a notary in the hollow of a casement window. The notary was there to elaborate all charges against Jeanne in the record, and to leave her answers blank. When Nicolas appeared in the open court he made a little sign to prevent her from showing her surprise. Then he assisted the severe examination.

  On the ninth of May, in the main tower of the Château, he declared that the need for torture was urgent.

  On May the twelfth all the judges assembled with the Bishop of Beauvais to decide if Jeanne should be tortured. Guillaume Erart thought it unnecessary. Enough material had been obtained without that measure, he said. In Master Nicolas Loyseleur’s opinion it would be well to torture her for the good of her soul, but his advice was not followed.