The Rebirth of Venus by Linda Proud

Author:Linda Proud [Proud, Linda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781907651120
Publisher: Godstow Press
Published: 2016-02-15T14:51:19+00:00

59

JANUS TIMES

1492

DURING THIS TIME OF BANQUETS, SAVONA ROLA FASTED. It was Lent and he preached daily to a crowd, now said to number fifteen thousand, who looked on his increasingly gaunt frame as that of a new Jeremiah.

Lorenzo, no stranger to self-flagellation of the body, wanted no scourges for the soul; ignoring fiery preachers, he had the musicians and monks of San Lorenzo perform the chants of our forefathers. While most of Florence heard prophecies of tumult in the city and blood in the streets, we, the Mediceans, listened to music most divine, the hymns of our ancestors ringing in the roof of San Lorenzo’s nave, resonating in eternity, one pure note after another, the cleansing, purifying teaching of Our Lord sung in human voice at its most sublime.

‘And there will be tumult in the city, tumult outside the city, tumult in the piazza, tumult in the palace, tumult for forty hours, tumult for eleven hours, tumult for twenty-four hours. Evils worse than evil most evil.’ Thus roared the Dominican, Fra Silvestro, at the Duomo.

We heard a new mass by Ockegenheim.

‘Blood will be everywhere. There will be blood in the streets, blood in the river; people will sail boats through blood, lakes of blood, rivers of blood…’ Thus fulminated Fra Domenico at Santa Maria Novella. ‘Two million devils are loosed from hell because more evil has been committed in the past eighteen years than in the preceding five thousand.’

In San Lorenzo we listened to the music of Heinrich Isaacs and felt our hearts melting in that surrender of the soul which is love of God. My eyes would fasten on the paintings, not the new ones venerating Man, but old ones of the Holy Virgin against a sky of burnished gold. I wanted to reach out to the certainties of the past, the piety of the artists, the virtue of the governors, the devotion of the poets. The future – as predicted by the soothsayers – was becoming a source of deep fear. I wanted to remove the clever hands from mechanical clocks; I wanted to take the gnomons from all dials, to snuff out the calendar candles and arrest the sand in hour glasses; I wanted the heavenly spheres to stop in their orbits and for the sun itself to become fixed, because something terrible was coming.

These were queer times, Janus times. Pico had bought and moved into a villa on the slope of Fiesole just above Angelo. This proximity allowed one to run to the other, even in his night clothes, when some interesting fact had been discovered in his reading. Indeed, Pico had a path cut down through the woods so as to enter our villa through the garden and save five minutes on the road. Often they read together, Pico standing at a lectern, Poliziano chin in his hands at a desk. You would think it the ideal of conviviality, but sometimes during the meals they shared they could come close to blows over Savonarola, each shouting at the other to wake up and see the truth.

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