Blood and Gold - Anne Rice [115]
Before dawn a guard came upon me. I allowed it to happen. With the Spell Gift I gently convinced him that I belonged where I was.
“Who is the figure here in these paintings?” I asked, “the elder with the beard and the gold light streaming from his head?”
“Moses,” said the guard, “you know, Moses the prophet. It all has to do with Moses, and the other painting has to do with Christ.” He pointed. “Don’t you see the inscription?”
I had not seen it but I saw it now. The Temptation of Moses, Bearer of the Written Law.
I sighed. “I wish I knew their stories better,” I said. “But the paintings are so exquisite that the story doesn’t matter.”
The guard only shrugged.
“Did you know Botticelli when he painted here?” I asked.
Once again, the man only shrugged.
“But don’t you think the paintings are incomparably beautiful?” I asked him.
He looked at me somewhat stupidly.
I realized how lonely I was that I was speaking to this poor creature, trying to elicit from him some understanding of what I felt.
“Beautiful paintings are everywhere now,” he said.
“Yes,” I said, “yes, I know they are. But they don’t look like this.”
I gave him a few gold coins, and left the chapel.
I had only time enough to reach the vault of Those Who Must Be Kept before dawn.
As I lay down to sleep I dreamt of Botticelli, but it was the voice of Santino that haunted me. And I wished that I had destroyed him, which, all things considered, was a very unusual wish for me.
15
The following night I went to the city of Florence. It was of course splendid to see it quite recovered from the ravages of the Black Death, and indeed a city of greater prosperity and greater ingenuity and energy than Rome.
I soon learnt what I had suspected—that having grown up around commerce, the city had not suffered the ruin of a classical era, but had rather grown progressively strong over the centuries, as its ruling family, the Medici, maintained power by means of a great international bank.
Everywhere about me there were elements of the place—its growing architectural monuments, its interior paintings, its clever scholars—that drew me fiercely, but nothing really could keep me away from discovering the identity of Botticelli, and seeing for myself not only his works, but the man.
Nevertheless, I tormented myself slightly. I took rooms in a palazzo near the main piazza of the city, hired a bumbling and remarkably gullible servant to lay in lots of costly clothes for me, all made in the color red as I preferred it, and still do to any other, and I went at once to a bookseller’s and knocked and knocked until the man opened his doors for me, took my gold, and gave me the latest books which “everyone was reading” on poetry, art, philosophy and the like.
Then retiring to my rooms, I sat down by the light of one lamp and devoured what I could of my century’s thinking, and at last I lay flat upon the floor, staring at the ceiling, overwhelmed by the vigor of the return to the classical, by the passionate enthusiasm for the old Greek and Roman poets, and by the faith in sensuality which this age seemed to hold.
Let me note here that some of these books were printed books, thanks to the miraculous invention of the printing press, and I was quite amazed by these though I preferred the beauty of the old handwritten codexes, as did many men of the time. In fact, it is an irony that even after the printing press was very well established, people still boasted of having handwritten libraries, but I digress.
I was talking of the return to the old Greek and Roman poets, of the infatuation of the era with the times of my birth.
The Roman church was overwhelmingly powerful as I have suggested.
But this was an age of fusion, as well as inconceivable expansion—and it was fusion which I had seen in the painting of Botticelli—so full of loveliness and natural beauty though created for the interior of the Pope’s own chapel in Rome.
Perhaps near to midnight, I stumbled out of my quarters, finding the city under curfew, with the taverns which defied