The girl is naïve. Intelligent, yes. Beautiful, yes. But naïve. She had even seemed surprised to hear of Ludovico’s betrothal to Beatrice d’Este. No one thought to inform the poor girl? Does she even see that her own dressmaid, Lucrezia Crivelli, is angling to take her place?
In my sketches, I’ve tried many different turns and shifts of the head. And I’ve tried to capture the mixture of intelligence and naiveté that I observe in Cecilia’s face. There must be a way to portray the vivacity, the immediacy of life that anyone feels in her presence. Surely it is part of what drew Ludovico il Moro to her bed.
But no. Something is not right. I scribble out the image and crumple the page. I’ve been working on the composition for days, but I don’t have it yet.
I set down my drawings and walk to my bedchamber window. The Corte Vecchia is an old residence but like an aging beauty, it has its charms. From the fortified rooftop and from the windows of my suite of rooms, I enjoy a glorious, unencumbered view of Milan’s cathedral in progress, the ducal castle on the edge of the city, and on a clear day, the foothills of the Alps.
But today, there is no vista. Fat, wet snowflakes fall from a gray sky. If I could catch one on the black sleeve of my cloak, I might see—only for a fleeting moment—perfect symmetry, a unique design of our Creator, captured in ice. And then, just as I might begin to trap the most complex and perfect of God’s designs in my mind, it would disappear from view, leaving only a dark, wet stain on my sleeve.
Cecilia’s days are numbered, I think, drumming my fingers on the cold, stone windowsill and trying to think of a new way, a novel way to make her live through paint on panel. And I must figure it out quickly, before Il Moro changes his mind. A woman like Cecilia Gallerani must know that she comes into the ducal palace going out. The only question is, when? And more importantly, how? What will become of this girl?
I watch the heavy snowflakes drop down into the gated precinct of the cathedral workyard below my window. The workyard is filled with slabs of pink-veined white marble shipped on barges from the Alpine lakes along manmade canals dredged only for this purpose. The building must have been under construction for at least a hundred years before my arrival, I think. For the years I’ve been in Milan, those marble slabs have never moved. At the rate it’s going, I imagine that the building might not be finished a hundred years from now.
I observe the first spikelike spires completed along the buttresses of the building, a strange style I am told is common in France. If the construction continues along this design, I think that the building might one day resemble a great ice palace. Along with many others, I myself have proposed a design for an octagonal central cupola of the building before Ludovico il Moro. But Il Moro hardly seems interested. Instead, all he can think about is lovely Cecilia.
Cecilia.
I turn away from the window, away from the perfect proportions of architecture and snowflakes, and back to my sketches.
Master Verrocchio taught us that painting is the imitator of all works of Nature. My picture must resemble the girl as she is in life. That is certain. Ludovico il Moro may not be well informed on matters of painting, but a resemblance will be the least of his expectations. And it is also certain that Cecilia Gallerani is already perfect in her own right.
But perfection and beauty lie not only in Nature, but in proportions, in the composition of a perfect harmony, in the perfect placement of the body and the head on the panel. The perfect placement of the features of her face. Time will destroy the harmony of female beauty; that is also certain. But by painting Cecilia Gallerani, by capturing her beauty today, I will preserve it for eternity. And the viewer—now or in the future—may derive pleasure from the depicted beauty as much as from the living beauty.
His Lordship is smitten in a way that he has never been before; that’s what Bernardo the poet has told me. It is easy to see Il Moro’s obsession. There is something about Cecilia that is hard to put into words. A liveliness of spirit, an intelligence that is matched by any man at court. A few more marks on my page, and the outline of Cecilia’s lips take shape. For a moment, I think she might speak or sing.
23
Edith
Pełkinie, Poland
September 1939
A PORTRAIT OF FLEETING BEAUTY, OF FROZEN PERFECTION that had endured through the centuries. Edith braced the wooden panel of Lady with an Ermine against her drab green uniform skirt as she watched the Czartoryski Palace grow smaller in the distance. She could not let anything happen to the portrait. She had done enough already.
The driver of the light cargo truck, a boy who looked too young to have been sent to war, had invited Edith to sit in the front seat, but she had declined. She preferred to secure the painting against her leg as the rugged vehicle rattled out of the manicured, lush grounds of the palace and onto the main road.
Under normal circumstances, Edith would have insisted that a work like a portrait by Leonardo da Vinci, as well as the dozen other paintings she had selected as the best of the Czartoryski collection, be packed in custom-made wooden crates made for carrying such works of incalculable value. But there was no such thing here.
Besides, she refused to let the picture out of her sight. It was the least she could do, she thought, for its rightful owners—the Polish prince and his pregnant wife—who were now in the hands of the Gestapo. Edith was filled with shame as she pressed the picture to her side.
In the secret room, she had instructed a handful of soldiers how to carefully pack each picture in layers of canvas tarps. She had personally inspected each package as it was loaded into the back of the truck. Each was tagged with the full identifying information. But with da Vinci’s work, Edith did not want to take a chance. She positioned herself in the back seat, laying the wrapped portrait flat beside her as the truck lugged across the rutted road.
The land unfolded into vast expanses of forested hillsides and cultivated fields. Flocks of birds flew over the drooping stems of dying crops, diving, then corralling, then swarming up into the sky again.
Resisters in the countryside. Were they being watched? Edith scanned the landscape. In the distance, she glimpsed a few thatched-roof farmhouses, but there was no smoke in the air and she saw no one.
“All those packages in the back of the truck are pictures?” The driver turned his head briefly back toward her.
“Yes,” she said.
“Where are they going?”
“For now, Jarosław. Later, I think that they may be . . . safeguarded . . . in other locations.”
From under the driver’s seat, Edith spied the corner of a newspaper. She leaned down to grasp it, spreading it across her lap. Deutsche Lodzer Zeitung, its black Gothic letters announced in bold across the top. The German-language newspaper of Lodz, Poland.
Edith read the headline: 120,000 POLES MARCHING IN GERMAN CAPTIVITY TODAY.
An image of Heinrich seared through her mind. Had he arrived in Poland? Was he part of this massive operation of capturing prisoners across the country?
Instinctively, Edith turned to look out the window of the vehicle again, as if she might catch a glimpse of him. But there were no people outside, only endless rolling hills with the hint of autumn color in their leaves. In a great field, hundreds of sunflowers were dying. They had turned their faces to the sun for one last time, and now the stalks stood angled and leaning, their heavy flower heads drooping and brown, dropping seeds to the fields.