Pasquale's Angel

by Paul McAuley

Genres: Science Fiction; Cyberpunk; Dystopian

Synopsis

Florence in the year 1518 is riven by scientific and sociological change caused b the wonderful devices of the Great Engineer, Leonardo da Vinci. Now he is old and lives as a recluse working behind the walls of his castle. The Raphaelites, artists and anti-technologists led by Raphael of Urbino, call for his excommunication. Pasquale di Cione fiesole, an apprentice painter witnesses an assassination attempt on Raphael at a Cathedral service. The weapon falls into his hands, and he is soon on the run from engineers and artists, desperate to prove his innocence.

Release date: December 30, 2010

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 284

Sample

Morning, just after dawn. The sky, for once clear of the murk spewed by foundries and manufactories, the rich blue of the very best four-florins-to-the-ounce ultramarine. Men ambling to work along the Street of Dyers, leather-aproned, long gloves slung around their necks, hair brushed back and tucked under leather caps. Clogs clattering on flagstones, cheerful shouts, the rattle of shutters raised as the little workshops opened up and down the street. Apprentices hanging skeins of coloured wool on hooks over workshop doors: reds, blues, yellows, vibrant in the crisp slanting light against flaking sienna walls. Then a hollow rapid panting as someone started up the Hero’s engine which by an intricate system of pulleys and belts turned the paddles of the dyers’ vats and drove the Archimedes’ screw that raised water from the river. A puff, a breath, a little cloud of vapour rising above the buckled terracotta roofs, the panting settling to a slow steady throb.

Pasquale, who had drunk too much the night before, groaned awake as the engine’s steady pounding shuddered through the floor, the truckle bed, his own spine. Last year, when things had been going badly – the scandal over the commission for the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, and business, never more than a trickle, suddenly drying up – Pasquale’s master, the painter Giovanni Battista Rosso, had rented rooms on the second floor of a tall narrow house at the eastern end of the Street of Dyers. Although one room was only a closet, and the second, where Pasquale slept, was not much more than a passage with a bed in it, the main room was airy and light, and had a pleasant aspect over the gardens of the Franciscan friars of Santa Croce. On winter mornings, Pasquale had lain late in bed and watched the swarming shadows made on the ceiling of the narrow room by the lanterns of the dyers’ workmen as they passed by in the cold dark street below, and in spring he had turned his bed to face the opposite window so that he could watch the trembling dance of light and shadow cast through the leaves of the trees in the garden. But all that summer he had been woken at first light by the Hero’s engine, and now its vibration mingled with the queasy throb of his hangover as he groped for and failed to find his cigarettes.

Too much wine last night, wine and beer, a great swilling indeed, and then he’d taken a turn at watch over the body of Bernardo, he and three others all armed with pistols in case corpsemasters discovered its hiding-place, all of them drinking thick black wine sweet as honey, waving the weapons about and as likely to shoot each other in drunken jest as any corpsemaster. Poor Bernardo, white and still, his face seeming rapt in the light of the forest of candles burning at the head of his coffin, the two silver florins that shut his eyes glinting, more money than he’d ever had in his short life. Twelve years old, the youngest pupil of Jacopo Pontormo, Bernardo had been knocked down by a vaporetto that morning, his chest crushed by its iron-rimmed wheel, and his life with it. Altogether a bad omen, for he was killed on the seventeenth of October, the eve of the feast of Saint Luke, the patron saint of the confraternity of the artists of the city.

Other noises rising, floating through the open window. Automatic cannon signalling the opening of the city gates, their sounds arriving one after the other according to the law of propagation of waves through air, first near and loud, then further and fainter. The clatter of a velocipede’s wooden wheels over cobbles, its rider cheerfully whistling. Women, calling across the narrow street to each other, the small change at the start of the day. Then the bells of the churches, far and near, ringing out for the first mass. The slow heavy tolling of Santa Croce itself mixed with the beat of the dyers’ Hero’s engine and seemed to rise and fall as the two rhythms pulsed in and out of phase.

Pasquale made a last futile swipe for his cigarettes, groaned and sat up, and discovered himself fully clothed. He had a distinct impression that a surgeon had bled him dry in the night. Rosso’s Barbary ape sat on the wide window-sill at the foot of the bed, looking down at him with liquid brown eyes as it idly picked at calcined plaster with its long flexible toes. When it saw that Pasquale was awake it snatched the blanket from his bed and fled through the window, screeching at the fine joke it had played.

A moment later a human cry floated up. Pasquale thrust his head out of the window to see what was going on. The window overlooked the green gardens of Santa Croce, and the young friar who had charge of the gardens was running up and down the wide white gravel path below, shaking an empty sack like a flag. ‘You keep that creature of yours inside!’ the friar shouted.

Pasquale looked either side of the window: the ape had disappeared. He called down, ‘He is inside. You should be inside too, brother. You should be at your devotions, not waking up innocent people.’

The friar said, ‘I tell you, he was after my grapes!’ He was red in the face, a fat young man with greasy black hair that stuck out all around his tonsure. ‘As for innocence, no man is innocent, except in the eyes of God. Especially you: your profane and drunken songs woke me last night.’

‘Well, pray for me then,’ Pasquale said, and withdrew his head. He couldn’t even remember getting home, let alone singing.

The friar was still shouting, his voice breaking in anger the way that fat men’s voices often do. I’ll see to your grapes, Pasquale resolved, as he lit a cigarette with trembling fingers. The first puff was the test: the trick was not to inhale too deeply. Pasquale sipped cool green smoke cautiously, then more deeply when it seemed that he would not lose the contents of his stomach. He sat on his rumpled bed and as he finished the cigarette thought about angels, and Bernardo’s sweet dead face. Bernardo’s family would try and smuggle their son’s body out of the city today, taking it back to Pratolino, beyond the jurisdiction of the corpsemasters.

Pasquale poured water into a basin and splashed his face. Combing his wet springy hair back from his forehead with his fingers, he went into the main room of the studio and found his master already at work.

Rosso and Pasquale had whitewashed the walls and floor of the big airy room just two weeks ago, and even at this early hour it glowed with pure light. The ape was curled up in the brocade chair, the blanket wrapped around itself, snoring contentedly, hardly stirring when Pasquale wandered in and Rosso laughed long and hard at his pupil’s bedraggled state.

Rosso was working by the big window that overlooked the street. Its shutters were flung wide. He was using a feather to brush away charcoal from the lines of the underdrawing on the canvas that, sized, primed with oil, lead white and glue, had been standing against one wall for more than three weeks and was now propped on the work-table. He was barefoot and wore only his green work-apron, girdled loosely at his waist and falling to just above his knees. A tall pale-skinned man, with a shock of red hair stiff as porcupine quills, a sharp-bladed nose, and a pale-lipped mobile mouth. There was a smudge of charcoal on his forehead.

Pasquale picked a big goose-quill from the bundle on the worktable and lent a hand. Rosso said, ‘How are we this morning? Did Ferdinand wake you up as I asked him? And what was the good friar shouting about?’

Ferdinand was the Barbary ape, named for the late unlamented King of Spain.

‘He waited until I was awake before he took the blanket. And he did it because he likes my smell, not because of anything you told him. You couldn’t get him to drink a glass of water by asking if you chained him for a hundred days in the Araby Desert. As for the friar, he has a jealous soul. Do you like grapes, by the way? I’ve an idea to make our friend shout so loud he’ll burst.’

‘You’d have Ferdinand steal those grapes? You persuade him to do it, and I’ll believe you can talk to him with your fingers.’

Pasquale switched away the charcoal dust that had accumulated at the bottom of the canvas. The lines of the underdrawing had to be all but erased, or else they would show through, or, even worse tint the oils.

‘Master, why are you doing this now? Shouldn’t you be dressed?’

‘Why, I only just this minute got undressed.’

‘Out with your bumboy, I suppose.’

‘That,’ Rosso said, ‘is none of your business. Besides, just because you couldn’t sweet-talk Pelashil into giving you more of that poison, there’s no need to take it out on me.’

‘Pelashil? Did I try?’ Pasquale did remember talking to her, never quite an argument, he more and more insistent about wanting to try the híkuri again, and she telling him that a drunken man would only be bewildered by the visions it gave, but she had come up and given him a kiss later, in front of everyone, and told him to come and see her when he was in his senses. Pasquale groaned, half in pleasure, half with guilt. Pelashil was the servant of Piero di Cosimo, a Savage brought back from the friendly shores of the New World and widely held to be his common-law wife. She was twice Pasquale’s age, dark and heavy-haunched, but Pasquale was attracted by the challenge of keeping her attention long enough to make her smile. She had no time for small talk, and if conversation bored her she would turn away. Her silences were long, not so much sulky as self-absorbed; her sudden, flashing smile was all too rare. Strangely, what Pasquale took seriously, the euphoric híkuri dream, the sense of diving deep into the weave of the world, Pelashil maintained was nothing more than entertainment. She wouldn’t even listen when he tried to tell her what he’d seen after he’d chewed the shrivelled, nauseatingly bitter grey-green button she had fed him in her hot, brightly decorated little room.

Rosso, who understood his pupil, laughed and made the sign of a cuckold’s horns on his forehead. ‘For shame, Pasqualino! You take advantage of a poor crazy old man.’

‘Perhaps I want to follow in his footsteps, and see for myself the New World. We could go, master, you and I. We could make a fresh start.’

Rosso said, ‘I’ll not hold you to your contract if you want to leave. God knows you’ve learned all you will from me. Go if you want, but don’t break an old man’s heart and steal his servant. Old men need the warmth of women.’

‘Think of the light, master, and think that a man can live like a king for the rent you pay for this place.’

‘A king of Savages? What kind of honour is that?’

‘I know you will tell me you have your reputation here,’ Pasquale said. ‘I’m sorry to have mentioned it. You should get dressed for the procession.’

‘We have plenty of time before the procession.’ Rosso stepped back and looked critically at the underdrawing. It was the deposition of Christ, looking down the length of His dramatically foreshortened body as He was tenderly cradled by His disciples.

‘Surely this can wait.’

‘I have to finish it in two weeks, or I’ll be fined. That’s what the contract stipulates.’

‘You’ve been fined before. And we have to finish the wall for that light-show.’

Rosso had agreed to paint patterns on a newly plastered wall as part of an artificer’s scheme to amaze and entertain the Pope. Years ago, the spectacles celebrating the visit of a foreign prince would have been entirely provided by artists; now, they were reduced to assisting in the devices and designs of the artificers.

‘We will paint the wall tomorrow. I can’t afford to break that contract, and neither can I afford to break this one. We’re close to asking Saint Mark for half his cloak. Listen, if Signor di Piombino likes the picture, he may offer his private chapel to us. How would you like that, Pasqualino? Perhaps I would be able to engage new pupils.’

‘You’ll have to find a new bed, then. Mine is too narrow for two, and has a groove in it so deep I dream I’m buried alive.’

‘It has to be narrow to fit in the room. Ah,’ Rosso said with sudden exasperation, ‘what’s the point of new pupils anyway!’ His mood had swung around as it so often did these days. Pasquale knew his master was not recovered from the business with the director of the hospital, who had seen devils in the sketch of a commissioned painting where saints should have been, and loudly described how he had been tricked to any who would listen. Rosso said, ‘Maybe I’ll let you do the whole chapel, Pasqualino. But I feel like painting this, at least. It’s time it was finished. And there’s that panel you’ve been working on. When are you going to make a start on it? As for this, don’t worry, it’ll be a piece of piss to do. We’ll start by shading it across, right side brighter than the left. I sold one of your prints, by the way.’

Pasquale had found some of yesterday’s bread. Chewing hard, he said, ‘Which one?’

‘You know, the kind the women buy, the kind for which they never quite dare ask outright. She was a pretty woman, Pasquale, and blushed all over, I swear, as she tried to make me understand what she wanted. Put some oil on that bread, although how you can eat after all you’ve drunk … you won’t spew, I hope.’

Pasquale had made a number of studies for that kind of print – they were called stiffeners, in the trade. He had found a model in one of Mother Lucia’s girls, a compliant whore who would pose for pennies, and hold the same pose for an hour or more without complaint. He said, ‘Which one exactly? How much did you get?’

‘An early one,’ Rosso said carelessly. ‘Very virile, with cocks running rampant through it.’

‘That? It was pirated this spring.’

‘Yes, and the copy has improved on your original – the passage with the arms of the man holding the bladder and cock on a pole is much freer. Still, our blushing customer wanted a print of the original, which is a compliment of kinds, I suppose.’

‘Well, I’ll do another.’ Pasquale wiped oil from his hands on a bit of cloth and picked up the blackened goose-quill. ‘Are you really going to use this underdrawing, or are you going to start over again?’

‘Oh, I think this has promise. Although I don’t like the positioning of the two figures lifting the legs. Maybe I’ll move them back a little.’

‘It will spoil the lines of their arms, surely. Besides, if you lift a heavy weight, your arms are close to your sides, so they must be close to the body.’

‘Here’s my pupil, telling his master what he’s about.’

‘What about my fee for the print?’

‘As for that, it is already spent. Don’t look at me like that, Pasqualino. One must pay rent.’

‘Yesterday you said the rent could wait.’

‘I didn’t mean for the studio,’ Rosso said and winked.

‘Which bumboy was it last night? The Prussian with the scar?’

Rosso shrugged.

‘He’s a thief.’

‘You don’t understand a thing, Pasqualino. Let an old man find love where he can. Is it your hangover making you mean?’

Rosso was twenty-four, only six years older than Pasquale.

Pasquale scratched the ape around the ears. The animal stirred, and sighed happily. Pasquale said, ‘We should get ready for the procession.’

‘We have hours yet.’

‘We have promised to collect the banners from Master Andrea. Master … do you think he’ll be there?’

‘It would be very rude of him not to be.’

Raphael. They didn’t need to name him. His name was on everyone’s lips in the three days since he had arrived from Rome in advance of his master Pope Leo X.

Rosso added, ‘In any case, I must dress appropriately, and I haven’t quite decided …’

‘In that case I think I’ll have plenty of time to try and teach the ape something.’

They arrived late, of course. Rosso was famous for being late. Instead of dressing he lounged about in his work-apron, moodily staring at the cartoon, then started sketching Pasquale in red chalk while Pasquale tried to teach the ape to climb down a rope – not as easy as it seemed, for Barbary apes are not great climbers, and certainly not of ropes. Rosso was still in his odd changeable mood too, reluctant to leave and yet restless. By the time he had thrown on some clothes, he and Pasquale had to run through the streets to reach Andrea del Sarto’s studio, and still they were late.

Master Andrea was in a bate because of some business with his new wife. His pupils hung around the front of the studio, where rolled processional banners leaned against the wall. Their master’s angry voice rose and fell from an open window above. Cheerful with holiday spirit, in their best clothes, the pupils passed a fat marijuana cigarette back and forth and munched on the plump juicy Colombano grapes Pasquale and Rosso had brought with them, and laughed at the story Pasquale had to tell. He had a rope burn to prove it; at one point on its way down the ape had panicked and had nearly jerked the rope from his hands. By and by more painters and pupils drifted along – this street housed a dozen studios, mixed amongst the workshops of goldsmiths and stonemasons. Someone had brought a flask of wine, and it too was passed around.

Master Andrea came out at last, a portly man dressed in black velvet, with a belt of braided gold thread. His face was mottled, and his hands trembling as he smoothed back his long hair: he looked like an angry bee, shot out of its hole to see off intruders. He was in fact a kindly man, and a good teacher – Rosso had been his pupil, so that in a way Pasquale was his pupil, too – but he was prone to rages, and his new wife, young and pretty, provoked him to fantastic jealousies.

Rosso put his arm around his former master, talking with him as the group made their way to the Piazza della Signoria while Pasquale, a banner-pole on his shoulder, followed amongst the other pupils. He felt frumpy, still in the clothes he had worn the day before – he really didn’t have anything better to wear, things being what they were, but if he had not been so drunk, he would have taken off his doublet and hose and tunic and laid them under the mattress before going to bed. At least he had thought to scrub his face and hands, and anoint his palms with a rose-water receipt of Rosso’s. He had brushed his curly hair until it shone, and Rosso had put a circlet in it, and called Pasquale his little prince of Savages, just to annoy.

The party gathered other painters and their assistants and pupils as it went through the streets, and by the time it reached to the Piazza della Signoria there were half a hundred. The same number was already waiting in front of the Loggia, chief amongst them Michelangelo Buonarroti, towering over all by sheer force of personality, clad in a white tunic so long it was almost a robe – to hide his knock-knees, Rosso said, adding that, even so, had he possessed a thunderbolt, he would have made a passable Zeus.

Raphael and his entourage were not there.

The hired band struck up with shawm, sackbut and viole da braccio. Banners were unfurled, bright with gold and ultramarine, like flowers suddenly blooming in one corner of the stony fastness of the piazza. Following the example of the other pupils, Pasquale socketed the pole of his banner in the cusp of the leather harness he had put on; even so, his shoulders soon started to ache as wind tugged the heavy banner to and fro.

Not many of the passers-by took notice. The importance of the confraternity had dwindled, and they seemed a small, insignificant group, dwarfed by the big stage that workmen were hammering together in front of the Palazzo, in preparation for the Pope’s imminent arrival.

The hammering didn’t even stop as the blessing was read from the steps of the Loggia. What with that, and barked orders as companies of city militia drilled across the square’s vast chessboard, and the noise of the signal-tower atop the Palazzo della Signoria as its arms clattered and weaved in a kinetic ballet, the frail voice of the old Secretary to the Ten could scarcely be heard as he pronounced the annual blessing. The priest shook holy water towards the assembled painters even as the Secretary was led off by his attendants at what seemed an undignified speed. The priest muttered a prayer, sketched a cross in the air, and that was that.

The procession set off, gathering itself into a ragged line as people jostled for position. Gradually, they wound out of the piazza, through the shadow of the Great Tower. Square, studded with narrow windows and balconies, and machicolations and platforms clinging to its smooth stone as swallow-nests cling to a barn, the tower reared so high into the sky that it forever seemed to be toppling as clouds moved behind it. It nailed down the northwestern corner of the colleges and laboratories and apothecaria and surgeries and dissecting-rooms and workshops of the new university which had replaced an entire neighbourhood of crooked streets where once goldsmiths had worked, an interlocking complex of red roofs and white colonnades and terraces all overlooked by its architect, the Great Engineer himself, who in his Great Tower brooded hundreds of braccia above the common herd, perhaps even now watching the procession of the Confraternity of Artists creeping like a line of ants at the base of his eyrie as they turned towards the Ponte Vecchio. They had to march in single file, a heavy traffic of carts and carriages and vaporetti thundering past, before they turned to strike out along the wide promenade beside the river.

Pasquale, holding up the pole of a banner painted with the likeness of Saint Luke, benign and white-bearded, and painting one of his portraits of the Blessed Virgin (there were three, now at Rome, Loreto and Bologna), kept an eye on the river as he marched. He loved to watch the ships go by: the small barges which were the work-horses of the river-transport system; the paddle-wheel ferries; the big ocean-going maonas; and, on occasion, a warship on some mission that had taken it far from the naval yards of Livorno, prowling with its screw drive like a sleek leopard amongst domestic cats.

Sunlight fell through a rift in the clouds. The banners glowed; the musicians beat louder and everyone picked up his step. Pasquale’s heart was lifted at last, and he forgot his headache and his uneasy stomach, where bread and oil made an unwelcome weight, forgot the ache in his arms from holding up the heavy banner. Gulls, which followed the Grand Canal inland, were flakes of white skirling above the river-channels. Cries, far cries. He could dream of taking sloe-eyed brown-skinned Pelashil back to her native land: the New World, where white, stepped pyramids gleamed bright as salt amongst palm-trees, and every kind of fruit was there ready to fall into your hand if only you reached out for it, and flocks of parrots flew like arrows from the bows of an army.

The river was divided into channels, and the channel nearest the shore ran with strange colours that mixed and mingled in feathery curls – dye-works and chemical manufactories poured out mingling streams which unlike pigments did not mix to muddy brown but formed strange new combinations, chemical reactions fluttering across the surface in exquisite patterns as if the water had been stirred to life. Along the full flood of the raceway channel, watermills sat in chained lines strung out from the piers of bridges, their water-wheels thumping and churning, their machineries sending up a chattering roar. Most drove looms, trying to compete with the modern automatic machineries of the manufactories on the far bank. At night some went free-martin, cutting the mooring of their rivals, trying to jockey upstream to get advantage of a stronger current. Sometimes you could hear pistol-shots carrying across the water. The journalist and playwright Niccolò Machiavegli had once made a famous remark that war was simply commercial competition carried to extremes: and so here.

At the Ponte alla Grazie the procession turned away from the river, plunging into a warren of narrow streets between tenement buildings faced with soft grey pietra serena, stained with black streaks by polluted rain and crumbling away through the action of the tainted air and smokes poured forth by the manufactories. At street level, workshops and bottegas had opened their shutters for the day’s business, and their workers came out to cheer the procession as it went past. They especially cheered Michelangelo, who marched with steadfast dignity at the head of the procession, his white garments shining amongst the blacks and browns of the other masters. Florentines loved their successful sons, most especially if they were prodigals. Even better, Michelangelo had returned because of a furious argument with the Pope over the tomb of the Pope’s predecessor. He was seen as having upheld the honour of Florence over the wishes of her old enemy: not for nothing was his most famous work the statue of the giant-killer, David.

So at last the procession reached the homely church of Sant’ Ambrogio, in the neighbourhood where most painters worked. In the years before the confraternity had broken with the Company of Saint Luke and its physicians and apothecaries, who in truth had long bankrolled their impoverished artist brothers, the service had been held amongst the marble and bronze of the church of Sant’Egidio, in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. No more.

A fine rain had started. The drums beat on as the procession filed through the narrow door into the homely little church, with its plaster walls and shadows up amongst the rafters, and the noise of the reciprocal engines in the manufactory across the street.

Raphael was not there, either.

The mass was almost over when Raphael finally arrived. He swept in at the head of a gaggle of assistants and pupils, and the bustle at the door of the little church turned everyone’s heads. The idlers at the back, who had talked all through the service in the casual way of Florentines, the church being simply another public place that, except for its altars and chapels, was as secular as any other, stopped talking and gaped and nudged each other. The masters and pupils in the congregation glanced back, every one of them – with the exception of Michelangelo, who sat stiffly at the far end of the front row of seats in exactly the same pose he had held throughout the mass (and in which pose Pasquale had surreptitiously sketched him), not deigning to look back at his rival and yield him the satisfaction of recognition. Even the priest paused for a moment, before continuing with his blessing of the host amidst the ringing of many small bells. As Raphael and his followers doffed their raincapes to reveal fashionably black machine-cut tunics, doublets and leggings, the six-piece orchestra wheezed into the Agnus Dei, the ageing castrato coming in half a beat late, and almost everyone in the congregation began to whisper to everyone else.

Rosso nudged Pasquale and said in a stage whisper, ‘God’s second favourite son blesses us.’

Pasquale couldn’t help looking round to stare at the great painter. Raphael sat at ease amongst his assistants, some of whom would be masters in their own right if they had not chosen to serve Raphael. As who would not? Raphael earned more than any artist in either Rome or the Florentine Republic, and so more than any in all of Europe and the New World. Like Michelangelo, Raphael had taken the New Age to heart. In the age of the individual, he had become his own man. He took commissions as he chose, and his own fame made the rich, both the old money and the new, fiercely contest in bidding for his work, while the poor decorated their houses with shadow-engraved reproductions of his work. No other artist had that kind of cachet. Michelangelo did as he pleased, and usually fell out with his clients as a result, but only Raphael made sure that his clients got what they wanted while painting as he chose.

‘He’s come back to his roots to make sure they’re as bad as he remembers,’ Rosso said.

‘He has paid his florin,’ Pasquale said, meaning that Raphael had the right to celebrate mass with the Florentine Confraternity of Artists on the day of their patron saint because he had signed his name in the Red Book and paid his fee. Because Pasquale had been eager to catch a glimpse of Raphael, now he felt that he must defend him.

‘About the only one here,’ Rosso said, which was almost true. The Red Book of the confraternity recorded more debtors to Saint Luke than creditors, for few bothered to pay a whole florin to become a recognized master in a guild whose best days were gone, while those like Raphael Sanzio of Urbino or Michelangelo Buonarroti didn’t need a confraternity to prom. . .