The Madonna of the Almonds Read Online Free PDF Page B

followed him closely around the room. No, she was not handsome, so there would be little for him to pine for. But, leaning close, he whispered,because he could not help himself: ‘I hope to take my leave of you later, lady. When your husband is from home.’
     
    Bernardino walked his beloved streets under the cowl of a cloak – he did not wish to meet his rival before he could safely quit the place. But on the way back to his lodgings he went to the places he loved well. He walked in step with the bawling bells that shivered his ribs with their sweet cacophony. Through the Florence he loved, the square where Savonarola had burned, and the vanities with him. Bernardino had little to do with the looking glass, so he could not know that as he said a tender farewell to the wrestling statuary that adorned the Piazza della Signoria, the carrera marble exactly matched the strange silver hue of his eyes. He leaned on the warm stone balustrades of the Arno and said goodbye to the perfect arches of the Ponte Vecchio. The late evening sun – his favourite light of all – turned their stones from amber to gold in her daily alchemy. But Bernardino knew not that his own skin had the same rosy hue. As he wandered through precincts of Santa Croce and bid arrivederci to the monks of the Misericordia , he was unaware that those Holy fathers wore cowls as black as his own hair. He was innocent of the fact that the pearly marble of the vast domed basilica was precisely the white of his teeth. Yes, whether he knew it or not, Bernardino was as handsome as the city itself. At the last, he took a drink from the fountain of the golden boar and rubbed the Porcellino’ s nose to besure that, one day, he would return. Bernardino was not given to introspection. He would miss the place, to be sure, but his spirits were already bubbling to the surface. As he walked home he looked to the future, singing softly a ditty composed by Lorenzo de’ Medici, Il Magnifico himself: 
    Quant’è bella giovinezza,
    Che si fugge tuttavia!
    Chi vuol esser lieto sia:
    Di doman non c’e certezza.
     
    How fine a thing is youth but how short-lived.
    Let he who wishes to be merry, be so.
    For there’s no saying what
    Tomorrow will bring.
    In the studiolo , Leonardo was still for a moment as he thought on Bernardino. It was well he was gone, for the boy was too beautiful to be under his eye every day. He thought of the lustrous black curls, the startling eyes that spoke of a heritage far from Lombardy; the black lashes that looked as if each had been painted individually by the finest sable of no more than three hairs. Bernardino even had all his teeth – and white ones at that. Leonardo sighed in valediction and turned back to his model. She was no beauty, however he may flatter the husband, but still she had something, if only an exquisite seriousness of countenance. Heassumed that her nickname ‘La Gioconda’ was given to her with ironic bent – a play on her name, and no indication of her general humour. But wait…something was different… round the corners of her mouth there played – almost, but not quite, a smile? Her gravity had dissolved in an instant to this enigmatic, this wholly inappropriate expression. Leonardo cursed Bernardino roundly. What had he said to her? He took up his brushes and worked over the mouth once more. Damn the boy.
     
    When Bernardino swore that any woman he painted would have to be as beautiful as an angel, he did not know that he would have to wait more than twenty years to find her. When he painted his first commission for the Doge, her parents were just lately married. When he began his Pietà at Chiaravalle near Rogoredo, she was being born. When he painted one of his greatest works in 1522 – the magnificent ‘Coronation of Our Lord’, painted for the Confraternity of the Holy Crown in Milan – she was at that time being wed to another and choking on an almond nut at the feast. Bernardino’s mastery grew, but he