Painting Mona Lisa aka I, Mona Lisa

their target.

Know that I love you always. Know that I will approach Piero at the first opportune moment.

Yours forever,

Giuliano

XXXIV

Over the next few months, as spring turned to summer, my life became an agony of waiting. I heard nothing from Leonardo, received no letters or striking sketches from Milan. Even worse, I heard no more from Giuliano.

His elder brother, however, fueled much gossip all over the city. Piero directed his attention more to sports and women than to diplomacy and politics. It had long been said that his father had often despaired because of Piero’s lack of acumen and his arrogance.

Especially his arrogance, and Lorenzo proved right. Only months after il Magnifico’s death, Piero managed to alienate two of his father’s closest advisors, and most of the Lord Priors. It did not help matters that his mother, Clarice, had been from the noble and powerful Orsini clan, who considered themselves princes; nor did it help that Piero had married Alfonsina Orsini from Naples. For this reason he was considered an outsider-only one-third Florentine and two-thirds self-proclaimed royalty.

Savonarola astutely used this in his sermons, rallying the poor against their oppressors, though he took care not to mention Piero by name. Anti-Medici sentiment began to grow; for the first time, people spoke openly against the family, in the streets and even in grand palazzi.

I, in my misery, no longer had excuses to avoid Fra Girolamo’s sermons. I tolerated them, hoping that my obedience as a daughter would soften my father’s heart and keep him from rejecting Giuliano as a suitor. So I found myself twice daily in San Lorenzo, listening to the fiery little Dominican preach. In late July, when Pope Innocent died, Savonarola proclaimed it another sign of God’s wrath; in mid-August, when a new pope ascended St. Peter’s throne, Savonarola grew red-faced with rage. Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, now Pope Alexander VI, dared to take up residence in the Vatican with his three illegitimate children: Cesare, Lucrezia, and Jofre. And he did not, as most cardinals and popes had in the past, refer to them as niece and nephews; he blatantly insisted that his children be recognized as his own. There were rumors, as well, of whores in the papal palace, of orgies and drunkenness. Here was proof that God’s wrath was imminent.

Zalumma sat beside me in church with lowered lids and a distant expression. Clearly she was not contemplating the prophet’s words, as one might believe; I knew she was somewhere else in her imagination, perhaps in the beloved mountains she had left as a girl. I was elsewhere, too. In my imagination, I conjured the villa at Castello, and the glories housed there, or resorted to the memory of my tour in il Magnifico’s study, recalling the brilliance of a great ruby or the smoothness of Cleopatra’s chalcedony cup.

Those memories sustained me as I listened to Savonarola’s words; they sustained me as I dined each evening with my father and Giovanni Pico, who drank far too much wine and often wound up weeping. My father would take him to his study, and they would talk quietly late into the night.

Fall came, then winter, and the new year. At last, Zalumma smuggled me a letter bearing the Medici seal, and I tore it open with a mixture of desperation and wild joy.

“Madonna Lisa,” it began, and with those two distant words, my hope was crushed.

I am at wit’s end. Piero has steadfastly denied me permission to wed you; he seeks for me a bride who increases the family’s standing and better secures his position as Father’s successor. He thinks only of politics, not of love. My brother Cardinal Giovanni is determined that I should wed an Orsini, and will hear of nothing else.

I will not have it. I tell you such things not to discourage you, but rather to explain my long silence and assure you of my frustration and my determination. I will be matched to no one else. My inability to see you has not cooled my desire; indeed, it has fanned it. I think day and night of nothing but you, and of a way for us to be together. I am committed to designing that way.

I will be with you soon, my love. Have faith in that.

Giuliano

I let the letter fall to my lap and wept inconsolably. I had no faith-in God’s kindness, in Savonarola’s merciless teachings, in Giuliano’s ability to escape the demands of duty and station. I was only a wool merchant’s daughter that Lorenzo had taken a foolish interest in, that Giuliano had been silly enough to develop feelings for-feelings that certainly would pass with time.

I wanted to feed the letter to the lamp, to shred it into a thousand pieces, throw them into the air, and watch them settle like dust.

Fool that I was, I folded the letter carefully and put it away with other keepsakes: Giuliano’s medallion, and that of Cosimo and the Medici crest; the drawing of me by Leonardo, and his letter; and Giuliano’s letters, including the one he had expressly asked me to burn.

XXXV

The year 1493-the year after Lorenzo’s death, the first full year of Piero’s reign- passed grimly for me. I began my monthly bloods and did everything possible to hide the fact from my father, bribing the laundress not to mention the stained linens. Even so, Father began to speak of potential husbands. He had kept his promise to my mother, he said; it was not his fault that Lorenzo had died before giving his opinion on a match. And my fate could certainly not be trusted to that dolt, Piero, who had already proved useless as Florence’s marriage broker-he had allowed several pairings that provoked the disapproval of old noble families. No, my father had in mind a distinguished man, well placed in Florentine society but nonetheless godly, and when the time was right, he would receive him as my suitor.

Fortunately, I was still young, and my father’s talk of a husband remained simply that. Despite our uneasy relationship, I knew my father loved me, and that he missed my mother terribly. I was his one connection to her, and so I believed he was reluctant to part company with me.

That same year, the legend of the papa angelico-that unworldly pope who would be chosen by God, not man-merged with a second old story, that of the coming of a second Charlemagne, who would cleanse the Church. This Charlemagne would then unite Christendom under the spiritual rule of the papa angelico.

It did not help matters that the French king was named Charles, or that he listened to such legends and took them to heart. Nor did it help that he set his sights on Naples, deciding that the southern principality by the sea rightly belonged to him. After all, it had been wrested from French control only a generation earlier by old King Ferrante’s father, Alfonso the Magnanimous. Barons with French loyalties still dwelled within the city and would gladly raise their swords in support of their true ruler, Charles.

Savonarola seized on these ideas, merging them with his holy vision. He was shrewd enough never to suggest directly that he was that angelic pope, but he began to preach that Charles would wield the Lord’s avenging sword. Charles would scourge Italy and bring her to penitent knees, and the faithful should welcome him with open arms.

Perhaps Fra Girolamo and his most devoted followers were eager to see a foreign king invade Italy, but everyone I knew was unnerved by the thought. A sense of gathering doom hung over us all. By the end of the year, everyone in Florence was aware that Charles was making plans to invade Naples the following June.

“O Lord,” the prophet cried, during one of his Advent sermons, “You have dealt with us as an angry father; You