Painting Mona Lisa aka I, Mona Lisa

Francesco inclined his head toward mine, to indicate that he had not heard me, that I should repeat myself, but I said nothing more. Like the others, I stared at the scaffold, the executioner, the straw.

The clink of the chains came first; then the accused appeared on the balcony, flanked by men wearing long swords at their hips.

Bernardo del Nero was first. He had always been a dignified white-haired man, with large, solemn eyes and a straight, prominent nose. Those eyes were now puffed almost entirely shut; his nose, twisted and crusted with black blood, was enormously swollen. He could no longer stand straight, but leaned heavily on his captor as he took each halting step down. Like his fellows, he had been forced to surrender his shoes and meet death barefoot.

I did not recognize young Lorenzo Tornabuoni; the bridge of his nose had been crushed, and his face was so bruised and swollen he could not see at all, but had to be led down the stairs. Three other prisoners followed: Niccolo Ridolfi, Giannozzo Pucci, Giovanni Cambi, all of them broken, resigned. None of them seemed aware of the assembly gathered to watch them.

When they at last stood upon the scaffold, the gonfaloniere read the charges and the sentence: espionage and treason, death by beheading.

Bernardo del Nero was granted the mercy of dying first. The executioner asked his forgiveness, and was told, in a frail, thick-tongued voice, that he was forgiven. And then Bernardo squinted out at our small assembly and said, “May God forgive you, too.”

He was too weak to kneel without aid; a guard helped him settle his chin properly into the chopping block’s darkly stained cradle. “Strike neatly,” he urged, as the executioner lifted the axe.

I did not care if I made Francesco proud; I averted my face, closed my eyes. But I opened them again immediately, startled by the warm spray and the collective gasp of the crowd. I caught a sidewise glimpse of Bernardo’s kneeling body falling to one side, of blood spurting in a thick upward arc from its headless neck, of a guard moving forward to retrieve something red and round from the straw.

And suddenly I remembered. Remembered a day years before, in the church at San Marco, when my mother, her gaze fixed and terrible, had stared up at Savonarola in the pulpit. And she had cried out:

Flames shall consume him until his limbs drop, one by one, into Hell! Five headless men shall cast him down!

Five headless men.

I stepped backward, treading on the slippered foot of a Lord Prior. Francesco caught my arm and held me steady. “Nerves,” he whispered to the offended man. “Forgive her; it is only nerves. She is young and unused to such things; she will be fine.”

Guards came and took the corpse away; Tornabuoni was pushed forward, forced to murmur words of forgiveness, to kneel, to die. Two more followed. Giovanni Cambi was last. He collapsed from fear and had to be dragged to the block; he died screaming.

In the end, the straw was sodden. The smell of fresh wood was eclipsed by the tang of blood and iron.

By the time Francesco and I rode home, the darkness had not yet begun to ease. We sat in silence until Francesco abruptly spoke.

“This is what becomes of Medici supporters.” He was watching me curiously. “This is what becomes of spies.”

Perhaps my pallor seemed suspicious; perhaps he spoke simply out of a desire to relish his political victory. In any case, I did not answer. I was thinking of my mother’s words. And I was thinking of my father, and what would happen to him when the prophet was cast down.

LXV

As the weather cooled, the plague’s grip on the city eased. My father returned to his house, Francesco took up with his prostitutes again, and I went to the marketplace and church as often as I could. One morning I placed the book on my night table, even though I had found no new letter in Francesco’s desk, and the next I day went to Santissima Annunziata.

Leonardo was well, to my relief. He had even worked on the painting. The bold outlines and shadows of my features had been softened by the application of light cinabrese, a translucent curtain of flesh. I was beginning to look human.

But when I told him of my father’s warning that the Bigi would pay with their blood-of my anguish that I had not been able to come and warn him-he said, “You bear no guilt. We knew of the danger, well before your father spoke of it to you. If there is any fault, it is mine. I was unable-I could not-bring influence to bear in time. And the horror of it was, even had we been able to arrange a rescue…” He could not bring himself to continue.

“Even if they could have been rescued-they should not have been,” I finished.

“Yes,” he murmured. “That is the horror of it. It is better that they have died.” It was true; the executions had outraged everyone in Florence, even most of the piagnoni, who felt that the friar should have extended the same forgiveness he had freely dispensed in those days shortly after Piero was banished. Isabella, Elena, even the devout Agrippina, who had never dared risk my husband’s disapproval, now criticized Fra Girolamo openly.

“My mother said-” I began, and stopped, confused as to how to express my thought without sounding insane. “Years ago, my mother told me… that Savonarola would be brought down. By five headless men.”

“Your mother? Your mother spoke to you years ago of Savonarola?”

“I know it sounds very strange. But… I believe what she said was true. I think that this will cause Savonarola to be defeated. I think that he might even die.”

He grew motionless, intensely interested. “Did she ever say anything else about Fra Girolamo?”

“I believe she was speaking about him. She said, ‘Flames shall consume him until his limbs drop, one by one, into Hell! Five headless men shall cast him down!’”

What he said next astounded me. “He will die by fire, then. And these executions shall be his undoing. We will expect it, prepare for it.”

“You believe me,” I said.

“I believe your mother.”

I stared at him for so long that he lowered his gaze and said, with unexpected tenderness, “I told you that I had seen your mother once when she was pregnant with you.”

“Yes.”

“She told me she was carrying a daughter. She told me I would paint your portrait.” He hesitated. “I gave her the medallion, then, of Giuliano murdered. I asked her to give it to you, as a keepsake.”

I wanted suddenly to cry. I reached for his hand.

…

The Signoria tried desperately to win back the people’s love for Savonarola. It commissioned a medal to honor Fra Girolamo, with his alarming profile stamped on one side and on the other the image of a bodiless hand wielding a sword beneath the legend Ecco gladius Domini super terram cito et velociter. Worse, they encouraged him to defy the papal command that he should not preach. And so Francesco announced that he and I would go together to hear the prophet speak. My father was unwell and chose to remain at home.

The Lord Priors had decided that the most appropriate place for Savonarola’s return to the pulpit should be the Duomo, in order to accommodate the anticipated crowd; but when Francesco and I entered the cathedral, I was startled to discover it less than half full. Not everyone, it seemed, was eager to risk the possibility of excommunication by a wrathful Pope.

Francesco’s decision to attend the sermon provoked my curiosity. After the execution of the five Bigi, he had grown guarded where the subject of Savonarola was concerned. He no longer crowed about the successes of the piagnoni or spoke glowingly of the prophet, and when Agrippina let slip a critical remark about the friar, he said not a word. But our attendance at this defiant sermon