Epilogue

I beg your pardon. I am a mountain tiger.

TIGERS ARE SOLITARY CREATURES. I KNOW SOME OF YOU might prefer to hear that Leonardo and I lived happily ever after, perhaps together. That was not our history. What mattered were our conversations as he painted me and what we created in my portrait. In it, he found his artistic voice, his vision. In it, I live on to speak to you, about myself, about the treasure inside women’s hearts and minds.

Like the sultan who brought the Caspian mountain tiger to Venice and enchanted people of that city to look and wonder, write and sing, Leonardo and I made the people of our time realize there was much to be seen and learned about the person of a woman, behind her gaze—if you met and entered it. The outcome of such an exploration cannot be predefined or controlled. It is full of surprises, and yes, marvelous contradictions.

I beg your pardon. I am a mountain tiger.

Lorenzo de’ Medici did survive the Pazzi revolt. After days of horrendous violence in which scores of people were butchered by the mob, Florence calmed and seemed even more devoted to the Medici rule. Lorenzo continued to be the great arbiter of taste and culture in Florence until his death in 1492, the patron who nurtured one of the greatest, most productive periods in the history of art. So many legendary artists blossomed during the Medici family reign—Donatello, Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Verrocchio, Ghiberti, Pollaiuolo, Ghirlandaio, and, of course, Leonardo da Vinci.

Sadly, though, Lorenzo’s interest in Leonardo faded, especially after Giuliano’s death. Other patrons employed him, but always distracted with a thousand new ideas all at the same time, Leonardo took too long to complete his paintings. Soon the commissions dried up like oil paint left out too long—there were so many other gifted artists in Florence willing to keep to a deadline and who were more, shall we say, agreeable to following directions.

His truest friend and ally, Verrocchio, left for Venice to create an equestrian monument to General Bartolomeo Colleoni, thanks to Bernardo Bembo’s influence with the committee choosing the artist. And a young Michelangelo became the talk of Florence.

Leonardo needed a new stage, a fresh start.

He moved to Milan, arriving as a musician, an emissary of goodwill from Lorenzo the Magnificent, carrying a horse-head lyre Leonardo had carved himself. There he served primarily as an engineer. After showing Duke Ludovico Sforza his designs for war machines and water hydraulics, Leonardo embarked on one of his other great loves—inventing.

From that his fame, and his artistic wings, grew.

Leonardo did not depart Florence without leaving behind precious reminders for me. He entrusted my brother with the safekeeping of an unfinished Adoration of the Magi, astounding in its composition—thick with men crowding forward in amazement, horses nervous and agitated. Mary sits in the absolute center, calm, smiling down on her baby boy, who reaches gleefully for a jeweled chalice a Magi holds up toward him.

“You know, sister,” Giovanni said one day, “I swear I see some of you in that Madonna’s face.”

The loveliest part of the scene, however, was what I took to be Leonardo’s self-portrait—a youthful shepherd in the bottom right corner, his gaze turned outward to the viewer, while his inside arm points to Mary as if to say, “Look! Look what I can paint.”

I would stand in front of it and remember it all, including that kiss.

I continued to write and to come in and out of the sanctuary of Le Murate, relishing its quietude, which always seemed to open the floodgates of my verse, enjoying the conversation of women who did not hold back their opinions for fear of what men across the table might think. When I visited my brother and his children, I delighted in playing and reading with them, and encouraging their little souls to sing out—loudly.

So where are my poems? There, too, I followed my mentor, Abbess Scolastica. I took them with me, as a reminder of this good earth, this miraculous life of ours. Just as I had tucked her embroidery into Scolastica’s coffin, Sancha, then old but still fiercely loyal, slipped them under my dress as I lay in state in my casket.

Besides, I prefer you come to know me as Leonardo wanted, through the gaze he inspired and captured. And the one line of verse that remains says enough.

I beg your pardon. I am a mountain tiger.