Free Leonardo's Swans by Karen Essex Page A

cadavers if I left him to his own pursuits.”
    “But why?” Beatrice asked. She and Isabella suddenly huddled together, as if it would give them protection from this grisly news.
    “Why, to learn of organs and veins! That is what he says. He says that if he had been allowed, he would have devoted his life to learning the workings of the body’s interior and not the glorification of its exterior. Thank God he was born a bastard not allowed to study either law or medicine. If his father had not been an indiscreet youth, this great artist would be lancing sores on the legs of plague victims!”
    “He paints the exterior,” Beatrice offered. “Why must he study the interior?”
    “He is a medical man at heart, my dear. Oh, he is many things, but especially that. He has spent far too many hours drawing replications of organs, veins, limbs, and even one of a baby dead in the womb, when he should have been giving his mind to making the Castello at Milan a marvel for your eyes at our wedding.” Ludovico smiled at his young bride, giving her a little nod. As he lowered his face, she felt his eyes roam the length of her from tip to toe. It was a suggestive glance, the first indication of romance to come, or so she hoped. “You must see some of these drawings, for they are as extraordinary as they are macabre.”
    “I do not think I would like to see such things, Your Excellency,” Beatrice said. She cannot think of what else to call him. When in public and in letters, her parents used such titles with one another as well. “Death comes to too many babies in the womb. It cannot be good luck to look upon such a thing.”
    She wanted him to know that she would never jeopardize a child of his in her womb by looking at a dead fetus.
    “Perhaps in exploring the interior of the body, he is searching for its essence, that ineffable thing that animates the eyes, the expression, the gestures. Perhaps he is looking for the soul,” Isabella offered.
    Ludovico paused, cocking his head to the side, giving Isabella’s idea what seemed to Beatrice like a very long consideration. “Madame, when you meet him and speak with him, and when you see his paintings, I believe it will give confirmation to your theory. He is as much a philosopher as he is an artist or builder or man of anatomy. It would be just like him to open up a body in search of a soul.”
    Beatrice did not like the way that Ludovico kept looking at Isabella as if she had just forged some pathway in his mind, had illuminated a road of thought for him that he had been trying to find on his own. Beatrice could see by some uncomfortable change in her mother’s face that Leonora had observed this too. How could this be? There was no Cecilia Gallerani in sight, but it was as if her own sister was trying to usurp her. Just a few hours ago, Beatrice believed that she had captured her husband’s attention, and now it was seeping away, leaving her cold, as if the hot draft that had begun to warm her bones was suddenly redirected toward her sister.

FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF LEONARDO:
You have named painting among the mechanical arts! Truly, if painters were as equipped as poets to praise their own work with the written word, I doubt whether painting would ever have to be so defiled with such a description. You call it mechanical because it is by manual work that the hands represent what the imagination creates. Aren’t you writers setting down your words with the pen? Is that not mechanical? If you call it mechanical because it is done for money, who is more guilty of this error—if indeed it is an error—than you writers? If you lecture for the schools or academies, do you not go to whoever pays you the most? Do you do any work without monetary reward?
If you say that poetry is more everlasting than painting, to this I would reply that the works of a smith are more enduring still, since time preserves them longer than either your words or paintings; nevertheless, they show little