Status Updates From The Subtlest Soul

It is possible that he was poisoned, for no pope is without enemies, and Pope Pius had a desperate and bold one in Pandolfo Petrucci. But I prefer to think that God, having selected him as his vicar, then took pity on him and gathered him to heaven before he had a chance to imperil his soul through long exercise of the office of pope.

The coup was a bold one, and worthy of the duke, who had clearly not lost his wits with his sickness. By the time Christendom became aware it was fatherless, its coffers had already been picked dry.

Messer Leonardo was in Florence at this time, as I had learned at Cardinal Giovanni’s, having been lured into an artistic duel with the young master Michelangelo, whose talents as a painter were apparently as remarkable as his skills as a forger of antiquities.

Messer Leonardo had supplied the courier who brought it with a caricature he had drawn of me, to ensure that he found the correct recipient. It made me laugh, for although it was marvelously unflattering, the likeness was sufficient for it to be clear that it was a portrait of me.

”The butcher of Fermo wants a title,” he [Valentino] said, addressing Don Michelotto, who was seated by the fire, cracking walnuts into a silver basin and observing us. “Do you think marquis would do?” “Not a chance. A man of his stature. Duke at the very least.”

This was a great weakness of the conspirators, that they were bandits at heart. They considered themselves strategists and generals, but they were as easily distracted as magpies if they caught a glint of silver to the left or the right.

I was to help oversee the inventorying and packing of the great library of the dukes of Urbino. This was an extraordinary collection, one of the finest in Europe, famed especially for its remarkable manuscripts. Duke Federico, who assembled it, had no time for printed books, thinking it beneath the dignity of a ruler to sully his eyes with volumes a commoner might have on his shelf.

It may sound from what I have been saying that Messer Niccolò disdained the duke, but this was not true. He had much admiration for him. He saw in him a vastness of ambition and a relentlessness that carried a whiff of the ancient heroes of Rome. I remember he spoke much of the speed of Valentino’s march on Urbino, which was like that of some great carnivore.

This was Liverotto’s vindication, as he saw it. If he had not had the foresight to expunge every last drop of della Rovere blood from the city of Fermo through his killings, we would have risked suffering the fate of Urbino and becoming prey to a foreign tyrant. Instead, through his prudence, we had the patriotic consolation of being tyrannized over by a man of our own soil.

You can read of tyrannies in history and know in your mind that these things happen, but nothing can prepare you for the shock of finding yourself amid these atrocities. It is like the difference (I imagine) between reading the Inferno of Dante and feeling those dark gates close behind you yourself.

Messer Leonardo’s drawing was a thing of great beauty. I can see it very well in my memory: my young, shadowy, dreamy-eyed face. I do not have it now. I sold it to a connoisseur in Rome a few years after the time of this history.

When I entered his room at the Castel Sant’Angelo, Valentino was with his doctors...two swollen black leeches at the base of his neck, supping greedily on his blood. He looked murderously at me and abused me for having conducted my mission so ill...In his fury, he tore a leech off his neck and hurled it at me...the creature splattered hideously against a tapestry, covering a bucolic scene with an explosion of blood.

The only means to get in was to be lowered down a narrow cleft on a board strung from ropes and then to grope through the underground passageways by candlelight...We breathed it in wonderingly...Nero had been here, in this same room, fourteen hundred years before...
Nero's Golden House, Rome:

a letter arrived for me from Messer Leonardo. It was tied tightly with string, with a seal over the knot, and my name written in ink of a strange purplish hue. Messer Leonardo had supplied the courier who brought it with a caricature he had drawn of me, to ensure that he found the correct recipient...although it was marvelously unflattering, the likeness was sufficient for it to be clear that it was a portrait of me.

After I had been in Valentino’s service some months, I was employed..to help oversee the inventorying of the library of the dukes of Urbino...This was an extraordinary collection...famed especially for its remarkable manuscripts. Duke Federico, who assembled it, had no time for printed books, thinking it beneath the dignity of a ruler to sully his eyes to sully his eyes with volumes a commoner might have on his shelf

The day Messer Niccolò left, I was finally summoned to my audience with the duke...Duke Valentino received me in a handsome room on the uppermost floor of the palace, hung with tapestries representing scenes of hunting. He greeted me distantly..

Cesare Borgia, Duke Valentino by Altobello Melone

a sharp-eyed youth from my escort spurred up alongside me to say he thought he had seen a pair of feet in a thicket...we found nothing more fearsome than two living men, bound tightly hand and foot...I told my men to release them and untie their gags...
“God’s cunt, potta di Dio”...was the first phrase that issued from his mouth. This was my first meeting with the Florentine envoy, Messer Niccolò Machiavelli...

We won our audience with Pope Alexander, and I had the chance to bend my knee before the man whom many thought the Antichrist in person. He received us in a room in the Vatican, in the new series of apartments he had built for himself...of great splendor...adorned in paintings of wondrous brilliance.

Pinturicchio 1494

Our mission was a delicate one: to persuade Pope Alexander to recognize the new regime in Fermo without allowing him to extract more in recompense for this service than Liverotto’s stretched finances could afford.
Reading this while visiting the ducal palace in Mantua where the Gonzaga wrested control of the city from the Bonacolsi and then had to obtain papal recognition makes for interesting parallels.

“What do you see when you look at all this?” I looked down on the...peasants going about their labors, at a loss as to how to answer this strange question. “Five hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, we would have seen this same scene, essentially unchanged.” Leonardo sounded indignant. “How do you think it will look in five hundred years’ time? Things will be so changed we can barely encompass them with our mind.

a remarkable-looking man...had caught my attention...He looked as you might imagine the wizards of romance. He was wearing a robe in a lurid purplish color and a white fur tippet round his neck, ending in what looked like two desiccated snakes’ heads set in silver. His fine-featured face was surrounded by a great flowing mass of gray hair and a long beard that fell to his breast.
“Messer Leonardo,” the lady said