The Marriage Portrait(5)
The First Tiger in Tuscany
Palazzo, Florence, 1552
A foreign dignitary arrived in Florence, presenting the Grand Duke with a painting of a tiger. Cosimo was very taken with the gift and it wasn’t long before he expressed a desire to own one of these vicious, singular beasts. He kept a menagerie in the basement of his palazzo, for the diversion of visitors, and he felt that a tiger would be an excellent addition to his collection.
He gave an order to his consigliere ducale, Vitelli, that a tiger must be found, captured and brought to Florence. Vitelli, who had foreseen such an outcome ever since the painting arrived at court, heaved a deep and private sigh, duly making a note in his ledger. He hoped that the Grand Duke might be persuaded against the plan or even forget it, occupied as they were at that time by republican unrest in Siena.
Cosimo, however, refused to comply with Vitelli’s secret hope.
“What progress on the tiger?” he asked one day, without warning, as he stood on the terrace, readying himself to leave for his daily exercise, removing his lucco, and strapping on his weapons. Vitelli, caught off-guard, fumbled with the fastening of his ledger and managed to mumble something about difficulties with certain nautical routes from the east. Cosimo was not fooled. He fixed Vitelli with his left eye, while his errant right eye looked off to the side, at a place just beyond where Vitelli stood.
“I am disappointed to hear that,” Cosimo said, as he slid first one then two sheathed daggers into his boots, as was his habit when he was intending to step outside the palazzo walls. “Greatly disappointed. As you know, the enclosure in the basement is all prepared: it has been swept clean, the bars reinforced.” He accepted a leather belt from a servant beside him, and fastened it around his waist. “Such a pity that it lies empty. Something—or someone—will have to occupy it.”
Cosimo lifted his sword, a light and lithe one with a decorated blade that Vitelli knew he particularly liked. He swished it through the air and, for a brief moment, both of Cosimo’s eyes, alight with steely amusement, landed on Vitelli.
The Grand Duke inserted the sword into the scabbard on his belt and left the terrace; Vitelli heard him descend the stairs with a flurry of purposeful strides. Behind Vitelli, the secretaries were rustling and murmuring, agog, he suspected, to have witnessed this little display—he heard, distinctly, one smothering a titter.
“Back to work,” Vitelli snapped, bringing his palms together in a loud clap. “All of you.”
The secretaries slunk away, and Vitelli headed for his desk, where he sat down heavily, brooding for a moment, before drawing his ink and pen towards him.
The Grand Duke’s peculiar fancy for a tiger was communicated to an emissary, and then an ambassador, a sea captain, a silk merchant, an adviser to a sultan, a viceroy, a spice trader, an under-secretary in a maharajah’s palace, the maharajah’s cousin, the maharajah himself, his wife, his son, then back to the under-secretary, and on to a band of soldiers, then the villagers in a remote part of Bengal.
Captured, netted and tied to a pole, the tiger journeyed from its place of heat and rain and foliage. It spent weeks and months at sea, below deck, in a dank and salt-crusted hold, before being delivered to the dockside in Livorno. From there, it was conveyed inland in a wooden cage lashed to a cart, pulled by six terrified mules.
When Vitelli heard that the convoy carrying the beast was nearing Florence, he sent word that they must wait outside the city walls until darkness. Do not, Vitelli instructed them, on any account bring it through the city in daylight; pull the cart into a thickly wooded place and stay there, concealed, until nightfall.
A tiger, Vitelli knew, had never before been seen in Florence. People would jostle and scream to behold such a creature in their midst; ladies would faint from the shock; young men might compete with each other to goad it as it passed them in its cage, might poke it with sticks and spears. And what if the animal became enraged and perhaps burst its bonds? It could run amok through the streets, devouring children and citizens. Better, Vitelli decided, to wait for the dim hours after midnight: no one would hear them; no one would ever find out.
Except for little Lucrezia, tucked into a bed with both her sisters in a room under the eaves of the palazzo roof. Lucrezia of the solemn gaze and pale, wispy hair—incongruously so, for all her siblings had the sleek, fox-dark colouring of their Spanish mamma. Lucrezia, who was slight and small for her age, and was every night shunted to the edge of the mattress by Maria, the eldest, who had sharp elbows and a predilection for lying in the centre of the bed with all her limbs stretched out. Lucrezia, who always had trouble sleeping.
She, alone, heard the tigress’s cry as the cart entered the palazzo gates: a low, hollow call, like wind funnelled through a pipe. It severed the night with its mournful pitch—once, twice—before dying away in a hoarse rumble.
Lucrezia sat up in bed, as abruptly as if she had been stuck with a needle. What was that noise, the unfamiliar cry that had reached down into her dream and shaken her awake? She turned her head one way, she turned it the other.
She had extraordinarily sensitive hearing: she could hear what was being said, sometimes, on the floor below, or at the other end of the largest state room. The palazzo was a place of strange acoustics, with sound and vibrations, whispers and footsteps journeying along joists, behind the marble reliefs, up the spines of statues, through the bubbling waters of the fountains. Lucrezia, even aged seven, found that if she pressed the outer folds of her ear to the panelling or the frame of a door, it was possible to find out all sorts of things. The ordination of a cardinal, for example, the expected arrival of another sibling, the presence of a foreign army on the far side of the river, the sudden death of an enemy on the streets of Verona or a tigress due to arrive any day. These conversations, never meant for her, snaked into her head to take root there.