The Ruby Ring Read online

  Michelangelo was a sullen and temperamental sort who not only resented Raphael’s way with women, but the ease with which he apparently found more wealthy and powerful benefactors than he could accept. When the Medici pope, Leo X, had been elected a year ago, Raphael was offered the first, and best, commissions from him. To Michelangelo, who had been a great personal friend to the previous pontiff, nothing of value was offered. Eight months ago, he had left Rome. Now, apparently, with Raphael overburdened, overworked, and behind schedule, he had returned.

  Raphael found himself waiting alone on a cold stone bench outside the stanza that he had personally designed, and where his own crew of assistants was still painting. He glanced down the long vaulted corridor, delicately frescoed with intricate images from the Bible. Raphael’s smooth Umbrian complexion had mottled red when the tall painted oak door finally opened. Michelangelo, in white nether hose, a black velvet doublet, a cape, and a toque, swept out before him, then paused.

  He had aged, Raphael was startled to see. Michelangelo’s hair now was shot with gray, and his deep ebony eyes had dimmed and sunken deeply into a gaunt and withered face, all punctuated by a smashed little nose that had been badly broken years earlier. Raphael stood as they greeted one another coolly, yet with the familiarity of those who possess a deep history. “I might have known you would be here, Signor Sanzio.”

  “It is more than I can say for you—Signor Buonarroti.”

  Michelangelo grinned cautiously at that. His unmoving eyes were weary. “Ever the quick one, eh, Raffaello mio? Life and work are always such a game to you.”

  “My life, perhaps. But you, of all men, should know how seriously I take my commissions.”

  “It is that which separates us, Raphael. To me it is love of the work that moves me. To you, it is love of all that the commission brings you.”

  “That is not all that separates us,” Raphael said angrily. “I, for example, would never have left Rome only because of a change in patronage. That certainly is being moved by something other than the work!”

  Michelangelo lowered his gaze. “Well, Raffaello, I will say this: You and I are really nothing at all alike. That is absolutely certain.”

  Looking at the aging artist before him, slightly stooped, his long hands, through which so much talent flowed, now veined and gnarled, Raphael felt an unexpected stab of sympathy. Such utter brilliance in one man. A talent bestowed by God, like his own. There were so few on this earth who spoke their language, who understood the passion and the frustration of living so closely to one’s art. How then had they ever become such bitter rivals?

  “Will you remain in Rome?” Raphael found himself asking.

  “I came to the city only to personally beseech the Holy Father for news on the progress of funding for Pope Julius’s tomb.”

  “You are still going to do that?” Raphael was surprised. In spite of the friendship between Michelangelo and the previous pontiff, it seemed unwise to badger an unsympathetic successor about a monument to immortalize his predecessor.

  “It shall remain my life’s primary goal,” said Michelangelo with unshakable commitment, “to build a lasting monument to a Holy Father like no other.”

  In the quiet depth of the massive hall, with only the stone-faced guards around them, Raphael shrugged. He did not entirely believe it. There had been rumblings for days that with the pontiff’s impatience had come a quiet search for new artists to continue the grand commissions—help for Pope Leo to realize his own legacy.

  “I wish you good fortune with it then,” said Raphael, nodding deeply.

  “And I you, Raffaello mio. If you can get out of the way of yourself, I expect you shall find your true place in history. But you have always been your own worst enemy, you know.”

  “And your greatest nemesis.”

  “It is true that if I am able to defeat you in the eyes of the Holy Father, winning back the lion’s share of papal commissions, I shall do it in a heartbeat, so beware.”

  What Michelangelo meant was that he would try to do it with the help of his unscrupulous protg, Sebastiano Luciani. Now that was a name that caused the hair on the back of Raphael’s neck to stand on end. Sebastiano was a young painter who envied Raphael almost as much as his master did. Sebastiano certainly had talent on his side. But his unchecked ambition was against him.

  They had been pitted against one another once before at the grand villa of the wealthy banker, the pope’s great friend and benefactor, Agostino Chigi. When Raphael received a commission for a large, decorative panel depicting the sea nymph, Galatea, for an expansive salon that faced the Tiber, it was Sebastiano Luciani who received a companion commission to paint a large panel of his own directly beside it. Once the two panels were complete, Chigi released Sebastiano from further commissions, and hired Raphael exclusively to work in the villa and to ornament his family’s two private chapels. It was the beginning of open warfare.

  “I shall consider myself warned,” said Raphael.

  The rivals nodded to one another as though their dialogue had been the most civil of exchanges, and with that Michelangelo swept past him. But not before he left Raphael with a sense of foreboding. His critics were correct, he feared, as he was motioned into the pope’s chamber. As Michelangelo predicted, he might well find only himself to blame for his own undoing.

  “HOLY FATHER,” Raphael knelt and kissed the ring on the bulging finger of the Medici pope, enthroned on a crimson-draped dais and garbed in stiff and elegant white silk. A skullcap was perched at the back of his balding head and across his shoulders was an ermine-trimmed cape of crimson-colored velvet. Around the pontiff a collection of cassock-clad cardinals, bishops, secretaries, and emissaries gathered. They stood both in protection and judgment while, across the room, a boy sat on a tufted cassock, lightly strumming a lute for the pontiff’s pleasure. Behind him, another stood holding a silver tray piled with marzipan, pastries of pine nuts and sugar, Eastern sweetmeats, and other delectables topped with little clouds of whipped cream.

  This was the second major room Raphael had been commissioned to decorate in the Vatican. Begun for Pope Julius II, this stanza, expansive and grand, with great high ceilings, was the private receiving room in which the pontiff welcomed dignitaries. But the grandeur of these commissions, and the urgency to see them completed, signaled something far more than a love of art. Since these men of the Church could not have children—at least not ones they could openly acknowledge—these exquisite works, done especially for each of them, would give them an immortality nothing else could. It was their only legacy, and the scheme for many was to manipulate however—and whoever—necessary to see that legacy made reality.

  Still incomplete, the walls of this second room were steadily being covered with intricate, evocative, and passionately colorful scenes from different chapters in the history of the Church. Raphael and his team of assistants had grandly depicted the Expulsion of Heliodorus, the Mass of Bolsena, and, in their final panel, now half finished, the Repulse of Attila, in which an image of Pope Leo himself was to be immortalized. It was intentional, Raphael knew, as he was ushered into this room, that the scaffolding and drapery sheeting in the unfinished area had been cleared away.

  “I bid Your Holiness, forgive my delay. But at last I have found the perfect Madonna for your panel for the church at San Sisto.”

  The pope lifted a jeweled hand and swatted at the air. He was unimpressed. The Madonna had been commissioned by his predecessor, Julius II, and Pope Leo had other works—his own ideas—that had come to concern him far more.

  Breathing heavily, the pontiff ran a hand down the rotund expanse of his white damask cassock as he, too, gazed up at one of the ceiling images, that of God Appearing to Noah. His face was full and pasty, his lips like a pink rosebud stuffed into the folds above his chin. But the eyes, limpid blue, bore a kindness that had won Raphael’s personal allegiance quickly. A moment later, he sank back into the gold and jewel-encrusted throne, covered over in cr
imson silk.

  “So tell me, Raffaello.” He stroked his chin, then reached for a rich, sugary pastry from the glistening silver tray poised beside him. “What are your thoughts on our increasingly tenuous position with France now that the new young, and very ambitious, Franois is poised to be crowned king? Certainly you know even now, before the death of the old king, he is attempting to form an alliance with Spain in order to gain strength against Henry in England. He would like us allied with him in that.”

  Raphael was surprised, and taken off guard—the desired effect, he assumed. Politics? he thought. What on earth has that to do with me? “I would not dare to offer an opinion on something so important,” he cautiously replied.

  “Nonsense. You are among our inner circle here,” Pope Leo nodded, doubling his chin. “And from time to time all of my most intimate members have been called upon to offer keen insight in matters to which I have become too close.”

  “Your Holiness knows I am but a simple artist, unqualified to advise someone so great and learned as yourself on matters of state.”

  “Ah, but your art betrays you, my son.” He smiled patiently. “Nobility has always come through your paintbrush, as in the grand motif of church history you have brought to life here in our midst.” The pope glanced around them, as if to punctuate his point. “I therefore desire not advice on the matter, but rather your own noble observations.”

  Raphael knew, as did everyone within the papal sphere, that Pope Leo wished to remain neutral in the political firestorm for power brewing between France’s young heir, Emperor Maximilian, and Henry VIII in England. Not yet king, nevertheless Franois was endeavoring to form a pact with Spain to obtain Milan and Genoa by matrimonial alliance. He also knew how vexed the pontiff was over what to do in the matter. Pope Leo was a peaceful man, and his prime concern was the independence of the Holy See, and the freedom of Italy.

  Knowing this, with the greatest care, Raphael said, “Then, if I am to be tested in this way, Holy Father, I would say that one is prudent to sail with two compasses. Negotiation on all sides for as long as possible seems the most judicious course in any difficulty if peace is the objective.”

  “Very well said indeed, my son.” The pope’s rosebud lips lengthened into a more pleased smile. “The truth of the matter,” he conceded a moment later, leaning forward, as if in confidence, “is that this small test was prompted not by me but by Bibbiena.”

  That surprised Raphael. Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena had been his first ally at the Vatican, even before Leo ascended to the papacy, and before Raphael had become betrothed to the cardinal’s niece. It was, in fact, Bibbiena’s loggia that had inspired the new pope to commission one of his own, decorated by Raphael, based on the unearthed palace of Nero, called the Domus Aurea.

  “His Grace, the cardinal, wonders if perhaps the reason you have yet to marry Maria, after so lengthy a period of betrothal, is because you are not the man of the world you presented yourself to be. And that if you are not qualified to marry his niece, the power and access bestowed upon you here has been in error.”

  I have not married Maria Bibbiena because I do not love her, nor can I ever. Knowing that, I can only hurt her, and she does deserve better than a man who sees opportunity in every other woman he meets, and generally partakes of it . . .

  “I am saddened to hear that after living among you like this for so many months, my actions alone have not been proof enough of the man I am,” Raphael said instead, his mind filling quickly with images of the thin, pale, and consumptive niece who rarely smiled or spoke.

  “You know you have become like a son to me, Raffaello, and care though I do for Bernardo, I cannot bear to think that he might be correct in this, that his Maria is . . . well, that she is too far above you.”

  So the sudden examination of current events was apparently the pope’s convoluted way of coming to the true heart of the matter. To, as it were, frighten him into submission. Nor was it a coincidence that he had been summoned to this particular room that, by his hand, remained incomplete for a full year. Or that his greatest rival had been received here first.

  So that was what this was about. Not only a censure, and to remind him of his place, but a visual warning of just who would swiftly be there to take over the stanza projects—if he failed to put himself back on track.

  There were some truths on both sides, and Raphael was determined to have confidence enough to see that through. “I have come to realize that to go through with marriage to Signorina Bibbiena would be the gravest of errors for us both.”

  Still the pope was calm. “But did you not, of your own accord, promise yourself to that very young lady of his family whom His Grace offered to you in marriage?”

  It seemed a lifetime ago now, and he, someone else entirely. “These past years, Signorina Bibbiena and I have only grown apart, Holy Father.”

  “We speak of a marriage, Raffaello mio, not some frivolous random matter of the heart! Is it not business for those of the world like ourselves? Bibbiena, who brought you before me, has been good to you, and you have benefited greatly from your association with him and his niece, not to mention, dare we say, with your Holy Father.” He then lowered his watery, bulging-eyed gaze powerfully on Raphael. “No other artist in all the world is on the brink of marrying so high as you are!”

  “But, tell me, Holy Father, as payment, do I owe the cardinal my soul?”

  It surprised Raphael that the pope gave him a fat, wet-lipped smile. “Your freedom, my boy. Only just that.”

  “I cannot give him that!”

  “Santissima Maria! What is it that you do wish?”

  “To be free of my promise to marry Maria.”

  “And that is the one thing, dear Raffaello mio, that is not mine to give you. Nor, for the sake of good Bibbiena’s honor, would I if I could.” A moment later, in the echo of a strained silence, he said, “Michelangelo Buonarroti has just left us.”

  “We exchanged our greetings as he departed.”

  The pontiff brought his gaze back to Raphael. His full face held a sheen of perspiration, but there was something more in the bulging blue eyes and contrite smile. There had been something underlying in the comment, and the addition of his greatest rival to the conversation. “Did you ask Michelangelo if he had come to Rome to steal your commissions from you?”

  Raphael lifted a brow. He felt his jaw tighten. He waited, one beat then two, cautiously choosing the words, and the tone in which he spoke them. Their normally easy manner with one another had swiftly changed. “Did he come to Rome for that, Your Holiness?”

  “If he did not tell you, then perhaps it would be best for you to be left to wonder for a while, as it seems a good means of returning you to the focus of your work, and to remembering from where it originates.”

  Raphael shrank back a half step, surprised at the frankness of the pontiff whose custom it was to be jovial and affectionate with him. “Holy Father, has my work displeased you in some way?”

  “Only your lack of it, Raffaello mio. Of the outstanding commissions you hold, I am distressed to see that only the drawings of the stufetta for Bibbiena are near completion. And I trust you shall understand my intemperance in being disregarded so that you may begin another Madonna, no matter how magnificent the model. It does tend to chafe at a pontiff waiting for his own official portrait to be complete.”

  “At your suggestion only, Holy Father, I have searched for the model these months to complete the commission. I have also had my work at the Chigi funeral chapel, and now, as well, Signor Chigi is pleased enough with my past work to have enlarged his latest request. He has now included a mosaic ceiling to his family’s private chapel. And forgive me for saying that everything seems to have the same deadline of yesterday!”

  “Much of it is work, in the initial stages at least, for your many assistants, non?”

  “The execution, perhaps, Your Holiness, but the concept and structure rest solely with me.”

  “Perhaps
a new perspective . . . another artist with a bit of youthful vigor to lend you a hand?”

  Raphael kept on with his caution. He saw quickly where this was going. “Has Your Holiness someone in mind?”

  He scratched his shining chin and the jewels on his fingers glinted in the light. “Michelangelo tells me that his good friend Sebastiano Luciani would be willing to consult on this room.”

  The pope was a patient and generous man but he was also a Medici, not given to fully revealing his allegiances to any one in particular. Raphael felt trapped suddenly by that, by his own waning ambition, and by something unexplainable that was drawing him away from the torrent of work before him. He leaned forward and clasped his hands.

  “Before I do anything more, this room shall be complete for your more formal audience after Mass on Sunday, if I must work without sleep to make it so. I will need no more assistance on it than that which I already have. And”—he held his arm out flamboyantly, charmingly—“as a crowning glory, a symbol of my indebtedness to you for your patronage—and your most gracious indulgence of me—I shall bring Your Holiness the first sketches for the most glorious, innovative Madonna you can imagine, within a fortnight, and they as well shall be my personal gift to you!”

  “This chamber complete?” he pointed, each breath heavy, labored. “Finally, by Sunday?”