December 20th, Day of Saint Dominic of Silos.
Months ago, quite by accident, I discovered in my study a hidden spyhole in the oak panelling by the alcove in which my desk is situated. This cleverly constructed contrivance has allowed me, at all hours, to keep watch upon my studio, which is situated on the floor directly below.
The studio is a well-appointed, warm and spacious room, brightly lit by several large windows. I must maintain the strictest vigilance over it as it contains my instruments, a good number of my drawings, books and notebooks, rare curiosities, my paints, brushes, and above all, several of my paintings.
As I sit here today devising machines and decorations for the king’s entertainment, I cannot help but peer occasionally into this cleverly placed hole where, today, I observe Salai at work.
At this moment, he is making a silverpoint drawing of Angelique, his favourite model. This girl is seventeen, slim and muscular. She has long red hair and beautiful rustic features that are enhanced, I notice, because Salai has remembered to wipe her face with a clean, wet cloth – something with which she seems wholly unacquainted, being of lowly peasant stock. Still, Nature had granted her ample beauty, some intelligence and the willingness to satisfy Salai’s considerable carnal appetite.
*
Three scudi for the payment of Angelique.
*
December 21st, Saint Micah’s Day.
Francesco is Apollo to Salai’s Bacchus. I often find the former reading Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio while Salai reads nothing but the vilest specimens of the coarsest humour he can find and tracts illustrating the basest of human obscenities.
“It is erotica, Maestro”, he chides me, “not pornography. Surely a man of your boundless wisdom and erudition can appreciate the difference.”
But I say nothing. I merely smile, shake my head and walk away. I love them both dearly, better than if they were my own sons, but they are as night and day.
*
Pitiful are they who live long enough to become as their children’s children.
December 22nd, Saint Flavian’s Day.
Not wishing to be disturbed, shortly after dawn, I asked my servant Baptista to inform the household that I would be departing early to visit the gardens of the Chateau d’Amboise. In fact, I was determined to work on my treatise concerning storms. Having had several ideas come to me in the course of the night, I was eager to set these down as best I could considering the deteriorating condition of my hands. I also resolved to work on the accompanying drawings illustrating deluges of water. Of these, there will be ten.
I worked diligently until mid-morning when my attention was diverted by noises from the studio below. I recognised the sound of an easel being adjusted, paper being unrolled and then feminine laughter. It seemed that the alluring Angelique was once again to pose for Salai.
I returned my attention to drawing, delineating the contours of waves, torrents, eddies and vortices such as I had observed lately in the waters of the Loire and upon many previous occasions in Tuscany, in the Duchy of Milan and in a diversity of other places.
After a further hour had passed, I paused and removed the covering of the spyhole. There, in the middle of the room below, Salai had dragged a low couch upon which lay the naked Angelique. Behind him on the easel was a sheet of studies. Some showed her as Flora, some as Minerva, but most depicted her breasts, her ass and her cunt – all words that amply befit her.
Salai had long forgotten her as a subject. Now she was merely his object. He, too, was naked, showing his beautiful, perfectly proportioned body. Here indeed was my Bacchus incarnate.
Kneeling between her spread legs and laughing lewdly, he lapped and prodded her cunt with his long tongue. She responded with moans and by pressing his face deeper and deeper into her torrid folds.
The doors may have been locked, but the curtains were drawn, and it struck me that here was procreation without any hint of shame, fucking as Salai would have called it. His lips and tongue sated, he next knelt on the edge of the couch and pulled Angelique by the hair towards his rapidly hardening cock. She giggled girlishly but only for an instant as her mouth was soon filled to capacity. I am no stranger to Salai’s cock, and here he used it as though he were a bull or a stallion. Bucking and thrusting, throwing his long hair back again and again as lust begat desire, desire begat passion and passion overwhelmed all shame and restraint. Truly, this was a vision of man before the fall. I could not look away.
Now the girl pulled her face back, exposing his long, glistening shaft to the morning sunlight. She whispered something in French, and he playfully slapped her cheeks twice. She laughed and slid back as nimbly as a salamander in the flames, arching her back and bending her knees. Salai needed no further encouragement. He lunged forward and impaled her with his cock. It disappeared into her flaming crimson mound like a dolphin into the deep. She rapidly encircled his hips with her legs and held him tight. I thrilled to the energetic dance of muscled flesh which followed – surely this was Nature at her most primal, her most pure, her most honest.
On and on their lusty revels went. They changed angle and position several times until she rode him like a nymph savouring her satyr lover’s adamantine shaft. Her breasts bounced and heaved as his hands pressed into her hips, leaving white streaks where they had been. Finally, it was time for the denouement, as the French say. Salai retraced his lance and stood upon the floor. He gathered her up, and again she eagerly wrapped her legs around him ivy-like.
Now the beast that was Salai was finally freed. He gripped her throat, pulled her head back by her crimson locks and thrust so hard, so long, and so deep into her fecund depths that he became a blur before my eye. Seconds later, she screamed in ecstasy, convulsing and shivering, just as the wild dictates of Nature decreed. He slowed at last, and I saw his sly smile. Was the beast in him sated? No, for after the girl had ceased to shiver, Salai resumed his thrusting, grunting the whole time as though the faculty of speech had abandoned him. I counted ten thrusts before he withdrew, whereupon she grasped his cock and pumped its entire length. Like a harquebus in the heat of battle, he fired his seed in long, thick white streams all over her chest, neck and face. Finally, he howled like the Alpine wolf that he is and collapsed exhausted next to her.
Covering the spy hole, I reached for my anatomy notebook. This night, I had much to write.
December 23rd, the day of Saint Migdonius of Rome.
When my fellow artists honour me and call me master, my overwhelming desire is to remind them that I am but a humble disciple of Nature. It is she who is the true mistress of all masters.
*
In two days, the house will fill with the smell of roast goose and with the piquant aromas of those diverse and exotic dishes with which his most illustrious majesty, King François, often honours us. As usual, I will be content with bread, a bowl or two of Donna Maturina’s Tuscan minestrone and perhaps a pair of hard-boiled eggs with peppered pine-nuts.
*
The years take their toll, and paralysis increasingly afflicts me, but still, my regrets are few. It has been my desire these several weeks past to complete my panel of St John the Baptist, but my hands scarcely obey me, and at times I can barely even write. Though I have said nothing, these are facts well known to both Francesco and Salai. I have often said to them that art is never finished, only abandoned, yet my constant staring at the saint’s figure and my worried countenance belie that dictum.
This morning, they bestowed a great mercy upon me. After my gentle Maturina had bathed me, they entered my rooms and informed me that together, we would complete the work. They dressed me, fed me and between them conveyed my frail body to the studio. There, with my feeble arms around their sturdy shoulders, we acted as one; one mind, one resolve, one heart. We painted a cross of reeds, as had long been my intention, in the hand of the smiling saint. His joy could not have equalled or excelled mine.
Tomorrow… la notte della nascita del nostro Signore Gesù Christo…
*
December 24th,1518. Day of Saint Delphinus, at Amboise in the Palace of Cloux, by me, Leonardo da Vinci, the Florentine…
