Having come this far, connecting to Machiavelli's spirit, we need to snuggle closer to the father of political science.
This means an unplanned return to
Florence, and to St. Croces Cathedral where the remains of Florence’s revered
creative types–Michelangelo, Galileo, et al—are interred.
Mass is underway when we arrive, so
our driver whisks us to an offbeat museum devoted entirely to… (but of course)
angels and devils.
It features long corridors and
prison-like rooms, not much larger than cubicles, each preserving off-kilter
frescoes, paintings and icons that all seem bent on scaring the hell out of
everyone to pray and repent or spend eternity being eaten, pitch-forked,
knifed, speared or dismembered by that Emperor and Lord of Hell, Lucifer—and
assorted minor devils including, but not limited to, Cagnazzo, Gooseberry, Moco,
and of course, Ticky-Tacky (whom we found in Sedona, Arizona).
We motion back to St. Croces and
Machiavelli’s cenotaph: a
larger-than-life statue and, on the marble floor, a rectangular crypt-like
design suggesting that the relics (bones) of Big Mac lay beneath.
JL climbs over the rope barrier to
peer down upon him.
“That’s what he wanted,” I whisper.
JL throws a backward glance. “Huh?”
“For you to pay attention. You’re doing to him what he did to you.”
JL regards me with a quizzical
expression.
“Your dream at the villa,” I
say. “It wasn’t an alien.” I point at the statue of the alien-faced
Machiavelli. “It was a Big Machia Attack.
Niccolo wanted you to notice him.”
JL’s eyes widen with epiphany. “You’re right—it was him!”
“Now he knows you got the message,
he can rest in peace.” I pause. “He didn’t rape you, did he?”
JL blushes. “From where do you get these ideas?”
“It’s not easy being me.” I point at Latin words inscribed in marble on
the slab. “What do you want your own
epitaph to say?”
“Epitaph?” Thirty-somethings view death as an absurd
concept.
“Final words, on your gravestone.”
“Never thought about it. You?”
“I miss me.”
Machiavelli’s relics, alas, may not
lie in this spot.
His actual burial
place is unknown, but in all likelihood it is within the grounds of Villa Mangiacane, where his spirit roams. That
is where he went mad.
Hence, a tie-in unexpected when we
motioned ourselves across continent and ocean less than one week before.
When he was 25 years old
in 1494, two years after Columbus discovered America, Machia, as his friends knew him, entered government service in
Florence as a clerk.
A well-fortified and bustling
city-state, Florence was an appealing prize to papal armies and neighboring
countries. The mighty Medicis had just
been overthrown and expelled; Florence, transformed into a republic.
This suited Machiavelli just fine,
since he was really a republican—and a non-religious humanist—at heart.
He came to believe, however, that only an
autocratic royal ruler—a prince–could defend a city-state from hostile foreign
powers.
He kept his thoughts to himself
as, in the capacity of Second Chancellor, he undertook diplomatic missions
and—for three years—took charge of the Florentine militia, whose job it was to
defend the city.
It
all turned sour for Big Mac in August 1512 when the republic was scrapped and a
new Pope restored the Medicis to power.
They returned with vengeance.
On November 7th, Machiavelli was
fired.
A couple months later he was
arrested on charges of conspiring to overthrow the new regime, thrown into the
clink and interrogated by torture.
Big
Mac was strappado’d (hung from his
hands tied behind his back, hoisted to the ceiling and dropped, stopping short
just before hitting the floor).
Six times.
He admitted nothing, denied
everything, grew an inch or two.
The Medicis eventually released
Machia; they booted his butt to his family’s family estate in San Casciano,
where he lived thereafter in exile.
Politics and statecraft was all
Machiavelli cared about. He tried to
talk his way back into Florence, pledging support for the Medici rule–anything
that would keep him in the game—to no avail.
For a political junkie like Machiavelli, exile was almost as bad as the
strappado.
To take his mind off the intrigue
he was missing in Florence, Machiavelli worked the fields of his family
estate, supervising the cutting of trees to be sold as firewood, and playing
backgammon in the local tavern.
Evenings were preserved for solitude and madness.
This is what he wrote to his friend Francesco
Vettori on December 10th, 1513:
When
evening comes, I return to my house and enter my study; and at the door I strip naked, taking off
the day’s clothing, covered with mud and dust, and put on the regal robes of
court and palace; and re-clothed appropriately, I enter the ancient courts of
ancient men, where, received by them with affection, I feed on that food which
is only mine and which I was born for, where I am not ashamed to speak with them
and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer
me; and for four hours of time I do not feel boredom, I forget every trouble, I
do not dread poverty, I am not frightened by death; entirely I give myself over
to them and I pass indeed into their world.
Machiavelli believed that he
interacted directly with Dante, Plutarch, and Plato.
This became his art, upon which he was
totally focused; it provided therapeutic escape from his fears and depression
and led, ultimately, to his penning The
Prince–a work produced by what today’s New Agers would call trance-channel.
No doubt Machiavelli suffered
depression from his banishment.
But did
torture push him over the edge of sanity, into the realm of hallucination?
Talking to the dead qualifies as an idea of reference; hallucination is
criterion for schizophrenic disorder.
Big Mac’s words also imply fears of poverty and death-delusions,
symptoms of psychosis.
So:
Was Machiavelli nuts?
Had the Medicis driven him to
depression and madness?
We had not
sought Machiavelli; would not have imagined him a player in our creativity and
madness paradigm. But the Bounce–maybe Vincent, Dymphna or Dali,
all three–put us on a metaphysical wavelength upon which Big Mac reeled Van
Stein and me to him—to convince us of
his qualifications for membership in our travelling orb club.
Machiavelli’s
dialog with the great philosophers, which morphed into The Prince, was published posthumously thirty years after he wrote
it.
Like Vincent van Gogh, Big Mac died
feeling a failure.
He tried to use his
unpublished treatise to tease the Medicis into bringing him back to help govern
Florence.
Truth was, the Medicis had Machia pegged: He was a mediocre
statesman who took no risks for fear of compromising himself. He was good at two things: One, playing all sides, and two, writing
literature, for which his name endures.
When the Medicis
crashed and burned in 1527, giving way to a new republican government,
Machiavelli rushed to Florence to lobby for high office.
But he got sick en route, and died, oblivious to the
notion that one day Merriam-Webster
would define Machiavellian as cunning or devious.
Or that his smirk would captivate the world’s
imagination for centuries to come.
For this is
where Van Stein and I crack the real
Da Vinci code.
Forget Dan Brown and The Last Supper.
The real story
is that Big Mac and Leonardo knew each other in Florence during the first
decade of the 1500s. They even worked
together, from 1503 until 1506, on a bold engineering project to re-route the
River Arno away from Pisa, with whom Florence was at war, to deprive the Pisans
a fresh water supply.
It failed, causing
Da Vinci to exile himself to Milan for fear of reprisal (a typical response to failure), but also from a broken
heart.
Da Vinci, a homosexual, was in
love.
With Big Mac.
He documented his love by painting
Machiavelli.
As a woman.
The Mona Lisa was painted between 1503 and
1506, the same years Machiavelli and Da Vinci worked together.
Mona Lisa’s mysterious smile is Big Mac’s
enigmatic smirk, described by Machia’s biographer as “neither a grin nor a
sneer; a shield to protect against prying eyes.”
Mona Lisa’s
lash-less, almond-shaped eyes and manly hands also match Machiavelli; moreover,
the valley behind Mona Lisa is based
upon sketches Da Vinci drafted for the Arno River diversion project.
The painting, which Da Vinci never sold and
always kept near him, dear to his heart, pays homage to his love for
Machiavelli.
Villa Mangiacane
stands forlorn and desolate when we return for our bags. And now Machiavelli is deserting it, too—set
free by the séance to join our mystical band of sleep-deprived gang of
adventurers.
None of us want
this road trip to end.
Hence, arrival
in Monaco is not joyful, but a time to un-cling–from motional to
emotional—until it’s just me and Van Stein at Quai des Artistes quaffing grosse gambas with artichoke-stuffed
ravioli in a truffle sauce, a bottle of Margaux to wash it down.
(Later,
when Van Stein complains about this trip’s high cost, which he must repay in art, I respond thus: “The right time to protest was just before biting
into the grosse gambas, not long
after it’s been recycled.”)
