The School of Donnina Visconti: Pictures from the Trecento

By Gene Washington

"The School of Donnina Visconti" is a fictionalized account of the life and adventures of Sir John Hawkwood, condottiere, (1331?-1394) and his wife Donnina Visconti. The story is told primarily through, first, the voice of an editor (who found the MS) and secondly, through the consciousness of Donnina and her "pictures."

The poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was a descendant of Donnina Visconti and John Hawkwood.

"School" is an expansion of "Donnina Visconti," a short story that won first place honors in Utah Arts Festival Short Short Story Contest in 1993.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 1, 2000
• ISBN: 9781477175446

Gene Washington

Gene Washington has a Ph.D in English Literature. He is now an emeritus professor of English Literature at Utah State University. He lives in Logan, Utah where he spends his time gardening, skiing, writing and rambling in the mountains. Gene believes that one writes books, both fiction and non-fiction, because one looks for but does not find what one wants to read.

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Copyright © 2000 by Gene Washington.

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CONTENTS

THE SCHOOL OF DONNINA VISCONTI

Pictures From The Trecento

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THE SCHOOL OF

DONNINA VISCONTI

Pictures From The Trecento

Stories have a beginning, middle and an end—but not necessarily in that order. Jean-Luc Godard.

Every woman is condemned to have a love affair that remains unfinished. Mine has been with the Italian Trecento. It is a love I share with my great-grandfather, the poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley was a direct descendant of Donnina Visconti, the daughter of Bernabó, Archduke of Lombarby (1323-85) and her union with the condottiere, Sir John Hawkwood. Conclusive evidence is lacking, but it may be the case that her son, Roberto, was responsible for the final preparation, and preservation, of the MS of this novel.

(I now hold in my hand the ruby ring Shelley was wearing at the time of his death. The engraving inside reads il buon tempoverra.)

Due to the ravages of time and accidents, the task of transcribing the MS was a formidable one. Part of this was the result of the MS being stored at some time in its history in a damp place and the consequent mutilation and smearing of the ink. Insects seem to have eaten holes in some pages; a few sections are almost unintelligible; others have been struck out and new lines added. The title itself is in the hand of Shelley, as are many additions to the text itself. These, insofar as possible, have been retained and iden-tified by either an S, where the identification approaches certainty, or an S’, where, due to the shape of certain letters, there is some doubt. Many technical, and scientific, descriptions, the reader will note, are marked by an S. This reflects the fact that Shelley, as we now know, was widely read in these areas. We may also look upon these Shelleyan additions to the MS as his excursus on the need to constrain the literary imagination by adhering strictly to what is true.

Does what you are about to read fit any known genre? if we ignore the (occasional) unusual arrangement of its sentences, then I believe we can liken it to a novel. Like most early novels, it treats heavily of recollection and proceeds through multiple repetitions. We should recall that persons from that age did not always think, imagine or dream the way we do. To them the past was better, more complete than we now like to think, and far more accessible. Laudator temporis acti. But you will also find in what you are about to read not only the heroic and the marvelous, but also the infuriating, the shameful and the horrible.

Shelley, in a recently discovered letter to Robert Moore, seems to have the MS before us in mind. Here he refers to this species of writing as a mood-fiction. What he meant by this term cannot now be precisely determined. I myself believe it refers to a type of fiction that treats heavily in ambiguous signs of seen and unseen parallel realms, some of ghosts, perhaps, others of intangible, marginalized presences. Their appearances and disappearances in the narrative provide a constant hovering possibility of estranging shifts of perspective. We should not be surprised, then, at the multiple shifts in verb-tenses and the frequent use of the negative. (I might say in passing that the proof-reader, employed by my publisher, deleted a number of negatives. I have, after considerable effort, restored them.)

But perhaps all this trying to find a genre for the MS is besides the point. The sub-title of the MS is pictures and we should perhaps leave it at that

Mistakes in grammar, where they have been found, have been corrected and the archaic spelling of the original modernized.

My researches have so far turned up nothing substantial about the identity of Geoffrey, the self-proclaimed author of the MS. A friend has suggested, something I have yet to act on, that a search through the names Geoffrey, Jeffrey, or Jared in The Dictionary of National Biography might produce an identification.

The title was, at first, somewhat puzzling to me. But now I realize, after several fresh readings of the MS, that school has the likely meaning of the kind of pictorial and written representation of the Trecento that follows the practice of Donnina Visconti herself. A more exact description of the meaning of the term will have to wait on an analysis of the pictures, thought to show the hand of Donnina, that are now coming to light in parts of northern Italy, particularly, Milan, Verona and Turin. Some of these pictures, it is clear from the text, were available to Shelley. See, for example, the scene on p. 215 and the paragraph that begins, The subject is made, not given

On May, 21, 1377, Sir John Hawkwood, condottiere, married Donnina Visconti, daughter of Bernabó Visconti, in the old cathedral at Milan. Orange scented incense floated through the great cathedral. The nuptial scent of the incense seem to absorb the interior as a full moon overwhelms the landscape. Beyond the circle of light emitted by the candles from the cathedral, the city was plunged in total darkness. Low shuttered houses stood mute weighed down by the huge forms of convents, churches and monasteries. There were many of these structures, for women and men, for rich and poor, nobles and commoners, for Jesuits, Benedictines, Capuchins, and Carmelites. It was the buildings that gave Milan its weight and character, its elegance but also its grimness and feeling of impending doom.

Later that night, bonefires would be lit on the hills surrounding the city. These were the fires stoked by persons much like the princes who ruled the city. Persons who were sometimes fanatical, often self-absorbed, avid for power or for the lethagy that was for them the same as power.

Donnina removes John’s helmet and runs her fingers through the dark mat of his hair, still wet from the long ride from Vicenza. Above them, gnats spiral-dance in shafting sunlight. Apple-blossoms, level-slanting the sunlight, float down to crown John’s head, cradled in Donnina’s lap.

Below, she can just make out where the Adda starts to make its great bend north to its junction with the Po. On the other side of the valley, shadows begin to encroach on wind-carved, Assyrian-looking mass of stones. The shadow of a cloud moves slowly over the stones down toward the river.

What, my lord, is the difference between life and death"? She waits for his words. But she hears only his low breathing, the hard angles of his face now softened. She traces an old wound with her finger along John’s forehead. The air carries blossoms by in a dreamy, blue haze.

Only the sway of a small flame," she hears herself say.

John wakes, lifting his eyelids slowly. Their talk runs long into the evening.

Bernabó, Archduke of Milan, departed soon after the wedding for his hunting lodge in Hungary. Here he will entertain the Emperor with a boar-hunt and later a sumptuous meal of fermented mushrooms and pork.

To start the fementation of the mushrooms, the cook has sprinkled salt freely over them and let stand for a few hours. He will mash them and set aside for two days. Then he will follow with an addition of an ounce of peppercorns, a blade of mace, thyme, ginger and lemon rind.

It is thought that Bernabó and the Emperor have entered into secret negotiations to conquer the territories now held by the Pope in the mountains of Civitavecchia—known to contain rich deposits of alum.

Donnina stands in the doorway of the castello, watching the wind, like soft insistent fingers of an unseen hand, part the leaves on the beech trees of the great yard. In her arms she holds a brown puppy spaniel in cosy embrace. Smothering part of her face against the puppy’s small, fat body, she turns and moves back into the hall.

Donnina leans out from the low casement window. A flamelike shimmer, spreading into blueish darkness, covers the stones of the courtyard. Suddenly John appears from the shade of a yew tree. He watches the pale blue of her stretched down arm and face come closer. Reaching out an hand he can just reach the huge key she holds. Pink and blue Bougainvillaea bloom along the frame and sill of the window.

He takes the key from her warm hand.

Donnina’s eyes, moistening in the pale-blue light, turn up and outward. John looks. As his gaze goes deeper into her eyes, their colors begin to bloom and grow richer and deeper.

The pupils of Donnina’s eyes begin to dilate, perfect circles expanding outward.

S

The posterior part of the eyeball and the anterior parts of its muscles are enveloped in a lymph space, known as the capsule of Tenon, which assists their movements.

When Donnina and John’s wedding was announced in Rome. Cynics said that it would never last, that Donnina was too proud, too independent to live in such a constrained state. Epicureans saw in the wedding the emblem of the overriding nature of desire. Stoics, in late reply, said it was all illusion, a dream, a passing shadow.

Donnina and Hawkwood kneel before the altar. Candles gutter, throwing out pale combustions. Incensation, normally enjoined before the introit, at the gospel and again at the offertory and elevation, has been allowed by special dispensation of the Pope. The aroma of frankincense eddies and pools in the aisles of the great nave. For his services to the state, Hawkwood receives from the priest a clod of earth, a scepter and a sword. Along the surface of the priest’s chasuble run small welf-figures, in silver and gold, of Our Lord’s Passion. His maniple, in rich red and gold, falls loosely from his left arm.

Donnina closes her eyes. Edges, textures and surfaces of light retreat. Sounds from the street die away.

A celebrated manuscript in the Musee de Chantilly , the tres riches du Duc de Milan, represents Donnina at her dressing table the day before her wedding. Behind her is a fire in a hooded chimney. She is protected from its heat by a circular screen of plaited silver threads. The wall is covered by tapestries hung on hooks. Above the tapestries one can see lunettes enclosing clumps of foliage and other ornaments following the late Gothic tradition. The coffered ceiling is carved and painted the color of the night sky—at the time of the rising of the Pleiades. The table, with legs of trestle form, is covered with a striking white cloth and courtiers and maid-servants are busy around it.

Donnina sits in her chair. In form and ornament, it reminds one immediately of Carpaccio’s painting of St. Ursula’s dream, now in the Academy of Venice. The back, arms and legs of the chair are richly carved and gilded. (Walnut, a common wood in the mountains north of Milan is an admirable material for delicate carving.) The seat and back are of red velvet, plush, well-plumped.

In 1385, Gian Galeazzo Visconti murdered his uncle Bernabó and became sole ruler of the Milanese territories. Linear, illegal succession of power. Gian’s investiture, by the Emperor, occurred at Milan the following year. The leaves from the poplars fell early that year. The water had a strange, chemical, taste.

An investiture betokens the relation between a suzerain and vassal. From the Emperor, Gian received, as symbols of his office and estate, a clod of earth, a scepter and sword. Gian would later go on to found the new Cathedral at Milan, build the bridge across the Ticino at Pavia and improve its University. In 1387, he con-quered Verona and in the following year took Padua. While besieging Florence, in 1402, he died of the plague.

The investiture is about to begin. The dignitaries, including representatives of the Pope and Antipope, are all assembled. Rays of light, below the red, have raised the temperature in the great cathedral. A female scorpion fly, attracted by pheromones emitted by a male, lands on a fresco of the Last Judgment. A few of the guests are self-invited, like this wretched man in rags and that old blind woman in the corner. The smell of incense drifts through the nave. A stone-mason, high in an uncompleted spire at the southeast corner stops to urinate. A violet light, falling on the scarlet robes of the cardinals, creates a solemn impression. The female fly will mate with the male for an hour. The sound of the great bell stops. Yellow light, in the upper spires of the cathedral, will reach its greatest intensity in the pool of urine. Receptor cells activate the light.

Gian kneels before the Emperor. The old man leans forward. His right hand moves out toward Gian with the clod of earth. The old woman turns her head toward a brief, anomalous sound, Gian’s spur making contact with the marble floor. Patterns of stone tracery appear on the smooth, glossy, surface of the clod. The head of the mason’s penis swells. Circles of blood-diffusion. Gian raises his hand to take the object. The stone-mason, finishing buttoning his codpiece, stoops to pick up his chisel and hammer.

Some of them, at the same time, are thinking that the flowers, just before frost, seem highly eroticized.

Aspire to beauty.

It reminds her, faintly, of strawberries. Clarity of color and flavor will be singled out as positives. They are friends, these two cooks. A pink flush will later spread here, along the skin of her back and over the buttocks and upper legs. He will, acknowledging causality, notice it. The kitchen is hot, steamy. Drifts of visible sediment run through this particular vinegar. The pots of the liquid, seven in all, are just here, along this wall. Scrutinize this orifice. In a blind tasting of a surface, we must expect some movement of the tongue and sucking by the lips. Her nipples rose. There will be praise for its mellow and complex fruity flavor. It was as if they had found some absent space. But some will find it lip-puckering. Later their commitment will be to deeper, heavier, breathing. She was sweating along the hairline.

S

Kitchen pollutants, acting on the reproductive system of cooks of his class, have reduced the volume of viable semen in one ejaculation to 3.3 milliliters.

Smacks of berries and/or dried fruit. Red wine vinegar. Not until later will her skin, the crease of a thigh, make a commitment to a brighter color. When will you have your answer? The dark flat patch of hair between her legs shortens and elongates as she moves. Her description of the taste of the liquid will later be described by him as honest. She will, parting her legs, move over him. Tasters who dislike this also loathed it. He will later go limp. Others find the taste clean. In a few days. Foreign infusions, within a known group of membranes, may be a factor in the way we respond to others. It is only one of my many weaknesses. Kitchen work seemed to anchor their lives. But still rumors, counter-rumors, spread like other things. List here, in order of preference, the vinegars. I like that. I am very happy with it.

Before you belittle them, taste their obsessions.

Donnina felt a presence behind her, the sound of steel on the marble floor, and a voice demanding,

" Ragazza! Show me to the Duke."

Her robe swung in the heavy Lombardian air. She saw a tall, broad-shouldered man. The source of light is from the high windows of the castello. It shone across his burnished helmet, its encrusted image of an attacking hawk, and cuirass. The sound of spurs approached Donnina, surrounded her. Motes of dust hung, slow-spiralling, in the air. The man stopped.

You heard me. Move. I do not have, as you obviously do, time to waste.

S

The outstanding feature of Donnina’s robe is its rich, raised satin figures. They were formed from a loosely floating satin warp on the background of a second and special weft that was woven as a loose float. They were then tightly bound down by a separate binder warp.

Donnina felt her cheek flush. She looked up. She would, holding her position, say to him. I am not a servant, I am the daughter of the Arch-Duke of Lombardy. I possess the keys to all the doors of this castello.

In tying up the design, it was the background that was tied up, not the figures of Donnina’s robe. The two separate warps of the satin required two separate rollers. The main roller was weighted only lightly and the binder warp roller heavily, so that the background was held hard down while the figures were left loose and elevated. Background and figures were of different colors.

The cloth of the robe is luxurious and expensive. The figure weft include gold-and-silver threads.

A door from this room opens into a tunnel. It runs from here to the stables and then to the river beyond. It is never without sound or movement. Cobwebs sag in the wet air. A low pulsing sound, like paddles beating still water, comes from up ahead. In a small tunnel to the left a column of brown, wood-ants, attack the nursery of a colony of pharoah’s ants. The captured nestlings, raised as wood-ants, will later return to attack their parents.

The queen of the pharoah’s ants lies immobile, Aphrodite under the hill, in the moist darkness. Her gestation, birth and maturity take sixteen days. She does not intend to let any other female replace her as queen.

Ant-thorax, gaster, and legs lies parts-scattered over minute hills of brown clay.

"Go, go, avanti. I have news for your master."

Donnina did not speak. Her robe carried no authority for him. His eyes looked past her. Was he looking for signs of an ambush? An assassin, waiting around the corner, behind the door? His hand, she noticed, was suspended above the handle of his sword.

The sweet wind, blowing, sours as it enters the catapecchie.

Suddenly they were there, the sound and the force, pulling her up from the running earth. The stars were the palest things. She felt the darkness retreating, the dog-like sounds falling away and back. Pale ovals and circles advanced, moving, melding, reforming the stars with contrary shadows. The trees, releasing their scent into the high air, swung open into a meadow along a low hill. The great horse, its velocity increasing, even without the rider’s commands, turned right towards the lights of the village below. Donnina’s silken shoes, pulled by the force below, fell away.

The rider’s armor shone in the moonlight. He pulled her higher, closer. Along his shoulders the metal was cool. His breath was warm in her hair. Her skin felt light. The sensation, increasing as the lights of the village came closer, spread up and out. The rider, pulling her closer, moved his lips down.

Nel fuoco d’amore mi mise.

The lips are slightly parted. His right hand, fingers slightly spread, holds-caresses her cheek and hair.

Paint fever in her sex. Find successive rows of open windows to send to cast lights and shadows across her long hair and face. Emphasize the color of the eyes, the color of emeralds, inducing passion and then sleep.

The emerald, too, preserves and strengthens the sight.

They went together down the grand hall, past other windows, to the spiraling staircase. Donnina paused, her hand moved to rest on the oak balustrade. Why should she continue in this pretence?

Through the first window she looked across the long sweep of the yard, the river, to the Alps beyond. One day it will be mine, she said to herself. I will never marry. I will be free.

She then remembered the man behind, forcing her will.

Castration had removed them from the realm of theory. Show them not, like one or two of the others, singing the King out of his melancholia. Five arias an evening. The King on the balcony, leaning out, listening.

Show these begging in the streets, in rags. Above the King, just inside the window, the Queen also listens. These have been instructed by ilpreto (on the instructions of il vescovo) to avoid all churches, assembly-halls and central piazzas.

What color there was to their life has faded, still fading. This one’s face, the one without a curved ridge or delta. In each scene he-it exited to the left. The Queen is in love with the singer. Desire rises like a liquid in clear crystal. Suo viso del cristallo. Her vagina moistens. The area where the testicles should be are called whorls. This whorl has at least one recurving loop. The head of the clitoris, mobile, oily, pushes upward, toward silk-filtered light.

E’l suo bel viso dolcie ed amoroso. Only a relatively small number of these are unsuitable. His lungs had filled with a mucous-like substance. "Annus canicularis. That sounds more elegant than ‘dog-star,’ don’t you agree"? The Queen’s voice, warm in the singer’s ear, had a faint, familiar ring, amor condusse noi ad una morte. But he could not be sure. The organ went easily into her. There are two lines of regard here. Its head is erect, the first line of regard is toward a distant goal. Her response is effected by four straight muscles and two oblique.

Back of them the Adda River was flooding and beyond it was a steep, now muddy, cliff rising to a clump of aspens standing at a stone wall. This species of spider, in the grass below, is the Argiope. It hunts in daylight. To their right, left and front, the lances and crossbowmen of the Anti-Pope. Hawkwood, and what was left of the White Company were trapped. The Argiope decorate their webs, putting thick strands of silk in the middle to form zigzags (or cross-hatch) patterns. Hawkwood’s back hurt as he twisted in the saddle and pulled the great grey horse, already running hard, around to the right. The web signals to the prey of the spider, not open sky beyond, but blossoming flowers and nectar paths.

Hawkwood did not feel the weight of the heavy sword in his right hand. Web and flower glow in ultraviolet-reflecting light. Blood from a recent wound, driven by the rain and increasing speed of the horse, began to streak John’s armor and to stream back along the horse’s armored flanks. The bee tries to shake itself free of the web. On John’s left, the voice of Conrad of Pau, with him since the summer of 1375, vanished in the sound of rushing hooves and lances coming up and around. Variation in web-design have prevented the bee from learning from its mistakes. Twenty five yards from Robert’s first lances, the instincts of the horse and rider became one, heads slightly down, muscles tightening for the first impact, peripheral objects blurring. Fifteen yards, the horse and rider now seemed beyond gravity, within an elevated vortex of hooves, mud and wind. Five yards, Hawkwood’s heavy voice was coming back, along the line, calling them forward.

S’

The orb-weavers’ web is not a frail improvisation.

Three yards, the great horse, now free of all constraints, his ears flattened, the head and shoulder of the rider low along the flying mane—1000 pounds of accelerating mass aimed toward the center of the first rank. Evolution has given the Argiope the right to chose the color of its web with a strategic perspective in mind.

The lance that Simon held, like those of the other lancers of the first rank, was standard issue. Six and a half feet long, made of Apennine hickory, steel tipped, flat at the butt. Since he was an experienced soldier, he had been placed in the first rank—trained to kneel on his right leg, his right and left hands holding the planted lance—elevated at a twenty-five degree angle, ready to receive the charge. He was tired and wet and he felt heavy. His stomach was churning from fear and the effects of the grappa he had just drunk. The rain, blowing in his eyes, made it hard to see.

It has been estimated that the width of the Anti-pope’s position was approximately 950 yards. Simon’s lance, together with those of his comrades, constituted a kind of thicket.