The Brightest Flame

Prologue - From the Journal of Luca dei Rossi

Florence, the 6th of June, 1485

It is with a trembling hand and a mind fatigued by sleepless reflection that I set these thoughts to paper. The candle burns low beside me, its light casting flickering shadows against the walls of this narrow chamber. I feel as though I write not from within my own home, but from some ancient tomb in which I have been entombed alive.

I do not know what name may be given to the affliction that governs my life, but I know its weight, its fury, its allure. The physicians speak in terms of bile and blood, of temperaments and humours, but they know nothing. The priests speak of sin and possession. The monks offer silence. None of it touches the thing itself.

It begins with light. A sudden, terrible clarity overtakes me. Colours grow sharper. The air itself tastes of salt and iron. I become possessed of a conviction so great that I believe I could move the heavens with a word. My tongue becomes quick, my thoughts faster still. Ideas arrive in such numbers that I feel drunk with purpose. I speak of things I have not studied, yet they feel known to me. I create without rest. I am seized by something greater than reason or will.

But such splendour cannot endure. The fire consumes itself. When it fades, it leaves behind only ash.

There follows a silence so complete that I fear I am no longer part of the world. The light that once blinded me now recedes entirely, and I am left in a fog. Food repels me. Speech eludes me. I look upon my own face with disgust and avert my eyes from mirrors. Shame curls around my gut like a serpent. At times I fall to my knees and retch as though purging a poison, though no illness has touched my body. I sleep through the day and lie awake through the night, haunted by visions not of grandeur, but of everything I have destroyed.

There are those I have hurt. I have loved two women, not in passing, but with the full force of my soul. One was light and order, the other storm and flame. I did not choose between them. I could not. And I was undone by that failure.

I remember the final quarrel with my father. His voice rose, his hand lifted. I saw it coming and struck first. I do not recall how many times I hit him, only that his blood was on my sleeve when I fled. I left my name and blood behind that night. I have not spoken to any of them since.

If I were a wiser man, I would ask for forgiveness. But I have ceased to believe that forgiveness is meant for men like me. I ask only that, should these pages survive me, they be read with the understanding that I lived not in madness, but in extremes.

The world does not have words for what I carry. So I give it mine.

L.D.R.

From the journal of Luca dei Rossi

Florence, June, 1485

June 4

I am beginning to fear sleep. Whenever I shut my eyes, I see light the mind can’t handle. Colours not of this world whirl around in my eyelids. And even when I do manage to get some sleep (these nights are all about managing to get a solid few hours in), my body won’t let me stay lying down. I wake up with the sweat soaked into my clothes, with my heart racing, with my mouth dried up, as though I have been running through flames.

I got up early, before the bells rang, and walked to the chapel when the city still slept underneath its shroud of dust and silence. I needed the solitude. Florence smothers me during the day. Too many voices. Too many eyes.

The fresco was said to shine in the morning light in the chapel. It was not the paint. It was something else. Something inside it had started shifting as if it were a sleeping animal just below the surface.

With hands that shook I struggled up the scaffold and began to work. It was like my brush was painting itself. I stopped thinking. I only listened.

Memento mori. Memento mori. The words surfaced without prompting. I don’t remember when I first heard them, but they come back to me now as if they had always been there living beneath my tongue. They are both admonition and salve.

I painted the curve of the angel’s wing over and over until it felt sharp as a knife. They did not order the gentle guardian he is. He is judgement. He is ruin. And he is beautiful.

June 5

I’m not sure they know what they’ve asked me to do.

They desired a holy picture, something flattering to the patron, consoling to the faithful. But what they did not take into account is that heaven, in all honesty, is scary. God doesn’t descend on the wings of gentle lighting and harps. It comes with fire. It brings silence that shatters the mind.

Baldassare is still staring at me as if I am a candle about to set the curtains on fire. He doesn’t say anything of it to my face, but I catch him talking to Signor Rinaldi when they think I’m out of earshot. They are worried, yes. But not about the art. They fret about what the art shows.

Today I added a new figure. One of the damned, under the angel’s heel. His mouth open, screaming. His hands extended in an apparent gesture of seeking mercy. I didn’t know whose face it would turn out to be until the sculpture was almost done. It is my father’s.

I cannot explain why. Maybe because he tried to hit me once and I saw something in his eyes that I will never forget. Not hatred. Not disappointment. But fear. As though what he saw in me was something he wanted to hide. I wanted to paint over it. I truly did. But something stayed my hand. Well, there is no sanctity of deceit. If I’m going to condemn someone in my writing, let it be someone whose condemnation already rests on my shoulders.

June 6

I was cast out today.

Baldassare told me to put my brush down, said the plaster was drying too quickly, that my colours were bleeding into one another. He pointed to me, ‘This is a commission you have defiled’. The customers, he said, would not stand for heresy. He called the image unsettling.

Of course it is unsettling. They forget that holy things are not for consolation. They are meant to transform.

When he said I had become dangerous, something snapped in me. Perhaps it was pride. Perhaps it was something older. Dipped my brush into the red and crossed the brow of Saint Jerome. Just a single line. But it was enough. I heard the sound of the apprentices gasping. One of them crossed himself.

Then I left. I wandered the city streets barefoot and still covered in paint refusing to go home and put on shoes. Let them see me. Let them whisper. I am not ashamed. Nor does the light leave me, even to this day. It’s in my blood, flowing through me like the heat of the forge.

They stare because they are ignorant. They see a man undone. I see a man becoming.

I repeated the phrase as I walked under the cathedral. Memento mori.

Not as a warning, but as a promise. And I don’t know what’s going to happen with me. But I know what I must paint. I see it still, even now. The next wall calls. Now, the second vision blazons its fire behind my eyeballs.

I will not sleep tonight.