Sewn in the Lining

by Marsilio Ficino, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The girl had walked out from the city in the rain, and she would not sit down until she had put the thing on his desk. She took it from inside her bodice, where it had been warm, and unwrapped it from a square of grey linen. Then she stood back from it with her hands behind her, as if it had been a coal she had carried all the way from the Mercato Vecchio in her bare palm.

"The friar says it's the devil's," she said. "The priest at San Piero says to burn it. My mother says it's tin and tin is money. They told me at the Canto de' Pazzi that you wrote the book."

Marsilio Ficino did not touch it yet. He had been at Careggi since Candlemas, translating Dionysius and coughing, and the rain had come every day of Lent, and the brazier under his desk made the room smell of hot iron and wet wool. He moved the lamp.

It was a plate of tin a little wider than the palm of a hand and thin enough to bend, dark with handling at the edges and bright in the hollows. On it, cut with a graver by someone who had a good hand and was in a hurry, a man sat on a bird. The man wore a crown. His right arm was raised, and in the fist was something short and straight, a rod or a dart. The bird's wings were spread under him, and its claws held nothing. The engraver had tried to show a long garment falling over the bird's back in folds, and had given up halfway and finished it with three hasty lines.

He did not need to look it up. He had written it himself, at this desk, before the book went to the printer. A crowned man riding an eagle, a dart in his right hand, in a garment the colour of saffron. Cut in the hour of Jupiter, with Jupiter rising and fortunate. For health and for fortune.

"Sit down," he said. "You are wet to the knees. What is your name?"

"Lisabetta. Zanobi di Meo's daughter. He sold old clothes in the Ferravecchi, at the sign of the Stocking." She sat on the edge of the stool by the brazier, not near enough to it to get warm. "He's dead."

"When?"

"Tuesday week. After the sermon."

---

He turned the plate over with the end of his pen.

The back was not smooth. Across it, in two rows, ran a line of marks that were not letters, or not letters of any alphabet he had. Some were like the Greek, a sigma lying on its side, a broken theta. Some were little circles with tails, joined by strokes, like the plan of a garden. At the end of the second row was a small sign he did know, the sign like a figure four with its foot crossed, which the almanac-makers used for Jupiter, and after it a cross.

He sat looking at the cross for some time.

"Where did your father get it?"

"Out of a doublet." Lisabetta pulled the linen square through her fingers. "Six years ago, seven. A man died at Pisa, some kind of notary, and his heirs sold his clothes in a bundle, and my father bought the bundle. There was a black doublet with a good lining. When my mother unpicked the lining to wash it, that was sewn inside, at the left side. Over the heart." She showed him on herself. "My mother wanted to sell it to the pewterer. My father said no, it was a saint, look, he's got a crown. He kept it in his purse."

Seven years. It was older than the book, then. The notary at Pisa had had it from somewhere, and that somewhere had had it from the Arabs or from the old books that went about Italy in copies with no name on them, the books from which Ficino had himself taken it, holding them a little away from him as one holds a crab. The book had not made this image. The book had only described it, in the Latin of the Academy, in a fair hand, with a dedication to King Matthias of Hungary, and sent it into the world with the printer's ink on it.

He was not sure that made any difference. He did not think the girl would think so either.

"Tell me about your father," he said. "Not his soul. His body. What kind of man was he to look at?"

She looked at him as though this was not the question she had walked out from the city in the rain to have answered. Then she answered it, because he was a priest and sat behind a desk.

"Big. Red. Red in the face, I mean; his hair was grey. He laughed loud. He ate a great deal." She thought. "He used to be thin. When I was little he was thin and he worried. He counted the stockings at night. My mother says he was a hard man then, he wouldn't give a quattrino of credit to his own brother."

"And after the doublet?"

"I don't know if it was after the doublet."

"No. Neither do I. Tell me anyway."

"He got fat," said Lisabetta. "He got loud. He gave credit to everybody. He gave our neighbour's widow a whole winter cloak for nothing and told my mother it was moth-eaten, and it wasn't. He bought a share in a dyer's vat at Santa Croce and it paid. He paid for my dowry into the Monte, all at once, a hundred florins, he made the notary count it out twice so that I could hear it. He said the luck had come to him." She stopped. "He took it out of his purse on feast days and showed it to people. To the men at the tavern. He said, here is my saint, my saint is king of the birds."

"Did he have a physician?"

"He didn't hold with physicians. He was never ill."

"Did he bleed? In spring, at the barber's?"

She shook her head. "He said he had nothing to spare."

Ficino nodded. In the margin of the Dionysius, without looking down, he had written sanguineus and drawn a line under it, and now he looked at the word and was faintly ashamed of himself, as of a man who takes notes at a funeral.

"Tell me how he died."

---

It had been the first Tuesday of Lent. Zanobi had gone to the cathedral before light, with half the Ferravecchi, to hear the friar from Ferrara, because everyone went now, the friar filled Santa Maria del Fiore to the doors, and the men who sold old clothes stood at the back against the wall with the wool-carders and the porters. He had come home after terce. He was red in the face and he did not laugh. He sat in the shop on a pile of folded hose and said that the friar had preached against the astrologers, who read the heavens to sell the future, and against those who made images and wore them, and had said that whoever trusted in a planet trusted in the devil, and that the city was full of such things, sewn into clothes and hung in bedrooms, and that God saw them.

"He had his purse in his hand," Lisabetta said. "He kept opening it. I said, Father, take it out and throw it in the Arno if it frightens you. He said it didn't frighten him. He said it had been good to him for seven years and he would not throw away a friend because a Ferrarese said so. Then he went up the stairs to lie down, because his head hurt. My mother heard him fall on the landing."

She said all this in the same flat voice, looking at the brazier.

"He couldn't speak after. One side of his face had gone down, like wax. They sent to San Piero for the priest, and the priest came, but by then he couldn't say anything, he only made a noise, and the priest anointed him, and then he died. He hadn't confessed since Christmas. He had it in his hand, in his purse, the whole time. They had to open his fingers."

The rain went on against the shutter.

"The priest says the oil is good, the anointing is good, he can't say more. He said he'd seen it in his hand. He said, burn it, girl, and pray. My mother wants to sell it. She says if it's the devil's then the pewterer can have the devil for two soldi, and if it's not the devil's then it's two soldi." For the first time her voice did something. "I want to know whether my father is in hell because of your book."

---

Ficino laid the pen down. He put both hands flat on the desk on either side of the tin plate, not touching it.

He had answered this question before, or questions that wore its clothes. He had answered it in the autumn of the year the book came out, when word reached him that certain persons at the Curia were reading the third book with a pen in their hands, and he had written his apology in a night and a day and sent it round to his friends. It had said, he remembered it word for word, because he had been so frightened when he wrote it: that he had not approved these images, only reported them; that he wrote as a physician, who must know the poisons in order to know the remedies; that natural things act by nature, as pepper heats and lettuce cools, and that a figure cut in a fitting metal at a fitting hour is a natural thing, a shape of matter well disposed to receive what the heavens pour into all matter. That none of this asked anything of anybody. That a man who stands in the sun is warmed whether or not he prays to it.

And he had added, at the end, a little lower in the page, that he himself would rather use medicines than images, because medicines were plainly natural and images were not so plainly; and that words and letters carved on the back of such things were another matter altogether, and that he left them alone.

He had been acquitted. His friends had written letters, and the Pope had been told by people he trusted that Ficino was a pious man who sang to his lyre. He had gone back to his Plotinus.

He looked down at the two rows of marks.

Pepper does not speak. Lettuce does not speak. A shape of tin on the right day in the right hour, if it does anything at all, does what the sun does to a wall. But a word is said to someone. A letter is a word that waits. Somebody, in Pisa or Damascus or a back room in Venice, had cut these signs on the back of a king on an eagle so that something would read them, and he did not know what. He did not know whether the something that answered a man in a black doublet for seven years, that gave him luck and red cheeks and a loud laugh and a hundred florins for his daughter's dowry, had been the star of Jupiter, the most temperate and lawful of the wanderers, mild father of kings and judges; or the warm abundance of a man who had begun at last to eat; or something else, wearing Jupiter's crown the way a thief wears a dead man's doublet.

He thought that he believed the first. He knew that he did not know.

"I don't know where your father is," he said.

Lisabetta looked at him.

"Nor does the priest at San Piero, nor the friar. Only God knows, and the friar would tell you the same if you asked him alone, without a crowd. I can tell you what I do know. Will that do?"

She did not answer, which he took for yes.

---

"First, the body." He touched the word in his margin. "Your father had the complexion of Jupiter. Big, red, loud, liberal, fond of his food, quick to trust. Blood rules it, and blood is the best of the humours and the warmest, and Jupiter is its planet, the most fortunate of all the seven. Whether that came to him from his birth or from the tin or from seven years of good dinners after a thin youth, I cannot tell you, and nobody can. But I can tell you the danger of that complexion, because I am a physician's son and I have seen it a hundred times. It is fullness. The blood is generous, and grows too much, and it is not let, because a man who is never ill does not go to the barber in spring. Then something stirs it all at once, a fright or a fit of anger or a long morning standing in a crowd, and it rushes up into the head, and the head cannot hold it. The old physicians call it apoplexy. It's a striking-down. One side of the face falls, and the tongue goes thick." He said it gently. "That is a death of the body, and it comes to sober men and to drunk ones, to priests and to old-clothes men, with images and without. Whatever else is true, the blood killed your father. Not the tin."

"And the friar killed him," said Lisabetta, "frightening him."

"Perhaps. Or the stairs. Or Lent; he will have been fasting, and a full man who fasts is not a quiet one." Ficino put out a finger and, for the first time, touched the plate. It was still faintly warm from her bodice. "Now the soul. Your father took the anointing. The priest saw him take it. A man who cannot speak can still turn toward God in the silence where nobody hears him, and the Church does not say he did not. That is the second thing I know."

"And this?"

He turned the plate over again, so that the king and the eagle were underneath and the two rows of marks were looking at the ceiling.

"This," he said, "I don't know. I'll tell you exactly what I don't know, and then you may decide, because it is yours and not mine. On this side" — he tapped the back — "someone has cut letters I cannot read. I don't like letters on these things. I wrote in my book that I don't like them, and I meant it. A figure is like a medicine. It works, if it works, the way warmth works, without being asked. Letters are asked. They are a kind of speaking, and speaking is always to someone." He paused. "On the other side is a king on an eagle. I described that figure in my book. I took it from older books, and I said I did not approve it, and I put it in anyway, because I am a man who writes everything down. You may blame me for that if you like. I blame myself for it some nights."

Outside, a long way off, a bell began, thin through the rain. It might have been Santa Maria Novella, or the convent of San Marco; at that distance he could never tell.

"What would you do," Lisabetta said, "if it was yours?"

---

The kitchen at Careggi was warm and low, and smelled of onions and lye. Monna Fiore was plucking a pigeon by the hearth, which in Lent she was not supposed to be doing, and when the master came in with a strange girl she put the pigeon in her apron and looked at them both with great severity.

"I want the small iron ladle," said Ficino. "The one for the lead. And the tongs. And then I think you have an errand in the garden."

Monna Fiore gave him the ladle and the tongs and did not go into the garden.

He knelt on the hearthstone, which his knees did not thank him for, and raked a bed of coals forward with the tongs until they glowed orange under the grey. He set the ladle on them. Then he held out his hand to Lisabetta, palm up.

She looked at the hand, and at the ladle, and took the tin plate out of the linen again. She held it a moment, the king uppermost. The engraver's three hasty lines for the garment caught the firelight.

"My father would say you're throwing away a friend," she said.

"Your father would be right that I'm throwing something away. I don't know what. That is my reason."

She put it in his palm. He laid it in the bowl of the ladle face down, so that the letters were uppermost, and sat back on his heels.

Tin is a soft metal and a cowardly one in the fire; it gives way long before iron so much as warms. For a little while nothing happened. Then the letters went dull, as if breathed on. Then the edges of the plate softened and drew in, and the whole thin sheet sagged into the bottom of the bowl, and the signs on the back ran together and slid into one another and were not signs any more. The king and the eagle, underneath, he did not see go. A grey skin crept across the top of the metal, wrinkling as it formed. He reached in with the tip of a kitchen knife and drew the skin aside, the way Monna Fiore drew the skin off a broth, and under it the tin lay perfectly bright and perfectly level, like a drop of water standing in a spoon.

"Is that all it was?" said Lisabetta.

"That is all it is now."

He lifted the ladle off the coals with the tongs and set it on the stone to cool. They watched it. Monna Fiore, who had stopped pretending to pluck the pigeon, watched it too. As it cooled the surface clouded faintly at the edges, but in the middle it stayed clear; and when Lisabetta leaned over it, the girl's own face looked up at her out of the bottom of the ladle, small and dark against the rafters.

When it was cold enough he turned it out onto his palm. It came away in one piece, a round button of metal thicker at the middle than at the rim, smooth on top and pocked underneath where it had lain on the iron. It was heavier than it looked.

"Jupiter's metal still," he said. "I won't pretend otherwise. Tin is tin. If there is anything of that star in it, it was in it before anyone cut it and it's in it now, the way there is sun in a grape. But there is no king on it now and no letters, and nobody has written anything on it to be read." He held it out to her. "Give it to your mother for the pewterer. It is worth what the pewterer gives."

Lisabetta took it. She closed her fist on it and held it there, against the warmth that was still in it from the coals and from his hand.

"And my father?"

"On Thursday," Ficino said, "at dawn, at the altar of the Annunciation in San Lorenzo, I will say the Mass for the dead for Zanobi di Meo, old-clothes seller at the sign of the Stocking. You may come or not. That one, at least, I know the address of."

---

She went down the hill early in the afternoon, when the rain had thinned to a mist that hung in the olive trees. He stood at the gate with his cloak over his head and watched her go. At the turn of the road where the cypresses began she stopped, and stood for a moment with her back to him, and he saw her open her hand and look at what was in it.

Then she untied the corner of her kerchief, knotted the tin button into it, and tucked the knot inside her bodice, on the left side, where it had been before. She walked on toward the city with her head down against the wet, and below her, faint through the mist, the bells of Florence were ringing none.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā Marsiliō Ficīnō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Marsilio Ficino, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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