The Cloisters(51)

The academic world, I knew, was small; full of friends and enemies, lightly smoldering conflicts that had been stoked by years of offhand remarks about one’s work, and sometimes, one’s character. Just a survey of the room identified the different cabals: tenured faculty who still sat with their aging dissertation advisors from ten, twenty, thirty years ago, ringed by their own current graduate students who, no doubt, imagined how their own acolytes would someday gather around them. Each group was like a constellation, intertwined, but also circling each other, always trying to gauge the size of the other orbits, the power of individual gravitational pulls.

Unlike me, Rachel could have seamlessly merged into one. She could have been swept up into these constellations—a bright star in the academic heavens. But instead of joining one of the groups, we sat together while the lights dimmed, and I couldn’t help but prefer our exclusive group of two. At the back of the stage, the screen lit up with an image from a Renaissance tarot deck, one of the many examples of fragmented decks, incomplete save for a card or two. It was the World card. Against a gold-leaf background, a miniature painting of late medieval life—a boat being rowed, a knight moving between two castles—all curved into the shape of a sphere. Above this little world ruled a woman, a scepter in one hand, an orb in another.

Herb Diebold took his place behind the lectern. He was older than I expected, and shorter, but tidily dressed in a cheerful checkered button-up. An expertly groomed gray mustache set off his round cheeks and fully bald head.

“When I was in Pontegradella last summer,” he began, clearing his throat, “in a stuffy little municipal archive trying to find the arrest records of Alfonso, Ercole d’Este’s nephew, who many believed was his bastard, I came across something unusual. Yes, I found Alfonso’s arrest record of course, but there was something listed below it that caught my eye.”

Diebold paused and advanced the image on the screen to show a photograph of the arrest log, and there, in the upper corner, was an image I knew well, if only because I had seen it before leaving the apartment that morning—in Lingraf’s papers. Here was the complete image, an eagle, wings outstretched, the full watermark that we had only seen as partial: the municipal archives of Pontegradella, a commune of Ferrara.

I was just about to put a hand on Rachel’s arm when she whispered in my ear, “The watermark.”

I nodded as Diebold continued:

“It said, Mino della Priscia, arrested for speaking to a non-member of the court about the Duchess of Ferrara’s oraculum. At first, I thought this couldn’t be right, so I made some space on my research table and pulled out my handy Latin dictionary. Even after all these years, I still need some help translating.”

Here, a light smattering of polite laughter filled the auditorium. Everyone in attendance knew that Diebold did not, in fact, need any help translating.

“Of course, oraculum is very close to ‘oracle.’ But I didn’t believe that could be right because as far as I knew—and I know quite a bit about early Renaissance Ferrara—the Duchess of Ferrara was extremely devout.”

I looked at Rachel and she met my gaze. Around us the faces in the audience were lit by the light from the screen, their attention rapt.

“So what am I to make of this?” Diebold let the question sit while he took a sip of water. “That the mother of Isabella d’Este, Italy’s most prominent female patron of the Renaissance, was consulting oracles? I checked my dictionary a second time, but the etymology was clear. This is what we have come here today to talk about—oracles and seers, cards and dice, to determine what role they played.”

Here, Diebold paused and looked around the room before adjusting his glasses and returning his attention to the notes in front of him. I turned to Rachel and mouthed the opening line of the document we had translated: My dearest daughter.

“The question shouldn’t be Was divination in use? Of course it was. Astrology, we know, was everywhere. We also know that the aristocrats of the Renaissance were obsessed with whether or not their fates were fixed or mutable. They wanted to know what they could change, what was left up to chance, and what they couldn’t escape. They got this fascination from the Greeks and Romans, who were always turning to oracles to parse the fates of men. And if the medieval Christian world failed to consult oracles, it was only because it was an era besotted with apocalyptic thinking, a tendency handed down by the most important oracle of all—Christ.”

Diebold flipped over a page on the lectern and continued. And although I knew we had to stay, had to sit through the question-and- answer session during which Patrick’s voice was so thin I worried he might abandon the ordeal all together, through more small talk and coffees, I longed to leave the auditorium and return to the papers that I kept next to my bed. To see again with my own eyes, even though I knew it to be true, the matching mark on the page.

“And so the question becomes: How do we know? How do we know what fate awaits us? This was a question that preoccupied men and women of letters throughout the Renaissance. They wanted to know the future—the good, but especially the bad. The question was always: Could they change those futures, or were they predestined? Were they fate? This is the question that underlies what we are doing here today.”

Rachel leaned across the armrest as if to whisper something, but stopped when Diebold began again, “Of course, I went searching for that oracle of Ferrara, but I never found another reference to it. I asked Ferrarese scholars at the Università di Bologna about it, and they all shrugged. What could it be? they asked. Perhaps a temple, I said. Maybe a room in the Palazzo Schifanoia? A painting, a—”