The Medici Boy (10 page)

Meanwhile I stood, swathed in canvas, without moving as I watched the two great men move among the marbles outside, talking about sculpture which always fascinated Donato and about rare books and the new learning which did not. It was hard to believe that the rich and famous Cosimo who inspired fear by his power and his silence was the same person as this cheerful man talking now with my master about an ancient statue of Marsyas he had bought in Rome and would like repaired—or perhaps even copied—for the courtyard of his palazzo.

They came back into the posing room and seemed surprised to find me still standing swathed in my mock episcopal robes, my hands folded at my chest and sweat pouring down my face. “This is thirsty work,” Cosimo said, smiling at me. Donato apologized and began to remove my canvas robes piece by piece while Cosimo said merely, “The fault is mine,” and went to have a word with his servant. Before they left, the servant discreetly handed me a tiny red velvet sack in which I found a newly minted florin. The sack itself was a work of art.

When they had gone, Donato said to me, “Write this down. For my lord Cosimo de’ Medici: a small gold coffer tooled with the family crest and a jeweled clasp, this to serve as a kind of tabernacle for a Greek prayer book newly brought from Byzantium. Three designs. No fixed fee. No fixed date for delivery.” He paused and thought for a moment. “It is a handsome commission. I leave the design of it to you.”

I wrote out the receipt and placed it on his worktable on top of the other commissions. My task! My design!

Because I overflowed with happiness, I sent Cosimo’s florin on to Spinetta, a salve to my conscience, an answer to her prayers.

* * *

O
N THE EVENING
of August 20, Alessandra and I were married at the church door of little Santa Maria in Campo and then proceeded inside where mass was celebrated and our marriage vows solemnized. Donato was there and Michelozzo and Masaccio and all the apprentices. Afterward Donato made a plentiful feast with fish and fowl and venison and—because it was a wedding celebration—the testicles of a boar. To end the feast there were honeycakes, soft and hard, and comfits of every kind. We drank wine late into the night.

The apprentices had made for Alessandra the present of a handsome
cassone
that Caterina had painted with a scene of Mars wooing Venus, in which mine was the face of Mars and Alessandra’s the face of Venus. Our marriage bed had been bought with an advance against my thirty florins. That night Alessandra and I lay together as man and wife and she conceived. Our son, Donato Michele, would be one year old before my lord Donato would finish the Saint Louis of Tolosa.

* * *

I
N TIME MY
three designs for Cosimo’s gold coffer became thirty in number, but they were of no interest to Donato who now neglected everything—the towering Zuccone, the prophet, the sybil, commissions large or small—while he concentrated on the Saint Louis of Tolosa. He had finished the
bozzetto
, and had begun the full-sized statue.

He was working now on the body. This was to be his first full-sized bronze statue and he deliberately set himself new challenges: he wanted his Louis to look as lifelike as his Isaiah and he wanted the bronze to have the soft folds of cloth. He posed himself the further problem of how to make the finished statue look like me, the model for it, at the same time as it captured the sanctity and mystery and determined character of the boy Saint Louis himself. It was to be a real person who was me and Louis at the same time. In bronze. And finished in gold.

He had built an armature of wood approximately the size of the finished statue, a manikin fantastically fleshed out with a composition of clay, cloth, hair, and horse dung to create a headless bishop ready for the application of beeswax from which the actual cast would be made. But there remained problems of size and problems of material.

The Saint Louis was to be immense, nearly eight feet tall, and Donato was charged with the problem of how to cast it in a single pouring and the further problem of how to create the illusion of masses of brocade modeled first in wax and then in bronze. What he wanted, of course, was the thing itself, a young man, his heart beating hard, suffering. And to suggest a living body beneath those episcopal robes.

He agonized for weeks. He went back to his initial sketches, he restructured the
bozzetto
, he had me pose for him again and again until I began to think I had become the unwilling saint himself. He despaired of getting it right. He had, of course, considered sculpting it in pieces, but it was the cloth—or rather the appearance of cloth—that would not come right. The wax he was modeling continued to look like wax.

“It’s wrong,” he said aloud. “It’s all wrong.”

He said more, mostly to himself and all of it despairing.

This trial and failure went on for a long time.

“The wax won’t speak,” he said.

He said, “The wax is dead.”

And he said, “I can’t make it live.”

“Why not just soak
me
in wax, robes and all?” I waited, but he made no response. “And then cast the statue.”

He paused, his hand caressing the air, and then he stood back from his work and stared at me for a long moment. He gazed at the manikin he had constructed, nodded in agreement, and smiled.

“Yes,” he said. “I have it now.”

I was confused, but happy that he was happy.

“I have it!” he said. He was exultant.

He left his work stand then and came to me where I stood, motionless, on the posing platform. I did not move. I did not know what his intention might be. I thought he would adjust my pose.

He pushed the hair back from my forehead and smoothed his palms over my brow. With my head between his hands, he looked at me long and searching, his eyes upon my eyes as if he saw me in a new way, and then he kissed me full on the lips. It was a soft and searching kiss. His mouth lingered there on my mouth, his hands on either side of my head as he held me firmly in his grasp, and his lips were warm and hard. It was a lover’s kiss.

“I have it now,” he said, and went back to his work stand, smiling, happy.

The kiss was done, forgotten. He might have been kissing a statue, for the little it meant to him.

He had discovered how to breathe life into his Saint Louis and he was full of joy . . . and as indifferent to me as to the manikin of wood and hair and dung he was about to abandon.

CHAPTER
11

H
ERE MY LIFE
changed forever. We say that all the time, we point to a foul or fair moment in our lives and say, yes, here is where everything of a sudden went wrong, or right, and that is why today I am damned or saved. But in this case, it is true. My lord Donatello—who looked at me and into me and who knew me as none other has—kissed me on the mouth and changed my life forever. That night, Alessandra being large with child, I lay with Caterina who it seemed had long been willing. And when I left her I took money from Donatello’s hanging basket and went to the Mercato Vecchio where, in a meager passage used for that purpose, I stood against the wall with an easy whore, and after that with another.

Alessandra and I would have three more children—healthy, all of them, until the Pest of 1437 claimed the youngest two—and I would remain faithful to her, after a way, and keep her close until the end. But on this last day of May, 1423, Donatello had kissed me like a lover, and though I was never again to feel his mouth upon my own, however much I was to think on it, this careless act of his made me his abject creature and so I would remain forever. Even in heaven or in hell.

CHAPTER
12

T
HIS KISS
was nothing to Donatello, caught up as he was in his discovery of how to complete the Saint Louis. He abandoned the manikin in its robes of clay and created another that he threw together quickly and with ease. It was rudely done but in form very much like me, with my sloping shoulders and my narrow hips and even my way of standing with a slight twist to my back and my weight heavy on my right foot. Once again he postponed work on the head until later.

On this new manikin he hung not clay robes but robes of fine brocade—gown, cope, gloves, mitre—and he arranged the folds and rearranged them until they said what he wanted them to say. And then he did a bold thing that had never yet been done. He painted the brocade with watered clay. It was a fine mixture that looked more like dirty water than like clay. He used a brush and quick, deft strokes that let the water sink deep into the cloth and after several applications and before the cloth grew too stiff to alter form, he went to work arranging the folds.

The living cloth began to dry and harden as he shifted the curve of the drape so that when the clay water dried, the fabric took on the look of bronze that would reflect the light and create deep shadows. The cloth, weighed down and growing stiff, seemed nonetheless to billow outward. You could see at once that beneath those dramatic folds the saint’s body was not so much clothed in the episcopal robes as weighed down by them, the burden almost unbearable.

The process took more than a week but at the end Donato had his workable core. Now he brushed the hard brocade with a thin coat of the finest beeswax. The liquid wax molded itself to the stiffened cloth, catching and keeping the texture of brocade while quickening the light and dark folds of the fabric. Then he laid on the wax in long sheets and, while they were still soft and pliable, molded them over the clay robes. As the wax hardened, he fell to carving in earnest. He began with the heavy twist of fabric that served as a clasp for the cope and from there he moved to the collar—twisting, cutting, smoothing out his errors—and then to the luxurious knot of silk thread at the meeting of glove and crosier. I watched him carve, no longer as an apprentice but as a conspirator.

I do not think he held memory of the kiss.

* * *

I
T WAS THUNDER
weather. All day the sky had been heavy and overcast as if it might send down a deluge at any minute. It was hard to breathe and the noises of the
bottega
seemed louder in the gathering silence. Everyone’s temper was on edge. Donatello was at work completing the wax Saint Louis and all the apprentices were occupied at their several tasks when the great Cosimo made one of his surprise visits. Of a sudden he appeared at the door, splendid in his red cloak and
cappuccio
, accompanied as was his custom by a single servant. There were a few seconds of quiet while, one by one, we became aware of his presence and stared too long for courtesy, and then the ordinary noise of the
bottega
resumed.

Donatello at once covered the statue with a work cloth and turned to greet the great man. They embraced.

“My good friend,” Cosimo said.

“My good lord.”

They smiled. Cosimo remembered always that men wish to be treated with equality. Donatello remembered they were not equals.

“I’m returning to Rome,” Cosimo said, and my mind went immediately to his Byzantine prayer book and the golden coffer I had sketched so many times. “But first I have a new undertaking for you. And for Michelozzo too, of course. His Holiness Pope John the Twenty-Third”—he meant the anti-Pope, one of the three who reigned in 1415—“desired at his death that a great tomb be raised to his memory, of marble and bronze, to be lodged within the Baptistry. Michelozzo would design it. You would execute it.” He paused. “There would be a handsome fee, of course.” The fee seemed to be especially pleasing to him.

“Of course.”

“His Holiness has left, as well, his greatest personal relic: the finger of Saint John the Baptist. A golden reliquary would be required.”

“Of course.”

“Of your exquisite craftsmanship.”

Donatello nodded in agreement. No matter how much work there was in the
bottega
, no matter how far behind he was in that work, Donatello would refuse Cosimo nothing.

They walked together to the work yard and I hastened to the pile of boxes where Michelozzo stored the records of Donatello’s commissions. I found the sheaf of sketches I had made for Cosimo’s golden coffer and placed them in the center of the huge worktable. Months earlier Donatello had glanced at the sketches, and nodded twice at the particular design I now carefully placed on top of the pile. It had merit, I thought. It had become my favorite.

While they were outside rain began to rattle on the roof, and as the full force of the shower burst on them Cosimo and Donatello came in from the wet. There was a crack of thunder and a short shiver of lightning.

“Ah,” Cosimo said, shaking off the rain and approaching Donatello’s worktable, “the tabernacle for my book? You are at work on it. Well done. Well done.” He examined the sketch with evident pleasure.

“My lord,” Donatello said. “As you see.”

“Very handsome. The family seal. The laurel wreath. A jeweled clasp.”

“As you see.”

“Spare nothing. And perhaps when I next return I will be able to look upon the thing itself?”

Donatello smiled. Cosimo was a member of nearly all the committees that had commissioned Donatello’s work and he, better than anybody, knew that Donatello’s work was always astonishing and always late. Waiting was the cost of dealing with genius and Cosimo was an expert at waiting.

“And our Michelozzo? He goes well?” His voice, hearty and pleasant to attend, softened noticeably as he asked for Michelozzo. Cosimo loved Donatello for his great artistry but his love for Michelozzo was more personal; they were friends of the soul; they studied the principles of architecture together.

“He works with Ghiberti today. They are casting ‘Pentecost’ for the north doors.”

“A marvel.”

There was a loud crack of thunder followed by a long silence and a new onrush of rain.

“God agrees,” Donatello said. He believed still that his friend Brunelleschi should have had the commission for the Baptistry doors.

“And the Saint Louis?”

“Nearly done.”