The Medici Boy (25 page)

Agnolo pouted for a minute and then, never having known restraint, he said. “Look what I can do.” And again, “Look at me.”

“Go!” Donatello shouted. “I cannot work with you here. You’re driving me mad. Just go away!”

Agnolo went all red with anger and embarrassment. He pulled on his stockings, catching his toenail on the parti-colored cloth and tearing it, and he threw on the rest of his clothes and flung himself through the door. Meanwhile Donatello bent over his work in a terrible silence. When he was sure Agnolo had left, Donatello went out to the privy and did not return for some minutes. He came back and his face was gray with anger. He stood before the statue, staring. After a long while he turned to me and said, “I can’t work with him here. He must be made to stay at home. You must see to it. You can talk to him.”

“I will talk to him,” I said.

“After all, you are his brother.” And, with a half smile, “I beg you.”

* * *

“H
E SAYS YOU
are not to come to the
bottega
while he’s working. He cannot work with you there.”

“Are you so sure?”

It was the day after Donatello’s explosion and, as soon as I saw that he had resumed work on the David, I left the bottega and sought out Agnolo at the house he shared with Donatello. Agnolo had just risen from bed.

“He said to tell you not to come,” I said.

“He repented of his anger and I forgave him.” He gave me that coy look of his. “I raised the young man in him and he had me twice during the night. He desires me still.”

I shook my head. “But he does not want you at the
bottega
.”

“Then I’ll find other places to go.”

“You anger him at your own peril. You have been arrested once already.”

“He knows and he forgives that.”

“But the Onestà . . .”

“Donatello will protect me. He is mad for me.”

“And who will protect Donatello?”

“Cosimo,” he said, giggling, “and his fat wife.”

I left him to get through the day in whatever way he would.

C
ATERINA WAS THE
first to mention what I had noticed immediately. Donatello was in good spirits once again but he was not working on the David.

“It is hard to say which David he prefers,” she said, “the one in wax or the one in the flesh.”

“For shame,” I said.

“The shame is not mine.”

“We are behind in commissions. The pulpit, for instance.”

“Love,” she said airily. “Love is the great destroyer.” She returned to the
cassone
she was painting, Amor in pursuit of Dido.

Donatello had left off work on the David. Suddenly he was caught up in Michelozzo’s plans for Cosimo’s Castello di Trebbio and then he returned to work on the Prato pulpit. He was anxious, he said, about payments for commissions that had been fulfilled and not yet paid for. What about the three hundred florins for the Baptistry panel in Siena? The money had come, I said, it was in the hanging basket. But what about the Tabernacle of the Sacrament for San Pietro in Rome? Had we ordered the marble from Pisa? Why was the shipment late? Why was nothing completed?

The David stood there, unfinished, a reminder and a rebuke.

* * *

D
ONATELLO WAS DISMAYED
. He was back at work on the David but it was going badly. He could not concentrate and his hands and eyes were no longer sure. “What can I do?” he asked me.

Agnolo had taken to going out nights and not returning until long past curfew. He was bored staying home all day and wandered instead through the markets and back alleys in search of amusement. He met boys his own age, professional
bardasse
who talked of their lovers and the gifts they gave them and the adventures they had by night. Agnolo joined them, just for fun, just for excitement, he assured Donatello, but all the same he did not return until dawn sometimes and always disheveled and exhausted. He lay abed in the mornings and was out again each evening. This could not go on.

“It cannot,” I said. “Think of the dangers.”

Donatello looked at me as if he were uncertain what I meant.

“The Onestà,” I said. “He could involve you.”

He was silent and I felt I must say it. “He already has.”

Donatello showed no surprise.

“When I was summoned for my
Interrogatorio
, they asked me about . . . well, about you . . . and I assured them there was not a trace of truth in it.”

“In what?”

“That you were . . . you know.” I waited for a response. “Nor Cosimo either, despite the dedication of that book.”

Donatello offered no show of surprise or interest in what I had said. He turned from me quietly and went back to work on the David. Work went well for the rest of the day and that evening before leaving the
bottega
he said to me, “You do well to say little of this. You are a good man, Luca.”

I went home to my wife and boys, grateful for God’s mercy and love.

* * *

“H
E IS AN
old man,” Agnolo said. “He gives me presents and he loves me but he is old and clumsy in bed. I stay with him only to be kind.”

* * *

A
PRIL CAME
,
AND
the soft rain fell, and everyone was glad of the weather, except Donatello, except Agnolo.

CHAPTER
25

O
N 17
A
PRIL
in the year 1432 the Commune of Florence established a special magistracy called the Ufficiali di Notte, the Officers of the Night, whose task was to seek out and punish those who practiced “the abominable vice of sodomy.” Earlier offices had prosecuted sodomy as part of their commissions, but the Ufficiali di Notte was the first magistracy with sodomy as its sole target.

Attenzione
: I now write a section full of dates and facts . . . because they interest me in themselves and because I have the documents before me and because I must somehow wear out my length of days before I am allowed the great sleep that never ends. Indulge an old man, and I will tell you of the Ufficiali di Notte and its nice complexities.

Sodomy was nothing new or unusual in Florence: among the Germans a sodomite is even today commonly called a
florenze
r. In truth so common was florenzing that nearly a century ago Pope Gregory XI wrote “there are no two sins more abominable than those that prevail among the Florentines: the first is usury and the second is so unspeakable that I dare not mention it.” The unspeakable sin was sodomy.

Fra Bernadino of Siena did not fear to give voice to the unspeakable when he came to Florence in 1424, and again in 1425, to give the Lenten sermons. He awoke one night, he said, to find every street and courtyard ringing with the voices of unborn children crying out against the cursed sodomites: “to the fire!”

“When you see a grown man who is without wife, there you will discover the evil vice. They are so blind in this their wickedness that no matter how beautiful a woman may be, to him she stinks and is displeasing, nor will he ever want to yield to her beauty. Burn them at the street corners,” he cried out. “All of them, burn them with their fathers and mothers and all who support this unnatural vice. Away with them! To the fire! To the fire! To the fire!”

Bernadino did not immediately have his way. It was not until 1429 that Piero di Jacopo was burned at the stake.

This new magistracy—the Ufficiali di Notte—was the Commune’s most recent, and most desperate, attempt to control “the Florentine vice.” You must not think that in Florence there were sodomites on street corners from sunup to curfew, stockings down, buggering one another for the amusement of passersby. It was a vice practiced by few, but it was a vice that commanded the attention of the church and the nobles and therefore the officers of the Commune.

In truth it was a vice more jested about than practiced. Beccadelli’s little book of Latin verses made that clear: sodomy, with all that fuss about behinds and holes and horns, was the stuff of jokes; the act itself was intrinsically funny, the position for both partners was shitty. Here was a sport to ridicule, and yet more than a few young men of eighteen, hot with first lust, found it a sport worth playing. They were from good families mostly, men of substance and promise, who considered it no more than rough fun to take a teenaged boy from behind. They were not sodomites for life, they said, but for the moment. They were real men, they took the active role, the giver. The receiver was a boy, young enough so that no permanent shame attached to him but old enough to know what he was doing. He was like Agnolo, an adolescent—rebellious, at liberty in the streets—willing and sometimes eager. The sport might last an hour or a day, but when the boy turned eighteen, the game was over. He married if he could, and if he could not, he played the man, the giver, and—reversing roles—he found for himself a boy not yet eighteen, passive and willing, et cetera, et cetera. It was a game, a romp. But at thirty, everyone agreed, a man must marry. No matter if he had come to enjoy the sport, he must leave off sodomy forever and make an end to it with marriage and a family.

To be practical, to be frank, let me say this straight out. Sin is, by its nature, complicated. It does not always corrupt. It is, after all, Adam’s first gift to man. And so it was that my beloved Michelozzo had been Donatello’s boy. It is true. I hate it, and it remains mysterious to me, but it is true. And then at forty-five years Michelozzo married and had eight children and so what harm to anyone that he had been Donatello’s lover? And Donatello in his youth had played the boy to Brunelleschi—I can say it now; they are both gone—and both of them remained good men. And my son, my son, my Franco Alessandro! It is, in all, a great mystery.

Preaching and mockery and denunciation had been tried but had accomplished nothing. Fra Bernardino of Siena had come to Florence and shouted himself hoarse, and for a time good Christians spat on the ground when they passed the Buco and the Sant’ Andrea, but Bernardino’s preaching had little lasting effect. Parents were urged to forbid and condemn, and they did . . . and their counsels were greeted with the customary indifference of the young.

But we must have laws, the clergy said. The laws must be enforced, the nobles said. And so laws were made and were, in general, ignored.

Let there be some solace, the Commune said. If they must fuck, let them at least fuck women as God intended. Choosing fornication over sodomy, the Commune legalized certain brothels “for the easement of young men who could not yet afford marriage.” In truth this was a scandal, but it was the lesser of two scandals. The brothels flourished . . . and so did sodomy.

Over the years there were repeated attempts to legislate morality and stamp out sodomy.

In 1403 the Commune established the Otto di Guardia. This was to be the central criminal agency that would seek out and destroy political conspiracies and, as an afterthought, punish crimes against morality. The Otto di Guardia fought conspiracy with great success, and there was always a new conspiracy to fight, but morality was less important than conspiracy and the
Guardia
showed little interest in such crimes.

Then in 1421 the Ufficiali di Onestà was appointed to regulate prostitution and to supervise the city’s official brothels and to crush out sodomy. But how was this to be done without a police force and without scandal to the citizenry? The Onestà soon found itself no more than a legal office mired in its own paperwork. Only in sensational crimes did the Onestà push for trial, as they had with Piero di Jacopo in 1429, but his death at the stake, popular though it was, had proved a municipal horror no city administrator wanted to see repeated.

And so it came about that in 1432, in a mood of desperation, the Ufficiali di Notte was established to crush out sodomy now and forever. Or, failing that, to make the practice of it so dangerous that the streets would be safe from sodomites, more or less, and citizens could sleep soundly knowing that their sons and daughters were as pure and virginal as they themselves had been in their youth. One last attempt to legislate virtue.

There were six Ufficiali and three assistants for all of Florence, and from the start they knew they must depend on anonymous denunciations. How else could you apprehend criminals guilty of sodomy? Anyone could accuse anyone else simply by placing his name in one of the denunciation boxes that hung in the Duomo and in Orsanmichele and in San Piero Scheraggio. Once each month the Ufficiali would open these
tamburi
and examine the denunciations and decide which to investigate and which to ignore. Personal politics, they promised, would not be a consideration.

New laws laid out specific punishments. For the first conviction, males over eighteen years were fined fifty gold florins. For a second conviction, one hundred. And so on with increasing fines until the fifth conviction, when the penalty became death by burning at the stake. For males not yet eighteen, the fines were smaller, from ten florins for the first conviction and twenty-five for the second on up to five hundred for the sixth, and death by burning if by that time the youth, a hopeless sodomite, had reached his eighteenth year.

Since the Ufficiali di Notte could not function without help from citizens, they offered the usual rewards: informers were guaranteed anonymity and—more important—one fourth of the sodomite’s fine. It was an easy way to make money and an excellent way to punish an enemy. But how could the Ufficiali know if the denunciation was true or merely malicious? And how could they guarantee anonymity? And, if the informer’s name leaked out, how could they prevent the taking of revenge? Inspired by these doubts, then as now the Ufficiali employed “secret explorers,” spies whose job it was to investigate accusations before the officials proceeded with formal charges. It was a complicated web they wove, made more complicated still by the practice of revoking punishment for any sodomite who denounced himself, confessing his crimes and naming his partners.

Informers, secret explorers, anonymous accusations, self-denunciations and the naming of partners: you can see the danger of having even one enemy in the city of Florence. Or worse, a friend caught in a judicial trap.