The Medici Boy (32 page)

I looked at him, my son of fifteen years who was now almost a man, and I tried to believe him. These things often began with a snatched hat, I knew. No one knew why the hat should take on such significance but certainly it was true of female prostitutes that they made off with a man’s hat in order to force him to pay for sex. It had happened to me more than once and in truth I had entered happily into the game. And so I believed that a soldier or someone who looked like a soldier had snatched away Franco’s hat. What I could not believe was that my own son was so easy, that he had put himself in a place and a situation where sex of that nature was likely to occur, and that he had been willing to bend over and let himself be penetrated. That he could be like Agnolo was more than I could bear.

“The full story,” I said. “But it raises so many questions. Why were you there on the Via tra’ Pellicciai? Why do you hang about with boys who—do not deny it—make themselves available to soldiers? Or, I think, to anyone who has a few coins and is thick with lust? What would your mother think to know her son is a
bardassa
? She who prays night and day!” I was beginning to shout. “
Are
you a
bardassa
? Has it come to this? What shame to your brother!”

“I am not a
bardassa
. I never take money.”

I stopped then and listened to him. He never took money. So, this was not his first escapade. There must have been previous times when he was not caught. My anger faded and my heart ached for him, a poor vain boy. Playing at this kind of seduction was not rare among the rich and the noble—nor in truth among the very poor—but it was a thing that could not be borne by men of middle rank. Such men were sober and responsible, we worked hard, we married young. We were not seduced by the backsides of wanton boys.

And yet today, some twenty-six years later, the Florence vice is more common still and prevails among all levels of men, as if it is a necessary ritual for boys in their early teens, something they grow into and out of and it does not matter. But it does matter and it did. For this was not something Franco Alessandro would grow out of.

“Never again,” he promised on that day in 1440 and he wept most bitterly in my arms. I wept as well. But I sensed even then that he was lost to me forever.

CHAPTER
33

D
ONATELLO CLAIMED NOT
to miss Agnolo, not to care about him any longer, but I did not believe him and what I saw convinced me that Agnolo remained very much in his mind and heart. He had been pleased to hear that Agnolo was apprenticed to a wool carder—his own father had been a wool-carder—and from time to time he asked if I had news of the boy. The boy was now a man, of course, but in Donatello’s mind he was still that sixteen year old who, posing for the David, seduced him and stole his heart and remained still in possession of it.

Donatello had grown old—he was more than fifty years of age by now—and it seemed that with the exile of Agnolo he had lost interest in both his work and his life. Those good days when he would gather us all together at the end of a work day and we would joke and drink and he would say witty things about Ghiberti or intimate things about my lord Cosimo de’ Medici, those days were gone. He no longer laughed and he seemed always a little lost. He had never been of easy approach on any personal matter and now he seemed more remote than before. Still, I took courage and asked him outright about Agnolo.

“Do you miss him?”

Donatello gave me a sharp look.

“He is in Prato,” I said, “carding wool. It is not far off.”

“He was dear to me,” he said, “once.”

“He is a man now and has perhaps given up his evil ways.”

“His evil ways were my evil ways.”

“He is ever in need of money,” I said.

“And your evil ways? Of mind and tongue?”

“I could not help myself and so I said it. Sometimes . . .”

“Do you think the tongue corrupts the heart, Luca? Or does it work the other way?”

“I think you are hard on me. I want only to help.”

“It is good that you have Alessandra.”

I did not mention that Alessandra had grown cold to me and that I was forced to find my ease with whores. Of course it may be he knew this and was being sharp with me. With good reason he was called
intricato
.

He was silent for a while and then he said, “Yes, I miss him.”

“He could still be purchased, I think. At a bargain price.”

“Don’t,” he said. He looked at me, suddenly a very old man, and drew me to him. He was crying and I could feel his head shaking against my breast. For a fleeting moment I felt good to have brought him down. He pulled away then, his beard wet with tears, and said, “Come. We have work to do.”

* * *

H
E WAS LETHARGIC
, dull. He came late to the
bottega,
worked indifferently, and left even before dark. His mind was elsewhere and besides, though there were few new commissions, there were a great many works not yet complete. Of these the Cantoria mattered most. The marble was costly and the Duomo was committed to holding Donatello to contract. He worked dutifully but he had scarcely begun carving the right side of the frieze when his attention wandered to other commissions.

He passed off work on the dancing children of the Cantoria to his new assistant, Agostino di Duccio, and of course to the ever-present Pagno di Lapo. He had laid out the design for all the dancing children and he had done the preliminary cutting and now he allowed them to do carving that once he would have insisted on doing himself. Occasionally he would correct Pagno’s errors and sometimes he would be moved to take chisel in hand and show Duccio how to carve out a plump leg as it showed from behind a pilaster, but mostly he left them alone to complete the relief as best they could.

If the Cantoria failed to engage him in the old way, the lesser commissions were a positive annoyance. The Prato Pulpit he dismissed in disgust, finishing the carving as if he were attacking an enemy. But at last it was done.

* * *

F
RANCO
A
LESSANDRO WAS
arrested for sodomy. It was his second arrest. We paid the fine of twenty-five florins and he was released. There was a long silence in our house, and in my heart I had begun to despair of him.

For no reason I could allege, I blamed Agnolo for this.

* * *

C
OSIMO HAD MUCH
to occupy him. After his return from exile he had taken great care to remain in the background of political events and though he could have made himself the supreme power in Florence he chose merely to exile the Albizzi and their followers and to maintain the laws and offices unchanged. He announced his return to political life by accepting the office of Gonfaloniere for January and February of 1435 and then, having served the Republic as its visible head, he withdrew into the private life of a banker, retaining first approval of any candidate nominated for office, however high, however low. Without bloodshed and without rancor, Cosimo had quickly and effectively taken control of the government of Florence.

All this time, despite his involvement in politics, he remained mindful of his artisan friends. They needed money and so they needed work. His particular concern for Donatello had begun after the completion of the David. Donatello seemed downcast, defeated, as if by surrendering the finished sculpture he was losing something of himself. Cosimo responded as he invariably did, with praise, with devotion, with money.

By way of thanks—and in addition to the five hundred gold florins he paid on completion of the statue—Cosimo presented Donatello with a gown and cloak and
capuccio
in the finest red wool of the nobility, a thing worthy of the maker of David. And then, when the statue was mounted on a marble column in the center of Cosimo’s garden, he gave a banquet in celebration and, in addition to his extended family circle, he invited Ghiberti and Brunelleschi, Michelozzo and Uccello, della Robbia, Fra Angelico, della Quercia and the unspeakable Filippo Lippi. It was a gathering of my lord Cosimo’s dear friends, artisans of extraordinary skills, each of them in debt to him for work commissioned and work yet unimagined. Donatello was the guest of honor. He wore the red robes that Cosimo had given him and he drank much and marveled at the attention and praise they lavished on him, but in the end he found the attention tiresome and the praise meaningless. These were his gifted friends and sometimes his competitors whose loving admiration for him was limited by their own ambitions. There was jealousy here as well as love. He knew this and he was happy when the banquet was over.

Though he wore the red robes on the Feast of the Most Holy Name of Mary and again on the Feast of San Lorenzo, he was glad to give them back with thanks and apologies as being too grand for a simple artisan whose father had been a wool-comber. Cosimo understood and, taking back the robes with some reluctance, promised that nonetheless they would remain friends and collaborators . . . as even now there stood in his garden the beautiful bronze David that was proof of the importance of their collaboration.

* * *

F
RANCO
A
LESSANDRO WAS
arrested once again, his third arrest.

“Are you
trying
to disgrace us?”

“I’m sorry. I beg pardon of you and mother.”

“Are you trying to be another Agnolo Mattei?” I spat out the name.

“I am an evil son.”

He would sin again and would be punished again and so would we all. We paid his fine of fifty florins and begged him to sin no more.

* * *

M
ICHELOZZO HAD BY
now completed plans for the new Medici palace—a more controlled design than the grandiose palace Brunelleschi had earlier proposed—and my lord Cosimo was pleased with its strength and modesty and its quiet grandeur. There was a garden and a formal courtyard for display of statuary and there were separate apartments for members of his family and of course a private chapel for Cosimo himself.

The new palace was not Cosimo’s only concern. More and more he worried about the fate of his immortal soul, and the more he worried the more he invested his great wealth in works for the church. He poured a small fortune into the sacristy and chapel of San Lorenzo and a large fortune into the restoration of the Dominican monastery of San Marco.

He chose Michelozzo as architect and gave him a free hand. Michelozzo designed a new cloister with twenty-eight columned arches, an
ospizio
for the ill and the aged, a refectory, a chapter house, a second cloister, and a long corridor of cells for the monks, one of those cells reserved from the beginning for Cosimo’s personal use. It was to be a place where he could spend days and nights at prayer and meditation and where Mass could be said for the good of his soul. Fra Angelico painted frescoes in each of the cells and along the corridor, making of the passageway a veritable entrance to paradise. In Cosimo’s private cell, Angelico painted a fresco of the Adoration of the Magi, in which Cosimo himself may or may not have been represented as one of the wise men. Angelico was not readily given to flattery.

At this time Michelozzo chose at last to marry. At nearly forty-five years, he was nearing old age when he took as his bride the young and beautiful Francesca di Ambrogio, a tanner’s daughter of nineteen years. She reminded me much of Alessandra when I first knew her, a lively girl with green eyes and a full figure, a good bearer of children and with the attitude of a devoted wife.

For the wedding of Michelozzo and Francesca, Cosimo gave an enormous banquet in the courtyard of his old palace on the Via de’ Bardi. It was a rare mild day in January and the courtyard was alive with flowering shrubs brought in for the occasion and in the center stood the bronze David, mounted on a marble pillar and surrounded by wreaths of laurel. As a friend of Michelozzo—and, I like to think, as transcriber of manuscripts for Cosimo himself—I was invited to attend the banquet. There was much eating and drinking of rare wines and there was music and dancing and it was good to see Donatello give away his great friend to this tanner’s beautiful daughter.

As it happens Francesca was true to her appearance; she was indeed a devoted wife and a good bearer of children. In my own lifetime she bore Michelozzo four sons and four daughters and they all survived. None of them has his genius but they are all beauties and all devoted to him. And Michelozzo, as he deserves, is supremely happy.

* * *

F
RANCO
A
LESSANDRO WAS
arrested for sodomy—his fourth arrest—and now lay ill in the cellars of the Bargello until the fine of one hundred florins would be paid and names named and the sentence of one hour in the pillory carried out. We were ruined now. We had fifty florins in our savings box and my lord Donatello loaned us another fifty and we paid the hundred florin fine.

Franco Alessandro was released from prison and by the mercy of some jurisdictional accident he was spared an hour in the pillory. No one knew why. A check mark next to his name, a question raised by some City Eminence, some sleight of hand? He was spared the pillory and its torments thanks to Cosimo de’ Medici, but we were not to know this until two years later when Franco was arrested once more and Cosimo yet again came to his aid.

We welcomed Franco home this one last time. Another arrest would mean a two-hundred-florin fine and exile for life. Alessandra was convinced it would come to that. I too feared the worst. I had watched Agnolo’s madness play itself out over all these years and I knew that Franco would not easily give up his reckless way of life. In truth I was torn between rage and anguish. We had lost our two youngest sons to the Black Pest, and our oldest Donato Michele had given himself to God in the Order of Saint Francis, so it was sad to think our one remaining son should be such bitter gall to us. Alessandra felt only love for him but I felt love and hate together, the frustration of all my desires and my hopes. He made me want to cry on his shoulder and cry out against him all at the same time. He was our hope and our salvation, dashed.