The Medici Boy (9 page)

On an afternoon in May with the sun warm on my neck and the sweat pricking on my brow, I first came to Donato’s notice. I was lost deep in work and concentrated all in knots as I rolled the wax into strips and lay them on the frame of my
bozzetto
. Michelozzo stood by my side, encouraging me, silent. And so I did not hear Donato come into the little shed where we worked and I was surprised when he said, “How does it go?”

Michelozzo explained on my behalf—since as always I was speechless—that it would be a small bust. My first. We would use scrap marble.

Donato glanced at the sketches that lay on the worktable. “Rinaldo,” he said. “A handsome boy.” He smiled at Michelozzo and Michelozzo returned the smile. Donato examined the rough wax mess I had produced. “Rinaldo has a fine hand with marble. When you’ve completed his bust, you should ask him to sculpt you in return.”

I nodded agreement. He looked at me then, curiously, as if he were noticing me for the first time though I had worked in his shop every day and, as an errand boy for Michelozzo, I had brought him papers to sign and reminded him of appointments and commissions and schedules. I thought he might turn away but he continued to look at me, for a long time, in a new way.

“You should start to mold that wax before it hardens,” he said. He turned then and went back inside the
bottega
.

Michelozzo said, “He has seen you now and he will remember.”

* * *

T
O BE REMEMBERED
or not to be remembered was no matter to me. It was enough to be one of the six apprentices in the
bottega
of Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi. Donato was the most accomplished and the most innovative sculptor in Florence, and if in Florence, then in the whole world. And he was not alone. Lorenzo Ghiberti, absorbed in the sculpting and casting of his first bronze doors, nonetheless kept his eye on the work of my master and, as you can see in his second set of bronze doors, he learned from it. Masaccio—Big Thomas—was in and out of the
bottega
as a friend and student of the master. He was twenty years old and would be dead at twenty-six, but now he was still alive and at work on the San Giovenale Triptych and much preoccupied with color and with Uccello’s laws of perspective. Uccello himself spent a long afternoon showing Donato—and the few others who tried to understand—how to look at a sphere with seventy-two facets in the shape of diamonds and how to draw it and what the results might be. He was twittering and slightly mad and Donato was kind but firm with him, taking in what was useful and dismissing the rest with thanks, while Uccello returned to his solitary house in the hills and his paintings of every kind of animal, to his sad wife and his cages of wild birds. Donato’s oldest friend and companion, Brunelleschi, was in and out, working in secret on his miraculous dome, and my friend Michelozzo was there, whom I called Michele, learning from the master and keeping accounts for him and leading him out of the financial disaster he seemed to want to embrace. The great patrons would sometimes appear: the Medici—old Giovanni di Bicci and Cosimo himself—and Niccolò da Uzzano, the Rucellai, the Riccardi, and even the Albizzi who would later try to destroy Cosimo, our patron. The entire world came around to see what Donato was creating and to applaud the work and to ask a favor. And among all these, invisibly, I too was there, a man in years but still a boy in the craft of sculpting, unskilled, unsubtle, but full of hope and not yet possessed by the demon of . . . of what exactly I could not yet say.

* * *

I
T WAS A
sweltering day in June—hot in the way that only Florence can be hot—and the huge double doors to the courtyard had been thrown open in hopes of a breeze. There was none. The sun seemed to have settled over the city with the intention of putting it to fire. We had all laid aside our stockings and doublets and, dressed only in our long shirts, we gave ourselves over to lethargy. The stone floor was cool on our bare feet.

I was at the big table doing the accountant’s work Michelozzo had assigned me and I had finished sorting through the sheaf of commissions still unfulfilled. I had separated out the commissions that were fulfilled but not yet paid for—a
tondo
, a marble bust, two
cassoni
—and I had begun to add up the sums owed and the sums paid. But it was June, and hot, and I was distracted from thoughts of money by thoughts of Alessandra. I was set upon continually by desire for her. By—I must tell truth—by a lust that never seemed possible to slake though she was always willing to try. I shifted Donato’s commissions in my hands, but my mind was on her body, the soft skin of her inner thighs and the sweet mound there. I began to sweat and I began to go hard. It was lust, I knew, and I pressed my legs together to make myself harder. Yes, it is lust. And lust is evil but, since we are not angels, it is necessary. But was it only lust? I shut my eyes to see her the better and thought, Surely this is love.

Suddenly, the master was standing before me, and I realized he had been standing there for some time, staring. He had, as Michelozzo promised, remembered me. I leaped to my feet.

“How old are you, Luca?” he asked. “About twenty-three?”

“Twenty-one or maybe twenty-three.”

“Sit down. Sit down. And you were a Franciscan brother for a time.”

I nodded and sat down.

“Louis of Tolosa was twenty-three when he died. He was a Franciscan mendicant.”

He was thinking aloud, not truly looking at me now, and then suddenly he was, and it was as if he was seeing me for the first time. It was that same look he gave to whatever he was sculpting.

The look of a great artist is not a devouring look or even a penetrating look. It is illumination, as if a great light is turned upon you and all the dark places of your mind and heart are suddenly revealed. It is how God will look at you at his Final Judgment. It is naked, it is not decent.

I felt myself go hot under his stare, and then cold, and I began to sweat. My leg began to tremble and my sight went dim and I had fear of the worst but—a great mercy—the spell did not descend on me. I felt tears come to my eyes. I had never been looked at in this way. Would I be found out? Would I be acceptable?

Donato had already turned away.

“Rinaldo,” he called out, “set up a new armature. I am going to sculpt my Louis.”

CHAPTER
10

“W
HAT DO YOU
want?” Donato said, but it was not a question, it was merely something he was saying to himself as he sketched. I was seated on a low stool while he sat behind his huge worktable. “Lean forward a little. Bring your shoulders down. Good. Now a quarter turn to the left.”

He had been sketching me—or rather my head and shoulders—for more than an hour. He wanted not only my features but a sense of depth and volume.

“What do you want?” he said again.

At last I found my voice and said, “I want to marry.”

“Good,” he said. “That’s very good.” And after a moment he stopped drawing and asked, “What did you say?”

“I want to marry.”

He smiled then. “A handsome boy. But you’re so young.”

“I’m twenty-one. Or perhaps older.”

“Does she have a family, a dowry?”

“She is a street woman. I knew her sister in Prato.”

“You want to marry a prostitute? You
frati minori
are full of surprises.”

“I was not a very good Brother.”

“Is she comely?”

“She is very beautiful. Her name is Alessandra.”

“And you love her.”

I did not hesitate. “Yes.”

“Even though she has been with others?”

“Yes.”

“With many others?”

I said nothing.

“And without a dowry.”

“Yes.”

“You’ll need more money.”

“I need your permission.”

He made a gesture that seemed to say his permission was not important, though in truth I could not marry without it. He went back to his drawing.

“And I will need money for a room. I cannot well ask that she move in with me and Francesco and Rinaldo.”

“They might like that.” He smiled. He was amusing himself. “How much do we pay you now?”

“Twelve florins a year and a new pair of stockings.” I wanted to be clear: “A new pair of stockings each year.”

“You’ll need at least thirty florins. I’ll tell Michelozzo. Or you can tell him if I should forget.”

I had not intended to ask his permission to marry until he was done with the Louis statue and then, if I had less fear of him by then, I thought I might dare ask. I was overwhelmed. I could think of nothing to say.

“Thirty florins. And a new pair of stockings,” he said. “Each year.”

A
MONTH BEFORE
Alessandra and I were to marry, there came a letter from Prato. I had received a letter only once before—an appeal for money from Spinetta, the dyer’s wife, some years past when she learned I was apprenticed to Cennino, so I was convinced that the boy who brought it was in error. But he was a messenger by profession and assured me that if I was the Luca di Matteo apprenticed to Donatello,
orafo a Firenze
, then the letter was for me. I signed the note of receipt.

The letter was from Spinetta, written in a fine hand that could not have been her own. It was again a request for money. Her life was difficult beyond imagining, she wrote, her poverty crippling. Her oldest son had been scalded in a dyeing vat and could never work again. The next two boys were young, and sickly in any case, and together they earned less than enough to keep them in food and clothing. Agnolo, coming on to nine years old, was always in trouble. He had tried to run away. He was wild and uncontrollable, a young animal. Could I send money? Any little thing would help to keep them alive, but surely I could spare more than a little. I should ask the rich and famous Donatello, she said, since he was known to have pity on the poor. She assured me I had always been her favorite and that she counted on me now and she remembered me in her prayers day and night, storming heaven on my behalf.

I folded the letter and, to keep from thinking on it, put it away in my sandalwood box with my few special things. It was an odd collection: the New Testament in Latin that the Fratelli had let me keep when they turned me away and some charcoaled sheets I held in high value. There was a sketch I had made of Alessandra naked and one of the courtyard in Prato with the well and the white cat, and another of Lo Scheggia that Donato had drawn and then thrown out when he abandoned the earlier Saint Louis. And the ivory-handled stylus that was my first gift from Donato. There was also a single gold earring I had found days earlier in the Mercato Vecchio. It was valuable, surely, and engraved with tiny laurel leaves. I was keeping it to give Alessandra on her feast day. I put Spinetta’s letter at the bottom of the box and tried to forget about it. I was resolved that I would not reply.

I
WAS POSING
now, no longer for the bust alone but for the full length statue of Saint Louis. It was early evening, a scorching July day, and all the others had left the
bottega
. Donato was caught up in his work, taking advantage of the late light, when all at once it came to him to sketch me in episcopal robes. He hauled out three light canvas throws from where they hung on a storage rack and with much care, as if he were clothing me in heavy damask, he draped one around my front to make a gown and the other two around my shoulders, so that in a very short time I looked like a poor man’s bishop. I bore all the elaborate paraphernalia but what should have been brocade was in fact canvas and what should have been a bishop was an inept apprentice awash in sweat. Donato was caught up in the travesty. He arranged the gown in front, tying it with a cincture so that the light canvas draped like rich material, and he doubled back the shoulder pieces to make a kind of collar on the mantel and then he stood back and admired his work. He fussed with the folds, pulling and pushing the stiff fabric to make it hang like rich damask.

“We need episcopal gloves,” he said. “And a crosier. And we’ll make you a mitre.”

I was too uncomfortable to move, too drowned in canvas to speak.

“How do you feel? Do you feel like a bishop?”

“I don’t know how a bishop feels,” I said.

“Do you feel like a saint?”

“I feel like I’m being smothered.”

“You look like you’re being smothered.” This was not Donato speaking. It was a man of the nobility, magnificent in his bearing, dressed all in red and with a servant in black and gold by his side. I knew at once it was Cosimo de’ Medici. He was famous for being rich and powerful but he was famous for being ugly as well. He was tall and lean and his skin was yellowish. His eyebrows met in the middle of his forehead and the eyes themselves were small and narrow. His chin protruded in an uncomely manner. I could see why people said he was ugly, but he smiled as he greeted Donato with a greeting that was open and hearty and at that moment he appeared a man of supreme elegance and beauty. It was well known that women found him attractive.

“My friend,” he said, and embraced Donato with feeling, kissing him on one cheek and the other and then kissing him once again.

“My lord,” Donato said, returning the embrace.

“I am just returned from Rome. Your work goes well? And yourself?” His voice was deep and rich, a pleasure to hear. He was completely at his ease with Donato, but even more remarkable was that Donato seemed completely at ease with him. They were like old friends, not like patron and artisan. I could not help staring and he must have sensed my look because he glanced over at me and smiled. It was said that he was never too grand or too busy for even the little people and this seemed to be true. His servant waited patiently by the door, his hands folded before him, a small dagger at his right side and a velvet purse worked with gold thread hanging at his left. It appeared they had come on foot.

Donato led my lord Cosimo out to the work yard and showed him the huge Abraham and Isaac he and Nanni di Bartolo, working together, had nearly completed for the Or San Michele. It was a marvel, though Nanni’s work on the boy Isaac seemed to me less wonderful than Donato’s Abraham. Also there were two marble heads in bas relief—a sibyl and a prophet—for the Porta della Mandorla, completed and ready for delivery, and as always there were statues in progress: blocks of marble that in time would become the Jeremiah and the Zuccone and stand in niches on the west walls of Giotto’s campanile. At the moment, however, they were merely two massive blocks of marble, cut to size and crudely marked for first carving by the apprentices. Even now Donato could see that these rude stones would become great wonders and Cosimo, a connoisseur of all the arts, looked on and must have known this as well. He smiled and put his hands together, palm to palm. He was ugly, perhaps, but he was bold and heartening to look upon.