David (4 page)

But Angelo had also signed a contract to make fifteen figures for Cardinal Piccolomini in Siena; he had boasted about it. I couldn’t see how he was going to make those if he got the Duomo’s old block to sculpt. He told me he’d promised the Cardinal not to undertake any other work till the Sienese commission was finished, but I could see he didn’t intend to keep his word if he got hold of that block.

I was still staying with him at his father’s house; it wasn’t comfortable but it was convenient and I felt safe there. I hardly saw Lodovico but he was willing enough to have me in his home. It was obvious that money was a bit tight. Angelo never took any notice of home comforts – he was a bit like a monk in that way – and I’m ashamed to say I often sloped off back to Clarice’s in search of some better wine and more plentiful food. Yes, and other comforts too.

And I enjoyed playing with her two little daughters, Benedetta and Carolina. They knew me now and, for want of a father perhaps, they looked forward to my visits. They were sweet-natured, like their mother. I knew nothing of their father, save that he had died eighteen months earlier in a riding accident.

Angelo never said anything about my absences – just gave me a quizzical look when I came back smelling of perfume. He had found me work in a stonemasons’ workshop near the great cathedral, which kept me close to the big block of marble and to my lady’s palazzo. If I stayed overnight with Clarice, I could stumble out in the morning and into work, but when we broke off at midday I always found my footsteps taking me to the Opera del Duomo; that block was beginning to fascinate me almost as much as it did my brother.

He had started calling it ‘David’.

‘I can make something of this,’ he would mutter, walking round and round the block and making the odd mark here and there on the surface.

It was as if he were boring into it with his eyes, trying to find something inside it that was trapped, frozen in the marble like a fish in a block of ice. But it wasn’t a fish he was trawling for; it was a man.

One night back at the house he asked me to pose for him. He wanted me to strip and there’s no other man I would have done it for. I trusted him completely, but I was a bit nervous that some other member of the family might walk in. He wasn’t satisfied with my position until he had got me standing with my weight on my right leg, my body pivoted on that hip and my head turned to the left. My right arm was to hang down loose, but with my left – bent up towards the shoulder – I had to pretend to hold a slingshot. My left foot was raised – resting on a cauliflower!

‘Is that Goliath’s head?’ I asked.

Angelo just grunted.

I found it very difficult to hold the pose and I was embarrassed to have him gazing so intently at my naked body.

‘You’re frowning, Gabriele,’ he said, rapidly sketching in fast fluid lines.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s good. It’s how David would have looked.’

Over the next few weeks I got more used to standing with my clothes off while Angelo circled round me sketching me from every angle. There were sheets and sheets of drawings: my head, my arms, my back and my buttocks.

I thought I’d stopped frowning but there it still was in all the drawings of my face.

‘Do you need all these?’ I asked him one day, as casually as I could.

‘Huh,’ he grunted. ‘You want one for your lady love, don’t you?’

I blushed at being so transparent, but he gave me a handful of the drawings he didn’t want. It seemed to make him decide on what he did want, because the next day he said he was ready to make a wax model for the statue.

Clarice was delighted with the few sketches I gave her.

‘I will have this one framed and hang it in my bedchamber where none but I will be able to see it,’ she said.

And your servants
, I thought, uneasy about that little maid Vanna looking at me with no clothes on.

I stowed the rest of the drawings away carefully. I don’t know why. I certainly had no idea then how famous this David would be. Or how dangerous it would be for me to look like him.

My brother was now completely absorbed in the wax model he was making, based on those drawings. It was less than life-sized, being smaller than me, let alone than that huge old block. I looked at the progress of the wax model every day, drawn by this manikin who had my body and face. No one else was allowed in the workshop, even though the Operai were very interested in what he was doing. He was much too secretive to let them in or show them anything till the model was finished.

But then my lady hit me with news that put all thoughts of my other self out of my mind.

We had just finished eating a good dinner at her house and the servants had withdrawn when she chose to tell me.

‘Gabriele, dear,’ she began. ‘I’m afraid these lovely evenings of ours are coming to an end.’

I just gawped like a ninny. ‘Why?’ I asked stupidly. It should have been obvious that she had tired of me.

‘I am getting married again,’ she said simply.

My face must have shown my dismay and disbelief. She had never mentioned another man’s name all the times we had been together.

‘Antonello de’ Altobiondi has been courting me for some time,’ she said. ‘And I have a reason now to accept him.’

You’ll hardly believe that I still had no idea what she was talking about.

‘Innocent boy,’ she sighed, taking my face in her hand and squeezing it. She released me with a little shake. ‘I am expecting a child – and that is somewhat disapproved of in a widow.’

A child! She was carrying my child and this Antonello de’ Altobiondi was going to be its father.

Chapter Three

After the Sweet, the Bitter

On our rare days off work my brother took me round the city showing me what he thought were the best works of art. He called it ‘taking me to school’.

A favourite place of his was Santa Maria del Carmine across the river. It was a short walk from the cathedral and it felt as if we were going out into the countryside but there was the church with its chapel devoted to the life of Saint Peter.

‘I used to come here every day when I was a boy – younger than you,’ said my brother. ‘My old master sent me to copy the frescoes – it’s where I got my nose broken as a matter of fact.’

The atmosphere inside the chapel was so serene I couldn’t imagine any violence happening there. Small groups of young men, obviously apprentices in other artists’ workshops, were sitting diligently drawing.

I had never seen anything like those paintings on the wall.

‘Who did them?’ I whispered.

‘Big Tom,’ said my brother, grinning. ‘He was supposed to be helping Little Tom, who was older than him, but Big Bad Tom ran rings round him.’

‘Did you know him?’ I asked, surprised by his familiar tone. There was so much about my clever brother’s life I knew nothing about.

‘No,’ he said. ‘These were painted long before I was born – nearly eighty years ago. But everyone saw straight away that the younger painter was the greater artist.’

I looked at the fresco of Adam and Eve being driven out of the Garden of Eden. She was howling with grief and trying to cover her nakedness with her hands. But Adam had his hands over his face and looked inconsolable.

It made me feel very uncomfortable and set me thinking about my situation with Clarice. She hadn’t for one moment considered marrying me and I suppose I couldn’t blame her for that; aristocratic ladies don’t marry stonecutters, except in old fables. But it was the way she had kept the news of the baby to herself up till now and made this life-changing decision on her own that made me feel sore. As if it had been a women’s issue and I – or even Altobiondi – just pawns in a game where she was queen.

But my brother was pointing out another picture to me. Saint Peter was baptising some new converts – some of the first Christians ever – and there was a queue waiting to be initiated into the new religion.

‘That’s the one that got me my new nose,’ he said. ‘See that young man waiting to be baptised?’

Indeed my eyes had already been drawn to this figure. He stood stripped to his underwear, hugging himself with his arms to stop from shivering, just waiting to step into the river and be born anew. You could feel how cold and nervous he was.

‘Torrigiani started moaning about how Big Tom was an incompetent draughtsman,’ my brother continued. ‘The arms were “too small”, the anatomy “not accurate”, he said.’

I thought I could see where this was going but I had never heard the full story of the broken nose before.

‘What did you do?’ I asked.

‘Nothing,’ he said innocently. ‘I just told him he was wrong. In a certain amount of detail.’ He was grinning as if the incident were taking place right now before his eyes.

‘And Torrigiani didn’t like being wrong so he hit me – a great single punch in the face. We both heard my nose break. And the blood was pouring out in a flood – ruined the drawing I’d just made.’

‘What happened?’

‘Well, Torrigiani legged it and I went back to the sculpture garden.’

‘What did Lorenzo de’ Medici say?’ I asked, though I felt shy at even mentioning the great man’s name. I knew that my brother had caught the eye of this illustrious patron when he was just a boy. Lorenzo de’ Medici had taken him to live in his house and eat at his table alongside his own children. And put him to study in the sculpture garden up by San Marco. This was ten years ago or more and it didn’t last long; Lorenzo had died in 1492.

‘He was very angry with Torrigiani,’ said my brother, his strange horn-coloured eyes looking into the distance as if he could still see the remembered scene. ‘It must have looked worse than it was – me all covered in blood. Lorenzo called me in to give an account of what happened. I think he was pleased I had defended a great artist against a piffling student like Pietro Torrigiani.’

‘What happened to Pietro?’

‘Oh, he left town soon after,’ said my brother, smiling. ‘It taught him not to show disrespect of his betters.’

‘What was he like?’ I asked.

‘Torrigiani?’

‘No. Lorenzo.’

He looked round as if there might be listeners behind every pillar.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘There’s a tavern nearby. Looking at great art always makes me thirsty.’

We left the chapel and were soon sitting with two generous flagons of
vernaccia
. It was a warm August evening and I’d been in the city nearly five months but I still felt there was so much about it I didn’t know or understand.

‘You said you weren’t on anyone’s side when you arrived,’ said my brother. ‘Do you still feel the same?’

‘I don’t want to have anything to do with politics,’ I said quickly.

He snorted over his wine. ‘That’s what people say who don’t understand what the word means. And it’s very dangerous to stay ignorant in Florence – you might not stay alive very long.’

‘But what has a stonecutter to do with politics? How can I affect anything that goes on in government rooms and grand buildings?’

‘I might have thought that once, but I lived among the great men of the city when I was just a boy and that shaped my thinking.’

‘So you are a Medici man through and through?’

Again, he looked round cautiously as if the very walls might have ears.

‘I
was
,’ he said. ‘I was Lorenzo’s man, heart and soul. There was never anyone to touch him. But when he died and his son Piero took over, he was a bitter disappointment – nothing like his father.’

He seemed lost in thought.

‘Lorenzo gave me marble to work in. Piero gave me snow.’

‘Snow?’ It seemed impossible, a cruel joke.

‘It was the winter of ’94,’ he said. ‘Do you remember it? You’d have been – what? – twelve? It snowed in Florence, in January.’

‘I remember,’ I said, thinking of snowball fights with my friends in Settignano. It was the only time in my life I had ever seen deep snow.

‘Piero asked me to make a snowman,’ said my brother. ‘And I did. And it was a good piece of sculpture. But in a few days it was just a puddle. That’s the sort of man Piero was. I still have the marble reliefs I made for Lorenzo and I expect to have them till I die. I’ll show them to you.’

‘So you are a republican now?’

My brother called for more wine; he had a real stoneworker’s thirst and so did I. You never really seem to get the dust out of your throat.

‘I am all in favour of a single ruler if that ruler can be a Lorenzo de’ Medici,’ he said at last. ‘But there are few men like him. Even his own son had none of his quality. So in general, yes, I’m now a republican.’

‘Then I am too,’ I said.

He laughed his short barking laugh, a stonecutter’s cough.

‘You can’t just say you’re a republican because I’m one.’

‘I’m not. I’m saying it because you’ve explained it and I agree with you. I’d like to see those reliefs, by the way.’

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘You stick to stone and things you understand. But be careful. We may be republicans and that’s the faction with the upper hand in Florence now. But there are still lots of Medici supporters who would bring the family back. And the two sides hate each other. I can’t do that. I can’t hate the family that made me what I am. But until another Lorenzo is born, I’ll stay a republican, even if I don’t take an active part in the city’s politics – just enough to keep me alive.’