The Medici Boy (11 page)

“And may I . . . ?”

Donatello nodded, not willingly, but led him to the posing area where he removed the work cloth. Cosimo studied the wax sculpture for a long time and asked, “But how will you be able to cast it? It’s so large.”

“Lozzo is an expert,” Donatello said. “He’ll do the casting.”

Cosimo nodded and continued to look at the statue. “
Miracolo
,” he said.

They embraced and he made to leave, but before plunging out into the drenching rain, Cosimo turned and said—as if Donatello might not know this—“He’ll need a head.”

* * *

T
HE HEAD AGAIN
. He made a false start and then another until, frustrated, he let go the head and worked on the marble Zuccone and the two busts—a prophet and a sybil—long since commissioned for the Porta della Mandorla. Then one day, for no reason other than he saw me of a sudden with a different eye, he returned to the head of Saint Louis with a bold energy. The wax
bozzetto
he produced, carved in less than a week, seemed to me perfection itself. He worked with speed and fury, pausing only to confirm with his fingers the shape of my brow and my cheekbones and the line of my teeth. It was a marvel of invention. In another week the head and the whole was set for casting.

To the core of the statue he had applied liquid wax and to the wax, once hardened, he had applied layers of clay in increasing thickness. The whole would be bolted together, core and clay with the wax in between, and when it was heated the wax would melt and the bronze would be poured into the hollow left by the wax. It was an ancient technique.

He and Michelozzo broke the statue down into eight pieces and each was cast as a separate sheet, the head remaining till the last. The clay mold was bolted to the core and heated slowly, slowly—heated too fast, the wax would boil—until the wax began to melt and run out of the vents at the bottom. And then the molten bronze was poured into the mold through the funnel at the top, replacing in exact detail the wax that had run out the bottom. When the metal cooled, the bolts were removed and the clay armor stripped away and, behold, not the flawless wax that had been encased within but in its place a bronze mess, an eighth part of Saint Louis, that would now be carved and chased and polished. It seemed to me a disaster. All the fine detail was gone, the bronze had clotted, the brocade looked to be canvas. I gasped at the ruin of Donatello’s work.

He himself was pleased, however, and chisels in hand, he set about carving away the unseemly clots, chasing the hard bronze, polishing the smooth surface until it was ready for gilding. Each finished piece was heated—evenly and for a long time—above a charcoal fire. This would strengthen the statue to resist foul weather but, more important, the transformative mixing of the chemicals would cause the gold to adhere to the bronze in a way no ordinary gilding process could produce.

At the end the pieces were bolted together invisibly from behind. Constructed thus, the back remained unfinished and so would fit into the Or San Michele niche. The work was all but complete when—we had become this close—he let me put my mark upon it. The
putti
at the base of the niche are his in design but they are executed by me. To celebrate the birth of my son, Donatello assigned the making of these to me as a gift. That they stand there still—my poor work beside that of the great master—is a mark of his generosity and love.

A solemn music here. A change in tone. You’ve noticed? All is not what it seems. It never is.

During those weeks Donatello spent gilding the Saint Louis, I worked at carving the
putti
, making them frolicsome and antic, like Donatello’s own. In the end I was satisfied that the work was my best. But when Donatello looked upon it, he regarded the
putti
in a long silence, a fatal silence, but then because I stood beside him, hoping, he placed his hand on my shoulder and said, “Well done, Luca. You have done well.”

I could hear the disappointment in his voice and I knew that only his kindness kept him from pointing out the hundred places where my chisels had gone wrong. My
putti
were common, awkward, ugly; they were as unworthy of his great Saint Louis as I was of him. I felt a tingling in my leg and my foot began to tap, tap, tap and, though I tried to brush it away, that dull gray cloud descended upon my eyes. I made to cry out but no sound came. I lost all breath. The sculpting of the Louis was done, and my own sculpting of the
putti
had failed, and I would lose my master now, forever. Blood rushed to my head, pulsing. There was a roaring sound, and in my nose there was the stink of the dyer’s vats, and I made to cry out though no sound came. Donatello’s hand tightened on my shoulder and I began to shake and I could not stop. “
Mio figlio
,” he said. “
Mio tesoro
.” I heard the care in his voice and for a moment my vision cleared. But then I saw my work with Donatello’s eyes: these
putti
were not angelic babies, they were tiny men, deformed and loathsome. They had betrayed me. They had lost me his love and I was falling, falling.

I snatched up a chisel and made to lunge at the
putti
. I would efface them from this world.

He threw his arms around me and shook me hard. He pried the chisel from my hand and helped me to his private room. I lay down on his cot and he sat beside me, shushing me, be quiet, be quiet,
figlio mio
. He sat there, trembling himself, and placed his hand softly on my arm. And at his touch my terror fell away.

I lost all sense. I was in a green meadow, the sun upon my brow and cool water flowing nearby. I was safe from all harm. I was not alone. No ill could befall me ever again, no mad pulse of blood within the brain, no dissolution of the heart.

I fell asleep, his hand upon my arm a promise of salvation.

1427

CHAPTER
13

I
T IS TIME
to talk of Michelozzo and Donatello—and of me—and what we did in the
bottega
before Agnolo entered our lives, but that is all too much for now—I am unwell today, I am discontent—so instead I will talk of Donatello only, and of the things I learned from filling out the forms for his taxes.

Taxes ever were and are and always shall be. But in 1427, the year of the
catasto
, a new kind of wealth tax was introduced by Rinaldo degli Albizzi in hope of injuring his great enemy Cosimo de’ Medici and at last bringing him to his knees. Here was a tax that skipped over the poor and taxed the landowners and the merchants and the people who had all the money. The
catasto
obliged every Florentine citizen to declare in writing an account of his property, debtors, and creditors. As business people Donatello and Michelozzo fell under this obligation and I liked it much that it fell to me to tally what they owned and what was owed to them, for they were partners now. I grew close to both of them—they were my fathers, they were my brothers—and of Donato I learned much that I had longed to know.

I have his tax declaration to hand since I have always been a grand conservator of notes. What I learned about his finances did not surprise me but what I learned about his family pleased me much.

Niccolò, Donatello’s father lived long enough to see the marble David, though he was addled in his brain and had no proper sense of what his son had accomplished. He died in 1415.

Orsa, his mother, was eighty years old and still sound of mind and body. She was a small woman with eyes like a ferret and, though frail of hearing, nothing escaped her view. She longed for only one thing: to die. But she could not die. If mothers live past child bearing, it would seem they live forever.

His sister, Tita, five years his senior, was a dowerless widow with a sickly son, Giuliano, aged eighteen. He was crippled in his legs and he was given to fits and he could not speak. Small wonder then that Tita was a sour woman, jealous and self-pitying, who resented Donatello’s kindness to her son. She had a thorny, unforgiving wit. Donatello told me once that Tita’s heart had grown so bitter that it had shrunk to the size of a walnut. I was uncertain if he meant this in truth or if he was being figurative in speech or if this were some cruel jest. He was sometimes
intricato
in thought and in word.

Orsa and Tita and Giuliano lived in a warren of rooms next to his new
bottega
in the Via degli Adimari. Donatello was their sole support.

As for the tax itself Donatello claimed to owe one florin, three lira, and ten
piccioli
and to be without any property except thirty florins’ worth of tools and equipment for his art as a carver in partnership with Michele di Bartolomeo Michelozzi.

“I am owed,” he says, “one hundred eighty florins for a narrative scene in bronze which I did some time ago for the Cathedral of Siena. Also from the convent and monks of Ognissanti I am owed thirty florins for a bronze half figure of San Rossore. I rent a house from Guglielmo Adimari in the parish of San Cristoforo. I pay fifteen florins a year.” He then lists creditors—goldsmiths and bronze casters and assistants—to whom he owes a total of one hundred fifty-six florins, not counting the thirty florins he owes for two years back rent. Donatello hated paying taxes.

Michelozzo signed and filed Donatello’s tax report though it was I who did all the preparatory work. You can see how quietly useful I had become.

My life was full and good this year of our Lord 1427.

Alessandra gave me a third son, Renato Paolo.

I was now indispensable to the workings of our
bottega
.

And I had become the trusted friend of the greatest sculptor of our time. It is no small thing to have had the love of so great a man. How, then, did I become possessed . . . so that in the end it seemed the necessary thing was murder?

In truth it was the fire I feared.

Now, dying, I put aside my discontent to ask how different things would be if Donatello had not changed my life with that kiss and if that sharpened chisel had not come so readily to hand. I think, I pray. I remind myself that God permits these things. But in my dark heart I know the cause was fear . . . of Donatello used against Cosimo, Donatello denounced as a sodomite, Donatello stripped and at the stake, and I at fault for all that goodness consumed by flames.

1429

CHAPTER
14

I
N THE YEAR
of our Lord 1429, in one day, a great shame descended on the Florentine Republic. It was a bright November morning with an early frost underfoot and a hard cold sky above, a promising day for sunshine and merriment and sharp business for the vendors of onion tarts and sugared apples and those small meat pies that are eaten in hand. The wine taverns had been at serious business since dawn. The Piazza San Marco was crowded with city people and with country folk who had come in from the hillsides around Florence to witness the first public execution for sodomy within memory. Not for sodomy only, of course, but for the rape and mutilation of a ten-year-old boy.

Piero di Jacopo was to be burned at the stake and his ashes thrown into the Arno. It was Piero’s ill fortune to have raped the one child whose violation could concentrate the attention and the powers of the two great warring families of Florence, the Medici and the Albizzi.

Piero di Jacopo was a coppersmith from Bologna in the employ of Franco Severini, a servant to the estate manager of the Medici. As fate would have it, the boy he raped was the son of Marcello di Angelo, a servant to the estate manager of the Albizzi. Determining di Jacopo’s punishment, therefore, became a bitter contest between the Medici and the Albizzi. But in the end, since the accused was a notorious sodomite and since the violated child remained even now in medical care, judgment went to the Albizzi and di Jacopo was sentenced to death.

By sunrise it seemed that all the city had poured into the Piazza San Marco and waited, eager for the ceremony to begin. Somehow everyone knew the ritual: the prisoner would be led out, the indictment read, and then—tied to an ass—he would be paraded through the principal streets of the city to the Place of Justice to be burned at the stake. The excitement increased as the wait grew longer. A dense crowd, thick with the smell of wine and garlic, clustered around the church steps in anticipation. Children had ceased to run about and even the dogs had given over their quarrels and seemed to be waiting. The guards stood to attention, holding the crowd a little distance from the church steps.