The Medici Boy (34 page)

That night Cosimo moved against the Ufficiali di Notte. In a matter of days the charges against Donatello were dropped and the
magister
of the Night Officers sought occupation in another branch of the law. Nonetheless the Ufficiali guarded the anonymity of their sources in such a way that all of their files were protected as official and confidential. Thus the charges against Donatello remained on record to be held against him in case of any further denunciation. Cosimo could go only so far in subverting the law.

And so we began our ten-year residence in Padua, bitter weather in winter and scalding hot in summer, and the grim and endless croaking of frogs in spring.

Alessandra remained in our little house in Florence with Franco Alessandro and once again urged her petition to become a Sister of Saint Dominic. A lay Sister. A servant. Again I refused and, lacking my consent, the local Bishop refused as well.

Michelozzo began work on the destruction of the Inn of Santa Caterina and the erection of the Palazzo Medici in its place on the Via Larga. It would become the handsomest private residence in all of Florence.

Agnolo returned to carding wool in Prato, leaving us to wonder in what ways his next folly would complicate our lives.

As for us—all of us, save Caterina—we were for Padua and whatever wonders it might offer.

* * *

B
UT FOR ME
Padua and its wonders would have to wait. We had scarcely arrived in our new city when a message came saying that my Franco Alessandro had been arrested for the fifth time. He was eighteen years and still fell under the sodomy laws for minors, but these would not protect him from a public flogging and the two-hundred-florin fine that Alessandra had been saving against. Meanwhile he was locked, shivering, in the icy cellars of the Stinche. There was nothing for it but that I go.

I arrived in Florence and found—to my astonishment—that the matter was settled. Franco had been released without a flogging and was now condemned to exile—anywhere outside the Republic of Florence—where he must remain for the rest of his life under penalty of having his right foot cut off should he return. I detected here the intervention of Cosimo and I was not altogether wrong.

Giacomo, my lord Cosimo’s body servant, had been arrested
in actu
with Franco Alessandro in an alley behind the construction works for the new Medici palace. When the Ufficiali discovered whom they had arrested, they were at a loss what to do. You did not arrest the body servant of the most powerful man in the Republic and yet there he was, in prison, beside his partner in sin. They dithered. They discussed. They waited for something to happen.

And then came a message from Cosimo to the
magister
of the Ufficiali and they were both released, the boy Franco and the man Giacomo. It had been a misunderstanding. Apologies were made. There were no fines, no punishments. All the paperwork was made to disappear.

Months later we would learn that Franco Alessandro had agreed,
in segreto
, to go into voluntary exile—wherever they might send him—and to return never.

But now, in our ignorance, Alessandra and I celebrated with a great feast and much wine. I toasted her good health and happiness and promised I would pose no objection to her entering the convent. And then, though in her gratitude she offered me her bed for this one night, I politely declined and went out in search of the whore Pellegrina.

I left the next day to begin my new life in Padua.

CHAPTER
35

T
WO GREAT CITIES
could not have been more different than Florence and Padua. Money and the great works of artisans were the lifeblood of Florence, whereas in Padua the pursuit of knowledge was everything. Padua’s great university had for centuries brought together men from all parts of the world, students and professors, for the study of civil and canon law and for the more interesting study of man and his fate: astronomy and dialectic, philosophy and grammar and rhetoric. All these young men had needs and desires and the city of Padua looked out for them.

In the past century Padua had been the home of Dante and Petrarch and Boccaccio. Giotto had frescoed the Scrovegni chapel here, a toy box for the baby Jesus. And now Donatello di Betto Bardi would bring the city everlasting fame with his great equestrian bronze of Gattamelata, the marble carvings of the miracles of Sant’ Antonio, and the great high altar of the Basilica itself with its immense bronze crucifix and seven bronze saints. Thanks to Donatello, the Piazza San Antonio would become the center of a new city.

The old city was dominated by the University and the University was serviced by the Inn known as the Bo, so called for the fabled invincible Ox that once was stabled here. The Bo was a gathering place, handy to lecture halls and the nooks and crannies of the neighborhood where students shared bed and board with anyone who would have them. There were two central market squares, the Piazza della Frutta and the Piazza delle Erbe, and between them stood the immense Palazzo Ragione, the home of the law courts and a meeting place for the city council. On the top floor of the Palazzo was the vast Salone, a reception hall unequalled in size in all of Christendom. The Palazzo burned to the ground some twenty or more years before our arrival in Padua and it was immediately rebuilt, but lost in the fire were the frescoed walls of Giotto, floor to ceiling paintings of the cycles of the zodiac. The Bo, the Palazzo Ragione, and the two huge piazzas made up the public face of Padua. The private face lay deep behind the Bo, down alleys that smelled of decay, in taverns and inns that were dark and noisy even past the hours of curfew, and in those narrow, shuttered houses of pleasure with whores from all over Europe.

I was a man of forty-three years, more or less, and I had the same needs as those young men who were pursuing wisdom at the university. I sought out the private face of Padua at once.

* * *

O
N OUR SECOND
night in Padua Pagno di Lapo and I went out—there is no nice way to put it—in pursuit of whores. We had labored all day under a heavy sky that had brought on an early dusk and we were ready for the night. We were men alone, in a new city, and there was the excitement of the forbidden.

“I am not at ease with this,” I said. “I have always hunted alone.”

“I have never hunted at all,” Pagno said. “This is new to me.”

“Can it be that you have never had a woman?”

“Only Caterina,” he said. “And she never more than once a week.”

I was astonished. Caterina was Donatello’s niece and a woman not to be trifled with. I had had her more than once and I knew she fancied Agnolo but I had never thought of her fancying Pagno, however handsome he might be.

“Is it your red hair she liked? Or are you skilled in bed?”

“I would willingly have married her,” he said, “but she would not have me. She would not have any man to husband, she said, unless it be Michelozzo.”

Here was no end of surprises. Caterina had stayed behind in Florence even after Donatello had left his
bottega
. She found work readily with Luca della Robbia, for she was an accomplished painter. And in Florence she would be closer to Michelozzo, though now that he had married it was hard to imagine she would entertain hope of him.

For Pagno and me hope lay just around the corner.

We had reached the Palazzo Raggione and walked on through the Piazza delle Erbe where vegetables and herbs were sold until late afternoon and where the hours that followed were given over to students and their professors and the more expensive whores. These wore the gloves and bells and high-heeled slippers that—in observance of the law—marked them out as prostitutes. There were small shops along the fringe of the market and many of these shops provided tiny rooms where prostitutes could entertain their clients. Pagno and I ducked into an alley that became a warren of small taverns and houses of pleasure and we looked into several before we were hailed by a fine, tall woman at the door of a tavern called La Procedura. She was much taken by Pagno.

“Eh, Rosso,” she said softly. “You are a pretty one indeed.”

Pagno left me to reply. “And you yourself,” I said. “Have you a friend?”

“For you?”

“For me.”

“Everybody has a friend. But Rosso is for me. My name is Stina.”

Stina led us inside the tavern and up a narrow stairs. The noise from below was deafening and the tavern itself smelled of spilt wine and sweat. The students were singing an anti-clerical ballad with enthusiasm and accompanied it with much banging of tankards on table tops. Stina shook her head in disapproval and pulled aside a curtain to reveal a tiny cell with a pallet and a small table that held a bowl of water. “For cleanliness,” she said, pulling Pagno in behind her. Before she closed the curtain she called out “Katya” and almost at once a hefty young prostitute appeared and without a word led me into the cell next to Stina’s. She pulled the curtain, undressed me, and went through the business of washing my parts before she undressed herself and lay down on the pallet. The rest of the ceremony proceeded as you know. Katya was from Dalmatia, with fair hair and a pale coloring, and I took care to offer her the pleasures I had learned so many years ago with Maria Sabina. It was soon over and I paid her fee, with a handful of
piccioli
extra, and pulled aside the curtain. There leaning against the wall was Pagno, waiting for me, looking anxious and indeed none too satisfied. He said nothing until we were out in the street.

“It took you so long,” he said.

“Speed is not the point of the game.”

“No,” he said, but he seemed uncertain about it.

“Do you not feel better?” I asked. “And younger?”

“I am thirty-five years,” he said. “I am more than half done my life. Is it good to feel less old than you are?”

“You’re very somber after such sport,” I said. “Was it not good for you?”

He was silent as we continued to walk back toward the Piazza delle Erbe. The square was still alive with students, some drunk and singing, and a lovely young prostitute hailed us as we walked on in silence. I mentally marked the spot where she practiced her trade. We passed the Palazzo di Raggione and were crossing the Piazza della Frutta when Pagno paused and looked at me and said, “It is sin, finally, and no more than that.”

I found myself embarrassed. I had enjoyed myself with the Dalmatian Katya and I was relaxed and refreshed and I did not want to think it a sin. Still, it was. But it was such a small sin and such a good and pleasureful thing that I could not bring myself to consider it very wrong. I would confess it during the next Easter season and I supposed Pagno would as well, but a man must get through life somehow, poor forked creature that he is, and I trusted God would allow for a little human weakness. So I was not pleased when Pagno said again, with a certain insistence, “It is sin.”

Nonetheless in the months that followed we would go whoring together companionably enough, though I continued to hold him in distrust. That would change over our next ten years in Padua.

* * *

D
ONATELLO HAD LEFT
Florence on the promise of a commission to create a bronze equestrian statue of the famous general Erasmo da Narni, whom we all know as Gattemelata, the Honeyed Cat. The Condottiere had died earlier in the year 1443 and the Venetian government—which had ruled in Padua for nearly forty years now—decreed that he should be honored in the Piazza Sant’ Antonio with a monumental tomb of bronze and marble. Donatello alone should be its creator. He set to work first on the commission for a huge bronze crucifix that would hang above the main altar in the Basilica.

Our new
bottega
was established directly across from the Piazza Sant’ Antonio near a little house the Operai of the Basilica had set aside for Donatello and his assistants. This little house was readied within the month and he offered Pagno and me the opportunity to move in with him. The rooms were tiny, but neither Pagno nor I objected to the narrow cells we occupied—we were grateful each to have his own room—and an elderly woman came in by day to clean and cook for us so that the living arrangements were most agreeable. It lacked only Alessandra to make it seem like home.

Early each morning we would set out for the
bottega
, a chunk of bread and a wedge of cheese in our packets, and we would make ready for the serious work of the design and execution of a huge bronze crucifix.

Donatello was determined that this Padua crucifix, five feet wide and six feet tall, would reveal the suffering, redeeming Christ and not the peasant who carved it. He was already at work on his design.

He worked well and seemed not to be yearning for Agnolo and I wondered where his old madness had gone. I wondered too if they were meeting privately. But where? And, with Agnolo in Prato, how could this be possible? Perhaps he had cast the boy aside at last. I resolved to keep a keen eye. But was there ever an eye keen enough for the duplicities of Agnolo?

Well before the
bottega
was set up and ready for the casting of a bronze Christus, there arrived a huge shipment of iron—some forty-six pounds—for the cross itself and, even before that could be packed away for later use, there came another shipment—wax, this time—for use in creating the
bozzetto
of the corpus. The Operai of the Basilica were determined to get the best from Donatello.

“They have anticipated your needs,” I said.

“They have heard I’m
intricato
.”

“They have heard you like to work hard.”

“They think that if I have at hand all the material for the crucifix I will not easily walk away from it. They know me little.”

I was unsure what he meant by this. “You have iron and wax in abundance,” I said, “and you have your little house and a fine
bottega
.” Still he did not respond. “We are well settled in Padua, I think.”

“It is not Florence.”

“Do you miss it?”

He thought for a while and said, “I miss him.”