The Medici Boy (19 page)

All of us had long speculated on that sting and wondered just what form it took and who was its chief object. During my earliest years in the
bottega
I had worried that Michelozzo might be the lover of Donatello. Michelozzo had become—after Alessandra—the center of my life. He was a great artisan, a man of strength and integrity and it pained me to think he might, even for a moment, even once only, act the sodomite. It was unthinkable. He and Donatello shared work and they shared a house and I could not help fearing they shared a bed. Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between fear and knowledge.

Later, after the burning of Piero di Jacopo, my fear became more immediate. Sodomy among distinguished men was not unheard of and, in truth, among the great artisans, it was not uncommon. Moreover it was noised about that Michelozzo was not the first of Donatello’s lovers, that Brunelleschi had been there before him. Nearly thirty years earlier, at a time when I was still the squalling brat of the wool dyer and his wife, the young Brunelleschi had, in a fit of anger, gone off to Rome to explore the ruins of ancient temples and to unearth the secrets of architectural perspective . . . and, some said, to live in sin with Donatello. The stay in Rome came about in this way.

In 1401 the Officials of the Florence Cathedral—the Operai—declared a public competition to select the artisan who would make a set of bronze doors to celebrate the passing of the Black Pestilence of 1400. The doors, which were intended for the north side of the Baptistry, were meant to rival the great south doors of Andrea Pisano. Artisans from Florence and Siena and Assisi competed, five finalists were chosen, and each was given a year to submit a bronze panel depicting Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac. Though there were thirty-four judges, they quickly agreed on the final two competitors: Ghiberti and Brunelleschi. In the end, the votes of the Operai were evenly divided between the two and so the judges offered the commission equally to Ghiberti and Brunelleschi, splitting the work and the money between them. Brunelleschi, insulted and on fire with rage, refused the commission altogether and went off to Rome to dig through the ruins. While he studied the inner life of statues and sought out the secrets by which the ancients turned public buildings into works of art, he practiced as a goldsmith to support himself. Donatello was nine years his junior—a passionate sixteen—when he went with him to Rome.

I say “passionate” of the young Donatello because a year earlier he had been arrested in Pistoia for fighting with a German named Anichinus Pieri, wounding him with a large stick that caused much bleeding. It is not true that this was a lover’s quarrel. It was a case of two boys proving they were men. A court document of 24 January 1401—Donatello kept it; I have it by me today—warned “the Florentine” that he would be fined one hundred gold florins should he again violate the peace of Pistoia. Donatello found this an excellent time to go with Brunelleschi to Rome. He went there as an apprentice goldsmith and returned two years later as a master craftsman.

So there were Brunelleschi and Michelozzo to consider, but most mysterious of all was Donatello’s love of Pagno di Lapo. Pagno was a middling sculptor—he had no sense of how a body occupied space and whenever he attempted a
putto
, for instance, the result was always a miniature man, malformed and ugly. And yet Donatello insisted he was a sculptor of talent. Was he deceived by passion? Was it the fascination of his red hair and those eyes that were now blue and now green depending on his malice at the moment? “
Piccolo mio
,” Donatello called him at thirteen and, despite his low chin, Pagno had grown into a handsome young man, tall and of some physical strength, with a quick wit and a sharp tongue, and he moved as silently as a cat. He was forever enticing Donatello but, at a mere touch on his shoulder or a tousling of his hair, he would resist and pull away. I saw it happen but I did not understand.

I did not understand any of these attachments at that time, though in my old age I have come to have some sympathy for them. Love robs us of our strength—of mind as well as of character—and we cease to know who we are. In truth we become strangers to ourselves. I did not know it then, though Pagno knew it and so did Alessandra, but I was just such a stranger to myself.

Over the years I had become a spy and I had perfected my spying skills by watching Donatello at work. That intense stare, that ability to exclude from sight everything that was not the focus of his vision, had—in a worldly way—become my own. Nothing escaped my notice, not Michelozzo’s glance at Donatello, not Donatello’s suppressed smile, not the heartstrings’ jump of pleasure or delight that showed subtly on the face. I was a spy, and I was good at seeing the intent of things. I could hear the words they only meant to say, the touch that they intended, the dangerous thought left unformed in the mind. I do not exaggerate.

When Agnolo entered our lives, spying became for me an obsession. He had ruined Donatello and ruined the David and he had ruined me.

But now,
gratia Dei
, he was gone. And we could rest.

“Y
OU HAVE CHANGED
,” Alessandra said, “You’re a different man.” She was nursing Giovanni Marco and her face was peaceful though her voice was firm. I had come to recognize that tone. She was about to deliver hard truths that she felt were needful for her to say and good for me to know. “You begrudge Pagno his high favor with Donato.” She let that hang in the air for a while and continued to suckle the baby. She began to sing him a lullaby.

She was the picture of motherhood. She had grown more beautiful and more plump with each new birth, her green eyes soft, her hands delicate. She could have posed for the Virgin with Child.

“Pagno is only what your jealousy makes him,” she said. “He is of no importance.”

Giovanni Paolo sat on the floor at her feet twisting a bit of red yarn in knots while the two older boys were building a fortress with small wooden blocks I had made for them and painted to look like stone. Donato Michele at eight years was too old for this, but he played at knights and soldiers to entertain his brother. Donato, the oldest, was ever the giving child. Franco Alessandro, two years younger, was not. Still, here was a lovely family picture . . . until Alessandra spoke once more.

“Jealousy is beneath you.” She paused. “You are better than that.” She paused again. “You are better than him.”

I was ashamed and angry and so I began to play with the loose ends of wool on her loom. Alessandra did weaving by the piece—fine wool, chiefly, though sometimes rough silk—and she was paid well for her work. This was illegal, of course, but everyone did it and we were always in need of extra money. Even then, more than thirty years past, it cost a fortune to raise four boys.

“Don’t play with that,” she said. “You’ll throw me off.”

Finally I said, “I am not jealous of Pagno.”

“Of Pagno and of poor Agnolo too. It’s as well that he’s gone off . . . to wherever he’s gone.”

“He’s corrupt.”

“You’re obsessed by him. He is in your mind like a poison.”

“He is not.”

Alessandra looked at me in that way. I lowered my eyes. She took the baby from her nipple and laid him across her breast. She tapped him—pat, pat, pat—and he coughed up a small mess on her shoulder, gave a heavy sigh of satisfaction and fell asleep. Of a sudden I was overwhelmed with love for her.

* * *

L
ONG AGO, IN
our first year of marriage I asked her how it could be that we had made love so many times without conception and yet, once we married, she conceived immediately. I was wondering aloud and, if she was offended, she did not say so. She explained about the weed called
daucus carota
. . . and I now include this information as part of my confession to lighten the burden of listening to my sin. This is not advice, it is an explanation only, and my reader is free to pass it on to women who may find it useful or you may keep it for your own delight, an odd thing, good to know in itself.

The
daucus carota
is an acrid weed, a kind of wild carrot that grows by every roadside, and in late summer it produces a white lacy flower. In fall, you take the dried seeds of the flower and you grind them to a pulp, a greenish mess that is foul-tasting but very effective. You cannot swallow the seeds whole; they will do no good. You take one teaspoonful of this paste and you swallow it after sex and you will not conceive. No one knows why, but chemists say it causes slipperiness in the woman so that the man’s seed cannot take hold. And later, when you want to conceive, you simply stop taking the
daucus
remedy, and if you are in all other ways healthy and of good disposition, you will conceive. It is as simple as that. Is this not a good thing to know?

Alessandra and I had married for love—or what we took to be love—and, as sometimes happens in marriage, we continued to feel love for one another even after the pleasures of the flesh had become a common, if necessary, thing. Many marriages exist on nothing more than physical pleasure snatched here and there in moments of desire or demand, and so we considered ourselves fortunate to have found in each other someone who shared our loneliness and need and that feeling of not knowing who we are or why we are here.

We lived well. I was a clerk for Donatello, an accountant of sorts, a reminder of tasks, and a sometime sculptor. Donatello never thought of money and so it was only with the birth of each new child that he remembered my growing needs. He paid me well: eighty gold florins at the time of Giovanni Marco’s birth. Thus we could afford to send Donato Michele to study with the Franciscans and in the new year Franco Alessandro would join him. The two youngest boys were taught by Alessandra, who tended the little garden, washed and cooked and cleaned the house, took charge of bills and payments and, to our mutual satisfaction, took charge of me as well. And our four boys.

All I know about love I learned from Alessandra. Maria Sabina—may God have mercy—taught me everything about the body’s pleasures, but the love of God I learned from Alessandra. It is a hard love, like Donatello’s bronze: heated to the melting point and hammered afterward to a fine finish. This much I have learned. There is no love without pain. Forgiveness costs everything. Memory is itself the source of suffering. This is not the
Novum Testamentum
but it is true nonetheless.

These things too I include as part of my confession. To lighten the burden of sin and the boredom of telling. But perhaps I grow antic.

It is my sons, my sons, my lost sons that I repent. Because who is guilty if not me?

* * *

W
ITH
A
GNOLO GONE
, we could rest at last. Alessandra was my rest. She knew my little infidelities—what did they matter; they were meaningless—and she forgave them. She knew I was a failure as a sculptor and she forgave that as well. And she knew, better than I, my love for Donatello.

Which Donatello you ask? For indeed there were as many Donatellos as there were people who loved him. He was a different man with Michelozzo than with Pagno. And he was different still with me. It was not simply that he was changeable, a chameleon who responded to each of us as we were. He was a great deal more complicated than this.

He was a man of infinite capacity and each of us took from him as much as we could hold. This, I suppose, was the nature of his fascination for us as well as the source of our frustration. He turned his gaze upon us and for that little time we existed in a way we had not existed the moment before. For that time he was totally present, no other person existed for him, and he was transparent to us. We knew the man himself and he knew us. Everyone wanted to plumb the depths of who he was—as in truth they do even today as they examine his sculptures—but there was no easy explanation of his character then and no secret that could resolve the mystery of his genius now. There was always more to him than we could know.

Alessandra recognized my love for him and accepted it.

I did not tell her of that secret kiss—so many years gone by now—and that cry of discovery and delight that had meant nothing to Donatello but that to me had been an invasion and an assault. In that assault I knew I had been discovered. I did not tell Alessandra that.

CHAPTER
20

D
URING THE NEXT
eight months Donatello became again his old self, working continually, moving from statue to
cassone
to tabernacle as the mood or inspiration struck him, regardless of contracts and commissions and money owed or promises made. We were at ease now, all of us, and we gave ourselves over to the work of the
bottega
without the continual distractions caused by Agnolo and his need for attention. A single glance at my account books revealed how much we were behind in all our work.

The Prato Pulpit, for instance, was far from finished though Donatello and Michelozzo had in 1428 contracted to produce a pulpit for the Prato Cathedral, installed and ready for the feast of Our Lady on September 8, 1429. Money had been advanced and the project begun. It was begun again, and again, and it was abandoned just as many times because some new proposal was more pressing, more interesting, more challenging. Besides, Michelozzo had to finish his design for the lower half of the pulpit—the support pillars and the cornices—before Donatello could begin the figures for the balustrade. And, alas, Michelozzo was in Pisa, Michelozzo was in Lucca, Michelozzo was casting bronze for Lorenzo Ghiberti. Eventually Michelozzo completed his design and work proceeded on the cornices and balustrade. But then there were problems with the marble; the quality was poor, it was not uniformly white, it was streaky, pocked. New marble was ordered. But by then Donatello was occupied with the
bozzetto
for the bronze David and could think of nothing else. Pagno complained, Pagno begged, and finally he was given the opportunity to demonstrate his skill with fine marble. He carved the two
putti
for the brackets that would support the cornice. They were disastrous—ugly and deformed—and they were added to the heap of rubble used by apprentices for practice work. By now it was 1431 and the work was still in progress. The Prato Pulpit, as it turned out, would not be completed for a decade.