The Medici Boy (6 page)

“You have survived the pestilence,” he said. “You are very blessed by God.”

He had a bucket of water beside the cot, and he bathed the wound and put on it a poultice of rosemary, cumin, long grass, and pig dung to kill the infection and induce healing. “You have survived,” he said again, and sat on the stool beside my cot and told his beads. When he was done, he bathed my forehead with cool water, slowly, lingering, and before he left, he kissed me on the lips. He was being Saint Francis, of course, kissing the leper. He was a dedicated novice.

I fell asleep and dreamed an angel had come to my cot and breathed life back into me when I was dead. I awoke with Father Alfonso by my side.

“They are all dead,” he said. “Our Brothers in Christ.”

I could not understand.

“You and I have survived, useless and sinful as we are. All the others are gone. God’s ways are indeed mysterious.”

He was silent for a long while.

“You have brought the pestilence among us, Brother Luca,” he said. “It was God’s will that our Brothers should suffer and die this terrible death. It was God’s will that you and I, sinners, should survive. But it is God’s will too that you should leave the Order of Friars Minor.”

I made no response to this. How could I, dazed still from seven days of fever and guilty for the foul death I had brought among the Brothers who were my care and duty?

“When the pestilence is at an end and it is once more safe to go into the city, you must leave here. God has his plans for you. Whatever they may be, they do not lie among us.”

“Yes,” I said.

He fell silent, then he said, “Maria Sabina. She too is dead.” He looked at me for a long time. “May God have mercy on your soul,” he said.

CHAPTER
7

I
WAS SEVENTEEN
, old for an apprentice, but my natural father took pity on me and paid the initial fee that contracted me as student to the painter Cennino Cennini. His was a small
bottega
, but it was in Florence, that center of all the arts, where painters and sculptors seemed to spring up from the ground, and I was free at last to study with a master and to try my hand and my mind at making paintings.

At his command I visited the merchant, my father, in his wool office. I knelt before him, head bent, and tried to summon words of thanks for treating me like a son, but he cut me off when I had scarcely begun. “You have your mother’s face,” he said, and he ran his fingers through my thick hair. “And her hair.” He seemed lost in thought for a moment, then he said: “You could have been my son except that you were born in sin. That is my fault. You too are my fault.” He sighed. “But it is never too late for penance and so I have paid your fee as an apprentice and I have signed your contract. You have failed me as a Franciscan, Luca. Do not fail me as an artisan.” It was the first time I had heard him use my name. “You must make your life a sacrifice to God.”

* * *

T
HE CONTRACT HE
had signed put me under vow to submit to the direction of Cennino Cennini, my master in all things. I was to practice the virtues of obedience, constancy, and silence. And above all I was not to marry or attempt marriage without my master’s permission. Finally, I was committed to remain with him until such time as I would become skilled enough to be recognized by the Confraternity of Saint Luke as a master painter, perhaps five years, perhaps more. He, in turn, was committed to teach me, to provide me food and lodging, and to care for the good of my soul.

I was excited to be alive and to be in Cennino’s
bottega
and to be in Florence, that great city of artisans. And I was grateful. It was the year 1417 and as I stood on the hill above the city, I looked down on the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore where Brunelleschi had begun work on the soaring red brick cupola that would become the wonder of this age. Beside it Giotto’s slender, perfect campanile lifted toward the sky, and just beyond it the towers of the Bargello and the Badia appeared to bow toward one another. In the distance stood the four bridges that spanned the yellow Arno. It was a city fortified by seven miles of stone walls, with eighty watchtowers, and within those walls there were a hundred churches and fifty piazzas and more than twenty huge
palazzi
where lived the magnificent lords of the city, the Pazzi, the Strozzi, the Brancacci, and the two families struggling for dominance: the Albizzi and the Medici. But it was the artisans and their work that made the city so exciting: Brunelleschi and Donatello, della Quercia and della Robbia and Uccello, Ghiberti creating the bronze doors of San Giovanni, and Masaccio painting the Trinity at Santa Maria Novella. And Cennino d’Andrea Cennini, my master—of lesser fame, but fame nonetheless—who had set himself the task of putting down in writing the principles by which a craftsman may come into possession of all he needs to know in order to make pictures. A craftsman’s handbook. It was the morning of a bright new day in this world and it was exciting to be alive.

My master Cennino was a man in middle age who earned an adequate living as a painter but who never enjoyed those commissions from the Operai del Duomo that would give him the chance to prove himself a great artisan. His painting was for private patrons: a John the Baptist for a family chapel, a Virgin and Child for an entrance hall, a wedding chest, a birth tray, a commemorative plate, any of which could be rejected if it was not pleasing to the patron. He was not embittered by this. He lived in hope and the conviction that good work was its own reward. He was a fine draftsman and a skilled colorist but his great strength was as a teacher. He worked, he said, to preserve the tradition of Giotto and Taddeo Gaddi and Agnolo Gaddi, his own master. Cennino could teach anyone anything that required craft alone. He was not God, however, so he could not teach genius.

There were three apprentices in all, and after a day’s work, and sometimes in the middle of the day, the master would put aside his painting and take us through the city from church to church, and he would point out paintings that he said we must study, making copies, teaching ourselves the difference between ambition and accomplishment. “See, only see,” he would say. “We paint with the mind as much as with the hand. There is no substitute for genius.”

Cennino wrote notes as he taught us—the two other apprentices were younger and more accomplished than I—and his Craftsman’s Handbook mirrors the careful and difficult training he offered us. He undertook to teach us the principle of the plane and how to place figures in a foreground and how to represent a woman’s head, or a man’s, and the systems of the body. These were advanced lessons, abstract and very hard to master. To prepare for these we first learned to grind paints, to draw on a little panel with a leaden stylus and with a pen. We learned to cut the quill, to tint the paper for drawing, to trace and to copy from nature. To apply size to board or cloth, to gesso and gild and burnish, to temper and lay in, to pounce, stamp, and punch, to mark out, paint, embellish and surface a panel. These were never-ending tasks. The work of an artisan is in large part preparation. He taught us to work on a wall, to plaster, to paint in fresco. Varnishing, illuminating, the preparation of mosaic gold. To work on cloth, to make crests and helmets, caskets and chests, to model in glass for windows, bowls, reliquaries. To make life masks and to make death masks.

As for me, I had ability enough to satisfy but not enough to matter. “You work hard,” Cennino said, sadly. “You are very devoted.”

This was daily life for me in the
bottega
of Cennino Cennini, not made easier by the fact that he had me transcribe his notes each night.

I remember thinking I too can do this, I want to do this, and after all it was understood that no special gifts were required for the apprentice. Hard work and constancy would accomplish whatever could be accomplished and the rest would depend on the will of God. The will of God became clear for me as more and more often Cennino had me spend my day copying out his notes, keeping his accounts, writing up contracts in the common language of Florence first and then, for legal purposes, in my halting Latin. Like the others, I posed for him: as John the Baptist, as Jesus feeding the multitudes, as anonymous men in the crowd. I was still asked to assist in painting backgrounds and draperies, the less demanding parts that did not really interest him, but in truth I had become his amanuensis.

Still, I was paid my six florins for the first year, eight for the second, and ten for the third. I was saving them to marry Alessandra.

W
HEN
M
ARIA
S
ABINA
died of the Pest, Alessandra had done the only thing she could do. She came to Florence to find work as a prostitute. It was only a few years since the magistracy had legitimized prostitution and indeed had sponsored a house for this purpose near the Mercato Vecchio. This was not in the interest of fostering fornication or adultery; on the contrary it was—officials said—to counter the fervent and growing vice of sodomy. Men who could not marry were pleasuring each other. Better by far to indulge them in a vice that was at least natural. Alessandra was young and beautiful and she was willing to please. She had a room near the Mercato and, though she never lacked for clients, she kept Sundays for me. It was the custom that on Sunday apprentices were free to use the day as we wished. I spent the morning sketching but in the afternoon I walked out with Alessandra and we had congress and talked the foolish talk of lovers.

“Do you love me? In truth?”

“I love only you. I loved Maria Sabina, but that was a worldly love. Not like this.” Without thinking I placed my hand lightly on her breast.

“But this is worldly love. I am a whore.”

“You are not a whore at heart. You are a dear and gentle girl. You are a saint.”

She was pleased at this and we made love once again.

On another Sunday, in another month, we talked of marriage. The poor could marry where they loved and so, in this sense at least, we were more free than the great folk.

“I would be better for you if I could. I would be beautiful, with yellow hair and a fine figure. And a virgin as well.”

“Does it make you sad? To whore?”

“It makes me sad only when I think of you. You were a holy Friar.”

“A Friar, for a while, but never holy.”

“Would you choose to be one still, if it were not for . . .”

“I would have found you, wherever you might be.”

She was silent then, thinking, and when at last she spoke, her voice was different. More soft. More low. “I would have been a nun, if . . .”

I was ashamed then, and for no reason I could think of. We did not make love that day.

Nonetheless we planned our future. We would marry once I finished my apprenticeship and had freedom and money to do it. In our talks we came back always to the subject of love and our lives, as if we were great folk and mattered.

“Have you ever been truly, truly in love?” she asked me, caressing my shoulder as we lay side by side.

“Isn’t this being in love?”

“This is what I do. I give pleasure.”

“Yes.”

“Is this what you long for? Is this what you want?”

My years in the Friars Minor had done little to prepare me for talk of love. I was twenty years old and I hungered after something but I did not know what. Not love, I think. Not even a sense of belonging. My hunger was not for anything in the future or even in the present. It was for something past, and I did not know what it was.

“I want to have been born someone else.”

“Cennino,” she said.

But it was not that at all.

“Masaccio,” she said. “Or Giotto.”

I put my tongue against her upper lip, lightly, and moved my body against hers and our conversation was lost in the familiar motions of sex.

“We will marry,” I said afterwards. “For love. And soon.”

* * *

I
WAS NOT
prepared, then, for Cennino’s visit to my bed that night. He sat on the edge of my cot and said, “It’s all arranged. I am passing you on to Lorenzo Ghiberti, a second cousin and a friend, who will take you among his
garzoni
. Perhaps you will have more success with him.” He paused and put his hand on my shoulder, reassuring me. “It will be a great honor for you to work for the man who is creating the great bronze doors of San Giovanni. Even sweeping his floor.” He paused again as tears came to his eyes and he said, “You will never be a master painter, my son, and I cannot afford to keep you on.” He embraced me for a moment longer than necessary—the other apprentices lay quiet, listening—and then he said, “You will be happy with Lorenzo.”

I had one of my spells that night: the roaring in my head, the great pain, the dimness of my eyes, the flailing arms. The others pretended not to hear. No one held me. No one told me it would be all right.

And so it came about that at age twenty I was being given over once again. We have no lasting city here, Augustine said, and I was proof of that. I had failed to please the wool dyer and I had failed to please the Brothers of the Order of Friars Minor and now I had failed to please Cennino d’Andrea Cennini. And, it goes without saying, I had failed to please God. This alone should have filled me with fear, but I had little fear of God or love for him or concern for his holy will. I was hungry for something I did not know or understand.

Ghiberti, when I was presented, turned from his work and cast a long hard look at me and said, “Yes, he is fair indeed.” And to me, he said, “Why do you stand there with your hands folded in front of you. You look like a Friar.”

“I was a Friar, my lord. They made me leave.” He smiled suddenly, and nodded in agreement with himself. Three months later, when I had proved useless to him in casting, sanding, finishing, and polishing, he smiled again—not kindly—and said, “He is handsome but useless. Send him to Donato. Donato will find use for him.”

In this way—not at once, but in the fullness of time—I came to understand that love is not always what it seems and that some hungers can never be satisfied. I was hired on as an assistant to Donatello, the chief artisan of Florence.