The Medici Boy

by John L'Heureux

  Donato stood up suddenly. “Go and give a greeting to Rosso and the others. I have to get on with this.” As he left the worktable and moved toward his sculpting stand, he turned back to me and said, “If you have need of money, there’s some in the basket.” He pointed up to the ceiling where a small wicker basket hung from a rope.

  At that moment he seemed to disappear. Certainly he stood there, square and solid in front of the wax head, but the Donato who had welcomed me and made pointless, polite conversation was gone. I felt a deep hollow in my chest. I was too nervous to think what this meant. While he talked to me he had seemed an ordinary man, but as he moved away he became once again the terrifying artist I had first seen at work. I clutched to my chest the ivory-handled stylus he had given me.

  I met the others, nervous likeable young men who frightened me by their quick wit and their rare accomplishments and by how comfortable they all seemed at work in Donato’s bottega. I was not comfortable with them. I was new and a possible threat, I suppose, but I sensed they made a show of politeness because I was older and came recommended by Ghiberti. Caterina alone seemed pleased to see me.

  In truth I gave them only half my attention. My mind was fixed on Donato who stood motionless before his work stand as if incapable of movement. He did not stir. The air itself seemed to have congealed around him. He was looking only, from the wax head beneath his hands to the model posing for him, and again back and forth, and again. He said nothing and there was no expression I might read on his face. He seemed resolved to stand there forever.

  “You can go now,” I heard him say at last.

  Lo Scheggia slipped from the posing stool, grateful, and went outside to the privy closet.

  Donato stood looking at the empty stool. Then he looked long and hard at his unfinished sculpture. At last, expressionless still, he leaned forward and drew the sculpture to him. He crouched above it, lowering his chin to the crown of the wax head and hugging it close, embracing it hard. He pressed the sculpted face against his chest, harder and harder, until there was a small cracking sound and the head shattered. A long minute passed. He pulled away from the ruined sculpture finally—bits of wax and clay clung to his shirt—and, still with no expression on his face, he placed a rag over the shattered head and held it there for a moment.

  The apprentices continued talking, knowing it was better to pretend not to notice, and I joined in their talk, thrilled and frightened at what I had seen and what it all meant to my new life.

  CHAPTER 9

  MORE THAN A year would pass before Donato took any real notice of me and during that year my life in the bottega gradually changed so that I was no longer an outsider. I became an anonymous part of the comings and goings of the bottega and little by little I was accepted by the other apprentices—young, all of them, except for Lo Scheggia—but during most of that year I was largely ignored by Donato himself, even as he ignored the abandoned Saint Louis. The statue had been commissioned more than two years earlier for a special niche in the Or San Michele and Michelozzo remained mindful that at some future time Donato would have to complete it. And he remained mindful of me as well, though I could not have guessed what he intended either for the statue of Saint Louis or for my place in the bottega.

  On that calamitous afternoon—my first among them—Donato had turned from the shattered statue and packed everything away in the storage shed: the innumerable sketches, the battered armature, the crushed wax head. He looked to have lost all interest in completing Saint Louis, now and forever. He went on to other things—minor ones—a sandstone tondo of the Virgin and Child, a bust in terracotta, a coat of arms—gilded—of copper, some decorative work for a frieze. And then he returned to another abandoned project—a major one—the prophet Isaiah. It had been commissioned by the Operai of the Cathedral four years earlier and had long since been completed but not yet surrendered for judgment. It stood on wooden blocks outside in the courtyard, a statue over six feet tall carved of white Carrara marble and cloaked beneath a shroud of heavy sail cloth. The shroud was removed and here stood Isaiah: wisdom in old age rendered live in marble, the seal of the divine encounter written plain upon his face. To any observer it was Isaiah, there could be no doubt, but in truth the statue began as a portrait of Donato’s uncle Niccolò, a finisher of leather goods who could no longer work because of his age and his mangled hand. Donato had found the hard lines of his face and the balding head and the crippled hand sympathetic and convincing as marks of the prophet. Now he wanted time to think about the statue despite repeated demands of the Operai for its delivery. Uncle Niccolò as the prophet Isaiah? He returned to work on it and Saint Louis be damned.

  Meanwhile Michelozzo helped me settle into the life of the bottega. It was a working bottega, like Ghiberti’s, and the sounds of hammering and sawing and the sharp chink of iron against marble rang in the air. There was the smell of wood chips and the sweet tarry smell of paint and the smell of sweat. There was dust everywhere. At times it was like working in the campo, with too many people coming and going. Donato had many assistants in addition to his chief assistant, Michelozzo, who oversaw this constant motion. Nanni di Bartolo, who had helped in roughing out Isaiah’s robes, was there all the time and stonecarvers came in now and again to cut huge blocks to the rough shapes of statues. And there were artisans hired for a particular piece of work—experts in copper or silver—and sometimes too there were hangers-on who were simply eager to be linked in any way with my lord Donato. And of course there were apprentices who occupied workbenches and trestle tables and there were men delivering work materials—wood and wax and marble, sacks of lime, barrels of plaster—and there were others, visitors and friends, who seemed to have no purpose but to look on. To be sure, it was not always so. There were times, especially late in the day, when it seemed no one worked there except the apprentices and the master. Cosimo de’ Medici himself had been known to visit at such an hour, Michelozzo said. The great Cosimo ever avoided crowds but he rejoiced in visiting Donato.

  The bottega was huge, a vast rectangle divided into sections by work benches and partitions. At one side of the room was a long table covered with quills and styli and piles of paper: commissions of every kind, as well as sketches of work in progress. This table was supposed to be Donato’s command post, though in fact it was more often Michelozzo who occupied it. The idea was that from here Donato could see everything going on in the room and have instant knowledge of what was being done and what was being neglected and who needed assistance and who might give it, and thus the bottega would become a model of economy and efficiency. But Donato was renowned for abandoning a work in progress while he gave himself over to a fresh commission or a brave new idea that came to him in the night or as he crossed the Ponte Vecchio or sat dozing over a midnight cup of wine. His work was always late, therefore, and contracts had always to be rewritten. No one in the bottega seemed to notice and no one, saving Michelozzo, seemed to care.

  Working here was a continual excitement to me, and it seemed right and just that Donato’s bottega opened onto the Corso degli Adimari cat-a-corner to Giotto’s Campanile. There was a small door to the street for coming and going and beside it there stood great double doors wide enough to admit a cart loaded with granite or marble and these doors were generally kept barred except for deliveries. At the far end of the bottega there was another small door and, beside it, a set of matching double doors that gave onto an outside garden area and a courtyard used for carving heavy sculpture. A garden shed with a long overhang protected work in progress from the rain and snow, and a separate shed provided a stall for the donkey, Fiammetta, a patient, smelly beast used for carting materials. A flock of brown and speckled chickens scratched about in the courtyard for grain; they were a nuisance, Michelozzo said, being always under foot, but their eggs were essential for fixative in painting. Two black cats and the fat orange one that was Donato’s favorite kept watch over the chickens or curled up in a patch of sunlight or fought among the
mselves for amusement. A well with a hand pump stood in the center of the yard and, just beyond it, a small furnace for smelting ore. Close in against the outside wall was a privy closet for our physical needs.

  Inside the bottega Donato maintained a separate chamber walled off from the huge public work area. It had a lock on the door and a cot where he might spend the night if he worked too late to cross the Ponte Vecchio to his rooms. Here too he kept his most private papers. No one—except Michelozzo—was granted entrance to this room.

  * * *

  FROM THE START Michelozzo was my friend and my unexpected patron. It was not only my awkwardness that commended me to his attention, but my knowledge of Latin and my ability to attend to the fine details of the bottega’s commissions. Also, I was strong and he could see I would be able to assist him in casting bronze, which was his specialty. As the year went by he let me help in organizing the works in progress. Since I was much older than most of the other apprentices and since I was so much less talented than they, no one seemed to mind that I passed on to them orders that came from Michelozzo and thus from Donato himself. Michelozzo settled me among the apprentices and, with great patience and to the limits of my ability, he taught me to sculpt in marble.

  At first they all seemed nervous likeable young men who terrified me by their quick wit and their rare accomplishments and by how comfortable they all seemed at work in Donato’s bottega. Caterina was older, more gifted, and as a relative of Donato, she stood a bit apart. As they got to know me, they explained about the basket of money; it was really for Michelozzo to dispense when you had need, but if he wasn’t there and you had an emergency, you could lower the basket and help yourself to whatever money you needed. It was the ongoing joke that Donatello—so they all called him—was too unworldly to care about money. He would give you anything, but cross him in some other way—on design or workmanship or the pains necessary to get something right—and he would kill you. He had thunderous rages, they said. He would shout long and threaten much. He had been known to take a hammer to a marble bust, shattering it in a hundred pieces, rather than sell it short to a patron who accused him of charging overmuch. They were bursting with such stories and they were proud to work in the bottega of such an important and dangerous man. They made small mention of his kindness and generosity, of his booming laugh, of the late nights he spent with them drinking deep and telling fond stories of Cosimo de’ Medici and wry stories of working for Ghiberti. I would come to understand that the obvious point of each tale was that the great Donatello was unlike any sculptor before him; the less obvious point—but the real one—was that they were unlike any apprentices before them, chosen as they were by him.

  I came to know them well, all except Pagno di Lapo. He was a boy of twelve or thirteen, silent and surly with the others but full of light and charm with Donato, who thought him greatly gifted and called him Piccolo Mio. I did not trust him, though he gave no reason why I should not, unless it was his sliding smile. During this time I shared a small room with two other apprentices, Francesco Bottari and Rinaldo Franco, across the Ponte Trinità next door to the Palazzo Frescobaldi. Lo Scheggia lived at home with his brother, Masaccio, and of course Caterina Bardi lived with her own family. Francesco and Rinaldo were youths of fourteen and fifteen and I was expected to look after them, whatever that might mean, and I did so by making sure they were in bed each night before I locked the door. I did not want to inquire what they did with their free time. They were serious young workers, gifted beyond my own capacities, and though I suspected they sometimes visited whores near the Mercato Vecchio and undoubtedly pleasured themselves privately in ways I knew only too well, I made a point of not inquiring. Next door to us, in a little house rented from the Frescobaldi, Donato himself lived with Michelozzo. They had two rooms and a small kitchen garden as befitted men of substance and accomplishment. It was whispered by apprentices of Ghiberti—and, I must acknowledge, by others as well—that Donato and Michelozzo were lovers, sodomites, but I who saw them together each day knew that this could not be true. There was never that curious physical tension between them that is the mark of desire. They were simply men who loved one another. And in truth the laws were clear: the ultimate penalty for sodomy was death by fire.

  Gifted, but not gifted enough, I held a special place in the bottega, but it was not one of expertise as a craftsman and so it did not rankle. I got on with the others, I helped keep peace at work, I was useful and needed no special care.

  In this way, Michelozzo brought me, little by little, to the attention of the master himself.

  * * *

  RAW AND CLUMSY as I was, Michelozzo took pity on me and instructed me in the basic needs of Donato’s bottega. For weeks he let me grind paints and embellish panels and assist at plaster casting, but then it came time for work in sculpture.

  “You paint well, and we always need painters, but if you are to be of use to the master, you must learn to carve. Painting and sculpting are very different things.” He looked at me hopefully and nodded agreement with himself. He was teaching an idiot, he knew, but he was very patient. “Painting fills a particular space. You see?” He indicated the flat oaken wedding panel that Caterina was painting: Solomon meets Bathsheba. “But painting remains flat. Sculpture has depth. Not only the illusion of depth, but true physical depth. You can walk around a sculpture. You can touch it. It has life and motion from behind as well as from the front. If it is well done, you can feel it breathe.”

  He walked around Caterina’s painting and I followed him, noticing—not for the first time—that Caterina was full of figure and fair to look upon.

  “Also, a sculpture—and this no painting can do—a sculpture moves into the space of the observer. You are the observer being observed. You see?”

  “I see. I see.”

  Caterina allowed me the thin edge of a smile.

  “Sculpting is not painting.”

  “No.”

  “Donatello takes rough stone and creates this new life, this . . . Only look at what he is doing.”

  Donato was out in the courtyard making changes to Isaiah’s robes. As he worked, quickly, deftly, the shapeless gown that Nanni di Bartolo had rendered now began to reveal the body beneath it, the thrust of the leg, the arms that gave shape to the flowing sleeve. The Operai had at last been shown the statue and with gratitude they had paid more than the contracted fee and still Donato worked to perfect his Isaiah.

  “Do you see?”

  “I see.”

  Michelozzo smiled at me and put his hand on my shoulder as we stood watching my master at work. We both knew I would never sculpt like Donato. He was thinking this, I knew, though my own thoughts strayed to Caterina.

  Michelozzo went to work with a will, teaching me first the proper use of chisels for carving wood and stone. He was thorough and demanding and he did not wait long before starting me on my first carving, a marble bust of Rinaldo, one of the two young apprentices in my care.

  On an afternoon in May with the sun warm on my neck and the sweat pricking on my brow, I first came to Donato’s notice. I was lost deep in work and concentrated all in knots as I rolled the wax into strips and lay them on the frame of my bozzetto. Michelozzo stood by my side, encouraging me, silent. And so I did not hear Donato come into the little shed where we worked and I was surprised when he said, “How does it go?”

  Michelozzo explained on my behalf—since as always I was speechless—that it would be a small bust. My first. We would use scrap marble.

  Donato glanced at the sketches that lay on the worktable. “Rinaldo,” he said. “A handsome boy.” He smiled at Michelozzo and Michelozzo returned the smile. Donato examined the rough wax mess I had produced. “Rinaldo has a fine hand with marble. When you’ve completed his bust, you should ask him to sculpt you in return.”

  I nodded agreement. He looked at me then, curiously, as if he were noticing me for the first time though I had worked in his shop every day and, as an errand boy for Miche
lozzo, I had brought him papers to sign and reminded him of appointments and commissions and schedules. I thought he might turn away but he continued to look at me, for a long time, in a new way.

  “You should start to mold that wax before it hardens,” he said. He turned then and went back inside the bottega.

  Michelozzo said, “He has seen you now and he will remember.”

  * * *

  TO BE REMEMBERED or not to be remembered was no matter to me. It was enough to be one of the six apprentices in the bottega of Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi. Donato was the most accomplished and the most innovative sculptor in Florence, and if in Florence, then in the whole world. And he was not alone. Lorenzo Ghiberti, absorbed in the sculpting and casting of his first bronze doors, nonetheless kept his eye on the work of my master and, as you can see in his second set of bronze doors, he learned from it. Masaccio—Big Thomas—was in and out of the bottega as a friend and student of the master. He was twenty years old and would be dead at twenty-six, but now he was still alive and at work on the San Giovenale Triptych and much preoccupied with color and with Uccello’s laws of perspective. Uccello himself spent a long afternoon showing Donato—and the few others who tried to understand—how to look at a sphere with seventy-two facets in the shape of diamonds and how to draw it and what the results might be. He was twittering and slightly mad and Donato was kind but firm with him, taking in what was useful and dismissing the rest with thanks, while Uccello returned to his solitary house in the hills and his paintings of every kind of animal, to his sad wife and his cages of wild birds. Donato’s oldest friend and companion, Brunelleschi, was in and out, working in secret on his miraculous dome, and my friend Michelozzo was there, whom I called Michele, learning from the master and keeping accounts for him and leading him out of the financial disaster he seemed to want to embrace. The great patrons would sometimes appear: the Medici—old Giovanni di Bicci and Cosimo himself—and Niccolò da Uzzano, the Rucellai, the Riccardi, and even the Albizzi who would later try to destroy Cosimo, our patron. The entire world came around to see what Donato was creating and to applaud the work and to ask a favor. And among all these, invisibly, I too was there, a man in years but still a boy in the craft of sculpting, unskilled, unsubtle, but full of hope and not yet possessed by the demon of . . . of what exactly I could not yet say.