The Medici Boy

by John L'Heureux

  * * *

  IT WAS A sweltering day in June—hot in the way that only Florence can be hot—and the huge double doors to the courtyard had been thrown open in hopes of a breeze. There was none. The sun seemed to have settled over the city with the intention of putting it to fire. We had all laid aside our stockings and doublets and, dressed only in our long shirts, we gave ourselves over to lethargy. The stone floor was cool on our bare feet.

  I was at the big table doing the accountant’s work Michelozzo had assigned me and I had finished sorting through the sheaf of commissions still unfulfilled. I had separated out the commissions that were fulfilled but not yet paid for—a tondo, a marble bust, two cassoni—and I had begun to add up the sums owed and the sums paid. But it was June, and hot, and I was distracted from thoughts of money by thoughts of Alessandra. I was set upon continually by desire for her. By—I must tell truth—by a lust that never seemed possible to slake though she was always willing to try. I shifted Donato’s commissions in my hands, but my mind was on her body, the soft skin of her inner thighs and the sweet mound there. I began to sweat and I began to go hard. It was lust, I knew, and I pressed my legs together to make myself harder. Yes, it is lust. And lust is evil but, since we are not angels, it is necessary. But was it only lust? I shut my eyes to see her the better and thought, Surely this is love.

  Suddenly, the master was standing before me, and I realized he had been standing there for some time, staring. He had, as Michelozzo promised, remembered me. I leaped to my feet.

  “How old are you, Luca?” he asked. “About twenty-three?”

  “Twenty-one or maybe twenty-three.”

  “Sit down. Sit down. And you were a Franciscan brother for a time.”

  I nodded and sat down.

  “Louis of Tolosa was twenty-three when he died. He was a Franciscan mendicant.”

  He was thinking aloud, not truly looking at me now, and then suddenly he was, and it was as if he was seeing me for the first time. It was that same look he gave to whatever he was sculpting.

  The look of a great artist is not a devouring look or even a penetrating look. It is illumination, as if a great light is turned upon you and all the dark places of your mind and heart are suddenly revealed. It is how God will look at you at his Final Judgment. It is naked, it is not decent.

  I felt myself go hot under his stare, and then cold, and I began to sweat. My leg began to tremble and my sight went dim and I had fear of the worst but—a great mercy—the spell did not descend on me. I felt tears come to my eyes. I had never been looked at in this way. Would I be found out? Would I be acceptable?

  Donato had already turned away.

  “Rinaldo,” he called out, “set up a new armature. I am going to sculpt my Louis.”

  CHAPTER 10

  “WHAT DO YOU want?” Donato said, but it was not a question, it was merely something he was saying to himself as he sketched. I was seated on a low stool while he sat behind his huge worktable. “Lean forward a little. Bring your shoulders down. Good. Now a quarter turn to the left.”

  He had been sketching me—or rather my head and shoulders—for more than an hour. He wanted not only my features but a sense of depth and volume.

  “What do you want?” he said again.

  At last I found my voice and said, “I want to marry.”

  “Good,” he said. “That’s very good.” And after a moment he stopped drawing and asked, “What did you say?”

  “I want to marry.”

  He smiled then. “A handsome boy. But you’re so young.”

  “I’m twenty-one. Or perhaps older.”

  “Does she have a family, a dowry?”

  “She is a street woman. I knew her sister in Prato.”

  “You want to marry a prostitute? You frati minori are full of surprises.”

  “I was not a very good Brother.”

  “Is she comely?”

  “She is very beautiful. Her name is Alessandra.”

  “And you love her.”

  I did not hesitate. “Yes.”

  “Even though she has been with others?”

  “Yes.”

  “With many others?”

  I said nothing.

  “And without a dowry.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll need more money.”

  “I need your permission.”

  He made a gesture that seemed to say his permission was not important, though in truth I could not marry without it. He went back to his drawing.

  “And I will need money for a room. I cannot well ask that she move in with me and Francesco and Rinaldo.”

  “They might like that.” He smiled. He was amusing himself. “How much do we pay you now?”

  “Twelve florins a year and a new pair of stockings.” I wanted to be clear: “A new pair of stockings each year.”

  “You’ll need at least thirty florins. I’ll tell Michelozzo. Or you can tell him if I should forget.”

  I had not intended to ask his permission to marry until he was done with the Louis statue and then, if I had less fear of him by then, I thought I might dare ask. I was overwhelmed. I could think of nothing to say.

  “Thirty florins. And a new pair of stockings,” he said. “Each year.”

  A MONTH BEFORE Alessandra and I were to marry, there came a letter from Prato. I had received a letter only once before—an appeal for money from Spinetta, the dyer’s wife, some years past when she learned I was apprenticed to Cennino, so I was convinced that the boy who brought it was in error. But he was a messenger by profession and assured me that if I was the Luca di Matteo apprenticed to Donatello, orafo a Firenze, then the letter was for me. I signed the note of receipt.

  The letter was from Spinetta, written in a fine hand that could not have been her own. It was again a request for money. Her life was difficult beyond imagining, she wrote, her poverty crippling. Her oldest son had been scalded in a dyeing vat and could never work again. The next two boys were young, and sickly in any case, and together they earned less than enough to keep them in food and clothing. Agnolo, coming on to nine years old, was always in trouble. He had tried to run away. He was wild and uncontrollable, a young animal. Could I send money? Any little thing would help to keep them alive, but surely I could spare more than a little. I should ask the rich and famous Donatello, she said, since he was known to have pity on the poor. She assured me I had always been her favorite and that she counted on me now and she remembered me in her prayers day and night, storming heaven on my behalf.

  I folded the letter and, to keep from thinking on it, put it away in my sandalwood box with my few special things. It was an odd collection: the New Testament in Latin that the Fratelli had let me keep when they turned me away and some charcoaled sheets I held in high value. There was a sketch I had made of Alessandra naked and one of the courtyard in Prato with the well and the white cat, and another of Lo Scheggia that Donato had drawn and then thrown out when he abandoned the earlier Saint Louis. And the ivory-handled stylus that was my first gift from Donato. There was also a single gold earring I had found days earlier in the Mercato Vecchio. It was valuable, surely, and engraved with tiny laurel leaves. I was keeping it to give Alessandra on her feast day. I put Spinetta’s letter at the bottom of the box and tried to forget about it. I was resolved that I would not reply.

  I WAS POSING now, no longer for the bust alone but for the full length statue of Saint Louis. It was early evening, a scorching July day, and all the others had left the bottega. Donato was caught up in his work, taking advantage of the late light, when all at once it came to him to sketch me in episcopal robes. He hauled out three light canvas throws from where they hung on a storage rack and with much care, as if he were clothing me in heavy damask, he draped one around my front to make a gown and the other two around my shoulders, so that in a very short time I looked like a poor man’s bishop. I bore all the elaborate paraphernalia but what should have been brocade was in fact canvas and what should ha
ve been a bishop was an inept apprentice awash in sweat. Donato was caught up in the travesty. He arranged the gown in front, tying it with a cincture so that the light canvas draped like rich material, and he doubled back the shoulder pieces to make a kind of collar on the mantel and then he stood back and admired his work. He fussed with the folds, pulling and pushing the stiff fabric to make it hang like rich damask.

  “We need episcopal gloves,” he said. “And a crosier. And we’ll make you a mitre.”

  I was too uncomfortable to move, too drowned in canvas to speak.

  “How do you feel? Do you feel like a bishop?”

  “I don’t know how a bishop feels,” I said.

  “Do you feel like a saint?”

  “I feel like I’m being smothered.”

  “You look like you’re being smothered.” This was not Donato speaking. It was a man of the nobility, magnificent in his bearing, dressed all in red and with a servant in black and gold by his side. I knew at once it was Cosimo de’ Medici. He was famous for being rich and powerful but he was famous for being ugly as well. He was tall and lean and his skin was yellowish. His eyebrows met in the middle of his forehead and the eyes themselves were small and narrow. His chin protruded in an uncomely manner. I could see why people said he was ugly, but he smiled as he greeted Donato with a greeting that was open and hearty and at that moment he appeared a man of supreme elegance and beauty. It was well known that women found him attractive.

  “My friend,” he said, and embraced Donato with feeling, kissing him on one cheek and the other and then kissing him once again.

  “My lord,” Donato said, returning the embrace.

  “I am just returned from Rome. Your work goes well? And yourself?” His voice was deep and rich, a pleasure to hear. He was completely at his ease with Donato, but even more remarkable was that Donato seemed completely at ease with him. They were like old friends, not like patron and artisan. I could not help staring and he must have sensed my look because he glanced over at me and smiled. It was said that he was never too grand or too busy for even the little people and this seemed to be true. His servant waited patiently by the door, his hands folded before him, a small dagger at his right side and a velvet purse worked with gold thread hanging at his left. It appeared they had come on foot.

  Donato led my lord Cosimo out to the work yard and showed him the huge Abraham and Isaac he and Nanni di Bartolo, working together, had nearly completed for the Or San Michele. It was a marvel, though Nanni’s work on the boy Isaac seemed to me less wonderful than Donato’s Abraham. Also there were two marble heads in bas relief—a sibyl and a prophet—for the Porta della Mandorla, completed and ready for delivery, and as always there were statues in progress: blocks of marble that in time would become the Jeremiah and the Zuccone and stand in niches on the west walls of Giotto’s campanile. At the moment, however, they were merely two massive blocks of marble, cut to size and crudely marked for first carving by the apprentices. Even now Donato could see that these rude stones would become great wonders and Cosimo, a connoisseur of all the arts, looked on and must have known this as well. He smiled and put his hands together, palm to palm. He was ugly, perhaps, but he was bold and heartening to look upon.

  Meanwhile I stood, swathed in canvas, without moving as I watched the two great men move among the marbles outside, talking about sculpture which always fascinated Donato and about rare books and the new learning which did not. It was hard to believe that the rich and famous Cosimo who inspired fear by his power and his silence was the same person as this cheerful man talking now with my master about an ancient statue of Marsyas he had bought in Rome and would like repaired—or perhaps even copied—for the courtyard of his palazzo.

  They came back into the posing room and seemed surprised to find me still standing swathed in my mock episcopal robes, my hands folded at my chest and sweat pouring down my face. “This is thirsty work,” Cosimo said, smiling at me. Donato apologized and began to remove my canvas robes piece by piece while Cosimo said merely, “The fault is mine,” and went to have a word with his servant. Before they left, the servant discreetly handed me a tiny red velvet sack in which I found a newly minted florin. The sack itself was a work of art.

  When they had gone, Donato said to me, “Write this down. For my lord Cosimo de’ Medici: a small gold coffer tooled with the family crest and a jeweled clasp, this to serve as a kind of tabernacle for a Greek prayer book newly brought from Byzantium. Three designs. No fixed fee. No fixed date for delivery.” He paused and thought for a moment. “It is a handsome commission. I leave the design of it to you.”

  I wrote out the receipt and placed it on his worktable on top of the other commissions. My task! My design!

  Because I overflowed with happiness, I sent Cosimo’s florin on to Spinetta, a salve to my conscience, an answer to her prayers.

  * * *

  ON THE EVENING of August 20, Alessandra and I were married at the church door of little Santa Maria in Campo and then proceeded inside where mass was celebrated and our marriage vows solemnized. Donato was there and Michelozzo and Masaccio and all the apprentices. Afterward Donato made a plentiful feast with fish and fowl and venison and—because it was a wedding celebration—the testicles of a boar. To end the feast there were honeycakes, soft and hard, and comfits of every kind. We drank wine late into the night.

  The apprentices had made for Alessandra the present of a handsome cassone that Caterina had painted with a scene of Mars wooing Venus, in which mine was the face of Mars and Alessandra’s the face of Venus. Our marriage bed had been bought with an advance against my thirty florins. That night Alessandra and I lay together as man and wife and she conceived. Our son, Donato Michele, would be one year old before my lord Donato would finish the Saint Louis of Tolosa.

  * * *

  IN TIME MY three designs for Cosimo’s gold coffer became thirty in number, but they were of no interest to Donato who now neglected everything—the towering Zuccone, the prophet, the sybil, commissions large or small—while he concentrated on the Saint Louis of Tolosa. He had finished the bozzetto, and had begun the full-sized statue.

  He was working now on the body. This was to be his first full-sized bronze statue and he deliberately set himself new challenges: he wanted his Louis to look as lifelike as his Isaiah and he wanted the bronze to have the soft folds of cloth. He posed himself the further problem of how to make the finished statue look like me, the model for it, at the same time as it captured the sanctity and mystery and determined character of the boy Saint Louis himself. It was to be a real person who was me and Louis at the same time. In bronze. And finished in gold.

  He had built an armature of wood approximately the size of the finished statue, a manikin fantastically fleshed out with a composition of clay, cloth, hair, and horse dung to create a headless bishop ready for the application of beeswax from which the actual cast would be made. But there remained problems of size and problems of material.

  The Saint Louis was to be immense, nearly eight feet tall, and Donato was charged with the problem of how to cast it in a single pouring and the further problem of how to create the illusion of masses of brocade modeled first in wax and then in bronze. What he wanted, of course, was the thing itself, a young man, his heart beating hard, suffering. And to suggest a living body beneath those episcopal robes.

  He agonized for weeks. He went back to his initial sketches, he restructured the bozzetto, he had me pose for him again and again until I began to think I had become the unwilling saint himself. He despaired of getting it right. He had, of course, considered sculpting it in pieces, but it was the cloth—or rather the appearance of cloth—that would not come right. The wax he was modeling continued to look like wax.

  “It’s wrong,” he said aloud. “It’s all wrong.”

  He said more, mostly to himself and all of it despairing.

  This trial and failure went on for a long time.

  “The wax won’t speak,” he said.
/>   He said, “The wax is dead.”

  And he said, “I can’t make it live.”

  “Why not just soak me in wax, robes and all?” I waited, but he made no response. “And then cast the statue.”

  He paused, his hand caressing the air, and then he stood back from his work and stared at me for a long moment. He gazed at the manikin he had constructed, nodded in agreement, and smiled.

  “Yes,” he said. “I have it now.”

  I was confused, but happy that he was happy.

  “I have it!” he said. He was exultant.

  He left his work stand then and came to me where I stood, motionless, on the posing platform. I did not move. I did not know what his intention might be. I thought he would adjust my pose.