He had never explained to me what he was working on or what he hoped to achieve. He had never explained to anyone, until now.
“And this is all marble?” Agnolo asked.
“Limestone. The very best there is for carving.”
“You are very skilled.”
Donatello laughed softly at this. They stood there in silence for a moment and then Donatello placed his hand on Agnolo’s shoulder and squeezed it gently. Agnolo gave no sign that he felt the hand. Then, in the way he had done with all of us at one time or another, Donatello reached up and ruffled the boy’s hair. Agnolo shrugged his shoulders and pulled away. Donatello stepped back from him.
If there had been an offer, Agnolo had turned it away and Donatello recognized that. I watched to see what would happen next, but nothing happened. They continued to look at the Annunciation and then Agnolo said he had to go.
“To meet a friend?” Donatello asked.
Agnolo flushed and looked at the floor. After a moment he lifted his eyes to Donatello and gave him that look I had seen him give Caterina, lingering a moment too long, and with a kind of promise in his eyes.
“Could you spare a few piccioli? A loan only. I will repay you.” Donatello went to the basket and took out some money and gave it to him.
Agnolo looked at the coins in his hand. “So few?”
“Easier for you to repay,” Donatello said.
* * *
IT WAS IN this way that Agnolo became a frequent visitor to the bottega of my lords Donatello and Michelozzo. The assistants and the apprentices seemed to accept him as just another presence, here for a few minutes or a few hours and then gone again on his way. Caterina in particular seemed pleased by his visits. Michelozzo did not.
Agnolo made a show of repaying Donatello’s few piccioli and a week later borrowed some more. Donatello gave without hesitation, as he gave to anyone in need, but finally one day he said, “How do you plan on repaying me?”
Agnolo had watched Caterina posing for Donatello and now, without hesitation, he said, “I can pose for you.” He lowered his glance.
“If you find me comely enough.”
“You are comely enough.”
Agnolo cast him a long look.
“As Ganymede, perhaps.” Donatello paused. “The beloved of Zeus.”
“Ganymede.”
“Or as the boy David.” They continued to stare at one another, Agnolo eager, Donatello curious.
I could not understand his fascination for the boy. He seemed to think he was in truth a new Ganymede, the perfect boy, with his thick yellow hair and his long, thin body, like a girl’s. Everything about Agnolo was girlish, especially his hair. He fussed with it constantly, pushing it back and tossing it to the side, calling attention to it. One day he arrived with the sides cut shorter than the back, so that in the front it fell in thick curls about his ears but in the back it hung down until it touched his shoulders. He wore a farmer’s hat—a galero—a ridiculous affectation, with a laurel wreath around the crown—and of course he was never without those expensive leather boots, the gift from his soldier. To me he appeared laughable, the toy of sodomites. I could not abide him.
“We’ll talk of this later,” Donatello said and returned to his work.
“And where is your soldier these days?” I asked. “You seem to spend a good part of your day with us.”
Agnolo took no offense at this, and merely said, “He’s in Lucca, fighting. He could not take me with him.”
“And you would go if you could?”
“It would be my duty.”
“Duty? Are you his bride?”
“He gives me gifts and I am faithful to him. I am not like some of the boys. I am not for sale at the Buco.”
“But you were for sale at the Buco. That is where he bought you.”
“You want only to hurt.”
And he was right. I did want to hurt him. And to spare my master Donatello, since it was clear how tightly he was wound in Agnolo’s web.
“And Donatello?” I asked. “You are faithful to him as well?”
“My lord Donatello is a great worker in stone, but he is an old man of more than forty years. I have no designs on him.”
“But does he have designs on you?”
He smiled, then, on one side of his mouth. “Most men do,” he said. And then he added, as an afterthought, “I would rather Caterina.”
And so the situation was impossible. He would pose for Donatello and Donatello would wind himself tighter into that web and in the end it would all come to no good. I knew this and I think Donatello knew it as well.
AGNOLO, STRIPPED TO his underdrawers, stood on the posing platform while Donatello sketched him from every angle. I stood behind, watching him sketch. It was August, one of those sweltering days in Florence when the heat is unendurable, and Agnolo was hot and restless.
Donatello was trying to encourage him to hold his pose.
“You have just killed Goliath with a stone from your slingshot. You have cut off his head with his own sword and now you stand with one foot on his severed head. It is not your triumph, it is God’s.”
“It’s too hot.”
“Stop moving about.”
For a few moments he stood still and the only sound was Donatello’s stylus scratching against the paper.
“I get itchy standing here.” Agnolo flicked his thumb against his waist and then slipped one long finger into his crotch. He let it rest there.
Donatello gave a quick intake of breath. I could hear the lust in his throat.
“Keep still.”
“As you wish.” But in a moment he touched his crotch once again, as if by chance. I thought I saw Donatello’s hand falter.
I turned away from them and found myself facing my lord Cosimo who had come in unannounced and stood there watching. He never interrupted Donatello at his work. I made him a small bow and he nodded in return. His servant Giacomo stood, silent, beside him.
Donatello had stopped sketching. Agnolo stood there motionless. There was a great silence and a pulsing in my ears as if I knew what was about to happen.
“Take off your clothes.”
“I’ve taken them off.”
“Take off all of them.”
“Even my boots?”
“Leave the boots on.”
Agnolo tugged the cord that held up his drawers and they fell to his feet. He kicked them aside and stood there, utterly comfortable in his nakedness. After a moment he raised one foot and rested it on the posing stool. He raised his hands to his hips. “Now what?” He looked down at himself to see how he must look to Donatello and he was satisfied by what he saw.
It was at this moment that my lord Cosimo finally spoke. “Goliath, conquered by the boy David.”
CHAPTER 16
IT WAS NOT clear to me what Cosimo de’ Medici intended when he said, “Goliath, conquered by the boy David.” Was he referring to the scene before him, with Agnolo as David, his boot resting on the head of Donatello? Cosimo was a quick, hard man and, though he loved Donatello, he knew his nature well. Or was he suggesting that here was the subject of a new sculpture? Donatello had carved two Davids already, one for the Duomo and another for the Martelli family, both of them in the old fashion, both of them in marble, both of them clothed. Agnolo would make a new kind of David altogether. There had not been a naked statue in perhaps a thousand years.
“Clap him in bronze and you have your David,” Cosimo said.
“If he would stay still long enough,” Donatello said, smoothly, as if a naked boy in his studio was no rare thing. My lord Donatello was changing each day, becoming more subtle and more devious as he suited himself to Agnolo.
“We must persuade him,” Cosimo said, and they drifted off to Donatello’s worktable where they discussed the more immediate business at hand. As keeper of notes, I joined them.
First to hand was the war against Lucca. Brunelleschi had been hired as a consultant on battle plans and it was hi
s grand idea to mount a new kind of attack: instead of relying on a mercenary army and its feeble forays into the outlying areas of the city, he would quite literally swamp his adversaries: he would divert the river Serchio in such a way that it would flood the city out. The Consigli were enthusiastic and Cosimo had gone along with them. Michelozzo had been at Lucca for the past two months and had sent back word that he despaired of “the crazy scheme.” The scheme had been impractical from the start and was now proceeding so slowly that Cosimo, speaking for the Consigli, was inviting Donatello to lend his expertise as war engineer. Donatello never refused a commission and he readily accepted this one. I made a written note of the commission and a mental note that this could not turn out well, not for my lord Cosimo and not for Donatello either.
Cosimo then moved on to the next order of business, the delays with the Prato Pulpit. Two years earlier Michelozzo had signed a contract with Prato in the name of the partnership—La Bottega di Donatello e Michelozzo—to produce an outdoor pulpit for the Cathedral of San Giovanni for the celebration of the feasts of the Virgin and for the display of the holy sash that was the cathedral’s most prized relic. The contract was precise: the pulpit was to be supported on a fluted pier constructed at the corner of the new façade and to be of the finest white Carrara marble. All the details were very specific, all of it agreed to by Michelozzo and Donatello. I myself had inspected the contract and had made revisions in our native language that were later put into lawyer’s Latin, and so I was well aware that it specified completion of the pulpit in no more than one year, and now here we were in August of 1430 and the work was scarcely begun. It was Cosimo’s business this day to remind Donatello that the contract had been negotiated through the Medici banks and Cosimo himself was being made to look negligent. I made a note of this while Donatello assured him he would attend to the matter at once.
Finally, Cosimo wanted to talk of the soul and its perdurance after death. I excused myself because this was an intimate matter between two men of genius who shared a love and trust of each other and, for Cosimo at least, a great fear that beyond the edge of life there loomed the possibility of an eternity of fire that would burn but not consume. I wondered at the time if I had ever entertained such a fear myself and I wondered if Donatello—prey as he was to unnatural lust—shared Cosimo’s fear of eternal fire. I had little time to worry about the next life, however, since this one—with a wife and three sons to feed—kept me sufficiently occupied. Besides, I was not important enough to catch the eye of God and hold it. It was one of the advantages of being a little person.
When it seemed right to do so, I returned to my lords Cosimo and Donatello and found their talk had moved from eternity to the more pressing problems of mortality. The Pest had returned to Florence this summer and Cosimo was about to leave for Verona where the infection had not yet caught on. The disease seemed to have lost some of its original force since the decimations of 1400 and 1417. It continued to reappear, in summers usually, and it remained as cruel and as fatal, but the victims now were fewer in number and often weakened by other ills to begin with. Children were most vulnerable, but thanks be to God my boys were sturdy and, until now, lucky as well. Cosimo had only two sons, Piero who was fourteen and Giovanni who was nine, but like any father he was most eager to protect his family. Later, I would discover that he was eager to leave Florence to protect his family, not from the Black Pestilence but from that other pestilence, the family Albizzi. They were conspiring against him and in little more than three years they would succeed in placing blame on Cosimo for the failure of the war against Lucca and for “crimes against the state of Florence.”
“The David,” he said, turning to me. “In bronze. Life-size. For display in my garden.”
He cast a glance across the room to where Agnolo was standing, clothed now, fiddling with his hair. Cosimo looked frankly at Donatello and smiled, a strange kind of amusement.
“When you can find the time,” he said.
CHAPTER 17
FOR THE NEXT months—in truth, until the very end of the year—creating Cosimo’s David seemed the sole concern of the bottega.
Michelozzo had returned from the increasingly hopeless war on Lucca and assumed oversight of the Prato Pulpit and, having long since completed the overall architectural design, he now took on responsibility for the sculptural work that Donatello had put aside. This included a new balcony composed of seven marble sections bristling with child angels who hold between them the arms of the Commune of Prato. But even before Michelozzo could settle in and lay chisel to stone he was summoned by Ghiberti—with the intervention of the Operai—to assist in casting sections of the Baptistry doors. These were the second set of bronze doors for San Giovanni and they took precedence over all other public art works, so Donatello had no choice but to let him go. He put Pagno in charge of the frieze for the pulpit—scrollwork and laurel leaves—and promised that very soon, just as the Prato contract specified, he would sculpt the putti with his own hand. But not now. Not the pulpit and not anything else.
And so Donatello was at liberty and set to work sketching Agnolo from every angle as he worked out on paper the possibilities he would explore in clay. He seated Agnolo so that his head and the sketch and his own eye were all at the same level. He sketched the head and neck for the latter half of a day. The next morning he had him stand and turn beneath the angle of the light so that the unexplored planes of that soft, smooth body came newly into focus. He had him face front and back and side. He had him lean forward from the waist, then back. He had him stand with his left knee bent, his full weight upon his right leg, and then reverse the pose. He was searching for the angles with the greatest show of power and resilience. He was searching out the bronze David.
“You’re about to hurl a heavy stone. Bend back a little. Feel the weight of it.” He was taking great patience with the untutored Agnolo.
“I don’t know how.”
“This is not difficult. Relax. Now make as if you have a stone in your hand and you’re about to throw it.”
Agnolo made a feeble effort at throwing an imaginary stone. He stood up straight and still. He looked ridiculous.
“Like this,” Donatello said. “Your right leg forward, your upper body bent back so that your right arm can gather to a force, and your left arm across your chest supporting the other end of the slingshot. In a slight crouch.”
Agnolo folded his arms across his chest and stood there. Donatello held his patience as if this stupidity were a normal thing in a model.
“Right leg forward,” he said. Agnolo stretched out his leg as if he were about to dance. “Put your weight on that leg. Lean into it. It’s bent at the knee. Good. Now lean backward from your waist. More to the side. The right side. Good. Now crouch a little. No, just a little, and now pull your right arm back and down. Your right hand is holding the sling with the stone in it. Hold it back, and down. Now with your left hand reach across your body to grasp the other end of the sling. Good. Now look up at your enemy.” Agnolo looked at Donatello. “No, look up. Look up over your left shoulder. Pull the shoulder down a little. See? You feel the tension through your entire body. Your right foot curls down with the effort. Good. You are about to launch a stone that will fell Goliath in a single blow. Good. Very good. Now hold that pose while I sketch you.”
Agnolo held the pose for a moment, pleased with himself. He discovered at once that posing was not easy—all his limbs ached—and from this time on Donatello was hard put to encourage him.
“You are a poor shepherd in the hands of God. He is using you to perform His holy will.”
“You are one of the great heroes of the Bible.”
“The King has clothed you in his own armor but you have put it off because you find your strength in God alone.”
Agnolo was a boy without education of any kind, but he was quick to respond to approval.
“The king has summoned you to fight for Israel. You alone.” These brief hymns of praise we
re pleasing to Agnolo but almost at once he began to make difficulties. First it was a question of posing nude while someone drew pictures of him. This was degrading. This was beneath him.
Donatello, who had not considered this nicety, shot him a hard look and left me to deal with the matter. I was, in truth, made speechless by Agnolo’s complaint.
“What?” I asked. “Why?”
“I am not a whore. Only whores pose nude.”
“On both points you are in error,” I said.
“What do you mean?” He was not indignant. He did not understand.
“David fought Goliath with no weapon but a stone. He has to be nude.”
“But no one else is nude.”
“No one else is David.”
This seemed to please him, but a moment later he said he would not pose nude unless someone else was nude. “Ask Caterina,” he said, smirking, and Donatello, who was listening, made as if to strike him.
Well, he would not pose nude, he said, unless some third person was present.
Donatello’s face darkened and he frowned. It was a mark of anger we had all learned to fear.
“To protect you?” he asked.
Agnolo stared at him, a provocation.
“From me?”
Agnolo said nothing.
“Are you afraid for your reputation?”
“I am unused to posing. Nude.”
“I can find any number of boys who will be glad to pose. Nude.”
“Some boys will do anything,” Agnolo said.
Donatello fell silent, but I sensed that this was an insult he would not soon forget.
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