The Medici Boy

by John L'Heureux

  The prison was located just off the Piazza San Giovanni. It was a makeshift affair, a series of cells in the basement of the Palazzo Pretorio, the ancient castle that served as government offices for the Podestà. We approached the gate and explained that our desire was to speak with a prisoner. The guard at the door was unoccupied and free to make difficulties about our request.

  He asked if we were the prisoner’s lawyers and, since we were not, did we come with governmental authority? Were we representatives of the Podestà or the Otto di Guardia? Were we relatives of the prisoner?

  “He is my brother,” I said. “In a sense.”

  “In a sense?”

  “We were raised by the same parents. I had a different father.”

  “So you are half-brothers?”

  “In a sense.”

  “What was your brother’s alleged crime?”

  “Sodomy.”

  He gave a half smile at this. “Not a first charge, I think.”

  “There have been several charges.”

  “Torture perhaps. Perhaps death.”

  “We would like to see him.”

  “You can hope for exile.”

  “If we could see him . . . ?”

  Pagno slipped a silver florin into his hand and the guard nodded, satisfied, and led us down a steep flight of stairs to the prison cells.

  The air was cold and stank of sweat and urine with hardly any light to see by. There was the prison noise you would expect—fighting and cursing—but as the guard appeared leading two strangers the cells nearest us fell quiet. Our eyes adjusted to the gloom and we could make out cells full of prisoners, ten or twelve to each cell. They were starved-looking, lost behind their iron bars.

  “Mattei!” the guard shouted. “Agnolo Mattei!”

  There was no immediate response and so the guard said, “He is not here,” and turned to lead us out.

  “Agnolo!” I called out and again, “Agnolo!” One of the prisoners shouted, “He’s here,” and pointed to what looked like a pile of rags beneath a bench.

  Agnolo got up slowly from the floor and approached the bars where we stood waiting. He clung to the iron grill for support and the other prisoners gathered around him to listen in. “Twenty minutes,” the guard said and left us.

  Agnolo stared at us with glassy eyes, empty. I could hardly bear to return his gaze. He was filthy, of course, and he looked near death. He was so thin that the flesh seemed to have fallen away from his body leaving only a skeleton. His eyes were sunk deep in his head and his cheekbones appeared about to poke through the flesh. I thought of my Franco Alessandro and his five arrests and I prayed that he was not again in jail.

  Agnolo coughed and for the first time I felt pity for him.

  “I knew you’d come,” he said and, reaching through the bars, he took my hand in his. “You are a true brother.”

  “Are you well?” Pagno asked nervously and I looked at him as if he were mad. “I mean, have they set the charges against you? And can we help?”

  “My friend,” Agnolo said. “My true friend.”

  “The charges,” I said. “What are the charges against you?”

  “The charge is rape. But the boy offered himself. I paid. It was not rape.”

  “Was he a boy still? Was he underage?”

  “He was fifteen. And willing. He gladly took money, but after his arrest he gave up my name. It was his father who claimed the act was rape.”

  “So do they all,” one of the prisoners said, leaning on Agnolo’s shoulder. “We are worth more to them in fines than what we pay to fuck them.”

  One-fourth of the sodomite’s fine was paid to the anonymous denouncer. Everyone knew that.

  “We want to get you out of here, rape or not,” Pagno said. “We are going to seek powerful intervention. In Florence. You know the man. Do not mention his name here.”

  “Is it Cosimo?” Agnolo asked. “If it is Cosimo he will surely help me.”

  The prisoners looked at one another, surprised.

  “Tell him I too am innocent of rape,” a prisoner said.

  “And I.”

  “And I.”

  “We need the name of the boy’s father,” I said. “Whisper it to me.”

  He whispered the name of Rinaldo di Bino and I had him repeat it for surety and I turned to leave. I was surprised to see Pagno lean against the bars and kiss him lightly on the lips, like a saint with a leper.

  We retraced our steps down the corridor and up the stairs where the guards saw us out.

  * * *

  PAGNO THOUGHT TO set off at once for Florence but I wanted to linger in Prato for the rest of the day. In truth I wanted to revisit the Tintori where the wool dyers worked at their boiling vats and I wanted to revisit the Camposino San Paolo where I had first met Maria Sabina and, yes, I wanted to revisit Marguerita, the willing serving girl from the taverna, and have sex with her.

  “At a time like this?”

  “We would be late getting to Florence if we left right now and besides Prato is my home city. I served as a Brother of Saint Francis here.”

  “But you want to go whoring, Brother Luca.”

  “I am a weak man. I confess it.”

  Pagno was defeated by this and said simply, “As are we all.”

  So we visited the cathedral and studied the outdoor pulpit again for a long time and then Pagno accompanied me on a walk through the Tintori and the Gualdimare, with a pause I did not explain at the ruined houses in the tiny Camposino San Paolo. I said an Ave there for the repose of the soul of Maria Sabina and another for the good health of my wife Alessandra. Pagno was surprised to see me mumble my prayers and make my sign of the cross because, though he did not say so, he had come to think I was without religious feeling.

  “Alessandra lived here,” I said. “My wife.”

  Pagno nodded, given over to his own thoughts.

  We returned to the cathedral, and as it grew dusk we found an inn just off the Piazza San Giovanni and rented a room for the night. We sat down to a trestle table and were brought a stew of lamb and vegetables and some stout bread. We ate in silence.

  “I can think only of that boy,” Pagno said, and pushed aside his half-empty plate. “He looks to be dying. All bones and misery. He stinks of death.”

  “He is in prison. And he is thirty-three.”

  “He was uncommonly fair at sixteen,” he said.

  “I thought at that time that he was . . . special to you. You seemed always to have a smile and a good word for him and more than once I saw you giving him money.”

  He said nothing for a while, merely toying with the spoon in his empty bowl. “Yes, I purchased him. More than once. I was but twenty-two years of age, and curious. And as I said, he was very fair at sixteen.” There came into his face the flicker of a smile.

  I was astounded. Here was Pagno who was so concerned about sin when we went whoring and yet now he calmly admitted to having purchased the sad favors of a wanton boy and seemed to think it a small thing and no sin at all.

  “And was that not sin?”

  “Oh yes. And I knew it at the time. But it is a common sin among men our age who cannot afford to marry and whose blood is up and who do not frequent the brothels.”

  “But it is a better sin, and more wholesome, to fuck a woman.”

  He turned away from the raw edge of my language.

  “It is what God intended,” I said.

  “God intended charity and justice, only that. But he understands our weakness, as you yourself say.”

  For some reason I was deeply moved by what he said—only charity and justice—and so I made light of his words. I pushed back my bowl and emptied my tankard of wine. Deliberately raw, I said, “It is time for me to get some charity and justice of my own,” and I touched myself there where I had already begun to get hard.

  Pagno shook his head in disgust and got up from the table.

  “We leave at first light tomorrow,” he said.

 
I set off to find Marguerita, which was quickly done for she was waiting outside the taverna and the evening, though brief, was highly satisfying.

  The next morning at first light Pagno and I set off for Florence.

  * * *

  PAGNO HAD PRIVATE audience with Cosimo de’ Medici while I waited in an anteroom so dim they had lit candles. When they finished talking, Cosimo escorted him out and greeted me warmly. He promised to do all that was possible, he said, but laws must be observed and must be seen to be observed. But for Donatello’s sake and to honor that bronze statue in his garden he would do all he could to assure that Agnolo suffered no permanent harm.

  He did not say that he would intervene in the local justice system of Prato so that in the end Agnolo would walk free—exiled but free—and ready once more to become the central burden of our lives. But it was so.

  AS FOR ME, I had taken to heart Pagno’s talk of charity and justice and, mindful of Alessandra’s long patient love, I had decided I must sign the papers that would set her free.

  “We have done well,” I said. “It has been a good marriage.”

  “We had four sons,” she said.

  “And Donato Michele will be a priest.”

  She began to cry softly. I knew why.

  “You cannot blame yourself . . .”

  “I cry for the two babies,” she said. “And for Franco Alessandro.”

  She had loved them well, all of them, I told her.

  “And you,” she said.

  She put her hand in mine, but kept me at a little distance.

  “And now that he is gone—my Franco Alessandro—I have an ill life. Only think, Luca. You will have such a busy life away in Padua, a good life, you will have Donato and Pagno and Michelozzo and . . .”

  “And Agnolo,” I said with a grimace. “Always Agnolo.”

  “I ask only that you set me free to be a nun,” she said.

  “It is what I want and need,” she said.

  “Is it so much to ask?” she said.

  I looked at her with longing.

  “It is God’s will,” she said finally and her voice was sad and bitter.

  In her words I heard the words of Franco Alessandro and for a moment I knew and understood. I kissed her softly and told her that God desired charity and justice and so I would set her free. That night we slept close, touching, and I did not lay hands on her.

  It was a bright, clear morning with no cloud in the sky when I said good-bye to Alessandra and left for Padua. The year was 1447.

  CHAPTER 37

  COSIMO DE’ MEDICI knew the true cost to Donatello of his great works and it was on his behalf that Agnolo was freed from prison.

  Donatello could not work—Cosimo understood this—while Agnolo was shut up from the light, languishing in a dark cell. And so through his quiet intervention Agnolo was spared a flogging—he would not have survived it—and was sent from the Prato prison directly into exile in Padua. Donatello accepted legal responsibility for Agnolo’s behavior while in the first year of exile and he welcomed him into his little house. Indeed, he assigned him my room and in great discomfort I shared my bed with Agnolo until the feast of the Epiphany on 8 January when, complaining of my restlessness and my snoring, Agnolo moved from my bed to Donatello’s where he could sleep in peace. Or so he claimed.

  Ever the spy, I studied Donatello with a sharp eye for changes in his behavior, but there were none that I could see. He was every day caught up in some detail of the chasing and polishing of the bronze panels and the seven statues for the altar. He seemed to take Agnolo’s presence as a given, as if fate had bestowed him on us and our only task was to see that he ate and slept and put some flesh on his skeletal body. Agnolo came to us truly ill. He was so thin I could count the ribs in his chest. Now that he was clean and no longer dressed in rags, I would have expected him to look more like his old self. He was lazy, of course, and much given to lying in bed, but I could see in him unfeigned exhaustion, the way he doubled in two during his coughing spells and the way he dragged himself to the table and forced himself to eat. He ate but little. And he slept only in fits. His hair was lank and stringy and, though his tunic and stockings were clean, they were never neat. He seemed not to care any longer how he looked. At thirty-three years he appeared to be dying.

  Meanwhile all around us things were happening that would come to shape our lives and we remained unknowing.

  * * *

  IN 1447 VENICE broke off its alliance with Florence when the condottiere Galleazo Maria Sforza, a friend of Cosimo de’ Medici, declared himself Duke of Milan and took the throne by force. Sforza was an old enemy of Venice. The new alliance of Florence and Milan was good for the merchants of Florence but suddenly the Medici banks in Venice were forced to close and Florentine citizens were expelled from Venice and its provinces. An undeclared war existed now between the two great republics of Florence and Venice.

  For more than forty years Padua had been under Venetian rule and Padua had become, by association, a Venetian city. Suddenly Padua welcomed the Albizzi, the Peruzzi, the Strozzi, and other noble families exiled by Cosimo de’ Medici after his return from exile. These families, gathered together, began to realize the force of their numbers. They appealed to the Holy Roman emperor to dissolve the new union between Florence and Milan. They agitated for open war against Florence.

  They would do anything in their power to destroy the Medici, even to the gradual picking away at the integrity of old friends. Even so eminent a friend as Donatello di Betto Bardi, orafo e scharpellatore straordinario. And sodomite.

  The friend of my enemy is my enemy as well.

  BY 1447 OUR bottega in Padua had become a world of its own and it existed for one purpose only: to present to the city a completely new altar, with panels of bronze and marble and seven bronze statues, all complete and flawlessly finished . . . and this to be accomplished by 13 June 1448, the Feast of Sant’ Antonio. It was impossible of course but it was the genius of Donatello to accomplish the impossible. Our specialized workers now included five principal assistants and at times as many as eighteen people were at work in the bottega and the foundry.

  The rush to completion left everyone exhausted—even Ria Scarpetti, with her Amazonian strength—and it became clear that the altar itself would have to be a temporary structure. The bronze panels had been cleaned and polished and enhanced with gold, but none of the seven statues had been properly chased and Donatello was displeased to be revealing this uncompleted masterwork to the public. Nonetheless 13 June was the feast of Sant’ Antonio, the day agreed upon, so in early June all the statues and the panels and the marble carvings were mounted on a provisional altar and the basilica was thrown open to the public. The effect was overwhelming to everyone except Donatello. He could see at once that the mad rush to completion had left his great design unrealized.

  Now a stone framework for the altar became the focus of his attention. He hired the expert stoneworker Niccolò da Firenze and his two young assistants Meo and Pippo to replace the altar’s eight wooden columns with marble ones, four of them fluted and the other four pilasters. He ordered steps for the altar in red and white marble with terracotta ornaments on the risers and he had these painted and gilded. By 13 June 1450, again the feast of Sant’ Antonio, the finished statues had been mounted on the new and permanent altar and the Basilica was once more thrown open to the public. It was the wonder of the age.

  THE GREAT FLORENTINE families exiled to Padua did everything they could to encourage war between Venice and Florence. The Peruzzi, the Strozzi, and in particular the Albizzi invested what was left of their fortunes in pitting Venice against Florence, the Doge against Cosimo. Venice, however, was troubled by its ever precarious hold on trade with Constantinople and, like Naples in the south, chose to threaten war while holding on to the tenuous peace that made continued trade within Italy possible.

  Meanwhile just as England longed to possess France, France began to measure its territorial ambition
s in Italy. It had long desired to possess the Kingdom of Naples and now the undeclared war between Venice and Florence opened the possibility for King Charles of France to lay claim to the throne of Naples. At this moment Cosimo appealed to Charles for protection. No good could come of this.

  * * *

  BY 1450 THE major work for the Basilica was behind him and the great bronze Gatamellata lay ahead. He paused to draw breath and look around him. How could so much work have been accomplished in so short a time? It should not have been possible of course and it would not have been possible to any artisan save Donatello. He was at this time sixty-four years of age, a small man of immense strength of mind and body, and though his eyesight had begun to fail a little, his hands remained strong and certain and he could carve better in this his old age than most sculptors at the peak of their powers. Also he had chosen his assistants with care and wisdom. And he was happy.

  He was happy because his work had gone well and because he was surrounded by artisans he loved and respected and because at his little house off the Piazza Sant’ Antonio were the men he most trusted, Pagno di Lapo and myself. There too was the great burden of his life, the other half of his soul, the unremitting source of his joy and his grief, Agnolo Mattei, once the young bronze Medici boy and now a man well advanced in the process of decay.

  CHAPTER 38

  FROM THE START Agnolo complained that he could not sleep. He would lie on his back all night staring into the dark in a waking dream of horror and abandonment. These were dreams of prison in which he was made cruel sport. He was threatened with the rack and the strappado. He was put to the water torture until he could no longer breathe. He was beaten and raped. He knew he was awake but these horrors visited him nonetheless and in the morning he was sore and exhausted and, though starving, could not bring himself to eat.