by Mary Hoffman
A favourite place of his was Santa Maria del Carmine across the river. It was a short walk from the cathedral and it felt as if we were going out into the countryside but there was the church with its chapel devoted to the life of Saint Peter.
‘I used to come here every day when I was a boy – younger than you,’ said my brother. ‘My old master sent me to copy the frescoes – it’s where I got my nose broken as a matter of fact.’
The atmosphere inside the chapel was so serene I couldn’t imagine any violence happening there. Small groups of young men, obviously apprentices in other artists’ workshops, were sitting diligently drawing.
I had never seen anything like those paintings on the wall.
‘Who did them?’ I whispered.
‘Big Tom,’ said my brother, grinning. ‘He was supposed to be helping Little Tom, who was older than him, but Big Bad Tom ran rings round him.’
‘Did you know him?’ I asked, surprised by his familiar tone. There was so much about my clever brother’s life I knew nothing about.
‘No,’ he said. ‘These were painted long before I was born – nearly eighty years ago. But everyone saw straight away that the younger painter was the greater artist.’
I looked at the fresco of Adam and Eve being driven out of the Garden of Eden. She was howling with grief and trying to cover her nakedness with her hands. But Adam had his hands over his face and looked inconsolable.
It made me feel very uncomfortable and set me thinking about my situation with Clarice. She hadn’t for one moment considered marrying me and I suppose I couldn’t blame her for that; aristocratic ladies don’t marry stonecutters, except in old fables. But it was the way she had kept the news of the baby to herself up till now and made this life-changing decision on her own that made me feel sore. As if it had been a women’s issue and I – or even Altobiondi – just pawns in a game where she was queen.
But my brother was pointing out another picture to me. Saint Peter was baptising some new converts – some of the first Christians ever – and there was a queue waiting to be initiated into the new religion.
‘That’s the one that got me my new nose,’ he said. ‘See that young man waiting to be baptised?’
Indeed my eyes had already been drawn to this figure. He stood stripped to his underwear, hugging himself with his arms to stop from shivering, just waiting to step into the river and be born anew. You could feel how cold and nervous he was.
‘Torrigiani started moaning about how Big Tom was an incompetent draughtsman,’ my brother continued. ‘The arms were “too small”, the anatomy “not accurate”, he said.’
I thought I could see where this was going but I had never heard the full story of the broken nose before.
‘What did you do?’ I asked.
‘Nothing,’ he said innocently. ‘I just told him he was wrong. In a certain amount of detail.’ He was grinning as if the incident were taking place right now before his eyes.
‘And Torrigiani didn’t like being wrong so he hit me – a great single punch in the face. We both heard my nose break. And the blood was pouring out in a flood – ruined the drawing I’d just made.’
‘What happened?’
‘Well, Torrigiani legged it and I went back to the sculpture garden.’
‘What did Lorenzo de’ Medici say?’ I asked, though I felt shy at even mentioning the great man’s name. I knew that my brother had caught the eye of this illustrious patron when he was just a boy. Lorenzo de’ Medici had taken him to live in his house and eat at his table alongside his own children. And put him to study in the sculpture garden up by San Marco. This was ten years ago or more and it didn’t last long; Lorenzo had died in 1492.
‘He was very angry with Torrigiani,’ said my brother, his strange horn-coloured eyes looking into the distance as if he could still see the remembered scene. ‘It must have looked worse than it was – me all covered in blood. Lorenzo called me in to give an account of what happened. I think he was pleased I had defended a great artist against a piffling student like Pietro Torrigiani.’
‘What happened to Pietro?’
‘Oh, he left town soon after,’ said my brother, smiling. ‘It taught him not to show disrespect of his betters.’
‘What was he like?’ I asked.
‘Torrigiani?’
‘No. Lorenzo.’
He looked round as if there might be listeners behind every pillar.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘There’s a tavern nearby. Looking at great art always makes me thirsty.’
We left the chapel and were soon sitting with two generous flagons of vernaccia. It was a warm August evening and I’d been in the city nearly five months but I still felt there was so much about it I didn’t know or understand.
‘You said you weren’t on anyone’s side when you arrived,’ said my brother. ‘Do you still feel the same?’
‘I don’t want to have anything to do with politics,’ I said quickly.
He snorted over his wine. ‘That’s what people say who don’t understand what the word means. And it’s very dangerous to stay ignorant in Florence – you might not stay alive very long.’
‘But what has a stonecutter to do with politics? How can I affect anything that goes on in government rooms and grand buildings?’
‘I might have thought that once, but I lived among the great men of the city when I was just a boy and that shaped my thinking.’
‘So you are a Medici man through and through?’
Again, he looked round cautiously as if the very walls might have ears.
‘I was,’ he said. ‘I was Lorenzo’s man, heart and soul. There was never anyone to touch him. But when he died and his son Piero took over, he was a bitter disappointment – nothing like his father.’
He seemed lost in thought.
‘Lorenzo gave me marble to work in. Piero gave me snow.’
‘Snow?’ It seemed impossible, a cruel joke.
‘It was the winter of ’94,’ he said. ‘Do you remember it? You’d have been – what? – twelve? It snowed in Florence, in January.’
‘I remember,’ I said, thinking of snowball fights with my friends in Settignano. It was the only time in my life I had ever seen deep snow.
‘Piero asked me to make a snowman,’ said my brother. ‘And I did. And it was a good piece of sculpture. But in a few days it was just a puddle. That’s the sort of man Piero was. I still have the marble reliefs I made for Lorenzo and I expect to have them till I die. I’ll show them to you.’
‘So you are a republican now?’
My brother called for more wine; he had a real stoneworker’s thirst and so did I. You never really seem to get the dust out of your throat.
‘I am all in favour of a single ruler if that ruler can be a Lorenzo de’ Medici,’ he said at last. ‘But there are few men like him. Even his own son had none of his quality. So in general, yes, I’m now a republican.’
‘Then I am too,’ I said.
He laughed his short barking laugh, a stonecutter’s cough.
‘You can’t just say you’re a republican because I’m one.’
‘I’m not. I’m saying it because you’ve explained it and I agree with you. I’d like to see those reliefs, by the way.’
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘You stick to stone and things you understand. But be careful. We may be republicans and that’s the faction with the upper hand in Florence now. But there are still lots of Medici supporters who would bring the family back. And the two sides hate each other. I can’t do that. I can’t hate the family that made me what I am. But until another Lorenzo is born, I’ll stay a republican, even if I don’t take an active part in the city’s politics – just enough to keep me alive.’
It was not long after this conversation that Angelo decided to change the stance of the David and I had to pose for a whole lot of new sketches. We had got through a lot of cabbages and cauliflowers, much to the housekeeper’s annoyance, before my brother suddenly said one
night that he had changed his mind.
‘Everyone shows David when the fight is over,’ he said. ‘But wouldn’t it be more interesting to depict the young shepherd before he knows he’s going to win?’
I hadn’t thought about this. In fact, I hadn’t thought about the subject of the statue at all. I knew that in the Bible, David was a young boy who looked after his father’s sheep and had lots of older brothers. I knew lots of youths like him in my village home. But the one in the Bible killed a massive Philistine called Goliath with a shot from his sling, even though the enemy giant was armed to the teeth.
‘I see what you mean, I think,’ I said. ‘He goes out armed only with the slingshot he’d normally use on wolves and suchlike.’
‘And the Philistine is a huge monster of a man in full armour,’ said Angelo, ‘while David has no more than a rough loincloth to protect him. Not even a shield.’
‘Oh, he will have a loincloth?’ I asked.
‘No, not in my statue,’ said Angelo. ‘I shall show him naked to emphasise his vulnerability. I must get into his face – your face – all his determination and strength together with his nervousness and fear.’
‘That’s a tall order to put in one statue,’ I said.
‘It is. And it must send other messages too. This is a work to please the Republic. It must represent how Florence herself, even when seeming vulnerable to attack, is determined to beat any superior force, with the power of her proud history.’
If anyone could do all that, it would be my brother.
We abandoned the vegetables and I stood with all the weight on my right leg and my left leg lightly bent. I tried to look warlike and apprehensive at the same time, which caused my brother to laugh so much that he begged me just to concentrate and leave the expression to him.
I’d stopped going to see Clarice but I hadn’t stopped thinking about her. I didn’t love her but I was fond of her and it irked me that she was carrying my first child and had so casually decided to give it a different father. I decided I would find out everything I could about this usurper Altobiondi.
Antonello de’ Altobiondi was a dyed-in-the-wool Medici supporter and I got my information from an unexpected quarter: my brother’s father, Lodovico.
Lodovico didn’t approve of Angelo’s profession, thinking sculpture only one small step up from painting, which he saw as an artisan’s work, like dyeing or tanning. His oldest son, Lionardo, was a Dominican friar and had been a fanatical follower of Savonarola, that friar who had endured the same fate as all the fripperies he disapproved of – burned on a bonfire in the piazza before the government building.
The three younger boys were still at home though and Lodovico’s second wife, Lucrezia, had been dead a few years; it was a very male household, with no one minding too much about washing or changing their clothes very often. The old housekeeper did the best she could to put food on the table with the stingy amount Lodovico gave her but it was a struggle, with four hungry young men in the house. And now five, with me there.
Now that I couldn’t supplement my diet with trips to Clarice’s better-provisioned table, I was famished most of the time. Lodovico wouldn’t accept any of my wages, though I’d offered straight away. His pride was too great to take money from the child of his son’s wet nurse!
But he seemed to like having me there.
‘You bring a flavour of the country to my house,’ he had said graciously when I first arrived. ‘Tell me what news of my farm in Settignano. I don’t get there as often as I should – has the harvest been good?’
And in return for news of the countryside he enjoyed telling me about life in the city. After I’d had that conversation about politics with my brother, I began cautiously to pump old Lodovico for information about the rival factions in Florence.
I didn’t even have to raise the name Altobiondi before he mentioned it.
‘No one understands my position,’ he said. ‘We are distantly related to the de’ Medici – through my first wife, you know. She was a Rucellai through her mother and a Tornabuoni through other connections. Lorenzo the Magnificent’s mother was a Tornabuoni, of course. Yes, a fine woman of a noble family.’ He seemed to be drifting off into reminiscence.
‘So some people assume,’ he continued, ‘that I and all my family are Medici men! And yet at least three of my boys were followers of Savonarola and he was a bitter enemy of the de’ Medici, even though he visited Lorenzo on his deathbed.’
‘Three?’ I said. I had known only about Lionardo.
‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Lionardo, who lives as a religious in San Marco to this day. But not just him. Michelangelo and Buonarroto too. And I wouldn’t wonder if the others weren’t followers, except that they were a bit young to be influenced by his preaching.’
Lodovico never called my brother Angelo, as he was known in our family; he always gave him the full name of the archangel: Michelangelo. Angelo hadn’t told me he had been a follower of the Friar’s. I’d have to ask him about it. Certainly, you couldn’t be a Medici man and a Savonarola man at the same time.
‘So the arrabbiati expect me to side with them and yet I have at least three piagnoni in my family!’ said Lodovico.
Lodovico explained that the arrabbiati were the ‘enraged ones’ who were violently opposed to Savonarola, the fanatical friar. And the piagnoni were sneeringly called the ‘weepers’, people who had been moved to tears by the preaching of Savonarola, though they themselves preferred to be called frateschi he told me, which meant ‘followers of the Friar’.
‘The arrabbiati have gone underground now we have the Republic,’ Lodovico said, ‘but they are still active and dangerous. And then there are the compagnacci. There are only about a hundred and fifty of them but they are even fiercer than the arrabbiati and are at daggers drawn with the frateschi.’
All these words made my head reel and I decided to make a note of them. Politics in Florence was a much more complicated thing than even my conversation with Angelo had taught me.
‘Men like Antonello de’ Altobiondi won’t stay quiet for long,’ Lodovico was saying. I pricked up my ears at my rival’s name. ‘I shouldn’t like to be in Gonfaloniere Soderini’s shoes when they rise up against him.’
‘Altobiondi?’ I prompted him.
‘Yes, Antonello. He’s the current head of his family and leader of the compagnacci – they are all Medici supporters, of course. They’ve decided we are not, because of my sons, so we are in danger from them. You must watch your step. Don’t talk politics in public.’
I wondered if he knew about Angelo’s advice.
‘What’s this Antonello like?’ I asked.
‘Oh, he’s a bit of a blusterer. Proud of his family’s connections but there’s nothing wrong with that.’
‘What sort of age and appearance?’ I asked as casually as I could. ‘So that I know how to avoid him.’
‘Well, he’s about thirty,’ said Lodovico, frowning. ‘And pleasant-looking enough.’
I was disappointed. I was hoping he’d be at least fifty with a wart on his nose.
‘Well-made but a bit short.’ Lodovico was warming to his theme. ‘Dark hair, big nose. Oh, and here’s another thing, he’s going to marry the widow Buonvicini. Very hastily. There’s gossip that he’s got her with child already, because the wedding ceremony is being held very soon.’
It hurt to hear it, even though I already knew. What would old Lodovico say if he knew the baby the widow Buonvicini was carrying was mine? He clearly had no idea of my connection with her.
‘Purple and green,’ Lodovico was saying.
‘Sorry?’
‘The colours of his house – the de’ Altobiondi,’ he said. ‘His followers and a lot of the other arrabbiati have adopted purple and green as their colours.’
That should make them easier to avoid.
‘But isn’t it dangerous for them to display their affiliations publicly like that?’
‘Ha, my boy!’ said Lodovico. ‘You
can tell you haven’t spent much time in the city! When have Florentines ever been sensible about their affiliations?’
‘And the others, the frateschi?’
‘Black,’ said Lodovico. ‘Always in black.’
So I was now armed with a lot of useful information, even though I couldn’t quite believe that all the warring factions in Florence would wear identifying colours. But thinking back to my first night when I was robbed and the feeling of danger in the air when I walked to the San Procolo district to find my brother, I did remember that some of the groups of young men were dressed alike. I hadn’t noticed the colours then – only the air of hostility between them.
And the very next day, I saw Antonello de’ Altobiondi for the first time. I was walking from my bottega to Angelo’s workshop at lunchtime, so I could eat my bread and cheese with him, when I saw a short, big-nosed man with black hair, dressed in purple and green velvet, coming out of Clarice’s house.
I can’t tell you how it hurt to see him. My mind immediately put him between the sheets with Clarice and a burning jealousy started to eat at my insides.
He didn’t see me at all. He walked right past me and I, all dusty in my stonecutter’s clothes, made no more impression on him than if he’d walked past a horse. Less perhaps, since he might have been more interested in a bit of horseflesh.
I suppose I should have been grateful that he didn’t register me; it meant he didn’t share the widespread Florentine preference of men for men. But that meant he was as keen a lover of women as I was.
The day would come when he knew well enough what I looked like and who I was. But that was still in the future. For now the only comfort I could hug to myself was that it was my picture Clarice had hanging in her chamber. Or perhaps hidden under clothes in her cassone now that Antonello might be sharing her bed.
‘What’s the matter?’ my brother asked when I walked into his workshop with a face like thunder.
‘I’ve just seen an enemy,’ I said.
‘I didn’t think you had any enemies,’ he said.
‘It’s Antonello de’ Altobiondi,’ I said. ‘He’s going to marry Clarice.’
