by Mary Hoffman
‘Would I be doing it here, sir?’ I asked.
‘Why, yes, if you were agreeable,’ he said. ‘I have set Leone up with his own workshop in my courtyard. If you would be willing to pose for him two evenings a week, I would pay you . . .’
And he mentioned a sum that far exceeded what I earned at the stonecutters’ bottega. It would more than double my income and I could put all this extra money into my savings. If I could, at the same time, find out information that would satisfy my republican friends, it seemed to me that I had nothing to lose.
‘All right,’ I said, then realised that sounded a bit ungracious. ‘I mean I would be happy to oblige you.’
He looked at me with his pale hazel eyes. I couldn’t make out what he was thinking.
But he was smiling and shaking my hand again.
‘Excellent, excellent,’ he said. ‘Come tomorrow night if you can start so soon. You will get a good supper when your work is done.’
I thought about the meagre table at Lodovico’s and calculated I could eat in their house before leaving for Visdomini’s on my evenings as an artist’s model. That would supplement my diet without digging into my savings.
What could possibly be said against such an arrangement?
Chapter Six
Mothers
The day after my first meeting with Andrea Visdomini I was astonished to find two other people in my brother’s workshop. They weren’t looking at the emerging statue; that was behind sheets. But it was still an unusual event to meet anyone else there.
‘Ha!’ said my brother. ‘Here he is – my little model.’
The two men smiled as they took my hand. I loomed over them and Angelo.
They were introduced to me as brothers, both architects, known as ‘da Sangallo’ because of a famous commission the older one had completed years before. This Giuliano, ten years older than his brother Antonio, had been another artist favoured by the great Lorenzo, and Angelo had met him as a boy at his patron’s table.
Giuliano had an intelligent beardless face, with a quick bright expression. He had come from where he was working on a new palazzo for the Gondi family. His younger brother looked a lot like him and they both seemed to be old friends of my brother. To me they were just a pair of nice old men but I could tell that Angelo thought highly of them – and that wasn’t true of many people.
‘It’s a big day today, Gabriele,’ he said. ‘We’re going to turn him over.’
It took me a while to realise that he meant the statue. That meant he had already finished the front face of it to the point he was ready to work on the back.
I suppressed a smile. My brother knew I’d be there at lunchtime with willing muscles to put to the task but he had invited only two other people to help us and the older one must have been nearly fifty!
God forgive me that I thought fifty such a great age then! But I was still a boy, only months past my nineteenth birthday and fifty seemed an unimaginable distant landmark, a bit like the Pantheon in Rome – something I had heard talked about but never imagined seeing.
I knew that Angelo had invited the Sangallo brothers for their loyalty and discretion, not their strength. He was already taking down the sheets and the brothers were rolling up their sleeves.
But all three of us were dumbstruck when we saw what Angelo had done so far. Of course, I had seen the model – had posed for it – but this was something different. Out of the marble a giant was thrusting his way. His face was mine but turned to one side, with a fixed frown that I didn’t realise I’d had. His left leg was sticking forward while the right was going to bear his weight. My brother had made clever use of the gap already roughly chipped out by an earlier hand that showed where the division between the legs would come.
As I looked at this giant image of myself, I could easily believe that the rest of him was waiting inside the marble for my brother to come along and chip him out. He looked like an outsize man who had been trapped by a flood of molten stone and only half released.
I had no idea how much progress he had made in a few weeks and that the figure would be ready for turning so soon. But I think I knew even then that it would never be placed far up on high where people would see only the front of it. Angelo was going to make this a statue you could walk round and marvel at from all angles.
‘You have caught his likeness exactly,’ said Giuliano, gesturing towards me. ‘There will be no doubt in the city who your model is.’
‘You will be called David,’ said Antonio, ‘and it will be an honour.’
He was right about the first prediction – but not about the second.
The four of us took most of my lunch break to wrestle that old block with its half-formed giant breaking out of it, till it was turned on to its white marble stomach and the rough surface was ready for my brother’s chisels. Then he broke out the wine he had brought – far superior to what we usually drank at his father’s house.
I drank deeply because I had taken most of the strain of the weight, even though we had used ropes and an ingenious pulley system that my brother told me Antonio had shown him how to make. And as far as I know Angelo used it ever afterwards for his upright figures in the round.
When I left to go back to my workshop, the three men were contemplating the block with satisfaction. I was glad to be warmed by the red wine and the exercise, because it was winter now and I had to wear a woollen jacket over my canvas shirt. I tugged it around me as I passed by Clarice’s old house.
She had moved to live with Altobiondi on the Via Tornabuoni; I knew that. Her old palazzo had to my fanciful eyes a sad, deserted look. Though, of course, stone cannot show its feelings. I was the one who felt abandoned.
My first evening at Ser Visdomini’s house was unthreatening enough. I bolted down my evening meal at Lodovico’s even less ceremoniously than usual and turned up on the Via dei Servi promptly. But the evenings had been drawing in for some time and it was already dark. I was used to roaming the streets of Florence now and always kept an ear open for footsteps behind me and a keen eye for glimpses of anyone trying to spy on me.
I was surprised when I got to his house to be introduced not only to the painter Leone but also to Visdomini’s wife. I was actually more surprised that he had a wife. She was a slight pretty young girl, with fair hair and a trace of a lisp; Andrea treated her as if she were his younger sister.
Leone was a burly young man with a snub nose and arm muscles like a wrestler. I was glad he wasn’t going to be an enemy. Visdomini led us to Leone’s workshop in the courtyard, leaving his pale, insubstantial wife in their grand reception room.
I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw how completely fitted out the artist’s studio was. I caught his glance and saw that he realised just how lucky he had been to secure such a rich and discerning patron. There were low wooden tables with all that was needed to make his pigments and even an urchin to do the grinding. The boy was sitting dozing on a three-legged stool but jumped up when we came in.
And as well as canvas and paints, the room, which had both a large window and a skylight, was furnished with a velvet sofa and rich hangings and cloths for the painter to use as props. A brass ewer and bowl for water, a pewter jug of wine and a bowl of fruit completed what could have easily been a study for a natura morta painting.
Lucky Leone.
The room was well lit with candles in sconces but I could see that the winter evenings were not going to be the best times for sketching or painting. I hadn’t thought of that before. Perhaps Visdomini’s offer wasn’t what it seemed after all?
He soon left me with the painter and the little apprentice, who was allowed to go to bed on a straw mattress under one of the tables. Leone would not need any pigments tonight. It appeared that all he wanted to do was draw some preliminary sketches of my head.
‘You’re good at staying still,’ he said.
So I explained about posing for the little model of David. Leone was immediately fascinated.
&n
bsp; ‘You stood for the great Michelangelo?’ he said.
‘Yes, but I live in his father’s house so it was quite natural for him to ask me.’
I was quite pleased that Leone had such a high opinion of my brother. He sketched for about two hours and it wasn’t difficult to hold the pose; I could even sit while he worked. It was going to get more difficult in sessions to come but for now I was earning my money easily.
When the time was up, Leone rang a little bell and – to my delight – Grazia brought us our supper. There were meats and bread and olives and vegetables sott’olio, and another jug of good wine.
‘Stay and talk with us,’ said Leone, exactly what I should have liked to ask her.
‘My master sends you this,’ said Grazia, handing me a purse.
She sat down on the apprentice’s stool and even accepted a little wine.
‘Gabriele is the perfect model,’ said Leone and I was glad he had used my name in front of her, just in case she had forgotten it.
‘Can I see?’ she asked, putting out her hand for the sketches.
This was another good move, because it meant she looked from the papers to me and back again. Leone had drawn me from at least three angles.
‘Who is he supposed to be?’ she asked. She seemed very friendly tonight.
‘Hercules,’ said the painter. ‘He has the physique for it, don’t you think?’
Grazia was admiring my figure, which was very pleasant, when we had an unexpected visitor. I knew it only because Grazia jumped up, spilling her drink.
‘My lady!’ she said.
‘It’s all right, Grazia,’ said Signora Visdomini. ‘I just came to see that everything had gone well. My husband wanted me to make sure that Gabriele had been paid and given his supper. He has had to go out.’
‘Thank you, my lady,’ I said. ‘Your servant has been looking after me well.’
Then she asked to see the drawings, just as Grazia had. I wondered if she had really been asked to come and check on me or was just curious. But I didn’t mind at all that a second nice-looking woman was appraising my features.
I went home well pleased with my evening’s work and hid my money under my mattress. Being an artist’s model was much easier work than squaring and dressing stone.
Saint Nicholas’s Day was on a Monday and so I had two days off work in a row. I had to go and pose for Leone that night but I was pleased when Angelo asked if I would like to go to church with him; we didn’t spend much time together when he wasn’t working.
Santa Croce was the nearest big church to Lodovico’s home and the one his family most often attended, but after the service I found there was another reason to go there on this day. All the brothers were there, with their widowed father, and went to the graveyard to stand by a simple headstone.
FRANCESCA DI NERI DEL MINIATO DI SIENA
was the name on the stone.
1455–1481
MOGLIE BEN AMATA DI
LODOVICO DI LIONARDO DI
BUONARROTI SIMONI
We were here to pay our respects to Angelo’s mother.
‘Twenty years ago today,’ he said to me under his breath. ‘That’s when she died.’
The date soon after which I had been conceived according to my own mother. That thought made me feel so peculiar that I studied the dates on the stone to take my mind off it.
‘She was only twenty-six?’ I asked, sotto voce, because Lodovico was within earshot. He seemed so old to have had such a wife.
‘That’s right,’ said Angelo. ‘The same age I am now. Only she will be just twenty-six years old for ever.’
I didn’t know what to say; I had never seen Francesca but Angelo had often talked about her. He had spent too little of his six years with her before she died, he said, but I knew she was his ideal woman. He told me once that the Madonna in the statue in Rome, that had brought him so much fame, had his own mother’s face. If that were true, Francesca di Neri had a far finer monument than the one in Santa Croce’s churchyard.
‘She was worn out by bearing children,’ he whispered fiercely. ‘Five sons in eight years! And that’s just the ones that lived. It was having Gismondo that killed her in the end.’
He was looking at his father with a sort of bitterness.
‘Animal lusts,’ he growled. ‘I told you – best to steer clear.’
‘But if we all did that, the world would soon be empty,’ I dared to say. ‘Besides, you told me to marry.’
He rubbed his hands over his eyes. ‘You’re right. Don’t take any notice of me. I just wish she had lived longer – to see what I could do.’
Lodovico and his other sons were moving away from the graveside so I thought I’d leave Angelo on his own to pay his respects. But he didn’t want that.
Instead, he took my arm and said, ‘Come on. We’ll go and see a living mother now.’
I realised he intended us to walk to Settignano and my heart leapt.
My home village had never looked more lovely to me as I tramped into it along the dusty road with my milk-brother. It was a cold, crisp day and I knew we would be chilled to the bone walking back after dark but it felt so good to see my childhood home, modest as it was.
My mother did not know what to do with herself and which of us to kiss first. My father clapped us both on the shoulders. My sisters were sent for and arrived in a bustle of giggles, shrieks and young children, my little nephews and nieces.
After the first flurry of welcome, my mother was concerned about having enough food to give us all a sufficient Saint Nicholas’s Day dinner. I was mortified to have brought no presents for anyone but Angelo’s suggestion had been so sudden and there had been no time to go back to his house for money.
He, however, had brought a bag of silver coins, which he passed to my father and then he set to whittling wooden toys for the children, something I could help with. I wonder if they still have those wolves and bears and lions and dogs, original woodcarvings by the hand of Michelangelo? I’ve never asked but they would be worth a fortune now.
After the feast my mother provided, restlessness took me out of the house and off to find Rosalia. Now that the moment had come I felt very unsure of my welcome but I needn’t have worried.
As soon as she saw me through the window, she squealed and ran out to meet me. We had both had birthdays in the nine months I had been away and she was now a sixteen-year-old in full bloom. How I longed to be alone with her, but her family were all around her on this saint’s day and very interested to hear about my adventures in the city.
I had to give them all an expurgated version, of course, and all too soon it was dusk and I had to start the long walk back. Rosalia came with me to my parents’ house.
‘It’s too cruel,’ she said, ‘to see you for only one hour after you’ve been away so long.’ There were tears and I think disappointment that I had brought her no Saint Nicholas’s Day present. I felt that I was a very poor lover.
And holding Rosalia in my arms to kiss her goodbye I felt worse than that – a rat and a worm, who had betrayed her simple and honest love.
When we set off back to the city, I was in a whirl of emotions. Angelo by contrast seemed almost serene.
‘You have a good family,’ he said.
I just grunted.
‘And if that pretty girl is your sweetheart, you are a lucky devil,’ he added. ‘Are you serious about her?’
‘I am,’ I said, though I felt pretty miserable about Rosalia at that precise moment.
He looked sideways at me. We were striding out with our cloaks over our faces, walking into the wind, but I knew he was assessing my sincerity.
‘Don’t agonise about it,’ he said kindly. ‘I know you’ve been up to some unwise games in Florence but your Settignano girl need never know. Save your money, come back and marry her and be true to her ever after and there will be no great harm done.’
He was right. If only I could have taken his advice sooner.
There w
as time for only the briefest of bites to eat at Lodovico’s house. The older Buonarroti was in a foul mood because he had wanted to spend the whole day with all his sons, remembering their mother; he was angry that Angelo had deserted them without a word.
I escaped to Visdomini’s house as soon as I could and was a little late.
My head was full of images of mothers – my own living one and Angelo’s dead one. And of Rosalia, who I wanted to be the mother of my own children. And that sent me back to thinking of Clarice, who must be big with my child by now. It seemed to me that I had made an awful mess of my life in just nine months.
Grazia let me into Leone’s studio and gave me a nice smile. I smiled back. Maybe life was not so bad after all.
Leone wanted me to pose without my clothes and to hold a piece of cloth that he would transform into a lion’s skin in his painting. There was a fire in a small brazier and a stack of wood beside it and the little apprentice was staying awake to feed it so that I should not catch cold.
The painter had not got far with his sketch when the door opened behind me. I longed to snatch the cloth around my loins but did not dare move. There was a swish of some rich cloth on the stone flags of the floor and Andrea Visdomini came into view. He circled me and then went to look at what Leone was doing.
I was glad of the candlelight and firelight so that the lord would not see the colour of my face. He was examining me and the drawing as if he would like to buy me. I suppose in a sense he had.
I was just wondering if I should stop coming to this house when I heard the door open again. A muffled noise told me that the newcomer was female. This time I covered my nakedness with the cloth and turned to see Grazia in the doorway, her hand to her mouth. Visdomini looked highly amused.
‘What is it, girl?’ he asked. ‘Can’t you see I am busy?’
‘I’m sorry, my lord,’ she stammered. ‘But you have visitors. Ser Altobiondi and his friends are here.’
I grabbed my clothes and ran. Tonight I would go without payment or any supper.
