by Mary Hoffman
Chapter Seven
Beginnings and Endings
I thought I had burned all my boats at Visdomini’s but there was no way I could have borne any more evenings of people walking in on my nakedness without warning. I cursed my prudishness as I walked to work next day, not only because of the money and the extra food, but because Grazia’s announcement of the visitors confirmed my suspicions that Visdomini was in deep with the pro-Medici plotters. I might have lost my best chance to help the frateschi.
But I need not have worried. Visdomini himself was waiting outside my bottega, early though it was. He came towards me with both hands open and a penitent expression.
‘Gabriele!’ he said. ‘I am so sorry about last night. Please forgive us and come back to Leone for your next sitting.’
It was a strange new experience having a rich man humble himself to me and I wasn’t sure if I liked it.
Visdomini fished out a bag of money, larger than my usual fee and thrust it into my hand, continuing to apologise.
‘I am having a bolt installed on the inside of Leone’s studio door,’ he said. ‘Everyone who comes when you are there – including me – must knock and wait for admittance while you make yourself, er, comfortable.’
He did seem genuinely sorry and yet I was the one who had broken our agreement and run away.
‘It is I who must apologise, my lord,’ I said. ‘I should not have left with my work undone. I was merely startled.’
‘Understandably, and I promise it will not happen again. Please say you will come back. Leone is fearful that his Hercules will not be finished.’
What could I say? Visdomini insisted on my taking the money, even though I hadn’t earned it, and as soon as I had finished work, I went and bought a little cameo ring for Rosalia, which used all he had given me. Later that week, I entrusted it to a carter in a little packet addressed to my sweetheart. And before Our Lord’s birthday, I was rewarded with a letter written by a scribe in Settignano, in which she thanked me so artlessly and with such joy at having a memento from me, that I forgot my new patron’s eyes assessing the body of his Hercules.
He had been as good as his word and from then on, Grazia would knock at the door when she brought my payment and supper, and Leone would make her wait while I hurriedly dressed myself. He and I fell into the habit of eating our supper together. Sometimes Grazia stayed and drank with us; sometimes if she had urgent duties to attend to she left the two of us together.
Leone was painting now and his Hercules was emerging out of a greenish-brown background, his muscles glowing bronze, like the tawny lion’s skin.
The evenings that I was not posing, I was with the frateschi up near San Marco. I told them that I was now practically a member of the household of a prominent pro-Medicean and they didn’t again suggest that I should infiltrate de’ Altobiondi’s circle.
But after the night of my embarrassment, when I knew there had been conspirators at Visdomini’s house, I hadn’t heard any more about them. I was beginning to feel that although I was in one way an insider, in another I was further from finding out what was going on in his salone than if I spent my evenings in the street watching the comings and goings at his front door.
My chance to find out more didn’t come until the year had turned and then I am afraid it was baser instincts that led to my greater knowledge.
One evening, when I had been posing less than half an hour, there came an urgent knocking at the studio door.
‘Curses!’ said Leone. ‘Who is this interrupting my work now?’
I scrambled into my clothes.
It was much too early for our supper but it was Grazia, with an urgent message from her master.
‘He wants to bring his friends in to see the painting,’ she explained. ‘They are on their way down.’
Leone grumbled a bit; like most painters he didn’t want people to see his work before it was finished but what could he do about it? His patron housed, fed and clothed him and paid for all his materials and would buy the painting from him at the end. That left Leone no rights in the matter. And I had the strongest feeling that Visdomini had commissioned his Hercules because he wanted me to be the subject, rather than having searched for an appropriate human model for an idea he or Leone wished to see completed.
Chief among the friends who came crowding into the studio was de’ Altobiondi. For the first time, he registered my existence.
‘Your painter has caught the likeness well,’ he told Visdomini, looking at me and the canvas by turns. ‘But where did you find such a Hercules in our inferior times?’
‘In the Via del Proconsolo,’ said my patron, laughing. ‘See, he has the muscles to kill a lion with his bare hands. Show him, Gabriele.’
He made me roll up my sleeves and make fists to show off my arm muscles. I burned with the humiliation but put all my anger into clenching my fists with a realism that came from the desire to smash them into Altobiondi’s face.
‘A magnificent specimen,’ said Altobiondi, just as if his friend had shown him a new hunting dog or hawk.
‘Your wife certainly thought so’ was on the tip of my tongue, but I had no desire to be run through by the blade Altobiondi carried openly on his belt, so I kept quiet.
They didn’t stay long. Visdomini had been keen to show off his pet painter, the handsomely equipped studio and his tame Hercules, but once his friends had shown they were sufficiently impressed, they were keen to get back to whatever business they had upstairs.
‘Nobles!’ said Leone, hefting the coins the departing visitors had pressed on him.
I had come in for my share of largesse as well and it was all going to go into my stock under the mattress – my wedding fund, as I was beginning to think of it.
But we both gave a bit to Grazia, who was surprised and thankful.
‘You don’t have to,’ she said. ‘I do only what I get paid for.’
‘So do we,’ said Leone, and I saw for the first time that he was as much a servant as was the waiting-girl or the artist’s model. ‘They make me sick, with their fancy clothes and their airs and graces and their belief that God put them on the earth to get others to do their will.’
These were revolutionary thoughts. I looked round to check that none of Visdomini’s friends had lingered behind to ogle the pretty servant – or me – but we were safe.
‘Are you against the noble families then?’ I asked in a low voice.
‘I don’t know why any working man would think differently,’ he said, looking at me disapprovingly. ‘Even though I am dependent on their patronage.’
‘I feel the same,’ I said, the coin that Altobiondi had almost thrown at me burning in my palm. ‘I am a republican.’
‘But your friends in San Procolo are Medici men,’ said Leone.
We seemed to have stopped work and Grazia was listening to us intently.
‘The sculptor had a patron too,’ I said. ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici. And he had good cause to be grateful to him. But he became a supporter of Savonarola and so did at least two of his brothers. Indeed the oldest one is still a friar at San Marco.’
The name had been said. Leone looked round as if the walls might have ears.
‘What about you?’ he asked. ‘Are you a piagnone?’
I nodded. The painter came and clasped my hand.
‘We will not talk more of it here,’ he said. ‘But it gladdens my heart to know that you and I are on the same side.’
He glanced at Grazia. ‘You will keep our secret?’ he asked her. ‘Working people should stick together.’
‘Then you should know what’s going on upstairs,’ she said. ‘I hear things as I bring them their wine. Which I must go and do now. The master won’t like me to linger down here with you two when rich men might need food or drink.’
‘What is going on upstairs?’ I asked. ‘What have you heard?’
‘They want the de’ Medici back,’ she said.
‘Everyone knows that,’ said Leon
e. ‘They think the return of the family means the return of wealth to their pockets.’
‘But what are they doing about it?’ I asked. This was my chance to find out the details of the plot.
A bell rang in the distance and Grazia jumped up, flustered.
‘I must go,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow I have a half-day free in honour of Saint Remigius. Meet me at the Baptistery at midday and I’ll tell you what I know.’
And then she was gone. Leone looked at me with a half-smile.
‘I notice she didn’t offer to tell me,’ he said, as he bolted the door again. ‘Come on, get your clothes off. Neither of us is being paid to chat.’
I was outside the Baptistery as the bell in the campanile tolled the midday hour. And yet I almost missed Grazia. She had changed into her best dress, a mossy green velvet one that I somehow knew had once belonged to her mistress. It was only half covered by her russet cloak, so I knew she wanted to show it off. And in her hair she had twined a crimson ribbon. She wore no jewels – I doubt she possessed any – but she looked as charming as any lady could on this cold January day.
There were few places in the city where a young man might take a young woman to be warm in winter – especially on a saint’s day. But I knew of a bakery nearby, where the ovens would be fired up even on a holiday and the baker had befriended me some months before, for the sake of my closeness to the Buonarroti family. He had a very beautiful wife of good birth and was always talking about having her portrait painted. I think he liked to be on friendly terms with artists.
So I took Grazia to Gandini the baker’s and bought us hot soft rolls to eat as we sat in a corner of his paneficio. It wasn’t really open to the public but a few of the baker’s regulars were there and his wife gave us cups of hot spiced wine in honour of Saint Remigius, she said.
Grazia and I were sitting cosily in a corner and I realised that we looked like any other couple of the common people, enjoying some rare time away from work. I must tell her about Rosalia, I thought.
But she started to talk in a low and urgent voice about the conspirators at Visdomini’s house. It was clear that she didn’t think of our meeting as any kind of tryst.
‘They are supporting more than one member of the de’ Medici family,’ she said. ‘Piero, as before, but I think they have no high hopes of him after last time. So now they are talking about Giovanni – the one who is a cardinal in Rome. And another one . . . Giuliano? No, Giulio. He is the bastard son of Lorenzo’s brother.’
That made me jump a bit and I thought of Clarice for the first time for weeks. It seemed as if nobles could father children outside marriage and their offspring still find a superior place in society. But not men like me.
Still, this was a useful titbit to take back to the frateschi.
‘Do you know anything about when they are expecting to bring the de’ Medici back into the city?’ I asked. It was very intimate, sitting so close together that our faces were almost touching, keeping warm in the bakery while the streets outside were rimed with frost.
‘No,’ said Grazia. ‘I hear only snippets. It has taken weeks to understand as much as I have told you.’
‘It’s very helpful to me,’ I said. ‘But I don’t want to get you into any trouble.’
‘Why does it help you?’ she asked. ‘How does it?’
‘You know I am not sympathetic to the Medici cause,’ I said quietly. ‘There are . . . friends of mine who want to know this sort of information.’
‘And what would they do, these “friends” of yours?’
I didn’t know the answer to that.
‘Will you tell me anything else you find out?’ I asked, taking her hand.
It was a rough hand, not like Clarice’s, but rough with work like Rosalia’s. I respected them both for that. She blushed but did not take her hand away.
‘There is no need for you always to go straight home after you have finished posing for Leone of an evening, I suppose?’ she said.
It was true that it was always Grazia who guided me to the front door when I had finished my supper. She carried a lantern, saw me out through the postern door and then locked it behind me. It was probably her last duty of the night.
‘I can tell you what I have learned in the previous few days if you come to my room before you leave,’ she said. ‘I have a room to myself.’
That meant she was a favoured and superior servant. But the thought of being alone with her in her bedchamber put me in a new kind of danger. I needed her information to help my chosen companions, but the price I would certainly have to pay for it, though sweet, would cost me dear.
Angelo had nearly finished the statue. We had turned it again so that he could work in more detail on the front.
‘I am going to leave the top of his head unfinished,’ he said.
I climbed up to have a look. There, at the crest of this David’s curls, was a rough patch of unchiselled marble. My hand went unconsciously to my own hair and Angelo laughed his harsh, grating laugh like a key turning in a rusty lock.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘It marks the extreme limit of the original block,’ he said. ‘That way the Operai will see that I have used every bit of it and added nothing.’
It was a matter of pride with him that he had looked at the botched slab of marble and found a way of creating a figure in the round that had been buried exactly within its confines.
‘You have such genius,’ I said. And I meant it. Who but my brother could have pulled off a commission like this? That was why he had accepted, of course. It was the challenge of working within prescribed limits that excited him. He didn’t want just to make a passable statue out of a discarded block, but to turn that overlooked and ignored slab of marble into a work of art that would make people gasp.
It made me gasp and I had posed for it and seen it grow out of the stone day by day. Apart from the Sangallo brothers, no one else had had that privilege. I could just imagine how it was going to shock the citizens of Florence once the public were allowed to see it. At least some of them. The frateschi were going to love it but not the de’ Medici supporters.
It said as clearly as if it were chiselled into a stone scroll in the shepherd boy’s hand that here was defiance: the ordinary working man from the fields going out against a giant clad in armour, with only a slingshot and stone. And we all knew the outcome of that story. Angelo didn’t have to show it. There would be no head of Goliath in his helmet lying bloodily under this David’s foot.
The determination in his eye and the concentration of his frown meant that the stone would land squarely between the brows of the Philistine giant and fell him at a blow. I know that this David looked like me but for the first time I felt like him. Armed only with a little knowledge and a lot of idealistic feelings about the Republic, I was daring to pit myself against the most powerful family the city had ever known.
No wonder Angelo had wanted to show the hero naked; when you were faced with a seemingly impossible task, that’s how you did feel. I climbed down from the scaffolding and found him waiting for me, smiling.
‘I saw you with another pretty girl the other day,’ he said. ‘I wonder if you are following my advice, as you said you would?’
I didn’t know what to reply. The consequences of going to Grazia’s room to talk about the pro-Medici conspiracy had been inevitable. But I had thrust down my guilty feelings about Rosalia – whose very existence Grazia was still unaware of, thanks to my cowardice – by telling myself that what I learned from Grazia was vital in order to foil their plots.
It was some weeks since this arrangement had begun and I had passed on much useful information to the frateschi. It appeared that this time the compagnacci were taking it much more slowly. Neither Piero nor any other de’ Medici prince would appear suddenly at the gates at the head of a hastily assembled army. These conspirators would take every precaution to make sure their own followers were safe before letting the hated tyrants back in.
; At the end of February, Altobiondi was again at Visdomini’s house, according to Grazia, but this time on his own.
‘They were drinking to celebrate the birth of his son,’ she told me, as we lay contented in each other’s arms.
‘His son?’ I said stupidly.
‘Yes, his new wife – the widow Buonvicini – has given him an heir,’ she said.
I was glad she was not looking at my face when she told me. I had a son! A son who would grow up to be a rich man, one of the compagnacci probably. He would never know that his true blood father was a commoner who worked with his hands and a republican. I had so many conflicting feelings about this that I could hardly make myself lie still. But I didn’t want Grazia to know about my relations with Clarice; she didn’t even know about Rosalia.
I know. This makes me a coward as well as a villain. But that was how it was.
‘Did they say the boy’s name?’ I asked as casually as I could.
‘Why, yes,’ said Grazia, though she sounded surprised that I was interested. ‘They were toasting the name Davide.’
Davide! So Clarice hadn’t forgotten me! That was her secret code to let me know she would not forget her first son was the child of someone whose portrait she had to keep buried at the bottom of a chest.
Chapter Eight
Threats and Rumours
I can’t remember much about the next few months. It’s odd, when so much is vivid in my memory about the time before and after, but in those first few months after the boy was born that the world would call Davide di Antonello de’ Altobiondi I lost all sense of myself.
I was the stonecutter who went to work in the bottega every day. I was the artist’s model who posed, first as Hercules and then as Bacchus for Leone the painter two nights a week. I was a fratesco spy who met his friends on other evenings. And I was a lover with two beloveds – and that was without counting Clarice.
But of Gabriele himself I have no memory; I think I stumbled through spring and the beginning of summer as if I were in a dream or like a man intoxicated by a powerful brew. I was a figure trapped in an invisible block of marble – without feelings and unable to escape or even to want to escape.
