by Lisa Rochon
“Emotions associated with killing,” said Michelangelo. “Flight, fear, ferocity, boldness, murder.” He shook his head. “I want to prove that emotion—all of what we feel as humans—shows up in the brain.”
“If you discover the truth about the light and dark regions of the brain, you will have leapt well beyond Leonardo’s work,” admitted the prior. “And if you make that discovery, you must paint it, the separation of light from darkness. Take that moment from the book of Genesis and paint it so large that all those who see it will be forced to believe.”
“Light from darkness,” said Michelangelo. “Joy from terror.”
“Leave aside your feelings of jealousy, Michelangelo. You are an original, as well. Think of your Pietà.”
Michelangelo felt a wave of euphoria at hearing such praise. He had carved Mother Mary’s arm to fly unsupported into the air, each finger curled to express a different level of anguish. Others copied from the ancient Greeks. He had placed his Mother and her Son at the base of an oak, in the hope they might endure for as long as there was human suffering and trees on the Earth.
The prior put a hand on Michelangelo’s shoulder. “Leonardo is to be admired, not feared. Look to him for ways of seeing.”
Michelangelo felt his mouth grow tense. He was anxious to change the subject. “Are there others who might be passing?”
“One of our pastors is gravely ill. His skin has turned yellow and the doctors are at a loss. And another local man, a stonemason, can barely breathe; he’s not long for this earth.”
Michelangelo nodded. He hoped the men would hang on for another month at least; this latest dissection had left him exhausted.
“Get some rest. And remember my counsel,” said the prior, hugging him gruffly. “Leonardo can teach you more than you can imagine.” With that, he released the sculptor from the basilica.
Michelangelo went first to the fountain within the cloister and splashed the icy water over his face. Drying himself with his tunic, he heaved open the great wooden doors and stepped out to the piazza, his gaze yanked upward by a gaping blue sky.
He knew that Oltrarno had been settled long ago by outsiders obliged to put down roots across the river from the protected northern part of the city. This was where the ciompi wool workers were forced to bend their backs, where the Flemish and German weavers plied their messy trade, boiling dyes in tin and copper containers along the Street of the Boilers. Today, like every day, the pressed, dyed cloth made from English wool was hung out to dry, a riot of color flapping against sober earth-colored houses and shops. He liked the evidence of hard work fluttering gaily like festival pennants. He greeted the locals gathered on the steps of the church with a polite nod, then walked toward the river, heading to his studio on the other bank.
His fatigue was clearing and he turned briskly from the laneway onto Via Maggio, the widest boulevard in the city. It was being transformed, workers’ housing knocked down to make room for big houses owned by the burgeoning merchant class.
His boots made footprints in the construction dust that coated the black stone walkway, disguising its herringbone patterns. The prior had called him an original. He felt the gladness rush up from his stomach.
He quickened his pace. The prior had also recommended Leonardo as a friend. Friendship between competitors? Perhaps in Milan. Or Venice. Not here, he thought grimly; there were too many talented artists. If he was rich enough to support his father and brothers without working, then he could afford to seek out Leonardo as a wise mentor. But the roof needed patching, his brothers were complaining, his father made insufferable demands, and he needed to provide for them.
He came upon two girls begging for food. They appeared to be ten or eleven years old. Michelangelo stopped to study the scrawny girls with deltoids as round and hard as crabapples. He had seen girls like these begging for unsold food or rotten fruit from vendors once the market closed at Santo Spirito. This pair looked like sisters, and they walked with their arms linked, their faces grimy from the day’s heat. Somehow, he felt a kinship with them, for he had been their age once and had learned from Agnella and her stonemason husband how to work as hard as an animal. This was before his father had taken him home to Florence, before the start of grammar school. When times were lean, they would lay up stone walls for villagers in Settignano who could pay: the priest, the olive grinder, the stone agent. And even when there was little to eat, they would share their harvest with those in greater need. Agnella walked at the front of their procession, a basket of bread, onions and honey balanced on her head.
Michelangelo examined the neatly trimmed beards of two men standing nearby and guessed that they were landowners or guild members. They were deep in conversation:
“Via Maggio has the advantage of great width. Surely that alone would attract those willing to pay,” said one.
The perfectly symmetrical entrances and arched windows of the new palaces pleased Michelangelo well enough. What he regretted was the bullish invasion of new money. The half-built palazzi looked ridiculous towering over the ramshackle wooden houses of their ciompi neighbors.
“But on the filthy side of the river?” countered the other man.
“The river offers a welcome buffer from the meddling politicians! You watch, my friend, the Palazzo Pitti will someday be finished to lord it over Oltrarno.”
The men slapped the girls’ hands away from their capes, and one threw a quattrino to the ground. The girls scrambled to collect the coin from the dust.
“You live here?” Michelangelo asked the beggar girls.
“Yes, signore.” They looked up at him shyly. They stood and led the way to the rickety front door of the shack behind them. A veiled woman appeared, and the girls stood at her side.
“These girls are yours?”
She scrutinized him, his rumpled clothes and broken nose. She did not invite him inside, but spoke from the doorway: “I am their guardian. Their mother died in childbirth, their father in the war, killed by a Pisan, testa di cazzo, may God curse his family.” The woman spat on the floor, then crossed herself.
“They beg like this for what purpose?” asked Michelangelo.
“Not for what you may think, signore,” protested the woman. “I provide them with shelter. They beg for food, some coins they gather for their meager dowry. God willing, they will marry by the time they are sixteen.”
“Do they read?”
“A little, thank you, signore. And some math.”
“Then they go to school?”
She laughed bitterly. “Mainly they are trying to survive.”
Michelangelo looked back at the girls. So much was unfair; there was so much he wanted to repair. The older girl was retying the knot of the younger one’s hat. It came to him then, unexpected: his mother tying a straw hat onto his head. He could feel the tenderness of her hands. She wanted to protect him from the hot sun. Not long after, when he was barely six years old, she died.
“They have the blessing of the prior at Santo Spirito,” the woman said, fearful now that he meant to order the girls off the street and impose a heavy fine.
“And mine, too,” Michelangelo reassured her. He reached into his leather pouch and pulled out a handful of gold coins. “Here are some florins. With this you can buy enough food to last several months, and extra for their dowry.”
The gift was sizable—he was being paid four hundred gold florins by the Wool Guild to sculpt the biblical David. He knew nothing about this woman or these girls, yet he could not contain himself. To give away ten florins was an act of generosity that would surely merit the favor of God. Besides, it buoyed his spirits to help others, especially the poor, the marginalized, the girls. “See to it immediately, so that they no longer must beg on the streets.”
The woman stared at the coins and then buried her face in her hands and started weeping.
As he walked away, he felt that the spirit of God had touched him—of that he was certain. How many times had he passed by the
beggar girls and failed to do anything aside from recognize their miserable existence? He cringed at how his own pain blinded him to the needs of others. At least he had pulled himself out of his artistic obsession to listen to the girl, Beatrice. He thought back to her drawing of the goldfinch on his studio wall. Her ease with making art, without the obsessions he knew all too well, was like an offering of peace. He looked at the drawing every night before falling asleep. The wings alive and beating like hope. Sketched by a village girl. Maybe he could make a match with her, as Agnella had advised, and bury his longing for men.
By the time he set foot on the old stone bridge, he was in a state of near ecstasy. Bounding across the Arno, he threw his arms above his head and pretended, as he once did with his younger brothers, to slay the monster that lurked at the bottom of the murky river. He felt cloudless and pure, and time slipped by invisibly as he leaned over the narrow balustrade and watched the water flow slowly by. The river had created the city, he knew, and the city had created the river. Smiling like a child, he felt glad for all of it.
Suddenly, a heron lifted from the riverbank, floating over his head like a black veil and snapping him out of his reverie: “Release me!” It was David, trapped in marble, shouting at him from a workshop arranged by Governor Soderini and the Opera del Duomo, the cathedral’s public works committee. “Release me from this stone!”
Immediately, he felt sweat prickling the back of his neck. “What do you want to be?” he muttered back in frustration.
His thoughts circled around the massive block of white marble, landing on the rough outline of legs, badly blocked out by the previous sculptor, Agostino di Duccio. The feet were stiffly rooted, the legs static instead of moving forward into possibility. They might be impossible to repair. Then there was the long crack in the marble to solve, running where the heart side might be defined. That fool Duccio had driven his chisel in to indicate something—a knot of drapery? But he had not completed the blow. Had it been fear that stopped him? Indecision?
Directly across the bridge, on the Via de’ Tornabuoni, a handsome boulevard of simple, elegant austerity, a crowd was gathered. There were twenty, possibly thirty men. Michelangelo could now hear their shouts and laughter. He recognized some of the faces: Botticelli and his brother Simone, Raphael, and Filippino Lippi, as well as Piero di Cosimo—all talented artists. And there was Granacci, in a peacock-feathered hat. Rustici stood next to him—he could always be counted on to boast loudly. Then Michelangelo saw, at the center of the crowd, Leonardo, holding court.
“Michelangelo, vieni! Michelangelo, vieni, vieni, Michelangelo!”
It was Rustici. The bastard. He was waving his arms as if he had been set on fire.
The crowd went silent. Leonardo seemed to have inspired an aura of reverence. Even Raphael, who had visited him only a week ago to study some of his drawings, stood there indifferent to Michelangelo’s arrival.
“Join us in some enlightened conversation,” said Granacci. “We are honored to be here with Leonardo da Vinci!” He hoisted a jug of wine in the air.
“Come, my friend,” enthused Rustici. “Or has Oltrarno worn you out?”
“Pay them no mind.” Botticelli motioned to him. “Come to me. Kiss me, my son.” He lifted his arms.
Everybody knew Botticelli’s sugary painting of the naked Venus floating on a golden shell had bought him financial security. The canvas had been sold for a handsome fee, then rolled up and sent to decorate the country seat of a nobleman. Out of respect, Michelangelo received the elder artist’s bony embrace, felt gnarled fingers on his back.
“You promised you would visit. Why have you not come?”
Why indeed? Botticelli was a genius of perspective. But The Birth of Venus had marked the end of his serious career.
“My work keeps me occupied,” Michelangelo declared. The smell of piss wafted from Botticelli; the longer he stood next to the old man, the more his status declined.
It was Leonardo who broke the awkward impasse. “You are the youthful Michelangelo? You add extra gravitas to this already distinctive crowd,” he said, voice booming. “We were only now discussing the philosophy of science and art.” He waved a page of parchment in the air. “You’re familiar with Dante?” He began to read: “‘Art, as best it can, doth follow nature, as pupil follows master.’” Michelangelo recognized the passage instantly: Canto XI of Dante’s Inferno. He had been tutored at the Palazzo Medici, had written madrigals and sonnets himself. He had dined at the table of Lorenzo de’ Medici with Cristoforo Landino, who had translated Pliny, Horace and Virgil into the local volgare. He eyed Leonardo, his beautifully curled silver beard, his purple cape with its velvet hood. The old Master of Arts thought him stupid.
“The honor is mine,” he said. “Master,” he added gracelessly, feeling ridiculous. “Master of painting,” he added, to clarify.
“A master of painting?” Leonardo repeated. His mood seemed to darken. “Am I to be content or disturbed by this modest compliment? I am not entirely sure.” Uneasy laughter from the crowd. “I shall endeavor to be optimistic about the worth of my talent”—he gestured theatrically to Michelangelo—“to this, this wonderfully . . .” He stroked his beard as if to facilitate the search for the right word. “Young artist.”
Rustici immediately turned his body to Michelangelo and gestured with his hand as if releasing gas from his behind. A wave of laughter went up. Granacci caught Michelangelo by the sleeve and whispered, “He makes fools of us all. But remember, you are among friends.”
“There is plenty of time before the sun sets. Dante can wait,” announced Leonardo. “I wish to weigh your assertion: that I am a master of painting. For it is true that I do spend some of my days painting. Though if you were to speak to my good and generous clients, you would know that I am also preoccupied by the rigors of mathematical calculations and the invention of military arms. And the drafting of maps, as if from the viewpoint of a bird looking down on the land.”
Lippi spoke. “To be called a master of painting is a high compliment.” He had been apprenticed to Botticelli’s workshop some thirty years before. “On this we can all agree. It is what many of us—myself included—have devoted our lives to.”
The crowd murmured in agreement. Lippi’s exquisitely colored frescoes in the Strozzi Chapel flashed in front of their minds.
“A compliment, yes, true enough,” conceded Leonardo. “Fellow guildsmen, compliments are as easy and cheap as olives. Are they not?” He laughed and looked at each of them in turn. “Painting is a noble pursuit—with this, I am in agreement. Michelangelo, you have demonstrated a fine talent for sculpting stone. I believe you make proud the stonemason and his healer wife who raised you.”
Michelangelo was stunned by the old man’s audacity. His childhood—how his noble father had put him out to be reared by Agnella until he reached school age—had just been laid out like a dissected heart for all who stood on the public square.
Leonardo was still speaking. “Having observed the arts for more than forty years, I have come to the conclusion that painting is the more noble, greater than sculpting.”
Michelangelo felt his face burn. “I cannot agree with your contention—”
“Let us speak of specifics rather than of whether we agree or disagree,” interrupted Leonardo. “The life of a sculptor relies on relentless pounding, the waging of dumb strength against nature’s densest, hardest stone.”
“You know it is more than that.” Michelangelo scrambled in his mind to find an argument that might usefully serve him. He felt unhinged; the great Leonardo, twice his age and admired by all, had targeted him for public ridicule.
“I know that sculpting covers a man in white dust, like a baker.”
“And I know that your bitterness comes from failure!” shouted Michelangelo, his face twisted with rage. “Your equestrian monument in Milan. You were unable to cast it, and to your shame left it in the lurch.” The prior’s earlier instruction fully vanished. “Behol
d the truth! Your sculpture was seventy-five tons of failure!”
Breathing hard, he scanned the faces of the crowd. A few seemed mildly amused. Granacci looked away. Most of them regarded him with embarrassment and disbelief. “Everybody knows the story,” he continued, unable to rein himself in. “You make fantasies, mathematical nonsense and designs”—here, he flipped his hands in the air dismissively—“and those Milanese capons believed in your ability to do it!”
There was an uneasy quiet.
Then: “You speak the truth, my son,” Leonardo said, his voice a velvet baritone. “The duke of Milan asked me to raise a great monument to honor his father. He was an excellent patron. I wanted very much to please him. I owed him that.”
The crowd held still, as if paying respect to a lost friend.
“I labored over that giant horse statue for nearly twenty years. I visited the best stables in search of the finest horses, made countless studies. I wanted to show the beauty of the free, noble horse,” he said. “In the end, I could not find a way to cast it. The French were invading. The duke needed the bronze for cannons.” He paused and looked up to the heavens.
Then Leonardo did something nobody expected. He laughed—without any trace of bitterness, but genuinely, as if the folly of man stupefied him. “To no avail! The French marched into Milan. My clay model? It might have been the biggest equestrian monument ever. But it ended up being destroyed during target practice by French bowmen. That is the awful truth. My dream was destroyed and I came home,” he concluded, lifting his chin. “Here I am.”
The crowd murmured in agreement. Leonardo had won the vote of sympathy, had shown Michelangelo to be petty and brutish.
Botticelli attempted reconciliation. “Leonardo, we hold your opinion in high esteem. But we recognize, too, the extraordinary talent of Michelangelo.”
