He leaves Istanbul without a penny.
Mesihi no longer presented himself at Maringhi’s home.
Michelangelo wasn’t sure about having him summoned, he couldn’t make up his mind.
He organized his flight with Manuel; Michelangelo is unaware that, from afar, it’s Arslan who made the arrangements, found the Venetian craft that will deposit him in Ancona, and paid most of the cost for the journey.
They are ridding themselves of the cumbersome artist lost between two shores.
On the night of his departure, on the quay at the foot of the ramparts, the divine Michelangelo is nothing but a wounded, frightened body, wrapped in a black kaftan, impatient for them to set sail, impatient to see Florence again.
A few hundred meters behind them, upstream, stands the black shape of the scaffolding for the buttress of the bridge that Michelangelo will not see.
He embraces Manuel for a long time, as if he were someone else, then climbs aboard. He feels a dull pain in his chest, which he attributes to his wound; tears spring to his eyes.
The only object he takes with him is his notebook, in which he jots down a few last words, as the ship is passing Seraglio Point.
Appear, show through, shine.
Sparkle, scintillate, go out.
Hidden by the boats, Mesihi quickly turns away. He doesn’t want to watch any longer, there’s nothing more to see: dark oars striking obscure waves, a square sail whose whiteness doesn’t manage to pierce the night.
He will go lose himself in the city streets, lose himself in the hovels of Tahtakale; his sole souvenir of Michelangelo is the drawing of an elephant, and especially, in a fold of his clothing, the black-and-gold dagger that is burning into his belly now as if it were white-hot.
.
EPILOGUE
On September 14, 1509, just as Michelangelo was starting work on the Sistine Chapel, a terrible earthquake struck Istanbul. Chroniclers describe the awful damage in detail: 109 mosques and 1,070 houses are completely destroyed; several thousand men, women, and children die, buried in the rubble. They write that in the house of the Vizier Mustafa Pasha alone 300 knights die along with their 300 horses. The ramparts collapse partially on the sea side, and completely on the land side; the hospice for the poor and a large part of the complex of Bayezid’s mosque are destroyed. The plaster covering the Byzantine mosaics in Hagia Sophia cracks, revealing portraits of the Evangelists, which protect churches so well, say the Christians, that not a single church is damaged.
In any case the saints aren’t concerned with Michelangelo’s bridge, of which the piers, buttress, and the first few arches have already been erected: weakened, the work collapses; its rubble will be carried off to the Bosphorus by the water, stirred into fury by the earthquake, and no one will talk about it again.
Two years later, on August 5, 1511, while Michelangelo, his back bent, is still working on his scaffold in the Sistine Chapel, Ali Pasha passes away. The first great vizier to be killed in combat, he died on horseback, surrounded by his Janissaries, hit in the chest by an arrow from one of the Shi’ites from the East, the Tekke, whose rebellion he was trying to quell. They write that he would be avenged in a horrible way by Ismail, the new King of Persia, who wanted to reconcile with his powerful neighbor, after he had used the revolts to assert his power; captured, the killers of the Grand Vizier would be hurled into a pot of boiling water. They screamed a lot, it is said, before they were cooked and devoured by their guards.
This terrible vengeance would change nothing for Mesihi. The destitute poet, drunk and without a protector, killed himself even before the famous ceiling where God gives life to an Adam whose face so resembles that of the Turkish poet was finished.
Two extended fingers that don’t touch each other.
Mesihi died at sunset on a July evening in 1512, poor and alone, after having sought a new patron in vain. We have one of his last verses:
My God, do not send me to the grave before
my body can caress my friend’s chest.
Perhaps because he was a miscreant and a killer despite himself, or simply because his prayer was indecent, it will not be granted; he will die in a prosaic death rattle, a raucous breath soon swallowed up by the summons to sunset prayer, already streaming from countless minarets.
Sultan Bayezid, the second sultan to bear that name, loved bridges.
Among the artworks he had built in the twenty-four Asian and thirty-four European provinces that then made up his empire, we can list: one nine-arch bridge over the Kizilirmak in Osmancik; a fourteen-arch bridge over the Sakarya; a nineteen-
arch over the Hermos in Sarukhan; a six-arch over the Khabur, an eight-arch over the Valta in Armenia; one of eleven short, solid arches to let the army pass over it near Edirne; not to mention all the wooden bridges thrown haphazardly over the least consequential bodies of water that his janissaries or administrators encountered.
He died soon after abdicating in favor of his son Selim, in 1512, as he was on his way to Dimetoka, his birthplace. He never reached it: the poison administered by one of Selim’s henchmen, or those other venoms known as sadness and melancholy, got the better of the sultan who had dreamed of a masterwork signed by Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo Buonarroti in Istanbul: he gave up his soul near the village of Aya, they say, beneath his red-and-gold dais, near the pier of a little bridge on the Adrianople road, in whose shadow he had been placed.
A long time afterward, in February 1564, Michelangelo is preparing for his own death.
Seventeen large marble statues, hundreds of square meters of frescoes, a chapel, a church, a library, the dome of the most famous temple in the Catholic world, several palaces, one square in Rome, some fortifications in Florence, 300 poems, sonnets, and madrigals, just as many drawings and sketches, a name linked forever with Art, Beauty, and Genius: that, among other things, is what Michelangelo is getting ready to leave behind him, a few days before his eighty-ninth birthday, sixty years after his journey to Constantinople. He is dying wealthy, his dream realized: he has returned its past glory and possessions to his family. He hopes to see God, he will surely see Him, since he believes in Him.
It’s a long time, sixty years.
In the meantime, he has written some love sonnets, despite not having experienced love, clinging to the memory of a lock of dead hair.
Often, he strokes the white scar on his arm and thinks about his lost friend Mesihi.
Of Istanbul, he remembers a vague light, a subtle sweetness mixed with bitterness, a distant music, soft shapes, pleasures rusted by time, the pain of violence, of loss: the abandon of hands that life did not let him touch, faces he’ll never caress, bridges that haven’t even yet been raised.
NOTE
The opening quotation about kings and elephants is from Kipling’s introduction to Life’s Handicap.
As for the story recounted in this novel, here is what we can retrace easily:
The Sultan’s invitation is related by Ascanio Condivi (biographer and friend of Michelangelo), and is also mentioned by Giorgio Vasari. Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing for a bridge over the Golden Horn does indeed exist, and is preserved at the Museum of Science in Milan.
Michelangelo’s letters to his brother Buonarroto and to Sangallo quoted here are authentic; I have translated them from his Carteggio. The plans of Hagia Sophia sent to Sangallo by Michelangelo can be found in the Vatican Apostolic Library, in the Barberini Codex.
The sketch “Project for a Bridge for the Golden Horn” attributed to Michelangelo was recently discovered in the Ottoman archives, as well as the inventory of possessions abandoned in his room.
Dinocrates’s anecdote appears in Vitruvius, at the beginning of Book II of Elements of Architecture.
The story about the sultan and the Andalusian vizier corresponds to an episode in the eventful biography of Al-Mu’tamid ibn Abbad, the last ruler of the taifa
of Seville.
The black damask steel dagger inlaid with gold is exhibited in the treasure room at Topkapı Palace.
The biography of Mesihi of Prishtina the shahrengiz figures in all the histories of Ottoman literature, but mainly in Gibb, in the second volume, along with the extracts of his poetry reproduced here.
The lives of Bayezid the Second, his Vizier Ali Pasha, and the Genoese page Menavino (my Falachi) are largely documented in contemporary or subsequent chronicles.
The earthquake that hit Istanbul in 1509 is unfortunately real, as is the damage it did.
For the rest, we know nothing.
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