The Medici Boy

by John L'Heureux

  Thus, it was agreed that I should move my worktable nearer to the posing alcove so that, by merely looking up from my notes, I could see Agnolo and, if there were need, intervene to protect his virtue. I thought that Donatello would not concede this, but the boy had a power over him I could not understand. Agnolo glowed with satisfaction.

  * * *

  A DRAFT UPON Cosimo’s bank arrived that morning and I immediately inscribed in my quaderno the date, the amount, and the quantity of bronze it was expected to buy. The draft was an advance of fifty florins against materials—tin and copper and fine white wax—and another thirty to urge the project on. Donatello cared little if it were thirty or forty or one hundred. So long as his bills were eventually paid and the materials for his next project were readily available, he was indifferent to money. It was only with Agnolo that he seemed to count his coins and, even with Agnolo, he made up for a moment of stinginess with countless acts of generosity. “He’s just a boy,” he would say to me and reach for the rope to the money basket.

  Agnolo preened and fawned and pouted.

  DONATELLO GAVE HIM a new, easier pose, and—to ease the dreariness of posing—had him alternate it with the first. “Stand straight,” he said, “your weight is on your right leg, your left leg is extended. No, less extended. You are about to throw the stone. It is curled in your left fist and you hold it at your left shoulder. Do you see how easy? You are looking off to your left. Calmly. You see Goliath and you are not afraid. You are in the hands of God.”

  “What about my right hand? What is it doing?

  Pagno, who had stopped his own work to observe the new pose, leaned into me and made an obscene comment.

  “Nothing,” Donatello said. “It’s hanging by your side. Is that easy for you? Is that comfortable? We can alternate the poses when you tire.”

  But Agnolo made new difficulties. Now it was a question of money. He chewed on his lip and rubbed one booted foot against the other and finally came out with it: he could not possibly live on the few piccioli Donatello paid him.

  “You must tell him I need more,” he said.

  “Tell him yourself.”

  “He won’t speak to me.”

  “Don’t play the fool.”

  He hesitated and then he said, “He is offended that I know he wants me.”

  “He does not want you. You make too much of yourself.”

  “I need money.”

  “You need, you need,” I said. “Ask your soldier for money.”

  “He’s in Lucca, fighting. He doesn’t know my needs.”

  Once again my contempt rendered me speechless.

  “I’m standing here naked,” he said.

  “Then cover yourself. Put on a cloak.”

  “But I should take it off for him? I’m your brother.”

  “You’re not my brother. You’re the son of the wool dyer and his wife.”

  And so it was agreed that Donatello would pay him a weekly sum, due always in advance. This did not include the odd trips to the hanging basket, sometimes by Donatello, sometimes by Agnolo himself, and once—and this astonished me—by Pagno di Lapo who slipped the boy a handful of change. What, I wondered, could explain this?

  * * *

  THE MONEY ISSUE settled, Agnolo found himself hard-pressed for another source of complaint. It was not long, however, before he lit upon the Black Pestilence. He was not feeling well. He was hot. He had a fever. He wanted to lie down in Donatello’s privy chamber. He needed a cold drink. He was bored. He might die of boredom. Or of the Pest. In response, Donatello gave him the key to his privy chamber. He sent an apprentice for a cold drink, or a hot one, whichever the moment required. He assured him that boredom did not cause death. He promised him the Black Pestilence would pass when the weather grew colder. It always had. It would again. “And then I shall freeze,” Agnolo said.

  Besides, he said to me, Donatello did not respect him. Tell him so.

  I told him so.

  Donatello assured Agnolo he had the deepest respect for him. He could not possibly respect him more, not if he were a saint, not if he were an angel. His respect fell just this side of worship.

  For this Agnolo rewarded him with a smile and one of those looks that lasted a moment too long and this encouraged Donatello to ask for one final pose.

  “David has just killed Goliath and now he stands looking down at the severed head. He holds Goliath’s sword in his right hand and a stone in his left. Goliath’s head lies at his feet. No. Beneath his feet. Try this: David stands with his left foot on Goliath’s head as he looks down at him in triumph.”

  I was sent to the workyard for a block of scrap marble that would serve as Goliath’s head.

  Agnolo assumed the pose with surprising ease and speed. In truth he was learning the difficult skill of posing for a sculptor. But he quickly grew tired and assumed his usual girlish pout before Donatello could complete even his first sketches. Donatello resorted to his little hymns of praise—“You are God’s vengeance against his enemies.” “You will be the great King of Israel.”—but these did little to change Agnolo’s ill humor. He sulked. He pouted. And, in his boredom, he resorted to seduction. He fluttered his eyes and touched his hair and tipped his pelvis forward, an offering.

  Donatello, insulted and enraged, sketched him exactly as he was, a bold youth who could be bought for a pair of soldier’s boots. This would become the pose of the bronze David.

  * * *

  IT WAS NOVEMBER now and, for Agnolo’s comfort, Donatello installed a small wood stove in the posing area. It was no good, Agnolo said, it did not cast enough heat.

  “Stop moving.”

  “I’m trying to stay warm.”

  Donatello ignored him.

  “Look, I’m cold,” Agnolo said. He tugged lightly at his privy member which, as he intended, began to stiffen. “Look.”

  Agnolo had taken his provocation too far and Donatello would not have it. He put down his stylus. Slowly, deliberately, he crossed to his worktable and shifted through a small pile of sketches and then went out into the courtyard where Pagno, by another small wood fire, was chiseling floral scrollwork on the support brackets for the Prato Pulpit. Donatello engaged him in conversation. He pointed out places where the cuts were not deep enough, where proportions were amiss. He visited the privy. When he returned to the posing area, he appeared calm, disinterested.

  “Enough for today,” Donatello said, and he did not so much as cast a glance at Agnolo. He turned instead to me.

  “Does your work go well?” he asked, and I said yes, it went well, but I was concerned about commissions that were overdue. Not only the pulpit but the Annunciation and the marble reliefs for Cosimo and the score of other neglected commissions. Could he review them with me? Could he find the time? Perhaps now? And thus, together, we closed out Agnolo and he was left to dress and put away his privy parts and his hurt feelings and go home.

  The next day Agnolo did not appear until noon. It was not his fault, he said. He was unwell, he had a fever, he would probably die of the Black Pest. What difference did it make anyway? Donatello knew well enough by now what he looked like. And why was he still sketching? Why didn’t he move on to the next thing, the bozzetto? From this I knew Agnolo had been talking with Pagno.

  “You cannot well begin without a bozzetto,” Agnolo said, proud of his intimate knowledge of the technique of sculpting.

  Thus Donatello moved on to the bozzetto and for the next long days I watched with some wonder as he took a bunch of sticks and wires and hammered the wires into wood and twisted those wires to the rough shape of human limbs, metal bones he would convert to living flesh. As he applied the clay, the form of the boy began to come into being, the legs looked less like sticks and the arms took on shape and solidity. He moved slowly, steadily, following the sketch of the pose.

  During this period of making the bozzetto, there was no need for Agnolo to pose. But perverse as he was, he came to the bottega nonetheless, hanging
about in everyone’s way. He watched Caterina as she worked at the second of Cosimo’s cassoni, the one where King Solomon meets the Queen of Saba. He sat on a stool by Caterina’s side and asked if he could help her. Could he grind the paints? He leaned against her as she worked. He let his knee touch hers and he put his hand on her back. He played the modest lover. “Enough,” she said, pretending to annoyance, but it was clear she enjoyed Agnolo’s attention.

  He drifted off to Pagno who was still chiseling foliage on support brackets for the Prato Pulpit and asked if he could help. “What could you possibly do?” Pagno asked and looked about, pleased to be seen dismissing him.

  Agnolo returned to Donatello who, anxious and annoyed, shrugged off his neediness and told him to go away and let be. The bozzetto, it seemed, was a failure.

  “It is impossible,” he told me. “I cannot do this David in bronze.”

  “Tomorrow,” I said, trying out the words of Michelozzo.

  The next day Donatello did not come to the bottega at all, nor on the day following. I sought him at his home where Michelozzo met me at the door and said Donatello was not himself, I should be patient, all would be well soon. Another day went by and we waited.

  * * *

  MEANWHILE AGNOLO, with nothing to occupy him, turned to me for the attention he could not live without.

  “Why are you always writing?” he asked. “What do you keep in that notebook?”

  “It’s my quaderno a casa,” I said. “It’s a book of commissions, work that has been ordered but not yet completed.”

  “Am I in it?”

  “You’re in the campione, the general account book. You’re a liability.”

  “Because I model for the David?”

  “Because you cost money and provide nothing.”

  “As always, you speak only to hurt.”

  I asked pardon for offending his lordship and returned to my quaderno. He stood beside me, saying nothing, until I began to feel sorry for being hurtful. In truth I had changed since Agnolo had come among us: I took pleasure in finding fault with him. Alessandra had noticed it and made comment and, of course, so had Pagno di Lapo.

  Alessandra was pregnant again—our fourth son—and she was given to saying hard things with a sharp tongue. “You resent his closeness to Donato,” she said, and there was nothing but truth in her voice. “It is small of you, Luca, since he loves you so.”

  “He loves nobody, not even his soldier.”

  “I meant Donato.”

  “Donatello is obsessed with him.”

  “It is a passing thing. Agnolo is only a boy.”

  “A boy possessed by the devil.”

  “Luca,” she said, and that ended her rebuke.

  Pagno was more to the point. As always he seemed to imply more than he said. Words for him were another tool for carving.

  “You’ve changed since your brother has come among us.”

  “He’s not my brother.”

  “You’ve become querulous and testy. You’re always short of patience. Why do you suppose that is?”

  “He wastes our time. He costs us money.”

  “But he is pleasing to Donatello.”

  “He is useful to Donatello.”

  “You too were once pleasing to Donatello,” he said.

  In my anger I made no reply. Pagno himself pleased Donatello . . . beyond all reason. He had been Donatello’s prize apprentice and now he was the prize assistant, allowed to sculpt beyond his abilities and trusted beyond all measure. Given the chance—and in the end he would be given it—he would execute the two angels on the support braces of the Prato Pulpit and ruin them. Pagno had been the most comely of Donatello’s youths and was grown now into a handsome man of twenty-two years, tall and lean, with a high, broad forehead and eyes that were sometimes green and sometimes blue. Later he would be the model for Donatello’s bronze Daniel in the group of seven saints on the great altar at Padua, where it pleased me to see that his low chin betrayed his true weakness. I was ever keen to number Pagno’s failings.

  “He is useful to Donatello,” I said again. “Only that.”

  “So are we all,” Pagno said. He paused. “And he seems to have taken the eye of my lord Cosimo de’ Medici.”

  DONATELLO RETURNED TO the bottega on the third day. He was pale and he looked unwell and I wondered if he had passed these lost days in drink. He spent the morning in his privy chamber and in the afternoon he returned to his worktable where he went back over his earliest sketches, scores of them, dissatisfied, angry. Almost at once he began a new bozzetto: David triumphant, his foot resting lightly on Goliath’s severed head. A gift for a soldier.

  Agnolo assumed that pose once more, pleased to be the center of interest, excited to be nude and looked at and—as he thought—desired. The bottega was alive with tension once again. There was a heavy silence in the air as when a storm is threatening. Donatello worked in a fury. “You have killed him and you have cut off his head. It was nothing to you. You have the stone in one hand and his sword in the other. Your foot rests on his head. You are young and you have great power. And you are beautiful to look at.” Agnolo smiled and leaned forward. “No. Lean back. Look down. Your foot is on his head. How do you feel? What do you want?” He went on and on this way, returning always to David’s beauty and his power. “You are burning in your beauty,” I heard him say, and I set it down in my notebook because it was ridiculous and embarrassing, and I watched as Agnolo assumed that pose, burning from within.

  The bozzetto began to take form. Donatello completed the limbs bit by bit, fleshing out one arm and then another, one leg and then another, so that as it moved toward a fullness, the whole body seemed to be growing from the inside outward.

  Agnolo was much more cooperative now. He held a pose without fidgeting and he kept his complaints to himself, though it was now late December and the wood stove gave off little heat. He shivered and he chafed his arms and legs but he did not complain.

  “A little longer,” Donatello said. “And then you can have a rest.” Agnolo sighed to let us know how heavy a burden this posing had become.

  The arms and legs and the long torso were completed before Donatello had well completed the neck and head. He had left the private parts unformed, a blob of clay without shape, as if somehow this shameful part was not important. I noted this and so did Agnolo, but it was Agnolo who asked him about it.

  “In good time,” Donatello said.

  “You didn’t leave enough clay for my cazzo.”

  “We’re still in the early stages.

  Agnolo pouted.

  Donatello ruffled his hair but Agnolo pulled away from him.

  “You are tiresome,” Donatello said. “And more.”

  “I’m a good model, all the same.”

  “You are the best model.”

  “Then why don’t you show me as I am, here?” and he pointed at the unfinished blob of clay.

  Donatello did not reply, and I expected him to offer a rebuke but he only smiled to himself and placed a clean wet cloth over the bozzetto to protect it from drying out.

  * * *

  WINTER IN FLORENCE that year was wet and unforgiving. A cold fog descended on the city, and though the weather had brought an end to the Black Pestilence, everyone was unwell with afflictions of the head and chest. The light in the bottega was gray and for much of the time Donatello worked by rushlight as he finished the neck and head. The wet clay was clammy to the touch. Agnolo spent a week in bed and when he recovered he posed for shorter and shorter periods, huddling between times in woolen blankets. Despite all the delays, the day came when the bozzetto was finished.

  Donatello was pleased with his work, though he examined it as if it were an enemy who had come to threaten his life. He studied it from every side. He turned the revolving stand again and again. He felt the arms, the legs, he smoothed the blade of the heavy sword. He touched the soft and sagging buttocks and he ran his finger the full length of the feather on Goliath�
��s helmet from where it touched David’s ankle to where it disappeared high up between his legs. He stood back farther and farther and he was pleased. The effect, even in this preliminary sculpture, was of a boy satisfied with what he had done, indifferent to death, and at ease in his nakedness. He asked to be gazed upon.

  All this time Agnolo was caught up in admiration of himself. He saw the bozzetto as an extension of his own person and he wanted to know more and more. He could not get enough.

  “Tomorrow,” Donatello told him, and put the bozzetto under cover of a wet cloth. He was filled with excitement, I could tell, but he was determined to see the completed miniature in the hard light of morning before he pronounced it done. Agnolo would have to wait.

  It was late in the day. Most of the others had left. Michelozzo had come in to see how Pagno was getting on with scrollwork for the Prato Pulpit but left almost at once to get back to Ghiberti who was well along in the process of casting the bronze doors. Pagno himself lingered until Donatello finally told him he could go. My own presence he took as a given; I was there because I was always there; I didn’t matter.

  Now there remained only the three of us.

  Agnolo was dressed for January in heavy stockings and a woolen shirt beneath a thick quilted over-vest. He had already put on his outer cloak and, disappointed, was preparing to leave when Donatello said to him, “Wait.” And then, as if this had not been his plan all along, he said, “Come here,” and his voice was honeyed. Agnolo took off his cloak and tossed it on my worktable.

  Donatello removed the wet cloth from the bozzetto and his hands were trembling. “Look!” he said. “The galero, first of all, the peasant’s hat you wore all last summer is David’s now. He is a peasant, a shepherd. The king has dressed him in his own armor, a helmet of brass and a coat of mail. But David put off the armor and went out to meet Goliath armed only with a slingshot and stones. See here,” and he pointed to the stone in David’s fist. “We know this from the Bible.”

  But Agnolo was not interested in the Bible. He wanted to hear only about the statue.