The Medici Boy

by John L'Heureux

  We lived well. I was a clerk for Donatello, an accountant of sorts, a reminder of tasks, and a sometime sculptor. Donatello never thought of money and so it was only with the birth of each new child that he remembered my growing needs. He paid me well: eighty gold florins at the time of Giovanni Marco’s birth. Thus we could afford to send Donato Michele to study with the Franciscans and in the new year Franco Alessandro would join him. The two youngest boys were taught by Alessandra, who tended the little garden, washed and cooked and cleaned the house, took charge of bills and payments and, to our mutual satisfaction, took charge of me as well. And our four boys.

  All I know about love I learned from Alessandra. Maria Sabina—may God have mercy—taught me everything about the body’s pleasures, but the love of God I learned from Alessandra. It is a hard love, like Donatello’s bronze: heated to the melting point and hammered afterward to a fine finish. This much I have learned. There is no love without pain. Forgiveness costs everything. Memory is itself the source of suffering. This is not the Novum Testamentum but it is true nonetheless.

  These things too I include as part of my confession. To lighten the burden of sin and the boredom of telling. But perhaps I grow antic.

  It is my sons, my sons, my lost sons that I repent. Because who is guilty if not me?

  * * *

  WITH AGNOLO GONE, we could rest at last. Alessandra was my rest. She knew my little infidelities—what did they matter; they were meaningless—and she forgave them. She knew I was a failure as a sculptor and she forgave that as well. And she knew, better than I, my love for Donatello.

  Which Donatello you ask? For indeed there were as many Donatellos as there were people who loved him. He was a different man with Michelozzo than with Pagno. And he was different still with me. It was not simply that he was changeable, a chameleon who responded to each of us as we were. He was a great deal more complicated than this.

  He was a man of infinite capacity and each of us took from him as much as we could hold. This, I suppose, was the nature of his fascination for us as well as the source of our frustration. He turned his gaze upon us and for that little time we existed in a way we had not existed the moment before. For that time he was totally present, no other person existed for him, and he was transparent to us. We knew the man himself and he knew us. Everyone wanted to plumb the depths of who he was—as in truth they do even today as they examine his sculptures—but there was no easy explanation of his character then and no secret that could resolve the mystery of his genius now. There was always more to him than we could know.

  Alessandra recognized my love for him and accepted it.

  I did not tell her of that secret kiss—so many years gone by now—and that cry of discovery and delight that had meant nothing to Donatello but that to me had been an invasion and an assault. In that assault I knew I had been discovered. I did not tell Alessandra that.

  CHAPTER 20

  DURING THE NEXT eight months Donatello became again his old self, working continually, moving from statue to cassone to tabernacle as the mood or inspiration struck him, regardless of contracts and commissions and money owed or promises made. We were at ease now, all of us, and we gave ourselves over to the work of the bottega without the continual distractions caused by Agnolo and his need for attention. A single glance at my account books revealed how much we were behind in all our work.

  The Prato Pulpit, for instance, was far from finished though Donatello and Michelozzo had in 1428 contracted to produce a pulpit for the Prato Cathedral, installed and ready for the feast of Our Lady on September 8, 1429. Money had been advanced and the project begun. It was begun again, and again, and it was abandoned just as many times because some new proposal was more pressing, more interesting, more challenging. Besides, Michelozzo had to finish his design for the lower half of the pulpit—the support pillars and the cornices—before Donatello could begin the figures for the balustrade. And, alas, Michelozzo was in Pisa, Michelozzo was in Lucca, Michelozzo was casting bronze for Lorenzo Ghiberti. Eventually Michelozzo completed his design and work proceeded on the cornices and balustrade. But then there were problems with the marble; the quality was poor, it was not uniformly white, it was streaky, pocked. New marble was ordered. But by then Donatello was occupied with the bozzetto for the bronze David and could think of nothing else. Pagno complained, Pagno begged, and finally he was given the opportunity to demonstrate his skill with fine marble. He carved the two putti for the brackets that would support the cornice. They were disastrous—ugly and deformed—and they were added to the heap of rubble used by apprentices for practice work. By now it was 1431 and the work was still in progress. The Prato Pulpit, as it turned out, would not be completed for a decade.

  Meanwhile, in Agnolo’s blessed absence, Donatello finished carving the magnificent Annunciation to the Virgin for the Cavalcanti chapel. I recalled with envy how he had explained the work to Agnolo in the early days of that seduction. “You see, the Angel Gabriel kneels before the Virgin,” Donatello had said. “Mary is startled, as who would not be?” I could see him as he raised his long fingers and traced the book that Mary held, and the arm, and the figure rising from the chair. For that second I had hated him.

  But now, with Agnolo gone from our lives, we stood together before the completed Annunciation and I softened toward him. The sculpture, in its simplicity and its beauty, was itself a source of grace.

  “It needs a frame,” Donatello said. “A canopy or a frieze.” To me it seemed perfection as it was. “Putti,” he said, talking to himself. “Looking down. In awe. In fear.” He put his long hand on my shoulder. “Your boys. Your oldest two. Let me use them for the putti.”

  That is how it came about that my sons Donato Michele and Franco Alessandro will stand forever in the Basilica of Santa Croce, clutching one another in fear of the height as they look down on the Virgin at that stupendous moment when she assents to be Mother of the Christ. My boys appear again, of course, in the Cantoria that Donatello executed for the Duomo, but here they are most themselves, alive and full of mischief, as I would choose to remember them.

  The Annunciation was finished, save for a few bits of ornamentation left for Pagno to complete, to ease his disappointment at seeing his Prato carvings cast aside. Donatello turned at once to his several postponed commissions for Cosimo de’ Medici. First came two matching marble panels, one of the Crucifixion and one of the Ascension. Then a gilded coffer that would hold a manuscript copy of Aesop’s Fables in the original Greek. And then the long delayed bronze bust of Cosimo’s wife, Contessina de’ Bardi.

  For the Crucifixion and the Ascension Donatello devised a new kind of sculpture, rilievo schiacciato he called it: on a flat marble panel he carved a relief of such thinness that it appeared to be a drawing, as if by using a stylus instead of a chisel he had forced the marble to release the forms trapped beneath its surface. The setting is Golgotha and those dim forms, as you gaze at them, become the figure of Christ in his last agony and, kneeling at the foot of the cross, the Virgin Mother and Mary Magdalene and the apostle John. As you continue to gaze at the figures, the background too moves to the surface and you become aware of angry clouds troubling the sky and a darkness settling over the scene. The face of Christ is taut with agony and the face of his Mother taut with grief. The matching panel, the Ascension, shows Christ surrounded by his apostles, the Virgin Mother kneeling at his feet, as he rises into heaven. He ascends into a summer sky and Donatello has so ordered the lines of sight that as you observe the figures you are forced—like the apostles themselves—to look up in expectation and in hope. These are masterful works, unlike anything I have seen before or since, and they adorned the facing walls of Cosimo’s private chapel in the palazzo on the Via de’ Bardi. The tiny chapel was without windows and lit only by wall sconces so I am sure they could not be well seen but it was enough for my lord Cosimo to know they were there. Later, when he built the great new Palazzo Medici on the Via Larga, he moved these marble panels
to the family chapel which was well lit and where they could be seen to advantage. They are there even today.

  The gilded coffer was to be companion of the one I had designed for Cosimo’s Greek prayer book nearly ten years earlier. As you would expect, I had kept the original drawings—I was ever a devoted collector of papers—and so with speed and some skill I brought the coffer to completion. This time I was allowed to do the work myself. I adorned the coffer with the Medici family seal, I cast the laurel wreaths and gilded them, I attached the jeweled clasp. My finished work was a perfect match for Donatello’s original. It was my masterpiece. The twin coffers stand at either end of the altar in Cosimo’s chapel, a Byzantine prayer book on one side and Aesop’s Fables on the other, with Jesus on the cross between them.

  We went together to present the coffer to my lord Cosimo at his palazzo on the Via de’ Bardi. The name itself will tell you that the palazzo belonged to Cosimo’s wife although, since their marriage, Cosimo had gone far toward making it his own. The immense double doors that fronted the Via de’ Bardi now bore the Medici family crest—four balls within an ornate shield—and they were flanked on either side by decorative iron rings in the form of laurel wreaths that held torches against the night. Like all noble palaces of Florence, the Bardi had originally been a fortress and it seemed so still. The thick stone walls on the ground floor provided storage rooms where food and weapons had once been stacked against attack; these rooms were now workshops for the palace, stores for grain and wine, and shelters for the family horses and carriages. And, of course, the palace kitchens.

  We were greeted by two servants in full livery—I recognized Giacomo as one of them—and we followed them through the entryway to a huge courtyard paved in stone. In the center stood an ornate well crowned by a small statue of the bearded Marsyas playing a flute, the same Roman statue Donatello had repaired for Cosimo years earlier. Giacomo showed us to a vaulted staircase that led to the first floor balcony where Cosimo himself met us. He greeted Donatello with an embrace and a kiss on either cheek and he shook my hand with some warmth. My hands were sweating and I feared to drop the coffer, bundled in a crimson velvet cloth and clutched beneath my arm. Cosimo led us through two vast reception rooms to his private quarters. I scarcely had time to look around me. The public rooms were a blur of great wealth. Ornate marble floors, gilt ceilings, and walls painted with scenes of triumph from the Bible and mythology: the walls of Jericho tumbled down, Hercules wrestled with the Hydra. Cosimo’s private apartment was a series of rooms that unfolded, one from another. There was a sitting room with carved chairs and a long table, a study where he kept his huge collection of books in Latin and Greek and our native Italian, a bedroom, and his tiny chapel—scarcely more than a closet—where he daily made his prayers. I believe there was a bathroom, all unto itself.

  At a gesture from Cosimo I settled the coffer on the long table in his sitting room and he removed the velvet cloth. The coffer glowed in the dim light, and I watched with pleasure as Cosimo traced the laurel leaves with a stubby finger, caressed the gilded edges, and tried the jeweled clasp.

  “It is a perfect match,” he said to Donatello. “A beautiful, rare thing for my Aesop.”

  Donatello bowed and said that the design was mine.

  Cosimo seemed surprised, but he smiled and came to me and took my hand. I did not say what I was thinking: that the execution had been mine as well. All work that came from Donatello’s bottega—no matter who had produced it—came from the hand of Donatello and with his approval. High lords did not pay Donatello for work by his assistants. He had been generous to acknowledge that the design was mine.

  Wine was brought and Cosimo toasted Donatello’s good health and great talent and then they talked at length of other commissions Cosimo had in mind. The bronze bust of his wife, Contessina de’ Bardi, already agreed upon. A bust of Niccolò da Uzzano, quickly, before he dies. And after that he desired another bronze, a decorative piece, whimsical, something like the putti on the Annunciation Donatello had only now completed. A cupid perhaps, or a baby Pan, holding a butterfly or a little bird. He left it all to Donatello.

  This Pan, this dancing baby, would of course become the Atys Amorino, a pagan putto with tiny wings on his back and on his heels. In his outstretched hand he holds a butterfly and he is laughing with delight. He wears only leather pants, open in the front, to reveal his waggling privy parts. He is filled with pleasure in the butterfly and in the world and in himself. He is the perfect pagan. “He is the spirit that was Greece,” Cosimo would say when it was completed, but to me he was the spirit that was Donatello . . . if only Agnolo had not come among us.

  Cosimo himself escorted us to the door of the palazzo and stood bidding us farewell as if we were old friends who had stopped by to exchange a greeting.

  He turned suddenly to Donatello and asked, “How does it go with my bronze David?” He knew that Donatello had taken a hammer to the bozzetto—such news is never secret—but he asked nonetheless.

  “Slowly,” Donatello said.

  “Ah, yes,” Cosimo said, and nodded agreement. “Yes. Of course.” Then he turned to me and said, “You must encourage your brother to be of help.” He looked me full in the face and said, “I shall remember you.” He clasped my hands in his.

  I could not have been more surprised by the words or by the gesture. Cosimo was a man of extraordinary warmth beneath all that silence and it was a warmth I would have need of later as I lay in prison in cursed Padua. We said farewell.

  I write this down for what reason? Because it happened and because I would have you know that no less a critic than Cosimo himself approved my work and because he loved my lord Donatello enough to include me in that love.

  All this came about because Agnolo had left us and Donatello was himself once again and so was I, free for a time of what Alessandra called my poisoned feelings.

  Agnolo came back into our lives once more in August, 1431.

  CHAPTER 21

  AGNOLO WAS STANDING at the door in easy conversation with Pagno di Lapo. They were laughing together, like old friends. It was a warm day in August and Agnolo had left off his stockings and was wearing only a dirty white shirt and that ridiculous farmer’s hat. His hair was long and scraggly and his feet were bare. I approached them and said, “It’s well for you that Donatello is not here,” and I found that in my anger I could scarce get the words from between my teeth.

  Pagno looked at me in surprise, but Agnolo gave me a wide smile and said, “He’s not here. He’s at the Palazzo Bardi, sketching Big Contessina.” I should have struck him for his impertinence, but I was so astonished that he knew of Donatello’s whereabouts that in truth I did not know what to do.

  “Agnolo is newly back from Lucca,” Pagno said.

  “You’re not allowed to be here. Donatello has forbidden it.”

  “I’m only standing outside. I came to offer a greeting.”

  “Go away!”

  “He is always hurtful,” Agnolo said. “Why is he like this?”

  Pagno turned to me and then to Agnolo and then back again to me. There was no more to say. I waited for Agnolo to go but he did not move.

  “I looked for you everywhere,” I said. “My lord Donatello looked.”

  “I told Pagno where I was going,” Agnolo said. He turned to Pagno and said, “I told you.”

  “And I told you,” Pagno said to me. “I said he’s gone off with his soldier. You asked me and I told you.”

  “But you didn’t say you knew. You let us chase around the city looking for him! You let us go to the Buco!”

  “You went to the Buco?” Agnolo laughed, incredulous, pleased. “Did you enjoy it?”

  “I told you he was in Lucca,” Pagno said.

  “They’re very friendly at the Buco.” Agnolo was amused.

  I found myself speechless with anger and frustration. Here I was a man of thirty-one years, an accomplished artisan with a wife and four sons, being made fool of by a rent boy
, a bardassa, who had exploited my lord Donatello and was even now mocking me with what he had done. I turned away in fury.

  Agnolo and Pagno continued to talk, defying me, until Pagno slipped him some coins and Agnolo took his leave.

  “Donatello must not know of this,” I said, and my voice shook with anger.

  “Donatello will want to know he’s back,” Pagno said.

  * * *

  DONATELLO WAS, AS Agnolo had rightly said, at the Palazzo Bardi making sketches for the bust of Cosimo’s wife. He was there almost every morning for a week and when he returned he began at once on the bozzetto from which he would model the bust itself. He worked quickly and well, as was his way.

  I did not mention to my lord Donatello that Agnolo had returned to Florence nor that Pagno had known him to be in Lucca all those months, but I continued angry at Pagno that he had spoken truth about Agnolo’s disappearance but in such a way that we were meant to think it was not so. All my anger at Agnolo was now concentrated on Pagno and I wished him ill.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Donatello asked me. “You do not concentrate.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, try to concentrate.”

  “As you say, my lord.”

  “Never mind ‘my lord’. Only pay attention to what you’re doing.”

  What I was doing was helping prepare the framework for the bust of Contessina and in truth I had just badly formed the wires that would support her left shoulder.

  “It’s Pagno,” I said.

  Donatello sighed and shook his head. He was well aware there was discomfort between Pagno and me.

  “He knew all along where Agnolo was.”

  Donatello said nothing but he paused with his trowel poised above the bucket of clay.

  “And now he’s back. He was in Lucca the whole time we searched for him at the Buco.”

  Donatello said nothing.