The Medici Boy

by John L'Heureux

  WHEN NEWS OF Cosimo’s exile spread in the city—and it spread almost at once—a kind of panic started among the friends and debtors of the Medici. The levy of new taxes was inevitable, of course, but it was anyone’s guess what other burdens the Albizzi might lay upon them. Meanwhile friends of the Albizzi celebrated openly, though there were some who suspected they had merely postponed a terrible retribution by sending Cosimo to exile rather than to death. The Palazzo Bardi was confiscated in the name of the state and the Medici banking tables disappeared from the Mercato Vecchio, but for a while the life of the city continued on as it had. There were no prosecutions of Medici servants and—so it seemed—there were no secret lists of Medici followers who were marked out for “accidents.” Still, no one felt secure.

  “Now it will begin,” Agnolo said.

  “What will begin?”

  “The persecution of men like me.”

  This was not like him. Had he become a man who had some sense of himself, who understood how he failed to fit into the world?

  I thought for a while and then said, “You make too much of yourself,” but as I turned over in my mind what he had said, I realized he could be speaking truly. Under the Albizzi there would surely be persecution of men like Agnolo. And if Agnolo was in danger, so too was my lord Donatello.

  CHAPTER 28

  A SHUDDER RAN through all of Florence at the exile of Cosimo. It was an unimaginable thing and it affected everyone. In the taverns men drank less and talked more cautiously. At the banking tables in the Mercato Vecchio business slowed and even the chink of coins seemed more discreet. In our bottega there was the constant strain of things unsaid and the suspicion of friends who might at any moment be revealed as enemies: Donatello knew that as an intimate of Cosimo he was being watched by the Albizzi. He took care that in speech and action he was ever restrained.

  But as the constant spy, I noticed there had been a thaw in the relations between my lord Donatello and the newly humble youth Agnolo. For months now Agnolo had made himself useful in the bottega, running errands, feeding the chickens and looking after Fiametta, doing whatever he was asked to do but without his old insistence on being noticed at all times. And now my master Donatello seemed to have softened toward him.

  “How do you live,” I asked Agnolo, “you two alone in that small house?”

  “Peacefully. He asks nothing of me.”

  “He is fifty years of age. There is little he could ask.”

  Agnolo gave me a wry look and then a half smile. “It’s little you know about these things,” he said.

  “Then you must tell me,” I said, but he withdrew into the humble, quiet, self-possessed Agnolo he had lately become.

  I could tell nonetheless that there was increasing warmth between them.

  * * *

  EARLY IN JULY, when Cosimo’s arrest and exile were still unimagined, Donatello had taken on the commission to create a great marble pulpit for the new sacristy of the Duomo. It was to be of the finest marble. It would be placed above the door of the sacristy on the south side of the Cathedral as a complement to the pulpit of Luca della Robbia on the north. I have the documents before me and what I find of greatest interest is the strict determinations of the contract. It is as if from the very start the Operai of the Cathedral had learned from Prato to deal firmly with Donatello, however intricato he might be. They demanded a guarantee that “Donatello must finish each piece within three months after receiving the block, which will be furnished by the Operai but for which he must give security through a reliable bondsman.”

  Donatello read the conditions of the contract and smiled that cryptic smile. All through July and August he worked at the design of the pulpit. By September, when Cosimo was arrested and sent into exile, Donatello had already produced in miniature the magnificent pulpit that would become known as the Cantoria—the singing choir—for its frieze of babies who riot in joy at hearing the proclamation of the Good News. He made preparations, slowly, to carve.

  He was distraught for a while at Cosimo’s exile, but he allowed nothing to come between him and his work . . . and he found other consolations as well.

  * * *

  RINALDO DEGLI ALBIZZI had driven his great enemy from Florence and, though he now found himself unofficial ruler of the city, his own position was not what he had hoped. For one thing, the enormous Medici wealth he had planned to secure for himself had disappeared into Rome and Venice and, locally, into monasteries that he dared not plunder. For another, Cosimo remained popular in Florence while in Padua he was welcomed as a visiting dignitary, rich and distinguished and much to be admired. And who could tell what Cosimo’s followers might be up to?

  Rinaldo found it increasingly difficult to rule. The ancient noble families that had supported his attack on Cosimo remained supportive in words but when it came to gold florins their support wavered. The banking families, too, were reluctant to provide financial backing since they regarded the regime as unstable and perhaps even illegal. Increasingly, through manipulation of the Signoria, Rinaldo assumed the role of despot, banishing Medici supporters who called for Cosimo’s return and thus depriving the city of further tax revenue. Frustrated and furious, Rinaldo grew daily more erratic.

  His remark to a friend ran round the city. “You should not lift your hand against the mighty or, if you do, you should make certain to finish them off.”

  Cosimo meanwhile managed to have his exile commuted from Padua to Venice where he joined his brother Lorenzo and where, through his spies, he kept a close eye on events in Florence and on the several conspiracies mounted to bring about his recall. Ever the good citizen, he distanced himself from all these plots, waiting, watching.

  * * *

  DONATELLO SEEMED HAPPY. In truth he was never a man you would describe as happy, but there was a new ease about him now, a kind of comfortableness, as if his work on the Cantoria was enough for him and he longed for nothing else. I had no difficulty guessing the cause for this new satisfaction.

  “You’re sleeping with him,” I said one day to Agnolo. I caught him up as he came from Fiametta’s stall, a sack of feed in his arms. “Aren’t you.” I said it confidentially as if I knew this to be a fact and as if I did not disapprove.

  He looked at me, distrustful, and then he said, “We get on well.”

  “Even though he is a man of fifty years.”

  He said nothing.

  “And you are—what?—eighteen?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “I grow older but you do not. How is that possible?”

  “You grow older, Luca, and you grow more sly.”

  I laughed in appreciation of his wit and ruffled his hair in the way of Donatello with his apprentices. Agnolo looked at me, wondering if he should trust me. I smiled at him. He was easily won over.

  “We do sleep together, but that’s all it is.”

  “It seems to make him happy.”

  “I could make him happier still. I would gladly give more.”

  “Tell me.”

  “He likes to hold me only.” He thought about it. “He likes to run his hands over me. He likes to touch me. Sometimes he holds my cazzo. He doesn’t do anything with it, he just holds it.” He went on and I found myself growing hot with anger as my mind wandered to the picture of the two of them in bed. “But he won’t fuck me,” Agnolo said. He looked to me for sympathy and understanding. “He presses against me and he grows hard so I know he could do it if he wanted to, but he doesn’t.”

  At once I felt attacked and I had to struggle not to strike out at him.

  “He says he loves me. But he won’t fuck me.”

  “And yet he will,” I said, forcing a smile. “You can be sure he will.”

  * * *

  IN VENICE THE Doge himself welcomed Cosimo into exile as his special guest. Cosimo and his family were made comfortable in the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, a sprawling, beautiful building on an island at the entrance to the Canal’ Grande. This was the kind
of country retreat that Cosimo particularly enjoyed, he said, a place where he could live quietly with family and friends and pursue his study of Greek philosophy.

  If you did not know Cosimo the man of business and politic, you would think this the whole truth. It was in part truth since it was the contemplative Cosimo who so loved rare books and the things of beauty created by my master Donatello and those others—Ghiberti and Fra Angelico and Uccello and della Robbia and the wanton, half-crazed Filippo Lippi. And of course the fine mind and architectural genius of Michelozzo had always been Cosimo’s great delight, and his conversation as well, so to thank the monks of San Giorgio for their hospitality he resolved to build them a library and he invited Michelozzo to design it.

  The request came by messenger in plain clothes to the new bottega Michelozzo occupied now that his partnership with Donatello was so thinly observed. They still had mutual contracts—the Prato Pulpit, chief among them—and of course Michelozzo would still oversee the casting of bronze for Donatello, but their lives had moved in different directions and thus, for the present time, they maintained separate botteghe. It was a peaceful, friendly separation, but I saw behind it the thin, manipulative hand of Agnolo Mattei, model and whore.

  Cosimo’s invitation to join him in his Venetian exile was a great excitement to Michelozzo. He had long been Cosimo’s favorite architect and an intimate friend as well, so it seemed only natural for him to join his patron in Venice. He told the messenger that he would come at once. He put aside all his commissions at hand—among them were plans for the new Palazzo Medici—and, sending ahead a great trunk full of sketches and designs, Michelozzo set out to join Cosimo in exile. It was a cold clear day in November of 1433.

  * * *

  BY JANUARY DONATELLO had made small progress with the Cantoria. The marble provided by the Duomo was not the pure white that had been agreed upon, and so Donatello sent it back and gave himself over to the marble Feast of Herod that was to have been an Epiphany present from Cosimo to his brother Lorenzo. The idea was to achieve in marble the same miracle of perspective you find in the bronze Feast of Herod he had cast for the Baptismal Font in Siena. He put the Cantoria from his thoughts and was at once thoroughly caught up in his work for Cosimo.

  The January cold was bitter. There had been a dusting of snow during the night and it was good to be inside the bottega with the smell of wet wool and stone and the sharp, stinging scent of quicklime. A gray-striped kitten had replaced the departed orange cat that had been Donatello’s favorite and it was rioting now among the chickens and the two aged cocks were hard put to defend them. There was dust everywhere. Amid the noise of hammering and the hard, chunking sound of metal upon stone and the horseplay of the two new apprentices, we all found ourselves—for some unknown reason—in good humor.

  “My lord Cosimo is enjoying his exile, I think.”

  Donatello looked at me askance. “Exile is exile,” he said. “To be away from Florence is to be absent from the world.”

  “And yet you were willingly absent from the world . . . in Rome . . . for more than a year.” I could play with him this way now.

  “I was with Michelozzo.” He paused, remembering. “We were much in the world.”

  “And I was with Pagno. With Pagno we were not much in the world, even though we were in Florence.”

  He cast me a look of annoyance and would have said some sharp thing about jealousy or envy except he was too well disposed toward the whole world to bother catching me up short. He worked without stop as long as the light held out.

  At the end of the day he was in the mood for celebration. The Feast of Herod was not nearly finished but he could see already that the carving in marble—thin as paper—would be as fine in its own way as the bronze of the Siena font. It would perhaps be finer.

  He had dismissed the others and we had worked together for a short while by rushlight but then he feared to spoil the carving and put down his chisels.

  “A drink,” he said. “To keep out the cold. A deep drink of good wine for the old scharpellatore and his young tesoro, so badly neglected for a year and more. For shame. For shame. And such a handsome Louis of Tolosa you were.” He ruffled my hair as if I were still one of his apprentices.

  “Tell me about Rome,” I said. “Tell me about Michelozzo.”

  We were sitting now at his long worktable and by the light of a single candle we drank wine as he told me about Rome and the disgraceful luxuries of the Vatican and about Michelozzo, the most talented gold worker of our day.

  “And designer of buildings,” I said. He did not reply and I said, “My lord Cosimo is of that opinion.”

  “Michelozzo, yes. And Brunelleschi.”

  They too had been lovers—Brunelleschi and Donatello—what a small and incestuous world Florence had become, a stew of emotions. I longed to say, Tell me about Agnolo, but I dared not move ahead so rapidly. I decided on silence. And so I was astonished to hear myself say, “Tell me about Agnolo.”

  It was as if he had not heard me.

  He filled his cup and drank deeply and said, “A bishop it was, or it may have been a cardinal, who confided in Cosimo that in his reform of the clergy he hoped to persuade the priests to stop gambling. Cosimo listened in his sympathetic way and then replied that first he should persuade them to stop using loaded dice.”

  He laughed that deep infectious laugh and I could not resist laughing with him. I could see he was beginning to feel his wine.

  “Cosimo enjoys a good jest even when it turns on himself. He is quick witted and of a humorous turn of mind. For all his wealth, he has the same love of dirty jokes as the poorest of us. Cosimo . . . Beccadelli knew he was on safe ground when he dedicated Hermaphroditus to Cosimo.”

  “But holy mother church has condemned that book.”

  “It is a harmless book.”

  “It celebrates the joys of sex,” I said. “And the joys of sodomy.”

  “Harmless as well.”

  “But the church says . . .”

  “The church.” He shook his head sorrowfully and emptied his cup of wine. For a moment he said nothing and I wondered if I had gone too far. And then, as if he suddenly remembered what I asked, he said, “We get on well, Agnolo and I.”

  “And yet you do not fuck him. So he says.”

  “That would be to lose him.” He went on then at length about not using Agnolo for his own satisfaction. The whole matter came down to love, he said, what love could bear and what it could not. I had no idea what he was talking about. For me, from my first encounter with Maria Sabina, fucking was a natural and normal expression of love. I did not understand this anxious planning of what you might do in bed. And so I listened with care, hoping to understand the mysterious love of Donatello for Agnolo. It was lust that bound them, surely, a perverted lust. I was thinking exactly this when Donatello paused and said, “And so I love him.”

  I knew this, I had heard it before, but now, alone with him in this freezing bottega, it was as if Donatello had plunged a knife in my stomach and turned it.

  “I know,” I said. “You love him.” We were silent for a long time and then I said, shyly, exploring, “Was there not a time when you felt the same for me?”

  He looked at me, uncomprehending. Then he took a sip of wine and sat back and looked at me sadly. “Luca,” he said. “Not in that way. Never in that way.”

  “And yet you kissed me.” I spoke coldly and I was bitter in my mouth and in my heart.

  “Ah, Luca. Sometimes I do not know myself.”

  “You seemed to know well what you were doing then.”

  “I think you do not know yourself either, Luca.” He gazed at me with that terrible focus he brought to sculpting. “Tesoro mio,” he said softly. “I will be more kind.”

  And then, as if he had disposed of the matter, he put aside his wine, sighed deeply, and began to number the virtues of his friend and patron, Cosimo.

  “Cosimo de’ Medici is not the man he appears. He is kin
d and generous and he loves artisans. He has a fine mind. He knows beautiful things. He studies Latin and Greek and pursues the study of philosophy.” On and on he went. And in this way, with handsome talk of Cosimo de’ Medici, the matter between us was settled . . . for a time.

  * * *

  THE GREAT MISTAKE of Rinaldo degli Albizzi was in allowing Cosimo to leave Florence alive. The lesser mistakes followed fast upon the new year. In February Rinaldo exiled the rich and powerful Medici supporter Agnolo Acciaiuoli who had publicly called him a dictator and a few weeks later he exiled Mario Bartolommeo de’ Medici, a distant cousin of Cosimo, on grounds of sedition and conspiracy against the Signoria. These were difficult and unpopular decisions and they served to further alienate the already distressed grandi of Florence. Cosimo himself remained silent and aloof in Venice, content to let others do his conspiring for him.

  By March Rinaldo was facing nearly constant opposition and there was the feeling in the city that the spring thaw might see rising discontent among the popolo minuto and a corresponding unease among the grandi. Meanwhile there was no Medici money available to run the city and no bankers willing to lend—as Cosimo himself put it—“so much as a pistachio nut.”

  In May the Albizzi welcomed to Florence the Pope—Eugenius IV—who had been forced to flee Rome in disguise pursued by vicious mobs that burned and looted the holy city and rioted in the Vatican itself. Rinaldo himself welcomed the Pope and installed him and his court in the monastery of Santa Maria Novella. It was another mistake. The Medici had been and would be once again the Pope’s personal bankers.

  The Albizzi could look forward to a difficult summer.

  * * *

  THE DAY AFTER the Pope’s arrival in Florence a messenger came from Cosimo in Venice. For me. It was addressed to Donatello, of course, but the burden of the message was for me personally. I have it by heart.

  My lord Cosimo sent greetings to Ser Donatello, orafo e scharpellatore, and begged to be remembered to his fellows Pagno di Lapo Portigiani and Luca di Matteo. He wished the blessings of God and our Republic on all singly and together and hoped we were enjoying good health and good work. He regretted that so many of his own commissions were suspended for this time but he rejoiced that Michelozzo di Bartolomeo was working well and that the library of the monastery of San Giorgio was proceeding according to plan.