The Medici Boy

by John L'Heureux

  “You are unjust to him,” Alessandra said. “It is wrong to wish him ill.”

  “I don’t only wish him ill. I wish him dead.”

  At that moment it came to me: some day I will kill him. At once I put the thought from my mind, but of course it would not go easily. A mortal sin, an eternity in hell. But he has done me great harm and Donatello much harm and it was right that he should die. And then, No, I thought, I could never do such a thing.

  “He would be better dead.”

  I felt Alessandra go rigid at my side. For a moment I wondered if she too thought that some day I would kill him.

  “It is the death of your own soul to wish him dead.”

  “Our sons are gone. I lay the blame on him.”

  “Did I blame you for my sister’s death? And yet you made love with her that same afternoon she lay dying.”

  I was silent then thinking of Maria Sabina.

  “But I did not bring the Pest to her.”

  “Nor did Agnolo bring the Pest to us. The Pest is in the hand of God and he strikes where he will. We must accept.”

  “So Agnolo is the agent of God? I would think he was rather the agent of the devil.”

  “Is it not bad enough our sons are gone? Why make it worse by such sinful thoughts? They are with God.”

  I wanted to say, ‘There is no God. Death is the only God we all obey,” but the thought frightened me and I said nothing. For a second I saw again that cubbyhole in hell reserved for me. I began to tremble with fright and I reached out for safety.

  “Alessandra,” I said, and put my hand to her breast the way I did when we were to make love, but she pushed my hand away and turned from me.

  “It is too soon,” she said.

  I turned my back to her. Two can play at this game and I would show her that I would not be first to ask for love. In this I was mistaken. I asked again, repeatedly, and was refused. She had taken against me, like God. Never again in our married life did we make love.

  CHAPTER 32

  TIME PASSED AS it does whether you are happy or not and by my fortieth year I grew more bitterly silent as Alessandra grew fatter and more distant from me. She worked at her weaving and gave herself over to frequent prayer, perhaps because Donato Michele at seventeen years had chosen to enter the Order of Saint Francis and she wanted to be a worthy mother. Donato was a bright boy and virtuous and his Father Superior told Alessandra that perhaps one day he would make a priest.

  Perhaps one day, I thought, Alessandra will again be a wife to me.

  She had little time for me and no patience with my ongoing anger at Agnolo or my disappointment that Pagno was permitted to carve marble and I was not. With Donato Michele now a Franciscan novice, Alessandra grew more impatient with me and more indulgent with Franco Alessandro who at fifteen years was impossibly vain and lazy. He was apprenticed to a carpenter and was away from home much of the week but his requests for new things remained ever the same: a belt, a money pouch, new parti-colored stockings with one leg red, the other green. Worse than this, though he was a sturdy boy with a strong manly face, he fussed with his long yellow hair more than any young girl. He has never recovered from Agnolo’s visit, I thought, but I refused to let myself think what this might mean.

  What it meant was clear to everyone when in October of that year he was arrested and accused of sodomy. His was a first offense and so he was fined ten florins and released. He did not name his partner; he claimed not to know him.

  Alessandra was in tears beyond comfort and I was in a rage that I thought might bring on my first fit in years. There was that familiar roaring in my brain and then I seemed to lose control of my arms and legs and my eyesight went dim. I will kill him, I thought, and for a moment I did not know whether I intended my son Franco Alessandro or that devilish spawn Agnolo whom I held responsible for all things ill. I will kill him, I said to myself, and for a second, as the pain thrilled through my brain, I wondered if I might some day—in just such a fit—kill him indeed. The roaring passed and the pain diminished and I realized that Franco is my son and I his father and it was Franco’s foolish vanity that had brought him to this, not Agnolo, and so I determined on a calm but firm talk with him. I would be fatherly and forgiving. I would not rage at him.

  “Franco,” I said. “This is not good.”

  “It was not my fault,” he said.

  “Then let us reason together. How did it come about that you were arrested?”

  “It was all a mistake. It was all meant to be a jest.”

  I composed myself to listen to a string of lies.

  “We were acting the fool, Giovanni and Marcantonio and I, pushing and shoving one another, when two older men stopped us in the street. They were not soldiers but they were dressed like soldiers and they told us to stop and spend a minute with them. All on a sudden one of them snatched Giovanni’s hat and said he would not give it back unless he, you know, surrendered to him. I said, “Let’s go. Let’s get away from here.” We were on the Via tra’ Pellicciai and we knew it was a bad place to be after sunset. But the soldier would not give back Giovanni’s hat unless Giovanni went with him. Marcantonio tried to snatch back Giovannni’s hat but the other soldier—he only looked like a soldier—caught him by the arm and led him off to the old convent where there was a shed that opened onto the street and they went inside the shed. Then the first soldier took Giovanni to the shed. I was alone in the street and I was afraid, so when another man came along—this one was a soldier truly—I told him what had happened to my friends, and he listened carefully, but then he snatched away my hat and said I had to go with him. I said I wouldn’t go and he began to shout for anyone to hear that I had just serviced an old furrier but that I would not service him though I had taken his money. So I went with him down the alley where we ran into two officers from the Ufficiali di Notte and, while the soldier made his escape, they arrested me for sodomy. And that is the full story.”

  I looked at him, my son of fifteen years who was now almost a man, and I tried to believe him. These things often began with a snatched hat, I knew. No one knew why the hat should take on such significance but certainly it was true of female prostitutes that they made off with a man’s hat in order to force him to pay for sex. It had happened to me more than once and in truth I had entered happily into the game. And so I believed that a soldier or someone who looked like a soldier had snatched away Franco’s hat. What I could not believe was that my own son was so easy, that he had put himself in a place and a situation where sex of that nature was likely to occur, and that he had been willing to bend over and let himself be penetrated. That he could be like Agnolo was more than I could bear.

  “The full story,” I said. “But it raises so many questions. Why were you there on the Via tra’ Pellicciai? Why do you hang about with boys who—do not deny it—make themselves available to soldiers? Or, I think, to anyone who has a few coins and is thick with lust? What would your mother think to know her son is a bardassa? She who prays night and day!” I was beginning to shout. “Are you a bardassa? Has it come to this? What shame to your brother!”

  “I am not a bardassa. I never take money.”

  I stopped then and listened to him. He never took money. So, this was not his first escapade. There must have been previous times when he was not caught. My anger faded and my heart ached for him, a poor vain boy. Playing at this kind of seduction was not rare among the rich and the noble—nor in truth among the very poor—but it was a thing that could not be borne by men of middle rank. Such men were sober and responsible, we worked hard, we married young. We were not seduced by the backsides of wanton boys.

  And yet today, some twenty-six years later, the Florence vice is more common still and prevails among all levels of men, as if it is a necessary ritual for boys in their early teens, something they grow into and out of and it does not matter. But it does matter and it did. For this was not something Franco Alessandro would grow out of.

  “Never again,”
he promised on that day in 1440 and he wept most bitterly in my arms. I wept as well. But I sensed even then that he was lost to me forever.

  CHAPTER 33

  DONATELLO CLAIMED NOT to miss Agnolo, not to care about him any longer, but I did not believe him and what I saw convinced me that Agnolo remained very much in his mind and heart. He had been pleased to hear that Agnolo was apprenticed to a wool carder—his own father had been a wool-carder—and from time to time he asked if I had news of the boy. The boy was now a man, of course, but in Donatello’s mind he was still that sixteen year old who, posing for the David, seduced him and stole his heart and remained still in possession of it.

  Donatello had grown old—he was more than fifty years of age by now—and it seemed that with the exile of Agnolo he had lost interest in both his work and his life. Those good days when he would gather us all together at the end of a work day and we would joke and drink and he would say witty things about Ghiberti or intimate things about my lord Cosimo de’ Medici, those days were gone. He no longer laughed and he seemed always a little lost. He had never been of easy approach on any personal matter and now he seemed more remote than before. Still, I took courage and asked him outright about Agnolo.

  “Do you miss him?”

  Donatello gave me a sharp look.

  “He is in Prato,” I said, “carding wool. It is not far off.”

  “He was dear to me,” he said, “once.”

  “He is a man now and has perhaps given up his evil ways.”

  “His evil ways were my evil ways.”

  “He is ever in need of money,” I said.

  “And your evil ways? Of mind and tongue?”

  “I could not help myself and so I said it. Sometimes . . .”

  “Do you think the tongue corrupts the heart, Luca? Or does it work the other way?”

  “I think you are hard on me. I want only to help.”

  “It is good that you have Alessandra.”

  I did not mention that Alessandra had grown cold to me and that I was forced to find my ease with whores. Of course it may be he knew this and was being sharp with me. With good reason he was called intricato.

  He was silent for a while and then he said, “Yes, I miss him.”

  “He could still be purchased, I think. At a bargain price.”

  “Don’t,” he said. He looked at me, suddenly a very old man, and drew me to him. He was crying and I could feel his head shaking against my breast. For a fleeting moment I felt good to have brought him down. He pulled away then, his beard wet with tears, and said, “Come. We have work to do.”

  * * *

  HE WAS LETHARGIC, dull. He came late to the bottega, worked indifferently, and left even before dark. His mind was elsewhere and besides, though there were few new commissions, there were a great many works not yet complete. Of these the Cantoria mattered most. The marble was costly and the Duomo was committed to holding Donatello to contract. He worked dutifully but he had scarcely begun carving the right side of the frieze when his attention wandered to other commissions.

  He passed off work on the dancing children of the Cantoria to his new assistant, Agostino di Duccio, and of course to the ever-present Pagno di Lapo. He had laid out the design for all the dancing children and he had done the preliminary cutting and now he allowed them to do carving that once he would have insisted on doing himself. Occasionally he would correct Pagno’s errors and sometimes he would be moved to take chisel in hand and show Duccio how to carve out a plump leg as it showed from behind a pilaster, but mostly he left them alone to complete the relief as best they could.

  If the Cantoria failed to engage him in the old way, the lesser commissions were a positive annoyance. The Prato Pulpit he dismissed in disgust, finishing the carving as if he were attacking an enemy. But at last it was done.

  * * *

  FRANCO ALESSANDRO WAS arrested for sodomy. It was his second arrest. We paid the fine of twenty-five florins and he was released. There was a long silence in our house, and in my heart I had begun to despair of him.

  For no reason I could allege, I blamed Agnolo for this.

  * * *

  COSIMO HAD MUCH to occupy him. After his return from exile he had taken great care to remain in the background of political events and though he could have made himself the supreme power in Florence he chose merely to exile the Albizzi and their followers and to maintain the laws and offices unchanged. He announced his return to political life by accepting the office of Gonfaloniere for January and February of 1435 and then, having served the Republic as its visible head, he withdrew into the private life of a banker, retaining first approval of any candidate nominated for office, however high, however low. Without bloodshed and without rancor, Cosimo had quickly and effectively taken control of the government of Florence.

  All this time, despite his involvement in politics, he remained mindful of his artisan friends. They needed money and so they needed work. His particular concern for Donatello had begun after the completion of the David. Donatello seemed downcast, defeated, as if by surrendering the finished sculpture he was losing something of himself. Cosimo responded as he invariably did, with praise, with devotion, with money.

  By way of thanks—and in addition to the five hundred gold florins he paid on completion of the statue—Cosimo presented Donatello with a gown and cloak and capuccio in the finest red wool of the nobility, a thing worthy of the maker of David. And then, when the statue was mounted on a marble column in the center of Cosimo’s garden, he gave a banquet in celebration and, in addition to his extended family circle, he invited Ghiberti and Brunelleschi, Michelozzo and Uccello, della Robbia, Fra Angelico, della Quercia and the unspeakable Filippo Lippi. It was a gathering of my lord Cosimo’s dear friends, artisans of extraordinary skills, each of them in debt to him for work commissioned and work yet unimagined. Donatello was the guest of honor. He wore the red robes that Cosimo had given him and he drank much and marveled at the attention and praise they lavished on him, but in the end he found the attention tiresome and the praise meaningless. These were his gifted friends and sometimes his competitors whose loving admiration for him was limited by their own ambitions. There was jealousy here as well as love. He knew this and he was happy when the banquet was over.

  Though he wore the red robes on the Feast of the Most Holy Name of Mary and again on the Feast of San Lorenzo, he was glad to give them back with thanks and apologies as being too grand for a simple artisan whose father had been a wool-comber. Cosimo understood and, taking back the robes with some reluctance, promised that nonetheless they would remain friends and collaborators . . . as even now there stood in his garden the beautiful bronze David that was proof of the importance of their collaboration.

  * * *

  FRANCO ALESSANDRO WAS arrested once again, his third arrest.

  “Are you trying to disgrace us?”

  “I’m sorry. I beg pardon of you and mother.”

  “Are you trying to be another Agnolo Mattei?” I spat out the name.

  “I am an evil son.”

  He would sin again and would be punished again and so would we all. We paid his fine of fifty florins and begged him to sin no more.

  * * *

  MICHELOZZO HAD BY now completed plans for the new Medici palace—a more controlled design than the grandiose palace Brunelleschi had earlier proposed—and my lord Cosimo was pleased with its strength and modesty and its quiet grandeur. There was a garden and a formal courtyard for display of statuary and there were separate apartments for members of his family and of course a private chapel for Cosimo himself.

  The new palace was not Cosimo’s only concern. More and more he worried about the fate of his immortal soul, and the more he worried the more he invested his great wealth in works for the church. He poured a small fortune into the sacristy and chapel of San Lorenzo and a large fortune into the restoration of the Dominican monastery of San Marco.

  He chose Michelozzo as architect and gave him a free
hand. Michelozzo designed a new cloister with twenty-eight columned arches, an ospizio for the ill and the aged, a refectory, a chapter house, a second cloister, and a long corridor of cells for the monks, one of those cells reserved from the beginning for Cosimo’s personal use. It was to be a place where he could spend days and nights at prayer and meditation and where Mass could be said for the good of his soul. Fra Angelico painted frescoes in each of the cells and along the corridor, making of the passageway a veritable entrance to paradise. In Cosimo’s private cell, Angelico painted a fresco of the Adoration of the Magi, in which Cosimo himself may or may not have been represented as one of the wise men. Angelico was not readily given to flattery.

  At this time Michelozzo chose at last to marry. At nearly forty-five years, he was nearing old age when he took as his bride the young and beautiful Francesca di Ambrogio, a tanner’s daughter of nineteen years. She reminded me much of Alessandra when I first knew her, a lively girl with green eyes and a full figure, a good bearer of children and with the attitude of a devoted wife.

  For the wedding of Michelozzo and Francesca, Cosimo gave an enormous banquet in the courtyard of his old palace on the Via de’ Bardi. It was a rare mild day in January and the courtyard was alive with flowering shrubs brought in for the occasion and in the center stood the bronze David, mounted on a marble pillar and surrounded by wreaths of laurel. As a friend of Michelozzo—and, I like to think, as transcriber of manuscripts for Cosimo himself—I was invited to attend the banquet. There was much eating and drinking of rare wines and there was music and dancing and it was good to see Donatello give away his great friend to this tanner’s beautiful daughter.

  As it happens Francesca was true to her appearance; she was indeed a devoted wife and a good bearer of children. In my own lifetime she bore Michelozzo four sons and four daughters and they all survived. None of them has his genius but they are all beauties and all devoted to him. And Michelozzo, as he deserves, is supremely happy.