The Medici Boy

by John L'Heureux

  My oldest son, Donato Michele, is the Father Superior of the monastery and he is my jailer, a kind, good man without imagination and without malice. He sees me for the murderer I am and the brain-wrecked husk of a man I have become. I believe he loves me and feels sad for my imprisonment, but he has given his heart to God and there is little human love left in him. Mine is a good life, quiet, harmless, silent as the grave that awaits me.

  After the murder of Agnolo I thought to find that grave in Padua. I was taken at once to the stinche where for six months I awaited trial. The stinche is a true prison where brutalized men—some fresh from the rack, some yet unbroken—feed on hatred and anger and guilt till they cease to be men and are merely vessels for pain. I was spared this. My brain was yet addled from the seizure and my left side remained for a time in paralysis, and so I was allowed a cot and a night jar of my own. I was fed on bread and gruel and given two cups of water each day, but the filth and the stench of the prison made me long for death. Nonetheless, as these things will happen, I survived. My strength returned and my brain-fog cleared and I could move about again and even walk. I was able to stand during the long hours of my trial.

  I was sentenced to life imprisonment. I had spent six months in the filthy stinche before my trial and I spent a year there following it. Before my trial I survived on hope that Pagno di Lapo would continue to perjure himself and swear that Agnolo had struck first, that I had acted in self-defense. He was true to his word, lying boldly before the court, and so my life was spared. Cosimo de’ Medici, who had promised he would not forget me, remembered me a year later when the political winds had turned and he was able to have my sentence in Padua commuted to Florence and a lifetime in prison commuted to a lifetime with the Frati Minori of Santa Croce.

  And so the death of Agnolo Mattei became for me only a painful memory. For Donatello, however, it was catastrophe. He lapsed into a kind of trance, as if life was too much to bear and only death would satisfy him. It was not like early times when Agnolo would leave him for a passing soldier, nor like later times when Agnolo fled to another city or, worse still, disappeared into prison on some dark night. This was a different kind of trance. Donatello was unable to eat or drink or work. He had no interest in marble or bronze. He prayed each day for a quick death. Michelozzo called for medical help and saw that Donatello was well bled and thoroughly purged but still he did not return to his old self. And then Michelozzo turned to a Doctor Chellini who was famed for his skill at relieving the burdened soul. This doctor gave Donatello herbs and potions and looked into his mind to see why he preferred death to life. He found there only gloom and lost love and anger and so he prescribed work. He commissioned for himself a tondo of the Virgin and Child, in bronze, to be executed within the year. And thus he brought Donatello back to life.

  In little more than a year Donatello presented him the tondo as a gift and with that he returned to his old self and at once set to work. He sculpted—again in wood—his Mary Magdalene in penitence. She is gaunt and terrifying, wasted by fasting and abstinence, a woman who has loved much and whom much has been forgiven. But her face and body are the face and body of Agnolo Mattei. Donatello lost himself in work. He sculpted then the great Judith and Holofernes, in bronze and gilt, and there too you see the face of Judith is the face of Agnolo . . . and Holofernes is Donatello himself.

  He would never recover from the life and death of Agnolo and he would never lay eyes on me again.

  Nor did Pagno di Lapo. Nor did my wife Alessandra. Only Michelozzo was willing to look again upon me. Pagno, having lied at my trial and thus saved my life, left Padua for Florence and within the year left Florence for Bologna. He wished me well. He sent me a note upon my transfer from the stinche of Padua to the monastery of Santa Croce. He said he would pray for me and asked my prayers for himself. He was my true friend—who could have guessed it?—but I fear his compassion is more than human and in the end will prove the death of him.

  Alessandra petitioned entry to the convent and, with her dowry of forty gold florins, the price of a slave girl, she was admitted to the Dominican nunnery at Santa Maria Novella where she prays for me. She became Sister Adriana, O.P., a lay sister, allowed to live the spiritual life of the convent and to perform the work duties of a layperson: washing floors, cooking meals, spinning wool. This she saw as the will of God. I think of her often as I lean away from my writing, my eyes tired and my hand stiff. I call up her dear face and body—the young Alessandra when I first knew her—and I pleasure myself as in the old days, but not often and always with a sigh of regret. Sex is not for old men. We are tethered between life and death and sex is unseemly. But then life itself is unseemly and, old or young, we let it pass from us with difficulty and with regret.

  Michelozzo alone remains a constant in my life. His eight children—four boys and four girls—are a joy to him. He has designed a new cloister for the Frati Minori of Santa Croce and I see him daily as he executes his plans. It is Michelozzo who by night stole me from my prison here and took me—in a dark cloak, a midnight monk—through the streets to the church of San Lorenzo that I might visit Donatello’s tomb. But I get ahead of myself.

  I have been here twelve years, writing, copying. While he lived it was the will of Cosimo that I transcribe manuscripts for him and he arranged that Michelozzo bring me the originals and take away the finished copies. At his death, the care of his business and in particular the care of his library was taken up by his son Piero, called Il Gottoso for his gouty feet. I copy for him as once I copied for Cosimo. My final brain seizure left my body in large part a wreck. In truth my left side is nearly useless, my hand flopping about of its own accord, but my other side is dependable with a good right hand that is sturdy with a quill and parchment. Indeed my script has grown more fluid and more elegant with the passage of time and I have moved on from Latin texts to the rarer and more complicated Greeks: Plato and sequaces ejus, I know them all. In the matter of transcription I have more than satisfied the Medici and it is pleasing to know that many of the rare manuscripts in Cosimo’s vast new library have been copied by my hand.

  Cosimo died in 1464 and at his great funeral procession—the entire city was in mourning or pretended to be—the Signoria proclaimed him Pater Patriae . . . in shame for having sent him into exile and in acknowledgment that he had been friend to philosophers and poets, patron of sculptors and painters and architects, and founder of the greatest library since the fire at Alexandria. He had sponsored the work of Ghiberti and Brunelleschi and Michelozzo, of Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi and Verochhio, and above all Donatello. He had loved him faithfully to the end and at his death he directed that Donatello be buried in San Lorenzo in a crypt next to his own so that he could be near his friend in death as he had been in life. Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici has seen to that.

  After Donatello’s death in 1466, Piero arranged that all the documents of the bottega—notes, sketches, commissions, records of payments made and payments owed—should be delivered to me here in Santa Croce so that I might create a record of the man himself. These documents, along with the many I myself have secreted away, I have arranged in sequence that the reader might know what work Donato did and when he did it and where it rests today.

  As to Donatello himself, who could ever recreate him to the life? The facts, yes, I have those in writing. And the documents that date his commissions and record his payments and list his triumphs, but what of the man himself? His passion, his devotion to work, his great rollicking laughter, his kindness, his cruelty, his irreverence, his disdain for the great and the proud, his humble nature and his overarching pride, his sudden rage, his love of children, his patience with them and his impatience with his patrons, his blind fear of failure and his conviction that he could do anything he tried, his loyalty, his generosity of spirit and of mind: Who can capture this? I cannot write his life and so I have written my own and considered his only at a glance, a life caught from the corner of my watchful eye. I asked him once w
hat he thought was Ghiberti’s most significant accomplishment and he responded, instantly, “Selling that useless farm land in Lepricino.” And when he looked upon Brunelleschi’s crucifix, he said, “It is for you to sculpt the true Christ; I am the sculptor of peasants.” And in this comment I hear two Donatello’s: the humble giver of praise and the other, the confident sculptor who knows that the peasant in Christ is in truth our redemption. How do you capture such a spirit?

  Donatello died in his little house on the Via del Cocomero and ascended to his Maker on 13 December 1466. He was perhaps eighty years of age.

  He never recovered from Agnolo’s death and he never forgave me for causing it. He recovered his health, however, and though his eyesight continued to fail, he went on sculpting—in Siena, in Florence—and his last great works, I am told, are the bronze reliefs of the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ for the pulpit of San Lorenzo. They are rough-hewn bronzes, left unfinished at his death, but as powerful and poignant as anything he ever sculpted. So Michelozzo says. I have not seen them.

  Donatello was buried with a royal funeral. Some two thousand Florentines filled the streets for his funeral procession. There were prayers and masses and praise for his completed works, and the feeling that perhaps he had not been rightly appreciated, that with the Medici boy he had changed the shape and nature of sculpture forever, that mere beauty would never again be enough.

  How did he go to meet his Lord Jesus? With humility, I think, and with pride for work well done.

  And how will I meet my Lord? As a murderer, as a penitent, as a spy. I still cannot imagine he will damn me. I will be one of those ragged street urchins he invites to the banquet at the eleventh hour. And I will eat and drink with him and rejoice that he is merciful.

  I had always thought the Black Pest would carry me off but I have come to think—within these celestial prison walls—that it will be a fatal lightning bolt in the brain that will do for me. The brain will crack finally, and the heart as well, and then all will be quiet, everlastingly. And will I at the end remember Agnolo? I think at last I bear him no ill will. I wish to repent invoking his damnation. He was destined to be the life and death of Donatello and who am I to come between that great man and his fate? Perhaps Agnolo too will be at that final feast. If a man loves much . . . And yet . . .

  * * *

  POST-SCRIPTUM

  IN THE YEAR of our Lord 1467 on the thirteenth day of December Luca di Matteo passed to his eternal reward, taken as he sat writing of the life and works of Donato di Betto Bardi. He dwelt as a prisoner for twelve years in this monastery of Santa Croce and it is a sad and great hurt to record that he died in disgrace, impenitent, and with small remorse for his sins. It is to be hoped that he loved much for it is certain there is much to be forgiven.

  May God have mercy on his soul.

  Donato Michele di Matteo, OFM

  Author’s Note

  ON MY FIRST visit to Florence I had the exhilarating experience of seeing Michelangelo’s David at the Accademia and later that same day seeing Donatello’s David in the Bargello. Michelangelo’s deeply moved me but Donatello’s was a revelation. It was naked in every sense and seemed to me personal, erotic, a testament to the sculptor’s sexual obsession for the teenaged boy he had created. Someone, I thought, should write a novel about it.

  I spent years reading in a general way about early Renaissance art, politics and religion, and during those years revisited Florence many times, always with a long stop at the Bargello. In 2006 the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded me a generous grant that allowed me to spend an extended period in Italy doing research. Research aside, THE MEDICI BOY is pure invention, whose purpose it is to entertain, provoke, and disturb. The statue of David is its own narrative.

  I want to thank the Guggenheim Foundation and especially Edward Hirsch and André Bernard. And for their generous critical support: Eavan Boland, Edie Wilkie Edwards, Nancy H. Packer, and Arnold Rampersad. And for all those years of faith and patience: my agent, Peter Matson.

  A Brief Bibliography

  FOR READERS WHO want to know the true history of this amazing period of Renaissance Florence I offer this small list of works to which I’ve been most indebted in writing The Medici Boy.

  Bassett, Stephen. Death in Towns: Urban Response to the Dying and the Dead. Leicester University Press.

  Bennett, Bonnie A. and David G. Wilkins. Donatello. Oxford: Phaidon.

  Brucker, Gene A. Renaissance Florence. University of California Press.

  Brucker, Gene A., ed. The Society of Renaissance Florence: A Documentary Study. University of Toronto Press.

  Cagliotti, Francesco. Donatello e i Medici, storia del David e della Giuditta. L. S. Olschki. Studi, 14.

  Cennini, Cennino d’Andrea. The Craftsman’s Handbook (Il Libro dell’ Arte). Dover Publications.

  Chapman, Hugo. Padua in the 1450’s. British Museum Press.

  Cohn, Samuel Kline. The cult of Remembrance and the Black Death: Six Renaissance Cities in Central Italy. Johns Hopkins Press.

  Crum, Roger J. and John T. Paoletti. Renaissance Florence: A social history. Cambridge University Press.

  Duby, G. A History of Private Life. Harvard University Press.

  Ewart, K. Dorothea. Cosimo De’ Medici. Cosimo Classics.

  Father Cuthbert. The Romanticism of Saint Francis. Longmans, Green.

  Gilbert, Creighon E. Italian Art, 1400–1500: Sources and Documents. Northwestern University Press.

  Glasser, H. Artists’ Contracts of the Early Renaissance. Garland Press.

  Greenhaigh, Michael. Donatello and His Sources. Duckworth.

  Hartt, F. Donatello: Prophet of Modern Vision. Abrams.

  Hibbert, Christopher. The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici. Penguin.

  Hoffman, Malvina. Sculpture Inside and Out. Bonanza Books.

  Janson, H. W. The Sculpture of Donatello. Princeton University Press.

  Lightbown, R. W. Donatello and Michelozzo. Harvey Miller Publishers.

  McBrien, Richard P. Lives of the Popes. HarperSanFrancisco

  Mills, John W. The Encyclopedia of Sculpture Technique. B. T. Batsford.

  Najemy, John M. A History of Florence, 1200–1575. Blackwell Publishing.

  Newman, Paul. Daily Life in the Middle Ages. McFarland.

  Origo, Iris. The Merchant of Prato: Daily Life in a Medieval Italian City. Penguin.

  Parks, Tim. Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth Century Florence. Norton.

  Plumb, J. H. The Italian Renaissance. Houghton Mifflin

  Poeschke, Joachim. Donatello and His World: Sculpture of the Italian Renaissance. H. N. Abrams.

  Pope-Hennessy, Sir John. Donatello: Sculptor. Abbeville Press.

  Rich, Jack C. The Materials and Methods of Sculpture. Oxford University Press.

  Rocke, Michael. Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence. Oxford University Press.

  Rosenauer, Artur. Donatello. Electa.

  Singman, Jeffrey. Daily Life in Medieval Europe, 1476–1492. Greenwood Press.

  Strathern, Paul. The Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance. Vintage Books.

  Turner, A. Richard. Renaissance Florence: The Invention of a New Art. Abrams.

  Vasari, Giorgio. The Lives of the Artists. Oxford University Press.

  Waley, Daniel Philip. Later Medieval Europe, 1250–1520. Longman.

  Walker, Paul Robert. The Feud That Sparked the Renaissance: How Brunelleschi and Ghiberti Changed the Art World. William Morrow.

  Wirtz, Rolf. Donatello, 1386–1466. Könemann.

  Ziegler, Philip. The Black Death. Harper and Row.

  About the Author

  Photo by Dagmar Logie

  JOHN L’HEUREUX IS the author of eighteen books of poetry and fiction. His stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Harper’s, The New Yorker, and in Best American Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. Since 1973, he has taught fiction writi
ng, the short story, and dramatic literature at Stanford University. His recent publications include a collection of stories, Comedians, and the novels, The Handmaid of Desire (1996), Having Everything (1999), and The Miracle (2002).

  An Afterword

  “IN THE COURTYARD of the Palazzo Vecchio there is a life-size bronze David who has cut off the head of Goliath and places his raised foot on it; in his right hand he holds a sword. This figure is so natural in its lifelike pose and its rendering of the soft texture of flesh that it seems incredible to artists that it was not formed from the mold of an actual body. This statue once stood in the courtyard of the Medici Palace.” Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, 1550.

  The Medici Boy relies for its fictional characters on a fairly long list of historical figures and for its events on several important moments in the history of Florence. For information about these people and events I have depended on a great many historical and literary sources to which I am much indebted. The facts are theirs; the errors are mine.

  Here are some thumbnail biographies of a few real people who appear in this novel.

  Brunelleschi. (1377–1446) Filippo Brunelleschi was one of the foremost architects and engineers of the Italian Renaissance. He designed and executed the dome of the Florence Cathedral. He had a lifelong friendship with Donatello and a lifelong feud with Ghiberti.