Oil and Marble

by Stephanie Storey

  As he approached the main gate of Florence’s forty-foot-high city walls, he called, “Open up, I am a Florentine.”

  Two armed guards blocked his entry. The smaller, toothless one grabbed his horse’s reins. The bigger one, shouldering a sharpened axe, asked, “What’re you called, Florentine?”

  “Michelangelo Buonarroti, descendant of the Knights of Canossa.” The Buonarroti family, who had paid taxes in Florence for over three hundred years, could trace their lineage all the way back to Matilda of Canossa, one of the eleventh-century founders of the republic.

  When the two guards stared blankly, as though his lineage meant nothing, Michelangelo’s ire increased. “Sculptor from Medici garden,” he said, using the moniker from his youth.

  “Medici?” The smaller guard unsheathed his sword.

  Michelangelo groaned, immediately regretting using that name. When he was young, being a Medici favorite would open every door in Florence, but the Medici were now no longer beloved rulers, but feared rebels. A connection to the Medici was enough to get him hung for treason. “No, I didn’t mean it, I …” He tried to pull his horse away, but the guard gripped the reins hard.

  “Medici spy,” the larger sentry said, grabbing Michelangelo’s leg.

  “I’m a loyal Florentine.” But before he could explain, the guard swung an axe at his right shoulder. Michelangelo dodged out of the way. He couldn’t allow some ignorant guard to injure his sculpting arm. As the sentry pulled his axe back to strike again, Michelangelo fumbled through his leather satchel and pulled out his hammer. He cocked the weapon, but before he could strike, he felt a rush of air and a reverberating thud across the side of his head.

  So much for a hero’s welcome, he thought, and then everything went black.

  A punch to the gut jolted Michelangelo awake.

  His vision was fuzzy, and his world was upside down; the floor was three feet above his head. He squirmed to get his bearings. Legs bound with thick rope, he seemed to be hanging upside down from the ceiling in a small, windowless cell. His arms were tied behind his back. He smelled like piss and vomit.

  A wiry but muscular city guard loomed over him.

  “Ma che cazzo?” Michelangelo cried. “I am a Florentine!”

  “A Medici supporter. A spy,” the guard said in a thick Neapolitan accent, then spun Michelangelo. Hard. The room whirled. Michelangelo closed his eyes to keep from throwing up again.

  “I’m not a spy,” Michelangelo said through gritted teeth.

  “You told the guards you were affiliated with the Medici.”

  “I was a friend of Il Magnifico’s, yes.”

  When Michelangelo was a boy, he had been in awe of “the Magnificent” Lorenzo de’ Medici, the unofficial ruler of Florence. One day, when Michelangelo was fifteen, Lorenzo had spotted the young sculptor carving a marble fawn and was so impressed by his talent that he invited Michelangelo to live in his palace and study in his sculpture garden. Sometimes, when he thought back on those two glorious years that he had lived with the family—sleeping, eating, and studying alongside the Medici children—he feared he had used up all the happiness owed to him; no human deserved more joy than he had already experienced. But in 1492, Lorenzo died and his selfish, boorish son took over. Nicknamed “the Unfortunate,” Piero de’ Medici had always been jealous of the love his father had showered on the sculptor, so Michelangelo’s relationship with the family soured. When Florentines finally revolted against Piero’s incompetent rule, all of his contact with the Medici had ended.

  When he touted his Medici connections at the gates, Michelangelo had not been thinking about the fact that, for the past six years, Piero had been living in exile, hatching plans to reassert his tyrannical rule over Florence.

  The guard grabbed Michelangelo and pulled his face up to meet his. His breath smelled of stale wine and rotting meat. “You have come to help Piero infiltrate our city.”

  He flung Michelangelo, setting him spinning again.

  “I hate Piero de’ Medici.” To keep his bearings, Michelangelo focused on a spot on the floor. What was it? Mud? Water? Blood? “I would die to protect the Florentine republic and keep her free from that man’s foolishness.”

  “If you’re not a spy for Piero, why are you here?”

  “I live here.”

  “I have been in Florence for two years. I know everyone. I don’t know you.”

  “I used to live here. I’ve been in Rome. Working.”

  “What kind of work?”

  “I am a sculptor,” Michelangelo said, and even though he was hanging upside down, he pulled his shoulders back with pride.

  “A sculptor!” the guard exclaimed. “That’s it! You made art for Piero. He was your loyal patron.”

  Michelangelo fell silent. It was true—in part—but he would never talk about that.

  “If you don’t want to tell me, I’ll have you tortured as a rebel.”

  Fear pounded in Michelangelo’s head. No one knew he was there, locked in a dungeon, being interrogated for crimes he didn’t commit. He swallowed his mounting terror. He could be afraid later. “Torture me all you want. But I am not a traitor.”

  “According to your arresters, I understand you’re rather protective of …” The guard cut one of the ropes. Michelangelo’s right arm, numb from lack of blood flow, fell limply by his head. He tried to lift it, but couldn’t. “If you won’t talk, I can make you scream.” The guard grabbed Michelangelo’s arm and wrenched until it gave a sickly pop.

  As a bolt of pain shot through his shoulder, Michelangelo howled, but it wasn’t the pain that made him talk, it was the suffocating fear of never being able to grip a sculpting hammer again. “That damned Piero was no loyal patron,” Michelangelo blurted. “He only commissioned one thing from me. One, even after all my years of loyalty to his family, after growing up alongside him as a brother.”

  “So? What was it?” The guard’s massive hands gripped Michelangelo’s arm as tightly as if holding onto a sail’s rope during a thunderstorm. There was no way out.

  “A snow man.”

  The guard released some pressure. “What?”

  “A snow man. He ordered me to go out into the street, in front of everyone, and build him a snow man.” Even after all these years, the thought of that day made a bubble of humiliation rise in his chest. “Art that melts in the sun. I’d hardly call that a loyal patron.”

  “A man made of snow?” The officer let go of his arm. Michelangelo slowly rotated on the rope, his arm dangling helplessly.

  “It was actually more a man made of ice.” If he had to talk about it, he at least wanted the facts to be correct.

  “What did it look like?”

  “Tall. Thin. I was trying to carve an angel, but the clouds kept parting, so the sun kept melting it and …”

  The guard laughed, the sound echoing off the stone walls. “A man made of snow. I’ve never heard of anything so silly. Who would make such a thing? A snowman.”

  “Like I said, I hate Piero de’ Medici.” Michelangelo spit. His mouth was so dry nothing came out except a bit of blood from a busted lip. “Can I go now?”

  “You have any family who can vouch for your patriotic sentiments?” the guard asked, his wide smile showing off his two front teeth, both broken in half.

  “You can’t alert my family. I won’t tell them I’m in jail.” He would lose his arm, his leg, his life. Anything before that.

  “Well, I cannot release you until you have someone to vouch for you. Hey,” he said as he left the cell, “if you stay through the winter, you can build us a man of snow.” As Michelangelo dangled helplessly on the rope, he heard the officer’s voice ring throughout the prison. “A snowman! Wait until I tell Uncle Beppe.”

  White sunlight burned Michelangelo’s eyes as he stumbled out of the city’s prison. He had been locked in that cell all night, but it was now late afternoon, and he was finally free. “Thank you for vouching for me, my friend. Without you, I might’ve spen
t the rest of my life dangling from a rope in the belly of the Bargello.”

  “I doubt that. The city can’t do anything with conviction these days. Except save money. This latest bunch thinks cheapness is next to godliness.” Francesco Granacci took a flask out of his pocket and handed it to Michelangelo, who immediately drank down the sweet white wine. Granacci, handsome and from a wealthy family, was seven years older than Michelangelo, but had always insisted that he was much less talented than his friend. When Michelangelo was twelve, Granacci had convinced his teacher, the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio, to accept the young Michelangelo as an apprentice. “I will always be second to Buonarroti,” Granacci liked to say. Regardless of their respective talents, Granacci was now master of a successful painting workshop in Florence, while Michelangelo had returned home broke, looking for work.

  “They seemed serious to me.” Michelangelo pressed his fingers into the joint of his sore shoulder, but didn’t feel any protruding bones or ruptured muscles. It hurt, but it would heal.

  As the two walked away from the Bargello, Granacci let loose a deluge about what had changed in town over the last four years. He described the gruesome burning of the heretical Friar Savonarola at the stake, Cesare Borgia’s papal army encroaching on Tuscan land, and the ineffectual Florentine government trying desperately to hold onto their republic. Granacci, as usual, walked as he talked, and Michelangelo happily followed. As he listened, he realized he had been lonely in Rome.

  They wandered the winding streets. Some shopkeepers recognized the newly arrived sculptor and waved. A few even shouted, “Welcome home, Michelangelo,” but his name was always followed by that dreaded “di Lodovico Buonarroti.” Here, he was still his father’s son. Not one person dashed across the square to breathlessly congratulate him for his glorious Roman Pietà. No one even mentioned it.

  “So,” Granacci finally asked, “did you get any work in Rome?”

  Michelangelo stopped walking. If Granacci, his most fervent supporter, didn’t know … “You didn’t hear of my Pietà?”

  “Your what?”

  Michelangelo’s breath caught.

  “Oh yes, that’s right.” Recollection crossed Granacci’s features.

  Michelangelo could breathe again.

  “I did hear something of it. The statue with the peculiarly young Virgin Mother, eh …” Granacci nudged Michelangelo, suggesting something tawdry. “I’m sure it was good, my friend, you were always good.” Granacci kept walking without any further comment.

  Michelangelo swallowed hard. He now knew there would be no parade. No festival. No celebratory meal. Here, he was still just Michelangelo di Lodovico, the kid sculptor from the now defunct Medici gardens.

  “Listen, I know why you’re back,” Granacci said.

  “Why’s that?” If no one in town knew him, he wasn’t sure of the answer anymore.

  “The Duccio Stone commission, of course,” Granacci said with a shrug.

  Michelangelo stopped walking. “What about the Duccio Stone?”

  The Duccio Stone was arguably the most famous block of marble in all of history. Over forty years before, it had been a part of the biggest, most expensive sculptural project since the ancient Roman Empire: twelve colossal marble statues of Old Testament prophets to decorate the high buttresses of Il Duomo. The Office of the Cathedral Works, commonly called the Operai, had started by purchasing a single colossal block of marble from the hills of Carrara. It was nine braccia high, three times the height of a man, and the Operai hoped that, once complete, it would be the tallest sculpture carved out of a single block since the ancients.

  According to legend, from the moment it was unearthed, there was something extraordinary about that stone. Despite a long, arduous journey out of the mountains and up the Arno River, it arrived in Florence without a scratch, a pristine slab of solid stone that hummed with life. Everyone who saw it said it was the whitest, most beautiful block ever quarried. Upon seeing the stone, the cathedral elders declared that the marble was to be a statue of King David, to symbolize the greatness and faithfulness of Florence. All they had to do was find an artist worthy of carving it.

  Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi, better known as Donatello, had helped pull sculpture out of the dark ages and into a new era hearkening back to the great classical art of ancient Greece and Rome. Donatello was already the creator of two David statues, including the city’s most beloved version, a bronze sculpture depicting the young shepherd boy standing over Goliath’s severed head. It seemed only fitting that this great elder, then in his seventies, receive the commission for this new colossal marble David.

  However, Donatello’s eyesight was going, and his hands shook from age. So he requested the Operai hire Agostino di Duccio. The official commission went to Duccio, but everyone knew Donatello would work on it behind the scenes. Then, shortly after the contract was signed, Donatello died. Duccio remained on the project, but the protégé didn’t have the same sure hand as his master; his first cut into the block was clumsy, the second even worse. One day, desperate to do something dramatic, Duccio cut a yawning hole into the once-pristine block of marble. Throwing down his hammer and chisel, Duccio declared the rock unworkable. On his deathbed, Duccio was rumored to have muttered in delirium that the stone had fought him as though he were not the rock’s true master.

  After Duccio’s failure, other sculptors attempted to salvage the block, but none succeeded. The so-called Duccio Stone was abandoned in the outdoor cathedral workshop, and the program to decorate Il Duomo with giant marble prophets came to an inglorious end.

  “What about the Duccio Stone?” Michelangelo repeated.

  “The Operai … They are looking for an artist … an artist to … to carve it …” Granacci stammered. “I thought for sure you’d heard.”

  He shook his head. “No, I hadn’t.” His knees wobbled. The Operai was resurrecting the Duccio Stone? The most famous block of marble in history—a stone touched by Donatello himself? Michelangelo’s fingers tingled.

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have told you,” Granacci muttered.

  “Of course you should’ve told me,” Michelangelo said, a smile spreading across his face. He grabbed Granacci’s shoulders. “That stone was meant for these hands. That commission is mine.”

  “But, Michel,” Granacci said, staring at his toes. “That’s what I wanted to tell you. You’ll never get it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the Operai has already awarded the commission to someone else.”

  Michelangelo mentally flipped through the artists who were still alive and living in Florence. Sandro Botticelli, painter of The Birth of Venus and La Primavera—but even though he was a great master, he was a painter, not a sculptor. Pietro Perugino and Davide Ghirlandaio, brother of Michelangelo’s own teacher, were also master painters, but hardly able to compete with Michelangelo’s natural talents in stonecutting. Andrea della Robbia was famous for his delicate relief sculptures in blue and white terracotta, but he wasn’t a master of marble. Giuliano da Sangallo had experience as a sculptor, but his true talents were in architecture and engineering. “There’s no one in town better than I am at sculpting marble.”

  “Yes, there is.” Granacci averted his eyes.

  Michelangelo stared. It couldn’t be Granacci, could it?

  “Leonardo,” Granacci whispered.

  At the sound of that name, the entire city seemed to fall silent. Michelangelo didn’t need the clarifier “of the town of Vinci.” One name was enough. He had been only seven years old, still living in the countryside, when the legendary Leonardo da Vinci left Tuscany and moved to Milan. Michelangelo had learned how to draw by copying the master from Vinci’s Madonnas and poring over sketches of his Sforza horse. He was the artist he was because of Leonardo, and now they were both in the same city, at the same time. The news shook him. “Leonardo lives in Milan.”

  “Not anymore,” Granacci replied. “He’s been back for almost a year. And the Duc
cio Stone already belongs to him.”

  The stone was no longer Michelangelo’s main concern. Surely Leonardo—so worldly, so connected to art and innovation—had heard of his Pietà. It wouldn’t matter what anyone else thought, if he had Leonardo’s approval. “Do you think I could meet him?” Michelangelo asked, his heart tugging like a boat ferrying him toward his destiny.

  “Of course, mi amico.” Granacci grinned. “Andiamo. I’ll take you to him.”

  Leonardo

  Leonardo peeked out from behind a curtain at the fashionable Florentines packed into his studio, buzzing like opening night at the newest commedia dell’arte play. He nodded to Salaì, perched on a wooden platform hidden in the ceiling, and then silently counted to three. Uno. Due. Tre.

  A flash of fire popped, followed by a burst of purple and green smoke. Some in the crowd screamed and others giggled as Leonardo slipped out of his hiding place and into the cloud of sweet-smelling incense. When the smoke cleared, he was posed as if appearing in the room by magic.

  “Sex,” he hissed, letting his tongue slide across the “s” like a finger along a fiddle. The spectators laughed, but Leonardo kept his eyes on the friars. He had calculated that celibate men would secretly enjoy a bawdy joke. “The body parts involved in it are so ugly, I can’t imagine why God thought anyone would ever procreate. If it weren’t for darkness, the human species would disappear altogether.”

  The corners of the friars’ lips turned up.

  “Music!” Leonardo called, and a band of flutists, lutists, and drummers struck up a lively tune as his studio assistants—the friars paid for an entire household—put on an extravagant special effects spectacle. Candlelight, colored smoke, and water bouncing off drums, reflected in a series of mirrors, creating a pulsating, kaleidoscopic atmosphere. As he danced through the studio, Leonardo constantly recalibrated his performance to try to please the friars.

  For the past year, he had lived comfortably in this sprawling three-room studio on the top floor of Santissima Annunziata, part of his payment for painting an altarpiece for the church. He liked the rhythms of residing in a friary. The regularly scheduled prayers, meals, and bedtime provided a routine he hadn’t experienced since he was a child growing up in rural Vinci, abiding by the cycles of nature. He had become so relaxed that it took him ten months to draw the first lines for the altarpiece. He’d heard the gossip. Many saw this as laziness or lack of focus. He was, after all, notorious for not completing commissions. The Adoration of the Magi, St. Jerome in the Wilderness, the Sforza Horse in Milan—all were famously unfinished. But he wasn’t procrastinating because he didn’t want to work on the friar’s painting. No. A masterpiece did not pop immediately to mind. He had to knead the problems like dough: how could the Virgin’s face fulfill classical expectations of beauty, yet surprise the viewer with the unexpected; how could each of the figures maintain their separate identities, yet intertwine into a single whole; how could he transform a few scratches of lines on paper into a living, breathing, complex organism? Creating new life took time.