Michelangelo’s heart paused for a beat. Was it possible?
“Michelangelo Buonarroti, the Duccio Stone is yours,” Giuseppe Vitelli announced. He reached over and shook his hand vigorously. “The Duomo expects you to create a beautiful statue for her facade.”
As well-wishers swarmed, Michelangelo’s ears filled with the sound of rushing oceans. “Congratulazioni! Buona fortuna,” supporters cheered, patting him on the back and shaking his hand. Michelangelo barely felt their touch or heard their voices. They sounded far away, as though he were trapped inside a glass bottle closed with a cork. It was all happening too fast. He could hardly catch his breath.
His friend Granacci pulled Michelangelo into a hearty hug. “Splendente. You did it.” Other artists stepped forward to offer congratulations. Andrea della Robbia, Pietro Perugino, Giuliano da Sangallo, even Davide Ghirlandaio, the brother of Michelangelo’s teacher, Domenico Ghirlandaio, God rest his soul. Davide had always been jealous of Michelangelo’s talents, but on that day, he applauded Michelangelo as if he had always supported the younger man.
Then Botticelli cupped Michelangelo’s cheeks in his wrinkled, bony hands. “May God bless you, my son,” the aging master said, staring into Michelangelo’s eyes as though trying to transmit some of his power and knowledge into the younger man’s soul.
When Botticelli finally ambled away, Michelangelo turned to greet another admirer, but instead came face to face with the Master from Vinci. Leonardo’s face was stoic, but his eyes flared. Michelangelo tried to bow respectfully, but couldn’t move. Even his breathing stopped.
“Buonarroti,” Leonardo said. “Here’s a tale for you to ponder. An ass fell asleep on a frozen lake, but its body heat melted the ice, so that ass awoke in a cold, unwanted bath.” His eyes flicked from Michelangelo’s dirt-stained face to his muddy feet, then back again. “In hindsight, you may find you have already started melting the ice, for that wretched stone will no doubt be the end of your career and the end of your name. Forever.” He turned and strutted out of the workshop, his costumed assistant, lugging all of their materials, following him.
As the spectators continued to congratulate him, a new emotion rolled into Michelangelo’s chest and competed with his joy and pride. This new wave was of undeniable terror. Leonardo was right. He was lord of the Duccio Stone, which meant he was overseeing a silent, dead hunk of rubbish, tied around his neck like an anchor.
Michelangelo laid his hand on the stone and patted it like it was a distressed, wounded horse. “I hope you’re in this with me,” he whispered.
He waited for a response from the marble, but heard nothing.
Leonardo
Autumn
Wandering through the Piazza del Mercato, Leonardo sidestepped an aggressive butcher waving a stuffed pig’s head and walked down another aisle of overflowing stalls. Where was he going to find a human skull for sale? The market was not the right place to find such things. He was better off digging up some fellow out of the cemetery. Although the priests would probably refuse to let him dig up bones, too.
If he could get his hands on just one body to dissect, he could probably figure out a way to fit a proper human figure into that botched block of—Stop thinking about the Duccio Stone, he commanded himself. It does not belong to you.
Now, where was that apothecary, again? He should pick up some clay and cobalt to mix a new set of pigments—the friars were eager as ever for him to start applying color to the altarpiece. He pushed himself past the barking merchants, haggling housewives, and the potpourri of orange incense, fresh leather, and horse manure. Usually Salaì lead the way, but he’d left his assistant back at his studio. Taking Salaì to the market was always a risk. The young man had sticky fingers. He would either swipe merchandise or steal money from Leonardo’s pocket. Either way, the master had to pay. That was the problem with Salaì. Trouble with him, trouble without him.
Trouble if I’d won that wrecked slab of marble, torture without—Stop!
As he wandered in search of pigments and skulls, he marveled at how much busier the market was now than when he was young. Back then, there were some leather makers, a few silk weavers, a butcher, a cooper, and a hosier. Shopping in the market had been a bucolic experience. But over the last few years, an entrepreneurial spirit had taken hold of Florentines like a fever, and every citizen seemed to have a stall. There was a desperate rush to buy and sell goods. Leonardo had pondered the shift for quite some time and, after much deliberation, had developed a theory to explain it. Less than fifty years before, Johannes Gutenberg had given the world the printing press. Before Gutenberg, manuscripts could only be reproduced by hand. They were rare and expensive. However, since the creation of the printing press, more books were available to more people. Literacy was on the rise. Revolutionary ideas of independence and freedom trickled from the upper classes all the way down to the men, women, and children sleeping on the streets. The masses were still illiterate, but the democratization of information empowered people to take control of their lives, which resulted in, among other things, a rise in independent merchants.
Leonardo applauded autonomy, but the changes also worried him. He mistrusted book learning. If he wanted to discover how light reacted to a curved piece of glass, he didn’t read about it, but found a piece of glass and exposed it to light. If he wanted to cook soup, he didn’t use a recipe, but experimented with his own ingredients. If he wanted to find out what was hiding in the back of a cave, he crawled inside on his own hands and knees. With the explosion of books, people were more likely to rely on the theories of other men instead of learning from their own experiences. That path led to the regurgitation of old ideas, not newly formed thoughts. With a large library, people would no longer memorize facts, but look up whatever they wanted to know in a book.
The only way Leonardo had ever made a unique discovery was by contrasting, comparing, or combining two disparate pieces of knowledge already housed in his brain. If he no longer mentally stored information, he would no longer make unexpected connections and create something new. A unique thought sprang from a unique being, possessing unique knowledge. A book, although a handy storage unit, did not have the capability of the human mind to develop fanciful inventions. If the explosion of books continued, the world might be left with a bunch of mindless merchants selling meaningless material goods to each other, no one capable of inventing something new and spectacular. It was ironic. An exceptional invention like the printing press might end human innovation all together.
A goose squawked. Leonardo looked down and realized he had stepped on its tailfeathers. Tied up in front of a bird seller’s stall, the squawking goose flapped his wings at Leonardo’s feet. He bent down to inspect the goose. The bird’s right wing was bent, probably too damaged to fly. It was a shame. In Leonardo’s estimation, there was only one thing worse than never having flown: to have tasted flight and not be able to repeat it. He gently patted the bird’s neck, then explored the rest of the stall. There was a basket of quail, a few cooing pigeons, a flock of woodpeckers, and a tiny cage packed with seven agitated white doves. Doves were usually docile animals, but these were angry, screaming creatures furiously flapping their wings and biting at the bars, while the red-faced, pudgy bird seller shouted profanities and smacked their cage with a club.
“Ignore the brute, my friends,” Leonardo whispered into the cage. “Man has great powers of speech, but what he says is mostly vain and false. Animals, on the other hand, have little voice, but what they have to say is useful and true.” He gazed into the doves’ round, pink eyes. Whenever he had a chance to study birds in flight, he took it, and this flock had a special combination of agitation, anger, and energy that seemed ready to explode.
With the merchant busy kicking the squawking goose, Leonardo flipped open the lock on the cage and swung the gate open. The doves did not flee.
He bumped the cage with his elbow. The metal bars rattled. The birds screeched and then sprang from their priso
n, shooting into the air like cannon fire. As they soared away, Leonardo pulled out his notebook and sketched them.
“Thief!” the fowler roared.
“Do not fret, I will pay you,” Leonardo said with a calm smile. He’d done this exact thing in a dozen markets all over Italy. The vendor usually cursed Leonardo for releasing the product into the air, and onlookers often laughed at the strange man for wasting his money, but there was nothing anyone could do as long as he was a paying customer.
Leonardo reached into his moneybag to retrieve a few soldi. His fingers scraped the bottom of the bag. He didn’t feel a single coin.
“Give me my money,” the fowler said.
Leonardo darted his fingers around the bag, but felt nothing. It was empty.
Salaì. Salaì must have swiped his money before he left the studio.
“Damned thief.” The bird seller grabbed Leonardo’s left arm and unsheathed his sword. “Bird for a hand.”
“Wait, I have the money,” Leonardo said, struggling to keep his voice calm. He fumbled through his pockets, hoping to find a spare florin, but they, too, were bare. “Let me return to my studio and collect some coins.” He tried to pull his arm out of the fowler’s grasp, but a blacksmith, a candlemaker, a forester, and a farmer all stepped forward to restrain him. None of them liked a thief. Let one get away, and their stall might be next. The blacksmith grabbed Leonardo’s shoulder, and the farmer clutched him around the neck. Leonardo was strong, but not strong enough to fight off five men. “No, wait. I am Leonardo da Vinci.”
“I don’t care who you are or where you’re from. You can’t steal my birds and get away with it.” The fowler, with the help of the other merchants, bent Leonardo over and forced his left hand down on the counter of the stall. “I’ll be nice and take your left.”
“I’m left-handed!”
“That’s your problem. If I cut off the sinister limb, maybe you won’t steal anymore.” The bird seller spat onto the ground and raised his sword with a flourish.
“Stop! I have that man’s money.” A woman’s voice rang out over the din.
Leonardo, who’d shut his eyes, cracked them open.
The merchant’s sword froze in midair. “What is the meaning of this?” he bellowed.
Despite the farmer’s arm still wrapped around his neck, Leonardo could twist far enough to see a young lady, in her mid-twenties, step out from the crowd.
He had never seen her before. She wore a cream-colored gown made of shimmering silk, with gold embroidery adorning the bodice and sleeves. Metallic ribbons fluttered off her back like wings. She was pretty, but not strikingly so. She had a full bosom, her body curving like any mother’s. Her heart-shaped face rounded at the cheeks and pointed softly at the chin. Like most Italian women, she had long, curling brown hair, olive skin, and coffee-colored eyes, but unlike ladies of good breeding, when she spoke, she gazed directly into the eyes of men.
“This should more than compensate for your fowl,” she declared, and dropped several gold coins onto the vendor’s stall.
“Madonna,” the bird merchant said with a condescending smirk, tinged with a touch of familiarity. He was missing most of his teeth; only two yellow nubs protruded from behind thick lips. “I see your husband isn’t with you at the moment. But while I appreciate that you’re willing to part with his money to help a wretched soul, a thief is a thief. I can’t let him go without taking his hand. I am bound by justice.”
“The money is not my husband’s nor mine. It is this gentleman’s,” she said with the haughty tone of royalty, although Leonardo saw no indication that she was anything more than a merchant’s wife. “He left it with me for safekeeping. I hadn’t the chance to return it to him. It is not his fault he was without coin to pay you, my good man. It is mine.” She rolled up her sleeve to expose her bare wrist and laid it on the wooden counter next to Leonardo’s. “If you would like to chop off someone’s hand, take this one.” The mysterious lady held the fowler’s glare. Leonardo had never seen a common woman speak to a man in such a manner. Not even Isabella d’Este had that kind of courage, for when she spoke that way, she was protected by walls and armies and royal titles.
The other merchants released Leonardo and stepped awkwardly away. The crowd started to disperse. Taking the hand of a lady was no sport.
The fowler lowered his sword and snatched up the gold coins.
“Andiamo,” the lady urged, grabbing Leonardo’s arm and leading him away from the stall. They zigzagged down one aisle, then another, past tables piled high with rugs and pots and flowers and wine. Finally, they erupted out of the market at the edge of the sun-filled piazza. “Go. Get out of here,” she ordered.
“Wait,” he called as she started to walk away. “Why did you help me?”
She looked back. “Why did you free the birds?”
“Please, what is your name? I can reimburse you for the money you spent or …” Leonardo stared into her luminescent olive complexion. An entire world reflected back in her brown eyes. “An ant picked up a grain of wheat,” Leonardo said in a rush of words, hoping to stall her departure, “but the grain said, ‘If you’ll allow me to do my job, I’ll take root and reward you with thousands of grains just like me.’ The little ant listened, and the grain kept its promise. Please, allow me to be your grain. You saved my hand. Let me repay you.”
The lady shook her head.
“If not with money, then let me paint you, I’m an artist—”
“I know who you are. Learn to fly, Master from Vinci. That will be enough thanks for me.” The lady picked up her skirts and hurried back into the market.
Leonardo stared after her. He had thought his dreams of flying were a secret, known only to him, Salaì, and a few others, like Isabella d’Este and the King of France. Was the woman a spy, working for an enemy, following his every move, looking for some weakness to exploit? Was she a seer, able to read people’s minds and hearts? Or was she an angel sent from God to protect him and encourage his dreams?
There was only one thing he knew for certain as she disappeared back into the market. I must see her again.
Michelangelo
In the days after winning the Duccio Stone, Michelangelo worked alongside cathedral laborers to raise the block of marble off its side. It took a dozen men three tries to lift the unwieldy rock and stand it on its narrow base. A large knot, the apparent result of Duccio trying to hack out a swoosh of drapery, weighted down the left side, making the block lean, so Michelangelo constructed a wooden scaffolding to stabilize the stone and allow him to climb from bottom to top with ease.
Once the stone was situated, he studied the shape, making notes about its height, width, depth, and the size of its gashes and bumps. It looked like a weathered old tree trunk, tall and skinny, all its branches knocked off during decades of storms, left with only a few knots and holes where life used to flower. He hoped some miracle of design would pop to mind, allowing him to fit a human figure into that mangled, shallow stone, but the more he analyzed it, the more obstacles he found. If he drew a figure slender enough to fit inside the block, it would be too static to make a monument worthy of Il Duomo. However, if he constructed a design dynamic enough to make for a true masterpiece, it would not fit inside its narrow girth.
He drew thousands of sketches; some of models he paid using his last few soldi, others of strangers in the streets, still more out of his imagination. Sometimes he drew entire figures, other times just pieces: an arm, leg, head, torso, foot. Then he burned all of those sketches in a metal cauldron he had borrowed from his father’s kitchen. He fed page after page to the flames. He didn’t want to leave behind any evidence of strife. He wanted future generations to believe his Hercules had sprung immediately to mind in a singular burst of genius. If only he could experience the burst.
Sketch, burn, sketch, burn. Day after day, week after week he fought with his sketchpad, the chalk, the stone, himself, and all under the scrutiny of the public. All around him, carpe
nters and stonecutters tended to the cathedral’s constant repairs. Every day the men hung new tiles, replaced crumbling marble, and cleaned the exterior, struggling to keep up with the perpetual wear and tear. Michelangelo enjoyed the hum of the workshop, but he regretted not asking the city for a private space. Florentines camped out with loaves of hard rye bread and fiaschi of Chianti to watch him toil and to take bets on whether he would finish. The locals called the stone “Il Gigante,” not only because of its enormous physical dimensions, but also for its outsized problems.
His family despised the public spectacle as much as he did. Michelangelo had hoped they would be proud of him for being hired to decorate Florence’s cathedral, but his father barely spoke to him anymore, even when Michelangelo did make it home in time to join the family for dinner. Buonarroto, who was usually supportive, begged him to give up the commission. Maria, the silk weaver’s daughter, the one with the pretty singing voice, would never marry into a family with a lunatic brother, Buonarroto whined. Giovansimone, of course, cursed him for debasing the family name. “If you don’t stop this nonsense,” he screamed, his face turning a disturbing shade of scarlet, “I swear I’ll destroy you and your damned rock before you destroy us all.” Michelangelo began to notice Giovansimone following him, spying on him.
Even more irksome than his family’s disapproval were the artists who stopped by to offer their unsolicited advice. “Turn the figure to the right,” Botticelli suggested, resting his arms on the wooden fence of the cathedral’s workshop.
“No, to the left,” countered Pietro Perugino.
“Turn it on its head; it’s not going to matter,” said Giuliano da Sangallo.
“Just start cutting, already,” Davide Ghirlandaio grumbled.
Then Leonardo joined the fray. “I thought you said you were an experienced sculptor.” The jeweled ring on his finger glinted. “Miracles were supposed pour from your fingertips like holy water at a baptism.” Even after Leonardo went home for the night, his words made Michelangelo burn with ire.
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