Oil and Marble

by Stephanie Storey

  Tightening his gut against the pain, Leonardo pushed himself off the ground and limped toward the stalls.

  Shoppers and sellers packed into the Piazza del Mercato, a dizzying array of colors, smells, and sounds of haggling. As he navigated through the crowd, shoppers shoved and jostled him. Pain tore through his head. Blood dripped down his leg. His hands turned cold, his vision blurred, and he stumbled a few times, bumping against stalls. Where was the apothecary stationed, again? He never could remember.

  He limped down another aisle.

  Then he saw her.

  She had the same flowing brown hair, curving bosom, and olive complexion. The afternoon sun cast half her face in golden light, the other half in gray shadow. Her eyes were downcast, but there was no doubt she was his mysterious savior, who’d protected his hand from the axe and begged him to fly. Standing at a silk merchant’s stall, she was surrounded by long drapes of fabric flapping in the breeze: a sea of burnt orange and indigo, a forest of green and shimmering gold, a mountain range of crimson and teal. The lady herself wore a coffee-colored gown that matched the velvety richness of her eyes.

  As sweat beaded on his forehead, Leonardo wondered if she truly were an angel sent to save him from harm. The first time, she’d rescued his arm, and this time she’d appeared when he was on the verge of collapse. Leonardo staggered toward her. He was woozy, losing blood fast. The lady, his angel, was so close.

  Leonardo tried to speak, but his throat and mouth felt full of sand. He couldn’t catch his breath. He doubled over in pain. Using his last bit of energy, he lunged forward and, with muddy fingers, grabbed the lady’s skirt.

  She yelped and recoiled from the strange man grasping at her gown.

  “Help,” Leonardo said, his voice low and raspy.

  “Get away from my wife,” a man growled.

  Wife? Did angels have husbands? Leonardo shook his head to clear his vision and muddled brain.

  The man came out from behind the stall and grabbed his wife protectively. He was old enough to be the lady’s father. His tiny face was squished under a puff of prickly hair, and his small round nose wriggled. He looked very much like the hedgehogs Leonardo had seen burrowing in the fields when he was a boy.

  Legs shaking, Leonardo rose up onto his knees. “Please.”

  A flash of recognition crossed her face. Eyes wide, she leaned in and helped Leonardo drop gently to the ground. Her skin felt soft and warm. Her chest rose and fell with each breath. This was no ethereal angel. She was a flesh and blood woman.

  “Lisa!” her husband yelled. “Get away from that man.”

  Her name. Leonardo finally knew her name. “Lisa,” he whispered.

  As her husband tried to wrench her from his grasp, Leonardo’s vision started to dim. He kept his gaze fixed on the lady’s eyes and was transported to the magical landscapes of his youth. Undulating fields of sunflowers and olives stretched out before him. Cypress trees bent in the wind. Dark caves dove beneath the soil. The ground beneath his feet crumbled, and he was swept down a river, speeding toward the ocean in great gulps of pounding waves and tumbling waterfalls.

  He had finally found her, his savior. Now he could thank her, repay her, know her. “I would very much like to paint you,” he whispered, then exhaled and slipped into blackness.

  1502

  Michelangelo

  Winter. Florence

  There was a sharp knock at the door.

  Michelangelo jerked his head up. He and David had been alone in the shed for months, but they were about to receive their first visitors. Michelangelo’s beard and hair had grown long and unruly. He felt like he looked: a wild sheepdog protecting his flock from a rabid wolf.

  “Open up,” called Granacci. “Mi amico. We are here.” The handle rattled, but the door was locked.

  The Operai and guild leaders had requested a private inspection of the statue. If these men judged that he had not made enough progress, they had the power to fire him. Michelangelo could not refuse to let them in. The cathedral owned the stone. That was the hardest part about being an artist: he was always beholden to the men with the money.

  Rain clattered on the roof. He should not leave important men shivering in a downpour. He should open the door and welcome them inside. But his legs wouldn’t move.

  Another rap on the wood. Michelangelo knew he looked strong on the outside. Hacking through solid rock was a grueling job, much more akin to manual labor than art, so his muscles were well-defined. Constantly breathing in marble dust made him queasy, so he hardly ate. He had become leaner, his body as hard and chiseled as one of the Roman statues he so admired. But even though he looked strong, he didn’t feel it. He wasn’t ready to show off his work. He had made progress removing stone and blocking out the figure, but David had not yet woken and offered his own voice. What if the men could sense David was still asleep? What if they laughed at Michelangelo, mocked him, or dismissed him as an amateur?

  “Open up,” a man boomed. “This is the archbishop.”

  Michelangelo could not leave the head of Florence’s cathedral standing out in the rain. He lunged forward and released the lock, then cracked open the door. A small group of august men stood in the storm: Granacci, the glaring archbishop, Giuseppe Vitelli, two members of the wool guild, Pietro Perugino, and Sandro Botticelli. Michelangelo’s stomach lurched. He hadn’t expected fellow artists. The stone wasn’t ready for that level of scrutiny. He stepped outside and slammed the door behind him. “You can’t come in.”

  “Michelangelo!” Granacci protested.

  A flash of lightning lit the sky. “Let me by,” the archbishop said. His gray beard looked like the matted-down hair of a wet donkey.

  “The stone isn’t ready yet. It needs more work. You should leave and come back another—”

  “Stronzate,” Giuseppe Vitelli grunted and barreled past Michelangelo. The others followed. On his way in, Botticelli offered a supportive smile, and Perugino tipped his hat, dribbling rainwater out of his rim and onto Michelangelo’s dusty work boots.

  Then a set of purple and pink platform shoes and a turquoise walking cane stepped up to the entrance. Michelangelo let his eyes rise up the checkered hose, violet pants, long sleeved jacket with tails, and pink doublet. Unlike the others, Leonardo seemed perfectly content to stand in the rain. Drops splashed off his rose-colored hat, sparkling like flecks of crystal. A red gash marred his cheek, and a purple bruise colored his eye, but somehow, Michelangelo thought with exasperation, those wounds only made Leonardo’s golden eyes burn brighter.

  “Michelangelo.” Leonardo offered a sarcastically low bow, and then hobbled into the shed with the help of his cane.

  Everyone knew Leonardo’s injuries had been sustained during a confrontation with Cesare Borgia’s men. The old man recounted the tale with glee anytime someone asked. Florence was inundated with stories of Leonardo’s lion-like courage, fighting off two towering Borgia spies with nothing but a bag of rocks. “I defeated giants with a handful of stones,” Leonardo bragged. The comparison to David was not lost on Michelangelo. The old man couldn’t take his marble, so he stole his glory instead.

  Michelangelo followed the men into his shed. As the others examined the statue, Leonardo hung in the back, paying more attention to the state of the shelter than to the marble. He sniffed at a stack of sketches, pushed his toe against a pile of tools, and tapped his cane against one wall, testing its sturdiness. At least Michelangelo had taken a bath and cleaned up before the men arrived. Granacci had insisted. Now that Leonardo was poking around, Michelangelo was glad he had complied. The place looked, and even smelled, respectable. He only wished he had thought to shave off his tangled beard.

  He shoved his hands into his pockets to finger marble dust. He tried to look at the statue through the eyes of these men seeing the David for the first time. He had taken down the front part of the scaffolding so the men would have a better view. The emerging figure was like a sketch, barely suggested on the page, beaut
iful because it left so much to be imagined. Michelangelo didn’t even know how the statue would look when it was finished. For some reason, he couldn’t get the image of a powerful, muscular Hercules out of his mind. “I’m still finding the figure, but I picture him as a humble child,” he said, hoping to describe the image not only to the others, but to himself. “Looking shyly down, awkward in his triumph. He will be beautiful. Supple. The epitome of human frailty. All the credit for the victory will go to God.”

  “It barely looks half-done.” The archbishop started to take a step up a ladder, but when it creaked, he stepped back to the floor. “What’s taking so long?”

  Michelangelo flinched. People who didn’t sculpt could never understand the amount of work that went into creating a statue. If he did his job correctly, when he was finished, it would look effortless. “It’s just a start, I know,” Michelangelo said, pushing toward the front of the crowd to stand next to the stone. “But at least it finally looks like marble, and you can see the figure starting to take shape. It will be a full, in-the-round composition …”

  “The question is, will it be beautiful?” Leonardo asked as he limped up to the stone. “Is there anything here to indicate that beauty will eventually emerge?” Leonardo ran his fingers over the rough marble.

  Will it be beautiful? The question was a hot blade slicing through Michelangelo’s chest.

  “It will,” a deep voice answered with confidence. It was Botticelli. The revered painter was circling the stone, his eyes reflecting back the beauty he saw. “At least I think it will. There is something in there.”

  Michelangelo slid his fingers into a crook in the marble as though holding David’s hand. Nothing had ever made him as proud as those words. Botticelli’s La Primavera and his Venus were two of the most exquisite figures ever captured in art. Botticelli knew beauty.

  “He has much more work to do,” Botticelli warned. “And it could still end as the most spectacular catastrophe the city has ever seen. But it could also become something miraculous. At least we can see the stone is not the problem. The marble is strong, pure, and already glowing.” He held Michelangelo’s gaze for a long, silent moment. “It is now up to him.”

  “Well, if Botticelli says it is so, it is so.” Giuseppe Vitelli reached into his jacket, pulled out a small leather bag, and handed it to the sculptor.

  The sack was unexpectedly heavy. Michelangelo opened the pouch. Inside was a pile of gold coins. “What is this?”

  “Four hundred gold florins. You deserve to be paid properly for your work.”

  As Michelangelo felt the weight of the bag in his hand, Leonardo limped out of the shed, the sound of his dragging foot accentuated by the tap of his cane. The master had not seconded Botticelli’s endorsement, but Michelangelo wouldn’t worry about that now. With four hundred florins, he could pay for new supplies. Buy his father a new suit. Set his brother Buonarroto up with a shop so he could afford to propose to the wool dyer’s daughter. The money meant he was a man who could support himself and his family, no longer a boy chasing some foolish dream.

  As the men filed out of the shed, Michelangelo looked up at David, still silent and incomplete, and whispered, “Thank you.”

  That evening, Michelangelo locked up his shed early for the first time in months and returned to his family’s house for dinner. When he sat down at the table, his father remarked, “Ah, the king deigns to join us for a meal.”

  But nothing could dampen Michelangelo’s mood. He had enough gold in his pocket to wipe the sarcasm out of his father’s tone forever, but he didn’t share his news immediately. Instead, he sat back, drank wine, ate rye bread and mozzarella, and listened to his family bicker.

  Finally, Buonarroto, who had been staring at him all night, asked, “What is going on, Michel? You can’t stop smiling.”

  Without a word, Michelangelo took out his leather pouch and dumped all four hundred florins onto the table. They rolled around before toppling into a glittering, golden pile.

  Michelangelo was rewarded with the most magnificent silence he had ever heard.

  Then the family erupted.

  “What is this?” his father said, grabbing a handful of coins.

  “A feast for us all!” exclaimed Aunt Cassandra.

  “I knew you would get the money for me,” said Buonarroto, his shoulders straightening. “I’m gonna get married.”

  “For my progress on the statue so far,” Michelangelo said over the din. He snuck a look at his father. The old man’s smile was so wide that the backs of his toothless gums were showing.

  “A new bottle of wine, Mona Margherita,” his father said. “And don’t water this one down.”

  As the family celebrated, trading opinions about what they should do with their share of the treasure, Michelangelo knew this must have been how David felt standing triumphantly over the severed head of Goliath. This was the feeling of victory. He took a long swig of sweet wine.

  Giovansimone picked up a coin and rubbed it between his fingers as though inspecting the quality of a bolt of fabric. Then, loud enough for the whole table to hear, he said, “I didn’t know you could make so much money cutting open dead people.”

  Everyone fell silent. Michelangelo tried to swallow his mouthful of wine, but his throat didn’t work. Uncle Francesco dropped the coins as though they had suddenly turned to coals.

  “I told you I was following you,” Giovansimone said. His eyes looked as dark as the unlit mortuary and made Michelangelo feel just as sick.

  “I knew it.” Lodovico’s right hand trembled so much he had to put down his cup to keep from spilling. “I knew no one would pay this much money for a carving.”

  Michelangelo finally swallowed his gulp of wine. “People pay for art, Father, and the cathedral paid for mine.”

  The old man’s face was sagging. “Then what is Giovani talking about?”

  Michelangelo’s heart twisted. He didn’t like seeing his father in pain, and he hated to be the one who caused it. Yes, his art was important, but at the expense of his father? For a brief moment, Michelangelo had a pang he had never before felt. In that instant, he wondered if his art was worth it. “It’s nothing. I have been studying anatomy.”

  “Nothing?” Lodovico roared. “Nothing! Are you, are you …?”

  Giovansimone began filling his pockets with florins. “Oh, he is most certainly dissecting people. I’ve seen it.”

  Uncle Francesco and Aunt Cassandra fell to their knees and began praying. “Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee …”

  “And inside of a church, too,” Giovansimone added, his voice dripping with mock disappointment.

  Michelangelo considered denying it. Giovansimone could never prove his story. The problem with lying, however, was that Michelangelo did not see anything wrong with dissecting. It was a necessary part of his art, and his art was an expression of God. He would not silence God. “It’s true.”

  “Santo Padre,” Lodovico muttered.

  “But it’s not what you think,” Michelangelo said. “Studying anatomy is honest work. My teachers at the Medici Palace taught me …”

  “Those damned Medici.” Lodovico turned his head. “I should have known they were corrupting you. They always encouraged you and your Godforsaken art.”

  “Please,” Michelangelo said. “Come with me to see the stone. I’ll show you why I must do what I do. I will make you understand.”

  “I will never understand.” Lodovico stood up and pointed toward the door. “Out.”

  “Father. Please, I can explain …”

  “Out!” Lodovico walked toward Michelangelo, pushing his son backward simply with the force of his anger.

  “I’ll stop. I won’t go back, I swear.” Michelangelo crossed himself, but Lodovico slapped his hand down as though striking down a demon. “I’ll confess. To a priest. I’ll beg for forgiveness.”

  “Will you give up sculpting? For good?”

  Michelangelo looked his father direct
ly in the eyes. “You know I can’t do that.”

  “Then you are not my son,” his father said, spitting the last word. “You’re a devil who chooses a stone over his family.”

  “Wait, please,” Michelangelo begged, panic rising in his chest. “This is my home. I have no place else to go.”

  “I don’t care,” Lodovico replied coldly. He opened the front door.

  “My clothes, my money, it’s all here.”

  “You have only yourself to blame.” Lodovico stepped forward, driving Michelangelo out the front door.

  “Arrivederci, brother. I’ll miss you,” Giovansimone called from the table as he dropped the last few coins into his jacket pocket.

  “Giovansimone,” Michelangelo barked. “Put that money down. That’s not yours. That’s for the family.”

  “Don’t talk to your brother,” Lodovico ordered. “Don’t talk to any of us until you return without that filthy art muddying your soul.” He backed into the house and shut the door behind him.

  “No,” Michelangelo whispered. “Please,” he called, but one by one the shutters on the windows closed. “Please. Everything I do is for this family,” he cried at the locked windows. “I suffer. I toil. And now that I have begun to raise us up a little, now that I bring home a little money, you, you reject me. You, my own brother.” His guilt and fear burst into anger. “You, Giovansimone, you spy on me and use my own passions against me, all for your own greed. Body of Christ, if it isn’t true! Take the money,” he said, backing away from the door. “I will make more. And you know what I will do with it? I’ll bring it all back to you, because you’re my family and I will never turn my back on you, no matter what you do.”

  He waited, hoping the door would open, but the house remained silent. Sobs started to build inside his chest, but he swallowed them. Giovansimone was probably watching from some window. He wouldn’t give his brother the satisfaction of seeing him fall apart. He turned and walked away.

  He had nowhere to go but the cathedral workshop. He entered the shed and sank to the floor at David’s feet. His day of triumph had turned to the bitterest defeat. Michelangelo gazed up at his half-finished statue. He had given up his family for that silent lump of rock. Pulling a blanket over himself, he said to David, “Now would be a good time to start talking.”