The maid’s skirt swished again.
“That’s why you want to fly,” she asked rapidly, “so you can experience, what? The life of a bird for yourself?”
The skirt was coming closer.
“In order to study something, I find it is best to keep my distance,” Leonardo said, moving his chair back to his assigned location in the room. “If I get too close, I have no hope of rendering a scientific judgment. Getting close creates a dangerous bias. To capture humanity in a medium such as paint, I must observe it from afar.”
A flush rose up Lisa’s neck, and her hands stopped fluttering. Had he said something to offend her? Before he could ask, the maid entered. She did not leave them alone again for the rest of the day.
Michelangelo
December. Florence
“This is all my fault.”
“Father, you must calm down.”
“I can’t.”
“Please, stop crying.”
“It won’t help him if you kill yourself, too, Papa,” Buonarroto moaned.
Kill yourself, too? Had he died? No, his head hurt too badly to be dead. He tried to move, but his arms and legs felt heavy as boulders. He tried to speak, but no sound came out. He took a deep breath. The air smelled of candle wax, mineral medicines, and the heavy sweat of sickness.
“If I had not banished him, he would not be here. I would have watched over him.”
Michelangelo focused all of his energy onto his eyelids. They opened a slit. A fuzzy line of orange light glimmered then disappeared.
“Michel!” his father cried. Michelangelo felt his shoulders being shaken.
“Father, be careful. You’ll hurt him.”
“His eyes opened. I saw them.”
“You’re imagining things.”
“Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni. Wake up.”
He opened his mouth. All that came out was a low, gargled moan.
“Praise God, he’s alive.” Lodovico started to sob.
A wet sponge, tasting of vinegar, daubed Michelangelo’s dry, cracked lips. “Brother? Are you awake?”
He slowly opened his eyes and looked up into the face of his brother. Buonarroto broke into a wide, dimpled smile. “You’re right. He’s alive.”
“My beloved Michel.” Lodovico kissed his cheeks over and over again. “Thank God you’re all right. I never would have forgiven myself if anything had happened to you.”
Michelangelo was lying on a bedroll in a large stone room that he didn’t recognize. Nuns tended to other men lying on the floor around him. Three men hurried by, carrying a corpse. “Where am I?”
“Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova.” Santa Maria Nuova was the oldest hospital in Florence. Aunt Cassandra had always treated the family’s illnesses with her herbal remedies. Only patients in mortal danger ended up in a hospital. “The apothecary was out of medicines and every priest was already engaged. I didn’t want you to die.” Lodovico wept softly.
“How long have I been here?” Michelangelo asked. His voice sounded raspy as a mule.
“Three weeks,” Buonarroto replied.
Three weeks. It was all a fractured dream. Flashes of stomach pain and shivering fevers. Several times, priests had drained his blood and performed ceremonies to exorcise demons. He had screamed. His father had wept. He’d had nightmares that, in a fit of lunacy, he’d smashed his David into a thousand pieces.
“Please, boy, don’t cry.” Lodovico wiped Michelangelo’s cheek. “I know I raised you to regard frugality as a virtue, but you cannot go to extremes. You must take care of yourself, figlio mio.” He lifted Michelangelo’s head and carefully wrapped it in a warm, dry blanket. “Above all else, you must protect your head. Keep it warm and don’t wash it too often. Allow yourself to be rubbed, but don’t wash. It is the only way to stay well. Economy is good, but misery is a vice displeasing to God.”
Michelangelo had heard his father give these same instructions hundreds of times. Keep your head warm. Don’t wash too often. Misery is offensive to God. For the first time, he didn’t hear disapproval in those orders. He heard a father’s love.
“When you’re well enough to leave here, maybe in a day or two,” Lodovico said gruffly, “you’ll come home with me.” He patted his son’s hand.
Tears of relief sprang to his eyes. After living in exile for over a year, he was finally going back to his family’s home. All it took was nearly working himself to death.
Over the next few days, Buonarroto came and went. He was constantly running back home to check on Giovansimone, who had concocted an irrational plan to protect the family from Borgia and his army if they invaded Florence: he and a band of rogue soldiers had moved into the Buonarroti house and were planning to fight off Borgia’s army with nothing but their fists and a few household utensils. While Buonarroto kept the militia away from neighborhood maidens and put out their careless kitchen fires, Lodovico never left Michelangelo’s side. He slept next to his son on the floor of the hospital, brought him water and, eventually, food.
“The progress is good,” Lodovico said one day, when Michelangelo was finally sitting up far enough to sip from a bowl of steaming soup. “But once you’re better, you cannot return to working so hard. Your body cannot take it. No one’s can.”
Michelangelo swallowed the hot broth. “I have to return to work, Father,” he said gently.
“You’re killing yourself. For what?”
“For my art.”
“Art,” Lodovico grumbled. “I saw your statue when we went to that shed to help you …” Lodovico took the bowl of soup from Michelangelo. “He’s naked.”
“Most great classical Roman statues were nudes, Father.”
“You’re not Roman!” Lodovico barked.
A nun shushed him.
“And you don’t live a thousand years ago,” he said, lowering his voice but losing none of the reproach. “Don’t you remember Savonarola damning us all to hell for images like that? We are a Catholic country.”
“God made man. Our bodies are a representation of Him. Why shouldn’t I celebrate it?”
“Don’t you think church leaders will be embarrassed by a giant naked man? It’s supposed to adorn the cathedral, in nome di Dio. Can’t you add some clothes?”
“Who will be embarrassed?” Michelangelo’s ire popped like boiling oil. “The Florentines for whom this statue is a great tribute? Or you?” He laid back down onto his pallet and closed his eyes. He was tired. They could resume the argument later.
But there would be no time to continue such bickering. The next night, Giovansimone and his militia accidentally set another kitchen fire. Since Buonarroto wasn’t home to put it out, the whole house went up in a blaze. Neighbors passed buckets of water to stop the fire from spreading to the rest of the city. Such an inferno could burn hotter than all of Savonarola’s bonfires combined and devour all the Botticellis, Donatellos, and Giottos housed in Florence’s walls. It could destroy the Palazzo della Signoria, the Ponte Vecchio, Il Duomo itself.
When Michelangelo, still wrapped in a blanket from the hospital, finally arrived in front of the smoldering house, a wintry mix of snow and sleet had just begun to fall. There was nothing left but a pile of blackened wood and half of one staircase. It was all gone. Michelangelo looked up to heaven and opened his mouth. The falling sleet, he thought, must be God’s frozen tears.
That night, the snow fell for hours, covering the streets and the charred remains of the house with a thick blanket of peaceful white. The neighbors went home. Buonarroto told him the rest of the family was going to Santa Croce to warm up and rest, but Michelangelo stayed in the street, staring at what used to be his house. The sculptor had always believed his art did no harm, that he was serving God and his countrymen. But his father might be right. His hands were blistered nubs, his eyesight was starting to blur, and he had almost died in the hospital. His family had lost their dignity, their fortune, and now their home. For what? A piece of stone? No wonder God was weeping.
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sp; By the time the sun began to rise, the yellow light glinting across the smooth patch of gleaming white snow, Michelangelo had made a decision. His father was right. His art was the devil. It had taken everything from him. It didn’t matter that his David was still unfinished, nor that the city had already talked of commissioning him to carve twelve more apostles once David was done. None of it mattered. It was time to walk away.
Leonardo
Ruminating on the idea of loss and renewal, Leonardo tidied up his desk. Had he actually considered completing the David if Michelangelo had remained ill or even died? Now that word had spread that the sculptor said he was no longer an artist, that he would rebuild his family’s house and not return to work, Leonardo felt no yearning to pick up a chisel and finish the job. Let the statue fade into the shadows of history. It would only leave more light to shine on his city hall masterpiece.
As he put away brushes, threw out old scrap paper, and shelved books, he wondered why things that housed life were so easily destroyed. Man by death; Michelangelo’s home by fire; Lisa by marriage. Leonardo saw the way the life drained out of her whenever her husband or his servants entered the room. In those moments, she was like a burned-down house.
He wanted to rebuild her. But how? Over the past few weeks, he hadn’t been able to spend any time alone with her. Her husband and servants were always in the room. The loss of her spirited conversation stung. But, in one way, the constant chaperoning had been a gift because it taught him about her hands.
When they were alone, she spoke with her hands, her gestures accentuating every word, her fingers fluttering like hummingbirds. When her husband, children, servants, or anyone else was in the room, those hands dropped into her lap like stones. But even when her hands were motionless, he could always sense them yearning to burst alive again. In those moments, her hands had potential.
Leonardo believed in potential like many men believed in God. Whether it was a rain cloud, a new color of paint, or a fresh idea for an invention, he measured things not by how they existed in that moment, but in what they had the potential to become. A perfect, completed state didn’t hold much interest for him. He liked it when things could grow and improve. That was why he rarely finished his pictures. When they weren’t done, they still had the potential to rise to greatness. Once he called them complete, they no longer had any potential to become. They were what they were.
He picked up the pieces of a half-constructed pair of wings strewn across the floor. Usually messes made him feel calm, but tonight, the clutter made his neck itch.
Lisa wanted to be seen. She wanted her husband to see her, the world to see her. It was hard for him to understand the desire. He was always on display. Tourists clamored to stand near him and shake his hand so they could return home with a story of meeting the great Master from Vinci. He often wished he could be invisible, so he could sit quietly and sketch people without them noticing. She was the opposite. She was desperate to be seen, and he was desperate to give her what she wanted.
He moved into the next room, where he was experimenting with his oils. Resin bubbled in pots over burners, while chemicals smoked in flasks. He wiped up some oil oozing out of a metal press. He loved the acidic smell of oils, their slippery feel, the way his fingerprints were captured in the paint after he blended a section with his thumb. He loved how oils dried as slowly as a pond at the bottom of a cave, leaving him weeks and months to rework lines and shading. He loved how oils could vary in thickness and texture, from a thick wall of pigment to the thinnest glaze. He loved how oil was so translucent; he could apply thin layers of paint, one on top of another, but leave the earlier layers still visible underneath. The effect made clothing shimmer like real fabric, skin seem to glow from within, and shadows vibrate with hints of buried color. Mainly, he loved how he could rid his paintings of all harsh lines, using brushes and fingertips to blur every boundary. By using oils, he could make light evaporate like smoke into darkness.
For every one of his oil paintings, he developed a special array of tones. The lights would be bright and airy, the darks as rich as velvet. For Lisa’s portrait, he was experimenting with mustard seeds, cypress needles, walnuts, gum of juniper trees, ashes from his kitchen fire, his own hair and fingernails, dead ants, ground-up human bone, and fish scales. Some experiments worked, some did not, but his palette of colors was growing.
Lisa wanted to be seen. The thought rolled through his mind like a pebble tumbling down rapids. An idea was about to emerge, but he couldn’t quite see it through the muddy water. What was it?
He straightened up a corner full of a small furnace, pots, and glass beakers. He really should throw some of these things out. He didn’t need them all. He needed to simplify and—
His mind clicked into place like a peg sliding into a groove. Simplicity was the ultimate sophistication, the path to true complexity. That was it. The painting started to emerge in his mind the way stars appeared in the heavens at dusk.
Leonardo crossed to the other side of the studio in two long steps and rifled through a stack of wood. He had been collecting pieces for several weeks, hoping one might strike him as the proper base for the portrait. Choosing the right board was an important step. Pick the wrong piece and the entire painting could be ruined. The first pieces were too large. He wanted something smaller. A person should not be able to glance at this portrait from down the hall and walk away. It needed to draw the viewer in.
His fingers landed on a piece of poplar wood the size of a small window. Poplar was the most common type of wood for a panel picture. High quality, strong, durable. Other woods might be more unique, but poplar had potential. This piece was light in color with a slight golden tint. The finish was smooth, without a bump or blemish, but there was a subtle, yet inconsistent grain. It was a little unexpected. He propped the wood on his easel. Moonlight shone through a window and cast a silvery-blue glow across the board. It gleamed. He ran his fingers across the surface. His assistants had sanded it down as smooth as a mirror.
All portraits of women were essentially symbolic representations of the Virgin Mary. Every Italian woman yearned to be compared to the Holy Mother. Leonardo would adhere to this trope, but he would also make this portrait different from any other. This painting would be simple. No distracting objects or costly materials. No reams of silk, jewelry, or tassels. No ostentatious fireplace or horrendous gold-plated harpsichords, and certainly no red silk gown or portrait of her husband looming over her shoulder. She would not hold emblems of her father’s family or her husband’s success. There would be no physical symbols to identify her. It would be only her in the frame. Her eyes. Her hair. Her lips. The lady, in her simple, mysterious glory.
Before he could begin painting, he had to seal the wood. He mixed a batch of primer, made out of rabbit-skin glue and brown chalk, but instead of leaving the primer a plain dark brown, he split the gesso into two buckets. To one bucket he added a touch of blue paint; to the other a tinge of red. He would use the blue-tinted primer for the top half of the panel, to give a subtle suggestion of cool inaccessibility around Lisa’s head. But for the bottom, where her body dominated, Leonardo would switch to the red. He needed a hint of heat.
He swept the blue primer on first and then brushed the red on the bottom. He could already sense her spirit seeping into the wood grain.
As he waited for the primer to dry, he sketched out the portrait that was now clear in his mind. Lisa sat in a chair in front of a blank background. She wore a gown of dark silk and her curling hair cascaded down around her shoulders. To evoke a sense of movement, Leonardo turned her torso to the right, her head forward, eyes swiveling to the left as though seeing someone enter the room. The portrait was three-quarters in length, stretching all the way down to capture the lady’s hands resting on the arm of her chair.
He picked out the smallest brush he owned and yanked out a few bristles to make it even finer. He wanted to use a brush so small that his strokes would be imperceptible. He didn�
��t want anyone to focus on him. People could think about him when they viewed his Last Supper or his Madonna of the Rocks or the giant fresco waiting to emerge inside city hall, but not when they looked at Lisa. This time, he wanted to disappear into the background. He wanted the world to focus on her.
1504
Florence
Michelangelo
Winter
In early January, word reached Florence that Piero de’ Medici had died in battle fighting for the French. Florentines celebrated. Their longtime enemy, the snake that had coiled around their throat for years, was finally gone. However, the celebration did not last for long. Now that Piero was dead, every Medici son, brother, cousin, and uncle schemed to retake the city in Piero’s name. The threat had not died; it had multiplied.
Michelangelo swung his hammer as hard as he could. The nail drove easily into the board. As he breathed in sawdust, he pounded in a second nail just as quickly, then a third and fourth. He grabbed another piece of timber, laid it next to the other board, and began nailing it in, too. At this pace, he alone could finish the kitchen floor in two days. If the whole family worked as fast as he did, they could complete the entire house in a month.
He looked up. On the other side of the room, near where the fireplace used to be, his father and uncle swung their hammers clumsily. They weren’t used to doing manual labor; they spent more time chatting and drinking wine than they did working. At their rate, the job wouldn’t be finished until summer. Neither Giovansimone nor Buonarroto were there to help. No one had seen Giovani since after the fire, and Buonarroto had taken a job down at Leonardo’s Arno diversion project. He’d given up on the dream of financing his own shop. Maria’s father was making her meet with suitors; she would be engaged to a proper gentleman by the end of the year.
Michelangelo pounded in another nail. His fingertips burned with cold. He never felt warm these days. The house was open to the sky; there were no walls or roof. Every night, the family slept in the chilly stone basement of the Basilica of Santa Croce, with other homeless families, until they could finish construction.
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