Oil and Marble

by Stephanie Storey

  If the Medici were in charge, some said, this never would have happened. People were hungry and cold, unable to live in their flooded homes. Florentines were accustomed to floods; minor ones happened almost every year, but this deluge had carried mud and debris far into the city. Water marks rose as tall as men, and mold had already begun to sprout. Rugs, furniture, clothing were ruined. The people had lost so much. That kind of bereavement was a boulder that would take years to uncover and discard.

  Late nights, Michelangelo and Buonarroto had taken to keeping each other company after nightmares. They sat in front of a crackling fire in their father’s rebuilt kitchen and passed a carafe of watered-down wine. “Tell me again what happened when the rains came,” Michelangelo said. Before the flood, Buonarroto had said the levees were as fortified as the city walls. Only moments before the dam broke, the men had been adding more rocks and sandbags to further strengthen them. There must have been a weakness, but no one knew where. Leonardo had not been seen since the flood, so no one could ask him what he thought had gone wrong.

  “The water pushed and pushed, and the levees didn’t budge. Not one hair. But then …” Buonarroto’s voice drifted off as he stared into the fire. “Suddenly, it all gave way. Faster than …” He took a long slug of wine. “Faster than Father’s temper flares when you mention marble,” he said, forcing a laugh.

  Michelangelo made Buonarroto tell the whole story twice more, starting with his first days on the job and going all the way through those dark moments on the broken levees. But eventually, the young man’s eyelids drooped and stayed closed so long that Michelangelo knew it was time to return his brother to bed.

  But a grain of sand was still rolling around in Michelangelo’s mind.

  The levee had been secure. Perfectly stable. Immovable. Until it wasn’t.

  Strength and stability were something to aspire to, weren’t they? Michelangelo was strong. Although not always the most stable, he admitted, thinking of that night when he was hallucinating as his family carried him to the hospital. But that was only because the pressure had risen too high. The pressure to perform, pressure to finish, pressure to be a master. The pressure had built and built, without any release, until he cracked. Michelangelo had been immovable. Until he wasn’t.

  And with that, a connection sparked across his mind like a bolt of lightning connects heaven to the earth. Fumbling out of bed, he pulled work boots over bare feet and slipped a wool coat over his nightshirt, and then snuck out of the house and sprinted the whole way to the cathedral.

  In the pre-dawn light, David, still hidden under his protective tarp, towered on his transport in the same place they had left him when the rains began. A vandal had snuck into the workshop and scrawled the Medici coat of arms on David’s tarp. Soderini hoped the ground would be dry enough to try again in a week, so they could silence the growing pro-Medici faction.

  Michelangelo circled the transport, studying the taut ropes, the massive central pole, the thick truck bed. It was stable. Strong. Immovable. Until one day, it wouldn’t be.

  Marble was like that, too. It was a hearty rock that could stand for the ages, and yet, with one wrong knock of a hammer or one faulty bump in the road, it could shatter. Same with life. When Michelangelo tried to stay strong, clenching his jaw and bracing against shock, setbacks rattled his mind and his gut; but if he relaxed, he moved like an undulating wave, rising and falling across the sea. It was like his body, Michelangelo thought, jumping up and down. If he landed straight-legged, his bones shook, but if he bent his knees, he came down gentle as a feather.

  Michelangelo had been approaching the move all wrong. Now he saw the way, and he had Leonardo’s failure at the Arno to thank for the revelation. They shouldn’t be trying to stabilize David; they should be trying to destabilize him.

  It was time to give David knees.

  Leonardo

  “Speak to me!” Leonardo cried, and sat up straight. His heart was pounding, his linen shirt soaked with sweat. Where was he? His eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness. He was lying in his own bed in his own cluttered studio.

  He had been having that nightmare again. Ever since the flood, he’d had the same dream every night. In it, Michelangelo was always raging at the base of Il Duomo, screaming at the dome, demanding that it say something to him, but then, Michelangelo morphed into Lisa, and Leonardo began pleading with her to speak to him. But she wouldn’t. Or couldn’t. She was trying to tell him something. Something important. Dimmi, dimmi, dimmi, Leonardo begged, but the Arno burst over its banks, and a wall of water washed her away.

  He swung his feet out of bed and dropped them onto the cold stone floor. His old, bony knees creaked and popped. His feet tingled. He couldn’t catch his breath. He had a dreadful feeling he was dying.

  Machiavelli assured Leonardo the flood wasn’t his fault. It was bad luck, the worst storm Florence had seen in a century. Besides, history wouldn’t remember the Arno diversion catastrophe as Leonardo da Vinci’s project. Yes, he had designed it, but he wasn’t out there directing the men, giving day-to-day orders, making sure the site was safe. He was hardly even involved, he said. Gonfaloniere Piero Soderini took another tack. He said it must be God’s will that things should end this way, and they should all see it as part of a greater scheme whose purpose was still unknown. The families of the dead didn’t seem to blame Leonardo either. They stopped Salaì in the streets to relay messages of support. They thanked the master for trying to secure Florence’s borders and keep the republic free. Leonardo da Vinci was not the enemy. The real enemies were the French, the Medici, the Pisans.

  Leonardo wanted to believe Salaì more than he actually did. Feet on the cold floor, his heartbeat still thumping madly after the nightmare, he caught a glimpse of his face in a looking glass. His graying hair was long and greasy. He had a scruffy beard. He hadn’t shaved in weeks. He hadn’t bathed either. He no longer cared about his appearance.

  Wrapping a quilt around his shivering body, he got up, shuffled across the room, and settled on a stool in front of Lisa’s portrait. He spent all of his waking hours working on that picture now. He didn’t touch the Battle of Anghiari design or fiddle with the final details of his latest set of flying wings anymore. The only thing that gave him comfort was painting her.

  He had not seen her since before the flood. He picked up a leather strap with a magnifying glass attached and strapped it around his head. He had rigged up the contraption to get a closer look at the picture while keeping his hands free to paint. He dipped a thin brush into green pigment and then delicately added a speck to a distant rocky outcropping.

  After the flood, Leonardo had transformed the blank background behind Lisa into a vast landscape tilted strangely on its axis. While Lisa was depicted straight on, as though sitting directly in front of the viewer, the background was shown from above, as though from the eyes of a bird. Even though viewers would not know why, the differing points of view would make people feel off-kilter, just as he felt when he looked at Lisa. She and nature were both wild, untamed, ungraspable. So he melded the lady to the landscape, blending the vegetation in with her hair, rolling the hills to mimic her curves, winding the river around to twist into her scarf. The landscape wasn’t a real place or time, but an amalgamation of his memories, a countryside that would never burn or flood, because it only existed in his mind. The background was just like Lisa: beautiful, bewitching, and mysterious.

  He had already rendered her facial features precisely: the shape of her eyes, the turn of her cheek, the silky curve of her lips. Usually, such a realistic representation of a subject would have satisfied him, but this time, he yearned to go further. He didn’t want to only capture the lady’s physical features or the glint in her eye or even her energy in a gesture or movement. No, he wanted to know the lady, as fully as anyone, and communicate her whole person to the world. He wanted to capture her soul.

  But Lisa was inscrutable, especially when her husband was watching. How was he su
pposed to recreate her spirit in paint, when he hadn’t even felt it with his own senses?

  “Master?” Salaì’s voice was soft as a leaf on a breeze. He’d probably been standing there for some time, waiting for Leonardo to take a break. “You received a letter.” The young man dropped the note onto his lap, then slipped silently back out of the studio.

  A letter? What time was it? He looked out the window. The sun was up. It looked to be midmorning. He had been painting for hours.

  Leonardo set down his brush. He picked up the letter and turned it over to find his name scrawled across the front. He recognized the handwriting immediately. The letter was from that damned notary. It was probably a summons holding him legally accountable for all the flood damages and deaths. Leonardo dropped the unopened letter onto the floor and turned back to the painting. He daubed a touch of black onto his brush, leaned in closer, and carefully added a shadow under one of the arched supports of a tiny bridge. When he was a child, he had walked across a bridge just like it once. It had been a bright, sun-drenched day in the Tuscan countryside. The air smelled of honeysuckle and fresh basil. He had been about five years old. He was running and laughing. He was with his father.

  He shook his head and forced the memory out of his mind. The bridge wasn’t real, he told himself. He had imagined it. And maybe, just maybe, the flood was only a dream, too.

  Eighty men dead. He pulled his shaking hand away from the picture. No need to destroy the portrait, too.

  Bending down, he picked up the notary’s letter. Then, he got up from his stool, lumbered across the room with his quilt dragging behind, and sank down at his desk. He flipped the letter over and over again, and then placed the unopened note on his desk. He took out a fresh sheet of paper, a duck-feather quill, and well of ink.

  Madonna Lisa del Giocondo, he began. He did not know what her response would be, but unless he asked he would never know. He finished and signed the letter, Distinti saluti, Leonardo da Vinci, then entrusted its delivery to Salaì, with clear instructions that no one should know of its existence except the lady herself.

  Michelangelo

  May 1504. Florence

  “Are we ready to release him?” Giuliano da Sangallo called.

  Forty men were using ropes and pulleys to lower the statue, still covered by a tarp, onto a new transport: a simple, flat wooden platform lying across fourteen massive greased log rollers. Bolted to the top of the platform was a strong wooden framework from which David would be suspended using a series of ropes. Standing upright, the statue would ride along in a rope swing.

  Michelangelo checked the wooden framework and ropes one last time, and then said, “Okay. Let go.”

  The men released the statue. As David sank into the rope swing, the wooden framework groaned and bowed under the statue’s enormous weight. There was a creak. Then a pop. Michelangelo wanted to close his eyes; he couldn’t handle watching the device break and drop his marble to the hard ground below. But he couldn’t look away, either. He couldn’t even blink.

  The wood settled into silence.

  David, standing in his hammock, swayed gently in the wind.

  “It worked!” Granacci called with a tinge of surprise. Sangallo laughed.

  Michelangelo exhaled. You’re ready to march into battle, he said silently to the stone.

  As workers shook hands and slapped each other on the back, Michelangelo called, “Andiamo,” and the men let out a happy roar. The move could now begin.

  As the men pushed the platform forward, two workers removed the rear roller and carried it to the front. The group pushed the platform forward again, releasing another log out the back. At this pace, what was an easy ten-minute stroll from cathedral to city hall would take the men days. But as David crawled forward, Michelangelo could see that the contraption was working. As the transport wobbled over the uneven dirt of the cathedral workshop, David swayed gently in his swing, impervious to the jostling.

  A crowd hung over the workshop fence to watch the move. Shopkeepers, maids, farmers, wives, children, all chanted and sang. This was the happiest Michelangelo had seen his fellow Florentines since the flood.

  But just as David was about to roll off cathedral land and into the streets beyond, the euphoria ended.

  “Traditore!” a voice yelled from the back of the crowd, and a bottle hurtled over the workshop fence. It landed at David’s feet and shattered. As spectators screamed and ducked, the voice rang out, “Viva i Medici!”

  Frightened murmurs rumbled through the crowd. Medici, Medici, Medici.

  Michelangelo had been a Medici family favorite when he was young, and now Medici supporters were attacking him and his art. The world was upside down. He leapt onto David’s platform and scanned the crowd, searching for the vandal. “You want to fight?” Michelangelo called. “Step up and fight me face to face.”

  No one stepped forward. As Granacci and Sangallo picked up the broken glass, a nervous pall fell over the crowd.

  “Perhaps we should call it a day,” Sangallo said, clearly shaken. Behind him, some of the workmen nodded.

  “Why?” Michelangelo asked. David hadn’t even left cathedral grounds, and the men were already ready to quit? “The move just started. Why would we stop?”

  “Michel, we’ve made a lot of progress today. The statue is secure in his swing. The transport is clearly a success, but …” Granacci climbed up onto the transport and cupped his hand around Michelangelo’s neck. He had done the same thing since they were young, whenever they faced difficult times. “David was attacked. Let’s stop. Just for tonight.”

  “Because one cowardly savage threw one lousy bottle?” Michelangelo’s pulse thumped in his temple.

  “Figlio mio,” Soderini said gently. “They may be right. As long as David is on cathedral land, people will be less likely to attack him and risk the wrath of God, but once he has crossed out of the workshop, off holy land, and into the streets beyond …”

  “This bottle,” Michelangelo said, taking a shard of broken glass from Granacci, “proves that David is not safe here, either.”

  “But at least here, we can lock the gate all night,” Giuseppe Vitelli offered. They had taken down the archway to allow David to pass safely out of the workshop, but had left the gate in place to protect the workshop tools.

  Soderini and Granacci nodded.

  “All right. Say he is safe here tonight. So what?” He couldn’t believe they were ready to give up and walk away. Were they really so afraid? “What about tomorrow? And the next day, and the next? And what about when David stands on his pedestal in front of city hall? What about then? You think God will turn His back on David simply because the statue no longer stands on church soil? You think my fellow Florentines will not protect him?” As he spoke, men passed his words to those behind them. The speech trickled through the crowd like a sermon. He hoped the vandals were still in the crowd, listening. “If Florence cannot keep him safe there,” he said, pointing to the other side of the workshop’s fence, “then Florence cannot keep him safe at all, and he is doomed to be destroyed. And if he is already doomed, then I might as well smash him myself.” He pulled his heavy metal hammer out of his satchel. “I’d rather take his life than let someone else.”

  “Get a hold of yourself, boy,” Giuseppe Vitelli said.

  “Michel. Stop.” Granacci’s tone said he knew his friend was bluffing.

  “Today is the day David’s journey begins.” Michelangelo tossed his hammer into the dirt. “Let him face his battles. Let him rise to the occasion. We move. Now. Andiamo.”

  The men worked for another four hours, rolling the statue out of the cathedral workshop and maneuvering it around its first turn. But as the sun began to set, Michelangelo called work to an end. As much as he wished they could keep moving until the journey was complete, he knew that would be foolish. Everyone was tired, and tired men make mistakes. Even a tiny mistake could lead to David’s destruction.

  But as the others trekked home,
Michelangelo couldn’t bring himself to leave.

  “Andiamo, mi amico,” Granacci said with a tired smile.

  “What if Soderini is right? What if David isn’t safe out here?” The shadowy streets suddenly seemed more menacing than a bad neighborhood in Rome, the ones where not even the prostitutes and pickpockets ventured. “I should stay,” Michelangelo said. “It’s a nice spring night, no sign of rain.”

  “David will be fine. And you need your rest.”

  “I’m too anxious to sleep, anyway.”

  Granacci put both hands on his shoulders. “You and your health are necessary for the success of this move. Go home. Eat. Get some sleep.”

  “I can’t leave him alone.”

  Granacci sighed. “D’accordo. I’ll stay.”

  “What?”

  “You need your rest. I’ll stay.”

  “But you’re exhausted, too.”

  “You’re more important, caro amico.” Granacci stepped up onto the wooden platform and settled at the foot of the rope swing. Michelangelo started to protest, but Granacci cut him off. “Don’t bother arguing.” Granacci took off his jacket and rolled it up to use it as a pillow. “When we were children, do you think I stole your drawings, gave them to Ghirlandaio, and forced him to take you on as an apprentice, all because I didn’t believe in you? This is your moment to prove that I was right. Go home. Sleep. If not for you, then for David.”

  Michelangelo didn’t want to leave David behind. But Granacci would be there to protect him. “Keep an eye on him.”

  “I’ll guard him with my life.”

  Leonardo

  The door closed softly behind her. She raised her head and lowered the hood of her midnight blue cape. He was standing in the center of Florence’s Baptistery, an octagonal building with no interior walls or columns; it was open space. Leonardo and Lisa were alone with no place to hide.

  He hadn’t known how she would respond to his letter requesting a private meeting in the Baptistery. He had been elated when she wrote back to agree, then nervous when she sent a follow-up note that morning saying it must be that night. Her husband would be watching Michelangelo’s giant begin its move, and then be out carousing with other merchants. Machiavelli borrowed a key to the Baptistery and gave it to Leonardo, who used it to sneak in after the priests had locked up for the night. Before Lisa arrived, he’d lit a few candles to supplement the moonlight shining through the oculus in the ceiling.