by Mary Hoffman
‘Uh-oh!’ said my brother. ‘Then you have made a very dangerous enemy indeed!’
Chapter Four
Followers of the Friar
The wax model had done its job and in August it got my brother his commission from the Operai for the marble, but it wasn’t enough to act as a pattern for the sculpture, which he had two years to make. Besides, the wax was beginning to melt in the late summer heat, so Angelo made a cast of it in two halves and filled them with gesso. He pounded some good marble from Volterra into chips and mixed up such a fine plaster that when he stuck the two halves together and broke the cast after the plaster had dried, the figure shone almost like a finished statue.
He grunted with satisfaction as he tidied up the gesso model with a fine chisel.
‘It’s me,’ I said, staring at the plaster model. I remembered all those evenings – the awkward position I had to maintain till my muscles ached. I could see them straining in the chest and abdomen of the little model.
‘The left leg’s not right,’ he said, frowning. ‘I’ll never get that out of the block.’
‘I think I must have got it wrong when we gave up the cauliflowers while you were sketching.’
‘Not your fault,’ he said absently. He was never interested in what had caused problems, only in how to solve them.
It was much more embarrassing looking at my nude self in the round than it was seeing his sketches. And he had made such an elaborate decorative pattern of my pubic hair! It matched the curls on my head.
Looking at the model was like seeing my life from the outside and I didn’t like how it made me feel.
It was the day after I had first seen Altobiondi and I was feeling frustrated. It was all right as long as I was wielding my tools in the bottega but whenever I had idle time I found my fists clenching. I spent whole hours wanting to hit someone.
Angelo had built a workshop now in the Opera, the walls set up around the block and roofed over, so that he could work undisturbed. The old ‘David’ block was now propped at an angle, ready for my brother to start carving but the new model was being built up on a wooden trestle, standing upright. My brother was looking at the model as intently as I was – and back and forth between it and the big old marble block. It was hard to believe that he would make anything like as powerful a figure out of that botched block as he had created in gesso.
I opened and closed my fists thinking that I felt more like a botched block than the athletic and well-muscled man my brother had shown in the model. Was the real me somewhere inside that hulking ugly lump of marble? If only I could be as without emotion as the stone.
There was no getting any conversation out of Angelo while he was in this concentrated mood so I wandered away from his workshop with another hour left before I needed to go back to work. Most workmen found somewhere to sleep after their midday meal but I was young and fizzing with pent-up energy.
I hadn’t seen Clarice for over a week and I’m sorry to say I was probably suffering from pent-up lust as well. You forget about these things when you are as old as I am now but I was a healthy eighteen-year-old man, who had been satisfying his desires – and hers – daily for weeks so it was hardly surprising I was frustrated.
I drifted listlessly round the cathedral. There was a group of young men dressed in black on the steps talking animatedly. My ears pricked up. Were these piagnoni, the followers of Savonarola? One of them was looking directly at me, his gaze burning into me.
He detached himself from the group and came over to me.
‘You’re a friend of the sculptor, aren’t you?’
I nearly laughed. There were so many sculptors in Florence that was like asking me if I knew any bakers. But I knew who was meant.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘If you mean Michelangelo. I have known him all my life.’ I was proud that this was true but I wasn’t going to say he was my brother till I knew who this was and why he wanted to know.
‘So where does he stand?’ asked the man in black. He was shorter than me but still reasonably tall and well-made.
I bit back a facetious reply.
‘He means whose side is he on?’ said another man from the group, smaller, with fair hair.
‘Who wants to know?’ I asked.
‘We know he was taken up by the Medici,’ said the first man. ‘That sensualist and libertine Lorenzo was his patron.’
‘That is no secret,’ I said. Though the way my brother talked about Lorenzo had made him seem of a quite different character.
‘But what about now?’ said the little fair one. ‘Is he still in contact with the family?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘He was disappointed in Piero.’
This seemed to be a good answer. The men exchanged smiles.
‘So he is for the Republic?’ asked the first man.
‘Yes,’ I said. It didn’t seem to me that there was any harm in agreeing to that. ‘Can I go now?’
‘What about you?’ said the little one. He was looking up at me unafraid, though I towered over him. I wondered if he was armed. It was broad daylight and I wasn’t really scared of being attacked, even though there were six or seven of them.
‘What about me?’ I hedged.
‘Whom do you support? Are you a Medici man?’
‘I am a republican,’ I said.
They seemed to relax and the taller one clapped me on the arm.
‘Good fellow!’ he said. ‘We could use muscles like yours. Come and meet the others.’
And that was how I became a follower of Savonarola, even though I had never seen him and he had been dead three years.
The first of the black-clad young men who had spoken to me was Daniele – the frateschi did not use surnames. And Daniele told me that if I wanted to be one of them I had to use the more respectful term for the followers of the friar Savonarola. His small fair friend was Gianbattista, who invited me to his house up near the San Marco monastery that evening. Since I had nothing better to do, I went. There I met Paolo, a Dominican friar who had known Savonarola in person, and brothers called Giulio and Donato, who were alike as twins but with two years between them.
‘This is Gabriele del Lauro,’ said Daniele, introducing me to them one by one, and then Gianbattista poured me some wine and before I knew it I was one of the group.
You’d better know what side you are on, my brother had told me. Now it seemed I was on the side not just of the Republic but people who were violently opposed to the de’ Medici and plotting to make sure that family never returned to the city.
But they didn’t discuss plots in any detail that night. They just drank and talked like any other group of young men. The only difference was the presence of a religious in their midst, the Dominican, Fra Paolo, though that didn’t seem to restrain the others. Fra Paolo was the only one there who had known Savonarola personally but the others had all been present when the Friar had been executed three years before.
‘It was horrible,’ said Gianbattista, putting a hand to his eyes as if he could see the scene right in front of him. ‘They had tortured him for weeks. Then they left him a month and tortured him again. He knew what to expect the second time and that made his suffering all the worse.’
I felt a ghoulish interest in hearing an eyewitness account of the execution. Even in Settignano we knew about the Mad Monk and his doings in the city. He was a powerful preacher – Angelo had told me that – and the people who heard him preach in the great cathedral were swayed by what he thundered out to them from the pulpit.
These sermons and Savonarola’s ugly death were as fresh to my new friends as if they had happened yesterday.
‘They hanged him and two other friars,’ said Daniele.
‘I thought he had been burned,’ I said. That’s what we’d been told in Settignano.
‘That was afterwards,’ said Gianbattista. ‘As soon as the three men stopped twitching, the fire was lit under them – so that there should be no trace left of their bodies.’
‘But some women did get a few and the guards caught them and smashed the vases they had put them in,’ added his brother Giulio.
They painted such a vivid picture of the scene as the evening wore on that I felt in the end as if I had been there myself – the huge crowds of Savonarola’s enemies and supporters, the dangling men, the smell of scorched flesh. Only Fra Paolo said little, but when he did speak it was clear that the bitterness was as strong in him as in the younger men.
‘They punished us up at San Marco too,’ he said. ‘They took away our bell – the Weeping Lady, La Piagnone, and said we couldn’t have her back for fifty years. Fifty years! Which of us will be alive in 1548?’
I didn’t know then that I would be. I wonder if San Marco ever got its bell back? I suppose I’ll never find out now. And Fra Paolo must be long dead. Not many in that room that night would live even another ten years but I didn’t know that then.
I staggered back to Lodovico’s house well pleased with my new friends. I was rather too full of drink and not full enough of food and I had a terrible head the next morning. It took several hours of hard work and frequent splashing of my head under the water-pump before my brain cleared. And then I thought, who were the ‘they’ that killed the man my friends wanted me to accept as my dead leader?
It couldn’t have been the Medici – Piero had been chased out four years earlier, after my brother went to Rome. Florence had become a Republic then so it must have been republicans who killed Savonarola. But I was a republican and so was my brother – as were the frateschi who were so keen to recruit me to their cause.
Did I say my head was clear? The more the effects of the wine wore off the more I realised I was still a babe in arms as far as Florentine politics were concerned. And I wondered if I had got in with the wrong lot.
That day I saw Clarice again. She was coming out of the cathedral, arm in arm with Antonello de’ Altobiondi and they were attended by a group of fashionably dressed friends. Clarice had flowers in her hair and was wearing a gown of gold brocade. She had been getting married.
As the party swept past me near the Baptistery, Altobiondi looked through me as he had done before but Clarice caught my eye. Did I imagine her glance of sympathy? And was I the only one who could detect the swelling under her gold sash?
I wondered if she would possibly get away with her deceit of her new husband, but a feeling of despair washed over me. How could any man withstand the trickery and guile of women? She would bamboozle him about dates and the early arrival of the baby that was mine. And she had probably been sleeping with him since accepting his proposal. That thought did not console me.
Sick at heart, I went to see my brother.
Just for once he was not working; he was sitting gazing at the block, but when he saw my face he snapped out of his meditation and jumped up.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.
‘I’ve just seen Clarice and her new husband,’ I managed to say.
‘Well, you knew it was going to happen,’ he said.
‘But she’s carrying my child,’ I said. I couldn’t keep the burden of it to myself any longer.
My brother gave a great breath out, making a noise like a bellows. Then he put his hand, all dusty as usual, on my arm.
‘Gabriele,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry.’ He paused for a long while, looking into my eyes. ‘Can I give you some advice?’
He had never offered to do so before. I was surprised and nodded. I could feel tears building up behind my eyelids and I didn’t want to weep, not in front of my brother.
‘It’s not a good idea to waste your energy on physical love,’ he said eventually. ‘It saps your strength and distracts you from your purpose.’
‘That’s all very well for you,’ I said and I could hear myself sounding truculent, like a child. ‘You have a purpose – you’re a great artist. What do I have to save my strength for? I’m just a stonecutter.’
I felt the full force of this truth overwhelm me even as I said it. What was my purpose in life?
‘Then marry,’ said my brother. ‘Find a nice healthy girl and settle down.’
I thought of Rosalia waiting for me back in Settignano. How long would she wait? And was I supposed to live like a monk until I returned home? I was a fratesco in name only.
‘You see,’ said my brother. ‘All this has just made you unhappy.’
‘Do you follow your own advice, brother?’ I dared to ask.
He frowned and I wondered if I had gone too far and roused his famous temper. But he did give me my answer.
‘A long time ago,’ he said, ‘I decided there was too much pain in love. Since then I’ve put everything I feel into my work.’
I could see he was telling the truth; something very bad must have happened to him at some time in the past, something he wouldn’t have told his family in Settignano or Florence.
‘So you will not do what you advise me and take a wife?’
He gave me a very strange look then, half frown and half grin.
‘No, Gabriele, I shall not take a wife.’
I had reason to think of this conversation many times in the coming years. But for now I was comforted to know that he too had been unhappy in love. I sat and ate my lunch with him in silence but it was a companionable silence. Gradually, the ache I had been feeling round my heart started to subside.
I didn’t blame Clarice for her decision; it was just the way she had made it without me. And I had never before experienced physical jealousy the way I did towards her new husband. Now I felt as if I were growing up: no longer the baby of the family but a man – with a man’s problems. I decided to do my best to forget about Clarice and to concentrate on my work and save the money to go home and marry Rosalia – if she’d still have me.
To keep my mind off women, I spent more and more of my evenings with Daniele and the other frateschi. We usually met at Gianbattista’s house near San Marco and as time went by I met more of their associates. After that first night, the wine was brought by a young woman, who turned out to be Gianbattista’s sister. I wondered why she would demean herself to wait on a group of young men but gradually I learned that she had been a follower of Savonarola’s too.
‘We like to keep our meetings secret,’ Gianbattista told me. ‘It’s better not to have servants gossiping about us. And we can trust Simonetta – she is one of us.’
Simonetta was as different from Clarice as you could imagine. She kept her luxuriant dark hair fiercely constrained in the plainest of snoods and wore dark austere dresses with no ornament. But she was a beauty for all that. Nothing could conceal her luminous pale skin and her huge dark eyes. I shouldn’t have noticed, with my new decision to avoid women, but I did.
I was noticing altogether too much. It was clear from the house they lived in that Gianbattista and Simonetta were from a noble family but I never saw their parents or learned their surname. But I did wonder what they and their friends expected of me; I was the only working man among them.
All the men wore black, as I’d noticed before, and they wore their hair cut short. I stood out among them in my working clothes with my unruly curls unshorn. But they didn’t ask me to change how I looked.
‘We could use muscles like yours,’ Daniele had said at our first meeting and it seemed that was what they prized – my youth and strength.
It was weeks before I felt comfortable enough to ask what had bothered me after that first meeting.
‘Who were the people who got rid of your leader? I thought the city was republican by then so why would the government be against someone who spoke out against the Medici?’
‘You have much to learn,’ said Fra Paolo sternly.
But Gianbattista defended my ignorance.
‘We are so sensitive to all the factions here in Florence,�
�� he said. ‘But you can’t expect a country boy to know about that. His question is quite reasonable. And if you are to be one of us, Gabriele, we need to answer you.’
‘Savonarola had angered the Pope by his preaching,’ said Daniele. ‘His Holiness thought our leader had too much power in the city. And there were citizens who were against him too. Not just the arrabbiati, but all those who loved luxury and display.’
‘The compagnacci was what they were called!’ said Gianbattista. ‘It means “rude companions”. They were young men like us, of noble birth, who conspired against him. The ones who call de’ Altobiondi their leader.’
Altobiondi again!
‘And they are republicans?’ I asked, trying to remember my conversation with Lodovico but still confused.
‘No, they are pro-Medici all right,’ said Daniele. ‘They live lives of luxury and indulge themselves in the dining room and the bedchamber. They didn’t want to give up their velvets and laces and perfumes and rich food.’
‘You can tell them by their purple and green livery,’ said Donato. ‘They have adopted the heraldic colours of the Altobiondi family to show their allegiance.’
As I had thought before, if everyone was going to show what they believed by wearing distinctive colours, I would be all right! I wondered if I’d have to start wearing pure black.
Chapter Five
The Furious Ones
In September I had my first birthday ever away from home. There wasn’t a great deal of fuss but I was sure that being nineteen years old meant I was much more grown up than when I was a mere boy of eighteen.
My brother had made the first cut in the block of marble in the middle of the month. This was a significant moment. Before that, all he had done was knock off a sort of lump in the region of where the Giant’s chest would be.
‘Some sort of knot or clasp on the shepherd’s cloak, probably,’ he said. When it came to sculpture, he had a fine disdain for other people’s ideas.
But now he had stopped squaring and walking round the model roughing out the outline with charcoal on the stone, and was really sculpting, in a hail of marble chips. I was still the only one allowed into his improvised workshop and that made me proud. Though there was not much to see yet.