by Mary Hoffman
‘Every cell has a painting by the master we call our brother – Fra Angelico – or one of his followers,’ Lionardo told me, seeing the respect I had for art. ‘Come in and see this one. It is thought to be one of the best.’
There was scarcely room for three people to crowd into that cell but there was Our Lord, almost floating on the wall. It was the first meeting with Mary Magdalene after the Resurrection and He was putting out a warning hand for her not to touch Him. The thought struck me that Jesus in this painting was like a newly hatched butterfly, still damp and weak, not yet ready to spend His brief remaining lifespan on the earth. I hoped this thought wasn’t blasphemy.
‘Come down to the Refectory,’ said Lionardo. ‘There is more room there.’
There was another huge fresco on the wall of the Refectory, a Last Supper with all sorts of miraculous details like a peacock and a cat. I thought it was wonderful but Angelo was a bit dismissive.
‘My old master painted that,’ he said. ‘Ghirlandaio. My father apprenticed me to him but I got out of it.’
‘I remember the scenes about that,’ said Lionardo. ‘You always knew your own mind even as a ten-year-old.’
‘My father did not want me to be a sculptor,’ said Angelo. ‘But once Lorenzo took an interest in me and invited me into his own house, even Father could not object.’
‘So you were going to be a painter?’ I had not known that.
‘Not much of a one,’ said Angelo. ‘I have always preferred stone.’
We drank a cup of cool wine at the long scrubbed table and then walked in the cloisters with Fra Lionardo. After a while, I plucked up courage to ask him if he knew Fra Paolo. He nodded.
‘He was a devoted follower of our martyred leader,’ he said. ‘How do you know him?’
‘Yes, how do you know him, Gabriele?’ asked Angelo.
‘He is a friend of those people we passed in the street,’ I said, as if this explained anything. ‘But I don’t think he thinks much of me.’
‘I will tell him that he underestimates you then,’ said Lionardo. ‘No one who responds to art as you do should be dismissed.
I felt very warmly towards this oldest of Lodovico’s sons all of a sudden. We didn’t share the same bond I had with Angelo but he was sort of family all the same.
Chapter Nine
Another David
It was not long after our visit to San Marco that Angelo told me he had a new commission. His marble David was approaching completion, though the finishing of it moved very slowly, inch by inch, as there was a danger of damaging what he had already done if he worked too boldly.
‘I am to make another David,’ he told me one morning in August.
‘A copy of this one?’
‘No. A bronze for a maréchal in France,’ he said. ‘I think he wants me to copy Donatello’s one.’
Even I had heard of the Donatello David, a daring bronze that showed the hero naked but for his long boots and garlanded hat, but I had never seen it.
‘We’ll go and look at it on the next holiday – in a few days in fact.’
It was two days before Ferragosto – the Feast of Our Lady’s Assumption into Heaven – and we would have two full days off work. In fact, it was forbidden to work during the festival.
So after the feasting and celebrations for Our Lady, we set out for the government palace to look at Donatello’s statue.
‘I didn’t want to come before,’ said Angelo. ‘Though I remember the bronze well from when it was in Lorenzo’s courtyard, I wanted to do my David differently.’
I wouldn’t have been allowed into the palace on my own but my brother’s name was opening more and more doors in Florence. Word was spreading that he was working on a masterpiece – either in spite of or because of the secrecy in which he worked.
Donatello’s David was a much smaller statue than the giant my brother was working on. But it was in its way perfect. So highly polished and gilded it was hard to think that it had never just not been there in the world. Like the Fra Angelico frescoes I saw at San Marco, it filled me with awe at the power that artists like my brother had.
‘Well, Gabriele,’ said my brother, rubbing his hands together with relish, ‘you’d better resign yourself. I’m going to need you to pose for another David!’
So now I was David again in my spare time. It was as well that Leone’s Bacchus was finished. His next subject was to be Leda and the swan so I was not needed for a few months. Visdomini was paying me a retainer but I was back on short rations at Lodovico’s and seeing very little of Grazia.
It meant I had also lost my best source of information. But I found a substitute in an unlikely place. Angelo’s youngest brother, Gismondo, was only a year and a bit older than me and I found him an easy-going, rather lazy but good-hearted companion. He was supposed to work in the cloth business with Buonarroto but he spent little time there because of his fascination with all things military.
Gismondo was the one who had explained to me about Cesare Borgia and now he made it his business to continue my military education. He had friends in the city who kept him up to date with what was going on in the country as a whole and when he found out I was interested in what had happened to Piero de’ Medici, he decided to undertake my education. He took to coming and chatting to me while his brother sketched me in the evenings.
This was a new pose with me holding the head of Goliath in my left hand. Since there were, naturally, no severed heads in the Buonarroti household, I actually clutched a mophead. But I was way past being embarrassed by my props or even by posing in the nude now.
So, while one brother sketched, the other told me more about the military situation of Florence than I had known so far in my life. Occasionally Angelo would add or correct something.
‘After Piero failed to get back into the city in ’97,’ said Gismondo, ‘he joined up with the French army.’
‘Um,’ I said, twirling my mophead. ‘Can you just assume I know nothing and tell me all the background? What do the French have to do with anything?’
Angelo grunted. ‘Keep that mop still! I can’t believe you are so ignorant. It was Piero’s deal with the French that let them into Florence and that was – what? – only eight years ago.’
‘So I was eleven,’ I defended myself. ‘I didn’t know anything about politics.’
‘You don’t seem to know much about them now,’ said Gismondo good-naturedly. ‘But you would certainly have known something if King Charles had taken his troops through Settignano. I was only twelve and I remember it vividly.’
‘What happened?’
‘Well, Charles had an army of thirty thousand men and in September of ’94 he marched them across the Alps.’
I could see that Gismondo was settling in for a proper history lesson but I didn’t mind – it took my mind off the cramp in my right calf.
‘He sent an envoy to Piero – not that Piero had the right to negotiate on behalf on the city – asking him to acknowledge the French claim to the Kingdom of Naples.’
‘And Piero said yes?’
‘He said nothing at all for five days,’ said Angelo.
‘And then he decided that Florence would stay neutral,’ said Gismondo. ‘You can imagine how that went down with the French king. His army just pushed on into Tuscany, murdering as it went. Piero went and met Charles and conceded everything he asked for.’
‘And you can imagine how that went down with the city!’ said Angelo.
‘The Signoria locked him out of the government palace and rang the bell to call the people into the square,’ said Gismondo. ‘Piero and his family had to flee to Venice and the Signoria passed a law that no de’ Medici should ever set foot in Florence again.’
That bit I did know. ‘And then the French came?’ I asked.
‘Not straight away. First Charles went to Pisa and told them they were now “free” of the tyranny of the Florentine Republic.’
‘And all the while his envoys were looting
the Medici palace,’ said Angelo, drawn into the discussion in spite of himself.
‘Do you remember how Father tried to keep us all in the house and I escaped to go and see the soldiers?’ said Gismondo, clearly relishing the memory.
‘I remember you got a good thrashing for it,’ said Angelo.
‘But it was worth it! The French king, all in gold, had a bodyguard of at least a hundred men. Then there were thousands of cavalrymen, infantry and archers. I’d never seen so many soldiers in the city. The king himself came into the Piazza del Duomo at sunset on a huge black horse.’
‘That must have been a sight to behold,’ I said, caught up by Gismondo’s enthusiasm.
But his face fell. ‘The problem was,’ he said, ‘the king was such an ugly little man. I was glad he stayed only eleven days. He marched on to Rome and Naples and Savonarola encouraged people to put to death any Medici supporter left in the city.’
‘What happened to the French king?’ I asked.
‘He did become king of Naples,’ said Gismondo.
‘But not for long,’ said Angelo. ‘He went back to France and killed himself.’
‘It was an accident,’ Gismondo explained to me. ‘King Charles was playing a game of royal tennis. He leapt up to take a shot and hit his head on a door frame. Knocked himself out and died a few hours later.’
Angelo laughed rustily. ‘What kind of idiot kills himself like that? Aren’t there enough people wanting to assassinate monarchs without doing their work for them?’
‘So who’s the king now?’ I asked.
‘Another Louis,’ said Gismondo. ‘They’re always Charles or Louis. This one’s the twelfth. You must have heard of him. He took Milan less than three years ago. He’s the one bringing a huge army into Italy from France.’
I had heard that Milan had fallen to the French but only that bare fact.
‘So that’s the king that Piero de’ Medici’s joined up with?’ I asked. ‘The one that’s going to save us from Cesare Borgia?’
‘Piero thinks the French will support him in an attempt to get back into the city,’ said Gismondo. ‘But I think Giovanni de’ Medici is more likely than Piero to get the support of the French.’
‘The Cardinal?’ I asked, on safer ground here.
‘The youngest one ever,’ said Gismondo. ‘It was a present his father bought for him when he was sixteen – like a horse or a pet dog. But you must ask my brother about Giovanni – they were practically brought up together.’
‘We’re the same age, it’s true,’ said Angelo, narrowing his eyes as he tried to capture my awkward pose. ‘But neither Piero nor Giovanni was a patch on Lorenzo. They were both lazy, greedy and more interested in football and athletics than in learning anything. And Giovanni at least still lives that life in Rome, hunting and hawking and pawning the family silver to pay for lavish feasts.’
‘So how does that make him more likely to take back the family interests in Florence?’ I asked.
‘Don’t ask me,’ said Gismondo. ‘I’m not a Medici man after all. I’m a republican. But I’d dearly like to be a soldier in whatever army would take me.’
‘Even King Louis’ army?’ asked Angelo.
‘What we need is a proper Florentine army,’ said his brother, evading the question. ‘You can never get the same loyalty from mercenaries.’
And the conversation drifted on to Gismondo’s views about military strategy. But he had given me a lot to think about. Neither Piero nor Giovanni seemed at all likely to make good leaders. But there were other de’ Medici contenders and I wondered if the compagnacci were in contact with them.
It was a hotter than usual August and I spent my free time walking down by the river, trying to get some fresh air. Living in Florence in high summer was like sitting inside a bowl surrounded with boiling water. One Sunday I walked on my own up to Fiesole on the hillside outside the city. It was a long walk and stretched my leg muscles well but once I got there, I could take in great lungfuls of breeze-cooled air. I felt as if I hadn’t been able to breathe properly for weeks.
Looking down on the city from up there made all the political factions and intrigues seem as petty as the antics of insects. What difference would it make if one of them carried a leaf or not? It was what I needed and for a long time I just revelled in the view. It was impossible to miss the cathedral with the great dome Brunelleschi made for it; that cupola dominated the skyline.
So down there was the marble statue that looked like me and there would soon be another in bronze. I wondered how much longer than my own lifespan these copies of me would last.
I came back down from the hillside in thoughtful mood, temporarily refreshed but soon sweating again in the damp heat. Thunder rumbled round the hills. On an impulse I set out to walk to Gianbattista’s and arrived there tired and famished.
Gianbattista was not at home but his sister was and the servant who answered the door and knew me well showed me into the small parlour where Simonetta was sewing. She jumped up when she saw me and seemed flustered. It was the first time we had been alone together since the day I had seen her leaving flowers for Savonarola.
‘Was my brother expecting you?’ she asked. ‘Do you have information for him? I’m afraid he has gone out.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I was out walking and just found myself nearby. Don’t let me disturb you. I’ll go.’
‘Don’t go,’ she said. ‘You look tired. Sit down. Where did you walk to?’
‘Up to Fiesole,’ I said.
‘So far? You must be exhausted. And hungry too. Let me send for refreshment.’
I was glad enough to rest. The little parlour was snug and comfortable and if I had to feel warm and confined, where better than in a small space with a beautiful woman?
Simonetta was just going to ring for a servant when there came a mighty clap of thunder that seemed to be right above us. We both jumped and instinctively, I put my arm around her. There was a delicious moment – not more than a second or two – when she seemed to lean into me and relax her whole body into my arms. Then she sprang away as if stung by a bee and rang the bell hard.
I sat down and waited in silence, listening to the heavy rain that had at last fallen. It would feel fresher tomorrow. I knew Angelo had been wrong when he said Simonetta was a woman I hadn’t impressed. I knew she liked me. And I liked her too. But my life was so complicated that I dare not make any approach to her.
It seemed to me that if anything happened between us it would be bound to end in unhappiness. And I did not want to face an angry Gianbattista and a gang of frateschi as well as a disappointed woman.
It was a relief when the servant came back. Simonetta picked up her sewing and I ate and drank with a good appetite. Anyone watching us would have thought us an old married couple.
‘You visited the monastery the other day,’ she said at last.
‘Yes. I went with the sculptor to see his brother, Fra Lionardo. It was full of the most wonderful paintings,’ I said. I was glad we had found a subject of conversation that was quite safe. Even Savonarola must have approved of Fra Angelico’s frescoes or he would have had them whitewashed over.
‘I wouldn’t know,’ she said. ‘A woman can’t go there and visit the friars.’
‘That’s a pity. You would like them – they are all on religious subjects and beautifully done.’
‘Perhaps I should go into a convent,’ she said. ‘What do you think?’
This was sudden and unexpected and, I thought, a dangerous topic. So I avoided answering and left as soon as I could, even though it was still raining hard. I ran back towards the house in Santa Croce, letting the rain soak through my hair and clothes. I resolved never to call in at Gianbattista’s house again without being invited.
Chapter Ten
Mars and Venus
Round about this time, Angelo had a new idea. Apparently he had been impressed by the way I had appreciated all the paintings and sculptures he had shown me in the city and had
got it into his head that I should become an artist.
‘Do you want to be a stonecutter all your life?’ he asked me one day when I was posing for the new David.
We were on our own, as Gismondo was out gathering more information about the French army.
‘I wouldn’t mind,’ I said. ‘It’s an honest trade.’
‘Indeed. But I’ve seen your skill with a chisel and I’ve watched the way you respond to works of art,’ he said. ‘I think I could teach you to make a statue of your own.’
I was astounded. In all the time I had known him, Angelo had been quite determined that he would never take an apprentice.
‘I thought you always hated the idea of teaching,’ I said.
‘I hate the idea of taking on a pupil for money,’ he grunted, turning the paper round and starting again on a new version of my arm. ‘My old master couldn’t teach me anything under that system.’
‘Yes, but you have genius and probably knew more than he did,’ I said. I was the only person that Angelo ever allowed to tease him.
‘Possibly,’ he agreed in all seriousness. ‘I might not be a good example. But how can you know if a pupil shows any promise till you see him work? I know you can square stone and cut moulded corners, but I also know your maestro has had you working on acanthus leaves for capitols and other fancier stonecutting tasks.’
He must have been talking to my maestro del bottega.
‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘I can do that. That’s just copying. But I can’t do what you do – conceive a design for a commission. I wouldn’t know where to begin.’
‘Apprentices don’t start by planning whole statues,’ he said. ‘They start by doing tasks very like the ones you work on all day. And they use their eyes. They look at all the statues and friezes and reliefs they can find in their own city and they develop a sense of how sculpture works – in the round, in high and low relief. And they draw. Do you draw?’