by Mary Hoffman
I was relieved to see Visdomini there. He introduced me again to Altobiondi and for the first time to the others.
‘You should have seen him after the beating he got for being one of us,’ said Visdomini. ‘His poor face was just a mass of bruises.’
There were sympathetic murmurs and I saw that I recognised some of the people there. Two of them were plotters I had overheard that night behind the tapestry: Arnolfo Ridolfi and Alessandro Bellatesta. They were older men, who could have known Lorenzo il Magnifico.
I suddenly had an inspiration. ‘How can you be sure you are not being spied on?’ I asked. ‘Do you check the room for listening places? What about that tapestry?’
I strode across the room and pulled the hunting-scene back. With a tiny part of my mind I almost expected to see Gabriele the stonecutter concealed there in his rough working man’s clothes. I did see some old crumbs on the floor from a pastry Clarice had given me to eat but I crushed them to dust under one of the new soft leather boots Visdomini had added to his gift.
‘Nothing there,’ I said with satisfaction. ‘But we should leave the curtain drawn back.’
The others seemed impressed and were soon looking behind other drapes and opening doors to check for eavesdroppers.
‘You are quite right, Gabriele,’ said Altobiondi. ‘We have become lax. We must be more alert to the possibility of spies.’
I smiled with secret satisfaction. He was right to be wary, as I knew better than anyone else.
‘Have you heard who’s back?’ said Lodovico. ‘The Painter.’ He said it like that, as if it had a great letter at the beginning.
And Angelo clearly knew who was meant, because his head snapped up and an expression I had never seen before crossed his face, a mixture of curiosity and distaste.
‘The dandy?’ he asked.
Lodovico nodded. ‘Leonardo from Vinci,’ he explained to me, adding in a whisper, ‘Now we shall see the sparks fly.’
It was six months since I had become a Medici spy and I had been better fed than at any time since my arrival in the city. I still posed for Leone, and for Angelo when he needed me, still spent some satisfying hours with Grazia, and still managed to find time to meet the frateschi at San Marco.
I never had any time to myself and I did not in all that time visit Settignano. My head was too full of plots and intrigues to spare any room for my first home and my first love.
The city had been in an uproar since Soderini’s permanent appointment as Gonfaloniere. My new Medici friends had been incensed by it and muttered all sorts of dire threats against him but nothing had happened. In fact, although I was privy now to both main factions in the city, the prospect of a revolution in government seemed further away than ever.
But the arrival in Florence of Leonardo caused trouble of another kind.
He came to visit Angelo in the workshop. I happened to be there, eating my lunch when the man and his companions arrived. I might have said ‘retinue’ since that was the air he had – a supremely important man and his courtiers. I smelt him before he arrived: a good smell, I should add, one of an expensive perfume. I had to admit it was a preferable fragrance to my brother’s.
And after the perfume, the man, clad in rose-coloured velvet with a short purple cloak. At his elbow was a good-looking young man with luxuriant blonde curls and behind them a cluster of youths. What on earth would Angelo say to such an invasion of his private working space?
As it happens, he said nothing. He just roared. And descended from where he was working on the marble David, shrouded in sheets, in a shower of marble dust and colourful curses.
‘Ah, I had forgotten what a bear you are!’ said the man who had to be Leonardo da Vinci. ‘Wait outside, boys. No, hold on.’ He threw them a purse. ‘Go and find some lunch. Gandini the baker on Via Larga will feed you. I’ll meet you there later.’
Angelo looked as if he would like to throw the rose-coloured vision out of his workshop after his troop of boys but he restrained himself.
‘How are you?’ said Leonardo, looking at me till Angelo had to introduce us.
‘Well enough,’ he grunted. ‘This is my friend and model, Gabriele.’
‘Friend and model, Buonarroti?’ said Leonardo. ‘You sound like me. And such a handsome one. Be careful or tongues will wag.’
After the briefest of handclasps, he looked round the workshop with keen interest. His languid manner didn’t deceive either of us. Here was a man as intelligent as any I had met in Florence. His dark eyes were full of life and, though he was as old as the Sangallo brothers, he was still lithe and vigorous. He walked round the workshop like a fastidious cat while Angelo stood with his arms folded, his expression revealing nothing.
‘I heard you were working on that old marble block that Rossellino couldn’t finish,’ said the painter.
Angelo grunted.
‘Oh, come on, don’t be so cantankerous!’ Leonardo said in a wheedling tone. ‘You know I’m only curious. I thought they might give it to me, you know.’
‘Ha!’ said Angelo, stung at last into speech. ‘Why would they give a commission for a statue to a painter?’
‘Ah, dear boy, you make it sound as if I apply tints to the stucco of rich men’s palaces,’ said Leonardo. He hadn’t dropped his lazy, teasing tone since he came in, but I could see that his eyes were still darting everywhere.
‘You are working on a bronze too,’ he said, looking at the model, which was nearly ready for casting. ‘And I see it is also of your “friend” as David.’
He caressed the model’s smooth back, stopping just short of the buttocks.
‘You have caught his appearance well,’ he said. ‘You are right, too. I shall never be able to achieve anything like that that in the round. Though my portraiture is coming along.’
Coming along! Can you believe he said that? He was the most famous artist who had ever lived in the city – though I didn’t know then that one day my brother’s reputation would eclipse even his.
It served to mollify Angelo a bit, because he said, ‘Each to his own mystery then, Ser Leonardo. I prefer to sculpt. Painting bores me.’
‘I remember how you ran away from Ghirlandaio’s bottega,’ said Leonardo. ‘Does your father still live – is he well?’
‘He is in good health, though he grumbles all the time,’ said Angelo. ‘I am living with him in the old San Procolo house. You should pay him a visit. Gabriele can show you the way.’
He was clearly trying to get rid of both of us.
‘Gabriele knows the way?’ said Leonardo.
‘I live there too, sir,’ I said. ‘It is not far from Gandini’s.’
His arched eyebrows shot up into his dark and immaculately combed hair. ‘You live there?’ but he soon recovered his poise. ‘And you know dear old Gandini? He’s always asking me to paint his wife, you know.’
‘Maybe you should,’ said Angelo. ‘I hear she’s very pretty.’
‘It takes more than a pretty face to interest me in painting a woman,’ said Leonardo. ‘But I mustn’t keep you from your work any longer. I must collect my boys. And young Gabriele here can then show us to your father’s house.’
I would be late back to work but it would be worth it to spend more time in the company of this man who had become a legend in the city. And I dearly wished I could stay to see how old Lodovico would greet him. There was obviously a whole history here.
Leonardo’s arrival was a real feast day for the city gossips. Rumours flowed from his circle like wine from a jug. I came to believe he encouraged it. He had once been officially denounced for sodomy, old Lodovico told me.
‘It was all hushed up but he left the city till the scandal died down,’ he said. ‘That was years ago, when Michelangelo was a baby, but he has always had a reputation for scandal.’
I could believe it. I had seen with my own eyes how Leonardo had provoked Angelo in his own workshop. And I had walked with him and his ‘boys’ back to Santa Croce.
> First among them was the golden-haired young man. He said his name was Gianni but everyone called him ‘Salai’ – meaning ‘little devil’. And I could soon see why. He was casting jealous looks at me all the time I was talking to his master but I wasn’t afraid. I was much taller and stronger than him.
He was about halfway between Angelo and me in age and I could see he must have been a very pretty boy ten years earlier. Now his looks were fading but he still behaved like a charming if petulant youth. And Leonardo encouraged him.
But they gave me the strongest feeling that it was all just a game to them. Leonardo liked being looked at and so did Salai. They liked the way that, as they walked along a street, heads turned and whispers began rippling outward. The Painter walked through the city as if he owned it – just like one of the de’ Medici family.
Even I had seen his big drawing in the church of Santissima Annunziata – the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John. It had attracted a lot of attention and I fear had made my brother a bit jealous, even though he admired it.
‘He never waits until he has finished to show his work,’ he grumbled. ‘Leonardo is an exhibitionist, always needing to soak up praise while he works.’
‘I will kill him,’ growled Angelo. ‘I will personally strangle him with my own hands or stab him with my chisel.’
‘What are you babbling about?’ asked Lodovico.
We were sitting at dinner when Angelo stormed in late from his day at work.
‘Who is going to be strangled?’ asked Gismondo.
‘Leonardo da Vinci,’ Angelo spat.
‘Sit down and eat. Have some wine,’ said Lodovico. ‘What has he done to annoy you now?’
‘He has had me arrested!’ said Angelo.
That got our attention.
‘He denounced me,’ said Angelo, collapsing into a chair and drinking thirstily. He waved away all food. ‘I had the Devil’s own job to convince them to let me go.’
I think we all shouted ‘What for?’ at the same time.
Then the strangest thing happened. He looked straight at me and his face just closed up. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he muttered, and then, ‘but I will truly kill him and then they can arrest me for murder.’
‘Tell me what he said,’ insisted Lodovico.
‘Not in front of Gabriele,’ he said.
It was like being slapped in the face. I got up and left but looked at Gismondo to signal that I expected him to tell me everything later.
But it took days to get it out of him.
‘Someone put an anonymous denunciation in the Mouth of Truth at the Palazzo della Signoria,’ he eventually said.
‘Saying what?’ I demanded.
‘That . . . that my brother was having . . . unnatural relations with you.’
‘With me?’ I asked, staggered. ‘It gave my name?’
‘With “Gabriele, the model”, it said, according to Michelangelo,’ said Gismondo.
‘But that’s ridiculous! That’s . . . that’s slander.’
‘I know it and so do you but you know what they say – where you see smoke there’s sure to be something roasting. Some people will believe it. Especially if my brother is prosecuted.’
‘And he’s sure it was Leonardo?’ I asked, feeling as bruised as I had been after the beating.
‘The same thing happened to Leonardo years ago and Angelo thinks he did it out of spite because it is his star on the rise now, while Leonardo’s is on the wane.’
But I felt sure that whatever else he was Leonardo was not a spiteful person. Capable of envy, yes, but not of something so – petty. I remembered the way he had admired Angelo’s work.
‘I think I know who did this,’ I said. ‘And I’m going to make sure he pays for it.’
Chapter Thirteen
The Beast in the Labyrinth
Anyone could put an accusation in the Mouth of Truth. They didn’t even have to sign it. So there was as much gossip as genuine discovery of crime. Neighbours’ tittle-tattle about adultery or suspect business practices, like bribes, formed the majority of the denunciations.
Though common, sex between men was officially a crime in Florence and had to be investigated. And, although I hadn’t known it, ‘artist’s model’ was at the time almost synonymous with ‘prostitute’ of either sex.
I had posed only for Angelo and Leone; the one my milk-brother and the other, as I had swiftly found out, not interested in my nakedness except where it served his work. I felt hot to realise that I had told Angelo I would be willing to work in the city as a model for unknown painters. What had he thought I was saying? But surely he knew me better than that.
It also made me very uncomfortable to realise that anyone – like Vanna or the haughty manservant – could put a note about my relations with Clarice into the Mouth of Truth. And there would be the unfortunate complication that those accusations would be true.
But I wrenched my mind away from these worrying thoughts. I would have to cope with that if it happened. What mattered now was the false denunciation of my brother.
I was absolutely sure who had made the denunciation; it had devilry written all over it. It wasn’t hard to find out where Leonardo was lodging; the difficulty would be in getting Salai on his own, and in getting to either of them before Angelo had carried out his threat. It had taken too long to persuade Gismondo to tell me what had happened.
I went to Angelo and told him I knew. He was gruff with embarrassment.
‘Can I go to the magistrates and tell them that it is all lies?’ I asked him.
‘No, it would make it worse,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘Because then they would see how beautiful you are,’ he said simply.
I was now more embarrassed than Angelo. I knew he didn’t think of me in that way and yet he had warned me on my very first day of unwanted attentions from rich men who preferred their own sex to women. I knew that Visdomini had lustful thoughts towards me. I didn’t mind that, as long as he never acted on them. And as far as I was concerned, what two men did together in private, although it wouldn’t be my preference, was their own business.
‘You’re not really going to confront Leonardo, are you?’ I asked, to cover my confusion.
‘Well, I haven’t yet,’ he conceded, ‘but he’d better watch out the next time he crosses my path. I think I convinced the Officers of the Night that it was a malicious and untrue accusation.’
‘I don’t think it was him,’ I said.
‘Who else in the city has reason to hate me? You heard what he said when he came here – he wanted the David block himself. Though he would have made an awful mess of it.’
‘It might have been someone acting on his behalf – without his knowledge,’ I said.
‘He could never have cast that bronze horse that he tried to make for Sforza in Milan,’ said Angelo, still musing on motives for Leonardo’s malice towards him. ‘He’s just not a sculptor.’
I could see I wasn’t going to convince him of the Painter’s innocence but I was glad that his eruption of anger towards the older artist had subsided to a low rumble.
I couldn’t get away till the next Sunday but I went to seek Leonardo out then. The door was answered by one of his acolytes – not Salai – who said his master was resting after coming back from church. He eyed me curiously as if trying to remember where he had seen me before. Then light dawned.
‘Ah, you are the model for Michelangelo!’ he said.
At that point, Salai came out. He had the face of a ruined angel, framed by those amazing golden curls. But I was taller than him and could see that his hair was beginning to thin on top. If he lost that distinguishing feature of his, he would look very like a devil, I thought.
‘Well, look who’s here,’ he drawled. ‘The sculptor’s boy.’
‘If one is still a boy at twenty,’ I said. It was not my plan to rile him.
‘Some of us are boys for ever,’ he said and I felt a flash of sympathy
for him.
He had nothing but his looks and his youth, which were both rapidly receding. He might be Leonardo’s apprentice but he had none of his genius. I hoped that his master would continue to love him for the beauty he had seen in him as a boy; the man was certainly not attractive.
‘Were you looking for the maestro?’ he asked.
‘It was you I hoped to talk to,’ I said.
‘Then let us take a walk,’ he said.
We strolled through the Piazza Santa Croce, attracting plenty of attention as we walked. Salai seemed to relish this. He positively preened. I was rather amused by his vanity and wondered if he would have lorded it over me quite as much if I had been dressed in my Medici finery.
‘Let’s go down to the river,’ he said. ‘It’s such a warm day maybe we will see the boys swimming.’
‘A bit cold for that yet I fear,’ I said but turned my steps to follow his.
‘I can guess why you came,’ he said abruptly.
‘Really?’
‘Yes. It’s about the denunciation,’ he said.
‘It’s not true, you know,’ I said. ‘I like girls.’
‘Pity,’ he said straight-faced. ‘What about the sculptor?’
‘His preferences are his own business,’ I said. ‘But let us be clear that they have nothing to do with me. You have missed the mark there.’
‘I have?’ He looked at me with exaggerated innocence. ‘What does it have to do with me?’
‘We are milk-brothers,’ I said. ‘I live in his father’s house because he entrusted his son to my mother as a baby.’
Salai’s face fell but he was soon blustering confidently again.
‘My master is a bit short of money,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘He needs a new commission.’
‘What has that to do with the sculptor?’
‘Nothing. I just hope the next big commission doesn’t go to him.’
It was as close as he was ever going to come to admitting his guilt.