by Mary Hoffman
‘Michelangelo has quite enough work,’ I said. ‘He is not seeking more. But even if he were, this city is big enough to house two great artists, don’t you agree?’
He tried his most flirtatious smile on me but it didn’t reach his heavy-lidded eyes. He understood what I was saying.
After the Mouth of Truth incident, I took up Angelo’s offer to teach me to sculpt. He even let me do some work on my own toenails – at least the toenails of his giant David! Once I had got over my fear of chiselling one of the statue’s toes off, it was enjoyable. And it was a great honour to work on the statue that was going to cause a sensation in the city.
I don’t know how I knew then that it would – but I was right.
‘You can help me polish the legs too,’ he said, handing me a piece of very fine emery stone.
I approached the task as cautiously as if I were sandpapering my own bare legs. Angelo looked on approvingly.
‘It’s good to be slow and careful at this stage. So much can go wrong.’
The idea of damaging this magnificent statue made me sweat with fear.
He laughed. ‘Don’t be afraid. It has to be done – all of it.’
Yet he seemed to be working more on the bronze than on the marble David.
I was musing as I worked that I had now been David (twice), Hercules, Bacchus and Mars. And now Leone was designing an ambitious new scheme for Theseus and the Minotaur. Visdomini never seemed to tire of subjects which could depict me as a muscular hero or god, preferably naked or at least wearing minimal covering.
While I was working, the younger Sangallo brother came to visit.
‘Guess what,’ he said. ‘The Signoria are going to give Leonardo a commission!’
‘Soderini will, you mean, I suppose,’ said Angelo. ‘What is it?’
‘To paint a mural in the Palazzo,’ said Sangallo. ‘In the Sala del Gran Consiglio, to be precise. But it’s only a rumour so far – nothing’s been signed.’
I smiled to myself. I didn’t know if Salai’s malicious ruse had been the cause, but his master had got his commission and the fee would keep the little devil in rose-coloured stockings a while longer. But would Angelo have been given this commission if he hadn’t been slandered? I wasn’t to find that out yet.
It was enough for me that he wasn’t troubled by Sangallo’s news.
The next time I saw Gandini the baker, he was so cross he was practically foaming at the mouth.
‘Have you heard the news?’ he asked.
I was so used to his telling me all the gossip about Cesare Borgia and the other threats to the city that I expected some new nugget of military news but I was quite wrong.
‘He’s only taken another commission!’ he fumed.
‘Who?’
‘The Painter, Leonardo from Vinci!’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said carelessly. ‘The mural for the Palazzo.’
‘Mural? What mural? No, he has agreed to paint Giocondo’s wife! And haven’t I been asking him for years to make my wife’s portrait.’
‘Giocondo? The silk merchant?’
I knew him slightly; Clarice had ordered the material for dresses from him and Buonarroto, Angelo’s brother, sometimes did business with him. I seemed to recall he had married a much younger woman, after losing two earlier wives in childbirth.
‘That’s him,’ said Gandini. ‘Is my money not as good as his? People need bread more than they need silk, don’t they? You try eating silk in a famine and see how it agrees with you!’
I suspected that Francesco di Bartolomeo del Giocondo might have offered Leonardo more money than the baker had and that his ‘little devil’ would have encouraged him to take the richer commission. With that and the possibility of the Signoria’s mural, the court around the painter would be safe for quite a time. But I could see that Gandini was genuinely upset.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s probably political.’ It was the first thing that came into my head.
‘Political?’ he asked, stopped at last in his tirade.
‘Yes, you know, she’s probably distantly related to a de’ Medici or a Tornabuoni or something,’ I said, making it up as I went along. ‘And Leonardo used to work for Lorenzo, just like the sculptor. Perhaps that’s the reason.’
Gandini, though he was republican through and through, liked the reason, because it cast no bad reflection on him or his beautiful wife. He was so mollified he gave me a sweet pastry for free.
As I walked away from his shop, I mused on this new work of Leonardo’s. I had made up the explanation to soothe a friend’s hurt but maybe it was true. He had said it would take more than just beauty in a woman to make him want to paint her. What did Giocondo’s wife have that Gandini’s didn’t?
At this time, Angelo seemed to abandon both Davids and was working on something very different – a relief in the shape of a tondo. It was a Madonna and Child, the first he had attempted since that marble he had shown me of the Virgin sitting on the stairs, nursing her baby like a common working woman.
I like to think that had been a sort of portrait of my mother, just as the face of the Virgin in the Rome Pietà had been – so he told me – a tribute to his own birth mother.
This new one was nothing like either. He was working so fast on it that you could see the figures emerging from the stone, the Madonna with her head turned to look over her right shoulder and the Child standing beside her lap, leaning on his arm and an open book. Another child was beginning to peep out from behind the Holy Mother’s back and the whole had a quiet, domestic quality, unlike anything of his I had seen before.
‘It’s beautiful,’ I said, feeling the word was inadequate. It reminded me of Clarice and our boy, Davide, whom I had not seen once since I started visiting their palazzo as a spy. He was more than a year old now and must be able to stand like that sturdy little Christ, if supported by his mother’s arm.
‘You like it?’ Angelo asked. ‘It is for Bartolommeo Pitti.’
I couldn’t do more than nod.
‘Is that John the Baptist peeping out from behind?’ I asked when I could say more.
‘Yes, but he is a minor figure in the composition,’ said Angelo. ‘Not like that one of Leonardo’s.’
Still thinking of his rival!
‘Do you see how I’m working the relief?’ he asked. ‘It’s quite different from carving something in the round.’
I saw what he meant. He had to keep a part of the figures standing out proud from their background so that you believed in their solidity but he was not cutting away so much that there was any danger of their breaking away from the marble that held them.
It gave me the strangest feeling – as if I had moved from being a figure in the round, to one bound by his background never to be free. I suppose it was the thought of Davide that made me so pensive. I was sure in a way that I would never be free of him and his mother.
And then I noticed something even stranger; it was not the Child that had a face like mine – which would have made me think that my brother practised witchcraft and could see into my heart. It was the Virgin herself that had my features, at least she had features like a softened version of the face of the marble David and that had been based on mine.
I wondered whether to mention it. Then decided against it. It was bad enough what had happened with the Mouth of Truth, without wondering if the man I saw as my brother really did admire my appearance so much he would recreate it even without realising it. I just hoped Leonardo and his Salai would not see it and make something of it.
I posed for Leone that night, though I was so unsettled I would have made a better Minotaur than Theseus. Half man, half beast and no part of me a god.
‘You can’t stand still tonight, Gabriele,’ said the painter. ‘Do you need to go and relieve yourself?’
‘No. I’m sorry. I am agitated in my mind, not my body,’ I said.
‘Well, the one has influence on the other,’ he said, very reasonably, considering I was spo
iling his work.
‘Leone,’ I asked, ‘are you married?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Can’t afford it. But if I continue in my lord’s service, I should save enough money to marry in a year or so. There’s a girl I have my eye on.’
‘Me too,’ I said without thinking. He looked at me oddly.
‘You don’t mean Grazia, I take it?’
That was not likely to make me feel any more tranquil!
‘Look, why don’t you sit for five minutes and tell me what’s on your mind?’ he said. ‘You’re no good to me like this.’
He sent the little apprentice away and I sat on the stool, wrapped in a cloth that was going to be transformed into Theseus’s cloak and tunic.
‘You know what this hero did?’ Leone asked, gesturing at the canvas.
‘Killed the beast in the Labyrinth,’ I said.
‘And afterwards?’
I shrugged. I had never thought about ‘afterwards’; I never did. That was part of my problem.
‘He abandoned Ariadne, who was the one who helped him kill the Minotaur,’ said the painter. ‘He accepted her ideas and her help . . .’
‘The string?’ I remembered.
‘The string and everything else. Took her to an island and then left her. Sailed away without her.’
‘Is Grazia posing for your Ariadne, as she did for Venus and Leda?’ I asked.
‘Are you planning to abandon her?’ he said in return. ‘I think she has given you help with your spying.’
‘What happened to Ariadne?’ I asked.
‘She was rescued by Bacchus,’ said Leone. ‘He married her and took her to live on Mount Olympus.’
‘Well, I was Bacchus too,’ I said. ‘So she ends up with me anyway.’
‘I think all of us are part Theseus, part Bacchus,’ he said.
‘And part Minotaur?’ I asked. ‘That’s what I’ve been thinking.’
‘You are very young, Gabriele,’ he said. ‘Don’t be too hard on yourself. We all make some mistakes as we are growing up.’
‘I wonder when I shall be a grown man,’ I said. ‘I can’t imagine I am going to get much bigger but I still need to be a lot wiser.’
He laughed but not unkindly.
‘I don’t think wisdom comes with height,’ he said. ‘But it will with a few more years. I don’t think you should agonise over what can’t be changed. Just try to do better in future.’
He was absolutely right. I resolved there and then to tell Grazia about Rosalia that night. What happened after that was up to her.
Chapter Fourteen
A Glimpse of the Moon
The next time I saw Angelo, he was rubbing his hands in glee.
‘A new commission!’ he said. ‘All twelve apostles!’
‘Wonderful!’ I said, since he was expecting enthusiasm. But secretly I thought, How can he manage that, together with the two Davids and the tondo? Not to mention the statues for Siena.
‘We are going to choose the marble,’ he said.
‘We?’
‘You’re coming with me, I hope,’ said Angelo. ‘I’ve spoken to your maestro. The Operai will pay for me and an assistant to go to Carrara and choose twelve blocks.’
I was thrilled. I hadn’t been in a quarry since I left Settignano two years before. I hadn’t realised till then just how much I had been missing them.
‘And even better,’ said Angelo, more animated than I had seen him for ages, ‘the Operai are going to build me a house and a studio in the city!’
‘They must be very pleased with what you are doing here,’ I said. But I was thinking, Will Lodovico want me to stay at his house if Angelo moves out?
‘You must come and live there with me,’ said Angelo. ‘It’s going to be on the corner of Borgo Pinti and Via della Colonna.’
It was as if he read my mind! I suppose he was thinking that it would be good for him to get away from his father and brothers and strike out on his own in the world. In spite of having lived in Rome for five years, he was still treated very much as a son of the house in his father’s home. And to think he was to be given this honour just because of his great skill!
‘Of course, it will take a while to build,’ he said, his face falling a bit.
I suppose mine did too because I had a vision like his of us two bachelors living on the Borgo Pinti, with perhaps a middle-aged woman to look after us. We could be like a pair of hermits, keeping what hours we pleased and maybe working together in his new studio without distraction. After my last meeting with Grazia, it really appealed to me.
We didn’t know then that neither of us would live in this house or that the Apostles would not be made.
‘When do we go to Carrara?’ I asked.
‘At the beginning of next month, if you’re willing,’ he said.
So, on the first day of May, we set out in some style. That is to say, we travelled by cart all the way to the marble mountains of Carrara. I had never been so far from home and was in high spirits.
Grazia hadn’t exactly finished with me but she had wept when I told her about Rosalia.
‘So you have a fidanzata in the country already?’ she said. ‘As well as a grand lady in the city. How many others are there?’
‘None,’ I had promised her. ‘I told you before.’ But I must have looked uneasy because she pounced on me and pursued her questions.
‘Are you sure?’ she asked. ‘No other women in Florence you have looked on with desire – or who have looked on you in that way?’
She was without mercy or pity.
‘There is another woman I find attractive,’ I admitted. ‘But I would never do anything about it. Her brother is a friend of mine and he would be horrified if she attached herself to a humble stonecutter.’
‘So – another grand lady,’ Grazia said.
‘And you said yourself that you thought your lady cast amorous looks at me,’ I said, determined to excavate every last piece of incriminating evidence against myself so that there should be no more misunderstanding between us.
‘Well, it’s not your fault if women look at you with lust, I suppose,’ she conceded. ‘As long as you do nothing to encourage them.’
I honestly didn’t think that I did but was just wise enough not to say anything about it.
‘And you don’t see the lady Altobiondi any more?’ she asked in a small voice.
‘Only sometimes in passing,’ I said. ‘When I go to her house, it is to spy for the frateschi.’
‘So it is just between me and your first love?’ she asked.
‘Don’t say it like that,’ I said. ‘I haven’t seen Rosalia for a year and a half. I don’t even know if she will wait for me.’ (You see, I had grown up a little.)
‘But you definitely will leave the city and go back to Settignano to marry her?’
‘If she’ll have me,’ I said.
‘But what is there about her that is better than me? Is she prettier? Younger? More . . . adept in the bedchamber?’
What can a man say when a woman asks him these things? I had made a very bad fist of answering Grazia. So much so that when I left her I had more or less admitted that the only advantage Rosalia had over her was that I had met her first.
‘You are quiet today,’ said Angelo. ‘What are you thinking?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, pulling myself together. ‘I am glad to be leaving the city.’
‘Is it love or politics this time?’ he asked.
‘Am I so transparent? Well then, love I suppose. There is nothing much happening on the political front – at least not to me.’
‘And all too much happening with your complicated romantic life?’ he guessed.
‘I don’t see how I can follow your advice when women keep throwing themselves at me,’ I grumbled.
He laughed. ‘Some men would be very grateful to have your problems!’ he said. ‘It has never been an issue for me. I suppose I should be grateful to Torrigiani for that.’
‘It wo
uld almost be worth getting my nose broken,’ I said. ‘But I’m sorry – I don’t want to think about women at all. Let’s concentrate on stone for the next few days.’
Stone! I was born to it, my father, my uncles, every male I knew back home worked in the quarries. My childhood and youth passed in a haze of stone dust. Even Angelo used to boast that he got his calling from imbibing chisels and mallets with my mother’s milk!
Mind you, Lodovico didn’t like that. He was always opposed to Angelo’s work, and so was his uncle Francesco – until my brother’s reputation and fortune started to grow. Because Lionardo was a friar, Angelo was in effect the oldest brother and there were already signs that his father and younger brothers saw him as their own personal bank.
The love of stone was something he had in common with me and my family that his birth family could not understand. We both hated feeling anything sticky or greasy on our hands but the dry certainty of stone was what we were used to and never minded, no matter how dredged with white powder we were. There was something clean about it.
Those who work with stone must be strong and prepared to hard work; cutting marble out of a mountainside is no occupation for a weakling. And then it all has to be squared and transported before it can be turned into whatever its ultimate fate is. Statues are only a part of it – the high pinnacle of destiny for a block of marble. It might end up as table-tops or bathtubs or the facing for pillars. Some of it is used for grand schemes like the cathedral in Florence, other bits end up as marble chips in mosaics or some kinds of floor, while even the dust is valued and used, mixed with glue and lime to make a kind of artificial stone that was becoming popular as a cheap alternative to real marble.
I marvelled at how the earth seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of stone for us. The quarries at Carrara had been worked since the time of the Romans and were famous for the whiteness and purity of their marble. The ones at Settignano were almost as old – certainly for hundreds of years men like me had crawled over the face of the mountains hacking stone out and carting it miles away.
It was a dangerous craft too. I’d seen men fall to their deaths and others crushed by blocks of stone. Some had lost fingers but kept working when they had recovered. There were not many other ways of earning a living in my village; you either farmed or cut stone.