by Linda Proud
‘Outdone in what?’
‘Art.’
‘Art? Ghirlandaio has no art. He just traces from life. Tell me, my friend, what are you looking at?’
‘A perfect portrait of Angelo Poliziano and Marsilio Ficino.’
‘What are you supposed to be looking at?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What is the story of that scene? What is it depicting? What is its underlying theme?’
As Filippino continued to fire his questions, I struggled to identify the scene as that of the Angel appearing to Zacharias, though I had to admit that what I was looking at in reality was a dense crowd of Florentines.
‘Art?’ Filippino sneered. ‘This is mechanical reproduction. Art changes the viewer as alchemy changes substances, and this does nothing of the kind. It is sheer vainglory – a virtuoso display of technique.’
Was it true? Although I could see what he was saying, I longed for him to be wrong.
‘This is a monument to man’s hubris. These merchants of Florence – they value themselves above the sacred. They seek immortality of the flesh, and Ghirlandaio is just the man to give it to them. But how flat and lifeless are the holy characters.’
‘At least Domenico cannot be accused by Savonarola of using barrow boys as models for his saints.’
‘True enough, he uses no models at all for them but that cannot be the solution – everyday life so vivid that the sacred moment is rendered dull by comparison.’
‘No, but it’s an accurate reflection of how it is, isn’t it? The senses beguiling us.’ I had moved up and was now looking at a scene depicting the Visitation of Our Lady to Saint Elizabeth. While these figures could not be described as flat and lifeless, it was true that they did not bear the vivacity of the women in their train, lifelike portraits of Tornabuoni ladies, including Giovanna, the lovely wife of Lorenzo Tornabuoni who had died in childbirth only two years after their marriage. Young Tornabuoni, whose own mother had died the same way, was inconsolable. Whenever I saw him, I saw my own face.
Up another level, I came to the Birth of John the Baptist. Set in the palace of the Tornabuoni, in a room I could recognise, St Elizabeth was being visited by Clarice de’ Medici and her mother-in-law, Lucrezia Tornabuoni. The scene was a lively one with a very beautiful serving maid in a Greek chiton arriving with a tray of fruits carried on her head. What captured my attention, however, was the figure of a young woman in a pink gown. Domenico was a poet in colour, making juxtapositions that were surprising and inspired, ‘alchemical’ said some, given that he had devised a way of rendering gold in colour rather than using gold leaf. This rosy pink, set amongst the terracotta and ochre costumes of the other figures, held me spellbound. The face of the young woman – I reached out to touch it – was achingly beautiful. Domenico at his best was as good as any Flemish painter, and he had the same quality: an attention to mundane detail that somehow made the world itself a sacred place. But this woman was dead, was a portrait of Lorenzo Tornabuoni’s mother, Francesca; she was certainly attended by the dead, for both Lucrezia and Clarice de’ Medici had left this life in recent years. Lucrezia, Clarice, Francesca, Giovanna – these walls were a memorial to dead women. Stupidly I began to study the figures as I would a crowd in a square, to catch a glimpse of my Elena. Perhaps Ghirlandaio, sensitive as he was, had thought to include her portrait among the attendant maids. Could it be? Of course not. Yet hope made my heart beat louder and it was good to feel that prickle of expectation. Almost like being in love. Almost like being alive.
‘Oh, look at this. Who are these two tiny people? Dwarves? Children dressed as adults? Ridiculous! What idiot painted these? Granacci, I’ll be bound. I had him long enough in my own studio to know how useless he is. Still, Domenico should keep an eye on what his men are doing. It’s his name that will be attached to these walls.’ The ladders and boards creaked as Filippino mounted higher. ‘Ah, there are no portraits up here – just mediocre stuff. This will definitely be Granacci. He’s left, now. Did you know? When Ghirlandaio had to give il Magnifico two apprentices to study sculpture, he took the opportunity to get rid of one who was inept and one who was unbearable. Who can blame him? Have you met Michelangelo? Who could work with that precocious puppy telling you all your faults in his piping, treble voice? It’s a wonder he hasn’t been murdered.’ The ladders creaked again but as Filippino achieved the highest stage there came a silence which, for him, was unnatural.
‘Pippo?’ I asked eventually. ‘What are you looking at now?’
‘The Massacre of the Innocents.’
‘Is it good?’
‘Sublime. Come and see it. All these dead babies… Oh, and this mother pulling on the hair of a soldier. God Almighty… ’ Filippino was as generous in his praise as he was harsh in his criticism – when he found something worth praising.
‘In a moment…’ I said. I had not yet looked at the face of every female figure on my own wall. As the rising sun began to spill in through the window, the colour became radiant. Our time was running out. Hearing Filippino descend, I came down my ladders, bade Angelo and Marsilio good morning as if they really did stand before me, and crossed the chapel. Filippino had paused on the first stage, standing before the scene of the Birth of the Virgin. I went up to join him. This was much more elaborate than the birth scene I had been looking at and was clearly all Domenico’s own work. Filippino was staring at the nurse cradling the infant in her lap, a young woman quietly, happily smiling at a baby. On the point of tears, he gulped when I arrived and cleared his throat.
‘Terrible lettering,’ he said, pointing to the motto on the panelling of the saint’s bed in a vain attempt to distract me.
But I stared at her, as I had often seen her, sitting with the infant Giuliano de’ Medici on her lap, smiling down on him. Only here the infant was the Virgin Mary, staring up at my wife and reflecting her smile with her own. My head dipped into my hands. When I looked up again, Filippino had put himself between me and the wall and was gazing at me through eyes welling with tears. His grief was not mine; he did not mourn a dead wife; he was crying in frustration.
‘That lettering is truly terrible,’ he said eventually, wiping his sleeve across his face.
‘It truly is,’ I agreed, studying the amateurish attempt to render Roman capitals in gold leaf.
‘Domenico should have employed you to do it, and not his youngest apprentice. Never mind, I shall employ you. You can do my lettering. I want the names of the virtues as if engraved in stone by the best epigraphist in ancient Rome. It will ensure your immortality, for these walls celebrating mundane life are bound to sink into obscurity. They will be painted over within a few years, but mine – they will endure forever.’
‘He can do it, can’t he? Ghirlandaio can paint the smile.’
‘Yes, well, anyone can who is prepared to make a pact with the devil.’
Many people who had seen the walls were muttering about magic, saying that such art seemed beyond the power of human capability. ‘Come on Pippo, admit it. Domenico’s ability to capture a likeness is extraordinary – a divine talent.’
‘You are right. All talent comes from God – it’s just that Domenico lends his to the devil’s work: personal vanity. He gives rich men what they want, not what they need. Art must have meaning, or else it is just decoration. These glowing, sumptuous walls – they have no soul. What has this work to do with God and his Church? Nothing. Nothing at all.’
I disagreed. Something was working on me, some subtle thing. Dead babies. Dead mothers. I turned, looking now at this scene, now at another. The chancel was a monument to Tornabuoni grief. And hope. Before I could say as much to Filippino, he was calling down to a youth staring up at us.
‘Ah, Michel-diabolo,’ said Filippino. ‘Good morning to you.’
‘You are not allowed…’
‘Neither are you. You’ve left this wo
rkshop.’
Although I had heard much about this boy, I had not met him until now. He seemed himself to have been sculpted by a master artist who suffered from impatience: perfectly formed and strikingly handsome in a crudely-hewn, passionate kind of way. But something in his eyes did not allow you to stare at him too long, some piercing, intelligent thing that burrowed into you, questing for your own truth and integrity. It was hard to meet such a stare without flinching and looking away, particularly when your eyes are reddened by tears.
‘Is it true,’ Filippino asked him, ‘that you have taken up sculpture because you’ll never be able to paint as well as your master?’
‘Painting is an inferior art. Why content yourself with two dimensions when you can work in three?’ Michelangelo went to a corner where rolls of paper were stored and began to look amongst them.
‘I think it is an excellent thing that sculpture is being revived,’ Filippino said. ‘I would like to commission a piece.’
Michelangelo swung round. ‘Really?’
‘It is a tradition amongst our artists that, for love of me, they each carve me a chess piece. How would you like to do a pawn? Perhaps later, when you have more experience…’
Michangelo’s glare was like shards of glass.
‘So, it’s true that you steal your master’s drawings.’
‘I left something behind. It’s mine, although some say it is not possible that I should have done it. Ah, here…’ He pulled out a roll. ‘So, do you want to see whether I can paint or not?’
Intrigued, we went down the ladder and stood while the boy – about fifteen at that time and no longer with the treble voice that Filippino remembered – unrolled a picture of the Temptation of St Anthony in which the saint was being tortured by a crowd of fantastic and horrible creatures.
‘You didn’t do that. It’s a print by Martin of Holland.’
‘It is a copy of the print and the colour, obviously, is my own.’
Filippino took the sheet and turned until the best light fell on it. ‘Hmmm,’ he said at last. ‘Hmmm.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Where did you find – how did you think – are these colours from your imagination?’
‘No, from nature.’
‘Where are such monsters found in nature?’
‘In the fish market.’
Filippino laughed and complimented him. ‘I concede. Your draughtsmanship is steady; your use of colour is excellent. It must be true – you left painting for sculpture because you chose to.’
Michelangelo nodded, satisfied. ‘Now show me your work,’ he demanded, as if to a junior rather than to a master of the guild, and led the way out of the chancel to the chapel next door.
‘Oh, ah,’ said Filippino hurrying after him, pushing his cap back down almost over his eyes. ‘It is at a very early stage…’
Michelangelo led my hapless friend into the Strozzi chapel to torture him with his own blunt and merciless criticism.
‘Gesumaria!’ he cried. ‘What a shambles!’
41
IN THE SCULPTURE GARDEN
1490
AS I WALKED A LONE THROUGH SAN LORENZO MARKET I was dazzled by the colours of food and fabric: silk, taffeta, brocade, cloth of gold – exotic luxuries sparkling in the sun. There were stalls of Indian spices and African gold, of lapis lazuli from Afghanistan and jet from England. There were jugglers and tumblers, tight- rope walkers and dancers. Despatch runners hurried through the crowd, money-changers offered unique deals, slave traders paraded negroes and Georgians in chains; in curtained booths astrologers drew up horoscopes and predicted apocalyptic futures. Women rustled past in their silks, their faces chalked with powder, eyebrows drawn on, lips reddened and hair bleached; young men lounged at corners, wearing the latest fashions in a broad palette of colours. It was the Market of Desires, where all the goods of the world were available. If you were stupid enough to want them.
I had arranged to meet Angelo at the Palazzo de’ Medici, but outside the church Lorenzo’s favourite preacher, Fra Mariano, was addressing a crowd on the Word according to St John. Looking up at the palazzo, I could see Lorenzo at the window of his chamber listening to the sermon. Since Angelo was with him, I stayed outside to listen, to appreciate beautiful ideas being conveyed so elegantly by a man who employed the gestures of a polished rhetorician in the antique mould. The Word, the Logos, by which all things come to be. The ideas, rooted in St John, Fra Mariano elaborated with those of Plato and Hermes Trismegistus. He mentioned these by name but did not tell the crowd how much he was drawing from arcane wisdom to heighten his understanding of our Christian faith.
Lorenzo loved Fra Mariano, who so eloquently expressed all that he himself believed. He was having a monastery built near the Porto San Gallo especially for the preacher, to enable him to instruct the Florentines in a philosophical form of Christianity and make of his city a fountain of wisdom at which the world might drink.
I arrived in the courtyard at the same time as Giovanni Pico, who had also been listening to Fra Mariano. Where once Pico had been distinguished by the particular fineness of his costume and by his entourage, these days he walked alone dressed in black and lost in thought. Some said the changes in him were contrived to gain an acquittal from the charge of heresy, but it was not true. The costume was the man and fitted the mood of austerity that had come upon him when in prison in France. I told him about the paintings at Santa Maria Novella.
‘Truly, the figures appear to live. I have just seen several of them shopping in the market,’ I told him. The Count said he looked forward to the unveiling of the frescoes. Then I praised the wonderful sermon of Fra Mariano, telling him it had made my soul sing.
‘If you were to listen more carefully and more often to Savonarola, you would soon lose your taste for the superficial pleasures of Fra Mariano.’
‘The last time I listened to Savonarola carefully he was saying that our kidneys are rotting with excess, that our hands are stained with the blood of the poor, that we are going to be scourged, that he will hand our souls over to the eternal fires. Is this a man of truth?’
‘He speaks as he is moved.’
‘What, God talks like that?’
‘It is divine rhetoric, if you like, meant to impress the crowd. In private he says very different things. Come with me to San Marco.’
Lorenzo and his companions came down the stairs, preceded by Lorenzo’s favourite hound bounding down in advance to turn in leaping, excited circles, waiting for his master. Lorenzo’s gout caused him to walk slowly these days, and, while his companions moderated their pace to suit his, the hound yapped at his master to hurry. The sight of them, dressed in their finery for a Sunday walk, made me forget about prophets and I fell into step with Angelo. We went towards San Marco, not to hear Savonarola but to visit the garden Lorenzo was turning into a school for sculpture. Lorenzo wanted to see the work of his protégés while they were taking the day off.
‘I met Michelangelo earlier at Santa Maria Novella,’ I told Angelo.
‘What do you think?’
‘I agree it would be a good idea to view his work in his absence.’ Lorenzo’s sculpture garden stood behind a high wall that fronted the piazza of San Marco. I had been before, several years earlier, when it was an outdoor museum for Lorenzo’s collection of antique sculptures – headless gods and armless goddesses, dug from the earth in Rome or Greece – and also one of the meeting places for the Platonic Academy. In those days, Leonardo da Vinci had had his studio there. At the gate in the wall, Pico disengaged himself, saying he was going to the monastery. He glanced at me questioningly.
‘Later,’ I lied.
The enclosed garden had a loggia running all round inside its walls, except where there was a small house – a casino – interrupting its flow. It was a cloister garden without a church. The lawn was divided by gravel paths; lemons grew in pots; laurel, oleanders
and myrtle bordered the avenues with their lush, glossy green; a stand of cypresses pointed to the sky above. The garden rustled and cheeped with life – you could almost feel it breathing. Well-placed both in the loggia and in the avenues, marble statues stood on plinths, their whiteness heightened by the dark hedges. The word ‘paradise’, Angelo once told me, is Persian for ‘garden’. This, then, was a paradise.
The Pazzi conspiracy and the war with Rome had severed Lorenzo from his garden for several years; in reuniting with it, he had given it a new function. Several students were receiving tuition from Bertoldo here, but only one – Pietro Torrigiano – had so far shown any real aptitude. You may have met him here in London, Erasmo – he is the one who has done the head of the King in terracotta, the first portrait in England to resemble its sitter. Or you may know him as the man who broke Michelangelo’s nose. Well, someone had to do it.
We looked at a faun Michelangelo had carved, and a relief of the Madonna and Child. Truly, the boy could be forgiven his crusty manners, as all geniuses must be forgiven. Lorenzo smiled – that is, Lorenzo the poet smiled. This was not a wealthy patron who had discovered talent. It was a poet who had discovered someone else who could give expression to his own innermost thoughts and feelings. What Lorenzo recognised in Michelangelo – and it was a mutual recognition – was integrity. It is, I believe, what every father yearns to find in his son, someone simpatico with himself. It was most odd that anyone should find Michelangelo agreeable, least of all Lorenzo. But the lad had been beaten as a child for not being agreeable to his own father, for shaming the family with his ambition to be, as his father put it, ‘a stone mason’. Now he was like a horse that, having been broken with the whip, was likely to throw its rider at any time: Michelangelo needed to be retrained in the art of being human.