by Linda Proud
51
SITTING ON FENCES
1491
LORENZO HAD ANOTHER GARDEN ON THE VIA LARGA, close to the sculpture garden. Dedicated to peace, repose and horticulture, it had been bought to commemorate Lorenzo’s wife, Monna Clarice. Angelo had rooms in the casino there and enjoyed living in the city secluded by high walls. I stayed there when I needed to be in the city and had my days punctuated by the bells of San Marco. The windows faced the cloisters on the far side of the road, and whenever I looked out it was on to the magpie world of the Dominicans, walking piously in their striking black and white habits, austere and silent. Franciscans are always jolly, it seems, and greet the world and its creatures with a smile, their cheeks reddened by their liquors brewed from herbs. But the Dominicans, close-shaven and fastidious in dress, have an unearthly pallor and look on the world as something to be suffered. In the last two generations the friars of San Marco had become somewhat lax but Savonarola was setting new standards of austerity and many were following him in his practices of self- denial and fasting.
The sculpture garden had become a busy school, overseen by Bertoldo. Early one Sunday I walked through the stables there to see the chariots being built and decorated for a Roman Triumph that Lorenzo was organising for St John’s Day. Fifteen chariots of splendid construction being decorated by Granacci filled the stables. I had no doubt that, were Savonarola to know what was happening behind the high walls of the sculpture garden, it would give him a good theme for a sermon: the extravagant waste of money spent on a spectacle glorifying the men who had crucified Christ. All of which, of course, would be true – and missing the point. Lorenzo never thought of a theme without going through all four levels of meaning, and I knew enough to guess that the coming Triumph was designed to stir up the martial blood of the Florentines and strengthen their patriotism and pride. Lorenzo, who had his nose closer to the wind than anyone, could smell war ahead. But on another level he sought to purify the city of its voluptuousness, and the best foil to an excess of Venus is Mars.
I moved around the chariots, enjoying their details. A thousand stories from ancient poets were painted in their panels in monochrome tints to give the illusion of cast bronze. Stories of ancient Rome, its gods and heroes, which needed considerable knowledge to decipher, were here painted with such finesse that you would think they were collector’s items intended for close study in a rich man’s studiolo – not scenes that could only be glimpsed as the chariots moved past their viewers. In other words, there was no need for such painstaking detail. Instead of the usual tawdry that is the theatrical or processional prop seen close-to, here was art. How typical of Lorenzo that was. And why? For this reason: the evocation of Mars was not a mere theme for a pageant. Lorenzo was doing it: he was evoking Mars. Not the simplistic god of war, but the god of discipline, judgement and control. That was his way to cure his city of its decadence and, with an exquisite sense of timing, he was doing it at the festival of St John, for Florence has two patrons: the Baptist, and the God of War.
On this day, Savonarola was speaking in the church of San Marco on the Apocalypse of John. As I listened to the lines from Revelation, I heard them as if for the first time. Indeed, visions such as the seven lamps of fire burning before the throne, which are the seven Spirits of God, must surely, I thought, refer to Cabala. But although he knew about the art from the Count, Savonarola said nothing of Cabala in his exposition.
Suddenly there came that change in his voice which we all longed for and all dreaded. The mild and gentle preacher began to sound like an earthquake or avalanche. Savonarola had moved on to the subject of the four horses and was telling us that the white signified the apostles; the red the martyrs; the black the heretics. But the pale one…
‘It signifies the tepid ones, the fence-sitters, the ignorant; those who live life for themselves and not for God. And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him is Death.’
I began to tremble uncontrollably, even more so when the Friar continued: ‘Each horse represents an era of the Church. This pale one is our own. But there is another to come…’
And with those words he left off preaching and began to prophesy.
‘THE FIFTH STATE, WHICH IS OF THE ANTICHRIST AND OF CONVERSION, IS ABOUT TO BEGIN!’
The time and the half time. The one and a half millennium: the year 1500 Anno Domini.
‘I AM THE HAILSTORM THAT SHALL BREAK THE HEARTS OF THOSE WHO DO NOT TAKE SHELTER! HE THAT HATH AN EAR, LET HIM HEAR WHAT THE SPIRIT SAITH UNTO THE CHURCHES!’
My knees went weak. I could not have run had I wanted to. I felt like a mouse being tossed about by a cat and, once he had finished, I was astonished to find myself not only still alive but allowed to escape. I stumbled out into the open air. All around me were others in a similar condition, and many of them were wailing in remorse for their sins. Passers-by stared curiously: what was this stumbling congregation, heads buried in hands, mourning and lamenting like sinners in Dante’s Inferno? What had happened to them in the church of San Marco?
I could be ambivalent no longer: I must either stand with Angelo and condemn this friar or I must stand with Pico and accept what he was saying as true. And if it were true, then I had nine years left before the one and a half time, before the apocalypse, before the Day of Judgement. But who needs nine years to renounce all his sins? Nine hours would be long enough, if truly meant. Nevertheless, the future seemed capped: there was no point in looking forward in the vague hope of death-bed redemption. Now was the time to find out what was true and false within my own soul, to get off the fence if I would avoid the pale horse.
52
I TRY MY HAND AT SCULPTURE
1491
THE SCULPTURE GARDEN WAS FILLED WITH CHOKING, powdery air. ‘Greetings,’ I said, holding my sleeve over my nose. Michelangelo, covered in marble dust, looked like a living statue, albeit one with two purpled eyes. He grunted in reply, obviously not wishing to be disturbed in his work. I wanted to talk to him about Savonarola, about how he could wake up the soul with fire and freezing water and make you want to repent of every evil deed, but the youth, despite his own fondness for listening to the sermons of the friar, was in no mood to discuss the advent of the antichrist, not while he was working. So I settled down to watch him and recover from my ordeal. He had the large hands of a stone-cutter, and under the tutelage of Bertoldo, those hands were working with a power and confidence that made them seem old before their years. Michelangelo was sixteen but his hands were about forty. He struck the chisel deftly, sending chips flying, cutting his way into the stone.
‘Father Marsilio told me that Plotinus says we are to carve our souls as if they were statues,’ he said.
‘Yes, I remember that curious line and could not quite understand it.’
‘Oh, it’s easy. The ancient Greek sculptors did not make models – that is, build up a figure by addition. They cut away to find the figure trapped in the stone. That is what Plotinus means. Cut away the dross of the passions to find your true self. That is the sculpture of the soul. So cutting into marble is more noble an art than casting in bronze.’ His enthusiasm was palpable. ‘And that is the way I mean to work from now on, inwardly and outwardly.’
Michelangelo’s engagement with his work was infectious: I saw and thought nothing other than what was happening under his chisel as it cut effortlessly into the stone. Other artists these days refer to Michelangelo as a god and speak of him with awe, and whenever I hear him mentioned thus, I am transported to that day in the sculpture garden when I sat gathering stone dust in my hair and clothes, feeling the warmth of the sun on my skin and listening to a chisel as to a fine piece of percussion. My soul, which had been chilled by Savonarola, was coaxed back into the sunlight.
For the past six months Michelangelo had been living in the Palazzo de’ Medici and we had grown more used to each other and friendly, despite the gap in our ages. He was such
a forthright young man, and so devoted to his art, that his being merely sixteen seemed somehow illusory. He had lost any taste for friends of his own age, if he ever had one, and preferred to keep company with men older than himself. With Poliziano he was developing his skills in poetry; he spent hours in conversation with Ficino, discussing philosophy, especially as it relates to art. To me he came for help with his homework in Greek and Latin. Once that was done, he would talk to me about sculpture, and I listened to myself as I was at his age, talking about calligraphy and the arts of the scribe. With passion.
I gazed on Michelangelo at work. Can feelings echo like sounds? It was a fleeting thing, like the memory of the smell of roses in the midst of winter, a tremor in the vitals, an ‘Ah, yes!’ – and it was gone again.
‘Do you mind me watching?’
‘No. You are not like other men who watch me looking for faults, or those who fall asleep with their eyes open. You watch properly. It helps.’
A month previously his nose had been smashed in a fight with Pietro Torrigiani. The worst of the dreadful bruising had gone but he was still dark purple and pink round the eyes. Lorenzo, whose wrath had been so towering that Torrigiani had fled into exile, had tried to cheer Michelangelo up by saying that he took it as a compliment that Michelangelo wished to look like him, for they both now had flat noses; indeed, Michelangelo did find some cheer in this as he had become devoted to his patron. But he still wanted his old nose back.
‘Tell me,’ he said, putting his tools down for a moment. ‘Do you hate Pico della Mirandola for what he did to your arm?’
‘He did not injure me himself, or even intend it.’ I picked up one of the chisels and weighed it in my hand, appreciating its fine balance.
‘It is one thing to lose my nose but if someone robbed me of the ability to work, I would have to murder him.’
I laughed. ‘You cannot anticipate such things. Everything happens at the right time for the right reason. It is just not always easy to see what the reason is. In my case it was no doubt divine punishment for disobedience.’
‘Did I deserve to have my nose broken?’
‘Probably,’ I said, not really thinking, my mind disengaged and dwelling on a scatter of Cabala cards. Publish …
‘The stone will absorb anything – anger, sorrow, frustration.
Here, try it.’
He showed me how to hold the tools. When I hit the chisel with the mallet, the stone was surprisingly yielding. I felt childishly pleased with myself, looking at the chisel marks I had made as if at a fine piece of art. Michelangelo smiled. ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘enjoy yourself.’ He gave me a spare piece of stone.
So for an hour I was a sculptor, and made a head that any five-year-old would have been proud of. When at last I put down the tools, Michelangelo turned to see what I had done and barked with laughter. I could only join him. My sculpture was abysmal but I felt better for it, and said so.
‘How is it,’ he asked diffidently, ‘that you can hold a mallet but not a pen?’
I stared at my right hand. Was it cured? But no – it held all manner of things without trouble, knife, comb, glass of wine – indeed, any object except a pen. Michelangelo, curious about human anatomy, made me hold a quill while he studied the muscles of my forefinger and thumb under the skin, manipulating them, making me stretch and grip, stretch and grip. I dropped the quill several times in the exercise.
He examined the tendons of my arm. ‘I have no explanation,’ he said.
‘Neither do the physicians. They say the sword must have killed off the small muscles.’
‘Che peccato.’ He picked up his chisel and mallet and went back to work and, while I watched, he changed hands, first holding the chisel in his right hand, then in his left. It made no difference to the quality of his carving. He looked to see if I had noticed.
‘Were you born that way?’
‘No, I trained myself.’
‘That is the difference between us. I, too, have trained my left hand, but it can only do pedestrian work, nothing beautiful.’
‘Che peccato,’ he said again, this time with a shrug. He never had much sympathy for the lack of genius in men.
53
FOOLING A PRINTER
1491
I CONSULTED MY OLD MASTER, THE BOOKSELLER VESPASIANO da Bisticci, long since retired, to see if his opinion about printed books had changed. It had not. He said printing is the art of the devil, but that there had been one exception, and he told me to go to Filippo Strozzi and ask to see the Pliny.
I was fortunate to find Strozzi at home, since he was most often to be found at the site of his new palazzo. A familiar face not only from city life but also the Platonic Academy, Strozzi welcomed me in and took me to his studiolo, where he drew out his copy of Pliny’s Natural History as if his greatest treasure. He had obviously made a mistake, for I had asked to see the printed Pliny, but what he showed me was a manuscript of such surpassing beauty that, as I opened it, I recoiled – if recoil is the right verb to describe stepping back from the divine. What does Mary do when confronted by Gabriel? Recoil? No – she steps back. So, I stepped back, eyes wide. The image of the first page impressed itself upon my soul and I can see it now in my mind’s eye: a border with colours so rich – deep red, green, lustrous gold – that you felt within yourself a sense of majesty. A legend in Roman capitals – formed close to perfection, in gold leaf on a ground of ultramarine announced that this was a translation into Italian made by Cristoforo Landino. The capital D of the text was an exquisitely- wrought window on to the study of a scholar, which itself had a window looking out on to a landscape. One could have stepped into that study and looked over Pliny’s shoulder to see what he was writing – for now I was no longer stepping back but being drawn into the book, heart and soul. The margins were in correct proportion, wider at the top than at the bottom, the outer margin broader than the inner. And now that I was in tune with the design, seeing as it were the fine body inside the costume, I went to the text and realised for the first time that this book had been printed. The work of Nicholas Jenson of Venice. Strozzi had had the printed book decorated by Monte di Giovanni di Miniato.
‘Nearly had you fooled,’ he said amiably. ‘It fools nearly everyone, except the Duke of Urbino who knew it straight away for what it was. He said his nose tells him the truth where his eye is deceived.’
Mine should have done the same. I stood back and studied the page, went close and studied the letters. ‘I thought it was impossible for printing to be beautiful.’
‘Usually it is. Jenson was unique.’
‘Did he not have apprentices, someone to continue his tradition?’
‘A man called Torresani worked for him and bought up Jenson’s shop on his death. But whether he was party to the secrets of proportion I do not know.’
When Angelo returned from Venice, he told me that this very Torresani had become the partner of Aldo Manuzio. He fully approved my change of heart and direction.
‘I have had my Italian works published in their hundreds. I am content they will survive whereas, if my work remains in manuscript only, there will be small chance of its survival.’
‘When a book is beautiful,’ I said, ‘a lustrous jewel of ink and paint, it survives even dark ages, for men who cannot read value it for its appearance.’
‘The dark age is behind us,’ said Angelo. ‘Ahead is only light.’
‘Said the mayfly of the rising moon.’
‘Of course, the best thing about printed books is that I may write notes in their margins freely, or draw a hand pointing to an important line, without people like you complaining about vandalism.’
That was true enough.
I went to Antonio Miscomini, who was setting up Ficino’s translation of Plotinus. I told him I was willing to turn my hand to anything: editing, compositing, even inking. Miscomini said he could not
afford another wage.
‘Then I shall work for nothing,’ I told him. ‘I don’t need anyone. I am fully staffed.’
It seemed I was wasting my time. About to leave, I looked round at the many presses. ‘You print on single sheets.’ Almost everyone did. On the back of page one, they printed page two. But I knew a way of printing up to eight or even sixteen pages on one sheet and, on its reverse, another eight or sixteen. It did not take a great brain to invent the small book, but you did need to know the law of imposition.
‘Single sheets are hard enough, even with two pulls,’ he said. ‘What do you expect me to do? Print on two sheets at once?’
‘I can show you how to do two pages at once, or four, or eight. And I can show you how to make a quire of thirty two pages with only four formes.’
The imposition of pages is something I had learnt as a scribe but it seemed not to have occurred to the printers – at least, not to this one. I decided not to show him how easy it was to work out for himself. Instead I wrote out some numbers: 9/16, 8/1, 10/15, 7/2.
‘What is this cipher?’
‘It’s the number law of Cabala,’ I lied. ‘A secret formula revealed to Pico della Mirandola by an angel which I am prepared to offer you. The rest of the sequence is five over four, twelve over thirteen –’
‘Wait! Wait! I am lost.’
‘Nine over three and eleven over fourteen. Ecco! The outer forme.’
‘Well, you’ll have to tell me that all over again. And what do you mean the outer forme?’
‘And of course every other number has to be upside down, starting with the first. So, eight upside down over one; nine upside down over sixteen.’
‘Please…’
‘Then there is the inner forme.’ And I fired the second sequence at him: 7/2, 10/15, 11/14, 9/3. ‘And don’t forget, the first of each pair is always upside down.’