by Linda Proud
‘In this letter,’ said the Pope, ‘from one of my cardinals, it says that the salvation of the Medici Library is largely thanks to you. True?’
‘No, not true,’ I said, flooding with relief that the letter held more than a simple denunciation.
The Pope raised his bushy eyebrows.
‘It is wholly due to Cardinal Giovanni himself, but it is true that I was a member of his Company of the Library.’
‘He tells me that you entered the monastery at his express wish, surrendering your life and, he says, a prospect of marriage, in order to protect the books. True?’
‘Yes, that is true.’ I felt more than saw Rafaello’s look of amazement.
‘That was a great sacrifice. However, you made your vows to God, not to Girolamo Savonarola. Tell me what happened when you made those vows.’
My vision now excluded the watching cardinals and curia. The curious. I saw only the Pope, and in him I saw more than I had expected to see: one who takes his divine duty seriously. I could not lie now. I told him of that morning in Savonarola’s cell, that when I came to repeat the vows after him I felt as if I were sinking to the bottom of the sea but not drowning. I remembered that moment of grace, the full surrender. ‘In that moment, I meant everything I said,’ I told him, he, my spiritual father. ‘I gave my life to God.’
‘But you took it back again.’
I smiled wryly. ‘It was either that or lose it.’
Those rheumy old eyes twinkled for a moment, then the Pope inhaled and sat back, considering the matter. I glanced about at the audience, expecting to see them laughing at me, but all were following the exchange with interest. However much each man falls, we are united in this: the wish to be better than we are.
‘I have a solution,’ the Pope said at last. ‘Keep your vows, make your peace with the Vicar General, then come to the Vatican. I would have you working in my library.’
I stood staring at him, unable to comprehend this alteration in my fortunes, my destiny. All I had to do was nod and say thank you and the course of my life would change. I would live in Italy, among books. All I had to do was nod. It was then that I remembered my dream.
‘I cannot.’
He cupped his ear. ‘What did you say?’
‘Your Holiness, I thank you for your offer. Everything, almost everything within me strains to accept it, but I cannot.’
There is a place within that is beyond vows. It is so light it is dark. The unknowable light. My God within. Under direction of that light, in obedience to that light, not knowing what I was saying or why, I said again, ‘I cannot.’
‘You would prefer latrine scrubbing?’
I swallowed. ‘I would be released from my vows.’
‘For what reason? Do you wish to marry?’
‘No, it is not that. I have lived eight years in deceit. I need to be right with myself.’ In truth I did not know the reason and groped to express that which I did not know. ‘I wish to be free, if only to make the choice again, except this time it would not be under the influence of anyone else.’
The Pope nodded, and seemed to be losing interest in me. ‘Very well. You are absolved. I will have letters written to that effect. Go now. But Maffei, the offer of a position in the library remains.’
When I left the tent, I was still shaking but for different reasons.
‘Librarian at the Vatican?’ said Albrecht, amazed when I told him what had passed.
I looked to the north and to the south. ‘I am back on the fence,’ I said.
‘You get a better view there.’
Dürer said that he intends to enter Bologna as soon as the city surrenders, to find his master of proportion. ‘Will you come with me?’
I looked north. I looked south, to the mountains that only yesterday I was yearning for, but now… Now I am free to return to England, to go to John Colet and tell him I have found what I have lost: my integrity. That integrity, however, demands I fulfil my duty. ‘The King of England has commissioned me to measure the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. I am going to Florence.’
F lorence, November 13th, 1506
As a free man I entered a city enjoying a new republic and a stable government under Piero Soderini, who has been elected Gonfalonier for life. Florence has become the city it always wanted to be: safe and prosperous. It has found a middle way between the Medici and Savonarola, a way that is much to be preferred to both, even if it is dull. And colourless. Everyone seems to wear undyed cloth or, if dyed, then dyed black.
Dürer seems destined to miss opportunities, for in not coming to Florence with me he has missed meeting Michelangelo. Not that I can imagine them meeting, let alone befriending each other. No, Tuscany has been spared an earthquake. As Dürer has his destiny, so have I mine, and it is to be accompanied throughout this journey by northerners. Erasmus passed me to Dürer; now Dürer has passed me back to Erasmus. I met him by chance in the Piazza della Signoria, staring up at the great marble giant made by Michelangelo and placed outside the palazzo.
‘If this is David,’ I said, ‘how big is Goliath?’
Erasmus turned. When he recognised me, his face held none of the righteous anger that had dimmed it the last time we were together. ‘You have found what you have lost,’ he said affectionately.
‘To know what you have lost is not the same as finding it.’
‘So, what was it?’
‘Something perhaps I never had. Purity.’
‘We all began in purity,’ he said. ‘So you had it once. Can you remember a time?’
Yes, I can remember a time. It was when I put my hand into that of the Bishop of Volterra, that time when, as a small and frightened boy, I’d been hiding in the cathedral from the tumult. I found the new bishop in prayer. Here was not a lofty man or a clever or a patronising one. Here was a man who loved truth, though I could not have expressed it that way at the time. I took him by the hand and led him to his palazzo, where I lived as a servant. He taught me the New Learning. He arranged for my apprenticeship as a scribe. He taught me wonder. I was a naughty pupil and often punished, but in that moment when I took truth by the hand, in that moment I was pure.
There have been other such moments, I suppose, but that is the one I remembered when Erasmus asked. We get gnarled with age. One’s bark thickens. I had forgotten what I loved – not books, not Greek, not even Plato, but what this literature contains: an invisible essence that calls to the soul. Love of goodness. Love of truth.
What have I lost? My love of God. When did I lose it? When Elena died. Perhaps it is enough to know the answer without finding it. I shall not take long at the hospital but soon begin the journey home.
In the company of Erasmus I look upon my city with the eyes of a stranger. He is disappointed with Florence, that it is not full of buildings designed on ancient principles. Instead of the triumphal arches and marble palaces of his imagination, he finds palazzi of stone the colour of honey, churches without façades, many soaring towers that have stood now for three hundred years.
I took him to Santa Maria Novella to show him the façade designed by Leon Battista Alberti according to Vitruvian geometry. Erasmus peered at the bands of green and cream marble, the pointed arches of the doors, and saw a style that was familiar throughout Tuscany, the barbarian style of the dark age.
‘But that is its magic,’ I protested. ‘Alberti could not change the church itself, which was built in the twelfth century. He had to incorporate its features, such as the pointed arches. And then he used the old Tuscan style of banding, as you say. But then look what he did…’ And standing in the piazza, I showed Erasmus the geometry of the façade, its three tiers, its squares and volutes, all in the proportion of 2:1, the relationship of Man to God, and how each detail, being in the same proportion as the whole, is joined in harmony. ‘Alberti returned to the past to find his solutions but slavish imita
tion is not the way. Poliziano said that often enough with regard to poetry.’
Erasmus squinted, for the light was bouncing off the marble and giving him a headache. ‘Can we go inside?’
‘Indeed. There are two men I wish you to meet.’ So saying, I took him inside the church and to the chancel behind the high altar, the Tornabuoni chapel painted by Ghirlandaio, where I formally introduced him to the portraits of Ficino and Poliziano that are so utterly life-like.
Despite his headache, Erasmus was impressed, even touched as he looked on the faces of men whose books have inspired him. ‘Is this where you met Michelangelo?’
‘Yes, right here, when Filippino and I were stealing a preview of the paintings.’
I took him to the next chapel to show him Filippino’s frescoes, but their wild design and trompe l’oeil had a bad effect on my friend and he began to feel sick with his headache.
‘I have seen enough wonders for the day.’
‘We have hardly begun!’
‘Nevertheless…’ Erasmus thanked me for the tour and said he would meet me later. He needed to return to his inn to rest.
I remained in the church, going back to the chancel to gaze up at the portrait of the wetnurse, the portrait of Elena. I smiled at her, my wife, as she smiled at the child in her arms. I was aware of someone entering the chancel but took no notice until the man came close, peering at me. I turned, disturbed by quite a powerful smell. I expected to see a beggar but saw instead that strong, crushed face I once knew so well.
‘Ah, thought it was you.’
‘Michelangelo! I heard you were in Rome.’
‘I escaped.’
‘Escaped?’
‘Julius held me prisoner! Did you know that? But I escaped when the devil went off to conquer Italy. Stop looking at this confectionery and come and see some real meat.’
Michelangelo has been commissioned by Piero Soderini to decorate the newly built Hall of the Grand Council in the Palazzo della Signoria. He had been working on the design before being called to Rome by Pope Julius. Now, back in Florence, he has completed the cartoon and is putting it on display in the upper cloister of Santa Maria Novella. ‘I saw you from a window, staring at the façade. Giving a lecture on proportion, I think.’
I followed him upstairs into the rooms which had once been the papal apartments when the pope resided here in the time of Cosimo. There, pasted to a vast panel and set up against a wall – many men struggling to fix it so that it did not topple over – was a design writhing with the figures of naked men, hastily dressing and fastening on their armour: an heroic moment in the history of our republic, the Battle of Cescina, when the Florentine soldiers, bathing in the river, were surprised by a Pisan attack.
‘Hey! Raise it on the right, up, up. Careful now! That’s it.’
I gazed in particular at the figure of an old man wearing a wreath of ivy, struggling to draw his hose on over wet legs. The thrust of his muscles, the sinews, his grimace: I could feel his urgency and frustration as if it were my own. ‘It is not possible to do this with lines on paper,’ I said eventually.
‘Not possible by anyone else, I agree,’ said Michelangelo.
Once the cartoon was in place and the workmen finished, he offered to show me the wall where it is to be painted in fresco and we walked together through Florence to the Palazzo della Signoria, swathing ourselves in our mantles against the chill air. His mantle was old and torn and he covered his head with it as well as his body. Peering out of it like a beaten-up vagrant, he told me the story of the tyrant who is Pope Julius II.
‘I was working on the design for the battle two years ago. Leonardo was here in the city, having deigned to visit his mother- land after riding with Cesare Borgia…’
‘Leonardo rode with Cesare?’
‘He will work for anyone who pays him enough.’ Michelangelo spat on the pavement. ‘A commission for an altarpiece at the Annunziata had just been granted to your Filippino Lippi, but then Leonardo arrives back here and tells the authorities that he is willing to paint an altarpiece, such as the altarpiece for the Annunziata.’
I smiled, imagining my friend’s reaction.
‘Filippino withdrew.’
‘What?’
‘He just withdrew, quietly and without fuss, saying “Let the better man have the work.” But of course, Leonardo had not reformed, had not perfected himself as a man the way Filippino had. He took the money for the commission, made a start and then abandoned it as soon as Soderini asked him to decorate the wall of the Council. The commission for the altarpiece went back to Filippino, but he died, alas. A great soul, Filippino Lippi.’ The sense of loss yawned like a pit in the bottom of my soul but Michelangelo rattled on, telling me how all the painters in Florence had closed their workshops the day Filippino was buried. ‘A great soul,’ he repeated.
‘And Sandro Botticelli?’ I asked. ‘Is he still alive?’
‘Yes, but losing his wits. He’s just a mad old man living with his family in Ognissanti.’ Then he went back to ranting about Leonardo, saying any talent he has he gets from the devil. ‘I’m certain of it. You wait until you see the mess he has made on the wall of the Hall, this man made so rich by his inflated reputation that he strolls about like a prince, while I, I…’ Michelangelo began to hee-haw with rage.
‘Michelangelo, you are the most famous artist of our times and there is never a moment when you do not have work. Why is it that you are so poor, you who made the figure of the dead Christ in the lap of his Mother, a statue so famous that I have seen drawings of it in England. Why do you have no money?’
He stopped and faced me. ‘The Pope demands so much of me. He fixes the price at the beginning but then keeps adding to the commission. Now he wants me to do his tomb – was there an Egyptian pharaoh more vain and arrogant? His own tomb, and before he is dead. A tomb of marble with many figures. I bought the stone with my own money. Now it lies wasting in Rome, for the Pope changed his mind.’
‘I trust you remonstrated with him.’
‘Of course I did! Either that or starve. It was a simple enough request: pay me for the stone. But he met this with such fury that I nearly wet myself. So I took off. Better that than finding a dagger in my ribs. Now I am home, ruined in everything except my talent.’
‘But all these other great works you have done: you should be a rich man, like Leonardo.’
Michelangelo spun to face me. ‘I’ll tell you the difference between me and Leonardo da Vinci. I serve my art, not my vanity. I will suffer anything for my art. If it takes me twice as long to finish something as I’ve estimated, so be it. In my art is God, and I will give Him nothing less than everything I have.’
How I envy him, this bedraggled, proud, frightened man. Some artists serve their public, giving their commissioners exactly what they want. Some serve the Muse. ‘If wealth is in integrity,’ I said, ‘then you are rich beyond measure.’
‘I do not want money and what it buys. But I do want justice why are these vain and empty men rewarded? What I want is time and peace. But the Pope is calling for me to come back. Even while he is besieging Bologna, he keeps writing to Soderini to send me to him, and Soderini replies saying I am too scared to return. “Michelangelo is scared?” cries His Holiness. “Of me? For what reason?” I told Soderini I’ll go but only if he obtains a safe conduct in writing. He wrote to the Pope requesting it and got such an abusive reply that yesterday I was called in to see our Gonfalonier – he’s a good man, I like him – and he told me that he will do everything he can for me, but he will not go to war with Rome on my behalf.’
I looked askance at my friend, wondering how much of all this could be believed. ‘I have met the Pope. You have nothing to fear if you treat him with respect and tell the truth.’ Well, some of the truth, I thought wryly.
‘Then you have not met the Pope but some impostor.’
/> ‘I have met him. He absolved me of my vows and offered me a post in the Vatican library.’ The addition of this last part was, of course, made in pride. If I must be a gnat walking beside an elephant, I could at least be a big gnat. A big, swaggering gnat. ‘I turned it down.’
Michelangelo came to a halt. ‘Now I know you saw an imposter. No one refuses Julius anything he wants.’
I shrugged. ‘I did.’
‘Does he know you are here? He will be coming for you as he will for me. I tell you, both of us will be dragged to Rome in chains.’
I laughed. ‘Your fears are as exaggerated as your work.’
‘What do you mean, “exaggerated”?’ he cried, hurt.
‘Larger than life, that is all.’
He growled, gesticulated, began spewing more stories of what he has suffered, telling me how Leonardo had humiliated him in the street. When we entered the Piazza della Signoria, he did not even glance at his David. I had to interrupt him to tell him how marvellous I consider it to be, this portrait of the Florentine Republic.
‘But exaggerated.’
I begged his forgiveness for what I had said, and he nodded, appeased. He told me about the faults in the marble, all the difficulties he had had to overcome, the solutions he had found, and as he stood talking, people passing said, ‘Bravo, Michelangelo, bravo!’
The leading artists of the day had met in council to decide where the David should be placed and there had been much argument. ‘Most thought it should be here, near the Palazzo and not at the Duomo, but they could not agree where precisely it should be put. Some wanted it to replace the Judith…’ here Michelangelo waved dismissively towards the statue by Donatello now set up in the Loggia de’ Lanzi.
I looked at the statue of the maid raising a sword to behead a tyrant and grimaced. ‘I have never liked it.’
‘Some say it is a thing of evil omen, that we can date all our troubles to the day it was set up. It is unnatural, that the female kill the male.’