Michelangelo has introduced a new ritual into his half-idle life, along with the daily stroll with Mesihi: he asks Manuel to read to him. Every day after noon the dragoman joins him and sight-translates poems for him, Turkish or Persian stories, Greek or Latin treatises that they choose together in the beautiful brand-new library that — by royal privilege — Bayezid opened to the artist.
Decidedly these Ottomans are masters of light. Bayezid’s library, like his mosque, on a hill, is bathed in an omnipresent but discreet sunlight, whose rays never fall directly on the readers. You need all the attention of a Michelangelo to discover, in the knowledgeable game of placement and orientation of windows, the secret of the miraculous harmony of this simple space whose majesty, instead of crushing the visitor, places him at the center of the arrangement, flatters him, exalts and reassures him.
Michelangelo’s curiosity is boundless.
Everything interests him.
He chooses unknown manuscripts, narratives he knows nothing about; he has Manuel read him The Symposium, and is amused by Socrates’s games, the sandals he wore to keep from dirtying his feet, since he wanted to look handsome to go drinking at Agathon’s; scholarly treatises mostly interest him for the stories they contain.
For example, of The Elements by Vitruvius, the only known ancient treatise on architecture, Michelangelo will remember much more clearly Dinocrates’s anecdote than the considerations on the proportions of temples or urban planning. Dinocrates, counting on his experience and skill, set off one day from Macedonia to go to the army of Alexander, who was then master of the world, and to whom he wanted to make himself known. Leaving his country, he had brought letters of recommendation from his parents and friends to the most distinguished personages of the court, in order to have easier access to the king. Having been kindly received by them, he asked to be presented as soon as possible to Alexander. The promise was made; but the execution took time: a favorable opportunity had to be found. Suspecting they were making fun of him, Dinocrates took matters into his own hands. He was tall, his face pleasant. In him beauty was joined with great dignity. These presents of nature filled him with confidence. He left his clothes at his inn, rubbed his body with oil, crowned himself with a poplar branch, then, covering his left shoulder with a lion’s skin and arming his right hand with a club, he headed for the tribunal where the king was handing out justice. The novelty of the spectacle drew the attention of the crowd. Alexander saw Dinocrates, and, struck with surprise, ordered them to let him approach, and asked him who he was. “I am the architect Dinocrates,” he replied; “Macedonia is my homeland. The models and plans I present to Alexander are worthy of his greatness. I gave to Mount Athos the shape of a man who, in his left hand, holds the enclosure of a city, and in his right, a cup where the waters of all the rivers that emerge from the mountain flow in, before they spread to the sea.”
Lying on his wooden bed, Michelangelo listens enraptured to Manuel’s hesitant voice. This Dinocrates is ingenious.
Since the dawn of time people have had to humiliate themselves before the Caesars.
He pictures himself facing Julius II, wearing an animal skin, club in hand, and can’t help but burst out laughing.
May 20: peppercorns, cinnamon sticks, nutmeg, camphor, dried peppers, saffron pistils, rupturewort, agrimony, powdered cinnamon, cumin, euphorbia and mandrake from the Orient, all at just two aspers for four full ounces — you could make a fortune in this trade.
Michelangelo spent the day strolling around the city and its bazaars in the company of the poet Mesihi. The sculptor is surprised he gets along so well with an infidel. Their friendship is as strong as it is discreet.
Mesihi took Michelangelo far south, beyond the walls of Byzantium, to a strange open-air market, the market of live bodies, of men and animals. Michelangelo observed with terror the thin bodies of black slaves from Ethiopia, the white women taken from the Caucasus or Bulgaria, caravans of the wretched roped to each other, waiting for a better fate in the home of a wealthy Istanbul native or on a construction site. He quickly averted his eyes from the misery of his coreligionists.
The animals were even more impressive.
All of creation was there, or almost all. Oxen, sheep, golden horses from Turkmenistan, sorrels, Arab steeds as black as night, short-haired dromedaries, camels with long woolen coats, and, in one corner, the rarest mammals, from far-off India via Persia.
Mesihi was greatly amused by the Florentine’s astonishment.
Two little elephants were trumpeting, leaning against their mother.
Michelangelo wanted to go over and stroke them.
“They say that brings luck, Mesihi.”
The poet laughed when he saw the artist venture into the mud to touch the rough skin of the huge animals with the tips of his fingers.
“Do you want one?”
The Florentine pictured for an instant the look on the face of the skinflint Maringhi upon discovering an elephant in his courtyard, washing itself in his fountain. An entirely pleasing prospect.
“I couldn’t forgive myself for inflicting on this sumptuous animal the meagre fare my host serves, Mesihi.”
“That’s very true, Maestro. Look, I found something that would suit you better.”
In a tall metal cage, a tiny fawn-colored monkey, hand in its mouth, was mistrustfully observing the poet. At the sight of Michelangelo, it began executing a little dance, then hung from the bars by its tail, and finally fell gracefully back to the ground and saluted, like an artist after a performance.
Michelangelo applauded, laughing.
“He can recognize an appreciative audience, apparently,” said Mesihi, mockingly.
“You’re right. What’s more, his goatee gives him a very serious air. He is a noble monkey, worthy of a high-ranking person.”
“He is my present to you, then. He can keep you company as you work.”
Michelangelo didn’t think the offer was serious, and so didn’t protest; when he found himself with the cage in his hand, it was too late.
“It’s too kind, you shouldn’t have. His company will remind me of yours,” he added, in a honeyed voice.
Mesihi, disconcerted for a few seconds, burst out in a loud laugh when he saw the wicked smile on the artist’s mouth.
Now the animal is gamboling joyfully in his room, leaping onto the bed, onto the table, hanging from the open door of his apartment, pouncing on a seed, coming over to Michelangelo to disturb him in his note-taking.
This energy delights him.
He watches the monkey for a long time the way a child looks at an unpredictable mobile, before plunging back into his countless sketches of bridges.
At first sight Mesihi’s is a very different art: the height of the letter, the thickness of the line that gives movement, the disposition of the consonants, space stretching out according to sounds. Clinging to his reed pen, the calligrapher-poet gives a face to words, to phrases, to lines or verses. He is known to have drawn miniatures as well, but none of these images seems to have survived, unless one of them is still sleeping in a forgotten manuscript. Scenes of drinking bouts, faces, gardens where lovers are lying down while fantastical animals fly over them, illustrations of great mystical poems or courtly romances: an anonymous painter, Mesihi signs only his verses, which are few; he prefers pleasures — wine, opium, flesh — over the austere temptation of posterity. He is often found drunk, leaning against the wall of the tavern, at dawn; people shake him and then he needs to sweat for a long time in the steam bath, massaging his temples, to return to his body. Mesihi loved men and women, women and men, sang the praises of his patron and the delights of spring, both sweet and full of despair at the same time; he had no more experience with fatherhood or even marriage than Michelangelo did; unlike Michelangelo, he found no consolation in faith, even though he appreciated the aquatic calm of the courtyards of mosques and the fraternal
chant of the muezzin on top of the minaret. Above all he loved the city, the noisy dens where the Janissaries drank, the activity of the port, the accents of foreigners.
And, more than anything, he loved drawing, the black wound of the ink, that caress scraping the grain of the paper.
Your drunkenness is so sweet to me that it intoxicates me.
You are breathing gently. You are alive. I would like to move over to your side of the world, see into your dreams. Are you dreaming of a white, fragile love over there, so far away? Of a childhood, a lost palace? I know I don’t have a place there; none of us will have a place there. You are closed in like a shell. It would be so easy, though, for you to open up, a tiny crack where life could rush in. I can guess your fate. You will remain in the light, they will celebrate you, you will be rich. Your name, immense as a fortress, will hide us with its shadow. They will forget what you have seen here. These moments of time will disappear. You yourself will forget my voice, the body you desired, your tremblings, your hesitations. I would so like for you to keep something of it. For you to carry away a part of me. So that something of my far-off homeland could be passed on. Not a vague memory, an image, but the energy of a star, its vibration in the dark. A truth. I know that men are children who chase away their despair with anger, their fear with love; they respond to the void by building castles and temples. They cling to stories, they shove them in front of them like banners; everyone makes some story his own so as to attach himself to the crowd that shares it. You conquer people by telling them of battles, kings, elephants, and marvelous beings; by speaking to them about the happiness they will find beyond death, the bright light that presided over their birth, the angels wheeling around them, the demons menacing them, and love, love, that promise of oblivion and satiety. Tell them about all of that, and they will love you; they will make you the equal of a god. But you will know, since you are here pressed against me, you ill-smelling Frank whom chance has brought to my hands, you will know that all this is nothing but a perfumed veil hiding the eternal suffering of night.
May 22: cipolin, ophite, sarrancolin, serpentine, canela, delfino, porphyry, brocatello, obsidian, marble from Cinna. So many names, colors, materials, whereas the most beautiful, the only one worth anything, is white, white, white without veins, grooves or colorations.
He misses marble.
Its softness in hardness. The delicate strength you need to work it, the time it takes you to polish it.
Michelangelo quickly shuts his notebook when Manuel enters his room without knocking.
“Maestro, excuse me, but we were worried.”
Michelangelo puts down his quill.
“Why, Manuel? What worries you so much?”
Manuel suddenly seems embarrassed. Without a doubt this Florentine is mysterious.
“But Maestro, your lamp burned all night long, and you’ve eaten nothing since yesterday morning.”
The monkey seems to be listening attentively to the conversation from his perch.
The sculptor sighs.
“That’s true, you are right. Now that you tell me that, I think I’m hungry.”
The young Greek seems immediately reassured.
“I can have a meal sent up to you, if you like.”
“That’s very kind, Manuel.”
Before leaving, still on the threshold, the dragoman has one hesitation.
“May I ask you a question, master?”
“But of course.”
“What did you do all night in the candlelight? Did you work on the bridge?”
Michelangelo smiles at the translator’s naïve curiosity.
“No, at the risk of disappointing you, no. I tackled a much more arduous task, my friend. A real challenge.”
The artist senses that the answer does not entirely satisfy his interlocutor, who remains motionless, his hand on the door.
“I drew an elephant,” he adds.
Guessing that he won’t learn any more, Manuel, bewildered, leaves the room to go to the kitchens.
The day before yesterday monkeys and elephants; today iron, silver, brass. In the dazzling heat of the forge, Mesihi shows Michelangelo the work of the sultan’s artisans. The most perfect balance between hardness and ductility: that’s what gives a dagger or sabre its resistance and sharpness.
It’s a rare privilege Mesihi has obtained from Ali Pasha for the Florentine. The arsenal and its techniques are guarded even more jealously than the harem. Set a little apart from the city, to prevent fires, the arsenal forges swords, armor, culverin cannons, and arquebuses. In the heart of this arsenal, a small workshop produces the most beautiful blades using ingots of indestructible steel imported from India, in which the concentric outlines of the damask steel are already visible.
Michelangelo is fascinated by the smiths’ activities, by the power of the forgers and bellows handlers. The head of the workshop Michelangelo and Mesihi are visiting is a Syrian, whom the Sultan captured from the Mamelukes as war booty; he doesn’t seem at all put out by the heat, nor does he seem to perspire, whereas the artist is swimming in sweat beneath his doublet.
Michelangelo took out of his shirt the drawing he made that morning, after his night of elephants; it’s an ornate dagger with a straight blade, symmetrical on the axis of the handle, in perfect proportion, according to the golden ratio. The Syrian looks shocked, tells Mesihi it’s impossible to make such a thing, a pagan weapon, in the shape of a Latin cross, it brings misfortune by irritating God; Mesihi of Prishtina smiles, and explains to the Florentine that the drawing is not suitable. Michelangelo is surprised. Still, it is a pure form. Not caring to waste time in theological quibbling, the sculptor asks for an hour, a table, some graphite and red ink for the designs; they set him up in a well-ventilated room off to the side, where the heat is more bearable.
Mesihi doesn’t take his eyes off him.
He watches the artist’s hand reproduce his initial drawing, finding the proportions with a compass; then slightly curving the blade downward, starting from the second third, a curve he compensates for by a bend in the upper part of the handle, which gives the whole an imperceptibly snakelike movement, an undulation he will hide with a simple border, supported by the lower section. Two curves that complete and annul each other in the violence of the point.
The Latin cross has disappeared and given way to a masterpiece of innovation and beauty.
A miracle.
He had asked for an hour and, in forty minutes, the two sketches are finished, front and back, as well as a medallion for the detail of the handle.
Pleased with himself, Michelangelo smiles; he asks for a little water, which Mesihi hurries to procure for him before running to show this beauty to the Syrian, who is amazed in turn.
Then they have to choose the type of damask steel; Michelangelo decides on one of the most solid kinds, quite dark, whose almost invisible lines won’t disturb the design.
It will be a king’s weapon.
The wealthy Aldobrandini will have to pay a royal price for it.
Happy, the two artists return to their boat and leave Scutari for Stambul.
Sailing on the calm waters of the Bosphorus, Michelangelo remembers the crossing that separates Mestre from Venice, which he visited in his youth; it is not surprising that there are so many Venetians here, he thinks. This city resembles La Serenissima, but in fabulous proportions, where everything’s multiplied by a hundred. A Venice invaded by the seven hills and the power of Rome.
Constantinople, May 23, 1506
To Buonarroto di Lodovico di Buonarrota Simoni in Firenze
Buonarroto, you can tell Aldobrandini that I’ll have his dagger, and it will be splendid. I think I can send it to him by the beginning of next month. It might be safer to wait for my return so that I can bring it myself, but he’ll have to be patient for a little while longer. I don’t see my work advancing her
e and so I can’t yet settle on a date.
I read in your letter that you’re getting along perfectly and I’m happy to hear it.
As for the sum you ask of me again, I understand your needs; know that here my poor room is costing me a fortune and that I haven’t yet received the promised payments. As I told you, I beg you to rely on the Santa Maria Maggiore account if Giovan Simone insists.
Pray God that everything goes for the best.
Nothing else.
Your Michelagnolo
On May 27, the Grand Vizier Ali Pasha summons Michelangelo by way of Mesihi. He wants to find out how the work is advancing. The poet is a little nervous as he transmits this request to the Florentine; he sensed impatience in the Vizier’s order, an impatience that stems no doubt from the Sultan himself.
Bayezid is worried about his bridge.
The ceremony is less impressive than during their first meeting. Ali Pasha receives the sculptor after a meeting with his council, the divan; Michelangelo had to wait a long time, seated in the shade of a tree, accompanied by Mesihi the functionary who had found it difficult to conceal his anxiety and kept pacing back and forth like the monkey in its cage.
Falachi came to fetch Michelangelo and his companion to bring them to the deputy of the Shadow of God on Earth. The Genoese is less gracious than usual, and Michelangelo begins to feel the tension that is already agitating his companion.
Seated on a platform, surrounded by ministers and servants, Ali Pasha waves to Mesihi to approach. Michelangelo remains respectfully behind.
The dialogue is brief; the Vizier utters a few scant sentences to which his protégé replies with a word.
Then it’s the Florentine’s turn.
This time the Vizier speaks Turkish. Falachi translates.
“The Sultan is impatient to see your drafts, Maestro. We are too.”
“This will soon be possible, my Lord. In ten days at most.”
Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants Page 4