“Arrivederci,” the artist calls, bidding farewell to all the rats deserting the rathouse. Other predators have their scent, but there is nothing to see. Empty at the best of times, the rathouse is no emptier than at this time, when all its inhabitants have gone about their business. Then the rathouse resembles something like a Marie Celeste, a ghost ship with nothing to comfort it but its creaks and groans and ancient stenches.
They are all gone now, at least the ones he knows, but he has lived in the rathouse long enough to appreciate that there are others, that none can tell of, who live their own clandestine lives in distant dimensions. The rathouse is endless. So many reincarnated souls it makes the mind dizzy.
While the deserters are doomed to traverse the streets of Travesty to seek whatever it is they’ll find, Nisa has a much wider domain to explore. He doesn’t have to leave the rathouse in order to leave the rathouse. The life he lives here is but a pale imitation of the life he lived as Michelangelo Buonarotti, sculptor of Popes, scribbler of titanic male bodies in the age of the Renaissance.
All he has to do is turn back into his studio where a steady, voluminous grey light fills every corner, amorphous, dense and curiously depthless, like fibrostone. He hates this light; it has no clarity or vigour, no life but for a certain ubiquity. With a nostalgic sigh not staged for anyone’s benefit he remembers the muscular light of Renaissance Italy. Talk of streets! Florence, pale stone, rising like a hymn to beauty on the lush-lit Tuscany Plains. Pink and white marble, crimson skies, iridescent green hills, the shimmering purple of ripe grapes, evening sunlight as yellow as butter – there was a light that loved shaped stone!
He goes to the window, Sweeping imaginary hair from his fore-head, not to look out at the ongoing activity in the building opposite, but to look back at his studio dominated by the recreation of his own beloved David, towering above the clutter with a touch of adolescent awkwardness, an angular grace, right arm hung casually down to the thigh.
Oh! Peerless and exemplary youth!
Yes, but this dream of a youth is demeaned by the poisonous light in this dismal studio, demeaned by ignoble fibrostone. Looking into marble is like looking into a frozen cosmos with milky rivers of stars and pouring cliffs of white; looking into fibrostone, one sees only the hideous no-face of Travesty itself, grey, depthless, without feature or variation, without colour or commitment, a plastic poverty. Did Julius have a hand in this, getting him sent here; is this one of Julius’s jokes? He can hear the Pontiff’s soft, treacherous voice urging God to send the artist to some peeling, pustulant place, because the artist is, as God must well know, a wretched heathen at heart, a pantheist and a sodomite! And he was right!
Closing his eyes he sees his original David on the day it was finished after one year of hectic work, gleaming and pearly in the naked light, newly born and full bodied in the world. Something less than flesh, more than stone.
Almost full-bodied. Lacking one fundamental attribute.
Opening his eyes he sees his new David, the conception restored and complete, but somehow the effect is less than astonishing. In this nebulous, sourceless light, all things are reduced to a single plane of existence: the noble brow, the arch of the neck, the slide of muscle on muscle, all are pulverized into one density and flatness.
Even the magnificent phallus with its soaring intention, fulfilment of the figure’s musculature, looks oddly reduced and trivialized in the aqueous indifference of that light. Becomes thin and fragile.
The light of Tuscany was as sharp as flint, possessed of an ability to sculpt objects in space with a lucid sense of line and shadow, statement and implication. It was a complete medium in itself in which the heroic forms of his carved figures, such as his David and his Pieta, the Lady of Compassion, had full physical and mythical existence.
Nothing like this dull flickering.
Something else bothers him. His David is an exact replica of his original, with the one exception, he made sure of that. Technically, everything has been reproduced exactly, but the overall effect is subtly changed; it is as if his David, here in the drab and ashen of Travesty, has become infused with the artist’s own melancholy, his own homesickness. The glance the youth casts over his left shoulder is to the past, not the heroic future. Already a cloud has settled all over his brow.
Nisa retreats to a far corner from where he can peer into his studio as one would into an aquarium: a glassed-in underwater scene dominated by the statue, the youth with his gauche pose and his looming tumescence. Michelangelo Buonarotti, painter and sculptor with works commissioned by four successive Popes (dreaming of monuments to themselves), remembers the women singing and calling to each other in the olive groves at harvest, the hot damp wind in their faces, the bright cloth laid around the base of the trees to catch the falling bloodstone, heliotropic fruit when the men shook the branches. He sees the hands of the old women, the olive pickers, as browned and as hardened as the skin of a grass snake, as nimble and as quick, dancing like a children’s rhyme through the leaves. He sees a boy, too, more than a boy, standing under the trees as the olives hail down from shaken branches. There’s a cloth slung casually over his left shoulder, hand dangling by his right thigh, and he’s turned towards Nisa with an intense, brooding look.
This is the most precious corner of his memory, its most sacred grove. Veiled by a protective love, this is his heart’s treasure, this anonymous youth stripped for hard work in the heavy Mediterranean heat, his body a dark pearl in the green. This is the youth, no slut from the streets of Milano, who came to him in the soft evening, and the intense brooding look became something else, something enticing and savage. There, in the privacy of Michelangelo’s whitewashed room, a harvest moon on the rise, this youth of the olive groves laughed with the purity of the Virgin Herself and undressed like a god, a young god haughtily aware of his physical perfection.
And, like all youths, awkward and careless with his power.
These were the moments he’d sought in the verity of marble; this moment in the olive groves, the dark-eyed fruit raining down, and the moment in the moon-sweetened chamber in which the boy had shown himself in the glory of his sexual awakening, the numbing beauty of that unfolding. Put these moments together, in one pose, the result is both modest and gauche, arrogant and forceful; withheld and expressed, casual and deliberate, pure and pure harlot: this is the dynamic, the real source of tension in the carved figure.
Love! It is always love these old women sing of in their high, cracked voices as they gather the olives in.
Forms in marble, what nonsense all that is! He’d hacked away blind from chisel blow to chisel blow, knowing no more than each blow disclosed, sweating over the exact angle of each, trying to translate from memory, from a silly wax model, watching in devotion and terror as his dream shaped the inert stone. Forms in marble! Ha! This image of vitality and spiritual courage, this David, caught in a moment of quizzical tension before the battle with the champion of the Philistines, wasn’t just waiting inside the marble like a coy lover, but had to be wrenched from the twist and buckle of the artist’s own body.
And what do the critics say, in their great wisdom? That in David can be found Michelangelo’s heroic conception of man’s confrontation with life. Ha! Ha! Wait till they find out! Of course the clues were there, if they’d looked. His original sketch, a drawing for marble and bronze Davids, reveals the true purpose of the powerful right arm; in this drawing the right leg is raised, the youth is leaning back in masturbation just as Michelangelo saw him that moon heavy night late in the summer of 1501. He wrote a couplet giving the whole thing away but nobody understood. The lines kept their secret well.
David with the sling
And I with the bow
Michelangelo.
In this original sketch of the masturbating youth can be found the origin of his famous contrapposto pose, the asymmetrical arrangement of the limbs, you know, blah blah. Nothing is sacred.
At the bench he picks up the bottle of Sunshine and looks at the level. He’ll be no better than the old drunk soon, a bag of bones and smelly guts wandering from lost moment to lost moment through the hallways of the rathouse, full of visions of men’s bodies, massive and heavily muscled, struggling from the great unconsciousness of stone. Men with polished limbs and gleaming torsos; heavy, graceless frames full of turbid beauty walking in and out of the mineral landscape, out of the olive groves and quarries, already naked, already rehearsing the ascension of the flesh in stone.
He had to carve him again, of course, years later in 1510, but hid him this time in the figure of a dying slave, reclining like a woman, left arm up behind his head voluptuously, the other slung, spent, on his breast, casually holding up his singlet; limbs in contrapposto of course. Ooh la! Head turned coquettishly to one side. This dying slave is David after the act, in post-coital languor, as Michelangelo saw him on that moon fisted night, his body’s junket drying on his torso.
He takes a few sips of Sunshine and puts the glass down. What a devil’s curse this reincarnation is! With the taste of the grapes of Tuscany on his lips, how can he drink this abomination? It is the taste of his exile, the flavour of his shame, the rank mockery of his art.
Will they know him, even? Will they gaze upon the engorged genitals, carved with all that Florentine naturalism he was famous for, and know him? Looking up at that rearing member, full of muscled power, replete with straining veins and succulent glans, who among them could mistake it for anything other than the work of Michelangelo, the greatest sculptor in the world?
There are many holes in the world for doubt to creep in. His figure, his life’s work, is half turned towards the litter of the studio, its brooding look somehow made facile by the light; not the bright spirit at the dawn of Western Civilization, deity of intellectual courage, but something already corrupting and corrupted.
It strikes him now that by completing the figure thus, he has brought out a fatal flaw in the conception, an inherent dishonesty his addition doesn’t so much remedy as make explicit. All that nobility turns to petulant, arrogant sensuality. Lust and greed!
Tears squeeze out around his eyeballs as if he were a maudlin drunk. A line of his returns to him, written to the dying slave, his last vision of David, and he hears it in the rich, lush cadences of his former tongue:
Cosi four di mie rete altri mi lega.
So without my bonds, others bind me.