CHAPTER 13

IT IS TIME to talk of Michelozzo and Donatello—and of me—and what we did in the bottega before Agnolo entered our lives, but that is all too much for now—I am unwell today, I am discontent—so instead I will talk of Donatello only, and of the things I learned from filling out the forms for his taxes.

Taxes ever were and are and always shall be. But in 1427, the year of the catasto, a new kind of wealth tax was introduced by Rinaldo degli Albizzi in hope of injuring his great enemy Cosimo de’ Medici and at last bringing him to his knees. Here was a tax that skipped over the poor and taxed the landowners and the merchants and the people who had all the money. The catasto obliged every Florentine citizen to declare in writing an account of his property, debtors, and creditors. As business people Donatello and Michelozzo fell under this obligation and I liked it much that it fell to me to tally what they owned and what was owed to them, for they were partners now. I grew close to both of them—they were my fathers, they were my brothers—and of Donato I learned much that I had longed to know.

I have his tax declaration to hand since I have always been a grand conservator of notes. What I learned about his finances did not surprise me but what I learned about his family pleased me much.

Niccolò, Donatello’s father lived long enough to see the marble David, though he was addled in his brain and had no proper sense of what his son had accomplished. He died in 1415.

Orsa, his mother, was eighty years old and still sound of mind and body. She was a small woman with eyes like a ferret and, though frail of hearing, nothing escaped her view. She longed for only one thing: to die. But she could not die. If mothers live past child bearing, it would seem they live forever.

His sister, Tita, five years his senior, was a dowerless widow with a sickly son, Giuliano, aged eighteen. He was crippled in his legs and he was given to fits and he could not speak. Small wonder then that Tita was a sour woman, jealous and self-pitying, who resented Donatello’s kindness to her son. She had a thorny, unforgiving wit. Donatello told me once that Tita’s heart had grown so bitter that it had shrunk to the size of a walnut. I was uncertain if he meant this in truth or if he was being figurative in speech or if this were some cruel jest. He was sometimes intricato in thought and in word.

Orsa and Tita and Giuliano lived in a warren of rooms next to his new bottega in the Via degli Adimari. Donatello was their sole support.

As for the tax itself Donatello claimed to owe one florin, three lira, and ten piccioli and to be without any property except thirty florins’ worth of tools and equipment for his art as a carver in partnership with Michele di Bartolomeo Michelozzi.

“I am owed,” he says, “one hundred eighty florins for a narrative scene in bronze which I did some time ago for the Cathedral of Siena. Also from the convent and monks of Ognissanti I am owed thirty florins for a bronze half figure of San Rossore. I rent a house from Guglielmo Adimari in the parish of San Cristoforo. I pay fifteen florins a year.” He then lists creditors—goldsmiths and bronze casters and assistants—to whom he owes a total of one hundred fifty-six florins, not counting the thirty florins he owes for two years back rent. Donatello hated paying taxes.

Michelozzo signed and filed Donatello’s tax report though it was I who did all the preparatory work. You can see how quietly useful I had become.

My life was full and good this year of our Lord 1427.

Alessandra gave me a third son, Renato Paolo.

I was now indispensable to the workings of our bottega.

And I had become the trusted friend of the greatest sculptor of our time. It is no small thing to have had the love of so great a man. How, then, did I become possessed . . . so that in the end it seemed the necessary thing was murder?

In truth it was the fire I feared.

Now, dying, I put aside my discontent to ask how different things would be if Donatello had not changed my life with that kiss and if that sharpened chisel had not come so readily to hand. I think, I pray. I remind myself that God permits these things. But in my dark heart I know the cause was fear . . . of Donatello used against Cosimo, Donatello denounced as a sodomite, Donatello stripped and at the stake, and I at fault for all that goodness consumed by flames.