CHAPTER 33

DONATELLO CLAIMED NOT to miss Agnolo, not to care about him any longer, but I did not believe him and what I saw convinced me that Agnolo remained very much in his mind and heart. He had been pleased to hear that Agnolo was apprenticed to a wool carder—his own father had been a wool-carder—and from time to time he asked if I had news of the boy. The boy was now a man, of course, but in Donatello’s mind he was still that sixteen year old who, posing for the David, seduced him and stole his heart and remained still in possession of it.

Donatello had grown old—he was more than fifty years of age by now—and it seemed that with the exile of Agnolo he had lost interest in both his work and his life. Those good days when he would gather us all together at the end of a work day and we would joke and drink and he would say witty things about Ghiberti or intimate things about my lord Cosimo de’ Medici, those days were gone. He no longer laughed and he seemed always a little lost. He had never been of easy approach on any personal matter and now he seemed more remote than before. Still, I took courage and asked him outright about Agnolo.

“Do you miss him?”

Donatello gave me a sharp look.

“He is in Prato,” I said, “carding wool. It is not far off.”

“He was dear to me,” he said, “once.”

“He is a man now and has perhaps given up his evil ways.”

“His evil ways were my evil ways.”

“He is ever in need of money,” I said.

“And your evil ways? Of mind and tongue?”

“I could not help myself and so I said it. Sometimes . . .”

“Do you think the tongue corrupts the heart, Luca? Or does it work the other way?”

“I think you are hard on me. I want only to help.”

“It is good that you have Alessandra.”

I did not mention that Alessandra had grown cold to me and that I was forced to find my ease with whores. Of course it may be he knew this and was being sharp with me. With good reason he was called intricato.

He was silent for a while and then he said, “Yes, I miss him.”

“He could still be purchased, I think. At a bargain price.”

“Don’t,” he said. He looked at me, suddenly a very old man, and drew me to him. He was crying and I could feel his head shaking against my breast. For a fleeting moment I felt good to have brought him down. He pulled away then, his beard wet with tears, and said, “Come. We have work to do.”

* * *

HE WAS LETHARGIC, dull. He came late to the bottega, worked indifferently, and left even before dark. His mind was elsewhere and besides, though there were few new commissions, there were a great many works not yet complete. Of these the Cantoria mattered most. The marble was costly and the Duomo was committed to holding Donatello to contract. He worked dutifully but he had scarcely begun carving the right side of the frieze when his attention wandered to other commissions.

He passed off work on the dancing children of the Cantoria to his new assistant, Agostino di Duccio, and of course to the ever-present Pagno di Lapo. He had laid out the design for all the dancing children and he had done the preliminary cutting and now he allowed them to do carving that once he would have insisted on doing himself. Occasionally he would correct Pagno’s errors and sometimes he would be moved to take chisel in hand and show Duccio how to carve out a plump leg as it showed from behind a pilaster, but mostly he left them alone to complete the relief as best they could.

If the Cantoria failed to engage him in the old way, the lesser commissions were a positive annoyance. The Prato Pulpit he dismissed in disgust, finishing the carving as if he were attacking an enemy. But at last it was done.

* * *

FRANCO ALESSANDRO WAS arrested for sodomy. It was his second arrest. We paid the fine of twenty-five florins and he was released. There was a long silence in our house, and in my heart I had begun to despair of him.

For no reason I could allege, I blamed Agnolo for this.

* * *

COSIMO HAD MUCH to occupy him. After his return from exile he had taken great care to remain in the background of political events and though he could have made himself the supreme power in Florence he chose merely to exile the Albizzi and their followers and to maintain the laws and offices unchanged. He announced his return to political life by accepting the office of Gonfaloniere for January and February of 1435 and then, having served the Republic as its visible head, he withdrew into the private life of a banker, retaining first approval of any candidate nominated for office, however high, however low. Without bloodshed and without rancor, Cosimo had quickly and effectively taken control of the government of Florence.

All this time, despite his involvement in politics, he remained mindful of his artisan friends. They needed money and so they needed work. His particular concern for Donatello had begun after the completion of the David. Donatello seemed downcast, defeated, as if by surrendering the finished sculpture he was losing something of himself. Cosimo responded as he invariably did, with praise, with devotion, with money.

By way of thanks—and in addition to the five hundred gold florins he paid on completion of the statue—Cosimo presented Donatello with a gown and cloak and capuccio in the finest red wool of the nobility, a thing worthy of the maker of David. And then, when the statue was mounted on a marble column in the center of Cosimo’s garden, he gave a banquet in celebration and, in addition to his extended family circle, he invited Ghiberti and Brunelleschi, Michelozzo and Uccello, della Robbia, Fra Angelico, della Quercia and the unspeakable Filippo Lippi. It was a gathering of my lord Cosimo’s dear friends, artisans of extraordinary skills, each of them in debt to him for work commissioned and work yet unimagined. Donatello was the guest of honor. He wore the red robes that Cosimo had given him and he drank much and marveled at the attention and praise they lavished on him, but in the end he found the attention tiresome and the praise meaningless. These were his gifted friends and sometimes his competitors whose loving admiration for him was limited by their own ambitions. There was jealousy here as well as love. He knew this and he was happy when the banquet was over.

Though he wore the red robes on the Feast of the Most Holy Name of Mary and again on the Feast of San Lorenzo, he was glad to give them back with thanks and apologies as being too grand for a simple artisan whose father had been a wool-comber. Cosimo understood and, taking back the robes with some reluctance, promised that nonetheless they would remain friends and collaborators . . . as even now there stood in his garden the beautiful bronze David that was proof of the importance of their collaboration.

* * *

FRANCO ALESSANDRO WAS arrested once again, his third arrest.

“Are you trying to disgrace us?”

“I’m sorry. I beg pardon of you and mother.”

“Are you trying to be another Agnolo Mattei?” I spat out the name.

“I am an evil son.”

He would sin again and would be punished again and so would we all. We paid his fine of fifty florins and begged him to sin no more.

* * *

MICHELOZZO HAD BY now completed plans for the new Medici palace—a more controlled design than the grandiose palace Brunelleschi had earlier proposed—and my lord Cosimo was pleased with its strength and modesty and its quiet grandeur. There was a garden and a formal courtyard for display of statuary and there were separate apartments for members of his family and of course a private chapel for Cosimo himself.

The new palace was not Cosimo’s only concern. More and more he worried about the fate of his immortal soul, and the more he worried the more he invested his great wealth in works for the church. He poured a small fortune into the sacristy and chapel of San Lorenzo and a large fortune into the restoration of the Dominican monastery of San Marco.

He chose Michelozzo as architect and gave him a free hand. Michelozzo designed a new cloister with twenty-eight columned arches, an ospizio for the ill and the aged, a refectory, a chapter house, a second cloister, and a long corridor of cells for the monks, one of those cells reserved from the beginning for Cosimo’s personal use. It was to be a place where he could spend days and nights at prayer and meditation and where Mass could be said for the good of his soul. Fra Angelico painted frescoes in each of the cells and along the corridor, making of the passageway a veritable entrance to paradise. In Cosimo’s private cell, Angelico painted a fresco of the Adoration of the Magi, in which Cosimo himself may or may not have been represented as one of the wise men. Angelico was not readily given to flattery.

At this time Michelozzo chose at last to marry. At nearly forty-five years, he was nearing old age when he took as his bride the young and beautiful Francesca di Ambrogio, a tanner’s daughter of nineteen years. She reminded me much of Alessandra when I first knew her, a lively girl with green eyes and a full figure, a good bearer of children and with the attitude of a devoted wife.

For the wedding of Michelozzo and Francesca, Cosimo gave an enormous banquet in the courtyard of his old palace on the Via de’ Bardi. It was a rare mild day in January and the courtyard was alive with flowering shrubs brought in for the occasion and in the center stood the bronze David, mounted on a marble pillar and surrounded by wreaths of laurel. As a friend of Michelozzo—and, I like to think, as transcriber of manuscripts for Cosimo himself—I was invited to attend the banquet. There was much eating and drinking of rare wines and there was music and dancing and it was good to see Donatello give away his great friend to this tanner’s beautiful daughter.

As it happens Francesca was true to her appearance; she was indeed a devoted wife and a good bearer of children. In my own lifetime she bore Michelozzo four sons and four daughters and they all survived. None of them has his genius but they are all beauties and all devoted to him. And Michelozzo, as he deserves, is supremely happy.

* * *

FRANCO ALESSANDRO WAS arrested for sodomy—his fourth arrest—and now lay ill in the cellars of the Bargello until the fine of one hundred florins would be paid and names named and the sentence of one hour in the pillory carried out. We were ruined now. We had fifty florins in our savings box and my lord Donatello loaned us another fifty and we paid the hundred florin fine.

Franco Alessandro was released from prison and by the mercy of some jurisdictional accident he was spared an hour in the pillory. No one knew why. A check mark next to his name, a question raised by some City Eminence, some sleight of hand? He was spared the pillory and its torments thanks to Cosimo de’ Medici, but we were not to know this until two years later when Franco was arrested once more and Cosimo yet again came to his aid.

We welcomed Franco home this one last time. Another arrest would mean a two-hundred-florin fine and exile for life. Alessandra was convinced it would come to that. I too feared the worst. I had watched Agnolo’s madness play itself out over all these years and I knew that Franco would not easily give up his reckless way of life. In truth I was torn between rage and anguish. We had lost our two youngest sons to the Black Pest, and our oldest Donato Michele had given himself to God in the Order of Saint Francis, so it was sad to think our one remaining son should be such bitter gall to us. Alessandra felt only love for him but I felt love and hate together, the frustration of all my desires and my hopes. He made me want to cry on his shoulder and cry out against him all at the same time. He was our hope and our salvation, dashed.

We had tried everything, of course. At first we thought his wanton behavior was a lark, a sign of what might happen if your only interests were clothes and how you looked in them. Franco had been a handsome child, sturdy, with strong shoulders and good arms and hands. He might have grown into a carver of marble or a caster of bronze but from his earliest days his great interest was his hair and his clothes and the impression he made. Vanity, we thought, a woman’s vanity, or a preening noble’s, we hoped it would pass.

I was horrified at what he had come to but Alessandra was determined to offer him only love and understanding. She continued on this way after his second and third arrests, telling Franco she understood and she loved him still.

“What is it you understand?” I asked, furious, and when I asked him, “Do you think it makes you loved?” he would give no answer, choosing the silence of the victim instead of confessing his sins and changing his life thereafter, amen.

We did what parents could. We scolded, we cursed, we threatened to throw him out of our house and dismiss him from our family . . . forever. We pointed out the neighbors’ ridicule, we urged a show of manliness in this effeminate world, we called upon the honor of the di Matteo name. He remained dumb. We pleaded and we threatened and we tried to argue reasonably. In the end he agreed, he offered apologies and submission, but then a little time passed and he was once again curling his hair and slipping out at night with his band of young friends, all of them in parti-colored stockings, tight about the backside and the fork in front, an offer clearly on display.

Now he was back after being arrested for the fourth time. He was silent still. He would let neither Alessandra nor myself near him. He refused to see his brother the Franciscan. He would not go to confession. When he had been home from prison for over a week I determined on a firm talk with him. I waited till long after dark and then I entered the bedroom and sat on the edge of his cot. I could tell he was not sleeping but he gave no sign that he knew I was there.

“Franco mio,” I said softly.

He stirred beneath the covers but said nothing.

“Franco. Why?” Of course he did not respond. If he could easily have answered “Why?” he would long since have done so. But I went on talking softly, reasonably, and he listened. When I had run out of new ways to ask the question “Why” and new entreaties that he not do this to us—the shame, the cost, the waste of his young life—he suddenly responded.

In a strong clear voice, with no regard for the time or the darkness, he said, “Do you think I choose to be like this? This is who I am. This is what I am.” And he turned from me to face the wall. I sat there, wondering, and then because I could think of no other response, I repeated Alessandra’s words to him, “I know. I understand.” And for a short while I felt I had spoken truth.

* * *

FRANCO HAD LEFT us. He did not say where he was going. He simply disappeared the morning after our talk and I was torn between relief and fear of what might happen next. Alessandra was already preparing for what she was convinced would happen next.

“I need money,” she said. “I need one hundred sixty florins.”

I laughed at the idea of such a sum. Donatello paid me ninety florins a year, and it is true he gave me generous gifts—the fifty florins I had borrowed were a gift, he said—but that an artisan’s accountant should lay hands on that much money was surely a jest.

“I know it will take some time. We will have to live frugally.”

I was stunned. I fell speechless once again.

“It is not impossible,” she said. “I have saved forty florins myself.”

“That cannot be.”

She lifted a loose flagstone in the bedroom and took out a small leather sack. It contained forty-one florins.”

“How is this possible?”

“I spin fine wool and save every picciolo. And I save the living money you earn from Donato.”

“Forty florins is a fortune. For such a sum we could buy a slave girl or a mule.”

“With one hundred sixty more we can free our son.”

“When he is arrested again, you mean.”

“So.” She looked at me then in such a loving, trusting way that I forgave her coldness in keeping me from her bed. I took her in my arms.

“You’ll try?”

“I’ll try,” I said though I knew that such a sum was impossible.

But still she kept me from her bed.

It was just now that Alessandra first proposed entering a convent. Such a thing was always possible for rich widows and sometimes possible for married couples if both agreed to it and if the dowry was pleasing to the Lord . . . and to the Mother Superior. But I could not agree to this. I told her I would give it thought and that night I hastened off to the Mercato Vecchio to ease my pain with a whore, Pellegrina, who had become my favorite. She was young and lively and knew how to meet the needs of older men.

To me our marriage was a sacred thing.

MICHELOZZO’S WEDDING WAS the occasion for another of those Medici interventions in the lives of artisans that have produced astonishing works, like Donatello’s bronze David or the frescoes of Fra Angelico or the Madonnas of Filippo Lippi whom Cosimo locked in a room and refused to let out until he had made progress with his painting. These would never have existed without Cosimo’s insistence. And his money.

At the wedding I noticed that my lord Cosimo was more than usually taken with Pagno di Lapo. He always made much of Pagno, greeting him with undue affection and talking with him as if he were an equal. He did not talk this way with me, though in truth I was much closer to him in my appreciation of Latin and Greek manuscripts and in my ability to reproduce them in the Italian hand he particularly favored. Nonetheless, as I say, he favored Pagno, kissing him on both cheeks and letting his hand rest on his shoulders as if he were a favored son.

“The bust of a young man,” I heard him say to Donatello. “And he should wear one of my Greek medallions.”

His collection of rare coins and medallions was one of the wonders of Florence and I understood from what I overheard that Donatello would begin shortly to grant Pagno a kind of immortality, recreated to the life in marble or bronze. The San Lorenzo doors were finished but not yet hung and the Inn of Santa Caterina would soon be destroyed to make way for the new Medici palace, but despite all these pressures of time and work, I proved to be right.

On the very next day I found Pagno sitting for Donatello while he turned out sketch after sketch of a young man in classical draperies looking off into an impossible future with the gaze of Saint Francis in the presence of the risen Lord. He is in truth a handsome young man, with a mass of red hair and wide gray-green eyes, but if you examine the finished bronze in profile you will see that Donatello has caught the slightly receding chin, the essential weakness of the man. Donatello disagreed with me when I pointed this out. He said that here was the classically perfect chin and he went on and on about the balance of cheekbones and the width of the eye sockets and the turn of the lips; in short he defended Pagno, in statue and in life, as the perfect man. But you can see for yourself that I was right. The statue rests on a grand chest in the main sala of the new Medici palace. It is bronze and, in its way, perfect.

* * *

“I HAVE ARRANGED to buy a little farm, Luca. You must take care of the paperwork for me.”

This was indeed news. Donatello was now some fifty-seven years of age and had never yet shown interest in owning anything, let alone a house or a farm.

“Of course,” I said. “Congratulations!” And I asked him where this little farm was located. I thought perhaps in the Mugello, near one of Cosimo’s country homes or perhaps in the hills outside Florence.

“In Prato,” he said.

Of course. I knew at once. It was for Agnolo.

“And will you leave Florence and live in Prato?”

“When I am too old to work, who knows where I will live.”

“So the farm is for you and not, perhaps, a gift for someone else?”

“The farm is for me. It may be that in time I will make of it a gift for someone else.”

So. It had come to this.

“Do you see him? In Prato?”

“I see him in Florence. And I am buying the farm against the time when I should die. When I am gone, he must have a place to live and he cannot well buy it for himself.”

How could he be seeing Agnolo in Florence without my knowledge of it? Would not Agnolo be arrested if he were found in Florence? Did his exile mean nothing? I was speechless.

“He is with me even now.”

“Here? In Florence?”

He nodded.

“Living with you?”

He nodded again, pleased.

“Is this not dangerous? Would you not be liable to the law if he were discovered here?”

“Who would tell?”

“The Albizzi are gone but Cosimo—my lord Cosimo—still has enemies. And what better way to strike at him than to strike at you? You could be denounced, secretly, to the Ufficiali di Notte.”

“I’ve been denounced already. Three times. But that was years ago and it has come to nothing.”

My mind reeled with this new information. That he could have been denounced three times! And I not know of it! I thought of my appearances before the Ufficiali to pay the fines for Franco Alessandro. The Night Officers were not men to antagonize. I had sacrificed all our savings in fines for Franco Alessandro but that was the least of it. These men held over you the threat of prison, not to mention torture and death. Donatello seemed not to realize this. His infatuation with Agnolo had in truth become a kind of madness.

“I’ll do the paperwork,” I said.

“You did not know I’ve been denounced three times?”

“You must be careful, Donato mio.” I leaned into him and put my hand on his heart. “You should rid yourself of him.” He looked away. “But if you cannot live without him, you should leave Florence. Go to Rome. Or Venice. Or Padua where they ask for you daily. But somewhere out of the reach of the Ufficiali di Notte. I know them. They will be the death of you.”

He placed his hand over my hand as it rested on his heart and he fixed me with that gaze I knew so well from watching him at work.

“You are a loving friend,” he said and kissed me on either cheek. I shuddered with gratitude and pleasure.

IMAGINE MY HORROR then when a messenger arrived at the bottega with a notice that Donatello must present himself at once to the magister of the Ufficiali di Notte to respond to charges, unspecified and made anonymously.