And perhaps that was the beginning of the process that would end, three years later, in my becoming the best-known face and figure in Florence.
Chapter Two
The Old Block
It was two more weeks before I heard anything of my brother and by then I was deep in sin. Not in adultery, since my lady’s husband was dead, but treachery to my Rosalia. Even then I knew that if I ever did get back to Settignano and marry her, I would not say a word about my exploits in the city. But infidelity to a girlfriend is not a sin you have to confess to the priest – though fornication is. I decided to say nothing about either and on my one visit to the confessional while I was with Clarice I kept my counsel about both.
Then one day my lady sent for me when I was helping in the kitchen. In spite of my new fine clothes, I was often in the kitchen or courtyard lending a hand by cutting wood or lighting fires or even carrying barrels and boxes for the cook. I ran lightly up the stairs to her chamber – oh, if only I could take stairs at such a pace now! – and found Clarice looking rather sad.
She smiled when she saw me, as she always did, but I thought I saw her brush away some tears.
‘Bad news, my lady?’
‘No, not at all,’ she said. ‘Good news – for you at least! The sculptor is back in Florence. Shall I send a message to him for you?’
‘No!’ I said too eagerly. ‘Just tell me how to find his house and I’ll go myself.’
‘You will be happy to leave me, I think, Gabriele,’ she said.
Looking at her sad face, I knew then what I needed to say and do, but, still, a few hours later, I left the palazzo in my stonecutter’s clothes, carrying my canvas bag and it was as if I had just arrived in the city and the last few weeks had been but a dream. One difference was that I now knew to keep my purse thrust deep inside my jerkin and it was a lot heavier than when I left Settignano.
My step was light, as I headed towards the river, where my brother’s home was. It felt like a fresh start, though at the back of my mind I knew I’d be seeing Clarice de’ Buonvicini again. I squared my shoulders, tried to ignore the curious glances people were giving me, and walked away from the protective bulk of the cathedral, past the Bargello and then towards Santa Croce church.
It was beginning to get dark – my lady had been so reluctant to let me go – and as I searched for my brother’s house, a feeling of unease lowered my mood. There were a lot of people about, small knots of young men talking together and giving other groups evil looks. I patted my jerkin to make sure my money was safe.
But these were not like the ruffians who had robbed me on my first night. They were well dressed and well fed, more like Clarice’s circle of friends than robbers. Not that I had met any of her male friends, if she had any. These bravos were more like rival gangs of young aristocrats. But that didn’t make them any less dangerous: I saw steel glinting at several belts.
I wanted very much to be indoors among friends; life at Clarice’s must have made me soft.
‘If you are going to walk the streets at night, you’d better know whose side you are on,’ said a familiar gruff voice behind me.
I turned to grin at the face of my milk-brother before answering, ‘I’m not on anyone’s side.’
‘Not possible in Florence,’ he said, giving me a bear hug. ‘We’d better get you out of the way before you get into trouble.’
We were soon sitting in his father’s house toasting each other with rough red wine, no better than I used to drink in Settignano. There was no sign of his father, old Lodovico, however, or any of his brothers. I looked at him with satisfaction. No one could have called my brother a handsome man, though he might have been passable if a young friend of his hadn’t broken his nose when they were just boys. But he took no account of appearances and was careless about his clothes.
All the years I knew him, my brother moved in a sort of cloud of white dust. It made me feel right at home. It was partly that he worked all day on his sculpture but mainly because he hardly ever changed his clothes.
He was looking just as closely at me.
‘Gabriele,’ he said, ‘you’ve grown. You are a man now.’
‘Not much of a one yet,’ I said. Next to him I felt like a boy.
‘But a very good-looking one,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to be careful.’
I couldn’t help it; I blushed. My brother narrowed his eyes.
‘I don’t mean that high-born lady who’s been playing with you for these last weeks,’ he said. ‘That’s only to be expected. I mean men. There are a lot in Florence who would pay you to be their toy.’
This wasn’t a conversation likely to restore my composure. It was true I had been looked at by as many men as women when I was sitting in front of the cathedral, eating my bread and cheese, before my lady rescued me.
‘I have never been with a man,’ I said. ‘That is not the way my inclinations lie.’
He gave a short, barking laugh. ‘It might not be your inclinations that would be consulted,’ he said. Then he looked at me, appraising me, as if I were a block of marble. ‘Beauty like yours doesn’t last long,’ he said at last. ‘You might be tempted to make the most of it.’
‘Stop it, Angelo,’ I said. ‘I am willing to be a model for artists, if that’s what you mean, but nothing else. And I’d far rather earn my money cutting stone. That’s why I came, to see if there was any work to be had in the city.’
‘Plenty of work for a stonecutter,’ he said. ‘If that’s what you really want. But you’d better learn to protect yourself.’
He handed me a wicked-looking dagger.
‘Take this,’ he said. ‘And keep it with you always – just in case.’
Then he seemed to relax, as if I had passed some sort of test. He poured us both some more of the rough wine.
‘It’s good to see you,’ he said. ‘Tell me about your mamma.’
When Angelo – which is what we called him in the family – had been born, his mother, Francesca, sent him to my mother to be nursed. Not straight away, because they had been away from Florence when the baby was born. Francesca already had a two-year-old son and I think she might have liked to carry on suckling this new babe herself but her husband had grand ideas; he thought that their remote connection with the aristocratic Canossa family meant it would be demeaning for his wife to put milk in her own child’s mouth. So off went little Angelo to my mother, who had a baby girl – my sister Giulia – about the same age.
It was a funny thing: my mother had five daughters before I was born and Angelo’s mamma had five sons before she died. It’s like that with some women. But when Signora Buonarroti breathed her last after the birth of her fifth son, Angelo was still living with us. He was only six and I don’t know what happened to his four brothers; the new baby must have needed a nurse but it wasn’t Mamma. Angelo was pining and old Lodovico, his father, was at his wits’ end, so he let him stay with us.
I say ‘us’ but I wasn’t born then. My mother claims that I was conceived the very night Francesca died. That’s why they gave me my name.
‘She left your brother, named for the archangel Michael, with us and straight away a boy leapt in my womb,’ she would say. ‘So we called you Gabriele.’
It was embarrassing. And a bit blasphemous.
But my parents had been desperate for a son after five girls. My father was a stonecutter and he hoped to have sons to follow him into the trade. As it turned out, he got just the one. And that one was born nine months after little Angelo became a permanent part of the family.
Angelo was a stonecutter too! But in a much grander way. He was a sculptor who worked in marble. He always said he’d drunk his love of stone in with my mother’s milk. And he was no archangel, in spite of his name, but he was like a brother to me and I loved him. He lived with us for another four years until his father took him back and sent him to school. My earliest memory is of Angelo drawing pictures in the earth for me with a sharpened stick.
‘
Wake up, sleepyhead!’ said my brother, squeezing cold drops of water on my face from a cloth held high above me. ‘The sun and I have been awake for hours.’
I came to, spluttering. ‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘You got into soft ways at Signora de’ Buonvicini’s,’ he teased. ‘You never slept in like this in Settignano, I’ll wager.’
‘Wasn’t allowed to,’ I admitted.
‘Why did you come to Florence?’ he asked suddenly. ‘Wasn’t there enough work for you back home?’
‘Ay, enough, but only boring work,’ I said. ‘I wanted to be where you could see the cut stone turning into beautiful buildings.’
It was true. Half the reason I’d been so easily robbed that first night was because I was staring like a booby at the white, green and pink marble inlaid in the walls of the cathedral. Everyone knew in Settignano about this pattern and where the stone had come from – Carrara for the white, Prato for the green and Siena for the pink – but this was the first time I had seen it up close.
Angelo cuffed me gently round the head.
‘You’re too much of a dreamer to be a picchiapietre all your life,’ he said. ‘Maybe you should be a sculptor like me?’
‘I don’t think so, brother.’ I shook my head. ‘I might be a dreamer but I’m no artist.’
‘We shall see,’ he said. ‘Now eat a crust of bread and I’ll take you to see a real piece of stone.’
He wasn’t a man to spend long sprucing himself up before going out into the world in the morning so I had to hurry to keep up with him. Literally a crust to eat, after all those delicacies at my lady’s, and five minutes to splash my face with more water and drag my fingers through my hair, and then he was striding off back towards the cathedral.
I was a bit nervous about coming so close to Clarice’s palazzo again so soon after leaving it but my brother skirted up the other side of the cathedral and towards its works’ building.
He was obviously well known there, by all the greetings he got on the way in. But he merely grunted in reply or lifted a hand. He was a man with a purpose. And when he’d reached what he wanted to show me, I saw why.
It was a block of old marble lying on its side in a courtyard. It must have been nine braccia or so long – about the size of three men lying end to end. The surface of it had my hands itching, it was so pitted and full of holes. Someone had botched a job of turning it into something – or somebody.
‘Carrara,’ said my brother, tapping the block with his toe.
‘How old is it?’
‘It’s been lying around here nearly forty years.’
‘What was it going to be?’
‘A giant for the cathedral.’
‘Didn’t get very far, did he – whoever he was?’
My brother shrugged. I could see he wasn’t interested in whatever had happened to this block of stone in the past. The gleam in his eye told me that he was thinking only of its future.
‘You want it, don’t you?’ I said.
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘I think I can get it. They want to get rid of it.’
‘I should think so too, if they’ve been tripping over it for forty years!’
‘I’m not the only one after it, though,’ said my brother. ‘Someone else wants it as a present.’
‘A present?’
‘I’m going to charge them well for what I make of it,’ he said, ‘but it will be worth it.’
I could see that he thought this big ugly block was a challenge. I knew he was a great man now with a reputation that had travelled north from Rome but I really doubted he could make anything worth looking at out of such a monstrosity.
‘Come on!’ he said. ‘We’re going to measure it.’
By July negotiations were going on for Angelo to have the block of marble. He now had to make a model to convince the Operai del Duomo, those exacting men who oversaw the art of the cathedral, that he could really do something with it. I had never seen him so excited, but then I’d never seen him work before either. Whenever he had come to visit us at home, he had been on holiday.
But Angelo had also signed a contract to make fifteen figures for Cardinal Piccolomini in Siena; he had boasted about it. I couldn’t see how he was going to make those if he got the Duomo’s old block to sculpt. He told me he’d promised the Cardinal not to undertake any other work till the Sienese commission was finished, but I could see he didn’t intend to keep his word if he got hold of that block.
I was still staying with him at his father’s house; it wasn’t comfortable but it was convenient and I felt safe there. I hardly saw Lodovico but he was willing enough to have me in his home. It was obvious that money was a bit tight. Angelo never took any notice of home comforts – he was a bit like a monk in that way – and I’m ashamed to say I often sloped off back to Clarice’s in search of some better wine and more plentiful food. Yes, and other comforts too.
And I enjoyed playing with her two little daughters, Benedetta and Carolina. They knew me now and, for want of a father perhaps, they looked forward to my visits. They were sweet-natured, like their mother. I knew nothing of their father, save that he had died eighteen months earlier in a riding accident.
Angelo never said anything about my absences – just gave me a quizzical look when I came back smelling of perfume. He had found me work in a stonemasons’ workshop near the great cathedral, which kept me close to the big block of marble and to my lady’s palazzo. If I stayed overnight with Clarice, I could stumble out in the morning and into work, but when we broke off at midday I always found my footsteps taking me to the Opera del Duomo; that block was beginning to fascinate me almost as much as it did my brother.
He had started calling it ‘David’.
‘I can make something of this,’ he would mutter, walking round and round the block and making the odd mark here and there on the surface.
It was as if he were boring into it with his eyes, trying to find something inside it that was trapped, frozen in the marble like a fish in a block of ice. But it wasn’t a fish he was trawling for; it was a man.
One night back at the house he asked me to pose for him. He wanted me to strip and there’s no other man I would have done it for. I trusted him completely, but I was a bit nervous that some other member of the family might walk in. He wasn’t satisfied with my position until he had got me standing with my weight on my right leg, my body pivoted on that hip and my head turned to the left. My right arm was to hang down loose, but with my left – bent up towards the shoulder – I had to pretend to hold a slingshot. My left foot was raised – resting on a cauliflower!
‘Is that Goliath’s head?’ I asked.
Angelo just grunted.
I found it very difficult to hold the pose and I was embarrassed to have him gazing so intently at my naked body.
‘You’re frowning, Gabriele,’ he said, rapidly sketching in fast fluid lines.
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s good. It’s how David would have looked.’
Over the next few weeks I got more used to standing with my clothes off while Angelo circled round me sketching me from every angle. There were sheets and sheets of drawings: my head, my arms, my back and my buttocks.
I thought I’d stopped frowning but there it still was in all the drawings of my face.
‘Do you need all these?’ I asked him one day, as casually as I could.
‘Huh,’ he grunted. ‘You want one for your lady love, don’t you?’
I blushed at being so transparent, but he gave me a handful of the drawings he didn’t want. It seemed to make him decide on what he did want, because the next day he said he was ready to make a wax model for the statue.
Clarice was delighted with the few sketches I gave her.
‘I will have this one framed and hang it in my bedchamber where none but I will be able to see it,’ she said.
And your servants, I thought, uneasy about that little maid Vanna looking at me with no clothes on.
I stowed the rest of the drawings away carefully. I don’t know why. I certainly had no idea then how famous this David would be. Or how dangerous it would be for me to look like him.
My brother was now completely absorbed in the wax model he was making, based on those drawings. It was less than life-sized, being smaller than me, let alone than that huge old block. I looked at the progress of the wax model every day, drawn by this manikin who had my body and face. No one else was allowed in the workshop, even though the Operai were very interested in what he was doing. He was much too secretive to let them in or show them anything till the model was finished.
But then my lady hit me with news that put all thoughts of my other self out of my mind.
We had just finished eating a good dinner at her house and the servants had withdrawn when she chose to tell me.
‘Gabriele, dear,’ she began. ‘I’m afraid these lovely evenings of ours are coming to an end.’
I just gawped like a ninny. ‘Why?’ I asked stupidly. It should have been obvious that she had tired of me.
‘I am getting married again,’ she said simply.
My face must have shown my dismay and disbelief. She had never mentioned another man’s name all the times we had been together.
‘Antonello de’ Altobiondi has been courting me for some time,’ she said. ‘And I have a reason now to accept him.’
You’ll hardly believe that I still had no idea what she was talking about.
‘Innocent boy,’ she sighed, taking my face in her hand and squeezing it. She released me with a little shake. ‘I am expecting a child – and that is somewhat disapproved of in a widow.’
A child! She was carrying my child and this Antonello de’ Altobiondi was going to be its father.
Chapter Three
After the Sweet, the Bitter
On our rare days off work my brother took me round the city showing me what he thought were the best works of art. He called it ‘taking me to school’.