The Giant, page 11
“You sure about this, L’Indaco?”
“As sure as I am that the barman’s wife is ‘visiting’ the priest right now.”
The man smirks and makes a mark on his page. “All right then, into the wolf’s mouth!”
“May the wolf die.” I press my way to the front of the crowd for a good view.
The fighters circle and swing, their huffs and grunts audible above the jeers of the crowd. It only takes a few minutes. Soon enough, the tanner’s son is flat on his back on the cobbles, his face and his hands bloodied. Buffo raises his own bloody hands skyward as the crowd roars with delight.
For a moment, I feel I’m the one who has been punched in the gut. Time seems suspended, and the world goes quiet. My pile of money, weeks’ worth of coins exchanged for my street-side paintings, brushed into the communal pot with the sweep of an arm. Nothing left in my own pockets.
The crowd pushes past me, beginning to disperse from the square. In a few moments, the square will stand empty once again.
I snap back to life. I jog to my makeshift painting workshop, little more than a swath of linen spread on the ground, with a small display of pictures. Buffo reigns victorious, at least for today. I expect I will sell a few pictures to the crowd. Afterward, surely I’ll reclaim reward at the card table. I must. A dry swallow. I can’t go home empty-handed tonight.
“Ciao, Jacopo.”
Andrea Il Riccio, the curly-haired goldsmith and sometime-bronze-sculptor who frequents the same card tables as I, squats down and picks up one of my pictures, one of a woman’s face made entirely of fruit.
“You’re pretty good at painting figures. You looking for work?”
“Aren’t we all?”
He laughs. “I suppose. Just make sure the guild doesn’t catch you, that’s all. Say, some of us have begun to meet with Master da Vinci on Thursday mornings. Now that he is back in Florence, he is taking on assistants here and there.”
Leonardo da Vinci is taking on assistants. Would he take on a street painter? A failed sculptor’s assistant? A failed… A failure?
“Even if we don’t get hired,” he continues, “it only seems like a good idea to take advantage of any time he is willing to give to us younger artists. Have you been to any of the meetings?”
I shake my head.
“He likes to talk. We simply stand around and listen. The Servite brothers have provided him a studio and other rooms in their monastery at Santissima Annunziata; he is painting a large altarpiece for them. If it’s cold or rainy, we meet in his rooms at the monastery. If the weather is fair we meet at the Loggia of the Signoria. You should come.”
“I will consider it.” I clasp his hand as he offers it, then press my hands deep down into my empty pockets. “I’m feeling lucky.”
Leonardo da Vinci left Florence years ago in shame. He was put on trial for sodomy and chastised for an abandoned commission. I don’t blame him for escaping to Milan. In my father’s time, we heard the story on the streets everywhere, but now, it seems that no one in the city remembers any such transgressions over the years he has spent up north. No one has anything bad to say about Master da Vinci anymore. I have heard some call him our city’s greatest painter. Until today, I have only observed him from a distance.
Through a maze of dark corridors, I follow the squat form of a monk into the silence of Santissima Annunziata. The monk’s wooden block sandals clop on the stones, the only sound. At a small door, he gestures for me to enter. Another dark hallway; at the end, another doorway. This time, I hear the din of voices.
I take a deep breath and raise my fist to knock, but the door budges under my hand. Inside, I recognize not only my fellow card player, Andrea Il Riccio, but the familiar faces of several other members of the guild of Saint Luke, milling around a large table in the center of the room.
Ridolfo Ghirlandaio spies me when I close the door. “L’Indaco! Come. Join us.”
I make my way across the large vaulted hall, perhaps an old monk’s dormitory or dining room that has been turned into a makeshift studio. There are several tables covered with drawings, wooden contraptions, pots of pigment, and gesso-covered panels. The other painters have made a circle around one of the tables, and I press myself into a small space between two men. They pay me no mind. I look around, registering the familiar faces. All of the men around the table are guildsmen, artists with commissions, with workshops, and assistants of their own. I imagine that many may not recognize me at all.
At the head of the table stands Master da Vinci. He is an old man now, I see, past the time when many grown men have passed from this life to the World to Come. His hair has turned to gray frizz, his face lined like a thin veil of crepe. Yet there is an understated elegance about him, as if he were in the full bloom of youth. He is the very opposite of the Servite brothers, with their tattered robes belted with rope. As Master da Vinci raises his arm to speak, his rose-colored velvet cape falls open with a line of embroidered tassels and gilded threads of the kind that fine ladies weave into their hair and the bodices of their dresses. His dark purple hose match the velvet cape.
I look down at my own linen gown, nearly threadbare now, in spite of my sister’s careful diligence in stitching the moth holes and the small rips where the threads have worn thin. I wonder how I have been invited here, among these successful men, these learned makers, clustered around this artist who appears as a kind of biblical orator, a prophet in a hooded cloak, hanging upon his every word.
“Painting involves greater mental deliberation than sculpture,” the master is saying. “Painting is also of greater artifice and wonder than sculpture. It is therefore more esteemed and more valued. Painting is the most noble art. I’m sure you will agree, signori.”
Is Master da Vinci trying to justify why he did not win the commission for the giant? Or perhaps he never put his name on the list for consideration by the operai at all? I keep my questions to myself for now.
“But Master,” one of the younger men says, “is there not a role for sculpture at all? Does sculpture in a public place not help teach biblical stories to ignorant people, especially those who do not read?”
“You have just described most of the citizens of Florence,” says Andrea, and several of the men around the table nod in agreement.
Master da Vinci raises a slim hand, and everyone falls silent. “Yes, you are correct that public sculpture serves to teach and inspire the uneducated. But my friends, consider! Sculpture is made by the most mechanical exercise, often accompanied by great sweat and marble dust, which forms a kind of mud daubed all over the sculptor’s face. His back is covered with a snowstorm of chips.” A bark of laughter.
Encouraged by the response, Master da Vinci continues. “The exact reverse is true of the painter. The painter stands before his work, perfectly at ease and well dressed,” he says, rubbing his palms across his silk gown as if he is the perfect exemplar. “He adorns himself with whatever he pleases.”
“But the role of public sculpture is that it must be symbolic, do you not agree, Master?” one of the men asks. “Think of the Judith and the lion before the Signoria.”
“The Judith is a symbol of the Medici partisans,” an older man snaps, his eyes bulging and flashing in the evening light.
“You would do well not to let anyone hear you say it,” another voice at the table adds.
I feel as if I may burst. What of the new sculpture Michelangelo is creating inside that accursed wooden box?
Again, Master da Vinci calms the crowd with a mere gesture of his hand. “And you all would do well to pursue painting, gentleman, mark my word.” He gestures around the cluttered studio, and, as if he hardly sees the cobwebs or dust-covered tables, he says, “A painter’s house is always clean and filled with charming pictures, and often he is accompanied by music or by the reading of various and beautiful works, which, since they are not mixed with the sound of the hammer or other noises, are heard with greater pleasure. The painter moves a very light brush dipped in a delicate color, the nobler of the two pursuits without a measure of a doubt.”
“You did not want the commission for the giant yourself, then, Master?” I blurt. For a moment, the only sound is a kind of rushing in my ears. Every pair of eyes in the room is on me. I watch a shadow cross over the master’s face.
“We have enough marble sculptures in this city,” he says. “You have only to look in any of our squares. At the Loggia of the Signoria. At the Orsanmichele. I have more important ways to spend my time.” He gestures to a table filled with stacks of drawings and small wooden and metal models of various contraptions I cannot begin to fathom.
“With all due respect, Master, that’s not what the operai think,” an older man presses. “The Signoria has already paid him to hire assistants, though he refused,” says Ridolfo. “He is alone inside that box in the workyard. You have witnessed it yourself, have you not, L’Indaco?”
Suddenly, all the eyes in the room are on me again.
“You are a sculptor, son?” Master da Vinci sets his focus on me.
“Well,” I hesitate. “I am the son of the illuminator Torni. Mostly I paint, sir. Frescoes.”
“Very good!” Master da Vinci raises his eyebrows. “Stick with painting, young man. As I have said, it is a nobler art. When you are an old man like I am, you will be glad you followed this advice.”
Filippo Dolciati is nowhere to be seen. I sit cross-legged on our cloth outside the Porco tavern, running my brush across the small panel. Today it’s a scene of a woman with melons for breasts, which I have calculated sells better than any of my other works. There are no crowds, the market having moved to another part of the city until Saturday. The air weighs heavy and damp under my collar, and a wet mist coats the air in a white haze.
Eventually, the mist turns to heavy raindrops, pelting the tile rooftops like small pebbles. I am forced to stack my small, painted panels, gather the corners of my canvas tarp, and tie it in a knot. I slip into the crooked door of the Porco tavern.
For a few moments, I stand with my back to the wall and let my eyes adjust to the dim light. I hesitate. Tied around my waist is a sack full of coins, worth two days of work on the street corner. Maybe I should just take it home and add it to our coffers? It took me weeks to recover what I lost in the last fight, after all.
“Jacopo!” I see a familiar face at one of the card tables.
What would it take, I wonder, to bring home enough to pay off all our debts? Could I double my purse? Triple it?
Again, the call of my name. Now there is whistling, the waving of a hat, the raising of a glass. The spark of recognition. Acceptance. The men at the card table. They have spied me and now, there is no turning back.
I slide into a narrow bench along the card table, where a group of men have laid out a deck of frussi. Pen, ink, glazes, gilding. Knights. Knaves. Hunting horns. Hound tethers. Game nooses. The cards are exceptionally beautiful, a fine deck likely once made for a more wealthy man. I wonder how this deck ended up in a dirty tavern, and I think my sister and I could easily create a deck like this. How much would a rich man pay?
Stick with painting, young man. Master da Vinci’s voice echoes in my head.
At the table are several artists whose faces I recognize. A young man who used to work for Piero della Francesca raises his hand when I remove my hat. Filippino Lippi, an older painter who has remained a loyal assistant to Master Botticelli for years, squeezes my shoulders.
“Eh, Jacopo!” he says in my ear. A hiss. “Come. Care to wager?”
He is back again.
Though I cannot make out the words, I hear his gravelly voice rise up the stairs from the lower level. My sister’s whispered response is barely audible over the din of neighborhood children playing in the alley behind the house.
Through the orange light I perceive a crack in the battened shutter of my bedchamber. My stomach growls, and I surmise that it is evening. No wonder he has chosen this hour to appear. The smell of Lucia’s cooking wafts up the stairs.
I don’t remember how many days I have lain sweating in my bed, the shutters closed to the outside world. Lucia has tiptoed around me, leaving trays of fruit and bread on my desk, refilling the ceramic pitcher on the table, removing my chamber pot, and making fitful attempts to tidy the supplies littered around my bedchamber before making an exasperated sigh and surrendering me again to the darkness.
A few times Lucia has tried to lure me out of my bedchamber with the promise of food. “A meat pie,” she says, or, “Signora Gramchi has brought over a bounty of persimmons from her garden outside the walls.”
I growl a response, and she shuts the door.
How could I begin to tell her that instead of working on a grand fresco scene, instead of collaborating on the David, I have spent weeks sitting on a street corner drawing prostitutes, then gambling away what few coins I earn at the card table at Il Porco, a place in which I have promised her I would never set foot again? That after weeks—no, months—I have nothing to show for myself at all?
I must appear as a snarling hermit to her. I wish Lucia could see instead that I want nothing more than to lift this shadow of overwhelming shame, that she deserves to care for a husband instead of her undeserving brother. It is years past time, and perhaps she is well past the age of marriage anyway. Somehow her own fate became lost in the chaos of our parents’ death, our brother’s itinerant work, my own failure to live up to what I was tasked to do as the eldest son. It should have been my job to marry her off before it was too late, before she became too old. Instead, she has contented herself to take care of me rather than me caring for her, as our parents would have expected me to do. She quickly took the place of our mother, doling out words of advice for me, cooking and cleaning after me, admonishing me. I realize now that she has shielded me over the years, has tried to save me from myself. She is the only one who has stayed by my side when things go dark.
It is this realization, more than Michelangelo’s gruff voice, that prompts me to sit up in bed, then to get up and splash water on my face.
When I reach the bottom of the stairs, I see the two of them, their backs to me, hunched over my sister’s worktable under the window where a small book lies open. With his grubby hand he turns the pages, examining my sister’s minuscule illuminations.
“This one is not for the convent?” he asks.
“No, it’s for a young lady near Santa Maria Novella,” she says. “Her father has commissioned me to decorate it. I am taking it to Battistini the bookbinder as soon as it’s finished.” That bookbinder again. I’m not sure if it’s the talk of Battistini or the presence of Michelangelo that has brought color to her cheeks, light to her eyes.
I lean against the doorjamb, running my fingers through the greasy strands of my hair. They haven’t seen me yet.
Michelangelo has always had a strange allure with the ladies, I think. He’s always known what to say in any situation, when women crowd around him to watch him sketch, to listen to his words. As he grew from a boy into a man—dirtier, darker, ever more stooped—he had women, even beautiful noblewomen, always in his company. Even one of the most esteemed ladies of our city tried to catch him before her father betrothed her to another family in Siena. I, friendly and gregarious to all women, even those not so beautiful, could not manage to attract or keep any one of them. I never understood it.
Michelangelo picks up the small page on Lucia’s worktable and runs a crooked finger across her fine wisps of leaves and decorated initials. “Petrarca,” he says.
“Yes,” she says, satisfied with his recognition. “The lady reads it in addition to her prayer books. Her father allowed her to have these decorated as well. I am copying an ancient text from the library at the monastery at San Marco, but this is a welcome change from the same decoration I do. For this one, I can put my father’s pattern books away.”
“You have learned your father’s lessons well, but do not underestimate your own way with the brush. You are gifted in your own right.”
“It is kind of you to say,” Lucia says. From the light of the hearth I see her face glow again. I want to call out to her, to tell her to stop engaging with this deceiving man, that he will only lead her down a path with no end, that he will only break her heart. But then she turns and sees me standing in the doorway.
“Jacopo,” she says. “You are up.”
“L’Indaco,” Michelangelo says. The old, familiar, crooked smile crosses his face.
“Please,” she says to Michelangelo, “join us for dinner.” My sister stands and begins to busy herself in the kitchen. She fills our copper cups with a dusty bottle of wine. Our neighbor has shared with us from his vines in the countryside, near the place where Michelangelo’s father owns land. Michelangelo sips the wine and remains silent. My sister goes to the hearth, ladling large spoonsful of stew into bowls. She places a loaf of bread on the table. Michelangelo tears off a piece and begins to chew. He remains silent; so do I. I drain my cup in one gulp and refill it. The wine fills my cheeks with grapey flavor. I refill it again.
“I see that you eat well, L’Indaco. I thought I might take advantage myself.” Another awkward silence follows.
Into the silence, Lucia says tentatively, “We don’t have much food, but you would never know that by looking at him.” She pats my stomach before she steps out of the room.
My cup is quickly drained, and I refill it again. Michelangelo and I eat in silence for a few moments. When Lucia comes back, she has tidied her hair, exchanged her soiled apron for a new one, and tied it carefully at her waist. She grasps the spoon above the pot on the hearth, then refills our bowls. I watch him closely, feeling the malaise well up into my chest.
“I should think you would have enough to eat at your own house,” I manage to say finally.
