The Giant, page 15
He laughs. “Ah yes. That beffa. You and your little brother. Clever. Took me a few years before I forgave you for that one.”
My head starts to clear and I sit up, finally. “Ha! Those English people were convinced that you were mad. Do you remember that one man, what he said about…”
“L’Indaco,” he interrupts, his face suddenly dark and serious, “I understand that you might need a loan.”
I search his eyes to see if he is bluffing, but they are nearly invisible in the shadows. “I don’t want your money—or your charity.”
“But I am now in the thankful position of being able to help you if you need it,” he says. “It is the least I can do as I have not always treated you as a friend.” He squirms.
I feel this is the closest thing I might get to an apology, and I nod my head and close my eyes in acknowledgement.
“It’s all right,” I say. “I am working now. Nothing like what you are doing, of course. Little more than ephemera for di Cosimo’s pageants. But working all the same.”
“Good,” he says and jiggles my leg again with his dust-covered hand. “Di Cosimo. He is pazzo, but occasionally there is a flicker of pure genius. And what you are doing is a worthy task. And, I think it is all right to,” he waves his hand as if searching for the right words, “lower your standards of perfection sometimes.” He sees something in my face and hastens to correct himself. “What I mean is that you do not have to attain perfection to feel worthy. If you continually reach beyond your capacity, you will always feel disappointed. Set your expectations at a realistic level and you will never fall short.”
Once again he has managed to insult me without meaning to. I feel a burning sensation rise into my throat; it is enough to finally push me out of bed. I stand up at once and begin pacing the room.
“That is easy for you to say!” I cannot meet his eyes, so I look at the window as if it were open and I could see the view to the river, all the way to the cathedral workyard. “You and your commission, your raise, your admirers, your… your giant.” I feel a scoff roll off my lips.
I hear him sigh behind me. “L’Indaco, it was not meant as an insult. Please.” I feel him come to stand behind me; he places his hands on my shoulders. I feel a tingle ripple down to the small of my back as his thumbs press into my shoulder blades. A startling jolt. He leans into me, and I feel the swing of his hair against my cheek. “What I mean to say is… Everything is a work in progress. You can only go up from here.”
“What makes you so sure?” I close my eyes and feel his hot breath at the back of my neck.
“Because you are a creator in your heart. Besides that, you are well trained—by your father. By Master Ghirlandaio. You only lack the power of your own conviction. If you believe it, then others will, too.” I feel his hands tighten on me. My shoulders fall under his grip.
“I am nothing. I am not like you.” It comes out as a whisper, but I feel my heart pounding so hard inside my chest that he must hear it.
“On that count you are incorrect,” he says, almost a whisper.
I whip around to face him, pressing my hands on his shoulders. For a few long moments we stand like that, our hands on one another’s shoulders, like goats locking horns or wrestlers about to push each other to the floor, hanging in that suspended moment before one yields to the force of the other. For a moment, I wonder if we will once again start a fight that will end with him slapping my cheek, chuckling, and walking away. Or if he will pull me into a tight embrace instead.
“Prove me wrong,” I say in a loud whisper. I grasp his shoulders as tightly as I can, feeling that if I let go I will crumble to the floor, and then the tears will begin to fall. That is the last thing I want him to see. I feel the heat rise to my cheeks and his muscles push against my broad palms as he meets me with renewed force.
“Prove me wrong!” I spit out the words again.
I watch his dark, beady eyes flicker in the fire. “Bene. Come to the cathedral workyard when the sun rises tomorrow, amico. I will show you.”
As soon as I enter the gate, I hear scraping inside the wooden enclosure. The workyard is deserted, the guildsmen prohibited from working on the Sabbath. Michelangelo never believed that rules applied to him.
Dust hangs in the air, and I make my way through piles of lumber, stacks of limestone blocks, sawhorses, and hand tools. I knock softly at the door to Michelangelo’s wooden enclosure, and from the other side, I hear him fumble with the latch.
Inside the wooden box the air is warm and still. Although closed on all four sides, the top of the wooden enclosure is propped open to the sky. Morning sun filters into the space around the hut, dust motes and marble powder suspended in the gilded pools of light. The smell of damp stone hangs in the air, coating my throat and nostrils with fine powder.
He reaches out a hand coated in white, and gives me a short squeeze of the shoulder. Then he heads off to a large, makeshift worktable wedged into the corner.
Before my face, a foot the size of my torso. I gasp at the scale of it. “The operai must be very happy with you,” I say.
He shakes his head. “They have not laid eyes on it yet. No one has seen it. Only you.”
“Working on the Sabbath, I mean.”
“Hmm,” he says, scratching his head. I realize then that he has no idea what day it is.
For a moment I stand and soak in the light and the silence of the workyard. The great hunk of marble fills the space, as tall as three men. Much of the body has been roughed out but not yet smoothed. Still, from the awkward block, slowly, a colossus is taking shape.
I walk around the base of the sculpture. On one side, the block is still in its rough-hewn state. At first I perceive that he has done nothing with it, that it remains little more than a long hunk of marble turned upright.
On the other side, though, he has drawn a silhouette in charcoal on the face of the block. Then he has worked inward from the face, always working from that side, drawing the figure from the stone as if it were to be a relief instead of a sculpture in the round. The gesso model that we had carried in the box those months ago stands in the corner.
He picks up a gradina, a short, metal claw with a toothed cutting edge at one end. He climbs a few rungs up the ladder, and wordlessly, begins to remove marble. It is as if he is drawing with pen and paper, revealing muscles, skin, sinews in the same way he has brought vitality and life to the male form even with a pen and paper, as if the figure can breathe and move.
“You do not worry that your patrons have not seen your work yet?” I lean against the worktable and direct my question to his back, high up on the ladder now.
He shrugs. “Nothing is certain,” he says. “It could go away at any moment. Borgia could change his mind about our ransom and come through our gates right now. Or the French. They’ve already gathered at the gates of Rome. Who knows? The Medici partisans of our own city might have already plotted to slit Soderini’s throat in the middle of the night, for all I know.” I stop to consider that his knowledge of these larger forces far outstrips my narrow view of events in our city.
“So I don’t know if this project will see the light of day, if they will change their minds,” he says, gesturing with his chisel. “All I can do is my best work. Move forward. To use my skill to make something as beautiful as I am able. Plus, they are paying me to do a job. Just as you,” he says, locking eyes with me and reminding me of the scuffle that got me out of bed once again.
He makes a few crosshatches with his claw chisel, as if he were making a tentative sketch with his ink pen. They have the same effect: rounding and bringing out the depth of the figure.
I begin to walk around the block; I see the large foot, toes, a knee begin to emerge, rising up from the marble as if the body were a sunken ship rising up from the ocean, one side fully formed, the other lost somewhere below the surface, waiting to appear.
“The boy king is trapped inside the block,” I say.
“Precisely.” He cannot help but smile that I have understood him. “It is my job to release him. To release the colossus inside.”
Above my head, he has already completed the right hand, the one that holds the stone. Michelangelo has carefully chiseled the veins on the back side of the hand, and for a moment I believe that blood must be flowing through the marble itself. I feel all the latent tension of a young man preparing to hurl the stone at a giant, a beast of a man that no one had dared to challenge before.
Near the worktable, another wooden ladder stands propped against the wall, so tall that it reaches to the opening at the top of the box.
“Take a closer look,” he says, gesturing to the ladder.
The wooden steps lashed to the two vertical poles creak under my heft. I have never felt at ease in high places. I do not dare to look down at the earthen floor of the box. Instead, I look up. From the top of the ladder I turn my face to the spring sky. The sun breaks the edge of the box, and a bird flies over my head, peering down at me with a black eye, questioning what I am doing there at the top of the ladder, what I am doing there at all.
I dare to turn my body. At the top rung, I find myself face to face with the boy king, the David. About three-quarters of the face has been roughed out. Michelangelo has used a small drill to form the pupil of the right eye, as well as some of the neat curls of the hair; part of the hair disintegrates into the mass of the marble. One eye has been carved out, and a knitted brow; the lips curl in intense concentration.
I peer into the eye, into the soul of this boy hero, the one who is about to sling a rock that will knock out a giant, an impossible foe who no one would have believed possible to defeat. The face of this man-child is fierce, defiant. His brow is knotted above his nose, and he gazes out into the distance, toward the enemy that he is not sure if he can overcome. At the same time he is tense, coiled, and wound tight like a spring. He is brave but not quite confident. Now, standing face to face with this boy hero I see the uncertainty, the moment of getting ready, of facing a great enemy. He is not sure if he will win.
At the same time that I look into the face of a boy, I feel I am looking into the face of a god made flesh. But my friend has not slavishly copied a pagan statue he has seen in the ancient squares of Rome. No. I am looking into the face of God made into divine man. I am in touch with the divine. The divine of creation of man.
For a fleeting moment, I have glimpsed immortality, the immortality that my father always said was the highest aspiration of those of us who make things for a living.
More than that. I have glimpsed immortality, yes, but now, looking into the face of this new David, I know that immortality is not achieved by some stroke of magic, by some sudden windfall as in a game of cards or a roll of the dice. The glory has to go with hard work, with security in your own conviction. The way to immortality is paved with showing up inside a little box every morning to claw at a discarded block of marble. It’s losing hours of sleep sketching a hand holding a stone four hundred times. It’s a lot of marble dust.
There is no magic, no glory. It is only a small man attempting to do something big.
And I see now that this sculpture, this giant, is the result of nothing more than days, weeks, months of hard work; the talent in the hands and the dedication to see something through to completion. It is nothing more than the result of having the courage to pick up a sling, throw a rock, and see if its hits its target. I have never understood it until now.
“Ha!” I exclaim from the top of the ladder. Beyond that, I am rendered speechless.
Below me, at the base of the ladder, Michelangelo sharpens the flat end of a chisel, scraping the blade against a sharpening stone. Then he meets my gaze, and we stay like that for a long time, watching one another, immersed in the filtered light.
I return home to find Battistini the bookbinder lingering at our doorway. I stop in my tracks. Before he spots me, I duck under the awning of the cobbler’s shop at the corner.
My sister is there, too. Lucia talks softly to the bookbinder, standing at the threshold in plain daylight, as if she has no cares in the world for the old women across the street who are undoubtedly peeking through the cracks of their shutters.
Neither of them has spotted me. For a few minutes, I watch them talk together and share a quiet smile. Then the bookbinder brings her hand to his cheek, holding it there for a moment before he says goodbye, turns, and walks toward the river.
Later, I enter the house to find my sister fidgeting with the brushes on her worktable, her cheeks flushed, unable to look me in the eye.
I run up the stairs to my bedchamber and flip my wooden chair over onto the floor with a loud clatter. With one sweep of my arm, I send all the drawings stacked on my worktable fluttering to the floor.
My hands shaking, I crumple several half-finished sketches and feed them into the hearth. New flames leap to life. I ball more drawings into my fists, years of inadequate attempts to represent hands, feet, faces, trees, architecture. One by one, I toss each ball of parchment into the fire, watching them char and dissipate, tiny, black flecks in the gray draught. One by one, I burn them all. Everything. All the sketches of all the subjects I have done over the past years. Every sketch of that accursed giant.
Now, the playing cards. All the cards.
In a frenzy, I rummage through all the places around my bedchamber to see what’s left. There are stashes of painted playing cards in the drawers, stacked under pots of pigments, stuffed into and under the straw of my mattress.
Frussi. Naibi. Bassetta. Cursed games.
How many hours have I spent painting card decks with brushes loaded with vermilion, charcoal black? How many hours have I spent flicking my wrists furiously, sending the cards scattering across the table? Some old and worn, some with edges frayed and rubbed smooth from years of shuffling. Others newly printed in black on large sheets, then hand-painted by myself or another poor, unknown guildsman.
Batons, swords, cups, coins. Kings, queens, knights, knaves. How quickly I could palm one into my pocket and replace it with another. How well I could read the hands of my opponents. How easily I could produce a card from a narrow, nearly invisible drawer in the edge of a table. What did it amount to?
Nothing.
If I ever believed that winning a card game requires skill, then I have utterly deceived myself. I have nothing to show for all my so-called skill at the betting table.
Because of this compulsion, I cannot raise a dowry large enough to send my sister off with the man she loves. I can’t even put food on our table. And my little brother has had to seek his fortune far away.
I light a long match. One by one, I light each card.
When the flames lick the tips of my fingers, I toss the cards into the hearth. I watch them snap and burn in the flames, the bright colors disintegrating in the fire before my eyes, vibrant images of red and black.
None of it matters. Not my cards, not any of my pictures.
If I am to amount to anything at all, I must start again.
In the name of getting out of the money hole I have dug for myself, I resolve to get Master di Cosimo’s help. I follow the waddling artist through the alleys of San Lorenzo, looking for a chance to talk with him, to ask for his favor upon me, and for an advance against my day wages so I may begin to save a dowry for Lucia.
But I find myself vying for di Cosimo’s time and attention among many others who seek it, now that the normally reclusive artist has left the hovel of his studio and walks the streets of Florence. I file in behind nearly two dozen others who are paid from di Cosimo’s purse.
There is something about Master di Cosimo, I think, that is intimidating. This authoritative air seems at odds with his rotted teeth, wispy hair, and high-pitched voice. Assembling around him, we make a striking collection of artists and makers. Embroiderers. Goldsmiths. Makers of bronze and silver. A handful of painters. We have all come together to make di Cosimo’s latest pageant more fantastic, more spectacular than the last one. We follow him from the shade of an alley into the blazing square before the church of San Lorenzo, listening to him describe in great detail the procession he has planned for his latest public spectacle.
“Attenzione! There is a lot to cover, gentlemen.” Our master has wrapped his potato body in swaths of linen that hang down in dirty pieces, making him look like an ancient glutton who has taken to drink and spent weeks living on the streets.
“And ladies,” says the red-haired seamstress—Maria—whom I have come to learn is the daughter of Andrea del Sarto, one of di Cosimo’s most successful pupils. The other assistants laugh.
“Then I must make a correction,” says di Cosimo, bowing to her. “Signore e signori, there is much to discuss.”
Over a stretch of spring days, an unprecedented heat wave turns Florence into an inferno. Along the Arno, water birds collect under the shade of the bridge. People swim in the rushing river. Food spoils in the markets before our very eyes. A man hangs from the gallows by one foot just outside the city walls, his body black and rotting in the sun. Flies swarm.
Master di Cosimo does not appear to notice the heat. He seems to occupy another world than the rest of us anyway; he takes note of the things no one else sees. In addition to those of us who toil in di Cosimo’s wrecked workshop, a handful of finely dressed noblewomen, wives and daughters of the wool and silk guildsmen, who will sponsor this year’s festivities, follow behind in an entourage. In exchange for their largesse, the ladies get a preview of the event from di Cosimo himself. The ladies collect around him, sweating in their brocades, layers of silk and linen, red woolen caps and sheer headdresses.
The studio master, Giusto, follows close behind with a small book and a piece of black chalk, taking notes and sketching quick, labeled diagrams while Master di Cosimo talks. I look for an opportunity to wedge myself alongside Giusto so I have a chance to talk with Master di Cosimo, to ask him to pay my wages directly to an account for Lucia’s dowry.
