The agony and the ecstas.., p.20
The Agony and the Ecstasy, page 20
Moonfaced Bugiardini, who was growing to hate stone carving with a ferocity deep as Granacci’s, began spending his days at the shed, gradually taking on manual tasks and becoming Michelangelo’s assistant. Michelangelo had him chop a wooden block the size of the marble block he intended to use, and drive wires through it for an armature. Then from his exploratory drawings he began modeling the wax figures, attaching them to the armature, balancing the intertwined arms, torsos, legs, heads and stones as they would tumble backward in the final marble.
He found the block he wanted in the palace yard. Bugiardini helped him bring the stone into his shed and set it up on round wooden beams to protect its corners. Just to stand and gaze at it gave Michelangelo a sense of intense power. When he began roughing out he worked with his whole body, planting both feet wide apart for support, throwing all his weight into the arm holding the hammer, achieving the sculptor’s equilibrium: the force to remove must be equal to the marble to be taken away. He remembered having scraped a pan with a piece of metal and having felt the metal in his teeth; now he felt the marble in his veins.
It was his desire to communicate his existence in space. That was one reason he had known that he must be a sculptor: to fill the void of emptiness with magnificent statues, statues of noble marble, expressing the richest, most profound feelings.
In its formation his four-foot block had a veining like wood, angling off to where the sun rises. He checked for due east and rolled the block into the same position in which it had lain in its mountain bed. He would have to cut across the grain, north and south, otherwise his marble would peel in fragmented layers.
He drew a deep breath, raised his hammer and chisel for the opening assault. Marble dust began to cover his hands and face, penetrating his clothes. It was good to touch his face and feel its dust, it was the same as touching the marble he was working on; he had the sensation of becoming one with his medium.
Saturday nights the palace emptied. Piero and Alfonsina visited with the noble families of Florence, Giovanni and Giulio began a social round, Lorenzo sought pleasure with his group of young bloods, according to rumor, participating in orgies of drinking and love-making. Michelangelo never knew whether these tales were true; but the next day Lorenzo would be wan and listless. His gout, inherited from his father, would keep him in bed or hobbling about the palace with a heavy cane.
On such evenings Michelangelo was free to have supper with Contessina and Giuliano on the open loggia of the top floor, in the soft night air. As they ate cold watermelon and chatted over candlelight, Contessina told him of having read the Boccaccio comments on the centaurs.
“Oh, I’ve already left the original battle far behind,” he laughed.
He took paper from inside his shirt, a piece of charcoal from his purse, and moving the charcoal rapidly over the paper, he told Contessina what he was after. Man lived and died by stone. To suggest the unity of man and marble, the heads and the blocks being thrown would be indistinguishable. All twenty men, women and centaurs would be but one, each figure a facet of man’s many-sided nature, animal as well as human, female as well as male, each attempting to destroy the other parts. He indicated with swift strokes some of the sculptural goals he was trying to achieve: the three receding levels of figures, each level in lower relief but not lower in vitality, the half-released forms appearing to be free-standing, each figure radiating its own force.
“I once heard you say that behind a carving there must be worship. What will there be to worship in your version of man’s battle?”
“The supreme work of art: the male body, infinite in its expressiveness and beauty.”
Contessina unconsciously looked down at her thin legs, the barely beginning-to-blossom bosom, then met his eyes amusedly.
“I can blackmail you for your pagan worship of the body of man. Plato might agree with you, but Savonarola would have you burned as a heretic.’”
“No, Contessina. I admire man, but I worship God for being able to create him.”
They laughed, their heads close. Seeing Contessina’s eyes move to the door and her head come up sharply, a mottled flush come to her cheeks, he turned and could tell from Lorenzo’s posture that he had been standing there for a considerable time. Their intimacy had permeated the room, irradiating the atmosphere. Michelangelo had not been conscious of it. But interrupted at its height, it provided an aura that neither he nor Contessina nor Lorenza could miss. Lorenzo stood silent, his lips compressed.
“… we were … discussing … I had made some drawings …”
The harshness receded from Lorenzo’s brow. He came forward to look at the drawings.
“Giulio reports your meetings to me. Your friendship is good. It can hurt neither of you. It is important that artists have friends. And Medici as well.”
A few nights later when the moon was full and the air stirring with wild scents, they sat together in a library window seat overlooking the Via Larga and the enclosing hills.
“Florence is full of magic in the moonlight,” sighed Contessina. “I wish I could look down from a height and see it all.”
“I know a place,” he exclaimed. “Just across the river. It’s as though you could reach out your arms and embrace the city.”
“Could we go? Now, I mean? We could slip out the back garden, separately. I’ll put on a full head cape.”
They walked the way he always went, at a sharp angle toward the Ponte alle Grazie, crossing the Arno and climbing up to the ancient fort. Sitting on the stone parapet, it was as though they were dangling their feet in the gray stone waters of the city. Michelangelo pointed out her father’s villa in Fiesole, the Badia just below it; the wall of eight towers guarding the city at the foot of the Fiesole hills; the glistening white cluster of Baptistery, Duomo and Campanile; the golden-stoned, high-towered Signoria; the tight oval city enclosed by its walls and river; and on their side of the river the moonlit Pitti palace built of stone from its own quarry in the Boboli gardens just behind the parapet.
They sat a little apart, touched by the moon, caught up in the beauty of the city and the ranges of hills that embraced them as fondly as was Florence by her walls. Their fingers fumbled slowly toward each other on the rough surface of the stone; touched and interlocked.
The repercussion came quickly. Lorenzo, who had been taking the baths at Vignone for several days, summoned him from the garden. He was seated at the big desk in his office, its walls covered with a map of Italy, a map of the world, the Sforza castle in Milan; the tables and shelves bearing a collection of hard stone vases, ivories, purple leather volumes of Dante and Petrarch, a Bible bound in purple velvet with silver ornaments. Standing beside him was his secretary, Ser Piero da Bibbiena. Michelangelo did not need to be told why he had been sent for.
“She was safe, Excellency. By my side the whole time.”
“So I gather. Did you really think you would not be observed? Giulio saw her going out the rear gate.”
Miserable now, Michelangelo replied, “It was indiscreet.” He lifted his eyes from the richly patterned Persian rug, cried, “It was so beautiful up there; as though Florence were a a marble quarry, with its churches and towers cut out of a single stratum of stone.”
“I am not questioning your conduct, Michelangelo. But Ser Piero does question its wisdom. You know that Florence is a city of wicked tongues.”
“They would not speak evil of a little girl.”
Lorenzo studied Michelangelo’s face for a moment.
“ ‘Contessina’ can no longer be interpreted as ‘little girl.’ She is growing up. I had not fully realized it before. That is all, Michelangelo, you can return to work now, as I know you are impatient to do.”
Michelangelo did not move, even though he had been dismissed.
“Is there not something I can do to make amends?”
“I have already made them.” Lorenzo came from behind his desk, put both hands on the boy’s trembling shoulders. “Do not be unhappy. You meant no wrong. Change for dinner, there is someone you should meet.”
The last thing Michelangelo wanted in his wretched state was to eat with sixty guests; but this was no time to disobey. He washed splashingly out of his bowl, donned a russet silk tunic, and went up to the dining hall where a groom took him to a seat Lorenzo had saved next to Gianfrancesco Aldovrandi, of one of the leading families of Bologna. Lorenzo had named Aldovrandi podestà or visiting mayor of Florence for the year 1488. Michelangelo’s concentration was not very good, his mind and stomach were in a turmoil. Aldovrandi turned his full attention on him.
“His Excellency was so kind as to show me your drawings and the marble Madonna and Child. I was greatly stimulated.”
“Thank you.”
“I am not indulging in compliments. I speak because I am a sculpture enthusiast myself, and I have grown up with the magnificent work of Jacopo della Quercia.”
Michelangelo numbly asked who he might be.
“Ah, that is why I asked Il Magnifico if I could speak to you. Jacopo della Quercia is not known in Florence, yet he is one of the greatest sculptors that Italy has produced. He was the dramatist in stone, as Donatello was the poet. It is my hope that you will come to Bologna and permit me to show you his work. It could have a profound influence on you.”
Michelangelo wanted to reply that profound influences were precisely what he wished to avoid; yet Aldovrandi would prove to be a prophet.
During the ensuing days Michelangelo heard that Piero and Alfonsina had several times protested against “a commoner being allowed to associate on such intimate terms with a Medici”; and Ser Piero da Bibbiena had written to Lorenzo at the baths, a veiled but strong note saying, “If some decision is not taken about Contessina, we may regret it.”
It was not until several nights later that he learned what Lorenzo meant by amends. Contessina had been sent for a visit to the Ridolfi villa in the country.
12.
He received a message from his father. The family was concerned about Lionardo, who had been reported ill in the monastery at San Marco.
“Could you use your Medici connections to get in to see Lionardo?” asked Lodovico, when he went to see them.
“No outsider is allowed in the monks’ quarters.”
“San Marco is a Medici church and monastery,” said his grandmother, “built by Cosimo and supported by Lorenzo.”
After a number of days he found that his requests were being ignored. Then he learned that Savonarola would preach in San Marco the following Sunday.
“The monks will all be there,” Bertoldo told him. “You will get a look at your brother. You might even exchange a few words. Bring us back a report on the friar.”
San Marco was delightfully cool in the early morning. His plan to take up a position at the side door leading in from the cloister, so that Lionardo would have to pass close to him, was spoiled by the presence of the tight knot of monks in their black habits who had been praying and chanting in the choir since before morning light. Their cowls were pulled so far forward that their faces were buried. It was impossible for Michelangelo to see whether Lionardo was in the group.
The church was by no means full. When a murmur announced the entrance of Savonarola, he slipped into a pew close to the pulpit and sat on the edge of the hard bench.
There was little to mark a difference between Savonarola and the other fifty-odd monks as he slowly climbed the pulpit stairs. His head and face were deep in his Dominican cowl, a slight figure under the robe. Michelangelo could see little but the tip of his nose and a pair of dark veiled eyes. His voice had harsh northern accents; at first it was quiet, but soon it took on a commanding tone as he expounded his thesis on the corruption of the priesthood. Never, even in the most heated attacks in the palace, had Michelangelo heard the slightest part of the charges Savonarola now levied against the clergy: the priests were political rather than spiritual, put into the Church by their families for worldly gain; they were careerists and opportunists seeking only wealth and power; guilty of simony, nepotism, bribery, sell- ing of relics, accumulation of benefices: “The adulteries of the Church have filled the world.”
Warming to his task, Savonarola pushed back the cowl and Michelangelo got his first view of the friar’s face. He found it as emotionally disturbing as the words that were coming with accelerating heat and rapidity from the contradictory mouth, the upper lip thin and ascetic as the material of a hair shirt, the lower lip more fleshy and voluptuous than Poliziano’s. The black eyes flashing to the farthest corner of the church were sunken under high-boned, hollowed-out cheeks, obviously the victims of fasting; his nose jutted outward in a massive ridge with wide, flaring nostrils. It was a dramatic face that could have been invented by no artist save Savonarola himself. The bone structure fascinated Michelangelo as a sculptor, for the dark marble-like chin was carved from the same flesh as the passionate hanging under-lip, polished with pumice and emery stone.
Michelangelo tore his eyes from Savonarola’s face so that he might better hear the words that were now pouring like molten bronze, the voice filling the church, reverberating off the hollow chapels, returning to invade the left ear after it had boxed and reddened the right.
“I have beheld proud ambition invade Rome and contaminate all things, until she has become a false, proud harlot. O Italy, O Rome, O Florence, your villainies, your impieties, your fornications, your usuries, your cruelties are bringing us tribulations. Give up your pomps and shows. Give up, I tell you, your mistresses and your love boys. The earth is covered with blood, but the clergy cares not a rap. They are far indeed from God, those priests whose worship is to spend the night with harlots, the days gossiping together in the sacristies. The altar itself has been turned into a clerical shop. The sacraments are the counters of your simony. Your lust has made of you a brazen-faced whore. Once you were at least ashamed of your sins; once priests had the grace to call their sons nephews. They no longer bother now. ‘I will descend on you in your scurrility and your wickedness,’ says the Lord, ‘upon your whores and your palaces.’”
He scourged the people of Florence, cried out that Dante had used Florence as his model for the City of Dis:
“Within the second circle are confined
Hypocrisy and flattery, and those
Who practice witchcraft, sorcery and theft,
Falsehood and Simony and suchlike filth.”
Summoning his will, for Savonarola’s voice was a paralyzing agent, Michelangelo looked around and saw that the congregation was sitting as one individual, soldered together.
“The whole of Italy will feel God’s wrath. Her cities will fall prey to foes. Blood will run in the streets. Murder will be the order of the day. Unless ye repent! repent! repent!”
The cry of “Repent!” echoed around the church a hundred-fold while Savonarola pulled his hood forward, masking his face, prayed long and silently, then came down the pulpit stairs and out the cloister door, leaving Michelangelo deeply moved, a little exalted, a little sick. When he was again out in the hot glaring sunshine of the piazza he stood blindly blinking, unwilling to go to his home or to the palace, not knowing what to say. Finally he sent word to his father that he had been unable to see Lionardo.
The emotional upheaval had faded when he received a note from Lionardo asking him to come to San Marco at vespers. The cloister was beautiful at dusk, the grass freshly cut, the hedges trimmed, jasmine and sunflowers growing in the shade of the arches, the atmosphere tranquil and secluded from the world.
Lionardo seemed to Michelangelo as cadaverous as Savonarola.
“The family has been worried about your health.”
Lionardo’s head shrank deeper into the cowl. “My family is the family of God.”
“Don’t be sanctimonious.”
When Lionardo spoke again Michelangelo detected a touch of affection.
“I called for you because I know you are not evil. You have not been corrupted by the palace. Even in the midst of Sodom and Gomorrah, you have not been debauched, you have lived like an anchorite.”
Amused, Michelangelo asked, “How do you know these things?”
“We know everything that goes on in Florence.” Lionardo took a step forward, held out his bony hands. “Fra Savonarola has had a vision. The Medici, the palace, all the obscene, godless art works within its walls will be destroyed. They cannot save themselves; but you can, for your soul is not yet lost. Repent, and forsake them while there is still time.”
“Savonarola attacked the clergy, I heard his sermon, but he did not attack Lorenzo.”
“There are to be nineteen sermons, starting on All Saints’ Day, through to Epiphany. By the end of them, Florence and the Medici will be in flames.”
They stood side by side in the airless corridor along one side of the cloister. Michelangelo was shocked into silence.
“You won’t save yourself?” implored Lionardo.
“We have different ideas. All of us can’t be the same.”
“We can. The world must be a monastery such as this, where all souls are saved.”
“If my soul is to be saved, it can only be through sculpture. That is my faith, and my discipline. You said that I live like an anchorite; it’s my work that keeps me that way. Then how can that work be bad? Wouldn’t God give me a choice, as long as we both serve Him equally?”
Lionardo’s eyes burned into Michelangelo’s for a moment. Then he was gone, through a door and up a flight of stairs.
“Into a cell decorated by Fra Angelico, I hope,” said Michelangelo to himself, a little bitterly.
He felt he owed it to Lorenzo to attend the All Saints’ Day sermon. This time the church was full. Again Savonarola began in a quiet, expository manner, explaining the mysteries of mass and the wholeness of the divine word. The new-comers seemed disappointed. But the friar was just working up warmth; soon he had moved into oratory, and then into crescendo, his mighty voice whipping the congregation with its impassioned eloquence.
