The agony and the ecstas.., p.34
The Agony and the Ecstasy, page 34
On his birthday he walked disconsolately into the workshop in the Popolano garden. He found a block of white marble sitting on his workbench. Across it, scrawled in charcoal in Granacci’s handwriting, was the greeting:
“Try again!”
He did, immediately, without sketching or going into wax or clay, an infant that had half formulated itself in his mind while he was slogging away at the St. John: robust, lusty, pagan, carved in the Roman tradition. He never imagined he was doing a serious piece, it was an exercise really, something he got fun out of, an antidote to the confusions and tensions of the St. John. And so the marble flowed freely, and out of the block emerged a delightful child of six, sleeping with his right arm under his head, his legs spread comfortably apart.
The piece took him only a few weeks to carve and polish; he was neither attempting perfection nor hopeful of selling it. The whole project was a lark, designed to cheer him up; and now that it was finished he intended to return the marble to Granacci with a note which would read:
“Only a little the worse for wear.”
It was Lorenzo Popolano who changed his mind. When he saw the completed piece his face flushed with pleasure.
“If you were to treat it so that it seemed to have been buried in the earth, I would send it to Rome, and it would pass for an antique Cupid. Would you know how to do that?”
“I think so. I antiqued a whole folio of drawings once.”
“You would sell it for a far better price. I have a shrewd dealer there, Baldassare del Milanese. He will handle it.”
He had seen enough Greek and Roman statues to know how his marble should look. He worked first with the scraps left from the Bambino, rubbing the dirt of the garden into the crystals with his fingers, then sandpapering lightly before applying another layer, staining the outside edges heavily with earth tans and rust, using a hard bristle brush to bury the discoloration.
When he was satisfied that he had a good process, he began on the Bambino, working carefully, as amused at the idea of the impending fraud as he had been at the carving itself.
Lorenzo liked the result.
“It is convincing. Baldassare will get you a good price. I have packets going to Rome in a few days, and I’ll include your little statue.”
Lorenzo had guessed rightly: the Bambino was sold to the first customer to whom Baldassare offered it: Cardinal Riario di San Giorgio, grand-nephew of Pope Sixtus IV. Lorenzo poured a pouch of gold florins into Michelangelo’s hands, thirty of them. Michelangelo had thought an antique Cupid in Rome would bring at least a hundred florins. Even so, it was twice what it would have brought in Florence; if indeed anyone would have wanted it, with Savonarola’s Army of Boys forcibly sequestering all such pagan images from pri vate homes.
Just before Lent Michelangelo saw his brother Giovansimone hurrying down the Via Larga at the head of a group of white-robed boys, their arms laden with mirrors, gowns of silk and satin, oil paintings, statuary, jewel boxes. Michelangelo grabbed his brother, almost toppling his load of loot.
“Giovansimone! I have been home for four months and haven’t laid eyes on you.”
Giovansimone shook his arm loose with a broad grin, exclaimed:
“Haven’t time to talk to you now. Be sure to be in the Piazza della Signoria tomorrow at dusk.”
It would not have been possible for Michelangelo or anyone else in Florence to miss the giant spectacle the following evening. In the four main quarters of Florence the Army of Boys in their white robes were shaped into military formations and, preceded by drummers, pipers and mace bearers carrying olive branches in their hands and chanting, “Long live Christ, the King of Florence! Long live Mary, the Queen!” they marched on the Piazza della Signoria. Here, in front of the tower, a huge tree had been erected. Built around it was a pyramidal scaffold. The citizens of Florence and the outlying villages poured into the square. The section for the burning was roped off by the monks of San Marco standing arm in arm, with Savonarola in commanding posi tion.
The boys built their pyre. At the base they threw bundles of false hair, rouge pots, perfumes, mirrors, bolts of silk from France, boxes of beads, earrings, bracelets, fancy buttons. Then came all the paraphernalia of gambling, a shower of playing cards dancing for a moment in the air, dice and checkered boards with their pawns and characters.
On the next layer of the pyramid were piled books, leather-bound manuscripts, hundreds of drawings, oil paintings, every piece of ancient sculpture the boys had been able to lay their hands on. Thrown onto the highest tier were violas, lutes and barrel organs, their beautiful shapes and glistening woods converting the mad heap to a scene of bacchanalia; then came masks, costumes from pageants, carved ivories and oriental art works; rings, brooches, necklaces sparkled as they landed. Michelangelo recognized Botticelli as he ran up to the pyre and threw onto it sketches of Simonetta. Fra Bartolommeo followed with his studies, the Della Robbia monks, with frenzied motion, added their varicolored terra-cotta sculptures. It was difficult to tell from the alternating outbursts of the crowd whether they greeted the sacrifices with fear or ecstasy.
On the balcony of the tower stood the members of the Signoria watching the spectacle. The Army of Boys had gone from house to house asking for “all art works inappropriate to the faith,” all ornaments, fineries and decorations not permitted by the sumptuary laws; if they had not been given what they considered a sufficient contribution, they had brushed past the owners of the house and looted it. The Signoria had done nothing to protect the city against these “white-robed angels.”
Savonarola raised his arms for silence. The guarding line of monks unlocked their arms and raised them to the heavens. A monk appeared with a lighted torch and handed it to Savonarola. Savonarola held the torch high while he gazed around the square. Then he walked around the pyre, touching it in one place after another until the entire scaffolding was one huge mass of flames.
The Army of Boys marched about the burning pyre chanting, “Long live Christ! Long live the Virgin!” Great answering shouts went up from the packed mass. “Long live Christ! Long live the Virgin!”
Tears came to Michelangelo’s eyes. He wiped them away as a child would, first with the back of his left hand and then with his right. But they continued to well up, as the flames mounted higher and higher and the wild singing and crying reached an ever greater crescendo, until they rolled down his cheeks and he felt their saltiness on his lips.
He wished with all his heart that he could go away, as far from the sight of the Duomo as he could get.
15.
In June a groom came with a message from Giovanni Popolano asking Michelangelo if he would come to the palace to meet a Roman nobleman interested in sculpture. Leo Baglioni, the Popolanos’ guest, was a man of about thirty, blond, well spoken. He walked with Michelangelo out to the workshop.
“My hosts tell me you are an excellent sculptor. Could I see something of your work?”
“I have nothing here, only the St. John in the garden.”
“And drawings? I am particularly interested in drawings.”
“Then you are a rarity among connoisseurs, sir. I should welcome your seeing my folio.”
Leo Baglioni pored over the hundreds of sketches.
“Would you be so kind as to make a simple drawing for me? A child’s hand, for example.”
Michelangelo drew rapidly, a number of memories of children in various poses. After a time Baglioni said:
“There can be no question about it. You are the one.”
“The one?”
“Yes. Who carved the Cupid.”
“Ah!”
“Forgive me for dissembling, but I was sent to Florence by my principal, Cardinal Riario di San Giorgio, to see if I could find the sculptor of the Cupid.”
“It was I. Baldassare del Milanese sent me thirty florins for the piece.”
“Thirty! But the cardinal paid two hundred …”
“Two hundred! Why, that … that thief …”
“Precisely what the cardinal said,” declared Leo Baglioni with a mischievous gleam in his eye. “He suspected it was a fraud. Why not return to Rome with me? You can settle your account with Baldassare. I believe the cardinal would be pleased to offer you hospitality. He said that anyone who could make such an excellent fake should be able to make even better authentic carvings.”
Michelangelo shook his head in perplexity over the series of events; but there was no faltering in his decision.
“A few articles of clothing from my home, sir, and I shall be ready for the journey.”
BOOK FIVE:
The City
HE STOOD on a rise just north of the city. Rome lay below in its bed of hills, destroyed, as though sacked by vandals. Leo Baglioni traced the outlines of the Leonine Wall, the fortress of Sant’ Angelo.
They got back on their horses and descended to the Porta del Popolo, passing the tomb of Nero’s mother to enter the small piazza. It stank from piled garbage. Above them to the left was the Pincio hill covered with vineyards. The streets they followed were narrow lanes with broken cobbles underfoot. The noise of carts passing over the stones was so deafening that Michelangelo could barely hear Baglioni identifying the dilapidated tomb of the Roman emperor Augustus, now a grazing field for cows; the Campo Marzio, a plain near the Tiber inhabited by the poorer artisans whose shops were huddled between ancient palaces that looked as though they would topple at any moment.
More than half of the buildings he passed were gutted. Goats wandered among the fallen stones. Baglioni explained that the previous December the Tiber had flooded and the people had had to flee for three days to the surrounding hills, returning to a dank, decaying city in which the plague struck and one hundred and fifty corpses were buried each morning on the island in the river.
Michelangelo felt sick to his stomach: the Mother City of Christendom was a waste heap and a dunghill. Dead animals lay under the feet of their horses. Wrecking crews were breaking out walls of building stone for use elsewhere, burning marble slabs and columns for their lime content. He guided his horse around a piece of ancient statuary sticking up through the dirt of the road, passed rows of abandoned houses, salt and vines growing in their crumbling mortar. Skirting a Grecian temple, he saw pigs penned between its columns. In a block-square subterranean vault with broken columns half emerging from an ancient forum there was a horrendous odor, rising from hundreds of years of dumped refuse, and generations of men whose descendants even now were squatting over its void, defecating into its depth.
His host led him through a series of dark, winding streets where two horses could barely pass each other, past the theater of Pompey with hundreds of families living in its yawning vault; and then at last into the Campo dei Fiori where he saw his first signs of recognizable life: a vegetable, flower, cheese, fish and meat market, crowded with row upon row of clean colorful stalls, the cooks and housewives of Rome shopping for their dinner. For the first time since they had descended into Rome he was able to look at his host and tender him a wisp of a smile.
“Frightened?” Leo Baglioni asked. “Or revulsed?”
“Both. Several times I almost turned my horse and made a run for Florence.”
“Rome is pitiful. You should see the pilgrims who come from all over Europe. They are robbed, beaten, ridden down by our princely processions, bitten half to death by vermin in the inns, then separated from their last denaro in the churches. Bracciolini wrote some sixty years ago, ‘The public and private buildings lie prostrate, nude and broken like the limbs of a giant. Rome is a decaying corpse.’ Pope Sixtus IV made a real effort to widen the streets and repair some of the buildings; but under the Borgias the city has fallen into a worse condition than that of which Bracciolini wrote. Here’s my home.”
Standing on a corner overlooking the market was a well-designed house of three floors. Inside, the rooms were small and sparsely furnished with walnut tables and chairs, but richly carpeted, with tapestries and precious cloths on the walls, and decorated with painted wooden cupboards, gold mirrors and red leather ornaments.
Michelangelo’s sailcloth bag was carried up to the third floor. He was given a corner room overlooking the market and a staggeringly huge, new stone palace which his host told him was just being completed by Cardinal Riario, who had bought his Bambino.
They had an excellent dinner in a dining room that was protected from the noises of the street. Late in the afternoon they strolled to the cardinal’s old villa, through the Piazza Navona, former site of the long stadium of Domitian, where Michelangelo was fascinated by a half-buried, half-excavated marble torso, brilliantly carved, standing before the house of one of the Orsini, a relative of Piero’s wife Alfonsina, and which Leo thought might be Menelaus Carrying Patroclus.
They continued on to the Piazza Fiammetta, named after the mistress of Caesar Borgia, son of the Pope, and then to the Riario palace facing the Via Sistina and the city’s cleanest inn, the Hostaria dell’Orso, Inn of the Bear. Baglioni filled in his background on Raffaelle Riario di San Giorgio, a grandnephew of Pope Sixtus IV who had been made a cardinal when an eighteen-year-old student at the University of Pisa. The young cardinal had gone for a visit to the Medici palace in Florence, and had been worshiping at the altar in the Duomo when assassins killed Giuliano de’ Medici and stabbed Lorenzo. Though Lorenzo and the Florentines had been convinced that it was Pope Sixtus and his nephews who had connived with the Pazzi to murder both Medici, Lorenzo had absolved the cardinal of knowledge of the plot.
Cardinal Riario received Michelangelo amidst piles of boxes and half-packed trunks that were being readied for moving. He read Lorenzo Popolano’s letter of introduction, bade Michelangelo welcome to Rome.
“Your Bambino was well sculptured, Buonarroti, even though it was not an antique. I have the impression that you can carve something quite fine for us.”
“Thank you, Excellency.”
“I should like you to go out this afternoon and see our best marble statues. Start with the arch of Domitian on the Corso, then go to the column of Trajan, after that see the Capitoline collection of bronzes that my granduncle, Sixtus IV, started …”
By the time the cardinal finished he had named some twenty pieces of sculpture in a dozen different collections and parts of the city. Leo Baglioni guided him first to see the river god Marforio, a monstrous-sized statue lying in the street between the Roman forum and the forum of Augustus, which was supposed to have been in the temple of Mars. From here they moved on to the column of Trajan, where Michelangelo exclaimed over the carving of the Lion Devouring the Horse. They walked up the winding Quirinal hill where he was stunned by the size and brute force of the eighteen-foot-high marble Horse Tamers and the gods of the Nile and the Tiber, the Nile resting an arm on a sphinx, the Tiber leaning on a tiger, which Leo thought came out of the baths of Constantine. Near them was a nude goddess of breath-taking beauty, “probably a Venus,” proffered Leo.
They continued on to the garden of Cardinal Rovere at San Pietro in Vincoli, Leo explaining that this nephew of Sixtus IV was the founder of the first public library and museum of bronzes in Rome, had accumulated the finest collection of antique marbles in Italy, and had been Sixtus’ inspiring force in the project to fresco the walls of the Sistine Chapel.
Michelangelo stood breathless when he entered the little iron gate of Cardinal Rovere’s garden, for here was an Apollo, just the torso remaining, that was the most staggering piece of human projection he had ever seen. As he had in the Medici palace on his first visit with Bertoldo, he moved half stunned in a forest of sculpture, from a Venus to an Antaeus to a Mercury, his mind captivated, only dimly hearing Leo’s voice telling him which pieces had been stolen from Greece, which had been bought by Emperor Hadrian and sent to Rome by the shipload. If Florence were the richest center in the world for the creation of art, surely this miserably dirty, decaying city must hold the greatest collection of antique art? And here was the proof of what he had tried to tell his fellow Ghirlandaio apprentices on the steps of the Duomo: here were marble carvings as alive and beautiful as the day they were carved, two thousand years ago.
“Now we shall go to see the bronze Marcus Aurelius before the Lateran,” continued Leo. “Then perhaps …”
“Please, no more. I’m quivering inside. I must lock myself in my room and try to digest what I’ve already seen.”
He could eat no supper that night. The next morning, Sunday, Leo took him to mass in the little church of San Lorenzo in Damaso, next to Cardinal Riario’s new palace, and attached to it by a break-through in one of its walls. Michelangelo was staggered to find himself surrounded by a hundred marble and granite columns, no two alike, carved by expert stonemasons, each with a differently sculptured capital, “eclectically borrowed from all over Rome,” Leo explained, “but mainly from the front of the portico of the theater of Pompey… .”
The cardinal wished Michelangelo to come to the new palace. The vast stone edifice, twice the size of the Medici palace, was finished except for the central courtyard. Michelangelo climbed a broad flight of stairs, went through the audience chamber with rich tapestry curtains and mirrors framed in jasper, the drawing room with oriental carpets and carved walnut chairs, the music room with a beautiful harpsichord, until he came upon the cardinal in his red hat and vestments, sitting in his antique sculpture room, with a dozen pieces lying in open boxes filled with sawdust.
“Tell me, Buonarroti, what do you think of the marbles you have seen? Can you do something equally beautiful?”
“I may not carve anything as beautiful. But we will see what I can do.”
“I like that answer, Buonarroti, it shows humility.”
He did not feel humble, all he had meant was that his pieces would be different from anything he had seen.
“We had best start at once,” continued Riario. “My carriage is outside. It can take us to the stoneyard.”
