The agony and the ecstas.., p.6
The Agony and the Ecstasy, page 6
“What idiots were these, who cut such clumsy blocks?”
The father heard Michelangelo’s footsteps.
“Buon di, Michelangelo.”
“Buon di, Topolino.”
“Come va? How goes it?”
“Non c’è male. Not bad. E te? And you?”
“Non c’è male. The honorable Lodovico?”
“He goes well.”
Topolino did not really care how things went with Lodovico: he had forbidden Michelangelo to come here. No one got up, for the stonemason rarely breaks his rhythm; the two older boys and the one exactly Michelangelo’s age called out with welcoming warmth.
“Benvenuto, Michelangelo. Welcome.”
“Salve, good health, Bruno. Salve, Gilberto. Salve, Enrico.”
The scalpellino’s words are few and simple, matching in length the single blow of the hammer. When he chips at the stone he does not speak at all: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven: no word from the lips, only the rhythm of the shoulder and the moving hand with the chisel. Then he speaks, in the period of pause: one, two, three, four. The sentence must fit the rest count of four or it remains unsaid or incomplete. If the thought must be involved it will be spaced between several work counts of seven, filling two or three counts of four. But the scalpellino has learned to confine his thinking to what can be expressed in the single four-count pause.
There was no schooling for the stoneman. Topolino figured his contracts on his fingers. The sons were given a hammer and chisel at six, as Michelangelo had been, and by ten they were working full time on the stone. There was no marriage outside the stone ring. Agreements with builders and architects were handed down from generation to generation, as were the quarrying jobs at Maiano, where no outsider could find work. Between the arches hung an oblong piece of pietra serena with examples of the classic treatments of the stone: herringbone, subbia punch-hole, rustic, crosshatch, linear, bevel, centered right angle, receding step: the first alphabet Michelangelo had been given, and still the one he used more comfortably than the lettered alphabet with which he had been taught to read the Bible and Dante.
Topolino spoke. “You’re apprenticed to Ghirlandaio?”
“Yes.”
“You do not like it?”
“Not greatly.”
“Peccato. Too bad.”
“Who does somebody else’s trade makes soup in a basket,” said the old grandfather.
“Why do you stay?” It was the middle brother asking.
“Where else is there to go?”
“We could use a cutter.” This was from Bruno.
Michelangelo looked from the oldest son to the father.
“Davvero? It is true?”
“Davvero”
“You will take me as apprentice?”
“With stone you’re no apprentice. You earn a share.”
His heart leaped. Everyone chipped in silence while Michelangelo stood above the father who had just offered him a portion of the food that went into the family belly.
“My father…”
“Ecco! There you are!”
“Can I cut?”
The grandfather, turning his wheel, replied: “ ‘Every little bit helps,’ said the father who peed into the Arno because his son’s boat was beached at Pisa.”
Michelangelo sat before a roughed-out column, a hammer in one hand, a chisel in the other. He liked the heft of them. Stone was concrete, not abstract. One could not argue it from every point of the compass, like love or theology. No theorist had ever separated stone from its quarry bed.
He had a natural skill, unrusted after the months of being away. Under his blows the pietra serena cut like cake. There was a natural rhythm between the inward and outward movement of his breath and the up-and-down movement of his hammer arm as he slid the chisel across a cutting groove. The tactile contact with the stone made him feel that the world was right again, and the impact of the blows sent waves of strength up his skinny arms to his shoulders, torso, down through his diaphragm and legs into his feet.
The pietra serena they were working was warm, an alive blue-gray, a reflector of changing lights, refreshing to look at. The stone had durability, yet it was manageable, resilient, as joyous in character as in color, bringing an Italian blue- sky serenity to all who worked it.
The Topolinos had taught him to work the stone with friendliness, to seek its natural forms, its mountains and valleys, even though it might seem solid; never to grow angry or unsympathetic toward the material.
“Stone works with you. It reveals itself. But you must strike it right. Stone does not resent the chisel. It is not being violated. Its nature is to change. Each stone has its own character. It must be understood. Handle it carefully, or it will shatter. Never let stone destroy itself.
“Stone gives itself to skill and to love.”
His first lesson had been that the power and the durability lay in the stone, not in the arms or tools. The stone was master; not the mason. If ever a mason came to think he was master, the stone would oppose and thwart him. And if a mason beat his stone as an ignorant contadino might beat his beasts, the rich warm glowing breathing material became dull, colorless, ugly; died under his hand. To kicks and curses, to hurry and dislike, it closed a hard stone veil around its soft inner nature. It could be smashed by violence but never forced to fulfill. To sympathy, it yielded: grew even more luminous and sparkling, achieved fluid forms and symmetry.
From the beginning he had been taught that stone had a mystic: it had to be covered at night because it would crack if the full moon got on it. Each block had areas inside where it was hollow and bent. In order for it to remain docile it had to be kept warm in sacks, and the sacks kept damp. Heat gave the stone the same undulations it had in its original mountain home. Ice was its enemy.
“Stone will speak to you. Listen as you strike with the side of your hammer.”
Stone was called after the most precious of foods: carne, meat.
The scalpellini respected this stone. To them it was the most enduring material in the world: it had not only built their homes, farms, churches, town, but for a thousand years had given them a trade, a skill, a pride of workmanship, a living. Stone was not king but god. They worshiped it as did their pagan Etruscan ancestors. They handled it with reverence.
Michelangelo knew them as men of pride: to care for their cattle, pigs, vines, olives, wheat, this was ordinary work; they did it well in order to eat well. But working the stone, ah! that was where a man lived. Had not the Settignanese quarried, shaped and built the most enchanting city in all Europe: Florence? Jewel of the stonecarver’s art, its beauty created not by the architect and sculptor alone but by the scalpellino without whom there would have been no infinite variety of shape and decoration.
Monna Margherita, a formless woman who worked the animals and fields as well as the stove and tub, had come out of the house and stood under the arch, listening. She was the one about whom Lodovico had said bitterly, when Michelangelo wished to work with his hands:
“A child sent out to nurse will take on the condition of the woman who feeds him.”
She had suckled him with her own son for two years, and the day her breast ran dry she put both boys on wine. Water was for bathing before mass. Michelangelo felt for Monna Margherita much as he did for Monna Alessandra, his grandmother: affection and security.
He kissed her on both cheeks.
“Buon giorno, figlio mio.”
“Buon giorno, madre mia.”
“Pazienza,” she counciled. “Ghirlandaio is a good master. Who has an art, has always a part.”
The father had risen.
“I must choose at Cave Maiano. Will you help load?”
“Willingly. A rivederci, nonno, grandfather. A rivederci, Bruno. Addio, Gilberto. Addio, Enrico.”
“Addio, Michelangelo.”
They rode side by side on the high seat behind the two beautiful-faced white oxen. In the fields the olive pickers were mounted on ladders made of slender tree stalks, notched to take the light crossbar branches. Baskets were tied around their waists with rope, flat against the stomach and crotch. They held the branches with their left hand, stripping down the little black olives with a milking movement of the right. Pickers are talkers; two to a tree, they speak their phrases to each other through the branches, for to the contadino not to talk is to be dead a little. Topolino said under his breath:
“Daws love another’s prattle.”
The road, winding along the contour of the range, dipped into a valley and then slowly climbed Mount Ceceri to the quarry. As they rounded the bend of Maiano, Michelangelo saw the gorge in the mountain with its alternating blue and gray serena and iron-stained streaks. The pietra serena had been buried in horizontal layers. From this quarry Brunelleschi had chosen the stones for his exquisite churches of San Lorenzo and Santo Spirito. High on the cliff several men were outlining a block to be quarried with a scribbus, a point driven against the grain to loosen the hold from the main mass. He could see the point marks in successive layers through the stone formation, layers of stone peeled off as though stripped from a pile of parchment sheets.
The level work area where the strata fell after they were loosed was shimmering with heat and dust from the cutting, splitting, shaping: by men wet with perspiration, small, lean, sinewy men who worked the rock from dawn to dark without fatigue and who could cut as straight a line with hammer and chisel as a draftsman with pen and ruler: as concentrated in their hardness and durability as the rock itself. He had known these men since he was six and began riding behind the white oxen with Topolino. They greeted him, asked how things went: a primordial people, spending their lives with the simplest and most rudimentary force on earth: stone of the mountain, thrown up on the third day of Genesis.
Topolino inspected the newly quarried stone with the running commentary Michelangelo knew so well:
‘That one has knots. Too much iron in this. Shale; it’ll crumble into crystals like sugar on a bun. This one will be hollow.”
Until finally, climbing over the rocks and making his way toward the cliff, he let out his breath sharply:
“Ah! Here is a beautiful piece of meat.”
There is a way of making stone lift itself by distributing the tension. Michelangelo had been shown how to handle the density of the material without pulling his arms out of their sockets. He planted his legs wide, swung his weight from the hips; Topolino opened the first crack between the stone and the ground with an iron bar. They moved the stone over the boulders to open ground, then with the help of the quarrymen the block was fulcrumed upward through the open tail of the cart.
Michelangelo wiped the sweat from his face with his shirt. Rain clouds swept down the Arno from the mountains to the north. He bade Topolino good-by.
“A domani,” replied Topolino, flicking the lines for the oxen to move off.
Until tomorrow, Michelangelo thought, tomorrow being the next time I take my place with the family, be it a week or a year.
He left the quarry, stood on the hill below Fiesole. Warm rain fell on his upturned face. The dark clumps of leaves on the olives were silver green. In the wheat the peasant women were cutting with colored kerchiefs over their hair. Below him Florence looked as though someone were sprinkling it with gray powdered dust, blotting out the carpet of red tile roofs. Only the mammal dome of the cathedral stood out, and the straight proud upward thrust of the tower of the Signoria, complementary symbols under which Florence flourished and multiplied.
He made his way down the mountain, feeling fifteen feet tall.
11.
Having taken a day off without permission, Michelangelo was at the studio early. Ghirlandaio had been there all night, drawing by candlelight. He was unshaven, his blue beard and hollow cheeks in the flickering light giving him the appearance of an anchorite.
Michelangelo went to the side of the platform on which the desk stood majestically in command of its bottega, waited for Ghirlandaio to look up, then asked:
“Is something wrong?”
Ghirlandaio rose, raised his hands wearily to breast height, then shook his fingers up and down loosely, as though trying to shed his troubles. The boy stepped onto the platform and stood gazing down at the dozens of incomplete sketches of the Christ whom John was to baptize. The figures were slight to the point of delicacy.
“I’m intimidated because of the subject,” Ghirlandaio growled to himself. “I’ve been afraid to use a recognizable Florentine …”
He picked up a pen and flicked it swiftly over a sheet. What emerged was an irresolute figure, dwarfed by the bold John whom Ghirlandaio had already completed, and who was waiting, bowl of water in hand. He flung down the pen in disgust, muttered that he was going home for some sleep. Michelangelo went into the cool back yard and began sketching in the clear light that broke open Florence’s summer days.
For a week he drew experimentally. Then he took a fresh paper and set down a figure with powerful shoulders, muscularly developed chest, broad hips, a full oval stomach, and a robust pair of thighs rooted firmly in big solid feet: a man who could split a block of pietra serena with one blow of the hammer.
Ghirlandaio was shocked when Michelangelo showed him his Christ
“You used a model?”
“The stonemason in Settignano who helped raise me.”
“Christ a stonemason!”
“He was a carpenter.”
“Florence won’t accept a working-class Christ, Michelangelo. They’re used to having him genteel.”
Michelangelo suppressed a tiny smile.
“When I was first apprenticed you said, ‘The true eternal painting is mosaic,’ and sent me up to San Miniato to see the Christ Baldovinetti restored from the tenth century. That Christ is no wool merchant from Prato.”
“It’s a matter of crudity, not strength,” replied Ghirlandaio, “easy for the young to confuse. I will tell you a story. When Donatello was very young he once spent a lot of time making a wooden crucifix for Santa Croce, and when it was finished he took it to his friend Brunelleschi. ‘It seems to me,’ said Brunelleschi, ‘that you have put a plowman on the cross, rather than the body of Jesus Christ, which was most delicate in all its parts.’ Donatello, upset at the unexpected criticism from the older man, cried, ‘If it were as easy to make this figure as to judge it … Try to make one yourself!’
“That very day Brunelleschi set to work. Then he invited Donatello to dinner, but first the two friends bought some eggs and fresh cheese. When Donatello saw the crucifix in Brunelleschi’s hall he was so amazed that he threw up his arms in resignation, the eggs and the cheese that he had been holding in his apron falling to the floor. Brunelleschi said laughingly:
“ ‘What are we to have for dinner, Donato, now that you have broken the eggs?’
“Donatello, who could not take his eyes off the beautiful Christ, answered, ‘It is your work to make Christs, and mine to make plowmen.’ ”
Michelangelo knew both crucifixes, the one of Brunelleschi being in Santa Maria Novella. Stumblingly he explained that he preferred Donatello’s plowman to Brunelleschi’s ethereal Christ, which was so slight that it looked as though it had been created to be crucified. With Donatello’s figure the crucifixion had come as a horrifying surprise, even as it had to Mary and the others at the foot of the cross. He suggested that perhaps Christ’s spirituality did not depend on his bodily delicacy but rather on the indestructibility of his message.
Abstract theology held no interest for Ghirlandaio. He turned back to his work, the automatic gesture of dismissal for an apprentice. Michelangelo went into the yard and sat in the baking sun with his chin resting on his chest. He had made a nuisance of himself.
A few days later the studio was buzzing. Ghirlandaio had completed his Christ and was blowing it up to full size with color for the cartoon. When Michelangelo was permitted to see the finished figure he stood stunned: it was his Christ! The legs twisted in an angular position, a little knock-kneed; the chest, shoulders and arms those of a man who had carried logs and built houses; with a rounded, protruding stomach that had absorbed its quantity of food: in its power and reality far outdistancing any of the still- life set figures that Ghirlandaio had as yet painted for the Tornabuoni choir.
If Michelangelo expected Ghirlandaio to acknowledge him, he was disappointed. Ghirlandaio apparently had forgotten the discussion and the boy’s drawing.
The following week the studio moved en masse to Santa Maria Novella to start the Death of the Virgin in the crescent-shaped lunette topping the left side of the choir. Granacci was pleased because Ghirlandaio had given him a number of the apostles to paint, and he climbed the scaffolding singing a tune about how passionately he loved his sweetheart, Florence, the object of all Florentines’ romantic ballads. Up the scaffold went Mainardi to do the figure kneeling to the left of the recumbent Mary, and David on the extreme right, doing his favorite subject, a Tuscan road winding up a mountainside to a white villa.
Santa Maria Novella was empty at this early hour except for a few old women in their black shawls praying before the Madonnas. The canvas screen had been taken down to let fresh air into the choir. Michelangelo stood irresolutely beneath the scaffolding, unnoticed, then began to walk the long center nave toward the bright sunlight. He turned to take a final look at the scaffolding rising tier upon tier in front of the stained-glass windows, dark now in the slight western light; at the glowing colors of the several completed panels; the Ghirlandaio artists, tiny figures weaving across the lunette; at the wooden stalls at the base of the choir covered with canvas, the sacks of plaster and sand, the plank table of painting materials, all bathed in a soft glow.
