The Giant: A Novel of Michelangelo's David Read online

  THE GIANT: A NOVEL OF MICHELANGELO’S DAVID

  Copyright © 2020 by Laura Morelli. All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  English translations of Michelangelo’s sonnets based on work by John Symonds and Elizabeth Jennings

  Cover design by Kerry Ellis

  Interior design by Shannon Bodie, Bookwise Design

  ISBNs:

  Paperback 978-1-942467-36-6

  Hardcover 978-1-942467-37-3

  Large Print 978-1-942467-38-0

  Mobi / Kindle 978-1-942467-39-7

  EPUB 978-1-942467-40-3

  Audio 978-1-942467-41-0

  www.lauramorelli.com

  Davicte cholla fromba

  E io choll’archo

  Michelagniolo

  David with his sling

  And I with my bow

  Michelangelo

  Scrawled in the margins of a preparatory drawing for the David

  Contents

  PART I THE COMPETITION

  PART II THE WAGER

  PART III THE SLING AND THE BOW

  PART IV THE PAINTER AND THE SCULPTOR

  PART V THE LETTER

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Excerpt from THE NIGHT PORTRAIT

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  It began on the day our hands reached for the same silverpoint pen.

  In the dust-filled light of our master’s workshop, I saw his fingers first: short and slight, with knuckles too large for a ten-year-old boy. He gripped the bone stylus. I gripped it too, as hard as I could. The metal tip trembled in the air. My first thought was that my wide, thick fist would win out over his smaller hand, but when our gaze met, I saw only beady-black eyes filled with fire.

  I let go of my grip.

  I hardly had time to console myself with the idea that I had let him have the pen, for our master announced a competition to see who could draw the best rendition of a Moses in silverpoint. We boys wanted nothing other than to please our master. We darted to our places in the workshop, and each of us began to work as grains shifted noiselessly inside the sandglass.

  I watched him, that black-eyed boy. He slunk off to a dusty corner and hunched over his parchment so that no one could see what he had drawn.

  When the time was called, our master circulated quietly among his pupils. Then, he pulled the two of us by our sleeves to the front of the room, declaring a tie. That moment changed everything. We were friends. At least I thought we were then.

  But in my heart, I still wanted to beat that boy.

  PART I

  THE COMPETITION

  Florence

  Summer 1501

  The best artist has that thought alone

  Which is contained within the marble shell

  The sculptor’s hand can only break the spell

  To free the figures slumbering in the stone

  From a sonnet composed by Michelangelo Buonarroti

  From the shade of a fruit seller’s door, I watch the hanged man’s body spin and dangle.

  The midday bells in the tower of the Signoria have not yet begun to clang, but wavering heat emanates from the cobblestones and I feel a bead of sweat trickle from my neck to the small of my back. I press against the stone wall as a mule-drawn cart rattles by, sending up splashes of steaming mud left from the morning rain.

  Do I dare to look at the condemned man’s face? My calloused hand shields my eyes from the glare bearing down from behind the tiled roofs. Little more than a horrid puppet, the man’s jowls are as bloated as the putrid peaches in the fruit seller’s bins, his eyes bulging and crazed.

  Look away, Jacopo. The voice in my head.

  During the night, the Black Brothers led the condemned man to this fate. I imagine their hooded forms hoisting his wriggling body over the high window ledge and pulling the noose tight, before letting him fall against the stone wall of the Bargello prison for all to see. Now, his body unfurls from the window like a dark banner hung as a warning for the murmuring crowd of onlookers who began gathering in the square long before the first cock crowed.

  For days, the condemned man’s name—Antonio Rinaldeschi—has been on everyone’s lips. He had forfeited not only a pile of soldi but most of his clothing after losing a dice game in the tavern they call The Fig (not the tavern where I deal cards; that one is in the square near where Master da Vinci’s father lives.)

  I was told by the old woodcarver Monciatto, though he is not always reliable, that when Rinaldeschi was laughed out of the tavern, he was filled with as much rage as shame. Passing a painted image of Our Lady at a street-side tabernacle, he cursed the Virgin’s name in a loud tirade that roused the neighbors from their beds. On the cobblestones before the church of Santa Maria degli Alberighi, he picked up pieces of dried horse dung and hurled them at Our Lady.

  I imagine that Rinaldeschi then wandered off in a drunken stupor, thinking that his rant was finished, if he remembered it at all. But by dawn the next day, the brown, soiled rings on the Virgin’s crown drew a crowd. Someone said that one of the stains resembled a rose. People began to light candles. Hold vigils. The crowds around the dung-stained Madonna grew. By the time our archbishop arrived to inspect the defiled image, Rinaldeschi had fled the city. Great piles of melted candles littered the square, and a few opportunistic painters with meager skills were selling token pictures of the event in the alleys leading to the piazza.

  When the Night Guard traced Rinaldeschi to his hiding place in a villa outside the city walls, he tried to stab a dagger into his own breast. It struck a rib instead, sparing his life. He was dragged back into Florence and sentenced to hang here from the windows of the Bargello.

  If only my father could see it.

  The voice in my head speaks again, but this time it sounds like my father. Art holds the power to make us immortal, figliolo.

  Immortal.

  As a boy, I believed it. As a man, I can only conclude that art leads to eternal damnation.

  From the time I was old enough to hold a nub of charcoal steady in my hand, my father showed me how many of our city’s makers—Perugino, Brother Angelico, even my own Master Ghirlandaio—made pictures that brought them acclaim beyond measure. It was not as in previous generations, my father told me, wagging a plump finger under my nose, when a fresco painter might be paid based on a price per square. Now, he said, patrons would be willing to pay us on merit instead.

  Merit.

  It was what was inside the mind of the artist that counted, my father said, moving his thick hand from my nose to point at his balding head. The idea. We could create work that inspires passion, love, tears, my father told me. It would make us live forever.

  “It can inspire even the throwing of horse dung at a picture of the Madonna,” I mumble, as if my father could hear me all the way from his grave outside the city walls. It is precisely the artists’ ideas, I think, that have led us astray.

  Our priests tell us that the turn of the half-millennium may signal the beginning of the End Times, and as I contemplate the calamities along with Rinaldeschi’s head wrenched grotesquely to one shoulder on the wall above, I can only believe it to be true.

  It has hardly been three years since the noble people of our city lost their heads, tossing their paintings, books, and other precious objects onto a great bonfire in the Piazza della Signoria. Even that painter Botticelli dragged his own pictures to the spectacle, and everyone watched them curl and char in the flames. The event has left a raw, open wound in the hearts of all who craft beautiful artifice for a living.

  But it seems the chaos extends far beyond our city gates. Our brutal skirmishes with Rome, Siena, and Pisa—begun long before my parents’ own birth—seem to have no end. And even the unthinkable: the French have taken Milan. Our city’s leaders build alliances and make enemies so quickly that it is impossible to keep score.

  Who are our friends and who are our enemies? I no longer know.

  Rinaldeschi’s body has fallen still now. As the midday bells begin to peal, the brothers appear, their black hoods barely visible at the top rim of the wall. They reel up the body, which spins slowly one last time before it disappears over the ledge. A streak of blood, a smear from where the hanged man’s hands scraped the wall as he was pulled up, is the only remaining testimony of the hanging.

  I turn from the sight of streaked blood on the Bargello walls, and make my way home to the quarter of the city where my sister, Lucia, and I inhabit our parents’ old house. But the farther I walk away from the executed man, the more malaise rises from the pit of my stomach.

  Who, I wonder, has not left a tavern cursing his luck? Who has not felt the sting of loss at the card table, has not handed over a pile of coins to a rival, has not felt the urge to rant or throw dung when he has been dealt a bad hand? I am unable to rid my head of the image of the swinging body, for I know that it is only a curse said aloud, a roll of the dice—a hairsbreadth—that separates the hanged man from mysel
f.

  As the crowd disperses and I slip down the alley toward home, my mind is filled with only one thought. On another night, it might have been me.

  “L’Indaco!”

  I stop walking as I hear my nickname called from the direction of the square.

  I turn to see the blacksmith’s son, Paolo, jogging to catch up with me. His cheeks are streaked with soot, and beads of sweat dot his forehead. His skin looks as leathery as the apron that covers the stained camicia he wears between daybreak and the ringing of the afternoon bell. Long ago, Paolo and I worked alongside one another in Master Ghirlandaio’s workshop, both of us full of promise, only to return to work at our fathers’ sides.

  “Your father let you out of his sight?” I smirk, a long-running jab.

  “I wasn’t going to miss the spectacle,” he says, gesturing behind us at the Bargello walls. “Besides, it’s time my dutiful brother handles things at the foundry for once,” he says, his voice tinged with sarcasm. “And you? Did you sneak away from your fresco?”

  “I… I managed to,” I stammer the response and hope that Paolo cannot see the look of dumb shame on my face. I cannot admit that weeks have passed since I’ve picked up a paintbrush.

  “Senti,” he says, grasping my forearm. He doesn’t seem to register my hesitation. “You have heard the news of the competition?”

  “Competition?”

  “The giant,” he says. “They are saying the gonfaloniere is calling a contest for it to be carved after all this time.”

  All at once, I feel the hairs on my neck stand on end. I stop walking, feeling the crowds leaving the square snake around us, merchants and artisans, shopkeepers and servants, returning to their lives after the hanging.

  The giant. Il gigante.

  We all know the block of marble that lies in the workyard of our cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. They say that a sculptor named Bartolommeo Baccellino first attempted to make something from the marble long before my lifetime, but nothing ever came of it. Later, another sculptor, Agostino di Duccio, took his hammer to the block, only to cast it aside in frustration. Since then, some four decades ago, it has lain discarded and abandoned.

  “The giant,” I say, almost a whisper. “The Signoria has seen fit to resurrect the project? Why?”

  “The cathedral committee,” he says, setting his wide brown eyes on me. “A large David to adorn the tribune of the cathedral. I am surprised you have not heard of it. Everyone is lining up for a chance to take on the block,” he says. “Sansovino, Botticelli. Even da Vinci’s name has been thrown out.” The heat of the midday sun bears down on the back of my neck, as hot as a blue flame, and I wonder if my skin has already turned red.

  “But L’Indaco,” he continues, “there is one person missing from the list. You know it better than I. Too bad he is not here to propose his own name. He might have a fighting chance.” Paolo slaps me on the shoulder. “Buon lavoro,” he says, veering down a narrow alley toward his father’s foundry at the edge of the city wall.

  “Saluti,” I say, watching his broad back disappear behind a gaggle of people and a large oxcart loaded with bales of raw wool.

  The giant. A great David. The lowly shepherd of Israel who would become a mighty king. I feel my heart quicken in my chest, and my mind is already racing. Of course, there is no way the Signoria would give such a commission to a man like me. Not by myself. But maybe… My mind flashes with the memory of clambering over that block together with my closest friend when we were barely ten years old. If there is a giant David waiting to be freed from inside that old hunk of marble, I know the man to free it.

  But when I think of his face, my gut is filled with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. Would he come home?

  I feel a surge inside my chest. Yes. We need him. Florence needs him. If I am honest with myself, I need him. If I am to play any role in this competition—if I am to amount to anything at all—he might be the one who could help pull me out of this hole I have dug for myself.

  My friend.

  Michelangelo Buonarroti.

  To Michelangelo Buonarroti in Rome—

  It is all I have managed to scrawl on the parchment so far, for I struggle to find the words that will bring my childhood friend back home to Florence.

  I ponder the blank page in the dimming light. Beyond the leaded panes of my bedchamber window, the sky has turned a distinct shade of lavender-blue that only appears on summer evenings. The aroma of my sister’s pie, made with onions and the pickings of a boar carcass donated by a sympathetic, neighboring butcher, wafts into the room from the hearth downstairs. In spite of the fact that we are nearly broke, Lucia manages to feed us like nobility, night after night. We had to dismiss our last remaining servant two years ago—a shame, for the woman had served our parents for some three decades. Now my sister does everything herself.

  I swallow the saliva in my mouth along with the guilt I feel for allowing my sister to live like this. It has gone unspoken, but we all know that she is past marriageable age. There is no longer enough for a dowry; no one has to tell her that. But she prefers to paint small prayer books for the nuns rather than to live cloistered behind the convent walls with them. Our father taught Lucia, our younger brother, Francesco, and myself to paint minuscule scrolls, gilded initials, leaves, and delicate figures so small that one needs an oculus to see them. With Lucia’s talent at illumination, she can make a little money for us to eat. And as for our little brother Francesco… Well. He has had to work far beyond the walls of our city to keep himself warm and fed. He knew better than to rely on me.

  I light the oil lamp at my worktable, and the bright chaos of color springs to life on my bedchamber walls. Around me swirl faces of serene Madonnas, martyrs in agony, hands and drapery and horses, layered one atop another, a mess of pictures attacked and abandoned over years. Ever since I was small, my bedchamber walls have been my sketchbook. My parents gave up trying to stop me years ago. Into the wooden mantel I have carved obscene figures from the time I was young. Other images awoke me in the night, flashes of brilliance that I painted in a state of supreme inspiration, but by dawn’s light, they appeared dull, flat, inconsequential. Not good enough. They might send me back to my bed for days, my windows shuttered and my eyes closed so that I would not have to face my own failure.

  I brush aside a stack of drawings on my desk to make room for my parchment. In recent months, the table has become cluttered with drawings of churches, and small figures of clay and gesso that I have formed with my hands. If I am to become immortal as my father wished, then the gilded pages of books to be tucked away behind convent walls seem hardly enough. Instead, the monumental forms of statues and buildings are the only path, I am convinced. Sculpture. Architecture. Fortune has not favored me in the way that it’s favored men my age who have established workshops for themselves or have found important commissions in Rome—like Michelangelo himself.

  I brush a layer of ash and dust from carving into hardened gesso and stone. I plunge the tip of my quill into the glass inkwell, into the abyss of the midnight blue liquid. L’Indaco. Indigo. The deepest blue there is. The same as the nickname that Michelangelo himself gave to me.

  My blue boy, he said. All those years ago.

  How will I find the words to lure him back home?

  My friend,

  I have faith my letter will reach you with some important news. Surely you recall the old block of marble in our cathedral workyard.

  At last, the Signoria has decided to commission someone to sculpt it—a David for one of the cathedral tribunes.

  You know the block well enough, so I need not describe it to you.

  Doubt creeps in and my hand stops. It has been four long years since he left for Rome. He already has earned acclaim, won commissions from lords, cardinals, His Holiness himself. He has made a new life there. Surely he does not wish to return to his native city. Will he run his dark eyes across my letter and then stoke the fire in his hearth with it? It would be just like him to do such a thing.