Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Irving Stone
Title Page
Epigraph
One: | THE STUDIO |
Two: | THE SCULPTURE GARDEN |
Three: | THE PALACE |
Four: | THE FLIGHT |
Five: | THE CITY |
Six: | THE GIANT |
Seven: | THE POPE |
Eight: | THE MEDICI |
Nine: | THE WAR |
Ten: | LOVE |
Eleven: | THE DOME |
Note
Bibliography
Glossary
Present Location of Michelangelo’s Works
Copyright
Clarence Darrow for the Defence
They Also Ran
Immortal Wife
President’s Lady
Love is Eternal
Lust for Life
Depths of Glory
The Passions of the Mind
The Origin
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Version 1.0
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Reprinted in Arrow Books 2001
13
Copyright © Doubleday & Company Inc. 1961
The right of Irving Stone to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
First published in the United Kingdom in 1961
by William Collins Sons & Company
Methuen London edition published in 1987
Mandarin Paperbacks edition published in 1989,
reprinted 15 times
This edition published in Arrow Books in 1997
The eighteen lines from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, translated by
Horace Gregory, are reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 1958 by The Viking Press Inc.
The forty-five lines from Dante’s Divine Comedy, translated by
Lawrence Grant White, are reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 1948 by Pantheon Books.
Arrow Books
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099416272
The best of artists hath no thought to show
which the rough stone in its superfluous shell
doth not include; to break the marble spell
is all the hand that serves the brain can do.
How can that be, lady, which all men learn
by long experience? Shapes that seem alive,
wrought in hard mountain marble, will survive
their maker, whom the years to dust return!
Beauteous art, brought with us from heaven,
will conquer nature; so divine a power
belongs to him who strives with every nerve.
If I was made for art, from childhood given
a prey for burning beauty to devour,
I blame the mistress I was bom to serve.
MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI
HE SAT BEFORE the mirror of the second-floor bedroom sketching his lean cheeks with their high bone ridges, the flat broad forehead, and ears too far back on the head, the dark hair curling forward in thatches, the amber-colored eyes wide-set but heavy-lidded.
“I’m not well designed,” thought the thirteen-year-old with serious concentration. “My head is out of rule, with the forehead overweighing my mouth and chin. Someone should have used a plumb line.”
He shifted his wiry body lightly so as not to waken his four brothers sleeping behind him, then cocked an ear toward the Via dell’Anguillara to catch the whistle of his friend Granacci. With rapid strokes of the crayon he began redrafting his features, widening the oval of the eyes, rounding the forehead, broadening the narrow cheeks, making the lips fuller, the chin larger. “There,” he thought, “now I look better. Too bad a face can’t be redrawn before it’s delivered, like plans for the façade of the Duomo.”
Notes of a bird’s song came fluting through the ten-foot window, which he had opened to the cool morning air. He hid his drawing paper under the bolster at the head of his bed and went noiselessly down the circular stone stairs to the street.
His friend Francesco Granacci was a nineteen-year-old youth, a head taller than himself, with hay-colored hair and alert blue eyes. For a year Granacci had been providing him drawing materials and sanctuary in his parents’ home across the Via dei Bentaccordi, as well as prints borrowed surreptitiously from Ghirlandaio’s studio. Though the son of a wealthy family, Granacci had been apprenticed to Filippino Lippi at the age of ten, at thirteen had posed as the central figure of the resurrected youth in St. Peter Raising the Emperor’s Nephew, in the Carmine, which Masaccio had left uncompleted, and was now apprenticed to Ghirlandaio. Granacci did not take his own painting seriously, but he had a sharp eye for talent in others.
“You’re really coming with me this time?” Granacci demanded excitedly.
“It’s my birthday present to myself.”
“Good.” He took the younger boy’s arm, guiding him along the curving Via dei Bentaccordi which had been built on the oval site of the old Roman colosseum, past the high walls of the prison of the Stinche. “Remember what I told you about Domenico Ghirlandaio. I’ve been apprenticed to him for five years, and I know him well. Be humble. He likes his apprentices to appreciate him.”
By now they had turned into the Via Ghibellina, just above the Ghibellina gate which marked the limits of the second wall of the city. On their left they passed the magnificent stone pile of the Bargello, with its colorful governor’s courtyard, and then, after they had turned right on the Street of the Proconsul, the Pazzi palace. The younger boy ran his hand lovingly over the irregular roughhewn blocks of its walls.
“Let’s hurry,” urged Granacci. “This is the best moment of the day for Ghirlandaio, before he begins his drawing.”
They went with unmatched strides along the narrow streets, past the Street of the Old Irons with its stone palaces and exterior flights of carved stone stairs leading to jutting penthouses. They made their way along the Via del Corso and saw on their right through the narrow slit of the Via dei Tedaldini a segment of the red-tiled Duomo, and after another block, on their left, the Palazzo della Signoria with its arches, windows and crownings of its tan stone tower penetrating the faint sunrise blue of the Florentine sky. To reach Ghirlandaio’s studio they had to cross the Square of the Old Market, where fresh beeves, cut down the backbone and opened wide, hung on pulleys in front of the butchers’ stalls. From here it was but a short walk past the Street of the Painters to the corner of the Via dei Tavolini where they saw the open door of Ghirlandaio’s studio.
Michelangelo stopped for a moment to gaze at Donatello’s marble St. Mark standing in a tall niche of the Orsanmichele.
“Sculpture is the greatest art!” he exclaimed, his voice ringing with emotion.
Granacci was surprised that his friend had concealed this feeling for sculpture during their two years of friendship.
“I don’t agree with you,” he said quietly. “But stop gaping, there’s business to be done.”
The boy took a deep breath. Together they entered the Ghirlandaio workshop.
The studio was a large high-ceilinged room with a pungent smell of paint and charcoal. In the center was a rough plank table set up on horses around which half a dozen sleepy young apprentices crouched on stools. In a near corner a man was grinding colors in a mortar, while along the side walls were stacked color cartoons of completed frescoes, the Last Supper of the church of the Ognissanti and the Calling of the First Apostles for the Sistine Chapel in Rome.
In a protected rear corner on a raised platform sat a man of about forty, his wide-topped desk the only ordered spot in the studio, with its neat rows of pens, brushes, sketchbooks, its scissors and other implements hanging on hooks, and behind, on the wall shelves, volumes of illuminated manuscripts.
Granacci stopped below his master’s desk.
“Signor Ghirlandaio, this is Michelangelo, about whom I told you.”
Michelangelo felt himself being spitted by a pair of eyes reputed to be able to see and record more with one thrust than any artist in Italy. But the boy too used his eyes as though they were silver-point pens, drawing for his mind’s portfolio the artist sitting above him in an azure coat and red cloak thrown over the shoulders against the March chill and wearing a red cap, the sensitive face with its full purple lips, prominent bone formations beneath the eyes, deep cheek hollows, the opulent black hair parted in the center and worn down to his shoulders, the long supple fingers of his right hand clasped against his throat. He remembered Granacci telling him of Ghirlandaio’s exclamation only a few days before:
“Now that I have begun to understand the ways of this art, it is a grief to me that I am not given the whole circumference of the walls of Florence to cover with fresco.”
“Who is your father?” demanded Ghirlandaio.
“Lodovico di Lionardo Buonarroti-Simoni.”
“I have heard the name. How old are you?”
“Thirteen.”
“We start apprentices at ten. Where have you been for the past three years?”
“Wasting my time at Francesco da Urbino’s school of grammar, studying Latin and Greek.”
A twitching at the corner of Ghirlandaio’s dark wine lips showed that he liked the answer.
“Can you draw?”
“I have the capacity to learn.”
Granacci, wanting to help his friend but unable to reveal that he had been borrowing Ghirlandaio’s prints for Michelangelo to copy, said:
“He has a good hand. He made drawings on the walls of his father’s house in Settignano. There is one, a satyr …”
“Ah, a muralist,” quipped Ghirlandaio. “Competition for my declining years.”
Michelangelo was so intense that he took Ghirlandaio seriously.
“I’ve never tried color. It’s not my trade.”
Ghirlandaio started to answer, then checked himself.
“Whatever else you may lack for, it isn’t modesty. You won’t become my competitor, not because you haven’t the talent to do so, but because you care nothing for color.”
Michelangelo felt rather than heard Granacci’s groan beside him.
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“You’re small for thirteen. You look too frail for the heavy work of this studio.”
“To draw one does not need big muscles.”
He realized that he had been baited into saying the wrong thing, and that in addition he had raised his voice. The apprentices had turned at this contretemps. After a moment Ghirlandaio’s good nature asserted itself.
“Very well, suppose you sketch for me. What will it be?”
Michelangelo’s eyes traveled over the workshop, swallowing impressions the way country youths break bunches of grapes in their mouths at autumn wine festivals.
“Why not the studio?”
Ghirlandaio gave a short disparaging laugh, as though he had been rescued from an awkward position.
“Granacci, give Buonarroti paper and charcoal. Now, if you have no objections, I will go back to my work.”
Michelangelo found a point of vantage near the door from which to see the workshop best, and sat down on a bench to sketch. Granacci lingered by his side.
“Why did you have to suggest such a difficult theme? Take plenty of time. He’ll forget you’re here …”
His eye and hand were good working partners, grasping the essentials of the large room: the worktable in the center with its apprentices on both sides, Ghirlandaio on his platform under the north window. For the first time since entering the studio his breathing was normal. He felt someone leaning over his shoulder.
“I’m not finished,” he said.
“It is enough.” Ghirlandaio took the paper, studied it for a moment. “You have worked at another studio! Was it Rosselli’s?”
Michelangelo knew of Ghirlandaio’s dislike of Rosselli, who conducted the only other painters’ workshop in Florence. Seven years before Ghirlandaio, Botticelli and Rosselli had been called to Rome by Pope Sixtus IV to create wall panels for the newly completed Sistine Chapel. Rosselli had caught the pontiff’s eye by using the most garish reds and ultramarine blues and illuminating every cloud, drapery and tree with gold, and won the coveted prize money.
The boy shook his head no.
“I’ve drawn in school when Master Urbino wasn’t looking. And I’ve copied after Giotto in Santa Croce, after Masaccio in the Carmine …”
Mollified, Ghirlandaio said, “Granacci was right. You have a strong fist.”
Michelangelo held his hand in front of him, turning it from back to palm.
“It is a stonecutter’s hand,” he replied proudly.
“We have little need for stonecutters in a fresco studio. I’ll start you as an apprentice, but on the same terms as though you were ten. You must pay me six florins for the first year …”
“I can pay you nothing.”
Ghirlandaio looked at him sharply.
“The Buonarroti are not poor country people. Since your father wants you apprenticed …”
“My father has beat me every time I mentioned painting.”
“But I cannot take you unless he signs the Doctors and Apothecaries Guild agreement. Why will he not beat you again when you tell him?”
“Because your willingness to accept me will be a defense. That, and the fact that you will pay him six florins the first year, eight the second, and ten the third.”
Ghirlandaio’s eyelids flared.
“That’s unheard of! Paying money for the privilege of teaching you!”
“Then I cannot come to work for you. It is the only way.”
The color grinder was twirling his pestle idly in the air while he gazed over his shoulder at the scene. The apprentices at the table made no pretense of working. The master and would-be apprentice had reversed positions as though it were Ghirlandaio who, needing and wanting Michelangelo, had sent for him. Michelangelo could see the “No” beginning to take form on Ghirlandaio’s lips. He stood his ground, his manner respectful both to the older man and to himself, gazing straight at Ghirlandaio as though to say:
“It is a thing you should do. I will be worth it to you.”
Had he shown the slightest weakness Ghirlandaio would have turned his back on him. But before this solid confrontation the artist felt a grudging admiration. He lived up to his reputation of being a man “lovable and loved” by saying:
“It’s obvious we shall never get the Tornabuoni choir finished without your invaluable help. Bring your father in.”
Out on the Via dei Tavolini once again, with the early morning merchants and shoppers swirling about them, Granacci threw an arm affectionately about the smaller boy’s shoulder.
“You broke every rule. But you got in!”
Michelangelo flashed his friend one of his rare warming smiles, the amber-colored eyes with their yellow and blue specks sparkling. The smile accomplished the redesigning for which his crayon had groped earlier in front of the bedroom mirror: when parted in a happy smile his lips were full, revealing strong white teeth, and his chin thrusting forward achieved sculptural symmetry with the top half of his face.
Walking past the family house of the poet Dante Alighieri and the stone church of the Badia was for Michelangelo like walking through a gallery: for the Tuscan treats stone with the tenderness that a lover reserves for his sweetheart. From the time of their Etruscan ancestors the people of Fiesole, Settignano and Florence had been quarrying stone from the mountains, hauling it by oxen to their land, cutting, edging, shaping and building it into homes and palaces, churches and loggias, forts and walls. Stone was one of the richest fruits of the Tuscan earth. From childhood they knew its feel and smell, the flavor of its outer shell as well as its inner meat; how it behaved in the hot sun, in the rain, in the full moonlight, in the icy tramontana wind. For fifteen hundred years their ancestors had worked the native pietra serena, serene stone, building a city of such breath-taking beauty that Michelangelo and generations before him cried:
“Never shall I live out of sight of the Duomo!”
They reached the carpenter shop which occupied the ground floor of the house the Buonarroti clan rented in the Via dell’Anguillara.
“A rivederci, as the fox said to the furrier,” Granacci twitted.
“Oh, I’ll take a skinning,” he responded grimly, “but unlike the fox I shall come out alive.”
He turned the sharp corner of Via dei Bentaccordi, waved to the two horses whose heads were sticking out of the open-top door of the stable across the street, and climbed the rear staircase to the family kitchen.
His stepmother was making her beloved torta: the chickens had been fried in oil earlier in the morning, ground into sausage with onions, parsley, eggs and saffron. Ham and pork had been made into ravioli with cheese, flour, clove, ginger, and laid with the chicken sausage between layers of pastry, dates and almonds. The whole dish had then been shaped into a pie and was being covered with dough, preparatory to being placed in the hot embers to bake.
“Good morning, madre mia.”
“Ah, Michelangelo. I have something special for you today: a salad that sings in the mouth.”
Lucrezia di Antonio di Sandro Ubaldini da Gagliano’s name was longer than the written list of her dowry; else why should so young a woman marry a forty-three-year-old graying widower with five sons, and cook for a household of nine Buonarroti?
Each morning she rose at four o’clock in order to reach the market square at the same time the contadini arrived through the cobbled streets with their pony carts filled with fresh fruits and vegetables, eggs and cheese, meats and poultry. If she did not actually help the peasants unload, at least she lightened their burden by selecting while the produce was still in the air and before it had a chance to settle in the stalls: the tenderest, slender green beans and piselli, peas, unblemished figs, peaches.
Michelangelo and his four brothers called her Il Migliore, The Best, because every ingredient that went into her cooking had to be The Best. By dawn she was home, her baskets piled high with capture. She cared little about her clothing, paid no attention to her plain dark face with its suggestion of sideburns and mustache, the lackluster hair pulled tightly back from her brow. But as Michelangelo gazed at her flushed cheeks, the excitement in her eyes as she watched her torta baking, moving with authority and grace from the fire to her majolica jars of spices to sprinkle a fine dust of cinnamon and nutmeg over the crust, knowing every second of the seven-hour morning precisely where she was on schedule, he saw that she exuded radiance.
He knew his stepmother to be a docile creature in every phase of her marriage except the kitchen; here she was a lioness in the best fighting tradition of the Marzocco, Florence’s guardian lion. Wealthy Florence was supplied with exotic foods from all over the world: aloes, zedoary, cardamom, thyme, marjoram, mushrooms and truffles, powdered nuts, galinga. Alas! they cost money to buy. Michelangelo, who shared the bedroom with his four brothers next to his parents’ room, often heard his parents’ predawn debates while his stepmother dressed for marketing.
“Every day you want a bale of herrings and a thousand oranges.”
“Lodovico, stop cutting costs with a cheese parer. You are one who would keep money in the purse and hunger in the belly.”
“Hunger! No Buonarroti has missed his dinner in three hundred years. Each week don’t I bring you in a fresh veal from Settignano?”
“Why should we eat veal every day when the markets are full of suckling pig and pigeon?”
On those days that Lodovico lost he gloomed over the account books, certain that he would not be able to swallow a bite of the bramangiere of fowls, almonds, lard, sugar, cloves and expensive rice with which his young irresponsible wife was ruining him. But slowly, as the fragrances seeped under the door of the kitchen, through the family sitting room and into his study, it would eat away his fears, his anger, his frustration; and by eleven o’clock he would be ravenous.
Lodovico would devour a prodigious dinner, then push his chair back from the table, slap his bulging viscera with widespread fingers and exclaim the one sentence without which the Tuscan’s day is drear and futile:
“Ho mangiato bene! I have eaten well!”
With this tribute Lucrezia put away the remains for a light evening supper, set her slavey to wash the dishes and pots, went upstairs and slept until dark, her day complete, her joy spent.
Not so Lodovico, who now went through the inverse process of the morning’s seduction. As the hours passed and the food was digested, as the memory of the delicious flavors receded, the gnawing question of how much the elaborate dinner had cost began eating at him and he was angry all over again.
Michelangelo walked through the empty family room with its heavy oak bench facing the fireplace, the six-foot bellows propped against the stone, its wall chairs with leather backs and leather seats: all prodigal pieces that had been made by the family’s founder. The next room, still overlooking the Via dei Bentaccordi and the stables, was his father’s study, for which Lodovico had had built in the downstairs carpenter shop a triangular desk to fit into the forty-five-degree angle caused by the joining of the two streets at this end curve of the old colosseum. Here Lodovico sat cramped over his gray parchment account books. As long as Michelangelo could remember, his father’s sole activity had been a concentration on how to avoid spending money, and how to retain the ragged remnants of the Buonarroti fortune, which had been founded in 1250 and had now shrunk to a ten-acre farm in Settignano and a house with a legally disputed title close by this one which they rented.
Lodovico heard his son come in and looked up. Nature had been opulent to him in only one gift, his hair: since it grew freely he sported a luxurious mustache which flowed into his beard, cut square four inches below his chin. The hair was streaked with gray; across the forehead were four deep straight lines, hard-earned from his years of poring over his account books and family records. His small brown eyes were melancholy with tracing the lost fortunes of the Buonarroti. Michelangelo knew his father as a cautious man who locked the door with three keys.
“Good morning, messer padre.”
Lodovico sighed:
“I was born too late. One hundred years ago the Buonarroti vines were tied with sausages.”
Michelangelo watched his father as he sank into his work-reverie of the Buonarroti records, the Old Testament of his life. Lodovico knew to the last florin how much each Buonarroti generation had owned of land, houses, business, gold. This family history was his occupation, and each of his sons in turn had to memorize the legend.
“We are noble burghers,” Lodovico told them. “Our family is as old as the Medici, Strozzi or Tornabuoni. The Buonarroti name has lasted three hundred years with us.” His voice rose with energy and pride. “We have been paying taxes in Florence for three centuries.”
Michelangelo was forbidden to sit in his father’s presence without permission, had to bow when given an order. It had been duty rather than interest that led the boy to learn that when the Guelphs took over power in Florence in the middle of the thirteenth century their family rose rapidly: in 1260 a Buonarroti was councilor for the Guelph army; in 1392 a captain of the Guelph party; from 1343 to 1469 a Buonarroti had ten times been a member of the Florentine Priori or City Council, the most honored position in the city; between 1326 and 1475 eight Buonarroti had been gonfaloniere or mayor of the Santa Croce quarter; between 1375 and 1473 twelve had been among the buonuomini or Council of Santa Croce, including Lodovico and his brother Francesco, who were appointed in 1473. The last official recognition of the waning Buonarroti family had taken place thirteen years before, in 1474, when Lodovico had been appointed podestà, or outside visiting mayor, for the combined hamlets of Caprese and Chiusi di Verna, high in the rugged Apennines, where Michelangelo had been born in the town hall during the family’s six months’ residence.
Michelangelo had been taught by his father that labor was beneath a noble burgher; but it was the son’s observation that Lodovico worked harder in figuring out ways not to spend money than he would have had to work in earning it. Within the Buonarroti fortress there had remained a few scattered resources, enough to let him eke out his life as a gentleman providing he spent nothing. Yet in spite of all the skill and dedication Lodovico brought to his task their capital had dribbled away.
Standing in the recessed wall of the eight-foot window, letting the thin March sun warm his bony shoulders, the boy’s image went back to their home in Settignano, overlooking the valley of the Arno, when his mother had been alive. Then there had been love and laughter; but his mother had died when he was six, and his father had retreated in despair into the encampment of his study. For four years while his aunt Cassandra had taken over the care of the household, Michelangelo had been lonely and unwanted except by his grandmother, Monna Alessandra, who lived with them, and the stonecutter’s family across the hill, the stonecutter’s wife having suckled him when his own mother had been too ill to nourish her son.
For four years, until his father had remarried and Lucrezia had insisted that they move into Florence, he had fled at every opportunity to the Topolinos. He would make his way down the wheat fields among the silver-green olives, cross the brook which marked the division of the land, and climb the opposite hill through the vineyards to their yard. Here he would silently set to work cutting the pietra serena from the neighboring quarry into beveled building stones for a new Florentine palace, working out his unhappiness in the precision blows in which he had been trained in this stonecutter’s yard since he was a child and, along with the stonecutter’s own sons, had been given a small hammer and chisel to work scraps.
Michelangelo pulled himself back from the stonecutter’s yard in Settignano to this stone house on the Via dell’Anguillara.
“Father, I have just come from Domenico Ghirlandaio’s studio. Ghirlandaio has agreed to sign me as an apprentice.”
During the silence that pulsed between them Michelangelo heard one of the horses neigh across the street and Lucrezia stir the embers of her fire in the kitchen. Lodovico used both hands to raise himself to a commanding position over the boy. This inexplicable desire of his son’s to become an artisan could be the final push that would topple the shaky Buonarroti into the social abyss.
“Michelangelo, I apologize for being obliged to apprentice you to the Wool Guild and force you to become a merchant rather than a gentleman. But I sent you to an expensive school, paid out money I could ill afford so that you would be educated and rise in the Guild until you had your own mills and shops. That was how most of the great Florentine fortunes were started, even the Medici’s.”
Lodovico’s voice rose. “Do you think that I will now allow you to waste your life as a painter? To bring disgrace to the family name! For three hundred years no Buonarroti has fallen so low as to work with his hands.”
“That is true. We have been usurers,” angrily responded the boy.
“We belong to the Money Changers Guild, one of the most respectable in Florence. Moneylending is an honorable profession.”
Michelangelo sought refuge in humor.
“Have you ever watched Uncle Francesco fold up his counter outside Orsanmichele when it starts to rain? You never saw anyone work faster with his hands.”
At the mention of his name Uncle Francesco came running into the room. He was a larger man than Lodovico, with a brighter countenance; the working half of the Buonarroti partnership. Two years before he had broken away from Lodovico, made considerable money, bought houses and set himself up in style, only to be lured into a bad investment in foreign currencies, lose everything and have to move back into his brother’s house. Now when it rained he scooped up his velvet covering from the folding table, grabbed his bag of coins from between his feet and ran through the wet streets to his friend, Amatore the cloth cutter, who allowed him to set up his table under cover.
Francesco said in a hoarse voice:
“Michelangelo, you couldn’t see a crow in a bowlful of milk! What perverse pleasure can you derive from injuring the Buonarroti?”
The boy was furious at the accusation.
“I have as much pride in our name as anyone. Why can’t I learn to do fine work that all Florence will be proud of, as they are of Ghiberti’s doors and Donatello’s sculptures and Ghirlandaio’s frescoes? Florence is a good city for an artist.”
Lodovico put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, calling him Michelagnolo, his pet name. This was his favorite of the five sons, for whom he had the highest hopes; it was this affection that had given him courage to spend money for three years of schooling at Urbino’s. The master had been too proud to report to the father that his seemingly bright son had preferred drawing in his notebooks to learning his letters from the collection of Greek and Latin manuscripts. As for rhetoric, the boy had been bound by his own rules of logic which the persuasive Urbino had been unable to alter.
“Michelagnolo, the things you say about artists are as true as the word of a bench-talker. I’ve been too angry at your stupidity to do anything but beat you. But you’re thirteen now; I’ve paid for your training in logic, so I should practice logic with you. Ghiberti and Donatello began as artisans and ended as artisans. So will Ghirlandaio. Their work never raised their social position one braccio, an arm’s length, and Donatello was so destitute at the end of his life that Cosimo de’ Medici had to give him a charity pension.”
The boy flared at this attack.
“That’s because Donatello put all his money into a wire basket hung from the ceiling so his assistants and friends could help themselves when they needed. Ghirlandaio makes a fortune.”
“Art is like washing an ass’s head with lye,” observed Francesco, for the Tuscan’s wisdom is a web of proverbs; “you lose both the effort and the lye. Every man thinks that rubble will turn into gold in his hand! What kind of dreaming is that?”
“The only kind I know,” cried Michelangelo. He turned back to Lodovico. “Bleed me of art, and there won’t be enough liquid left in me to spit.”
“I prophesied that my Michelangelo would recoup the Buonarroti fortune,” cried Lodovico. “I should have spoken with a smaller mouth! Now, I’ll teach you to be vulgar.”
He started raining blows on the boy, his right elbow crooked stiffly so that he could use his arm as a club. Francesco, not wanting to fail his nephew in this critical moment of his youth, also began hitting the boy, boxing his ear with the heel of his palm.
Michelangelo lowered his head as dumb beasts do in a storm. There was no point in running away, for then the argument would have to be resumed later. Deep in his throat he sounded the words of his grandmother:
“Pazienza! Patience! No man is born into the world whose work is not born with him.”
From the corner of his eye he saw his aunt Cassandra bulking in the doorway, a big-boned woman who seemed to put on flesh from the air she breathed. Cassandra of the enormous thighs, buttocks and bosom, with a voice that matched her weight, was an unhappy woman. Nor did she feel it her duty to dispense happiness.
“Happiness,” said Aunt Cassandra, “is for the next world.”
The boom of Aunt Cassandra’s voice demanding to know what was going on now hurt his ear more than her husband’s palm. Then, suddenly, all words and blows stopped and he knew that his grandmother had entered the room. She was a retiring woman in black, not beautiful but with a finely modeled head, who exercised her matriarchy only in moments of family crisis. Lodovico did not like to give his mother offense. He slumped into his chair.
“That’s the end of the discussion!” he announced. “I have brought you up not to crave the whole world; it is enough to make money and serve the Buonarroti name. Never let me hear again about this being apprenticed to artists.”
Michelangelo was glad that his stepmother was too deeply involved in her torta to permit her to leave the kitchen; the room was too crowded now for more spectators.
Monna Alessandra went to her son’s side at the account desk.
“What difference does it make whether he joins the Wool Guild and twists wool or the Apothecaries Guild and mixes paints? You won’t leave enough money to set up five geese, let alone sons.” Her voice was without reproach; had it not been her husband, Lionardo Buonarroti, whose bad judgment and bad luck began the downfall of the family? “All five boys must look to their living; let Lionardo go into the monastery as he wishes, and Michelangelo into a studio. Since we can no longer help them, why hinder them?”
“I am going to be apprenticed to Ghirlandaio, Father. You must sign the papers. I’ll do well by us all.”
Lodovico stared at his son in disbelief. Was he possessed by an evil spirit? Should he take him to Arezzo and have him exorcised?
“Michelangelo, you are saying things that make me swell up a dozen times in anger.” He shot his last and crushing bolt. “We have not a scudo to pay for any apprenticeship to Ghirlandaio.”
This was the moment for which Michelangelo had been waiting. He said gently:
“There is no need for money, padre. Ghirlandaio has agreed to pay you for my apprenticeship.”
“He will pay!” Lodovico lunged forward. “Why should he pay me for the privilege of teaching you?”
“Because he thinks I have a strong fist.”
After a considerable silence Lodovico lowered himself slowly into his leather chair.
“Except God keep us, we shall be destroyed. Truthfully, I don’t know where you come from. Certainly not from the Buonarroti. All this must be your mother’s side, the Rucellai.”
He spat out the name as though it were a mouthful of wormy apple. It was the first time Michelangelo could remember hearing the name spoken in the Buonarroti house. Lodovico crossed himself, more in perplexity than piety.
“Truly I have conquered myself in more battles than a saint!”
Domenico Ghirlandaio’s was the most bustling and successful bottega in all Italy. In addition to the twenty-five frescoed panels and lunettes for the Tornabuoni choir at Santa Maria Novella, which had to be completed in the two years remaining of the five-year contract, he had also signed agreements to paint an Adoration of the Kings for the hospital of the Innocenti and to design a mosaic for over a portal of the cathedral. Every few days he made a trip on horseback to a neighboring town which wanted him to paint anything from a small altarpiece to the hall of a ducal palace. Ghirlandaio, who never sought a commission, could refuse none; on Michelangelo’s first day in the studio he told him:
“If a peasant woman brings you a basket that she wants ornamented, do it as beautifully as you can, for in its modest way it is as important as a fresco on a palace wall.”
Michelangelo found the place energetic but good-natured. Twenty-eight-year-old Sebastiano Mainardi, with long black hair cut to imitate Ghirlandaio’s, a pale, narrow face with a jutting bony nose and protruding teeth, was in charge of the apprentices; he was Ghirlandaio’s brother-in-law, though not, insisted Jacopo dell’Indaco, imp son of a baker, through any willing of his own.
“Ghirlandaio married him to his sister in order to keep him working for the family,” Jacopo told Michelangelo. “So be on your guard.”
Like most of Jacopo’s deviltries, this one contained a kernel of truth: the Ghirlandaios were a family of artists, having been trained in the workshop of their father, an expert goldsmith who had originated a fashionable wreath, called a ghirlanda, which the Florentine women wore in their hair. Domenico’s two younger brothers, David and Benedetto, were also painters. Benedetto, a miniaturist, wanted to paint only the minute and precise aspects of a woman’s jewels or flowers; David, the youngest, had signed the contract for the Santa Maria Novella along with his brother.
Domenico Ghirlandaio had moved on from his father’s studio to that of Baldovinetti, the master of mosaics, where he had remained until he was twenty-one, leaving reluctantly to open his own studio. “Painting is drawing, and the true eternal painting is mosaic,” he declared, but since few wanted mosaics any more he had turned to fresco, becoming the greatest absorber and eclectic in Italy. He had learned everything that the earlier fresco painters, from the time of Cimabue, had to teach. In addition he added something peculiarly and brilliantly his own.
Ghirlandaio had in truth embraced young Mainardi as a brother-in-law after the younger apprentice had helped him paint his masterly frescoes in the church at San Gimignano, a neighboring town of seventy-six towers. Mainardi, who now took Michelangelo in tow, was amazingly like Ghirlandaio: good-natured, talented, well trained in the studio of Verrocchio, loving above all things to paint, and agreeing with Ghirlandaio that it was the beauty and charm of a fresco that was important. Paintings had to tell a story, either from the Bible, religious history or Greek mythology, but it was not the painter’s function to look behind the meaning of that story, to search for its significance or judge its validity.
“The purpose of painting,” explained Mainardi to his newest apprentice, “is to be decorative, to bring stories to life pictorially, to make people happy, yes, even with the sad pictures of the saints being martyred. Always remember that, Michelangelo, and you will become a successful painter.”
If Mainardi was the major-domo of the apprentices, Michelangelo soon learned that sixteen-year-old Jacopo, with the monkey-like face, was the ringleader. He had a gift for appearing to be busy without doing a lick of work. He welcomed the thirteen-year-old boy to the studio by warning him gravely:
“Doing nothing else but hard work is not worthy of a good Christian.” Turning to the table of apprentices, he added exultantly, “Here in Florence we average nine holidays every month. Add Sundays to that and it means we only have to work every other day.”
“I can’t see that it makes any critical difference to you, Jacopo,” commented Granacci with a rare burn of acid. “You don’t work on workdays.”
The two weeks flew by until the magic day of his contract signing and first pay dawned. Michelangelo suddenly realized how little he had done to earn the two gold florins which would constitute his first advance. So far he had been used as an errand boy to pick up paints at the chemist’s, to screen sand to give it a fine texture and wash it in a barrel with a running hose. Awakening while it was still dark outside, he climbed over his younger brother Buonarroto, sprang out of the bed, fumbled in the bed-bench for his long stockings and knee-length shirt. At the Bargello he passed under a body hanging from a hook in the cornice; this must be the man who, failing to die when hanged two weeks before, had uttered such vengeful words that the eight magistrates had decided to hang him all over again.
Ghirlandaio was surprised to find the boy on his doorstep so early and his buon giorno, good morning, was short. He had been working for days on a study of St. John Baptizing the Neophyte and was upset because he could not clarify his concept of Jesus. He was further annoyed when interrupted by his brother David with a batch of bills that needed paying. Domenico pushed the accounts aside with a brusque gesture of his left hand, continuing to draw irritatedly with his right.
“Why can’t you manage this bottega, David, and leave me alone to to do my painting?”
Michelangelo watched the scene with apprehension: would they forget what day it was? Granacci saw his friend’s expression. He slipped off his bench, went to David, murmured something in his ear. David reached into the leather purse he kept hooked onto his wide belt, crossed the room to Michelangelo and handed him two florins and a contract book. Michelangelo quickly signed his name alongside the first payment, as stipulated in the Doctors and Apothecaries Agreement, then wrote the date:
April 16, 1488
Joy raced through his veins as he anticipated the moment when he would hand the florins to his father. Two florins were not the wealth of the Medici, but he hoped they would lighten the murky atmosphere around the Buonarroti house. Then he was aware of an enthusiastic hubbub among the apprentices and the voice of Jacopo saying:
“It’s agreed, we draw from memory that gnome figure on the alley wall behind the bottega. The one who draws the most accurate reproduction wins and pays for dinner. Cieco, Baldinelli, Granacci, Bugiardini, Tedesco, are you ready?”
Michelangelo felt a dull pain in the chest; he was being left out. His had been a lonely childhood, he had had no intimate friend until Granacci recognized in his young neighbor a talent for drawing. So often he had been excluded from games. Why? Because he had been small and sickly? Because there was not enough laughter in him? Because he communicated with difficulty? He so desperately wanted to be included in the companionship of this young group; but it did not come easy. At the end of his first week Granacci had had to teach him a lesson in getting along with one’s contemporaries.
Thirteen-year-old, heavy-boned Giuliano Bugiardini, a simple-natured lad who had been friendly to Michelangelo from the moment he entered the studio, had done a practice study of a group of women. Bugiardini could not draw the human figure and had no interest in it.
“What’s the use?” he demanded. “We never show anything except the hands and face.”
Seeing the sacklike outlines, Michelangelo had impulsively picked up a stub pen and made a number of quick strokes which had put limbs under the heavy dresses of the women and infused them with a sense of movement. Bugiardini blinked his heavy eyelids a few times to see his figures spring to life. He was free of envy and did not resent the corrections. It was the thirteen-year-old Cieco, who had been apprenticed to Ghirlandaio at the conventional age of ten, who had taken offense. The sharp-tongued Cieco cried out:
“You’ve been studying from a female nude model!”
“But there’s no such thing in Florence,” protested Michelangelo.
Tedesco, rawboned redhead, fruit of an early invasion of Florence, asked in a voice edged with hostility, “Then how do you know about the movements of a woman’s breasts and thighs, that you can put real people under their clothes?”
“I watch the women picking beans in the fields, or walking along the road with a basket of faggots on their head. What your eye sees, your hand can draw.”
“Ghirlandaio is not going to like this!” crowed Jacopo joyously.
That evening Granacci said confidingly:
“Be careful about raising jealousies. Cieco and Tedesco have been apprenticed for a long time. How could they see any justice in your being able to draw better instinctively than they can after years of training? Praise their work. Keep your own to yourself.”
Now, at the apprentices’ table, Jacopo was completing the details of the game.
“Time limit, ten minutes. The winner to be crowned champion and host.”
“Why can’t I compete, Jacopo?” Michelangelo cried.
Jacopo scowled. “You’re just a beginner, you couldn’t possibly win, and there would be no chance of your paying. It wouldn’t be fair to the rest of us.”
Stung, Michelangelo pleaded, “Let me join in, Jacopo. You’ll see, I won’t do too badly.”
“All right,” Jacopo agreed reluctantly. “But you can’t have a longer time. Everyone ready?”
Excitedly, Michelangelo picked up charcoal and paper and began hammering down the outlines of the gnarled figure, half youth, half satyr, which he had seen several times on the rear stone wall. He could summon lines from his memory the way the students at Urbino’s school had so miraculously brought forth verses of Homer’s Iliad or Virgil’s Aeneid when the master demanded them.
“Time limit!” cried Jacopo. “Line up your drawings, center of the table.”
Michelangelo ran to the table, put his sketch in line, quickly scanned the other sheets. He was astonished at how unfamiliar, even incomplete they appeared. Jacopo stared at him with his mouth wide open.
“I can’t believe it. Look, everyone, Michelangelo has won!”
There were cries of congratulation. Cieco and Tedesco smiled at him for the first time since their argument. He glowed with pride. He was the newest apprentice, yet he had won the right to buy everyone dinner … .
Buy everyone dinner! His stomach sank as though he had swallowed his two gold florins. He counted heads; there were seven of them. They would consume two liters of red wine, soup-of-the-country, roast veal, fruit … making a sizable hole in one of the gold pieces that he had waited for so eagerly to turn over to his father.
On the way to the osteria, with the others rushing ahead laughing heartily among themselves, a loose thread began flapping in his mind. He ran the spool of his thoughts backward, fell in step beside Granacci.
“I was gulled, wasn’t I?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you warn me?”
“It’s part of the initiation.”
“What will I tell my father?”
“If you had known, would you have made yourself draw badly?”
Michelangelo broke into a sheepish grin.
“They couldn’t lose!”
There was no formal method of teaching at Ghirlandaio’s studio. Its basic philosophy was expressed in a plaque which Ghirlandaio had nailed to the wall alongside his desk:
The most perfect guide is nature. Continue without fail to draw something every day.
Michelangelo had to learn from whatever task each man had at hand. No secrets were kept from him. Ghirlandaio created the over-all design, the composition within each panel and the harmonious relation of one panel to the many others. He did most of the important portraits, but the hundred others were distributed throughout the studio, sometimes several men working on a single figure and on a one-day spread of plaster. Where there was an excellent angle of visibility from the church, Ghirlandaio did the entire panel himself. Otherwise major portions were painted by Mainardi, Benedetto, Granacci and Bugiardini. On the lateral lunettes, which were hard to see, he let Cieco and Baldinelli, the other thirteen-year-old apprentice, practice.
Michelangelo moved from table to table, doing odd jobs. No one had time to stop work to teach him. He watched Ghirlandaio complete a portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni, painted as a separate commission, and then draw it for the cartoon of the Visitation panel.
“Oil painting is for women,” Ghirlandaio said sarcastically. “But this figure will go well in the fresco. Never try to invent human beings, Michelangelo; paint into your panels only those whom you have already drawn from life.”
David and Benedetto shared with Mainardi a long table in the far corner of the studio. Benedetto never worked freehand. It seemed to Michelangelo that he paid more attention to the mathematical squares on the paper before him than to the individual character of the person portrayed. Nevertheless he was an expert with the instruments for squaring up. He told Michelangelo: