David (30 page)

But I was no engineer.

‘Take heart, Gabriele,’ said Angelo. ‘The block came down from the mountains in Fanti Scritti, didn’t it? And was transported all the way from Carrara to Florence. All we have to do is get the carved block from here to the piazza.’

It was no longer a block that could be heaved around on slings and chains by strong men, was it? It was a statue – with all the dangers to its limbs that a real man would face, but magnified many times.

‘If only we could ask him to bend down and go through the door and walk to the Signoria!’ I said.

‘It may be lifelike,’ said Angelo, ‘but I don’t think we can hope for that.’

Now that the statue was virtually finished I noticed he had stopped referring to it as ‘him’ or ‘David’. I supposed it was his way of detaching himself from the work, of moving it in his mind from something he was perfecting, to something in his past, a separate object that could and would be judged as a work of art, one to compare with Donatello’s or Verrocchio’s interpretation of the shepherd boy that killed Goliath.

Giuliano and Antonio da Sangallo were not thinking of art; they were taking measurements and sketching a contraption to transport the Giant those few hundred yards that I could stride in less than ten minutes.

Over the next few months I saw the wooden cage grow. David was going to travel suspended by ropes within his protective house of wood and the whole structure would be pulled by more ropes passing through winches. How many men it would take to pull it through the streets was eventually settled at forty and the Operai started searching out the strongest and fittest men in Florence to do the job.

I always thought I would be one of them, right up till the night we moved David. But things worked out differently from what I expected.

Clarice had indeed had a second son and Altobiondi was delighted. He was taken to the Baptistery two days after his birth and given the names Cipriano Francesco di Antonello di Niccolò de’ Altobiondi.

Was it the birth of little Cipriano that first planted the suspicion in Antonello’s mind that Davide was not his real son? The new baby was said to look very like his father, with a mop of straight black hair and strong features. While his two-year-old brother had fair curls and was already tall for his age.

In fact, the night of Cipriano’s birth, when Davide had been brought out to be caressed and admired by the
compagnacci
, one of them had commented on his resemblance to me.

It was only a throwaway remark – something like ‘That little boy could be your baby brother, Gabriele.’ But had that been enough, followed by the birth of a son that was his exact image, to start Antonello wondering? Even though I had hoped for a boy, I now realised the dangers of comparing son with ‘son’.

I don’t know, but I believe that night saw the beginning of a chain of circumstances that led to the worst moments of my life.

I began to sense a coolness towards me when I went to the Altobiondi palazzo. And Gherardo was no longer as friendly towards me as he had been at del Giocondo’s. He and his three friends often seemed to be whispering together and to stop if I came near.

But it was Grazia who really alerted me to the new danger I was in. The women’s network had brought alarming news.

‘Altobiondi has been questioning his wife about her life before they married,’ Grazia told me. ‘And doing his sums about Davide’s arrival.’

It seemed at first as though the premature birth of Cipriano had confirmed Clarice’s original story that Davide had come before his time. She was just a woman whose babies came early and Altobiondi was reassured that he was the boy’s real father.

‘But the new baby is so much more like him,’ said Grazia, ‘that no matter how much she assures him that the first boy takes after her late mother, who was tall and fair, he has begun to suspect that he was gulled.’

I was now seriously alarmed. All Antonello had to do was question the servants and he would find out that I had been a regular visitor to the house before Clarice accepted his proposal – indeed that I had even lived there for a few weeks when I first came to the city. I wouldn’t put it past Vanna or the snooty manservant to betray their mistress.

So I was thoroughly uncomfortable on the Via Tornabuoni.

And hardly less so at San Marco. Daniele had been disgusted with my failure to kill the Cardinal. I could hardly think about it. I wasn’t an assassin! I was a stonecutter or, at most, a stone-carver, learning a few techniques of sculpture from his master and milk-brother.

Gianbattista and the others were more understanding.

‘He had a taster.’ ‘The horse pulled me away from the Cardinal.’ ‘Giovanni’s bodyguard stayed too close to him.’

They accepted my excuses. But I knew I could have done it if I had been prepared to die in the attempt.

I had almost stopped going to pose for Leone too; my visits to Visdomini’s were the occasional ones as Grazia’s accepted follower – a below stairs existence, cut off from the aristocrats. I still saw Visdomini sometimes at Altobiondi’s and he was civil –warm even – but I was uneasy.

My life had contracted to the workshop near the cathedral and the problems of transporting my colossal image to the Piazza della Signoria. The Sangallo brothers practically lived with Angelo and me in those days in the workshop. And by the month of May we were ready to move the marble statue.

On the night of the fourteenth, we had our team of forty strong men primed with wine. Angelo had told me he didn’t want me to be one of them; he wanted me to help supervise the operation, with him and Giuliano and Antonio da Sangallo.

We started by breaking down the brickwork above the door of the workshop and then slowly, slowly the Giant moved out into the Piazza del Duomo.

It was midnight. The square was alight with torches and full of people watching David emerge from his prison. The workmen had to lay fourteen greased wooden planks in front of the wheeled cage, then pull the structure forwards and run back to retrieve the planks from behind and lay them in front again.

It was painstakingly slow. It reminded me of the
lizzatura
– the method whereby blocks of marble were slid down the mountainside from the quarries in the Apuan Alps. Only there they had the slope to help them move. Had the original block that David had been hewn from made its stately progress down the mountain in that way? Probably. But this finished figure gave nothing away. He stood staring sternly over his left shoulder at the crowds in the square, who seemed stunned by his presence.

I was busy running back and forth, checking the placement of the planks and did not at first notice the tensions building up around us. The men were all sweating, even though we had chosen the coolest time of day to start the movement off.

And we had travelled only about twenty yards when the attack came.

Stones hurtled through the air, landing on the workmen and me and a few falling inside the wooden cage.

There were shouts of ‘
Palle! Palle!?
’ – the cry of Medici supporters for over a century. But this was one occasion on which I could not pretend to be one of them.

I saw Angelo leap awkwardly up on to the structure and slip between the bars so that he was inside with his David.

Stopping only to tell Antonio da Sangallo to summon the City Watch, I followed him, squeezing between the bars with a lot more difficulty. It was eerie inside the crate with the noise from the piazza dampened down and no one but me, my brother and the silent marble giant.

He had one arm round the statue’s right leg, its massive right hand brushing the top of his head, and he was sobbing.

I thought at first it was from rage and fear for his masterpiece but then I saw that his other arm was dangling down uselessly at an angle. It was pain that caused the tears to stream down his face.

‘It’s broken, Gabriele,’ he moaned. ‘One of the stones hit me. I won’t be able to finish the David now.’

Chapter Twenty

A Man of Marble

My mind was working faster than it ever had before. I understood straight away that if Angelo were to be seen injured in public it would represent a great victory for the pro-Medici party. But he could not be left to suffer like that.

‘Stay here,’ I said, squeezing out through the bars again. ‘I’ll fetch help to you.’

Outside in the square there was total chaos. Men were shouting and jostling, the Watch were making their slow way through the crowds, some people were running away, others chasing them. Torches were snatched from brackets on walls and carried through the streets above heads. Whooping cries disappeared in the distance up alleys and byways.

I ran back to the workshop. It took only seconds, even though men had toiled for ages to get the statue the few feet it had travelled. There were lots of pieces of wood lying about the floor and I quickly chose two without too many splinters and dashed back to the stranded cart.

The pullers had broken off from their work to fight with the stone-throwers or at least the men they took for stone-throwers. The Watch were having trouble separating and restraining them. I dodged between them, worried in case they’d think my bits of wood were weapons.

‘Quick!’ I hissed at Antonio da Sangallo. ‘Come in with me.’

He squeezed in more easily than I did, being a good deal slighter. Angelo was as I had left him, but his eyes were tightly closed as he grappled with the pain.

I had seen a lot of men with broken limbs in the quarry. And Angelo was lucky: his arm was broken but not crushed by a heavy weight of marble. But it was going to hurt a lot more while we set it and there was no chance of getting a surgeon to him in all that mayhem. And we needed to keep his injury secret.

Sangallo saw immediately how it was. Miraculously, he had a small flask of spirits in his jerkin and he offered it to Angelo, who gulped at it eagerly. Then I tore the bottom of my canvas shirt into strips and we gently laid his forearm on the first piece of wood. Any movement was agony for him, and it was a hard thing to do.

I was glad that Sangallo knew what he was doing. I left it to him to pull the arm straight and align the bones, while I gripped my poor brother by the shoulders. After one stifled scream, he fainted, which was a great relief to both of us. We bound the arm firmly between the two splints and, by the time he came round, it was all over and we poured more spirits down his throat.

There wasn’t much left of my shirt by the time we made him a sling to carry the arm in. Then Sangallo took off his cloak and put it round Angelo’s shoulders. Apart from his extreme pallor, he now looked normal and no one would see his complexion by torchlight.

‘Get him home, Gabriele,’ said Sangallo. ‘When the madness has died down outside, Giuliano and I will continue to supervise the movement of the statue. We know what has to be done, after all.’

Angelo was too weak to protest. Getting him out through the bars was tricky, with his arm in a sling. But no one in the crowd was looking at us. Slowly, I helped him away from the noise and fighting by the cathedral and led him back to the house in Santa Croce.

It was a slow progress, with many halts. And a cold breeze was chilling my middle where the bottom of my shirt used to be.

‘You and Antonio have fixed my arm,’ Angelo said, his voice slurring with pain and drink. ‘But who will fix my David?’

‘We will worry about that in the morning,’ I said. ‘For now you must rest and we must keep your injury a secret.’