Free The Medici Boy by John L'Heureux

commissions of every kind, as well as sketches of work in progress. This table was supposed to be Donato’s command post, though in fact it was more often Michelozzo who occupied it. The idea was that from here Donato could see everything going on in the room and have instant knowledge of what was being done and what was being neglected and who needed assistance and who might give it, and thus the bottega would become a model of economy and efficiency. But Donato was renowned for abandoning a work in progress while he gave himself over to a fresh commission or a brave new idea that came to him in the night or as he crossed the Ponte Vecchio or sat dozing over a midnight cup of wine. His work was always late, therefore, and contracts had always to be rewritten. No one in the bottega seemed to notice and no one, saving Michelozzo, seemed to care.
    Working here was a continual excitement to me, and it seemed right and just that Donato’s bottega opened onto the Corso degli Adimari cat-a-corner to Giotto’s Campanile. There was a small door to the street for coming and going and beside it there stood great double doors wide enough to admit a cart loaded with granite or marble and these doors were generally kept barred except for deliveries. At the far end of the bottega there was another small door and, beside it, a set of matching double doors that gave onto an outside garden area and a courtyard used for carving heavy sculpture. A garden shed with a long overhang protected work in progress from the rain and snow, and a separate shed provided a stall for the donkey, Fiammetta, a patient, smelly beast used for carting materials. A flock of brown and speckled chickens scratched about in the courtyard for grain; they were a nuisance, Michelozzo said, being always under foot, but their eggs were essential for fixative in painting. Two black cats and the fat orange one that was Donato’s favorite kept watch over the chickens or curled up in a patch of sunlight or fought among themselves for amusement. A well with a hand pump stood in the center of the yard and, just beyond it, a small furnace for smelting ore. Close in against the outside wall was a privy closet for our physical needs.
    Inside the bottega Donato maintained a separate chamber walled off from the huge public work area. It had a lock on the door and a cot where he might spend the night if he worked too late to cross the Ponte Vecchio to his rooms. Here too he kept his most private papers. No one—except Michelozzo—was granted entrance to this room.
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    F ROM THE START Michelozzo was my friend and my unexpected patron. It was not only my awkwardness that commended me to his attention, but my knowledge of Latin and my ability to attend to the fine details of the bottega ’s commissions. Also, I was strong and he could see I would be able to assist him in casting bronze, which was his specialty. As the year went by he let me help in organizing the works in progress. Since I was much older than most of the other apprentices and since I was so much less talented than they, no one seemed to mind that I passed on to them orders that came from Michelozzo and thus from Donato himself. Michelozzo settled me among the apprentices and, with great patience and to the limits of my ability, he taught me to sculpt in marble.
    At first they all seemed nervous likeable young men who terrified me by their quick wit and their rare accomplishments and by how comfortable they all seemed at work in Donato’s bottega . Caterina was older, more gifted, and as a relative of Donato, she stood a bit apart. As they got to know me, they explained about the basket of money; it was really for Michelozzo to dispense when you had need, but if he wasn’t there and you had an emergency, you could lower the basket and help yourself to whatever money you needed. It was the ongoing joke that Donatello—so they all called him—was too unworldly to care about money. He would give you anything,