Free The Medici Boy by John L'Heureux Page B

breathe.”
    He walked around Caterina’s painting and I followed him, noticing—not for the first time—that Caterina was full of figure and fair to look upon.
    “Also, a sculpture—and this no painting can do—a sculpture moves into the space of the observer. You are the observer being observed. You see?”
    “I see. I see.”
    Caterina allowed me the thin edge of a smile.
    “Sculpting is not painting.”
    “No.”
    “Donatello takes rough stone and creates this new life, this . . . Only look at what he is doing.”
    Donato was out in the courtyard making changes to Isaiah’s robes. As he worked, quickly, deftly, the shapeless gown that Nanni di Bartolo had rendered now began to reveal the body beneath it, the thrust of the leg, the arms that gave shape to the flowing sleeve. The Operai had at last been shown the statue and with gratitude they had paid more than the contracted fee and still Donato worked to perfect his Isaiah.
    “Do you see?”
    “I see.”
    Michelozzo smiled at me and put his hand on my shoulder as we stood watching my master at work. We both knew I would never sculpt like Donato. He was thinking this, I knew, though my own thoughts strayed to Caterina.
    Michelozzo went to work with a will, teaching me first the proper use of chisels for carving wood and stone. He was thorough and demanding and he did not wait long before starting me on my first carving, a marble bust of Rinaldo, one of the two young apprentices in my care.
    On an afternoon in May with the sun warm on my neck and the sweat pricking on my brow, I first came to Donato’s notice. I was lost deep in work and concentrated all in knots as I rolled the wax into strips and lay them on the frame of my bozzetto . Michelozzo stood by my side, encouraging me, silent. And so I did not hear Donato come into the little shed where we worked and I was surprised when he said, “How does it go?”
    Michelozzo explained on my behalf—since as always I was speechless—that it would be a small bust. My first. We would use scrap marble.
    Donato glanced at the sketches that lay on the worktable. “Rinaldo,” he said. “A handsome boy.” He smiled at Michelozzo and Michelozzo returned the smile. Donato examined the rough wax mess I had produced. “Rinaldo has a fine hand with marble. When you’ve completed his bust, you should ask him to sculpt you in return.”
    I nodded agreement. He looked at me then, curiously, as if he were noticing me for the first time though I had worked in his shop every day and, as an errand boy for Michelozzo, I had brought him papers to sign and reminded him of appointments and commissions and schedules. I thought he might turn away but he continued to look at me, for a long time, in a new way.
    “You should start to mold that wax before it hardens,” he said. He turned then and went back inside the bottega .
    Michelozzo said, “He has seen you now and he will remember.”
    * * *
    T O BE REMEMBERED or not to be remembered was no matter to me. It was enough to be one of the six apprentices in the bottega of Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi. Donato was the most accomplished and the most innovative sculptor in Florence, and if in Florence, then in the whole world. And he was not alone. Lorenzo Ghiberti, absorbed in the sculpting and casting of his first bronze doors, nonetheless kept his eye on the work of my master and, as you can see in his second set of bronze doors, he learned from it. Masaccio—Big Thomas—was in and out of the bottega as a friend and student of the master. He was twenty years old and would be dead at twenty-six, but now he was still alive and at work on the San Giovenale Triptych and much preoccupied with color and with Uccello’s laws of perspective. Uccello himself spent a long afternoon showing Donato—and the few others who tried to understand—how to look at a sphere with seventy-two facets in the shape of diamonds and how to draw it and what the results might be. He was