David by Mary Hoffman

Author:Mary Hoffman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2011-06-19T16:00:00+00:00

‘Have you heard who’s back?’ said Lodovico. ‘The Painter.’ He said it like that, as if it had a great letter at the beginning.

And Angelo clearly knew who was meant, because his head snapped up and an expression I had never seen before crossed his face, a mixture of curiosity and distaste.

‘The dandy?’ he asked.

Lodovico nodded. ‘Leonardo from Vinci,’ he explained to me, adding in a whisper, ‘Now we shall see the sparks fly.’

It was six months since I had become a Medici spy and I had been better fed than at any time since my arrival in the city. I still posed for Leone, and for Angelo when he needed me, still spent some satisfying hours with Grazia, and still managed to find time to meet the frateschi at San Marco.

I never had any time to myself and I did not in all that time visit Settignano. My head was too full of plots and intrigues to spare any room for my first home and my first love.

The city had been in an uproar since Soderini’s permanent appointment as Gonfaloniere. My new Medici friends had been incensed by it and muttered all sorts of dire threats against him but nothing had happened. In fact, although I was privy now to both main factions in the city, the prospect of a revolution in government seemed further away than ever.

But the arrival in Florence of Leonardo caused trouble of another kind.

He came to visit Angelo in the workshop. I happened to be there, eating my lunch when the man and his companions arrived. I might have said ‘retinue’ since that was the air he had – a supremely important man and his courtiers. I smelt him before he arrived: a good smell, I should add, one of an expensive perfume. I had to admit it was a preferable fragrance to my brother’s.

And after the perfume, the man, clad in rose-coloured velvet with a short purple cloak. At his elbow was a good-looking young man with luxuriant blonde curls and behind them a cluster of youths. What on earth would Angelo say to such an invasion of his private working space?

As it happens, he said nothing. He just roared. And descended from where he was working on the marble David, shrouded in sheets, in a shower of marble dust and colourful curses.

‘Ah, I had forgotten what a bear you are!’ said the man who had to be Leonardo da Vinci. ‘Wait outside, boys. No, hold on.’ He threw them a purse. ‘Go and find some lunch. Gandini the baker on Via Larga will feed you. I’ll meet you there later.’

Angelo looked as if he would like to throw the rose-coloured vision out of his workshop after his troop of boys but he restrained himself.

‘How are you?’ said Leonardo, looking at me till Angelo had to introduce us.

‘Well enough,’ he grunted. ‘This is my friend and model, Gabriele.’

‘Friend and model, Buonarroti?’ said Leonardo. ‘You sound like me. And such a handsome one. Be careful or tongues will wag.

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