“Benvenuto! Is that you?” he heard, and stopped in one of the galleries. Perhaps this hadn’t been such a good idea, after all.
The duchess herself-Eleonora de Toledo-swept out from one of the antechambers, in a full-pleated gamurra and white satin cap, and he greeted her as pleasantly as he could. When she was cordial to him, it was always for a reason-and this proved to be no exception.
“I want you to look at these pearls,” she said, “and tell me what you think they’re worth.”
She held out a rope of seed pearls strung between her fingers.
“Are you planning to sell them?” he asked warily. He could already see that several were losing their luster.
“No, I want to buy them, and Messer Antonio Landi is asking six thousand scudi.”
“That’s a lot more than they’re worth.”
From the immediate frown on her face, he knew he had said the wrong thing.
“Are you sure? I think they’re quite beautiful.” She held them up to her neck, so that they caught the light from the windows.
“Pearls are not gemstones, my lady. They do not hold their color, as a diamond or a sapphire does. They are the bones of a fish”-this alone had always predisposed him to devalue them-“and as a result, they deteriorate. Look, these have already begun to do so.”
Her face hardened, and she concealed the necklace in her closed fist. “If I come to the duke to ask him for the money to buy them, and he asks for your opinion-”
Which was likely, Cellini thought.
“-you will take a more favorable view.”
Captain Lucasi, hovering at a discreet distance, coughed, and for once Cellini was glad of his prompting. “You will have to excuse me, Duchess,” he said, moving on, “but you know how I hate to keep the duke waiting.”
Even before he saw Cosimo himself, he saw the crate, resting on a Persian carpet. The duke was at his desk, attending to piles of papers. In a city that boasted over seventy banks, the Medici were the premier financiers; single-handedly, they had made the gold florin the most trusted currency on the Continent. Lucasi announced their presence, and the duke, his black hair hanging down on either side of his long face like the ears on a basset hound, glanced up. “Forgive me,” he said, “I didn’t hear you come in.” He was dressed in crimson velvet, and still had his riding boots on. He raised his chin in the direction of the crate. “That just arrived from Palestrina, and I wanted you to be the first to see what’s inside.”
Just from its provenance, Cellini could guess what the box contained. A town just south of Rome, Palestrina was a treasure trove of antiquities. Every time a farmer dug a new well, something turned up.
“With your permission…?” Cellini said, and the duke nodded.
Tossing the lid aside, his fingers burrowed into the straw filling the crate, until they felt the hard contours of cold marble. With infinite care, he lifted out the torso of a classically modeled boy. Its feet were missing, its arms were gone, there was no head, but the trunk had been exquisitely executed. It was not more than a couple of braccia long, the length of a horse’s head, but oh, how Cellini wished he could have seen it whole.
“What do you think?” Cosimo asked.
“I think its maker was a great artist,” Cellini said, cradling it in his arms like a baby. “And although restoring such antiques is not my trade, I would be honored to undertake this work.”
The duke laughed with pleasure. “You think that highly of it?”
“With the right piece of Greek marble, I could complete it. I could not only add the missing parts, but an eagle, too. We could make it a Ganymede,” he said, referring to the beautiful Trojan prince carried up to Heaven by Zeus’s eagle.
“You could make what a Ganymede?” Cellini heard from the doorway, where he now saw Baccio Bandinelli, perhaps the most prosperous of the Medici court sculptors, loitering.
After asking pardon for his intrusion, Bandinelli cast a cursory eye over the broken statue and scoffed out loud. “A perfect example, Your Excellency, of what I have often told you about the ancients. They didn’t know anything about anatomy-they hardly looked at a human body-before taking the chisel to the stone. And what you get in the end is things like this, full of faults that could easily have been corrected.”
“That’s not what Benvenuto says. He was quite impressed.”
Waving his fingers in the air, Bandinelli sought to dismiss his rival’s claims, and it was all Cellini could do to keep from strangling the man with his own long beard. Bandinelli, in Cellini’s view-a view shared by nearly every artist in Italy-was an overrated hack whose work disgraced every pedestal it stood on. What made matters worse was that one of his commissions-a dual statue of Hercules and Cacus, the fire-breathing giant the hero had slain- spoiled the Piazza outside the Medici door. Every time Cellini saw it-cheek by jowl with the works of the divine Donatello and Michelangelo-it made him cringe.
“Perhaps that is why, when my own Hercules was unveiled,” Bandinelli declared, “there were those who did not understand or appreciate it.”
Did not understand it? Did not appreciate it? Cellini was floored at the man’s conceit. As was the custom when any new statue was unveiled, hundreds of Florentines had spontaneously written sonnets about it, but they had unanimously excoriated its shoddy shape and execution. Cellini had written one himself, lamenting the fact that Pope Clement VII had originally awarded the marble to Michelangelo before inexplicably changing his mind. What a waste of fine stone!
“Benvenuto, what have you got to say for the torso now? It’s not like you to hold your tongue.” A smile was playing around the duke’s lips. He knew about the enmity between the two men-and knew, too, that it was a struggle for Cellini to control his temper.
“When it comes to bad workmanship, Your Excellency, I have to yield the floor to Messer Bandinelli. No one knows more about it than he does.”
The duke laughed and clapped his hands together, while Bandinelli pasted a condescending smile on his lips. “Joke all you want,” he said. “You could never have made my Hercules.”
“True enough,” Cellini retorted. “I’d have to be blind first.”
“Your Eminence,” Bandinelli protested.
“If you cut the hair off of its head,” Cellini declared, “what would you be left with? A potato. And has it got the face of a man or an ox?” It felt good to let go, and he saw no reason to stop. “The shoulders look like the pommels on a pack saddle, and the chest looks like a sack of watermelons. The arms? They hang down without any grace at all, and at one point, unless I’m mistaken, both Hercules and Cacus appear to be sharing the same calf muscle. You have to wonder-I know I do-how they manage to stand up at all.”
Through all of this, Bandinelli fumed and writhed, while the duke listened intently, absorbed and amused. But when Bandinelli challenged him to find fault with the design of the statue, of which he was inordinately proud, and Cellini proceeded to demolish that, too, Bandinelli could take no more and he shouted, “That’s enough out of you, you dirty sodomite!”
A hush fell over the room, and the duke scowled, perhaps expecting Cellini to launch a physical attack. And the artisan was sorely tempted.
But he knew that if he did, he risked offending Cosimo, too. Instead, mustering all his resolve, Cellini replied, in a cold and ironic tone, “Now I know you’ve gone off your head. Although that noble custom you just mentioned is reputedly practiced by many great kings and emperors-even Jove himself was said to have indulged in it with young Ganymede-I am a humble man of natural tastes myself, and so I don’t know anything about it.”
The duke looked relieved, and even Bandinelli, perhaps aware that he had gone too far, shrank back. Out of the corner of his eye, Cellini spotted the duchess coming, wearing the rope of pearls, and lest he get into yet another fracas, he quickly tried to extricate himself.
“I thank Your Lordship for this opportunity to see the antique torso, but I would like to return to my studio now. There is still a good deal of work to do on the medallion.”
As the duchess and one of her ladies entered the chamber, and Bandinelli bowed so low his beard nearly grazed the floor, Cellini made his escape. Eleonora threw him a look, as if to say I was counting on your support, but he pretended not to notice and didn’t even break his stride to study the Giotto fresco mounted above the staircase. Only when he was out in the Piazza again, standing before the Loggia dei Lanzi, with its pantheon of statuary on display, did he stop and bend over, his own hands on his knees, to breathe deeply and try to calm
