Pasquale's Angel Read online

  Rosso shrugged.

  ‘He’s a thief.’

  ‘You don’t understand a thing, Pasqualino. Let an old man find love where he can. Is it your hangover making you mean?’

  Rosso was twenty-four, only six years older than Pasquale.

  Pasquale scratched the ape around the ears. The animal stirred, and sighed happily. Pasquale said, ‘We should get ready for the procession.’

  ‘We have hours yet.’

  ‘We have promised to collect the banners from Master Andrea. Master…do you think he’ll be there?’

  ‘It would be very rude of him not to be.’

  Raphael. They didn’t need to name him. His name was on everyone’s lips in the three days since he had arrived from Rome in advance of his master Pope Leo X.

  Rosso added, ‘In any case, I must dress appropriately, and I haven’t quite decided…’

  ‘In that case I think I’ll have plenty of time to try and teach the ape something.’

  They arrived late, of course. Rosso was famous for being late. Instead of dressing he lounged about in his work-apron, moodily staring at the cartoon, then started sketching Pasquale in red chalk while Pasquale tried to teach the ape to climb down a rope—not as easy as it seemed, for Barbary apes are not great climbers, and certainly not of ropes. Rosso was still in his odd changeable mood too, reluctant to leave and yet restless. By the time he had thrown on some clothes, he and Pasquale had to run through the streets to reach Andrea del Sarto’s studio, and still they were late.

  Master Andrea was in a bate because of some business with his new wife. His pupils hung around the front of the studio, where rolled processional banners leaned against the wall. Their master’s angry voice rose and fell from an open window above. Cheerful with holiday spirit, in their best clothes, the pupils passed a fat marijuana cigarette back and forth and munched on the plump juicy Colombano grapes Pasquale and Rosso had brought with them, and laughed at the story Pasquale had to tell. He had a rope burn to prove it; at one point on its way down the ape had panicked and had nearly jerked the rope from his hands. By and by more painters and pupils drifted along—this street housed a dozen studios, mixed amongst the workshops of goldsmiths and stonemasons. Someone had brought a flask of wine, and it too was passed around.

  Master Andrea came out at last, a portly man dressed in black velvet, with a belt of braided gold thread. His face was mottled, and his hands trembling as he smoothed back his long hair: he looked like an angry bee, shot out of its hole to see off intruders. He was in fact a kindly man, and a good teacher—Rosso had been his pupil, so that in a way Pasquale was his pupil, too—but he was prone to rages, and his new wife, young and pretty, provoked him to fantastic jealousies.

  Rosso put his arm around his former master, talking with him as the group made their way to the Piazza della Signoria while Pasquale, a banner-pole on his shoulder, followed amongst the other pupils. He felt frumpy, still in the clothes he had worn the day before—he really didn’t have anything better to wear, things being what they were, but if he had not been so drunk, he would have taken off his doublet and hose and tunic and laid them under the mattress before going to bed. At least he had thought to scrub his face and hands, and anoint his palms with a rose-water receipt of Rosso’s. He had brushed his curly hair until it shone, and Rosso had put a circlet in it, and called Pasquale his little prince of Savages, just to annoy.

  The party gathered other painters and their assistants and pupils as it went through the streets, and by the time it reached to the Piazza della Signoria there were half a hundred. The same number was already waiting in front of the Loggia, chief amongst them Michelangelo Buonarroti, towering over all by sheer force of personality, clad in a white tunic so long it was almost a robe—to hide his knock-knees, Rosso said, adding that, even so, had he possessed a thunderbolt, he would have made a passable Zeus.

  Raphael and his entourage were not there.

  The hired band struck up with shawm, sackbut and viole da braccio. Banners were unfurled, bright with gold and ultramarine, like flowers suddenly blooming in one corner of the stony fastness of the piazza. Following the example of the other pupils, Pasquale socketed the pole of his banner in the cusp of the leather harness he had put on; even so, his shoulders soon started to ache as wind tugged the heavy banner to and fro.

  Not many of the passers-by took notice. The importance of the confraternity had dwindled, and they seemed a small, insignificant group, dwarfed by the big stage that workmen were hammering together in front of the Palazzo, in preparation for the Pope’s imminent arrival.

  The hammering didn’t even stop as the blessing was read from the steps of the Loggia. What with that, and barked orders as companies of city militia drilled across the square’s vast chessboard, and the noise of the signal-tower atop the Palazzo della Signoria as its arms clattered and weaved in a kinetic ballet, the frail voice of the old Secretary to the Ten could scarcely be heard as he pronounced the annual blessing. The priest shook holy water towards the assembled painters even as the Secretary was led off by his attendants at what seemed an undignified speed. The priest muttered a prayer, sketched a cross in the air, and that was that.

  The procession set off, gathering itself into a ragged line as people jostled for position. Gradually, they wound out of the piazza, through the shadow of the Great Tower. Square, studded with narrow windows and balconies, and machicolations and platforms clinging to its smooth stone as swallow-nests cling to a barn, the tower reared so high into the sky that it forever seemed to be toppling as clouds moved behind it. It nailed down the north-western corner of the colleges and laboratories and apothecaria and surgeries and dissecting-rooms and workshops of the new university which had replaced an entire neighbourhood of crooked streets where once goldsmiths had worked, an interlocking complex of red roofs and white colonnades and terraces all overlooked by its architect, the Great Engineer himself, who in his Great Tower brooded hundreds of braccia above the common herd, perhaps even now watching the procession of the Confraternity of Artists creeping like a line of ants at the base of his eyrie as they turned towards the Ponte Vecchio. They had to march in single file, a heavy traffic of carts and carriages and vaporetti thundering past, before they turned to strike out along the wide promenade beside the river.

  Pasquale, holding up the pole of a banner painted with the likeness of Saint Luke, benign and white-bearded, and painting one of his portraits of the Blessed Virgin (there were three, now at Rome, Loreto and Bologna), kept an eye on the river as he marched. He loved to watch the ships go by: the small barges which were the work-horses of the river-transport system; the paddle-wheel ferries; the big ocean-going maonas; and, on occasion, a warship on some mission that had taken it far from the naval yards of Livorno, prowling with its screw drive like a sleek leopard amongst domestic cats.

  Sunlight fell through a riff in the clouds. The banners glowed; the musicians beat louder and everyone picked up his step. Pasquale’s heart was lifted at last, and he forgot his headache and his uneasy stomach, where bread and oil made an unwelcome weight, forgot the ache in his arms from holding up the heavy banner. Gulls, which followed the Grand Canal inland, were flakes of white skirling above the river-channels. Cries, far cries. He could dream of taking sloe-eyed brown-skinned Pelashil back to her native land: the New World, where white, stepped pyramids gleamed bright as salt amongst palm-trees, and every kind of fruit was there ready to fall into your hand if only you reached out for it, and flocks of parrots flew like arrows from the bows of an army.

  The river was divided into channels, and the channel nearest the shore ran with strange colours that mixed and mingled in feathery curls—dye-works and chemical manufactories poured out mingling streams which unlike pigments did not mix to muddy brown but formed strange new combinations, chemical reactions fluttering across the surface in exquisite patterns as if the water had been stirred to life. Along the full flood of the raceway channel, water-mills sat in chained lines st
rung out from the piers of bridges, their water-wheels thumping and churning, their machineries sending up a chattering roar. Most drove looms, trying to compete with the modern automatic machineries of the manufactories on the far bank. At night some went free-martin, cutting the mooring of their rivals, trying to jockey upstream to get advantage of a stronger current. Sometimes you could hear pistol-shots carrying across the water. The journalist and playwright Niccolò Machiavegli had once made a famous remark that war was simply commercial competition carried to extremes: and so here.

  At the Ponte alla Grazie the procession turned away from the river, plunging into a warren of narrow streets between tenement buildings faced with soft grey pietra serena, stained with black streaks by polluted rain and crumbling away through the action of the tainted air and smokes poured forth by the manufactories. At street level, workshops and bottegas had opened their shutters for the day’s business, and their workers came out to cheer the procession as it went past. They especially cheered Michelangelo, who marched with steadfast dignity at the head of the procession, his white garments shining amongst the blacks and browns of the other masters. Florentines loved their successful sons, most especially if they were prodigals. Even better, Michelangelo had returned because of a furious argument with the Pope over the tomb of the Pope’s predecessor. He was seen as having upheld the honour of Florence over the wishes of her old enemy: not for nothing was his most famous work the statue of the giant-killer, David.

  So at last the procession reached the homely church of Sant’Ambrogio, in the neighbourhood where most painters worked. In the years before the confraternity had broken with the Company of Saint Luke and its physicians and apothecaries, who in truth had long bankrolled their impoverished artist brothers, the service had been held amongst the marble and bronze of the church of Sant’Egidio, in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. No more.

  A fine rain had started. The drums beat on as the procession filed through the narrow door into the homely little church, with its plaster walls and shadows up amongst the rafters, and the noise of the reciprocal engines in the manufactory across the street.

  Raphael was not there, either.

  2

  The mass was almost over when Raphael finally arrived. He swept in at the head of a gaggle of assistants and pupils, and the bustle at the door of the little church turned everyone’s heads. The idlers at the back, who had talked all through the service in the casual way of Florentines, the church being simply another public place that, except for its altars and chapels, was as secular as any other, stopped talking and gaped and nudged each other. The masters and pupils in the congregation glanced back, every one of them—with the exception of Michelangelo, who sat stiffly at the far end of the front row of seats in exactly the same pose he had held throughout the mass (and in which pose Pasquale had surreptitiously sketched him), not deigning to look back at his rival and yield him the satisfaction of recognition. Even the priest paused for a moment, before continuing with his blessing of the host amidst the ringing of many small bells. As Raphael and his followers doffed their raincapes to reveal fashionably black machine-cut tunics, doublets and leggings, the six-piece orchestra wheezed into the Agnus Dei, the ageing castrato coming in half a beat late, and almost everyone in the congregation began to whisper to everyone else.

  Rosso nudged Pasquale and said in a stage whisper, ‘God’s second favourite son blesses us.’

  Pasquale couldn’t help looking round to stare at the great painter. Raphael sat at ease amongst his assistants, some of whom would be masters in their own right if they had not chosen to serve Raphael. As who would not? Raphael earned more than any artist in either Rome or the Florentine Republic, and so more than any in all of Europe and the New World. Like Michelangelo, Raphael had taken the New Age to heart. In the age of the individual, he had become his own man. He took commissions as he chose, and his own fame made the rich, both the old money and the new, fiercely contest in bidding for his work, while the poor decorated their houses with shadow-engraved reproductions of his work. No other artist had that kind of cachet. Michelangelo did as he pleased, and usually fell out with his clients as a result, but only Raphael made sure that his clients got what they wanted while painting as he chose.

  ‘He’s come back to his roots to make sure they’re as bad as he remembers,’ Rosso said.

  ‘He has paid his florin,’ Pasquale said, meaning that Raphael had the right to celebrate mass with the Florentine Confraternity of Artists on the day of their patron saint because he had signed his name in the Red Book and paid his fee. Because Pasquale had been eager to catch a glimpse of Raphael, now he felt that he must defend him.

  ‘About the only one here,’ Rosso said, which was almost true. The Red Book of the confraternity recorded more debtors to Saint Luke than creditors, for few bothered to pay a whole florin to become a recognized master in a guild whose best days were gone, while those like Raphael Sanzio of Urbino or Michelangelo Buonarroti didn’t need a confraternity to promote their interests. Pasquale had heard Master Andrea grumble, as the procession had filed through the church door, that they were less than the ratcatchers’ guild now, that once upon a time the whole street on which this little church of Sant’Ambrogio stood had been crowded with a joyful procession, all come out to see a single painting leave the studio of Cimabue, and where now was that ardour?

  But the processional banners were still bright, for all that their finery was patched and faded, older than the century. And even in this little church there was evidence aplenty of the Golden Age, when image had sung straight to God. There was a flaking fresco of the Annunciation over the first altar, and, in better condition, a beautiful fresco over the second altar of the Madonna on her heavenly throne, with Saint John the Baptist and Saint Bartholomew. This theme was repeated over the third altar, where this time the Virgin was portrayed in her glory with an array of saints. The gold-leaf of the frescos shimmered in the candle-light, giving the illusion that the church was larger than it really was, as a lake glimmering through trees will seem like a sea.

  Pasquale had contrived to sit as close as he could to the best work in the church. It was in a niche between the third and second altars, a little roundel of the Annunciation painted by Lippi in the Golden Age before the rise of the artificers. For most of the mass, which was a full ceremony paid by subscription from every master, debtor and creditor alike (Rosso had grumbled mightily over this imposition), Pasquale had gazed at this little window into another world, a world of clear colours and clean lines. The grave acceptance of the Madonna at her window, her face and demeanour expressing the fourth of the fifth of the Laudable Conditions of the Blessed Virgin, namely Humiliatio; the golden line from the dove of the Holy Spirit to her womb; and the angel Gabriel kneeling in the garden amongst spring flowers. Most of all the angel. Pasquale was collecting angels. Except for his wings (which despite the gold tracery were clearly modelled on the wings of a pigeon; Pasquale had seen another of Fra Lippi’s Annunciations where the angel had the Argus-eyed wings of a peacock), this one could have been any youth from some great house in the time of Lorenzo the Unlucky. He was fourteen or fifteen, pale-skinned, with a long, wondering face and blue long-lashed eyes, and was dressed in the sumptuous costume of those courtly days. Stripped of his superficial exoticism he could have been a deacon or a page-boy. What held Pasquale’s attention, what he had twice tried to fix on a scrap of paper, was the angel’s expression. It was raptly attentive, filled with sorrowing knowledge at the burden which the Holy Child must bear, but also with joy at this compact between Heaven and Earth at last made flesh.

  Or that at least was how you were supposed to read it, Pasquale thought. But how could you capture the true feelings of a creature both greater than man (for he stood closer to God than any but the most blessed of the saints) and lesser (for despite his command of legions of lesser angels, Gabriel was in the end no more than a messenger, a go-between who carried the Word from God to man but was not t
he Word, only its vessel: angels did not choose to serve, for not to serve was to fall)? It was something he had been trying to work out ever since the conception for his masterwork had fallen on him. Piero di Cosimo, who Pasquale liked to think was his secret master, had in a rare moment of lucidity told him to paint truly if he was to paint at all, but how could you paint the truth of something beyond ordinary human comprehension? How could you paint the face of an angel?

  Fra Lippi’s solution to this question had been to portray his angel as a beautiful courtier; it was the solution of most painters of the Golden Age. And most painters in Florence, at one time or another, had painted at least one Annunciation, a popular theme because the feast-days of both the Annunciation and the New Year fell on the same day, the twenty-fifth of March. But the Golden Age was gone, as fragmented by the devices of the artificers as reality itself. The New Age had arrived, and demanded genius or nothing. In his youth, Raphael had painted angels as idealizations of idealizations, not the best or most beautiful courtier but the ideal courtier of Castiglione’s imaginary conversations. It was said that when Raphael painted he caught not just the hues of his model’s face, but the very thoughts and personality. But he had not painted an angel since his apprenticeship, except in his depiction of the flight of Saint Peter from prison, and that in shadow. If the greatest painter in the world shied from the task, how could Pasquale meet his self-imposed challenge?

  For while Pasquale had his vision and the ruinously expensive little panel he had prepared with great care, he had not made a brush-stroke towards realizing it. He had glimpsed or thought he had glimpsed more than mere beauty or even the ideal of beauty, but did not know how to begin to express what he had been vouchsafed. He only knew that to fail in this was to fail himself, and believed that if he could only talk with Raphael, the great painter would understand.

  Poor drug-crazed Piero di Cosimo, with his talk of creatures from worlds that interleaved this, understood more than most, but for all his adventures in the far shores of the New World, his way of seeing was that of the Old World; he had not entirely escaped his training. And as for Rosso, Pasquale had barely mentioned the subject of his painting to his master, let alone his vision. Rosso was a master of the technical problem, of perspective and plastic space, of the swift decisions needed to paint tempera panels and the bold revisions that the new Dutch and Prussian formulae for oil paints made possible, but while he was a good man and a generous master, he was also increasingly bitter with his lot, and more conservative than he liked to admit. Artists were artisans first and last, was his constant motto.