In memory of Irving Stone
Holy Week 2026
Ad majorem Dei gloriam
Michelangelo tossed the letter back on his desk. From the window of his study the waxing moon flooded the room with a blue light that did battle with the orange glow of his single candle. He longed to answer her straightaway. The sonnet had been burning a hole in his drawer for a month. It wanted only a final couplet.
He closed his eyes and tried to summon her sun-blonded hair and shy, sardonic smile. As if fashioned by the old bastard Botticelli himself, just to torture him. From the thick sheet of Fabriano paper her looping scrawl murmuring to him alta voce, as surely as if she were standing at his side. And she may well be, he thought. She always seemed to know his mind before he did. He glanced over his shoulder, as if expecting an apparition.
He rolled the pen between his fingers. As a tongue-tied youth he had despaired of ever making himself understood. Stone had saved him, allowed him to speak. Now the nib that by day traced out the architecture of bicep and rib, by night gave him the words that had always eluded him.
But not tonight. No words would come this night. Tonight they would be drowned in the beehive thrum of his mind, its chaos of dubious plans, frightening images, desperate calculations. Every night for weeks had been the same: A turning over and over of forking eventualities until exhaustion took him, an hour or two of sleep on the divan, and then awaking to the pink dawn light, drenched with sweat, and awash in the horrible clarity that all his deliberations added up to nothing more than a stufato of nonsense. Love was a madhouse, yes, but now he was locked in another sort of madhouse altogether, one which suffered poetry no entry. There was no relief even in work, no solace in the happy fatigue of chiseling. Would there ever be again?
With a sudden impulse of disgust he wrenched himself from his chair. He would endure not one more night of this, he would remain in this self-imposed cell not a minute longer. When the first rays of sunlight broke past the hills above Settignano he would present himself at the palace, come what may.
***
He wandered the streets, striped blue and black in the the moonlight. Few torches were lit, no lamps in the windows. He saw no one else about. The night watchmen seemed to have abandoned their rounds. The city had the crouched apprehensiveness of a prey animal who knows its last hope lies in stillness.
These streets he loved. Here he had always felt most free, deep in the night where the world was an affair only between stone and him. He ran his hand along the smooth pietra serena of the churches and palaces, over countless blocks as lovingly beveled as the shin of his David.
He found himself following a well-worn route. He began by looping up past Santa Maria Novella with its geometric facade, and over to the Baptistery where, as always, he paused to admire Ghiberti’s bronze doors with a lump in his throat, then, with the Duomo at his back, passing along the edge of the Piazza della Signoria, through the narrow Via Lambertesca, and to the waterfront. But at the river, instead of crossing at the Ponte Vecchio and on to Santo Spirito, he turned and continued along the bank of the Arno, its broad channel a black serpent in the night, until he reached Gaddi’s five-arched Santa Trinitá bridge.
Near the bridge’s centerpoint he stopped to gaze back at the ghostly heart of the city. Behind its towers were appearing the first fingers of dawn, the merest indigo on black, perhaps only a trick of the eyes. By now he should be hearing the beginnings of the morning’s familiar bustle, the bantering and the creaking of wheels and the scraping of wood on stone. But all was still.
He felt suddenly that he was not alone. He turned.
At the center of the bridge was a being surpassing description, if it could be called a being. It was huge, at least as tall as the tower of the Signoria, and white like the walls of the city in the moonlight. But not a dense white like stone—a shimmering, centerless white, like a blizzard, a swirl of snow. And not snow blowing as it will—but disciplining itself somehow into form. Like a murmuration, the form was in constant movement yet held together by some invisible genius. He could see that the being’s interior was full of overlapping patterns, lines and shapes sliding over and against and into each other, dissolving and reappearing. Eyes and wings and stars and swords and fire. As he stared, transfixed, into its dizzying depths, he could find within it no center and no end.
Out of this swirling universe, some of the shards of light began to slow, and then compact, and then cohere, until from the being’s giant bosom emerged a small, gleaming figure. Before Michelangelo’s astonished face was a child, as chubby and fleshy as any winged putto he had laid into the damp plaster of a fresco. Its countenance was strange—grave, like an old man, but much younger than any living man had ever been.
The being spoke. Later, that’s how he would say it, to himself, for he never breathed a word of it to another soul: it spoke. But it did not speak as men speak. It was a voice from everywhere and nowhere. He heard it ringing through the early morning air as clear as the rasping call of the fishmongers. But the hearing was as if somewhere inside, playing on his bones like on the strings of a clavichord.
Thou art Michelangelo.
Michelangelo had to summon every ounce of nerve, all of his stamina cultivated over the long years, not to bow to his animal instincts, and flee. For his heart, if not his mind, knew there was nowhere to flee from this all-consuming light, nowhere to hide. He could not draw another breath, and burning inside his skin was pain like he had never experienced. So was this the moment? Had Death arrived for him? Then all at once all anguish ceased.
Son of Lodovico, peace. Be not afraid.
The voice was unlike anything he had ever heard, and it was everything he had ever heard. It was the ringing of bells at Easter, it was the crashing of waves at Ostia, it was Clarissa’s sigh in his ear, it was his mother’s laughter, it was his father’s hand on his shoulder, it was the warm pulse of marble under his fingertips, it was the sweetness of burnt dust under the Tuscan sun, it was the rustle of leaves in Lorenzo’s garden at midnight. It was a union of all senses interweaving and catching against the light in a dance like the ripples of the Arno trailing behind the fishing boats at dawn. And it was something else besides… a Sound beyond sound that underlay all the accumulated notes like a harmony, knitting them together and resounding them more deeply than they had ever been in life. Some uniting chord that later he would never be sure if he really heard, or only felt. But he knew with immediate interior knowing that he had always known it, that it had always been with him.
Michelangelo was on his knees.
My Lord. My Lord.
I am not thy Lord. Stand.
He stood.
I carry tiding merely. Will thou hear it?
He had never before felt his heart lurch with such an otherworldly ache.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
***
He never reached the palace. His friends—some in hiding in Florence, some having fled to Rome or Venice or their childhood villages, some who simply shrugged at the tiresome gyrations of History and got on with their lives—speculated among themselves. Some believed Michelangelo protected by a powerful patron. Some feared him dead with the others, his diminutive body dumped in the Arno or chopped up and scattered in the hills he loved. Some, led by Torrigiani’s old faction, spit on him as coward. Many more prayed for him behind their closed doors. Still others kept his charcoal drawings in portfolios safely tucked away in their wardrobes, and leafed through them by candlelight after all others had retired to bed.
***
He had never liked boats. He had never liked the feeling of the world unstable under his feet. In his life he had always sought solidity, solid ground. Now once more the mendicant, he carried nothing save cloak and hat, a dwindling pouch of florins, a wooden box of charcoal sticks, and a few books interleaved with papers.
In the bosom of the sea, he wrestled with his knotted heart. He had always needed a chisel in his hands to do so. It was not the case, as some of his friends teased him, that he had been a man without room for love. He believed that even the basest love was a gift from God, and he was not a man who would turn away from such a gift. But that confusing melange of desire, of awe, of admiration, of reckless hunger for self-sacrifice: what could this mean for him, apart from the profundity it could bestow on figures of marble?
He remembered Clarissa’s melancholy credo: All love is only love in a way. He had not been able to accept her words, then. And now? He loved his city, he loved the fruit of the quarries, he loved sweat and marble dust on his brow, he loved God, he had loved Clarissa and Contessina, and now he loved her. Were not all these things the same? Could they not be somehow united, made whole?
The long days and nights below decks, separated from the tools and the stone that he had taken for his only bethrothal, he returned to the Greeks he had so long neglected, to the dismay of Urbino and Pico and all the rest. Driven by idleness into a sort of lucid madness he poured over tragedies and epics and satires. He read them aloud to the illiterate crew until they grew tired of words and left him, and then he read them aloud to himself. Amid the ship’s rhythmic rocking he began to lose any sense of the separation of ages. The figures of legend were no more distant from him than the gulls that circled the ship’s wake as it passed by the parade of sun-parched islands and bitterly-contested straits.
He stood on the deck and gazed into the endless flat horizon in a horrified stupor. His heart ached for the calming density of stone, for the benevolent guardianship of the mountains, for the glory of towers and domes and frescoes that pulled the eye upward, ever upward. No, he must never, never again leave sight of the Duomo!
But finally he passed through his restlessness, and the brutal monotony of the sea began to calm him, and he began to write. He poured all his doubt into verse, creating characters that split out the riven factions of his soul. He felt the urgency of seeing them from every dimension, pacing around them as he must the block of marble, to consider it from every perspective, over and over, before daring his first incision. Now he was his desire, grasping at flesh; now he was his spiritual nature, yearning to transcend but distancing him from those he loved; now he was his heroic temper, seeking great deeds but infected by pride; now he was the child, filled with wonder but overwhelmed by placeless fear; now he was the woman, divided between hope and grief.
FERNANDO What is plainly said shall not be left to rot But will sow within the mind where quickly grows Fantasy and truth in competition, whose untangle The work of boy and man together, their age allied Against the world that would undo them ‘gainst themselves. My lady, suffer move this arm that does so move me Further, just so, into the light. I wish only To speak my heart, and then no more to speak.
STELLA My man, my unbent but mind-obliterated man, You see this arm and her attendant shoulder Yet see it not, but only an imagined idol Sped by o’erweening skill to something sacred That poor reality could not match. And this, I know, Will return your blunt attentions with betrayal And alchemize too-hard love to hate. O hate I do my own Loud skin, which sings to men like you a song It cannot for any length sustain.
FERNANDO
So many words
And so long pondered in your fury, to cover over
The hope to which you dare not yourself submit.
Show again, my love. Do not hide this treasure,
Which veiled grouse-like in a thicket only speeds
The blood of hunters to their kill.STELLA
This arm, darling?
It could not rouse your brush
Were it last flesh remainéd on the earth.FERNANDO O foolish one, our sickness oft makes us see What is not there, and blind to all that is. This arm Commands, as one less perfect sent Menelaus To the breach. Its perfection is as honey, sweet To all it traps and sticks within. It reaches past Big brass doors so long locked and bids them bow To the robber that undoes them, in gratitude For she who mocks their duty. O great arm! Gold chain That ropes him ‘gainst weak sense and unmans The rampart thrown up to batter down his will. This arm Would I have ‘til taut skin is loosed and melted From the bone that anchors it to life. I would have its death as wife.
STELLA
I see you speak
As men do who have known not death nor wife.
Who are ignorant of my person, and your own. Those
Like us are jailor and convicted at one blow, locked
Within our minds and grateful for the penance,
Knowing as we do alone the gravity of our crimes.
If this arm be golden it be gilt on rot, or the petal
Crowning chaff, which chill wind must cause to fall
And in its mulch make way for your next season.
Leave me as readily as you have left your reason.FERNANDO This I cannot, and yet am bound by love’s vast legion To bend to every order. If I go, to war or commerce Or the company of far-flung friends, it is only as One season gracelessly departs with final flurry To descend more strongly on some future turning Of the orb. Foolish one, fare well.
He read the words that had come from his pen. With tears in his eyes he climbed to the top deck, and tossed the papers overboard.
***
He crossed out of Tanais in a caravan of Venetian merchants who accepted his labor but did not care to impose upon his solitude. Around their fires he caught in distorted snatches news of the peninsula’s republics, but learned in much more detail the jealousies and dramas of the men alongside whom he traveled.
In Samarkand he broke off, tired of the Venetians’ intrigues. In the marketplace, or in a shaded corner of the Registan, or before the Bibi Khanym, he sketched the imposing iwan of the city’s grand rectangular structures, the intense sunlight throwing sharp shadows under the peaked arches, a severity leavened by the graceful feminine curves of the minarets. Everywhere man’s art could not help but reach upward.
Here was perhaps a purer architecture, unornamented by figures human or divine. The interdict against such portrayals fed a genius of total geometry, of the communication of the coherence of the world through line and arch, a Logos searched out not in man but in the repeating patterns that undergird the world. These patterns were at once organic and inorganic, natural and supernatural, drawing on the structure of nature but seeking to simplify and purify it, to touch its essence. Where at first Michelangelo had found only dead abstraction, soon, under the tutelage of his charcoal sticks, he learned the spiritual force of these designs. They spoke something true about the inaccessibility of the divine, the God who could not be named in words nor apprehended with human eyes, but could only be gestured at, a magnificence magnified by distance.
Yet the grandeur left him lonely. Perhaps it was a weakness, but he knew he needed the Lord whose broken body he could have held in his own arms.
He stood at Timur’s tomb in the Guri Amir, and surprised himself by speaking aloud to this ghost. Even in his grave the great conquerer, whose life was an outpoured violence of ceaseless movement, could not find his rest: if he was here in this mausoleum it was only because his body had been denied its owner’s wish to make his way back home, to Kesh. Fate frustrates all wills, even the greatest, perhaps especially the greatest. He ran his hand along the dark green nephrite tombstone, in its simplicity so different from the funeraries of the Christian lords and princes, yet in its very featurelessness seeming to condense something otherwise incommunicable about the implacability of the warrior and the true flat fathomlessness of death.
***
By Cascar, having crossed through the peaks of Imaus, along the burly Zarafshon river, and past Ptolemy’s stone tower, he knew he was a different man. His beard had grown wild, and his breeches and blue linen camicia had long been traded for a woolen cloak and cowl that anonymized his features into those of any other Turk. His face had been hammered by the sun into something like a Donatello bronze, and the tip of his jagged nose was burnished to a deep umber.
In the Taklamakan he finally accepted that he would die. Before his eyes were constant visions: fantastical talking beasts, pools of water, bare-shouldered women, towers in the distance, Christ in tattered robes, vast armies mounted on mechanical creatures ringed with fire, snowdrifts, clouds.
The expeditionary force that found him debated among themselves for some time over how to proceed. The strange man that could not have conversed with them even were he conscious. A Christian but in Turkish garb—a spy most likely, if a stupid one. But in his satchel they found nothing of importance to the state, only sheaves of drawings, filled with lines so perfect and forms of children at play so tender that the lieutenant, fond of ink himself, wandered away from his men under pretense of illness, over a dune and behind its shade, so that they would not see him weep.
***
Michelangelo sketched in silence, his brow furrowed in concentration. After so many years he could fluently wield the native tongue, but he had little appetite for conversation while working. Nor at any other time.
The Ming princess sat rigidly, elevated on her dias, flanked on both sides by her eunuchs. For three sittings she had presided coldly, speaking neither in greeting nor departure, but only fixing him with an unnerving stare. Finally, from his place cross-legged on the floor, seated on a thin pillow, he had lost his patience.
Your Highness, I beg you turn your gaze away so that I may render a profile.
She did not move, but the eunuchs took a step forward. She glanced sidelong at them.
Leave us.
Still without moving, she addressed Michelangelo.
This is not our custom.
Highness, is it custom to leave your royal person alone in the company of dangerous foreigners?
The slightest hint of a smile cracked her stony lips.
Customs exist to serve our person, not the other way around. Though my father would disagree.
Michelangelo bowed. When he lifted his head, the princess had turned. She was gazing out the window, and had lifted her arm and lain it across the lap of her gold-fringed crimson gown. He returned to his chalk with renewed gusto.
Dangerous foreigner, why do you remain with us? What of your family?
Annoyed, he did not lift his eyes from his drawing.
My family is better without me.
What of your home?
My home has no further use for me.
Then you are alone?
We are alone the day we are born.
We do not believe this. We believe the others are always with us. Do the Christians not think so?
He had immediately regretted his harsh words. As so many times before, he tried to summon his resolve to speak no more.
So then you have no wife. And in our palace you have taken no woman, or man. These are things easy for me to know. My father loves you, and he loves few. He would give you what you asked for. Land, woman. Not me, of course.
He looked for a smile on her face and found none.
You are not a eunuch? Here that would be no shame. So many of our heroes have been.
He could feel his cheeks burning.
Your Highness, I know myself to be an ugly man.
Now she laughed, a strange, startling sound. Michelangelo glanced toward the curtained doors, through which he knew his every word was being noted.
All men are equal in ugliness.
Not so, Highness. The form of man is balance, proportion, power. The pinnacle of Nature’s force and mastery. As Da Vinci knew, a man’s body is the condensed intelligence of the universe in miniature.
At this blunt contradiction, he felt her eyes snap back toward him.
And woman?
Something I have never been able to describe.
***
He was summoned in the dead of night to a high and lonely place along the great Wall that ran north of the city from the foothills across almost the entire empire until its channels petered out into the oblivion of the Western desert. All around him rose the ink-black humps of the Jundu mountains, and low on the firmament, the eye of the setting gibbous moon.
Beside him stood a man. He was as three men, who spoke with one voice. He was beautiful, and very tall, with golden hair falling down the back of his cloak, and his eyes, too, glittered even in the dark with a golden light. When he spoke his voice was soothing, yet energizing, like a first cup of wine.
Michelangelo. Do you know why you are here, with us?
I do not wish to be.
To the contrary. No man comes to us without some part of himself wishing that it were so.
Michelangelo would not meet the man’s eyes.
You are here because you show much promise. We observed your defense of Florence with great interest. You know yourself, as we know you, to be a man of unsurpassed intelligence and prowess. We know, as you know, that it has never been properly recognized. Michelangelo, simply put, your genius has been wasted on them.
I did not seek to protect what I love for recognition.
We agree, we agree. The recognition of the ungrateful and ignorant means little. To know this is true nobility.
No. I know real nobility. Lorenzo’s humility. The Topolinos’ calloused hands. Prior Bichiellini’s faithfulness. Granacci’s friendship. They were good people.
Good people? My dear, did you really think you belonged among such people? You know even better than we what kind of soul you have. Blasphemous and idolatrous, disloyal son, desecrator of corpses, deceitful, selfishly pursuing your ambition, hurting anyone who gets close to you.
That is not—
It is true. But all is not lost. You must now think clearly about what a soul like yours is good for. You have already wasted so much, do not waste yet more. There is hope.
Is there?
Yes. All that you have dreamed of in your grasping little heart—all great men have such hearts!—is within reach. It is a thing so easily done, for those who understand power. A chance meeting here, a rainstorm there. A bout of plague here, a vial of belladonna there. Battles and thrones and dynasties turn on the smallest, deftest wheels, wheels that so often yield to our hands. You know this to be true.
I know too well.
Then you know, Michelangelo, that it should be yours. We brought you to this high place, of which we are justly proud, to show you this. But you are wise, and you already know. You know you are a man made to rule kingdoms, to weave kingdoms into empires. But more, much more—to unite these meager empires into an unprecedented civilization, enlightened by a renewed dawning of art, of culture, of poetry and painting and sculpture. This was the vision of your beloved Lorenzo. Now you can fulfill it. You can finally make your father proud, your real father. Look around. No one else has the vision, the intelligence, and the will to make of power anything but an absurd charnel house. Only you. And, of course, the ruthlessness. You know what is required for any great undertaking. As you are ruthless in your art, as you heartlessly cast aside all that stands in your way, you will cast aside the opposition. And they will all love you for it.
I do not want the love of all.
Of course, of course not. Like all discerning men, it is the love of only one that you crave. But the entire love—total possession. Nothing less will do. We well understand. Accept your task and this too shall be added to you.
Michelangelo gazed toward the moon. The same moon that hung over the villa tucked in the trees along the riverbank, where perhaps even now there was a single candle lit in the bedroom that opened onto the back garden.
Like your heroes, you must think in generations. Dynasties, Michelangelo. Children, children of children. Halls filled with the best marble, enough for many lifetimes. Family outings, Sunday dinners, a hand squeezing yours at the end of a day of labor. Your name remembered and praised forever. And you, the father of a new world.
He could not stop himself from crying out.
I do, I do desire it!
Then you cannot turn back now. It is done. Kneel to recieve our commission.
He tried to remember a certain voice from long ago. He could almost hear it, but it shimmered like smoke and wafted away. His head swam and everything inside felt like it had been gouged out with a dull chisel. The abiding warmth at his center that had once surged at the touch of pink marble was a distant memory, the memory of another man. He could not remember the man’s name.
He took a step forward to kneel, and stumbled, catching himself on the parapet. The stone was rough-hewn but smoothed by centuries of weather. It was cold under his hand, cold and dense with the blood of slaves who had poured themselves into its formation. He looked at the hand that caught him, small and ugly, but white and alive in the moonlight, and he recognized it. The faint old scar along the back that he had gashed roughing out a stubborn block. His own hand!
O Deceiver, leave me!
There was only silence, and great dark, and an aeon of desolation compressed into the fist-sized void under his left breast. He knew he would be utterly torn apart by the vacuum.
He awoke in his bed, drenched in sweat and tears. Zheng stood in the doorway, holding his spear at his side.
Michelangelo, the Emperor is dead. You must make haste.
***
He followed Zheng at a jog through the courtyards and pavilions of the palace complex.
Who has killed him?
They found him in the stables, in full regalia. He was trying to mount his horse. His heart could not stand it. The old fool, he could not even rise from bed without assistance.
An honorable death for an honorable man. Then the rebels…
Still in the hills, well beyond the walls. But our scouts report an overwhelming force. The city is in panic. My uncle will throw open the gates. I can no longer protect you.
Then there is still time. Your father asked me to help him prepare for this day.
In the throne room, where those loyal to the Emperor had gathered, Michelangelo leaned over the map. He pointed to an oblong zone several miles to the north which he had marked out with cross-hatching.
The frontal assault must seem credible. You must fully engage them, and take your losses. Your retreat will draw their main force here, into the marshes. Your commanders know the dry path through, but their best fighters will be mired.
Zheng looked incredulous.
What marshes?
They did not exist a year ago. I diverted the river here, and here, with a series of channels. What remains of their force will face a choice: to retreat, or to advance along the high dry ground that runs alongside the wall. It is a narrow corridor. Cannon and archers hidden in the turrets will have their way with them.
Michelangelo frowned.
If, that is, they are persuaded to advance. If they think it through, they will withdraw and lay seige. It is a great risk. You do not have the men to flank them if they retreat.
Zheng nodded.
Then we must appear even weaker and stupider than we are.
Michelangelo smiled.
A strategem upon which I have often relied.
***
Zheng watched Michelangelo saddle his Arabian stallion, a handsome and good-natured chestnut sabino gifted by the Emperor out of his own stock.
Do not go. We will win.
And then?
You will rule with me. I am brave but dumb, and have need of advisers.
Michelangelo looked him hard in the eye.
Zheng, you know there is only one way out. Your brother must fulfill the succession, or the kingdom will crack down the middle. It will be war of faction against faction. Learn this much at least from Florence’s woes.
He is a drunk, and a carouser. And, they say, a poet! There is no hope.
He may yet surprise you. I, too, am a second son. We must make our own way.
Heaven chooses whom it will for its crown.
And yet Heaven helps those who help themselves.
My sister was right about you. You have fear of neither God nor man.
I fear many things, my friend. But there is not time enough for it. Farewell.
In Michelangelo’s quarters, Zheng found a twine-bound folio with his name inked across the front. It was closed by a red wax seal imprinted with the stylized chevron of the Buonarroti clan.
He cut the twine with the tip of his spear and opened the folio. Inside was a stack of drawings, full of geometric designs, page after page of schematics. Flipping through the sheets, he recognized plans for a new palace and an expanded ring of city walls, defended at its high points by a type of battlement he had never seen. After that he found designs for a modest but beautiful home. Interwoven with the horizontal lines and ribbed tile roofs of Ming taste were traces of a Western hand, assertive but organic: harmoniously spaced pilasters that endowed the main rooms with dignity and solidity, arched arcades connecting the living quarters with the garden, and, above the central courtyard, an unusual vertical element, marrying earth and sky: a wooden dome, with its eight ogival ribs arcing away at the bottom, turning into eaves that would allow light and air into the heart of the home while protecting it from the spring rains. Under the drawing, in confident calligraphy, a dedication: House of Zheng and Liang Yu.
On the last sheet was a portrait of a woman, his sister. Her robe was lightly traced in flowing red chalk, with white highlights where gold glinted in the sunlight. His sister had never been a beautiful woman, but here she was transformed into something lovely, and more intensely herself: strong, elegant, imperious, sarcastic. And around the thin stony lips, the slightest hint of a smile.
***
In the summer palace, tucked into the rolling landscape surrounding the causeway out of the city, Michelangelo found the prince. Now the emperor, he supposed. Though he saw no sign that anyone had been alerted to that fact. No one stopped him at the gate, no one stopped him along the path, no one stopped him at the entrance to the small villa that sat toward the back of the complex, facing a slow-moving tributary of the wandering river.
The day was warm and bright. On the porch that gave out to the sloping lawn of the riverbank, the prince lay on the floor. He was sound asleep, fully nude. Scattered about him, interspersed on embroidered pillows and low divans alongside discarded robes and jugs of wine, were perhaps a dozen courtesans in various stages of undress. Under Michelangelo’s feet, leaves of rice paper rustled in the breeze.
He bent and picked one up:
Slow river in the moonlight
Moon like a bangle on her wrist!
When she dances, armies quiver
And the sun delays her rise.
And another:
Days pass slowly studying ancients
What can Wang Xizhi say to me?
Yes, his script may be masterful
So I am told; where is it now?
Michelangelo let the papers fall, shaking his head. He walked to the river. A small boat was tied up on the bank. Inside it he found a wooden bucket.
Returning to the prince’s side, he dumped the bucketful of water over his head. The prince bolted awake, coughing. He wiped his long wet hair back from his eyes. He looked up at Michelangelo wildly, uncomprehendingly.
The foreigner! You dare assault my person. You… you are even more foolish than you are ugly. You will not always enjoy my father’s protection.
Your father is dead. Your uncle has betrayed you. Your childhood has come to an end.
The prince stared at him dumbly.
Even now your sister and brother prepare the defenses for the city. Go, and lead them.
The prince appeared not to hear. His attention was fixed outside, where the midday sun shone on the brilliant green of the young leaves.
It is spring, and the pear blossoms are in bloom. Are they not lovely?
Michelangelo looked around on the bare-skinned women splayed on the pillows like so many snow leopards. Most were still sleeping off the wine, but a few studied him lazily.
Yes, I can see that.
He crouched down before the prince and spoke in a whisper.
If your uncle is allowed to welcome the rebels, you will never again touch a woman’s flesh. You and all of your siblings will be executed for traitors. These concubines will be raped and then either enslaved, or, more likely, strangled and dumped over the wall. Your pear orchard will burn. Go then, and do something worth writing about.
Michelangelo stood. For a moment, he too watched the pear blossoms like white stars falling. There was no sound but the wind in the leaves and the ripple of water and the soft exhalations of women.
When I was young, I dreamed of other lands where life would be strange and different. But now I see that in all places men are the same. Bravery and honor everywhere skip generations, and all sublime achievements are as delicate as blossoms, crushed under the boots of pretenders. It is a great shame.
The prince was now on his feet, covering his bare loins with a wrap of woman’s silk brocade.
Such insolence will not go unpunished.
Michelangelo turned in the doorway.
I will spare you the trouble, your Majesty.
***
He rode for what seemed to him ages, the freshness of northern spring giving way to verdant, lustrous summer. He had no path and did not need one; the plain was vast and open before him, coaxing him toward the pure pleasure of riding, of sleeping under the stars or in granaries, of eating nourishing bowls of millet porridge and turnip soup with the tenant farmers who would not accept his silver coins, but would allow him the satisfaction of a day of labor alongside them. He relished the open air after so many years of palace life. Of being always watched, of watching always where he stepped, how he must speak, and to whom he must not. Amid the bawdy laughter of the peasants he felt the fetid and anxious atmosphere of the capital slowly purging itself from his lungs.
South of Jinan, in Chufou, he wandered the Kong Forest. Before the graves of Confucius and his descendents, he pondered the words of the princess. For the first time in many years, in a grove of trees, amid the dried petals of flower offerings, he put down on his knees and prayed. Father, forgive me. Father, give me strength. Be with Lodovico, and forgive him. Be with Lorenzo, and forgive him. Be with my brothers, and guide them. Mother, pray for me and remember me. Amen.
At Yangshan he stopped at the old quarry from which an emperor once decreed an impossibility with the force of divine law: that a stone be raised, in a single piece of flesh from the mountainside, to a vertical stele measuring more than 120 Florentine braccia. Were it to be completed, almost as high as Giotto’s campanile. Many men had died for this impossibility, now long abandoned, but as he ran his hand along the gigantic monolith, almost entirely, but not quite, freed from its earthly base, he could not help but admire, and even somehow envy, their doomed ambition.
Simplicity: A calling that could never be completed, whose inevitable failure would cost your life, which you could never escape or, more importantly, ever hope of escaping. And then with a grim smile he recalled the Topolinos’ maxim: Stone yields itself to skill and to love. He wondered what they would have said about this bloody and pointless block.
***
In Fugiu with the long hot days already starting to shorten he stayed above a tavern fronting the canal where by night he was kept awake by the carousing of merchants and soldiers. He sold the stallion, whose frentera with the royal seal between its big black eyes had earned him easy passage along his route. He got a very good price from a harried diplomat tasked with a mission to the summer capital. He patted the creature’s muzzle affectionately in farewell, and then leaned in to kiss its soft nose.
The city was sweltering and bright, until the typhoons rolled in. The storms veiled the mountains and shook the fig trees. As he waited through the long afternoons, trapped in his room by the rains, he tried again to read or to draw. It was no use.
One day, finally oppressed beyond endurance by the directionless gray light on the walls, he donned his peasant’s wide-brimmed bamboo hat, and went out into the storm.
He was instantly soaked, his cloak heavy like a carcass upon his back. He did not care. There was no else about on the streets. He walked for what seemed to him hours, days. The light waxed and waned and waxed again but in the storm it was all the same. He reached the river, crossed its broad expanse, circled the island, and then crossed back. In the middle of the bridge he looked down. He made no reflection in the strong current. Along the far banks the ships were huddled together, their masts fastened securely against the winds. He stared into the rushing water and counted up his failures once more. Failure in love. Failure to please his father, to support his brothers. Failure to protect at least two kingdoms, two different homes. And now failure in his work, too, failure to honor his gifts. And so they had grown impatient, and left him. Could he blame them?
He knew that in this weather a man could simply disappear into the swollen river, running so close and fast under the belly of the stone bridge. No one would miss him, or even know. He turned and kept walking.
He walked and walked. He found himself passing, by haphazard turns through narrow nameless alleyways and under countless pailou stained dark with water, into a quarter of the city that was unknown to him. Here the streets widened and the handsome blocks of paving stone gave way to muddy lanes. The rain pelted him harder than ever and he knew it would soon grow dark again. Alone amid the houses and workshops he spotted a tea shop lit by the warm glow of lanterns. He nearly fell onto the bench under the green awning. He sipped at the hot bitter liquid eagerly, burning his tongue. All at once his exhaustion fell on him.
Next to him on the porch was a man he had not at first noticed. The man was dressed strangely, in a white farsetto under a tan-colored cape and white calzoni. On his breast was stitched the blood red Florentine fleur-de-lis. He was bone dry. He lifted his teacup to Michelangelo and smiled. Michelangelo knew somehow that he knew this man. Then with a shock that sent his tired heart pounding, he recognized him.
Magnifico!
A title you never gave me in life, Michelagnolo. Why do you do so now?
In an impulsive gesture, Michelangelo had reached out his hand to grasp Lorenzo’s shoulder. Lorenzo laughed, with a heartiness he had rarely had on Earth.
I am as real as anything, my young friend. Sit with me a while. You have travelled far to visit. Did you not know you could have found me more easily just inside the Basilica?
I would have travelled all oceans to spend another evening around the fire with you.
In time, it will be so. You must not lose heart. But now tell me: Where next O great adventurer?
Michelangelo remembered the bridge, and felt ashamed.
I had thought… I intended… There are traders here who will carry me to Cipangu. Then perhaps beyond. Perhaps… I have even had dreams of the New World.
He found himself unable to lie to Lorenzo, who looked at him with a profound pity. Lorenzo placed his hand on Michelangelo’s arm.
Perhaps, figlio, it is time to go home. There is yet work to be done. Nothing need bar you from this.
Michelangelo felt tears welling in his eyes.
I saw it, Lorenzo. The evil one showed me. I saw who I really am, what I really desire. What my talents really are. How can I bear to wield them now?
Lorenzo gave him a severe look.
He is a liar above all. You know that.
He deceived but there was nonetheless truth in what he spoke. Or at least in what it awoke in my heart. I felt it.
It is more devastating to deceive with the truth than with falsehood. In this way one loses all mooring of truth, as you have done. The truth is…
Now the smile had returned to Lorenzo’s face.
The truth is much stranger than you can imagine.
But what can I do? There is still a price on my head.
You may find that such paper tigers crumple at one blow.
Lorenzo sipped his tea and considered this man, who, though his beard was full of gray, appeared now, with his head in his hands, as the boy who first presented himself at the Medici sculpture garden, impetuous, eager, lost.
Tomorrow, at dawn, if you so desire, a man named Christopher will be waiting for you at the docks. He has been informed that you are an able seaman seeking working passage on one of the spice freighters bound for Al-Qulzum. I must warn you, it will be a very long time at sea. One who walks far into the forest must walk the same distance back out.
Michelangelo lifted his head and cried out to the empty street.
The sea is not my trade!
Lorenzo laughed, and was gone.
***
He had passed with the merchant train under the San Niccolò gate with tears in his eyes. His beloved city, with its warm bright walls and the red of the Duomo popping against the deep blue November sky. He had not dared hope he would ever again lay eyes on it.
He was surprised to find his studio on the Via Mozza unoccupied. He was not surprised that none recognized him on the street. After all these years, he could barely recognize himself, though beneath his long beard and sun-creased forehead his reflection in the river still berated him with the same old visage: disfigured nose, unbalanced face, sunken eyesockets.
Someone had been through his things, and many of his drawings had disappeared from his worktable, but his marbles stood untouched. And on his desk, under his pen, a thick sheet of Fabriano paper. He could not bear to look at it.
Suddenly Granacci was at his side. His old friend, passing by, had been startled to see a lamp lit in the abandoned studio. His face was twisted in a struggle between grief, confusion, and joy. Otherwise his clear blue eyes were as sharp and youthful as ever.
We’ve searched everywhere for you, and then here you are!
Here I am, dear Granacci. I tried my best, but I could do no other.
Then you must have already heard of Clement’s pardon. Though I myself have only just heard.
Pope Clement?
Who else, you old buffoon? He’s putting you back to work. Aren’t you happy?
I can make no sense of it... What of my father?
He is well, though he complains bitterly of your abandonment.
Nothing changes. And her?
Granacci’s face darkened. Michelangelo found he had no more weeping left in him. The dullness was far worse.
Oh Granacci. What a fool I have been. An old man does not have decades to waste.
Decades? Caro, Ferrucio fell in August. Come here, your fever must be worsening.
Michelangelo waved him away. He sat down at his desk. He opened the drawer and took out the sonnet. He added the final couplet. Considered it. Then signed under the last line, folded the paper, sealed it, kissed it. And then he collapsed.
***
Winter came and spring came and winter again and spring again until the cycles seemed to float free of their anchorage and his life no longer appeared to him divided into stages or progressing along any trajectory, but instead as a scrap paper palimpsest muddled with overlapping marks and ghosts of deletions and half-formed lines, whose origins in time and space and whose ultimate intentions could no longer be discerned but only dimly guessed at.
Popes and princes come and go, projects begin, or finish, or are abandoned, love blooms and dies; but all that mattered was that his chiseling had fallen silent. His heart was weak and his head ached. His future seemed to him bleaker, more opaque than ever. But even in old age he was full of the energy that had never had outlet enough, and so he walked. He walked and walked. Amid the lilies and the swollen, rushing streams and the intoxicating scents of jasmine and fennel and oregano, he felt as if a man outside of himself, watching from above. The outpouring of new life all around him inspired his gratitude, as always, and yet it only threw into greater relief his own deadness.
From the heights of Fiesole he looked down on Florence. His city had survived to fight on, but perhaps he had not. War, plague, heartbreak, starvation, deserts, oceans, tyrants, fanatics, vindictive clients, murderous stone crashing down from the heights. He had endured it all—for what? In his desk he still had the letter from the court of Francis; perhaps he would just keep walking, to France. And then further. To what end? It didn’t matter. And this time he would not return.
***
The little girl was alone in the fishing boat along the banks of the river. Michelangelo, jolted from his rumination, stood gazing at her dumbly. There was no father with her, no brother. Indeed he saw now that there was no one else in any direction. Nothing moved, and even the boastful nightingales that nested along the waterside were silent.
Son of Francesca, I bid thee join me. The water is deep and wide.
The little girl laughed, and as she did so his bones reverberated like they had been struck by a chisel, and his skin hummed with warmth.
Lady, I bow to the one who sends you.
The girl did not appear to make any effort to steer, but nonetheless the craft drifted upriver, toward the bridge. The girl was leaning lazily over the gunwhale, trailing her hand in the water, singing to herself. It was the most beautiful melody he had ever heard. For the rest of his life this melody would be on the tip of his tongue, but he could never fully recover it. Finally she turned toward him. They were in the center of the river’s stream and overhead the noon sun burned hot.
O thou faithful one. Why art thou sad?
His eyes were streaming with tears.
I was not strong enough to fulfill the tasks appointed me. I wasted, I sinned, I failed to love. I was not the man I should have been.
The girl laughed, and the bridge and the city beyond flickered like a candle flame battered by a gust of tramontana, then reappeared solidly once more.
Young one, peace. Surely thy Lord bids thee don these torn garments no longer. Such are not fit for a wedding feast.
Lady, do you carry me there now?
She did not answer, but studied a clump of oak along the bank with childlike pensiveness.
Michelangelo, early thou receivest one purpose, and thou sweatest night and day in fulfillment, but just as one leaf of the tree knowest naught of the purposes of the body.
I did seek to follow the light that was given me to the sky.
And are thou not of much larger worth than this leaf?
My Lady, one leaf is nothing to the tree.
Her fingers were tracing out little circles in the water.
Think thou not? Does the sculptor not bear with his whole being over every stroke?
That he does, Lady.
How much greater thy Master than sculptor merely.
She laughed again, a sound the color of cherry blossoms. Flocks of birds wheeled up from the banks of the river. A breeze was rising, and voices were carrying from the bridge. The little boat was moving fast, rocking in the current. Michelangelo realized some of the voices were coming nearer.
Ho! Buonarroti! Drunk again I see!
Seba, was I not told this one works night and day? A hard labor!
Bernardo, faith. Surely he was set upon by highwaymen and impressed to this sunny exile!
Bernardo, Sebastian, and young Daniele looked down on him from their yacht, a gift, Michelangelo guessed, from the new duke.
Mark his red face! Il Divino has taken quite the scoundrel in his old age.
Shall we rescue this rat or let drift? Up Arno without oars! Perhaps he needs to learn a lesson.
Let us be merciful, friends. Perhaps he was celebrating the completion of some new masterpiece, eh?
Sebastian was attempting to toss over a knotted rope for Michelangelo to afix to the smaller boat’s bow, but, doubled over in laughter, he kept missing.
Michelangelo watched their hilarity with an indulgent smile. And he watched Daniele, kneeling at the yacht’s gunwhale, his long arms bent over his knee in supple balance with the rocking ship, his trapezius tensed, the line of the muscle that reached from its anchor in the clavicle up behind the ear effortlessly guiding the heavy skull in its delicate movements under the mop of dark hair. This youthful form, powerful but agile, brute but sensitive to the slightest command, condensing the intelligence of the universe.
And all at once Michelangelo saw: he saw in his mind’s eye the balance of pillars and pendentives and domes, he saw a soaring vault unlike any other created by the mind or hand of man, he saw beams of sunlight slashing sidelong across vast halls. He saw arches and architraves, he saw children playing, he saw rough white faces mourning, he saw green eyes flashing, he saw men learning to love and work and suffer, he saw Christ’s kingly arm outstretched, he saw Saul thrown from his horse, he saw Kephas with his feet in the heavens, he saw millions, billions, uncountable throngs of people, kneeling and exclaiming and remembering and weeping and worshipping in languages he had never conceived of, a parade of all the nations down all the corridors of time seeking something they could not define, perhaps could not understand, but knew somehow they had been searching for, that they had known all their lives. And in the silent heart of his vision, in the shadow of a column, dwarfed by the dome, in the solitude of the sanctuary, she beckoned to him, and turned, and disappeared.
There was so much yet to be done!
Above him, Daniele was nodding along playfully with Sebastian, whose rope had finally landed with a thud on Michelangelo’s deck.
Fine, fine, Seba. I suppose we should not yet give him up. Perhaps the old ox can still make himself useful, somehow.