The Medusa Amulet

Chapter 6

The knock that had just sounded on Benvenuto’s door was not a friendly one, and the voice that called out his name was equally peremptory.

His hands were coated with warm wax, and he was in the middle of making a model of Caterina, who stood in the nude holding a wreath as if offering it up to the Heavens. It had taken him half the day just to calm her down, and it was bad enough that she insisted on wearing a scarf over her white hair.

“Who is it?” he bellowed, his eyes still trained on the girl. “What do you want?”

Cellini had already had to send his assistant Ascanio to the apothecary’s shop for a hair dye made of boiled walnuts and leeks-Caterina said she would not set foot outside until her hair was made black again-and now there was no one there to answer the damn door.

“It’s Captain Lucasi, and I am here at the behest of his lordship, Cosimo, the Duke de’Medici.”

The duke was the immensely wealthy ruler of Florence and patron to all of its greatest artists-Cellini among them. As for this Lucasi, Cellini knew from previous run-ins with the man that he was an officious prig, terribly impressed with the colored balls-the Medici insignia-adorning the front of his uniform.

“Damn it to Hell!” Cellini exclaimed, wiping his hands on a rag and throwing it on the worktable. “Let him in.”

Caterina wrapped herself in the bedsheet and, after making sure no wisps of white hair were escaping from under the scarf, opened the door.

Lucasi took her in slowly, looking from head to foot with a sly smile on his lips. “Shouldn’t you be wearing a yellow veil?” he said, referring to the garment prostitutes were required to wear in the streets of the city.

Caterina scowled and walked away.

Lucasi stepped into the room, looking all around. “What have I interrupted?” He poked his nose into the fireplace, where a pot of white beeswax was being kept warm and malleable, but when he ventured to touch it with his finger, Cellini shouted, “Get away from that, you dolt!”

The captain pretended to take no offense, but turned, with the smile still on his lips, and said, “You need to come with me.”

“Where? What for?”

Captain Lucasi shrugged. “The duke pays for everything you’ve got here,” he said, gesturing widely at the silver cups on the floor, the gems still loose on a table, and finally at Caterina, who had planted herself on top of the seaman’s chest, “and when he says come, you come.”

Cellini was within a hair of refusing, but even he knew better. When the Medici summoned, you answered their call, or wound up in a cell in the notorious Stinche. He had been there before, for public brawling, and had no wish to return.

“Give me a minute,” he growled, roughly scrubbing the wax off his hands and wrists with a bar of lye soap before pulling on a fresh shirt and blue tunic. Beneath them he wore the Medusa, which he had sworn to himself he would never again remove. “Take the charcoal from the hearth,” he said to Caterina, “and put a lid on the wax.” Marching toward the door, he said to Lucasi, “Let’s go then.”

The captain glanced down at his pants and shoes, still spattered with bits of wax, and said, “You don’t want to change those, too?”

“I thought you were in such a hurry,” Cellini replied, starting down the wooden stairs. If the duke thought his finest artist should live at his constant beck and call, then he’d better get used to seeing the signs of his toil.

Outside, the narrow street was relatively quiet, the heat having driven everyone indoors hours ago. The sun was lower in the sky, and the shadows of the other workshops fell over the cobblestones. A stray dog lay panting under the eaves of the ironmonger’s across the way, a grocer’s cart slowly rumbled along behind a swaybacked donkey. From a third-story window, an old woman beat a carpet against the balcony rail.

With Cellini leading the way, and Captain Lucasi doing his best to make it look like the artisan was in his custody, they marched to the Ponte alla Carraia, the ancient bridge where the wool carts from as far away as Flanders and France brought their wares to be sold and dyed and spun. The dyers, whose hands and arms were stained blue and green, used the Arno River below to rinse and wash the wool. But at this time of year, there wasn’t much to work with; the water level had fallen so low that dying fish were flopping on the banks. Dante called the river, which neatly divided the city in two, that “cursed ditch,” and Cellini would not have argued the point.

When they reached the Piazza della Signoria, the broad public square where some of the city’s greatest statuary was on display-Michelangelo’s unrivaled David, and Donatello’s Judith and Holofornes -Cellini slowed down, as he could never help but do, to admire the workmanship, and Captain Lucasi gave him a shove on the shoulder. Cellini whirled around and barked, “If you do that again, you’ll regret it.”

“Just keep moving,” Lucasi retorted.

“Barbarian.”

The duke’s palazzo, a huge fortress of pale stone topped by a crenellated tower, sat on the square like a great brooding giant, a fitting symbol of the Medici power and influence throughout Tuscany and beyond. Cellini had been there countless times before, but he never failed to notice the immediate hush that fell the moment he passed beneath its arched doorway, the sense of leaving the ordinary world and entering a far more rarefied precinct. Not that it instilled in him any trepidation. Since the day he was born and his father had christened him Benvenuto-or Welcome-he had felt at home anywhere. He was proud to say he was cowed by no man, and with only a few exceptions-his friend Michelangelo, the painter Masaccio-considered himself the superior of anyone he met, even dukes and princes and popes.

He would bend the knee, he often said to himself, but never the head.

The footmen recognized him, and even before the captain had announced their arrival, Cellini was mounting the marble steps to the salons that surrounded the central courtyard. He had powerful legs and moved like a bull with his head down, always plowing through any obstacle that might present itself. His shoulders were broad and strong, conditioned by years of sculpting and metalwork; his hands and fingers were knotted and hard from bending gold and silver to his wishes. He was thirty-eight years old but looked younger and could handle himself in a fight with men half his age.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Captain Lucasi complained when Cellini turned left at the top of the stairs and took his usual shortcut through the duchess’s suite of rooms. Everywhere, on walls and ceilings, in niches and on plinths above the doorways, there were remarkable works of art-frescoes by Benozzo Gozzoli, statues by Mino da Fiesole, paintings by Uccello and Pollaiuolo. Cellini never missed an opportunity to reacquaint himself with the past masters whose work he strove to surpass.

“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 himself. If Bandinelli had had the nerve to fling such an accusation at him anywhere but the Duke de’Medici’s office, he’d have knocked his head off. His heart was pounding so hard that he could feel the cold metal of La Medusa, on its thick silver chain, bobbing under his shirt.

“Benvenuto. Are you feeling all right?”

He glanced up and saw the jeweler, Landi, no doubt heading to the Medici palace to sew up the sale of the pearl necklace.

“Yes, yes, I’m fine,” Cellini replied.

“Do you happen to know if her ladyship is receiving?”

“She is.”

Landi narrowed his eyes and smiled. “And is she in a buying mood?”

“When isn’t she?”

Landi laughed, said “God bless her for that,” and swaggered on. Cellini hoped that the duchess would keep his appraisal of the pearls to herself. He hardly needed to make another enemy in Florence.

It was dusk already, and the monumental sculptures in the square threw long shadows on the stones. Donatello’s Judith stood, sword raised above the head of the Assyrian general, Holofernes. Michelangelo Buonarotti’s David, armed with slingshot, gazed confidently across the courtyard. And Cellini, already an acknowledged master in so many arts, longed to make his own contribution to their august company. What the piazza needed, and what he knew he could provide, was a bronze more perfectly modeled and chased and refined than any such statue ever done.

Its subject?

The hero Perseus… in the winged sandals given to him by Hermes, and holding the sword-forged by Hephaestus himself, to defeat the Gorgon-bestowed on him by Athena.

What could be more fitting, more dramatic, and more likely to make Bandinelli hang himself in envy?

With that happy thought in mind, he headed off to the Ponte Vecchio, so that he could stop at the artisans’ shops that lined both sides of the bridge and pick up some much-needed supplies. He thought it also might be nice to buy some little gift for Caterina, perhaps a bit of lace, or maybe an amber comb. She was undoubtedly attending to her hair, and he was confident that as it grew out, it would return to its lustrous black.

But as for Caterina herself… that was another question completely. When would she realize the full import of what had happened? When would she discover the full effect of the moonlight striking the glass? A year? Five years? When would she know?

Or when should he tell her?

He had been a fool to have left the schematics for the iron box out on his worktable… but she was more ingenious than he’d suspected, first finding the casket and then figuring out how to open the lock. And it was that very cunning, he had to admit, which gave her such a powerful hold over him. She was not only the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, but the most clever. He had first spotted her on the arm of an aristocrat at Fontainebleau, when he had gone there to design a fountain for the King of France, and he had known from that very first moment that he had to have her… as model, as muse, as lover.

After picking up some odds and ends-wire and wax for his armatures-he found a perfect small sapphire at a jeweler’s shop, poorly set in a pendant necklace. The foil behind it, meant to bring out its brilliance, was instead dulling it, and he thought that, with a little work, he could reset it. The jeweler, another friend of his, gave him a good price, but as he stepped out of the shop, thinking about his dinner, he caught a whiff of smoke in the air. Several other people had smelled it, too, and they were all looking toward the southern side of the Arno, from which the wind was blowing.

Cellini’s step quickened as he crossed the rest of the bridge, and quickened even more as he entered the Borgo San Jacopo. The smell of smoke was stronger here, and it was blowing from the west, the direction of his studio. A gypsy boy was sprinting past, and Cellini snagged him by his arm. “Where’s the fire?” he asked and the boy, yanking his arm loose, said, “Santo Spirito.”

Cellini broke into a run, the smell getting stronger all the time, and passing people who were also heading in the direction of the fire. By the time he rounded the corner, and saw the fire wagon outside his workshop, with Ascanio and a dozen other men throwing buckets of water at the blaze, he had dropped all but the necklace.

He pushed his way through the onlookers and rushed to Ascanio’s side. “Is everyone safe? Is Caterina safe?”

Ascanio, his face smeared with soot, shouted “Yes!” over the crackling of the flames. “We threw what we could out the windows!” Indeed, some loose books and sketches and even a few medallions still littered the street. “I’ve got the jewels in my pockets!”

“And the rest?” Cellini said, knowing that Ascanio would take his meaning.

“They are safe.”

Cellini was so relieved that his most prized treasures had been saved, and Caterina spared, that the loss of everything else hardly mattered. He grabbed an empty bucket, filled it from the barrel on the wagon, and hurled the water through a burning window frame. But he could see, through the billowing smoke, that nothing would stop the fire. The residents of the neighboring houses were already emptying out their own homes, for fear the conflagration would spread, and in all the confusion, a man with a sword at his side suddenly slapped a firm hand on his shoulder and said, “Benvenuto Cellini?”

Before he could even answer, someone else had slipped a black sack over his head and jerked a leather cord to tighten it around his neck.

He heard Ascanio holler, and the sounds of a street brawl, and he swung the bucket at whoever was holding him. It hit something brittle, he heard a groan, then the cord was yanked tighter. He couldn’t breathe, and he was knocked off his feet by what might have been the hilt of a sword. Still kicking, he was dragged into an alleyway, then manhandled into a waiting carriage. He heard the crack of a whip and felt the wheels begin to roll. As he struggled to get up again, a knee was pressed to his chest, and a voice close to his ear hissed, “Call on your demons now.”