The Courier's Tale
Read The Courier's Tale Online
Authors: Peter Walker
P
eter
W
alker
For Marie and Don
He, Michelangelo, is never less alone than when alone . . . yet he willingly keeps the friendship of those in whom rays of excellence shine forth – for instance, the illustrious Monsignor Pole, with his rare talents and singular goodness . . .
– Ascanio Condivi,
Life of Michelangelo
, 1553
C
ontents
Reginald or Pole, or Poole, born 1500, cousin of Henry VIII
Michael Throckmorton, Pole’s courier
Pietro Bembo, Italian writer, poet, connoisseur
Michelangelo
Vittoria Colonna, poet and patroness
Henry VIII, King of England
Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, ruler of Spain, the Netherlands, Sicily, Peru, etc.
Francis I, King of France
Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief minister
Mary, Henry’s daughter by Katherine of Aragon, later known as ‘Bloody Mary’, born 1516
Philip of Spain, the Emperor’s son, Mary’s husband
Margaret Plantagenet, the ‘Lady of Sarum’, Reginald Pole’s mother
Judith Tracie, Throckmorton’s cousin and first love
Agnes Hide
Sir George Throckmorton, Michael’s elder brother
Marc’Antonio Flaminio, Italian writer and poet
Lord Montagu, Pole’s brother
Marquis of Exeter, Pole’s cousin
Edward Courtenay, Exeter’s son
Gian’pietro Carafa, Pope Paul IV 1555–1560
Ercole Gonzaga, Regent of Mantua
Stephen Gardiner, Chancellor of England
One night some time ago three men broke into a room which is now famous all over the world and which even then, while under construction and shrouded in secrecy, was the subject of intense curiosity in Italy and beyond.
The term ‘broke into’ perhaps conveys the wrong impression. Using a key illicitly obtained, they made their way through the dark in almost complete stealth.
Right at the entrance, however, two of them stumbled, one after the other. This was because the door, which is framed in marble, has an unusual high threshold or ‘saddle’, to use the technical term. You walk into the room as if stepping through a window frame. Even today, in our own perilous but well-lit age, this can trip the unwary.
The first man cursed in Italian: he knew the obstacle was there but had forgotten. The second cursed, in English, because he stubbed his toe.
It would do no good to tell you what they said. Nothing dates with such finality as an oath. The ‘
fuck you
’s of the 1960s and the ‘
sink me
’s of the 1690s share the same doom. But two of those shadows slipping into the Medici chapel in Florence that night were young men in their twenties, for whom even the idea of their own death is hard to believe, much less the fact that one day they will have died so long ago they will seem no more than stick-figures from an antique age.
The Italian who led the way in was a workman on the site. Following him were two Englishmen. One was a scholar named Tom Lupset. The other was considered the most brilliant and accomplished young man in Italy. His name was Reynold or Reginald Pole. In Italy he was known as
Il Signor d’Inghilterra
, the English lord, or even the lord of England, although he was in fact an ordinary ‘Mr’.
But he was a cousin of Henry the Eighth, and a much cherished cousin at that, which was itself unusual, for Henry preferred attention to be directed to his own accomplishments. As King of England, however, he was not in a position to shine in person in the Italian universities. And his cousin’s reputation there reflected well on his own genius. Henry paid Pole one hundred pounds a year to maintain a magnificent household among the students.
The Italians for their part were very pleased with Pole. His lineage alone made him a figure of romance. He seemed to have arrived among them straight out of the beautifully named, if confusing, War of the Roses,
la rosa bianca e la vermiglia
. His mother was the last person to bear the surname Plantagenet. It was his grandfather who drowned in the famous butt of Malmsey.
As well as all that, young Pole was noted for scholarship and virtue. Not only the Doge of Venice and the political establishment of the Republic paid him compliments; he was befriended and praised by the leading scholars and intellectuals of the day – Erasmus, Bembo, Giberti, Sadoleto . . .
What amazed people about him most, however, was this:
he put himself to bed
.
We have a contemporary description of Pole: ‘Of medium height, in complexion white and red, as commonly are the English, his face a little broad, with merry and benignant eyes, and in youth his beard was rather fair. Robust of body, seldom sick . . . he did not care for much personal service and often went to bed without assistance.’
And furthermore: ‘He rose before daylight and dressed himself without any man’s help.’
Pole had been a student in Padua since 1521. In 1525 he made his first visit to Rome. It was on the way back from Rome that we see him slipping into the construction site in Florence.
Entry into the Medici chapel was strictly controlled. Michelangelo, the architect and sculptor of the work, kept the keys; he was the last to leave at night and first back in the morning. A few months before, at the end of 1524, there had been a series of nocturnal break-ins. Nothing was stolen; the sole purpose seems to have been to look around the chapel, where, it was reported, a marvellous group of figures was coming into existence – gathering, as it were, at the tombs of two young Medici dukes, Giuliano and Lorenzo.
Michelangelo was furious at the incursions. To his mind, making a work of art was like making a child – something best done in private. For a week or two he made his foremen stay on site and keep watch all night. But it was midwinter, it was bitterly cold, they missed their lovely wives, and in any case nothing ever happened. After a while he had to let them go home again.
Cautiously, the midnight visits were resumed. This, after all, was Italy. In other countries, aristocratic pastimes were different – hunting, tournaments, mock battles where only the blows given to the peasants were real. But in Italy there was a great passion for art. Dukes and cardinals spied through keyholes, lured away painters, sculptors and medallists, swooped on commissions made by others. The Pope himself slipped into the Sistine one day to inspect the ceiling frescos before they were finished, only to be met by a rain of curses, and, so it is said, planks, thrown down by the painter, working alone high above him.
In the Medici chapel, however, any such seclusion was out of the question. Dozens of stone masons, carpenters, bricklayers and labourers were employed there. We have their names, we even know their nicknames – Chicken, Liar, Gloomy, Babyface, the Goose, Horse, Nero, Antichrist, Woodpecker . . . And when Antichrist and Babyface are on the payroll, even the best security arrangements tend to go awry. Which particular workman let in Lupset and Pole that night is uncertain. Let’s say it was Woodpecker, if only because his name brings him closer to us than the others: across the centuries, you can still hear the very light, rapid action of his chisel . . .
So there they are – Woodpecker leads the way in, Lupset and Pole follow. Woodpecker stumbles, Lupset stumbles, then all three are inside the ‘chapel of the princes’. High above them the cupola is unfinished; only a little starlight shines in. But then Woodpecker brings out the little lantern he has kept until now under his cloak, and suddenly, here and there among the builders’ gear, they begin to see human forms, strange, splendid, some alone, some in groups, some carved in white marble and others, their direct forebears as it were, full-sized models made of dark tow, pitch and rags.
For five hundred years people have been trying to describe the peculiar melancholy conveyed by the statues in the Medici chapel. The figures are sublime, august, yet the atmosphere is muted, full of doubts and speculation, modest; it suggests something remote but commonplace, domestic almost, and inevitable. In short, the subject is the hour of death itself.