New Decameron Ninety-Two: Jo Walton

Or What You Will, chapters 4 and 5

By Jo Walton

4. Three Anecdotes

Once upon a time -- have you ever thought about that formula? Why is it "upon"? We hear the phrase as one word once-upon-a-time and don't think about it. This happened once only, and it happened in time and... upon is a time word, and a strange one: upon a May morning, upon reading these words, upon turning this tap, upon reaching your destination. Usually it means as soon as something has happened. Upon a time. _The_ time where all stories start. And once, as if to say this was so, but it is no longer. And don't say no, war stories start "No shit, there I was," as if that's different from "once upon a time". I hate that. And it's bullshit. There's no difference between fairy tales and war stories, stories for families and stories for men when they're on their own. Pah. All stories start both ways. There's no difference between once upon a time, and believe me, because I was there and still bear the scars. There are scars in everyone's stories, and people who were right there, and unless they've died they're right here still. What all told stories have in common, and the thing that makes them different from life is that they are over, completed, known.

Once, in a land of rolling hills and gentle swift flowing streams, a land of vines and olives and hard wheat, a land where all the towns and villages were built on hilltops, for defence and to see far away, there was one town, rich with the manufacture of art and wool and luxury goods, that lay in a plain beside a river. It was not defenceless, however, for it had walls. The walls were bigger than the town needed, for after it had grown and extended its walls several times a terrible plague came, and the population no longer filled the whole of the space the walls enclosed. They were strong walls of smooth grey stone, and the six gates set in them had towers and portcullises like castle walls, and bright flags flew from them, and they were defended by guards in glistening mail and coloured surcoats. The flags caught the breeze and showed their brave devices in bright colours: flowers and eagles and the sun. Here and there in the walls stood solid stone bastions, and on the bastions were set cannons. That's what bastions are, solid blocks strong enough to take a cannon recoil, which makes the common term "last bastion" have much more resonance. Bastions were invented in the early fifteenth century by Brunelleschi, an artist and architect who spent a season in the field with the army and came up with this innovation, a man of this city, because yes, this city in the plain is the flowering city of Florence, or rather let us call it Firenze, because why should we choose to filter its name through the tongues of its French enemies? They're the reason why they needed the walls and those bastions in the first place.

Here we find ourselves suddenly on a stout grey wall in the real world, in a real place and time. It wasn't Brunelleschi who pulled us out of the realm of fairy-tale, not Brunelleschi only, it was the guns. You can have the Renaissance in secondary world fantasy, but never gunpowder, though gunpowder was an invention of the Middle Ages that came before, and platemail was invented to defend against pistols, so those knights in shining armour you like to imagine lived in a world that never was. Guns somehow poison the possibility of fantasy. (Even Zelazny only just got away with it in _The Guns of Avalon_. Most fantasy that has guns is real history with added magic, like _The Dragon Waiting_.) 

Brunelleschi, sculptor, architect, and inventor, turning his hand to many things in that way that absolutely characterises the Renaissance, that time of excitement when everything that was old that was good was coming back and mixing with everything that was new in a heady ferment that had never been before. And, in a way that was particularly Florentine, he was a trickster too. Let me tell you about Brunelleschi in the real world before we advance further towards the borders and bounds and brinks of the fantastic.

First, the story you may already know. In that time of revival, when they thought they could get back the ancient world but better, with God and without slavery, Brunelleschi built the dome of the Duomo, Firenze's great cathedral. It is still the largest unsupported masonry dome in the world. At the time they began it, in a great leap of faith, to make the greatest cathedral anyone had ever raised to the glory of God, they had no idea how to complete it. The ability to make a dome like that had been lost, if indeed it had ever existed. But they built the foundations, and then Brunelleschi came along and created new mathematics, new machinery (cranes and winches unlike any ever seen before, which still exist and seem rather a product of the Industrial Revolution that was still three hundred or more years away) and new designs. From all this a huge miraculous dome rose, which is hidden among houses, so that whenever you do catch a glimpse of it, you cannot but be startled at its size, as well as catching your breath at its beauty. Before Brunelleschi began work, when he was standing before the committee who could give him the job, when he had never built any dome at all, they asked him for details of how he would do it. He pulled an egg out of his pocket and asked them to make it stand on end. People tried various ways, and failed. Brunelleschi broke the end off the egg, and stood the rest of it up. They scoffed and said anyone could have done that, and Brunelleschi said yes, they could, if they had only thought of it. He didn't explain further, and despite the lack of details they gave him the money and the workers and the permission that let him go ahead and make his beautiful incredible dome, which still stands, defying perspective, accreting legend. His dome, their dome, Firenze's dome, the world's dome.

It's amazing it worked, really.

The committee who gave him the job, the Wool Guild's committee for overseeing the work on the Duomo, deserve a great deal of credit for supporting him in his genius. Not everybody would. Indeed, few committees at any time and place would have given Brunelleschi funding after he broke that egg and refused to explain. The committee members were men of vision too. And the committee still exists. Not the individuals, of course. They lived in this world and were mortal. The committee itself, which is eternal, replaces its members one by one as they retire or die, but it survives, still continuing its long task. It has a beautiful and informative museum beside the Duomo now, but better than that, the committee still oversees the actual work of building the cathedral, which still isn't complete, which will never be complete, which is being created even as it is restored. The committee lives, the work goes on, scaffolding rises, tiles are commissioned and made and set in place, choices and decisions are made about funding, now as when that arrogant genius Brunelleschi stood before them with the egg. This is one way to be immortal, which may be some consolation in the absence of more satisfactory ways.

The next story is about Brunelleschi and Ghiberti. Brunelleschi and Ghiberti were both artists, sculptors and architects, and rivals in everything. They were both of the same age, and the same social class -- guildsmen, which meant they could vote and hold office in the oligarchic republic that was Renaissance Firenze. They could wear the woven red cioppa as a sign of their status, as a toga was in ancient Rome. (Cosimo de' Medici said cynically that three yards of red cloth made a gentleman.) A hundred years before this, Firenze had rid itself of its nobles, who were always feuding. They killed them, or exiled them, or barred them from holding office, and all the old noble families except one vanished. That one, the Tornaquinci family, went to ground, changing their name to Tornabuoni and pretending they had been merchants all along like everyone else. The strangest thing about this is that it means nothing. There are no consequences. They married into the other guild-class families and become exactly like them, and their origin never mattered to anyone. They didn't end up on top, or betray the city, or anything. History doesn't work like a story. It rarely wraps up satisfyingly. It's full of perpetual loose ends and dangling motifs that any writer reading it immediately wants to tug on and tie up into bows. But here, now, at the moment we are considering early in the Renaissance, 1401, the very beginning of an exciting new century, the names of qualified guildsmen are put into purses and drawn out to see who rules the city. Eight men of the merchant class rule for two months at a time, the highest honour the city affords. It was a real, if time-bounded, power, and if it led to inconsistent policies, well, it's better than tyranny, and how is your democracy doing at that this fine day? (Don't answer that. Don't even think about that.)

The names were drawn out for other things, too, such as judging city art competitions. There was in 1401 an art competition for who should make the new bronze doors of the Baptistery, Firenze's amazing circular church, with its inner dome covered already in golden mosaics telling the whole story from creation to doomsday. It was actually built around 1100, but falsely believed by 1400 to be a converted Roman temple to Mars, because anything large and wonderful was attributed to the Romans, in Italy, as in more northern places the works of the Romans were attributed to giants. The artists competing to make the Baptistery doors were given some bronze and asked to make from it a sample panel, the story of the sacrifice of Isaac. Ghiberti and Brunelleschi each made a panel, in fierce rivalry. None of the other entries were worth consideration, but these two were both wonderful. The judges whose names were drawn from a purse were torn between the two offerings, but in the end chose Ghiberti's panel, and gave Ghiberti the job of making the great doors. 

This committee of judges, unlike the Wool Guild committee, was an ephemeral thing that dissolved right away, as soon as Ghiberti was chosen. The two panels, however, were preserved, and can be seen today in the Bargello Museum. The most interesting thing isn't comparing them and second guessing the committee to decide which one you'd give the prize to, fun though that is. But it's much more interesting to compare Ghiberti's panel in the Bargello to the same panel on the actual doors he made, the doors that bear the name Michelangelo gave them a century later, "The Gates of Paradise". Look carefully at the panels. We have three, the one on the doors and the two competition models, all showing the same scene from the same story, that strange Old Testament moment of aborted child sacrifice, when Abraham obediently takes up the knife to murder his son at God's command, and God sends an angel with a ram just in time to save the child. They're all different. In between the time of the competition and making the actual door, linear perspective had been invented, mostly by Brunelleschi. 

There were ways of sort-of faking perspective before. Massaccio was the first person to do a true perspective painting that survives, Leon Battista Alberti was the first person to write about perspective. But it was Brunelleschi, with his mathematical skill, who first figured it out. He stood in the doorway of the Duomo and painted a picture of what he saw, precisely: the Baptistery, and the space between, and the pillar where St Zenobius's miraculous elm tree once stood, using perspective. It was a painting so wonderfully lifelike people actually confused it for reality and tried to walk into it. Ghiberti's panel on the door has true linear perspective. Neither his competition panel nor Brunelleschi's does. When you think of what it means to live in a golden age, think about that.

Brunelleschi's perspective painting of the view from the steps of the Duomo, the very first painting with true linear perspective, doesn't survive. There's no trace of it, and no record of what happened to it. We just have awed descriptions of it. But we know what it must have looked like. The square is still there, the Baptistery, and the pillar. The clothes on the people have changed, and of course Ghiberti finished his doors. But the descriptions say it was as real as the real thing, and we can still stand where he stood and see the real thing. Standing where he stood, looking at the real thing, surely we can imaginatively recreate the painting?

Third Brunelleschi story. As well as his rival Ghiberti, he had a best friend (and sometime lover), the sculptor Donatello. Donatello made a painted wooden crucifix for the great church of Santa Maria Novella. Brunelleschi criticized it, saying that Donatello had made Christ look like a carpenter. Donatello challenged him to do better. Brunelleschi then carved his own crucifix, for the great church of Santa Croce. Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce were rival churches then, the first belonged to the Dominicans and the second to the Franciscans, rival monastic orders, founded in about 1200 by St Dominic and St Francis, respectively. They must have been very pleased to each get a comparable crucifix. They were always competing for art, wealth, and fame. In the way in which Firenze has divided up the functions of spirituality and human life between its different churches, Santa Maria Novella is where people get married, and Santa Croce is where prominent Florentines are buried. (Though of these three, only Ghiberti ended up in Santa Croce. Donatello is in San Lorenzo, the church of the soul, and, exceptionally, Brunelleschi lies under his own dome, in the Duomo.)

When Brunelleschi had completed his own crucifix, he knew that if he just openly showed it to Donatello, Donatello wouldn't admit it was better than his. So he invited Donatello to dinner, without saying anything about the crucifix, and met him beforehand in the market, the old market that is called the new market, the Mercato Nuovo, down near the guild church of Orsanmichele. (The market is still in the same location, with the same open sides, stone supports, and covered portico, but now it sells leather bags and silk scarves and tapestries to tourists, and if you want food you have to go to the luscious markets of San Ambrogio or San Lorenzo.) They met there, among the food stalls, and Brunelleschi told Donatello he'd be along in a minute, and asked him to take the groceries home. 

Don't imagine paper or a shopping bag. He'd have had the groceries in his arms, or perhaps in a wicker basket. If there was a fish, (as there very well might have been, nobody recorded the menu that day but they ate a lot of fish, fresh from the Arno or brought up from the sea at Pisa) it would be suspended by a thread through the gills, as we see in paintings of Tobias and the Angel. Or it might have been mostly prepared food from stalls that specialised in takeout. Lots of people in Firenze at that date lived in apartments that didn't have anywhere to cook, and these stalls did a thriving business in ready cooked food. We think of prepared food as a modern thing, but it was very common in Renaissance Firenze. Brunelleschi had his own house, which probably did have a kitchen, up under the roof as was usual in Italy at this time -- the reason was to prevent fire damage. If the kitchen was up there, it would burn the roof but it wouldn't take out the whole place. He probably had servants to cook and clean for him, though we know from this story that they didn't normally do the grocery shopping. There was nothing unusual to Donatello that day in Brunelleschi being in the market choosing his own food for dinner. 

But even if these potential invisible servants (women, she says, women who don't get into the history books or the stories people tell, there have been no women in these stories so far) even if they normally cooked, he still might have chosen takeout that day, for a special dinner with his beloved Donatello. What did they eat? We don't know. We have Michelangelo's shopping lists, with exquisite little drawings of anchovies and spinach, and Pontormo's diaries, from a century later, record menus of half a kid's head, fried, with soup, rosemary bread, and grapes, and on another day an egg and artichoke frittata, ricotta crepes and fried fish. All these seem plausible guesses for Brunelleschi too, but we just don't know and can't find out. For Brunelleschi and Donatello's time we have only records of the elaborate banquets of the rich.

There they were in the market, two artists among stalls selling fresh food and prepared food, workers and merchants from the city, and farmers come in from farms with their produce, milk and cheese and vegetables and fruit, people who had a personal relationship with those they bought from and sold to, often offering them lines of credit, which was easier for everyone in a literate society with very little small change. Donatello, suspecting nothing, accepted the groceries, which I see as a basket, and went with them to Brunelleschi's house. He let himself in (had Brunelleschi given him the key, or did he have his own key?) and immediately saw the crucifix. It's enormous, bigger than lifesize, it looks big in the nave of a huge church. In a house, it would have been overwhelming. It's hard to think where Brunelleschi would have even had room to put it. Donatello dropped the groceries in shock, breaking the eggs that Brunelleschi had deliberately put in there, not for a frittata but so that Donatello wouldn't be able to pretend to indifference.

When Brunelleschi got home soon after, Donatello, with the witness of the broken eggs, generously affirmed that his lover had made Christ look like the Son of God. Did they laugh together then and make dinner out of the dropped groceries? History doesn't record, but we can feel sure they did. 

Like the competition panels, both these crucifixes survive, and hang in the churches they were made for. You can go there now and compare them. She and I went to see them on two consecutive days, on purpose, and I can hardly see a lick of difference between them. They're both huge, stylized, almost iconic, with gold backgrounds and great soulful eyes. We probably wouldn't even have noticed them, and certainly wouldn't have spent any time looking at them compared to the other treasures those churches hold, if it hadn't been for this story. I love a lot of Donatello's sculpture, his David, his St George. Brunelleschi's dome inevitably makes me gasp with delight whenever I glimpse it. But these two crucifixes leave me cold. Carpenter? Son of God? Iconic clones.

All the same, when we recognise great art, let us, like Donatello, let those eggs drop and admit that we are moved, that we care, that this is important.

I need to tell you another story about Brunelleschi, but it should have its own section.

5. Who will laugh, I wonder?

What almost nobody says when they retell the story of the fat woodworker is how incredibly cruel it is. It's a cruel joke that plays with making a man doubt his own self. This is a joke that goes far beyond making your friend drop the eggs. Brunelleschi was cruel, and everyone who helped and everyone who laughed were all cruel too. We can think of the two friends eating supper after the eggs and laughing together. This story doesn't end so happily. Playing a joke on somebody isn't funny unless the victim also agrees that it is.

Once upon a time, Brunelleschi invited a group of close friends to dinner. We don't know the menu and, again, we don't know who did the cooking. Women and servants invisible to history, doubtless, women who were there and had their own complex lives and stories but fade from the record. Even if Brunelleschi bought the food ready prepared from a stall, somebody cooked it. Let us observe the lacuna and move on.

His friends came for dinner, with wine and conversation, but one of his friends didn't show up. This was Manetto Ammanatini, known as Grasso, which means "fatso", and known to history as "the fat woodcarver" because this story got turned into a novella and published about fifty years later that was the title. Shall we be respectful, unlike his friends, and call him Manetto Ammanatini, and not Grasso?

Brunelleschi and his friends decided to play a trick on Manetto to pay him out for not turning up for dinner. To do this, they persuaded very many people to participate, including the city jail, a family of labourers, and of course all of their friend group, people who knew each other well enough to meet for dinner parties. 

Manetto was an unmarried man in his twenties. He lived with his mother, and had a separate workshop where he carved picture frames and wooden figures for altars. So he was a guildsman, and doing well in his career. He wasn't married yet -- men would marry typically between twenty eight to thirty five, before that they were known as "youth" "giovane" (from Latin juventes) allowed more sexual (especially homosexual) license, and not expected to settle down. We don't know why Manetto didn't show up for dinner that day with Brunelleschi. Maybe he was busy. Or sick. Or in love. He was of an age where a little irresponsibility was usually allowed. But this time he didn't get away with it.

After a great deal of preparation, they chose an occasion when they knew Manetto's mother was away. Donatello delayed Manetto in his shop while Brunelleschi went to his house. His mother was expected home, so it was easy for Brunelleschi to let himself in, the report says. But maybe Brunelleschi jimmied the lock. He could have, he was capable of it, he had the skills. People usually locked their doors. There were thieves. Why wouldn't Signora Ammanatini have had her own key? Where was she anyway? History is infuriating in what it leaves out, what it tells us and doesn't tell us. But sometimes these gaping holes are everything, are the crack where the light gets in. Sometimes the lacuna is what makes space for new stories.

When Manetto got home from work, after his induced delay, his door was locked, and he heard Brunelleschi telling him, in an imitation of his own voice and his mother's, that Grasso was already inside, and busy. This impersonation puzzled him, but he was much more puzzled to be addressed by the voices as "Matteo". Then Donatello went by and greeted him as "Matteo" and asked if he was looking for Grasso, because he thought he was busy. Other people in on the joke also addressed him as Matteo, and soon the local guard came by to haul him off to jail for Matteo's unpaid debts. He tried to tell everyone who he was, but everyone was in on it and appeared to recognise him as Matteo, an unskilled labourer with debts and a drinking problem, and refused to believe he was Manetto Ammanatini, known as Grasso. They knew Grasso, they said, and Grasso was at home with his mother.

After a night in jail, Matteo's brothers came by to lecture him for his bad behaviour, pay his fine, and take Manetto home to Matteo's house. All Matteo's friends seemed to recognise him as Matteo and none of his own friends would recognise him as himself. So he gave up, accepting the role of Matteo. He got drunk on rich Tuscan red wine, and who wouldn't, in his place? When he had fallen into a drunken sleep, Matteo's brothers and his friends carried him home to his own house, where they put him to sleep in his own bed, but the wrong way up, with his feet on the pillow. When he woke up, everyone recognised him as his real self, addressing him as Grasso again, but wouldn't admit that anything had happened. 

Eventually they did admit to the joke, and roared with laughter, laughing at him, not with him. How could he laugh, who had been so profoundly shaken as to doubt his own identity? But everyone else found this whole event hilarious, and were talking about it even years later, when it was written down in the version that survives. Even today, many people can't see how cruel it is, to take away a name and a self and work -- though Manetto's hands would still have had his skills, had he had any chance to test them. Brunelleschi, genius, creator of perspective and of the dome, conceived this, persuaded others it could work, carried it out, and laughed at it. Manetto had to live with the ridicule of the "joke" that had been played on him,

Except that he didn't. He didn't live with it, and he didn't kill himself either. He left Firenze and went to Hungary. Or that's what the story tells us. He went to Hungary, the thriving Renaissance realm of the Raven King, the humanist collector of books and art, Matthias Corvinus, who would have been delighted to get a real Florentine woodcarver at that date.

But maybe it wasn't Hungary he went to. Maybe, having been dragged across the bounds of identity and singularity that way, when he left Firenze, he went further. Shall we follow Manetto, the fat woodcarver?  Picture him, a tall plump young Florentine, a worker in wood, with his own shop even though he isn't thirty yet. He packs up his tools and his clothes and his savings in gold, says goodbye to his mother (but where had she been? Was she, could she have been, in on the joke too?) and he walks through the streets where people are still sniggering when they see him pass. Shall we follow where Manetto went, when he walked away from his cruel genius friends and out of the story?

Let's watch him walking down the street, away from his house that he'd been locked out of and then woken up in, heading away from his own workshop, going to Brunelleschi's workshop, over near the unfinished Duomo. There are a lot of things piled up in Brunelleschi's workshop, as you'd expect, tools, and parts of machines, and paintings, and designs. There are blocks for carving, and sheets of calculations, and boxes of bricks, and coiled rope, and the head of a winch. There's a crowd of people too, Brunelleschi's apprentices, and servants, and friends, and creditors, and members of the committee dropping in to see how everything is going. When Manetto shows up, Brunelleschi would laugh and tease him as usual, for a little while.

Manetto has on his vermilion chaperon hat folded over his head, and his red cioppa around him, his bag of clothes over his shoulder and his box of tools for carving wood under his arm. It's a hinged wooden box, freshly painted green. When Brunelleschi takes his eyes off him for an instant, Manetto takes another step, sideways, into a painting done on a wooden panel and left leaning on the wall, behind all the impedimenta of a busy genius who is building a dome, and a boat, and carving in wood and stone. It's the perspective painting of the view from the door of the Duomo, lifesize and as real as life, perhaps even more real, endowed with the mana of being the first. 

Manetto isn't a small man, and he isn't thin, but he walks into the painting and shrinks. He turns and looks back, and for a moment there he is, painted, his face serious under his hat, red cloak and green box, painted in perfect perspective beside the column that marks the elm tree of St Zenobius. Then he nods to his friends, and walks around the corner of the Baptistery and out of sight.

And Brunelleschi and all the inferiors and superiors and equals gathered around chattering in the little workshop where he's trying to work just stare at the painting, and at the space where Manetto was, and isn't any more, and then they stare at each other -- asking themselves and each other what just happened? What could possibly have happened, because what they saw couldn't be it. Hungary, one of them would have said, yes, he went to Hungary to start a new life without us laughing at him. He headed off to the furthest edge of civilization they could imagine, Hungary, because he couldn't have just walked into the painting.

Did Brunelleschi wonder if Manetto was ever going to walk back out? And what happened to that painting? Where is it now?

*********************************************

"Well?" Maya asks. The cat is sprawled on her lap, asleep, his brindled fur still faintly iridescent in the streaming sunlight.

"Well what? A frittata with artichokes?" He hands her one.

She takes the plate absently. "Where is the painting?"

"Well, if we had it, it would be an easy way of getting you into the story, now wouldn't it?" he says.

"Is it in the Palazzo Pitti?" she asks, taking a bite of the frittata, which is fluffy and perfectly cooked.

"Good guess, but no," he says. "Nobody knows where it is. It's lost. But there might be other ways in. If you want to get in."

"I'm not sure what I want," she says. "They rang the bells, and that may mean that the plague is over. But nobody has come in. The computer has gone. I can't remember how old I am any more. I don't want to go home. I want to read all of all these books I've only read the first chapter of, that's what I really really want. The City in the Crags and Machinehood and Perhaps the Stars and all the others."

"Well, let's keep trying," he says.

"Was that you telling the story?" Maya asks. "It sounded just like you."

"It was me," he confirms. "But let's read something else. We have a story by Pamela Sargent called The Drowned Father."

"Ooh, I love Pamela Sargent. The Shore of Women was great."

She swallows the last bite of frittata and puts the plate down. The cat shifts in his sleep. She takes the book, and they read.