Oddly enough, however, it is really only through underplaying it in certain ways that L’Heureux’s recreation has fallen short of the historical reality.
It is rich in fascinating detail of life then and most especially enlightening on the technical means of production of artistic masterpieces.ĭespite the premise on which the story is built, some may be taken aback by the amount of homosexuality depicted as going on in Florence then. So much popular fiction set in the fifteenth century betrays quite fundamental ignorance of how people thought and behaved that it is a rare and wonderful delight to find an author so obviously at home in this setting that one can drop one’s guard and enjoy his story without worrying that one is being lulled into a false sense of the sights and sounds of Florence in its golden age.
The author spent a year doing research for his book in his Florentine setting, and it certainly shows. Luca disapproves because Agnolo, as a shallow rent boy, is unworthy of the great man’s obsession, a convincingly conceived scenario except for the stretch of the imagination required to see a youth of 17 to 18, however slender and effeminate, as the model for the barely pubescent David to be seen in the Bargello today. This statue, “the first free-standing bronze nude in more than a thousand years”, is felt by L’Heureux to be “a testament to the sculptor’s sexual obsession for the teenaged boy he had created.” Hence this richly imagined tale of that obsession, narrated through the life story from birth in 1400 to death in 1467 of Donatello’s assistant Luca, the disapproving foster-brother of Agnolo. The eponym of this story, Agnolo Mattei, is not literally a Medici, but the fictitious boy model for Donatello’s bronze David commissioned by Cosimo de’ Medici. Well-written and researched, but a missed opportunity
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