It’s odd, when so much is vivid in my memory about the time before and after, but in those first few months after the boy was born that the world would call Davide di Antonello de’ Altobiondi I lost all sense of myself. I was the stonecutter who went to work in the bottega every day. I was the artist’s model who posed, first as Hercules and then as Bacchus for Leone the painter two nights a week. I was a fratesco spy who met his friends on other evenings. And I was a lover with two beloveds – and that was without counting Clarice. But of Gabriele himself I have no memory; I think I stumbled through spring and the beginning of summer as if I were in a dream or like a man intoxicated by a powerful brew. I was a figure trapped in an invisible block of marble – without feelings and unable to escape or even to want to escape. And yet it was a time of great terror in the city; Florence had some implacable enemies, who had nothing to do with the de’ Medici or Savonarola. ‘Cesare Borgia,’ said Gandini the baker.
