The Medici Boy

In The Medici Boy (2013) author John L’Heureux whisks readers back to the Italian Renaissance of 15th century Florence and the studio of famed sculptor Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi (c. 1386 – December 13, 1466), known to the world as Donatello. The story is told as a flashback and is narrated by an illegitimately conceived boy, Luca Mattei. Early in life Luca is handed off by his father to a wool-dyer to perform work which he is physically beyond him. Failing at his tasks, Luca is sent to the Brotherhood of Saint Francis to “learn to read and write and do numbers” so he can eventually “embrace a life of poverty, chastity, and obedience.” Only twelve, Luca fails with the Brotherhood because of his insatiable desire to appease the “thing” between his legs that has “a passion and a will of its own,” that doesn’t allow Luca to be a “pure spirit.” Recognized as having talents, Luca is sent to be a novice in the Order of Friars Minor to “care for the aged and dying.” “Trapped” by desire for a prostitute he meets, Maria Sabina, by the age of seventeen Luca refuses to believe his intercourse with Maria is anything but “natural and therefore right.” Luca finds himself without a home or a future until he is brought to the attention of Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi and becomes a member of the artist’s bottega and the story of The Medici Boy begins for real.John L’Heureux writes in a note at the novel’s start that he spent a year in Florence researching the background for his book. L’Heureux’s story covers events from 1400 to 1467 and is a remarkable historical novel. It brings to life the sights, sounds, and even smells along with the history and culture of Renaissance Florence. The author covers numerous topics from the profane to the sacred, the Black Plague and its reoccurring flare ups and hideous effects upon the populace, the horrors for those living in poverty, the role of the Church, the terrifying penalties for those found guilty of sodomy ranging from fines, imprisonment, and death; the intense rivalry between the Medici and Albizzi families, and the support of artists by commissioning what in many cases would become historically lasting and influential creations of art by the upper class.First and foremost The Medici Boy is L’Heureux’s brilliant portrait of the famous sculptor, Donatello. Luca Mattei frequently refers to himself as “a spy” carefully watching the man and the artist he so obviously respects and loves (in a platonic fashion). Woven throughout the text, too, is a different kind of love: the love Donatello feels for a young male street prostitute, Agnolo Mattei, Luca’s half-brother. For Donatello it is a love of beauty, a love that inspires, a love for a fellow human being—but it is not a love that crosses the line and becomes sexual (Indeed, although there has always been speculation that Donatello was homosexual, there has never been any concrete evidence of it—during his lifetime or since—and L’Heureux respects that in his novel). In Luca’s mind and certainly in his narrative, however, Agnolo is akin to the plague, “the Pest,” that comes and goes and whenever he is present, he brings with him malady and ruin.It is Agnolo who poses for Donatello and both inspires and frustrates the sculptor at the apex of his creativity as he works on his most famous creation: a brass David and Goliath—the first full-standing, bronze, explicitly nude sculpture to be created in a thousand years. It is also a very different Agnolo who later proves to be the great artist’s model for the haggard John the Baptist sculpted from wood.Almost without realizing it because of how L’Heureux skillfully handles his material, throughout The Medici Boy readers learn much about the processes used by a sculptor working in a variety of mediums and quite a bit of the history of the period and the warring factions of the Medici and Albizzi families which end up entangling entire nations during the period. The author also does a compelling job of bringing to life the great Donatello. However, late in the novel Luca Mattei writes of how easily it is to catalogue Donatello’s artistic creations and the facts of his life, but of the impossibility to form a true picture of the man’s mind, his sources of creativity, his spirit—in other words, the core of the man himself—words that likely echo the author’s own thoughts.The conclusion of the novel’s events will come as no great surprise to readers as it is hinted at a number of times as L’Heureux lays down the foundation for his tale’s fictional climax.Writing truly great historical fiction requires a balancing act by the writer. Too much history and the reader might as well select a work of non-fiction to read as the story is too sparse. Too much speculation or diversion from history and the story becomes unrealistic and the facts that are utilized become an annoyance. To this reader, L’Heureux achieves the perfect balance between history and fiction in The Medici Boy. The story is gripping, evocative, and even suspenseful and heart-warming at times all the while being informative, realistic, and rich in historic detail. In keeping with such, L’Heureux provides “A Brief Bibliography” at the end of the book for those that would like to further explore “this amazing period of Renaissance Florence” as well as “An Afterword” in which he produces “thumbnail biographies” of some of the “real people who appear” in the novel.L’Heureux, in an unassuming “Author’s Note,” states The Medici Boy “is pure invention, whose purpose it is to entertain, provoke, and disturb” whereas Donatello’s statue of David “is its own narrative.” Well written, believable, and involving, The Medici Boy is an excellent reading experience on par with the best of modern historical fiction.

Set in Florence in the first half of the 1400s, this historical novel is a story told by Luca Mattei, an apprentice in the workshop of Donatello. It’s not clear why the book has the title it does. Although it’s true that Cosimo de’ Medici commissioned Donatello’s bronze “David with the Head of Goliath,” neither the narrator nor the youth who poses for the statue has any personal connection with the Medici family.Told from Luca’s point of view, we watch as Donatello falls hopelessly in love with Agnolo, a beautiful, lazy, calculating and dishonest boy-prostitute who becomes the model for the artist’s erotically charged statue of David. Although in the course of the novel Luca marries and fathers 4 children, a single passionate kiss from Donatello years earlier seems to have had a profound effect on him. There’s a fair amount of emphasis throughout the novel on sodomy-- the name given to homosexual relations in that era.The author has done his homework on Florence in the Renaissance, including its Europe-wide reputation as a good place to be gay, and on the complex technical processes involved in bronze casting. What he lacks, however, as far as I’m concerned, is a memorable writing style. The story is fascinating but the prose in which it’s told is flat and mediocre.There are also a number of historical and spelling errors: A work of art identified as “Solomon meets Bathsheba” should be “David meets Bathsheba.” The statue of Abraham and Isaac was made for the bell tower of Florence cathedral and not for Or San Michele. The Medici Palace was built on Via Larga, not Via Longa. The duke of Milan in the mid-1400s was Francesco Sforza (died 1466) and not his son, Galeazzo Maria Sforza. The Medici family originated in the Mugello area, not the Muggelo; and the son of the duke of Milan was Galeazzo and not Galleazo. These are minor points that may seem petty to some readers, but I think it's important that authors of historical fiction get their facts right and their spelling accurate.

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. 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. 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.The author spent a year doing research for his book in his Florentine setting, and it certainly shows. 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. It is rich in fascinating detail of life then and most especially enlightening on the technical means of production of artistic masterpieces.Despite 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. 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. He has read and richly informed his story with many of the findings of Michael Rocke’s Forbidden Friendships, the monumentally important study which ascertained from Florentine court records that most men and boys there were at some time implicated in what was then called sodomy and would now be called pederasty. Nevertheless, without contradicting Rocke’s evidence, L’Heureux has given his story a modern sensibility which stops him doing it full justice.Considering both the evidence Donatello loved boys actually more fervently and frequently than depicted here, and his failure to marry, it is fair enough to depict him as one of those fairly rare individuals the court records called “inveterate sodomites” to distinguish them from the majority for whom pederasty was mostly a youthful phase preceding marriage. But by choosing for his two other main characters males with an equally exclusive taste for one gender, Luca for women and Agnolo for men as a boy then boys as a man, rather than choosing typical members of what Rocke found to be “a single male sexual culture with a prominent homoerotic character”, L’Heureux has given his tale an untypical, modern feeling. Worse still, recognizing that his 12-year-old son Franco Alessandro was eager for sex with men (a recognition as historically realistic as it is courageous for a 21st-century author to depict), Luca wonders “Why is he made so?” This is anachronistic: a 15th-century father might have thought such a son wicked, but not fundamentally different from others.In a review of Forbidden Friendships, I wrote that “Rocke's findings provoke one extremely important question neither he nor anyone else I have heard of has ever attempted to answer: what effect does ubiquitously-practised pederasty have on a society? The ancient Greeks believed erotic bonds between men and boys were vitally important in transmitting skills and virtues from one to the other. … Fifteenth-century Italy in general was considered "the mother of sodomy" and Florence in particular was in Savonarola's words "defamed throughout all of Italy" for it. One might well say exactly the same about their respective reputations at the forefront of the extraordinary cultural flowering known as the Renaissance, a flowering that included the revival of the naked male youth as a worthy subject of art by artists themselves often well known for their love affairs with boys. Is this just an amazing coincidence?” Leonardo da Vinci, one of the most firmly-documented of the many Florentine artists who loved boys, certainly thought not, defending the practice as explaining why “there have issued forth so many rare spirits in the arts.” I believe he must have been right and that his point is of momentous importance.I explain this because what seriously disappointed me about The Medici Boy as a well-written novel on the topic is the missed opportunity to explore how this could have worked. Mary Renault showed brilliantly how it did in ancient Athens in her Last of the Wine. Showing this in Florence would admittedly be more challenging. Instead of philosophical writings, virtually all our information comes from court records. Necessarily concerned as these were with only the potential for prosecution offered by the love affairs between artists and boys, they are nearly useless for showing how such bonding could transform merely promising adolescents into geniuses. With enough imagination and emotional honesty though, it must be possible to show, and it would be an extraordinary and original accomplishment. L’Heureux forfeited the chance to try through focusing narrowly on an artist’s sexual obsession with a worthless “boy whore” incapable of deep emotional or intellectual response. It would have been more rewarding, for example, to have told the story of how the boy Donatello evolved as an artist through the love affair Luca is made to say he had had with the older Brunelleschi. Moreover, I think it would have made a much more moving story. The one told here instead is certainly interesting, but not emotionally compelling enough to be great.Edmund Marlowe, author of Alexander's Choice, www.amazon.com/dp/1481222112, a modern British tale of Florentine-style amore masculino.

I couldn't put this book down - and how often can you say that? The author imagines the creation of Donatello's bronze statue of David, an ambiguous, soft-bodied figure who wears only a hat and high boots and stands in a pose that is both classical and provocative with one foot on the severed head of Goliath. L'Heureux evokes an intricate web of passions around the work - the ageing scupltor's love for a much younger man, the jealousy of the narrator, the envy, loyalty and venality of the apprentices in the workshop and the fatal narcissism of the model. Beyond the workshop rage the political storms of the era, threatening the great Cosimo de Medici, Donatello's patron and, indeed, patron of so many great artists of the Renaissance. It's not a perfect novel - lapses into exposition, clunky cameos from Vasari's big names - but the emotional truth is completely compelling and the history seems scrupulous.

A gripping story of the human condition written around the creation of one of the most iconic pieces of renaissance sculpture. The author describes the loves and social pressures of a complete cross section of Italian 15th century society from the lowliest workshop assistant to the most powerful political patron, Cosimo de' Medici. The theme of sexual jealousy is shown bursting through the bonds of self control of the unfortunate narrator.

A extremely good work of fiction with factual elements. The book has a gay theme but this is just a background fact which gives the book its base. I found the tale a remarkable read and it give the reader a glimpse into the past of the Medici times. I would recommend this book yo anyone.

Intelligently contrived 'insider's view' account of life in Florence during the supremacy of the Medicis, focussing on the workshop of Donatello. Based on surviving documentary evidence of the religious, social and political context in which art was produced at that period, the narrative is also a compelling insight into the moral dilemmas of the age.

Interesting insight into the times of the Medici and Donatello.Whether this story is based in fact I would not know but aninteresting read.

An absorbing, well-written story which brings to life Renaissance Florence and the life of a great artist, through the eyes of his assistant.

**3.5**Hard to rate this, as there are moments of sheer brilliance and beauty as well as moments of pure boredom.The Medici Boy tells the story of Donatello's David as it could have happened, as a fictional account by Donatello's equally fictional assistant Luca di Mattei. Revolving figure and the person the title refers to, though, is Agnolo: Luca's young foster brother, whore, and muse to Donatello; the boy who, in this story at least, becomes the model for the David.L'Heureux chose a mock mémoire style for his book, and it actually works here. The Medici Boy reads like the memories of old Luca di Mattei looking back on his years with Donatello. Luca's not the most reliable narrator, denying things in one moment, admitting them the next. His obsessive love for Donatello is almost as strong as the obsessive jealousy and hate he feels for Agnollo, leading to dire results.Due to the mock mémoire style there's a lot of telling, showing off the author's extensive research in didactic accounts of historical events. Whenever the author chose to actually show things, though, everything comes brilliantly, vibrantly alive: from the brutal life in 15 century Italy and the consequences of the Black Pest to Donatello's work and the casting of bronze, described in a compelling and sensual way.Recommended for people interested in Florentine renaissance and art history.

Florence is brought to life through the eyes of an artisan . Working for the great sculptor Donatello he narrates for us the noble, the genius and the failings of famous persons. His careful treatment of homosexuality i, and unrequited love weaves a mysterious thread through the respected genius of important character,

Boring. Unlikeable, uninteresting characters. The author fails to convey the supposed charm and sexiness of the Medici Boy.

A fascinating story, a great read!

This book was a marvel to me. It tells the story of the creation of the enigmatic statue of David by Donatello. Equally beautiful in its own way but in contrast to that of Michelangelo the Donatello is overtly sexual and disturbing. The book is narrated by a craftsman devoted to Donatello. He says not sexually but there is a very fine line there. He tells of the coming of a young man loosely related to him who captivates both Donatello's body and heart and becomes the model for the David. The book is beautifully written and captures the life of Renaissance Italy and the work in a great artist's workshop. The characters are sympathetically drawn, even the wayward, foolish, needy Medici Boy. I felt for the narrator and for the tortured Donatello who could not deny his heart. It was a privilege to read this book. It is pure fiction but I for one will never be able to look at a depiction of the Donatello statue of David without thinking of the wanton Medici Boy and seeing his sly smile of triumph for achieving immortality in that silky bronze face.

Pedestrian. L'Heureux has done his research; he now needs to sew it altogether, piece of cloth by piece of cloth, lump of clay on lump of clay, yawn...

A decent read but not as good as I expected from having read the reviews. Undoubtedly well-researched, but sometimes you get the impression that he has done so much research he is going to get the facts in front of you no matter how tangential to the plot. And the plot is somewhat one-dimensional. Donatello falls in love with Agnolo, his model (and the narrator's "brother"). Agnolo, a promiscuous young sodomite, comes and goes into Donatello's life. Meanwhile there is a little bit in the background about Cosimo di Medici's rivalry with the Albizzi clan. And that's about it really.

Overall quite good. I was nt especially convinced by the writing style. However, it was well researched and the historical backdrop felt well constructed. The ending was rather sudden and a bit of a let down.