from Αναγέννηση (2024) [“Renaissance”]
Translated from the Greek by Patricia Felisa Barbeito
MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI
(1475–1564)
It was Agostino di Duccio
who came to the conclusion
that a statue
of the dimensions demanded
by the Florentine authorities
–un gigante proprio–
called for a single slab of marble.
He even went in person
to the Carrara quarries
in search of the right piece.
The block he selected
was gigantic,
the size of a boulder,
eight and a half tons in weight.
For reasons unknown
only a year later
he abandoned the work,
possibly due to the death
of Donatello, his teacher.
Thirty-five years later
the young Michelangelo
was commissioned to finish it.
When asked by the Operai del Duomo
how he planned to proceed,
in true Neoplatonic form
he claimed that the statue
already existed within the marble.
He could see it
in his mind’s eye.
His task was merely
to free it of its bonds.
And so he incarnated
the “ideal” male nude.
The statue’s
manly muscularity,
its contrapposto stance
(bulging right hand poised for battle)
impressed all,
even its critics
who one night,
a few days after it had been installed
in the Piazza della Signoria,
attempted to destroy it.
Some were alarmed by the expression
in the young man’s eyes–
the look of arrogance and resentment
he cast on his creator,
as if he and not Goliath
were the true enemy.
Michelangelo for his part,
in anticipation of his own defeat,
jotted a verse in the margins
of one of his preliminary sketches
Davicte colla fromba e io coll’arco:
David with his sling and I with the bow.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
(1452–1519)
In the manner of Ruther Kopland
All those extraordinary drawings
of horses’ legs and hoofs
found strewn in his workshop
amongst precious notebooks
and half-finished portraits
of the elegant women of nobility.
He wished to discover
the way their bodies work,
“the source of their astonishing power,”
but as the pencil (the lancet)
dug ever deeper,
he felt a callus form over the skin of their souls,
the secret evanescent through the paper’s pores.
He made dozens of copies.
He studied every anatomical detail.
He threw them away.
LORENZO GHIBERTI
(c. 1378–1455)
For twenty-seven years he carved
decorations into the eastern doors
of the Florence Baptistry
after besting Brunelleschi for the commission.
“A stroke of luck!” declared a historian of the period.
“For Brunelleschi was then free
to design and build
the famous dome of the city’s cathedral,
a feat of mastery no other architect
was in a position to accomplish.”
Michelangelo notably likened
Ghiberti’s gilded bronze doors
to the “Gates of Paradise.”
Conversely, Bonaccorso—his grandson—
wielded all he had learned from his grandfather
(recorded in detail in his autobiography, I commentarii)
to very different ends:
the manufacture of cannons, shells, siege engines.
Clearly he never paused to consider
whether the baptistry doors
led to Paradise.
His led straight
to the Borgias.
PIETRO ARETINO
(1492–1556)
I read your pornographic sonnets
for the first time
(in the classic translation by Putnam)
at a bar in Venice
behind the Accademia di Belle Arti.
A perfect setting, naturally.
It was not far from the house
where Pound once lived,
a poet I doubt you would have cared for—
he was nowhere near as lussurioso as you.
Still, this is where he too died
and published his first collection.
I also visited your palace
(or, more accurately, your brothel)
the Palazzo Bolani,
and I imagine the pleasures
of mornings spent
in the wanton arms of a cortigiana
(never the same one!),
the Canal Grande in view
beyond the window.
The very definition of the dolce vita.
(Mi scusi, Fellini).
To be honest though,
I was not much impressed by your poetry:
Mettimi un dito in cul, caro vecchione
e spinge il cazzo dentro a poco a poco.
Today, verses like these shock no one;
the internet is awash in culi and cazzi.
Even back in the day
I doubt they would have raised an eyebrow
on a Catullus or a Rufinus.
You were, of course, hounded
by the nightmare of the Catholic Church
and its Pope, the idiotic Adrian.
So, yes, it is true, you were coraggioso,
and your dogged defense
of your friend Marcantonio
for his “obscene” engravings
was truly poignant.
(Did you ever try his Sixteen Pleasures
I wonder?)
If anything shocked me—
this is, after all, our main point, isn’t it?—
it was your letter to Michelangelo,
the way you dressed him down
for his portrayal of some saints
in The Last Judgement—
Bartholomew among them—in the nude.
To hear you reprimand the “lack of decorum”
and denounce him for “impropriety”
is comical indeed.
Did you intend something else by it?
Perhaps you hoped he would offer you
one of his paintings
to end the public derision you poured
on him among so many others.
I cannot believe you died of suffocation
from “laughing too much”
at the sight of a pet monkey
astumble, its feet in your boots.
Most likely it was a heart attack.
At sixty-four—you should have known better!—
all-night orgies are unwise.
And your headstone
I must admit
is priceless:
Here lies Aretino: the bitter Tuscan poet
with a tongue so poisonous to those who knew it.
Among the living or dead, only God did he spare—
“I never met Him,” he liked to declare.
FEDERICO DA MONTEFELTRO
(1422–1482)
Federico, I’m going to tell you something
that will make you laugh, I’m sure:
You share a common trait
with a famous singer and ladies’ man
of my youth,
Julio Iglesias.
You refused to have the right side of your face
depicted in your portraits
(you lost your right eye in a duel),
while Julio, for his part, insisted that photographers
avoid his left profile
for it emphasized his “crooked nose.”
There is no need for me to repeat
what Ecclesiastes has to say
about vanitas—
I imagine you have already read it.
I do wonder about one thing, though:
that well-known portrait
you commissioned from Piero,
do you believe it flatters you?
Julio’s nose
in comparison to yours
is a thing of beauty, a natural wonder.
Could you not have asked the artist
to retouch yours a little?
Refine the shape into something more fitting
for a nouveau riche condottiere like you?
Because every time
someone utters your name
(the Duke of Urbino
with his 300,000-ducat Palazzo,
his sixty servants,
five cooks,
forty-five stable hands,
thirty-two lackeys,
renowned Studiolo,
and so on and so forth)
all I can see in my mind’s eye
is that frightful nose of yours—
even now writing to you
I see it before me.
It sticks out like a sore thumb—
a thumb in your missing eye.
Haris Vlavianos is a renowned Greek poet, critic, translator, and editor. He is the author of fourteen collections of poetry and a range of prose works (including the semi-fictitious historical work, Hitler’s Secret Diary). He teaches Contemporary History and Modern Greek Poetry at the American College of Greece and Creative Writing at the Hellenic Open University.
Patricia Felisa Barbeito is Professor of American Literatures at the Rhode Island School of Design and an award-winning translator of Greek fiction and poetry.
World Poetry Review 