David Read Online Free

it. I had never seen him so excited, but then I’d never seen him work before either. Whenever he had come to visit us at home, he had been on holiday.
    But Angelo had also signed a contract to make fifteen figures for Cardinal Piccolomini in Siena; he had boasted about it. I couldn’t see how he was going to make those if he got the Duomo’s old block to sculpt. He told me he’d promised the Cardinal not to undertake any other work till the Sienese commission was finished, but I could see he didn’t intend to keep his word if he got hold of that block.
    I was still staying with him at his father’s house; it wasn’t comfortable but it was convenient and I felt safe there. I hardly saw Lodovico but he was willing enough to have me in his home. It was obvious that money was a bit tight. Angelo never took any notice of home comforts – he was a bit like a monk in that way – and I’m ashamed to say I often sloped off back to Clarice’s in search of some better wine and more plentiful food. Yes, and other comforts too.
    And I enjoyed playing with her two little daughters, Benedetta and Carolina. They knew me now and, for want of a father perhaps, they looked forward to my visits. They were sweet-natured, like their mother. I knew nothing of their father, save that he had died eighteen months earlier in a riding accident.
    Angelo never said anything about my absences – just gave me a quizzical look when I came back smelling of perfume. He had found me work in a stonemasons’ workshop near the great cathedral, which kept me close to the big block of marble and to my lady’s palazzo. If I stayed overnight with Clarice, I could stumble out in the morning and into work, but when we broke off at midday I always found my footsteps taking me to the Opera del Duomo; that block was beginning to fascinate me almost as much as it did my brother.
    He had started calling it ‘David’.
    ‘I can make something of this,’ he would mutter, walking round and round the block and making the odd mark here and there on the surface.
    It was as if he were boring into it with his eyes, trying to find something inside it that was trapped, frozen in the marble like a fish in a block of ice. But it wasn’t a fish he was trawling for; it was a man.
    One night back at the house he asked me to pose for him. He wanted me to strip and there’s no other man I would have done it for. I trusted him completely, but I was a bit nervous that some other member of the family might walk in. He wasn’t satisfied with my position until he had got me standing with my weight on my right leg, my body pivoted on that hip and my head turned to the left. My right arm was to hang down loose, but with my left – bent up towards the shoulder – I had to pretend to hold a slingshot. My left foot was raised – resting on a cauliflower!
    ‘Is that Goliath’s head?’ I asked.
    Angelo just grunted.
    I found it very difficult to hold the pose and I was embarrassed to have him gazing so intently at my naked body.
    ‘You’re frowning, Gabriele,’ he said, rapidly sketching in fast fluid lines.
    ‘Sorry,’ I said.
    ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s good. It’s how David would have looked.’
    Over the next few weeks I got more used to standing with my clothes off while Angelo circled round me sketching me from every angle. There were sheets and sheets of drawings: my head, my arms, my back and my buttocks.
    I thought I’d stopped frowning but there it still was in all the drawings of my face.
    ‘Do you need all these?’ I asked him one day, as casually as I could.
    ‘Huh,’ he grunted. ‘You want one for your lady love, don’t you?’
    I blushed at being so transparent, but he gave me a handful of the drawings he didn’t want. It seemed to make him decide on what he did want, because the next day he said he was ready to make a wax model for the statue.
    Clarice was delighted with the few sketches I gave her.
    ‘I will have this one framed and hang it in