As Signor Ricci wished him good luck, and meandered off, David opened the Codice 101, S, with weary hands, and read the all-too-familiar opening invocation: “All men of whatsoever quality they be, who have done anything of excellence, or which may properly resemble excellence, ought, if they are persons of truth and honesty, to describe their life with their own hand.…”—but he felt little hope of finding anything new. Although the manuscripts differed by a word or two here and there, they were all close copies, and detailed the same adventures, and the same miraculous acts of creation. Studying them had been a necessary step, but where, David wondered, was he to go next?
He carefully turned another page—the copyist had used a deep black ink that had faded to brown—and let his eye course down its length, looking for anything new, any anomaly, anything to indicate fresh passages to distinguish this copy from all the others. And after working so closely with Olivia Levi, he found it strange to have no one there to consult, or commiserate, with. Although scholarly work was generally solitary in nature, he’d quickly gotten used to having company and exchanging all kinds of ideas. Olivia was open to any suggestion or query, no matter how off-the-wall, and in nearly every case she could top it. She had a vast field of reference—there was almost nothing David could bring up that Olivia didn’t already have a firm opinion about—and she was willing to talk all night. He found himself lonely, missing her quick wit, her erudition, and—if he was completely honest with himself—the nearness of her, perched, knees up, in the next chair, her nose buried in a book. Once, she had caught him, lost in thought and simply staring at her, and she’d said, “Don’t you have work to do?”
He’d been so flustered, he hadn’t known what to say.
Olivia laughed and said, “It’s okay. You may be American, but you are also Italian.”
She was bringing that out in him more and more each day.
David was about midway through the manuscript at hand, his eyes beginning to glaze over, when he heard the sound of Signor Ricci’s slippers and looked up to see him tottering under a stack of loose pages and cracked binders. Just before he almost toppled over, the old man managed to deposit them on David’s carrel and steady himself by catching the back of a chair.
“What are these?” David asked.
Ricci, taking a second to catch his breath, said, “Nothing you’ll find at the Laurenziana. These are the household accounts of Cosimo de’Medici.”
Though he didn’t want to appear ungrateful, why, David thought, would Ricci think these would be of any use? Why should he care how much wine or butter or wheat was consumed?
“Including the art and jewelry commissions,” Ricci explained, as if reading his mind. “If Benvenuto made anything for Cosimo or his wife or his family—like a looking glass—it would be listed somewhere in here. The Medici kept careful records of everything they spent, and everything they received.”
That they did, and for the first time in weeks, David felt a sudden surge of optimism. If nothing else, it was a fresh avenue to explore. Ricci could see that David was pleased, and his face cracked open in a nearly toothless smile. “Go to it,” he said, patting David on the shoulder and teetering off. “And be sure to tell people where you found what you needed.”
Putting the Codice aside, David cleared a space on the carrel and began to systematically go through the ledgers, skipping quickly over the shopping lists of comestibles and the other household goods, and zeroing in on anything having to do with the purchase of art supplies—marble, brushes, paints, plaster—or metals, such as copper, bronze, silver, gold. Punctuating the lists of raw materials were finished works, separately bracketed, and David was stunned to see the purchase of world-renowned works by Leonardo and Andrea del Sarto, Botticelli and Bronzino, recorded for the first time. On one page, he found a shipment from Palestrina, describing a “stone torso of a boy” that had been unearthed by a farmer’s plow. Was this the torso that Cellini had written about in his autobiography, the one that the ignorant Bandinelli had scorned but that Cellini had later refashioned into a Ganymede?