The author spent a year doing research for his book in his Florentine setting, and it certainly shows. 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. 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. 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. Well-written and researched, but a missed opportunity
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