#i just forgot to make the post unrebloggable earlier

[partystoragechest]

I feel the need to point out (if it wasn't already obvious) that Unwanted absolutely does not take place in whatever version of Thedas Tevinter Nights was set in, because a week to climb to Skyhold is bonkers.

[stravagatefaster]

An Impossible Task

The following short story written by Mary Hoffman is from the official Stravaganza-website, which doesn't exist anymore. It is accessible through the Wayback Machine, but I am uploading the short stories here to a) act as a secondary archive and b) to make them accessible to fans. If this story is ever re-published somewhere or I am asked to delete it, I will do so. This post will be unrebloggable, but feel free to link to it if you wish to add comments/discuss the story. I do not own the story, and it is directly copy-pasted from the old website (except for a link at the end which does not work).

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Girolamo Miele, the greatest architect in all Talia, was in jail. Not for murder or theft or treason; he had forgotten to pay his Guild fees. And angry as he was with those who had plotted to imprison him, he was much more fearful of what his young wife Beata would have to say about his forgetfulness.

Miele paced the stone floor of his underground cell, only a few hundred yards from where he should have been working on the great unfinished cathedral of Giglia. He stopped to cast a critical eye at the vaulted ceiling of the cell; it was competently designed, no more. Still, prisons did not have to be more than functional.

But Girolamo Miele was a sculptor and goldsmith as well as an engineer and architect. And he believed that form and beauty were the same thing — if a thing functioned properly it would be beautiful in its own right and all ornament just a footnote, an indulgence of the maker. Mentally he began to redesign the dungeons, to pass the time till Beata would come with the money for his fine.

*

'Twelve scudi!' Beata had exclaimed earlier when the guards had come for Miele.

'You would imprison my husband, the great Miele, for non-payment of a sum that is less than he pays a labourer on the cupola for one lousy day's work!'

For that was what the missed dues to the Stonemasons' Guild amounted to: one scudo for each month of the year. But the fine was a hundred times the sum, a punishing one thousand two hundred scudi. It didn't matter to Miele; he had thirty or forty times that banked with the di Chimici family, who were the richest family in Giglia.

Beata and Girolamo wasted no time on enmity towards the guards; they knew who was really responsible for the arrest. The feud between Girolamo Miele and Ottavio Altamonte had being going strong for thirty years, since before Beata had been born, and this was just the latest skirmish.

The Rivals

In 1400, when the di Chimici were just coming into their fortune as bankers in Giglia, the Guild of Wool Merchants decided to hold a competition. The huge cathedral, Santa Maria del Giglio, Saint Mary of the Lily, was nearing completion. The crossing was still open to the sky, its floor messed by pigeons, awaiting a dome worthy of the mighty building conceived a hundred years before.

But in front of the cathedral façade, which was still rough brick at that time, stood a much more ancient building. The black and white striped baptistery was an octagonal structure, now dedicated respectably to Saint John, the patron saint of all baptisms. But there wasn't a single Giglian who didn't know that it had once been a temple dedicated to the Consort of the Goddess, the Sun.

Its very shape — eight sides representing rays of the sun — showed it to belong to the old religion of the Middle Sea, the one that Talians continued to believe in their bones, under the surface of form and doctrine that modern fifteenth-century men and women wore.

Talia had been converted to Christianity only a few hundred years before and only on the understanding that people could go on believing what they liked because no one was going to ask them. So Talians, and that meant Giglians as much as anyone else, built their churches and cathedrals  but went on swearing 'By the Goddess!'  They had their Pope in Remora, but never forgot that it had been capital of the Reman Empire when the Goddess and her Consort held sway all over the Middle Sea.

And in 1400 Giglians were afraid that they had perhaps not been paying enough attention to the old deities. There had been a terrible plague — the Cold Death they called it, 'Morte Fredda', because once the victims reached the shivering stage of the disease, they were doomed. A quarter of the city's inhabitants had died.

So the Guild of Wool Merchants had decided to cheer up the remaining three quarters by having a competition to do something magnificent for the old temple. Donato Nucci, who was leader of the Guild, wanted the people to let the Lady know that she and her fiery lover were still important to the city, that the vast bulk of the Christian cathedral rising over the old temple was no insult to the old gods.

So he authorised the Lana, the Wool Merchants, to pay for a pair of splendid bronze doors that would face Saint Mary of the Lily and remind all worshippers of the new religion that the old one was always nearby. The doors would show scenes from the Christian Holy Book but ones that could be interpreted as representing older stories. The prize would be 80 silver florins and was open to all sculptors in Talia. The cost of the materials would be borne by the Guild and the competition would be judged by a special committee.

The scene to be depicted for the competition was that of the Maddalena weeping over the dragon. It was an enormously popular story with Talians because it had two meanings. The one in the Holy Book was that the reformed sinner wept over the creature because it belonged to the pagan past, which would dissolve under the influence of the new faith. That was what the Archbishop of Giglia could believe when he came to bless the doors.

But in the older version the Saint was none other than the Lady herself and the dragon was the new religion, which would devour her. She wept then because she saw how the future would be but the ravening beast dissolved at the first drop because, after all, the Lady cannot be driven away; she will always find new forms.

There were at least seven serious contenders but only two matter for this story. Ottavio Altamonte was a young lad of twenty, untried and inexperienced but good-looking and extremely polite. Girolamo Miele was twenty-four and had cast bronze before but was ill-favoured and not possessed of the sweetest temper. While the competition panels were being made, Ottavio sought advice from every artist and person of judgment in the city. No one was allowed to look at Miele's work, except his great friend the sculptor Gabriele.

Now this Gabriele was no better-looking or more polished than his friend, but the two men had known each other all their lives, had both been born within sight of the rising cathedral and were passionately loyal Giglians. Gabriele had sculpted in marble, cast in bronze, carved in wood and could represent anything he saw and lots of things he didn't.

Miele was more interested in how things worked; if there was no tool or device available to make the piece he was working on, he designed and made what he needed.  Recently he had become interested in buildings and taken to hanging round the stonemasons working on the cathedral. He knew of the problem that no one was sure how the vast apse could be domed and had taken to making sketches in chalk and charcoal on the walls of his father's bottega, where he was still apprenticed to him as goldsmith.

The dragon panel had to be worked on after hours, when everyone else had gone home. Miele would hurry back to his parents' house and gulp down a quick supper then return to the workshop, entrusted with the keys, and work on, sometimes till dawn.

'That boy's digestion will never recover from this competition,' his mother said, shaking her head.

And she was right, for Miele's dyspeptic disposition was made much worse at this time, both from snatched meals and from hearing his rival's work praised wherever he went. It was Young Ottavio this and Dear Altamonte that all over the city. Rumours were circulating that the younger man was sure to win: his Maddalena was a miracle of beauty, bending over the dragon so realistically that you could swear you saw the tear fall.

Miele spent his time drawing the little lizards that dozed on the hot paving stones in the yard, until he had perfected his knowledge of how their scales fitted into the pattern of their elegant skins. 'Dragons in miniature,' he called them. But when Girolamo had finished the first model for his panel, Gabriele saw that the dragon was to be immense.

It dominated the scene, towering over the Saint, who was not beautiful; she was a small, weary woman, whose tears must have dropped on no higher part of the beast than the clawed foot he was extending to her.

'It will be your masterpiece,' said Gabriele. 'You are bound to get the commission. And be known as the greatest sculptor of the fifteenth century.' He felt no jealousy as he said it; fine artist though he was himself, he was awed by his friend's great talent.

But the committee decided differently. The great efforts made by Ottavio to get its influential members on his side had paid off. And his panel was undeniably very fine, in a style the judges were familiar with. They saw Miele's as ugly and possibly subversive: hadn't he shown the dragon much larger than the Saint? No, Altamonte was the safer choice and so the florins went to him.

Exile and Return

Miele was so disgusted that he would not stay in Giglia another day. He packed a bundle of tools, told his father his apprenticeship was over, and set out for Remora. On the road, he was overtaken by his old friend Gabriele.

'I am bound for Remora too,' he said. 'I find the air of Giglia does not agree with me at present.'

Nineteen years the two men stayed in Remora, studying the old Reman ruins, digging up broken statues and measuring the remains of fine buildings. They had lodgings in the contrada of the Lady and news reached them often from their home city, where Ottavio was working on his doors and growing rich on other commissions.

In all this time, Miele did not cast another bronze or make another statue. But he built two churches and was designing a third when momentous news came from Giglia. There was to be another competition and this time it was to build the dome for the cathedral.

'It's an impossible task,' objected Gabriele.

'Exactly!' said Miele, his eyes gleaming. 'That is why is must be me that takes it on.'

So the two friends re-entered the city they had left nearly twenty years before. Miele's father had died and the workshop had been sold but the two men had enough money from their Reman ventures to buy another, even closer to the east end of the cathedral, where the cupola would rise above them.

Gabriele's reputation as a sculptor had grown in his absence and commissions were soon coming into the bottega for him. Miele did nothing but sketch and make models for the dome, spending more time in the unfinished cathedral than in the workshop. He had heard that Ottavio was making a model too and he was determined not to be beaten again. And this time the prize was 200 silver florins.

While the Giglians had been away Ottavio had finished the bronze doors and was now one of the richest artists in the city. He wore silver-trimmed velvet and jewelled rings, while Miele and Gabriele preferred homespun and kept their hands unadorned so that they could work the better.

When Miele's full-scale model of the dome was built, out of real bricks, Gabriele lent it all his skills of ornamentation, even down to a miniature Giglian flag flapping from the top of the cupola's lantern. The dome was divided into sections separated by ribs to be clad in white marble. But the secret ingredient was hidden inside it: the method by which it was to support itself without scaffolding as it rose from the existing building. Miele wouldn't tell anyone that — not even Gabriele.

How to support the dome was exercising Ottavio's ingenuity too. He knew that was the important issue. Most people in Giglia did not believe the dome could be built without internal scaffolding. But to get enough wood to build the centring would be almost impossible. So in the end, he decided to be as mysterious as his rival.

The big day of decision came and the field was as before narrowed down to two: Girolamo Miele and Ottavio Altamonte. Miele was more confident than last time; he knew he could build the dome. But unfortunately his confidence came across as arrogance. Ottavio, on the other hand, was all smiles and charm.

The new dome committee became more and more alarmed as Miele explained his model. He waved his arms about wildly and the words came tumbling out in the wrong order, falling over each other and tripping up his tongue. The committee didn't even let him finish before asking Ottavio to explain his plans. And at the end, they asked the younger man to build the dome.

Building

This time, Miele didn't run away. He got married instead. Gabriele was surprised how calm his friend was after his disappointment about the competition. He was normally so fiery and proud about his work. Instead, he accepted a commission to build the Ospedale della Misericordia and proposed marriage to Beata, the daughter of his housekeeper.

It was a fine match for the girl but the artist was more than twice her age and not much to look at. She began by being a little afraid of him but soon learned that he had a good heart and in time realised what a great mind he had too. Fear turned to respect and then to love, particularly when she saw him with their first child.

 Gabriele was quite astonished; he had assumed the two friends would have grown old together as confirmed bachelors.

'You should try it yourself,' said Miele, dandling his baby son on his knee. 'A warm wife in your bed, a good meal on the table, a boy to pass your talent and your wealth on to and work of the kind you love — what more could a man ask for?'

But there were other sources for his contentment. All the time that he was working on the building that would be the Ospedale, Miele was getting news from the cathedral that work on the dome was proceeding at a snail's pace. The committee was unhappy but Miele just smiled. The model of his own design still sat in the courtyard of his bottega, its pointed cupola complementing the huge nave and side chapels.

And all the while the bricks crept slowly up the real thing, as Ottavio wrestled with the problem of building such a huge cupola without scaffolding. Giglians began to say that it would take the intervention of the Goddess to get the crossing vaulted. Five years after the competition Miele had a wife, two babies and a third on the way, and the Ospedale was finished, to the wonder of all the masons of Giglia. It was the most elegant and beautiful building the city had ever seen, with its stepped loggia and slender columns supporting curved arches.

Ottavio was having to justify to the committee four years of paying a huge team of workmen with very little to show for it. He put on a spurt, urging the men to lay more courses of bricks in a few months than they had in the past two years. The dome was beginning its inward curve.

And then came disaster. The plague returned to Giglia. The people were superstitious and when the first citizens began to shiver on the same night that four courses of bricks fell into the cathedral from the growing cupola, they felt sure the catastrophes were linked. Fortunately, since it happened at night, there was no one in the building to be hurt. But Ottavio was deeply damaged in his reputation: now when people passed him in the street they made the Hand of Fortune and crossed to the other side.

Rescue Mission

The knock on the door was not altogether unexpected. Miele and his family now lived in a substantial house not far from the bottega and they kept a servant-girl, who opened the door to the senior members of the cathedral committee. It was evening, three days after the cathedral dome had caved in, and they were shown into Beata's little parlour.

Big with child, Beata levered herself out of her chair to find refreshment for them, providing also all the niceties of welcome and conversation, because Miele remained resolutely silent. He was going to let them sweat.

But by the time they left, Miele was made capomaestro of the cathedral, on a salary of 200 silver florins a year. His one condition was that Ottavio should have nothing further to do with the project.

The first thing that Miele did was to get the masons to undo all the bricks they had laid, so that he could start with a clean slate. By three years later, the dome was rising strong and curved against the blue Giglian sky, supported and sustained by all manner of architectural devices: rings of wood, stone and metal were embedded in the brickwork, two shells rose at the same time, an inner and an outer dome.

Miele was by now the father of three sons and two daughters, although Gabriele was a bachelor still. Alfonso di Chimici had succeeded his father Ferdinando as head of the family and the bank. Ottavio Altamonte was making another set of baptistery doors. His reputation as an architect never recovered from the collapse of his dome, but he still got many lucrative commissions as a sculptor. He was wealthier than Miele, for he had no family to feed, but his resentment of his older rival festered on.

And so it was that the great architect Miele languished in a dungeon while his wife fetched the money for the fine from Alfonso di Chimici and Ottavio ate a good dinner in his house on the other side of the cathedral. When Beata came to secure his release, Miele was sleeping peacefully on a straw mattress.

As they walked across the piazza dominated by the great cathedral, Ottavio just happened to be taking an after-dinner stroll. The two men came face to face for the first time for many years. Ottavio doffed his plumed hat with elaborate courtesy. Beata was inclined to be frosty but her husband was feeling mellow. His younger rival had not a thing that he wanted; Ottavio's wife was barren, the dome had been taken away from him and, against his feathers and velvet, the man's skin looked sallow and his eyes lustreless.

'I trust I find you well, Maestro?' said Ottavio politely, his dull eyes taking in the straw that still clung to Miele's hair.

'Never better,' replied the architect. 'I have had a delightful and unexpected rest. And I have used it to design the crane that I shall need to hoist the marble up inside the dome for the lantern that will crown it.'

'You are confident then of finishing the dome?' said Ottavio, his lip lifting in a perceptible sneer. 'You must have been praying to the Goddess.'

'No,' said Miele, putting his arm round his wife's comfortable waist. 'I think others have been doing that. I think that their prayers were answered three years ago when I was appointed capomaestro.'

Then he felt sorry for the man and put out his hand to shake the other's more sincerely.

'Messer Ottavio,' he said. 'Is it not time to put aside all enmity and work in harmony for the beautification of our city? We do not expect a musician to write poetry or a mason to weave silk. You are a fine sculptor and your doors are a miracle. Leave the dome to me and the Goddess.'

Something thawed a little in Ottavio's chilly heart. He only nodded.

But many years later, when the dome was finished and the cathedral had been consecrated and the great master-architect Miele had been laid to rest under its nave, two bronze statues stood in wall niches above it. One was by his dearest friend Gabriele. But even though Gabriele was now acknowledged as the finest sculptor in bronze in all Talia, there were those who said that the likeness cast of Miele by his life's rival, Ottavio Altamonte, was even finer.

Note: I have taken great liberties with art history of the Renaissance here. Filippo Brunelleschi was never married and Lorenzo Ghiberti tried his hand on the dome only briefly. For the real story behind the Cupola of the Duomo in Florence, you can read Ross King's Brunelleschi's Dome (Chatto & Windus, 2000) and Paul Robert Walker's The Feud that Sparked the Renaissance: How Brunelleschi and Ghiberti Changed the Art World (William Morrow, 2002).

There are great websites at:

But in Talia, the Giglian architect, Girolamo Miele, was the ancestor of sculptor Giuditta Miele, who is a character in City of Flowers.