Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel Read online

  It cannot be too strongly emphasised that almost every form and figure, almost every image among the myriad images with which Michelangelo spanned the vault of the chapel, is starkly unconventional. He was well aware of the solutions that had been found by earlier generations of artists, who had illustrated the same Old Testament stories that were prescribed as his subject matter. But he did his utmost to avoid repeating them. The paintings that he produced, ranging from The Separation of Light and Darkness to The Creation of Adam, from The Deluge and the other stories of Noah to the depictions of the prophets, are exhilaratingly varied and inventive. But they bear little resemblance to any pictures made before their time. Even at the halfway stage of their completion, when the artist’s scaffolding was moved across the vault to reveal the work he had done so far, what most immediately struck those who thronged to see the pictures was their utter originality. They were instantly recognised as a ‘new and wonderful manner of painting’ .8

  There was, in fact, a well-established Renaissance convention of eschewing convention — of creating works of art with the explicit intention of leaving previous works of art in the shade. That tradition was particularly strong in Florence, the town where Michelangelo spent his formative years and began his career as an artist. It was embodied in the works of the quadrumvirate of Florentine masters who had reinvented the languages of painting, architecture and sculpture during the first half of the fifteenth century: Brunelleschi, who had erected the great dome of the city’s cathedral; Ghiberti, creator of the bronze reliefs that decorated the doors to the city’s Baptistry, famously dubbed by Michelangelo himself ‘the doors of paradise’; Masaccio, painter of the frescoes for the Brancacci Chapel in the church of the Carmine, where Michelangelo drew and studied in his youth; and Donatello, the sculptor of the marble St George that stood guard over the city’s grain store at Orsanmichele, and the creator of the figures of prophets and saints, whether of St John the Baptist or Mary Magdalene, carved with such subtle realism they seem instinct with thought and on the point of speech.

  Of those figures, it seems likely that Donatello meant the most to Michelangelo. This was not only because Michelangelo, himself, wanted to be a sculptor. A pupil of Donatello’s, Bertoldo di Giovanni, almost certainly gave Michelangelo his own first lessons in sculpting; and the young artist’s earliest surviving work, The Madonna of the Stairs, is a bas-relief evidently inspired by the bas-reliefs of Donatello. It may well be that Michelangelo felt that there was a direct line of inheritance between them, although in temperament and approach the two artists could not have been more different.

  The source of Donatello’s power as an artist is the strength of his faculty of imaginative projection. He asks himself what a desert prophet such as St John in the wilderness might actually have looked like, emaciated and wild, and he carves what he sees in his mind’s eye. He asks himself what it might look like when a woman such as the vengeful biblical heroine Judith cuts a man’s head off, and he casts the image in bronze. His works are compelling but they compel no meaningful interest in him because in creating them — in giving them such a strong sense of life that they present the illusion of being not works of art but actual human beings — he has absented himself.

  Michelangelo is not like that. His originality is of a different order, his creativity of a different nature. The images presented by his paintings for the Sistine Chapel ceiling are not the product of any great sense of human empathy. If anything, they suggest that Michelangelo had little interest in entering into and genuinely sympathising with the lives of other people — in the field of his art, at least. It is impossible to believe in Michelangelo’s Adam, in Michelangelo’s Noah, in Michelangelo’s people fleeing from the deluge, in anything like the same way that it is possible to believe in Donatello’s figure of a wild-eyed prophet known as Zuccone (literally, ‘pumpkin face’). Michelangelo’s figures are removed from reality in such a way that they appear almost as phantasms or ideas.

  The whole Sistine Chapel ceiling easily assumes the appearance of a phantasmagoria, in which all the images are united by their nature as emanations of Michelangelo’s own thought and sensibility — his own contemplation of the truths that might lie embedded in the mysterious and often inscrutable Old Testament stories which he had been called upon to illuminate. The fresco cycle as a whole radiates a powerful and sometimes oppressively strong sense of introspection. Looking at it feels almost nothing like looking at the real world. It feels, instead, like looking inside the mind of the man who created it.

  Michelangelo was an accomplished poet as well as a visual artist. That fact contains within it a clue to the particular, unique qualities of his painting. To draw a literary analogy, Michelangelo does not tell a story in the prosaic, direct manner of Boccaccio but in the poetically allusive style of Dante — the one Italian writer, according to Michelangelo’s biographer Ascanio Condivi, whom the artist ‘has always studied’. Every pose, every gesture, in the Sistine Chapel ceiling is charged with the sense of deliberation, intensity and polyvalence that words and phrases acquire in great poetry. No element of Michelangelo’s work is without significance, depth, implication, sometimes to the point where his language becomes so fraught with possibility, so compressed and allusive, that it cannot be pinned down to the expression of any single doctrine or idea.

  In this sense his spirit of innovation as a painter might be compared to that of Shakespeare as a writer — who, in Hamlet, invented what Frank Kermode describes as ‘a new rhetoric’, so inward-looking and so rich in complexity that ‘sometimes it takes the poet beyond the limits of reason and intelligibility’. Nothing means only one thing and everything has been subjected to the immense pressure of the artist’s thought. This holds for the larger patterns of meaning that play across the surface of the Sistine Chapel ceiling’s surface, connecting one picture with another; it prevails too at the minute level of the smallest detail, epitomised by the most famous detail of the ceiling’s most famous image of all — that small area of painted plaster where the whirling energies of a multitude are suddenly stilled, crystallised, to the particulate density of two fingers pointing across a few inches of air.

  In short, Michelangelo did not just invent a new kind of art, but a new idea of what art could be. He put his own sensibility, his own intellect, his own need and desire to fathom the mysteries of the Christian faith, centre stage. Before considering the ceiling’s many layers of meaning — the principal concern of this book — it will be helpful to consider Michelangelo’s personality, insofar as it can be understood, and to give some account of his life in the years leading up to its creation.

  PART ONE

  Michelangelo Buonarroti and His World

  Michelangelo knew how deeply implicated he was in his own art and how closely it expressed his own thoughts and feelings. He wanted other people to recognise this too, although he understood that they might not find it easy to do. The notion of self-expression implicit in his work was not familiar to his contemporaries. They had no language to bring to bear upon it. No conventions existed for the discussion of such a phenomenon. Largely in order to clarify the nature of his achievements, Michelangelo paid a great deal of attention to establishing the story of his life, as he wished it to be known.

  First he gave considerable assistance to Giorgio Vasari, who in 1550 published the earliest full biography of Michelangelo, much of it evidently drawn from conversations with the artist. Vasari’s text appeared in the first edition of his pioneering Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects. It was subsequently revised and extended for the second edition of 1568, but because Michelangelo was less than completely satisfied with Vasari’s work he had already, by then, taken the unprecedented step of encouraging another writer to compose another biography — one that would be more acceptable to him. The author was Ascanio Condivi. Had he never written his Life of Michelangelo, published in Rome in 1553, Condivi would not now be remembered. Little is known about him other than that he w
as, for a time, one of Michelangelo’s pupils and that he went on to become a distinctly unsuccessful artist. He disappears from history some time around 1574, when he is said to have died while attempting to ford a stream.

  Both of the early biographies are interestingly unreliable. They reveal a great deal about Michelangelo, but in no straightforward way, being written in a kind of code. Many of the stories that the authors recount, whether they tell of Michelangelo’s youth and upbringing, his troubled but fruitful relationship with Pope Julius II, or his heroic endeavours in painting the ceiling, have the quality of parables or fables. They are stories with subtexts, stories that invite certain morals or messages to be drawn from the narratives that they present. Given that the source for nearly all of them was Michelangelo himself, it can be assumed that those morals and messages were ones that he himself intended readers to draw. In their oblique way they reveal all kinds of fascinating things about the artist, about how he thought of himself and how he wanted to be remembered. This is particularly true of Condivi’s life, which was written in such close association with Michelangelo himself that it might plausibly be regarded as an autobiography written under dictation. It is a kind of work of art – Michelangelo’s self-portrait, carved out in words rather than marble.

  The two biographies occasionally disagree, both with each other and with the known historical facts, as they can be established from other documentary records of the time. But the lies that they perpetuate and the omissions of which they are guilty also shed light on Michelangelo’s personality. A good example is the account given by Condivi of the artist’s early training, which was clearly intended by Michelangelo as a corrective to the account that had been given by Vasari in the first edition of the Lives of three years earlier.

  A self-portrait by Michelangelo, c. 1540s

  Vasari had written that when Michelangelo was in his teens he was apprenticed to Domenico Ghirlandaio, one of the leading painters of late fifteenth-century Florence. Ghirlandaio was at that time working on his most celebrated work, a cycle of frescoes that can still be seen today, in the Tornabuoni Chapel in the church of Santa Maria Novella. This apparently harmless piece of information helps to explain how it was that Michelangelo, despite his insistence that he was essentially a sculptor rather than a painter, was able to tackle the painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling with such vigour and assurance. He had been taught the principles and methods of painting in buon fresco in the workshop of one of its leading exponents.

  Yet Condivi goes to great lengths to refute the idea that Ghirlandaio played any role whatsoever in Michelangelo’s formation as an artist. In his telling of the story this was a myth put about by Ghirlandaio and his descendants, who were jealous of Michelangelo for having outshone them and told the lie so that they could bask in a little of his reflected glory. ‘I wanted to mention this,’ Condivi says, ‘because I am told that Domenico’s son attributes the excellence and divinità of Michelangelo to a great extent to his father’s teaching, whereas he gave him no help whatever.’1 For his part, Vasari was so enraged by the suggestion that he had got the story wrong that he marched off to Ghirlandaio’s workshop and dug out the original copy of Michelangelo’s contract of apprenticeship. In his second, revised life of the artist he quoted it chapter and verse with evident relish.

  The truth is that Michelangelo was indeed taught the rudiments of painting in Ghirlandaio’s workshop, but wanted to conceal the fact. A number of possible motives suggest themselves. The idea that he was first and foremost a sculptor was always important to him. He told Condivi that sculpture was in his blood, relating that shortly after he was born, in 1475, he had been put out to a wet nurse in the little village of Settignano, near Arezzo in Tuscany. ‘She was the daughter of a stonemason, and the wife of a stonemason. For this reason Michelangelo is wont to say, perhaps facetiously or perhaps even in earnest, that it is no wonder that the chisel has given him so much gratification.’

  A more pressing need for the lie about his apprenticeship may have been Michelangelo’s desire to preserve intact the aura of his own self-sufficiency. This pattern of suppression, revealing his desire to remove from the record any evidence that he was ever taught to paint or sculpt, was repeated when it came to the role played by Bertoldo di Giovanni in his early life. Whereas Vasari explicitly states that the artist was given lessons in sculpture by Bertoldo, in Condivi’s adjusted version of the truth Bertoldo has simply been removed from the picture.

  In fostering the myth of his own untutored genius, Michelangelo was not merely trying to put himself in a good light. He was trying to communicate something that he felt was morally if not literally true. Even though he had attended Ghirlandaio’s workshop and even though Bertoldo had given him instruction, as far as Michelangelo was concerned, no one had the right to say they had taught him to be the artist that he became. He was different. He was unique.

  Michelangelo told Giorgio Vasari a similar version of the story he related to Condivi about having been wet-nursed by a stonemason’s daughter. Vasari, who was himself from Arezzo, near Settignano, where the wet nurse had lived, recalled Michelangelo’s words: ‘Giorgio, if I have anything of the good in my brain, it has come from my being born in the pure air of your country of Arezzo, even as I sucked in with my nurse’s milk the chisels and hammers with which I make my figures.’2 However playfully expressed, the story implies that Michelangelo’s conception of himself as an artist was tinged with uneasiness. He suggests not only that he has been marked out by fate, by God, to pursue a career in art. He also suggests an awareness that his destiny will not always be easy. Sucking in chisels and hammers — the artist makes his sense of vocation sound like something painfully ingested.

  Little is known about Michelangelo’s real mother, save that her name was Francesca and that she died when he was six years old. It was common practice at the time for families of some education and social pretension, such as his, to pass newborn babies to wet nurses for the first two years or so of their lives. So it can be assumed that Michelangelo had returned to the family home in Florence in about 1477 — only for his true mother to die just four years later. Mortality rates in fifteenth-century Italy were high, especially among young, child-bearing women. But the artist’s early childhood was certainly traumatic, even by the standards of the time. Having been separated from his surrogate mother and lost his true mother in quick succession, he was soon to encounter difficulties in his relationship with his father.

  Both Vasari and Condivi recount that Lodovico Buonarroti, recognising the boy’s intelligence, sent Michelangelo to a grammar school in Florence run by a certain Maestro Francesco from Urbino. But as Condivi tells the story, ‘nature and the heavens, which are difficult to withstand, were drawing him toward painting ; so that he could not resist running off here and there to draw whenever he could steal some time and seeking the company of painters ... On this account he was resented and quite often beaten unreasonably by his father and his father’s brothers who, being impervious to the excellence and nobility of art, detested it and felt that its appearance in their family was a disgrace.’3

  There is probably an element of exaggeration here. Michelangelo was clearly a very well-educated man. Not only did he read Dante, he also wrote his own poetry, in fluent cursive handwriting. So it seems unlikely that he neglected his studies altogether. It is also clear that Michelangelo’s father, Lodovico, eventually became sufficiently resigned to his son’s inclinations to have him apprenticed to Domenico Ghirlandaio (although Condivi, of course, leaves that fact out). But there does nonetheless seem to have been a longstanding disapproval, within Michelangelo’s family, of his choice of career.

  The cause, as Condivi’s choice of the word ‘disgrace’ suggests, was a form of snobbery. Although the status of artists had risen considerably in fifteenth-century Italy, in many quarters they were still commonly regarded as little better than glorified craftsmen. This seems to be have been so in Michelangelo’s family. The Buonarrot
i were once-prosperous moneylenders — a traditional Florentine occupation — who had fallen on hard times. Michelangelo’s grandfather, Lionardo, had squandered the family business, and by the time the artist was born the family estates had dwindled to no more than a little property in Florence and one small farm on a hillside in Settignano.

  Yet still the Buonarroti persisted in thinking of themselves as rightful members of the leisured classes. They were landowners, albeit in a very small way, who preferred to subsist on the extremely poor revenues of their diminished estates rather than engage in anything as demeaning as manual labour. They might take on clerical duties in the counting houses of contemporaries such as the Strozzi, but working with their hands was out of the question.4 The artist’s father, Lodovico, must have hoped that the evidently gifted Michelangelo might one day restore the family fortunes. But in choosing to become an artist — to be an apprentice, to work with his hands — there was in his father’s eyes a clear danger that he might take the family even lower down the social scale than it had already fallen.

  As things turned out, Michelangelo did more than restore the family fortunes. He became a rich man, frequenting the company of popes and cardinals. Throughout his meteoric rise he gave considerable financial support not only to his father but also to his varyingly feckless brothers, of whom he had four (one was a priest, who died young; the other three never amounted to much). Yet he always feared that his family would look down on him, despite his accomplishments.