Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel Read online

  Michelangelo stayed with Gianfrancesco Aldovrandi for little more than a year before returning to his native Florence. The city was by then in the throes of a great upheaval, having been whipped into a collective frenzy of penitence by the sermons of the hellfire Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola. Savonarola had been preaching in Florence, to increasing popular enthusiasm, since before the death of Lorenzo il Magnifico. His sermons had been instrumental in the uprising against the Medici that had been correctly predicted in the dark vision of Cardiere — indeed, the friar had created a climate of hysteria and spiritual emergency that made men prone to visions and hallucinations.

  Savonarola identified the Rome of the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, with the forces of the anti-Christ. His doom-laden interpretation of St John the Divine’s visions in the Book of Revelation had led him to believe that the start of the sixteenth century marked the beginning of the end of the world — the start of the Final Conflict between the forces of good and evil. His call for spiritual reform was coloured by a deep sense of eschatological urgency. If the people of the world did not repent, if the Church did not mend its ways, and immediately, it would be too late. ‘I say to you the church of God must be renewed, and it will be soon.’17 Savonarola’s pious revolution was destined to be overthrown, its leader burned at the stake. But his impact on Michelangelo’s thought should not be underestimated. Even in old age, the artist said that the memory of Savonarola’s words remained vivid in his imagination.

  Savonarola was removed from power partly at the instigation of the papacy. But although he was regarded as troublesome and dangerous, a threat both to the Church’s temporal power and to its spiritual authority, many of his ideas were reflected within the Vatican itself. He is sometimes regarded as a freak of history, when he was really a larger-than-life incarnation of attitudes extremely common at the time. Many others shared his apocalyptic view of the world.

  Astronomers and theologians, Savonarola’s contemporaries, nervously scanned the skies for comets that might portend the Second Coming. Omens were found everywhere. Plagues, floods and other natural catastrophes were interpreted as eruptions of the wrath of God. It was even widely assumed that Columbus’s discovery of a new world must have been a sign from above, indicating the imminence of Armageddon — a heaven-sent opportunity for mass conversion of the heathen, and therefore God’s way of swelling his Christian armies, even as the satanic forces of Islam gathered in the East.18 Astrologers competed to put a precise date to the world’s final day. Italy at the end of the fifteenth century was extremely susceptible to eschatological terrors. As the historian Damian Thompson notes, ‘the conventional picture of Renaissance Italy, in which a cultivated elite turns away from superstition and towards the study of art, architecture, music and astronomy, is extremely selective. We do not see the prophets wandering through Florence and Rome proclaiming the end of an age; nor do we spot the figure of the anti-Christ lurking behind the doric columns of the renovatio.’19 In the art of the young Michelangelo — with its ‘elite’ references to classical antiquity and its deep, countervailing Christian piety — these very different attitudes are uniquely combined.

  The greatest projects of the so-called High Renaissance, including the creation and decoration of the Sistine Chapel itself, were themselves bound up with a strong sense of ‘end time’. The renovation of Rome, the rebuilding of St Peter’s, the fortification of the Vatican — in papal circles these schemes were conceived not just as assertions of power and authority but as ways of readying the Church for the imminent judgement of the Last Day. One of the principal theologians at the court of Michelangelo’s greatest patron, Pope Julius II, was the vicar-general of the Augustinian order, Giles of Viterbo. Giles, who may also have sought to influence the iconography of Michelangelo’s paintings for the Sistine Chapel, gave explicit expression to this Messianic strain of thought. In a sermon preached in Julius’s presence in 1507 he portrayed the pope as a figure to be equated with Moses, Socrates and St Peter, one destined to play a great part in the unfolding of God’s awesome plan: ‘You, after more than 250 popes, after 1,500 years, after so many Christians and emperors and kings, you and you alone . . . will build the roof of the most Holy Temple so that it reaches heaven.’

  The literal reference was to St Peter’s, but Giles had a larger meaning in mind too. Julius II was to preside over the creation of that greater Church, all of Christian humanity, drawn by Rome’s splendour, as by a beacon, to fight on the side of good against evil in fulfilment of St John the Divine’s visions of the apocalypse.20 The commission to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling was accompanied by the same sense of spiritual urgency that had animated Savonarola, whose words had left such a strong impression on the young Michelangelo. The paintings for the ceiling would bear vivid traces of that apocalyptic anxiety.

  The Drunkenness of Bacchus

  The first triad: The Separation of Light and Darkness (bottom), The Creation of the Sun, Moon and Plants (centre and overleaf) and The Creation of Life in the Waters (top)

  The central triad: The Creation of Adam (bottom and previous page), The Creation of Eve (centre) and The Temptation and Expulsion (top)

  Above : The Creation of Eve

  Overleaf : The Temptation and Expulsion

  The Deluge (previous page and in detail above)

  The Sacrifice of Noah (top) and The Drunkenness of Noah (below)

  The third triad: The Sacrifice of Noah (bottom), The Deluge (centre) and The Drunkenness of Noah (top)

  Michelangelo left Florence in the summer of 1496, two years before Savonarola’s downfall and execution. The cause of his departure was a fake. One of his works, a sleeping Cupid,21 had been passed off as an antiquity by an unscrupulous Florentine dealer. A prominent collector in Rome, Cardinal Riario, had been duped into believing it was of ancient Roman provenance, and had paid the princely sum of two hundred ducats for it. After discovering that he had been the victim of a confidence trick, the cardinal had sent an envoy to Florence. The messenger was given two tasks: first, to track down the crooked dealer and get a refund; second, to find the artist responsible for such fine work and bring him to Rome. Michelangelo was twenty-two years old. His career was about to take off.

  Riario was intrigued to meet the young prodigy. He even put him up in his own house for a year, according to the artist’s biographers. Condivi says that although the cardinal gave Michelangelo no commissions, the artist ‘did not lack a connoisseur who did make use of him; for Messer Jacopo Galli, a Roman gentleman of fine intellect, had him make in his house a marble Bacchus ten palmi high’.22 The work in question, which unlike the faked Cupid still survives, is a life-size incarnation of the ancient god of wine, revelry and mystic orgies. Roundbellied and leering, the stone Bacchus (opposite) seems to stagger rather than walk, raising a glass as he teeters through space. Vasari wondered at the way in which Michelangelo had given the figure ‘both the youthful slenderness of the male and the fullness and roundness of the female’,23 which has encouraged one or two subsequent commentators to find in it an early indication of the artist’s presumed homosexuality.

  There is no documentary proof that Michelangelo found men more attractive than women. He had close friendships with members of both sexes — most notably, in his later years, with Vittoria Colonna, whose piety and interest in spiritual reform he shared, as well as with a young Roman nobleman called Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, to whom he dedicated some drawings and wrote letters that express his affections in the inscrutably formulaic language of courtly convention.

  As he came towards the end of his biography of Michelangelo, Vasari felt the need to insist that the artist’s love of the beautiful male form was totally innocent and pure. This suggests that there must have been rumours to the contrary. Such gossip was rife in the overwhelmingly male city of Rome. Michelangelo, who was both unmarried and extremely famous, was a natural target. Where does the truth lie?

  On the evidence of his painting and sculpture, he w
as more strongly drawn to the representation of the male than the female form. But it would be unwise to draw firm inferences about his sexual orientation on the basis of that. He was fascinated by the art of classical antiquity, by sculptures such as the Laocoön, unearthed in Rome before his very eyes. The heroic male nude is essential to classical sculpture, the most fundamental element of its language. It became the basic unit of Michelangelo’s expressive language as well, to the point where he could no more invent a composition without it than a writer could compose a sentence without words.

  To complicate matters further, he wrote various love poems addressed to women when he was young. These include a comically coarse and erotically direct lyric, in three octave stanzas, in which he compares his beloved’s body, part by part, to the produce of a farm. Her face is more beautiful than a turnip, her teeth whiter than a parsnip. Her eyes are the colour of treacle and her breasts like ‘two ripe melons in a satchel’. 24 The poem is a farmyard parody of the courtly love tradition, a peasant’s proclamation of desire for a dairymaid, so it should not be taken as a direct reflection of the artist’s own feelings. But it shows that he was not only and exclusively interested in men.

  The only really strong evidence about Michelangelo’s sexuality indicates that he disapproved of sex altogether. The artist explicitly told his biographers that he preferred to have no intimate relationships at all, in order to preserve his energies for art. He repeated the sentiment in conversation with a friend: ‘I already have a wife who is too much for me; one who keeps me unceasingly struggling on. It is my art, and my works are my children.’25

  Michelangelo would spend almost his entire career creating art in the service of religion. Like a number of his other early works, the Bacchus is an exception. Perhaps that is why it seems to embody such a wild vitality, such an irrepressible sense of freedom. The strangely smiling figure, with distant unfocused eyes, is a dream of life as it might be lived without any sense of law or limit. The Bacchus exists outside the relentless arc of Christian time, outside its cycle of damnation and salvation. The figure is inscrutable, unjudgeable, unruly and alive. Michelangelo allows himself a reprieve from his own habits of spiritual solemnity — a sudden, drunken moment of release from the imperatives of his faith.

  Shortly after creating the Bacchus, the artist carved the celebrated Pietà now in St Peter’s (overleaf). He received the commission from a French cardinal who never lived to see the wonder he had paid for. The subject, unusual in Italian Renaissance art but common in the painting and sculpture of Northern Europe, is the Virgin Mary cradling the dead Christ on her lap. Michelangelo’s Virgin is distant, so absorbed in her thoughts that she seems, paradoxically, to have less vitality than her dead son. She is withdrawn and remote, while his graceful form seems still to pulse, as if with the memory of life so recently stilled. She is swathed in stony draperies, while he is naked except for a loincloth. His body, carved with astonishing skill, has a deep pathos about it — the head that lolls back, the legs that dangle, but above all the limp right arm, gently squeezed at its juncture with Christ’s torso by the pressure of the Virgin’s hand, an arm rendered with such profound attention to each vein, every joint and bone and tendon, that it seems almost impossible that a human being armed only with hammer and chisel, let alone a young man of twentythree years, could have created such a thing.

  The Pietà now in St Peter’s

  Vasari, searching for words to express the extent of his admiration for the work, remarks that ‘it is a miracle that a stone without shape should be reduced to such perfection’. But the Pietà is unsettling too. Christ is as vulnerable, in his nakedness, as a baby. The draperies in Mary’s lap suggest a shell or cave, a womb-like enclosure. She might almost be contemplating the terrible miracle of a full-grown but stillborn son. Artists had often depicted the Virgin as a young mother troubled by the foreknowledge of the agonies her baby will endure as an adult. Here Michelangelo telescopes time in the other direction, to suggest that in the moment of Christ’s death Mary is remembering how she once cradled him as an infant.

  Michelangelo had already been recognised by a few discerning connoisseurs as an artist of promise. But the Pietà made him famous. He was instantly acclaimed, not just as the most accomplished sculptor of his time but as a strange and truly marvellous phenomenon. How could an artist so extraordinarily young have produced a work of such astonishing complexity, such unprecedented truth to life? The myth of the ‘divine’ Michelangelo, sent down to earth by God himself, may have begun right at the start of his career.

  The artist would himself grow to believe that he was an instrument of divine will. But he still wanted people to know that the Pietà had been shaped by his, by Michelangelo’s, hands. The work became a popular attraction, drawing many of the pilgrims who flocked to Rome. Vasari tells the story of an outraged Michelangelo overhearing a man from Lombardy casually informing the rest of his group that the work had been sculpted by a certain sculptor named ‘Giobbo’, from Milan. According to Vasari, the artist crept into the chapel that housed the statue that same night, and sculpted his signature into the girdle that divides the Virgin’s breasts. ‘Michelangelo fecit’ — Michelangelo made this. It was the first and last time that he ever deemed it necessary to sign his work.

  In the spring of 1501, Michelangelo returned to Florence after five years in Rome. On his arrival, he agreed to sculpt a number of small statues for the tomb of Cardinal Piccolomini in Siena. He even signed a contract for the work, but soon asked for it to be set aside because he had a far more ambitious project in mind. In the workshops of the Duomo, Florence’s cathedral, a great piece of marble had been gathering dust for nearly forty years. The block had been acquired in 1464 in the hope that it might be carved into a giant figure of a prophet for one of the cathedral’s tribune buttresses. But the stone had defeated every sculptor’s attempts to form it, and now it stood misshapen and abandoned. According to Vasari, Michelangelo’s friends in Florence had told him that Piero Soderini, the Gonfalonier of the city, was keen to see one more attempt made on the abortive block. So the artist went to investigate.

  ‘Michelangelo measured it all anew,’ writes Vasari, ‘considering whether he might be able to carve a reasonable figure from that block by accommodating himself as to the attitude to the marble as it had been left all misshapen . . . and he resolved to ask for it from Soderini and the wardens [of the cathedral], by whom it was granted to him as a thing of no value, they thinking that whatever he might make of it would be better than the state in which it was at that time.’26 They had made a wise decision. Within three years Michelangelo had transformed the botched block of stone into a flawless and monumental figure of David (overleaf).

  Vasari’s own judgement of the work, pronounced some halfcentury after its creation, conveys some sense of the breathless amazement which ‘il Gigante’ —‘the Giant’, as the sculpture was instantly nicknamed by the people of Florence — elicited from those who first saw it:

  He uncovered it, and it cannot be denied that this work has carried off the palm from all other statues, modern or ancient, Greek or Latin; and it may be said that neither the Marforio at Rome, nor the Tiber and the Nile of the Belvedere, nor the Giants of Monte Cavallo, are equal to it in any respect, with such just proportion, beauty and excellence did Michelangelo finish it . . . And, of a truth, whoever has seen this work need not trouble to see any other work executed in sculpture, either in our own or other times, by no matter what craftsman.27

  How did Michelangelo, still only in his mid-twenties, manage to create what Vasari rightly describes as one of the wonders of the world? This is one of the greatest mysteries concerning him. He had never been apprenticed to a sculptor. In fact there is nothing to suggest that he had ever received any extensive tuition in sculpture, aside from a few lessons from Bertoldo di Giovanni, the aged custodian of Lorenzo il Magnifico’s sculpture garden. He had studied anatomy, but he was by no means alone in that — Leonardo da Vinci had
studied anatomy more deeply than Michelangelo, yet he never showed anything like Michelangelo’s abilities as a sculptor. Part of the answer would seem to be that Michelangelo was born with a rare and exceptionally strong form of spatial awareness, an ability to hold a particular three-dimensional form in his mind’s eye, with total accuracy and for long periods of time. But it was also allied to an extraordinary manual dexterity, an instinctive ability to shape with his hands the images in his mind.

  David

  Vasari says that before making the David, Michelangelo made a model for it in wax. It was in the transition from that model to the finished work that he displayed his unique talents. One problem was that of scale, of translating the small image of the model into the gigantic size of the great block. The other and yet more difficult problem was to recreate an image formed by one process, but using a totally different technique. When Michelangelo made his model he was using an additive method, making a form by adding wax to wax, shaping and kneading it until he had what he wanted. When he made the David itself, he had to do the opposite. To carve is to remove, to chip away, to make a form by many acts of reduction. Most sculptors lose and find the desired form, lose and find it again, change it by a process of trial and error — all this as they go along. But for Michelangelo it seems that the form was always there for him in the marble, permanent and unchanging, as if it were simply waiting for him to reveal it. Vasari says that he carved forms from stone as if he were pulling figures from water. This haunting metaphor sounds like one of the artist’s own phrases. It may have been his attempt to describe, as best as he could, the mystery of his processes.