Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel (4 page)
Read Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel Online
Authors: Andrew Graham-Dixon
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.
More than three hundred of Michelangelo’s letters to and from his father and siblings survive. They are overwhelmingly concerned with practicalities, mostly financial — the purchase of property, the banking of sums of money. Michelangelo’s own letters testify to his sense of family duty and his considerable generosity, but they are constantly punctuated by complaints and lamentations. He lives wearied by gargantuan labours, he protests, again and again, and all for no thanks. A typical example is the letter he wrote to his father from Rome in October 1512, just after he had completed the Sistine Chapel ceiling, in which he concludes: ‘all this I have done in order to help you, though you have never either recognised or believed it — God help you.’
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The most extraordinary thing about Michelangelo’s letters to his family is the fact that he never once discusses his art with them in any moral or intellectual sense. It is ever-present in the background, as the cause of his exhaustion and source of whatever help he can give them. But that is all. Michelangelo may have felt that his family could never really understand who he was or what he was trying to accomplish. This may be another of the subtexts behind the story of the wet nurse and the miraculous capacities with which her milk had endowed the artist. Hellmut Wohl succinctly expresses this aspect of the story’s secret meaning in his analysis of Condivi’s
Life of Michelangelo
: ‘As a sculptor, he implies, he was not the child of his father and mother, but of his wet nurse; he had been reborn, set apart from his natural heritage, and invested with a creative power that was his alone.’
All this may help to explain Michelangelo’s extraordinary drive, his almost monastic dedication to work, his readiness to take on projects of such magnitude as to seem virtually unachievable — and, most of the time, actually to carry them off. He was motivated, in part, by a deep desire to prove his family wrong. It was an important part of his life’s work to convince even the most sceptical that art could indeed be the noblest of professions.
Where did Michelangelo acquire his deep-seated belief in the nobility and intellectual seriousness of art? Largely from Florence and the traditions he encountered there. Brunelleschi, Masaccio, Donatello and Ghiberti, the founders of early Renaissance style, had not only furnished the city with copious examples of their ingenuity and talent. They had also effected the beginnings of a sea-change in attitudes to art and artists across the entire Italian peninsula. By the second half of the fifteenth century, the role of the artist itself had undergone a profound metamorphosis. The most gifted painters, sculptors and architects — men such as Piero della Francesca, who wrote a treatise on mathematics, or Leonardo da Vinci, who became expert in numerous branches of scientific knowledge — were no longer content to be regarded as mere craftsmen. They were intellectuals, possessors of special skills and forms of knowledge often so arcane they liked to refer to them as ‘secrets’ — men capable of mastering the complexities of human anatomy, or making the detailed calculations necessary to create the illusions of perspective.
The new skills and ambitions of artists were in turn recognised and encouraged by a new breed of patron. The princes who ruled the city-states of Renaissance Italy — the Sforza in Milan, the Gonzaga in Mantua, the Este in Ferrara — had themselves undergone a sea-change. Having emerged from the ranks of merchants and mercenaries, their horizons had been suddenly broadened by an intellectual revolution that took place in their midst. They too had learned to value different forms of learning, in particular to share that interest in the classical past proselytised by the men hired to educate them. Their teachers were drawn increasingly from the ranks of humanist scholars, followers of Petrarch, united by a fascination for what he had called ‘the pure radiance of the past’. The princely patrons of Renaissance Italy themselves became intrigued by the past and consumed by the ambition to rival the glory of antiquity.
Michelangelo experienced this new world at first hand during his formative years, when he came into direct contact with the circle of the Medici, the principal family of Florence. At its head was Lorenzo de’ Medici, otherwise known as Il Magnifico, ‘The Magnificent One’, who gave much encouragement to the artist in his early years. Vasari tells the story behind their first meeting, which took place when Michelangelo was no more than fifteen years old, in convincingly circumstantial detail:
At that time the Magnificent Lorenzo de’ Medici kept the sculptor Bertoldo in his garden on the Piazza San Marco, not so much as custodian or guardian of the many beautiful antiques that he had collected and gathered together at great expense in that place, as because, desiring very earnestly to create a school of excellent painters and sculptors, he wished that these should have as their chief and guide the above-named Bertoldo, who was a disciple of Donato [Donatello] . Bertoldo, although he was so old that he was not able to work, was nevertheless a well-practised master and in much repute . . . Now Lorenzo, who bore a very great love to painting and to sculpture, was grieved that there were not to be found in his time sculptors noble and famous enough to equal the many painters of the highest merit and reputation, and he determined, as I have said, to found a school. To this end he besought Domenico Ghirlandaio that, if he had among the young men in his workshop any that were inclined to sculpture, he might send them to his garden, where he wished to train and form them in such a manner as might do honour to himself, to Domenico, and to the whole city. Whereupon there were given to him by Domenico as the best of his young men, among others, Michelangelo and Francesco Granacci . . .
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Some modern scholars have unaccountably chosen to regard Lorenzo’s sculpture garden as a fiction. But it certainly existed. It contained an avenue of cypresses and a loggia, as well as Lorenzo’s collection of classical statuary. Vasari goes so far as to call it an art academy, in which case it would have been one of the first such institutions, although his actual description makes it sound a little more informal than that — a place where young men could study sculpture in their own time and make their first attempts in the medium, sporadically supervised by Bertoldo, the ageing tutorcum-custodian. Lorenzo the Magnificent had a habit of turning up unannounced to inspect the progress of his young protégés.
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According to both of Michelangelo’s biographers, he took to Michelangelo more or less instantly.
Condivi tells the story of how Michelangelo decided to make his own copy of one of Lorenzo’s classical statues:
One day, he was examining among these works the
Head of a Faun
, already old in appearance, with a long beard and laughing countenance, though the mouth, on account of its antiquity, could hardly be distinguished or recognised for what it was; and, as he liked it inordinately, he decided to copy it in marble . . . He set about copying the
Faun
with such care and study that in a few days he perfected it, supplying from his imagination all that was lacking in the ancient work, that is, the open mouth as of a man laughing, so that the cavity of the mouth and all the teeth could be seen. In the midst of this, the Magnificent, coming to see what point his works had reached, found the boy engaged in polishing the head and, approaching quite near, he was much amazed, considering first the excellence of the work and then the boy’s age; and, although he did praise the work, nonetheless he joked with him as with a child and said, ‘Oh, you have made the
Faun
old and left him all his teeth. Don’t you know that old men of that age are always missing a few?’
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As soon as Lorenzo had left, Michelangelo got to work on the statue, removing an upper tooth from its mouth and drilling a hole in the gum to make it look as though it had come out by the root:
‘. . . the following day he awaited the Magnificent with eager longing. When he had come and noted the boy’s goodness and simplicity, he laughed at him very much; but then, when he weighed in his mind the perfection of the thing and the age of the boy, he, who was the father of
virtù
, resolved to help and encourage such great genius and to take him into his household; and, learning from him whose son he was, he said: ‘Inform your father that I would like to speak to him.’
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Michelangelo’s father does not emerge with much credit from the rest of Condivi’s account. When Lodovico hears that he has been summoned, he suspects that he is being manipulated by Michelangelo. He protests that he will never suffer his son to become a mere stonemason, and refuses to listen when it is explained to him ‘how great a difference there was between a sculptor and a stonemason’. However, he cannot refuse to meet Lorenzo the Magnificent, who is so much his social superior. Lorenzo asks him ‘whether he would be willing to let him have his son for his own’, in exchange for which he promises to grant him ‘the greatest favour in my power’. Lodovico agrees but, like some hapless character in a fairy story, immediately fails to take advantage of his fortunate situation. Offered, as if by magic, anything he might wish for, he asks for a minor job in the customs office. Lorenzo claps him on the shoulder and smiles at his naïveté, commenting, ‘You will always be poor.’
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The contrast between Lodovico’s lack of ambition and his son’s strength of purpose could hardly be greater. Concealed within this parable of a father who foolishly fails to understand the nature of his son’s genius, then even more foolishly fails to profit by it, lies a message from Michelangelo to his contemporaries. Lodovico, who cannot grasp the difference between a sculptor and a mere stonemason, represents all of those who would doubt the true dignity of the artist’s vocation. His objections, rooted in snobbery, are made to seem all the more absurd by the fact that it is a member of the noble house of the Medici who refutes them.
The Battle of the Centaurs
The moment when Lorenzo il Magnifico took him into his household was always regarded by Michelangelo as a milestone in his life. According to both Vasari and Condivi, Lorenzo treated the artist as if he were one of his own sons. Michelangelo ate at Lorenzo’s table and benefited from conversations with the many leading humanist authors who were part of the Medici circle. He is said to have been inspired to create one of his earliest works, a bas-relief on the classical theme of
The Battle of the Centaurs
(above), by the poet Angelo Poliziano. The work in question, which was not a commission but was created for the artist’s own satisfaction, remained in the hands of his heirs for centuries and can still be seen in the Casa Buonarroti in Florence. This study in writhing, intertwined human bodies is a testament to Michelangelo’s extraordinary abilities with a chisel, at the age of just sixteen or seventeen. It is also evidence of his volatility of temperament and his deep sensuality.