Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel (7 page)

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 was 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