Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel (8 page)

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:

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.

To express the matter simply, Michelangelo’s brain was not the same as most people’s brains. He might be compared to certain individuals who are gifted with seemingly inexplicable mathematical skills, such as the ability to solve the square root of an enormous number in a fraction of second. Some of Michelangelo’s later architectural drawings, done at a time when he had been put in charge of the huge project of completing the new St Peter’s, show that he could effortlessly manipulate particularly complex forms, like heavily moulded architraves, drawing them from all angles without any sign of calculation or workings-out — as if he had the equivalent of a modern computer-modelling program installed in his mind.

Certain drawings for the Sistine Chapel suggest that he made use of the same skill in creating his paintings for the vault. He would produce numerous, apparently disjointed, sketches and studies for a particular composition — an arm, a leg, a torso, modelled often from life, in widely differing conditions of light and shade. Then, in the act of painting, he would resolve this conflictingly lit jigsaw of shapes into a single unified whole. No other Renaissance painter drew with the same disregard for a consistent lighting scheme, and none worked with the same freedom from sketch to finished painting. Michelangelo could do this because of the skills he had shown as a sculptor — because of his unique ability to hold all the elements of a picture in his mind as if they were physical, three-dimensional presences. By the time he came to paint the image, it already existed so completely for him that he no longer needed to depend on his drawings. His celebrated rival Raphael painted his frescoes on to meticulously squared-up drawings that had been transferred to the surface of the plaster. But towards the later stages of the Sistine ceiling, when he was at his most assured, Michelangelo was able to dispense with such laborious methods. He painted
The Separation of Light and Darkness
, for instance, freehand. Study of the plaster ground itself proves that he did it in a single session of no more than eight or nine hours.

Study for the ceiling