The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (76 page)

Michelangelo’s major works were not merely assignments fulfilled but had an aura of the preternatural, of his uncanny ability to overcome all competitors. His most familiar early masterpiece, his
David
, in what he called “the prime art” of sculpture, revealed his ability to do what others could not: if other artists required a piece of marble specially suited to their design, Michelangelo could make a masterpiece from marble already mangled by others. Back in 1463 the authorities of the cathedral of Florence had acquired a sixteen-foot-high chunk of white marble to be carved into a figure to top an external buttress of Brunelleschi’s dome. Two well-known sculptors, one from Siena, another from Florence, had worked on the piece but had given up, and the block was put in storage. Forty years later the authorities still sought a sculptor. In 1501 they decided to take their chance on the twenty-six-year-old Michelangelo for the giant figure to be placed conspicuously at the door of the Palazzo della Signoria. Condivi tells the story.

In Florence, Michelangelo’s work for those months became proverbial—how he measured and scrutinized the mangled piece to see what it would accommodate, how he made small wax models and drawings for parts, how he slept in his clothes to save time, and finally “released” his fabled Giant from material abandoned for a half century.

This surprising achievement in sculpture would be outdone by his masterpiece in painting. Here, too, was the genius besting all others and even somehow exceeding himself. After Pope Julius II summoned Michelangelo to Rome in 1505 to design and build for him a world-dazzling tomb to be completed in four years, Michelangelo himself went to the mountains of Carrara to select and quarry the marble needed for the forty more-than-life-size figures in the plan. Michelangelo stayed in the mountains for eight months “with two workmen and his horse, and without any other salary except his food.” From the unpredictably undulating marble veins he sought out huge blocks without blemishes and had them laboriously loaded on ships. When Michelangelo himself arrived in Rome, to his astonishment the pope refused to see him. The pope had been persuaded by Bramante to rebuild the whole basilica of St. Peter’s in place of his own grandiose tomb.

This episode Condivi appropriately called the First Act in the Tragedy of the Tomb. It baptized Michelangelo in the dirty politics of Vatican art. And its melodrama would ironically produce Michelangelo’s masterpiece. Bramante (1444–1514) and his kinsman Raphael were jealous of Michelangelo, irritated by his exposure of Bramante’s mistakes and by the pope’s favoritism (including even a private drawbridge between the pope’s rooms and Michelangelo’s). They hatched a plan that would release the pope’s resources from the tomb for their own project of rebuilding St. Peter’s. They reminded the pope that building a tomb in one’s lifetime was bad luck and might bring an early death. Their project for Michelangelo would remove him from the scene of competition for some years and impose on him a task for which he was not competent. Then the discredited Michelangelo would no longer be their rival in other projects. These diversionary tactics produced the most spectacular Pyrrhic victory in the history of the arts.

The project they persuaded Julius II to assign to Michelangelo was relatively obscure but sufficiently difficult. It was to fresco the ceiling of the private chapel that Julius’s uncle Pope Sixtus IV a quarter century before had built (1473–81), and which came to public notice only when it was used for papal elections. The chapel had already been copiously decorated with frescoes by Perugino, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and others. Michelangelo would be commissioned to decorate the tunnel-vaulted ceiling, a curved surface broken up by eight windows that produced unmanageable triangles and lunettes. “In this way,” Vasari reports, “Bramante and Michelangelo’s other rivals thought they would divert his energies from sculpture, in which
they realized he was supreme. This, they argued, would make things hopeless for him, since he had no experience of colouring in fresco he would certainly, they believed, do less creditable work as a painter. Without doubt, they thought, he would be compared unfavourably with Raphael, and even if the work were a success, being forced to do it would make him angry with the Pope; and thus one way or another they would succeed in their purpose of getting rid of him.” Michelangelo, protesting that painting was not his art, still took on the project.

In every way it was a challenging task. Since Michelangelo had never used color, nor had he painted in fresco, he had to enlist friends to teach him the techniques. He had to discard the scaffolding that Bramante had erected, which would have left holes in the ceiling, for a scaffold of his own. Though he would engage some workmen as helpers, he determined to design and paint the whole ceiling himself. The impatient Julius tried repeatedly to see the work in progress and demanded to know when it would be completed. “When it satisfies me as an artist!” was the proverbial reply. “Finally,” Vasari reports, “the Pope threatened that if Michelangelo did not finish the ceiling quickly, he would have him thrown down from the scaffolding. Then Michelangelo, who had good reason to fear the Pope’s anger, lost no time in doing all that was wanted.”

After four years of Michelangelo’s furious solitary labor, the ceiling was unveiled in 1512. “I have finished the chapel which I was painting,” he wrote his father. “The Pope is well satisfied.” And so were the crowds that now thronged in. “He executed the frescoes in great discomfort,” Vasari recalled, “having to work with his face looking upwards, which impaired his sight so badly that he could not read or look at drawings save with his head turned backwards, and this lasted for several months afterwards.” His enemies had stage-managed the masterpiece that quickly established him as the artist genius of the age. In that awkward curved space fragmented by lunettes and triangles Michelangelo managed to depict the history of the Earth from the Creation to Noah, surrounded by ancestors and prophets of Jesus and finally revealing the liberation of the soul. Writhing nudes dramatized the agony of the body preparing for spiritual freedom in Michelangelo’s version of the Neoplatonist doctrine that the body was only the vehicle of the soul. The work would have been remarkable enough on a wide unbroken canvas, but thrust into this space it was unmistakable witness to genius. “There is no other work to compare with this for excellence, nor could there be,” exclaimed Vasari, “and it is scarcely possible even to imitate what Michelangelo accomplished. The ceiling has proved a veritable beacon to our art, of inestimable benefit to all painters, restoring light to a world that for centuries had been plunged into darkness.” Succeeding centuries have not dissented.

Michelangelo was barely able to benefit from the pope’s acclaim, for Julius died four months after the ceiling was unveiled. The heirs renewed the contract for an enlarged tomb for Julius in Rome. But Michelangelo returned to Florence, where the Medici in turn commissioned him to make a grandiose funerary monument of their own. Much of the rest of his life he would be torn between the Medici monument and the promised tomb of Julius II, which the heirs never ceased to demand. And he continued to benefit from the rivalry of papal families when in 1534 the Farnese pope Paul III commissioned Michelangelo to paint the wall behind the altar in the Sistine Chapel. His
Last Judgment
, begun in 1536, was completed in 1541. This Christian panorama depicted the Second Coming and mankind tested by the revolving forces of the universe, in the aura of his favorite poet, Dante. “To any discerning critic the Last Judgment demonstrates the sublime force of art and Michelangelo’s figures reveal thoughts and emotions that only he has known how to express …” acclaimed Vasari. “All these details bear witness to the sublime power of Michelangelo’s art, in which skill was combined with a natural inborn grace. Michelangelo’s figures stir the emotions even of people who know nothing about painting.”

In 1546 the seventy-nine-year-old Pope Paul III confidently called on the seventy-one-year-old Michelangelo to be chief architect and superintendent of the rebuilding of St. Peter’s. Michelangelo again objected “that architecture was not his vocation.” But “against his will” he took on the job at the pope’s command. Despite his protests of architectural incompetence Michelangelo had already designed several remarkable buildings in Florence. For the Medici pope Clement VII he had built the New Sacristy, or Medici Chapel, in the Church of San Lorenzo. And his bold Biblioteca Laurenziana was the first great Western library to be designed (1524) specifically for its secular purposes rather than by the canons of religious architecture. Its famous vestibule, an enclosed space with a freestanding staircase in the center, became the model for monumental staircases in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It led up, not to the familiar three naves of religious buildings, but to a long low rectangular reading room. Simply designed for the quiet concentration of readers, it became a prototype of countless library reading rooms to follow.

But the St. Peter’s task was on a scale without precedent since the medieval cathedrals. The rebuilding of the basilica had been going on for forty-one years plagued by vacillating plans, from Bramante’s simple Greek cross (1506) to Sangallo’s complex Latin cross (1530). Braving the displeasure of those who had been working at the basilica in recent decades, Michelangelo ordered a return to Bramante’s simple design, which he said was “clear, straightforward, luminous, and isolated from the Vatican Palace all around.” When the pope commanded all to take their orders only from
him, “Michelangelo, seeing the great trust and confidence that the Pope reposed in him, wanted to demonstrate his own good will by having it declared in the papal decree that he was devoting his time to the fabric for the love of God, and without other reward.”

This was to be the grand project of his next seventeen years. He resisted all efforts to distract or seduce him from the job, or remove him from it. Since his completion of St. Peter’s had become a religious mission, to fail in it would be “a great disgrace and sin.” He stayed on but the work was not completed in his lifetime. The project was so vast, and so many architects had a hand, that it is not easy to separate the parts for which Michelangelo should be credited. But his sculptural approach to architecture and his belief in buildings as organisms with lives of their own would be embodied in the completed St. Peter’s. The dome was inspired by Brunelleschi’s cathedral dome in Florence, and the façade was not his design. There remained, however, Michelangelo’s grand and simple concept for the building: a dome of the heavens over the four cardinal points of the earth.

A cult of Michelangelo began to appear about 1540, when the vigorous creator was only sixty-five. The popes sanctified his plans for St. Peter’s and took measures to prevent the slightest change. Three sets of imaginary dialogues with him were published by 1552, and biographies appeared while he was still alive. He would never be more extravagantly appreciated than by his contemporaries. Vasari noted in 1568 that he had “in the three arts a perfect mastery that God has granted no other person, in the ancient or modern world, in all the years that the sun has been spinning round the world.” The awe-inspiring quality of the artist and his work they called
terribilità
. “Michelangelo’s genius,” according to Vasari, “was recognized during his lifetime, not, as happens to so many, only after his death. As we have seen, Julius II, Leo X, Clement VII, Paul III, Julius III, Paul IV, and Pius IV, all these supreme pontiffs, wanted to have him near them at all times; as also, as we know, did Suleiman, Emperor of the Turks, Francis of Valois, King of France, the Emperor Charles V, the Signoria of Venice, and lastly … Duke Cosimo de’ Medici, all of whom made him very honorable offers, simply to avail themselves of his great talents.”

No longer painting to order by the hour as a minion of court or cathedral, the creator, the genius artist, had become an inspired source, sought after by pope and prince. The Sistine ceiling and
The Last Judgment
displayed the new independence of the artist. And for Michelangelo, in the limbo between patron and client, this cost personal agony. While Leonardo had spent much of his life in pursuit of patrons, Michelangelo was more often the pursued. The funerary project that Julius II proposed to Michelangejo in 1505 would dog him for the next forty years. He changed the design at
least six times with the changing nuances of his own religious sentiments, and Julius II himself vacillated. After Julius’s death, the Rovere family continued their demands while the Medici popes pressed their competing projects. “I am solicited so much,” he complained, “that I cannot take time to eat.”

Michelangelo was well aware of the awesome quality of his person and his art. “When Buonarroti comes to see me,” Pope Clement VII used to say, “I always take a seat and bid him be seated at once, feeling sure that he will do so without leave or license otherwise.” Stories of his
terribilità
were legion. On his abrupt departure from Rome in 1506, when Julius II had changed his mind about the tomb, the pope sent five horsemen after him, Michelangelo recalled, with a threat of the pope’s displeasure if he did not return at once. “I replied then to the Pope that as soon as he would discharge his obligations towards me I would return; otherwise he need not hope ever to see me again.” This caused a diplomatic incident between the papacy and the city of Florence. Michelangelo was not pacified until the Signoria of Florence finally agreed to write the pope that should he do Michelangelo harm, “he will be doing it to this Signoria.” About that time Julius II was going to Bologna, which was nearer to Florence than to Rome and when Michelangelo met him there the pope considered that he had deferred to the artist. The bishop “who had presented Michelangelo to the Pope began to make excuses for him, saying to his holiness that such men were ignorant creatures, worthless except for their art, and that he should freely pardon him. The Pope lost his temper at this and whacked the bishop with a mace he was holding, shouting at him: ‘It’s you that are ignorant, insulting him in a way we wouldn’t dream of.’ ”