Michelangelo

by Miles J. Unger

  A sounder claim to highborn status came via Michelangelo’s mother, Francesca, daughter of Neri di Miniato del Sera and Bonda Rucellai. The Rucellai family was one of the richest and most powerful in Florence. Merchants who had grown prosperous by importing a plant used to create a prized purple dye, they were staunch allies of the ruling Medici clan and flourished along with that powerful family. This connection, rather than the spurious kinship with the descendants of Countess Matilda, could have paid real dividends, but Lodovico never seems to have turned it to his advantage.

  For all their pretensions, however, at the time of Michelangelo’s birth the Buonarroti were barely clinging to respectability. This had nothing to do with ancestry but rather with the lack of cold, hard cash, the other critical measure of status in mercantile Florence. Michelangelo’s grandfather Lionardo had been so poor that he could not scrape together enough money to provide his daughter with a dowry and had to pledge his house on the Piazza dei Peruzzi to secure a suitable groom. Failure to provide for a marriageable daughter was a source of shame to a Florentine patrician as well as a practical obstacle, since dowerless women could not be deployed to forge the connections with other successful families necessary to rise in the world.

  Large City View of Florence (Catena Map). C. 1500/1510. bpk, Berlin/Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany/Jörg P. Anders/Art Resource, NY

  This blow to family pride occurred in 1449, but neither Lodovico nor his brother had done anything in the interim to improve their situation. Michelangelo’s uncle, Francesco, was a small-time money changer who kept a table in the New Market, but unlike the vast majority of his compatriots he seemed to possess little aptitude for turning a profit. Lodovico’s attempts at restoring the family’s fortunes were even more halfhearted. For the most part, he preferred life as a gentleman of modest means. Lacking the drive to get ahead in business, he and his growing family had to be content to live off the income derived from a modest property in Florence and a small farm in the neighboring village of Settignano, supplemented by an occasional stint as a minor civil servant.

  Michelangelo was less than a month old when Lodovico and his family returned to his native city of Florence at the end of his term in office. In 1475, about 50,000 people lived within the Tuscan capital’s high walls; at least an equal number lived in the contado, the surrounding countryside where for thousands of years a large number of peasants and a smaller number of gentleman farmers had cultivated wine, grain, and olives in the rocky hillsides. The city itself was a crowded maze of streets and alleyways hugging either side of the Arno River. From the surrounding hills of Fiesole, Bellosguardo, and Settignano, the city was a sea of terra-cotta roofs overtopped by magnificent basilicas and bristling towers. Much of the city was given over to fetid slums filled with crowded tenements, home to the workers who were the muscle behind the thriving textile industries, but there were plenty of gracious homes fronting wide boulevards and spacious piazzas where merchant princes lived in opulent splendor. It was these successful men of business who, along with the Church, gave steady employment to the city’s many artists.

  Florence was a city built by merchants and run by merchants, equally suspicious of the proud feudal nobility and the downtrodden masses, both of whom would like nothing better than to plunder the wealth they had so patiently accumulated over the centuries. Every banker or wealthy trader lived in fear of having his throat slit in the night, a not unreasonable concern given Florence’s history of murder and riot. This history was built into the architecture itself, with leading families—and even the Signoria, the collective lordship of Florence—residing in fortresslike structures with high stone walls, crenellations, and narrow windows.

  In theory, the form of government was republican. Middle-class artisans and wealthy merchants were all eligible for public office, though not the urban proletariat, who, however long they resided in Florence, were not considered citizens. Frequent elections made for a lively political scene as Florentines competed for the honor and power that came from winning a place among the Tre Maggiori, the three most prestigious offices in the state. In reality, effective control remained in the firm grasp of the Medici family and their allies. For decades they had skillfully played one faction off against another and, through a combination of intimidation and bribery, had managed to grasp the levers of power while retaining the outward forms of democracy. The current head of the family, Lorenzo—known to history as Il Magnifico—the Magnificent—for both his legendary wealth and his patronage of artists and writers—reconciled the people to their loss of freedom by staging splendid pageants for their amusement and generally keeping the city in peace and prosperity.

  Though still ruling over an extensive empire—in which Lodovico played a small part as podestà for the towns of Chiusi and Caprese—Florence was already falling behind other Italian states. The Duchy of Milan and the Republic of Venice in the north, the Papal States surrounding Florentine territory on three sides, and the Kingdom of Naples in the south, could all deploy more men and resources. And compared to the rising nation-states of Spain and France, hungrily eyeing the rich but politically divided Italian peninsula, Florence was little more than a tasty morsel.

  The one area where Florence was still preeminent was in the arts, building on a tradition that extended back centuries, to Cimabue and Giotto in painting, to Donatello in sculpture, and to Dante and Boccaccio in literature. In the final years of Lorenzo de ’ Medici’s reign, his good friend Marsilio Ficino could still write: “This is an age of gold, which has brought back to life the almost extinguished liberal disciplines of poetry, eloquence, painting, architecture, sculpture, music, and singing to the Orphic Lyre. And all this in Florence!” This proud history was one of the reasons that Michelangelo remained loyal to his native land. No matter how long he lived outside its walls, Michelangelo always thought of himself as a Florentine, celebrating its victories and mourning its defeats. He maintained these ties even beyond the grave, insisting, much to the chagrin of the Romans who felt they had contributed more to his everlasting fame, that his body be returned to his native land for burial.

  For the first few years, Michelangelo did not live under his father’s roof in the modest house on the Via de ’ Bentaccordi; as was customary for Florentine children, the infant boy was shipped out to live with a wet nurse. He was taken in by a stonecutter’s wife in Settignano, a town located in the hills just to the northeast of Florence where the Buonarroti owned a small farm. Crucially for Michelangelo’s development as a sculptor, this village was the site of ancient quarries that for centuries had been home to many of Florence ’s most skilled stoneworkers.IV Michelangelo viewed this early environment as providential, telling his friend Vasari: “Giorgio, if I have anything of the good in my brain, it comes from my being born in the pure air of your country of Arezzo [near Caprese], even as I sucked in with my nurse ’s milk the chisels and hammer with which I make my figures.”

  This remark was more than a literary conceit. There is very little in Michelangelo’s formal training as an artist to suggest how he mastered the difficult art of stone carving. His skill in a medium that had all but died out in Florence by the time of his birth, his natural affinity for the material and affection for the humble quarrymen who excavated the marble blocks from which many of his masterpieces were carved, all point to the formative experience of a youth spent clambering among the rocky hills and consorting with the scarpellini (stonecutters) of Settignano. Michelangelo’s admiration for these workers was genuine. He respected not only the skilled artisans who carved the columns and decorative moldings of Florence ’s churches and palaces, but also the brawny, illiterate laborers who at great risk to life and limb actually hacked the blocks from the quarries. This generosity stands in marked contrast to the disdain he felt for those who called themselves artists and claimed to be his equals.

  In addition to the arrival of three younger brothers—Buonarroto (1477), Giovansimone (1479), and G
ismondo (1481)—the first event of note in the life of young Michelangelo was the death, when he was only six, of his mother, Francesca. Not surprisingly, the impact of this early bereavement has given rise to much forensic psychoanalysis. The mother-and-child motif is the single most common theme in all of Michelangelo’s art, from his earliest known work, the Madonna of the Stairs, to his last, the so-called Rondanini Pietà, left incomplete in his studio at the time of his death. Could it be that his almost obsessive engagement with the theme reflects a grown man’s response to a childhood loss? While Michelangelo was certainly preoccupied with the intense, psychologically fraught maternal bond, it would be simplistic to attribute his fascination primarily to this experience. Not only is the mother-and-child a universal theme, but it was particularly popular in the Renaissance when the Virgin Mary and her son—shown either as an infant, or after his descent from the Cross—was perhaps the most common subject of religious art. Indeed, while it is tantalizing to speculate about the effect of such a loss on a young, impressionable boy, there is no indication that Michelangelo was permanently scarred by his mother’s early death.

  A more critical factor in Michelangelo’s development was the Oedipal struggle with his father over his decision to become an artist. In 1485, the same year that Lodovico remarried (to Lucrezia Ubaldini), he sent Michelangelo to the grammar school of Francesco da Urbino, where he was expected to acquire a facility with reading and writing in his native Italian before moving on to master Latin letters, essential for any Florentine who wished to pursue a respectable career. At the same time, Michelangelo struck up a friendship with the sixteen-year-old Francesco Granacci, an apprentice in the studio of the painters Domenico and Davide Ghirlandaio, one of the busiest and most successful shops in all of Florence. Michelangelo was bored by the instruction he received at Master Francesco’s school, though he later regretted his lack of Latin and was embarrassed when contracts had to be translated so that he could read them. It was his friendship with Granacci that would prove more consequential, for it was this amiable youth—the sort of good-natured, unambitious man the always competitive Michelangelo preferred to surround himself with—who introduced Michelangelo to the delights of drawing and painting and to the studio where he was to take his first steps toward becoming an artist himself.

  Michelangelo’s decision to become an artist was clearly the fulfillment of a deep-seated compulsion. “[T]he heavens and his nature,” Condivi wrote, “both difficult to withstand, drew him towards the study of painting, so that he could not resist, whenever he could steal the time, drawing now here, now there, and seeking the company of painters.” Late in life, Michelangelo still vividly recalled what happened when he was discovered neglecting his studies to spend his time in the studio: “[H]is father and his uncles, who held the art in contempt, were much displeased, and often beat him severely for it,” Condivi recorded; “they were so ignorant of the excellence and nobility of art that they thought shame to have her in the house.” This tale, in which the idealistic young man defies his parents to pursue his dream of becoming an artist, has a familiar ring; it’s been a staple of the mythology since at least the time of the Renaissance. But in Michelangelo’s case the story is particularly powerful since the artist himself shared some of his father’s doubts about his chosen career, a conflicted attitude that spurred his ambition and compelled him to raise the status of his profession to new heights. Indeed, eradicating the taint of manual labor became something of an obsession on his part. Condivi explained that “he has always desired to cultivate the arts in persons of nobility, as was the manner of the ancients, and not in plebeians.” All the pride his father invested in the family name, Michelangelo hoped to recoup through his immortal fame, demonstrating that art could be a noble pursuit proudly pursued by noble men.

  As it turned out, father and son were engaged in an unequal contest. The willful boy soon broke down Lodovico’s resistance, perhaps in part because even the small salary he would draw as an apprentice in Ghirlandaio’s bustling atelier meant that he would be adding to the family coffers. The 24 gold florins the Ghirlandaio brothers were to pay Lodovico to acquire Michelangelo’s services for three years could make a real difference to a family barely keeping its head above water.V From this day forward, and increasingly with the passage of years, the artist will become the principal support for his feckless relatives.

  Later in life Michelangelo sought to conceal the truth about his initiation into the artistic profession. One of the most telling examples of the artist altering his biography comes in Condivi’s discussion of his earliest training. In 1550, Michelangelo’s younger friend and colleague Giorgio Vasari published the first edition of his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (usually shortened to Lives of the Artists), a magisterial collective biography of the greatest Italian masters of the last three centuries. The work, in many ways an homage to his famous friend, culminated in a life of Michelangelo himself, the first time such an honor had been accorded a living artist. Here, Vasari offered an effusive portrait of the great man. “The most blessed Ruler of the Universe,” he wrote,

  seeing the infinite futility of all that toil, the most ardent studies without fruit and the presumptuous opinions of men—farther from the truth than shadow is from the light—and to relieve us of such errors, took pity by sending to us here on earth a spirit with universal mastery of every art. . . . And he chose to endow this man as well with true moral philosophy and with every ornament of sweet poetry, so that the world might admire him and hold him up as a model to be followed, in life, in work, in holiness of character and all human striving, so that we believed him heaven-sent rather than of this world.

  Despite this treatment more appropriate to the life of a saint than of an artist, Michelangelo was unhappy with some of the details contained in Vasari’s biography, and prevailed upon Ascanio Condivi to “correct” the record. Perhaps the most telling change has to do with Michelangelo’s relationship to his first teacher, Domenico Ghirlandaio, a prolific frescoist beloved by Florentine patricians who enjoyed seeing themselves flatteringly portrayed in the religious scenes with which he covered walls and ceilings of the city’s churches.VI Directly contradicting Vasari’s account, Condivi insists that Michelangelo “received absolutely no assistance from him,” claiming instead that Ghirlandaio’s attitude toward the talented young artist was one of “envy.”

  Denying Ghirlandaio’s role in launching Michelangelo’s career was such a transparent deception that even the usually accommodating Vasari balked, going to great lengths in the second edition of his Lives (1568) to rebut Condivi’s claims by quoting at length from the actual contract.

  Why did Michelangelo try so hard to alter the record? One explanation is that throughout his career Michelangelo claimed sculpture as his principal art; admitting that his formal training was as a painter in the shop of the era’s most successful practitioner of this medium tended to undercut that argument. More significantly, the narrative of his apprenticeship reveals that he began his career like any other youth wishing to become an artist, grinding colors, preparing brushes, doing all the menial chores associated with an entry-level position. Far from suggesting an aristocrat pursuing independently a high and cerebral calling, the true story of his apprenticeship betrayed the artisanal origins of Michelangelo’s glorious career.

  In fact, the kind of bottega Ghirlandaio ran was antithetical to everything Michelangelo stood for: it was an art factory, turning out panel paintings and frescoes almost like an assembly line, with apprentices and assistants suppressing their own individuality in order to produce a uniform product. When Michelangelo said he never kept a shop, he must have had in mind his own introduction to the art world, an initiation he still regarded with contempt.

  III. IN THE GARDEN

  If Michelangelo’s initiation into the world of art turns out to have been more prosaic than he claimed, the next phase of his career has become the stuff of legend. For two years M
ichelangelo learned the rudiments of his craft in Ghirlandaio’s studio, working alongside Francesco Granacci as the studio cranked out portraits, devotional paintings, and the large-scale fresco series for which the shop was famous. At the time, the Ghirlandaio brothers were at work on frescoes in the Dominican Church of Santa Maria Novella, specifically the chapel of the Tornabuoni family depicting the lives of the Virgin and St. John the Baptist. While no one has successfully identified the hand of the young Michelangelo in the work, it is probable that the artist helped in such tasks as preparing the smooth coat of wet plaster that was to be painted on by the masters, and perhaps even composing some of the secondary figures and backgrounds. Though Michelangelo refused to admit his debt to his first master, he was fortunate to have this training to fall back on when he was commissioned to paint monumental frescoes of his own, summoning skills he claimed he never learned from a master he was reluctant to acknowledge.

  Both Vasari and Condivi confirm the young Michelangelo’s precocious talent, Condivi (rather inconsistently) claiming that Ghirlandaio was jealous of his abilities even though they ostensibly had no working relationship. Curiously, the two biographers agree that one of the young Michelangelo’s greatest talents was as a forger. Not only did he make copies from drawings that the studio kept on hand for the edification of its young students, but, according to Vasari, “he counterfeited sheets by the hands of various old masters, making them so similar that they could not be detected, for, tinting them and giving them the appearance of age with smoke and various other materials, he made them so dark that they looked old, and, when compared with the originals, one could not be distinguished from the other.” Emphasizing his skill in mimicking the work of others fits awkwardly into a narrative that was meant to highlight Michelangelo’s originality, but stories of a neophyte putting the master to shame is a common motif in Vasari’s work. In his life of Leonardo, Vasari recounts that Andrea Verrocchio was so startled upon first seeing his young pupil’s efforts that he never painted again, “dismayed that a child knew more than he.” Similarly, Vasari claimed to have in his possession a drawing by Ghirlandaio to which Michelangelo had made a few judicious alterations, “showing the excellence of a mere lad who was so spirited and bold, that he had the courage to correct the work of his master.”