Michelangelo

by Miles J. Unger

  Beating the master at his own game was, in fact, almost a rite of passage for the aspiring genius. One doesn’t need to accept Condivi’s dismissive account of Ghirlandaio’s contribution to believe that Michelangelo quickly learned all he could from that pleasing but uninspired master. After only two years in the Ghirlandaio shop, the fifteen-year-old painter’s apprentice was looking for new horizons to conquer. Happily, at the very same moment Florence ’s leading citizen, Lorenzo Il Magnifico, was combing the studios of the city in search of talented artists willing to learn the sculptor’s craft by studying in his garden filled with ancient statues. Vasari explained Lorenzo’s motives: “Given the great love he had for both painting and sculpture, he despaired that in his time one could not find famous or noble sculptors to equal the many great painters of note, and so he determined . . . to create a school.”

  Few episodes in the history of art have stirred as much debate. Some scholars have sought to diminish the significance of this so-called school of sculpture, insisting it was little more than an informal gathering of dilettantes with no real program; others have gone even further, claiming that the myth of Lorenzo’s sculpture garden was invented out of whole cloth by Vasari himself as a means of flattering another Medici, his patron and Lorenzo’s distant relative, Duke Cosimo de ’ Medici. Contemporary documents, however, confirm its existence. Not only did Michelangelo recall the time he spent there with great affection, but the garden itself, located off the Piazza San Marco near the Medici Palace, was marked as a notable site on a map made by one Piero del Massaio. It is even possible to trace the origin of Lorenzo’s project to a specific moment in 1489 when the Duke of Milan wrote to the ruler of Florence requesting help with the bronze equestrian statue of his father. Much to his chagrin, Lorenzo was forced to admit, “I cannot find any master who satisfies me . . . and this pains me no end.” Lorenzo was acutely aware of how much Florence ’s prestige in the world depended upon its reputation as a home for the muses, and his inability to honor Duke Sforza’s request must have spurred him to action. Offering up his vast collection of ancient and modern statuary as models and using his clout to persuade the leading masters to lend some of their most promising students, Lorenzo set out to reverse the decline of an art form that had once been the pride of Florence.

  If Lorenzo’s motive for establishing a training ground for young sculptors is straightforward, less clear is the exact nature of the school. Even more obscure is what Michelangelo actually learned there. Bertoldo di Giovanni, an accomplished modeler in bronze who had been a pupil of the great Donatello himself, was apparently hired to provide instruction, but it is unlikely that students there received anything like the rigorous training available at Ghirlandaio’s shop. By 1489, when Michelangelo first began to attend sessions at Lorenzo’s garden, Bertoldo was a sickly old man (he would die two years later), and he worked almost exclusively in bronze, a medium Michelangelo famously despised.

  It is probable that at first Michelangelo divided his time between Ghirlandaio’s studio and Lorenzo’s sculpture garden. Sketching alongside him among the cypresses and laurel hedges were not only his friend from Ghirlandaio’s atelier, Francesco Granacci, but also Giovanfrancesco Rustici (the man who would later realize some of Leonardo’s sculptural designs), Giuliano Bugiardini, and Pietro Torrigiano. It was in Lorenzo’s garden that Michelangelo made his first sculpture, a head of a faun based on an ancient model in Lorenzo’s collection. As Condivi tells the story, the sculpture, though little more than a student exercise, transformed Michelangelo’s life:

  One day, [Michelangelo] 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 recognized 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 had 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 hollow 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 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 this Faun old and left him all his teeth. Don’t you know that old men of that age are always missing a few?”

  To Michelangelo it seemed a thousand years before the Magnificent went away so that he could correct the mistake; and, when he was alone, he removed an upper tooth from his old man, drilling the gum as if it had come out with the root, and 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 all 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.”

  At first, Condivi tells us, Lodovico was appalled, “lamenting that his son would be led astray . . . moreover, that he would never suffer his son to become a stonemason.” As much as he loathed the idea of his son becoming a common artisan, he was equally upset by the thought (and not without reason) that Michelangelo would be corrupted by the loose morals of that famously libertine crowd. But in the end he could not resist a summons from the uncrowned ruler of Florence. The meeting between the proud but poor Lodovico Buonarroti di Simone and Il Magnifico in the intimidating surroundings of the Medici Palace has a slightly comic tinge. When Lorenzo asked Michelangelo’s father what he did for a living, Lodovico replied, “I have never practiced any profession; but have always lived upon my meager income looking after the small property left to me by my ancestors. . . .” Face-to-face with the powerful Medici lord, Lodovico’s resolution crumbled. Of course, he declared, “not only Michelangelo, but all of us, with our lives and all our best faculties, are at the service of your Magnificence.” All he asked in return was to be named to a post in the customs house. Upon hearing this modest request, “[t]he Magnificent put his hand upon his shoulder and, smiling, said: ‘You will always be poor,’ for he expected that he would ask for some great thing.”

  It is possible that Condivi embellished this story, but the basic outlines are not in dispute. In 1490, Michelangelo left his shabby paternal home in the quarter of Santa Croce and moved into the magnificent Medici Palace, where, again according to his own account, Il Magnifico provided “a good room in his own house with all that he needed, treating him like a son, with a seat at his table.”

  In light of Michelangelo’s tendency to burnish his biography, it is reasonable to treat this last characterization with caution, if not outright skepticism. Being treated like a son by the magnificent Lorenzo de ’ Medici would place Michelangelo in rarefied company and remove any suspicion that he was little more than a glorified household servant. It also helped erase the embarrassing facts of his humble origins. But while the story is certainly self-serving, there is in fact plenty of evidence to suggest that in this case Michelangelo did not stray too far from the truth. Years later, when Lorenzo’s second son, Giovanni, was sitting on the throne of St. Peter as Pope Leo X, he recalled the happy period when Michelangelo lived at the palace. “When he speaks of you,” reported the painter Sebastiano del Piombo, “it is almost with tears in his eyes, because as he told me, you two were raised together. . . .”

  No doubt there was an element of noblesse oblige in Lorenzo’s kindness. He worked hard to cultivate his image as a simple citizen of Florence even as he consolidated his hold over the government, and his generosity toward talented men was a large part of the mystique that earned him the title Il Magnifico. Lorenzo’s “court” was filled with men of gr
eat gifts and small means, men like the poets Luigi Pulci and Angelo Poliziano. Not only did he genuinely enjoy their company, but these eloquent and influential figures repaid his generosity in full by broadcasting his virtues to the world.

  It is difficult to overstate the significance for Michelangelo of the two years he spent under Lorenzo’s roof. In a very real sense, Il Magnifico was the father he wished he had and felt he deserved, a man not only of unquestioned pedigree but one who, unlike the dour Lodovico, held artists and writers in high regard. Where Lodovico cut a shabby figure, Lorenzo was magnificence itself; while Lodovico expressed his contempt for art and artists, Il Magnifico demonstrated their true worth by showering them with riches.

  By focusing on his two-year residence at the Medici Palace rather than his equally brief stint as a lowly apprentice in Ghirlandaio’s studio, Michelangelo created a new origin story for himself as an artist. In the palace, Michelangelo was tutored by the brilliant Poliziano and scholarly Ficino, men whose reputations as intellectuals elevated them above artists who worked with their hands. Conversing with these cultivated men, he became convinced that painting and sculpture were not merely crafts but tangible philosophy.

  Michelangelo, Battle of the Centaurs, c. 1492.

  Of the two sculptures Michelangelo executed while in residence at the Medici Palace, one of them at least was inspired by Poliziano, who had taken the young artist’s education in hand. The so-called Battle of the Centaurs depicts an obscure mythological theme of the kind beloved by the humanists in Lorenzo de ’ Medici’s circle. The battle between the Lapiths and the savage centaurs is an allegory of Man overcoming his bestial nature; happily for Michelangelo, it also offered an opportunity to depict the male nude in action, the theme he will explore in most of his greatest works. Michelangelo himself believed this early work contained the seeds of all he would later accomplish. Seeing this youthful exercise again after many years, he told Condivi “how much wrong he had done to his nature in not following promptly the art of sculpture, judging by that work how well he might have succeeded. . . .”

  The small-scale relief also recalls the work of his first sculptural master, Bertoldo di Giovanni, whose most accomplished piece was a bronze battle scene modeled on an ancient Roman sarcophagus. Bertoldo’s influence can also be detected in Michelangelo’s earliest extant sculpture, the small relief known as the Madonna of the Stairs, which probably dates from 1491, the first year Michelangelo spent at the Medici Palace. The small marble of the Virgin with the infant Jesus is done in a technique that Michelangelo rarely employed, what Italians call rilievo schiacciato, or flattened relief. The form was pioneered by Donatello in the early fifteenth century and would have been familiar to his pupil Bertoldo. It is, in effect, a form of drawing in stone in which the depth of the carving does not so much correspond to three-dimensional forms as suggest them through subtle modulations of light and shadow. Vasari deems the technique, which he traces back to ancient cameos and coins, “very difficult . . . demand[ing] great skill and invention. . . .” Though the depth of the actual carving can be measured in mere millimeters, Michelangelo has managed to pack a lot into a little: a monumental Virgin Mary seated stoically on her blocklike throne; the baby Jesus twisting in her arms; and a staircase leading to another room sufficiently commodious to serve as the perch for three cherubs carrying a sheet (symbolizing the shroud that will drape the dead Christ’s body).

  Michelangelo has depicted Mary in a style that recalls classical Greek funerary monuments and reflects the erudite humanism of the Medici Palace, where Lorenzo was constantly adding to his collection of ancient statues, cameos, and vases and where the wisdom of the ancients was examined with the reverence of Holy Scripture. Even her profile is distinctively “Greek,” with her brow and nose forming a single, unbroken line, in keeping with classical canons of beauty. The most original (and nonclassical) element is the Christ child himself. He is seen from the back, his head protectively buried in the folds of his mother’s dress. His pose is curious. Is he turning to take his mother’s breast, or recoiling in fear as he sees his own fate foreshadowed in the form of the burial shroud? There is an uncomfortable psychological distance between the mother and her child, whom she envelops but largely ignores. She tends to him distractedly, her gaze drawn by the putti, whose activities seem to rehearse the sorrow of the Passion. Jesus, for his part, appears to simultaneously burrow into the protective folds of his mother’s garments, while struggling to free himself from her suffocating embrace. Michelangelo will employ the same complex, twisting pose—suggestive of struggle and internal contradictions—in mature works like the famous Night from the Medici tombs.

  The technique of rilievo schiacciato that Michelangelo employed in the Madonna of the Stairs would prove to be an artistic dead end. Even when he worked in two dimensions, he usually strived for three-dimensionality. His paintings exhibit a brittle quality that some contemporaries compared unfavorably to the atmospheric subtleties of Leonardo, Raphael, and Titian. Indeed, Michelangelo, rebutting Leonardo’s claim that painting was superior to sculpture, famously remarked: “[I]t seems to me that painting may be held good in the degree in which it approximates to relief, and relief to be bad in the degree in which it approximates to painting”—a standard that if applied to the Madonna of the Stairs would brand it an utter failure.

  The two years Michelangelo lived in Il Magnifico’s palace reinforced his sense of superiority and his faith in the natural affinity of art and other more refined pursuits. The works he created there, especially the Battle of the Centaurs, were philosophical allegories realized in three dimensions. Poliziano, Ficino, Pico, and Lorenzo himself all encouraged him to think of art in rarefied terms, as a product of the mind rather than of the hands. At a later period in his life, when he was beset by many cares, he excused his dilatoriness by reminding his correspondent, “you work with your mind and not with your hands,” an attitude that reflected the cultured atmosphere of the Medici Palace but would have been considered laughable in the busy atelier of the Ghirlandaios, where no distractions could be allowed to interfere with productivity.

  Michelangelo, Madonna of the Stairs, c. 1490–92. Scala/Art Resource, NY

  Michelangelo’s pretensions did not always sit well with his colleagues, who believed—rightly, as it turns out—that he looked down on them. Michelangelo’s privileged position as Il Magnifico’s favorite created a rift between him and his fellow students. Granacci accepted his junior partner’s promotion with good humor, but others were less willing to put up with his arrogance. Matters came to a head one day while the students, on a field trip from the garden, were sketching from the frescoes of the great quattrocento master Masaccio in Santa Maria del Carmine, in the Oltrarno district of Florence.VII Vasari wrote of the incident: “It is said that Torrigiano, after contracting a friendship with [Michelangelo], mocked him, being moved by envy at seeing him more honored than himself and more able in art, and struck him a blow of the fist on the nose with such force, that he broke and crushed it very grievously and marked him for life; on which account Torrigiano was banished from Florence. . . .”

  Torrigiano himself offered a slightly different version of events many years later to the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, recalling: “Buonarroti and I used to go as boys to the Church of the Carmine where there ’s a chapel painted by Masaccio: and because it was Buonarroti’s habit to mock everyone who was drawing there, one day when he was irritating me more than usual, I made a fist and gave him such a sock on the nose that I felt bone and cartilage crumble like a cracker. He will bear that mark of mine as long as he lives.”

  The accuracy of Torrigiano’s prediction can be proved by portraits of Michelangelo, all of which show the crooked, flattened nose he acquired as a result of this assault. Torrigiano has never escaped the infamy of having disfigured the great Michelangelo, but one can’t help feeling a certain amount of sympathy for the assailant who never achieved for his work in bronze or marble the notoriety
that came from his one attempt at a composition in living flesh and bone. The truth is that Michelangelo was insufferable, particularly as a youth when his sense of superiority had not yet been matched by any great achievement.

  Michelangelo did not lament his misfortune, embracing his homeliness as a paradoxical revelation of an inner beauty. In one of his poems he admits, “I know I am ugly,” and in a madrigal of the 1530s he writes, “I pray my body, though/ so homely here on earth, would rise to paradise.” Like the famously pug-nosed Socrates, Michelangelo’s outward flaws signal an inner perfection. This tension between interior and exterior informs much of his work and is often expressed as an eternal battle between the soul and the body. In his poetry, this duality is captured in the image of a snake shedding its old skin, as in this poem of 1530:

  So accustomed am I to sin, that heaven has denied me

  the grace that falls like rain.

  As an old serpent squeezing through a narrow slot

  I shall pass, and leave behind my discarded skin,