Michelangelo

by Miles J. Unger

old habits gone,

  my soul restored to life and to every earthly thing,

  now protected by a stronger shield—

  for compared with death, the world is less than nothing.

  Michelangelo’s focus on his own homeliness seems more metaphorical than real, an external manifestation of inner demons. Vasari, who knew him as an older man, has left us a detailed description of his friend that suggests a somewhat plain but by no means displeasing appearance:

  [T]he master’s constitution was very sound, for he was lean and well knit together with nerves, and although as a boy he was delicate . . . he could always endure any fatigue. . . . He was of middle stature, broad in the shoulders, but well proportioned in the rest of the body. . . . His face was round, the brow square and spacious, with seven straight lines, and the temples projected considerably beyond the ears; which ears were somewhat on the large side, and stood out from the cheeks. The body was in proportion to the face, or rather on the large side; the nose somewhat flattened, as was said in the Life of Torrigiano, who broke it for him with his fist; the eyes rather on the small side, of the color of horn, spotted with blueish and yellowish gleams; the eyebrows with few hairs, the lips thin, with the lower lip rather thicker and projecting a little, the chin well shaped and in proportion with the rest, the hair black, but mingled with white hairs, like the beard, which was not very long, forked, and not very thick.

  IV. THE FORGER

  With the death in April 1492 of Lorenzo de ’ Medici, an idyllic interlude in Michelangelo’s life came to a close. For many years the uncrowned ruler of Florence had been suffering from gout and other chronic illnesses, and his death at the age of forty-three—while tragic both for Michelangelo personally and for his fellow citizens, who would now have to take their chances with his son, the twenty-year-old Piero—was not entirely unexpected. The two years Michelangelo spent at the Medici Palace were perhaps the happiest of his long life. Never again would he find a patron as sympathetic as Il Magnifico, and the unrealistic expectations set by this relationship made the deficiencies of subsequent ones all the more apparent. While in residence at the Medici Palace on the Via Larga he met many of his future patrons, including not only Giovanni de ’ Medici, later Pope Leo X, and his cousin Giulio, the future Pope Clement VII, but also Alessandro Farnese who, when he was elevated to the throne of St. Peter many years later, remembered the young boy he ’d met at the palace and turned to him for some of his most important commissions.

  More important, time spent mingling with the brilliant company assembled in Lorenzo’s palace broadened Michelangelo’s conception of what art could be and inflated his sense of his own worth. Walking around town in the silks and brocades provided courtesy of Lorenzo’s generosity, Michelangelo seemed miles apart from his former colleagues toiling away in Ghirlandaio’s studio. The touchy pride he inherited from his father was confirmed by his new circumstances, and the compliments he received from the greatest man in Florence assured him he was on the right track.

  Shortly after Lorenzo’s death, Michelangelo returned to his father’s house. It was an unhappy reunion for the young artist forced to trade a room in the most magnificent palace in the city for the crowded homestead in Santa Croce. Even more difficult than the loss of material comforts was the unpleasant task of explaining to his father how he was going to make his way in the world. His older brother, Lionardo, had taken up holy orders and attached himself to the fire-and-brimstone preacher Savonarola, which placed added responsibilities on the shoulders of Michelangelo as the future leader of the Buonarroti clan. How many “I told you sos” Michelangelo had to endure at home can only be imagined, but there is no doubt the cantankerous Lodovico leapt at every opportunity to point out how badly he ’d blundered in his choice of profession.

  The new head of the Medici household—and now de facto ruler of Florence—was the far less capable Piero, the spoiled son of a great man with none of the brilliance or political skills of his father. When Michelangelo again took up residence in the palace on the Via Larga for a brief period, Piero was overheard praising the artist as one of the two most cherished members of his household, the other being his Spanish groom, who was not only handsome but so fleet of foot that he could outpace him as he galloped on horseback. Such a lack of judgment was typical of the arrogant youth, who quickly squandered the goodwill of his compatriots. Florentines were willing to submit to Lorenzo’s tyranny because it was so artfully disguised; Piero, by contrast, loved the trappings of power and traveled about the city with a large retinue more fit for a prince than a citizen. The only work Piero was known to have commissioned from Michelangelo at this time was a snow lion in the courtyard of the palace during a particularly severe winter storm.

  Michelangelo completed another work a year or so after leaving the Medici Palace: an eight-foot-high Hercules in marble that he carved from an old, weather-beaten block—the only kind he could afford to purchase. The origins of this now lost work are somewhat mysterious. It is not known if it was commissioned and, if so, by whom; it ended up in the courtyard of the Strozzi Palace, home to bankers second only to the Medici in wealth and power, but it is not clear whether they paid the sculptor for the work or acquired it at some later date. Another theory is that it was made at the behest of Piero de ’ Medici as a monument to his father, a project that Michelangelo would certainly have welcomed. Hercules, along with the biblical hero David, was a traditional symbol of the Florentine Republic and would have made a fitting tribute to the man who led the state so ably for so many years.

  If, as seems possible, Michelangelo sculpted the Hercules simply for his own pleasure, it would have been a rarity in an age when almost every work was made on commission. This was especially true of a large-scale sculptural work, since marble was expensive and the commitment in time and energy even more costly. The fact that Michelangelo devoted a year of his life to such an unrewarding project (at least from the financial point of view) shows that he was at loose ends. Too proud to submit to the drudgery of a workshop, he cast about for a means to earn his living, not only to provide for his family but also to prove to them that he was not the failure they believed him to be.

  The struggle of these lean years demonstrates Michelangelo’s strength of will. With little encouragement and no obvious way forward, he continued to push himself as an artist, acquiring on his own the knowledge and technical skills essential to his later triumphs. Without a formal master, and with no potential patrons in sight, Michelangelo set out to teach himself everything he needed to know to create works that matched his outsized ambition, confident that the time would come when the greatest lords of Europe would come knocking on his door.

  The one surviving sculpture from this period in his life throws an interesting light on the young sculptor’s studies. It is a life-size crucifix carved in soft poplar wood and painted in realistic flesh tones, the only work Michelangelo is known to have executed in this medium. Michelangelo presented the sculpture to Niccolò Bichiellini, prior of the Church of Santo Spirito, in gratitude for allowing him to dissect the cadavers of those who had died in the adjacent hospital. In taking this scientific approach, Michelangelo was following the recommendations set down by Leon Battista Alberti in his treatise On Painting: “Before dressing a man we first draw him nude, then we enfold him in draperies. So in painting the nude we place first his bones and muscles which we then cover with flesh so that it is not difficult to understand where each muscle is beneath.” Michelangelo found the gruesome work upsetting, and it is a testament to his will to perfect his art that he persevered, despite the fact that it “turned his stomach so that he could neither eat nor drink with benefit.”

  The fruits of these late-night sessions are apparent in almost all Michelangelo’s subsequent works. With the possible exception of Leonardo da Vinci—whose investigations were as much scientific as they were artistic—Michelangelo possessed an unmatched understanding of human anatomy. His nudes are not superficial appr
oximations of the human form but seem to pulse with an inner life, an illusion conjured by his unmatched knowledge of the dynamic mechanism of the human body. The articulation of joints, the structure of muscle and tendon working together to produce motion, the branching networks of veins suffusing flesh with vital nutrients and nerves linking mind to body—all these are articulated with a deep understanding of how each contributes to the whole.

  Michelangelo’s anatomical studies were not simply a means to an end. His two years at the Medici Palace had confirmed his faith in the nobility of art, but with prestige came responsibility. To fulfill its promise, art must do more than reflect the appearance of things: it must delve beneath the surface to deliver profound truths. Leonardo began his Paragone by asking whether or not painting was a science, answering in the affirmative by employing an argument that must have appalled his more bookish colleagues: “[A]ll sciences are vain and full of errors that are not born of experience, mother of all certainty, and that are not tested by experience, that is to say that do not at their origin, middle, or end pass through any of the five senses.” From this he derives the postulate that “painting, which arises in the mind but cannot be accomplished without manual operation,” is more science than craft since it is, first and foremost, a means of investigating the world through the visual faculty, the most powerful tool we have for apprehending reality.

  Though Michelangelo’s interests were never as purely academic, or nearly as wide-ranging, as Leonardo’s, he shared with his older colleague a conviction that art is a tool for making sense of the world. Studying the body with the precision of an anatomist, uncovering its deep structure, allowed Michelangelo to probe human nature more thoroughly than any artist before him and to create figures in which every gesture expresses an inward state and every pose is fraught with possibility.

  The Santo Spirito crucifix is unique in Michelangelo’s oeuvre. Not only is it in an unusual medium for the artist (a fact easily explained by his straitened circumstances), but it is an oddly flaccid figure for an artist more often criticized for going to the opposite extreme. Compared to the magnificent drawing of Christ on the Cross from the 1540s, the wooden sculpture lacks all dramatic tension and any sense of dynamic movement. Christ hangs limply, as if already dead, his body not only unmoving but apparently incapable of movement. All these flaws can be attributed to Michelangelo’s youth and immaturity. He was an artist still in search of himself, dissatisfied with the models he had available to him but as yet uncertain how to impose his individual stamp on conventional themes. The one element that hints at an original mind at work is the figure ’s startling nudity, a foreshadowing of a bold, even iconoclastic imagination. Though at the time he carved the crucifix the young artist was presumably elbow-deep in gore, he had yet to learn how to make full use of his discoveries.

  For Michelangelo the two apparently uneventful years following Lorenzo de ’ Medici’s death were crucial to his evolution as an artist. He was not discouraged by the lack of gainful employment (though he must have tired of his father’s constant carping), since it allowed him the freedom to develop in his own way without having to cater to demanding patrons. The fact that he neither second-guessed his decision nor settled on the easier path of returning to Ghirlandaio’s studio demonstrates his resolve to achieve success on his own terms.

  Given his youth, inexperience, and lack of affiliation with a recognized master, it’s not surprising that he received no important commissions. But Michelangelo was not the only underemployed artist in Florence. These were difficult days for the profession as a whole, particularly for those wishing to pursue the expensive and time-consuming medium of sculpture. In the years following Il Magnifico’s death, the Medici hold on power grew more tenuous. As Piero’s power waned, the influence of the firebrand preacher Girolamo Savonarola waxed. Railing against greed and corruption from the pulpits of San Marco and the Cathedral, he called for Florentines to turn away from worldly pleasures and return to the simple virtues of the Gospels. “O Florence, O Florence, O Florence,” he cried, “for your sins, for your brutality, your avarice, your lust, your ambition, there will befall you many trials and tribulations.” These jeremiads tended to have a chilling effect, since art, unless specifically made for devotional purposes, was among those vanities Savonarola condemned as distractions from the holy life. “I want to give you some good advice,” he lectured the people of Florence. “Avoid those artifacts that belong with the riches of this world. Today they make figures in churches with such art and such ornamentation that they extinguish the light of God and of true contemplation, and in these you are not contemplating God but the artifice of the figures.”

  Portrait of Savonarola by Fra Bartolomeo, c. 1500.

  Emblematic of the new age was Sandro Botticelli. He had thrived under the patronage of the pleasure-loving Medici, painting joyous and sensual masterpieces like the Primavera and The Birth of Venus. But moved by the passion of the friar and frightened by his apocalyptic visions, Botticelli disavowed his earlier work. Turning his back on his former life, he joined the Piagnoni (Weepers), becoming “such a partisan of that sect that he abandoned painting and, having nothing to live on, fell into very great distress.”

  On a practical level, the austerity imposed by Savonarola meant that artists had fewer and less ambitious commissions. The Bacchanalian celebrations that were a feature of Florentine life during Lorenzo’s reign and that had given steady work to artists like Botticelli, who designed the elaborate floats and decorations, gave way to more pious demonstrations. Savonarola’s most famous innovation was the so-called Bonfire of the Vanities, a spectacle vividly described by one eyewitness: “There was made on the Piazza de ’ Signori a pile of vain things, nude statues and playing-boards, heretical books . . . mirrors and many other things, of great value, estimated at thousands of florins . . . the boys . . . set it on fire and burnt everything. . . .” Among those participating was Botticelli, who was reported to have tossed some of his own paintings onto the pyre.

  Michelangelo himself remained ambivalent toward the charismatic preacher. He was a pious Christian and shared, at least in his later years, Savonarola’s gloomy vision of the world as a place of suffering and sin. In his funeral oration for the artist, the humanist Benedetto Varchi asked rhetorically: “Who ever was more religious? Who ever lived a more godly life? Who ever died a more Christian death than Buonarroti?” But this picture tells only half the story. Like many deeply religious men, Michelangelo wrestled with his faith. His relationship with God was never comfortable; salvation never seemed assured as he contemplated how often he fell short of His commandments, as he confessed in this sonnet of 1534:

  I want to want, O Lord, what I don’t want:

  Between the flame and this icy heart a veil descends

  that extinguishes the fire.

  Filled with doubt and tormented by what he regarded as sinful desires, his piety was intense but never complacent. He did not scoff, like so many of the intellectuals he came across at the Medici Palace, at the simple superstition of peasants. But there were aspects of Savonarola’s worldview, including his disdain for art and beauty not directly in the service of promoting piety, that appalled him. Like many Florentines, Michelangelo was torn, attracted to Savonarola’s spirituality but made uneasy by his single-minded focus.

  • • •

  In October 1494, with a massive French army descending on Tuscany on its way to conquer the southern Italian kingdom of Naples, Piero de ’ Medici panicked, conceding without a fight the republic’s strategic fortresses and allowing the subject city of Pisa to throw off the Florentine yoke. Returning to Florence on November 9, the son of Il Magnifico found the city in open revolt. Piero and his brothers barely escaped with their lives, fleeing through the northern gates, pursued by armed mobs filled with a rage that had built up over years of frustration.

  Fortunately for the artist closely associated with the now-disgraced family, he was no longer in Florence.
A month earlier Michelangelo had attended a sermon by Savonarola in the Duomo where the preacher expounded on Genesis 6, in which God sends a great deluge to punish the wicked human race. “I shall spill flood waters over the earth,” the Dominican friar thundered from the pulpit, insisting that Florentines would suffer the same fate as Noah’s contemporaries unless they quickly turned to the Lord. Pico della Mirandola, who was also in the crowd that day, confessed that this dismal revelation was so frightening that it made “his hair stand on end.”

  Like all prophets of doom, Savonarola welcomed signs of the Lord’s displeasure. “[I]t is known to all Italy that the chastisement hath already begun,” he proclaimed, viewing with satisfaction the depradations of the vast host that had just crossed the Alps. More concerned with physical than with metaphysical dangers, in early October Michelangelo and a few companions took to their horses and headed north, leaving the anxious city behind. This will prove to be a recurring theme in the artist’s life: a precipitous flight undertaken at the first sign of trouble. During another period of civil unrest, he pleaded with his brother Buonarroto to “do as you would in the case of the plague—be the first to flee.” When it came to his own safety or that of his family, Michelangelo always opted for discretion over valor, a trait that his enemies called cowardice but that he would have called prudence.

  Fleeing as if a deadly disease were raging in the streets was the policy he apparently adopted in the fall of 1494, but, embarrassed by his less-than-heroic conduct, he concocted an implausible scenario to excuse his behavior. It involves a dream told to him by a musician in Piero de ’ Medici’s employ named Cardiere, in which Lorenzo’s ghost, dressed in rags, appears and warns him that his son will soon be driven from Florence. While Piero apparently laughed at this supernatural apparition, Michelangelo was more easily spooked, setting out on the road to Venice.