Michelangelo

by Miles J. Unger

  Here one sees chalices beaten into helmet and sword,

  and the blood of Christ sold by the gallon,

  so that even His patience wears thin.

  But for Michelangelo, Rome had one undeniable advantage over Florence. It was, as the agent for Cardinal Riario pointed out, “the widest field for a man to show his genius in”—a quality that more than made up for its drawbacks in the eyes of a young man anxious to make his way. Like many a provincial who seeks his fortune in a great capital, Michelangelo was simultaneously fascinated and dismayed. He railed against the corruption he saw while simultaneously seeking to profit from the fruits of that corruption. In his heart he remained a Florentine, born of its stony soil and heir to its glorious traditions, but Rome was filled with men whose resources could satisfy his ambition.

  Michelangelo arrived in Rome on June 25, 1496, finding quarters near the still-unfinished residence of the Cardinal di San Giorgio, the Casa Nuova, which Riario intended as a showcase of princely living. It had been eight years since Michelangelo first signed on as an apprentice in Ghirlandaio’s studio, and six since his precocious talent was first recognized by the uncrowned lord of Florence. Now twenty-one, he was no longer a callow youth blessed only with raw talent and brimming with enthusiasm. He was already an experienced sculptor with a handful of private commissions from prominent clients to his credit, along with a more-than-respectable contribution to an important religious monument in Bologna. His abilities had already won him the admiration of the kind of men he would need if he were to make a successful career, and the minor scandal over the fake Cupid had brought him to the attention of many more. From Lorenzo de ’ Medici to Cardinal di San Giorgio, those who knew about such things took notice of the brash young man with the piercing eyes and quick temper. But, as the cardinal’s man noted, Rome was a far grander stage than any on which he had yet performed. Here, a man might win the greatest applause, but if he stumbled, it would be with the eyes of the world upon him.

  The circumstances surrounding Michelangelo’s journey to Rome, like the details of his apprenticeship with Ghirlandaio, are among the events most thoroughly distorted by the artist himself. Michelangelo complained to Condivi that “the Cardinal di San Giorgio understood little and was no judge of sculpture.” Not only did he “not give him a single commission,” but, “still smarting under the deceit,” he prevented him from collecting the money that was owed him for the Cupid. Given the fact that it was the cardinal who invited him to Rome in the first place, the notion that he was still angry with Michelangelo is implausible. In fact, the artist’s version of events is contradicted by a letter he wrote to his patron, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de ’ Medici, a week after his arrival:

  Magnificent Lorenzo, etc.—This is to let you know that we arrived safely last Saturday and paid a visit to the Cardinal di San Giorgio, to whom I presented your letter. He seemed pleased to see me and immediately asked me to go look at certain statues. . . . [H]e asked me what I thought of what I’d seen. I responded that I thought he had many beautiful things. Then the Cardinal asked me whether I had the spirit to attempt something as fine. I replied that I might not be able to do anything quite as beautiful, but that he should see what I could accomplish. We have purchased a piece of marble for a living figure and on Monday I’ll begin to work. . . . I gave Baldassare his letter and asked for the cupid, telling him I’d return the money he ’d given me. He replied very angrily, saying he ’d smash it in a hundred pieces, that he had bought the cupid and it was his.

  Far from suggesting that the cardinal wanted to punish Michelangelo for the fraud, the letter confirms what was evident from the start—that the artist had come to Rome at the invitation of San Giorgio and that he ’d been promised a commission for a major sculptural work. The fact that Michelangelo later chose to portray San Giorgio as a vindictive and uncultivated man tells us more about the artist than about the cardinal. Michelangelo’s letter proves that the relationship began well, and that whatever misunderstandings occurred must have come later. As he explained in his letter to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, the two men quickly agreed on a subject, and Michelangelo, as always anxious to get to work, set about carving the marble almost immediately.

  Though the subject is not mentioned in the letter, the cardinal’s own account books name the sculpture as the Bacchus, now in the Bargello Museum in Florence. The pagan god of wine was exactly the kind of subject that would have appealed to the high-living cardinal with a taste for classical statuary, and it was clearly what he had in mind when he summoned the young man to Rome. Michelangelo was not being hired for his originality, but because he had already demonstrated a talent for aping the manner of the ancients. The cardinal could not have known that Michelangelo was temperamentally incapable of suppressing his personality to conform to the demands of his patron; perhaps even Michelangelo himself did not yet fully understand his need for self-expression. He had not yet gained a reputation for being a difficult customer. The Bacchus was the first sculpture in which he demonstrated the power of his wayward genius, and the first occasion on which he clashed with a patron who had anticipated a conventional work and was dismayed to discover he had conjured something entirely original.

  Against all the evidence, Condivi claims that the Bacchus was not in fact commissioned by Cardinal Riario but by Jacopo Gallo, “a Roman gentleman of good understanding.” Michelangelo met the banker Gallo through the firm of Baldassare and Giovanni Balducci, who handled the cardinal’s finances. Gallo would soon become Michelangelo’s chief advisor and champion in Rome, and it is not surprising that the artist would wish to give him credit for his first major work. And while Condivi’s version of events is untrue, the Bacchus did in fact end up in Gallo’s garden, strongly suggesting that the banker stepped in after the cardinal rejected the work he had commissioned. This interpretation is reinforced by another letter Michelangelo wrote to his father almost exactly one year after he began the sculpture, in which he complains: “I have not yet been able to settle up my affairs with the Cardinal and I do not want to leave without first receiving satisfaction and being remunerated for my pains.” He follows this up with a more general observation as to the nature of these relationships that foreshadows countless difficulties to come. “With these grand masters,” he grumbles, “one has to go slowly, because they cannot be coerced”—words that could equally well be applied to Michelangelo himself.

  The explanation that best conforms to the available evidence is that the cardinal who purchased Michelangelo’s services was disappointed in the final result. His account books showed that he ultimately paid the artist in full, but Michelangelo’s complaints about the delay strongly hint at his patron’s displeasure. It was only after the work was completed and paid for that Gallo, more discerning than the cardinal, stepped in to take the work off his hands.

  It’s not difficult to guess why Cardinal di San Giorgio rejected the sculpture. While superficially resembling the work of the ancients he so admired, Michelangelo’s version of a pagan god is radically different from anything that could have come from the imagination of a Greek or Roman artisan—or from any of his contemporaries, for that matter. Unlike the Cupid, which easily passed for an ancient work, this sculpture must have struck the cardinal as a perversion of a classical ideal. With the Bacchus, Michelangelo revealed himself to be an artist of unparalleled technical ability and startling originality, but not an accommodating craftsman adept at realizing his master’s vision.

  Michelangelo has given an ancient subject a modern twist (literally), showing the god of wine teetering after having sampled too freely his own invention. He lurches unsteadily on his feet, his balance precariously maintained as he steadies himself with the aid of the satyr who sits behind him greedily stuffing grapes into his mouth. The god raises his cup to his slack lips, his small head lolling uncertainly on a slender neck. His handsome, boyish features have been rendered stupid with drink; his eyes are heavy with sleep.

  T
he Bacchus is less a god than a fallen (or falling) idol, soft, effeminate, and singularly unheroic. The dissections Michelangelo conducted in the morgue at Santo Spirito have paid dividends as he renders the difficult pose with an assurance absent in the statuettes for the altar of St. Dominic. But, as Leonardo tended to do, he envelops muscle and sinew in seductive, yielding flesh. Every movement seems organic, each limb responding to its partner in a languid ballet. Bacchus is not one of those overmuscled titans for which Michelangelo would soon become famous, but a beautiful, epicene youth of somewhat dissipated habits, his soft curves indicating a life of self-indulgence.

  Michelangelo, Bacchus, 1496–97. Scala/Art Resource, NY

  Unlike the famous Captives of his later years, there are no knotted muscles or rope-taut tendons to suggest Man at odds with himself and at war with fate. Bacchus epitomizes listlessness; he is incapable of resisting anything, least of all temptation. What ties this work to Michelangelo’s later masterpieces is not the specific treatment of the body but the fact that form is fully at the service of a larger idea. Bacchus is not master of the intoxicating grape, he is mastered by it. Everything about his pose, from the bent right leg to the subtle twist of his torso to the forward lean of the neck, reinforces the message that this is someone who has succumbed to his sensual nature.

  Perhaps the cardinal rejected Michelangelo’s sculpture not because he failed to understand its meanings but because he understood them all too well. It is hard to avoid seeing in the Bacchus a subtle rebuke of the cardinal and other princes of the Church who coveted pagan artifacts and were slaves to sensual pleasures. In the Bacchus, Michelangelo has turned the cult of the antique on its head, offering up a paragon of androgynous male beauty only to treat it with almost Savonarola-like contempt.

  Riario may have also detected in the soft effeminacy of the god a troubling homoeroticism; his beauty seduces even as it repels. Michelangelo shows the god as both desirable and wanton, an object of lust and of disdain, conflicting emotions that no doubt reflect the artist’s own conflicted sexuality. Michelangelo was attracted to handsome young men, but carnal lust was almost always accompanied by feelings of pollution and unworthiness. Accusations that Michelangelo engaged in activities that were still officially criminal were so prevalent in his lifetime that Condivi was forced to refute them in print. “He has also loved the beauty of the human body, as one who best understands it,” he insisted, “and in such wise that certain carnal-minded men, who are not able to comprehend the love of beauty unless it be lewd and shameful, have taken occasion to think and speak evil of him, as if Alcibiades, a youth of perfect beauty, had not been purely loved by Socrates, from whose side he arose as from the side of his father.” A less naïve take on this ancient story was offered by Baldassare Castiglione, who in his sixteenth-century bestseller The Courtier casts a cynical eye on such supposedly innocent relationships. “[I]t was a strange place and time,” he writes facetiously, “—in bed and by night—to contemplate the pure beauty which Socrates is said to have loved without any improper desire, especially since he loved the soul’s beauty rather than the body’s, though in boys and not in grown men, who happen to be wiser.”

  Even had the term been available to him, it is unlikely that Michelangelo would have considered himself gay. Rather, he thought of himself as a sinner, prone to impure thoughts and illicit urges, some of which he no doubt acted upon. This attitude was reinforced by the prevailing ethic that deemed all sexual desire as sinful, a necessary evil rather than a healthy expression of human nature. A devout Christian, Michelangelo was often tormented by what he regarded as his moral weakness. Love consumed him, in more ways than one; as much as he felt the pull of desire, he longed to free himself from sin and make himself worthy of God’s love. “I want to want, O Lord, what I don’t want,” he wrote, the cri de coeur of a man at war with his own nature.

  On a more mundane level, he was harassed throughout his life by accusations of sexual impropriety. It was one form of eccentricity he could not embrace openly for fear that the taint of scandal would hurt his career and embarrass his family. But it’s clear that his attempts to protect himself were not always successful and that his proclivities were a source of gossip, no matter how strenuously he denied them. Sometimes this could lead to hilarious misunderstandings. Once Michelangelo was accosted on the street by a man who wished to apprentice his son to him, telling the sculptor “that if I were but to see him I should pursue him not only into the house, but into bed.” Michelangelo, communicating through a mutual acquaintance, responded to the proposal with biting sarcasm, saying “I assure you that I’ll deny myself that consolation, which I don’t want to filch from him.” On another occasion, when a friend accused him of a romantic entanglement with a young man named Febo di Poggio, Michelangelo protested: “You are quite wrong in supposing that my interest in the young man is sexual, because it is nothing of the kind.”

  But despite his protestations, there are indications that he often succumbed to temptation and that his close associates were aware of the fact. A letter written by his friend Leonardo Sellaio in 1539, when the artist was well into his fifties, warns him “not to go out at night and to abandon those habits that are harmful to both soul and body.” If Sellaio felt called upon to act as his friend’s conscience, he could have saved himself the trouble since no one was more aware of his failings than Michelangelo himself.

  II. THE CONTRACT

  Cardinal Riario’s rejection of the Bacchus was a blow to the ambitious young artist. Michelangelo had come to Rome certain that he would vault to stardom with the backing of one of the city’s great princes. But now he had lost his patron’s confidence and was set adrift in a hypercompetitive and uncongenial world. Writing to his father in July 1497, he speaks of his intention to return to Florence as soon as his business with the cardinal is wrapped up, but there is no indication he actually made any preparations to leave Rome. To do so now would be to admit defeat, and the prospect of having to listen to Lodovico’s recriminations was more than enough motivation to stay put.

  This letter also records an early instance of what was to become a recurring theme in Michelangelo’s life. Sometime in June, his older brother Lionardo showed up at the artist’s house penniless, having fled from Viterbo for some unexplained reason. Despite the fact that he was short of money himself—largely because of Cardinal Riario’s reluctance to pay him the full amount he ’d been promised—Michelangelo gave his brother a gold ducat and sent him on his way.

  Unfortunately, Lionardo was not the only relative currently in financial straits. In July of 1497, Michelangelo’s stepmother, Lucrezia, died, probably of the plague, which had been raging in the city during the hot, dry summer. Adding to Lodovico’s woes, he was simultaneously threatened with arrest by his brother-in-law if he did not repay a debt of 90 florins. Michelangelo did his best to help, writing that “[a]lthough I have very little money, as I’ve told you, I’ll contrive to borrow it.” With each passing year Lodovico grew increasingly dependent on his one successful son. It was a burden Michelangelo shouldered willingly, if not graciously. Throughout his life he remained devoted to his kin, though his patience was sorely tried by relatives who were full of advice about how he should live his life but could never manage to earn a steady income themselves. “You must realize,” he told his father, “that I too have expenses and burdens. But whatever you ask I will send to you, even if I must sell myself into slavery.”

  • • •

  Michelangelo’s first attempt at making a name for himself in Rome had proved to be something of a fiasco. The brilliant polymath Leon Battista Alberti—who in addition to being one of the foremost architects of the fifteenth century was the author of the seminal books On Painting and On the Art of Building—would have been quick to spot the problem. “It often happens that the rich, moved more by amiability than by love of the arts, reward first one who is modest and good, leaving behind another painter perhaps better in art but not so g
ood in his habits,” he wrote in his primer for the aspiring artist. “Therefore the painter ought to acquire many good habits—principally humanity and affability.” Michelangelo, not known for either his modesty or his easygoing nature, had trouble following this advice, assuming his brilliance absolved him from having to cultivate the social graces.

  Fortunately, he was able to inspire fierce devotion as well as fierce antipathy. For all those who found him difficult to deal with, there were almost an equal number who saw through the awkwardness and knew that the young man with the flashing eyes and quick temper had something special to offer the world. After Jacopo Gallo snapped up the Bacchus for his own collection, he recommended Michelangelo to another member of the Sacred College, the French Cardinal of St. Denis, Jean Bilhères de Lagraulas. This great prelate—who was not only a cardinal but the French ambassador to the Holy See—was casting about for a sculptor to carve his tomb in the shrine of Santa Petronilla, an ancient mausoleum attached to the Basilica of St. Peter that had long been patronized by the French monarchy. The fact that Michelangelo was considered for and then entrusted with such an important commission suggests that the difficulties surrounding the Bacchus had not tarnished his reputation among the princes of the Church who could make or break the sculptor’s career. It is probable that the cardinal had seen the Bacchus and arrived at a very different verdict than his colleague, but he was still taking a chance on a young sculptor with a thin résumé. In any case, the sculpture he had in mind was almost the polar opposite of Riario’s commission: a pious work meant for a holy site, not a pagan idol for a pleasure garden. While he undoubtedly admired Michelangelo’s previous effort, it’s unclear what convinced the Cardinal of St. Denis to commission a work that demanded a far different skill set and a radically different sensibility.