Michelangelo

by Miles J. Unger

  The contract, which was not formally signed until the following year, reveals no lack of confidence on the part of either the artist or the man who hired him:

  Let it be noted and made manifest to he who reads this document, that the Most Reverend Cardinal di San Dionisio has agreed with Michelangelo, Florentine sculptor, that the said master will create a Pietà out of marble at his expense, that is a Virgin Mary clothed with the dead Christ in her arms, as large as a true man, for the price of 450 gold papal ducats, at the end of a year from the day the work is begun.I . . . And I, Iacobo Gallo, promise to the Most Reverend Monsignore that the said Michelangelo will make this work within one year, and that it will be the most beautiful marble that there is today in Rome, and that no other living master will do better. And vice versa, I promise to Michelangelo that the Most Reverend Cardinal will make payment according to what is written above.

  The 450 ducats Michelangelo was to receive for the commission was a handsome sum for the artist, three times the amount he ’d been paid just a year earlier for the Bacchus. The most interesting clause is the promise that the finished sculpture would be “the most beautiful marble that there is today in Rome, and that no other living master will do better”—a proud boast for a sculptor who had yet to make his mark. It is a testament to Michelangelo’s achievement that neither the cardinal nor anyone else ever claimed that he had not fulfilled to the letter the terms of the contract.

  The document also reveals that the most important esthetic decision, the one upon which Michelangelo’s triumph was ultimately based, was made not by the artist but by the cardinal who commissioned “a Pietà out of marble at his expense, that is a Virgin Mary clothed with the dead Christ in her arms, as large as a true man.” It is highly doubtful that Michelangelo altered the commission in any significant way; even the choice of medium was the cardinal’s. In fact, the Pietà, while not entirely unknown, was not yet a popular theme in Italian art. The depiction of the dead Christ in his mother’s arms had originated in Germany at the end of the fourteenth century. It quickly grew in popularity, spreading to the Low Countries and eventually to France. But before Michelangelo, the Pietà was a rarity in his native land, and the choice of subject no doubt reflected the tastes and traditions of the man who hired him.

  Even before he selected the block he was to carve, Michelangelo worked out the basic forms in a series of drawings, using live models who would pose for him, often for hours at a time, in his studio. Though none of these drawings survive, we know from other works that these would have included rapid sketches in which he worked out the basic structure, as well as detailed studies of individual parts. Once he arrived at a satisfactory composition, he would have created a small-scale model in wax or clay. Vasari explained the process: “Sculptors, when they wish to make a figure in marble, are accustomed to make what is called a modelII for it in clay or wax or plaster; that is, a pattern, about a foot high, more or less, according as is found convenient, because they can exhibit in it the attitude and proportion of the figure that they wish to make, endeavoring to adapt themselves to the height and breadth of the stone quarried for their statue.”

  Only after determining the statue ’s overall composition and proportions could Michelangelo begin the search for a suitable piece of marble. In November 1497, more than half a year before the contract was actually signed, Michelangelo set out for the quarries of Carrara to obtain the flawless block from which his figures would emerge. This hands-on approach was exceptional; sculptors usually purchased blocks from dealers or issued instructions to scarpellini on site who would do the dangerous, time-consuming work of cutting the stone from the mountain. Michelangelo had followed this procedure himself in his earlier sculptures, but this hands-off approach had not always yielded happy results. In the case of the Bacchus, he had purchased the marble from a dealer in Rome for 10 ducats, but in the course of carving it had discovered flaws that spoiled the finish. While working on a later project, Michelangelo told his stonecutter that the marble must be “white and without any veins, spots, or flaws whatsoever”—exacting standards that he certainly demanded for this most important project. That he succeeded in finding just what he was looking for is indicated not only by the near-flawless finish of the completed sculpture but by the fact that he returned to the same spot years later in search of equally fine specimens.

  Michelangelo set out for Carrara on a dapple-gray horse he purchased for 3 gold ducats from the cardinal’s advance; he withdrew another 5 for expenses along the way. The fact that he undertook the arduous journey reveals a character trait that will contribute to his difficulties with patrons and colleagues: Michelangelo was a perfectionist. He was willing to sacrifice comfort and profit, indeed almost any tangible benefit, for the sake of the work itself; he not only demanded enormous exertions from himself but anticipated, no doubt correctly, that others were less particular. He insisted on being intimately involved with aspects of a project that other artists would have considered menial. This inability to delegate, to trust others to carry out his vision even when it came to minor details, helps explain the large number of projects he left unfinished and that caused him no end of difficulties with his patrons.

  It is also true that having spent his formative years among the stonecutters of Settignano, Michelangelo had a feel for the material rare among artists and a respect for the laborers who actually did the backbreaking work of quarrying the stone. He was able to spot minute imperfections that would ruin the finished work, and to judge the density and consistency of the crystalline structure that would determine how the chisel would bite into the stone.III Though Michelangelo did more than any other artist before him to lift the profession above the humble status of the artisan, he understood that such a leap into the stratosphere could not be launched without a firm grounding in craftsmanship. He was something of a paradox, a conjurer of cosmic ideas who fussed over the slightest details of his trade, knowing that only the most perfect forms were adequate vessels to contain the vastness of his imagination.

  Michelangelo traveled to Carrara accompanied by Piero d’Argenta, the first in a long line of assistants who would, for the most part, serve him faithfully. The rivalry that marked his relations with his equals rarely extended to his underlings, who, as long as they were loyal and hardworking, were treated with kindness and generosity by their master. He carried with him a letter of safe conduct from the Cardinal of St. Denis:

  We have recently agreed with Master Michele Angelo di Ludovico Florentine sculptor and bearer of this, that he make for us a marble tombstone, namely a clothed Virgin Mary with a dead Christ naked in her arms, to place in a certain Chapel, which we intend to found in St. Peter’s in Rome on the site of Santa Petronilla; and on his presently repairing to those parts to excavate and transport here the marbles necessary for such a work, we confidently beg your Lordships out of consideration for us to extend to him every help and favor in this matter.

  Michelangelo spent the better part of four months in the mountains of western Tuscany, taking only a short break to visit his family in Florence during the Christmas season. Quarrying was difficult and dangerous, and Michelangelo was not one to stand aside while others did all the work. Though he left no account of these months, letters written in 1518 while he was excavating stone for the façade of the Church of San Lorenzo detail the extent to which he was involved in the most arduous tasks. “As to the marbles,” he wrote to the project supervisor in Florence,

  I’ve got the excavated column safely down to the channel, about fifty braccia from the road. It’s been harder than I’d imagined to haul it down. The harness was badly made, and someone broke his neck and died on the spot. I myself was almost killed. . . . The excavation site is very rugged, and the men ignorant in such matters. Thus, we will have to show patience for many months, before the mountains are tamed and the men brought up to speed. Then it will go more quickly. You must know that I’ll accomplish what I promised and produce the most beautiful
work ever made in Italy, if only with God’s help.

  Though Michelangelo was back in Rome by March, the marble did not arrive until June, having been held up by customs, and it took another two months before it was hauled from the docks on the Tiber to his studio. As he examined more closely the stone he had labored so long to acquire, he must have been pleased. The beauty of the material he would soon transform into his first masterpiece was proverbial. More than two decades later, the scarpellini of the region still recalled the stone ’s perfection, writing to the sculptor excitedly to tell him they had just excavated a piece “as beautiful . . . as that used for the Pietà you made in Rome.”

  As he stood before the rough-hewn block, Michelangelo already had in mind the forms he would “liberate” from the white stone as he probed the mass with drill and chisel. As he had learned from his master Bertoldo, he had already worked out the basic composition in rough sketches, finished drawings, and finally in clay models. But for Michelangelo the true art of sculpture was subtractive, a process of removing excess material and exposing forms latent in the mass. “By sculpture I mean that which is fashioned by the effort of cutting away, that which is fashioned by the method of being built up being like unto painting,” he wrote in 1547.

  The paradox of carved sculpture is that form and matter are in conflict: the more there is of one, the less there is of the other. Meaning comes only through a process of reduction, through a stripping away of matter until all that is left is pure spirit. In his poetry Michelangelo most often deploys the image of the sculptor’s art as a metaphor for the tension between body and soul, between carnal love and divine love—the block standing for the earthly body while the form that emerges slowly beneath the chisel represents the soul struggling to free itself from its material prison:

  Just as by removing, my lady, one forms

  from hard mountain stone

  a living figure,

  which grows more as stone grows less;

  so the little good that I possess

  trembles ’neath the body’s fleshy form,

  imprisoned in its hard carapace.

  Only you can free me

  from my bonds,

  since in me there ’s neither force nor will.

  Or again in this sonnet of 1538:

  The greatest artist has no concept

  not already present in the stone

  that binds it, awaiting only

  the hand obedient to mind.

  The metaphor of the body as the prison of the soul—the carcere terreno—has deep roots in both Greek philosophy and Christian theology. It was a theme Michelangelo heard elaborated at great length during his years at the Medici Palace, where, under the guidance of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, Neoplatonism was very much in vogue. “[O]nce our souls leave this prison, some other light awaits them,” Ficino wrote in a typical passage from his Platonic Theology. “Our human minds, ‘immured in darkness and a sightless dungeon,’ may look in vain for that light. . . . But I pray that as heavenly souls longing with desire for our heavenly home we may cast off the bonds of our terrestrial chains . . . and with God as our guide, we may fly unhindered to our ethereal abode. . . .” For the sculptor probing for meaningful form within the rough-hewn block, such philosophic flights provided a compelling metaphysical analogy for his craft.

  III. DAUGHTER OF THE SON

  We have no account that allows us to peek inside the studio and watch as Michelangelo “found” the figure of the Virgin Mother and her divine son inside the stone. Michelangelo was notoriously secretive and resented any intrusions or interruptions while he was at work. Until the moment the sculpture or painting was finished, he did his best to keep prying eyes away, as if to maintain the illusion that the artwork had emerged miraculously from the artist’s mind like Athena from the head of Zeus.

  Given his reluctance to let anyone observe his methods, we are fortunate to have a description of the artist at work on a similar piece, one of the last sculptures he ever created, the so-called Florentine Pietà, which he intended for his own tomb. The almost reckless abandon described in this later account no doubt reflects a confidence gained from a lifetime ’s experience, but even at the age of twenty-four Michelangelo possessed a remarkable faith in his own powers:

  [I]n a quarter of an hour [the visitor wrote] he caused more splinters to fall from a very hard block of marble than three or four masons in three or four times as long . . . he attacked the work with such energy and fire that I thought it would fly into pieces. . . .

  With one blow he brought down fragments three or four fingers in breadth, and so exactly at the point marked that if only a little more marble had fallen he would have risked spoiling the whole work.

  It was fortunate that Michelangelo was a quick worker, since the contract stipulated that the piece be completed “at the end of a year from the day the work is begun.” Given the complexity of the composition and the high degree of finish he was striving for, this was an almost impossible task. And, in fact, it is unlikely that Michelangelo actually met this unrealistic deadline, which meant that the man who commissioned the work didn’t live to see the finished product, since the Cardinal of St. Denis died early in August of 1499.

  The completed statue was placed as the cardinal had requested above his tomb in Santa Petronilla, where it was immediately acclaimed a masterpiece. Vasari recalls that from this work “he acquired very great fame,” while Condivi confirms that Michelangelo “gained great fame and reputation by it, so that already, in the opinion of the world, not only did he greatly surpass all others of the time and of the times before, but also he challenged the ancients themselves.”

  It is impossible to reconstruct precisely the Pietà’s original setting, since the old Chapel of Santa Petronilla was destroyed in 1505 during Bramante ’s rebuilding of St. Peter’s. The statue was moved twice more, to the Chapel of the Madonna della Febbre in St. Peter’s and then to the choir of Sixtus IV, before being brought in 1749 to its present location in an ornate Baroque chapel on the north side of the aisle of the great basilica. It is clear, however, that current viewing conditions are far from what Michelangelo intended, and certainly far from ideal. Not only are we forced to look at the Pietà from a distance, through a thick plate of bulletproof glass—installed after a 1972 attack on the sculpture—but it has been placed too high and tilted forward so that both the Virgin’s face and Christ’s body are obscured. Not the least of the problems is the busy backdrop of multicolored marble that overwhelms the subtleties of Michelangelo’s carving.

  In fact the Pietà is one of those artworks—like the Mona Lisa, which is similarly protected to death in the Louvre—that is better appreciated in reproduction where, with the aid of a good photograph, the eye can linger on the exquisite finish and intricacy of the carving. The level of skill and the care he took in executing every detail remains unsurpassed in Michelangelo’s oeuvre. This is the work of a precocious young man showing off, hoping to astound his contemporaries with his preternatural ability to render every vein and sinew in the dead Christ’s body, and every pleat in the Virgin’s cloak and headdress. It is a tour de force, a work by someone who felt he had still to prove himself. Yet for all its superficial tricks, its bravura passages meant to excite our admiration rather than contribute to the overall emotional impact, the Pietà remains a masterpiece of observation marshaled in the service of a larger expressive idea.

  Here for the first time Michelangelo has taken full advantage of the knowledge he acquired at such great cost to his well-being in the morgue of Santo Spirito. Particularly in the body of the dead Christ, he shows an unrivaled command of anatomy. His is not simply a static textbook knowledge, but an understanding of the human body as an organism in which each part responds to every other, working in harmony for a common purpose. Ironically, the dead Christ appears more vital than perhaps any figure in the history of art, his limp form more responsive to actual physical conditions than depictions of living
, breathing humans by other sculptors. The rise of Jesus’s right shoulder where Mary’s hand reaches around to support him beneath the armpit, the shift of the joint and the flex of his muscles, is unsurpassed both in terms of its truth to nature but also in the way such a subtle observation contributes to the overall narrative. It allows us to feel the weight of Christ’s body, the suppleness of his now lifeless flesh. As some critics have pointed out, those Pietàs where Jesus lies across his mother’s lap like a board, his body rigid from rigor mortis, are actually more realistic than Michelangelo’s. But how much less poignant! As Michelangelo has conceived the scene, though Jesus has ceased breathing, he has only just crossed the threshold from life to death.

  Michelangelo’s Pietà marks a quantum leap over both the Santo Spirito Crucifix and even the Bacchus in terms of his ability to tell a profound story using only the human form. Due to the nature of the subject, Christ’s body in the Pietà is utterly passive, but unlike the flaccid form of the Crucifix or the deliberately discombobulated pose of the Bacchus, Michelangelo has learned how to transform what could have been either brutal or insipid into something powerfully evocative. He nestles in his mother’s capacious and accommodating lap in a sinuous S-curve. There is a sensuous languor to the pose. He gives himself up to Mary’s embrace with abandon, slumped, spent, with no sign of his recent agony to intrude on our meditations.