To some extent, Michelangelo reprises the theme of the Bacchus in order to infuse it with an entirely new meaning. Both figures are characterized by an enervation so unlike the heroic struggle we associate with Michelangelo’s nudes. Bacchus is listless as he succumbs to his carnal nature; Jesus is literally lifeless, signaling his complete renunciation of the flesh. Both figures are yielding, unresistant, but for very different reasons. Where the Greek god of wine sags downward as he abandons the higher faculties in pursuit of base desires, Christ sloughs off his earthly nature in his climb to the heavens.
Michelangelo was famously averse to showing anything that marred the perfection of the human form, even in scenes like this where gruesome details would not be out of place and might, in fact, heighten the pathos. Christ’s delicate, almost feminine features retain no trace of his recent ordeal. Michelangelo even minimizes the signs of Christ’s wounds; the gash in his side where he was stabbed with a spear is barely noticeable, as are the holes where his hands and feet were pierced by nails. All artists who depict Jesus must grapple with his dual nature, human and divine, conveying his otherworldly spirit within a body that is wholly flesh and blood. Michelangelo implies this through a beauty that is unconquerable even in death, a beauty that foreshadows the Resurrection still to come.
In depicting Mary, Michelangelo was faced with a similar challenge. Mary is not divine. She represents the pinnacle of human, and more specifically female, nature, but as an emblematic figure, vessel of all that is good and pure, she must also be free to some extent from the ills that plague mere mortals. This led Michelangelo to one of the more controversial decisions he made in carving the Pietà—to depict Mary as a young woman, perhaps even younger than the child she supports. There is in fact some precedent for this approach, as suggested by the famous lines of Dante, “Virgin mother, daughter of thy Son,” but Michelangelo’s interpretation was controversial even in his own lifetime. Decades later, Condivi still felt it necessary to defend his hero from the barbs of critics who believed the sculpture was not only implausible but perhaps even impious. When a copy of Michelangelo’s famous statue was made for Santo Spirito in Florence by Giovanni Lippi, the sculptor reworked the original to show the Virgin at an appropriately matronly age. But even thus altered, the new and improved version did not meet with universal acceptance. “[I]t derives from that inventor of obscenities, Michelangelo Buonarroto,” wrote one anonymous critic, “who is concerned only with art, not with piety,” claiming such unorthodox images “undermine faith and devotion.”
It is easy to condemn the anonymous critic as a hopeless philistine, but he was actually sensitive to a subtly subversive subtext that the loyal Condivi either failed to see or simply ignored. Michelangelo shows Mary as an adolescent, while depicting Jesus as a young man, so that each appears to be the age at which Italians of the Renaissance usually got married. Jesus seems to have collapsed in her arms in what, if one didn’t know better, could be interpreted as a postcoital swoon. Thus the Virgin appears to be both mother and bride, a dual role that contributes to an uncomfortable and slightly morbid eroticism.
Condivi’s explanation for why Michelangelo chose to depict Mary as a teenage girl, clumsy as it is, goes some way toward explaining what the artist had in mind: “Do you not know [he quoted Michelangelo as saying] that chaste women retain their fresh looks much longer than those who are not chaste? How much more, therefore, a virgin in whom not even the least unchaste desire that might work change in her body ever arose?” Naïve as this sounds to modern ears, this account does suggest that Michelangelo was not about to let the facts stand in the way of deeper Truth. Just as Christ’s body retains its perfection even in death, so Mary’s face remains unmarked by time.
Michelangelo renders the scene removed from the temporal, contingent realm where physical forms are subject to growth and decay. Even as Mary supports her Son’s body with her right hand, she makes a rhetorical gesture with her left, as if to say: “Behold! This is my beloved child who offered Himself up for the sake of all mankind.” Michelangelo represents Jesus’s death not as an incident occurring at a particular time and place, but as the Eucharist, the miraculous reenactment of Christ’s sacrifice and Man’s redemption. Mary presents his body much as the priest at Mass holds up the consecrated host, miraculously transformed by ritual into the flesh of the Redeemer.
This symbolic function helps explain Mary’s calm demeanor, for Michelangelo’s Pietà is not meant to conjure the moment in history when Christ’s body was taken down from the Cross and placed on his mother’s lap, but rather the entire arc of history in which Man’s fall was redeemed through the death that makes possible our eternal life.
The Virgin’s rhetorical gesture acknowledges our presence, inviting us to participate in this most sacred mystery, but her implicit acknowledgment is subverted by the direction of her gaze. She avoids confronting us directly. She averts her eyes, turning inward to meditate on the same mystery that she invites us to contemplate. These gently contradictory gestures constitute perhaps the most profound and profoundly moving aspect of the piece. Mary looks neither at us nor at the face of her beloved child, apparently absorbed in her own thoughts, aware of the immensity of Jesus’s sacrifice and her own particular loss. But if through the death of her Son she has lost more than we, she recognizes that we too have a role to play, both to mourn but also to pay homage to Him who gave his life for us. We come reverently, on tiptoe, careful not to disturb her in her sorrow, but also reassured by her quiet gesture that we are not intruders, that, in fact, without us—the recipients of grace—the circle of meaning cannot be closed.
Mary is as physically remote as Christ is physically present. If He is divinity incarnate, she is all ethereal spirit. This despite a certain mountainousness that allows her to take the body of a full-grown man effortlessly on her lap. It is a measure of Michelangelo’s brilliance that we barely notice this incongruity. He has concealed it not only by the voluminous pleats that fall in great sweeping cascades but also by the serpentine contour of Jesus’s body that allows him to nestle comfortably within these capacious folds. In lesser hands, Mary’s sweet, girlish face might seem wholly inadequate to the monumental body below, but so dazzled are we by the billowing fabric—hanging in thick swags in her skirts, in more delicate ripples in her blouse so that the whole has an effect of upward movement—that, again, we blithely pass over the improbability of it all. Such deviations from mere fact are typical of Michelangelo’s mature work as he searches for a truth more elevated, truer, than prosaic reality.
The contrast between the clothed Virgin and her almost naked son allows Michelangelo an opportunity to show off his bravura technique. The architectonic quality of the drapery—as structurally important as the rocky outcropping on which she sits—shows a remarkable advance over the statues of Saints Proclus and Petronius and the kneeling angel for the Bologna altar carved only four years earlier. In those earlier sculptures, Michelangelo struggles to find a meaningful relationship between the clothing and the bodies beneath. In the Pietà, Mary’s garments have a dynamism and structural function all their own. They conceal far more than they reveal, but the dramatic diagonal sweep of her skirt hem and the gathered folds at her knees provide essential visual support for the body above, while the delicate tracery of her blouse—like the ripples on a windswept lake—leads the eye upward before coming full circle in the headdress that envelops Mary’s delicate features in soft folds. If, instead, our eyes start at the top, those pleats and folds read as flowing water, beginning in nervous little rivulets above and becoming mighty cascades as they reach the bottom.
• • •
The statue Michelangelo carved for the tomb of the Cardinal of St. Denis is the first of three versions of the Pietà he carved during his lifetime—he left the other two unfinished in his studio at his death—but it is not his first treatment of the Virgin holding her Son in her lap. In fact his earliest extant work, the Madonna of the Stairs, depicted
the same two figures at the beginning of their journey together, and the quietly mournful tone of that piece already contains a premonition of what’s to come.
The Roman Pietà is probably the best loved of Michelangelo’s works, more approachable than the epic Sistine Ceiling and conceived on a more human scale than the David, whose grandeur and supreme self-confidence inspire awe rather than tenderness. The almost universal affection comes despite the fact that Michelangelo holds us at arm’s length; the Pietà is a work of silence and of mystery, of contemplation rather than raw feeling.
To some extent, Michelangelo is deliberately working against type by eschewing obvious dramatic effects. The image of a mother grieving for her dead son is one that touches everyone on a visceral level. No parent can witness this mournful scene without terror, but though Michelangelo presents us with a theme that exposes our deepest fears, he does so in a way that reassures as well. Mary is overcome but not overwhelmed by her sorrow, grave but not despairing. One of the many consequences of depicting Mary as a young girl is to blunt the emotional impact of the scene: she does not look like the mother, nor does Jesus look like her child. Rather than tugging on our heartstrings, Michelangelo seeks out a higher spiritual plane. Mary’s dignity at this most trying moment evokes the theological message of Jesus’s sacrifice, the paradoxical mystery at the heart of Christianity. Through His death we gain eternal life; our greatest sorrow is the prelude to our greatest joy.
• • •
Michelangelo’s approach defies expectation and runs against the grain of history. The Pietà has become such a common motif in Christian art—due in no small measure to the popularity of Michelangelo’s version—that it is surprising to learn that it is a scene for which there is no basis in the Gospels. The popularity of the Pietà originally stemmed from its appeal to our emotions; no one, no matter how theologically ignorant or spiritually indifferent, is immune to its universal message.
The theme first emerged during a wave of religious fervor that gripped central Europe at the end of the fourteenth century, when a new iconography was invented to speak more directly to the spiritual longing of the faithful. In one of those periodic religious revivals—akin to the various Great Awakenings that have been a feature of American religious life—the faithful of late medieval Europe sought a more direct connection to the divine. Rite and ceremony lost their monopoly as vehicles for salvation. To supplement these stale observances, men and—especially—women sought out stories that touched their hearts and brought the supernatural within the realm of everyday experience. This impulse often manifested itself in a form of mystical ecstasy in which the devout imagined scenes of Christ’s Passion playing out before their eyes or, in the most extreme instances, in which they themselves endured Christ’s agony on the Cross. The fourteenth-century German nun Mechtild of Hackeborn wrote an account of her visions, a kind of spiritual ecstasy so intense as to induce hallucinations: “At Vespers, one saw the Lord taken down from the cross. One also saw the Virgin Mary hold him in her lap and the prayerful Mother spoke to him: Come hither and kiss me my holy wonder, my beloved Son, whom I love so much.”
The early German Pietàs combine wild expressiveness with stark realism. Artists spared their viewers nothing, focusing with relish on the gruesome injuries and contortions of Christ’s brutalized body. Mary herself is not merely grief-stricken but unhinged. These images were meant to do more than arouse our empathy; they were calculated to evoke a powerful response in the viewer who could be excited to such a degree as to actually feel Our Lord’s suffering or his mother’s sorrow, much as if the viewer herself had undergone the ordeal. Like St. Francis receiving the stigmata, a man or woman of sufficient piety could be expected, through the sympathetic magic of art, to participate in the suffering that leads to redemption.
And it was a form of magic, tapping into that current of wonder that lies behind all art and whose ultimate source can be traced back to the shamanistic rites of our Stone Age ancestors. The primitive notion that a depiction bears some deep connection to the thing depicted—a notion that lies behind magical practices like voodoo—accounts for much of art’s power to move us and explains why icons and idols have always been vital props for the world’s major religions. A kind of sympathetic vibration is set up between the sculpture and the sacred theme to which it refers, so that the faithful might kneel down before an image of a saint and expect their prayers to be heard.
When Michelangelo set out to create his own version of the Pietà, it is clear he was determined to take a more cerebral approach. He eschews the histrionics typical of the subject in favor of a dignified reserve. One needn’t assume he was less religious than the anonymous craftsmen who carved the humble wooden effigies before which the faithful prostrated themselves, but his attitude toward his work was profoundly different, not the least because the prospect of anonymity was appalling to him. Fame, not piety, was his primary motivation, and he would measure the success of the sculpture by how effectively it reminded viewers of his unique genius.IV His ego would never permit him to create any work that required a ritual setting to complete its meaning. Michelangelo’s Pietà is entirely self-sufficient, the proud creation of a single man and a bravura performance intended to excite the admiration of the crowd. Whatever magic was present would be conveyed through the perfection of its form and the power of the artist’s singular vision, his ability to solve difficult problems of composition and to render contrasting materials of billowing fabric and bare flesh. It was a showpiece, a technical tour de force, made all the more remarkable, as Condivi pointed out, because it was carved from a single block of stone.V His masterpiece was meant to attract the eye and stimulate the mind; there was never any question of Michelangelo creating a cult object like those carried around the villages of Germany and Flanders in solemn procession. He was creating, first and foremost, a work of art.
Another way to put it was that Michelangelo was divesting the Pietà of its medieval trappings and reimagining the theme for a new age. The approach he shared with his contemporaries—and that characterizes the Renaissance as a whole—was not quite the “art for art’s sake” ideology popular in the late nineteenth century, but the stress placed on autonomous values of beauty and form over functional or ritualistic imperatives launched us on the journey toward that very modern conception. Michelangelo transformed a cult object—made by an anonymous artisan and intended for use in a ritual setting—into a work of art whose spiritual efficacy was a by-product of its formal properties. Carved in gleaming white Carrara marble, a medium that was both self-consciously “arty” and devoid of any superficial resemblance to the hair, flesh, and fabric it depicted, Michelangelo’s masterpiece exists on an ideal plane, far removed from the messy contingencies of life, reversing the original function of the Pietà as the site in which the sacred and the mundane commingled.
IV. THE SIGNATURE
The conceptual distance between Michelangelo’s version of the Pietà and its medieval predecessors can be measured by one element in particular, perhaps the most controversial feature of the sculpture: the presence of the artist’s signature chiseled on the strap that crosses Mary’s breast. Like the decision to depict the Virgin as a young girl, Michelangelo’s decision to place his name so boldly in such a visible—not to say intimate—location stirred controversy from the beginning. In his Lives of the Artists, Vasari includes an anecdote in order to justify what would otherwise have been condemned as a presumptuous act:
Such were Michelagnolo’s love and zeal together in this work, that he left his name—a thing that he never did again in any other work—written across a girdle that encircles the bosom of Our Lady. And the reason was that one day Michelagnolo, entering the place where it was set up, found there a great number of strangers from Lombardy, who were praising it highly, and one of them asked one of the others who had done it, and he answered, ‘Our Gobbo from Milan.’VI Michelagnolo stood silent, but thought it something strange that his labors should
be attributed to another; and one night he shut himself in there, and, having brought a little light and his chisels, carved his name upon it.
Vasari’s tale is easily disproved by the evidence of the work itself. The strap was an integral part of the original composition. It presses down on the Virgin’s blouse, tugging slightly at the material around her breasts to expose, if only demurely, what lies beneath. It is an unusual accessory that seems to have no function other than to carry the artist’s signature. Clearly, this was not an afterthought but rather something Michelangelo had planned from the moment he began to work the block with mallet and chisel. The fact that Vasari felt compelled to concoct this improbable story is a sign of how uncomfortable Michelangelo’s champions were with this intrusion of artistic ego into a sacred tableau.
Since Vasari’s story is so obviously an invention, one must look elsewhere for an explanation of Michelangelo’s cheeky bit of graffiti. On the most obvious level it was an assertion by a young man who knew he ’d accomplished something remarkable. At the very least, Vasari’s story shows a budding artist afraid that someone else might take credit for his work. Michelangelo was always accusing others of stealing his ideas, and this fear must have been particularly acute at this point in his career, when he was still little known to the general public. Indeed, Michelangelo had good reason to worry, since it was commonplace for artists to copy each other’s work and unusual for them to credit the source. As we ’ve seen, Michelangelo himself was not above perpetrating similar frauds, though he thought himself so superior to his contemporaries that he was willing to be confused only with the ancient masters.
In fact, the form of the signature is itself a kind of fraud or pun, deliberately meant to evoke the ancients. Carved in shallow letters on the strap are the words MICHEL.A[N]GELVS.BONAROTVS.FLORENT.FACIEBA[T], literally “Michelangelo Buonarroti the Florentine was makin[g].” The final “T” is blocked out by Mary’s blouse, heightening the illusion that the signature was not added by the artist but actually inscribed on the Virgin’s garment. The unusual use of the imperfect tense is actually a learned allusion to the Roman writer Pliny and comes from the preface of his Natural History:
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