I should like to be accepted on the lines of those founders of painting and sculpture who . . . used to inscribe their finished works, even the masterpieces . . . , with a provisional title such as Faciebat Apelles or Polyclitus, as though art was always a thing in process and not completed, so that when faced by the vagaries of criticism the artist might have left him[self] a line of retreat to indulgence, by implying that he intended, if not interrupted, to correct any defect noted.
In alluding to this passage—which Michelangelo almost certainly heard about from Angelo Poliziano—he adopted a phrase originally intended to express the artist’s humility in order to show he deserved to be included among the greats. The shallowness and deliberate sloppiness of the letters is also a kind of visual pun. Had Michelangelo wished, he could easily have worked it out so that the letters were all the same size and fit perfectly on the strap. The elisions, like the grammatical syntax, represent a studied carelessness, as if, as Vasari asserts, they were merely an afterthought, softening the arrogance implied by scrawling his name across the Virgin’s bosom.
By brazenly signing his name on a sacred work, Michelangelo was following a trend that had already begun among Renaissance artists. As early as the fourteenth century, Giovanni Pisano inscribed his pulpit for the Cathedral of Pistoia: “Giovanni carved it who performed no empty work, born of Nicolà but blessed with greater skill, Pisa gave him birth, endowed with learning in all things visual.” Two tombs carved by his fellow Florentine Antonio Pollaiuolo for Popes Sixtus IV and Innocent VIII, provided a more likely source of inspiration, particularly since they were both in St. Peter’s Basilica, near where his own funerary monument was to be erected. Pollaiuolo’s signature on the tomb of Pope Innocent in particular was prominently placed. Inscribed on the armrest in which the pontiff sits, it reads: “Antonio Pollaiuolo, famous in gold, silver, bronze, and painting, he who finished the sepulcher of Sixtus here by himself brought to an end the work that he had begun.”
Michelangelo’s signature, while less overtly boastful, is far more prominently placed, exposing him to the charge not only of hubris but impiety. Through this bold declaration of authorship, Michelangelo interjects himself into the sacred communion between the worshiper and the icon. He not only calls attention to himself but also to the fact that this is a work of art, made by a mortal man. If anything miraculous is taking place, he wants to make sure he receives the credit.
Nothing evokes the soul of the Renaissance more than this imperative to make one ’s mark on the world. Along with an appreciation for Man in general came a renewed appreciation for men as individuals, each of whom was seen to possess unique qualities and a unique set of skills for which he demands to be rewarded. Giorgio Vasari chronicles this slow-moving revolution in his Lives of the Artists, a magisterial work that covers more than two and a half centuries of innovation, from Cimabue and Giotto at the end of the thirteenth century to the death of Michelangelo in 1564. It is not so much a history of art as of artists, a treasure trove of revealing anecdotes and quirky personalities, of individual triumphs and collective progress. He reaches back into what for him was the dim past, but he reflects the concerns of his own day: the thirst for fame and the desire to be recognized as a distinctive personality. As he proclaims in the preface:
It was the wont of the finest spirits in all their actions, through a burning desire for glory, to spare no labor, however grievous, in order to bring their works to that perfection which might render them impressive and marvelous to the whole world; nor could the humble fortunes of many prevent their energies from attaining to the highest rank, whether in order to live in honor or to leave in the ages to come eternal fame for all their rare excellence.
To some extent, Vasari was projecting the obsessions of his own day onto an earlier age, but he was the first to clearly articulate what was distinctive about the cultural moment he lived through and to seek its origins in the triumphs of those long-dead masters. Dante, writing some two centuries earlier, felt the first stirrings of this new egotism, though he uses an artistic rivalry to make a typically medieval point about the vanity of all worldly striving:
O empty glory of human powers!
how briefly lasts the green on its top,
unless it is followed by an age of dullness!
In painting Cimabue thought to hold the field
and now Giotto has the cry, so that the other’s fame is dim.
“Seeking the bubble reputation,” as Shakespeare put it, became a Renaissance obsession. The competition for fame and honor that had long animated the ruling class now filtered down to the writers, scholars, and artists who served them, spurring them to new creative heights and rewarding those who could stamp their work with their own unique personality.
These pioneers were not simply moving the story of art forward; they were inventing the very concept of art as a specialized field of endeavor and of the artist as a man with a particular gift and distinctive point of view. The medieval craftsman was necessarily self-effacing. The more his personality came to the fore, the less the work served its essential function of mediating between the earthly and heavenly realms. A thirteenth-century miracle-working panel from Santissima Annunziata, with which Michelangelo as a native of Florence was intimately familiar, perfectly illustrates the medieval mindset. It was begun, so the story goes, by a monk from the church’s cloister who threw the painting aside in frustration at not being able to capture the sacred scene. But while he slept, it was completed by an angel—a provenance that assured its healing power.
By contrast, the Renaissance work of art, even if not actually signed, proclaims its very human maker through distinctive marks of style and handling. If Leonardo had an angel whispering in his ear while he painted or Michelangelo one guiding the chisel, neither was letting on. The superhuman power behind Michelangelo’s works is the man himself, who has combined in his person the role of both artist and angel, an individual fully capable of working miracles in his own right.
Vasari proclaimed Michelangelo the culminating figure in a centuries-long journey that began with Giotto. He was the man “sen[t] down to earth” by God, “a spirit with universal ability in every art.” But while Michelangelo may have been heaven-sent—divine, in the words of his admirers—his work has lost some of its primitive talismanic power. His sculptures and paintings excite the admiration of all who see them, but they fall short in terms of eliciting the prayers of the faithful. It is safe to say that among the thousands who stream through the Sistine Chapel each day, few are moved by purely religious emotions. The tension between esthetics and spirituality is particularly acute in the case of the Pietà precisely because of the subject’s history as a site where the faithful came in contact with the divine. In this most poignant, human moment, the miracle of the God-made-flesh becomes visible. But Michelangelo’s work is self-consciously artistic, almost unapproachable in its perfection. We are meant to contemplate these sacred figures from a distance—both spatial and emotional—rather than to engage on a more visceral level.
• • •
Of all Michelangelo’s masterpieces, the Pietà in St. Peter’s is the least Michelangelesque, the least imbued with those qualities—grandeur, heroism, struggle—that we ’ve come to associate with the artist’s work. It is also, and not coincidentally, the most finished. Each detail is lovingly rendered, down to the pleated folds of Mary’s blouse and the individual hairs in Christ’s beard, and each exquisitely polished surface gleams in the dim light of the cathedral.VII
The level of detail and high degree of finish are exceptional in Michelangelo’s work. In fact, over the course of his long and productive career, he left so many works at various stages of incompletion that the unfinished has taken on an esthetic life of its own. The row of half-carved Captives in the Accademia in Florence perhaps speaks more eloquently to modern viewers than the undisputed star of the museum, the David. After watching as these muscular figures wrestle to free themselves from the
matrix of stone, David can seem a bit too self-assured, too complacent.
In retrospect, and for all the jaw-dropping skill it displays, the Pietà is still the work of a young man burning to show what he can do. It is a showpiece of the sculptor’s art, like a Paganini cadenza that’s meant to impress the audience with the violinist’s superb technique. After two years of squandered opportunities and frustration, the twenty-three-year-old artist set out to prove to the world what he was capable of. His signature, brazenly scrawled across the Virgin’s bosom, leaves no doubt that he felt he had succeeded. But it was also a mark of insecurity. The next time, he was certain that everyone would know who had made the work without being told.
* * *
I. In 1508, the young Raphael was given 100 ducats to fresco a room in the pope ’s palace. Raphael was just beginning his rise to fame (as was Michelangelo when he received the commission for the Pietà) and sculpture was generally more costly to produce, but the far larger sum Michelangelo received is a mark of the high esteem in which the cardinal held him. The evidence to be gleaned from the account books of the Balducci brothers, who handled Cardinal Riario’s finances, suggest Michelangelo was paid a total of 160 ducats for the Bacchus, including ten to purchase the stone.
II. It is unclear whether Michelangelo made both small-scale and life-size models for his early sculptures. The small three-dimensional “sketch” was known as a bozzetto, while the more finished full-scale model was known as a modello. Benvenuto Cellini, who knew Michelangelo and was a great admirer of his, recalled that “the marvelous Michelangelo Buonarroti . . . has worked both ways; but having recognized that he could not long satisfy his good talent with little models, ever after he set himself with great obedience to make models exactly as large as they had to come out of the marble for him: and this we have seen with our own eyes in the sacristy of San Lorenzo.” (Quoted in Hartt, David by the Hand of Michelangelo, 64.)
III. After the early missteps with the Bacchus, only rarely was his judgment betrayed. An exception is the Risen Christ. In the process of carving the face, the artist’s chisel exposed a black vein in the marble, requiring him to throw out the almost completed statue and start again.
IV. The art theorist Hans Belting has characterized the Renaissance as the age in which “the old aura of the sacred” was replaced by the “new aura of the masterpiece.” [Quoted in Campbell, “Fare una Cosa Morta Parer Viva,” Art Bulletin, vol. 84, no. 4: 606.]
V. Carving a complex group from a single block was considered to be a mark of a great craftsman. According to Pliny, the famous Laocoön group had been one such masterpiece, but when it was excavated from a field in Rome in 1506, Michelangelo—who was one of the first to inspect it—determined it had actually been made in five pieces.
VI. This nickname, meaning “hunchback,” belonged to Cristoforo Solari (1460–1527), a well-known sculptor from Milan who was closely associated with Leonardo da Vinci.
VII. This high finish was achieved, so Vasari informs us, “with points of pumice stone [the sculptor] rub[s] all over the figure to give that flesh-like appearance that is seen in marvellous works of sculpture.” [Vasari on Technique, no. 50, pp. 151–52] The Pietà is not in fact finished at every point. Since it was originally placed inside a niche and was meant to be seen only from the front, the back has been left completely unresolved. In fact, the sculpture is not conceived in the round but is basically a very high relief. But the visible portions are more finely finished than any of his other sculptures.
Michelangelo, David, 1501–4. Nicolo Orsi Battaglini/Art Resource, NY
III
The Giant
Michelangelum Lodovici Bonarroti, citizen of Florence, is to make and carry out and to finish perfectly a figure, the so-called Giant . . . nine braccie tall, already present in the Opera [the cathedral works] . . . within two years, beginning next September, and with salary and wages each month of six gold florins.
—Contract for the David, August 16, 1501
I. MONOLITH
The massive block of Carrara marble had lain in the courtyard of the cathedral workshop for over thirty years. Exposed to the wind and rain, surrounded by weeds and covered in grime, the abandoned monolith was a monument to frustrated ambition and humbled pride. On close inspection, the weathered column resembled an ill-formed man, though one would be hard-pressed to say what sort of figure the sculptor had in mind when he began hacking away with inexpert blows. Florentines simply referred to it as “the Giant,” only dimly recalling the intention of the obscure artist who’d abandoned the project he ’d barely begun.
In the summer of 1501, the overseers of the cathedral began to take a renewed interest in the neglected block. Measuring nine braccie (almost eighteen feet) from end to end, such a massive piece of stone—excavated from the mountainside by teams of scarpellini and carted some eighty miles along narrow, rutted roads—represented a substantial investment of time and money. Those charged with the upkeep and decoration of the city’s chief religious shrine were thrifty men, not the sort to spend a penny more than was absolutely necessary, even for the greater glory of God. They were prominent merchants, men who had prospered in part by keeping a sharp eye on the bottom line. When commissioning a statue to adorn the exterior of the cathedral, it seemed irresponsible to purchase new material when there was perfectly serviceable material already on hand.
Though Santa Maria del Fiore, as the cathedral of Florence was officially known, was already over two hundred years old, it was still a work in progress. Construction had begun during the boom at the end of the thirteenth century, a period of explosive growth in Florence that also saw the building of the Palazzo della Signoria, the fortresslike capitol building at the heart of the city,I and the two great basilicas of Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce, home respectively to the mendicant orders of the Dominicans and the Franciscans, as well as a vast encircling wall that protected the vibrant metropolis from hostile neighbors. In 1436, after more than a century in which the interior of the church was exposed to the elements, Filippo Brunelleschi succeeded in capping the vast opening at the center with his remarkable dome, an engineering feat that made the Cathedral of Florence a wonder of the world.
As with most great medieval building projects, progress on the cathedral of Florence was slow and subject to the vicissitudes of fortune. Civil strife, economic upheaval, and the devastation left in the wake of the Black Death of 1348 all forced delays, but after each crisis the citizens of Florence renewed their plodding march into the future. From the beginning there was a yawning chasm between the ambition of its original conception and the limited financial and technical resources available to the commune. The enormous dome was only the most glaring example of this mismatch; more than a century elapsed before Florentines discovered in Brunelleschi a man with the genius to solve the engineering problems posed by erecting a vault over such a wide drum.
Responsibility for ensuring that this emblem of civic pride and religious fervor was suitably adorned fell to the Arte della Lana (the wool guild) and its board of overseers, the Opera del Duomo. (The smaller but equally prestigious Baptistery was under the purview of the Arte di Calimala, the guild of international cloth merchants.) This type of public-private partnership served Florence well as each guild vied with its rivals in beautifying the city. The Opera had purchased the marble column in the middle of the last century as part of a program to place colossal statues along the exterior roofline of the cathedral. The series was to include twelve biblical prophets, Old Testament figures like David, Isaiah, and Joshua who combined spiritual strength with patriotic ardor. These monumental figures would emphasize a point dear to the hearts of most Florentines—that they, like the ancient Israelites, were a people favored by God.
As was often the case, however, dreams had to be scaled back when reality intruded. The technical difficulties involved in raising tons of marble high atop the tribunes and stabilizing them against the wind and weather proved m
ore daunting than anticipated. In 1412, the city’s most celebrated sculptor, Donatello, did succeed in mounting a massive Joshua on the eastern tribune, but he was forced to substitute lightweight terra-cotta (whitewashed to resemble stone) for the more durable and precious marble.
The column that now lay abandoned in the courtyard had arrived in Florence in 1464, during a renewed burst of enthusiasm for the project. Contemporary documents record that the task of carving a monumental figure of David from the block was given to one Agostino di Duccio, a pupil of Donatello. Since Agostino had no experience in carving such large-scale figures, it may well have been that this lesser talent was merely hired to assist the now elderly Donatello. In fact, the great sculptor died in December 1466 at the age of eighty, which could explain why the project was once again abandoned. Another attempt was made a decade later as the Operai brought in Antonio Rossellino to take up where Agostino had left off. But he too quickly determined he could do nothing with the roughed-out block.
Despite this discouraging history, in 1501 the officers of the Arte della Lana made yet another attempt to resuscitate the moribund project. As was often the case in Florence, the decision was driven as much by political as by artistic considerations. This latest attempt at civic improvement was undertaken at a time of deep anxiety and was calculated to project a confidence in the state most citizens no longer shared. Three years earlier the fickle citizens of Florence had turned on Girolamo Savonarola, the fire-and-brimstone preacher whom they had recently proclaimed the savior of the Republic. Disillusionment with his erratic foreign policy and frustration with his austere regime, combined with unrelenting pressure from Pope Alexander—the chief target of Savonarola’s sermons denouncing the corruption of the Church—helped turn public opinion against the self-proclaimed prophet. On April 8, 1498, the Prior of San Marco was arrested by the authorities and dragged to a cell in the Palazzo della Signoria. Tortured, Savonarola was forced to confess that his prophecies were the product of worldly ambition rather than divine inspiration. After an ordeal lasting almost two months, he was finally hanged in the square in front of the Signoria.
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