Michelangelo

by Miles J. Unger

  But this starring role on the public stage did not last long. The David was born at a time of anxiety about the survival of the Republic, in response to a military and political crisis. His air of steely resolve gave renewed hope to an anxious people, but from the beginning the David seemed bigger than the cause he served. Like Machiavelli’s The Prince, written nine years after its installation in the piazza, the David reminded Florentines of their glorious past in order to prod them to future greatness, while largely ignoring the grim realities of the present. Florence, in fact, was already a city in decline. It took only another quarter century for the Republic to vanish altogether following a doomed struggle against a Medici pope. In an odd twist of fate, the David was severely damaged in this last spasm of civic idealism when, during an anti-Medici riot, a stone bench tossed from the upper floors of the Palazzo broke off its left arm.VI By the time the statue was repaired, the Republic he represented no longer existed.

  Over the years, the David has been domesticated. He has been shorn not only of his specifically ideological connotations but of his place in the civic arena. Writing from half a century’s remove, Vasari downplayed the sculpture ’s partisan dimension, focusing instead on its “beautiful contours” and its “harmony, design, and excellence of artistry.” Insofar as he retained any political significance, the David had become a generic symbol, urging those in power to “defend her [Florence] valiantly and govern her justly” rather than a specifically republican device. Vasari’s whitewashing of history is not surprising given the fact that, as a servant of Grand Duke Cosimo de ’ Medici, the statue ’s republican origins might prove embarrassing to his employer. Long before 1873, when the David was finally removed from the Piazza della Signoria, it had ceased to function as a symbol of the independent Republic. Its placement beneath the coffered dome of the Accademia merely confirmed an evolution centuries in the making, from embodiment of republican virtue to objet d’art, defanged, estheticized, universalized.

  If this transformation has weakened the impact of the statue, Michelangelo himself was complicit in this neutering. More than any other artist before him, he stood for the proposition that art formed a distinct realm of meaning, that it should be insulated from the noise of civic or doctrinal debate and from the petty demands of those who paid his salary. Throughout his long career he fought with patrons who interfered in his creative process and bridled at the notion that his work served any cause beyond art itself. No matter who commissioned the work, and for whatever purpose, Michelangelo demanded the freedom to do as he pleased, insisting that art followed its own rules and served its own purposes.

  In the case of the David, Michelangelo knew that his work would long outlast the fragile state that had given it life. He was too proud, too much the consummate craftsman, ever to sacrifice his art for the sake of a cause, no matter how much he may have believed in it. The David shares the fate of most artifacts created at a particular time and place and made for a particular purpose: plucked from its original setting, function gave way to pure form. Vasari is both a witness to and a participant in this process, inscribing the David firmly within the history of style rather than in the dramatic story of a people clinging to their ancient liberties.

  From a twenty-first-century perspective, the David belongs securely to the world of art rather than politics. To art historians, he represents perhaps the most eloquent expression of what is called the High Renaissance, that brief moment lasting from the 1480s when Leonardo painted his first masterpieces to the death of Raphael in 1520. The greatest works of this era are characterized by a grandeur of utterance and a perfection of means, by unmatched technique in the service of eternal truths. A delicate balance is maintained between the Real and the Ideal. The greatest works of this era exude confidence, a heroic vision of Man as not only the measure of all things (as the Greek philosopher Protagoras believed) but as the summit of God’s Creation.

  Such moments are rare and difficult to sustain. The search for perfection is inherently quixotic, undermined by internal contradictions. One can see this in the Pietà, where harmony is achieved only through a distortion of plausible fact, a distortion so artfully concealed that we barely notice the trick. The David is likewise poised precariously between plausible realism and aspirational idealism. In fact, many have criticized the statue for erring on the side of prosaic fact, describing the biblical hero as awkward, gangly, his hands and feet too large and his features lacking in nobility. And it’s true that he doesn’t exhibit those ideal proportions as set down by the architect Vitruvius and espoused in the Renaissance by Leonardo in his famous “Vitruvian Man,” a system by which “the famous painters and sculptors of antiquity attained to great and endless renown.” Compared to Leonardo’s famous figure, the David is long and lean, his proportions determined intuitively rather than according to a predetermined mathematical formula. Michelangelo adheres to the less rigid approach favored by Vasari: “the eye must give final judgment, for, even though an object be most carefully measured, if the eye remain offended it will not cease on that account to censure it.”

  But while the David exhibits traces of a prosaic realism (the last vestige, perhaps, of immaturity on the part of a still youthful artist), he is also an ideal—Man as the hero of his own narrative. Indeed, realistic touches like the tousled hair and knobby knees that recall an adolescent model more than a Greek god save the work from sterile formalism. They breathe life into the gargantuan figure, as if one can still see the shepherd boy in the holy warrior. Compared to the Apollo Belvedere, David appears a bit uncouth, but that merely heightens our appreciation of his nobility and steadfastness of purpose. He is a boy, but a boy imbued with the spirit of the Lord. No one can contemplate his alert yet confident pose and not come away with a renewed faith in human potential.

  In the David, Michelangelo unabashedly celebrates the beauty of the male form without reserve, without remorse.VII There is none of the morbidity, the sense of shame and wracking guilt that characterizes much of his later work and that is apparent in much of his poetry. David is not a figure at war with himself; there are none of those contortions that bespeak inner turmoil or metaphysical discomfort. The David is fully in command of himself, untroubled by doubt. This is the work of a young man who surveys the horizon and believes there is nothing he cannot achieve. “David with his sling, I with the bow.” The artist and his subject are perfectly matched, each supremely confident, each out to conquer the world. This unclouded view of the future will not long endure, either in the artist’s work or in the work of his colleagues, but for a brief moment both the artist and his creation seem capable of carrying the world on their shoulders.

  V. TWO BATTLES

  With the installation of the David, Michelangelo became the most celebrated sculptor in Europe, his reputation as an artist surpassed only by that of Leonardo. The presence of the two great artists in Florence at the same time was bound to stoke competitive fires in these ambitious men, particularly the younger Michelangelo, who felt he had more to prove. Their rivalry was as much a product of their contrasting temperaments as their common genius. As a youth, Leonardo was known for his beauty, gracious manner, and multifaceted talents (he had a fine singing voice and improvised brilliantly on the lute), while Michelangelo was famously homely, antisocial, and narrowly focused on perfecting his art. The “celestial” Leonardo was cool, elegant, and aloof; Michelangelo was intense, disheveled, and irascible. These differences, in turn, determined the nature of their interaction. While Leonardo’s instinct was to ignore or gently mock his younger colleague, Michelangelo lashed out at his rival.

  Leonardo had just turned fifty-two when the David made its debut in the Piazza della Signoria. He was already the grand old man of Italian art, a legendary figure whose actual achievements never quite seemed to measure up to the brilliance of his mind. “[S]o great was his genius,” wrote Vasari, “and such its growth, that to whatever difficulties he turned his mind, he solved them with ease.” Un
fortunately, Leonardo constantly turned to new difficulties before he had brought the old ones to a satisfactory conclusion, leaving behind a catalogue of uncompleted or ruined projects even more disappointing than that compiled by Michelangelo. One frustrated patron complained: “This man will never do anything. Here he is thinking about finishing the work before he even starts it!”

  In 1500, Leonardo had returned to his native Florence, where he offered his services as a military engineer in the war with Pisa, then in its sixth year and apparently going nowhere. With the support of the Second Chancellor of the Republic, Niccolò Machiavelli, he launched an ill-conceived project to divert the Arno River, but like so many of Leonardo’s grandiose projects, this one ended in failure when sabotage and a sudden rainstorm caused the weirs so laboriously constructed to collapse.

  Da Vinci’s artistic efforts during these years met with better success. Taking time out from his military responsibilities, Leonardo produced a few panel paintings on commission from private citizens and religious institutions. While Michelangelo was hard at work on the David, Leonardo began his portrait of the wife of a prominent Florentine businessman, Francesco del Giocondo, incorporating into the background those landscape studies he made while pursuing the pipe dream of diverting the Arno River. The origins of this portrait, now known as the Mona Lisa, are shrouded in mystery, but for the most part Leonardo, always a showman, was happy to let the public follow his progress. While he threw open the doors to his studio, allowing the crowds to gawk at his latest creations, Michelangelo built high walls to shut them out.

  One incident in particular reveals the depth of Michelangelo’s animosity. It comes from an anonymous account of 1544, one that could be dismissed as apocryphal except for the fact that it corresponds so closely to other well-documented outbursts. One day, so the story goes,

  Leonardo . . . was walking by the benches at Palazzo Spini, where there was a gathering of gentlemen . . . debating a passage of Dante. They hailed said Leonardo, saying to him that he should discourse to them on this passage. And by chance at this point Michelangelo passed by and was called over by one of them, and Leonardo said: “Michelangelo will explain it to you.” It seemed to Michelangelo that Leonardo had said this to mock him, and he replied with anger: “You explain it yourself, you who have made the design of a horse to be cast in bronze but who was unable to cast it and abandoned it in shame.” And having said this, he turned his back on them and left. Leonardo remained there, made red in the face by his words.

  The clash between the haughty Leonardo and the insecure Michelangelo has the ring of truth, but the rivalry between the two great men was far more fruitful than the pettiness of this incident would suggest. Surprisingly, the most explicit case of one artist quoting the other comes in a drawing by Leonardo that is both an homage to Michelangelo’s David and a subtle critique, as he “corrects” some of the perceived flaws of the original, including, most tellingly, its un-Vitruvian proportions.VIII

  But for the most part, the influence flowed in the other direction. Michelangelo was too dedicated to his craft to ignore the achievement of the older man, though he was reluctant to admit a debt to any artist, particularly one he disliked. Three works Michelangelo made during these years in Florence show him responding directly to the challenge posed by Leonardo. Two relief sculptures, the Taddei Tondo and the Pitti Tondo, as well as a panel painting of the Holy Family known as the Doni Tondo, reflect Michelangelo’s attempt to grapple with and, he surely hoped, to surpass Leonardo’s powerful legacy. In paintings like The Last Supper, The Madonna of the Rocks, and The Madonna and Child with St. Anne, as well as the drawings of the same subject, Leonardo had imbued his figural groupings with a psychological depth and formal coherence unmatched in the history of art. Each figure responds to the others with the sympathy of an instrument in a string quartet as Leonardo weaves a richly textured score made up of minute gestures and subtle expressions. His characters are as fully realized as characters in a novel by Tolstoy, appearing to possess deep inner lives marked by both joy and sorrow. Compared to these works, Michelangelo’s Madonna of the Stairs, his earliest exploration of the mother-child relationship, seems crude and unconvincing, and even his Pietà falls short in terms of conveying a fully rounded subjective experience.IX

  Michelangelo was perceptive enough to know that he could not simply dismiss Leonardo’s achievement; instead, he hoped to find an equivalent using his own distinctive vocabulary of forms. The three tondiX Michelangelo made in the years 1503–5 represent his fullest response to his rival, but in challenging Leonardo on his own turf Michelangelo demonstrates the limitations of his own art. In none of these works does he achieve the psychological penetration of Leonardo at his best. The two relief sculptures in particular feel unresolved (as well as incomplete, as if Michelangelo realized they were not entirely successful). In the Taddei Tondo the figures seem to fly apart rather than cohere, tugged at by centrifugal forces, while in the Pitti Tondo the distracted gaze of the Madonna induces a psychological discomfort that recalls the Madonna of the Stairs.

  Michelangelo, Doni Tondo, c. 1504.

  The Doni Tondo (also known as the Holy Family), painted in 1503–4 to commemorate the wedding of Michelangelo’s friend Agnolo Doni to Maddalena Strozzi, is Michelangelo’s most powerful and fully realized response to Leonardo. As the only finished panel painting from Michelangelo’s hand, the work is a particularly precious document, but, like the reliefs with which it is closely associated, it reveals both his strengths and his weaknesses as an artist. No one, not even Leonardo, could have conceived a composition of such striking originality. The figure of the Virgin Mary reaching back to receive her child from the hands of Joseph is particularly audacious, mother to all those torqued bodies of the Sistine Ceiling and Medici Tombs. Such strenuous exertion feels awkward in the context of what is meant to be an intimate family moment, but Mary’s serpentine pose demonstrates Michelangelo’s unmatched gift for eloquent physicality. Leonardo was a brilliant portraitist, conveying psychological nuance through a twitch of a finger or a coy, sideward glance, while Michelangelo—who had almost no interest in individual faces—was a supremely gifted choreographer, forcing his figures to leap and strut like acrobats across the stage. Leonardo’s characters are introverts, the richness of their interior lives only hinted at in mysterious half smiles, hooded eyes, and fleeting tremors. Michelangelo’s are extroverts, enacting cosmic dramas through vigorous flexions and improbable contortions.XI

  Leonardo was fascinated with the ephemera of visual perception, the subtle variations of light and weather that transform each moment into a shimmering veils of worm glow and murk. His is a world always in flux, moving from dawn to dusk, from morning mist to evening’s shadowed mystery. Michelangelo’s is a noontime world where everything declares itself immediately. He had no use for Leonardo’s famous sfumato, the atmospheric haze that softens every contour and submerges form beneath an enveloping penumbra. Michelangelo deploys shading only sparingly, not to mask contours but to give them greater clarity. Even as a painter Michelangelo is essentially a sculptor, defining each figure in bold relief. He plunks Joseph, Mary, and Jesus down in a spare landscape lit by a probing sun and robes them in acid-hued fabrics, creating jarring dissonances that are the antithesis of Leonardo’s muted harmonies. If the complexity of Michelangelo’s family grouping ultimately derives from Leonardo’s ensembles, in everything else he flees as fast as he can in the opposite direction.

  There is something defiant about this painting, even pugnacious, as if Michelangelo were deliberately picking a fight with the older artist. Whether or not he succeeded in beating the master on his own turf is debatable. Even the man who commissioned the painting had second thoughts, apparently, refusing to give Michelangelo the money he ’d been promised. When Doni’s agent informed the artist he ’d only pay 40 ducats instead of the 100 initially agreed to, Michelangelo lost his temper, now demanding 140 ducats in order to punish his friend for his insole
nce. In the end, Doni paid the higher sum, withering in the face of the artist’s wrath.

  • • •

  Despite Agnolo Doni’s misgivings, Michelangelo was now an artist very much in demand. Even before completing the David, the Arte della Lana awarded him another major contract, which, had he fulfilled the terms, would have tied up his services for years to come. Signed in April 1503, it called on Michelangelo to carve for the cathedral twelve life-size statues depicting the Apostles of Christ, at the breakneck speed of one a year. The leaders of Florence apparently recognized what a treasure they had in their gifted son and wished to keep him gainfully employed for the foreseeable future. To sweeten the pot they provided him with a studio on the Borgo Pinti, just to the east of the Duomo, built to his own specifications. Like so many long-term programs, however, it fell victim to changing circumstances. The only relic of this ambitious project is the partially completed St. Matthew now in the Accademia, whose muscular build and vigorous pose are harbingers of things to come.

  So far the rivalry between Leonardo and Michelangelo was one-sided, confined largely to the imagination of the younger artist. But the contest between the two giants of Italian art was about to be waged on a far grander scale and for stakes that not even the complacent Leonardo could ignore.

  Construction of the Hall of the Great Council in the Palazzo della Signoria had been largely completed by 1496, but after seven years the walls of the cavernous chamber had yet to receive suitable decoration. The Great Council was the principal deliberative body of the state, cornerstone of the Savonarolan reforms of 1494, and it was in this hall that the leading citizens gathered to debate the great issues of the day. Thus the blank expanse of unadorned plaster represented both an embarrassment and an opportunity for the current regime.