Michelangelo

by Miles J. Unger

  In the fall of 1503, Piero Soderini approached Leonardo to create for the hall a monumental fresco of a suitably uplifting scene. Like Michelangelo’s colossus soon to stand guard at the entrance to the palace, the mural was part of the government’s ongoing project to rekindle the patriotic ardor of the Florentine people. And while the two works were too dissimilar in form to invite direct comparisons, both artists—each now a salaried propagandist for the state—were firmly inscribed within the same orbit, where proximity and natural competitiveness made a collision almost inevitable.

  The subject of Leonardo’s fresco was The Battle of Anghiari, depicting a rare victory by Florentine forces over those of Milan. Leonardo set up shop in the Sala del Papa (Room of the Pope) in Santa Maria Novella, one of the few spaces in town large enough to accommodate the 22-by-54-foot cartoon that would serve as a guide for the actual painting. For Leonardo, one of the many advantages the painter enjoyed over the sculptor was that his more gracious profession afforded an opportunity to hold court. “[T]he painter sits in front of his work at perfect ease,” he wrote in his Paragone:

  He is well dressed and handles a light brush dipped in delightful colors. He is arrayed in the garments he fancies, and his home is clean and filled with delightful pictures, and he often enjoys the accompaniment of music or the company of men of letters who read to him from various beautiful works to which he can listen with great pleasure without the interference of hammering or other noises. . . .

  How different this dandyish lifestyle from Michelangelo’s sordid, hermitlike existence! While the sculptor toiled away in secret in his shed behind the Duomo, Leonardo welcomed his fellow citizens. Once again his tidy workroom became a site of pilgrimage for the city’s many painters and sculptors who hoped to learn from the master, as well as ordinary citizens who just came to gape in wonder.

  And, as before, the great man did not disappoint. Instead of offering up a pompous scene of military pageantry, Leonardo evoked what he called “the beastly madness of war” through a swirling maelstrom of horse and rider caught up in a savage contest where victor and vanquished alike are reduced to madness. “[R]age, fury, and revenge are perceived as much in the men as in the horses,” Vasari recalled.XII It was hardly the triumphalist celebration his patrons might have hoped for but, as was so often the case with Michelangelo as well, Leonardo’s mercurial genius made the outcome of any commission unpredictable.

  Soderini was less concerned, in any case, with Leonardo’s idiosyncratic interpretation than he was with his erratic behavior. For all the brilliance of his conception, da Vinci had difficulty following through, as if after an initial creative burst he lost interest in the practicalities. “Leonardo da Vinci,” the Gonfaloniere complained to Jafredo Carolo, Bishop of Paris, “has not comported himself with this Republic as one should, because he has taken a good sum of money and given small beginning to a large work that he was to execute.”

  While officials nagged, Leonardo put down his brushes, refusing to paint in the face of what he considered bureaucratic micromanagement. After withholding payment for some months, on May 4, 1504, officials drew up a new contract spelling out the obligations of each party, “enacted in the palace of the aforementioned Lords, in the presence of Niccolò son of Bernardo Machiavelli, Chancellor of the aforementioned Lords, and Marco, of ser Giovanni Romenea, citizen of Florence, as witnesses.”

  In October, Piero Soderini and his advisors decided to fresco the wall adjacent to Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari with a scene taken from an earlier war between Florence and Pisa. In keeping with the Renaissance belief that men performed best when engaged in a struggle for fame and fortune, they assigned this project to the man most likely to treat the commission as an opportunity to show up his colleague—Michelangelo Buonarroti. Soderini was certainly aware of the rivalry between the two artists, hiring the younger man “in competition with Leonardo.”

  On one level the decision to hire Michelangelo to paint The Battle of Cascina was perfectly understandable. Fresh off the triumphant debut of the David, Michelangelo had proven his genius as both an artist and propagandist. Not only would the people of Florence profit from employing his talents once more, but the prospect of the younger artist nipping at his heels might well provoke the older to reexert himself. But on another level the government’s choice was bold, perhaps even foolhardy. As Michelangelo was the first to admit, he was no painter. True, he ’d begun his career in the studio of Domenico Ghirlandaio, one of the most proficient fresco painters of his generation, but ever since he fled his first master’s studio for Lorenzo de ’ Medici’s sculpture garden, he ’d shown a decided preference for work in three dimensions. Throughout his life he insisted on signing his letters “Michelangelo, sculptor,” defying the expectations of the day that an artist should be prepared to employ his talents in varied media. To date, his only significant efforts in the medium consisted of two works—the half-completed Entombment in Rome and the Doni Tondo—neither of which could have given either the Gonfaloniere or the artist himself much confidence. These modest works would not have prepared him for the notoriously unforgiving medium of fresco, particularly on such an epic scale.

  Bastiano (Aristotile) da Sangallo, Battle of Cascina (after Michelangelo), c. 1542.

  There is no indication, however, that Michelangelo balked at this assignment as he had over the bronze David for the Marechal de ’ Rohan. No doubt the prospect of squaring off against the great Leonardo overcame his reluctance. When the public had a chance to view their monumental frescoes side by side, Michelangelo was certain whose would be judged superior.

  As they had for Leonardo, the Signoria provided spacious accommodations where Michelangelo could prepare the large cartoons for the fresco, this time at the dyers’ hospital attached to the Church of Sant’Onofrio in the quarter of Santo Spirito. He was soon hard at work making the dozens of sketches from the live model he would then assemble into the full-scale cartoon. With the two greatest artists in Italy now hard at work on paintings of identical size (each was to measure 24 by 54 feet), similar subject matter, and intended for adjacent walls in the same great hall, art-obsessed Florentines split into two rival camps with all the passion of sports fans before a championship game.

  Both artists played to their strengths. Leonardo, fascinated by fluid dynamics, created a swirling vortex of man and beast—horse and rider half lost beneath a cloud of smoke and dust—a penetrating psychological study of Man in extremis. Michelangelo’s composition is more static and more crisply rendered, in keeping with his tendency to treat painting as if it were merely a form of low relief. He chose to focus on an episode when a group of Florentine soldiers were caught by surprise while bathing in a river, a motif that allowed him to concentrate on his favorite subject, the male nude. The friezelike arrangement of bodies recalls his earliest sculpture, the Battle of the Centaurs, but now with a far greater command of anatomy and monumental form.

  Soon, talk of this clash of Titans spread beyond the borders of Florence, to Siena, where a young painter was assisting Pinturicchio on his frescoes for the Piccolomini Library. “The reason [Raphael] did not continue at it,” Vasari relates,

  was that some painters in Siena kept extolling with vast praise the cartoon that Leonardo da Vinci had made in the Sala del Papa of a very beautiful group of horsemen, to be painted afterwards in the Hall of the Palace of the Signoria, and likewise some nudes Michelangelo Buonarroti in competition with Leonardo, and much better; and Rafaello, on account of the love that he always bore to the excellent in art, was seized by such a desire to see them, that, putting aside that work and all thought of his own advantage and comfort, he went off to Florence.

  Michelangelo paid little attention to the arrival in Florence of his future nemesis. Raphael appeared in October 1504, carrying a letter of introduction from Elisabetta Gonzaga, the Duchess of Urbino, to Gonfaloniere Pietro Soderini: “The bearer of this will be found to be Rafaelle, painter of Urbino, who, being grea
tly gifted in his profession has determined to spend some time in Florence to study. . . . [He] is a sensible and well-mannered young man [and], on both accounts, I bear him great love. . . .”

  At twenty-one, Raphael was a handsome youth endowed “with natural sweetness and gentleness . . . agreeable and pleasant to every sort of person.” He was also immensely talented—in other words, exactly the kind of man Michelangelo despised, though for the moment he had little to fear from the provincial upstart. Raphael had already shown an immense gift for imitation, aping (and even improving on) the pleasantly old-fashioned manner of his teacher, Perugino, but had not yet given any hint of the originality that would later allow him to challenge the great Michelangelo himself.

  The one quality Raphael possessed from the beginning was a gift for profiting from the genius of others. An early drawing of the David seen from the back shows him trying to come to terms with a monumentality of form so different from his master’s soft, ingratiating style, while a Madonna and Child from this same period offers a striking variation on Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo. But in these early years Raphael absorbed far more of Leonardo’s secrets, creating his own successful formula by painting Madonnas with a sweetness that soon made him a favorite with the city’s merchant princes.

  • • •

  Unfortunately, the great contest fizzled even before it began, a victim of circumstance and of the mercurial temperament of the two principals. The hiring of Michelangelo seems, at least for a brief time, to have renewed Leonardo’s commitment to the project, but his enthusiasm quickly turned to frustration. Leonardo blamed his failure on the weather, writing: “On Friday, 6 June 1505, at the stroke of one in the morning, I began to paint in the palace. At the moment of picking up the brush, the weather turned bad and the bell began to toll to summon men to their duty, and the cartoon came loose, the water ran, and the jug that held the water broke. And suddenly the weather deteriorated and it poured rain until evening, and it was dark as night.”

  But the fault had as much to do with the man as with weather. As happened with his ill-fated project to divert the Arno, Leonardo’s scheme crumbled when reality refused to cooperate with his grand conception. Dissatisfied with the inherent limitations of the fresco technique, so ill suited to conveying those atmospheric effects he was fond of, he pushed the boundaries of the possible, experimenting (as he had in The Last Supper) with techniques that increased the range of expression but failed to stand the test of time. Even before he had completed his vast mural, it began to discolor and even slide from the wall.

  Leonardo soon abandoned the project (and the city) in a huff. But while Leonardo’s fresco deteriorated rapidly, Michelangelo’s never even made it onto the wall. Even before he had completed the cartoon, he was summoned to Rome by the new pope, Julius II:

  [W]hen he sent for me from Florence [he wrote almost two decades after the events he recounts], which was, I believe, in the second year of his pontificate, I had undertaken to execute half the Sala del Consiglio of Florence, that is to say, to paint it, for which I was getting three thousand ducats; and I had already done the cartoon, as is known to all Florence, so that the money seemed to me half earned. And of the twelve Apostles that I also had to execute for Santa Maria del Fiore, one was blocked out, as still can be seen, and I had already transported the greater part of the marble. But when Pope Julius took me away from there, I got nothing either for the one or for the other.

  But in his typically self-serving way, Michelangelo was rewriting history. At the time, he viewed the pope ’s summons as a splendid opportunity and was happy to be relieved of his obligations in Florence. Soderini, for his part, was disappointed, but he could not afford to provoke the new pontiff. He had no choice but to release the artist, consoling himself for the loss of the great man’s services by calculating how much money he was saving the depleted treasury.

  Despite the twin disasters, both frescoes continued to haunt the imagination of future generations even as they disappeared from view. Leonardo’s fresco was visible for years as a ghostly remnant of a once-great masterpiece, copied by art students and masters desperate to salvage something from the wreckage. Michelangelo’s cartoon, displayed for many years in the room where it had been made, was mined by artists who repeated many of the figures in their own compositions. So influential was this aborted work that it became “a light to all those who afterwards took pencil in hand.” It was almost literally loved to death as Michelangelo’s admirers tore off pieces and pinned them up in their own studios to learn from at their leisure. According to Condivi, as late as 1553 one could still see tattered fragments of the great work “preserved with the greatest care like something sacred.”

  The prospect of returning to Rome after four relatively peaceful and productive years in his native land filled Michelangelo with both dread and excitement. He had no love for the city. The climate was poor, cold and damp in the winter, suffocating in the summer, and at all times unhealthful, notorious for the swamps that sickened the inhabitants with malarial fevers and the crowded slums that were a breeding ground for plague and other contagions. The dangers imposed by the physical landscape were matched by those posed by the inhabitants: while the lower classes resorted to banditry and theft, the great princes indulged in blood feuds and murderous plots. One resident mourned: “Rome, once queen of the world, is today so fallen that its very inhabitants regard it as only a somber and horrible cave.”

  But his decision was never really in doubt. The project Pope Julius was proposing was much more to his taste than the fresco he had planned for the Hall of the Great Council, a task he considered unworthy of his talents. What the pope was offering him, in fact, was a commission that finally lived up to his own outsized ambition—an opportunity to create the richest and most spectacular sculptural ensemble ever conceived and executed by a single man.

  * * *

  I. The Palazzo della Signoria (the Palace of the Lordship) was the capitol of the Florentine Republic, located on the piazza of the same name that served as the city’s main public square. It is also known as the Palace of the Priors and the Palazzo Vecchio (Old Palace).

  II. Images of David were common in Florentine art. Donatello made at least three statues of the youthful warrior, and Verrocchio contributed another famous version, the David now in the Bargello. Painters like Andrea del Castagno and Antonio Pollaiuolo also depicted David, never the king but always the youthful hero.

  III. One can see the marks left by the toothed gradina in many of Michelangelo’s works, including the Pitti Tondo and the Taddei Tondo, as well as his unfinished Captives. In highly finished works like the Pietà and the Bruges Madonna, almost all such traces were eliminated in the final polishing.

  IV. Plotinus was a third century C.E. Roman philosopher whose mystical teachings were crucial for the development of Christian theology. Though a pagan himself, his idea of the “transcendent One” was easily adapted to a monotheistic religion. Michelangelo may well have been familiar with his works since Marsilio Ficino was translating his Enneads in the same years the artist was living in the Medici Palace. The role of Neoplatonism in Michelangelo’s art is still a controversial topic, but there is no doubt that the artist was at least familiar with its basic tenets—including the central notion that behind the world apprehended by the senses lies a more profound reality, one that reflects the mind of God.

  V. This oration is echoed in Hamlet’s famous speech: “What a piece of work is a man, How noble in Reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel! in apprehension how like a god, the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.” (Hamlet, II, 2.)

  VI. The pieces of the broken left arm were salvaged by a young Giorgio Vasari, along with his friend Francesco de ’ Rossi, and stored until they were eventually reassembled.

  VII. The authorities, however, were not so open-minded. Upon installation, a garland of twenty-eight copper leaves was
draped around his waist to conceal his private parts.

  VIII. Leonardo’s so-called Neptune is clearly a version of Michelangelo’s David, but he is far stockier than the original. Since Leonardo, unlike Michelangelo, showed his working drawings in public, the younger artist may well have seen this “improved” version.

  IX. From this same period comes the so-called Bruges Madonna, commissioned by Flemish merchants in Florence. Like many of Michelangelo’s treatments of the Madonna and Child, the Bruges Madonna is characterized by an emotional distance between Mary and her infant son.

  X. A tondo is a painting or relief in the round. The name comes from the Italian word rotondo, meaning “round” or “circular.”

  XI. Michelangelo’s approach recalls the one recommended by Alberti in On Painting: “[W]e weep with the weeping, laugh with the laughing, and grieve with the grieving. These movements of the soul are made known by movements of the body.” (Book 2, 77.)

  XII. Ironically, it was Vasari who, half a century later, covered over Leonardo’s damaged fresco with his own battle scenes. Recent attempts to find traces of Leonardo’s masterpiece behind Vasari’s bombastic paintings have so far proven fruitless.

  IV

  Creation

  [G]ood painting is nothing else but a copy of the perfections of God and a reminder of His painting.

  —From Holanda, Dialogues with Michelangelo

  Michelangelo, Creation of Adam, Sistine Ceiling, c. 1510–11. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY