Michelangelo

by Miles J. Unger

  Finding suitable candidates proved difficult, in part because Michelangelo’s terms were rather stingy. “[W]hen they have come here and have come to an agreement,” he wrote in his ledger, “the said twenty ducats received shall be paid on their account as salary, said salary from the day they left Florence to come here; and if they are not in agreement, they shall have half of said money for the expense and time of travel.” Granacci complained to Michelangelo of his difficulties, but assured him that “in any case I will come, if I must, even if it’s only Bastiano [da Sangallo] and me.”

  By the summer, Granacci had managed to cobble together a team of five painters, all of them more experienced in fresco than Michelangelo himself. Joining him for the trip to Rome were Giuliano Bugiardini and Jacopo di Sandro, a fellow graduate of Ghirlandaio’s studio, Indaco (the elder), Agnolo di Donnino, and Aristotile da Sangallo.XIII The list is provided by Vasari, who goes on to say that Michelangelo fired them shortly after they arrived: “[S]eeing how their work was far from what he might have wished . . . he decided one morning to destroy all they had done. Then, shutting himself up in the chapel, he would not let them in. . . . Once it seemed no longer a joke to them, they took themselves off to Florence with their heads hung low. From then on Michelangelo arranged to complete the entire work by himself. . . .”

  As was often the case, however, the truth was somewhat less dramatic. It is clear that Michelangelo never relied as much on his assistants as had been the practice in Ghirlandaio’s studio, but he was also not the solitary genius he claimed to be. The hands of various helpers can be detected throughout the work, particularly in the early narratives and in minor elements like the faux-bronze medallions. But it would be accurate to say that he exercised a far greater degree of control over the entire process than was typical for such a massive project. The fact that he hired mediocrities, paying each of them a meager fee, suggests that he regarded them as underlings rather than true collaborators. Even Granacci, the most talented of the bunch, was more distinguished for his agreeable manner than for his originality and was entrusted with only minor tasks.

  When it came to his materials, Michelangelo showed the same bias in favor of his native land. In May 1508 Michelangelo wrote a letter to Fra Iacopo at the Monastery of San Giusto alle Mura in Florence, informing him that he ’d “been hired to design certain schemes, or rather to paint them,” and requesting “a certain amount of fine blue pigment. . . .” His reliance on Florentines was not merely a sign of jingoism: Michelangelo’s hometown had an unmatched tradition of fresco painting, and this particular monastery was famous throughout Europe for the quality of its pigments. Its reputation was such that in his contract for The Adoration of the Magi, Leonardo had insisted that all his colors be supplied by the conscientious brothers of San Giusto. Michelangelo was also determined to have the best, well aware that the beauty of his work—and its longevity—depended on the quality of the ingredients he used.

  Even supplied with the best of ingredients and an experienced crew, however, Michelangelo was apprehensive. Carving in stone he felt supremely confident; when it came to fresco painting he was filled with doubt. Buon fresco (true fresco) was the most demanding form of painting, requiring vast expertise and painstaking preparation. “Of all the methods that painters employ,” Vasari contends, “painting on the wall is the most masterly and beautiful, because it consists in doing in a single day that which, in the other methods, may be retouched day after day. . . .” In buon fresco, colors are applied to wet plaster to ensure a permanent chemical bond between pigment and surface, which means that an artist has to be familiar with the properties of his materials, plan ahead, and work with both speed and precision.XIV As Vasari concludes: “There is needed a hand that is dexterous, resolute and rapid, but most of all a sound and perfect judgment; because while the wall is wet the colors show up in one fashion, and afterwards when dry they are no longer the same.”

  Michelangelo already had some experience designing (if not executing) a large-scale fresco, but painting a vault some 60 feet off the floor posed unique challenges. When composing his scenes, he would have to compensate for the distortions created by the curved surface, and take into account the fact that the figures would be viewed from far below. Anxiety fed a paranoia that was never far from the surface, fueling his belief that he was being set up for failure by his rivals: “In this manner it seemed possible to Bramante and other rivals of Michelangelo to draw him away from sculpture,” Vasari wrote, “in which they saw him to be perfect, and to plunge him into despair, they thinking that if they compelled him to paint, he would do work less worthy of praise, since he had no experience of colors in fresco. . . .” Faced with a task for which he felt so ill prepared, Michelangelo blamed others for his predicament, conveniently forgetting that he himself had lobbied for the more elaborate scheme.

  Preparations continued throughout the spring and summer of 1508, prompting protests from Paride de Grassi, the pope ’s master of ceremonies, who complained to his master that the dust and noise made it impossible to hold services. Much to his annoyance, Julius sided with the artist and told him that the cardinals would simply have to live with the disruptions.

  Michelangelo was ready to begin painting by early October. While his assistants hauled heavy bags of sand, lime, ash, and buckets of water to the base of the platform, he contemplated the vast, empty expanse before him. He had designed the scaffolding with care, making sure he allowed enough room between the planks and the vault to stand erect while he worked, but before long his back ached and his eyes became so inflamed he could barely read. He composed a rueful sonnet filled with bitter humor, listing his various ailments, accompanied by a sketch that shows him hard at work, back bent, neck twisted, as he dabs at the surface above his head:

  I’ve already got myself a goiter from this hardship

  Such as the water gives the cats in Lombardy,

  Or maybe it’s in some other place;

  My belly is pushed by force underneath my chin.

  My beard toward Heaven, I feel the back of my skull

  Upon my neck, I’m getting a harpy’s breast;

  My brush, always dripping down above my face,

  Makes it a splendid floor.

  My loins have pushed into my tummy,

  And by counterweight, I make of my ass a horse ’s rump,

  And without eyes, move my steps in vain.

    Before me, my hide is stretching

  and to fold itself behind, ties itself in a knot,

  And I bend like a Syrian bow.

    Therefore deceptive and strange

  Issues the judgment that my mind produces,

  Because one aims badly with a warped pea-shooter.

    My dead picture

  Defend henceforth, Giovanni, and my honor,

  Because I am not in a good place, and I am not a painter.

  Each morning an assistant would trowel on a new area of smooth, wet plaster to be painted that day, larger or smaller depending on the intricacy of the scene. (These sections, known as giornate, or days, can still be detected through close inspection of the surface.)XV Another assistant would then transfer the corresponding section of the cartoon to the moist surface, either by tracing the lines with a stylus or by the more laborious method known as spolvero in which charcoal powder was sifted through tiny pin pricks in the master drawing. Once the outlines were fixed, Michelangelo laid the color on rapidly, applying his water-based pigments in shimmering, translucent veils with boar-bristle brushes before the plaster dried.

  But for all his meticulous preparations, the project was nearly abandoned after only three months when the just-completed sections became badly discolored. Seeing all his hard work come to ruin, Michelangelo threw down his brushes in disgust and, seeking an audience with the pope, asked to be relieved. “I have already told your Holiness that this is not my art,” he said: “all that I have done is spoiled; if you do not believe it send and see.”


  Fortunately for Michelangelo (and for history), the man Julius sent to inspect the damaged work was the knowledgeable and sympathetic Giuliano da Sangallo. He quickly determined the source of the problem and suggested a simple remedy. Michelangelo’s Florentine helpers, he explained, had failed to account for the damp of the Roman winter, mixing their plaster with too much water, a formula that promoted the growth of mold. Sangallo, having isolated the cause of the problem and provided them with a new formula, the pope “made [Michelangelo] proceed, and the excuse was unavailing.”

  Michelangelo’s readiness to throw in the towel suggests that his heart was still not in the work. He was unhappy, plagued by insecurity, and nagged by the feeling that his true talents were being wasted. He led a spartan existence in the crowded house on the Piazza Rusticucci, neglecting his meals and—with the exception of his fellow toilers on the ceiling whose company he could hardly escape—shunning most human contact. His natural melancholy was exacerbated by the fact that, living only for his work, he had nothing to fall back on when faced with professional disappointments. He called his art a wife who has always given him tribulation, and his work his children. Setting out each dawn in the direction of the Chapel, he was forced to pick his way through ghostly canyons formed by the blocks hauled at such cost from Carrara hillsides, a constant reminder of the neglected tomb and his frustrated dreams. One sign that he longed to return to what he regarded as his true profession was that, even when dealing with official business for the ceiling, he signed his letters, “Your Michelangelo, sculptor in Rome.”

  In January he poured out his frustrations to his father: “I am still in a bind since it’s been already a year since I’ve had as much as a grosso from this Pope, though I’ve not asked him for more since the work is not progressing in a way that it seems to me merits it. Such is the difficulty of the work and, again, it’s not my profession. And so I waste time needlessly.” Matters had not improved by the following summer when he groused: “Here, I am ill content and none too healthy and overworked, without help and without money. . . .”

  But still he plowed ahead, afraid to defy the pope again and unwilling to give his rivals the satisfaction of witnessing his failure. And as he worked, he gained valuable experience, picking up speed and exhibiting greater boldness in execution. Self-doubt was replaced by self-confidence and his conviction grew that in overcoming his greatest hurdle he would produce his greatest triumph. He was, as Vasari says, “determined to demonstrate in such a work that those who had painted there before him were destined to be vanquished by his labors, and also resolved to show to the modern craftsmen how to draw and paint.”

  Michelangelo and his team worked from east to west, that is, from the Chapel entrance toward the altar wall. Technical and stylistic analyses reveal that the central narrative scenes and the adjacent sibyls and prophets were painted simultaneously. Indeed, all show a similar evolution toward simpler, more monumental forms. The earlier scenes tend to be busy, crowded with figures too small to make much of an impact when seen from 60 feet below; these earlier panels are flanked by prophets who fit comfortably within their thrones. By the time Michelangelo reached the middle of the ceiling, he was conjuring a race of giants, while the adjacent prophets spill from thrones that can no longer accommodate their massive frames.

  Michelangelo drove his assistants like galley slaves, goaded by an impatient master and by his own fierce ambition. Unfortunately, despite a monklike dedication to his work, Michelangelo could not shut out the rest of the world. He was employed by the most profligate patron on earth, but serving at Julius’s court meant suffering the turbulence of life at the center of a whirlwind. Not only was he harried by unreasonable demands made on him by the pope—a man of “a vehement nature, and impatient of delay”—but he was harassed by the carping of the cardinals whose scarlet robes were ruined by the dust falling from the scaffold and by the preachers who complained their inspired phrases were drowned out by the incessant din.

  Even more disturbing to his peace of mind was the cutthroat atmosphere fostered by Julius. Like Piero Soderini, the pope apparently believed the way to get the most out of his artists was to pit one against the other. Michelangelo’s natural tendency was to regard colleagues as rivals and imagine conspiracies that never were, but Julius’s fickle partiality served only to feed his paranoia. Late in 1508 the pope brought Raphael to Rome to help fresco his new apartments in the Belvedere. Not surprisingly, Michelangelo was infuriated by the appearance of yet another rival for the pope ’s attention. His suspicion of the newcomer was sharpened by the fact that it was Bramante who sponsored him, in order, Michelangelo assumed, to promote his compatriots at the expense of the Florentine contingent. The 100 ducats initially offered to the young artist reflects his junior status and the modesty of the commission, but Michelangelo still feared the emergence of an Umbrian cabal at the heart of the Vatican.

  Michelangelo was acquainted with the handsome, good-natured youth from his initial visit to Florence in 1504. Since he dismissed Raphael as little more than a facile imitator of other people ’s work, it galled him when Julius and the wealthy cardinals of Rome loaded him with lucrative commissions, even though Michelangelo had no desire to take them for himself. To prevent Raphael and other mediocrities from snooping around and stealing his ideas, he kept the doors to the chapel locked and the scaffolding well draped with canvas. Unfortunately, this penchant for secrecy extended not only to his competitors but to Julius as well, leading to further misunderstandings. On more than one occasion when Julius demanded to see what he was paying for, Michelangelo refused him entry. This insubordination, combined with Julius’s habitual impatience, contributed to renewed tensions. At one point relations between the two headstrong men deteriorated to such an extent that the pontiff threatened to have the artist tossed from the scaffolding.

  Though Michelangelo managed to irritate the pope with his suspicious ways, he was apparently unable to prevent his rivals from spying on him. Raphael was only the biggest fish to slip through his net, aided by Bramante who, as the pope ’s magister operae (chief of works), had the keys to the chapel. To the impressionable young painter, even a brief opportunity to study the fresco by candlelight proved a revelation. “[T]he sight of it,” Vasari recounts, “was the reason that Raffaello straightaway repainted, although he had already finished it, the Prophet Isaiah that is to be seen in S. Agostino at Rome, above the S. Anne by Andrea Sansovino; in which work, by means of what he had seen of Michelagnolo’s painting, he made the manner immeasurably better and more grand, and gave it greater majesty. Wherefore Michelagnolo, on seeing afterwards the work of Raffaello, thought, as was the truth, that Bramante had done him that wrong on purpose in order to bring profit and fame to Raffaello.”

  Raphael, The School of Athens, 1509–10. Scala/Art Resource, NY

  To be fair, Raphael was more than the mindless hack Michelangelo believed him to be. He was an accomplished master in his own right who could learn from giants like Perugino, Leonardo, and even Michelangelo himself, and transform these lessons into something wholly original. He had come to Rome in 1508 as the junior partner of Sodoma, but in no time he had eclipsed the older artist. The frescoes he painted for the so-called Stanza della Segnatura in the pope ’s residence are among the greatest masterpieces of the High Renaissance, as accomplished as Michelangelo’s and certainly more accessible.XVI Among the celebrated works he painted in this room, The School of Athens is the most perfect expression of Raphael’s harmonious genius. Indeed, this magisterial work epitomizes the Renaissance ideal, the belief in the perfectibility of Man and the faith that reason will always triumph over darkness. It is a view of the world that came naturally to him. “He was not obliged like so many other geniuses to give birth to works by suffering,” Vasari noted. Instead, “he produced them as a fine tree produces fruit.” In many ways The School of Athens is the antithesis of the Sistine Ceiling, tranquil where Michelangelo’s masterpiece is agitated, a shri
ne dedicated to intellectual serenity rather than a barbaric temple of unfathomable mysteries.

  In The School of Athens, Raphael has conjured a spacious dome and coffered vault—one that owes much to Bramante ’s designs for St. Peter’s—beneath which the ancient philosophers congregate to ponder life ’s deepest questions. At the center is the idealist Plato pointing to the heavens, while his more pragmatic pupil Aristotle gestures to the earth; and, in the right-hand corner, surrounded by a flock of eager disciples, stands Euclid with his protractor, to whom Raphael has given the features of his friend Bramante. These great minds meet in harmonious congress in a space whose geometric perfection and sense of proportion, order, and balance seems to offer a reproach to the imploding architecture Michelangelo invented for the Sistine Ceiling.

  There is one interloper in this idyll: the disheveled, brooding man in the foreground representing Heraclitus, “the weeping philosopher.” Technical analysis demonstrates that Raphael added this figure after the fresco was already completed, probably after August 1510, when the first half of the Sistine Chapel was revealed to the world. There is little doubt that this bearded figure—slouched on the steps in a filthy worker’s smock and knee-high boots, absorbed in his own thoughts—is a portrait of Michelangelo. It is a backhanded tribute to a man whose misanthropic nature earned him the epithet “the hangman” from the normally easygoing Umbrian, a tribute that is all the more poignant given that all Raphael received in return for his admiration was Michelangelo’s contempt. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine Michelangelo returning the favor. His attitude toward Raphael, a paradoxical combination of envy and disdain, would never have allowed the younger artist a place in his painting.

  III. TIME’S ARROW

  Michelangelo completed the first half of the ceiling in July 1510.XVII In little more than twenty months of intense, agonizing, and ultimately triumphant labor, he and his assistants had covered over 2,000 square feet with sweeping panoramas and crowded vistas, with dozens of figures in striking poses, either nude or robed in dazzling colors, each a bravura display of anatomical precision and expressive gesture. Challenged by the cosmic story of Creation, Michelangelo developed a new artistic vocabulary, one that invested the monumental muscularity first achieved in the David with a new dynamism and emotional depth. Already in that heroic figure the lassitude of the Bacchus and the solemn reverie of the Pietà have been replaced by a taut expectancy. A latent violence registers as a faint tremor that courses through David’s sleek limbs, but that potential is held in check by an almost Olympian self-possession. He is very much the master of himself and of the moment. The Lord’s presence instills in him a quiet confidence that makes him all the more lethal.