Michelangelo

by Miles J. Unger

  On his second trip to see the pope, in December 1510, he stopped in Florence to visit with his family. As usual, the various members of the Buonarroti clan were seething with resentments and prey to delusional schemes, most of them based on the belief that Michelangelo would always bail them out. Even Lodovico apparently had no compunction helping himself to Michelangelo’s money, withdrawing without his permission 100 ducats from his account in Florence.

  But the family member who caused him the most grief was his brother Giovansimone, his junior by four years, a feckless good-for-nothing who managed to precipitate a crisis in the already tumultuous Buonarroti household. When Michelangelo learned of the violent quarrel between Giovansimone and their father, he lashed out at his younger brother:

  Giovan Simone . . . I have tried for many years, with kind words and deeds, to induce you to live well and to get along with your father and with the rest of us, and yet you go from bad to worse. I won’t say that you’re wicked, but you are acting in ways that please neither me nor the rest of your family. . . . For some time now, I have provided for your expenses and your house, for the love of God, believing that you were my brother as much as the others. Now I know you are not my brother, since if you were you would not threaten my father; in fact, you are a brute, and like a brute I’ll treat you. You know that he who threatens his own father is said to forfeit his own life. But enough. I tell you that you’ve nothing in this world, and if I hear the least complaint of you, I will ride there and show you the error of your ways and teach you not to destroy the possessions and set fire to a house that you have not earned yourself. . . . If I am forced to come there, I will show you such things that you’ll shed hot tears and you will know what little cause you have for your arrogance.

  He concluded his letter by reminding Giovansimone of all he ’d done for him and his brothers:

  [F]or twelve years I have been travelling all over Italy, enduring every humiliation, bearing every hardship, flaying my body in every endeavor, placing my life in a thousand perils, only to help my family. And now that I’m beginning to raise us up a little, you seem to want only to tear down in an hour all that I’ve built over so many years with so much suffering.

  Despite Giovansimone ’s appalling behavior and despite his resentment at being used by relatives who lived off the sweat of his brow, Michelangelo remained fiercely loyal to his family, in part because the honor of the Buonarroti name was crucial to his pride and sense of himself.

  In fact, for all his protestations of poverty, Michelangelo had already succeeded in restoring luster to the faded Buonarroti name. No matter how often he claimed that the pope had shortchanged him, it was clear he was prospering. With the money he earned, he had begun to invest in properties in Florence and the surrounding countryside, establishing the Buonarroti among landed gentry to which he always felt they belonged.XXIII It was during the years he was painting the Sistine Ceiling that he first announced his plan to set up three of his brothers in their own business. The project was finally realized in 1514 when he purchased a wool shop, which, while it never flourished, provided them with something Michelangelo valued more than money—social prestige. Even though Michelangelo helped them all, Buonarroto was the only one who managed to make a success of himself, eventually parlaying his desultory career as a businessman into a more-than-respectable career in government. In 1515, Buonarroto rose to the rank of prior, a far more exalted position than any enjoyed by his father during his career as a civil servant.

  Meeting with Julius in Bologna, Michelangelo found the pope a changed man. Illness and a string of reversals at the hands of the French had left the once-fearsome pontiff gaunt and dispirited. But what he had lost in terms of belligerence he seemed to have made up for in gravitas. Over the course of his illness he had grown a beard, which now hung down over his sunken chest in white, wispy strands, swearing he would not shave until he had driven the barbarians from their midst. Now, approaching the end of life, he was no longer Il Papa Terribile but had come to resemble one of those Old Testament figures like Noah, Zechariah, or Ezekiel populating Michelangelo’s fresco. It is this haunted, haggard face that Raphael captured in his famous portrait, showing Julius as a man who, though old and careworn, still burned with inner fire.

  Perhaps it was his newfound introspection or his understanding (driven home by recent defeats on the battlefield) that the art he commissioned was likely to prove his most enduring legacy, but Julius was receptive to Michelangelo’s pleas, sending him on his way with promises that he would receive the necessary funds to complete the Chapel. When Michelangelo arrived back in Rome at the beginning of 1512 he found an additional 500 ducats in his bank account and a deed permitting him to live in the house on the Piazza Rusticucci rent-free.

  IV. THE FORMLESS WASTE

  With his money troubles behind him, at least for the moment, and his family enjoying a rare interlude of calm, Michelangelo could finally turn his attention to the neglected ceiling. He had been away for almost half a year. Over the months of idleness he had plenty of time to mull over what he ’d already achieved and absorb the lessons of seeing the fresco for the first time as the public would, from the floor, craning his neck to gaze on figures high above his head. His style had begun to evolve even before the old scaffolding had come down, as if he realized instinctively that compositions based on a few large forms vigorously handled would be more effective than the busy compositions with which he ’d begun. (The evolution toward more majestic forms may also have had a more prosaic origin: a realization that he could cover more square feet more quickly this way.) No doubt the experience of seeing the fresco from the pavement confirmed his judgment and pushed him further in the direction of simplicity and monumentality.

  Perhaps the most important thing he gained from viewing the fresco from below was (literally) a fresh perspective. While he painted the earlier panels as if they were perpendicular to our space—that is, parallel to the ceiling and the floor—in the narrative panels painted during the second campaign, he frequently deployed the di sotto in sù perspective that Vasari claims was the most difficult art of the fresco painter. Even now, Michelangelo did not employ perspective consistently; he never attempted the crowd-pleasing illusion that the ceiling has melted away and become open sky, but instead exploited selectively and strategically the expressive possibilities of daring points of view. The earlier panels seem firmly earthbound, but these later narratives propel us into space. All the usual signposts we use to orient ourselves vanish as we enter the seething cauldron of Creation, before there was ground to stand on or sun to light our way, before even time itself.

  Michelangelo’s newfound mastery of radical foreshortening is most evident in the two fan-shaped panels in the corner: The Brazen Serpent and The Punishment of Haman, which echo David and Goliath and Judith and Holofernes at the far end of the chapel. Each of these scenes is linked thematically, an episode of Jewish deliverance that foreshadows the redemption of humanity from sin in Jesus Christ. But it is only the two later panels that exploit the di sotto in sù viewpoint for maximum dramatic impact. Haman’s suffering on the gibbet is heightened by showing his contorted body from below so that muscles, already stretched to the snapping point, appear to convulse in agonized clots. Even more shocking is The Brazen Serpent, where the telescoping perspective creates an effect of writhing limbs tumbling into our space as if from an overhead abattoir.

  In the second half of the ceiling, Michelangelo displays an unprecedented emotional range. His figures are supercharged, Titans capable of scaling the highest summits and excavating the lowest depths. The scenes of Haman and the Brazen Serpent show Michelangelo in his darkest, most pessimistic mood, while The Creation of Adam, the first scene completed after he remounted the scaffolding in January 1511, shows him reveling in the glory of Man’s limitless potential. One is reminded, as with the David, of Pico’s view of Adam as a man “confined by no limits,” who may choose “to descend among the lower forms
of being” or “reborn out of the judgment of [his] own soul into the higher beings, which are divine.” Here, for the first time in the ceiling, Michelangelo gives free rein to his delight in the human (specifically male) form. The languid body of Adam as he props himself up on his elbow is unabashedly sensuous, a celebration of Man’s uncorrupted beauty at the beginning of the world. His pose echoes that of Noah in the scene of his drunken humiliation, setting up a contrast between the glory of Man’s God-given beauty and the degradation of his fallen state. The aging Noah, though “a man perfect in his generation,” belongs to a corrupted world where flesh is associated not only with illicit pleasure but with suffering and pollution. Adam’s beauty, by contrast, is unmarred. He is innocent of shame just as he is innocent of knowledge, a man perfect though also limited. Sprawled on the grass, he begins to stir to consciousness as he senses God’s presence, reaching out longingly to the source of all life like a lover to his beloved.

  This is not the first time Michelangelo has represented God in the ceiling. The Lord appears in the earlier panel, The Creation of Eve, as a grave, patriarchal figure with a long white beard.XXIV The God of The Creation of Adam shares almost nothing with this unremarkable figure. Rather than standing on the ground, he hurtles through space, his billowing mantle shrouding a seraphic host that seems unhinged by a divine ecstasy. He thrusts His hand toward Adam’s, His implacable will and certain purpose matched by Adam’s yearning yet tentative reach. Their fingers approach but never touch, leaving a narrow gap crackling with invisible discharges across which the animating spark leaps.

  Here, Michelangelo’s originality, his willingness to depart from the text for the sake of greater dramatic impact, is on full display. The image he creates appears nowhere in Scripture. “God fashioned man of dust from the soil,” the Bible tells us. “Then he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and thus man became a living being.” But Michelangelo transforms this intimate act into something far more muscular. Never before in the history of art has the Lord of Hosts been conceived in such a manner. He is a transcendent being, completely corporeal (even his nipples are visible through his sheer, windswept robe) yet somehow also pure, unadulterated spirit.

  Michelangelo’s conception owes more to ancient depictions of Jupiter than to the Judeo-Christian tradition, where God has always seemed too awesome to be rendered convincingly (despite the fact that Scripture states that Man was made in His image.) For the most part, artists preferred to depict Christ, God made flesh; when they attempted to depict God Himself, the result had usually been to diminish Him. Even an artist as gifted as Jacopo della Quercia came up short in this regard. His own version of The Creation of Adam, which may well have inspired Michelangelo’s, shows God as a regal old man, not as a transcendent being, supreme ruler of the universe.

  It is this transcendent being who dominates the remainder of the ceiling, an airborne Hercules who conjures light from dark and form from chaos. Much of the power of these final frames comes from Michelangelo’s decision to raise the Almighty from the earth and send Him careening through the void. Unencumbered by the laws of gravity, He shows Himself superior to law itself. In The Separation of the Earth from the Waters, God is rendered remarkably foreshortened, so that he seems to rocket out of the picture and into our space. In The Creation of the Sun, Moon, and Planets, He appears twice, coming and going. We see Him once speeding toward us, fashioning the orb of the sun with a gesture of imperious command; and, in an even more daring image, flying away from us so that we see little more than the soles of His feet and His sacred buttocks. In the hands of a lesser artist, such an image would appear ridiculous, perhaps even blasphemous, but Michelangelo has endowed the Creator with such titanic energy and supreme authority that we barely notice the incongruity.

  It speaks volumes about Michelangelo’s self-confidence that he dared to tackle the most difficult, most unpaintable subject in all of art. Capturing God’s ineffable grandeur poses such a daunting task that many religions have instituted an outright prohibition, and even Christian painters, for whom no such prohibition applies, remain leery, knowing how easy it is to be accused of hubris or, even worse, to appear ridiculous. For an artist of Michelangelo’s ambition, however, the subject was compelling, perhaps even inevitable. Of course, even at his most egomaniacal, Michelangelo was too conventionally pious, and too aware of his failings, to invite a comparison, at least as a man. But as an artist, he believed he tapped into something supernatural. He writes in one of his sonnets of “lovely art that, heaven sent, conquers nature herself.” And in his Dialogues with Michelangelo, Francisco de Holanda quotes the great artist comparing the creator of the universe to a painter: “[G]ood painting is nothing else but a copy of the perfections of God and a reminder of His painting.” It would be going too far to claim that, in painting God, Michelangelo was fashioning his own self-portrait, but in depicting the creator of the universe he, like Prometheus, was stealing some small ember of the divine fire for himself.

  In these last few frames Michelangelo carries us on such a fast-paced, vertiginous journey that by the time we reach the panel God Separating the Light from the Dark our heads are spinning. The cyclonic energy generated by the creative act radiates outward in concentric circles, causing everyone and everything to sway like wind-lashed treetops in the wake of an approaching storm. Even the massive prophets and sibyls who occupy this torrid zone cannot resist the propulsive forces unleashed by Creation. The Libyan Sibyl executes an improbable seated pirouette, her back turned to us while her hips swivel forward as if the book she ’s been reading is a discus about to be launched into space. Across the ceiling from her is Jeremiah, “the weeping prophet,” a dark and brooding figure whose angular features recall those of the artist himself. Most remarkable of all, however, is the figure of Jonah, the reluctant prophet, who occupies the crucial position right above the altar. He is the only figure with the courage (or temerity) to gaze at the vault above him, turning his face toward God and His Creation. The centrifugal forces that tug at the prophets—from Isaiah and the Cumaean Sibyl in the center to Daniel and the Libyan Sibyl near the altar—have become cyclonic. Jonah, his eyes wide with fright or the ecstasy of divine revelation, spins on his seat, his feet lifted from the ground as if he ’s about to be sucked by the vortex into the heavens. Like many of Michelangelo’s most eloquent inventions, he interiorizes conflict. He is a man torn between two imperatives, gesturing earthward even as he gazes heavenward, a man struggling with God before finally succumbing to His will.

  The last figures Michelangelo painted were the ancestors of Christ in the lunettes above the windows. Painted freehand, without the use of cartoons to guide him, they demonstrate a supreme confidence gained after almost four years on the scaffolding. After the heroic host depicted above, these peculiar creatures come as a bit of a shock. On the vault itself, even the so-called brazen nudes possess a certain grandeur, but the ancestors are a gaggle of odd ducks. Some, like the pointy-bearded Booz, verge on caricature, as if Michelangelo was indulging in a rarely glimpsed satiric wit. These mismatched family groups with their household goods, their squirming infants, and workaday clothes, are deliberately mundane. They belong to our world, share our faults and our homely virtues. As the ancestors of Jesus in his earthbound aspect, they form the all-too-human link between our world and the celestial realm above. They derive from an ancient tradition in which humorous or grotesque characters were inserted at the margins of sacred tableaux, adding a touch of realism to scenes that might otherwise collapse under the weight of their own piety or dissolve into vaporous dreams. For Michelangelo they play a similar role, grounding the celestial drama above in daily life and confirming the profligate variety of Creation.

  • • •

  The frenetic pace of this last campaign left Michelangelo spent. “I work harder than any man who has ever lived,” he wrote to Buonarroto in July, 1512, “and am in bad health and greatly exhausted.” But a few months later he could fi
nally see a light at the end of this very long tunnel, writing to his brother, “I expect to finish by the end of September,” and making plans to return to Florence: “I shall be home before All Saints [November 1] in any case, if I do not die in the meantime. I’m being as quick as I can, because I long to be home.”

  The final months of work coincided with a happy turn in the pope ’s fortunes, relieving Michelangelo’s anxiety that he ’d be forced to abandon the ceiling with the end in sight. By the summer of 1512, Julius had snatched triumph from the jaws of almost certain disaster. On April 11, near Ravenna, forces of the Holy League fought the French and their allies in one of the bloodiest battles ever waged on Italian soil. Though the French held the field, they were, according to Guicciardini, “so weakened and dispirited . . . by the victory which they had won at such expenditure of blood, that they seemed more like the conquered than the conquerors.” Most devastating was the death of their brilliant commander, Gaston de Foix, a loss that sent the French armies “flying like mist in the wind.”

  Reading an account of the French retreat, Julius turned to Paride de Grassis, his Master of Ceremonies, and exulted: “We have won, [Paride], we have won!”XXV As word spread, the mood in Rome turned from despondency to jubilation. The pope, recently reviled as the author of their troubles, was now greeted as a liberator. Fireworks were set off from the Castel Sant’ Angelo and bonfires kindled in the squares. Julius, confirming the destiny foretold when he chose his papal name, was hailed as a new Caesar. “Never was any emperor or victorious general so honored on his entry into Rome,” wrote the Venetian envoy, “as the pope has been today.”