Michelangelo

by Miles J. Unger

  For more than a decade and a half Michelangelo struggled to complete the tomb, persevering through war and plague—not to mention more mundane difficulties caused by bad weather and incompetent assistants—trying to reconcile the conflicting demands of his patrons and to tame the unbridled fertility of his imagination. Over the course of this often-frustrating saga, he transformed not only his own craft but the trajectory of Renaissance art as a whole. Forms and expressions that were only latent in the Sistine Ceiling, dissonant notes barely audible beneath the trumpet blasts, now begin to assert themselves, stepping out from the shadows and blinking in the cold sepulchral light.

  The Medici Chapel, or New Sacristy, chronicles the passing of one age and the emergence of another. Beneath its graceful cupola the optimistic spirit that characterized the Renaissance congeals, replaced by a mood of anxiety; faith in reason is replaced by expressions of doubt; civic values decay into morbid introspection. In the eccentricities of his architecture and in the odd distortions Michelangelo imposed on his figures, one can detect the emergence of a new expressive language, one that usually goes under the rather elastic term of Mannerism.XVII In the New Sacristy the motifs of classicism are shuffled, yielding quirky new combinations, while the human form, home to a restless spirit yearning for something that mere flesh cannot encompass, is stretched Gumby-like past all plausibility. The search for balance, the supreme confidence in Man’s ability to master his environment, is rejected in favor of forms that exhibit insufficiency; the heroism of a doomed struggle against fate is preferred to the harmonious resolution of conflict.

  Neither Michelangelo nor his patrons were fully aware of the profound historical and psychological shift memorialized in the Medici tombs at San Lorenzo. Like any great artist, Michelangelo was not only responding to demands of the specific commission but channeling the prevailing mood, giving voice to inarticulate murmurings and form to that which was still inchoate. The tombs Michelangelo provided are every bit as regal as his patrons could have wished, but in their almost neurotic introversion they unwittingly commemorate not only the death of men but of an ideal. As ancient republican institutions grew more feeble—even the outward forms had atrophied to a point where they seemed only to mock past triumphs—the artist registered these changes deep within his soul. A Florentine patriot, he now answered to men determined to stamp out the last vestiges of the city’s ancient liberties. The fact that he was not explicitly partisan made it easier to serve many different masters, but even Michelangelo could sense the loss of the communal vitality that had sustained the republic for centuries. By the time he returned to Florence in 1517, real power had already passed to Rome, where an autocrat reigned in gilded splendor and gave only a passing thought for what transpired in the city of his birth. The shrine Michelangelo built for the great man’s relatives recalls the splendor of the imperial capital, but only as a hollow echo; it is a monument to death, to absence, a temple of introspective melancholy.

  The elegiac nature of the commission touched a chord in a man who felt the cumulative effects of overwork and disappointment. In a letter written in 1517, when he was still only forty-two, Michelangelo already described himself as “an old man.” A few years later he grumbled: “I have a great task to perform, but I am old and unfit; because if I work one day I have to rest four.” Melancholy always came naturally to him, but it grew more pronounced as the confidence of youth receded and the darker demons that haunted the recesses of his consciousness began to assert themselves. He struggled with bouts of despondency and found solace in human contact. “Yesterday evening,” Michelangelo recounted to Sebastiano in Rome, “our friend Captain Cuio and several other gentlemen kindly invited me to go and have supper with them, which gave me the greatest pleasure, as I emerged a little from my depression, or rather from my obsession.”

  He found other means, as well, to shake off depression. In middle age he took up his pen as often as his hammers and chisels, discovering in poetry a personal outlet he was not permitted in works commissioned by powerful lords with their own agendas. Here he strikes a more intimate, more confessional tone. In his youth Michelangelo gave the impression of a man on the make who was simply too busy to allow personal entanglements to slow him down. Even then he was almost certainly not living a life of monkish celibacy, but there is no indication of deep personal attachments. But now new notes are sounded in his correspondence and his verses. He reaches out to his fellow man not only socially but by baring his soul on the page.

  Expressions of spiritual anguish increase; he is acutely aware of his own sinfulness:

  I live on death, and do believe,

  live happily on misery;

  he who lives and knows not anguish and death

  is destined for the flames,

  just as I am by passion consumed.

  Like the tomb of Pope Julius and so many other projects Michelangelo began, the Medici Tombs (or the New Sacristy) were never finished and, in their present form, cannot be considered the definitive realization of his vision. But even in their fragmentary state they represent his most successful attempt to unite the arts of sculpture and architecture within a single, unified system of meaning.

  In one medium he was an unsurpassed master, in the other a relative novice, but his approach to both—and to the difficult problem of integrating the two—proved characteristically audacious.XVIII Throughout Michelangelo’s career, bold innovation was often the result of struggling against preexisting limitations, as if his creative fires were stoked by the challenge of overcoming intractable problems. The badly worked block from which he conjured David and the awkward spaces of the Sistine Ceiling elicited some of his most inspired solutions. The same tensions helped spur the creative solutions deployed in the New Sacristy.

  The innovative architecture Michelangelo developed for the New Sacristy emerged naturally in the process of developing the overall sculptural program for the tombs. His original proposal to Cardinal Giulio was for a freestanding, centralized tomb in which each of the four sides would commemorate one of the Medici deceased. But after Giulio voiced his concern that such a structure would dwarf the rest of the chapel, Michelangelo abandoned this conception in favor of more traditional wall tombs. Ultimately, he settled on a scheme for a double tomb to house the remains of the two so-called Magnifici (Lorenzo and Giuliano, fathers to Popes Leo and Clement) and single tombs for each of the two dukes (or captains). The fourth wall was to be reserved for the altar, a vital if often overlooked element in a chapel whose principal function was to perform Masses for the dead.

  From the outset Michelangelo’s options were severely circumscribed by the need to follow the basic layout of Brunelleschi’s Old Sacristy on the far side of the nave, a masterpiece of early Renaissance architecture against which Michelangelo’s efforts would be judged. As always, however, Michelangelo refused to be bound by strict rules, viewing the fifteenth-century model as a point of departure rather than a destination. He would pay tribute to the original—and to the Florentine architectural tradition of which it was a founding monument—but then ring changes on that basic theme, giving rise to novel forms and providing his successors a heady example of an artist unafraid to attack sacred cows and violate taboos.

  Michelangelo’s reverence for the masters of the past was sincere, particularly for the giants of the Florentine tradition whose heir he believed himself to be. In architecture his admiration for Brunelleschi was unbounded, as it was in painting for Masaccio and in sculpture for Donatello. Later in life when asked if he would attempt to distinguish the lantern of the dome he was designing for the Basilica of St. Peter’s from the one designed by Brunelleschi, he reportedly answered, “Different it can be made with ease, but better, no.” While he was envious of his contemporaries—above all Leonardo and Raphael—the dead did not arouse his jealousy.

  The ground plan of the New Sacristy conforms almost exactly to that of Brunelleschi’s on the north side of the nave. It consists of a cubic space almost
40 feet in each dimension, surmounted by a hemispherical dome, and extended on one side by a rectangular altar. In many of the details too, Michelangelo has followed Brunelleschi’s lead. The interior is a study in contrasts, employing a traditional Florentine building technique in which the structural supports are carved from a dark gray sandstone known as pietra serena that stand out in bold relief against white stucco walls. This rhythmic give-and-take imparts an austere grace and self-evident structural logic to the whole, a system that had been perfected a century earlier by Brunelleschi himself. Michelangelo even employs the same classical order, based on fluted Corinthian pilasters, to convey a mood of stately measure, of harmonious proportion, of mathematical clarity.

  But from these simple ingredients Michelangelo has concocted a strange brew. Vasari (who went on to supervise the completion of the Medici Chapel after Michelangelo’s death) only hints at the radical transformation his predecessor wrought when he declares that he followed Brunelleschi “but with another manner of ornamentation . . . in a more varied and original manner than any other master at any time, whether ancient or modern. . . .” To modern eyes, Michelangelo’s departures from the classical orders appear minor. After all, the New Sacristy features those same pillars, pilasters, pediments, capitals, and architraves that have been a staple of Western architecture since before the building of the Parthenon, or at least since the Romans reinterpreted them in light of their own needs; even the decorative motifs—acanthus-leaf capitals, funerary urns and wreaths carved in low relief, grotesque masks and skulls symbolizing death—would have been familiar to someone strolling through an ancient cemetery and studying the grave steles or making offerings at a temple to a pagan god. But Michelangelo deploys these forms with unprecedented freedom. He has evidently delved into the writings of the Roman theorist Vitruvius, whose Ten Books on Architecture were read as gospel by Renaissance builders; he draws as well on his own knowledge gleaned from firsthand study of ancient monuments. But he studies the ancient authority not with the devotion of an acolyte but with the subversive intent of a heretic, “wherefore,” Vasari says, “the craftsmen owe him an infinite and everlasting obligation, he having broken the bonds and chains by reason of which they had always followed a beaten path in the execution of their works.”

  The radical nature of Michelangelo’s undertaking was such that half a century later Vasari still frets that he set a bad precedent in excusing those with more imagination than good sense to create “new fantasies . . . which have more of the grotesque than of reason or rule in their ornamentation.” In flouting decorum (to employ one of Vitruvius’s favorite terms) Michelangelo was defying contemporary practice. While his contemporaries measured their success by how skillfully they quoted precedent, Michelangelo, as he showed when he “antiqued” his own Cupid, regarded the cult of the ancients as absurd. He respected their achievement but was not cowed by their reputation. He dismissed impatiently the notion that sculptures carved thousands of years ago could not be surpassed and that ancient buildings provided a vocabulary of forms to be treated as holy text, departure from which was akin to sacrilege. Looked at another way, Michelangelo’s approach represents a return to origins, a rediscovery of essences that over the centuries had been obscured by a thick crust of rules and precedents—a deference to authority the authorities themselves never had.

  Like many of Michelangelo’s most powerful works, the Medici Chapel is an essay in dynamic contrasts, of incommensurate forms and unresolved tensions. Building a shrine to feudal and ecclesiastical power in the heart of republican Florence, he has given concrete form to the contradictions inherent in the commission. Contrasting textures and vocabularies capture the unease of a transitional moment: Florentine simplicity reproaches Roman opulence; Republican virtue forms an uneasy partnership with autocratic excess.

  The structural skeleton of the New Sacristy—the pilasters and architraves carved from dark pietra serena—pays homage to and elaborates on Brunelleschi’s forms. These more traditional elements recall a simpler age, the age of Giovanni de ’ Bicci and Cosimo, when even a Medici was compelled to observe the forms, if not the substance, of republican government. Even here, however, Michelangelo departs from his model, adding a third story that attenuates the sturdy proportions of the older building to form a structure at once lighter and more ethereal.XIX The pendentives that support the dome don’t spring, as they do in Brunelleschi’s chapel, directly from the architrave that runs just above our heads, but are separated from the earthbound realm by an intervening clerestory, creating an affect of spiritual uplift but also a sense of the vast distance between our world and the heavens above. This ascent replicates the apotheosis of the family whose glory is celebrated here. From their role as simple citizens, first among equals, the Medici have now become the vicars of Christ on earth, a promotion codified in an architecture that, soaring heavenward, has left the rest of us behind.

  Where Brunelleschi provides a logical balance between horizontal and vertical elements, Michelangelo emphasizes the vertical axis through a singularly imaginative device. In the lunettes just below the dome, Michelangelo has replaced Brunelleschi’s round oculi with tall windows that brush against the base of the cupola. To increase the soaring effect, Michelangelo has made the windows trapezoidal, wider on the bottom and narrowing as they rise, increasing the illusion of loft through forced perspective.

  Exploiting optical distortions for expressive effect, Michelangelo stands the practice of architecture—that most practical of art forms—on its head. In his buildings, the manipulation of space can no longer be considered an abstract problem in static measurement, but must take into account a body moving through that space and experiencing it in four dimensions. This experiential quality is even more pronounced in the vestibule to the Laurentian Library—which he designed only a few years later and that was located only a few hundred feet from the New Sacristy—where the stairs cascade in rippling flows, as if they do not simply exist but embody a process of becoming.

  While Brunelleschi’s buildings are based on a simple set of proportions rigorously multiplied, Michelangelo’s play off our faulty perceptions. They also defy our expectations. Reassuring solidity is eschewed in favor of forms that seem to war with themselves, like the reclining sculptures on the sarcophagi whose limbs are locked in equally self-defeating poses. Space is not fixed, but contingent; form is not planar but organic; rigid geometry yields to something more plastic, more expressive.

  Michelangelo gives free rein to his inventive imagination on the lowest of the three tiers, where the Medici dukes rest in their elaborate sarcophagi and where their effigies preside in frozen splendor. Here, Michelangelo has introduced an alien element into the austere fabric, a marble architecture of unprecedented richness that mediates between the Euclidean geometry of the walls and the biomorphic forms of the sculptures themselves. Rather than simply placing his figures within a self-sufficient architectural setting, Michelangelo sets up a dialogue between the figures and the structures that enclose them, imbuing normally rigid forms with a vitality of their own. Those decorative eccentricities that both inspired and terrified Vasari are really hybrid forms, the rigid geometry of the built environment infused with the dynamic pulse of a living organism.

  The radical nature of Michelangelo’s approach is less apparent to contemporary audiences, but to cultured men and women of the Renaissance his subversion of the classical orders was nothing short of blasphemy. His liberal approach is apparent in the eight doors located at the chapel’s corners. By extending the decorative moldings along the threshold (which might prove a tripping hazard were the doors actually used), Michelangelo elevates form over function, transforming a practical into a pictorial element.XX Each of these false entrances, in turn, is surmounted by an ornate tabernacle, a mysteriously blank stone window adorned with a single garland. Too heavy for the doors below them, they are supported on brackets whose delicacy merely draws attention to their inadequacy to perform the task at
hand. These largely empty shrines are treated with an imaginative freedom that subverts, even parodies, the very notion of functionality. Surmounted by pediments that appear fractured and gouged out as if shattered by tectonic forces, they register stress, squeezed into corners too narrow to comfortably accommodate them. All is in flux, each post incapable of fulfilling its supporting role, each lintel decomposing under unsustainable pressure. There is an organic push/pull to the architectonic forms that turns walls into the diaphragm of a living, breathing creature.

  Where a traditional craftsman would confine the more delicate elements to the upper portions, Michelangelo often reverses the expected order of things so that fragile brackets and slender columns seem to hold up immense piles of stone, creating a vertiginous sense of dislocation similar to that imparted by the multiple perspectives of the Sistine Ceiling. As an architect, Michelangelo retains those qualities that make him such a powerful artist, endowing forms with a sense of movement that seems to reflect inner turmoil or metaphysical distress. Indeed, Michelangelo treats architecture as not only a frame for his figurative sculpture but as sculpture itself, as form that is both malleable and emotionally fraught. In place of Brunelleschi’s implacable logic, Michelangelo gives us an architecture of emotion; in place of clarity, he revels in ambiguity.

  Michelangelo plays a kind of conceptual peekaboo throughout the chapel in which he cuts against the grain of our expectations. His fascination with visual paradox extends to sculptural elements that are deliberately unresolved, strained, or even contradictory. Perhaps the most obvious example involves the strange costumes he has chosen for the two dukes. Despite the fact that both wear ornate cuirasses, their chest muscles and the fleshy creases of their bellies are clearly delineated as if their armor were nothing more than a sheer, skin-tight fabric. Such garments have no historical or practical justification, but they reinforce that disquieting sense that we have entered a realm where the laws that govern everyday life no longer apply. Like the false doors and broken pediments, the ducal armor exists as pure symbol, stripped of any functional role, as if to highlight the fact that these two men are warriors in name only, their battles more metaphysical than real.