Michelangelo

by Miles J. Unger

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  Michelangelo’s work on the Medici Chapel coincided with a traumatic period in Florentine and Italian history and an unhappy decade and a half in the artist’s own life. Many of the dislocations and much of the anxiety of that tumultuous age are enshrined in this disquieting masterpiece. The rich marble veneer of the lower story already memorializes this political upheaval as the clan of merchant-bankers sought to reinvent itself in light of its newly exalted status. Recalling the pompous architecture of Imperial Rome—albeit in idiosyncratic fashion—Michelangelo’s hybrid forms reminded his compatriots that the Medici were no longer simply citizens, first among equals, but belong to the ages.

  Medici hegemony, however, was built on fragile foundations. In December 1521, Pope Leo died suddenly at the age of forty-seven, and in the subsequent conclave the cardinals, instead of doing what was expected of them and elevating his cousin, chose the dour Dutchman Adriaan Florensz, Bishop of Cortona, who ascended to the papal office as Hadrian VI. (Giulio’s failure in the conclave was due to the interference of the French king, who feared the Medici cardinal was too close to Emperor Charles V.) With Leo’s death, Medici dominance of Florence no longer seemed assured, and the projects they financed in large part through Church revenues were thrown into confusion. Through Cardinal Giulio—who had been de facto ruler of Florence since before Duke Lorenzo’s death in 1519—they still operated the machinery of local government, but without the prestige and the resources of the papacy behind them, the Medici and their allies were more vulnerable to a republican challenge. In June 1522, a group of young intellectuals meeting in the gardens known as the Orti Oricellari—most of them friends of Machiavelli, inspired by the old civil servant’s writings—were discovered plotting the assassination of the cardinal and the overthrow of the Medici regime. Though quickly suppressed, the failed conspiracy and its brutal aftermath cast a pall over the city. For Michelangelo, sympathetic to the radicals but a servant of the establishment, the internal contradictions inevitably colored the mood of his work.

  More pedestrian issues also interfered with Michelangelo’s progress, including the usual difficulties finding men to work the quarries of Pietrasanta and Carrara who met his exacting standards. Management of a project on this scale demanded organizational skill, and despite his preference for solitary work, Michelangelo had become the boss of a large crew of skilled and unskilled laborers. In 1525, while he was continuing to work on the New Sacristy and had begun the Laurentian Library, he was supervising a payroll of more than 100 craftsmen at San Lorenzo alone. In addition to common laborers, he oversaw a team of gifted artisans, including Francesco da Sangallo (son of his old friend Giuliano) and Silvio Corsini. It was these men who actually carved most of the decorative elements—from drawings by Michelangelo—a sign that the unremitting pressure of work was forcing him to relinquish some measure of control. But even now he had a tendency to micromanage every detail. While he was away in the quarries, work ground to a halt in Florence as the scarpellini were instructed not to do anything without his explicit instructions. In truth, this was probably a wise precaution since Michelangelo’s designs were so unorthodox that any attempt to execute them in his absence was bound to cause confusion.

  The death of Pope Leo was not an immediate disaster for Michelangelo. For years he had been dealing chiefly with Cardinal Giulio, who remained as committed as the pope to raising monuments to the family’s greatness. If financing was somewhat harder to come by, at least the cardinal’s attention was not divided between Florence and Rome. Since he was no longer serving as the pope ’s principal advisor, Giulio had more time to devote to securing his family’s position in his native land—an important part of which centered around the various projects underway at San Lorenzo.

  But now that Michelangelo had lost the protection of his most powerful patron, the della Rovere heirs—who for a decade had been watching with impotent rage while Michelangelo took on ever more work for the Medici—were emboldened, demanding that he fulfill the terms of the contract for Pope Julius’s tomb. In April 1523, Julius’s nephew Francesco della Rovere, newly restored to his Duchy of Urbino, made a pilgrimage to Rome to pay tribute to the new pontiff. Among the matters he particularly wished to take up with Hadrian was the status of his uncle ’s tomb, neglected for years by an artist who had taken tens of thousands of his ducats and produced little in return. Faced with financial ruin and a concerted attack on his honor, Michelangelo wrote a desperate letter to Ser Giovanni Francesco Fattucci, a chaplain of the Cathedral of Florence who was acting as Michelangelo’s representative in Rome:

  Now you know that in Rome the Pope has been informed about his Tomb of Julius and that a motu proprio [decree] has been drawn up for him to sign, in order that proceedings may be taken against me for the return of the amount I received on account for the said work, and for the indemnity due; and you know that the Pope said that this should be done “If Michelangelo is unwilling to execute the Tomb.” It is therefore essential for me to do it, if I don’t want to incur the loss, which you see is decreed. And if, as you tell me, the Cardinal de ’ Medici now once again wishes me to execute the Tombs at San Lorenzo, you see that I cannot do so, unless he releases me from this affair in Rome. And if he releases me, I promise to work for him without any return for the rest of my life. It is not that I do not wish to execute the said Tomb, which I’m doing willingly, that I ask to be released, but in order to serve him. But if he does not wish to release me, but wants something by my hand for the said Tombs, I’ll do my best, while I’m working on the Tomb of Julius, to find time to execute something to please him.

  Michelangelo’s habit of promising more than he could possibly deliver, of refusing no commission that came his way—either because it came from a friend, or it posed a particular artistic challenge or would increase his fame—in short, of juggling more balls than he could keep in the air, had finally caught up with him. A few years earlier, facing a similar backlog of unfulfilled commissions, he had written despairingly: “I’m dying of anguish and seem to have become an impostor against my own will.” In the case of Julius’s tomb, the suffering brought about by pangs of conscience might well be compounded by the humiliation of being dragged before a judge on charges of fraud.

  Cardinal Giulio still hoped to keep Michelangelo busy at San Lorenzo, but in his current reduced position he could do little to protect the artist from the resurgent della Rovere. Michelangelo initially rejected a generous monthly salary of 50 ducats from the cardinal, since he could not devote himself to the Medici until he got the della Rovere off his back. He informed the cardinal that he would work for him

  with this proviso, that the taunts to which I see I am being subjected, cease, because they very much upset me and have prevented me from doing the work I want to do for several months now. For one cannot work at one thing with the hands and at another with the head. . . . I haven’t drawn my salary for a year now, and I’m struggling against poverty. I have to face most of the worries alone, and there are so many of them that they keep me more occupied than my work, since I cannot employ anyone to act for me, as I haven’t the means.

  Of course, one should not accept Michelangelo’s chronicle of woe at face value. He had every motive to paint the worst possible picture of his circumstances, and his notions of poverty, as we have seen, would have puzzled most of his fellow citizens, who were forced to get by on much less. But his distress was very real, caused more by the toll it was taking on his tattered reputation than on his bank account. Trying to get out from under his debt to the della Rovere, he contemplated selling some property in Florence. He also called in the loan for the woolen shop from his father and brothers, precipitating yet another of those crises that threatened to tear the family apart. After Lodovico made the outrageous charge that his son was trying to cheat him, Michelangelo wrote a letter dripping with sarcasm:

  If my life is an annoyance to you, you’ve found the remedy and will soon secure t
he key to that treasure that you say I have; and you will thrive, because all Florence knows how you were a fine rich man and how I always robbed you and deserve to be punished. You will be praised to the skies! Shout it from the rooftops and call me whatever you like, but do not write to me any more, because you prevent me from working and I still need to make up what you’ve had from me for the last twenty-five years. I wish I didn’t have to say this, but I can’t hold back.

  IV. AGE OF ANXIETY

  The quarrel with his father increased Michelangelo’s sense of isolation; all the world seemed to have turned against him, and he was left feeling exhausted and dispirited. Ultimately, he was willing to pay a steep price to buy back his honor. Prodded by the cardinal, he finally agreed to accept an allowance, but only if it was reduced to a paltry 15 ducats per month, a stipend Fattucci described as “shameful.” Two years later, in April 1525, he declared himself ready to admit his fault if only this would get his creditors off his back. “They can’t sue me if I admit that I’ve done wrong,” he pointed out.

  I’ll act as if I’ve been taken to court and lost and must give them satisfaction. And this I’ll do, if I can. But if the Pope wishes to help me in this matter—which would give me great pleasure, seeing that, either from old age or infirmity I will never finish the Julius’s tomb—he, in his role as middleman, can say that he wishes me to restore what I’ve received for completing it, so that I can be free of this burden, and the relatives of the said Pope, having obtained restitution, can give the job to whomever they choose and have it made as they wish.

  Even as he cast about for a way to satisfy both the cardinal and the heirs of Pope Julius, he continued to work sporadically on the tomb in his Florentine studio. It was during these unhappy years that he began the four magnificent Captives now in the Accademia Gallery in Florence. Though he finished none of them, they are among the most powerful in Michelangelo’s entire oeuvre. Only partially released from the surrounding matrix of stone, each seems to struggle against his fate, engaged in a Manichaean contest of pure spirit against corrupt matter. For Neoplatonists like Pico della Mirandola, the body is the prison of the soul, released only in death. “Through the first death, which is only a detachment of the soul from the body . . . the lover may see the beloved celestial Venus,” Pico declares, “but if he would possess her more closely . . . he must die the second death by which he is completely severed from the body. . . .” In his own writings, Michelangelo often expresses a similar idea, at one point transcribing Petrarch’s famous line “Death is the end of a dark prison.” The sculptor, probing the inarticulate mass with his chisel, finding form within formlessness, replicates the kiss of death, a stripping down to bare essentials that releases the soul from its fleshy cage.

  More than any artist in history, Michelangelo left behind an impressive body of half-completed works, many of which are masterpieces in their own right. In fact, a list of his unfinished works would be far longer than a list of paintings and sculptures fully executed. But even works like the New Sacristy or the captives meant for Julius’s tomb—fragments of a larger whole that by no stretch of the imagination can be said to reflect Michelangelo’s initial conception—remain compelling, not despite their half-realized state but largely because of it. To modern audiences in particular, the rough-hewn Captives are more poignant than the polished Pietà, their manifest imperfection providing a glimpse into the artist’s soul that is closed off by the gleaming finish of the earlier work.

  It is not only modern audiences who find something to admire in Michelangelo’s unfinished work. In his funeral oration for the artist, Benedetto Varchi declared that the artist’s genius was such that his roughed-out sculptures surpassed the finished works of lesser masters. The fact that so many of his uncompleted works are still with us is a testament to how avidly they were collected in his own day, preserved in the years following his death as mementos of the great man’s life. Treated like holy relics, these fragments participated in the cult growing up around the artist. As Michelangelo came to be revered as a kind of secular saint, his work was valued not in proportion to the skill exhibited, but by how intimately it was associated with his person. A sua mano (by his own hand) was a phrase frequently inserted into contracts of the time to ensure that the master actually carried out the work in question, but in the case of Michelangelo this standard clause became a kind of fetish as collectors sought anything, no matter how trivial, that bore the sign of the artist’s touch. Where before, sketches used in the process of working out a composition were discarded as worthless, Michelangelo’s were treasured as art in their own right.XXI In fact, these unfinished artworks were perhaps even more precious than those he actually completed, like a cloth stained with a martyr’s blood.

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  Michelangelo’s fortunes brightened in September 1523 with the death of Pope Hadrian. Not only had the pope been personally hostile to Michelangelo, he seemed to have had little use for art in general. A pious and ascetic man, he tried to rein in the excesses of his predecessors and launch the kind of reforms that might have risen to the challenge posed by Martin Luther and his followers. Unfortunately, his stinginess made him unpopular with the people of Rome, who depended on vast papal expenditures to provide them with both jobs and entertainment. His death was celebrated by Romans, who inscribed on the door of his personal physician, whose efforts on behalf of his patient were so ineffectual, the mock tribute: “To the Liberator of the Fatherland, the Senate and the Roman Pope.”

  The conclave that followed proved even more than usually contentious. Cardinal Giulio de ’ Medici was the preferred candidate of Emperor Charles V, which automatically made him anathema to the French contingent. Charles, the Holy Roman emperor, was the most powerful monarch in Europe, ruler of a domain that extended from Spain in the south to Flanders and Germany in the north. With voyages of exploration and settlement heading out from the ports of Spain and Portugal, he could claim large chunks of the New World as well as the old, making his the first truly global empire.

  Cardinal de ’ Medici’s elevation was opposed by the only European monarch who could approach the emperor in terms of wealth and military might: the French king, Francis I. Unfortunately, Francis had not abandoned his ancestral claims to large parts of the Italian peninsula, while Charles, despite the fact that he had troubles of his own—including the religious revolt incited by Martin Luther that was already spreading to much of north and central Europe—was not inclined to give the French a free hand in Italy. And so the two great continental powers prepared to resume the ruinous generational conflict that had brought untold suffering to the people of Italy and no commensurate benefit to the contestants who had spilled so much blood for so little gain.

  Given the sharp divisions within the Sacred College, it is not surprising that it took more than fifty days for the conclave to name Hadrian’s successor, ultimately awarding to Cardinal Giulio the title he had anticipated on the death of his cousin two years earlier. Though Giulio, who took the name Pope Clement VII, had been promoted by the Spanish contingent, once in office he was forced to steer a narrow course between the two great powers, pledging his loyalty to whichever one seemed less likely to swallow up the Papal States at any given moment. This proved a difficult and ever-shifting calculation, which necessarily meant that his policy pleased no one. On February 24, 1525, French and imperial forces clashed at Pavia in northern Italy. Not only were the French forces crushed, but Francis himself was taken prisoner. To many observers, it seemed as if the decades-long struggle for European supremacy was finally at an end.

  But nothing in that unhappy land was ever settled, since, as had happened after the effortless triumph of French king Charles VIII in 1494, the success of one side immediately galvanized every other party to resist the victors. Leading the fight to overturn the verdict of Pavia (though surreptitiously, since he was still officially allied with the emperor) was Pope Clement, who tried to repeat the success of Julius in drivi
ng out the “barbarians.” But Clement had none of Julius’s martial temperament. He hoped to prosper through cleverness rather than force of will, signing and breaking treaties with an alacrity that earned him a reputation for deviousness. “[A]lthough he had a most capable intelligence and marvelous knowledge of world affairs,” wrote Francesco Guicciardini, who served him for many years, “yet he lacked the corresponding resolution and execution. For he was impeded not only by his timidity of spirit . . . but also by a certain innate irresolution and perplexity.” The Venetian ambassador summed him up with a brief, cutting analysis: “He talks well but he decides badly.”

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  For Michelangelo the new pope ’s faults were not immediately apparent or particularly relevant. What mattered to him was that after two difficult years he had an ally back on the throne of St. Peter. Now he could rededicate himself to his work secure in the knowledge that he had the full support of the wealthiest and most powerful patron in Christendom. Clement had already demonstrated that he was a sensitive master, far more appreciative of his genius and tolerant of his prickly personality than Leo had been. Michelangelo greeted the news of his elevation with a sigh of relief. “You will have heard that Medici is made Pope,” he wrote to his assistant Topolino in Carrara, “at which it seems to me all will rejoice; and I believe that here, with regard to art, much will be accomplished.”

  In the short run, at least, Michelangelo’s optimism proved well founded. Crucially, Clement was prepared to intervene with the della Rovere heirs, urging them to moderate their demands in order to free Michelangelo for what he considered the more important work on the Sacristy and the Laurentian Library. Clement’s offer to put Michelangelo on salary demonstrates his sensitivity to the artist’s needs, ensuring much-needed financial security and peace of mind after an extended period in which he ’d enjoyed neither. In Clement, Michelangelo had the most congenial patron since the days of his youth, when the current pope ’s uncle had given him a room in his palace and place of honor at his table.