Michelangelo

by Miles J. Unger

  The first item on the pope ’s agenda was to complete the great project Clement had proposed to Michelangelo two years earlier during their meeting in San Miniato al Tedesco. As originally conceived by Clement, the plan was to paint two frescoes for the Sistine Chapel: on the entrance wall to the east, The Fall of the Rebellious Angels, and on the western wall, where the altar stood, a Resurrection. Exactly how and why the plan evolved remains obscure, but, as often seemed to happen with Clement, he apparently reversed course in midstream, proposing instead a single monumental fresco for the altar wall on a theme whose cosmic scope made it a fitting companion to the story of Creation overhead. At some point in the months before his death, he instructed Michelangelo to paint perhaps the most difficult scene in all religious art: a vast end-of-times panorama, showing the ultimate fate of the universe whose birth the artist had rendered so powerfully two decades earlier.

  There is no proof that Michelangelo was the first to propose the new subject, but it is so thoroughly in keeping with his approach—reflecting both his vaunting ambition and his taste for tragic grandeur—that it seems likely he was involved in the decision. His natural inclination was to expand the scope of any commission, as in the case of the Sistine Ceiling, where he replaced the Twelve Apostles proposed by Julius with the epic story of Creation, or the David, which seemed to demand a site more prominent than the one originally assigned. Substituting the somber Last Judgment for the hopeful Resurrection sent a clear signal that the princes of the Church were attuned to the mood of a people still traumatized by the horrors they’d endured. Unflinching in its savagery, Michelangelo’s apocalyptic masterpiece gave grim comfort by assuring the victims that in the end justice would be done. His vision is dark—anything less would have struck a false note—but those who contemplated the terrifying spectacle he conjured had the satisfaction of knowing that however out of joint the world appeared, all would be set right at the end of times.

  II. ANGELS WITH LOUD TRUMPETS

  In April 1535 the serenity of the Sistine Chapel was disturbed once again by the tramp of clogs, the clang of hammers, and the whine of saws, as workers began erecting the scaffolding on the western wall. A short time later the plasterers arrived, sending up thick clouds of dust that caught in the throat and settled on the silk vestments of the dignitaries assembled for the daily Mass.

  The pope assigned the task of preparing the wall to Michelangelo’s longtime ally Sebastiano del Piombo. For the past decade he had enjoyed a comfortable if not particularly productive career, supplementing his income from commissions by serving as keeper of the seal for the pope.V Though to all appearances relations between Michelangelo and the Venetian-born painter had remained civil, they no longer worked hand in glove as they had in the days when the competition with Raphael had drawn them together to defeat a common enemy.

  The truth is that their relationship had been born of expedience rather than any deep sympathy, a fact that became apparent immediately following Raphael’s sudden death at the age of thirty-seven. To Sebastiano in particular, this seemed less like a tragedy than an opportunity. Hoping to profit from Michelangelo’s influence in the Vatican, he dashed a letter off to his friend in Florence: “I’ll briefly fill you in on the situation regarding the painting of the pope ’s chambers,” he wrote. “Raphael’s boys are boasting greatly, and propose to do them in oils. I beg you to remember me and to recommend me to the most reverend monsignor, and recall that I have acquitted myself well on similar projects, and I wish to tackle this one, since I will cause you no embarrassment, as I have not up till now.” Michelangelo obliged his old ally, but the facetious tone of the letter he sent to the pope ’s advisor, Cardinal Bernardo Dovizi, seemed intended as much to pierce Sebastiano’s pretensions as to secure his appointment. “Monsignor, I come to your Most Reverend Lordship not as a friend or servant, since I merit neither title, but as one who is low, poor, and foolish, to ask that Bastiano the Venetian be appointed, since Raphael is dead, some part of the work in the palace. But if it seems such a favor would be wasted on one such as I, it seems to me that in serving fools there is still some pleasure, just as on occasion, for a change of pace, one might try onions for one who is used to mushrooms.” When Sebastiano presented the letter, the cardinal merely laughed at him, calling it “a great joke” and informing him that the job had already been assigned to Raphael’s former apprentices. Sebastiano grumbled that for the next week the letter made the rounds of the Vatican and “is almost the only topic of conversation and makes everyone laugh.”

  Over the following decade a superficial cordiality masked a growing estrangement, culminating in a final misunderstanding that turned former friends into bitter enemies. While Michelangelo worked on the cartoons, Sebastiano and his crew set to work preparing the altar wall, laying down a slick surface suitable for painting in oils rather than the rough coat of arriccio (plaster) needed for fresco. It’s impossible to believe that the Venetian was unaware of the Florentine ’s long-standing aversion to oil painting. It’s also impossible to believe that Michelangelo had no idea what was going on in the Chapel in his absence. His failure to raise an objection at the beginning seems like classic passive-aggressive behavior. Only after Sebastiano had completed the task and removed the scaffolding did Michelangelo make his feelings known, but once he got going, he made up for lost time. Saying that oil painting was only “for lazy people and women,” Michelangelo demanded the whole wall be removed.

  Having humiliated his former comrade, Michelangelo took over the preparations himself, fretting over every detail as was his wont. First, he demolished Sebastiano’s work. Then, working with a mason named Maestro Giovanni Fachino, he rebuilt the wall using thin bricks specially made for the purpose. The wall’s most unusual feature is that it slopes inward as it rises, so that the top projects eleven inches over the bottom. Vasari claims that this was done to ensure that dirt and smoke from the candles on the altar would not collect on the surface of the fresco but, as Michelangelo was surely aware, the unusual construction would actually have the opposite effect.VI It seems instead that Michelangelo, always sensitive to the optical and psychological impact of a given form, wanted to increase the dramatic impact of his monumental fresco by inducing in the viewer the sensation of being enveloped by looming armies of the damned and legions of the blessed. Like the top-heavy architectural forms of the New Sacristy, the canted wall of The Last Judgment encourages a vague feeling of disquiet as the elect assemble overhead in teetering, vertiginous cohorts, while the damned plunge precipitously to their doom.

  Preparing the Sistine Chapel to receive his latest masterpiece involved a certain amount of creative destruction. From a liturgical point of view, the altar wall contained the most important image in the chapel: Perugino’s Assumption of the Virgin, the sacred event to which the shrine was dedicated. Above this iconic image were two more paintings by Raphael’s master, one depicting the birth of Jesus and the other the discovery of Moses among the bulrushes, the starting point for each of the narrative series along the room’s main axis. Michelangelo may have taken a grim satisfaction in destroying three important works by an artist with whom he had quarreled in the past. Many years earlier, Vasari recounts, the older Perugino had been jealous of the upstart Florentine, “and seeing the greatness of his own name . . . being obscured, he was ever seeking to wound his fellow-workers with biting words. For this reason, besides certain insults aimed at him by the craftsmen, he had only himself to blame when Michelangelo told him in public that he was a clumsy fool in his art. But Pietro being unable to swallow such an affront, they both appeared before the Tribunal of Eight, where Pietro came off with little honor.”

  But if Michelangelo had few regrets about demolishing the work of Raphael’s teacher, at least he was an equal-opportunity vandal. Above Perugino’s panels, to either side of the magnificent Jonah, were two lunettes by Michelangelo himself depicting the ancestors of Christ. These too were slated for destruction to make way fo
r the new composition. In fact, an early sketch indicates that Michelangelo had originally intended to retain Perugino’s Assumption, but he quickly rejected this compromise as unworkable. In the end, he was determined to eliminate anything that would disturb the unity of the image he had in mind.

  Michelangelo began painting in April or May of 1536, beginning at the top right-hand corner and working his way down the wall in alternating bands. Despite the great physical labor involved in covering the immense surface, Michelangelo did almost all the work himself, aided only by his trusted assistant Urbino, who prepared the intonaco (smooth plaster), ground his colors, and tried his hand at a few of the minor figures.

  Francesco d’Amadore, known as Urbino, had been with Michelangelo since about 1530, when Antonio Mini left his service to seek fame and fortune in France. While Michelangelo’s relations with his peers were almost always marred by jealousy, he was often kind to those who served under him, as long as they were thoroughly devoted and demonstrated at least a minimal competence. When Mini departed for France, Michelangelo gave him a number of valuable drawings as well as the painting of Leda and the Swan (originally commissioned by the Duke of Ferrara), which Mini sold to earn enough to live on while he got on his feet, an example of the kind of generosity Michelangelo was capable of when he didn’t feel threatened.VII

  Taking a job with the workaholic Michelangelo was not for the timid. He drove himself hard, and his employees were expected to show the same zeal and indifference to creature comforts as he did. Fortunately, Urbino, who was about eighteen when he entered the great man’s service, was devoted to his master, and Michelangelo repaid his loyalty in kind, urging the pope to provide him with a comfortable salary and nursing him when he was ill. The strength of Michelangelo’s attachment is shown by the fact that he remained at Urbino’s bedside during what proved to be his final illness in 1555. His death was a severe blow to the artist, who had come to rely on him. “I must tell you,” Michelangelo wrote to his nephew,

  that last night, the third day of December at 9 o’clock, Francesco, called Urbino, passed from this life to my intense grief, leaving me so stricken and troubled that it would have been more easeful to die with him, because of the love I bore him, which he merited no less; for he was a fine man, full of loyalty and devotion; so that owing to his death I now seem to be lifeless myself and can find no peace.

  Even after his death Michelangelo continued to repay Urbino for his years of service by providing handsomely for his widow, Cornelia, and their two children.

  Nor was Urbino the only one to benefit from Michelangelo’s benevolence. He was unfailingly generous toward the poor, constantly reminding his nephew Lionardo to donate a portion of the money he sent him to various charitable organizations in his native Florence. “As to the almsgiving,” Michelangelo reminded him, “it seems to me that you’re too lax. If you do not give of my money for the soul of your father, still less will you give of your own.” Significantly, one of his greatest concerns was to provide dowries for the daughters of destitute noblemen who would otherwise be unable to marry someone of their own class—a form of charity that speaks to his own fears of downward social mobility.

  Michelangelo’s sympathy for the humble was heartfelt and, as already noted, he often seemed most comfortable in the company of lowly workers. After his father’s death Michelangelo worried over the fate of Lodovico’s longtime housekeeper and was deeply distressed when he got word of her passing: “The news of Mona Margherita’s death has been a great grief to me,” he wrote to Lionardo, “more so than if she had been my sister—for she was a good woman; and because she grew old in our service and because my father commended her to my care, God is my witness that I intended before long to make some provision for her.” This warmth stands in marked contrast to his stormy relations with colleagues or those higher up on the social scale. While he claimed to belong to society’s elite, it was among the rude scarpellini and household servants that he felt most comfortable and that his human kindness could find an outlet.

  Though The Last Judgment was to prove his most controversial work, its execution proceeded without the squabbles and crises that so often undermined his major commissions. During the casting of the bronze statue of Julius in Bologna and while painting the Sistine Ceiling, Michelangelo employed a small team of assistants. In each case rapid turnover and public spats revealed tensions in the workplace. Even less satisfactory were conditions at San Lorenzo and the quarries where he supervised large crews whose unreliability forced him to waste valuable time and energy. He much preferred to work alone, where nothing distracted him from his single-minded purpose, or with a single dedicated servant who understood his needs and never questioned his decisions. Despite the demanding nature of this latest project, the arrangement proved efficient. Urbino could be counted on to carry out his master’s wishes without complaint, providing another set of hands while subordinating his will and artistic personality to his master.

  Also contributing to the efficiency of the operation was the fact that Michelangelo was able to purchase whatever materials he needed through the papal treasury. This was particularly important because the huge expanse of blue sky demanded large quantities of ultramarine, a costly pigment made from pulverized lapis lazuli. While working for Pope Julius, Michelangelo often had to pay out of pocket and then beg for reimbursement from the treasurer, but now Jacopo Meleghino, Commissioner of Papal Works, supplied him with everything he needed.

  Once the altar wall had been remade to Michelangelo’s specifications, he and Urbino worked rapidly from cartoons prepared by the master in his studio. Many of the secondary figures reflect the freedom achieved in the final stages of the ceiling, where he captured the essentials of a pose in a few vigorous sweeps of the loaded brush. Even more than in that earlier work, he seems compelled to show the human form in every possible (and many an impossible) attitude and from every point of view. Radical foreshortenings and telescoping perspectives show how much he had learned from painting the ceiling, and while many contemporaries regarded these contortions as artificial, they serve an important expressive function, conveying the disorienting effect of the Apocalypse when all familiar landmarks will be swept away and even the laws of physics no longer apply.

  Michelangelo worked on the fresco for five years, but only 449 giornate were required to cover almost 2,000 square feet with more than 400 figures—a remarkable pace maintained by an artist now in his sixties. The one major interruption came near the end of the campaign, in the summer of 1541, when Michelangelo hurt his leg falling from the scaffolding. Despite the severity of the injury, he refused medical care and might well have died had his friend the physician Maestro Baccio Rontini not forced his way into Michelangelo’s house, where he discovered the artist “in a desperate state.” Refusing to leave his bedside until he was cured, Rontini nursed him back to health. The impact of the accident on the finished product can be observed in some of the figures in the lower left-hand portion of the fresco, where the diminished quality of the drawing betrays the hand of the loyal but mediocre Urbino.

  • • •

  If the pigments he employed in painting The Last Judgment were expensive, he required fewer of them than he had when painting the ceiling. The stripped-down palette Michelangelo now employed distinguishes it from his prior work in the chapel and reflects the dualism inherent in the theme. At the End of Time complexity collapses and the universe is reduced to either/or, saved or damned; there is little nuance, no in-between. The Sistine Ceiling chronicles a woeful tale of decline, but one that is filled with scenic incident and moments of incandescent triumph. The Last Judgment, by contrast, is reductive, distilling all human history into a single critical moment. Michelangelo builds the fresco around a dominant contrast between cold blue sky and the warm reddish-brown flesh tone of the figures. Gone are those pastel hues—lavender, turquoise, mint, and pale yellow—that had imparted a shimmering delicacy to the cosmic drama of the ceiling.VIII The moo
d is now starker, more somber; the limpid morning light of Creation has been replaced by harsh sunset hues, as the unforgiving shafts of a dying sun cause naked flesh to stand out in bold relief against a deepening firmament.

  In fact, Michelangelo’s reductive approach to painting The Last Judgment precisely reverses the expansive one he had deployed in painting the ceiling. Changes in organization, scale, and mood all signal rupture rather than continuity with that earlier campaign. There is no use, he seems to say, pretending that nothing has happened in the two and a half decades that have intervened between then and now. Both he and his audience have been chastened by experience, seared by the suffering they have witnessed. God’s Creation feels more like a curse than a blessing, and we await the Final Days with a mix of dread and expectation.

  For all its raw emotional power, the Sistine Ceiling is didactic, a discursive narrative laid out in multiple chapters, each commented upon by encircling images that tease out hidden meanings. Confronted with the awkward, compartmentalized layout of the vault, Michelangelo made a virtue of necessity, adding his own trompe l’oeil architecture that provided a visual and conceptual framework to tame the explosiveness of God’s fecund imagination. Faced with a similarly fragmented field on the altar wall, Michelangelo went in the opposite direction, eliminating anything that would interrupt the singularity of his vision. While the story of Creation unfolds in time, like a growing organism sprouting multiple narrative tendrils, The Last Judgment is a study in compression. Everything is stripped down to bare essentials, which to Michelangelo is nothing more or less than the human form in all its variety and tragic nobility.

  Instead of inhabiting a built environment, the souls in The Last Judgment are the architecture. “He opened out the way to facility in this art in its principal province,” Vasari wrote of the fresco, “which is the human body, and, attend[ed] to this single object. . . .” In Francesco de Holanda’s Dialogues, Michelangelo makes a similar point. “Excellent painting imitates the works of God,” he says, “and the noblest painting imitates his noblest work, the human figure. . . .” In the end, Man becomes not merely the measure of all things, as the Greek philosopher Protagoras claimed; he is (almost literally) the only thing, supporting the vault of heaven—and bearing the entire burden of meaning—on his strong back.