The polished character Holanda presents is not entirely fictional, though his portrayal certainly contains an element of wishful thinking. Michelangelo had indeed mellowed over the years. With nothing left to prove, he no longer pursued his art with the single-minded fury of old or lashed out indiscriminately against rivals he feared were stealing his best ideas. In 1537, the year before Holanda himself arrived in the city, Michelangelo was named a citizen of Rome, a high honor for a foreigner and a mark of the universal esteem he now enjoyed. His famed terribilità was less in evidence as he transformed himself into the grand old man of Italian art.
But this is clearly an airbrushed portrait that softens his harsh edges and dresses his shabby figure in clothes more suitable to the refined circles in which he now traveled. While Holanda acknowledges his hero’s foibles, he insists that his eccentricities do not disqualify him from polite company. In fact, they are signs of his refined and sensitive nature. At one point Michelangelo addresses the issue head-on. “I wish to make a complaint against many persons,” he declares,
on my own behalf and on behalf of painters of my temperament. . . . There are many persons who maintain a thousand lies, and one is that painters are eccentric and that their conversation is intolerable and harsh; they are only human all the while, and thus fools and unreasonable persons consider them fantastic and fanciful, allowing them with much difficulty the conditions necessary to a painter. . . . painters are not in any way unsociable through pride, but either because they find few pursuits equal to painting, or in order not to corrupt themselves with useless conversation of idle people, and debase the intellect from the lofty imaginations in which they are always absorbed.
To Vasari, Michelangelo expressed the same idea in blunter terms: “[I]t is necessary that [he] who wishes to attend to studies of art flee company.”
In presenting his more courtly version of the artist, Holanda completes the task begun by Alberti a century earlier, removing the painter or sculptor from the ranks of the lowly artisan and placing him among the respectable citizens who work with their minds rather than their hands. Holanda wishes to extol Michelangelo as a rare creature, absolved to some extent from conventional expectations, while simultaneously dropping the names of his wellborn friends in an effort to confirm his high status. This is not quite the Romantic myth of the alienated genius brooding alone in his garret, but a halfway point where the artist and society maintain an uneasy alliance, each conferring upon the other a kind of legitimacy. Negotiating this delicate balance, Holanda stands the age-old prejudice against the uncouth painter or dust-caked sculptor on its head, transforming the vice of social awkwardness into the virtue of authenticity.
In Holanda’s account, those who accuse Michelangelo of boorishness mistake superficial manners for genuine feeling, which is the true mark of a noble soul. In fact, as Michelangelo himself claims in another contemporary dialogue—this one written by his friend Donato Giannotti—he shuns small talk not out of an indifference to his fellow man but from an ardent heart that is too full to traffic in meaningless encounters. “Whenever I see someone who may have talent,” he tells Giannotti, “I am bound to fall in love with him, and I fall prey to him in such a manner that I am no longer my own: I am all his. So if I were to have dinner with you, as you are all so well endowed with talent and kindness, beyond that each one of you three has already robbed me of something, each one of those dining with me would take a part of me.”
Reading Giannotti and Holanda allows us to watch as the legend overtakes the man. Their sanitized portrait of the sensitive but ultimately respectable citizen, cultivated and at ease in the most refined company, presented an acceptable alternative to the popular image of a misanthrope at war with everyone, including himself. The reality of his life in Rome during his final decades lay somewhere in between these two extremes. Though he continued to be consumed by work, Michelangelo was no longer living in squalid isolation. His letters and poems reveal an inner life far more tortured than the bland portrait Holanda presents, but they also provide ample evidence of a loyal circle of well-connected friends who looked after him and with whom he felt comfortable enough to share his most intimate thoughts.
Fame facilitated Michelangelo’s entrée into Rome ’s elite, and financial security eased his daily stress. Having been born into poverty—and compounding this mistake by entering a profession that was still regarded as beneath the dignity of a gentleman—he had finally achieved a status that satisfied his own easily wounded pride. Even so, Michelangelo was always more comfortable among the rude scarpellini than in elegant salons. He himself provides a rather glum picture of his life in a letter of 1547, though this too should be taken with a grain of salt, since it was written as a defense against accusations that he was consorting with Florentine exiles plotting against the Medici regime. “[A]ll Rome knows what sort of life I lead, since I am always alone,” he wrote pathetically. “I go out little and speak to no one, Florentines least of all. . . .”
The truth was that, like many men of genius, he was still too wrapped up in his art to make a congenial dining companion. He lacked that sprezzatura—the effortless grace—which Baldassare Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier praises as the mark of a true gentleman and that everyone admired in the author’s good friend Raphael. Michelangelo’s intensity was the opposite of aristocratic nonchalance. If he attracted a few devoted friends, it was due to the admiration his genius inspired rather than to social graces he never mastered.
• • •
For Michelangelo, fame proved to be a mixed blessing. While the greatest lords of Europe now usually treated him with the deference to which he felt entitled, he could not possibly keep up with their increasingly desperate pleas for some work, no matter how slight, from his hands. With the death of Leonardo in 1519 and Raphael a year later, his status as Europe ’s greatest living artist was secure.XIII Popes, dukes, and kings all vied for his services, to such an extent that he was forced to master the art of polite refusal, excusing himself with one great lord by citing his obligations to another. Demand was so great that even the king of France found himself thwarted. In 1546, Francis wrote to the artist expressing his “great desire” to have something from him, “praying you, if you have some excellent works already made at his arrival, to give them to [Francesco Primaticcio], with his paying you well. . . . And moreover, . . . that he cast copies of the Risen Christ and of the Pietà, so that I can decorate one of my many chapels with them, as things about which I have been assured are among the most exquisite and excellent of your art.” But by now Michelangelo had become adept at hiding the sting of rejection beneath a bouquet of flattering words. “Sacred Majesty,” he replied,
I know not which is the greater, the favor or the wonder that Your Majesty should deign write to a man like me, and still further to request of him examples of his work, which are in no way worthy of Your Majesty’s name. But such as they are, be it known to Your Majesty that for a long time I have desired to serve You, but have been unable to do so, because even in Italy I have not had sufficient opportunities to devote myself to my art. Now I am an old man and shall be engaged for some months on work for Pope [Paul]. But if, on its completion, a little of life remains to me, I will endeavor to put into effect the desire which, as I have said, I have had for a long time, that is to say to execute for Your Majesty a work in marble, in bronze and in painting.
His fame guaranteed that not only his art but his private life were subject to sometimes uncomfortable scrutiny. The dangers of this higher profile are well illustrated by his rocky relations with the waspish Pietro Aretino, “the scourge of princes,” who always had his finger to the wind and was eager to interject himself into any situation that would either earn him a profit or at least make him the center of attention. Before The Last Judgment was half complete, the writer was already hoping to capitalize on the attention it was receiving. “Now who would not be terrified to apply his brush to so awesome a subject?” he inquir
ed of Michelangelo in September 1537:
I see an Antichrist in the midst of the rabble, with an appearance only conceivable by you. I see terror on the faces of all the living, I see the signs of the impending extinction of the sun, the moon and the stars. . . . I see Nature standing there to one side, full of terror, shrunken and barren in the decrepitude of old age. I see Time, withered and trembling. . . . Then I see the guardians of the infernal pit, who are dreadful to behold and who to the glory of the martyrs and the saints are taunting all the Caesars and Alexanders, who may have conquered the world but did not therefore conquer themselves. . . . I see the lights of Paradise and the furnaces of the abyss which pierce the shadows cast on the vault of the empyrean. . . .
In his younger days Michelangelo might well have answered such a pompous, self-serving missive with a curt dismissal, but now he responded with a lighter touch:
Magnificent Messer Pietro, my lord and brother—The receipt of your letter has caused me at once both pleasure and regret. I was exceedingly pleased because it came from you, who are uniquely gifted among men, and yet I was also very regretful, because, having completed a large part of the composition, I cannot put your conception in hand, which is so perfect that, if the Day of Judgment were passed and you had seen it in person, your words could not have described it better.
Now as to your writing about me, I not only say in reply that I should welcome it, but I entreat you to do so, since kings and emperors deem it the highest honor to be mentioned by your pen. In the meantime, should I have anything that might be to your taste, I offer it to you with all my heart.
In conclusion, do not, for the sake of seeing the painting I am doing, break your resolve not to come to Rome, because that would be too much.
The gentle irony Michelangelo employs here, so different from the cutting tone he often used with his rivals, may reflect a genuine admiration. More likely, it stemmed from an understandable reluctance to offend someone whose sharp pen was usually deployed to wound those who crossed him.
In the end, Michelangelo’s best efforts were not enough to keep the mercurial writer on his side. Aretino’s about-face came in April 1544, after the artist politely refused his request for some drawings. “But why, O Lord,” Aretino wrote plaintively, “do you not repay my constant devotion, I who revere your celestial quality, with a relic of one of those papers that will cost you so little? You can be certain that I would appreciate two scratches of carbon on a piece of paper more than all the cups and chains that this prince has ever bestowed upon me.”
Like a rejected suitor, Aretino now turned on the man he had so recently labeled “celestial,” assailing him at his weakest point when he speculated publicly that such gifts were reserved for “certain Gerards and Thomases”—a reference to Gherardo Perini and Tommaso de ’ Cavalieri, men who, the gossips assumed, shared Michelangelo’s bed as well as his affections.
To be fair, Aretino’s change of heart was not based solely on personal pique. Always quick to seize the moment, he knew he could salvage his own unsavory reputation by damaging the artist’s. If the poet transformed himself in an instant from one of Michelangelo’s most ardent admirers into his fiercest critic, it was less a matter of petty spite than opportunism. Aretino was quicker than Michelangelo to sense the winds of change that were sweeping across Europe, and while the artist was unable or unwilling to bend, the writer was only too happy to hoist his sails and ride the breeze.
IV. SPIRITUALI
By the time Aretino launched his attack, it took no great courage to take on the famous artist. Michelangelo’s latest masterpiece, so highly anticipated before the fact, had been met with howls of protest when it was finally unveiled in October of 1541, and Aretino was merely adding his voice to an already mighty chorus.
The Last Judgment was presented to the public at a particularly fraught moment, when men and women on either side of the growing religious divide were primed to examine every text and representation for subtle theological messages, anxious to seize any weapon to attack their opponents and fearful of discovering any chink in their own armor. As a papal commission in the most sacred shrine in Christendom, the fresco was destined to attract particular scrutiny. Michelangelo’s idiosyncratic approach to Scripture, which in quieter times might have provoked little comment, not only aroused the ire of Church officials, who suspected him of flirting with schismatic beliefs, but derision from critics of that same Church, who pointed to his latest work as evidence of an institution that had lost its moral compass.
Indeed, signs of trouble began even before the painting was finished. At some point—probably in 1539 or 1540, after upper portions of the fresco had been completed but before Michelangelo had populated the nether regions with the armies of the damned—Pope Paul visited the chapel accompanied by his master of ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena. While the pope was pleased with what he saw, the man tasked with maintaining decorum in the Vatican was shocked by the pervasive nudity. Not surprisingly, Michelangelo bridled at the suggestion he make any changes, dismissing Biagio as a hack with no understanding of art. Then, as a warning to philistines everywhere, he proceeded to paint the features of the prudish master of ceremonies onto Minos, the demon with ass’s ears and a snake ’s tail who stands guard at the gates of hell.XIV When Biagio saw the unflattering portrait, he demanded the pope intervene on his behalf and instruct the artist to remove the offending image. But Paul, demonstrating once again his loyalty to the artist, merely joked that had Biagio been placed in purgatory, he might have been able to do something, but that since he had been placed in hell, he was unable to oblige.
Assembled dignitaries and a few select citizens of Rome got their first glimpse of Michelangelo’s monumental fresco on All Saints Eve, 1541, twenty-nine years to the day since the ceiling was first unveiled to almost universal acclaim. Upon seeing the completed work for the first time, the pope was said to have fallen to his knees, exclaiming, “Lord, do not charge me with my sins when you come on the day of Judgment.”
Others, however, were sharply critical. Many agreed with Biagio da Cesena that there was something unseemly about the display of so much naked flesh in a holy place, apparently forgetting the nudes that for decades had been frolicking above their heads with no sign of God’s disapproval. Even Michelangelo’s allies feared they were in danger of being drowned out by his detractors. “The work is of such beauty,” wrote Nino Sernini, agent for Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga, who had asked him to procure a copy of the work, “that your excellency can imagine that there is no lack of those who condemn it. The very reverend Theatines [reactionary defenders of the faith] are the first to say that the nudes do not belong in such a place . . . although even in this [Michelangelo] has shown great consideration, for hardly ten figures of so great a number are seen as immodest. Others say he has made Christ beardless and too young, and that he does not have the appropriate majesty, and so there is no lack of talk.” Typical of these critics was the anti-Lutheran preacher Fra Ambrogio Caterino, who simply dubbed the work “shameful.”
These were the opening salvos in a campaign that would grow increasingly assertive over the years, ultimately leading to charges of impiety and even heresy on the part of the artist. Had The Last Judgment been completed two or three decades earlier, it would have struck many as unconventional, perhaps even radical. No doubt it would have sparked conversation among the cognoscenti, who would have debated the artistic innovations Michelangelo had introduced, and perhaps even carping from the more conservative elements who generally disapproved of artists reinterpreting the sacred text in light of their own concerns. After all, that’s how the public responded to the Sistine Ceiling, which was equally unconventional in its approach to Scripture.
But the outrage provoked by The Last Judgment was unprecedented. Michelangelo had set out in 1536 to paint a Renaissance masterpiece; emerging from the Chapel five years later, he found himself blinking in the dawn of a new age. The easygoing tolerance and worldly sophistication th
at had prevailed during the reigns of Julius II and Leo X had been replaced by a suspicion of anything that smacked of freethinking and a puritanical discomfort with the human body. As long as the Church had exclusive custody of the keys to the kingdom of heaven, its leaders took a relaxed stance toward artists’ representations of sacred narratives, but once their monopoly was challenged by Luther and his followers, they demanded of the artists they conscripted the unquestioning obedience of soldiers engaged in a holy war.
The age of the Platonic Academy, in short, had become the age of the Inquisition. To make matters worse, The Last Judgment was unveiled only months after an attempted reconciliation between Protestants and Catholics in the imperial city of Regensburg had collapsed, devolving into mutual recrimination. Each side in the theological debate now closed ranks, more determined than ever to hew to strict interpretations of sacred text and to vilify anyone who deviated from the party line.XV The very next year, Pope Paul established the Roman branch of the Inquisition (modeled on its notorious Spanish predecessor) in order to define more sharply the tenets of the faith and root out anything that departed from it. Heading up the new body was Cardinal Caraffa, a man who once declared: “Even if my own father were a heretic, I would gather the wood to burn him.” With men like Cardinal Caraffa in the ascendant, Michelangelo’s highly individualistic approach to matters of faith was no longer acceptable.
Defenders of the faith like Cardinal Caraffa had cause for alarm. Michelangelo was not simply a passive witness to the momentous debates shaking the foundations of belief or the innocent victim of a new puritanism. Though he was never one to indulge in theological hairsplitting, he was deeply engaged in the great religious debates of the day, disturbed by the crisis consuming the Church but also intoxicated by the new spirituality transforming the inner lives of men and women on both sides of the divide. While superficially orthodox, his Last Judgment breathes the spirit of reform, embodying a yearning for a new relationship with God, one unmediated by priests, that eschews the safety of empty ritual in favor of an intense and unsettling embrace of the divine.
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