Michelangelo’s conflicted response to the crisis mirrors the confusion of many in a time of profound dislocation. Consumed by guilt over his carnal urges and fierce ambition, he constantly strived to perfect his sinful nature. But for many years he had been alienated from conventional forms of religious observance. As a child of Florence, he ’d felt the winds of reform blowing long before Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses sounded like a thunderclap across Europe. And while he did not fully succumb to the blandishments of the fire-and-brimstone Savonarola, he was clearly attracted to his message of repentance. In the end, what prevented Michelangelo from joining the Piagnoni like his older brother Lionardo was not a lack of religious fervor but the preacher’s disdain for the profession he practiced and that to him was as vital a source of spiritual sustenance as the sacraments.
Like many cultured men of his day, Michelangelo found himself tugged in opposite directions, seduced by the sensual, humanist strain within Renaissance culture, but also longing for a more personal relationship with God. When he first returned to Rome in 1534—during the period his passion for Cavalieri burned hottest—Michelangelo poured out his heart in a series of drawings that were at once frankly sensual and pagan in their subject matter. Not surprisingly, as his passion for Cavalieri cooled and as his work on The Last Judgment began to dominate his thoughts, he set out once more on a spiritual journey from which he was sometimes distracted but never really abandoned.
His return to faith was nurtured by his friendship with the Marchesa of Pescara. Michelangelo probably first met Vittoria Colonna in the spring of 1536, while she was a resident at the Convent of San Silvestro. Vittoria was the daughter of one of the most exalted clans in Italy, the mighty Colonna of Rome, renowned for producing princes of the Church and mercenary generals in almost equal number. Following the death in 1525 of her husband, Francesco d’Ávalos, Marchese of Pescara, Vittoria had dedicated herself to a life of quiet contemplation, retiring to the convent, where she spent her days writing pious verses and studying with many of the foremost religious thinkers of the day.
By the time Michelangelo met her, the forty-six-year-old Vittoria was a beloved figure, renowned for her intelligence and revered for her goodness. Holanda describes her with only slight exaggeration as “one of the most illustrious and famous ladies in Italy and in all Europe . . . chaste yet beautiful, a Latin scholar, well-informed and with all the other parts of virtue and fairness to be praised in woman.” Though fifteen years Michelangelo’s junior, the great lady became something of a mother figure to a man who had few females to look up to in his life, a mentor and spiritual guide whose gentle nature exerted a calming influence on the often volcanic artist.
Like many sincere Catholics, the marchesa clung to the faith into which she was born while at the same time she was drawn to the Protestants’ call for a more direct experience of God; she revered the Holy Church, but could not turn a blind eye to the corruption of a priesthood more interested in promoting its worldly status than saving souls. Neither she nor her spiritual mentors wished to break from the Church. Rather, they hoped that by adopting the simple faith of the Apostles they could save it from a collapse induced by internal rot.
Even before the catastrophic sack of Rome, Pope Hadrian acknowledged that the Church must accept some of the blame for the current fracturing of Christendom. “God has permitted this persecution,” he proclaimed, “because of the sins of mankind, especially of priests and prelates. . . . For our part, we pledge ourselves, that the Curia, perhaps the source of all evil, shall be wholly renovated.” The disasters that plagued the reign of his successor only served to confirm this gloomy verdict. In 1536, Paul made common cause with the reformers when he instituted the Consilium de Emendanda Ecclesia (The Council on the Reform of the Church), naming as its head the devout Cardinal Gasparo Contarini.
But true reform was not simply a matter of rooting out corruption; a change of heart as well as of form was necessary before the Church would be able to meet its foes on the field of battle. In Italy, progressive Catholics like Contarini were known as the Spirituali. Many of them—including the Capuchin monk Fra Bernardino Ochino; Cardinal Reginald Pole,XVI cousin of King Henry VIII of England; and Pole ’s most famous disciple, Vittoria Colonna—were followers of the Spanish mystic Juan de Valdés. Like Luther himself, Valdés believed that grace was freely bestowed by God and could not be purchased through indulgences or even good works.
Luther’s doctrine sola fide, justification by faith alone, challenged the Church by eliminating the elaborate machinery that allowed men and women to secure a place in heaven simply by purchasing indulgences or submitting to sacraments administered by a priest. In time, Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone came to be viewed as a mortal threat to an institution that claimed to have received from Christ himself the “keys to the kingdom of heaven,” but in these early days one could at least flirt with the dangerous belief while remaining a true son or daughter of the Church. Del Beneficio di Gesù Crocifisso (On the Blessings of Jesus Crucified)—written by a follower of Valdés, Fra Benedetto da Mantova—spread the doctrine of justification to the Catholic world, proclaiming: “The justice of Christ is sufficient to make us the Children of Grace, without any good works on our part. . . .”
Still, Vittoria and her fellow Spirituali had to walk a fine line, maintaining outward obedience to the Church while seeking a more direct experience of the divine.XVII As Cardinal Pole put it, she should “believe that she could only be saved by faith, but . . . act as if she could only be saved by works.” Before attitudes hardened in the wake of the Council of Trent (1545–63), it seemed possible that the reformers and the papacy would find common ground.XVIII Indeed, many had welcomed the election of the current pope, believing he shared their basic goals: “You have taken the name of Paul,” they wrote. “We hope that you will imitate his charity. He was chosen as an instrument to carry the name of Christ long since forgotten among the heathen and by us the clergy, to heal our sickness, to unite Christ’s sheep again in one fold, and to avert from our heads the wrath and already threatening vengeance of God.”
Michelangelo was introduced to the doctrines of the Spirituali through his friendship with the marchesa. As he had done during the period of his infatuation with Cavalieri, Michelangelo memorialized his intimacy in both verse and image. While his desire for Cavalieri had wrung from him passionate sonnets and drawings filled with erotically charged pagan imagery, his relationship with the noble Vittoria elicited only pious expressions. Despite the best attempts of biographers (including Condivi) to manufacture a romantic interest between the artist and the chaste noblewoman, there was never the least hint of a sexual attraction. There is no doubt that Michelangelo cared for her deeply and that she returned his feelings, but nothing suggests anything more than an affection between two people united by mutual admiration.
Their friendship was sealed early on by an exchange of gifts. “Before taking possession, Signora,” Michelangelo wrote upon receiving from her some religious verses, “of the things which Your Ladyship has several times wished to give me, I wanted, in order to receive them as little unworthily as possible, to execute something for you by my own hand. Then I came to realize that the grace of God cannot be bought, and that to keep you waiting is a grievous sin.” In return for her gift, he made for the marchesa three exquisite drawings, including a Pietà and a magnificent image of the Crucifixion rendered in black chalk. “Unique Master Michelangelo and my most particular friend,” Vittoria wrote after she had a chance to examine them, “I have received your letter and seen the Crucifix which has certainly been crucified in my memory.”
Michelangelo, Crucifixion, c. 1536. © The Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY
The immediacy and raw emotion of these drawings reveals Michelangelo’s deep engagement with Spirituali beliefs. Meant for private devotion, these images reflect a longing for an intimate experience of God. “Through the cross, through blood and swea
t,” Colonna wrote in one of her canzoni, “with a spirit ever more burning for trial, and not/ with idle wishes and sluggish deeds should man/ serve his true Lord.” As she knelt beside Michelangelo’s moving images, what need had she of priests and their rituals?
For Michelangelo, the Spirituali emphasis on a personal engagement with Christ confirmed his experience of God’s presence in his life. He was skeptical of priests and the institution of the Church, certain that, for better or worse, he alone was responsible for his fate. The phrase he used in his letter to Vittoria—“I came to realize that the grace of God cannot be bought”—is an allusion to the belief in justification by faith that he had absorbed during their conversations at the Convent of San Silvestro, a sly tribute to his guide in matters of the soul. A more explicit reference to these ideas comes in a sonnet from the 1530s:
O flesh, O blood, O holy wood that caused Your agony,
My sins are justified through You,
the sin in which I’m born, my father too.
You are the highest good; Your boundless mercy
lifts me from the mire,
so close to death, from God so far.
It is easy to discern Vittoria’s influence in the intimate drawings he made for her private devotion, but the doctrines of Valdés, Pole, and the rest of the Spirituali also shaped Michelangelo’s conception of The Last Judgment. The massive fresco was the first work to grapple with the radical metaphysics in which the burden of salvation is lifted from the Church and placed instead on the individual conscience. Before the Protestants and the Catholic reformers revealed that grace could not be bought, the path to heaven had been well marked; it was even supplied with toll booths that allowed the faithful to proceed onward and upward after the payment of a nominal fee. The clergy served as both toll collectors and traffic cops, and the rites they administered constituted rules of the road that all could follow.
Michelangelo has done away with this neat, well-regulated scheme. All is chaos. Each of us must find his or her own way, groping in the darkness to an unseen destination. In his version of the world to come, the old hierarchies have been demolished, just as they were disintegrating here on earth. Salvation can no longer be assured by human institutions; certainty has given way to doubt, rigidity to a dynamism at once exhilarating and frightening. The new theology provided a religious experience that was more intense but also disorienting, as each of us stumbles along obscure paths, clinging to hope but full of dread. If the medieval conception of the Last Judgment served to reinforce the existing social order—with the Church in the crucial role as the mediator between heaven and earth—Michelangelo’s reflects the anxiety of an age in which the traditional institutions had been discredited but the new theology was still in flux.
Traditionalists responded to the fresco with varying degrees of discomfort as they sensed a subversive message they could not quite define. To Michelangelo’s contemporaries, one of the most striking features of the painting—a source of inspiration to some, confusion to many others—is the absence of the usual attributes by which an artist provides a who’s-who of the heavenly realm. A few of the saints to Christ’s left are identifiable by the traditional instruments of their martyrdom—St. Catherine with her wheel; St. Lawrence with his griddle; St. Bartholomew with the knife and flayed skin—but the hosts of Heaven are remarkable for their ambiguity or complete anonymity. Even Condivi and Vasari could not agree whether the figure immediately to Christ’s right dressed in animal skins is Adam or St. John the Baptist, while the figure bearing the Cross is either St. Philip or Dismas. And while St. Peter is immediately recognizable through the keys he holds, his counterpart St. Paul has never been positively identified. One critic complained that, unlike earlier painters who showed “sacred images modest and devout, with those signs that have been given by the ancients for the privilege of sainthood,” Michelangelo and those who followed him painted “acrobats and actors rather than those who stand in contemplation . . . [and] have so lowered that holy usage with this new invention, that they could hardly paint figures more immodest in bathhouses or taverns.”
Not only does Michelangelo’s celestial realm lack signposts that would allow us to orient ourselves, it confronts head-on the unpredictability of grace. Instead of being greeted by neat ranks of well-labeled saints that explain our place in the celestial bureaucracy, we are thrown in with the clamorous mob, a confusing jumble of “acrobats and actors,” many of them nude or half nude so that to many observers they looked less like the elect than like participants in an orgy. Another critic complained of those souls who embrace each other just to the right of St. Peter: “Is it not ridiculous to represent among the multitude of blessed souls in heaven, some tenderly kissing each other, when they ought to be intent, with their minds fixed in contemplation of the Divinity, and of the future sentence.”
Michelangelo’s tumultuous masterpiece offered an Apocalypse that spoke to the uncertainties of the new age, one in which the saints’ role as intercessors between this life and the next has been undermined. Even Mary, traditional symbol of the Mother Church, no longer has the power to intervene on our behalf. And if these holy men and women cannot save us, how much less can we depend on those normal social markers that distinguish us here on earth. The clothes that separate the priest from his flock and the rich man from his servant have been discarded. In the end, each of us must face the ultimate test naked and alone.
Painting both saints and sinners in the nude, then, was not a gratuitous pagan intrusion into a Christian subject but an essential part of Michelangelo’s message, an affirmation that we are all equal in the sight of the Lord. But such subtle theological reasoning offered an inadequate defense in the face of increasingly vituperative attacks by Protestants, as well as many within the fold, who accused the Church of commissioning art that was both decadent and idolatrous. Following the lead of the pope ’s master of ceremonies, it was easier simply to denounce Michelangelo’s fresco as indecent.
The most articulate, if the least scrupulous, critic was Pietro Aretino, a surprising role for a man who, only a few years earlier, was threatened with arrest after he provided verses to accompany a series of obscene engravings by Giulio Romano.
Now Aretino joined the hypocrites he so eloquently skewered when they pointed out his own transgressions. In an open letter to Michelangelo he professed his outrage at the sight of so much naked flesh, excusing the apparent inconsistency on the flimsy grounds that he at least kept his pornography separate from his faith. Willfully ignoring the deep philosophical significance Michelangelo attached to the naked body, he played to the crowd:
[A]s a baptized Christian, I am shamed by the license, so unlawful to soul and intellect, you have taken in expressing those ideas and that goal to which all aspects of our truest faith aspires. So then—that Michelangelo of stupendous fame, that Michelangelo notable for his prudence, that Michelangelo whose demeanor all admire has chosen to display to the people a religious impiety only matched by the perfection of its painting. Is it possible that you, who since you are divine do not deign to consort with men, have done this in the most majestic temple of God? Above the chief altar of Jesus? In the greatest chapel of the world where grand cardinals of the church, reverend priests, and the Vicar of Christ himself confess? . . . And yet is a Christian, who because he rates art higher than faith, holds it as right royal a spectacle to observe no decency among martyrs and virgins as to show someone being seized by his genitals: a brothel would avert its eyes in order not to see such things. What you have done would better suit a voluptuous bath-house than the supreme chapel! It would be less heinous if you had no belief, rather than being a believer yourself, to sap belief in others.
Despite the heavy-handed sarcasm and the blatant dishonesty of the letter, Aretino makes at least one crucial point. His accusation that Michelangelo “rates art higher than faith” exposes his greatest transgression in the eyes of his critics: his insistence that the true artist must emancipate hims
elf from the tyranny of vulgar princes and narrow-minded clerics. For more than four decades he had struggled to redefine what it meant to be an artist, replacing the traditional view of the craftsman who worked on commission with that of the shaman who tapped into a hidden source of spiritual power. But in the heated atmosphere of the Counter-Reformation such freethinking was unacceptable. Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti set down what was to be expected of artists from now on in his Discorso Intorno alle Imagini Sacre e Profane (Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images), largely in response to the scandal provoked by Michelangelo’s infamous fresco:
Some subjects by their nature are not known or are not clearly narrated in Scripture, in which case it seems to many that this allows them a wide field for representing them according to their own imagination. Such is the case in depicting the terrifying Last Judgment and the person of Lucifer, the damned souls, the celestial glory, or the highest heaven and the thrones of the blessed. In such things many inventions are made up merely from the artist’s head, without being supported by or based upon any doctrine of the Holy Fathers or of others approved by the Holy Church. . . . We know that some painters at times excuse themselves, saying these novelties have an allegorical meaning. . . . We say, since it is the duty of the painter to represent things naturally as they are shown to mortal eyes, he must not go beyond his limits, but rather leave to the theologians and the holy doctors the expansion of them to other higher or more hidden meanings. Otherwise everything would be confused and things would pass tumultuously from the natural state to that of grace or glory.
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