Michelangelo

by Miles J. Unger

  On the one hand, Michelangelo is engaged in a little self-promotion, attempting to persuade someone who may have been skeptical of his qualifications that his training made him the perfect man for the job. But he was doing more than this: Michelangelo’s approach to anatomy, unlike Vitruvius’s—and also unlike that of Leonardo, the only contemporary to rival his profound knowledge of the human bodyV—is functional, not based on abstract mathematical proportions but on the dynamism of a body in motion. Inscribing the body inside various geometrical patterns works when that body is conceived as a static form, but what happens when that figure crouches, twists, or recoils in horror? Then, rigid formulas must give way to a different kind of understanding.

  Michelangelo’s approach to building follows from this insight. Weight, mass, tension, stress—these are not simply problems to be solved by the engineer but the very soul of the building. This is not exactly the modernist creed that form must follow function. Indeed, Michelangelo often makes a mockery of these fundamental laws of physics, as when he places the columns of the Laurentian Library vestibule in recessed niches or leaves the brackets of the Medici tombs hanging in midair. But unlike most architects, whose esthetic demands a static sense of order, of logical coherence, Michelangelo treats the building as a dynamic system, as each part responds to the forces working upon it. Exertion and exhaustion, rather than serenity and balance, are the hallmarks of his architecture.

  In the case of St. Peter’s, this quality can be most clearly seen in the so-called hemicycles, the walls and pilasters that weave around the rear of the building like a Chinese dragon and that support the soaring mass of the dome above. Compared to Bramante ’s perfect circles, squares, and crosses, Michelangelo’s undulating wall feels like something living, an effect achieved, in part, by defying Vitruvian norms and turning the secondary piers at oblique angles so that one form flows into another. These quirky shapes are the equivalent of the lozenge he introduced into the pavement of the Campidoglio that gives the impression that the ground is being squeezed by the converging buildings to either side. The whole western half of the church appears to throb and swell in response to the burden of carrying the immense dome above, as if, like the millions of pilgrims making the rounds of the holy sites, the stones themselves wish to show their devotion to the Lord through the strength of their effort.

  Also uncanonical are the giant Corinthian pilasters that rise from the ground to the architrave (the horizontal band that runs below the attic) and that knit together the multiple stories of the exterior wall into coherent units. Though based on ancient precedents, such “colossal” orders—which he also deployed in the buildings of the Campidoglio—can be found nowhere in Vitruvius. It was one of those creative adaptations to novel situations that offended those for whom the ancient texts were gospel.VI In another break with convention, Michelangelo superimposes these pilasters so that they overlap and bunch together at each turn, like a bundle of sticks gathered in the hand, softening the angles and reinforcing the impression that we are looking at a natural rather than a man-made form. The bays articulated by these grouped pilasters are not uniform, but instead alternate in a pattern of wide-narrow-wide, creating a rhythmic movement that encourages us to move in sympathetic response. This accordionlike effect of compression and release is echoed in the architrave, where the parallel bands bunch together as if squeezed by the weight of the dome above. Ironically for a sculptor who famously despised the technique of modeling, Michelangelo treats his building materials as if they were as malleable as soft clay. Of course, the pilasters and other architectural elements are cut from hard stone—the warm, pale travertine so often favored by Roman builders—but they seem to respond to the undulant flow of the wall, dispersing or clumping together as it snakes along the ground.

  • • •

  Michelangelo’s most visible contribution to the exterior is the soaring dome on its high drum that still dominates the Roman cityscape, a beacon to the armies of the devout—and to the hordes of tourists—who can use it to orient themselves without the need of a map. Even here, however, an uncertain journey leads from conception to realization. While the drum was completed by 1564, the dome was not raised until 1590, when Giacomo della Porta finished the job in a remarkable two-year campaign.

  Most scholars assume that the vertical contour we see today is not the one Michelangelo intended but is the invention of della Porta freely interpreting his predecessor’s design. Making the dome steeper allowed for greater visibility as the church was extended to the east to form a traditional Latin cross, and relieved some of the lateral stress that would have been exerted by the hemispherical cupola originally contemplated. But in fact, sketches from Michelangelo’s workshop show the artist playing around with alternate profiles, trying out different combinations of drum, cupola, and lantern. Unlike Sangallo, who worked out every detail in advance, Michelangelo liked to keep his options open, making modifications as he experienced the building rising up around him. If della Porta’s dome does not follow Michelangelo’s final conception, it certainly replicates ideas he had contemplated at an earlier stage of development.

  Even if we grant that the steeper profile is della Porta’s invention, in almost every other way the magnificent dome is essentially Michelangelo’s. Bramante had proposed a low, stepped cupola of concrete inspired by the Pantheon, while Sangallo reconceived it as a tiered structure with stacked colonnades that would carry the fussy ornamentation of the lower stories into the sky. Not surprisingly, Michelangelo rejected Sangallo’s solution. But he also rejected Bramante ’s, sensing that the immense bulk of the church demanded a more dramatic focal point.

  In reimagining Bramante ’s cupola, Michelangelo naturally turned for inspiration to the famous dome erected by Brunelleschi more than a hundred years earlier in his hometown of Florence. Shortly after his appointment as operaius, he wrote to his nephew Lionardo: “I want you to get, through Messer Giovan Francesco, the height of the cupola of Santa Maria del Fiore from where the lantern begins to the ground, and then the over-all height of the lantern, and send it to me. Also send me in the letter the measured length of a third of a Florentine braccio [about two feet].”

  Like Brunelleschi’s dome, Michelangelo’s cupola is a ribbed vault made from mutually reinforcing shells. As built, St. Peter’s dome has three shells beginning (from the inside out) with the skin that forms the hemispherical interior and ending with the more conical vault that creates its distinctive profile.VII But while Michelangelo clearly looked to Brunelleschi for inspiration and structural guidance, he knew he could improve on the original. During his years in Florence he had been consulted by a commission tasked with completing the still-unfinished drum of the Cathedral. Not only did Michelangelo criticize Baccio d’Agnolo’s design for a gallery as “a cricket cage,” but he tried to work out his own solution to bridging the unsightly gap between the roof of the nave and the cupola. In the end, he abandoned the scheme as unworkable, but the lessons learned in this abortive project informed his design at St. Peter’s.

  Instead of the eight ribs springing from an octagonal drum, Michelangelo doubles the number to sixteen, each set on an entablature supported by pairs of Corinthian columns. Between these paired columns he places rectangular windows with alternating triangular and curved pediments, creating a musical, richly textured play of solid and void, light and shadow. Viewed from the ground and bathed in the bright Roman sun, the dome surges to a satisfying crescendo, billowing ever higher in powerful muscular ripples. Nowhere can Michelangelo’s unmatched feeling for sculptural form—for imparting to obdurate matter an almost sexual element of tumescence as stone seems imbued with pulsing life—be seen to greater effect, as the great stone vaults yearn skyward in a climax that is equal parts sensual and spiritual.

  • • •

  Entering the church, one is hard-pressed to discern the same genius at work. Indeed, it is difficult to experience a coherent sense of space at all in the gilded, polyc
hromed, encrusted, bejeweled, and generally overelaborated spectacle that constitutes the most famous church in Christendom. Though the space beneath the dome, as well as the surrounding areas encompassing the transept and the apse, largely reflects Michelangelo’s reworking of Bramante ’s basic scheme, all clarity is lost amid the profusion of decorative elements. The massive piers faced by colossal Corinthian pilasters—the most enduring relics of Bramante ’s original design—still possess some of the majesty of the original conception, but even here at its most capacious, St. Peter’s suffers from surfeit, a horror vacuii in which no surface is left undecorated, no space unencumbered.

  If there can be said to be a presiding genius at work here, it would be the great seventeenth-century sculptor and architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini, responsible for the baldachino—the gargantuan canopy that sits beneath the dome on spiral columns—and for the magnificent peristyle piazza, as well as much in between. In the years following Michelangelo’s death, the basilica continued to creep eastward as three bays and a narthex (porch) were added to the nave, transforming the centralized structure conceived by its first architect into the Latin cross that was always the favored solution of the Vatican bureaucracy.

  As the Renaissance faded, so did the infatuation with pure geometry that fifteenth- and sixteenth-century humanists absorbed from their study of Greek texts and Roman buildings. Such abstractions seemed irrelevant to the new passions and new imperatives of the Counter-Reformation. Just as titillating nudes and pagan gods were purged from frescoes and altarpieces, so too were the philosophical conceits of an earlier generation of architects swept aside to make way for built environments that served the needs of the Church Militant. If Alberti believed that a church should reflect the perfection of God, the popes who presided over the later stages of the construction thought like businessmen concerned with getting as many people through the door as possible. Once there, of course, they should be suitably impressed, but architectural space was not an end in itself—any more than beauty in painting or sculpture was an end in itself—but merely a means of heightening spectacle in order to win more converts to the faith.

  The new Basilica of St. Peter was finally consecrated on November 18, 1626, more than sixty years after Michelangelo’s death, in a solemn ceremony presided over by Pope Urban VIII. It was exactly 1,300 years after the consecration of the first church built atop St. Peter’s tomb and 120 years since Pope Julius II laid the cornerstone for its successor. More than 40 years would elapse before the complex received its final form with the completion of Bernini’s magnificent piazza, within whose stony embrace tens of thousands of the faithful still gather to hear Easter Mass or to welcome each new pope as he makes his first public appearance on the second-floor balcony. The church’s façade, designed by Carlo Maderno at the beginning of the seventeenth century, bears the inscription of a man every bit as boastful as the one who set the project in motion: IN HONOREM PRINCIPIS APOST PAVLVS V BVRGHESIVS ROMANVS PONT MAX AN MDCXII PONT VII (In honor of the Prince of Apostles, Paul V Borghese, Supreme Roman Pontiff, in the year 1612, the seventh of his reign).

  Even on the façade one can find echoes of Michelangelo’s work, particularly in the colossal Corinthian pilasters that define the corners. But while Maderno borrows some of his motifs, he lacks Michelangelo’s gift for expressive form. The wide, flat entranceway has none of the dynamism of the earlier work. Pompous, stuffy, and ornate, it is built to impress rather than to inspire, more closely resembling the approach to a royal palace or government office building than to the house of the Lord. Lacking all sense of transcendence, this represents the Church at its most corporate, most overstuffed, weighed down by earthly concerns.

  Though Bernini’s formal borrowings from Michelangelo are less immediately apparent, he shares more of his spirit. The sense of dynamic movement, the eccentricities of form in which a rigid geometry begins to melt into strange serpentines, culminates in Bernini’s exuberant version of the Baroque. The wraparound arms of the peristyle and the hip-swiveling columns supporting the baldachino are the young master’s tribute to the old. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine the full-blown biomorphic frenzy of Bernini—and of the Baroque in general—without those subversive deviations from strict rectilinearity first introduced by an architect who, as Vasari pointed out, “never consented to be bound by any law, whether ancient or modern . . . as one who had a brain always able to discover new things.”

  IV. O NIGHT, THE SWEETEST TIME

  From the time of his appointment by Pope Paul III on the first day of 1547 to his death a little more than seventeen years later, Michelangelo dedicated himself to the work at St. Peter’s, putting off a planned homecoming to Florence and begging Duke Cosimo de ’ Medici to excuse him on the grounds that he was engaged in a sacred undertaking. Whether or not he really intended to return to his native land or whether citing his work at the Vatican was merely a handy excuse to deflect the importunate duke, the challenge certainly engaged his mind and taxed his frail body; the fact that he was doing the Lord’s work also soothed his troubled soul. Indeed, it was a fitting culmination to a career that had begun more than half a century earlier, and which saw him rise from a humble apprentice in the studio of Ghirlandaio to become the most famous artist on earth, a man who could sharply rebuke a prince of the Church or take his ease with popes.

  Worldly considerations alone would not have caused him to take on this herculean task. His reputation was secure even without this particularly gaudy feather in his cap, and despite his incorruptibility, he had become financially secure, even wealthy, in the service of popes and other great lords. In 1547 he was seventy-two years old and troubled by the usual illnesses that afflict old men. The difficulty of the work—not to mention the trials of battling with a recalcitrant bureaucracy and fending off ambitious young men eager to push him aside—took a daily toll. Though he remained as much of a perfectionist as always, his diminishing vigor meant that his desire to control every aspect of the project was often a source of frustration. He could not be the hands-on, detail-obsessed tyrant of old; he simply lacked the energy to bully his underlings into submission. His unconventional approach and secretiveness meant that instructions to his workers were easily misinterpreted. On at least one occasion this proved a disastrous combination. In April 1557, Michelangelo discovered that the vault over the southern apse had been built incorrectly, as the overseer, one Bastiano Malenotti, misread his plans, taking the centering structure he had sketched out to be the design for the vault itself. “I am in a state of greater anxiety and difficulty over the affairs of the said fabric than I have ever been,” he wrote to the duke. “This is because, owing to my being old and unable to go there often enough, a mistake has arisen over the vault of the Chapel of the King of France, which is unusual and cunningly contrived, and I shall have to take down a great part of what has been done.” In reporting the same mishap to Vasari, he concluded, “if one could die of shame and grief I should not be alive.”

  But Michelangelo persevered, working against time to secure his legacy. Like Pope Julius II, who had decided to rebuild St. Peter’s as a monument to God and to himself, Michelangelo assumed that whatever served his art must necessarily serve the Lord. As he approached the end of his life, his piety deepened, but dedicating himself to a higher cause did not mean he was capable of putting ambition aside or that he was inclined to treat his colleagues with greater consideration. He continued to believe that the world was full of mediocre men determined to steal credit for his work, as he explained in a letter of 1557 to his nephew: “[I]f I’ve delayed in coming [to Florence] as I promised, I’ve always included this condition, that I would not depart until I had brought the building of St. Peter’s so near to completion that no one could ruin or change my design, and to give no opportunity to those who would rob and steal.” If he was to invest so much of himself in this final tribute to an awesome God, he wanted to make sure the Lord knew who was making the offering.

  Mich
elangelo was not only beset by technical difficulties but harassed by the deputies of La Fabbrica, who continue to wage guerrilla war against him. In return, he made no secret of his disdain, treating them as nothing more than bean counters who should keep their noses out of his business, while they schemed behind his back to have him replaced. “From the year 1540 when the rebuilding of St. Peter’s was resumed with new vigor to the year of 1547, when Michelangelo began to do and undo, to destroy and rebuild at his own will, we have spent 162,624 ducats,” the deputies of the Fabbrica complained to the pope:

  [We] highly disapprove Michelangelo’s methods, especially in demolishing and destroying the work of his predecessors. This mania for pulling to pieces what has already been erected at such enormous cost is criticized by everybody; however, if the Pope is pleased with it, we have nothing to say.

  Once again Julius III was forced to choose between the artist and the bureaucrats, and once again he ruled in Michelangelo’s favor, issuing a new motu proprio (decree by his own will) that not only reaffirmed the authority given to him by Pope Paul, but also named two additional deputies of unimpeachable loyalty whose sole purpose was to ensure that Michelangelo would not be “disturbed, or hindered, or disquieted in any way. . . .”