Michelangelo

by Miles J. Unger

  Varchi’s second lecture was presented as a paragone, a learned discourse on the relative merits of painting and sculpture, taking as its point of departure Michelangelo’s oft-stated belief that carving in stone was the most noble of the arts. After receiving a copy of the lecture, Michelangelo sent a reply in which he acknowledged his prior views but confessed that Varchi had opened up to him new possibilities:

  I admit that it seems to me that painting may be held good in the degree in which it approximates to relief, and relief to be bad in the degree in which it approximates to painting. I used therefore to think that painting derived its light from sculpture and that between the two the difference was as that between the sun and the moon.

  Now since I have read the passage in your paper where you say that, philosophically speaking, things which have the same end are one and the same, I have altered my opinion and maintain that, if in face of greater difficulties, impediments and labors, greater judgment does not make for greater nobility, then painting and sculpture are one and the same, and being held to be so, no painter ought to think less of sculpture than of painting, and similarly no sculptor less of painting than of sculpture. By sculpture I mean that which is fashioned by the effort of cutting away, that which is fashioned by the method of being built up being like unto painting. It suffices as both, that is to say sculpture and painting, proceed from one and the same faculty of understanding, we may bring them to amicable terms and desist from such disputes, because they take up more time than the execution of the figures themselves. If he who wrote that painting is nobler than sculpture understood as little about other things of which he writes [a snide reference to Raphael’s friend Baldassare Castiglione, who made just such an argument in The Courtier]—my maidservant could have expressed them better.

  In this letter Michelangelo exhibits a surprising intellectual adroitness. Obviously flattered by Varchi’s attention and pleased to be welcomed into the community of writers, he appears to agree with the historian while at the same time making an able defense of the point he has apparently conceded. In fact, Michelangelo had an ulterior motive in conceding Varchi’s argument. By claiming that all the arts were equally noble since each had its genesis in the creative mind, “the faculty of understanding,” the humanist was conferring on Michelangelo’s profession the respectability he had fought for all his life. Michelangelo’s apotheosis at the Florentine Academy was further evidence that the humble artisan has joined the poet and the scholar as a member of the cultured elite. Artists work with their minds, not their hands, Michelangelo always insisted, a point driven home by Varchi’s eloquent tribute. Thus, while Michelangelo maintains his preference for “relief,” he has to agree with Varchi that a true artist is not defined by the medium in which he works: painters, sculptors, architects, poets, and musicians are all alike, shapers of the intangible stuff of the imagination, Man’s most noble endeavor and God’s greatest gift.

  • • •

  For Michelangelo, such tributes affirmed the path he ’d chosen in life, but securing his legacy meant not only securing his status as a great artist but also restoring the faded luster of the Buonarroti name. The two goals were inextricably linked in his mind, and each was vital to his sense of who he was. From a childhood marked by poverty and shame, he had struggled to bridge the chasm between the lofty self-image instilled in him by his father—who claimed descent from the nobilissimi counts of Canossa—and the humiliating reality he experienced every day. While Michelangelo’s brothers preferred to follow Lodovico’s example, leading lives of indolence in keeping with their exalted status, Michelangelo strived to restore the family fortune while simultaneously insisting that he worked not for monetary reward but out of a sense of a higher calling.

  Michelangelo funneled much of the money he earned from the sweat of his brow to his relatives, but his generosity came at a steep price. Each gift was accompanied by a sermon as well as an itemized account of every indignity he had been forced to endure so that they could live off the fruits of his labor. After the death of his father and brothers—his last surviving brother, Gismondo, died in 1555—his nephew Lionardo was the beneficiary of his largesse and the chief target of his ill humor. As the surviving member of the family tasked with carrying on the Buonarroti name, he was subject to a constant barrage of advice, complaint, and invective from his hard-to-please uncle. “I do not want to . . . describe to you the state of misery in which I found our family when I began to help them, because a book would not suffice,” he scolded Lionardo in a typical letter from 1551, “and never have I found anything but ingratitude. So give God recognition for the position in which you find yourself and do not go trailing after airs and graces.”

  Reading their correspondence, one sympathizes with the nephew, whose pathetic attempts to please his uncle were usually thrown back in his face. Michelangelo was both ill tempered and overbearing. While he occasionally expressed gratitude for the delicacies Lionardo insisted on shipping from Florence, Michelangelo would more often dash off a letter grousing that the wine was sour or the pasta moldy, and that he couldn’t use the items in any case. No act of kindness went unpunished, whether it was a gift of food or cloth with which to make a new set of clothes, or a trip to Rome to visit his uncle. In the summer of 1544, when Michelangelo was lying gravely ill in del Riccio’s apartment, Lionardo made a hurried journey to Rome. But instead of thanking him for his consideration, Michelangelo refused to see him. Adding insult to injury, he then fired off an angry letter in which he accused his nephew of hovering over him like a vulture over a dying beast. “Lionardo,” he wrote as soon as he was sufficiently recovered to hold his pen, “I have been ill and you have come in place of Ser Giovan Francesco to kill me off and to see if I’ve anything left. Isn’t all that you’ve had from me in Florence enough for you? You cannot deny you’re like your father, who turned me out of my own house in Florence. . . . So go with God, and don’t come near me any more and never write to me again. . . .” Del Riccio, adding to his long list of services that of family therapist, tried to heal the breach by reassuring Lionardo, “[I] have not failed to commend you to your Messer Michelangelo, who certainly loves you as a son.” Del Riccio was right. The truth is that for all his harsh words, Michelangelo loved his nephew, if only in his own peculiar and bullying way, and his constant carping was a sign of how much he had invested in the young man who had to bear the burden of carrying on the Buonarroti name.

  Much of their correspondence is concerned with purchasing property in and around Florence and the crucial task of finding Lionardo a suitable bride—the twin pillars upon which the future of the family would rest. As to the first, Michelangelo clung to the old-fashioned belief that land ownership conferred status. Much of his savings were invested in farmland in the contado, but he was even more obsessed with acquiring a stately mansion in Florence itself since, he explained to his nephew, “an imposing house in the city redounds much more to one ’s credit,” justifying the expense “since we are, after all, citizens descended from a very noble family.”

  Michelangelo knew less about women than he did about real estate, and his advice to his nephew in these matters is comical and often grotesque. The process of finding Lionardo a bride, which dragged on for years, shows Michelangelo alternately overly picky and completely bewildered. Given his insecurity about the Buonarroti’s status, he was far more concerned with pedigree than wealth. “All you need have an eye to is birth, good health and, above all, a nice disposition,” he wrote to Lionardo in 1550, not missing the opportunity to put down his nephew. “As regards beauty, not being, after all, the most handsome youth in Florence yourself, you need not bother overmuch, provided she is neither deformed nor ill-favored.”

  One of Michelangelo’s failings as a matchmaker was his deep-seated misogyny, though in this he was little different from most of his contemporaries. Typical of his hostile attitude is a letter he wrote to Lionardo in 1550 asking him if he could find him a new housekeeper,
“[one] who is clean and respectable—which is difficult, because they are all pigs and prostitutes—let me know. I pay ten julians a month; I live poorly, but I pay well.” Michelangelo’s disdain for women in general and the institution of marriage in particular can be gleaned by a letter he wrote to Lionardo in 1552, when it appeared that his nephew might be getting cold feet. If so, he commiserated, it was a feeling with which he could sympathize:

  Bishop de ’ Minnerbeti was here recently and . . . he asked me about you and about your taking a wife. We discussed it and he told me that he had a nice girl to present to you and also that she doesn’t have to be married out of charity. . . . Now you write me that I have no idea who among her relatives talked to you in Florence and encouraged you to take a wife, and told you that I greatly desired it. This you know for yourself from the letters I have written you on several occasions, and this I repeat, to the end that our race may not end here—not that the world would come to an end on that account. . . . If, however, you do not feel physically capable of marriage, it is better to contrive to keep alive oneself than to commit suicide in order to beget others.

  In the end, Lionardo overcame his doubts. The search was concluded in April 1553 when he married Cassandra, from the distinguished Ridolfi clan. The following month Michelangelo wrote to his nephew expressing his satisfaction in how things had turned out: “Lionardo, I understand from your last letter that you have taken the young lady to your house and that you are most content . . . but that you have not yet secured the dowry. Your satisfaction gives me the greatest pleasure, and it seems to me we should continually offer our thanks to God. . . . I feel I should mark the happy occasion. I’m told a beautiful pearl necklace would suffice.”

  Michelangelo finally settled on two fine rings—one diamond, one ruby—an unusual expression of paternal affection and an even rarer vote of confidence in his nephew. Soon, however, his normal pessimism reasserted itself. Responding to a letter from Lionardo expressing his contentment with his new bride, Michelangelo was quick to remind him that life was a vale of tears. “We must give thanks to God, all the more so because it is rare indeed.” In April 1554, when he heard news that Cassandra had given birth to a healthy boy, Michelangelo tempered his joy with a discourse on the unpredictability of life. “[S]uch pomp displeases me,” he told Vasari after hearing that his nephew had celebrated the occasion with a grand feast. “One ought not to laugh when the whole world weeps; on which account it seems to me that Lionardo hasn’t much judgment, and particularly not in making such a feast for the new-born with the rejoicing that should be reserved for the death of someone who has lived a good life.” The wisdom of Michelangelo’s gloomy prophecy was cruelly demonstrated the following year when a second son, named after his illustrious great-uncle, died after only a few weeks.XV

  • • •

  Death was never far from his thoughts these days. “[I]f life pleases us,” he mused, “we ought not to fear death which comes from the same Master.” In 1547, at the time of Benedetto Varchi’s tribute at the Florentine Academy, Michelangelo had already far exceeded the average life expectancy of a man of the era. Events like this, which seemed to have a commemorative, retrospective element, naturally caused him to dwell on his own mortality. “I am not only an old man,” he told Varchi, “but must almost be numbered among the dead.” It was his nature to dwell on the melancholy side of life and to see every accomplishment and every misstep in terms of a final reckoning. Soon he would stand before his Maker and answer for his life, and he was still unsure of the verdict. “Before men, I do not say before God, I count myself an honest man,” he confessed, and his doubts only grew as he approached the end. He berates himself for having “clung to fantasies,” for making “of my art an idol and a king,” though, he concludes, “I’ve come to know my error,/sad emptiness of Man’s desire.”

  But while Michelangelo regretted that so much of his life had been spent pursuing fame and fortune, he could not deny that art also provided him an essential spiritual outlet. Like his passion for Tommaso de ’ Cavalieri, which combined elements of illicit desire with other, more exalted sentiments, his passion for his art could not simply be dismissed as the sinful pursuit of worldly ambition. However much ego and ambition clouded the purity of the impulse, in the end he believed that his gift was a celebration of God’s creation.

  Nowhere is the link between the creative and religious impulses more evident than in the two Pietàs he left unfinished at his death. When, approaching the end of his life, Michelangelo picked up his hammer and chisels again, it was an act of reverence. Neither work was commissioned; each is the product of his need to pour out the most elemental yearnings of his soul, a motivation that seems entirely natural to us but that was still unusual in the sixteenth century. Like his work at St. Peter’s, these sculptures were made for the sake of his immortal soul rather than for worldly glory. Ever since he first encountered Vittoria Colonna and was drawn into the circle of the Spirituali, Michelangelo’s faith had expressed itself in ever-more-introspective forms. Poems and drawings provided a more intimate outlet for his religious impulses, allowing him to confess anxieties that would have been inappropriate to larger public works.

  The Florentine Pietà (c. 1547–55) and the Rondanini Pietà (c. 1556–64) represent Michelangelo’s final essays in a medium and on a theme that had engaged him from his earliest days. Unlike so many other sculptures that lack the final touches, these are not only unfinished but appear unfinishable. In fact, both are a testament to a still-vivid pictorial imagination no longer matched by equivalent physical powers. The Florentine Pietà in particular caused him no end of grief as he found it impossible to realize his vision. In a rage, he smashed Christ’s left leg with a hammer and would have destroyed it entirely if a friend, Francesco Bandini, hadn’t begged the artist to give it to him.

  The Florentine Pietà—which he intended for his own tomb—is one of the most complex figural compositions he ever attempted. It consists of four figures: Christ, the two Marys, and Nicodemus, whose cowled, bearded face is an idealized self-portrait. Depicting himself as one of those bearing the burden of the Savior’s body is an apt symbol of a life spent in the service of both art and God. Though ultimately unresolved—and perhaps unresolvable—the Florentine Pietà contains many profoundly moving passages, above all the lifeless body of Christ slumped in the arms of his mother and his most devoted follower.XVI

  The Rondanini Pietà is even more fragmentary. Its attenuated, sticklike forms are eerily reminiscent of Gothic Pietàs with their powerful yet crudely carved forms. The sculpture captured the imagination of many modern artists who celebrated its deficiencies as virtues. Audiences accustomed to the distortions of Brancusi and Giacometti can easily accept Michelangelo’s incorporeal forms, but for all its expressive power, the Rondanini Pietà must be regarded as a failure, a heartbreaking last work by a sculptor no longer able to realize in stone the forms he conjured in his mind.

  Both these late sculptures memorialize the slow withdrawing from the world that is a natural part of old age, a loss of skill, of energy, of worldly ambition, but also a corresponding engagement with the life to come. “I’ve reached the end of my life ’s journey,/a fragile boat swept along on stormy seas/to the port where all debark,” he wrote in 1552. At the time he composed this poem, he still had twelve years to live, but his thoughts had already turned to the life to come. Even art, the demanding muse to which he had dedicated his long years, seemed to him but an empty vanity.

  As he grew older, Michelangelo had increasing difficulty sleeping and often worked late into the night with the aid of a candle stuck into a paper hat. These final works have a quality of melancholy, of lonely vigils stretching out through the quiet hours when thoughts of mortality cannot be held at bay. “O night, though black, the sweetest time,” he wrote years earlier, while working on the Medici tombs,

  to peace converting all our toil. . . .

  O shadow of death, that closeth


  every anguish of the soul, all pain of heart,

  for every ill a blessed remedy.

  You restore to health our failing flesh,

  dry our tears and relieve our burdens,

  so that the good man need not struggle ever more.

  In 1557, Giovan Francesco Lottini reported to his master, Duke Cosimo, on the health of the eighty-two-year-old artist: “Michelangelo Buonarroti is, in fact, so old that though he still wishes to do so, he is unable to stir very far and now seldom or rarely goes to St. Peter’s, besides which the model [of the cupola] will take months and months to complete and he is obliged and anxious to complete it. When I made him Your Excellency’s offer, he was moved to tears and one could see that he was desirous of serving You if he had the power, but, in fact, he cannot do so, as besides the stone, he has other troublesome disorders.”

  Resigning himself to the fact that the aged artist would never serve as an ornament in his court, Cosimo did the next-best thing by honoring him in absentia. In 1563 he founded the Accademia del Disegno (Academy of Design), an official recognition that painting and sculpture had now achieved parity with the literary arts. Unlike the ancient painter’s Guild of St. Luke, this was not a fraternal organization of craftsmen but rather an honorary association of men considered leading lights in the intellectual community. To no one ’s surprise, Michelangelo was named “second academician” (Cosimo was the first) and designated the “head, father and master” of all the artists, an acknowledgment of his place in the hearts of his countrymen.