Michelangelo

by Miles J. Unger

  By now Michelangelo was so frail he could no longer write his own letters, adding his signature after he had dictated them to an assistant. He was growing increasingly dependent on the members of his small household. Friends and family back in Florence worried that his various assistants and housekeepers were taking advantage of him. Showing he had lost none of his old pugnaciousness, in August 1563, Michelangelo dictated an angry note to his nephew:

  Lionardo—I see from your letter that you are lending credence to certain envious rascals who, being unable either to manage me or to rob me, write you a pack of lies. They are a lot of sharks and you are such a fool as to lend credence to them about my affairs as if I were an infant. Spurn them as envious, scandal-mongering, low-living rascals. As regards allowing myself to be looked after, about which you write me, and about the other things—I tell you, as to being looked after, I could not be better off; neither could I be more faithfully treated and looked after in every way. As regards my being robbed, which I believe you mean, I assure you I don’t need to worry about the people I have in the house, whom I can rely on.

  On February 12, 1564, Michelangelo took up his tools for the last time, scraping away at the already emaciated forms of the Rondanini Pietà. He intended to work some more the following day, until he was reminded that it was Sunday, the day of rest. The following afternoon Michelangelo suffered a minor stroke. Though he rallied a bit, it was clear to him that the end was not far off. Sending for his friend the sculptor Daniele da Volterra, he said: “O Daniele, I am done for; I ask you not to abandon me.” Michelangelo then requested Daniele to summon his nephew. “So it would seem to me,” Daniele wrote to Lionardo, “that you should not delay in coming here; and when you are here you will be able to arrange things for the future as will seem best to you.”

  Unfortunately, Michelangelo had waited too long. The following day, the sculptor Diomede Leoni reported: “I left him . . . a little after the third hour of night [about eight], feeling well and in sound mind, but much troubled with continual insomnia . . . between twenty-two and twenty-three in the afternoon, he wanted to go riding as he is used to doing every fine evening. But the seasonal coldness and the weakness of his head and legs prevented him, so he returned to the fireside and settled down in a chair, which he greatly prefers to his bed.”

  Michelangelo passed away early on the evening on February 18, 1564, “in the attitude of a perfect Christian about the time of the Ave Maria.” Present at the end were his servants Antonio Francese and Pierluigi Gaeta, his two physicians, and a few close friends, including the artists Daniele da Volterra and Diomede Leoni. Also at his bedside was Tommaso de ’ Cavalieri, faithful to the end.

  V. THE GREATEST MAN THE WORLD HAS KNOWN

  News of Michelangelo’s death was greeted with mourning in Rome and in his native Florence, as well as in the courts and capitals of Europe. His physician Gherardo Fidelissimi, writing to Duke Cosimo, described him with more than a hint of exaggeration as “the greatest man the world has ever known.” While a bit over the top, Fidelissimi’s evaluation reflected the universal sense of loss. The hagiography began almost at once, replacing the flesh-and-blood reality of a flawed, tormented man with the pale ghost of a secular saint.

  Like the remains of other holy men or patriotic heroes, Michelangelo’s body was fought over by those claiming to represent his true home. Rome ’s claims could certainly not be ignored: he had spent the greatest part of his career in the Eternal City, and his greatest triumphs had been won in the service of the popes. In 1537, the city had recognized his contribution by bestowing on him the rare honor of citizenship. Florence ’s claims were equally valid. Florence was the land, if not exactly of his birth, of his ancestors, and the place with which he identified most strongly. Here he had grown to adulthood and to maturity as an artist, following in the footsteps of Donatello, Masaccio, and Brunelleschi.

  Most critically, however many years he spent in Rome he continued to see himself as a Florentine, and if he delayed returning to the city late in life, he made no secret of where he wished to be buried: “[Y]ou must know for certain that I desire to lay my feeble bones beside those of my father, as you beg me,” he told Vasari a decade before his death, and in the intervening years he never strayed from his intention to find eternal rest in his native land.

  The desire to possess the great man’s remains touched off a comical competition between the two cities. Shortly after his death, Michelangelo’s body was carried in solemn procession, “in the sight of all Rome,” to the Church of the Holy Apostles. There, Pope Pius IV proclaimed, he would remain until a more suitable tomb could be prepared in St. Peter’s itself. But the pope had not counted on the determination of the people of Florence to retrieve the remains of their most famous son. “Lionardo, his nephew, arrived after it was all over,” Vasari reported:

  When Duke Cosimo was informed of the event, he confirmed his resolve that since he had not been able to have him and honor him alive, he would have him brought to Florence and not hesitate to honor him with all manner of pomp after death; and the body was sent secretly in a bale, under the title of merchandise, which method was adopted lest there might be a tumult in Rome, and lest perchance the body of Michelangelo might be detained and prevented from leaving Rome for Florence.

  • • •

  Michelangelo’s body arrived at the customs house in Florence on March 10, where it was taken into custody by Giorgio Vasari, acting on behalf of the Accademia del Disegno. His body was placed in San Pietro Maggiore, before being carried by the artists of Florence in a solemn torchlight procession to the Church of Santa Croce, only a block or two from the artist’s boyhood home. Vasari and his colleagues attempted to keep news of his arrival in Florence secret, “lest the report might spread through the city, and there might flock thither such a multitude that it would not be possible to avoid a certain degree of tumult and confusion. . . .” But despite their best efforts, word got out and “in the twinkling of an eye the church was so filled, that in the end it was with the greatest difficulty that the body was carried from the church to the sacristy. . . .”

  Indeed, the process of interring the great man soon took on the dimensions of a sacred nationalistic rite. While no actual miracles were attributed to Michelangelo, the stories surrounding the fate of his mortal remains follow a script familiar from the lives of holy martyrs. When the coffin was opened—at the request of Don Vincenzo Borghini, the current Lieutenant of the Academy—the crowd was stunned by what they found:

  [W]hen . . . all the rest of us present thought to find the body already marred and putrefied, because Michelangelo had been dead twenty-five days and twenty-two in the coffin, we found it so perfect in every part, and so free from any noisome odor, that we were ready to believe that it was rather at rest in a sweet and most peaceful sleep.

  Years earlier, the poet Ariosto had called him, “Michael, more than mortal, angel divine.” The “miracle” of his uncorrupted body turned metaphor into fact.

  For the most part, however, claims of divine favor avoided such idolatry. It was not the man himself but his genius that was heaven-sent, as Vasari proclaims at the end of his biography:

  Truly his coming was to the world, as I said at the beginning, an exemplar sent by God to the men of our arts, to the end that they might learn from his life the nature of noble character, and from his works what true and excellent craftsmen ought to be. And I, who have to praise God for infinite blessings, as is seldom wont to happen with men of our profession, count it among the greatest blessings that I was born at the time when Michelangelo was alive, that I was thought worthy to have him as my master, and that he was so much my friend and intimate, as everyone knows, and as the letters written by him to me, now in my possession, bear witness. . . .

  Duke Cosimo had a somewhat different view. As anxious as Vasari to exploit Michelangelo’s fame, he was less interested in the metaphysical significance of his life than he was with the propaganda that
could be exploited in death. To this end, he graciously agreed to the Academy’s request (no doubt arranged beforehand) that the memorial service be held in the Medici family Church of San Lorenzo. Cosimo spared no expense to make the tribute as magnificent as possible. On July 14, 1564, Michelangelo’s coffin was placed on an elaborate platform in San Lorenzo surrounded by allegorical figures designed by the leading artists of the day representing Florence and Rome, as well as a statue of Fame and paintings illustrating scenes of his life. Many of these scenes stressed the intimate relations between the artist and the Medici family, including one showing Lorenzo the Magnificent’s first encounter with Michelangelo in his sculpture garden, and another showing Pope Clement granting the commission to build the Library of San Lorenzo. A Latin epitaph on the side facing the high altar read:

  The Academy of Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, with the favor and assistance of Duke Cosimo de ’ Medici, their head and the supreme protector of these arts, admiring the extraordinary genius of Michelagnolo Buonarroti, and seeking to acknowledge in part the benefits received from their own hands and from all the affection of their hearts, to the excellence and genius of the greatest painter, sculptor, and architect there has ever been.

  In his eulogy, Benedetto Varchi asked: “Who ever lived a more godly life? Who ever died a more Christian death than Buonarroti?” Many of those who actually knew him could have supplied the speaker with a host of candidates, but accuracy was not really the point. Varchi began with the premise that art is a noble profession, an expression of a divine spark, from which he derived what seemed to him the logical corollary: that the man who had practiced that profession for so long at the highest levels must himself be something akin to a saint. Commenting on Michelangelo’s sonnet, Varchi had written: “The greatest power that can be bestowed upon man is the faculty of soaring to the heavens, while still belonging to earth, and of becoming not just an angel but God himself.” All artists traffic in sacred mystery, but it was Michelangelo who led the way, revealing how close a mere mortal could approach to the divine.

  Paradoxically, the tributes that poured in even before his death suggest that Michelangelo had already become a relic of a vanished age of giants. The man had become legend, assigned to that distant Olympus where the gods reside largely untroubled by the goings-on of mere mortals.

  Like all gods, Michelangelo was more revered than obeyed. Even minor works were treasured as holy relics, while monuments that still played a role in public life were modified by men who paid lip service to his genius but shaped his legacy to suit their own needs. This task became all the more critical as the process of his apotheosis gathered momentum, lest the more impressionable be persuaded that anything he touched had the unassailable status of scripture. The Council of Trent, which concluded its final session two months before Michelangelo’s death, declared: “[I]mages shall not be painted and adorned with a seductive charm, or the celebration of saints and the visitation of relics be perverted by the people into boisterous festivities and drunkenness.” The following month a commission headed by Cardinal Giovanni Morone decided to have the offending parts of The Last Judgment painted over, giving the job to Michelangelo’s friend Daniele da Volterra out of respect for the old man.

  For Michelangelo it was a bittersweet end to a decades-long battle against the censors and the know-nothings. Unlike the iconoclastic Protestants, the Catholic Church embraced the role of the arts in service of religion, but as conscripts in the pope ’s army, artists were no longer permitted the freedom of conscience that nurtured Michelangelo’s idiosyncratic genius. Even more than The Last Judgment, the Sistine Ceiling was a product of a vanished age when an artist was allowed to follow the dictates of his anarchic muse, without worrying about being hauled before the Inquisition.

  When it came to his last major work, the basilica to which he devoted the last decades of his life, a similar process of adaptation took place. After Michelangelo’s death, Pope Pius IV refused to hire a replacement without first getting guarantees that his successor would follow Michelangelo’s plans to the letter. But Michelangelo’s designs were themselves outdated, embodying the Renaissance belief that geometry was itself a sacred value, that divinity could be expressed through the perfect forms of the circle and the square. By the time of his death, such abstract notions seemed quaint as well as impractical. The Church had more pressing needs than to dwell in such ethereal realms. There were souls to be won and enemies to smite. Just as the indecent parts of The Last Judgment were painted over so as not to distract from the message of salvation and damnation, so too the most important church in Christendom would have to conform to rituals elaborated over centuries.

  In the following decades, the purity of Michelangelo’s design for St. Peter’s was obscured, suffocated beneath busy veneers, cluttered by elaborate altars, and encrusted with sparkling mosaics. Even had it been possible to follow a precise set of blueprints bequeathed by the great master, it would have been a betrayal of the intuitive, organic process by which he himself operated, responding to the building as it took shape, adapting his original conception to the exigencies of the moment.

  In the end, both works of art and legacies must live in the world. As objects, works of art are subject to the vicissitudes of time and of accidents, both natural and man-made. Both the St. Peter’s Pietà and the David were damaged by deliberate acts of vandalism, the Pietà in the twentieth century and the David in the sixteenth. And neither of them can be seen in the original context that formed a crucial part of the work’s meaning. The Medici tombs, while still in place, cannot be regarded as a definitive statement by the artist, but rather as a monument to a process interrupted and frozen in time.

  His great frescoes have fared no better. Darkened by soot and then overzealously scrubbed, retouched by both competent craftsmen and ignorant hacks, updated by later generations that assumed they knew what the master had in mind or could improve on his original conception, they are not the same works Michelangelo saw when he laid down his brushes and stepped back to admire his handiwork.

  None of his masterpieces, however, has suffered the indignities of his last great work, the immense Basilica of St. Peter. But while we may regret the loss of Michelangelo’s vision, it was never really his in the first place. By its very nature architecture is a collaborative endeavor, involving the labor of thousands and the genius of at least a few—particularly on a work as vast and important as this one. For all its flaws, its bombast, and its gaudy splendor, its mismatched parts and bland affect, it embodies the vast bureaucracy and tortured history of the institution it represents far better than any work derived from the mind of a single man, even one as gifted as Michelangelo.

  • • •

  The meaning of a life is even harder to determine. Fame is a free-floating signifier, able to be harnessed in almost any context and for any purpose. The process began even before Michelangelo’s death. Artists basked in his reflected glory, walking through doors he opened that led directly into the elegant salons of society’s elite and to the tables of great lords, where a successful painter or sculptor now had an honored place. For Florentines, his fame bolstered their shaken confidence after years of foreign domination, reminding them of their glorious past, while for the lords of that city, the presence of his body—now laid to rest in an ornate tomb in Santa Croce, pantheon of the city’s famous sons—conferred a certain legitimacy on a regime still resented by many of its own subjects. For the Church he had served so well for so many years, Michelangelo remained something of a problem, both the brightest star in a constellation of brilliant men whose talents had served to glorify the one true religion, but also a dangerous example of freethinking that was no longer acceptable in an age that valued discipline over originality.

  Over the years, Michelangelo has been both beatified and vilified, reinvented in each subsequent age to suit its particular needs. He ’s been in and out of fashion, but whether he is viewed as an inspirational example of
someone willing to defy convention or a monument so imposing as to block all possibility of forward progress, his life and his work changed the world. He not only transformed the way art was made but the role art plays in our collective consciousness. In fact, he invented the very notion of genius, if by that term we mean greatness that flows from the peculiarities of an individual life and personality, not merely the application of great skill to a given medium.

  Before Michelangelo, it was possible to tell the story of art without reference to the artist. The artist was a man possessed of expertise, and his biography might throw an interesting light on his creations, elucidating the evolution of his style or the meaning of certain passages, but his works stood largely on their own. Michelangelo’s art refuses such anonymity. His paintings and sculptures can be forceful, strident, even belligerent; they are sometimes arrogantly confident and sometimes convulsed by agonized self-doubt; they can thunder across vast public spaces or communicate in a confessional whisper; in all cases they demand to be heard. More than any artist before him—or perhaps since—Michelangelo projects himself through his work into our lives, a ferocious, unignorable presence. Despite what his friends believed, or pretended to believe, he was no saint, nor are the things he touched possessed of any supernatural power. He was simply a man, mortal and very flawed. But after five centuries, the works he left behind offer something more nourishing than the faint perfume of sanctity. They throb with the earthy, pulsing, difficult stuff of life.

  * * *

  I. La Fabbrica still exists and continues to be responsible for the upkeep of the great basilica.

  II. Part of the reason for the neglect was the fact that Rome ’s civil officers had very little real power. The last vestiges of communal independence had long been stamped out by the popes, who wielded the real authority in the city.