Heretics and Heroes

by Thomas Cahill

  Though the pubic hair and the dropped testicles alert us to the fact that David is no child, the oversized hands and feet (features the Greeks would have shunned as inelegant) remind us that this boy is still growing and possibly a little awkward. The breastbone pushing through his chest (another non-Greek feature) even elicits our tenderness for this boy-man. Though completely nude, this is no Donatellesque toyboy. Rather, to use an expression found in many languages, he’s got balls:9 this is a serious, even a grim figure, shown to us in his last moment before the decisive battle, when all is at stake.

  A committee of citizens (including Leonardo) decided that the extraordinary work must be exhibited in Florence’s central square in front of il Palazzo Vecchio, the town hall. “It was,” remarks Heusinger, “the first time since antiquity that a large statue of a nude was to be exhibited in a public space.” Though local newsstands today sell postcards displaying, among other views of the statue, a close-up of David’s genitals, this is just an example of contemporary embarrassment before herculean greatness: there is nothing sexually suggestive about this David. Michelangelo would have pulled down the newsstands in short order.

  What could an artist be expected to accomplish as an encore to a feat of such consummate grace? Why, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, of course.

  When, at the command of the newly elected Pope Julius II, Michelangelo came to Rome in 1505, he was just turning thirty. He brought with him not only his own colossal talent but the entire Italian Renaissance, which till then had been almost wholly confined to Tuscany, largely to Tuscany’s capital. Julius, a titanic figure possessed of a will to match Michelangelo’s in strength, wished to build a tomb for his own eventual interment, and this the pope envisioned as an enormous freestanding monument with forty-five life-sized statues, to be constructed in a manner so grand that its like had not been seen since the burials of great men in ancient times. Michelangelo, the pope thought, was the obvious fellow for the job.

  As the young artist settled into his work, the pope—at twice Michelangelo’s age—began to have trouble finding the right venue for his elaborate funerary erection. Meanwhile, he decreed, Michelangelo could keep busy by helping with plans for the new Saint Peter’s Basilica. Michelangelo, failing to obtain an audience with the pope to discuss these matters—and even barred by an officious little footman from entering the pope’s chambers—fled Rome. Soon enough, the artist found himself confined to Bologna and forced to work on most unwelcome tasks. Back in Rome by 1508, he was still prevented from working further on Julius’s tomb. Rather, the mercurial Julius decreed, Michelangelo could occupy himself by painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

  In order to perform this feat, Michelangelo, who, as we know, despised painting, had to learn the elaborate art of frescoing, something he’d never done before—but, as we also know, Michelangelo was an incredibly quick study. Now, as Michelangelo grudgingly accepted the limits placed upon him by the pope and began to plot a complex scheme for the ceiling, Julius II “allowed himself to be carried away by Michelangelo’s creative violence and the two inspired each other in turn with always grander designs,” to quote Heusinger.

  The result was the most splendid work of this reluctant artist’s amazing career, a progressive set of illustrations of salvation history that to this day fills every viewer with an awe that overwhelms whatever historical or theological preconception one may bring to the chapel, drowning any and every objection you may wish to pose between yourself and this ceiling and finally exalting you mercilessly in its very nearly blinding illumination. As Yeats would put it:

  Michael Angelo left a proof

  On the Sistine Chapel roof,

  Where but half-awakened Adam

  Can disturb globe-trotting Madam

  Till her bowels are in heat,

  Proof that there’s a purpose set

  Before the secret working mind:

  Profane perfection of mankind.

  It may be profane in the sense of its pagan roots in art history, but it is also deeply religious, profoundly rooted in the artist’s—certainly not the warrior-pope’s—biblical faith. While Michelangelo remained for four years wedded to the pope’s ceiling and his own elaborate plan for it, the equally busy pope—in silver armor—was leading papal armies through northern Italy, forming a holy league with Venice and Spain, then with England and Switzerland, driving the French from Italy, and adding Parma, Piacenza, and Reggio Emilia to the Papal States.

  Michelangelo, meanwhile, was gradually being crippled in the execution of this commission, as he lay on his scaffold straining himself unnaturally toward the ceiling, ending up with a goiter in his throat and most of his muscles and joints pushed out of shape. As he put it in one of his many excellent poems:

  La barba al cielo, e la memoria sento

  in sullo scrigno, e ’l petto fo d’arpia,

  e ’l pennel sopra ’l viso tuttavia

  mel fa, gocciando, un ricco pavimento.

  My beard toward Heaven, I feel the back of my brain

  Upon my neck. I grow the breast of a Harpy:

  My brush, above my face continually,

  Makes it a splendid floor by dripping down.

  Dinanzi mi s’allunga la corteccia,

  e per piegarsi adietro si ragroppa…

  In front of me my skin is being stretched

  While it folds up behind and forms a knot…

  Michelangelo had also to endure the curiosity of various papal insiders, as well as rival artists who, at work on other papal commissions, would inevitably attempt to steal a look at what he was up to. Raphael, in particular, was an annoyance. Eight years Michelangelo’s junior, he recognized the older artist’s enormous talent, but, a gifted imitator, he even tried to be appointed by Julius as Michelangelo’s replacement, once he had had a peek at the “new and marvelous style” in which Michelangelo was proceeding. Had his vile little conspiracy succeeded, we could have had a ceiling that gradually devolved from Michelangelo’s noble conceptions to a sweetly sentimental soup. Easy, untrustworthy Raphael, bon vivant, lover of many women, professional charmer, often painted in a mawkish style that he knew would be popular. Cute children and lovely women, whether the Virgin Mary or one of his current mistresses, tended to be his favored subjects. Essentially, he went Botticelli one better, though he lacked Botticelli’s underlying seriousness and owned no trace of Michelangelo’s unbending nobility. His late-night carousing shortened his life considerably: he died while still in his thirties. Let us memorialize him here with his sketch of Leda and the Swan, which he made in imitation of a lost work by Leonardo. (More of Raphael’s work may be found in the Portfolio of Egos, which follows.)

  Once Julius was able to absorb what Michelangelo was about, it is hard to imagine his ever switching artists. Rather, the old pope found himself ever more attached to this artist of his ceiling: he “loved him utterly,” wrote Ascanio Condivi in Michelangelo’s own lifetime, “and was more caring and jealous for him than for anyone else whom he had around him.” And Michelangelo returned the sentiment, despite the shocking candor with which he often addressed God’s Vicar. When Julius ordered him to enrich his Old Testament figures by adding some gold leaf to their draperies, Michelangelo refused outright, saying, “My Lord, they were all poor men.”

  (illustration credit 67)

  The vaulted ceiling on which Michelangelo lavished such love that he became utterly loved by such a pontiff, a man exceedingly brusque and egotistical even for a pope, cannot be adequately described here, for indeed it cannot be adequately described anywhere. It contains, by my count, seventy-five principal images—both full-fledged scenes and dramatic single figures, such as a succession of Hebrew prophets and classical sibyls—each one set off by itself and framed by some architectural or trompe l’oeil effect. Kings of Israel, as well as figures from secular history, such as Alexander the Great, put in an appearance. David slays Goliath once more, as Judith decapitates Holofernes. Moreover, there are scores of che
rubs and youthful nudes that serve as additional framing devices to the principal scenes and figures. And all is in aid of the central panels: the cosmic God of the Jews creating the universe and its first human beings, the Temptation in the Garden, the Expulsion, and the salvific story of Noah and the Flood.

  There are whole books devoted to unpacking this ceiling, and this book cannot be one of them. Rather, we print here a photograph of the ceiling [Plate 19] and a close-up of one of the scenes—the most famous image of all: The Creation of Adam [Plate 20]. But to understand the “proof” that Michelangelo left for us one must, like the “globe-trotting Madam” of Yeats’s poem, behold the thing in itself, not merely in reproduction. Go early in the day, taking the first bus from Saint Peter’s Square at 8:30 a.m., when most tourists are still eating their breakfasts. And when the bus drops you at the Vatican Museum, do not linger over any of the astonishing riches to be seen along the way. Go straight to the Sistine Chapel. If possible, lie down on the floor. And look.

  And as you look, the ceiling will greet you, welcome you, and take you in. As Elaine Scarry has described the confrontation with a supreme masterpiece: “Not Homer alone but Plato, Aquinas, Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, Dante, and many others repeatedly describe beauty as a ‘greeting.’ At the moment one comes into the presence of something beautiful, it greets you. It lifts away from the neutral background as though coming forward to welcome you—as though the object were designed to ‘fit’ your perception.… It is as though the welcoming thing has entered into, and consented to, your being in its midst. Your arrival seems contractual, not just something you want, but something the world you are now joining wants.”

  I promise you, you will feel you have come home.

  When Julius died in 1513, his tomb remained unfinished. Though he had always been generous in his payments to Michelangelo (as to his many other artists)—in the process making Michelangelo a rich man—the pope probably never amassed the extraordinary sums necessary for his tomb, at least as originally planned, modern dictators never quite being able to pull off the depredations that ancient ones could manage. Julius, putting the brakes on his personal monument while sending Michelangelo off in other directions, forced the great sculptor to become both a great painter and a great architect. Michelangelo’s best-known achievement in architecture is of course the dome of Saint Peter’s, but there are numerous others.

  Michelangelo very much wanted to construct an elaborate tomb for Julius, but both Julius’s occasionally straitened circumstances and, after his death, the parsimony of his heirs made that impossible. Today, his much-reduced monument stands in a side aisle of the otherwise modest Church of San Pietro in Vincoli (Saint Peter in Chains), its paltry size a commentary on the priorities of a formerly impoverished family—the della Rovere—made rich and powerful by their famous relative’s pontificate. But central to the monument is the statue of Moses [Plate 21], which Michelangelo considered his most lifelike creation. It is certainly a great work, as appropriate a tribute to the barely contained violence of Julius’s tremendous ego as to the austerely dominating will of Michelangelo. (Each man was, in his way, a kind of Moses.) The figure’s horns, a usual feature of Moses in Christian art because of a (probably) inaccurate translation of the Torah’s Hebrew into Latin, seem appropriate to this muscular middle-aged man, no longer a forward-moving, athletic aspirant like the David, but a singular, seated, unbendable authority.

  Sadly, Michelangelo’s personal authority, however impressive, was no match for the authority of popes. Of the eight popes who succeeded Julius II in Michelangelo’s lifetime, most were enthusiastic patrons of the arts, but they lived in different times, and far more complicated political pressures than Julius had known forced them to look upon Michelangelo with caution and even, as time went on, with suspicion.

  It was, of course, Julius, always in need of funds to implement his large ideas, who struck the match that lit the fires that would encircle these later popes. To finance the building of the grand new Basilica of Saint Peter’s, which would just have to be the most astounding building in all of Christendom, Julius arranged for a sale of indulgences. At the time, it seemed not at all a momentous move, almost routine, but it would serve to spark the Protestant Reformation and to help trigger, subsequently, a Catholic Counter-Reformation, the movements that will occupy us for the remainder of this book. The end result would entail the permanent fracture of Christendom.

  Clement VII, a Medici bastard and the third pope after Julius II, would commission Michelangelo to paint a vast mural on the wall above the Sistine Chapel’s main altar. His successor, Paul III, would reign as Michelangelo completed the commission, a seven-year project. This mural, known today as The Last Judgment [Plate 22], was given by Michelangelo a much more positive title, The Resurrection.

  At its dramatic center, a muscular Christ, accompanied by the Virgin Mary, raises his right arm in a gesture of repudiation. It appears that he is assigning some to Heaven, others to Hell, a depiction of the scene of final judgment related in Matthew 25. But there is mass confusion, especially among the figures on either side of Christ and his mother. There are actually four tiers of clustered nudes: the ones on the lowest level are either in Hell or on the nearby shore of the River Styx, waiting to be ferried to Hell by an exceedingly horrific Charon. Even at this lowest level, however, there are skeletons rising from their graves, yet to be clothed in flesh—and who knows where they will end up? On the second tier—of nudes floating on clouds—some seem about to sink below, while others appear destined to float higher. Next comes the tier with Christ, Mary, and large clusters of nudes who seem mostly uncertain as to where they will end up. The highest tier, whose floaters mostly embrace instruments of torture, are already safely Heaven-bound: the instruments they hold—a cross, a crown of thorns, a pillar—are the instruments of Christ’s own passion and possibly theirs. These are the martyrs.

  Except for those already arrived in Hell and perhaps those few in the second tier who seem to have already despaired, Michelangelo appears to hold out the hope that many will reach Heaven. Why then is one’s initial impression that of sheer confusion or even despair? Surely, because this is part of the artist’s conception—to confuse viewers initially and foist a question on them: Will I make it or not? This is meant to be—finally—a hopeful scene, but offering hope only after one has made a personal examination of one’s own conscience and resolved henceforward to live a better life.

  The moral was insufficient for Pope Paul III. He was shocked by so much nudity, as were many in his court—or at least they claimed to be—and the pope, egged on by his master of ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena, began objecting to the nudes long before Michelangelo was finished. To Michelangelo the nudity was unremarkable, even required: “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb,” insists the Book of Job, “and naked shall I return thither.” By 1541 when the mural was completed, it was clear that one of the nudes in Hell, the one sprouting donkey’s ears and encircled by a snake that was biting off his genitals, looked remarkably like the master of ceremonies. Biagio objected vigorously to Paul, insisting that the painting belonged in a tavern. The pope, unwilling to confront the artist, shrugged his shoulders and explained to Biagio that popes have no jurisdiction over Hell.

  Papal Rome was at last singing a new and more solemn tune. Luther’s Reformation and its consequences had fragmented Europe politically as well as religiously, and, like Humpty Dumpty, the continent would never be put back together again. The Catholic Church’s own instrument of Reformation, the Council of Trent, was intermittently wending its tortuous way. Everyone now knew that public scandal would only hurt the Catholic Church further. Nudes were scandalous; in fact, they were pagan, not Christian, no matter what Michelangelo might have to say about their honesty, beauty, reality, or symbolic worth.

  Walter Pater would describe the aging Michelangelo thus: “The world had changed around him. The ‘new catholicism’ had taken the place of the Renaissance. The spirit of
the Roman Church had changed: in the vast world’s cathedral which his skill had helped to raise for it, it looked stronger than ever.… The opposition of the Reformation to art has been often enlarged upon; far greater was that of the Catholic revival. But in thus fixing itself in a frozen orthodoxy, the Roman Church had passed beyond him, and he was a stranger to it.”

  Once Michelangelo was dead and could no longer wither others in confrontation, a subsequent pope—the exceedingly antipathetic Paul IV—hired Daniele da Volterra, one of Michelangelo’s old assistants, to paint perizome (loincloths) over all the visible genitals and backsides in the mural. This assistant also scraped and repainted whole figures that were judged too sexually suggestive. He never finished his work; most of it, though not all, has recently been removed.

  Pants painters and pants sculptors were suddenly everywhere, concealing at the direction of the frozenly orthodox what had formerly been open to the light of day. Even a late marble sculpture of Michelangelo’s, one of his best, a nude Christ bearing his cross, a beautiful figure with a beautiful face, had to be assigned its (metal) drapery. Fig leaves became omnipresent. It is a shameful human dynamic that so often in history reformation should precipitate, and then codify, hypocrisy.