True, the limitations of his Italian meant that he had little more than nodding acquaintances with most people in Pietrabella. And the fact that he had spent a good deal of his time posing for Richard Christian in an otherwise unpopulated studio didn’t allow for much socializing.
Richard’s studio was a single room with a high ceiling and large, frosted glass windows with an eastern exposure. It had the soft greyness of natural light and the pleasing combination of clutter and emptiness that often characterizes places where artists work. It was furnished with tools, and reference books, and propane tanks, and rulers, and calipers, and drawing pads, and various works in progress, and armatures waiting to be used. There were dusty wooden tables and workbenches and a high, long shelf for his finished pieces. There was a large poster of Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque on the wall.
There was great discomfort in modelling: the damp chill, the awkwardness of certain difficult poses, the slight headache of a long, hungry morning. As well, there were levels of irritation: itches that couldn’t be scratched, lashes in eyes that couldn’t be whisked away. But these are not the worst of it.
The real pain was stillness. It did not matter if a particular pose was hard or easy. The piece that Richard was working on when Oliver modelled for him required poses of considerable difficulty. Figures huddled. Figures writhing. One of the figures hung, as if from the struts of a bridge—an idea that Richard had latched on to shortly after Oliver had shown up on the doorstep of the apartment on Via Maddalena.
“I try to use what comes my way,” Richard said.
But it was not the difficulty of the poses that was Oliver’s biggest problem. It was simply not-moving that became intolerable. Sometimes he felt sick with it.
He found that the most casually bent knee, the most relaxed emphasis of weight on a hip, the lightest rest of an elbow on a ledge built steadily in intensity. They began as nothing worth thinking about and, after only five or ten minutes, became his sole preoccupation. He knew that this would eventually end—Richard would usually work about an hour before calling a break—but that didn’t help somehow. In fact, it made things worse. Oliver found that when he couldn’t move he was constantly in danger of being able to think about nothing else. His daydreams were of feasts of movement: he was running like a boy on a hillside path; he was walking through thick summer nights of olive groves and valleys; he was making love with Anna. But these were never dreams in which he could lose himself. They were longing. He’d never found the present so endless. There was no straightening, no idle step, no stretch that could relieve its oppression.
But even with these stretches of time the four months vanished. Even with poses that felt more like eras to Oliver than afternoons, his summer in Italy disappeared. I never heard his name spoken by the sculptors, artisans, workshop owners, bartenders, restaurant owners, and shopkeepers to whom I’d turned for clues. Oliver had dropped through Pietrabella’s past without leaving a ripple. It was like he’d never been there.
MICHELANGELO WAS IN ROME, waiting for the marble he had quarried for the tomb to arrive from Carrara, when, in 1506, Laocoon and His Sons was discovered by a man working in a vineyard on the Esquiline Hill. The piece fascinated Michelangelo. It was an inspiration. From the ancients came the heroic form that he held as the greatest expression of beauty. But even more importantly, from the ancients came the philosophy that transformed the sweaty, dusty drudgery of mallet and gradino into a process almost divine. Michelangelo’s gift for uncovering an object’s beauty was how he believed he reached the purpose of his soul.
This quest was so central to Michelangelo’s sense of himself that every delay in the marble shipments from Carrara felt to him like disaster. Every obstacle wasn’t just an obstacle—it was an idea that, impeded, might become ordinary.
By the time Michelangelo was back in Rome, by the time he set out to see the statue of Laocoon that had been discovered in a local vineyard, he was feeling the slow, dull wound that artists almost always get to know. Those who esteemed him, those who honoured him, those who encouraged him, those who once boasted that they knew him seemed to be turning away. He was feeling the hollow, lonely sensation of attention going elsewhere.
Michelangelo had always been drawn to the beauty of the male body in exertion: straining, pulling, struggling. And Laocoon—the sad, unheeded character in the Aeneid who warns his fellow Trojans of the Greeks’ intentions—is a figure of such writhing anguish that some have suggested that Michelangelo saw his own struggles in the Trojan’s furious effort to free himself from the two snakes twisting around his extended arms and between his powerful legs. By then, struggle was something that Michelangelo understood well. Nothing was easy. Least easy of all: working for Julius II.
It wasn’t an uncomplicated time to be pope—which was just as well, since Julius thrived on his capacity for complexity. He had the French to worry about, and the Spanish. The Florentines were always difficult, the Venetians worse, and he was intent on regaining control of the papal fiefs of Perugia and Bologna. Still, with enough on his military and political agenda to occupy fully the mind and the treasury of a more modest man of God, Julius chose this moment in history to establish a legacy far beyond a mere tomb.
Designs for the new St. Peter’s occupied those of his attentions not already busy with diplomacy, politics, and war. The project for which he’d commissioned Michelangelo—the masterpiece that Michelangelo had imagined would be the crowning achievement of his youthful triumphs as a sculptor—wasn’t cancelled exactly. It was just that Julius was busy now with other, bigger things.
Michelangelo must have seen the tribulation of being an artist in the torment of Laocoon’s face. Even the greatest artist had to worry about money, about schedules, about impatient patrons, about dishonest quarry owners, about conniving agents, about wagons breaking down on mountain trails, about freighted barges on stormy seas. It was all impossible. No wonder he ground his teeth in his sleep. But there was an even bigger worry. Everything depended on how importantly his work was regarded by those who hired him. He needed their money, of course. But money was only the measurement of something more important: affirmation. To be ignored was a cruelty he found intolerable.
IMAGINE A GREEK CARVER of marble kouroi in 600 BC. This is something my mother used to tell me to do when she felt it necessary to teach me about the history of carving stone. She told me to picture an ancient Greek banging away on a block.
He is working at right angles to the unaccommodating surface. He is using a mallet on a bronze punch. This is because he’s a century or so too early for iron tools that can carve marble obliquely. As a result of this professional bad luck, he is obliged to create his figure with small, repeated indentations in the stone instead of the longer furrows that will soon become the bread-and-butter strokes of stone masons and sculptors. And let’s say that he grows tired of his arms feeling like battering rams. And let’s say he gets a little bored with figures that, even when they are finished, look a lot like the block of marble from which they’ve come.
The kouroi are majestic, in their way. They have … something. That’s what my mother said. Something. She could have said magic.
But she imagined that this particular Greek sculptor begins to think about the stone differently than any Greek sculptor had ever thought of it before. He wonders: What if it’s just stone?
And so, one day, with his mallet raised, and his face smeared with marble dust, and the sun glinting on the soon-to-be-obsolete alloy of his bronze punch, and his hands going numb with his constant hammering against a material that seems not to want in the least to be hammered, the ancient Greek sculptor thinks: fuck it. He’s going to ease off—just a bit. He’s not going to bother putting absolutely all the strength, and all the grace, and all the skill, and all the inspiration, and all the apprehension of physical beauty that sits at the heart of a stone carver’s soul into every single stroke of his mallet. He thinks nobody will notice anyway.
It’s
a moment with repercussions. My mother is of the opinion that it changed everything.
She said, “It doesn’t take long for everything to stop working the way it worked before. Soon the magical springs are just places to get water. Soon there are no spirits in the woods. Swans are just swans. Midsummer spells become stories people make up. Everything is different. But nobody notices.”
Nobody notices, that is, until an artist as great as Michelangelo comes along. Because it’s not only that he is inspired by antiquity, it’s that he remembers something the world keeps forgetting.
Were you to stand in the Italian Sculpture Gallery in the Louvre, as the young Oliver Hughson did in the spring of 1968, and were you to circle slowly, around and around, The Dying Captive, and conclude that, in all your life, you had never seen a form more charged with beauty, you might decide that Michelangelo’s struggles were against forces far greater than practical difficulties. His real battle was with beauty itself. It was never easy to find. He had no choice but to put everything that sits at the heart of a stone carver’s soul into every stroke of his mallet.
THE KIND OF TECHNICAL VIRTUOSITY THAT, by the nineteenth century, came to be embodied by an artist as efficient and as smoothly successful as the Venetian sculptor Antonio Canova, would probably have seemed little more than skilful cleverness to Michelangelo. Canova’s pieces were created by the transposition of a small clay maquette to a larger block of stone by studio assistants and by the use of a pointing system—a multiplication of the key exterior points of the model to the larger scale of the stone. This was mechanics, my mother always said, not magic. Oliver was never sure how, but he somehow knew exactly what she meant.
Even as a young man, even as someone who knew almost nothing about sculpture, Oliver Hughson was puzzled by the people who gathered around Canova’s Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss in the Italian Sculpture Gallery in the Louvre, and who then hurried past the unfinished Michelangelos. How was it possible for them to get things so wrong?
That’s what my mother always wants to know. “Why can’t people see what there is to see?” she asks. Often. Because when it comes to the ability to recognize the importance of great art, her opinion of most of mankind is this: they are barbarians. Specifically, so she likes to say, they are the barbarians who came south and stumbled on the village of Luni, an outpost of the Roman Empire—the empire they’d got it into their lice-ridden heads to conquer.
Luni was on the flats below what is now the region of Massa-Carrara. It was a dull, provincial place that did nothing but supply white stone for the empire’s capital.
Over time, the steady buildup of silt at the mouth of the Magra River, running not far to the north of the present-day city of Carrara, would turn the port of Luni into unhealthy and unprofitable marshlands. But the barbarians stumbled onto Luni long before that. And they were dazzled by it.
Dazzled by its one temple. And its one aqueduct. And its one bath.
The barbarians threw all their bearded, furious numbers at the handful of startled soldiers and workers stationed there.
There was the usual mayhem. Then, when it was over and the carrion birds were circling, the barbarians headed back north. They were very pleased with their great triumph. But they were idiots, actually. They thought they’d just sacked Rome.
WHEN PIER-GIORGIO CALLED CLARA and me into his office for his decision, he came directly to the point.
“This won’t do,” he said.
The brochure was to have been distributed throughout the area, left at train stations and at the reception desks of inns and hotels and restaurants popular with foreigners.
He held the text of “Michelangelo’s Mountains” at the edges of the pages, as if holding it more firmly would have demonstrated a commitment to its content that he was disinclined to make. “You seem to think our job is to send tourists to Rome,” he said.
Clara began to splutter a response, but he cut her off.
“No,” he said. “Rome does not need our assistance. We don’t need to send our tourists to the Vatican. We want them to come—” his pause made it clear that he felt he was stating the painfully obvious “—here. We want them to spend their money—” a pause of similar irony, only longer “—here.”
The tomb of Julius II, as Michelangelo envisioned it, was never completed. The blocks of Carrara stone that Michelangelo had quarried had come to Rome from Carrara by ship. Likely they’d been loaded somewhere in the vicinity of Forte dei Marmi and shipped to the Ripa Grande port on the Tiber, and then hauled by ox cart to Rome. But it was not long after they were amassed in the square of St. Peter’s, not far from Michelangelo’s modest rooms, that it became apparent that the attention of Pope Julius had shifted. Julius pretended that this was only a small matter—merely a redirection of funds.
The truth was this: Michelangelo was heartbroken. He had to give up ambitions that are the hardest to surrender. He was being forced to abandon the artist he thought he was becoming. And this, of course, proved to be impossible.
During his eight months in the quarries, Michelangelo had studied the workers’ daily fight against gravity—for that is what their work amounted to. The conditions were harsh, the demands of quarry owners terrifying, the rewards to the workers paltry. All this he understood. It was like working for the pope.
Whether Julius came to believe that building his own lavish tomb was bound to be an ill omen or whether Michelangelo fell victim to the whisperings of his competitors isn’t clear today. It probably wasn’t clear then. Julius let it be known that the tomb would not proceed in the immediate future.
Michelangelo was furious. So furious, he let the pope know that he was furious—a dangerous impertinence that only an artist of the stature of Michelangelo could have dared. But Julius’s monumental self-importance made him oblivious to any reasons for an artist’s outrage, even when the artist happened to be one of the greatest in the world. Michelangelo was still just someone to be hired. Or not. When Julius changed his mind about his own tomb, he considered himself generous and thoughtful to be giving Michelangelo an alternative commission.
The new job wasn’t one that pleased Michelangelo in the least. He “made every effort to get out of it,” Condivi wrote. He thought of himself as a sculptor more than a painter. But even more importantly, it was impossible for him to abandon an idea that had been so consuming. He had the splendour of his design for the tomb in his imagination. It was hard to let such a vision go.
This was the point Clara and I made in the text for our brochure. We claimed Michelangelo never did abandon his vision, not entirely. He drew on his hopes for it. He drew on what he had lived and seen and what he dreamed of when, sore with the scratches of bramble of mountain paths and stiff with his long day’s work, he lay down on the hard bed provided to him by the holy sisters in their bleak convent in the hills.
When he was in Rome, when he was addressing the pope’s new commission, the quarries stayed inside him. The sawing. The hammering. The lifting. The hauling. Nothing was easy, not the quarrying of stone and not the creation of beauty. Always, what he thought would take weeks, took him months, took him years. It was all impossible.
There are still visitors to the Carrara region who struggle up paths, scale fallen screes, and edge across long-forgotten trails, searching for an M carved into an abandoned and overgrown rock face—as difficult as it is to imagine Michelangelo carving an initial into a rock to amuse either himself or posterity. There are people who hike the ridges that they think must have been Michelangelo’s cobbled roads, and who climb to the dark, surprisingly small caverns that they think must have been his quarries. Everywhere, there are rooms where he was said to have signed contracts for stone. There are buildings where he was said to have slept.
But the richest souvenir of Michelangelo’s eight months in the Carrara area may well have nothing to do with stone. This is what Clara and I proposed. It may be that tourists who want to know something of Michelangelo’s mountains can find
what they are looking for well to the south of Carrara. It may be that they have to go to Rome.
Resigned finally to his new commission, Michelangelo drew on his efforts in the mountains for inspiration: on the energies of his youth and on his memories of the quarry workers who had laboured beside him, on the gleam of their arms, on the breadth of their backs, on the fall of their thick hair on sunburned necks. He saw them working in the thin air and he saw them reclining on a ledge of rock eating bread and pork fat in the sunshine. He saw them turning away, arms stretched back into the tension of a rope. He saw them seated for their lunch, reaching out, a cup of wine in their broad hands. He saw them straining, pulling, reaching, pushing—resisting the unassailable force they confronted every day. These images seemed to tumble from him, these crouched and turning and twisted figures, these outreached hands, these roundly modelled, uplifted faces.
It took Michelangelo four years to complete the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
GRACE WAS A TEENAGER when she jumped from the storage loft of the Cathcart Art School. She was, even then, fierce in her defence of women’s equality. “Did you know,” she had written in a prize-winning essay for her third form social studies essay, “that the question of votes for women is one which is commanding the attention of the whole civilized world; that during 1911 the press of this country gave more space to woman’s suffrage than to any other public question?” This, like her belief in art, was a passion that never left her.
Grace always remembered the afternoon when she first set eyes on the villa’s grounds. She often described it to friends. She was walking with Julian Morrow. They were making their way at a leisurely pace toward the pool. That was where their luncheon would be served.
Grace was adept at gauging the physical difficulty of anything she was about to do without alerting anyone to her caution. She didn’t like anyone to know, but she needed to rally herself for these exertions. She had been in conversation with Julian Morrow as they had approached the stone steps leading up through his gardens to his pool. He was explaining to her that it was the terraces of the marble quarries that had inspired him to conceive of levels of flower beds and rockery divided by a single, long, central stair. “The inclines are constructed for the downward conveyance of the marble blocks from the quarry walls,” he said. “I’ve always greatly admired the look of them. They are called the lizzatura, and they are oddly beautiful in their dangerous steepness.” The last two words of this explanation caused Grace to glance ahead.
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