by Ross King
Ingenious the technique may have been, but the potential for disaster dogged the painter’s every step. One major problem concerned the time available to paint the intonaco, which stayed wet, depending on the weather, for no more than twelve to twenty-four hours. Since after this period the plaster no longer absorbed the pigments, it was laid down only in an area that the frescoist could complete in a single day, known as a giornata (‘day’s work’). The large surface of a wall or vault would therefore be divided into anything from a dozen to several hundred of these giornate, all varying widely in size and shape. Ghirlandaio, for example, divided the huge surface of the Tornabuoni Chapel into 250 of these units, meaning that a typical day saw him and his apprentices paint an area roughly four feet by five feet – the dimensions of a good-sized canvas.
Consequently, the frescoist was forced to work against the clock to complete each giornata before the plaster hardened, a fact that made working in fresco radically different from painting on canvas or panel, which, since they could be retouched, tolerated even the most lax and procrastinating artist. Titian, for example, tinkered endlessly with his canvases, making changes and corrections throughout his life, sometimes adding as many as forty separate coats of paint and glaze, the final layers of which he then smeared with his fingertips so the picture looked impulsive.
Michelangelo would have no such luxuries of time and retrospection in the Sistine Chapel. To speed their work a number of frescoists adopted the habit of working with a brush in each hand, one charged with dark paint, the other with light. The quickest brushes in Italy supposedly belonged to Amico Aspertini, who began frescoing a chapel in the church of San Frediano in Lucca in 1507. The eccentric Aspertini painted with both hands at once, his pots of paint swinging from a belt at his waist. ‘He looked like the devil of San Maccario with all those flasks of his,’ chortled Vasari, ‘and when he worked with his spectacles on his nose, he would have made the very stones laugh.’10
Nevertheless, it would take the speedy Aspertini more than two years to paint the walls of the chapel in San Frediano, which were considerably smaller than the vault of the Sistine Chapel. And Domenico Ghirlandaio, despite his large workshop, had spent almost five years on his frescoes in the Tornabuoni Chapel. As this chapel also had a smaller surface area than the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo would have realised that his new commission could take many years to complete.
One of the first tasks facing Michelangelo was the removal of the plaster on which Piermatteo d’Amelia’s damaged fresco had been painted. It was sometimes possible to paint one fresco on top of another through a technique known as martellinatura, in which the surface of the old fresco was roughened with the pointed end of a martello, or hammer, so that the plaster for the new fresco would adhere to that of the old, over which it was then painted. But this was not the method adopted with Piermatteo’s fresco. The whole of his starry sky was to come crashing down to earth.
Once Piermatteo’s old fresco had been chiselled from the vault, an undercoat of fresh plaster, called the arriccio, would be spread over the entire ceiling to a thickness of roughly three-quarters of an inch, filling various gaps and irregularities such as the joints between the masonry blocks and creating a smooth surface over which, when the time finally came to paint, the intonaco could be spread. The process entailed both removing tons of old plaster from the chapel and fetching into it hundreds of bags of sand and lime to mix the arriccio.
The major task of hacking Piermatteo’s fresco from the masonry and laying the arriccio for the new one was given by Michelangelo to a fellow Florentine, Piero Rosselli, the man who had defended him against the slurs of Bramante. A sculptor and architect in his own right, the 34-year-old Rosselli was well qualified for the job. He was also a close friend of Michelangelo, addressing him in his letters as charisimo fratello, ‘dearest brother’.11 Michelangelo paid him eighty-five ducats for his work, which kept him and his team of plasterers busy for at least three months, until the end of July.
The destruction of Piermatteo’s heaven required an elevated platform that would allow Rosselli’s men to work their way as quickly as possible from one end of the chapel to the other. This scaffold needed to span a width of forty-four feet and rise some sixty more above the floor, not to mention proceed down a chapel 130 feet in length. Michelangelo and his team would need a similar sort of staging if their paintbrushes were to reach every inch of the vault’s surface. What worked for the plasterers would clearly work for the painters, and so it was logical for Michelangelo and his assistants to inherit Rosselli’s scaffold. But first this structure needed to be designed and built. A good deal of the eighty-five ducats paid to Rosselli was therefore spent on timber.
Frescoes always called for staging of some sort. The usual solution, especially for walls, was to devise the kind of ground-supported wooden scaffold used by masons, complete with ladders, ramps and platforms. Wooden structures of this type must have been built in the bays between the windows of the Sistine Chapel when Perugino, Ghirlandaio and the others painted their frescoes on the walls. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel presented much more of a problem. The scaffold would have to rise to a height of around sixty feet, yet somehow leave the aisles clear for the priests and pilgrims as they observed ceremonies beneath. For this reason alone, a ground-based scaffold – one whose supports would unavoidably block the aisles – was unworkable.
Assorted other practicalities also demanded attention. Any scaffold would have to be both robust and spacious enough to accommodate the teams of assistants and their equipment, including buckets of water, heavy bags of sand and lime, and the large cartoons that had to be unrolled and then transferred to the ceiling. Not least, safety was an issue. The dizzy heights of the chapel meant that anyone who ascended the scaffold faced a serious occupational hazard. Fresco-painting occasionally produced casualties, such as the fourteenth-century painter Barna da Siena, who was said to have fallen almost a hundred feet to his death while frescoing The Life of Christ in the Collegiata in San Gimignano.
The scaffolding of the Sistine Chapel clearly called for the talents of no ordinary pontarolo, as the scaffold-maker was known. Piero Rosselli was equipped for the job, having made his name as an engineer as well as a sculptor and architect. Ten years earlier he had devised a system of pulleys and cranes to recover from the Arno a sunken block of marble that had been promised to Michelangelo. However, in the first instance the Pope brought in Donato Bramante. If this development displeased Michelangelo, ushering into the project the unwelcome presence of his supposed enemy, ultimately he turned it to his advantage by humiliating Bramante when the architect failed to find a viable solution. Bramante had hit on the unusual idea of suspending wooden platforms from ropes anchored in the vault, which therefore needed to be pierced with a series of holes. This plan may have addressed the problem of keeping the scaffolding clear of the floor, but it left Michelangelo with the greater predicament of how to fill in the unsightly holes once the ropes were removed. Bramante dismissed the problem, saying that ‘he would think of that afterwards, and that it could not be done otherwise’.12
For Michelangelo, this improbable scheme was merely the latest example of the architect’s bungling. After protesting to Julius that Bramante’s plan could not work, Michelangelo was told by the Pope to build the scaffold however he saw fit. And so, in the midst of his various other preparations, Michelangelo found himself tackling the problem of the scaffold’s design.
Though Michelangelo possessed far less experience as an engineer and builder than Bramante, he did have aspirations in this area. Not least was his proposal, hatched in the dark days of 1506, to build the huge bridge across the Bosphorus. Spanning the Sistine Chapel, by comparison, surely seemed a small matter. Fittingly, his design for the scaffold ultimately produced a sort of bridge, or rather a series of footbridges that spanned the chapel from the level of the windows.13 Holes were drilled some fifteen inches deep into the masonry immediately over the uppermost corni
ce, a few feet above the heads of the thirty-two frescoed popes. These holes were used to anchor short wooden brackets, rows of cantilevers known in the building trade as sorgozzoni (literally, ‘blows to the throat’). The brackets supported a number of stepped arches, built to the same profile as the ceiling, that served as linked bridges across the void, giving the painters and plasterers decks on which to work as well as access to every part of the ceiling. The scaffold extended only half the length of the chapel, or across the first three bays between the windows. Thus, when Rosselli’s men finished with the first half of the chapel they were required to dismantle the arches and construct them anew in the second – a process that Michelangelo would have to repeat when he came to paint.
14. This rough sketch, found in the corner of a sheet of Michelangelo’s drawings, shows what the scaffold for the Sistine Chapel might have looked like.
A simple but resourceful solution to the problem, this scaffold also proved a more economical structure than Bramante’s. Condivi claims that, once the scaffold had been erected, Michelangelo found himself with a surplus of rope, not having required the enormous lengths purchased for Bramante’s suspended platforms. He therefore donated the superfluous material to the ‘poor carpenter’ who helped build the scaffolding.14 The carpenter then promptly sold the rope and used the money as dowries for two of his daughters, thereby providing a fairy-tale ending to the legend of how Michelangelo trumped Bramante.
Since Michelangelo’s ingenious scaffold left the floor clear, it was business as usual in the Sistine Chapel during the summer of 1508, with Rosselli and his men hacking out the old plaster and spreading the new while religious ceremonies were celebrated below. Predictably, problems arose with this arrangement. Barely a month into the job, Rosselli’s workmen were chastised for their disruptive labours by Paride de’ Grassi, the new Magister Caerimoniarum, or papal master of ceremonies. De’ Grassi, a nobleman from Bologna, was a ubiquitous figure in the Sistine Chapel. He was the man in charge of preparing it for Mass and other ceremonies, making sure there were candlesticks on the altar, for example, and charcoal and incense in the thurible. He also supervised the officiating priests, watching to see that they consecrated and then elevated the Host in the accepted fashion.
Querulous and impatient, de’ Grassi was a stickler for detail. He would complain if either the hair or the sermon of a priest was too long, or if a worshipper was sitting in the wrong place or – a common problem – making too much noise. No one escaped his ruthless eye for detail, not even the Pope, many of whose antics exasperated him, though the Master of Ceremonies was usually wise enough to keep his annoyances private.
On the evening of 10 June, de’ Grassi ascended from his office below the chapel to discover that it was impossible to chant vespers for the vigil of the Pentecost on account of the dust stirred up by the workmen. ‘On the upper cornices,’ he wrote angrily in his diary, ‘construction was going on with the greatest dust, and when so ordered the workmen did not cease, about which the cardinals complained loudly. I myself argued with several workmen, and they did not cease. I went to the Pope, who was almost disturbed with me because I did not warn them twice, and made a defence for the work. The Pope then sent in succession two of his chamberlains, who ordered the work to stop, which was barely done.’15
Piero Rosselli and his men must have been working very long hours if they managed to disturb vespers, which was always chanted at sunset. In the middle of June the sun would not have set before nine o’clock. And if Julius defended the plasterers, as de’ Grassi resentfully observed, then he must have approved of such tactics – which may explain why Rosselli’s men dared stand up to the cardinals and the Master of Ceremonies.
Time would certainly have been of the essence. The arriccio needed to dry completely before the intonaco could be laid, not least because the rotten-egg smell of wet arriccio was considered bad for a painter’s health, especially in a confined space. A period as long as several months, depending on the weather, therefore had to elapse between the laying of the arriccio and the start of work on the fresco itself. Rosselli was probably trying – at the behest of both Michelangelo and the Pope – to apply the arriccio as swiftly as possible so that it might have the hot summer months in which to dry. Furthermore, Michelangelo would also have wanted to begin work, if possible, before winter. Painting was virtually impossible in the frigid temperatures brought to Italy by a winter wind, the tramontana, which blew south from the Alps. If the intonaco was too cold, or if it froze, the colours did not absorb properly and so flaked off.
If Rosselli did not have the vault ready for painting by October or November, Michelangelo’s work would have had to wait until February. Impatient and anxious for results, the Pope would not have looked favourably on such a delay. And so it was that during the summer of 1508 Rosselli and his team worked well into the evenings, the din of their hammers and chisels drowning out the chanting of the choir a few yards below.
6
The Design
AS PIERO ROSSELLI and his men demolished Piermatteo d’Amelia’s old fresco, Michelangelo was busy designing the new one. He was working according to a plan provided by the Pope, since Julius had requested a specific pictorial scheme for the vault. It is unclear whether the Pope himself was the author of this design or if he developed it in consultation with an adviser. Michelangelo claimed in a note to himself that he was working ‘according to conditions and agreements’1 laid down by Cardinal Alidosi, a statement suggesting that the cardinal, for one, was closely involved.2
It was normal practice for a patron to stipulate the subject matter of a work. Painters and sculptors were regarded as craftsmen who worked according to precise instructions from whomever was paying the bill. Domenico Ghirlandaio’s contract with Giovanni Tornabuoni is a classic example of how a patron went about commissioning a large fresco cycle from an artist.3 Tornabuoni, a wealthy banker, drew up a contract outlining virtually every detail of the decoration of the chapel in Santa Maria Novella that bears his name. Little was left to Ghirlandaio’s imagination. Not only was the painter instructed as to which scenes should be painted on which wall, he was also given their exact order and dimensions. He was told which colours to use, and even the date on which to begin painting. Tornabuoni demanded large numbers of figures in the scenes, including all sorts of birds and animals. Ghirlandaio, a diligent craftsman, was happy to indulge his patron’s whims, and his frescoes teem with life – so much so that some of the scenes are, in the words of one celebrated art historian, ‘as overfilled as the sheets of an illustrated newspaper’.4 In one scene, Ghirlandaio even painted a giraffe. This exotic creature was probably painted from life, since in 1487 Lorenzo de’ Medici’s garden was home to an African giraffe until, unused to the cramped spaces of Florence, it banged its head on a beam and died.
The artist of Michelangelo’s time therefore bore little resemblance to the romantic ideal of the solitary genius who would conjure original works of art from the depths of his own imagination, unfettered by the demands of the marketplace or patron. Only in a later century could a painter like Salvatore Rosa, born in 1615, haughtily refuse to follow the orders of his patrons, telling one of them, who had been too specific with his requests, to ‘go to a brickmaker, as they work to order’.5 In 1508, the artist, like the brickmaker, was forced to work to the demands of his patron.
Given these practices, Michelangelo cannot have been surprised when, in the spring of 1508, he was presented by the Pope with a detailed scheme for the decoration of the Sistine Chapel. The images that Julius had in mind were considerably more complex and involved than Piermatteo’s star-spangled heaven. He wanted twelve Apostles above the windows of the chapel and the remainder of the ceiling to be covered in an interlocking geometric pattern of squares and circles. Julius seems to have been fond of such kaleidoscopic patterns, which imitated ancient Roman ceiling decorations such as those at Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli, which had become a site of intense interest in the latt
er half of the fifteenth century. During the same year, he had commissioned similar schemes from two other artists: one from Pinturicchio for the vault of the choir that Bramante had recently completed in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo, and another for the ceiling of the Stanza della Segnatura, the room in the Vatican Palace into which he intended to move his library.
Michelangelo made a number of drawings in a diligent attempt to come up with an arrangement of patterns and figures to please the Pope. In search of inspiration, he even seems to have appealed, around this time, to Pinturicchio. The wine-loving Bernardino di Betto, better known because of his gaudily ornamental style as Pinturicchio (‘Rich Painter’), was one of the most experienced frescoists in Rome, having by the age of fifty-four decorated numerous chapels throughout Italy. He probably worked on the walls of the Sistine Chapel itself as an assistant to Pietro Perugino. Pinturicchio did not actually begin his work in Santa Maria del Popolo until September 1508, but it is quite possible that he was producing drawings that Michelangelo saw earlier in the summer. In any case, Michelangelo’s first drawings for the Sistine ceiling look suspiciously similar.6
However, Michelangelo was clearly still not satisfied with his efforts. His main problem with the proposed scheme was that, apart from the twelve Apostles, there was very little scope for him to explore his interest in the human form. He added winged angels and caryatides to the design, but these conventional figures were merely part of the geometric scenery and, as such, both a far cry from the sinewy, writhing nudes of The Battle of Cascina and a poor substitute for the abandoned papal tomb, for which he had hoped to carve a series of naked, struggling supermen. Faced with such an uninspiring design, Michelangelo must have felt his appetite for the commission dwindle still further.