by Ross King
The first members of the team probably arrived at the workshop in the Piazza Rusticucci at some point in late spring, shortly before Piero Rosselli began removing the old plaster from the vault. However, one of the painters on the list, the youngest member of the group, a 27-year-old artist and architect named Bastiano da Sangallo, may have been in Rome already. Nicknamed ‘Aristotile’ because of his supposed resemblance to an antique bust of Aristotle, Bastiano was the nephew of Giuliano da Sangallo, a fact that would have automatically recommended him to Michelangelo. Too young to have studied with Domenico Ghirlandaio himself, who died in 1494, he had trained under the painter’s son Ridolfo, then joined the workshop of one of Michelangelo’s rivals, Pietro Perugino.
Bastiano’s tenure as one of Perugino’s assistants was short-lived. In 1505, while working with Perugino on an altarpiece, he saw Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina displayed in Santa Maria Novella. In comparison to the dazzling virtuosity of this cartoon, the work of Perugino suddenly seemed trite and old-fashioned. Perugino’s paintings had once been renowned for their aria angelica et molto dolce – ‘angelic air and great sweetness’8 – but in the violent, muscle-bulging figures of The Battle of Cascina Bastiano knew he had glimpsed the future of painting. Entranced by Michelangelo’s brave new style, he had abruptly abandoned Perugino’s workshop and began copying Michelangelo’s cartoon instead. Perugino’s commissions in Florence soon evaporated, and a year later, aged fifty-six, he left the city for good – the sweetness and grace of the quattrocento overpowered by the Herculean new forms created by Michelangelo.fn1
After leaving Perugino’s workshop, Bastiano came under the influence of yet another of Michelangelo’s rivals. Moving to Rome to live with his brother Giovan Francesco, an architect in charge of quarrying stone and burning lime for St Peter’s, he took up architecture himself. He studied first with Giovan Francesco and then Donato Bramante – ironically, the man whose plan for St Peter’s was accepted over his uncle Giuliano’s. Still, the connection to Bramante did not seem to trouble Michelangelo. Since Bastiano did not have as much fresco experience as the other members of the team, Michelangelo may have wanted him precisely for his architectural expertise. An architect would have been helpful in designing the illusionistic architectural elements that Michelangelo wished to include in his fresco.
Giuliano Bugiardini was another former apprentice from the Ghirlandaio workshop. Exactly the same age as Michelangelo, he was old enough to have worked as an apprentice with Ghirlandaio in the Tornabuoni Chapel. If the underwhelming Francesco Granacci did not threaten Michelangelo, Bugiardini would have worried him even less. He must have been a competent painter if he had trained under Ghirlandaio, but Vasari portrays him as an inept artist and something of a simpleton, describing how the hapless Bugiardini, while painting a portrait of Michelangelo, placed one of his subject’s eyes in his temple. Later, he supposedly spent the better part of a decade racking his brains over the design of an altarpiece showing the martyrdom of St Catherine, even managing to botch the job after Michelangelo showed him how to foreshorten the figures.
As with Granacci, it was personality more than artistic prowess that recommended Bugiardini to Michelangelo. He possessed, Vasari claims, ‘a certain natural goodness and a sort of simplicity in his mode of living, free from all envy and malice’.9 Because of his good nature, Michelangelo called him Beato (‘happy’ or ‘blissful’), a nickname that may also have been an ironic reference to a considerably more talented (but equally good-humoured) Tuscan painter, Fra Angelico, sometimes known as Beato Angelico.
The 42-year-old Agnolo di Donnino came from the workshop of Cosimo Rosselli, with whom he had been close friends until Rosselli’s death a year or two earlier at the age of sixty-eight. The oldest member of the group, Agnolo may have apprenticed with Rosselli as early as 1480, when he was fourteen, and therefore he might have assisted him on the walls of the Sistine Chapel. However, Agnolo also had more recent experience in the medium, having executed several frescoes at San Bonifazio, a foundling hospital in Florence. An extremely diligent worker, he constantly reworked his drawings, seldom putting them into execution, with the result that he would eventually die in poverty. He was known as Il Mazziere, ‘the card dealer’, a nickname that possibly suggests another reason for his slow work and impecunious death. But it also indicates that, like the pleasure-loving Granacci and the amiable Bugiardini, he was a sociable and convivial character.
The fourth assistant mentioned by Granacci was Jacopo di Sandro, sometimes known as Jacopo del Tedesco, or Jacopo ‘of the German’, which suggests Teutonic blood even though his father had the decidedly Italian name Sandro di Chesello. Jacopo had also been a member of the Ghirlandaio workshop. Little is known of his early career, though he had been active as a painter for at least a decade. Granacci refers to him by his first name only, indicating that he was as well known to Michelangelo as the other men. Unlike the other men, though, he voiced a specific concern about travelling to Rome and assuming the task of assisting in the chapel. ‘Jacopo,’ wrote Granacci, ‘would clearly like to know what he is to be paid.’10
In fact, each man would be paid a lump sum of twenty ducats, ten of which could be kept as compensation if any of them travelled to Rome but, for whatever reason, decided not to assist Michelangelo. The offer was not particularly tempting. Michelangelo had paid Lapo d’Antonio, his assistant in Bologna, a salary of eight ducats per month. Twenty ducats was therefore the amount a qualified artisan could earn in a couple of months. This modest sum suggests that Michelangelo did not intend to employ his assistants for the whole of the project, which would clearly require several years of work at least. Instead, it seems he planned to hire them for only a short duration, consulting with them at the start of the job and then replacing them with cheaper labour once the work had begun.
One can therefore understand Jacopo del Tedesco’s concerns. A certain amount of self-sacrifice was required to leave Florence, relinquish the chance of gaining other commissions, relocate to Rome and work as only one of a number of assistants, all for a fairly humble salary, and possibly for only a very brief period of time.
Yet soon enough Jacopo set aside whatever reservations he had – something that both he and Michelangelo would live to regret – and by the summer of 1508 he and the other assistants were in place. Hard on their heels came Francesco Granacci, arriving in Rome to start managing Michelangelo’s affairs.
fn1 Bastiano’s copy of the central portion of Michelangelo’s cartoon also had happier repercussions. Over thirty years later, long after Michelangelo’s cartoon had disappeared, Bastiano used his own drawing – on the advice, apparently, of Vasari – to make an oil painting for François I, the King of France. It is solely because of this painting (now in Holkham Hall, Norfolk) that anyone knows what The Battle of Cascina might have looked like.
8
The House of Buonarroti
MICHELANGELO INHERITED LITTLE from his father except hypochondria, self-pity and a snobbish conviction that the Buonarroti were descended from a noble and ancient family. In fact, it was Michelangelo’s firm belief that the Buonarroti were direct descendants from the princely house of Canossa.1 This was no small claim. The house of Canossa boasted as its most illustrious forbear Matilda of Tuscany, the ‘Great Countess’, a wealthy and learned woman who spoke Italian, French and German, composed her letters in Latin, collected manuscripts and owned most of central Italy. Married, until his murder, to Godfrey the Hunchback, she lived in a castle near Reggio Emilia and, at her death in 1115, willed all of her vast lands to the Holy See. Later in life, Michelangelo would treasure in his archives a letter by which the existing Count of Canossa – a considerably less impressive figure than Matilda – craftily confirmed his kinship with the artist, addressing him as ‘messer Michelle Angelo Bonaroto de Canossa’.2
As an old man, Michelangelo would claim that his sole aim in life had been to help the house of Buonarroti regain its former eminence. If so, his attem
pts to restore the family to glory were continually undermined by the antics of his four brothers, and sometimes by those of his father Lodovico. However, in Lodovico’s opinion it was Michelangelo himself who had first threatened to bring the Buonarroti name into disrepute when he decided to become, of all things, an artist. Ascanio Condivi reported that when Michelangelo first began to draw he was ‘quite often beaten unreasonably by his father and his father’s brothers who, being impervious to the excellence and nobility of art, detested it and felt that its appearance in their family was a disgrace’.3
Lodovico’s horror at discovering an artist in the family is explained by the fact that painting was not considered a suitable occupation for a gentleman. Since they worked with their hands, painters were considered mere craftsmen, enjoying about the same social standing as tailors or bootmakers. For the most part they came from humble families. Andrea del Sarto was, as his name suggests, the son of a tailor, while the father of the goldsmith Antonio del Pollaiuolo – as his name also suggests – raised chickens. Andrea del Castagno began life herding cattle, the job at which the young Giotto was supposedly occupied when he was discovered by Cimabue.
It was because of these sorts of associations, then, that Lodovico, so proud of his ancestry, had been unwilling to apprentice his son to a painter, even to one with Domenico Ghirlandaio’s reputation. Because, while Ghirlandaio went on to execute the largest fresco of the quattrocento, he also earned his living by taking on more humble tasks such as painting hoops for baskets.
By 1508, however, it was not Michelangelo but his brothers who were undermining the family reputation, particularly Buonarroto and Giovansimone, aged thirty-one and twenty-nine respectively. The lowly status of these two brothers, who toiled in the wool shop of Lorenzo Strozzi, was a humiliation to Michelangelo. For the past year, he had been promising to buy the pair their own shop. In the interim, he sensibly urged them to learn the trade so that when the time came they could succeed in the enterprise. But Buonarroto and Giovansimone had more ambitious plans: they wanted their older brother to find positions for them in Rome.
It was with this in mind that, in the heat of early summer, Giovansimone headed south for Rome. A year earlier he had hoped to visit his brother in Bologna, but on that occasion Michelangelo had succeeded in putting him off with stories – not entirely exaggerated – of plague and political upheaval. This time it seemed there was no stopping him.
Rome must have presented an enticing prospect to Giovansimone since his older brother was, after all, an intimate of the Pope. Still, it is unclear what sort of position he expected Michelangelo to find for him. While Florence had been made wealthy through the wool trade, Rome had no equivalent industry and so there was little work to be found. The city was populated mainly by priests, pilgrims and prostitutes. Under Julius II it may have become a magnet for artists and architects, but Giovansimone had no experience in these fields, let alone talent. A restless young man, ambitious but erratic, he had trouble applying himself to anything. Unmarried, he still lived in his father’s household – to which he contributed precious little towards his keep – and frequently clashed with his father and brothers.
Unsurprisingly, the visit to Rome proved fruitless for Giovansimone and annoying to his older brother. Busy making sketches and other preparations for the Sistine ceiling, Michelangelo could only have found his presence a hindrance. Worse still, Giovansimone had not been long in Rome before he fell seriously ill. Michelangelo feared the young man had come down with the plague. ‘I think he will soon be returning to Florence, if he does as I advise,’ he wrote to Lodovico, ‘because I think the air here does not agree with him.’4 The bad air of Rome would become a convenient excuse for Michelangelo whenever he wished to rid himself of unwanted family members.
Giovansimone eventually recovered from his illness and, at Michelangelo’s urgings, returned to Florence. But no sooner had he departed than Buonarroto began making noises about a visit of his own. He had journeyed twice to Rome when Michelangelo was carving the Pietà a decade earlier, and he must have liked what he saw, since over the next few years he became determined to land a position in Rome – or, rather, to have Michelangelo land one for him. Early in 1506, he had written to his older brother, asking him to ‘look for an opening’ for him. Michelangelo had not been encouraging. ‘I should not know either what to find or what to look for,’ he pointedly replied.5
Buonarroto, a more trustworthy character than Giovansimone, was Michelangelo’s favourite brother. Michelangelo wrote to him more often than to his other brothers, addressing his letters, rather grandly, to ‘Buonarroto di Lodovico di Buonarrota Simone’. While in Rome he wrote home to Florence, on average, every few weeks, usually to either Buonarroto or his father, who carefully preserved the letters, which were invariably signed ‘Michelangelo, sculptor, in Rome’. Since there was no public postal service in Italy, all of these letters were carried privately, either by friends travelling to Florence or on the mule trains that left Rome every Saturday morning. Letters to Michelangelo were delivered not to his workshop but to his bank in Rome, Balduccio’s, from where he retrieved them. He valued news from home, frequently berating Buonarroto for failing to correspond more regularly.6
Buonarroto was eventually dissuaded from making the journey to Rome because Michelangelo claimed he needed him to look after affairs for him in Florence, including purchasing an ounce of red lake, a pigment made from the fermented root of the madder plant. Buonarroto’s dreams of visiting Rome again, like his dreams of owning a wool shop, were put on hold.
Michelangelo’s brothers were not the only members of the family to cause him worry in the summer of 1508. In June, he had learned that Francesco Buonarroti, his father’s older brother, had passed away. One of the uncles who used to beat Michelangelo after he declared his intention to become a painter, Francesco had not made a particular success of his own life. A money changer by trade, he had run a modest business from an outdoor table beside Orsanmichele and, whenever it rained, from an indoor table in a nearby cloth cutter’s shop. He had married a woman named Cassandra around the same time that Lodovico married Michelangelo’s mother, after which the two brothers set up home together with their wives. On Francesco’s death, Cassandra suddenly announced that she planned to sue Lodovico and his family for the return of her dowry, which probably amounted to roughly four hundred ducats.7
For Michelangelo, this lawsuit must have felt like a betrayal by someone who had been his surrogate mother, while for his father it came as an unwelcome financial blow. Much as the cash-strapped Lodovico wished to keep the dowry, his sister-in-law had a clear-cut legal right to it.8 In Florence, as elsewhere, dowries always reverted back to a wife on the death of her husband, enabling the widow to make a second marriage if she wished. Cassandra’s age meant she stood little chance of attracting a new husband,9 so life on her own must have appealed more than that in the Buonarroti household. For the previous eleven years she had been the only woman in the Buonarroti home, and with her husband dead she evidently had no wish to remain with her in-laws.
Legal battles over dowries were common, but as widows had the law on their side they almost always won their cases. Lodovico thus informed Michelangelo that, as one of his uncle’s heirs, he had to renounce his right to Francesco’s estate or else face being made responsible for his debts, including the repayment of Cassandra’s dowry, if and when the lawsuit went against them.
Giovansimone’s visit and illness, as well as the death of his uncle and the lawsuit of his aunt, were irritating intrusions as Michelangelo attempted to create his design for the vault of the chapel and organise his team of assistants. No sooner had Giovansimone recovered than Michelangelo suddenly found himself with yet another invalid on his hands. Besides Urbano, he had brought with him from Florence an assistant named Piero Basso. Basso, or ‘Shorty’, was a carpenter and jack of all trades who had been a long-time employee of the Buonarroti family.10 Born of humble stock in Settignano, he had
worked for many years at the Buonarroti farm, supervising construction work on their house, among various other duties, and in general acting as a steward for Lodovico. Michelangelo brought him to Rome in April to help build the scaffolding and perhaps also to assist Piero Rosselli with clearing the old plaster from the vault. Equally vital were his duties in Michelangelo’s workshop, where he worked as a household servant, ordering his master’s affairs and running various errands.
But Basso was sixty-seven years old and in frail health. Like Giovansimone, he had found the scorching Roman summer too much to bear and by the middle of July had fallen seriously ill. Michelangelo was distressed not only by Basso’s illness but also by the fact that as soon as he was able the old man returned to Florence. Michelangelo clearly felt he had been betrayed by his family’s faithful old retainer.
‘I must inform you,’ he wrote in an ill temper to Buonarroto, ‘that Piero Basso fell ill and left here on Tuesday, whether I would or no. I was put out about it, because I am left alone and also because I’m afraid he may die on the way.’ He therefore asked his brother to find someone to replace Basso, ‘because I cannot remain alone, besides which, no one trustworthy is to be found’.11
Michelangelo was not alone, of course, since Urbano and the four other assistants were in Rome. But he still needed someone to manage his household affairs by performing menial tasks such as buying food, preparing meals and keeping the workshop running smoothly. Fortunately, Buonarroto found a young boy, whose name history fails to record, to fill the role. It was a common practice for a painter or sculptor to employ such an errand boy in the workshop. Known as a fattorino, he would be given food and lodging in lieu of a salary. What is unusual about the child dispatched to Rome is that someone of such tender years should have made the journey. Obviously Michelangelo’s preference for Florentines – and his distrust of Romans – extended as far down the workshop hierarchy as the fattorino.