by Ross King
Raphael’s new petition to Soderini produced no better result than Giovanna Feltria’s four years earlier, perhaps due to Tuscan jingoism. Soderini, a Florentine patriot, would hardly have wished to let an artist from beyond the borders of Tuscany, no matter how talented, adorn the walls of the political headquarters of the Florentine republic.12 However, the lack of a large commission in Florence ceased to matter so much when the Pope began taking an interest in the young artist. Raphael could have come to Julius’s attention in a number of ways. Since Giovanna Feltria was married to Julius’s brother, he may have learned of Raphael through either her or his nephew, Francesco Maria. But it is equally possible that Bramante was the first one to mention the brilliant young painter from his home town.13 The architect was even said by Vasari to be Raphael’s kinsman.
Whatever the case, in the autumn of 1508 Raphael was summoned to Rome, where Bramante quickly became his close ally and faithful supporter. Taking lodgings near St Peter’s, in the Piazza Scossa Cavalli, the ‘Square of the Riderless Horses’, a stone’s throw from Michelangelo’s workshop, Raphael prepared to start work on exactly the kind of prestigious commission that had eluded him in Florence.14
11
A Great Quandary
AFTER HEAVY AUTUMN rains, Rome was whipped in the new year by the tramontana, the frigid north wind that was reputed to bring fatigue and depression to Italy along with the cold. More unfavourable conditions for painting a fresco could hardly be imagined, but Michelangelo and his team pressed on, eager to finish The Flood. However, in Janury disaster struck when both a fungus and an efflorescence of salt appeared on the surface of the fresco, obscuring its figures so badly that they could barely be distinguished. ‘I am in a great quandary,’ Michelangelo wrote to his father after this efflorescence appeared. ‘My work does not seem to go ahead in a way to merit anything. This is due to the difficulty of the work and also because it is not my profession. In consequence, I lose my time fruitlessly.’1
Michelangelo and his assistants had made the worst possible start. The salts crystallising on the surface of the fresco at such an early stage of the project did not bode well, obviously, for the rest of the task. The damage was most likely the result of calcium nitrate, known as wall or lime saltpetre. Generally caused by damp, calcium nitrate was a scourge of the frescoist. The salts carried in any rainwater that managed to penetrate the vault would leach their way through the plaster, dissolving the crystals of calcium carbonate and causing the pigments to blister and flake. Occasionally, there were more macabre infiltrations than rainwater. The floods that regularly swamped Florence and Rome would soak the ground under churches, releasing the saltpetre produced by decomposing corpses, then carrying it to the painted surfaces of the walls, where it ate like a cancer into the frescoes.
Painters went to great lengths to prevent their frescoes being attacked by damp and, therefore, by salts and nitrates. Giotto was well aware of the danger when he painted the façade of the Camposanto in Pisa. Because the façade was turned to the sea, he knew it would face the full might of the sirocco, which blew sea salt on to the surface. He tried to overcome the problem by mixing pounded brick into both the arriccio and intonaco, but this measure proved fruitless and soon the intonaco began scaling off. Sometimes frescoists would try to waterproof their work by attaching reed mats to the walls, then covering them with the arriccio. Buffalmacco, a younger contemporary of Giotto, used these mats in his Triumph of Death on the Camposanto in order to protect it from the salt breezes — but this expedient only hastened the disintegration of the plaster. Buffalmacco was a chilling exemplum for the frescoist. A master whose skills were praised by Boccaccio and Ghiberti, he proved so unlucky in preserving his frescoes from the elements that not one of them now survives.
Michelangelo appears to have used a different method to safeguard his fresco against damp. He and his assistants made their intonaco not with sand but by mixing the lime with the volcanic ash known as pozzolana. Although common in Roman building work, pozzolana was probably a bit of an unknown quantity to Michelangelo’s team of Florentines, given that Ghirlandaio had made his plaster, like most Tuscan frescoists, with sand instead of ash. But Michelangelo may have chosen pozzolana for its special properties. This blackish ash from Mount Vesuvius was the key to the large vaults and domes of the ancient Romans — and the reason why so many of them survived more or less intact for well over a thousand years. By mixing volcanic ash into their mortars, Roman builders had created strong, swift-setting concretes that were almost impervious to water. While conventional plasters gained strength only when the lime reacted with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, pozzolana added a further ingredient to the mix, a compound of silica or alumina. These acted directly on the calcium oxide independent of its contact with the atmosphere, resulting in a rapid bond that could even set underwater.
Pozzolana should, then, have made for a plaster ideally suited to the wet weather of Rome as the tramontana swept down from the Alps. But something had clearly gone awry.
The problem seemed to the frustrated Michelangelo a final proof of his inability to carry out the task. He even used the efflorescence as a convenient excuse to throw down his brushes and quit work. ‘Indeed I told Your Holiness that this is not my art,’ he informed the Pope. ‘What I have done is spoiled. If you do not believe it, send someone to see.’2
Julius duly dispatched the architect Giuliano da Sangallo to the Sistine Chapel. His concerns possibly extended beyond Michelangelo’s fresco. He may have suspected a serious problem with the chapel’s roof, perhaps even a recurrence of the flaw that damaged Piermatteo’s fresco a few years earlier and threatened the stability of the entire chapel.
Sangallo was the man in charge of inserting the twelve iron rods that, in 1504, temporarily arrested the movement of the south wall of the chapel. He was therefore a natural choice to examine the vault in 1509. But the Pope sent him for another reason as well, since Sangallo was one of the few people in Rome whom Michelangelo trusted. With the artist now threatening to quit work, Julius knew that Sangallo was probably the only person able to mollify him.
Damp may well have infiltrated the Sistine Chapel because of problems with its roof, since renovations were needed a few years later, in 1513, when 130 square feet of roofing were replaced.3 But the problem, as Sangallo saw it, was a simpler one. Although born and trained in Florence, he had lived and worked for many years in Rome. Having carried out repairs on the Castel Sant’Angelo and built several churches as well as a huge palace for Julius, he knew far more than Michelangelo about Roman building materials. The lime for the intonaco in the Sistine Chapel had been made from travertine, a whitish limestone quarried near Tivoli, twenty miles east of Rome. As unfamiliar with travertine as they were with pozzolana, Michelangelo’s crew of Florentines had used large amounts of water to slake the quicklime and, once the pozzolana was added, to make the mixture plastic enough for spreading. However, while pozzolana cured quickly, travertine dried much more slowly. Michelangelo and his assistants, in their ignorance, had been applying the plaster when it was still too wet. The salt efflorescence was not so much the result of foreign water infiltrating the vault, therefore, as it was of these copious quantities added by the assistants — an error that Sangallo taught the team to correct.
The other complication confronting Michelangelo — the appearance on the vault of mildew — raised a different issue. The mildew was probably concentrated in those places where the pigments were spread, after the plaster had dried, with the help of a fixative like glue or oil. Unlike a painter in tempera or oil, a frescoist would, of course, normally dilute his pigments with nothing but water. Binding agents were superfluous for the simple reason that the pigments, sealed fast in plaster, needed no further adhesives.
Sometimes, however, a frescoist would be tempted to paint a secco (‘in the dry’), that is, to mix his pigments with a fixative and add them to the plaster after it had dried. The benefit of painting a secco was that it
allowed for a wider range of colours, especially the brighter, mineral-based pigments such as vermilion, ultramarine and verdigris. The frescoist’s palette was somewhat restricted because a good many of these bright colours could not withstand the corrosive activity of the lime-rich intonaco. For example, the blue pigment azurite, sometimes called ‘German blue’, gradually turned green after coming into contact with the moisture in the plaster — a phenomenon that explains the number of green skies found in frescoes. Even more drastic was what happened to ceruse, or lead white, which would oxidise and turn black, transforming highlights into shadows, snow-white robes into black, pale skin into dark, and so on — an inversion that made the fresco into a sort of negative of itself.
A frescoist wanting to use bright colours like azurite or verdigris therefore added them to the fresco only after the intonaco had dried. This method had a major drawback, however. Because the glues and gums used as fixatives were not as tenacious as the rock-hard intonaco, the secco touches were always the first to perish. Giorgio Vasari warned of the dangers of this technique, pointing out that ‘the colours become clouded by that retouching and in a short time turn black. Therefore let those who desire to work on the wall work boldly in fresco and not retouch a secco, because, besides being a very poor thing in itself, it renders the life of the pictures short.’4
By Michelangelo’s time, painting exclusively in buon fresco — that is, without any secco additions whatsoever — was imperative for any artist who wished to showcase his virtuoso talents and test the limits of his art. Patrons often demanded the more durable buon fresco for their commissions. Ghirlandaio’s contract with Giovanni Tornabuoni, for example, decreed that the frescoes in Santa Maria Novella should be done entirely in buon fresco, a condition expertly fulfilled by the workshop.5 However, even though Michelangelo was lucky enough to have on his team a number of painters trained by Ghirlandaio in this virtuoso technique, he and his assistants used a large number of secco touches when they frescoed The Flood.6 And as anyone with wallpaper knows, moulds and mildews tend to grow on binding agents exposed to damp — precisely the problem that beset the team of painters in the Sistine Chapel. These moulds needed to be removed immediately, otherwise, like the salts, they would destroy the fresco. Sangallo duly showed Michelangelo how to deal with the fungus, after which the artist was ordered to continue his work.7 Michelangelo was not to be released from his obligations in Rome quite so easily.
The episode of the salt efflorescence and the outbreak of mildew may have led Michelangelo to take a jaundiced view of his assistants. The story goes that, dissatisfied with their work, he dismissed the lot of them soon after starting the project, then heroically carried on by himself. The man largely responsible for this myth, his biographer and friend Giorgio Vasari, relates how one day Michelangelo locked the door of the chapel on his helpers as they arrived for work, refusing them entry. ‘And so, when the jest appeared to them to be going too far,’ Vasari wrote, ‘they resigned themselves to it and returned in shame to Florence.’8 Michelangelo then went on paint the ceiling, as Condivi puts it, ‘without any help whatever, not even someone to grind his colours for him’.9
This story is every bit as appealing — and every bit as far-fetched — as the one that claims Michelangelo frescoed the vault while lying flat on his back. It is unlikely that the event described by Vasari ever actually happened, much less at such an early stage, when Michelangelo needed all the help and expertise he could get.10 It is true that none of the Florentine assistants was present for the whole of the Sistine Chapel project. They had been hired by Granacci on the understanding, implicit in their lump-sum payments of twenty ducats each, that Michelangelo would release them from service when he no longer needed their help. And in time they would indeed be replaced by a team of lesser-known artists. But their departure from Rome, when it eventually came, was neither as dramatic nor as ignominious as Vasari made it, especially since most of them stayed on friendly terms with Michelangelo for years to come.
At this point, though, one of Michelangelo’s assistants did leave Rome under a cloud, since Jacopo del Tedesco departed for Florence at the end of January, never to return. Michelangelo was not sorry to see him go. ‘He was in the wrong a thousand times over and I have every reason to complain about him,’ he seethed in a letter to Lodovico, warning his father not to listen to anything that Tedesco might say against him.11 He was concerned that the disgruntled assistant would traduce his reputation in Florence, as Lapo and Lotti had done a few years earlier. Following their sacking in Bologna, the two goldsmiths had gone straight to Lodovico with their complaints, causing him to chastise his son. Michelangelo was keen to prevent Tedesco from tarnishing his name with a similar pack of lies. ‘Turn a deaf ear and leave it at that,’ he instructed his father.
Among Tedesco’s thousand faults were his complaints about the shabby accommodation in the workshop behind Santa Caterina. Even though he himself had grumbled about exactly the same situation in Bologna, Michelangelo had scant sympathy for Tedesco. The assistant’s problem seems to have been that he was altogether too much like the perpetually malcontent Michelangelo.
Tedesco may well have had a point about his living conditions in Rome. Besides working side by side on the scaffold, the men were also living together in the grim hospitality of the workshop near the Piazza Rusticucci, where conditions were almost as cramped as they had been in Michelangelo’s quarters in Bologna. Tucked away in a narrow backstreet beneath the looming city wall, close by the swamp-like moat of the Castel Sant’Angelo, and hemmed in by the teams of masons and carpenters at work on both St Peter’s and the Cortile del Belvedere, the studio cannot have provided the men with a pleasant or restful atmosphere. And their spirits would not have been helped by heavy rains that pelted Rome throughout the autumn and winter, threatening a real-life flood.
Though undoubtedly convivial at times, life in the workshop must have been frugal, industrious and devoid of all but the simplest comforts. Michelangelo might well have believed the Buonarroti to be descended from princes, but he himself did not live like a prince. Quite the opposite. ‘Ascanio,’ he once proudly boasted to his faithful apprentice, ‘however rich I may have been, I have always lived like a poor man.’12 He was indifferent, for example, about his food, taking it ‘more out of necessity than for pleasure’,13 and often fortifying himself with nothing more than a piece of bread and some wine. Sometimes he would eat his humble dinner as he worked, chewing on a crust of bread as he sketched or painted.
Worse than Michelangelo’s frugality was his personal hygiene, or lack thereof. ‘His nature was so rough and uncouth,’ wrote Paolo Giovio in his biography of the artist, ‘that his domestic habits were incredibly squalid, and deprived posterity of any pupils who might have succeeded him.’14 There is no reason to doubt that Michelangelo faithfully followed his father’s advice. ‘Never wash yourself,’ Lodovico urged his son. ‘Allow yourself to be rubbed, but don’t wash yourself.’15 Even Condivi was forced admit that Michelangelo had some disgusting habits after witnessing how he ‘often slept in his clothes and in the boots which he has always worn … and he has sometimes gone so long without taking them off that then the skin came away like a snake’s with the boots’.16 This sight was disconcerting even in an age when people changed their clothes and went to the public baths, at most, only once a week.
Perhaps even worse was Michelangelo’s antisocial behaviour. He was, of course, a man capable of friendship and camaraderie. The Florentine assistants had been brought to Rome for the very reason that they were long-standing friends and acquaintances whose company he enjoyed. But often Michelangelo did not want the society of others, since he was by nature a solitary and melancholic character. Condivi admits that Michelangelo won himself a reputation, as a young man, for being bizzarro e fantastico because he ‘withdrew from the company of men’.17 According to Vasari, this aloofness was not arrogance or misanthropy so much as a necessary prerequisite to creating great works of art
, since artists, he claimed, should ‘shun society’ in order to devote themselves to their studies.18
What was beneficial for Michelangelo’s art was not, however, quite so good for his personal relations. One of his friends, Donato Giannotti, told the story of how he invited Michelangelo to dinner only to be rebuffed by the artist, who wished to be left to himself. Giannotti persevered with his invitation, arguing that Michelangelo should allow himself the pleasure of an evening’s entertainment as an antidote to the cares and worries of the world. Still Michelangelo refused, musing gloomily that he had no desire to be cheered up since the world was a place of tears.19 Another time, however, he accepted a friend’s invitation to dinner ‘because my melancholy — or perhaps better, my madness — left me for a while’.20 He then discovered, much to his astonishment, that he actually enjoyed himself.