Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

by Ross King

  Not until Florentine artists such as Donatello reverted to classical aesthetic ideals in the first decades of the fifteenth century – a time when antique art was being excavated and collected – did the nude come back into favour. Even so, appreciation of the nude was not unqualified. ‘Let us always observe decency and modesty,’ Leon Battista Alberti pleaded in De pictura, his handbook for painters first published in the 1430s. ‘The obscene parts of the body, and all those that are not pleasing to look at, should be covered with clothing or leaves or the hand.’11 Michelangelo paid scant heed to this injunction when sculpting his marble David, causing the members of the Opera del Duomo, who commissioned the statue, to insist on the addition of a garland of twenty-eight fig leaves to hide the genitals.fn1

  By the time of Michelangelo’s apprenticeship, drawing from nude models was among the workshop’s most valued exercises. Would-be painters started their careers by sketching statues and frescoes, then graduated to human models, taking turns drawing one another’s posed bodies, both nude and draped, and then working them into their paintings and sculptures. Leonardo, for example, advised painters to ‘pose men, dressed or nude, in such a way as you have determined in your work’. Quite considerately, he also recommended using nude models only during the warm summer months.12

  Michelangelo naturally employed nude models for the Sistine ceiling. Even robed figures were sketched from nude models, a practice encouraged by Alberti, who urged artists to ‘draw the naked body … and then cover it with clothes’.13 Only through this method, it was felt, could the artist convincingly portray the nuanced shapes and motions of the human figure. Michelangelo designed the robes themselves through a method learned in Ghirlandaio’s workshop. A length of fabric was dipped in wet plaster and then arranged in folds over a support, either a workbench or a purpose-built model. As the plaster hardened, the folds would freeze in place, enabling the artist to use them as models for tumbling draperies and robes.14 Apprentices in Ghirlandaio’s workshop made sketches from these drapery models as part of their training, and their drawings were then compiled in a portfolio that provided ready-made patterns for Ghirlandaio’s finished paintings.15 Michelangelo might have used one of these model books as a short cut for some of the garments, but many others undoubtedly came from plaster models cast in his workshop.

  One of the Ancestors in the lunettes, a blonde woman who raises one foot and peers contemplatively into a mirror held in her left hand, shows how Michelangelo proceeded. Though the young woman in the fresco is robed in green and orange, the model in the sketch is clearly naked. The merest glance at the sketch also reveals how this model was not a woman at all, rather an elderly man with a slight paunch and sagging buttocks. Unlike Raphael, who did not scruple to use women, Michelangelo’s models were without exception always male, no matter the sex of the character portrayed.

  27. A sketch of drapery.

  28. A sketch for a female figure in a lunette.

  Even if Michelangelo heeded Leonardo’s advice about warm weather, life for his models must have been uncomfortable at times. Some figures on the ceiling called for awkwardly contorted poses that even the supplest model could have held for only the shortest time. How these startling poses were arranged and held – and who exactly were the models for them – remains one of the mysteries of Michelangelo’s working practice. He was rumoured to have visited Rome’s stufe, or bathhouses, in order to study the anatomy of nude men.16 These were underground spas with steam rooms that originally catered for illnesses such as rheumatism and syphilis but soon became the haunts of prostitutes and their clients. Michelangelo may or may not have visited some of these establishments in search of models and inspiration. However, the old man who served as a model for the female Ancestor in the lunette, as well as the bulky muscles of so many figures on the ceiling, suggest that he did not make exclusive use of young apprentices.

  Another means of studying the human body was also available to the artist of Michelangelo’s time: the dissection of corpses. One of the inspirations for the artistic interest in the minutiae of sinews and muscles was Alberti’s doctrine that ‘it will help when painting living creatures first to sketch in the bones … Then add the sinews and muscles, and finally clothe the bones and muscles with flesh and skin.’17 Knowledge of how flesh and skin clothed the bones and muscles required the artist to possess more than a passing acquaintance with how the body fitted together. Leonardo therefore claimed that anatomical study was an essential part of the artist’s training. Unless a painter knew the structure of the body, he wrote, his nude figures would look like either ‘a sack full of nuts’ or ‘a bundle of radishes’.18 The first artist to perform dissections seems to have been Antonio del Pollaiuolo, the Florentine sculptor, born about 1430, whose works show a keen interest in the nude. Another dedicated anatomist was Luca Signorelli, who was rumoured to make nocturnal visits to burial grounds in his search for body parts.

  Such macabre activities may have been partly responsible for a story about Michelangelo that once circulated through Rome. The rumour spread that while preparing to carve a sculpture of the dying Christ he fatally stabbed his model in order to study the muscles of a dying man – a perverse devotion to art recalling the malicious gossip that Johannes Brahms strangled cats so he could transcribe their dying cries for use in his symphonies. After the model’s death was discovered, Michelangelo supposedly fled to Palestrina, twenty miles south-east of Rome, and hid out in the village of Capranica until the fuss subsided. This anecdote is undoubtedly apocryphal,fn2 yet it hints at how Michelangelo – the moody, aloof, obsessive perfectionist – was viewed by the people of Rome.

  Michelangelo did study the muscles of dead bodies, of course, albeit not ones that had perished on the point of his dagger. As a young man in Florence he had dissected corpses given to him by Niccolò Bichiellini, the prior of Santo Spirito, who put a room in the hospital at his disposal. Condivi applauded Michelangelo’s gruesome studies, relating how the maestro once showed him the corpse of a Moor, ‘a most handsome young man’, laid out on a table. Then, plucking up his scalpel like a doctor of medicine, Michelangelo proceeded to describe ‘many rare and recondite things, perhaps never before understood’.19

  This statement is not the hyperbole in which Condivi sometimes indulged, since Michelangelo was indeed an accomplished anatomist. Surface anatomy today possesses a nomenclature of roughly six hundred terms with which to refer to bones, tendons and muscles. Yet, according to one estimate, Michelangelo’s paintings and sculptures show at least eight hundred different anatomical structures.20 For this reason, he is sometimes accused of inventing or distorting anatomical forms. In fact, his works accurately depict structures so recondite that medical anatomy, five hundred years later, has still to name them. One of the few instances where he did alter an anatomical structure is the right hand of the David, where he correctly represented some fifteen bones and muscles but then elongated the border of one muscle – the abductor digiti minimi – to enlarge slightly the hand holding the stone which will slay Goliath.21

  By the time of his work in the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo had for the time being ceased dissecting corpses. He was forced to abandon the practice, Condivi reported, ‘because his long handling of dead bodies had so affected his stomach that he could neither eat nor drink’.22 Still, his nauseating labours in Santo Spirito were put to good use as he began displaying on the chapel’s vault his unsurpassed knowledge of the contours and structures of the human body.

  fn1 Five centuries on, Michelangelo’s nudes are still a cause of controversy. In 1995, on the 3,000th anniversary of its establishment as the capital of the kingdom of Israel, the city of Jerusalem refused the gift of a replica David from Florence on the grounds of the statue’s nudity. Later the city fathers somewhat grudgingly accepted the replica, though only after its privates had been concealed by a pair of underpants.

  fn2 No real evidence exists for the story, partly because many of the documents that may have s
hed light on the subject – the records of the Congregation of San Girolamo della Carità, a confraternity that acted as a public notary in all criminal cases – have been damaged, destroyed or stolen. There are local legends in Capranica that ascribe to Michelangelo both carved and painted work in the church of St Mary Magadalene. Yet Michelangelo’s handiwork in Capranica is not, of course, proof of murder.

  16

  Laocoön

  WHEN DOMENICO GHIRLANDAIO came to Rome to paint the walls of the Sistine Chapel in 1481, he had strolled among the ancient ruins with his sketchbook in hand, looking for likely subjects. A superb draughtsman, he soon made scores of detailed studies of columns, obelisks, aqueducts and, of course, statues. Among these drawings was a sketch of one of Rome’s best-known marbles, a statue known as the Arrotino, or ‘Knife Grinder’. An ancient replica of a statue carved in Pergamon in third century BC, the Arrotino depicted a nude youth kneeling to sharpen his weapon. Back in Florence a few years later to paint the Tornabuoni Chapel, Ghirlandaio neatly turned the figure in this sketch into a character in his fresco: a nude man kneeling to remove his shoe in the scene showing the Baptism of Christ.

  Some of Michelangelo’s earliest sketches show how he too had roamed the streets with his sketchbook after arriving in Rome for the first time in 1496. There is in the Louvre a drawing that reproduces a statuette from a fountain in the Giardino Cesi, a podgy child carrying a wineskin on his shoulder. Another statue drawn on one of these expeditions was a Mercury that stood on the Palatine Hill. Like Ghirlandaio, he made these drawings to develop a repertoire of classical poses for his paintings and statues. One of the marbles he sketched, a nude figure on the corner of an ancient Roman sarcophagus, even seems to have inspired the pose for his David.1

  29. Michelangelo’s sketch of a figure on a Roman sarcophagus.

  Nude models alone could not have provided Michelangelo with the hundreds of poses he needed for the Sistine Chapel. When the time came to make drawings for his fresco, it was only natural that he should have turned for inspiration to the antiquities of both Florence and Rome. Faced with such a huge task, he resorted to borrowing – or what art historians call ‘quoting’ – from ancient statues and reliefs. One place where these quotations are particularly evident is in the nudes that flank five of the Genesis scenes – twenty strapping, six-foot-high figures for whom Michelangelo coined the name Ignudi (from nudo, ‘naked’).

  One of the first designs for the ceiling – the geometric design featuring twelve Apostles – had called for angels supporting medallions. While the overall plan was quickly abandoned as a ‘poor thing’, the concept of angels holding medallions was not. However, Michelangelo ‘paganised’ these angels, removing their wings and turning them into athletic young nudes akin to the ‘slaves’ he had been hoping to carve for Julius’s tomb. Michelangelo found poses for some of these Ignudi by copying Hellenistic reliefs in Rome and ancient engraved gems in the collection of Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence.2 For two of them, he even reproduced, in an altered form, the most famous antique statue of the day, the Laocoön – a work he was uniquely placed to appreciate.3

  Carved by a team of three sculptors on the island of Rhodes around 25 BC, this marble group portrayed the Trojan priest Laocoön and his two young sons struggling with sea serpents sent by Apollo to strangle them after Laocoön – the man who uttered the famous words ‘Beware of Greeks bearing gifts’ – tried to stop the Trojans from opening the hatch of the Wooden Horse. The sculpture was transported to Rome by the Emperor Titus in AD 69, and afterwards buried for centuries amid the city’s rubble and ruins. In 1506, the group (minus Laocoön’s right arm) was unearthed in a vineyard on the Esquiline Hill belonging to one Felice de’ Freddi. Michelangelo was present at the excavation, having been summoned by Julius to the vineyard to help Giuliano da Sangallo confirm its identity.

  30. The Laocoön.

  Ecstatic at the find, Julius purchased the statue from Felice for the price of six hundred gold ducats per year for life, then moved it to join the Apollo Belvedere and various other marbles in the new sculpture garden designed by Bramante in the Vatican. In a city where the antique was fast becoming a religion, a mania for the statue was unleashed. Cheering crowds tossed flowers as it trundled through the streets to the chanting of the papal choir. Copies were made in wax, stucco, bronze and amethyst. Andrea del Sarto sketched it, as did Parmagianino. Baccio Bandinelli carved a version for the King of France, Titian drew a Monkey Laocoön, and the scholar Jacopo Sadoleto wrote a poem in the statue’s honour. Its image was even displayed on majolica plates sold in Rome as souvenirs.

  Michelangelo was as taken with the ancient statue as everyone else. With its writhing male nudes, the Laocoön had a clear appeal to the man whose youthful Battle of the Centaurs anticipated its tortured, athletic figures. Soon after its excavation he made a study of it, sketching the three snake-entwined figures locked in the twisted pose aptly known as the figura serpentinata. At the time, Michelangelo was hard at work on Julius’s tomb and so undoubtedly drew the statue with the plan of carving versions of it for the mausoleum. But with the tomb project shelved, the figures inspired by the Laocoön were transplanted to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, where they grapple, not with serpents, but with the fat garlands of Rovere oak leaves and acorns.

  The two Ignudi inspired by the Laocoön are found beneath The Sacrifice of Noah, the third and last of Michelangelo’s scenes from the life of Noah. The Sacrifice of Noah shows the old patriarch and his extended family giving thanks with ‘burnt offerings’ after the waters of the deluge have retreated.4 Michelangelo and his assistants took just over a month to paint Noah’s sons hard at work before the altar, carrying wood, stoking the fire, eviscerating a ram. A red-robed Noah watches as one of his daughters-in-law shields her face from the heat as she holds a torch to the altar. These figures, too, were inspired by ancient statues. Noah’s daughter-in-law is a direct copy of the figure of Althea on a Roman sarcophagus now in the Villa Torlonia in Rome,5 while the young man who stokes the fire comes from an ancient sacrificial relief which Michelangelo likewise sketched on one of his excursions.6

  Despite their sculptural antecedents, the figures in The Sacrifice of Noah make for a considerably more effective scene than those in the previous Noah panels. Michelangelo managed to create a compact, action-packed tableau in which the figures are carefully developed in relation to one another. Their mirroring body language as they grapple with rams or hand each other sacrificial fowl balances the composition and provides a sense of interplay absent from The Drunkenness of Noah.

  By the time this triptych of the life of Noah was completed, sometime in the early autumn of 1509, Michelangelo and his team had painted their way across a third of the chapel’s ceiling.7 Work was beginning to proceed more steadily, and after a full year’s work on the scaffold, some four thousand square feet of the vault had been frescoed in glorious colour, including three prophets, eight Ignudi, a pair of spandrels, four lunettes and two of the pendentives. The year consumed, in total, more than two hundred giornate. And all of this work had been done despite several drastic hitches in the winter and Michelangelo’s illness during the summer.

  Michelangelo was in no mood for celebrations, however. ‘I am living here in a state of great anxiety and of the greatest physical fatigue,’ he wrote to Buonarroto. ‘I have no friends of any sort and want none. I haven’t even time to eat as much as I should. So you must not bother me with additional worries, for I could not bear another thing.’8

  Michelangelo was still distracted from his work by irksome family problems. Predictably, Lodovico had lost the legal dispute with his sister-in-law, Cassandra, and was obliged to repay her dowry. Equally predictable, he was distraught at having to part with the money. For the past year he had been living in what Michelangelo called a ‘state of fear’.9 With the suit finally lost, the artist tried to raise his father’s low spirits. ‘Do not alarm yourself or be in the least depressed about it,’ Michelange
lo urged him, ‘because to lose one’s possessions is not to lose one’s life. I will do more than make up to you what you will lose.’10 Michelangelo and not Lodovico, it was clear, would be the one to reach into his pocket to repay the disgruntled widow. Fortuitously, however, he had just received from the Pope a second instalment of five hundred ducats.

  Buonarroto, usually the reliable one, was also the cause of the ‘additional worries’. Not content with life in Lorenzo Strozzi’s wool shop, he hoped to invest some money – Michelangelo’s, of course – in a bakery. The switch from wool to wheat was inspired by his experience on the family farm, where surplus quantities of wheat were sometimes sold to friends at knockdown prices. Michelangelo, a bit stingily, disapproved of the practice. After a bountiful harvest in 1508, he scolded his father for giving the mother of a friend named Michele 150 soldi worth of wheat. Buonarroto therefore seems to have decided to make a more lucrative use of the surplus. Flushed with enthusiasm for his new venture, he dispatched a courier to Rome with a loaf of bread for Michelangelo to sample. Michelangelo enjoyed the bread but pronounced the enterprise itself unappetising. He pointedly ordered the would-be entrepreneur to keep his nose to the grindstone in the wool shop, ‘for I hope when I return home that you will be set up on your own, if you be men enough’.11