Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel

by Andrew Graham-Dixon

  To express the matter simply, Michelangelo’s brain was not the same as most people’s brains. He might be compared to certain individuals who are gifted with seemingly inexplicable mathematical skills, such as the ability to solve the square root of an enormous number in a fraction of second. Some of Michelangelo’s later architectural drawings, done at a time when he had been put in charge of the huge project of completing the new St Peter’s, show that he could effortlessly manipulate particularly complex forms, like heavily moulded architraves, drawing them from all angles without any sign of calculation or workings-out — as if he had the equivalent of a modern computer-modelling program installed in his mind.

  Certain drawings for the Sistine Chapel suggest that he made use of the same skill in creating his paintings for the vault. He would produce numerous, apparently disjointed, sketches and studies for a particular composition — an arm, a leg, a torso, modelled often from life, in widely differing conditions of light and shade. Then, in the act of painting, he would resolve this conflictingly lit jigsaw of shapes into a single unified whole. No other Renaissance painter drew with the same disregard for a consistent lighting scheme, and none worked with the same freedom from sketch to finished painting. Michelangelo could do this because of the skills he had shown as a sculptor — because of his unique ability to hold all the elements of a picture in his mind as if they were physical, three-dimensional presences. By the time he came to paint the image, it already existed so completely for him that he no longer needed to depend on his drawings. His celebrated rival Raphael painted his frescoes on to meticulously squared-up drawings that had been transferred to the surface of the plaster. But towards the later stages of the Sistine ceiling, when he was at his most assured, Michelangelo was able to dispense with such laborious methods. He painted The Separation of Light and Darkness, for instance, freehand. Study of the plaster ground itself proves that he did it in a single session of no more than eight or nine hours.

  Study for the ceiling

  Studies for Haman

  Michelangelo was extremely busy during the years that followed his return to Florence in 1501. He carried out several other commissions for sculpture, as well as demonstrating his formidable abilities in the field of painting. He painted the so-called Doni Tondo, a roundel of the Holy Family now in the Uffizi Galleries, for a wealthy Florentine named Angelo Doni. The patron is said to have baulked at the price of seventy ducats, whereupon the proud and volatile artist promptly doubled it. (Picasso, who greatly admired Michelangelo, was fond of playing the same trick on recalcitrant would-be collectors of his own work.) During these years Michelangelo also created a vast cartoon, or preparatory sketch, for a painting of a famous Florentine military victory, The Battle of Cascina. This was intended to be one of a pair of monumental frescoes for the main hall of assembly in Florence’s Palazzo della Signoria. The other painting, a depiction of The Battle of Anghiari, was commissioned from Leonardo da Vinci, but neither work got further than the drawing board.

  Michelangelo’s enormous drawing, which survives only in the form of a later copy, now at Holkham Hall (overleaf), showed a group of soldiers surprised by the call to battle as they were bathing in the Arno. With characteristic independence, he had treated the commission for a battle painting as the pretext for a complicated homage to the art of antiquity – a frieze-like composition thronged with naked male figures, each in a different pose, all suddenly energised by the urgency of a moment of crisis. The drawing was long preserved in Florence, where, according to Vasari, it became a kind of school for artists. Eventually it fell victim to its own fame: ‘it was left with too little caution in the hands of the craftsmen, insomuch that ... it was torn up and divided into many pieces.’

  The Battle of Cascina, after Michelangelo’s drawing

  No such fate befell the statue of David. The sculpture of the young hero, sling at his shoulder, was regarded in Florence as an apt emblem of the city-state’s own resolute determination to preserve its independence. Vasari indicates that the artist had always intended the work to be interpreted in that way. He also tells a story about the David that reflects on Michelangelo’s ingenuity in getting his own way. It seems that when Michelangelo first unveiled the statue, Gonfaloniere Piero Soderini unwisely tempered his otherwise fulsome praise of the figure by commenting that its nose was too broad. The artist rushed to remedy the fault, or at least gave the appearance of doing so:

  Michelangelo noticed that the Gonfalonier was beneath the Giant, and that his point of view prevented him from seeing it properly; but in order to satisfy him he climbed upon the staging, which was against the shoulders, and quickly took up a chisel in his left hand, with a little of the marble-dust that lay upon the planks of the staging, and then, beginning to strike lightly with the chisel, let fall the dust little by little, nor changed the nose a whit from what it was before. Then, looking down at the Gonfalonier, who stood watching him, he said, ‘Look at it now.’ ‘I like it better,’ said the Gonfalonier, ‘you have given it life.’ And so Michelangelo came down, laughing to himself at having satisfied that lord, for he had compassion on those who, in order to appear full of knowledge, talk about things of which they know nothing.28

  Shortly after Michelangelo performed this cunning trick, a commission was formed to decide exactly where the marble giant should stand. Its members included two state heralds and a trumpeter as well as every artist of distinction in the city. 29 Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Piero di Cosimo and the San Gallo brothers, among others, attended. The senior of the two heralds suggested putting the statue at the entrance to the Palazzo della Signoria, the civic heart of Florence. The site was already occupied by Donatello’s bronze of Judith and Holofernes, another biblical allegory of the traditional Florentine disdain for despotism, which had been placed there as a warning to tyrants after Piero de’ Medici had been expelled from the city. But the herald argued that Donatello’s work had brought bad luck to Florence: ‘The Judith is a death-dealing sign,’ he said, ‘and it is not good for a woman to kill a man,’ adding that things had gone ‘from bad to worse’ for the city since it was placed there. What better replacement could there be than the magnificent new sculpture of David? After long and tortuous deliberations, the herald’s proposal was accepted.30 At a stroke, Michelangelo’s colossus had become the most prominent work of art in Florence. He had supplanted Donatello and secured his fame in the city where he had grown up. No wonder he believed that sculpture, not painting, was his true vocation.

  The David was set in its place on 28 May 1504. Six months earlier, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere had been elected Pope Julius II. Known to his contemporaries as ‘Il Terribile’, ‘The Terrible One’, he was a fierce and warlike pope who spent much of his ten-year pontificate marching up and down the Italian peninsula at the head of his army. He wore a suit of silver armour and a silver beard to match. The beard, a novelty for a Renaissance pope, was no mark of piety. Julius II wore it in emulation of his ancient Roman namesake, Julius Caesar, who had once sworn that he would remain unshaven until he had avenged himself on the Gauls for massacring his legions. Julius II’s beard was a pledge against his own numerous enemies — the French, the Bolognese, the Venetians, the Turks.31

  ‘Fuori i barbari!’ was the pope’s warcry — ‘Out with the barbarians! ’ He had been an implacable enemy of the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, and he was determined to recover the papal territories that had been lost to Borgia nepotism— to reclaim, in particular, the extensive lands in northern Italy that Alexander VI’s son, Cesare Borgia, had been allowed to carve into a state of his own. Julius II also fought to push back the Venetians, who had made steady incursions into the traditional papal territories of the Romagna. By the time of his death, in 1513, he had driven the French from Italy and brought Parma, Piacenza and Reggio Emilia into the papal states.

  Pope Julius II by Raphael

  Despite his advanced age — he was sixty years old when he became pope — Julius II was a man of
enormous energy. He was determined not only to redraw the map of political power in Italy, but also to transform the physical fabric of the Holy City. Despite its elevated status as the capital of western Christendom, early sixteenth-century Rome was little more than a series of linked villages clustered around the banks of the Tiber. The fabled seven hills of the city of the Caesars had become grassy wooded slopes, where sheep and cattle grazed amongst the overgrown ruins of temple, forum and amphitheatre. The gap-toothed hulk of the Colosseum towered over all, memorial to an empire long since extinct.

  The city was derelict because of the decline that it had suffered during the Middle Ages. When Julius was elected to the papacy, Rome had only been home to the popes for a little more than eighty years. Martin V, whose election in 1417 had ended the Great Schism, had returned there in 1420. According to Platina, the fifteenth-century author of The Lives of the Popes, ‘he found it so dilapidated that it bore hardly any resemblance to a city’.32 Intervening popes had done what they could to build and rebuild the city’s fortifications, streets, squares and fountains. Julius II’s own uncle, Sixtus IV, whose pontificate began in 1471 and ended in 1484, had established the Vatican Library and rebuilt the old Palatine Chapel of Nicholas III – which henceforth, in Sixtus’s memory, would be called the Sistine Chapel. Before that, a coherent vision of what the city might one day become had been set forth in a speech delivered in 1455 from his deathbed by Pope Nicholas V to his cardinals: ‘to create solid and stable convictions in the minds of the uncultured masses, there must be something that appeals to the eye: a popular faith, sustained only in doctrines, will never be anything but feeble and vacillating. But if the authority of the Holy See were visibly displayed in majestic buildings, imperishable memorials and witnesses seemingly planted by the hand of God himself, belief would grow and strengthen like a tradition from one generation to another, and all the world would accept and revere it.’33

  Julius II did more than any other Renaissance pope to turn this dream, a blueprint for the future magnificence of papal Rome, into reality. During his pontificate, the Vatican Palace was renovated and its new apartments decorated by Raphael with paintings that simultaneously celebrated the progress of human learning and the enlightened teachings of the Church. The Cortile del Belvedere was begun. New palaces were built, streets were widened and improved. Julius founded the Vatican museum and established Rome’s most significant collection of the art of antiquity. He laid the foundation stone for the new St Peter’s. He commanded his principal architect, Bramante, to improve access to the city for pilgrims by straightening the Via Lungara and building a parallel street on the other side of the Tiber — the Via Giulia, the longest straight road since Roman times.

  He did all this, but at a cost. It was partly to raise the revenues for his many grand projects in Rome that Julius went to war so often. The territories he conquered became an important source of income, but the funds at his disposal could never match the scale of his ambition, so he resorted to other methods too. Simony and the traffic in indulgences — papally sanctioned pardons for sin, hawked across Europe by the agents of Rome — thrived under his pontificate. In the eyes of the pope and his advisers, the ends justified the means. Giles of Viterbo, favourite of Julius II and vicar-general of the Augustinian order, had a messianic vision of Rome becoming the new Jerusalem as the end of the world approached. Giles enthusiastically endorsed the sale of indulgences, never imagining the scale of the rebellion against the Church that this would soon inspire in Germany.34 In 1517, only four years after Julius II’s death, Martin Luther composed his ninety-five theses objecting to the sale of indulgences, precipitating the Reformation.

  Julius II made some reforms to the monastic orders and dispatched missionaries to America, India, Ethiopia and the Congo. But he was destined to be remembered as a pope whose temporal policy had eclipsed his spiritual office. His pontificate culminated in a tragic paradox. In trying to realise the most grandiose dream of the post-Schismatic papacy, he had only helped to shatter it for ever. Although he had striven with all his might to consolidate the papal states and assert the immutable authority of the one true Church, his unscrupulous methods had fanned the embers of the Reformation that would sunder the Church and transform the very landscape of European Christianity into a war zone.35

  In 1523, looking back at the pope’s achievements from a post-Reformation perspective, Erasmus published a bitterly comic satire entitled Julius Exclusus. It tells the story of Julius meeting St Peter at the entrance to heaven and finding the gate locked against him. The pope protests, listing his military victories and citing the magnificence he has brought to Rome, but the saint remains adamant that he will not enter: ‘You are a great builder: build yourself a new paradise.’36

  From the moment of his election, it had been inevitable that the ‘great builder’ would call on the services of Michelangelo. Rome already contained an impressive advertisement of the artist’s skills, in the shape of the Pietà, and stories about the marble colossus that he had created in Florence must soon have reached the pope’s ears. Here, plainly, was an artist who could work on the scale demanded by Julius II’s own enormous ambition.

  The call came in the spring of 1505, when the pope summoned Michelangelo to Rome. Well aware that papal patronage would open a new world of opportunities for him, the artist was happy to obey. According to Condivi, the pope spent several months wondering how to make use of Michelangelo’s gifts before finally conceiving the idea of commissioning him to create his own tomb.

  Michelangelo proposed a design of stunning scale and complexity, which Condivi describes in considerable detail: ‘to give some idea of it, I will say briefly that this tomb was to have had four faces: two were to have been eighteen braccia long to serve as the sides, and two of twelve braccia as head and foot, so that it came to a square and a half. All around the exterior there were niches for statues . . .’37 There were to be more than forty of these statues. Some were to depict the liberal arts as slaves, indicating that with the death of Julius painting, architecture and sculpture and ‘all the artistic virtues’ had been reduced to a state of feeble passivity. Others were to represent angels, both sad and happy, to lament the passing of Julius and to rejoice at his entry into heaven. There was even to be a second monument within the monument, a great tomb resembling a temple to house the sarcophagus containing the pope’s remains.

  So began what Michelangelo would, in later life, call ‘the tragedy of the tomb’. It was a project on which he embarked with the highest hopes, but that was destined to be beset by a thousand interruptions and delays — one that would preoccupy him not only for years, but for decades of his life, and that would only be realised, belatedly and long after Julius II’s death, in a much reduced form. It is hard, however, to share Michelangelo’s belief that the failure of the project, in the form that he first planned it, amounted to a tragedy.

  The Louvre in Paris contains certain figures of the slaves, which the artist brought to varying states of completion, of an undeniable pathos and beauty. But the fact remains that the artist’s initial proposal was a megalomaniac fantasy, an obscene monument to ego, pride and power. The oppressive object described by Condivi would have been no mere tomb, but a self-sufficient building, combining the functions of chapel and sarcophagus. It would have towered fifty feet in the air and would have occupied an area of eight hundred square feet. Its exterior would have been decorated with a multitude of niches, each containing a life-size statue, while, as Condivi says, four more statues, each one a giant, would have crowned its marble summit. One of these was actually carved by Michelangelo, the frowning figure of Moses that dominates the much reduced memorial that was eventually erected in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli. It is a statue that still evokes the chilling grandeur of Michelangelo’s first idea for the tomb. Sigmund Freud was both fascinated and repelled by the work, and when he lived in Rome returned to it again and again, revelling masochistically in what he described as its g
randiose repudiation of his merely mortal condition.

  At a conservative estimate it would have taken Michelangelo between forty and fifty years to carve the monument’s statues alone. Yet such was the pope’s instant enthusiasm for the proposal that he allowed himself to be carried away by the artist’s Herculean confidence in his own abilities. Michelangelo was dispatched straight away to Carrara, with an advance of a thousand papal ducats, to quarry the immense amount of marble required for the project. Condivi records that he stayed in the mountains for more than eight months, with only two helpers and a horse for company. He also tells a story that vividly conveys Michelangelo’s frenetic state of mind at the time: ‘One day while there, he was looking at the landscape, and he was seized with a wish to carve, out of a mountain overlooking the sea, a colossus which would be visible from afar to seafarers.’38

  Once the quarrying was finished, Michelangelo returned to Rome, having arranged for the marble to be transported there by boat. It was unloaded at the port of Ripa Grande, then taken to the Piazza San Pietro, behind the church of Santa Caterina, near the artist’s own lodgings. ‘So great was the quantity of the blocks of marble,’ says Condivi, ‘that, when they were spread out in the piazza, they made other people marvel and rejoiced the pope, who conferred such great and boundless favours on Michelangelo that, when he had begun to work, he would go more and more often all the way to his house to see him, conversing with him there about the tomb and other matters no differently than he would have done with his own brother.’39