Michelangelo. Eugene Muntz
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extended necks, tortured poses and troubled facial expressions of these characters rattle our sense of reality nonetheless! How the entire corpus of anatomical science is helpless to inspire such occasionally crushing but invariably destabilising faith in the existence of this world of colossuses! It is rightly said that not a single figure of Michelangelo’s could stand up and walk without making the universe tremble and disrupt the very foundations of Nature.
In his Anatomie des Maîtres (1890), the eminent anatomist Mathias Duval adds a precious quip:
Although Michelangelo is an impeccable anatomist, as much cannot be said about him as a physiologist; all the muscles in his works are in a state of tetanus. In Nature, when one muscle contracts, the other relaxes.
So another conflict appears here between Michelangelo and his forebears: they worked from healthy living models while he used cadavers. Ghirlandaio, the so-called ‘master’, neither instructed nor influenced the so-called ‘student’. To date, we have only two Michelangelo drawings inspired by Ghirlandaio: one in the Louvre and one in the Albertina. Michelangelo’s stay with the Medici powerfully sharpened his thinking and education. Living amidst the family’s priceless collections, he developed an easy familiarity with the tiniest art secrets of Antiquity.
But if Antiquity so generously endowed the Renaissance master with ideas and themes, inspired him to worship form and stimulated his appetite for abstraction, Michelangelo’s ideals unswervingly opposed those of Ancient Greece. For example, he would subordinate every element in a composition to a single overriding impression: not just the hands, arms, legs, eyes and mouth that express the feelings and intentions of the soul, but also the torso and other somehow unconsciously expressive body parts. In short, we should underscore his habit of making the entire human form resonate with a single note, a note that expresses pathos, the strongest emotion. Does anything else clash more violently with the errant ways of the sculptors of Antiquity so concerned with pure and graceful curves before giving any thought to rendering the ripples of the soul?
26. The Virgin Mary with Child, 1512–1534. Marble. New Sacristy of San Lorenzo, Florence.
27. Pietà, 1498–1499. Detail. Marble, 174 cm. St. Peter’s, Vatican.
28. Pietà, 1498–1499. Marble, 174 cm. St. Peter’s, Vatican.
29. Bacchus, 1496–1497. Detail. Marble, 203 cm. Bargello, Florence.
We know luck led Michelangelo to Lorenzo de’ Medici. Lorenzo developed a fondness for the youth and took him under his wing after Michelangelo immediately broke a tooth off his marble mask of a faun because Lorenzo had remarked that the face was too old to have all its teeth. Thus, the artist became a part of his patron’s daily life in the Medici home on the Via Larga where he met Angelo Ambrogini, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola and other humanists of the Neo-Platonic School as well as a variety of poets, philosophers and intellectuals. Lorenzo himself was a man of exceptional cultivation.
Michelangelo’s first major work during his stay with the Medici was a low relief for what became the ‘Casa Buonarroti’ entitled Battle of the (Lapiths and) Centaurs.
Michelangelo’s full maturity as a sculptor was already obvious. His works not only demonstrate a mastery of anatomy that drove his rivals to despair and still dazzle posterity but go on to show a ferociously proud soul and even less imitable powers of dramatisation. Wholeheartedly swept up in ardent warfare, Michelangelo’s combatants are true athletes and masters of every palestral exercise, with muscles bulging and chests thrust forward and defiant stares that resonate physical and moral strength, adding a note of gripping pathos to each of Michelangelo’s works. Just as in the admirable Slave in the Louvre, which is perhaps the best example, his subjects not only brave their adversaries but the gods as well, and this is what makes them supremely eloquent representations of “being a free soul”.
Lorenzo de’ Medici’s death in April 1492 interrupted this enviable lifestyle. His arrogant son Piero had no real taste for the arts and sciences that were his father’s joy and glory. It appears he would have Michelangelo sculpt in snow or send him on errands for semi-precious stones. But the youth put his time to better use with his marble Hercules (long on display at the chateau in Fontainebleau until stolen in the seventeenth century) as well as with his wooden Crucifixion. The latter was executed as a gift to the priory of the Santo Spirito Convent in Florence for having hosted him there. Long missing, the Crucifix was found, restored and set up in the sacristy of the Santo Spirito Church.
30. Bacchus, 1496–1497. Marble, 203 cm. Bargello, Florence.
31. Sketch for a David with Catapult, 1501. Exhibition Room, The Louvre, Paris.
However, a storm was brewing that would bring down Medici rule. Cardiere, a singer in the Medici social circle, told Michelangelo of a vision, twice experienced, in which Lorenzo had appeared before him dressed only in a torn black shirt to ask him to tell his son Piero that he would soon be driven out of the city – upon which the young artist promptly fled to Bologna with a pair of friends. Given the extraordinary stress levels Michelangelo imposed on himself, these brusque depressions are not surprising. Nature, pushed to the limit, suddenly took its revenge. Likewise, he fled Rome in 1506 after imagining that Pope Julius II was going to have him killed. He went on to flee Florence just as suddenly during the siege of 1529, though only to return and stand tall among his fellow citizens once the initial panic had worn off.
In Bologna, Michelangelo netted a most flattering commission: the execution of several figures for the Arca (Shrine) di San Domenico in the church of the same name. This famous monument, started in the thirteenth century by Niccolo di Pisa and continued in the fifteenth century by Niccolo da Bari (a.k.a. Niccolo dell’ Arca), depicts the development of Tuscan sculpture from its beginning to its demise. Michelangelo’s contributions were the statues of St. Petronius and St. Proculus as well as the statuette Angel Holding a Candelabra. Until recently, the monument generated singular confusion over which sculptor did which work. However, there is no doubt about the statuette and close examination confirms material evidence from the archives: to carry a torch, this athletically-built child deploys the strength of Atlas carrying the Earth. This sombre-faced child with a gigantic torso, who looks like a miniature male adult, can only be the product of Michelangelo’s chisel. Admirable in its own right for its representation of sharply focused vitality, the Angel Holding a Candelabra offends credibility. Why pump up an angel into Hercules to lift a torch? The angel’s role and character call for suavity and Michelangelo’s predecessor, Niccolo dell’ Arca, fathomed the requirements for this subject very differently: his figure radiates inexpressible grace and charm. As for the St. Petronius, he stands barefoot and capped in a mitre as he holds forth a scale model of the church; the figure is much alive and almost tortured, with disappointing drapery effects. It resembles Jacopo della Quercia’s statue of the same saint, done for the façade of the San Petronio Church. Indeed, their busts show striking similarities in terms of looks, hairstyle and hang of the cloak. Michelangelo only recovers his own style in the lower half of the statue, where the comparison is not to his advantage. For its part, St. Proculus prefigures his David although the saint is shorter, stockier and more juvenile, with garments of lifelike pleating but an unpleasant look on his face, very unlike the one on his future masterpiece.
The most striking thing about the works done by Michelangelo in his youth, i.e. Battle of the (Lapiths and) Centaurs, the Domenico Angel in Bologna and the Tondo Doni, is the overemphasised muscles of his heroes. Instead of being round and pudgy, even the child figures have arms that look able to handle the heaviest chores and roughest fist-fights – this rebel genius yearned for a more robust humanity replete with more powerful limbs and more muscular bodies. Moving moral messages worried him little at the time: