Michelangelo. Eugene Muntz
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placing one on the chest and the other on the head – a stroke of genius that gives the figure astonishing eloquence and pathos. Another example is the Madonna of the Stairs, a straightforward copycat drawing of a low-relief attributed to Desiderio de Settignano.
However, the case of Luca Signorelli is trickier. Usually marked as a precursor of Michelangelo, he painted the Last Judgment in Orvieto. It is endlessly repeated that Michelangelo started out from Signorelli’s anatomical and muscular studies, assimilating the latter’s fascination for torso effects. The standard justification is the resemblance between the naked children in the background of Michelangelo’s The Holy Family (Tondo Doni) and those of Signorelli’s Madonna, both now in the Uffizi. In fact, Signorelli started his Final Judgment in 1499 and finished it in 1505 while Michelangelo had already demonstrated, with powerful relief, a fine command of human anatomy by 1492 in his Battle of the Centaurs. In fact, he only borrowed from Signorelli’s Last Judgment for his own Last Judgment) in the Sistine Chapel: note the swooping demon with a woman on his back whose general layout recalls a demon in Signorelli’s.
The blind force of destiny, however, had more to do with their meeting than any wilful choice of Michelangelo. He definitely never deliberately imitated Signorelli, whom the Renaissance widely considered outdated, the way he did Jacopo della Quercia or the masters of antiquity. And then Signorelli went on to copy his “plagiarist’s” Pietà in grisaille at St Mark’s in Rome!
From this angle, we can spot Michelangelo’s forebears in Andrea Verrocchio and Antonio Pallaiuolo, whose dogged anatomical research spawned breakthroughs in anatomical studies. True, both had long left their home towns for Rome or Venice but, given the effervescence of Florence at the time, their teachings must have reached that city and deeply affected its art scene. Michelangelo was still young when he first studied anatomy at the Santa Maria Novella poorhouse in Florence before continuing the pursuit in Rome. In Oxford, one drawing shows him dissecting a cadaver by candlelight.
As Klaczko notes:
No master definitely ever outclassed or even equalled him in the science of the human body. How the athletic builds, 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.
Pietà, 1499.
Marble, height: 174 cm.
St Peter’s Basilica, Vatican.
Pietà (detail), 1499.
Marble, height: 174 cm.
St Peter’s Basilica, Vatican.
Bacchus (detail), 1497.
Marble, height: 203 cm.
Museo del Bargello, Florence.
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?
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 Centaurs.
Bacchus, 1497.
Marble, height: 203 cm.
Museo del Bargello, Florence.
Naked Man, Standing, 1501.
Pen and brown ink, 37 × 19.5 cm.
Musée du Louvre, Paris.
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, 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 exercise performed in a palestra, 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. The Medici’s 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 17th century) as well as with his wooden Crucifix. The latter was executed as a gift to the priory of the Santo Spirito Convent in Florence for having hosted him there. Long missing, Crucifix was found, restored and set up in the sacristy of the Santo Spirito Church.
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.
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