Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D

The sculptor toiled on the refractory material for two and a half

years; with heroic labor he drew from it, using every inch of its

height, his David. On January 25, 1504, the Operai assembled a

council of the leading artists in Florence to consider where Il

gigante, as they called the David, should be placed: Cosimo

Roselli, Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Giulano and Antonio

da Sangallo, Filippino Lippi, David Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Giovanni

Piffero (father of Cellini), and Piero di Cosimo. They could not

agree, and finally they left the matter to Michelangelo; he asked that

the statue be placed on the platform of the Palazzo Vecchio. The

Signory consented; but the task of moving The Giant from the

workshop near the cathedral to the Palazzo took forty men four days; a

gateway had to be heightened by breaking a wall above it before the

colossus could pass; and twenty-one additional days were spent in

raising it into place. For 369 years it stood on the open and

uncovered porch of the Palazzo, subject to weather, urchins, and

revolution. For in a sense it was a radical pronunciamento, symbol

of the proud restored republic, stern threat to usurpers. The

Medici, returning to power in 1513 left it untouched; but in the

uprising that again deposed them (1527) a bench thrown from a window

of the Palace broke the statue's left arm. Francesco Salviati and

Giorgio Vasari, then lads of sixteen, gathered and preserved the

pieces, and a later Medici, Duke Cosimo, had these fragments put

together and replaced. In 1873, after the statue had suffered

erosion from the weather, David was laboriously transferred to the

Accademia delle Belle Arti, where it occupies the place of honor as

the most popular figure in Florence.

It was a tour de force, and as such can hardly be overpraised; the

mechanical difficulties were brilliantly overcome. Esthetically one

may pick a few flaws: the right hand is too large, the neck too

long, the left leg overlong below the knee, the left buttock does

not swell as any proper buttock should. Piero Soderini, head of the

republic, thought the nose excessive; Vasari tells the story-

perhaps a legend- how Michelangelo, hiding some marble dust in his

hand, mounted a ladder, pretended to chisel off a bit of the nose

while leaving it intact, and let the marble dust fall from his hand

before the Gonfalonier, who then pronounced the statue much

improved. The total effect of the work silences criticism: the

splendid frame, not yet swollen with the muscles of Michelangelo's

later heroes, the finished texture of the flesh, the strong yet

refined features, the nostrils tense with excitement, the frown of

anger and the look of resolution subtly tinged with diffidence as

the youth faces the fearsome Goliath and prepares to fill and cast his

sling- these share in making the David, with one exception, *05045

the most famous statue in the world. Vasari thought it "surpassed

all other statues ancient and modern, Latin or Greek." `051731

The Duomo Board paid Michelangelo a total of 400 florins for the

David. Allowing for the depreciation of currency between 1400 and

1500, we may equate this roughly at $5000 in the money of 1952; it

seems a rather small sum for thirty months' work; presumably he

accepted other commissions during that time. Indeed the Board and

Guild themselves, while David was in process, engaged him to carve

statues, six and a half feet high, of the twelve Apostles, to be

placed in the cathedral. He was allowed twelve years for the work, was

to be paid two florins a month, and a house was to be built for his

free occupancy. Of these statues the sole survivor is a St. Matthew,

only half emerged from the block of stone, like some figure by

Rodin. Looking at it in the Florence Academy, we understand better

what Michelangelo meant when he defined sculpture as the art "that

works by force of taking away"; and again, in one of his poems: "In

hard and craggy stone the mere removal of the surface gives being to a

figure, which ever grows the more the stone is hewn away." `051732

He often spoke of himself as searching to find the figure concealed in

the stone, knocking the surface away as if seeking a miner buried in

fallen rock.

About 1505 he carved for a Flemish merchant the Madonna that

sits in the church of Notre Dame at Bruges. It has been highly

praised, but it is one of the artist's poorer works- the drapery

simple and dignified, the head of the Child quite out of proportion to

the body, the face of the Virgin pouting and mournful as if she felt

that it was all a mistake. Still stranger is the homely Virgin in

the Madonna painted (1505) for Angelo Doni. In truth Michelangelo

did not care much for beauty; he was interested in bodies,

preferably male, and represented them sometimes with all the defects

of their seen forms, sometimes in a way to convey some sermon or idea,

but seldom with a view to catching beauty and imprisoning it in

lasting stone. In this Doni Madonna he offends good taste by placing

a row of naked youths on a parapet behind the Virgin. Not that he

was paganizing; he was apparently a sincere, even a puritan,

Christian; but here, as in The Last Judgment, his fascination with

the human body triumphed over his piety. He was deeply interested,

too, in the anatomy of position, in what happens to limbs,

extremities, frame, and muscles when the body changes its pose. So

here the Virgin leans backward, apparently to receive the Child over

her shoulder from St. Joseph. It is excellent sculpture, but

lifeless and almost colorless painting. Michelangelo was to protest,

time and again, that painting was not his forte.

Therefore he must have felt no great pleasure when Soderini

invited him (1504) to paint a mural in the Hall of the Great Council

of the Palazzo Vecchio, while his bete noire, Leonardo da Vinci, was

to paint an opposite wall. He disliked Leonardo for a hundred reasons-

for his aristocratic manners, his costly and pretentious dress, his

retinue of pretty youths, perhaps for his greater success and fame,

till then, as a painter. Angelo was not sure that he, a sculptor,

could rival Leonardo in painting; it was courageous of him to try. For

his preliminary cartoon he set up a panel of linen-backed paper 288

square feet in area. He had made some progress on this sketch when a

summons came to him from Rome: Julius needed the best sculptor to be

found in Italy. The Signory fumed, but let Michelangelo go (1505).

Perhaps he was not sorry to leave the pencil and the brush, and return

to the laborious art that he loved.

2. Michelangelo and Julius II: 1505-13

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He must have seen at once that he would be miserable with Julius,

they were so much alike. Both had temper and temperament: the Pope

imperious and fiery, the artist somber and proud. Both were Titans

in spirit and aim, acknowledging no superior, admitting no compromise,

passing from one grandiose project to another, stamping their

personalities on their time, and laboring with such mad energy that

when both were dead all Italy seemed exhausted and empty.

Julius, following the example long since set by the cardinals,

wanted for his bones a mausoleum whose size and splendor should

proclaim his greatness even to distant and forgetful posterity. He

looked with envy upon the beautiful tomb that Andrea Sansovino had

just carved for Cardinal Ascanio Sforza in Santa Maria del Popolo.

Michael proposed a colossal monument twenty-seven feet in length and

eighteen in width. Forty statues would adorn it: some symbolizing

the redeemed Papal States; some personifying Painting, Architecture,

Sculpture, Poetry, Philosophy, Theology- all made captive by the

irresistible Pope; others depicting his major predecessors, as, for

example, Moses; two would picture angels- one weeping at Julius'

removal from the earth, the other smiling at his entrance into heaven.

At the top would be a handsome sarcophagus for the mortal papal

remains. Along the surfaces of the monument would run bronze reliefs

recounting the achievements of the Pope in war, government, and art.

All this was to stand in the tribune of St. Peter's. It was a design

that would use many tons of marble, many thousands of ducats, many

years of the sculptor's life. Julius approved, gave Angelo two

thousand ducats for the purchase of marble, and sent him off to

Carrara instructed to pick the finest veins. While there Michael noted

a hill overlooking the sea, and conceived the idea of carving the

mount into a colossal human figure, which, lighted at the top, would

serve as a beacon to distant mariners; but Julius' tomb called him

back to Rome. When the marble that he had bought arrived, and was

piled up in a square by his lodgings near St. Peter's, people marveled

at its quantity and cost, and Julius rejoiced.

The drama became tragedy. Bramante, desiring money for the new St.

Peter's, looked askance at this titanic project; moreover he feared

that Michelangelo would replace him as the Pope's favorite artist;

he used his influence to divert papal funds and passion from the

proposed tomb. For his part Julius was planning war upon Perugia and

Bologna (1506), and found Mars an expensive god; the tomb should

wait for peace. Meanwhile Angelo had received no salary, had spent

on marble all that Julius had advanced him, had paid out of his own

pocket to furnish the house that the Pope had provided for him. He

went to the Vatican on Holy Saturday, 1506, to ask for money; he was

told to return on Monday; he did, and was told to return on Tuesday;

like rebuffs met him on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday; on Friday he

was turned away with the blunt statement that the Pope did not wish to

see him. He went home and wrote a letter to Julius:

-

Most Blessed Father: I have been turned out of the Palace today by

your orders; wherefore I give you notice that from this time

forward, if you want me, you must look for me elsewhere than at

Rome. `051733

-

He gave instructions for the sale of the furniture he had bought,

and took horse toward Florence. At Poggibonsi he was overtaken by

couriers bearing a letter from the Pope, which commanded him to return

at once to Rome. If we may accept his own account (and he was an

unusually honest man) he sent back a reply that he would come only

when the Pope agreed to fulfill the conditions of their

understanding for the tomb. He continued to Florence.

Now he resumed work on the immense cartoon for The Battle of Pisa.

He chose as his subject no actual warfare, but the moment when the

soldiers, who had been swimming in the Arno, were suddenly called to

action. Michael was not concerned with battles; he wanted to study and

portray the nude male form in every position; here was his chance.

He showed some men emerging from the river, others running to their

weapons, others struggling to pull up stockings on wet legs, others

leaping or riding on horseback, others hurriedly adjusting their

armor, some running stark naked to the fight. There was no landscape

background; Michelangelo never cared for landscape, or for anything in

nature except the human form. When the cartoon was finished it was put

alongside Leonardo's in the Hall of the Pope in Santa Maria Novella.

There the rival sketches became a school for a hundred artists- Andrea

del Sarto, Alonso Berruguete, Raphael, Iacopo Sansovino, Perino del

Vaga, and a hundred more. Cellini, who copied Michelangelo's cartoon

about 1513, described it with youthful enthusiasm as "so splendid in

action that nothing survives of ancient or modern art which touches

the same point of lofty excellence. Though the divine Michel Agnolo in

later life finished that great [Sistine] Chapel, he never rose halfway

to the same pitch of power." `051734

We cannot say as much. The picture was never painted, the cartoon is

lost, and only minor fragments survive of the many copies made.

While Angelo was working on the sketch Pope Julius sent message

after message to the Florentine Signory, commanding them to send him

back to Rome. Soderini, loving the artist and fearing for his safety

in Rome, temporized. After the third letter from the Pope he begged

Angelo to obey, saying that his obstinacy endangered the peaceful

relations between Florence and the papacy. Michael demanded a

safe-conduct, to be signed by the Cardinal of Volterra. During the

delay Julius captured Bologna (November, 1506). Now he sent to

Florence a peremptory order that Michelangelo should come to Bologna

for an important commission. Armed with a letter from Soderini to

Julius, which begged the Pope to "show him love and treat him gently,"

Michael went once more over the snows of the Apennines. Julius

received him with a heavy frown, ordered from the room a bishop who

presumed to rebuke the artist for disobedience, gave Angelo a

grumbling pardon, and a characteristic assignment. "I wish you to make

my statue on a large scale in bronze. I mean to place it on the facade

of San Petronio." `051735 Michael was glad to get back to sculpture,

though not confident of his ability to cast successfully a sitting

figure fourteen feet in height. Julius provided a thousand ducats

for the work; Angelo reported later that he had spent all but four

ducats on materials, so that he had for himself only that reward for

two years of labor in Bologna. The task was as heartbreaking as that

which Cellini described for casting the Loggia Perseus. "I work

night and day," the sculptor wrote to his brother Buonarroto; "if I

had to begin the whole thing over again I do not think I could survive

it." `051736 In February, 1508, the statue was raised to its place

above the main portal of the cathedral. In March Michael returned to

Florence, probably praying that he might never see Julius again. Three

years later, as we have seen, the statue was melted into cannon.

Almost at once the Pope sent for him. Angelo went back to Rome,

and was chagrined to find that Julius wanted him not to carve the

great tomb but to paint the ceiling of the chapel of Sixtus IV. He

hesitated to face the problems of perspective and foreshortening in

painting a ceiling sixty-eight feet above the floor; he protested

again that he was a sculptor, not a painter; in vain he recommended

Raphael as a better man for the work. Julius commanded and coaxed,

pledging a fee of 3000 ducats ($37,500?); Michael feared the Pope

and needed the money. Still murmuring, "This is not my trade," he

undertook the arduous and uncongenial task. He sent to Florence for

five assistants trained in design; tore down the clumsy scaffolding

that Bramante had raised, erected his own, and set to work measuring

and charting the ten thousand square feet of the ceiling, planning the

general design, making cartoons for each separate space, including

spandrels, pendentives, and lunettes; in all there were to be 343

figures. Many preliminary studies were made, some from living

models. When the final form of a cartoon was finished it was carried

carefully up the scaffolding and was applied, face outward, to the

freshly plastered surface of its corresponding place; the lines of the

composition were then pricked through the drawing into the plaster,

the cartoon was removed, and the sculptor began to paint.

For over four years- from May, 1508, to October, 1512- Angelo worked

on the Sistine ceiling. Not continuously; there were interruptions

of uncertain length, as when he went to Bologna to besiege Julius

for more funds. And not alone: he had helpers to grind the colors,

prepare the plaster, perhaps to draw or paint some minor features;

parts of the frescoes reveal inferior hands. But the five artists whom

he had summoned to Rome were soon dismissed; Angelo's style of

conception, design, and coloring was so different from theirs and

the traditions of Florence that he found them more hindrance than aid.

Besides, he did not know how to get along with others, and it was

one of his consolations, up there on the scaffold, that he was

alone; there he could think, in pain but in peace; there he could

exemplify Leonardo's saying: "If you are alone you will be wholly your

own." To the technical difficulties Julius added himself by his

impatience to have the great work completed and displayed. Picture the

old Pope mounting the frail frame, drawn up to the platform by the

artist, expressing admiration, always asking, "When will it be

finished?" The reply was a lesson in integrity: "When I shall have

done all that I believe required to satisfy art." `051737 To which

Julius retorted angrily: "Do you want me to hurl you from this

scaffold?" `051738 Yielding later to the papal impatience, Angelo took

down the scaffolding before all final touches had been applied. Then

Julius thought that a little gold should be added here and there,

but the weary artist persuaded him that gold trimmings would hardly

become the Prophets or the Apostles. When for the last time Michael

descended from the scaffold he was exhausted, emaciated, prematurely

old. A story says that his eyes, long accustomed to the subdued

illumination of the chapel, could hardly bear the light of the

sun; `051739 and another story that he found it now easier to read

by looking upward than by holding the page beneath his eyes. `051740

The original plan of Julius for the ceiling had been merely a series

of Apostles; Michelangelo prevailed upon him to allow an ampler and

nobler scheme. He divided the convex vault into over a hundred

panels by picturing columns and moldings between them; and he enhanced

the tridimensional illusion with lusty youthful figures upholding

the cornices or seated on capitals. In the major panels, running along

the crest of the ceiling, Angelo painted episodes from Genesis: the

initial act of creation separates light from darkness; the sun,

moon, and planets come into being at the command of the Creator- a

majestic figure stern of face, powerful of body, with beard and

robes flying in the air; the Almighty, even finer in form and

feature than in the previous panel, extends His right arm to create

Adam, while with the left arm He holds a very pretty angel- this panel

is Michelangelo's pictorial masterpiece; God, now a much older and

patriarchal deity, evokes Eve from Adam's rib; Adam and Eve eat the

fruit of the tree, and are expelled from Eden; Noah and his sons

prepare a sacrificial offering to God; the flood rises; Noah

celebrates with too much wine. All in these panels is Old Testament,

all is Hebraic; Michelangelo belongs to the prophets pronouncing doom,

not to the evangelists expounding the gospel of love.

In the spandrels of alternate arches Angelo painted magnificent

figures of Daniel, Isaiah, Zecharia, Joel, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Jonah.

In the other spandrels he pictured the pagan oracles that were

believed to have foretold Christ: the graceful Libyan Sibyl, holding

an open book of the future; the dark, unhappy, powerful Cumaean Sibyl;

the studious Persian; the Delphic and Erythrean Sibyls; these too

are such paintings as rival the sculptures of Pheidias; indeed, all

these figures suggest sculpture; and Michelangelo, conscripted into an

alien art, transforms it into his own. In the large triangle at one

end of the ceiling, and in two others at the other end, the artist

still stayed in the Old Testament, with the raising of the brazen

serpent in the wilderness, the victory of David over Goliath, the

hanging of Haman, the beheading of Holofernes by Judith. Finally, as

if by concession and afterthought, in the lunettes and arched recesses

above the windows, Angelo painted scenes expounding the genealogy of

Mary and Christ.

No one of these pictures quite equals Raphael's School of Athens

in conception, drawing, color, and technique; but taken all

together, they constitute the greatest achievement of any man in the

history of painting. The total effect of repeated and careful

contemplation is far greater than in the case of the Stanze. There

we feel a happy perfection of artistry, and an urbane union of pagan

and Christian thought. Here we do not merely perceive technical

accomplishment- in the perspective, the foreshortenings, the unrivaled

variety of attitudes; we feel the sweep and breath of genius, almost

as creative as in the wind-swept figure of the Almighty raising Adam

out of the earth.

Here again Michelangelo has given his ruling passion free rein;

and though the place was the chapel of the popes, the theme and object

of his art was the human body. Like the Greeks, he cared less for

the face and its expression than for the whole physical frame. On

the Sistine ceiling are half a hundred male, a few female, nudes.

There are no landscapes, no vegetation except in picturing the

creation of plants, no decorative arabesques; as in Signorelli's

frescoes at Orvieto, the body of man becomes the sole means of

decoration as well as of representation. Signorelli was the one

painter, as Iacopo della Quercia was the one sculptor, from whom

Michelangelo cared to learn. Every little space left free in the

ceiling by the general pictorial plan is occupied by a nude figure,

not so much beautiful as athletic and strong. There is no sexual

suggestion in them, only the persistent display of the human body as

the highest embodiment of energy, vitality, life. Though some timid

souls protested against this profusion of nudity in the house of

God, Julius made no recorded objection; he was a man as broad as his

hatreds, and he recognized great art when he saw it. Perhaps he

understood that he had immortalized himself not by the wars that he

had won, but by giving the strange and incalculable divinity

fretting in Angelo freedom to disport itself on the papal chapel

vault.

Julius died four months after the completion of the Sistine ceiling.

Michelangelo was then nearing his thirty-eighth birthday. He had

placed himself at the head of all Italian sculptors by his David and

Pieta; by this ceiling he had equaled or surpassed Raphael in

painting; there seemed no other world left for him to conquer.

Surely even he hardly dreamed that he had over half a century yet to

live, that his most famous painting, his most mature sculpture, were

yet to be done. He mourned the passing of the great Pope, and wondered

whether Leo would have as sure an instinct as Julius for the noble

in art. He retired to his lodgings, and bided his time.

CHAPTER XVIII: Leo X: 1513-21

I. THE BOY CARDINAL

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THE Pope that gave his name to one of the most brilliant and immoral

ages in the history of Rome owed his ecclesiastical career to the

political strategy of his father. Lorenzo de' Medici had been almost

destroyed by Sixtus IV; he hoped that the power of his family, and the

security of his progeny in Florence, would be helped by having a

Medici sitting in the college of cardinals, in the inner circles of

the Church. He destined his second son for the ecclesiastical state

almost from Giovanni's infancy. At seven (1482) the boy was given

the tonsure; soon he was dowered with benefices in commendam:

i.e., he was made absentee beneficiary of church properties, and

received their surplus revenue. At the age of eight he was given the

abbacy of Font Douce in France; at nine the rich abbey of

Passignano, at eleven the historic abbey of Monte Cassino; before

his election to the papacy Giovanni had collected sixteen such

benefices. `05181 At eight he was appointed protonotary apostolic;

at fourteen he was made a cardinal. *05046

The young prelate was provided with all the education available to a

millionaire's son. He grew up amid scholars, poets, statesmen, and

philosophers; he was tutored by Marsilio Ficino; he learned Greek from

Demetrius Chalcondyles, philosophy from Bernardo da Bibbiena, who

Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D

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