The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  Lodovico Buonarroti placed his other four sons with the wool and silk guilds, but he could afford to send Michelangelo to a grammar school. There the boy stole time from his studies to pursue his obsession with drawing, which his father and older brothers tried to cure by occasional beatings. Finally abandoning hope of forcing the boy to give up drawing for some more elevated pursuit, Lodovico apprenticed him at the age of fourteen to the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio. The precocious Michelangelo made copies of works by masters that were indistinguishable from the originals, then aged them with smoke, and exchanged them for the originals that he coveted.

  After a year he left the painter’s workshop for a curious art school that Lorenzo the Magnificent had set up in the Medici gardens. Lorenzo, who had collected antique sculpture and employed a pupil of Donatello as teacher, now hoped by gathering young talents like Michelangelo to establish a new school of painters and sculptors. Even as a boy Michelangelo had sculpted masterly reliefs, his Madonna of the Stairs and the Battle of the Centaurs. Discovering Michelangelo’s rare talent in “the prime art,” sculpture, Lorenzo added the boy to his household. The philistine Lodovico Buonarroti still found it hard to see the difference between a stonemason and a sculptor and thought neither occupation suitable for a scion of the counts of Canossa. Another Medici apprentice, the envious Torrigiano, left his mark on the face of Michelangelo. In one of their many ill-tempered encounters for which Torrigiano was banished from Florence, Torrigiano’s fist broke Michelangelo’s nose. When Lorenzo de Medici died in 1492, the boy returned to live with his father, but, except for a brief interval, never ceased to be known as a Medici partisan in Florence’s turbulent politics.

  While living with his father from 1492 to 1494, Michelangelo often heard the eloquent Savonarola (1452–1498) preach in the cathedral of Florence. The passionate and persuasive Savonarola was the declared enemy of the arts that made Florence great, and he mistrusted the ancient classics. “The only good thing which we owe to Plato and Aristotle,” Savonarola preached, “is that they brought forward many arguments which we can use against the heretics. Yet they and other philosophers are now in Hell. An old woman knows more about the Faith than Plato.” Savonarola drove the Medici from Florence in 1494 and established a “democratic” dictatorship with himself at the head. There in the Piazza della Signoria in 1497 he ignited his famous Bonfire of the Vanities, feeding it with carnival costumes and masks, wigs and cosmetics, mirrors, playing cards and musical instruments, every kind of work of art, along with volumes of “corrupt” Latin and Italian poets, including Boccaccio. When the Medici fled Florence, so did Michelangelo, first to Bologna and then in 1496 to Rome “as the widest field for a man to show his genius in.” There he took some commissions, a Bacchus for a banker and for a cardinal the Pietà, which was his first important work on the Christian themes that would consume his life and would become one of St. Peter’s featured attractions. Meanwhile, in Florence, Savonarola, having exhausted the power of his eloquence, was tortured, hanged, and burned. When Michelangelo returned in 1501 the Republic of Florence commissioned him (at twenty-six) to do the David that became a symbol of the city, and in 1504 to do a fresco in the Palazzo Vecchio opposite Leonardo’s. This Battle of Cascina, like Leonardo’s battle piece, was never finished and never survived.

  When the ambitious and impetuous Julius II (1443–1513) came to the papacy (1503–13), he became the patron and catalyst of Renaissance art and a dominant force in Michelangelo’s life. He brought Michelangelo back to Rome, commissioning him to design and build a tomb for him that would be the wonder of the world. Michelangelo remained in Rome until 1514, when the Medici pope Leo X sent him back to Florence, where Leo X and still another Medici pope Clement VII would set him at projects commemorating their family. In 1534 he left Florence for Rome, where projects for succeeding popes kept him occupied until his death in 1564.

  The contrast between Leonardo and Michelangelo is an allegory of the arts in modern times. Leonardo left copious notes of his observations on nature and the world around him, but little about his feelings or his inner life. Michelangelo, in his letters, his poetry, in biographies by his friends and students Vasari and Condivi, in conversations with Francisco de Hollanda and others, left us vivid revelations and eloquent chronicles of himself. Leonardo, the self-styled “disciple of experience,” was a hero of the effort to re-create the world from the shapes and forms and sensations out there. But Michelangelo, prophet of the sovereign self, found mysterious resources within. These two greatest figures of Italian Renaissance art dramatized a modern movement from craftsman to artist. If Leonardo could be called the Aristotle—practical-minded organizer and surveyer of experience—Michelangelo would be the Plato, seeker after the perfect idea.

  The same Platonism and Neoplatonism that must have discomfited Leonardo in Florence appealed to Michelangelo. The ideas of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola and others of the Platonic Academy whom he would have known in the household of Lorenzo de Medici he expressed in poems and letters to the handsome Tommaso Cavalieri, his earthly embodiment of “the divine idea.” But Leonardo’s was a religion of scientific skepticism, the faith of a discoverer. He seems to have been a disciple of the mathematical pioneer and heretic Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), who had proved the Donation of Constantine to be a forgery, invented a “total science” based on the knowledge of objects, tolerated religious diversity, and recognized the conjectural truth of all religions.

  Michelangelo in his twenties had fallen under the spell of the fanatical Savonarola and never recovered. He was seduced into the most unlikely discipleship in the history of art. The Pietà of his first trip to Rome had signaled the leitmotif of his life. Michelangelo’s piety, despite the secular and sometimes vulgar interests of the popes he served, deepened with the years. While he combined pagan and Christian themes, he still shared Savonarola’s narrow Christian view of the ancients. Michelangelo’s faith was reinforced in Rome after 1536 by the brilliant and charming widow Marchioness Vittoria Colonna. Sixty years old when he met her, he was enamored of her “divine spirit,” and was “in return tenderly loved by her.” A disciple of the Spanish theologian Juan de Valdés (1500?–1541), and a partisan of German Reformation ideas, she seems to have converted him to the theological dogma of justification by faith. Michelangelo adored her in his later Roman years, and she fired his religious passion, attested by his poems and letters and drawings for her.

  Michelangelo’s major works were not merely assignments fulfilled but had an aura of the preternatural, of his uncanny ability to overcome all competitors. His most familiar early masterpiece, his David, in what he called “the prime art” of sculpture, revealed his ability to do what others could not: if other artists required a piece of marble specially suited to their design, Michelangelo could make a masterpiece from marble already mangled by others. Back in 1463 the authorities of the cathedral of Florence had acquired a sixteen-foot-high chunk of white marble to be carved into a figure to top an external buttress of Brunelleschi’s dome. Two well-known sculptors, one from Siena, another from Florence, had worked on the piece but had given up, and the block was put in storage. Forty years later the authorities still sought a sculptor. In 1501 they decided to take their chance on the twenty-six-year-old Michelangelo for the giant figure to be placed conspicuously at the door of the Palazzo della Signoria. Condivi tells the story.

  As they were not able to get anything out of this piece of marble likely to be any good, it seemed to Andrea del Monte a San Savino, that he might obtain the block, and he asked them to make him a present of it … but the Operai, before disposing of it, sent for Michel Angelo, and told him the wish and offer of Andrea, and, having heard his opinion that he could get something good out of it, in the end they offered it to him. Michel Angelo accepted it, and extracted the abovementioned statue without adding any other piece at all, so exactly to size that the old surface of the outsides of the marble may be seen on the top of the head and in t
he base.… He received four hundred ducats for this work, and finished it in eighteen months.

  (Translated by Charles Holroyd)

  In Florence, Michelangelo’s work for those months became proverbial—how he measured and scrutinized the mangled piece to see what it would accommodate, how he made small wax models and drawings for parts, how he slept in his clothes to save time, and finally “released” his fabled Giant from material abandoned for a half century.

  This surprising achievement in sculpture would be outdone by his masterpiece in painting. Here, too, was the genius besting all others and even somehow exceeding himself. After Pope Julius II summoned Michelangelo to Rome in 1505 to design and build for him a world-dazzling tomb to be completed in four years, Michelangelo himself went to the mountains of Carrara to select and quarry the marble needed for the forty more-than-life-size figures in the plan. Michelangelo stayed in the mountains for eight months “with two workmen and his horse, and without any other salary except his food.” From the unpredictably undulating marble veins he sought out huge blocks without blemishes and had them laboriously loaded on ships. When Michelangelo himself arrived in Rome, to his astonishment the pope refused to see him. The pope had been persuaded by Bramante to rebuild the whole basilica of St. Peter’s in place of his own grandiose tomb.

  This episode Condivi appropriately called the First Act in the Tragedy of the Tomb. It baptized Michelangelo in the dirty politics of Vatican art. And its melodrama would ironically produce Michelangelo’s masterpiece. Bramante (1444–1514) and his kinsman Raphael were jealous of Michelangelo, irritated by his exposure of Bramante’s mistakes and by the pope’s favoritism (including even a private drawbridge between the pope’s rooms and Michelangelo’s). They hatched a plan that would release the pope’s resources from the tomb for their own project of rebuilding St. Peter’s. They reminded the pope that building a tomb in one’s lifetime was bad luck and might bring an early death. Their project for Michelangelo would remove him from the scene of competition for some years and impose on him a task for which he was not competent. Then the discredited Michelangelo would no longer be their rival in other projects. These diversionary tactics produced the most spectacular Pyrrhic victory in the history of the arts.

  The project they persuaded Julius II to assign to Michelangelo was relatively obscure but sufficiently difficult. It was to fresco the ceiling of the private chapel that Julius’s uncle Pope Sixtus IV a quarter century before had built (1473–81), and which came to public notice only when it was used for papal elections. The chapel had already been copiously decorated with frescoes by Perugino, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and others. Michelangelo would be commissioned to decorate the tunnel-vaulted ceiling, a curved surface broken up by eight windows that produced unmanageable triangles and lunettes. “In this way,” Vasari reports, “Bramante and Michelangelo’s other rivals thought they would divert his energies from sculpture, in which they realized he was supreme. This, they argued, would make things hopeless for him, since he had no experience of colouring in fresco he would certainly, they believed, do less creditable work as a painter. Without doubt, they thought, he would be compared unfavourably with Raphael, and even if the work were a success, being forced to do it would make him angry with the Pope; and thus one way or another they would succeed in their purpose of getting rid of him.” Michelangelo, protesting that painting was not his art, still took on the project.

  In every way it was a challenging task. Since Michelangelo had never used color, nor had he painted in fresco, he had to enlist friends to teach him the techniques. He had to discard the scaffolding that Bramante had erected, which would have left holes in the ceiling, for a scaffold of his own. Though he would engage some workmen as helpers, he determined to design and paint the whole ceiling himself. The impatient Julius tried repeatedly to see the work in progress and demanded to know when it would be completed. “When it satisfies me as an artist!” was the proverbial reply. “Finally,” Vasari reports, “the Pope threatened that if Michelangelo did not finish the ceiling quickly, he would have him thrown down from the scaffolding. Then Michelangelo, who had good reason to fear the Pope’s anger, lost no time in doing all that was wanted.”

  After four years of Michelangelo’s furious solitary labor, the ceiling was unveiled in 1512. “I have finished the chapel which I was painting,” he wrote his father. “The Pope is well satisfied.” And so were the crowds that now thronged in. “He executed the frescoes in great discomfort,” Vasari recalled, “having to work with his face looking upwards, which impaired his sight so badly that he could not read or look at drawings save with his head turned backwards, and this lasted for several months afterwards.” His enemies had stage-managed the masterpiece that quickly established him as the artist genius of the age. In that awkward curved space fragmented by lunettes and triangles Michelangelo managed to depict the history of the Earth from the Creation to Noah, surrounded by ancestors and prophets of Jesus and finally revealing the liberation of the soul. Writhing nudes dramatized the agony of the body preparing for spiritual freedom in Michelangelo’s version of the Neoplatonist doctrine that the body was only the vehicle of the soul. The work would have been remarkable enough on a wide unbroken canvas, but thrust into this space it was unmistakable witness to genius. “There is no other work to compare with this for excellence, nor could there be,” exclaimed Vasari, “and it is scarcely possible even to imitate what Michelangelo accomplished. The ceiling has proved a veritable beacon to our art, of inestimable benefit to all painters, restoring light to a world that for centuries had been plunged into darkness.” Succeeding centuries have not dissented.

  Michelangelo was barely able to benefit from the pope’s acclaim, for Julius died four months after the ceiling was unveiled. The heirs renewed the contract for an enlarged tomb for Julius in Rome. But Michelangelo returned to Florence, where the Medici in turn commissioned him to make a grandiose funerary monument of their own. Much of the rest of his life he would be torn between the Medici monument and the promised tomb of Julius II, which the heirs never ceased to demand. And he continued to benefit from the rivalry of papal families when in 1534 the Farnese pope Paul III commissioned Michelangelo to paint the wall behind the altar in the Sistine Chapel. His Last Judgment, begun in 1536, was completed in 1541. This Christian panorama depicted the Second Coming and mankind tested by the revolving forces of the universe, in the aura of his favorite poet, Dante. “To any discerning critic the Last Judgment demonstrates the sublime force of art and Michelangelo’s figures reveal thoughts and emotions that only he has known how to express …” acclaimed Vasari. “All these details bear witness to the sublime power of Michelangelo’s art, in which skill was combined with a natural inborn grace. Michelangelo’s figures stir the emotions even of people who know nothing about painting.”

  In 1546 the seventy-nine-year-old Pope Paul III confidently called on the seventy-one-year-old Michelangelo to be chief architect and superintendent of the rebuilding of St. Peter’s. Michelangelo again objected “that architecture was not his vocation.” But “against his will” he took on the job at the pope’s command. Despite his protests of architectural incompetence Michelangelo had already designed several remarkable buildings in Florence. For the Medici pope Clement VII he had built the New Sacristy, or Medici Chapel, in the Church of San Lorenzo. And his bold Biblioteca Laurenziana was the first great Western library to be designed (1524) specifically for its secular purposes rather than by the canons of religious architecture. Its famous vestibule, an enclosed space with a freestanding staircase in the center, became the model for monumental staircases in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It led up, not to the familiar three naves of religious buildings, but to a long low rectangular reading room. Simply designed for the quiet concentration of readers, it became a prototype of countless library reading rooms to follow.

  But the St. Peter’s task was on a scale without precedent since the medieval cathedrals. The rebuilding of the ba
silica had been going on for forty-one years plagued by vacillating plans, from Bramante’s simple Greek cross (1506) to Sangallo’s complex Latin cross (1530). Braving the displeasure of those who had been working at the basilica in recent decades, Michelangelo ordered a return to Bramante’s simple design, which he said was “clear, straightforward, luminous, and isolated from the Vatican Palace all around.” When the pope commanded all to take their orders only from him, “Michelangelo, seeing the great trust and confidence that the Pope reposed in him, wanted to demonstrate his own good will by having it declared in the papal decree that he was devoting his time to the fabric for the love of God, and without other reward.”

  This was to be the grand project of his next seventeen years. He resisted all efforts to distract or seduce him from the job, or remove him from it. Since his completion of St. Peter’s had become a religious mission, to fail in it would be “a great disgrace and sin.” He stayed on but the work was not completed in his lifetime. The project was so vast, and so many architects had a hand, that it is not easy to separate the parts for which Michelangelo should be credited. But his sculptural approach to architecture and his belief in buildings as organisms with lives of their own would be embodied in the completed St. Peter’s. The dome was inspired by Brunelleschi’s cathedral dome in Florence, and the façade was not his design. There remained, however, Michelangelo’s grand and simple concept for the building: a dome of the heavens over the four cardinal points of the earth.