Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

by Ross King

  15. A drawing by Giuliano da Sangallo of a ceiling from Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli.

  16. A detail from one of Michelangelo’s early designs for the ceiling.

  Accustomed by now to hearing complaints from Michelangelo, the Pope would not have been terribly surprised when, sometime in the early summer, the artist stood before him with yet another objection. Audaciously outspoken as ever, he complained to the Pope that the design proposed by His Holiness would prove a cosa povera (‘poor thing’).7 Julius appears, for once, to have acquiesced without much argument. He merely shrugged his shoulders and then, according to Michelangelo, gave him free rein to design his own programme. ‘He gave me a new commission,’ the artist later wrote, ‘to do what I liked.’8

  Michelangelo’s claim that he was given carte blanche by the Pope must be viewed with suspicion. For a pope to hand over to a mere artist – even to an artist of Michelangelo’s reputation – the complete pictorial programme for the decoration of the most important chapel in Christendom would have been, to say the least, highly unusual. Theological experts were nearly always brought in to advise on the content of such decorative schemes. The theological sophistication of the frescoes on the walls of the Sistine Chapel, for example – a series of erudite parallels between the lives of Moses and Christ – could not possibly have been devised by a group of painters who had neither been taught Latin nor studied theology. The Latin inscriptions above the frescoes were in fact composed by the papal secretary, a scholar named Andreas Trapezuntius, and the team also received instructions from the formidably bookish Bartolommeo Sacchi, known as Platina, the first keeper of the newly founded Vatican Library.9

  If there was an adviser for the vault’s ambitious new design, the leading candidate for the role, besides Cardinal Alidosi, would have been the Prior General of the Augustinian Order, Egidio Antonini, more usually known, after his place of birth, as Egidio da Viterbo.10 The 39-year-old Egidio was certainly equipped for the task. One of the most learned men in Italy, he was fluent in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic. However, the real source of his fame lay in his fiery sermons. A sinister-looking figure in black robes, with unkempt hair, a black beard, flashing eyes and pale skin, Egidio was the most spellbinding orator in Italy. Testament to his amazing powers of eloquence is the fact that even Julius – famed for dozing off fifteen minutes into a sermon – managed to stay awake during his rousing two-hour orations. The silver-throated Egidio was the Pope’s greatest propagandist, and since the ceiling was intended by Julius to be seen, like a number of his other commissions, as a glorification of his reign, Egidio’s ability to find prophetic references to Julius in the Old Testament would have recommended him for the job.

  No matter who invented them, the designs for the fresco would have required approval from the ominously named Haereticae Pravitatis Inquisitor, or the Master of the Sacred Palace, the Pope’s official theologian. In 1508, the office was filled by a Dominican friar named Giovanni Rafanelli. The Master of the Sacred Palace was always a Dominican. Because of their fervour, Dominicans were punningly known as domini canes, ‘hounds of the Lord’, and over the centuries the popes had used them for unpleasant tasks such as collecting monetary levies and staffing the Inquisition. One of the order’s more notorious members was Tomás de Torquemada, who burned over two thousand heretics at the stake after the Inquisition was revived in Spain in 1483.

  It was Rafanelli’s job to choose the preachers for the Sistine Chapel, censor their sermons if need be and snuff out any sign of heresy. Anyone selected by him for the honour of preaching in the Sistine Chapel, even Egidio da Viterbo, had to submit beforehand a copy of his text for inspection. Rafanelli even had the power to interrupt in mid-sermon and remove from the pulpit any preacher who strayed into controversial territory. In these duties he was sometimes assisted by Paride de’ Grassi, who was always vigilant for any sort of theological impropriety.

  Someone with Rafanelli’s concern for orthodoxy in the Sistine Chapel would certainly have taken an active interest in Michelangelo’s work. Even if Rafanelli had no actual creative input, the painter must at least have discussed his project with him at various stages, possibly showing him drawings and cartoons. Interestingly, however, there is no evidence that Michelangelo – never one to keep his annoyances private – was bothered by the Master of the Sacred Palace or, for that matter, by any other theologian who might have tried to interfere with his plans. This fact – as well as certain telling details on the ceiling itself – might indicate that Julius did indeed allow Michelangelo to do as he pleased.

  Michelangelo would certainly have been better prepared than most artists of his day when it came to conceiving rich and complex pictorial programmes. For about six years he was schooled in grammar, though not in Latin, by a master from Urbino, at the time a celebrated centre of culture to which the wealthy Roman and Florentine families sent their children to be educated. More important, when he went to the Garden of San Marco, at the age of about fourteen, he studied not only sculpture but also theology and mathematics under a number of brilliant scholars. Among these luminaries were two of the greatest philosophers of the age: Marsilio Ficino, the leader of the Accademia Platonica who had translated into Latin both Plato and the Hermetic texts; and Giovanni Pico, the Count of Mirandola, a student of the Cabala and the author of Oration on the Dignity of Man.

  Just how much Michelangelo rubbed shoulders with the literati is unclear. Ascanio Condivi is vague, merely stating that one of Michelangelo’s earliest surviving sculptures, the Battle of the Centaurs – a marble relief featuring nude, contorted figures in combat – was carved on the advice of another of the Garden of San Marco’s teachers, Angelo Ambrogini. Better known by the pen name Politian, Angelo was an impressively learned scholar even by the lofty standards of Lorenzo’s school, having translated the first four books of The Iliad into Latin by the age of sixteen. Condivi asserts that Politian loved the young artist ‘very much and, although there was no need, urged him on in his studies, always explaining things to him and providing him with subjects’.11 But what degree of interchange might actually have existed between this famous scholar and an adolescent sculptor remains a matter of conjecture.12 Nevertheless, there is little doubt that Michelangelo received enough education to play an active part in the conception of a new design for the ceiling.

  As the new scheme was developed over the summer of 1508, Michelangelo must gradually have warmed to the commission. In place of the abstract pattern of interlocking squares and circles, he composed a much more ambitious layout that would allow him to concentrate his talents on the human form in the same way as he had in The Battle of Cascina. However, the 12,000 square feet of space awaiting his brush was considerably more complex than the flat wall that had confronted him in Florence. Besides extending the length of the vault, his fresco for the Sistine Chapel needed to incorporate the four large sail-shaped fields, called pendentives, in the corners of the chapel, where the vault met the walls. It also had to encompass eight smaller triangular spaces, or spandrels, that projected above the windows. As well as the vault, Michelangelo would be painting the uppermost reaches of the four walls, the crescent-shaped areas (known as lunettes, or ‘little moons’) above the windows. Some of these surfaces were curved, others flat; some were large, others small and awkward. Michelangelo therefore faced the dilemma of how to arrange his fresco across these inconvenient subdivisions.

  The vault raised by Baccio Pontelli was made from blocks of tufa that featured a bare minimum of ornamental stonework. Michelangelo instructed Piero Rosselli to chisel away some of the existing masonry – small decorations such as mouldings and acanthus capitals – on the pendentives and in the lunettes. He then set about creating his own divisions by composing an imaginary architectural background for the fresco, a series of cornices, pilasters, ribs, corbels, caryatides, thrones and niches that recalled those planned for Julius’s tomb. Besides giving the impression from the floor of rich sculptural decoration, this fi
ctive setting, known as a ‘quadratura’, incorporated the awkward pendentives, spandrels and lunettes into the rest of the vault and provided him with a series of distinct fields on to which he could paint his scenes.

  Along the length of the vault would be nine rectangular panels divided by imitation marble ribs and separated from the rest of the ceiling by a painted cornice. Below the cornice, Michelangelo envisioned a series of figures seated on thrones set in niches. These thrones were a leftover from the first scheme, since originally he had intended frescoing the twelve Apostles here. Below the thrones, in the spaces above the windows, came the spandrels and lunettes, which provided him with a series of pictorial fields running round the base of the vault.

  With this framework established, Michelangelo needed to settle the new subject matter. The New Testament theme of the twelve Apostles seems to have been quickly abandoned in favour of scenes and characters taken from the Old Testament. The Apostles were replaced on their thrones by twelve prophets, or rather by seven prophets from the Old Testament and five sibyls from pagan mythology. Above these figures, in the rectangular panels running along the spine of the vault, would be nine episodes from the Book of Genesis. The spandrels and lunettes, meanwhile, would feature portraits of the ancestors of Christ – a rather uncommon subject – and the pendentives four more scenes from the Old Testament, David slaying Goliath among them.

  The choice of scenes from Genesis is a revealing one. Such illustrations were popular in sculptural reliefs, and Michelangelo was familiar with a number of examples, most notably those by the Sienese sculptor Jacopo della Quercia on the massive central door of the church of San Petronio in Bologna. Carved from Istrian stone between 1425 and 1438, the year of Quercia’s death, the reliefs on the Porta Magna, or ‘Great Door’, show numerous scenes from Genesis, including The Drunkenness of Noah, The Sacrifice of Noah, The Creation of Eve and The Creation of Adam.

  Quercia sculpted these scenes during the same years that another artist, Lorenzo Ghiberti, was casting the second of his two sets of bronze doors for the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence, which featured similar scenes from the Old Testament. Michelangelo was such a great admirer of Ghiberti’s bronze doors that he is said to have christened them the Porta del Paradiso, the ‘Door of Paradise’. He seems to have admired Quercia’s work on the Porta Magna just as deeply. Having seen the reliefs on San Petronio for the first time in 1494, he would have familiarised himself with them while casting his bronze statue in Bologna in 1507 and then supervising its installation directly above the Porta Magna. Quercia’s images were therefore fresh in his mind as he designed his fresco in the summer of 1508, and the nine Genesis scenes planned for the Sistine Chapel were clearly inspired by the work of both Quercia and Ghiberti. Their scenes from the Old Testament are, in fact, the nearest precedent for his own decorative scheme – a fact lending further credence to Michelangelo’s claim that he did as he pleased.13

  Michelangelo’s tremendous ambitions revealed themselves in this new scheme. One of the largest assemblies of images ever planned, it would ultimately involve more than 150 separate pictorial units and include more than three hundred individual figures. By rejecting as a ‘poor thing’ the scheme suggested by the Pope, he had committed himself to an even more exacting project, one that would pose an enormous challenge even for someone whose fame rested on his ability to execute gigantic works of art.

  7

  The Assistants

  TOWARDS THE END of May 1508 a friar in the Convent of San Giusto alle Mura, just outside the walls of Florence, received a letter from Michelangelo. Fra Jacopo di Francesco was a member of the Gesuati, a religious order (not to be confused with the Jesuits) founded in 1367. Their convent was one of the most beautiful in Florence, boasting an exquisite garden as well as paintings from the hands of Perugino and Ghirlandaio. It was also a hive of industry. Unlike the Dominicans, who had abandoned manual labour, the Gesuati were dedicated workers. The monks busily distilled perfumes and prepared medicines, and in a room above their chapter house they manufactured stained-glass windows in a roaring furnace. These windows were so beautiful and of such high quality that they were sold to churches throughout Italy.

  Even more than their stained-glass windows, the friars of San Giusto alle Mura were famous for their pigments. Their colours were the best and most sought after in Florence, their blues in particular. Many generations of Florentine painters had come to San Giusto alle Mura for their azurite and ultramarine. Leonardo da Vinci was only one of the most recent. His contract for the Adoration of the Magi, begun in 1481, included the stipulation that he acquire all of his pigments from the Gesuati and no one else.

  Michelangelo seems to have known Fra Jacopo personally. He had probably dealt with the Gesuati a few years earlier when he painted his Holy Family for Agnolo Doni, since he used azurite for the sky and, in the robe of the Virgin Mary, a brilliant ultramarine.1 From Rome, he wrote to Fra Jacopo requesting samples of blue pigments, explaining that ‘I have to have certain things painted here’ and requesting ‘a certain amount of fine quality azure’.2

  The expression ‘to have certain things painted’ indicates how Michelangelo was prepared to take a hands-off role in the actual frescoing of the ceiling. His letter to Fra Jacopo shows that at this early stage he considered delegating much of the work on the ceiling to assistants or apprentices, much in the manner of Ghirlandaio. Michelangelo was still hoping to work on the tomb, and to that end he had written himself a memo, soon after his return to Rome, stating that he needed an immediate payment from the Pope of four hundred gold ducats, together with regular payments of a hundred ducats a month to follow.3 These hoped-for ducats were not for the frescoes of the Sistine ceiling but, rather, for the Pope’s tomb. Remarkably, Michelangelo was still dreaming of the giant sepulchre even at the very moment when Cardinal Alidosi was drawing up the contract for him to fresco the vault. With the tomb project in mind, he had brought with him to Rome a sculptor named Pietro Urbano, who had assisted with the bronze statue in Bologna.4

  In this same memorandum, Michelangelo wrote that he was expecting the arrival from Florence of a number of other assistants – men to whom he may have hoped to delegate the task of painting much of the ceiling. Michelangelo would have required assistance even if he had decided to take a more active role, since painting in fresco always involved teamwork. Besides, not having worked in fresco for almost twenty years, he needed a team of assistants to familiarise him with the various procedures.

  By nature a solitary worker, Michelangelo had a strong distrust of assistants, especially after the episode with Lapo in Bologna. He therefore entrusted their recruitment to his oldest friend, a Florentine painter named Francesco Granacci. Michelangelo, who chose his friends with extreme care, respected Granacci’s opinions more than anyone else’s. ‘There was no one with whom he was more willing to confer touching his works or to share all that he knew of art at that time,’ claimed Vasari.5 Michelangelo and Granacci went back a long way, having both grown up in via dei Benticcordi, near Santa Croce, and then studied together in Ghirlandaio’s workshop and the Garden of San Marco. Granacci, the older of the two, had apprenticed with Ghirlandaio first, and it was on his advice that Michelangelo also entered the workshop, giving him credit, in a way, for the shape of Michelangelo’s career.

  17. Francesco Granacci.

  Though he had been one of Ghirlandaio’s best pupils, by the age of thirty-nine Granacci had failed to fulfil his early promise. While Michelangelo redefined the possibilities of sculpture with one masterpiece after another, Granacci plodded through a series of competent but uninspired panel paintings, most in the style of Ghirlandaio. Eventually, he came to specialise in theatrical scenery, triumphal arches for parades, standards for ships, and banners for churches and knightly orders.

  Granacci may have failed to distinguish himself because he was a relaxed, unambitious and even rather lazy character. ‘Allowing but few cares to oppress him, he was a merry fello
w,’ reports Vasari, ‘and took his pleasures with a glad heart.’6 This love of easy living and aversion to physical discomfort is reflected in the fact that he worked almost exclusively in tempera and oil, never in the more difficult medium of fresco.

  This lack of desire for glory, together with his carefree spirit, were exactly what Michelangelo found appealing. Threatened by more talented and ambitious artists – by rivals such as Leonardo and Bramante – Michelangelo always felt safe with Granacci, who happily acknowledged his supremacy and, according to Vasari, strove with ‘incredible attention and humility to be always following that great brain’.7 It was this kind of loyal, unwavering support that Michelangelo required for the Sistine Chapel. He did not need Granacci to help with the fresco itself – that would be left to the other assistants. He wanted him, instead, as his trusted lieutenant, a second in command who would not only recruit and pay the assistants but also supervise Piero Rosselli and aid with various additional duties such as procuring pigments and other supplies.

  Granacci showed no signs of his usual laziness when it came to helping his old friend. Soon after Michelangelo arrived back in Rome, Granacci dispatched the names of four painters willing to assist in the Sistine Chapel: Bastiano da Sangallo, Giuliano Bugiardini, Agnolo di Donnino and Jacopo del Tedesco. They were not painters of the same calibre as the team that had painted the Sistine Chapel’s walls a generation earlier, but all were competent and experienced. Not surprisingly, all four came from the Florentine workshops of either Domenico Ghirlandaio or Cosimo Rosselli, meaning they had been well trained in the art of fresco. A number were even veterans of the Tornabuoni Chapel. Most crucially, they had the recent experience with fresco that Michelangelo lacked. All of this, combined with the fact that he had known all of them for many years, must have reassured Michelangelo.