Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

by Ross King

  The fattorino left Florence a few days before someone else who was also recruited by Buonarroto. Michelangelo had recently received from a man named Giovanni Michi a letter offering his services and stating that he would be available, if needed, to do anything ‘useful and honourable’. Michelangelo quickly sent Buonarroto a letter, asking him to deliver it to Michi. Buonarroto duly tracked him down, confirmed that he was indeed available for service, and reported that Michi would leave in three or four more days, once he had settled his affairs in Florence.

  Little is known about Giovanni Michi. He probably trained as a painter, since in 1508 he was working in the church of San Lorenzo – possibly on frescoes in the north transept – and he certainly had connections in the artistic community in Florence.12 Unlike the other assistants, though, he was unknown to Michelangelo and, presumably, Granacci.13 Michelangelo was willing to take a chance on him, however, and so Michi arrived in Rome in the middle of August, completing the team of assistants.

  At the end of July, as the ailing Piero Basso departed for Florence, Michelangelo received a letter from his father. Lodovico Buonarroti had clearly learned from Giovansimone something of the hectic working habits, as well as the anxieties, of his talented second-born son. Concerned for his son’s health, Lodovico wrote of his regret that Michelangelo had agreed to accept such a gargantuan task. ‘It seems to me that you work too much,’ he observed, ‘and I understand that you are unwell and very unhappy. I wish you could avoid these projects, because when you are worried and unhappy it is difficult to do well.’14

  All of this may have been true, but by now the Sistine project was well under way and could not be ‘avoided’. With the assistants in place, Francesco Granacci returned to Florence to purchase more pigment samples. Before leaving, he paid Piero Rosselli for the last time. The removal of the old fresco and the plastering of the vault was now complete. In less than three months, Rosselli and his team of workmen had built a scaffold, hacked the plaster from 12,000 square feet of ceiling and replaced it with a new coat of arriccio. The pace at which they had worked was nothing short of phenomenal. With this major task finished, the vault of the Sistine Chapel was ready for painting.

  9

  The Fountains of the Great Deep

  FRESCO PAINTING CALLED for numerous preparatory stages, but among the most vital and indispensable were the drawings by which designs were worked out and then transferred to the wall. Before a single stroke of paint could be applied to the vault of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo needed to produce hundreds of sketches to establish both the intricate body language of the characters and the overall composition of the various scenes. The poses for many of his figures, including the dispositions of their hands and expressions on their faces, were composed through six or seven separate studies, which means he may have executed over a thousand drawings in the course of his work on the fresco. These ranged from tiny scribbles – thumbnail sketches called primo pensieri, or ‘first thoughts’ – to dozens of highly detailed, larger-than-life cartoons.

  Michelangelo’s drawings for the ceiling, fewer than seventy of which survive, were done in a variety of media, including silverpoint. Learned in Ghirlandaio’s workshop, this method involved drawing with a stylus on paper whose surface was specially prepared with thin layers of white lead and bone dust (made from table scraps) mixed together and bound with glue. The roughened surface of the paper scraped from the stylus small deposits of silver which rapidly oxidised, leaving behind fine grey lines. Since this was a slow and precise medium in which to work, for more rapid sketches Michelangelo used both charcoal and bistre, the latter a brown pigment prepared from soot and applied with either a quill or brush. He also made more careful drawings in red chalk, or haematite, a new medium whose use had been pioneered a decade earlier by Leonardo da Vinci in his studies for the Apostles in The Last Supper. Its brittleness was perfect for small, finely detailed drawings, and its warm colour provided an expressive range that Leonardo exploited to great effect in the faces of his Apostles, and that Michelangelo would use with equally dazzling virtuosity to show the gradations of tone along anatomically exact knots of muscle.

  18. This celebrated sketch for the Libyan Sibyl, done in red chalk, shows how Michelangelo worked out a pose through numerous drafts.

  Michelangelo worked on the first of these sketches as Piero Rosselli prepared the vault. He seems to have finished his first stage of drawing around the end of September, after working on his designs for four months, exactly the same amount of time he had spent sketching plans for the much smaller Battle of Cascina. By this point he had probably made drawings for, at most, only the first few scenes. His habit for the Sistine Chapel would be to produce sketches and cartoons only as he needed them – that is, only at the last possible minute. After making designs for and then frescoing one part of the ceiling, he would go back to the drawing-board – quite literally – and begin making sketches and cartoons for the next.1

  By the first week of October, Michelangelo was finally ready to paint. At this point, a rope-maker named Domenico Manini, a Florentine working in Rome, received a payment of three ducats for rope and canvas delivered to the Sistine Chapel. Suspended beneath the scaffold, the canvas would perform the vital task of preventing paint from dripping on to the chapel’s marble floor. Even more important, from Michelangelo’s point of view, the sheet of canvas would prevent anyone on the floor of the chapel from seeing the work in progress. He may well have been suspicious of public opinion, since stones had been thrown at David after it was removed from his workshop near the duomo. In 1505, his cartoon for The Battle of Cascina was executed amid great secrecy in his room in Sant’Onofrio, from which all but the most trusted friends and assistants were banned. Presumably the same sort of regime prevailed in the workshop behind the Piazza Rusticucci, with no one privy to the drawings except his assistants and, perhaps, the Pope and the Master of the Sacred Palace. Michelangelo intended the fresco to remain a mystery to the people of Rome until, in his own good time, he decided to unveil it.

  To begin their work each day, Michelangelo and his assistants climbed a forty-foot ladder until, reaching the top of the windows, they mounted the lowest planks of one of the bridges. The steps of the scaffold took them another twenty feet to its top. Railings may have been erected to protect them from a fall, while the sheet of canvas served another welcome purpose: screening the sixty-foot drop beneath the scaffold. Scattered about the decks would have been the tools of their trade – trowels, pots of paint and brushes, as well as buckets of water and bags of sand and lime that had been winched on to the scaffold. Illumination came from the windows as well as from the torches that Piero Rosselli’s men had used as they laboured late into the evening. A few feet above the men’s heads curved the vault of the chapel, an immense, greyish-white expanse awaiting their brushes.

  The first task on any day was, of course, the application of the intonaco. The ticklish matter of mixing the plaster was probably left to one of Rosselli’s men. Painters knew from their apprenticeships how to make and spread plaster, but in practice most of the work was done by a professional plasterer, or muratore, not least because making plaster was a disagreeable chore. For one thing, the quicklime was so corrosive that it was sprinkled on corpses to hasten their decomposition and therefore lessen the stench around churchyards. Also, it was hazardous when slaked, since calcium oxide generated a tremendous heat as it expanded and then disintegrated. This task was vital, because if the quicklime was not properly slaked it could damage not only the fresco but also – such was its corrosive power – the stonework of the vault.

  Once the calcium hydroxide had formed, the job became merely toilsome. The mixture needed to be stirred with a spade until the lumps were gone and a paste or putty had formed. The paste was kneaded and mixed with sand, after which more stirring was required until an ointment-like consistency was achieved. Further stirring was then needed to prevent cracks and crevices from appearing when the plaster was
left to stand.

  The intonaco was applied with a trowel or float to the area specified by the artist. After spreading it, the plasterer wiped the fresh plaster with a cloth, sometimes one in which a handful of flax was tied. This removed the marks of the trowel and roughened the wall slightly so the paint would adhere. The intonaco was then wiped again, this time more gently with a silk handkerchief in order to remove grains of sand from the surface. An hour or two after it was spread – time enough to transfer the designs from the cartoons – the intonaco formed a skin on which the paint could be applied.

  In these early days, Michelangelo must have acted something like a foreman, delegating tasks to his various assistants. At any one time there could have been five or six men on the scaffold, a couple grinding pigments, others unfurling cartoons, still others at the ready with paintbrushes. The scaffold seems to have provided a commodious and convenient place for all of them to work. As it was clear of the vault for the whole of its span by about seven feet, it allowed them to stand erect as they worked. Applying the intonaco or spreading the paint simply required them to lean backwards slightly and extend their arms upwards.

  Contrary to myth, then, Michelangelo did not fresco the ceiling while lying prone on his back – a picture lodged as solidly in the public mind as the equally inaccurate one of Newton sitting under the apple tree. This misconception stems from a phrase in a short biography of Michelangelo called Michaelis Angeli Vita, written in about 1527 by Paolo Giovio, the bishop of Nocera.2 Describing Michelangelo’s posture on the scaffold, Giovio used the term resupinus, which means ‘bent backwards’. But the word has frequently – and erroneously – been translated as ‘on his back’. It is difficult to imagine how Michelangelo and his assistants could have worked under such conditions, let alone how Rosselli’s men might have cleared 12,000 square feet of plaster while lying flat on their backs in a narrow crawlspace. Michelangelo was to encounter numerous obstacles and inconveniences as he worked on the fresco. The scaffold, however, was not one of them.

  Michelangelo and his team painted, for the most part, from east to west, starting near the entrance and moving towards the sanctum sanctorum, the western half reserved for the members of the Papal Chapel. But they did not begin in the space immediately above the entrance, rather some fifteen feet to the west, on a portion of the ceiling above the second set of windows from the door. Here, Michelangelo planned to paint the apocalyptic episode described in the Book of Genesis, chapters six to eight: Noah’s Flood.

  Michelangelo began with The Flood for a number of reasons, first and foremost, perhaps, for its inconspicuous location. His lack of experience in fresco made him wary of starting with a more prominent scene, one more likely to strike the visitor’s eye as he entered or, more critically, that of the Pope as he occupied his throne in the sanctum sanctorum. Second, this scene was one for which he no doubt had some enthusiasm, given that his previous work – most notably The Battle of Cascina – had already prepared him for it. It was with this scene in mind that in the middle of August he had sent money to Florence to purchase the azure ordered from the Gesuati monks in San Giusto alle Mura – pigments which he would use to colour the rising flood waters.

  Michelangelo’s Flood illustrates the story of how, soon after the Creation, God began to regret having created mankind. Because of their determined wickedness, He decided to destroy everyone except Noah, the ‘just and perfect man’, a farmer who had reached the ripe old age of six hundred. He instructed Noah to build from gopher wood a boat three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide and three storeys high, with one window and one door. Into this vessel went a pair of every type of living creature, together with Noah’s wife, sons and daughters-in-law. Then, the Bible records, ‘the fountains of the great deep burst forth’.3

  Obvious similarities to the figures and actions in The Battle of Cascina suggest that this earlier work was still very much in Michelangelo’s mind when he planned The Flood. Indeed, a number of poses from The Battle of Cascina repeat themselves, with some variation, in this later scene.4 It made perfect sense for Michelangelo to draw upon his previous experiences when he came to design the ceiling in 1508, given that The Battle of Cascina had created such a sensation three years earlier, and given that recycling a few of these earlier poses meant a slight reduction in an enormous workload. Michelangelo also reused figures from another of his previous works, since one of the characters in The Flood – the nude man trying to board the small, overcrowded boat – holds exactly the same jack-knifed pose as one of the warring figures in The Battle of the Centaurs, carved over fifteen years earlier.

  Like these two other works, Michelangelo’s Flood is crowded with human bodies. It portrays a bleak, windswept waterscape in which dozens of nudes – men, women and children – beat a retreat from the deluge. Some make their way in orderly fashion to a patch of high ground on the left of the panel; others shelter beneath a fluttering, makeshift tent on a rocky island; and still others, equipped with a ladder, do their best to storm the ark. The ark itself is in the background, a rectangular wooden vessel with a pitched roof and a window from out of which leans the bearded, red-robed Noah, seemingly oblivious to the calamity that surrounds him.

  Although The Flood gave Michelangelo the chance to indulge to the full his passion for throngs of doomed figures in dramatic, muscle-straining poses, he also added more homely touches in the shape of people rescuing humble possessions. One of the women balances on her head an upturned stool laden with loaves of bread, pottery and a few pieces of cutlery, while, nearby, two naked men carry bundles of clothing and a frying pan. Michelangelo would no doubt have witnessed similar scenes of evacuation whenever the Tiber or the Arno flooded. Having no embankments, the Tiber routinely burst its banks, deluging the surrounding areas under several yards of water in a matter of hours. Michelangelo himself had first-hand experience of salvaging possessions from flood waters when, in January 1506, heavy rains overflowed the Tiber, submerging a cargo of marble he was unloading from a barge at the port of Ripa, two miles downstream from the Vatican.

  Despite the expertise of the assistants, work on the fresco does not seem to have begun well, for no sooner had the panel been completed than a large part of it had to be redone. Corrections, known quaintly as pentimenti (‘repentances’), always presented a frescoist with serious problems. Someone working in oil or tempera simply painted over his errors, but the frescoist was not able to repent so easily. If he realised the mistake before the intonaco dried, he could scrape the plaster from the wall, apply it afresh and resume work; otherwise he was forced to take his hammer and chisel to the dried plaster and remove the whole of the giornata – which is precisely what Michelangelo did. Or, rather, he removed a dozen or more giornate, destroying more than half of the scene – including the whole of the left-hand side – and started anew.5

  The reasons for the destruction of a good part of this scene are unclear. Michelangelo may have been unhappy with his design for the figures on the left-hand side, or he may have changed or refined his fresco technique after a few weeks on the job. But since this act involved taking a hammer to almost a month’s work, it must have been disheartening to all concerned.

  The only part of the fresco left intact after the obliteration was that showing the group huddled fearfully under their tent on the rock. These figures are therefore the earliest surviving part of the ceiling. They are the work of many hands, showing how at this early stage Michelangelo made full use of his assistants, though it is uncertain exactly who painted which part of the fresco. The only bit of The Flood Michelangelo is known for certain to have painted himself is the pair of figures on the edge of the rock: the sturdy old man grasping in his arms the lifeless body of a young man.

  Repainting the left-hand side of the fresco took a total of nineteen giornate. Allowing for feast days and Masses, this work must have been spread over almost four weeks, taking the team towards the end of November, dangerously close to the time when cardinals reach
ed for their fur-lined hoods and fresco painters, if the weather worsened, were obliged to down brushes for weeks on end.

  Work on The Flood had proceeded at a frustratingly slow pace. Not counting the destroyed work, the scene took, in all, twenty-nine giornate. These giornate were relatively small, averaging less than seven square feet, or roughly one-third of a typical day’s work in the Tornabuoni Chapel. Even the scene’s largest giornata was a mere five feet long by three feet high, still well under the average of Ghirlandaio’s workshop.

  One reason for this slow rate, besides Michelangelo’s inexperience, was the sheer number of human figures in The Flood. Frescoing the human form was more time-consuming than a landscape, especially for someone who used elaborate, unusual poses and strove for anatomical accuracy. Faces, especially, demanded attention. The quicker method of making incisions in the cartoon – that is, tracing its outlines on to the plaster with a point of a stylus – could be used for a scene’s larger and less explicit details, such as arms, legs and draperies. But frescoists almost always transferred facial features from cartoons through the more precise but slower technique of spolvero, which involved sprinkling charcoal on to the plaster through the perforations of the cartoon’s outlines. Curiously, however, when painting The Flood Michelangelo and his team used spolvero everywhere, forsaking incision entirely,6 even though winter was fast approaching.

  *

  Floods always had a blunt meaning for Michelangelo. An intensely pious man, he never failed to view violent meteorological events as punishments from a wrathful God. Many years later, after autumnal rains had flooded both Florence and Rome, he would comment woefully that the catastrophic weather had lashed the Italians ‘on account of our sins’.7 One source for this fire-and-brimstone pessimism – and an inspiration behind his depiction of The Flood – was a figure from his impressionable youth, the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola.