Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling
Page 17
Even Michelangelo’s youngest brother Sigismondo, the soldier, was a cause for concern that autumn. Enticed by the same shimmering prospects that lured Giovansimone to Rome a year earlier, he was planning his own visit. A house guest was, of course, the last thing Michelangelo needed, especially one, like Sigismondo, woefully unable to support himself. As the season for both plague and malaria had passed, Michelangelo could no longer preach his usual sermon about Rome’s unhealthy air, so he resigned himself to his brother’s visit. But he begged Buonarroto to warn the young man that he was not to expect any help. ‘Not because I do not love him as a brother,’ he emphasised, ‘but because I cannot help him in any way.’12 If Sigismondo did travel to Rome, the visit must have passed without event, for Michelangelo made no further mention of it.
The only good news from Florence was that Giovansimone, at least, was behaving himself. Michelangelo’s enraged letter had produced startling effects in the young man. Hitherto, Giovansimone had lazed about either in the house in Florence or on the farm in Settignano. Now, though, he began looking boldly and ambitiously to his future. But unlike Buonarroto, who saw his destiny in loaves of bread, Giovansimone dreamed of making his fortune from more exotic fare: he planned to invest in a ship that would sail from Lisbon to India and return laden with spices. He even talked about sailing to India – the sea route to which had been discovered by Vasco da Gama a decade earlier – if this first venture succeeded.
Such a voyage would have been extremely hazardous, and Michelangelo must have realised that he could easily lose his brother as well as his ducats if he agreed to fund this latest enterprise. Still, Giovansimone was ready to risk life and limb on the adventure, stirred to action, perhaps, by Michelangelo’s claim that he had risked his life ‘in a thousand dangers, solely to help my family’.
Michelangelo’s complaint to Buonarroto that he was suffering ‘the greatest physical fatigue’ indicates the incredible strain involved in painting the fresco. Around this time, he sent to a friend named Giovanni da Pistoia a comic poem recounting his grotesque physical travails as he painted the vault, complete with a sketch that shows him reaching upwards with his paintbrush. He was forced to work, he informed Giovanni, with his head tipped back, his body bent like a bow, his beard and paintbrush pointing to heaven, and his face splattered with paint. His posture on the scaffold, as he toiled at the fresco, was almost as painfully twisted, it seems, as that of the half-strangled Laocoön, who likewise tips back his head, warps his back and thrusts his arm skyward:
My beard toward Heaven, I feel the back of my brain
Upon my neck, I grow the breast of a Harpy;
My brush, above my face continually,
Makes it a splendid floor by dripping down.
31. Michelangelo’s poem to Giovanni da Pistoia.13
Ingenious and efficient though the scaffold was, certain physical hardships were inescapable on a project of such magnitude, since pain and discomfort were the occupational hazard of a frescoist. Michelangelo once told Vasari that fresco was ‘not an art for old men’.14 Vasari himself claimed that when he frescoed five rooms in the palace of the Grand Duke of Tuscany he was forced to build a kind of brace to support his neck as he worked. ‘Even so,’ he complained, ‘this work has so ruined my sight and injured my head that I still feel the effects.’15 Jacopo da Pontormo suffered just as badly. His diary for 1555 describes how he was forced to stoop on his scaffold for long periods at a stretch as he frescoed the Chapel of the Princes in the church of San Lorenzo in Florence. The result, unsurprisingly, was terrible back pain that sometimes grew so intense he was unable to eat.16
One of Michelangelo’s worst symptoms was a bizarre form of eye strain. After spending so much time with his eyes turned upwards, he found he could read letters or study drawings only if he held them at arm’s length above his head.17 This debilitating condition, which persisted for months on end, must have affected his ability to make sketches and cartoons. But Vasari claimed that Michelangelo courageously bore the rigours and pains of his job. ‘In fact,’ he declared, ‘becoming more and more kindled every day by his fervour in the work, and encouraged by the proficiency and improvement that he made, he felt no fatigue and cared nothing for discomfort.’18
There is little evidence of this heroic disregard for physical distress in the wretched letter to Buonarroto. A gruelling year of work on the scaffold, coupled with the worries about his family, seem to have left Michelangelo both physically and emotionally depleted. And other factors may also have contributed to his downcast spirits, since he also felt that he lacked moral support. ‘I have no friends of any sort,’ he had grumbled in his letter. It seems unlikely that he would have deplored a lack of friends had Granacci, Indaco and Bugiardini still been on the scene. Having served their purpose, most of the hand-picked team of assistants had probably left the project by the summer or autumn of 1509, after spending no more than a year on the job. Michelangelo was therefore left to continue his task – two-thirds of which still remained – with a new group of assistants.
17
The Golden Age
MICHELANGELO WAS A superstitious man. When one of his friends, a lute player named Cardiere, told him of a strange vision, the artist did not scruple to question its reliability.1 It was 1494, the year in which Charles VIII’s army descended on Italy. In Cardiere’s dream, the ghost of Lorenzo the Magnificent appeared before him, dressed in rags, and ordered the lute player to warn his son Piero de’ Medici, the new ruler of Florence, that unless he mended his ways he would be driven from power. Michelangelo urged the frightened Cardiere to relate the dream to the arrogant and incompetent Piero, but the lute player refused, fearing Piero’s temper. A few days passed, then Cardiere came to Michelangelo a second time, more terrified than ever. The ghost of Lorenzo had appeared to him again, on this occasion striking him on the cheek for having failed to carry out his orders. Once more, Michelangelo begged the lute player to divulge the vision to Piero. But when Cardiere finally plucked up the courage to confront him, Piero scorned him, stating that his father’s ghost would not sink so low as to appear to a lowly lute player. Convinced, however, that the prophecy was soon to be fulfilled, Michelangelo and Cardiere promptly fled for Bologna. Soon afterwards, Piero de’ Medici was indeed toppled from power.
Michelangelo was not alone in his belief in dreams and omens. At the time, there was at all levels of society an unquenchable fascination with prophetic knowledge – with everything from visions and astrology to ‘monstrous births’ and the ranting of bearded hermits. Even as sceptical a thinker as Niccolò Machiavelli accepted the deeper meaning of prophetic utterances and other portents. ‘Nothing important ever happens in a city or in a region’, he wrote, ‘that has not been foretold either by diviners or by revelations or by prodigies or by celestial signs.’2
Anyone professing the power to read the future could be assured of a large audience in a city like Rome, and there was no shortage of prophets and other self-professed holy men wandering the streets and prophesying doom to anyone who would listen. In 1491, Rome had been visited by one of these latter-day oracles, a mysterious beggar who roamed the streets and squares, crying: ‘I say to you, O Romans, that many will weep in this year of 1491, and there will be tribulations, killings and blood upon you!’3 One year later, Rodrigo Borgia was elected Pope. Then another such prophet appeared in the city. His rather sunnier message – ‘Peace, peace’ – brought him such a large following among the rabble, who called him ‘Elijah’, that the authorities threw him in prison.4
This credulous fascination with prophetic knowledge helps explain the presence of the five larger-than-life female figures – sibyls from Greek and Roman mythology – in Michelangelo’s fresco. The sibyls were soothsayers, women who dwelt in sacred shrines and predicted the future in fits of inspired madness, often using obscure utterances such as riddles and acrostics. The Roman historian Livy reported that a collection of their writings was guarded by priests and consulte
d by the Roman Senate in times of need. Used for this purpose as late as AD 400, most of the writings were burned soon afterwards on the order of Stilicho, leader of the Vandals. From the ashes of these texts, however, reams of new ones arose, claiming to offer the wisdom of the sibyls. In Michelangelo’s time, these prophetic writings enjoyed a wide circulation, including in a manuscript called the Oracula sibyllina. This particular work was actually a confusing and fraudulent mishmash of Judaeo-Christian writings, but in 1509 few scholars thought to question its validity.
Figures from pagan mythology might seem like strange interlopers in a Christian chapel, but two of the Church Fathers, Lactantius and St Augustine, had granted the sibyls a Christian respectability by declaring that their utterances actually foretold such things as the Virgin Birth, the Passion of Christ and the Last Judgement. The sibyls had prepared the pagan world for the coming of Christ, it was maintained, in the same way that the Old Testament prophets had prepared the Jews. The sibyls and their prophetic books were therefore alluring to scholars who aimed to reconcile pagan mythology with orthodox Christian teachings. They neatly bridged the gap between these two worlds, offering a compelling link between the sacred and the profane, between the Roman Church and the esoteric pagan culture that so enchanted artists and scholars alike.
Some theologians, such as Aquinas, had refused to grant the sibyls the same powers as the Old Testament prophets, but by the Middle Ages their place in Christian art was assured. Choir stalls carved in the cathedral of Ulm in the fifteenth century boldly displayed them alongside female saints and Old Testament heroines. In Italian art they became almost ubiquitous, appearing, among other places, on the façade of the duomo in Siena, on pulpits in Pistoia and Pisa, and on Ghiberti’s bronze doors for the Baptistery in Florence. They also made popular subjects for frescoes. After Ghirlandaio depicted four sibyls on the vault of the Sassetti Chapel in Santa Trìnita, Pinturicchio followed suit in the Borgia apartments, frescoing a dozen sibyls alongside a dozen Old Testament prophets. Soon afterwards, Perugino included six of each in the Collegio del Cambio in Perugia.
The first sibyl that Michelangelo painted in the Sistine Chapel, Delphica, was famous for informing Oedipus that he was destined to kill his father and marry his mother. The most important oracle in Greece, the Delphic Sibyl dwelt on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, in a temple to Apollo that displayed on its façade the maxim ‘Know Thyself’. From here, she delivered pronouncements so enigmatic that priests were required to interpret them. One of her notoriously slippery prophecies had been addressed to Croesus, the King of Lydia, who was told that, by attacking the Persians, he would bring down a mighty empire; only after his dramatic defeat did Croesus realise that the empire in question was his own. Less ambiguous were her prophecies in the Oracula sibyllina, where she supposedly foretold how Christ would be betrayed into the hands of his enemies, mocked by soldiers and given a crown of thorns.
Michelangelo and his assistants spent twelve giornate on the Delphic Sibyl in the autumn of 1509, taking roughly the same amount of time, in other words, as they had on Zechariah a short while earlier. Michelangelo depicted her as a young woman with parted lips, wide eyes and a faint look of distress, as if she had just been startled by an intruder. Showing little of the divine madness for which the sibyls were renowned, she was in fact pieced together from a number of Michelangelo’s Virgins. Her blue headdress, painted in smaltino, resembles those on the heads of the sculpted Virgins of both the Pietà and the Bruges Madonna, the latter being a Madonna and Child completed in 1501 and purchased by a family of Flemish cloth merchants who installed it in their family chapel in Bruges. Her head and posture, meanwhile, recall the Virgin in Michelangelo’s Pitti Tondo (a marble relief finished about 1503), and her draped garment and muscular arm, bent at a ninety-degree angle, come from the Holy Family painted for Agnolo Doni.5
‘Michelangelo has a most retentive memory,’ Condivi once claimed, ‘so that, although he has painted all the thousands of figures that are to be seen, he has never made two alike or in the same pose.’6 On the contrary, it was precisely because Michelangelo had a most retentive memory that he was able to generate, in a short space of time, so many hundreds of postures for the Sistine’s ceiling.
Michelangelo would paint four more sibyls on the vault, including the ancient Romans’ most important prophetess, Cumaea. According to the myth, Cumaea had dwelt a hundred miles south of Rome in a grotto at Lake Avernus, near Naples. It was here, supposedly, that Aeneas, the hero of Virgil’s Aeneid, had watched her lapse into a frightening trance and heard her utter ‘words of mystery and dread’.7 And it was here, to a stinking cave beside this deep, sulphurous lake, that scholars of Michelangelo’s day beat a trail as if to a religious shrine. The cave was probably a Roman tunnel built by Agrippa as part of a harbour known as the Portus Julius. These learned pilgrims imagined themselves, however, in the very spot where Aeneas and his Trojan friends had conversed with the Cumaean Sibyl and then made their way into the underworld.
Given the popularity of the sibyls in Italian art, Michelangelo did not necessarily require the urgings of an adviser such as Egidio da Viterbo to incorporate Cumaea and the other ancient prophetesses into the ceiling. The sibyls depicted in the Sistine Chapel are the first five from a list of ten given in the Divine Institutions of Lactantius, a coincidence suggesting that Michelangelo might simply have flicked through this volume to make his selection. Egidio may nonetheless have been responsible for the inclusion and prominence of the sibyls, since he had a strong interest in their prophecies, particularly those of the Cumaean Sibyl.8 He himself had made an excursion to her grotto on Lake Avernus, boldly descending into the cave to report how the fetid subterranean air was conducive to trances and hallucinations of the sort witnessed by Aeneas.9
One of Cumaea’s pronouncements Egidio found of special significance. In Virgil’s Eclogues, she prophesied the birth of a child who would bring peace to the world and return it to a golden age: ‘Justice returns to earth, the Golden Age / Returns, and its first-born comes down from heaven above.’10 It had obviously been a simple matter for theologians such as St Augustine to give this prophecy a Christian spin by identifying the ‘first-born’ child as Christ. The resourceful Egidio went a step further, declaring in an oration in St Peter’s that the new golden age foreseen by Cumaea was actually the one inaugurated by – naturally – Julius II.11
Prophets in Italy were divided into those, such as Savonarola, who foresaw the approach of a deadly doom, and those like Egidio who took a more optimistic view of things. Egidio’s reason for optimism was his faith in the steady unfolding of God’s purpose through Julius II and King Manuel of Portugal. In 1507, for example, Manuel had written to the Pope announcing the discovery of Madagascar and various Portuguese conquests in the Far East. This wonderful news prompted Julius to declare three days of feasting in Rome. In the midst of these celebrations, Egidio took to the pulpit and announced that these events on the other side of the world were proof – together with various other events closer to home, chief among them the rebuilding of St Peter’s – that Julius was fulfilling his divine destiny. ‘See how God calls you by so many voices,’ he rejoiced in a sermon addressed to the Pope, ‘so many prophecies, so many deeds well done.’12 Surveying these accomplishments, he was in no doubt that the prophecies of both the Scriptures and the Cumaean Sibyl were being fulfilled, and that a golden age of a worldwide Christendom was about to dawn.13
Not everyone in Rome agreed with Egidio. The Cumaean Sibyl depicted on the Sistine ceiling certainly cut a strange figure for someone meant to be the prophetess of the golden age heralded by the deeds of Julius. Michelangelo portrayed her as a grotesque behemoth with one of the most daunting physiques on the entire vault, complete with long arms, huge biceps and forearms, and Atlas-like shoulders whose sheer bulk dwarfs her head. This rather derogatory portrait also shows her to be far-sighted, for she has to hold her book almost at arm’s length in order to read. Poor eyesight
need not, of course, mean poor insight. Quite the reverse, in fact, since according to some versions of his myth, Tiresias received his prophetic powers as compensation for being blinded after watching Athena at her bath. The impaired eyesight of Cumaea might likewise be understood as a sign of her spiritual foresight.14 Equally, Michelangelo may have been making a point about the unreliability of her spiritual as well as her physical vision. Whatever the case, his attitude towards this hideous crone and her prophecies seems to be summed up in the gesture of one of the two naked children by her side: he ‘makes the fig’ at her, a rude gesture (described by Dante and still known to Italians) that involved sticking the thumb between the index and middle fingers – an Italian equivalent of giving someone the finger.15
This obscene gesture is one of a number of sly jokes, not visible from the floor in an age before photographs and telescopic aids to vision, that Michelangelo inserted into his fresco. Despite his surly nature, the artist was renowned for his sarcastic wit. He once joked, for example, that a certain artist had executed a picture of an ox very well because ‘any painter can make a good portrait of himself’.16 The naked child making the fig behind the sibyl’s back shows that, despite everything, he had not lost his sense of humour. But, like his poem about crosses and thorns, if also indicates his scepticism regarding Egidio’s exuberant proclamations about the Pope and the golden age.
Michelangelo was not the only person in Rome to take a dim view of the Pope’s supposedly divine mission to reclaim papal territories. An even more sceptical attitude towards Julius was expressed by a distinguished visitor who had arrived in the city in the summer of 1509. Desiderius Erasmus, a 43-year-old priest from Rotterdam, was one of the greatest scholars in Europe. He had travelled to Italy three years earlier to serve as tutor to the sons of the court physician of Henry VII of England, who were completing their education abroad. His time had been divided between Venice and Bologna, in the latter of which he happened to witness Julius’s triumphant entrance. Now with a new student in his care, Alexander Stuart, the illegitimate son of King James IV of Scotland, he came to Rome as the guest of the Pope’s cousin, the enormously wealthy Cardinal Raffaello Riario. As well as educating Alexander in the classics, Erasmus hoped in the course of this visit to obtain from the Pope a dispensation absolving him of the sin of his father, a priest who had clearly not kept his vow of celibacy.