Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

by Ross King

  Another member of the Garden of San Marco, Pico della Mirandola, showed how ambiguously a Renaissance gentleman might conduct his love life. In 1486, the handsome young count, then aged twenty-three, eloped from Arezzo with a woman named Margherita, the wife of a tax collector. In the ensuing scandal, which involved armed combat, several men were killed and Pico himself injured and then hauled before the magistrates to explain himself. He was forced to apologise to the tax collector, to whom Margherita was promptly returned. The bold young lover then moved to Florence and began exchanging passionate sonnets with the man who became his constant companion, the poet Girolamo Benivieni. This affair did nothing to dim Pico’s admiration and support for Savonarola, the scourge of those who took ‘beardless youths’ and nurtured ‘unspeakable vices’. This was not simply a matter of hypocrisy. Despite his love for Benivieni, Pico clearly did not consider himself a sodomite — or at least not the sort of sodomite that Savonarola denounced. Pico and Benivieni were eventually buried side by side, like man and wife, in the church of San Marco, where Savonarola had been the prior.

  The case for Michelangelo’s homosexuality often rests on a similar sort of relationship with Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, a young Roman nobleman for whom he developed a powerful infatuation after they met in about 1532. However, whether or not Michelangelo ever consummated his love for Cavalieri is an open question. Whether or not he ever consummated a love for anyone, male or female, is equally uncertain.11 He seems to have been, throughout his life, almost utterly indifferent to women, at least as lovers. ‘Woman’s too much unlike,’ he wrote in one of his sonnets, ‘no heart by rights / Ought to grow hot for her, if wise and male.’12

  One possible exception to this antipathy was Michelangelo’s fourteen-month interlude in Bologna, when some biographers believe he may have taken time away from his work on the bronze statue of Julius to fall in love with a young woman. The evidence for a heterosexual love affair on this occasion is extremely slight: a sonnet inscribed on the back of the draft of a letter written to Buonarroto in December 1507. In the poem, one of the earliest surviving examples of his three-hundred-odd sonnets and madrigals, Michelangelo rather saucily imagined himself as a wreath of flowers crowning a girl’s brow, a dress binding her breast and a sash embracing her waist.13 Yet even if his work on the huge statue did leave him opportunities for an affair of the heart, such elaborate conceits make the poem more likely to have been a literary exercise than an ardent declaration of love for a flesh-and-blood Bolognese maiden.

  Another biographer, hoping to overcome rumours that Michelangelo was impotent, a paedophile or a homosexual, has speculated that the artist may once have contracted syphilis.14 The evidence for a venereal disease — a mysterious letter from a friend who celebrates the fact that the artist has been ‘cured of a malady from which few men recover’15 — is even more slender than that for a passionate heterosexual tryst in Bologna. The most damning evidence against this theory is simply that Michelangelo lived to the age of eighty-nine without any of the debilitating symptoms, such as blindness or paralysis, associated with the disease. On balance, it seems highly likely that he practised the abstinence that he preached to Condivi.

  This kind of self-denial was definitely not the prevailing philosophy in the workshop of Raphael. Popular not merely among his numerous male companions, the young artist was also a dedicated and successful ladies’ man. ‘Raphael was a very amorous person,’ claimed Vasari, ‘delighting much in women, and ever ready to serve them.’16

  If Michelangelo abstained from the pleasures of the flesh available in Rome, Raphael would have found many opportunities for indulging his own apparently insatiable appetites. Since there were more than three thousand priests in Rome, and since celibacy for priests generally meant little more than not taking a wife, there was naturally an abundance of prostitutes. Chroniclers of the day claimed that Rome, a city of fewer than 50,000 people, was home to some seven thousand prostitutes.17 The houses of the wealthier and more sophisticated, the so-called cortigiane onesti, or ‘honourable courtesans’, were easy to find since their façades were decorated with gaudy frescoes. The courtesans themselves could be seen in the windows and loggias, where they lounged on velvet cushions or dyed their hair blonde by sitting in the sun after drenching their tresses with lemon juice. The cortigiane di candela, ‘courtesans of the candle’, occupied less salubrious premises, plying their trade in either the bathhouses or a foul labyrinth of lanes near the Arch of Janus known as the Bordelletto. They generally ended their days living under the Ponte Sisto — the bridge built by Julius’s uncle — or confined to a hospital, San Giacomo degli Incurabili, where victims of syphilis were treated with lignum vitae, or ‘wood of life’, a medicine made from the wood of a Brazilian tree.

  In 1510, Rome’s most famous courtesan was a woman named Imperia, whose father had been a singer in the Sistine Chapel’s choir, and whose house stood conveniently near Raphael’s in the Piazza Scossa Cavalli. Her house was probably more opulent than the young painter’s, for its walls were covered with gold-threaded tapestries, its cornices painted in ultramarine, and its bookcases filled with richly bound books in both Latin and Italian. The floors were even carpeted — something of a novelty at the time. It also boasted another coveted feature, since legend claims that Raphael and his assistants took time away from their efforts in the Vatican apartments to paint a fresco of a naked Venus on the façade.

  It was hardly surprising that Raphael and Imperia should have crossed paths, since artists and courtesans frequently mixed together. Not only did courtesans provide painters with nude models, but wealthy patrons sometimes paid for portraits of their mistresses. A few years earlier, for example, Lodovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, had hired Leonardo da Vinci to portray his mistress, Cecilia Gallerani. Even the Mona Lisa might have been the portrait of a courtesan, since a visitor to Leonardo’s study once claimed to have seen what he described as a portrait of Giuliano de’ Medici’s mistress.18 The Mona Lisa was never delivered to Giuliano, or whoever else the client might have been. Evidently fond of the piece, Leonardo kept it with him for many years, eventually taking it to France, where it was bought by King François I. Still, nothing suggests that Leonardo’s interest in his enigmatic sitter was anything other than aesthetic. Not so, however, with Raphael and Imperia. Their relations became considerably more intimate, since the amorous young painter — perhaps predictably — eventually became one of her numerous lovers.19

  20

  The Barbarous Multitudes

  ‘HERE I AM working as usual,’ Michelangelo wrote home to Buonarroto at the height of the summer in 1510. ‘I will have finished my painting by the end of next week, that is to say, the part I began, and when I have uncovered it, I think I shall receive payment and will try to get leave to come home for a month.’1

  It was a triumphant moment. After two years of unremitting work, the team had finally reached the middle of the vault.2 Despite his concern for secrecy, Michelangelo planned to remove the canvas and scaffolding to show his work to the public before starting the second half. Julius had ordered this unveiling, but Michelangelo himself was no doubt eager to see what effect the fresco would produce from the floor. However, he was surprisingly downcast in his letter to Buonarroto. ‘I do not know what will ensue,’ he wrote. ‘I am not very well. I have no time to write more.’3

  Recent work had gone smoothly in comparison to some of the earlier efforts. In a relatively short space of time, Michelangelo had completed two more lunettes and spandrels, the Prophet Ezekiel, the Cumaean Sibyl, two more pairs of Ignudi, and his fifth Genesis scene, The Creation 0f Eve. The three figures in The Creation of Eve had been painted in only four giornate, a swift pace that would have impressed even Domenico Ghirlandaio. Michelangelo was able to work so quickly in part because he had started transferring his cartoons on to the intonaco using a combination of spolvero and incision — the method used by Ghirlandaio and his assistants in the Tornabuoni Chapel. While the finer
details on the cartoons, such as faces and hair, were always perforated and then pounced with charcoal, the larger outlines of bodies and clothing were simply traced over with a sharp stylus. This technique showed Michelangelo’s growing confidence in his abilities as well as, perhaps, his increasing desire to finish the task.

  The Creation of Eve was painted directly above the marble screen that separated the clergy from the rest of the chapel. Open-mouthed with astonishment, Eve staggers from behind the slumbering Adam to greet her Maker, who regards her almost sorrowfully as He offers a benediction that looks rather like the conjuring gesture of a magician. This was Michelangelo’s first portrayal of God, and he represented Him as a handsome old man with a white, wavy beard and a flowing lilac robe. The Garden of Eden in the background, like that in The Temptation and Expulsion, was represented as a place of the most dubious charms. Michelangelo had no use for landscape painting, deriding the depictions of natural scenery by Flemish painters as works of art suitable only for old ladies, young girls, monks and nuns.4 His Paradise was therefore nothing more than a barren patch of land distinguished by a dead tree and a few outcrops of rock.

  After the dexterous and imaginative handling of the figures in The Temptation and Expulsion, those in The Creation of Eve come as something of a disappointment. Michelangelo’s design borrows heavily from Jacopo della Quercia’s version on the portal of San Petronio in Bologna and is therefore slightly stilted. No foreshortening was used, and the trio of figures have shrunk to a mere couple of feet in height, making them difficult to see clearly from the chapel’s floor.

  Michelangelo’s talents were displayed to much better advantage in the adjacent figure of Ezekiel. Thus far the prophets and sibyls, together with the Ignudi, had been the most successful parts of the fresco. If Michelangelo was experiencing difficulties composing scenes as eloquent and ordered as those of Raphael, his larger-than-life single figures allowed him to invoke his talent for muscular colossuses. By the halfway point he had painted seven prophets and sibyls in all, a gallery of weighty characters who scrutinise books and scrolls or else, like the Isaiah beneath The Sacrifice of Noah, stare contemplatively into the middle distance with a furrowed brow that recalls the thoughtful and worried expression of the David. The handsome, tousle-headed Isaiah resembles, in fact, a seated version of the famous statue, complete with an overlarge left hand.

  Ezekiel made a fine addition to this cast of broad-shouldered giants. He was an appropriate subject for the Sistine Chapel, having exhorted the Jews to rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem after receiving a vision in which a surveyor armed with a line of flax and a measuring rod appeared to him and demonstrated the structure’s proper dimensions, including the thickness of its walls and the depth of its threshold — dimensions faithfully repeated when the Sistine Chapel was constructed. Michelangelo painted him sitting on a throne with his body torqued violently to the right as if to confront someone. His head is in profile, his face a mask of concentration, eyebrows raised and jaw out-thrust.

  Besides Ezekiel and Cumaea, The Creation of Eve is flanked by four Ignudi and two bronze-coloured medallions threaded with yellow ribbons. The medallions, like the architectural decorations, were left almost entirely to Michelangelo’s assistants, who painted ten of them in all. At least one was not only painted but also designed by an assistant, probably Bastiano da Sangallo, since it is similar in style to a number of drawings attributed to him.5 Four feet in diameter, these medallions were painted entirely a secco and, after the first pair, without cartoons as guides: Michelangelo simply drew sketches which the assistants then transferred on to the plaster in freehand. The bronze colour was achieved using burnt sienna, to which gold leaf was afterwards applied using a resin-and-oil fixative.

  All ten of these scenes were inspired by woodcuts in the 1493 edition of the Biblia vulgare istoriata, Niccolò Malermi’s Italian translation of the Bible. One of the first printed Bibles to be translated into Italian, it was published in 1490, eventually proving so popular that it had run to six editions by the time work started in the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo must have owned a copy of this text and consulted it as he made his sketches for the medallions.

  The popularity of the Malermi Bible meant that Michelangelo would have expected the pilgrims filing into the Sistine Chapel for Mass to recognise the scenes on the medallions. But even the illiterate, who had never seen the Malermi Bible, would no doubt have been familiar with many of the scenes from depictions of them elsewhere — just as, of course, they would also have recognised The Flood and The Drunkenness of Noah. Few artists lost sight of the fact that their art was intended to illuminate stories for the uneducated. The statutes of the painters’ guild in Siena stated outright that their task was ‘the expositions of sacred writ to the ignorant who know not how to read’.6 Frescoes therefore served much the same purpose as the Biblia pauperum, or ‘Poor Man’s Bible’, a picture book used by the illiterate. And since Masses could last for several hours, worshippers had plenty of time in which to contemplate the illustrations around them.

  What, then, might a pilgrim from Florence or Urbino have made of the medallions on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? Michelangelo’s choice of woodcuts from the Malermi Bible is intriguing. Five of the medallions were copied from the illustrations to the Books of Maccabees, the last of the fourteen books of the Bible known as the Apocrypha. The Apocrypha (derived from the Greek apokrupto, meaning ‘hidden’) were works of doubtful authority nonetheless included in the Vulgate, the official Latin version of the Bible compiled and translated by St Jerome. The Books of Maccabees tell the exploits of a family of heroes who ‘chased the barbarous multitudes, and recovered again the temple renowned all the world over’.7 The most illustrious member of the family was Judas Maccabaeus, the warrior priest who stormed Jerusalem in 165 BC and reconsecrated the Temple, an event still commemorated by Hanukkah, the Jewish feast of dedication.

  Michelangelo’s scenes from Maccabees showed the enemies of the Jewish people getting their just deserts. One of the medallions nearest the door, that above the Prophet Joel, illustrated II Maccabees 9, where God sends the King of Syria, Antiochus Epiphanes, sprawling to the ground as he rides towards Jerusalem in his chariot, bent on conquering the Jews. Further along the vault, the medallion over the Prophet Isaiah showed the episode from II Maccabees 3 in which Heliodorus, the king’s chancellor, descends on Jerusalem with orders to despoil the Temple, only to be stopped in his tracks by the sight of a horse mounted by a ‘terrible rider’. Heliodorus is not only trampled by the horse but also flogged by two men armed with sticks — the action featured in the medallion.

  Religious wars, would-be plunderers, a city under threat from invaders, a warrior-like priest who wins victory for his people with the help of the Lord — the Books of Maccabees would have possessed a special resonance for visitors to the Sistine Chapel during the turbulent reign of Julius II. Art was meant to do more, of course, than simply educate the masses about events in biblical history; it could also bear a compelling political import. It was no accident, for example, that the rulers of Florence had commissioned The Battle of Cascina, an illustration of a victorious skirmish fought against Pisa, at a time when they were themselves waging their own war with the Pisans. The scenes from Maccabees on the vault of the Sistine Chapel likewise suggest that Michelangelo — or, more likely, an adviser — was anxious to force home points about papal authority.

  One of the medallions painted in the spring or summer of 1510 was particularly emphatic. The Malermi Bible included at II Maccabees 1 a woodcut of an event not actually described in the Apocrypha, that of Alexander the Great kneeling before the high priest of Jerusalem. Alexander had been on his way to plunder Jerusalem when the high priest met him outside its walls and so awed him that the great warrior spared the city. The medallion itself displays the crowned Alexander kneeling before a robed figure wearing a papal mitre. As such it was similar to a stained-glass window commissioned for the Vatican in 1507, which depi
cted Louis XII on his knees before Julius. Both this window and the bronze medallion were eloquent and uncompromising in their insistence that kings and other temporal rulers must submit to the will of religious leaders such as the Pope.

  Michelangelo was therefore glorifying the Rovere popes not only by festooning the chapel with oak leaves and acorns but also by bolstering the conviction, through the images on these bronze medallions, that enemies of the Church should be brought sharply to heel. However, since he objected in private to the belligerence of the Warrior Pope, Michelangelo seems to have proved something of an unwilling propagandist for Julius’s military campaigns. The illustrations from Maccabees may well have been familiar to pilgrims visiting the chapel, but deciphering the tiny discs from the floor would have been possible for only the most sharp-eyed among them. Their small size, plus the fact that hundreds of larger and more striking figures overshadowed them, meant their political impact was inevitably blunted. It would take Raphael, working next door in the Vatican, to inflate such scenes to more grandiose proportions.

  If Michelangelo’s feelings about the Pope’s campaigns were decidedly mixed when he started the fresco, in the summer of 1510 — as he prepared to unveil the first half — his support must soon have dwindled even further.

  Intimidated by neither the fierce reputation of Alfonso d’Este nor the presence on Italian soil of an enormous French army, Julius readied himself for battle. He confidently informed the Venetian envoy that it was the ‘will of God’ that he should ‘castigate the Duke of Ferrara and free Italy from the hand of the French’.8 The thought of the French presence in Italy put him off his food, he claimed, and kept him from sleeping — which was indeed unusual, for Julius liked both his dinner and his bed. ‘Last night,’ he complained to the envoy, ‘I got up and paced the room, unable to rest.’9