Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

by Ross King

  Buonarroto had not been pleased by his brother’s investment. Now thirty-five and desperate to become his own master, he had written to Michelangelo in July, stating his worries that the purchase of La Loggia meant his older brother was about to renege on the promise he had been making for the past five years. Michelangelo’s response was emphatic: he rebuked Buonarroto for his lack of faith and ordered him to be patient. ‘I work harder than anyone who has ever lived,’ he wrote furiously. ‘I am not well and worn out with this stupendous labour, and yet I am patient to achieve the desired end. So you, too, can very well be patient for two months, being ten thousand times better off than I am.’4

  A suffering figure struggling heroically and patiently with endless cares, labours and illnesses — Buonarroto was by now all too familiar with the image that Michelangelo projected back to Florence whenever his family made demands upon him. But at least the end of the ‘stupendous labour’ was in sight, since Michelangelo gave Buonarroto yet another revised forecast as to when he might finish the fresco, reporting that he anticipated roughly two more months of work. A month later he was still hoping he might finish by the end of September, though he had missed so many deadlines that he became reluctant to prophesy. ‘The truth is,’ he explained to Buonarroto, ‘it is so great a labour I cannot estimate the time within a fortnight. Let it suffice that I shall be home before All Saints in any case, if I do not die in the meantime. I am being quick as I can, because I long to be home.’5

  Michelangelo’s gloomy and irritable mood as he neared the end of his labours was expressed in a figure on the north side of the chapel. Completed a short time after God Separating Light from Darkness, the Prophet Jeremiah was portrayed slumping motionless on his throne in a pose that anticipated — and no doubt influenced — Auguste Rodin’s famous sculpture The Thinker. An old man with a long beard and unkempt grey hair, Jeremiah stares at the ground, striking an attitude of morose reflection as he props his chin on his massive right hand. He sits directly across the chapel from the Libyan Sibyl, the last of the giant prophetesses painted on the vault. The body language of these two seers is sharply contrasting, for the sibyl adopts a dramatic and daring pose that required Michelangelo’s model to sit in a chair, twist his torso sharply to the right and raise his arms to the level of his head while bending his left leg and splaying his toes — an uncomfortable position that must have caused him agonies.

  Jeremiah’s idle pose, on the other hand, would not have taxed the sitter in the least. This is just as well, since it is generally believed that Jeremiah was another of Michelangelo’s self-portraits. Jeremiah is not one of his unflinchingly ugly images of himself, such as the grimacing, beheaded Holofernes at the other end of the chapel. But his likeness as the Prophet Jeremiah depicts a different — and, in some ways, equally unflattering — aspect of his character.

  ‘My grief is beyond healing,’ the notoriously glum Jeremiah exclaims at one point in the Bible, ‘my heart is sick within me’ (Jeremiah 8:18). In a later chapter he laments: ‘Cursed be the day on which I was born! The day when my mother bore me, let it not be blessed!’ (Jeremiah 20:14). This pessimism can be explained by the fact that Jeremiah lived in the dark days after the Babylonians invaded Jerusalem, sacked the Temple and carried the Jews into captivity. The sad fate of Jerusalem is deplored in another of his books: ‘How lonely sits the city that was full of people! How like a widow she has become, she that was great among the nations!’ (Lamentations 1:1.)

  Jeremiah had been given a memorable interpretation more than a decade earlier when Savonarola compared himself to the prophet, claiming to have foretold the invasion of Florence just as Jeremiah had predicted the fall of Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar. In his final sermon before his execution, Savonarola further identified himself with Jeremiah, saying that since the prophet had continued to speak despite his afflictions, he, Fra Girolamo, would not be silenced either. ‘Thou has made me a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth,’ he declared a few weeks before his death, echoing the prophet’s words.6

  Michelangelo, too, saw himself as a man of strife. Given his reputation for moroseness, his comparison of himself with the most doleful of the Hebrew prophets was as appropriate as Raphael’s depiction of him as the ornery and unpleasant Heraclitus. In fact, the Jeremiah on the Sistine vaults so closely resembles Raphael’s pensieroso in The School of Athens — the slouching body, the crossed feet, the heavy head supported by a hand — that it raises the question of whether Michelangelo saw his rival’s work in the Stanza della Segnatura before painting Jeremiah. No evidence exists one way or another, though by the summer of 1512 Michelangelo had surely learned of Raphael’s addition to his fresco.

  Michelangelo may have been sharing Raphael’s joke by portraying himself as the lugubrious author of Lamentations. Yet this characterisation still bears a good deal of truth. ‘I get my happiness from my dejection,’ he wrote in one of his poems, many of which are filled with sombre meditations on age, death and decay.7 ‘Whatever’s born must come to death,’ he declared in another, going on to describe how everyone’s eyes will soon turn into ‘black and frightful’ sockets.8 In a poem composed in his mid-fifties he even wrote longingly of suicide, observing that self-slaughter would be ‘right for him who lives a bondsman, / Wretched, unhappy …’9

  If Michelangelo was wretched and unhappy by nature, his work in the Sistine Chapel made him all the more miserable, as the numerous complaints in his letters reveal. Not only was he made wretched by his seemingly never-ending labours on the scaffold, but he was constantly troubled by events outside the chapel. Like Jeremiah, he was doomed to live in dangerous and troublesome times. And now, in his last few months of work on the fresco, yet another cause for worry loomed.

  ‘I long to be home,’ Michelangelo had written to Buonarroto towards the end of August. But within days his home town would be awash with what one chronicler called ‘a terrible wave of terror’.10

  30

  In Evil Plight

  IN THE SUMMER of 1512, Florence was battered by some of the most violent thunderstorms in decades. In one of the fiercest, a bolt of lightning struck the Porta al Prato, on the north-west edge of the city, knocking from the gate tower a coat of arms decorated with golden lilies. Everyone in Florence knew that lightning strikes were portents of things to come. In 1492, the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici had been foretold when a bolt of lightning hit the dome of the cathedral, sending tons of marble crashing down in the direction of the Villa Careggi, where Lorenzo lay in bed with a fever. ‘I am a dead man,’ Il Magnifico was said to have exclaimed when told of the cascading marble. True enough, he died three days later, on Passion Sunday.

  The bolt of lightning that damaged the Porta al Prato was equally unambiguous. As the golden lilies on the shield were the insignia of the king of France, it was obvious to everyone that the Florentines were to be punished for supporting Louis XII against the Pope. And the fact that the lightning struck the Porta al Prato, of all gates, suggested that this terrible vengeance would come by way of Prato, a walled town a dozen miles north-west of Florence.

  This prophecy was fulfilled soon enough, since in the third week of August the five-thousand-strong army of Ramón Cardona descended on Prato, which it aimed to conquer before marching on Florence. The Pope and his allies in the Holy League were determined to crush the republic headed by Piero Soderini and restore the city to the sons of Lorenzo de’ Medici, who had been in exile since 1494. The subjugation of Florence was expected to be a simpler matter than chasing the Bentivogli from Bologna or taking Ferrara from Alfonso d’Este. The Florentines, with their untested commanders and small, inexperienced army, were no match for the well-drilled, battle-hardened Spaniards under Cardona. Panic swept the streets of Florence as the viceroy and his troops moved south through the valleys of the Apennines.

  Amid these scenes of panic, hasty preparations were made for a defence of Florence. The official in charge of the republic’s militia, Niccolò Machia
velli, conscripted foot soldiers from among the peasants and farmers in the surrounding countryside. Armed with long pikes, two thousand of these ragtag soldiers filed under the blasted gate tower and marched away to fortify Prato. Situated on a plain beneath the Apennines, Prato was notable for its greenish marble, which had been used to clad the exterior of the cathedral in Florence. It was also known for its most famous relic, the girdle of the Virgin, which Mary herself had given to St Thomas, and which was preserved in a special chapel in Prato’s cathedral. In the coming days, however, the town’s name was to become synonymous with something else — an event that would make it more notorious even than Ravenna.

  The Spaniards appeared before the walls of Prato at the end of August, hard on the heels of Machiavelli’s militiamen. Despite their numbers, Cardona’s men were not, at first sight, an especially imposing force, possessing a woefully inadequate artillery that consisted of only two cannons, both of them the small-calibre guns known as falconets. They were also poorly provisioned and, after eight months on the road, thoroughly exhausted. To cap it all, following their frantic retreat from Ravenna, some of the Spaniards had been assaulted in the countryside by the bandits who made the roads of Italy such a menace.

  The siege did not begin promisingly for Cardona’s men. As they started bombarding the walls, one of their guns immediately split in two, leaving them with a single cannon. Hungry and dispirited, they immediately offered a truce to the Florentines, claiming it was not their wish to attack the republic, only to persuade its government to join the Holy League. Suddenly encouraged, the Florentines refused to accept it, leaving the Spaniards to reload their lone cannon and pepper the walls with shot. To everyone’s surprise, after a day’s bombardment the falconet managed to open a small breach in one of the gates. The Spaniards poured through the hole unresisted while Machiavelli’s inexperienced soldiers threw down their weapons and ran for their lives.

  What followed was, in Machiavelli’s rueful description, ‘a miserable scene of distress’.1 Trapped in the cobbled streets of Prato, neither the conscripts nor the people of Prato were shown mercy by the Spanish pikemen. For the next few hours, there was, in the words of another commentator, nothing but ‘cries, flight, violence, sack, blood and killing’.2 By the end of the day, more than two thousand people – Florentines and Pratesi alike — lay dead inside the walls. The Spaniards, meanwhile, who had lost barely a single fighter, were only a two-day march at most from the gates of Florence.

  ‘I think you should all see about withdrawing to some place where you would be safe, abandoning your possessions and everything else, since a man’s life is of far more value than his possessions.’3

  So wrote a frantic Michelangelo to his father on 5 September, less than a week after the sack of Prato. The bloody massacre of civilians as well as soldiers had been the worst atrocity perpetrated on Italian soil since the dark days a decade earlier when Cesare Borgia bestrode the peninsula. Florence received word of the slaughter with shock and terror. Learning the news in Rome a few days later, Michelangelo was in no doubt as to what course of action his family should take to escape the ‘evil plight’, as he called it, that had befallen his home town. He urged Lodovico to withdraw money from the account in Santa Maria Nuova and flee with the family to Siena. ‘Act as in case of plague,’ he begged his father, ‘be the first to flee.’

  The situation in Florence was already resolving itself by the time Michelangelo wrote this letter. Initially, Piero Soderini had been confident that he could bribe the Spaniards to spare Florence, thereby keeping the Medici at bay. Cardona had gladly accepted money, levying an indemnity of 150,000 ducats against the citizens of Florence, but he still insisted that Soderini and his republican government must be replaced by the Medici. Made bold by the approach of the Spaniards, a band of young Florentines, supporters of the Medici, then stormed the Palazzo della Signoria and seized control of the government. A day later, 1 September, Soderini fled into exile in Siena. In a bloodless coup, Giuliano de’ Medici, the son of Lorenzo, took control of the city. Machiavelli later remembered that a thunderbolt had struck the Palazzo della Signoria shortly before Soderini took to his heels — yet another example of how, in his opinion, nothing important ever happened without a celestial sign.

  Machiavelli was optimistic about the return of the Medici. ‘This city remains very quiet,’ he wrote a week or two later, ‘and hopes not to live less honoured with the Medici’s aid than she lived in times gone by, when the Magnificent Lorenzo their father, of happy memory, was ruling.’4 Sadly for him, he was deprived forthwith of his government post and then, suspected of anti-Medici plotting, imprisoned and tortured by the strappado (‘the ripper’), a brutal technique that involved dropping the victim from a platform and suspending him in mid-air from a rope binding his arms together behind his back. The punishment usually resulted in dislocated shoulders and agonised confessions. Tortured by the same device, Savonarola had confessed to all sorts of crimes, including having conspired with Giuliano della Rovere to overthrow Pope Alexander VI. Machiavelli made no such forced confessions, however. Banished from Florence on his release from prison a few months later, he retired, at the age of forty-three, to his small farm near San Casciano, where Lodovico Buonarroti had recently been podestà. There his days were spent snaring thrushes with his bare hands and his nights playing tric-trac with the locals in a tavern. He also began composing The Prince, his cynical work on statecraft in which he bitterly declared all men to be ‘ungrateful, fickle, liars and deceivers’.5

  46. Niccolò Machiavelli.

  Michelangelo proved much more cautious about the return of the Medici. It is ironic that when Lorenzo’s son, Piero de’ Medici, was expelled by the people of Florence in 1494, Michelangelo had bolted to Bologna because of his close association with the dynasty, only to be equally fearful of repercussions for himself and his family when the Medici were returned to power almost two decades later. ‘Don’t get yourselves involved in any way, either by word or deed,’ he urged his father, while to Buonarroto he offered similar guidance: ‘Do not make friends or intimates of anyone, save God, and do not speak good or evil of anyone, because no one knows what the outcome will be. Attend only to your own affairs.’6

  Machiavelli’s treatment at the hands of the new lords of Florence suggests that Michelangelo had sound reason for encouraging such caution. He was profoundly distressed, therefore, when he learned from Buonarroto how it was reported in Florence that he had spoken out against the Medici. ‘I have never said anything against them,’ he protested to his father, though he did admit to having condemned the atrocity at Prato, which everyone now blamed on the Medici.7 But the stones would have condemned the sack of Prato, he claimed, if only they possessed the powers of speech.

  Poised to return to Florence in a matter of weeks, Michelangelo therefore suddenly found himself in fear that reprisals awaited him there. He urged his brother to carry out some detective work and get to the bottom of the malicious rumours. ‘I wish Buonarroto could see about learning discreetly where that person has heard that I spoke badly of the Medici,’ he told Lodovico, ‘to see if I can discover where it comes from … so I can be on guard against it.’ Despite his high reputation — or perhaps because of it — Michelangelo believed he had enemies in Florence who wished to blacken his name with the Medici.

  Michelangelo had financial concerns as well at this time. He was trying, as usual, to extract further payments from the Pope, even though he had received virtually all of the money — a total, so far, of 2,900 ducats8 — owing to him under the terms of the contract written by Cardinal Alidosi. He was also trying to retrieve money that his father had, for the second time in two years, misappropriated from his bank account. Prompted by his son’s order to finance an escape to Siena with funds from Santa Maria Nuova, Lodovico withdrew, and spent, forty ducats despite the fact that the getaway never became necessary. Michelangelo expected restitution, and forbade his father to take any more money. However, he wa
s soon forced to pay yet another of his father’s unexpected expenses. Lodovico had found himself with a bill for sixty ducats as his share of the indemnity the people of Florence were required to pay the Holy League in order to preserve their liberties. He could only afford half, forcing Michelangelo to reach into his pocket for the remaining thirty ducats.

  Michelangelo’s frustrations at this point — with his father, with the dangerous political situation in Florence, with his own unceasing efforts on the fresco — showed themselves in a remarkably self-pitying letter written to Lodovico in October 1512, a month after the sack of Prato. ‘I lead a miserable existence,’ he complained to his father in a lament worthy of Jeremiah. ‘I live wearied by stupendous labours and beset by a thousand anxieties. And thus have I lived for some fifteen years now and never an hour’s happiness have I had. And all this I have done in order to help you, though you have never either recognised or believed it. God forgive us all.’9