Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

by Ross King

  18 Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, vol. 2, p. 736.

  19 Dialogi di Donato Ciannotti, ed. Deoclecio Redig de Campos (Florence: G.C. Sansoni, 1939), p. 66.

  20 Il Carteggio di Michelangelo, vol. 3, p. 156.

  21 Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, vol. 1, p. 607.

  22 Ibid.

  23 Ibid.

  12: THE FLAYING OF MARSYAS

  1 Quoted in Vincenzo Golzio, Raffaello nei documenti, nelle testimonianze dei contemporanei, e nella letteratura del suo secolo (Vatican City: Panetto & Petrelli, 1936), p. 301.

  2 Ibid., p. 281.

  3 Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, vol. 1, p. 710.

  4 Ibid., p. 711. Vasari’s comments on Raphael’s upbringing must be taken with a grain of salt, given the fact that he misses the actual date of Magia Ciarli’s death by a decade.

  5 Raphael’s serene physical beauty sparked much discussion in later centuries. German physiologists scrutinised the handsome face in his self-portraits for clues to his personality and genius. One of them, Karl Gustav Carus, rhapsodised about the ‘sensual, arterial and pneumatic qualities of his temperament’ reflected in the harmonious proportions of his skull. See Oskar Fischel, Raphael, trans. Bernard Rackham (London: Kegan Paul, 1948), p. 340. This harmoniously proportioned skull, or at least one purporting to be Raphael’s, did the rounds of European museums for several decades until, in 1833, in order to expose the fraud, the painter’s tomb in the Pantheon was opened and the remains – which included a skull – exhumed. The skeleton was examined by the Professor of Clinical Surgery at the University of Rome, who concluded that the painter possessed a large larynx. Raphael therefore had a manly baritone to go with his sundry other charms.

  6 Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, vol. 2, p. 422.

  7 Ibid., p. 418.

  8 Ibid.

  9 No conclusive and incontrovertible documentary evidence links the Bibliotheca Iulia with the Stanza della Segnatura. Their identification – accepted by most (though not all) scholars – is based largely on the room’s decorative design, which seems to be that of a library. For a clinching argument, see John Shearman, ‘The Vatican Stanze: Functions and Decoration’, Proceedings of the British Academy (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 379–81. Shearman argues convincingly that during Julius’s reign the Signatura was located next door, in the room now known as the Stanza dell’Incendio (p. 377).

  10 For the contents of Julius’s library, see Léon Dorez, ‘La bibliothèque privée du Pape Jules II’, Revue des Bibliothèques 6 (1896), pp. 97–124.

  11 For a study of the relationship of the personifications to the scenes on the walls below, see Ernst Gombrich, ‘Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura and the Nature of its Symbolism’, in Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1972), pp. 85–101.

  12 Recent conservation in the Stanza della Segnatura has failed to discover whether Raphael and Sodoma worked simultaneously on the vaults, or whether Sodoma worked on the vaults while Raphael started on the walls and then intervened on the vault only when Sodoma completed his own sections. On this problem, see Roberto Bartalini, ‘Sodoma, the Chigi and the Vatican Stanze’, Burlington Magazine (September 2001), pp. 552–3.

  13 Kenneth Clark, Leonardo da Vinci (London: Penguin, 1961), p. 34.

  14 For Sodoma’s payment, see G.I. Hoogewerff, ‘Documenti, in parte inediti, che riguardano Raffaello ed altri artisti contemporanei’, Atti della Pontificia Accademia Roma di Archeologia, Rediconti 21 (1945–6), pp. 250–60.

  15 On this difference in style, see Bartalini, ‘Sodoma, the Chigi and the Vatican Stanze’, p. 549.

  13: TRUE COLOURS

  1 See D.S. Chambers, ‘Papal Conclaves and Prophetic Mystery in the Sistine Chapel’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 41 (1978), pp. 322–6.

  2 Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, vol. 2, pp. 666.

  3 Quoted in Robert J. Clements, ed., Michelangelo: A Self-Portrait (New York: New York University Press, 1968), p. 34.

  4 On Michelangelo’s practice of working in these latitudinal bands, from the central panels to the lunettes, see Mancinelli, ‘Michelangelo at Work: The Painting of the Lunettes’, p. 241. There has been disagreement among scholars over whether Michelangelo painted the lunettes concurrently with the rest of the vault or as part of a later campaign. In 1945, Charles de Tolnay argued that they were not painted until 1511–12, by which time he claims the remainder of the fresco was complete (Michelangelo, vol. 2, p. 105). The view has more recently been adopted by Creighton Gilbert (‘On the Absolute Dates of the Parts of the Sistine Ceiling’, p. 178). Other art historians, such as Fabrizio Mancinelli, disagree, arguing that the lunettes were not part of a distinct, later campaign, but rather were painted at the same time as the rest of the vault: see Mancinelli, ‘The Technique of Michelangelo as a Painter: A Note on the Cleaning of the First Lunettes in the Sistine Chapel’, Apollo (May 1983), pp. 362–3. Mancinelli’s thesis in this article, that ‘the painting of the lunettes should be related to the progress of the work on the ceiling of the whole’ and that ‘these two phases were closely linked and not distinct’ (p. 363), marks a revision of his earlier view – expressed in The Sistine Chapel (London: Constable, 1978), p. 14 – that the lunettes were executed in a later campaign carried out in 1512. Mancinelli’s revised view is a confirmation of Johannes Wilde’s early intimation that ‘the lunettes and vaulted triangles [the spandrels] are not later than the central parts of the ceiling corresponding to them’. See ‘The Decoration of the Sistine Chapel’, Proceedings of the British Academy 54 (1958), p. 78, n. 2. Wilde’s chronology has also been accepted by Sidney Freedberg in Painting of the High Renaissance in Rome and Florence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 626; idem, Painting in Italy, 1500–1600 (Penguin, 1971), p. 468; Michael Hirst, ‘“Il Modo delle Attitudini”: Michelangelo’s Oxford Sketchbook for the Ceiling’, in The Sistine Chapel: Michelangelo Rediscovered, Paul Holberton, ed. (London: Muller, Blond & White, 1986) pp. 208–17; and by Paul Joannides, ‘On the Chronology of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling’, Art History (September 1981), pp. 250–2.

  5 John Gage, Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (London: Thames & Hudson, 1993), p. 131.

  6 Robert W. Carden, ed., Michelangelo: A Record of His life as Told in His Own Letters and Papers (London: Constable & Co., 1913), pp. 57–8.

  7 Evelyn Welch, Art in Renaissance Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 84.

  8 Mary Merrifield, The Art of Fresco Painting (London, 1846; rpt London: Alec Tiranti, 1966), p. 110.

  9 For Michelangelo’s pigments, see Mancinelli, ‘Michelangelo at Work’, p. 242; and idem ‘Michelangelo’s Frescoes in the Sistine Chapel’, in The Art of the Conservator, ed. Andrew Oddy (London: British Museum Press, 1992), p. 98.

  10 Cennino Cennini, Il Libro dell’arte: The Craftsman’s Handbook, trans. Daniel V. Thompson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1933), p. 27.

  11 A successful painter such as Pietro Perugino, for example, paid twelve gold florins per year for a studio in Florence: A. Victor Coonin, ‘New Documents Concerning Perugino’s Workshop in Florence’, Burlington Magazine 96 (February 1999), p. 100.

  12 For Ghirlandaio’s use of ultramarine in buon fresco, see Roettgen, Italian Frescoes, vol. 2, p. 164. The possible use of ultramarine on the vaults of the Sistine Chapel has been a matter of some debate since the controversial restoration of Michelangelo’s frescoes between 1980 and 1989. The matter is clouded by a number of conflicting statements about ultramarine made by the Director of Operations for the restoration, Fabrizio Mancinelli, who was the Vatican’s Curator of Byzantine, Medieval and Modern Art until his death in 1994. At stake is whether the restorers, in their zeal to clean the fresco, removed secco touches (including passages of ultramarine) that Michelangelo added, or whether these secco touches
– many of which had darkened the colours – were the work of previous restorers. Mancinelli vacillated wildly over whether or not Michelangelo used ultramarine and, if so, whether or not he added it a secco. In 1983, he claimed that some blues (which he did not name) were indeed added as secco touches. In 1986, he revised this view, declaring that Michelangelo made no secco touches to the fresco, but rather added ultramarine in buon fresco – a view reiterated the following year at a symposium in London. In 1991, two years after the restoration was completed, he changed his mind yet again, deciding that the blues on the ceiling were not ultramarine after all, but rather smaltino. In 1992, however, Mancinelli made yet another U-turn, proposing that ultramarine was used after all. It seems virtually impossible, on the basis of these contrary statements, to determine whether Michelangelo in fact used ultramarine on the Sistine’s vaults. The bulk of evidence does, however, suggest that it was used in a number of places, for example, on Zechariah’s collar, where it was added a secco.

  For Mancinelli’s various statements, see (in order of publication) ‘The Technique of Michelangelo as a Painter: A Note on the Cleaning of the First Lunettes in the Sistine Chapel’, pp. 362–7; ‘Michelangelo at Work: The Painting of the Lunettes’, pp. 218–59; ‘Michelangelo’s Frescoes in the Sistine Chapel’, pp. 89–107. For a critique of the Sistine Chapel restoration, see James Beck and Michael Daley, Art Restoration: The Culture, the Business and the Scandal (London: John Murray, 1993).

  13 Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo, p. 58.

  14 See Gianluigi Colalucci, ‘The Technique of the Sistine Ceiling Frescoes’, in de Vecchi and Murphy, eds, The Sistine Chapel: A Glorious Restoration, p. 34. Colalucci claims that Michelangelo’s secco interventions consisted of a few additions of ‘a limited and imperceptible scale’.

  15 For a full discussion of the painting of the lunettes, see Mancinelli, ‘Michelangelo at Work’, pp. 242–59.

  16 For the number of giornate, as well as for information on spolvero and incision, see Bambach, Drawing and Painting in the Italian Renaissance Workshop, Appendix Two: ‘Cartoon Transfer Techniques in Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling’, pp. 365–7.

  17 It is difficult to know how exactly to refer to the characters on the spandrels and lunettes. Art historians sometimes identify the figures in the spandrel with the first name on the nameplate on the lunette below. However, difficulties with this procedure arise due to the fact that some of the nameplates provide only two names, others only one. It is now widely agreed that no one-to-one connection exists between the names on the tablets and the individual figures in the spandrels and lunettes. One looks in vain, for example, for King David on the lunette bearing his name. Lisa Pon therefore states that ‘it is impossible to give a specific identity to each individual figure. It is only when they are seen collectively and in conjunction with the series of names that the figures can represent the genealogy of Christ.’ See Pon, ‘A Note on the Ancestors of Christ in the Sistine Chapel’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 61 (1998), p. 257.

  18 De Tolnay, Michelangelo, vol. 2, p. 77.

  19 Paul Joannides, Titian to 1518: The Assumption of Genius (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 161. This painting, in Longleat House in Wiltshire, was stolen in 1995 and recovered in London in the summer of 2002.

  20 See Allison Lee Palmer, ‘The Maternal Madonna in Quattrocento Florence: Social Ideals in the Family of the Patriarch’, Source: Notes in the History of Art (Spring 2002), pp. 7–14. Palmer argues that these images ‘played an active role in modelling behaviour within the family’ (p. 7).

  21 Similarly, Domenico Canigiani commissioned the Holy Family from Raphael on the occasion of his marriage in 1507 to Lucrezia Frescobaldi, after which the work hung in their wedding chamber.

  22 De Tolnay, Michelangelo, vol. 2, p. 77.

  23 Robert S. Liebert, Michelangelo: A Psychoanalytic Study of His Life and Images (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 28.

  14: REJOICE GREATLY, O DAUGHTER OF ZION

  1 Quoted in Pastor, History of the Popes, vol. 6, p. 285.

  2 Quoted in Shaw, Julius II, p. 246.

  3 Frederick Hartt, ‘Lignum Vitae in Medio Paradisi: The Stanza d’Eliodoro and the Sistine Ceiling’, Art Bulletin 32 (1950), p. 130.

  4 The drawing, now in the Uffizi, was correctly identified by Charles de Tolnay. See Michelangelo, vol. 2, p. 55. Michelangelo added a beard to Zechariah, since Julius did not sprout whiskers on his chin until 1510.

  5 See John O’Malley, ‘Fulfilment of the Christian Golden Age under Pope Julius II: Text of a Discourse of Giles of Viterbo, 1507’, Traditio 25 (1969), p. 320. The biblical text comes from Isaiah 6:1. For Egidio’s prophetic view of history, see Marjorie Reeves, ‘Cardinal Egidio of Viterbo: A Prophetic Interpretation of History’, in Marjorie Reeves, ed., Prophetic Rome in the High Renaissance Period (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 91–119.

  6 Complete Poems and Selected Letters of Michelangelo, trans. Creighton E. Gilbert (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 8. Some editors date the poem to Michelangelo’s first arrival in Rome in 1496. However, Christopher Ryan claims that ‘the pontificate of Julius II, with its direct involvement in military matters, would seem to fit better the subject matter of the poem’. See Michelangelo: The Poems (London: J. M. Dent, 1996), p. 262. Ryan therefore dates the poem to 1512, but the bitter references elsewhere in the poem to the aborted tomb project – a phrase that Ryan translates as ‘here work has been taken from me’ – and the militarised papacy make 1506 or 1508 seem more likely. In any case, it seems to be an indictment of Julius II, not Alexander VI.

  7 Fabrizio Mancinelli states that Raphael painted the Stanza della Segnatura ‘almost single-handedly’. See The Dictionary of Art, 34 vols, ed. Jane Turner (London: Macmillan, 1996), vol. 26, p. 817. Still, he almost certainly had a number of assistants and apprentices, however modest in number. John Shearman states, for example, that for the first year or two of his work on the Stanza della Segnatura Raphael probably did not need help for anything but the humblest tasks; see ‘Raffaello e la bottega’, in Raffaello in Vaticano, ed. Giorgio Muratore (Milan: Electa, 1984), p. 259. It is highly unlikely that any of the stalwarts of his later workshop – Giulio Romano, Giovanni da Udine, Francesco Penni, Perino del Vaga, Pelligrino da Modena – were with him at this early point. In 1509, Giulio Romano, for example, was only ten years old.

  8 John Shearman, ‘The Organization of Raphael’s Workshop’, in The Art Institute of Chicago Centennial Lectures (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1983), p. 44.

  9 Quoted in John W. O’Malley, ‘Giles of Viterbo: A Reformer’s Thought on Renaissance Rome’, in Rome and the Renaissance: Studies in Culture and Religion (London: Variorum Reprints, 1981), p. 9.

  10 Raphaelis Urbinatis Vita, in Vincenzo Golzio, Raffaello nei documenti, p. 192. It has also been argued that Egidio da Viterbo was the man behind the Disputà. See Heinrich Pfeiffer, Zur Ikonographie von Raffaels Disputa: Egidio da Viterbo und die christlíche-platonische Konzeption der Stanza della Segnatura (Rome: Pontificia Universitas Gregoriana, 1975).

  11 For the relations between Savonarola and Giuliano della Rovere, see Wind, ‘Sante Pagnini and Michelangelo: A Study of the Succession of Savonarola’, pp. 212–14.

  12 For an argument in favour of Inghirami’s participation in the decoration of the Stanza della Segnatura, see Ingrid D. Rowland, ‘The Intellectual Background of The School of Athens: Tracking Divine Wisdom in the Rome of Julius II’, in Marcia B. Hall, ed., Raphael’s ‘School of Athens’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 131–170.

  15: FAMILY BUSINESS

  1 Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, vol. 1, p. 663.

  2 Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo, p. 58.

  3 Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, vol. 2, p. 675.

  4 See Shaw, Julius II, p. 171.

  5 Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, vol. 2, pp. 662–3.
<
br />   6 Quoted in Pastor, History of the Popes, vol. 6, p. 214.

  7 The Letters of Michelangelo, vol. 1, p. 50.

  8 Ibid., p. 52.

  9 Ibid., p. 49.

  10 De Tolnay, Michelangelo, vol. 2, p. 25.

  11 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson, ed. Martin Kemp (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 76. Alberti translated this work into Italian from Latin in 1436.

  12 Vinci, Treatise on Painting, vol. 1, pp. 106–7, 67.

  13 Alberti, On Painting, p. 72.

  14 Invented by Leonardo’s master, Andrea del Verrocchio, this technique was later used by Ghirlandaio. See Jean K. Cadogan, ‘Reconsidering Some Aspects of Ghirlandaio’s Drawings’, Art Bulletin 65 (1983), pp. 282–3.

  15 See Francis Ames-Lewis, ‘Drapery “Pattern”-Drawings in Ghirlandaio’s Workshop and Ghirlandaio’s Early Apprenticeship’, Art Bulletin 63 (1981), pp. 49–61.

  16 Lynne Lawner, Lives of the Courtesans: Portraits of the Renaissance (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), pp. 8–9.

  17 Alberti, On Painting, p. 72.

  18 Vinci, Treatise on Painting, p. 129.

  19 Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo, p. 99.

  20 James Elkins, ‘Michelangelo and the Human Form: His Knowledge and Use of Anatomy’, Art History (June 1984), p. 177.

  21 Ibid. Other apparent anatomical anomalies in the David, such as its disproportionately large head and protuberant eyebrows, may be explained by the fact that the statue was originally intended to stand high on one of the cathedral’s buttresses.

  22 Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo, p. 97.

  16: LAOCOÖN

  1 For this argument, see de Tolnay, Michelangelo, vol. 1, p. 71. This sketch is also in the Louvre. De Tolnay points out that Michelangelo ‘stored up in his memory a repertory of classical poses and figures which served him in an infinite number of combinations and transformations’.

  2 For a list of these classical quotations among the Ignudi, see de Tolnay, Michelangelo, vol. 2, pp. 65–6.

  3 For the similarities between these Ignudi and the figures in the Laocoön, see ibid., p. 65. The statue is now thought to be a late Hellenistic copy of the original.