OF THE MANY EARLY CHRISTIAN BASILICAS in Rome, San Pietro in Vincoli (Saint Peter in Chains) is particularly interesting for its unique mixture of history and legend. The chains the church is named after are supposedly the ones that bound Saint Peter during his imprisonment, first in Jerusalem and then in Rome. Empress Eudoxia, wife of Valentinian III, fulfilled a vow made by her parents by bringing these shackles from the Holy Land to Pope Leo the Great. When he in turn brought them near the ones in the Roman prison where Peter had been held captive, they miraculously welded themselves together. These ancient chains are still visible today in a reliquary on the high altar.
But what immediately catches the eye when first walking into the basilica are the twenty magnificent columns, ten on each side, which divide the nave into three sections. They are among the most beautiful to be seen in Rome and, I feel, the entire world. These are ancient Doric columns over six meters tall made of white marble quarried at Mount Hymettus in Greece, whose stone, to the naked eye, isn’t too different from white Carrara marble. They were originally cut for a Greek temple, and were then used in the city prefect’s office on the nearby Esquiline Hill before being placed here. The ionic bases date to the eighteenth century. In the mid-fifth century, Valentinian III gave the set of columns to his wife as his contribution to the rebuilding of the church atop the foundations of an earlier sacred building. When I visited the basilica to prepare this chapter, one of the priests pointed out how the lower part of the columns is abraded up to a certain height, as if in the remote past humans, or perhaps animals, had been tied to them.
The two imposing beams anchored high in the right-hand wall of the central nave are just one trace of the many vicissitudes the building has endured. They’re part of the truss of the original roof, which was restored in the fifteenth century by Cardinal Nikolaus Chrypffs, a scientist, theologian, and cardinal born at Cues, near Trier, known by the Italianized name of Nicolò Cusano. These enormous beams were decorated with carvings because they were in plain sight, and they bear a still-legible inscription with the date, ANNO DOMINI M * CCC * LXV. The cardinal’s tomb is in the left nave, and is distinguished by a well-carved sculpture in high relief attributed to Andrea Bregno.
The church may be full of extraordinary things, but the underground chambers are even more fascinating. As part of the project begun in 1956 to replace the building’s worn-down floor, the archaeologist Antonio Colini was commissioned to survey the buildings that had been covered by the basilica’s construction. These excavations yielded extraordinary findings; beneath the church were houses dating from the Republican period through the third century AD, with fragments of mosaic pavements, cryptoporticus vaults, and a 34-meter-long rectangular hall ending in an apse. The remains of a villa were also uncovered, and are perhaps part of Nero’s Domus Transitoria, including gardens, a portico-lined courtyard, and a fountain basin. Further excavations were carried out in the 1990s under the supervision of the engineering department of the University of Rome, La Sapienza, which is housed next door to San Pietro. The results were once again extraordinary. The church and the whole area around it were built in what had been the heart of the ancient city. The Domus Aurea and the Coliseum are just steps away, and to the west the hill steeply descends to the Suburra, which in ancient times was a densely packed working-class neighborhood.
The thick air in the spaces below San Pietro in Vincoli is just one part of a richly evocative atmosphere. The floor mosaic friezes have a sophisticated chiaroscuro modeling, and the tiny tesserae are arranged side-by-side with magisterial regularity. The walls’ curvature, which breaks off toward the top, hints at the barrel vaults that were still whole when the space was a complete portico. Still visible here and there are the bocche di lupo—wolves’ mouths, or openings—that allowed light to pass through. Now visitors need to duck in the dark to wander under the overhanging floor of the church above, but this spot once was a series of gardens and walkways inundated with sunlight, the tinkle of running water, and the rustling of tree branches. It was the Rome that scores of writers and directors imagined before the dust of history almost completely buried it. In one of the hypogea the remains of a chapel are still visible, suggesting it may once have been a mortuary chamber.
Since the moment Colini’s work came to a halt, in 1959, nothing has changed, and the excavation has the air of being abandoned—new dust has settled on the ancient dust. A graffito scratched into the wall tells us a man died here in 1798. His name is no longer legible, and only the date and the word morì (died) remain clear, hinting at a secret death remembered only by the partial, moving graffito. A rather different memorial, of a rather different death, can be found in the venerable church above, bathed in glorious light rather than hidden down here in the dark, where Michelangelo left us one of the finest examples of both his greatness and what he termed his “tragedy.” The work I refer to is his Moses, a huge block of stone made human—perhaps too human—by the artist’s consummate skill.
The density of intertwined meanings in this statue is so great that looking at it without knowing something about it is almost like not seeing it at all. The great skill with which it was sculpted is immediately striking to anyone, but within the context of Michelangelo’s life the Moses represents such a period of prolonged suffering that he came to call it, and the tomb it decorates, “the tragedy of my life.” Let’s have a look at this affair, then, as it’s an indispensable premise for understanding one of the great masterpieces of human history.
In March of 1505 Pope Julius II, Giuliano della Rovere, summoned thirty-year-old Michelangelo to Rome. Julius was a warrior pope, skilled politician, and a man interested in conquest and domination. Nothing in him recalled the virtues of Christian charity or brotherly love; on the contrary, the declared objective of his papacy was the reinforcement of the Papal States. Immediately after becoming pope he led an army northward to dislodge the Baglioni family from Perugia and the Bentivoglio from Bologna in order to take their cities. He was more a Renaissance prince than a man of the church, and behaved accordingly. What did this pope ask of the artist? He wanted the Florentine sculptor, creator of the extraordinary Pietà and David, to build him the greatest tomb ever conceived. At the time the pope was sixty-two years old, and certainly wasn’t young, but he remained an indomitable man, full of physical and mental energy. Why, then, would he have been so concerned about his tomb? There are several theories, but the one I find most credible is that a man like him, so avid for greatness and pomp, aimed to guarantee for himself a sort of immortality with a majestic monument.
Michelangelo’s prodigious energy and the vastness of his vision were a good match, moreover, for Julius II and his desire for greatness. The two were destined to understand one another, and in this sense the pope picked the right man. “If it is to be done,” the artist wrote in a letter shortly after receiving the commission, “it must be the most beautiful in the world.” Just what the artist intended as “most beautiful” soon became apparent in his drawings; it wasn’t going to be the average decorated wall tomb, but instead would be a tall, rectangular structure, a massive tower one could walk around and admire from all sides. It was to be something like a classical mausoleum, measuring seven by eleven meters, built on three levels: the terrestrial realm, with the famous slaves, on the bottom; the figures of Moses, Saint Paul, and two other prophets above; and the papal cenotaph at the top. There were to be a total of forty figures, all carved from marble, as well as cast bronze niches and reliefs. The interior of this dazzling monument was to house an oval room as the true tomb. It was conceived as a temple dedicated to the Della Rovere pope set within a temple dedicated to Saint Peter.
The patron was so pleased with the design that he ordered the artist to depart as soon as possible for the quarries near Carrara to find the marble best suited for the job. Receiving an initial advance of 1,000 ducats, Michelangelo headed north into Tuscany; he spent eight months in the mountains, between May and December of 1505, negotiating with quarrymen and stonecutters for the blocks of marble, then with muleteers and ship captains since the stone, once carried down to the valley, had to be transported to the docks and then travel by sea to Rome. It was then unloaded at the Ripa Grande, the city’s riverbank docks, and dragged on rollers and sledges to the piazza in front of San Pietro in Vincoli. These were superb blocks, numerous enough to fill much of the square, and going to admire them became one of the most popular public diversions.
Michelangelo took up lodgings nearby and immediately started work on the tomb, and the pope, who often took a secret passageway to check the artist’s progress, was most pleased. Ascanio Condivi, the artist’s humble biographer, tells us that he often stayed to talk with Michelangelo, “conversing with him there about the tomb and other matters no differently than he would have done with his own brother.”1 Condivi’s Life of Michelangelo was practically dictated to the obedient biographer by the artist himself.
We don’t know the details, but it’s quite likely that the statue of Moses was one of the first figures Michelangelo carved for the tomb, in part because the prophet’s proud bearing and furious energy must have been very much like Julius’s. Della Rovere didn’t care to waste time—once he’d made a decision he wanted the project completed. He asked Bramante, leading architect of the day, to design a whole new church to replace the existing basilica, an old and venerable building commissioned by Constantine the Great in the fourth century. His vision was of a building that would be the mother church of the Christian universe, the largest and most beautiful temple ever conceived. Its dimensions were beyond all imagination, and Julius’s equally immense tomb would be housed within—the surest way to guarantee that his spirit wouldn’t die, even after he was dead.
What happened, instead, was that once he launched the project to rebuild Saint Peter’s, the pope’s enthusiasm for his tomb, so passionate at the beginning, cooled. Perhaps other, more pressing projects, distracted him, or the malice of other artists changed the pope’s mind. Michelangelo believed the latter hypothesis, and years later offered an explanation in a letter: “All of the discord that grew up between Pope Julius and me was caused by the jealousy of Bramante and Raphael of Urbino. This was the reason he did not pursue his tomb while he was alive, and it ruined me.” The ever-obedient Condivi was even more explicit, “[thus] the architect Bramante, who was loved by the pope, made him change his plans by quoting what common people say, that it is bad luck for anyone to build his tomb during his lifetime, and other stories.”2
Are we to believe him? It’s possible he was right, although in truth Raphael didn’t arrive in Rome until several years later. Relationships between artists were never easy, and were often made worse by rivalries, envy, and jealousy, as had always happened, especially in a court setting, where a single decision-maker’s mood or capriciousness may affect the commission. It’s also possible that Julius II slowed work on the tomb because he’d been distracted by the more grandiose project of rebuilding the basilica, and what Michelangelo saw as malevolence on Bramante’s part may only have been a political change of heart on the pope’s part.
This ambiguous situation culminated in a scene famous for its high drama and mysteriousness. On April 17, 1506, the Friday following Easter, Michelangelo suddenly left, or, more accurately, fled from Rome. He was responsible for paying off the marble blocks that kept arriving, and since the pope had suspended payments to him he just didn’t have the money. He repeatedly sought audience with the pope to discuss the matter, but it was to no avail, until finally, while he was waiting in an antechamber, a guard approached and ordered him out of the palace. The artist hadn’t the temperament to stand such an affront, and in great fury wrote a note that read, “Holy Father, I have been thrown out of the palace this morning by Your Holiness; I therefore wish to let you know that from now, if you want me, you will need to look for me somewhere other than Rome.”
The pope, informed of the incident before he even received the note, immediately sent five messengers on horseback to follow the sculptor. They didn’t catch up to him until the middle of the night, however, in the town of Poggibonsi, which was in Florentine territory and outside the jurisdiction of the papacy. The confrontation was a bitter one. The messengers ordered him to obey, and Michelangelo threatened to have them killed. In the end the artist refused to allow himself to be taken back to Rome, and sent a message to the pope that, since his interest in the tomb had lessened, he considered himself freed of any further obligation. Michelangelo’s absence from Rome lasted two years; the proud artist and arrogant pontiff later met in Bologna, and Michelangelo cast a gigantic bronze statue (unfortunately later destroyed) for the pope, but returned to Rome only in the late spring of 1508. He’d hoped to resume work on the tomb, but was instead greeted by a new appointment—and new letdown.
The fruit of that disappointment was an unmatched masterpiece: 300 square meters of painted surfaces filled with hundreds of figures, four years of hard work from the spring of 1508 to late October of 1512, and earnings of 3,000 scudi as recompense for unspeakable physical and emotional distress. The result of all that was the Sistine Chapel, which upon Bramante’s insistence Julius II was determined to have Michelangelo decorate with frescoes. Why did the famous architect push such a project? One reliable hypothesis is that Bramante wanted to force Michelangelo into a commission and challenge utterly new to him, thus putting the sculptor’s reputation at risk and hoping, secretly, that his relationship with the pope would be compromised.
Things went a bit differently. For the sculptor-turned-painter those four years were true torture, but what could’ve become a failure instead became one of the greatest achievements in the history of art. At first the pope asked only that the twelve apostles be painted in the chapel’s lunettes and that the ceiling be painted a deep blue with a field of stars as was customary at the time. The artist took on the commission with an entirely different vision, making both divine and human history burst out across those walls. He filled the space with the figures that preceded Christ’s arrival—his ancestors, as well as the prophets and sibyls who foretold his coming. He spent four years stretched out on the scaffolding boards, stooped, contorted, holding his arms out for hours on end, with his eyes so close to the wall that it affected his vision. Condivi wrote, “… because he had spent such a long time painting with his eyes looking up at the vault, Michelangelo then could not see much when he looked down; so that, if he had to read a letter or other detailed things, he had to hold them with his arms up over his head.”3
Four months after the Sistine’s unveiling, in February of 1513, Julius II died, creating new troubles and some serious uncertainties for the great artist. His relationship with the imperious pope had been bitter, but was also emotionally very intense for both of them. Julius had struck Michelangelo at least once with his staff, on the day when the pope had pestered the artist repeatedly with the question, “When will you finish painting this chapel?” and Michelangelo bad-temperedly replied, “When I can.” For all of its difficulties, this was in any case a real rapport between two impossible men made to understand one another. Things changed under the next pontiff, as Leo X, Giovanni de’Medici, was a terrible pope who completely misjudged both how deep the feelings of the faithful were with regard to Martin Luther’s insistent demands, spreading quickly across Europe, for a greater morality in the church. Luther, an Augustinian monk, had raised a very frank question—why did the pope, who was richer than Triumvir Marcus Licinius Crassus, not pay for the rebuilding of Saint Peter’s from his own pocket, instead of financing it with the offerings of the poor faithful? Moreover, the Roman Curia was mired in the undignified market of indulgences, slips of paper guaranteeing the remission of sins in the next life in exchange for money in this one.
When Leo rose to the papacy he was only thirty-seven; he’d been made cardinal at the age of thirteen, and his father was the great Lorenzo de’Medici, called Lorenzo the Magnificent. His was a worldly, sensuous, lazy, and politically uncertain papacy, one in which his relatives and cronies were shamelessly favored. A man like Michelangelo wasn’t much to his liking, yet he did have a little work he wanted the artist to complete—the facade of the church of San Lorenzo in Florence. The sculptor tried to avoid the commission, saying that he was busy with Julius’s tomb and had just signed a new contract with the former pope’s heirs. In the end, though, Michelangelo couldn’t refuse the current pope. Leo was, after all, a fellow Florentine, and more importantly, the artist wanted to test himself at a new endeavor; he’d already worked in sculpture and painting, and now it was time to try architecture. His plans for the church were good, but in the end nothing came of the facade project.
Other commissions came along, not all of them successes, as well as other contracts with the executors of Julius’s estate, and other troubles. There were also other popes: Leo X died in 1521 and was succeeded by Adriaan Florisz, Hadrian VI, a man of puritanical sensibilities, who shunned the ostentation and corruption of the papal court in Rome. He reigned for little more than a year before dying in September of 1523, and even though his pontificate lasted mere months, he, too, showed keen interest in Michelangelo. In this case, though, the attention was unwelcome, since he was incapable of distinguishing between the decadence of the Curia and the admonitory power of the nudes on the Sistine ceiling, confusing their uncovered members with the many examples of corruption he found in Rome. He planned to have the chapel torn down, as Vasari recounts in an episode of his Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.
With the death of the Dutch pope, another Medici was elected to the Vatican throne, Giulio, the bastard son of Giuliano, who reigned as Pope Clement VII. His pontificate saw the brutal sack of Rome in 1527 at the hands of Charles V’s Imperial troops, followed by the schism with the Church of England promoted by King Henry VIII. Before becoming pope, Cardinal Giulio had asked Michelangelo to design a new sacristy for the Medici church of San Lorenzo in Florence, although in reality it was a family tomb to house the remains of his ancestors, beginning with his uncle, Lorenzo the Magnificent. For the umpteenth time the artist was forced to abandon the sculptures for Julius’s tomb, an obligation that had weighed on him for twenty years, in order to take up this new commission, a work that would come to rank amongst his greatest. Shortly before he died, in 1534, Clement came up with another commission for Michelangelo—he wanted a Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel to complete its decoration.
In the meantime the artist had survived years of political tumult, wars, and sieges—events in which he was involuntarily involved—years that forced him to flee, fear for his life, and precipitously return to Florence several times, both before and after the city’s ephemeral experiments in Republicanism. In July of 1531 Duke Alessandro de’Medici entered Florence as its new ruler. Condivi described him as “a fierce and vengeful young man.”4 He also hated Michelangelo to the point of considering having him killed. He was young, just barely over twenty, when his so-called uncle, Clement VII (in reality his father), gave him the new title, making him lord of the city. With Alessandro’s arrival Michelangelo no longer felt comfortable in Florence and, additionally convinced by a number of deaths in the family, he decided to return to Rome. He arrived in the Eternal City on September 23, 1534, and two days later fifty-six-year-old Pope Clement died.
At this point in the story I think it’s quite clear why Michelangelo considered Julius’s tomb the tragedy (though he could just as well have said nightmare) of his life. After Clement’s death a new pope—and for Michelangelo a new patron—ascended to the throne. Paul III, Alessandro Farnese, came to the papacy as an old man, but he proved to be an energetic pontiff. It was left to him to convene the Council of Trent, a crucial point in Catholicism’s centuries-old history. Paul III took up the idea of the Last Judgment for the Sistine Chapel from his predecessor, and wanted at all costs to have Michelangelo paint it, in hopes of making this immense fresco a political manifesto of papal intentions in front of Protestants and the whole world. But Buonarroti had returned to Rome obsessed by the idea that had haunted him for so long, to finish the tomb of Julius II, not least because the former pope’s principal heir, his nephew Francesco Maria Della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, a warrior capable of bloody violence, publicly demanded that the unfaithful artist finally decide, after several years and delays, to finish the work he’d already been paid for.
In those same few days something happened that was as extraordinary as it was unheard of. With a dozen or so cardinals in tow, Paul III went in person to Michelangelo’s house, in the area of the Macel de’Corvi, around Trajan’s Forum. Once there he asked to see the preparatory drawings and cartoons for the Last Judgment. He was so impressed that he became even more convinced that this fresco must absolutely be executed. The artist was torn; he had Julius’s tomb on his mind, as well as the recent threats of Della Rovere’s bellicose nephew. The already completed statue of Moses dominated his studio. Ercole Gonzaga, Cardinal of Mantua, pointed to it and said, “This one statue is enough to do honor to the tomb of Pope Julius.” When Paul III understood that the artist was reluctant to take up the Last Judgment largely because he was afraid of Francesco Maria Della Rovere’s reaction, he said, “I will make it so that the Duke of Urbino is content with three statues from your hand, and the other three can be made by someone else.” The pope was true to his word, pacified the hot-tempered duke, and assigned the artist a lifetime salary of 1,200 gold scudi to be paid, in part, by the income from the transit tolls on the Po River near Piacenza. Michelangelo returned to the Sistine Chapel in the summer of 1535 to begin the Last Judgment.
The plot of this chapter is the statue of Moses and its checkered destiny, but, having broached the subject of the Last Judgment, we can’t ignore the fallout following this extraordinary work’s unveiling on November 1, 1541. It aroused enthusiasm in some who saw it, but from the beginning contrary opinions prevailed. Someone said the figure of Christ was represented as too young, being beardless, and that he was thus deprived of his due majesty. The vindictive writer Pietro Aretino chimed in, noting that Michelangelo’s angels and saints “on the one hand lacked any earthly grace, and on the other were deprived of any celestial bearing.” What really struck those who saw it, though, was the nudity. Bernardino Ochino, a former monk, talked openly of its indecency and rebuked the pope for tolerating “so obscene and dirty a picture in the chapel where divine offices are sung.” This reaction was the product of bigotry, fear of fueling the Protestant reformation, inability to recognize greatness, and sheer intellectual shortsightedness. In one of its last sessions, the Council of Trent established severe rules governing sacred representations. Wretched Pope Paul IV, Gian Pietro Carafa, successor to Paul III, called the fresco “a pit of nudity,” and came very close to plastering the whole thing over. In the end, perhaps with Michelangelo’s agreement, a compromise was reached that allowed loin cloths to be added to the male figures to hide their nudity (fortunately these were removed years ago). This task was initially assigned to Daniele da Volterra in 1564, the year Michelangelo died, and then to Girolamo da Fano.
Once the large Last Judgment was finished, the artist was bent on finally completing the tomb of Julius II, even if it meant doing so in the reduced scale agreed upon, and accepting a humble placement in the tiny church of San Pietro in Vincoli. But the tragedy—or nightmare—would continue, and once again the proposed finish was for naught. The pope wanted Michelangelo to decorate yet another chapel in his name, the Pauline Chapel. The artist’s two paintings here are the Crucifixion of Saint Peter and the Conversion of Saul.
Meanwhile years passed, illness and family deaths weighed down both body and soul of the great artist, and the tomb of Julius II was yet to be completed. Not until 1545, exactly forty years after it was begun, did the so-called tragedy finally come to an end. At least five times the contract had been revised and signed; the artist had been a vigorous thirty-year-old when the adventure began, and was now an aged seventy-year-old, saddened by melancholy. Della Rovere’s heirs had accused him of trying to keep the money he’d been given without completing the commission, wanting to invest the funds in real estate and make profits through usury. Contract after contract, what should have been a superb mausoleum, the most beautiful, grandiose tomb conceivable, was greatly reduced in size and the number of statues that would decorate it. It should have risen up in the middle of Saint Peter’s, queen of all basilicas, and instead ended up in the corner of a much lesser church. According to the first contract there were to be forty statues, which then became twenty-eight, then twenty-two; in the contact of 1532 they dwindled to six, and the sepulcher was to have only one face, hence flanking the wall. Vasari reports, “Finally, an agreement was reached on the tomb, and it was to be finished this way: Michelangelo would no longer make the tomb free-standing and four-sided but would do only one side in whatever way he liked, and he was obliged to include six statues by his own hand.…”5
In the last compromise with the Duke of Urbino, the number of statues the artist was to carve for the tomb was reduced to three: Moses, Rachel, and Leah. The other three, a Madonna, a Prophet, and a Sibyl, were to be carved by someone else. In February of 1545 Michelangelo had both Moses and the two figures flanking him—on the left Contemplative Life (also Rachel, or Faith) and on the right Active Life (also Leah, or Charity)—moved to San Pietro in Vincoli. Four popes had maneuvered for forty years to keep the artist from finishing this work. The first was Julius himself; when he became disenchanted with the project he reduced its funding and forced Michelangelo to accept the exhausting commission for the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Leo X then made him waste years on the facade of San Lorenzo, and Clement VII later gave him the commission for the Medici family tombs and the new sacristy. Finally Paul III ordered him to finish the decoration in the Sistine Chapel by painting the Last Judgment—all works which contributed to the artist’s glory. Nevertheless, had Julius’s tomb been completed as originally planned, today it would certainly remain one of the world’s wonders.
This is a rather straightforward summary of the tomb’s history. So far, though, I’ve said nothing about Michelangelo himself, except that he had a temper. He was certainly a great artist, but what about the man? He was born into a family we would now consider part of the petite bourgeoisie. He was born on March 6, 1475, in the village of Caprese, now known as Caprese Michelangelo. His mother, Francesca, was eighteen at the time, and died fairly young, only six years later. His father, Ludovico, played no key role; he never did grasp his second child’s genius, and tried to change his vocation, convinced that painting and sculpture—manual work that involved applying colors or cutting stone—were unworthy professions for the son of a man who wielded a pen and could draw up a report or keep accounts, and who had also been the podestà, or appointed governor, of a few small fortified settlements. He changed his mind only when he understood that by sculpting Michelangelo earned sums he’d never dreamt of. He then began instead to pester him, asking for money and then complaining that what was sent was less than he’d hoped for. Years later he remarried a woman named Lucrezia degli Ubaldini.
Michelangelo had four brothers—a merchant, a friar, an adventurer, and a mercenary soldier. Genius, however, was his alone, as was his delicate health and personality that tended toward melancholy, due perhaps to a childhood with a weak, strange father, a mother who died too young, and a stepmother he never loved. At thirteen he went to learn the artistic ropes as an apprentice in Ghirlandaio’s workshop. There he assisted the painters, mixed colors, set up easels, hung cartoons, and was finally allowed, from time to time, to make a sketch that the studio master would then appropriate as his own. Lorenzo the Magnificent, poet and patron of the arts, recognized that this fifteen-year-old boy had talent, and quickly decided to bring him to live in his court. He sent for the boy’s father, Ludovico, and essentially offered to adopt his son and give him a position as customs official in recompense.
What were these years like for Michelangelo? From a material comfort point of view they were as good as he could imagine; he had a room to himself, clothes worthy of his position, and the chance to sit at the most sophisticated table in Europe with people whose conversation was both brilliant and current, and whose ideas would give Europe its modern appearance. Marsilio Ficino, Angelo Poliziano, and Pico della Mirandola were guests at the Medici court, and Sandro Botticelli, Giuliano da Sangallo, Pollaiuolo, and Verrocchio all worked there. Even the streets of Florence were crowded with men who would make an impressive mark on those years, including Leonardo da Vinci, Luca della Robbia, and Niccolò Machiavelli. Then there were the churches and monuments, where the young artist could admire work by best painters of the past, from Giotto and Masaccio to Fra Angelico and Donatello. Michelangelo had neither regular schooling nor a master who trained him; just breathing the air of Florence seems to have been enough to shape him in the same vein and push him to new heights.
Those years also shaped the young artist’s spirit, and, after an unpleasant incident, also changed the appearance of his face. The sculptor Pietro Torrigiano worked with Michelangelo in Lorenzo’s sculpture garden, a sort of art academy; he was three years older, as well as stronger and more violent. According to Vasari he was a handsome, courageous man, with the air of a great soldier, more than that of a sculptor. Among other attributes, he was also quick to anger. The relationship between the two sculptors was bad, perhaps because Torrigiano was jealous of Michelangelo’s evident superiority, perhaps because of Michelangelo’s habit of teasing others even though he wasn’t physically strong. Whatever the case, one day the hot-tempered Torrigiano punched him hard, breaking his nose and disfiguring his face for life. He described what happened in his own words, “It was Buonarroti’s habit to banter all who were drawing there; and one day when he was annoying me, I got more angry than usual, and, clenching my fist, I gave him such a blow on the nose that I felt bone and cartilage go down like biscuit beneath my knuckles; and this mark of mine he will carry with him to the grave.”6
While he may have been gigantic in art, Michelangelo was not a physically large man. Torrigiano’s blow disfigured a face that was already unhandsome, instilling in the sensitive young Michelangelo what we would today call an inferiority complex. Torrigiano himself met a nasty end, and was forced to flee Florence to escape Lorenzo’s anger. He then wandered around Europe, finally ending up imprisoned by the Spanish Inquisition, where he was left to starve to death.
Michelangelo’s ambiguous sexual and romantic behavior was certainly a result of the trauma of his youth, including that punch in the face. Who knows if he really said the words Donato Giannotti, a mediocre writer and ardent republican, gave him in his Dialogues: “I am a man inclined to love people, perhaps more than anyone else in any time.” This passionate declaration notwithstanding, Michelangelo’s love life was fraught with difficulty in many ways. He definitely paid women for sex, and his relationships with men were even more complex, if we can judge from the letters he sent to Febo di Poggio and Tommaso del Cavaliere in particular. These documents, and their delicate interpretation, bring up difficult biographical problems.
Tommaso was beautiful, and Michelangelo especially admired physical beauty, be it in men or women. They met in 1532, when Tommaso was probably not yet twenty and the artist was almost sixty—a dangerous combination indeed. There’s no doubt Michelangelo loved Tommaso, who was handsome, sweet-tempered, and artistically talented. The real question regards what kind of love united them: was it carnal? Many have suggested it was, from Aretino to André Gide. Might it instead have been a spiritual love? Some believe it was, including Giovanni Papini, who wrote a wonderful biography of the artist. Michelangelo did something for the young man no one else ever had—he drew his portrait. Done in black chalk, this finished drawing appeared to be drawn by the hand of an angel. The picture showed Tommaso “with those beautiful eyes, nose, and mouth, dressed in the ancient style, beardless, and holding a portrait or a medal in his hand. All in all it was enough to frighten any lively intellect.” This marvelous work has been lost, and we are left instead with several letters—four, to be exact—in which this love is apparent, perhaps even to the point of impropriety. This wasn’t a love of the senses, of course, but rather the immodest and openly declared availability for love when it is total. “Your lordship,” the greatest artist of his time wrote to the young man, “cannot therefore rest content with the work of anyone else, being matchless and unequalled—light of our century, paragon of the world. If, however, any one of these things which I promise and hope to perform were to please you, I should count that work much more fortunate than excellent. And if, as I’ve said, I would ever have the assurance of pleasing your lordship in anything, I would devote to you the present and the time to come that remains to me, and should very deeply regret that I cannot have the past over again, in order to serve you longer than with the future only, which will be short, since I’m so old.”7
The elderly artist wrote astonishing things. He defines as “the light of our century” a boy, or little more than a boy, when he himself had made the most marvelous works of art, and he knew it. He humbled himself before a beauty that enchanted him: “Far from being a mere babe, as you say of yourself in your letter, you seem to me to have lived on earth a thousand times before. But I should deem myself unborn, or rather stillborn, and should confess myself disgraced before heaven and earth, if from your letter I had not seen and believed that your lordship would willingly accept some of my drawings. This has caused me much surprise and pleasure no less.”8
Everyone can judge these expressions of an enraptured spirit as he sees fit. Michelangelo also wrote verses for the lovely Tommaso that open with a languorous declaration, “Oh, give me back to myself, that I may die.”9 Regardless of the nature of this love, it lasted for the rest of the artist’s life. When Michelangelo died in February of 1564, the no-longer young Tommaso was among the very few people in the poor room beside his deathbed. In the meantime, he’d married and had two children. His oldest son, Emilio, became an important figure in a Florentine literary society, the Camerata de’Bardi, which invented the new genre of the melodrama.
As I mentioned earlier, the artist loved beauty in any shape, including the human form of both sexes. As a young man he dedicated lots of time and care to studying the human body, and even dissected bodies in a Florentine morgue. He pursued this study at length because he considered the mechanics of movement essential in the making of sculpture and painting. This practice included dissection, consulting anatomy books, and studying prints by other artists, including Albrecht Dürer’s treatises on human proportions (which Michelangelo didn’t particularly like). Condivi writes that he found Dürer’s work “very weak.” In his later years in Rome Michelangelo befriended Realdo Colombo, one of the most famous anatomists of the time, widely deemed “a very superior anatomist and surgeon.” Colombo admired the great painter’s scrupulous attention to anatomy, and one day sent him the body of a Moor, which Michelangelo used to show his biographer “rare and recondite things, perhaps never before understood.” Condivi also noted that the artist’s passion for analysis and scrupulous observation reached the point where the artist “would go off to the fish market, where he observed the shape and coloring of the fins of fish, the color of the eyes and every other part … so that by bringing it to that perfection of which he was capable, from that time he excited the admiration of the world.…”10
The results of this long, meticulous study are clearly visible in works like the famous figure of Adam who stretches his hand toward his creator; the series of slaves, sibyls, and prophets; the contorted bodies of the damned on the day of the Last Judgment; the vigor of the saved souls; the harmonious majesty of David; and the lifeless limbs of the dead Christ, held by others because his legs no longer support any weight, in the many Pietà he sculpted. Representations of neither the human nor the divine body had ever before been so knowledgeably faithful to its glory, neglect, asceticism, sensuality, or the mortal exhaustion of death.
Michelangelo’s sublime veneration for the body is one of the reasons his art is unequaled. In the conclusion of his biography, Condivi tried to defend the artist against the charge of homosexuality, writing, “He also loved the beauty of the human body as one who knows it extremely well, and loved it in such a way as to inspire certain carnal men, who are incapable of understanding the love of beauty except as lascivious and indecent, to think and speak ill of him.”11 It was an attempt at justification that no longer carries much importance beyond strictly historic fact.
The harmony and beauty of the human body were really the only aspects of nature that interested Michelangelo. Art historians have long noted that his work almost never has an open background; there are none of the hills, trees, or bodies of water that make Italian painting so immediately recognizable. Michelangelo was an urban painter; he always lived in a city (mainly in Florence and Rome, and briefly in Bologna and Venice), and not until he was quite old did he give any sign that he appreciated the nature he’d spent so much time ignoring. In 1556, at the revered age of eighty, he was forced for the umpteenth and last time to flee from a city—in this case from Rome, which was being threatened by the army of the Viceroy of Naples, Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alba. Because the invaders were coming from the south, Michelangelo went north to Spoleto, where he stayed for about a month. He took advantage of this time to visit the area around the town, and hiked to the hermitage of Monteluce, one of several Franciscan sites in Umbria. He wrote to Vasari in December that it gave him great pleasure “to visit those hermitages in the mountains around Spoleto, and in such a way that I have only partly come back to Rome, since it is really true that one can only find peace in the woods.”
The Michelangelo who returned to Rome was only half the man who’d left the city because a part of him remained in the woods where he’d been able to find some peace, where life was reduced to a bucolic simplicity and an uninterrupted silence, where the weighty breaths of a tired traveler resting on his walking stick might be the only noise around. This shy and solitary man plagued by melancholy, a lover of liberty who was forced to depend on commissions from the powerful in order to express himself, found in that distant autumn of 1556, in the wilds of Monteluco, the peace that neither the Papal States nor the Duchy of Florence was ever able to give him.
Let’s return to the sculpture of Moses. We needn’t bother to discuss its powerful perfection, since anyone can plainly see it. There is, however, another aspect of it we should investigate—the statue’s meaning both for itself and the artist’s life. This topic has been debated at length, and involves many different aspects of Michelangelo’s art as well as his own spiritual journey. A simple biographical fact about the artist gives us an important clue: in the jubilee year of 1550 Michelangelo, who was then seventy-five, wanted to make the traditional pilgrimage to the city’s Early Christian basilicas. This ritual tour was supposed to be made on foot, but Michelangelo was granted an exception by the Pope himself, allowing him to travel on horseback. This alone is enough to indicate that Michelangelo was a profoundly religious man. The next question, though, is what kind of religion; these years were crucial for the Catholic Church, which had been badly shaken by its own corruption and the reaction to the shocking behavior of the Roman Curia across Europe.
Michelangelo had a special veneration for Jesus Christ. We see this in his agonizing Pietà, in his letters, and in the confidences repeated by those who had spoken with him. As a boy in Florence he listened to the thundering sermons of an anti-papal and anti-Medici Dominican preacher, Girolamo Savonarola, who dreamt of a theocratic democracy and hurled invectives against the corruption of the Church. Declared a heretic, Savonarola was burned at the stake in 1498, when Michelangelo was in his early twenties. As he grew older, the artist confessed he could still hear the ring of that admonishing voice echoing inside his head. Dante and Savonarola were his chief guides, and his Catholicism was strict and ascetic—the opposite of what dominated the Vatican. In a sonnet he wrote, “Here they made helmets and swords from chalices / and by the handful sell the blood of Christ.”12 When Julius II asked him to decorate the Sistine ceiling with gold since he found it “too poor,” Michelangelo replied frankly, “Those who are painted there were poor, too.”
These few words directed at the pope are enough to indicate his religious fervor. Although some have suggested that Michelangelo had some sympathy for Lutheran Protestantism, this is certainly an exaggeration. It is true, however, that his circle of friends favored spiritual reform within the church, even as they conceded nothing to the Protestants. Vittoria Colonna was part of that group; she was the widow of Francesco d’Avalos, Marquis of Pescara, and had withdrawn into a semi-cloistered life at the convent of San Silvestro on the Quirinal Hill. There she gathered a court of intellectuals, of sorts—called the spirituali, or spirituals—and they included high churchmen, writers, poets, and artists, including Michelangelo, who gave her many gifts, including religious drawings—a Crucifixion, Pietà, and Good Samaritan—all now lost. Their friendship was so intense that many assumed that they were also lovers, a plausible notion that was at the same time hardly relevant, since what counted was the spiritual connections that bound them. Condivi reports that upon Vittoria’s death at only fifty-six, on February 25, 1547, Michelangelo went to pay his last respects, was highly moved, and bent down to kiss her face.
Another important figure amongst the spirituali was Cardinal Reginald Pole, Vittoria Colonna’s spiritual advisor. Pole was English but had been educated in Europe. He was a distant relative of Henry VIII, and thus a pivotal figure at a moment of real tension between the court of Saint James and the Roman Curia. The hot-tempered king protested Pole’s elevation, and when Pole openly declared his position against the English schism, Henry took revenge by having the cardinal’s mother decapitated and then making an attempt on his life as well, as mentioned in the first chapter of this book.
The Cardinal’s prestige was so great that when he went into the conclave after Paul III’s death he was one of the favored candidates to be elected to the papacy. He narrowly missed election to the papal throne, and blamed it on his own position as a strict reformer. A few years later Gian Pietro Carafa became Pope Paul IV, and a rather severe persecution of the spirituali ensued. Paul IV was responsible for the index of banned books issued in 1559, which went as far as condemning part of the Bible and even some of the writings of the church fathers. The pope himself personally reformed the inquisition that Paul III had announced in July 1542, giving it extraordinary power to crush any position that even slightly resembled Lutheranism. His zeal for reform reached the point of outright fanaticism, and he ordered the arrest of Cardinal Giovanni Morone, one of the church’s greatest personalities and not coincidentally a friend of Colonna, Pole, and Michelangelo. The artist had made several drawings and paintings for Morone, though none have survived. Pole’s defeat in the conclave of 1549 was a blow to those who had hoped to reform and rebuild the church from the inside out.
Paul IV’s reasons for such harshly repressive measures were clearly political, even if they were also driven by doctrinal concerns. He needed to parry the Protestant thrust, did so by tightening the institution’s rules, and as a consequence was also forced to condemn reformist groups within the church. Lutherans believed that Catholic devotional practices were pointless, and were empty ritual, if not open superstition used by the church to control its faithful. In his short book, Il beneficio di Cristo, a work widely read in spirituali circles, Benedetto da Mantova made an argument for justification by faith, in other words that faith alone was enough to absolve sinners in the eyes of God. Without disdaining good works, (“And this faith would nevertheless be impossible without good works”), he maintains that they must flow from an intimate feeling of faith, rather than practiced to fulfill a duty or done in exchange for some reward. The pious author invited the faithful to meditate on the real benefits to be constructed from the Crucified Christ, as well as the perfection the soul can achieve by trusting entirely in Him.
The relationship between faith and good works in this justification of the Christian sinner before God was one of the fundamental questions behind the shattering of the church’s unity. In some of the verses he wrote as an old man, Michelangelo hints that he had been attracted to a Lutheran theory of justification, attributing to the blood of Christ—in other words, to faith—the greatest hope humankind has for the redemption of their sins. “Although you were not miserly with your blood, / what use will be such a merciful gift from you / if heaven’s not opened for us with another key?” Or, “my dear Lord, you who alone can clothe and strip / our souls, and with your blood purify and heal them / of their countless sins and human impulses.…”13
Michelangelo took risks in writing some of the things he did, and in being seen with certain people; the circle of those who commented on Mantova’s book had been identified and placed under observation by Vatican authorities, who considered them only a little less dangerous than Lutheran heretics. Indeed, championing the doctrine of justification by faith alone, reinforced by the cult of the blood of Christ, meant a conviction that the church and its hierarchy needed to be reformed in a way that would have moved it closer to the Protestant position. Michelangelo was always prudent in his politics, and was usually unwilling to take sides in public debates. The fact that he took such risks in this case suggests a strong conviction. It’s nevertheless true, however, that his fame as an artist made him largely untouchable and guaranteed him privileges that would never have been granted to other artists. The most the new pope dared do to him was take away his right to the income from the tolls on the Po River that Paul III had granted him for life.
I’ve tried here to summarize the basic facts of a conflict that, according to some scholars, had a lot to do with the statue of Moses and its final placement. The final contract with the Della Rovere family, signed in March of 1542, established that the tomb of Julius II would be decorated with seven statues. There was to be a recumbent effigy of the pope flanked by a prophet and sibyl on the upper level, below them would be the Madonna and Child, and on the lower level would be Moses, flanked by two prisoners (or slaves). It seemed finally, after so many years, that there was a definitive design for the tomb. By July of the same year the artist was having second thoughts, and wanted to substitute the prisoners with two other figures, representations of active and contemplative life, embodied by Leah and Rachel respectively, which he’d already begun to work on.
Of the seven statues on the tomb as it now stands in San Pietro in Vincoli, Michelangelo was responsible, obviously, for Moses, the two female figures and, according to a very recent attribution, the effigy of Julius II (whose figure is very difficult to see, as it’s so high up). The other figures were designed by the artist but executed, after arduous negotiations, by Domenico Fancelli and Raffaello da Montelupo.
Why did Michelangelo decide to substitute the slaves with the two female figures? The official, rather unconvincing reason he gave was that the figures of active and contemplative life went better with the rest of the composition. Some experts, however, have suggested another motive that can be found in the spiritual belief of the circle around Vittoria Colonna and Cardinal Pole. Antonio Forcellino, a Michelangelo scholar who has written on the recent restoration of the Moses sculpture, thinks that the artist wanted to substitute these figures because he was abandoning “the iconographic program, with its strong pagan associations that … he had defended for thirty years, in favor of one that expresses the spirituality of the Beneficio di Cristo with all the transgressive and subversive implications that came with that idea.”
There’s another document, however, that throws an interesting light on the Moses sculpture and its position. An unnamed friend of the artist told Vasari the following story: He had set up the statue of Moses, which he had largely finished when Pope Julius II was still alive, in his house, and as I found myself there looking at it, I said to him, “If the head of this figure were turned a little more this way I think it would be better.” He made no response to me, but two days later, when I was again at his house, he said, “Don’t you know, Moses overheard us talking the other day and in order to understand us better he turned his head.” I went to see, and I found that he had turned his head … which was a miraculous thing; I thought so myself, thinking such a feat to be almost impossible.
This extraordinary account comes from March of 1564, shortly after the artist’s death. His friend recounted the facts, but neglected to say when they occurred. Based on this story specialists like Christoph Frommel and Forcellino have suggested that the change in the position of Moses’s face, and especially the substitution of Rachel and Leah for the two slaves (now in the Louvre), happened just before the final arrangement of the tomb and can thus be considered proof of the almost heretical spiritual beliefs Michelangelo held in the last part of his life.
As everyone knows, the statue has lent itself to many interpretations. In 1914 Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, wrote a famous essay (first published anonymously) in which he wrote near the beginning:
Another of these inscrutable and wonderful works of art is the marble statue of Moses by Michelangelo, in the Church of S. Pietro in Vincoli in Rome.… For no piece of statuary has ever made a stronger impression on me than this. How often have I mounted the steep steps from the unlovely Corso Cavour to the lonely piazza where the deserted church stands, and have essayed to support the angry scorn of the hero’s glance! Sometimes I have crept cautiously out of the half-gloom of the interior as though I myself belonged to the mob upon whom his eye is turned—the mob which can hold fast no conviction, which has neither faith nor patience, and which rejoices when it has regained its illusory idols. But why do I call this statue inscrutable?”14
Freud then begins a long and fascinating analysis of the figure that I can only briefly sum up here. Moses is seated, his head is turned to the left, his right leg is firmly planted on the ground and his left leg is drawn back, his foot resting only on its toes, in a dynamic pose. His left arm rests in his lap, and he holds the law tablets he’s just received from God on Mount Sinai firmly with his right arm. His right hand, index finger extended, holds part of his flowing beard. The Bible says that Moses, leader of his people, had a hot temper. He came down from the mount to find that the Israelites, tired of waiting for him, had begun to worship the figure of a golden calf, and were dancing around it. Infuriated, he threw the tablets to the ground, smashing them. The Biblical Moses, however, is not Michelangelo’s; Freud analyzed the positions of various parts of his body, including his beard, and concluded that the stone Moses was not a man prey to irrational sentiments like anger. On the contrary, the artist shows us a man torn between impetuousness and a firm, interior resoluteness. There is anger in his eyes, but his solemn sense of calm tells us that self control has won out. Freud concluded, “What we see before us is not the inception of a violent action but the remains of a movement that has already taken place. In his first transport of fury, Moses desired to act, to spring up and take vengeance and forget the Tables; but he has overcome the temptation, and he will now remain seated and still, in his frozen wrath, and his pain mingles with contempt. Nor will he throw away the Tables so they will break on the stones, for it is on their especial account that he has controlled his anger; it was to preserve them that he kept his passion in check.”15
The Jungian psychologist James Hillman offers us another, more recent interpretation of this statue, suggesting that Michelangelo wanted to represent the Moses who, according to several Biblical passages, was an alchemist and magician. In his essay on this topic he cites several examples, “[t]he plagues inflicted on the Egyptians, the parting of the Red Sea, the ability to make water flow from stone and food fall from the sky, the bronze serpent which heals, to mention only some of the better known events reported in the Scriptures and elaborated in legends and midrash.”
Again according to Hillman, Michelangelo’s Moses adapts the traits of patriarchs and magicians, including the beard, the pointing finger, the severity of the lawgiver, but also the horns of the man-animal. These horns, however, could also be the result of an error in the Latin translation of Exodus 34:29, in which the Hebrew word karan, or rays emanating from the face of a hero, became keren, or horns. Hillman concludes that the reason for them is not very important, since “those horns, whether placed there by God or by Michelangelo, restores to Moses that which he wanted to separate out and distance from himself—God and the animal, the law and instinct, duty and pleasure and Jewish monotheism and Egyptian polytheism.”
Michelangelo died practically alone, and although he wasn’t poor, he died like a pauper, perhaps because of avarice, or maybe just his habitual frugality. In a corner of his house at Macel de’ Corvi he drew the image of Death along with a few funerary verses of commentary. He was ninety years old, and he knew the end was near. In his Dialoghi, Donato Giannotti gives these words to the master: “We must think about death. This thought alone lets us know ourselves … and the effect of thinking about death is marvelous, as it destroys everything according to its nature, preserves and maintains those who think about it, and defends them from all human emotions.” As he grew older, the artist frequently returned to this thought in his conversations, letters, and verses. “Whoever is born comes to die / with the passage of time, and the sun / nothing is left alive.”
In early February of 1564 Michelangelo began to feel unwell, and although he tried to keep up his normal routine, his condition soon proved irreversible. Nonetheless, he was still chiseling on his last work up until a few days before he died. On a very cold and rainy day a disciple coming to visit saw him standing in the street in the foul weather, ran to him, and dragged him back home. He affectionately chided the master for his rashness, but Michelangelo answered, “What do you want from me? I am not well and I cannot find any peace anywhere.” A few pupils and his servant put him back to bed. In a letter to Vasari, Daniele da Volterra wrote:
When he saw me he said, “Oh, Daniele, I am done for, and please, I beg you, do not abandon me.” He had me write a letter to Lionardo, his nephew, asking him to come, and then he said to me that I should wait there in the house and not leave for any reason. I did that even though I felt more ill than well.… [H]is illness lasted five days, two he spent by the fire and three in bed and then he died on Friday evening.…
It was February 18. Daniele da Volterra, Diomede Leoni, Michelangelo’s servant Antonio, and his beloved Tommaso del Cavaliere were at his bedside.
1. Ascanio Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo, trans. Alice Sedgwick Wohl, 2nd ed. (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 30.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., 58.
4. Ibid., 69.
5. Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, trans. Julia Conway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 459.
6. Torrigiano to Benvenuto Cellini and then repeated in Cellini’s autobiography. Cited in Condivi, 146, n.129.
7. E. H. Ramsden, ed., The Letters of Michelangelo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1963), v.1,193.
8. Ibid., 180, 183.
9. James S. Saslow, trans., The Poetry of Michelangelo (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 91–92.
10. Condivi, 9–10, 99.
11. Ibid., 105.
12. Saslow, 78.
13. Ibid., 483, 501.
14. Sigmund Freud, Writings on Art and Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 124–125.
15. Ibid., 141–142.