CHAPTER 14

Visible and non-visible bodies

In the third part of Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari introduced the artists of the bella maniera, the beautiful style. His list began with Leonardo da Vinci and was followed by artists such as Raphael and Andrea del Sarto. Even though earlier artists had achieved great results, they still lacked the refinement of later generations and Vasari lists five important qualities where the artists of the bella maniera were superior to their predecessors: rule (la regola), order (l’ordine), proportion (la misura), design or drawing (il disegno), and style (la maniera).³⁴³ Specifically, he said that their drawing was truer to nature than used to be the case, and so was their colouring and the grouping of their figures:

Now, although the masters of the second age improved our arts greatly with regard to all the qualities mentioned above, yet these were not made by them so perfect as to succeed in attaining to complete perfection, for there was wanting in their rule a certain freedom which, without being of the rule, might be directed by the rule and might be able to exist without causing confusion or spoiling the order; which order had need of an invention abundant in every respect, and of a certain beauty maintained in every least detail, so as to reveal all that order with more adornment. In proportion, there was wanting a certain correctness of judgement, by means of which their figures, without having been measured, might have, in due relation to their dimensions, a grace exceeding measurement. In their drawing, there was not the perfection of finish, because although they made an arm round and a leg straight, the muscles in these were not revealed with that sweet and facile grace which hovers midway between the seen and the unseen, as in the case with the flesh of living figures; nay, there were crude and excoriated, which made them displeasing to the eye and gave hardness to the manner.³⁴⁴

The perfection of the bella maniera lay with one artist alone, the divine Michelangelo Buonarroti. He excelled in all of the three arts: painting, sculpture, and architecture. Furthermore, he triumphed not only over contemporary artists but also over Nature herself and over antiquity:

He has so enhanced the art of sculpture that we can say without fear of contradiction that his statues are in every aspect far superior to those of the ancient world. For if their work were put side by side, the heads, hands, arms, and feet carved by Michelangelo being compared with those made by the ancients, his would be seen to be fashioned on sounder principles and executed with more grace and perfection: the effortless intensity of his graceful style defies comparison.³⁴⁵

Michelangelo, said Vasari in an intriguing formulation, was the master of all forms and all bodies, in painting as well as in sculpture, ‘upright or not upright, palpable or impalpable, visible or non-visible’.

It is telling that the artist is presented as the master of bodies ‘upright or not upright, palpable or impalpable’. He could well have been praised for perfecting the representation of both men and women, of both large and small people, or perhaps the beautiful and the grotesque. Vasari was correct, however, in saying that Michelangelo did not appear to have been very interested in representing general categories such as gender or age. Instead, he aimed to bring out individual and psychological attributes. He was concerned with the unique rather than with general features. Some men, such as Bacchus, are pliable and sensual while others, such as Moses, are massive and austere (Fig. 3.4 & 8.3). The same went for the women. The Sistine Chapel ceiling has both the powerful figure of the Cumaean Sibyl and the more conventionally built women of the holy families (Fig. 5.3). In the Medici Chapel the reclining figures on the two tombs, a man and a woman on each side, represent different times of day rather than ideals of male or female beauty (Fig. 7.5 & 7.6). The same is true of the tomb of Julius II: the relationships between the standing, seated, and recumbent bodies seem to be more important than, say, age differences (Fig. 8.1). As for the palpable and impalpable, the concept of impalpable bodies may seem incomprehensible; however, it could refer for example to Julius’ tomb, with some figures low down and touchable and others high up, beyond reach. It is also possible that Vasari was thinking of the difference between painting and sculpture discussed in the same passage. Michelangelo was the master not only of figures in perspective—the ones visible though untouchable—but also of the sculpted body made flesh. In the Sistine Chapel, the figure of Jonah is striking in its difficult foreshortening on the curved wall. He is altogether ungraspable in his loftiness, yet absolutely proximate in his bodily presence.

The most intriguing formulation, though, is the ‘visible and non-visible’ bodies. It is possible that the author did not think much about it when he set down those words. He had already said that Michelangelo’s bodies are both upright and not upright, both palpable and impalpable, and now he wanted a third pair of concepts to conclude the passage. Vasari was working with dichotomies, suggesting that Michelangelo was in control of the most extreme and difficult challenges. What he wrote was not simply that the artist could create figures both standing and not standing up, but rather the suggestion is that he could do everything in between too. Indeed, many of Michelangelo’s figures are seated, perhaps a majority of them. Furthermore, they are often in motion, sitting down if they are standing, getting up if they are reclining. What Vasari said was that Michelangelo was masterful at describing all the complex movements of the human body, that he was a master of contrapposto.³⁴⁶ The same was true of the palpable and the impalpable: Michelangelo was capable of perfecting both aspects in one figure, as with Jonah. Both pose and tactility are so apt when describing Michelangelo’s art in a few words that it is worth considering that final phrase about the visible and non-visible. There is an important reference to the Nicene Creed in Vasari’s text. The Creed was adopted by the Church already in the fourth century and it has had almost exactly the same phrasing: ‘I believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, And of all things visible and invisible.’³⁴⁷ The Italian translation has ‘le cose visibili ed invisibili’, the Latin text ‘visibilium omnium et invisibilium’. This would not be the only occasion where Vasari made a demigod out of Michelangelo—and of other artists as well when it suited him. The artist was a godlike creature, creating life out of dead matter.³⁴⁸ There was a slight difference in wording—the Creed having invisible and Vasari having non-visible—but the point was probably taken anyway. Another difference was more crucial. Where God created all things, Michelangelo created sculpted figures. It is one thing to create invisible things in general and quite another to create unseeable bodies. The first action is impressive enough, but not ungraspable for the mind—God, after all, can be credited with creating love, fear, and laughter. To create non-visible bodies, on the other hand, seems like a paradox, as bodies are almost by definition tactile and visible.

Given the context, it seems likely that Vasari is referring here to the more abstract qualities of art. Some of them he has discussed a little earlier in the same text—rule, order, proportion, design, and style—each with direct bearing on the human body. The rules of measurement, order, and proportion could certainly be enumerated and compared, as was done by several other writers; Vasari, though, was sceptical of defining the rules for such measurements. He believed in them, in the sense that they had to be comprehended by the artist in order to achieve greatness, but he did not believe in the usefulness of setting them down as precise numbers. On the contrary, he was critical towards artists such as Leon Battista Alberti, Paolo Uccello, and Piero della Francesca who let theoretical dogma come between them and their work. It led to unnecessarily stiff and dry work, deprived of artistic inspiration and unmediated intuition. No great work of art could be produced only through rules and measuring; the certainty was that one had to go beyond that. Leonardo da Vinci certainly knew of the possibilities of calculation and proportion, but in his painted works he let go of the rules—or they were so thoroughly internalized that he did not have to think of them when he was working. It was the same for Michelangelo and his bodies: his knowledge of the human body, its muscles and bones, as well as the rules, orders, and proportions, were embedded in the work to the point where they became both visible and non-visible. As Vasari pointed out in the passage quoted above, gracefulness is something that can both be seen and cannot be seen.³⁴⁹

The same was true for design and style, those even greater abstractions than the other three qualities mentioned by Vasari. Design, or disegno, is paradigmatic. All the visual arts—architecture, sculpture and painting—depend on drawing as their main working tool. It is the craft that brings them all together. Furthermore, in their first designs, their drafts and sketches, artists elicit from vagueness (chora) something that is real and tangible (thetic). Indeed, through disegno, the invisible idea becomes flesh and so visible. Michelangelo was a virtuoso of design without equal, and that was how he came to master all three arts. It was also how he surpassed all others in his ability to come up with new ideas and artistic solutions. Style, or maniera, is perhaps an even less graspable concept than design. This is not the place to go into all its different permutations; it is enough to say that in Vasari’s judgement, Michelangelo in his painted and sculptured bodies brought the bella maniera to perfection. Precisely how this perfection of style came about is difficult to say, though; whether it was found in one single work or several works taken together, whether it was a constant or how much it may have varied, and to what extent it was shared by Michelangelo and his fellow artists working in the same style. Certainly, it extended beyond what was purely visible in one specific figure, in the tangible body. The ancient works referred to by Vasari and their intertextualization in Michelangelo’s art also warrant a mention. It has been noted many times that his figures have echoes of the Laocoön Group, the Belvedere Torso, the Niobids, and so on. Again, it is not entirely correct to say that they are invisible, because somehow they can be discerned, yet objectively they are not to be seen in the work either—they were rather suggested, partially quoted, or alluded to through subtle gestures or movements. They belonged to the intertextual network of these bodies, but as such they were altogether invisible if the canonical works themselves were not known to the viewer.³⁵⁰

Finally, testing the most abstract possibilities of Vasari’s phrase, it is possible to reach back to the idea of sculpture as the art of reduction— the claim that the true mastery of sculpture is not in what remains but what is removed. Michelangelo’s bodies, like all bodies, are what they are because they occupy a certain space; they are what they are as well as what they are not. Lifted to the existential plane, life is driven by choices, with paths chosen and paths igored. In all their inevitable presence, Michelangelo’s sculpted bodies confront spectators with their own situation and their own embodiment, compelling them to relate to their own individuality in ever-new ways, in ever-new constellations. Perhaps it was this relationship between what was removed and what contingently remained in place (the spectators, the ambience, the soundscape), which was what Vasari wanted to express in his intriguing talk of Michelangelo’s non-visible forms and bodies, drawing attention in the process to certain fundamental aesthetic principles and one of sculpture’s most profound qualities.