ELEMENTS OF LORENZO’S personality are a recognisable evolution from that of his grandfather Cosimo through his father Piero, whilst it was from his mother Lucrezia that he inherited his artistic temperament and creativity. Such was his genetic inheritance – but this was only the beginning. Lorenzo grew up in the astonishing household of the Palazzo Medici, which was in the process of becoming one of the great intellectual centres of the Renaissance. During Lorenzo’s life, no fewer than three of the outstanding artists of the Renaissance are thought to have spent at least a brief formative period of their early lives in the Palazzo Medici: Botticelli, Leonardo and Michelangelo.
Botticelli was born Alessandro Filipepi in 1444, and is said to have taken the name Botticelli (meaning little bottle’) from his oldest brother, who had a pawnbroker’s shop at the sign of Il Botticelli. His father was a tanner who lived and worked in the poor Ognissanti quarter, on the north bank of the Arno west of the city centre. Botticelli was a difficult child, who showed little interest in his education; his father apprenticed him to a goldsmith, but eventually recognised his embryo artistic talent and managed to place him under the tutelage of Fra Filippo Lippi. Here Botticelli would soon acquire Lippi’s mastery of delicate line and colour, to such an extent that it would be several years before he finally outgrew Lippi’s influence; despite this, the exceptional nature of his talent quickly became evident.
Soon after graduating from Lippi’s studio, Botticelli was invited to live at the Palazzo Medici by Lucrezia, Piero the Gouty’s wife. He would repay this by painting a delightful portrait of Lucrezia as the Madonna, with her two young children, Lorenzo and Giuliano, at her knee on either side of the infant Jesus. In this painting, Botticelli’s original style is beginning to shine through the influence of Lippi and the sculptural effects he had learned from studying the works of Verrocchio.
Botticelli was taken on as a member of the family by Piero and Lucrezia; he would eat at table with them, along with Lorenzo (who was just five years younger than him) and the cherubic younger Giuliano, who would become his favourite. In summer, he would travel with the family out to Cafaggiolo; he would also listen intently at the meetings of the Platonic Academy which took place in the Medici residences. The Platonic ideas of Ficino and the classical mythology of Poliziano would introduce him to an entirely new world, which would fill the gap left by his inattentive schooldays.
Living with the Medici, Botticelli would also experience the excitement and terror of the political events that had the Palazzo Medici as their epicentre. After the attempted coup by Pitti and Soderini, when the seventeen-year-old Lorenzo saved Piero the Gouty from being ambushed, Botticelli would celebrate this event with his first full-scale masterpiece. This is The Adoration of the Magi, intended as a thanksgiving altarpiece for the church of Santa Maria Novella, in which Botticelli depicts several of the Medici family and their circle. To the left stands Lorenzo, the proud hero of the day, his hands resting on his propped sword, the head of one of his favoured white chargers peering over his right shoulder. Lorenzo’s face is suitably idealised: this represents the Platonic hero, rather than the charismatic ugliness of reality. Poliziano leans on his other shoulder, squeezed next to the surprisingly plain figure of Pico della Mirandola. At the centre of the picture, worshipping the Virgin and Child, is the oldest of the three Wise Men, a posthumous portrait of Cosimo, ‘Father of the Country’; to his right, one of the other Wise Men is Piero the Gouty; and at the far right of the painting stands the tall, bulky figure of Sandro Botticelli himself, swathed in a robe. His head is turned, looking out of the painting; he has an unexpectedly beefy face beneath his thick, curly red hair, but his heavy-lidded green eyes have a piercing stare.
It is difficult to distinguish Botticelli’s character from the few stories that have come down to us, along with the overwhelming poetic presence of his paintings. He seems to have been intensely affected by the atmosphere of his surroundings; inside the powerful frame, behind that proud stare, there lurked a fragile temperament of extreme sensitivity, which appears to have been ill at ease with the outer man. He was said to have been clumsy and impulsive, and his behaviour was inconsistent, making him appear eccentric to some. But this was the man who lived outside his work; most who speak of him mention his almost complete absorption in his art, which could give him an abstracted air, characterised by some as an almost mystic dreaminess. Much of this would seem to fit the painter of the paintings we know – whether it is in any way the character of the actual man we will probably never know.
Yet Botticelli was no otherworldly saint; such an existence would have been impossible in the Palazzo Medici of Lorenzo’s time. There was always Poliziano’s knowing wit, or Pico’s arrogant brilliance, or yet another tale of Giuliano de’ Medici’s amorous antics. But like everyone else, Botticelli was in the end most drawn to Lorenzo, who certainly responded to him. However, with the Medici Bank in difficulty, Lorenzo could not always afford to pay him properly; money was needed for pageants and festivals to keep the citizens happy. Instead Lorenzo made sure that Botticelli was kept employed by those best able to afford his talents. As a result, he fulfilled commissions for Tommaso Soderini, the Tornabuoni family, the Vespucci family and even the Albizzi. It was now that he painted the first of the two transcendent paintings for which he will forever be remembered: Primavera (Allegory of Spring; see colour plates).
It was long thought that this was commissioned by Lorenzo the Magnificent himself, but in fact it was produced for a rich cousin called Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici. Here Botticelli achieves a blend of Platonic ideas and classical mythology to depict a scene of buoyant lightness, colour and beauty. In the centre with her attendant figures stands Venus, the goddess of love; but this is a Platonic Venus, whose ideal love informs the workings of all Nature around her. To the right, the figure of Flora caught in the embrace of the West Wind is thought to have been based on Simonetta Vespucci, Giuliano de’ Medici’s ‘great love’, as celebrated by Poliziano. The year before this was painted she had died of consumption at the age of seventeen; the ghostly blue embrace of the West Wind swooping behind her, the startled backward glance of her face, and the sharply silhouetted leaves tumbling from her opened mouth take on a darker symbolism in the light of this knowledge.
Lorenzo may have enjoyed the company of artists and done his best to encourage them, but surprisingly his patronage of them was not as widespread as that of his father Piero. In fact, he preferred his collection of jewels to paintings, and this included several individual items worth 1,000 florins – by comparison, Botticelli usually received 100 florins for a painting, which even so was more than a year’s wages for a skilled craftsman. Yet it would be a painter, Lorenzo’s favourite, who produced the one artefact that perhaps mattered more than any other to Lorenzo. Botticelli, the poetic Platonist amongst painters, was Lorenzo’s choice to paint the hanging Pazzi conspirators on the wall by the Palazzo della Signoria; and here surely was a reward for friendship and loyalty, rather than aptness of talent. Botticelli was ordered to depict in every lifelike detail the portraits of the men who would be publicly mocked, the men who had murdered the brother they had both grown up with, the brother they had both loved.
In 1481 Botticelli left to work in Rome for Pope Sixtus IV, on the recommendation of Lorenzo de’ Medici, as part of the reconciliation process between Florence and Rome after the war. Lorenzo was now using Florentine art and artists for political purposes. Apart from impressing individuals (the pope, the Dukes of Milan and Urbino, and others), the artists concerned also helped promote an implicit message: Florence was the supreme centre of Renaissance culture – destroy it, and you are destroying Italian civilisation.
Botticelli worked in Rome for two years, painting frescos in the newly built Sistine Chapel (originally spelt Sixtine, for it was named after Sixtus IV). But Botticelli’s major work for the pope consisted of several large biblical scenes; these appear less graceful, more awkward and more sombrehued. This may well reflect the lack of freedom and ease that he felt in these commissions, as well as his feelings on his absence from the lightness and brilliance of Lorenzo’s circle. On his return to Florence, Botticelli would quickly rediscover the lightness of his previous inspiration; once again he would be commissioned by Lorenzo’s cousin Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, and in response he produced the second of his transcendent masterpieces, The Birth of Venus. This found its immediate inspiration in a verse from Poliziano:
She travels through sea where white waves surface,
A young virgin without a human face,
Towards the shore by lustful Zephyrs blown
Beneath blue sky on a shell she is borne.
Yet Botticelli’s painting would become infused with much, much more than this simple classical scene. Where earlier Renaissance paintings had incorporated scientific discoveries (perspective, anatomy and so forth), The Birth of Venus embodies philosophy. The serene simplicity of Venus being washed ashore on her scallop-shell is in fact interwoven with all manner of highly complex Platonic allusions. Ficino and Poliziano once devoted an entire evening meeting of the Platonic Academy to elucidating different Platonic aspects of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. Again, the main figure is said to have been a portrait of Simonetta Vespucci; this time she appears both more beautiful and more ethereal, a haunting evocation of the young virgin without a human face’. The legendary beauty that Giuliano and Lorenzo had loved in her life now becomes an otherworldly emblem of the Platonic love which created the world. This Venus has an idealised spiritual quality – part of the beautiful reality that is visible when we turn our gaze away from the shadows playing over the wall of the dark cave of mere worldly appearance.
The Birth of Venus confirmed a trend in art that was becoming ever more widespread. This picture was painted on canvas, and framed; it was not a fresco, such as might have appeared on the wall of a church. Paintings were now becoming valuable private possessions, rather than devotional treasures; and their contents would begin to reflect this. In the preceding centuries of the medieval era, the Church had been seen as the fount of knowledge, the sole spiritual source, its religion the inspiration of art. Now art was extending itself beyond its traditional confines; it was becoming secular, an embodiment of rediscovered learning and new scientific discoveries, a movable possession to be admired in the home, a celebration of philosophy or life rather than religion. Instead of stylised saints, these paintings were inhabited by portraits of recognisable human beings.
The second figure who may have spent time living at the Palazzo Medici in his youth was Leonardo da Vinci – though this remains disputed. What is not disputed is the decisive role that Lorenzo de’ Medici played in Leonardo’s early artistic career. Leonardo da Vinci was born in 1452, just outside the small country town of Vinci, in the hills above the Arno valley fifteen miles west of Florence. He was the first illegitimate son of a young peasant girl called Caterina and a twenty-three-year-old lawyer, Ser Piero da Vinci. (‘Ser’ was the honorary title accorded to accredited notaries, though it is far from certain that Piero da Vinci had actually qualified as such.) Piero da Vinci was already carving out a moderately successful career for himself as a state notary in Florence. The young Leonardo was brought up on the family estate in the countryside outside Vinci, probably by his grandmother; at twelve he moved to Florence, where he lived in his father’s household as the only child. His father would not have another child until he married for the third time when Leonardo was twenty, and Ser Piero’s first two childless wives appear to have doted on the young Leonardo as if he were their own. When they died in succession during his teenage years it must have been a source of deep personal pain, and this may have been responsible for a certain reserved self-possession that soon became evident in his character. Yet it was the continuum of unquestioning female love that lasted through his childhood, youth and into early manhood which affected him most. This gave him the utter self-belief which comes from being the centre of such a worshipping motherly world; and it may also have contributed to his homosexuality.
Leonardo was early apprenticed to the studio-school of Verrocchio, and here he soon established a reputation for his meticulous artistry. He also became known for his exceptional physical beauty, his self-confidence and his peacock dress sense; people soon knew who Leonardo was, and he wanted to make sure that they remembered this. By the age of twenty he had come to the notice of Lorenzo de’ Medici, on account of his artistic talent rather than his fancy dressing. Even Lorenzo adhered to the Medici style laid down by his grandfather Cosimo: dress plainly and attract no attention to yourself. Only for pageants would Lorenzo dress up, though the magnificence of his appearance on these occasions suggests that his everyday wear marked a distinct repression.
From the outset, Lorenzo and Leonardo seem to have been wary of one another; whether Leonardo’s homosexuality, and Lorenzo’s possibly more covert bisexuality, had anything to do with this is difficult to say. What is clear is that Leonardo just did not fit in with Lorenzo de’ Medici’s circle. Having been brought up in the country, Leonardo had something of a yokel’s accent; curious though it may seem, the beautiful young Leonardo struck Pico and Poliziano as a distinctly uncouth and ignorant young man; his education had been so poor that he did not even speak Latin. At Verrocchio’s workshop Leonardo had already exhibited an almost pathological hunger for knowledge, though this was largely technical knowledge: how mechanical devices worked, how to build ‘machines’ for lifting, for pumping, for catapulting stones. None of these was like the theoretical science used by previous artists: the perspective lines they drew on the canvas prior to painting, the surface anatomical contours they learned from studying models.
Leonardo’s precocious artistry was recognised by Lorenzo and his circle, but his intellectual precocity they simply dismissed as the hobby of a talented ignoramus. Plato had written above the gate to his Academy: ‘Let no one enter here who knows not geometry’; Leonardo knew no geometry, no mathematics, and would not learn these for another ten years. Instead he taught himself by studying with his eyes, by examining things closely – by looking and looking and looking, and recording precisely what he saw.
In 1476 Leonardo was publicly denounced for practising sodomy. The charge appears to have been regarded very seriously, and he may well have spent a brief time in jail. The extreme punishment for homosexuality was being burned at the stake, but as we have seen, in practice attitudes were much more lax; for the most part, it was overlooked. So why was Leonardo singled out? The most likely explanation is that this denunciation was a covert attack on Lorenzo de’ Medici and his circle; in the end the case was never brought to trial – almost certainly through Lorenzo de’ Medici’s intervention. However, Leonardo would have been stigmatised by this charge; already stigmatised by his illegitimacy (though not at home), he must have felt further alienated by this traumatic public event. He wanted to be known – but now he knew what they also knew about him and said about him behind his back.
Despite their personal lack of rapport, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s support for Leonardo was unwavering; indeed, it may have been during this period that Leonardo was invited to stay at the Palazzo Medici, in part for his own protection. Residence at the Palazzo Medici would also account for his friendship with Botticelli, whose painting he did not in fact like. It was probably Botticelli who first showed Leonardo da Vinci the Masaccios at the church of Santa Maria del Carmine. These works, by way of influencing Fra Filippo Lippi, had very much influenced Botticelli, and they would also have a profound affect on Leonardo. The living curves and shaded volume of Masaccio’s figures were like a revelation to Leonardo; these were not simply depictions of human form, they appeared to exist on the canvas. Much of Leonardo’s originality too would stem from this source, but he would develop in a completely different way from Botticelli. Where Botticelli embodied myth, Leonardo was more interested in the actual representation, and the psychology, of living figures in reality.
There is further evidence of Botticelli’s firm friendship with Leonardo, and of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s close regard for him. When Lorenzo had wanted a mural of the Pazzi conspirators painted on the wall opposite the Palazzo della Signoria, he had turned to his beloved Botticelli – who might otherwise have seemed an unlikely choice for such a task. In 1479, when this mural needed altering (after Bandini had been brought back in chains from Constantinople and executed), Lorenzo would have turned once more to Botticelli, but for some reason he was unavailable. Botticelli almost certainly suggested Leonardo da Vinci to Lorenzo de’ Medici, though Lorenzo would not have chosen Leonardo on this recommendation alone. Lorenzo prized this mural: it was also a very public statement on his behalf. Florence had many successful artists, several of whom had enjoyed Medici patronage for years, yet he chose the twenty-seven-year-old wayward Leonardo. There can be no doubting his regard for Leonardo the artist, or his willingness to have himself associated with him, even if their personal psychologies grated to a degree.
The enigmatic Leonardo now received, with Lorenzo’s help, a major commission to paint The Adoration of the Magi for the Dominican friars at the church of San Donato at Scopeto, just outside the city. The contrast with Botticelli’s reading of this subject could not be more extreme. In Botticelli’s version, the well-dressed Medici figures assemble with some decorum before the Madonna and her Child. In Leonardo’s version, the surrounding figures are overwhelmed and astonished at the sight of the miraculous divine presence, falling before him and gesticulating around him. In the background in contrast to this mêlée of figures, the clear lines of a classical building rise towards its unfinished higher floor with the exactitude of an architectural drawing. Leonardo was continuing with his self-education, drawing buildings, imaginary engineering projects, military machines, anatomical features. And this was the trouble: he was so interested in all these things that he soon lost interest in the project at hand. Despite years of intermittent work, along with the entreaties and then the threats of the Dominican friars, The Adoration of the Magi was never finished; this would be but the first of many such projects, which recurred throughout Leonardo’s life.
Lorenzo de’ Medici must have realised that Leonardo could not go on making enemies in Florence if he wished to survive as an artist. Taking a characteristic risk, he recommended Leonardo da Vinci to the new ruler of Milan, Lodovico Mauro Sforza, who had succeeded his brother Galeazzo Maria Sforza, after the latter’s assassination. Lodovico Mauro Sforza was known as ‘Il Moro’ (‘The Moor’), a pun on his middle name as well as a reference to his dark ‘Moorish’ appearance. He was another difficult Sforza – educated in the humanist tradition, he had developed a cultured taste; he was vain about his appearance (particularly his curly and coiffeured hair), but his absurdities of manner were tempered by an unmistakable Sforza robustness inherited from his condottiere father, Francesco Sforza. Lodovico was both headstrong and devious, by turns cowardly and brave: unreliable in foreign affairs, and unpredictable at home. Fortunately for Leonardo, Lodovico took an instant liking to him, and Leonardo responded to this.
Leonardo arrived in a booming Milan. This was the centre of a lucrative silk-making industry, commanding the rich Lombardy farmlands; the city was also famous for its millinery (which takes its name from Milan). But this prosperity was only beginning to absorb the full development of the Renaissance. The city in no way matched the cultural richness of Florence, or its cultural snobbery; the self-conscious young artist with the country accent immediately felt at home here.
Leonardo would remain in Milan for seventeen years; it was here that his full talent would blossom, and that he would find a measure of personal happiness. In 1490, he took on a ten-year-old boy called Giacomo Salai as his servant. On his second day of employment, Leonardo fitted him out in a set of new clothes and put aside the money to pay for these; Giacomo immediately noted where he had concealed the money, and stole it. Leonardo was furious, but the boy refused to confess his guilt. Leonardo recorded that Giacomo was ‘a thief, liar, pig-headed and a glutton’; he was also mischievous, but possessed a winning charm, and some years later Leonardo and Giacomo would become lovers. The untutored Giacomo would learn to put up with his master’s long, enigmatic silences (which so often disconcerted his visitors), and Leonardo grew to tolerate his servant’s persistent petty thieving. Giacomo Salai would remain with Leonardo for the rest of his master’s life.
Leonardo was commissioned by the Duke of Milan to design a full-scale bronze statue of Francesco Sforza, the founder of the Sforza dynasty. The drawings and models Leonardo made for this great projected work of art would be amongst his most admired, and the task of casting the sixteen-foot-high bronze monument would tax his ingenuity to the utmost, although the project would never be completed. In 1495 Leonardo was also commissioned to paint a fresco of The Last Supper for the refectory of the Dominican friars at Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. This would prove to be the culmination of all his painterly knowledge, a work conveyed with such supreme authority that it appears both inevitable and timeless. Each of the saints grouped along the table on either side of the blessing figure of Christ has his own characteristic personality, which is imbued with both profundity and living emotion. The painting itself would take years to execute, but Leonardo would eventually bring it to completion in 1498. This time the flaw was in the preparation: the wall on which it was painted suffered from damp, and the pigments that Leonardo mixed using his own novel method were unsuitable. Within sixty years, according to an eyewitness, the fresco it was ‘a mass of blurs’: all that we know today of this masterpiece comes from copies by lesser artists.
In Milan, Leonardo would be left free to develop his ideas. Lodovico Sforza was intrigued and delighted by Leonardo’s designs for ‘battle machines’, such as catapults, giant screws, armoured vehicles and battering rams. Leonardo also concocted schemes for draining tracts of countryside with networks of canals, and designs for ideal cities; he began dissecting human cadavers, recording the details of the inner human anatomy and organs. To entertain his master, he produced ice sculptures, designed firework displays and constructed mechanical monsters. Leonardo was, more than anything else, a sheer ‘intellectual force’. Sforza housed him in an apartment within his large castle complex, for which Leonardo designed a central-heating system; he was also given a large painting studio, complete with apprentice artists and associates, though precisely what work he gave all these assistants remains a mystery. Where painting was concerned, Leonardo worked at his own excruciating pace, on his own. During the seventeen years that he was in Milan, he would complete just six paintings – though their quality was never less than sublime.
Yet even these were lucky to be finished. Leonardo would sit for days on end, musing over his ideas, sketching in his notebooks, making jottings in his secretive mirror writing. Here was the cornucopia of raw genius – his investigations covered everything from astronomy to the position of the child in the womb, from botany to facial expressions, from art to arsenals. The fact that there was a unifying idea behind these apparently disparate jottings is often overlooked; for Leonardo, this was all part of his scheme for the ‘science of painting’. To him, the painter was the supreme scientist; he had the ability both to perceive the world in its every detail and to record its exact workings. Leonardo drew up a hugely ambitious plan which involved artists observing each and every detail in the world, perceiving its structure and its form, and recording this precisely as it was. Here art becomes science: as he remarks in one of his notebooks, ‘my subjects require for their exposition experience rather than the words of others ... I take [experience] as my mistress, and to her in all points make my appeal.’ In Leonardo’s ideas it is possible to see the scientific method in embryo, although it would be well over a century before Galileo advanced on these ideas, launching the era of modern science.
Leonardo’s ambitious scheme for the ‘science of painting’ remained unrealised. It was of course unrealisable; and this is very much to the point in Leonardo’s work. This is perhaps why he abandoned so many of his greatest projects: he had seen beyond what could possibly be done, he had exhausted his subject before he completed it. The subject thus held no further interest for him; there seemed no reason to finish it.
Leonardo liked Botticelli, even if he did not like his work (he does not say so directly, but he does on occasion speak of painting that is unmistakably Botticelli’s, giving it as an example of how not to visualise a work of art). Yet when it came to the third member of the trio of supreme artists associated with the Palazzo Medici, Leonardo liked neither the man nor his art. Leonardo simply detested Michelangelo, and made no secret of it. He saw himself as a cool-headed scientist with no need for God; Michelangelo, on the other hand, was obsessed with God. Leonardo wished to record the precise and subtle nature of what he saw and understood, while Michelangelo sought to record humanity’s spiritual struggle. To Leonardo, Michelangelo had a medieval mind; others have seen his work as the epitome of the Renaissance spirit – the embodiment of the humanist ideal struggling and suffering in its attempt to realise itself.
Michelangelo Buonarotti was born in 1475, in the hilly countryside forty miles south of Florence at the small fortified town of Caprese (now Caprese Michelangelo, in his honour). His father was a Florentine, appointed as the local mayor by the state authorities. The Buonarotti family claimed descent from the Knights of Canossa, the eleventh-century rulers of Florence, but this was just family mythology and had no basis in fact; the family had been members of the gentry, but had fallen on hard times. Within six months of Michelangelo’s birth, his father’s spell as mayor was over and the family returned to Florence. As was often the case at the time, the young Michelangelo was farmed out to a country wet-nurse. For his first three years he lived at Settignano, a stone-cutters’ village three miles up the Arno valley; years later, the great sculptor would claim: ‘I absorbed with my mother’s milk the sound of the hammers and chisels with which I make my statues.’
The young Michelangelo grew up in Florence, in genteel poverty at the family house in the Santa Croce district, on a respectable street but uncomfortably close to the riverside slums. His father maintained his social aloofness, and young Michelangelo was brought up in an atmosphere of stifling adherence to the ‘old ways’. However, unlike almost all other artists, he did receive an education, at the school of Maestro Francesco da Urbino, where he learned grammar, rhetoric and Latin. This was no enlightened humanist school, and Michelangelo soon grew tired of copying out and learning by rote; instead he turned to drawing to pass the time, and decided he wanted to become an artist.
Buonarotti senior highly disapproved of his son’s artistic endeavours: such activities were beneath a family of their standing. There were family rows, and according to Michelangelo he ‘was often severely beaten’. But his grim stubbornness prevailed, and at the comparatively late age of thirteen he was packed off to the studio of Ghirlandaio; apprentices were usually taken on at ten, but despite lagging three years behind the others in tuition, Michelangelo’s exceptional talent quickly became apparent to Ghirlandaio.
According to Vasari, in his renowned but not always reliable Lives of the Artists, in 1489 Lorenzo de’ Medici decided to open a school for sculptors. He began making enquiries for suitable pupils, and Ghirlandaio immediately recommended the fourteen-year-old Michelangelo. Lorenzo’s sculpture school was situated in a garden by the Piazza San Marco, just a few minutes’ walk from the Palazzo Medici; here, in a pavilion, were stored the Medici family collection of Ancient Roman sculptures, which had been started by Cosimo on Donatello’s recommendation. The school was run by Donatello’s former pupil Bertoldo, a talented sculptor in bronze, who according to Vasari ‘was so old that he could not work’. In summer the sculptures were moved out into the garden, where the pupils would sit in the shade copying them. In later life, Michelangelo would always claim that he was self-taught as an artist, and that his gift came from God alone, but the ageing Bertoldo probably taught him how to model figures in clay and wax. From early on, Michelangelo is said to have had a remarkable ability to carve stone so that it appeared as smooth as wax.
Michelangelo seems to have been a strange youth. As was often the case at the time, his character matured early; at fourteen he was mentally a young man, even if in many ways he remained gauche and shy. Though well mannered, he was awkward in company and appears to have had a phobia about the way he looked, despite his rugged and not unattractive appearance. This may well have been due to the first, perhaps unconscious, inklings of his homosexuality; he certainly had a forceful temperament, which he kept bottled up. As a result, he was often irritable and on occasion had a volatile temper; his nose had already been badly broken in a fight, and would remain flat for the rest of his life.
Michelangelo’s legendary first encounter with Lorenzo de’ Medici in the garden near San Marco would mark a turning point in the artist’s life. Michelangelo was carefully carving, with hammer and chisel, the head of an old grinning satyr, using a Roman original as his model. He was so immersed in his task that he did not notice Lorenzo standing behind him, watching in awe at the precocious craftsmanship of the young pupil, whose work was going into far greater detail than the worn block of ancient marble before him. Michelangelo dug into his stone head, hollowing out the satyr’s mouth. Delicately he chipped away to reveal its tongue, and finally the rows of individual teeth in the upper and lower jaws. Suddenly aware of someone behind him, Michelangelo spun round, and blushed. Lorenzo smiled, attempting to set him at his ease. He leaned forward examining the satyr’s mouth, pointing out that it was not quite correct – no old satyr would still have all his teeth.
The young Michelangelo scowled, mortified at his mistake. As soon as Lorenzo moved on, the young sculptor immediately returned to work. He chipped off one of the satyr’s teeth, digging into the gum to give it further authenticity, as if the tooth had fallen out. When Lorenzo came back, he was amused; but most of all he was amazed by what he had seen, and following this incident Michelangelo was invited to live and work in the Palazzo Medici. He was given his own room, and the equivalent of almost five florins a month (just over half the wage on which a fully fledged craftsman could support his entire family). In order to smooth matters at home, Michelangelo’s father was even given a post in the customs administration office.
From now on, for the next four years, Michelangelo would dine at table with Lorenzo and his family – just as Botticelli, and perhaps Leonardo, had done before him. Amidst such surroundings he became a little more at ease with himself; and Lorenzo encouraged him to attend meetings of the Platonic Academy. Unlike Botticelli and Leonardo, Michelangelo would have had sufficient education to grasp at once the gist of what was going on. One can imagine him frowning in the corner as Pico, Poliziano and the others dazzled the company. Michelangelo was soon inspired by their Platonic philosophy, its breadth of abstract ideals giving a range to the narrow intensity of his religious faith. The poetry they declaimed demonstrated to him how it was possible to articulate feelings in words, feelings that in his case remained choked within him; he must have studied the actual poems too, for it was around this time that he began expressing himself in poetry. Although this talent would not mature for several years, his earliest efforts would prove to be much more than the amateurish efforts of a difficult teenager. In time, Michelangelo would write poetry that excelled even that of Lorenzo de’ Medici – such that it became one of the great ornaments of the Italian language. His earliest extant fragments would hint at this talent:
Burning, I remain in the shadow,
As the setting sun retreats into its glow.
The others have gone to their life of pleasure,
I alone lie grieving, with the earth my measure.
Despite such literary promise, the fine arts would remain Michelangelo’s main preoccupation, and these too initially received inspiration from the Platonic Academy. His early frieze Battle of the Centaurs was suggested by lines from Poliziano (adapted from Ovid) describing a legendary classical scene; according to the legend, a group of centaurs became so drunk at the wedding party of King Pirithous that they attempted to rape and carry off all the women. With youthful intensity, Michelangelo depicts a tangle of writhing, struggling naked bodies. It is a work of consummate artistry, influenced by Ghiberti’s great bronze doors to the Baptistery, which the young Michelangelo had likened to the gates of paradise. Yet this is a hellish piece; and its chaotic but controlled composition probably owes more to the homoerotic fantasies of his overheated mind than to ancient myth. By contrast, his other early masterwork is a relief of classic stillness and beauty. The Madonna of the Stairs is clearly influenced by Donatello; the Madonna sits at the foot of the solid angular steps, suckling a realistically awkward, if somewhat muscular infant Christ, whilst in the background, higher up the steps, are the forms of playing children. But it is the drapes of the Madonna’s voluminous dress that immediately draw the eye; here there is such exact lightness achieved in polished marble, such masterfully realised fluidity of form. There could be no mistaking that this was the birth of another superlative talent, first encouraged by the Medici; and as we shall see, Michelangelo would remain deeply involved with the Medici family until the end of his life.