PART ONE

Michelangelo Buonarroti and His World

Michelangelo knew how deeply implicated he was in his own art and how closely it expressed his own thoughts and feelings. He wanted other people to recognise this too, although he understood that they might not find it easy to do. The notion of self-expression implicit in his work was not familiar to his contemporaries. They had no language to bring to bear upon it. No conventions existed for the discussion of such a phenomenon. Largely in order to clarify the nature of his achievements, Michelangelo paid a great deal of attention to establishing the story of his life, as he wished it to be known.

First he gave considerable assistance to Giorgio Vasari, who in 1550 published the earliest full biography of Michelangelo, much of it evidently drawn from conversations with the artist. Vasari’s text appeared in the first edition of his pioneering Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects. It was subsequently revised and extended for the second edition of 1568, but because Michelangelo was less than completely satisfied with Vasari’s work he had already, by then, taken the unprecedented step of encouraging another writer to compose another biography — one that would be more acceptable to him. The author was Ascanio Condivi. Had he never written his Life of Michelangelo, published in Rome in 1553, Condivi would not now be remembered. Little is known about him other than that he was, for a time, one of Michelangelo’s pupils and that he went on to become a distinctly unsuccessful artist. He disappears from history some time around 1574, when he is said to have died while attempting to ford a stream.

Both of the early biographies are interestingly unreliable. They reveal a great deal about Michelangelo, but in no straightforward way, being written in a kind of code. Many of the stories that the authors recount, whether they tell of Michelangelo’s youth and upbringing, his troubled but fruitful relationship with Pope Julius II, or his heroic endeavours in painting the ceiling, have the quality of parables or fables. They are stories with subtexts, stories that invite certain morals or messages to be drawn from the narratives that they present. Given that the source for nearly all of them was Michelangelo himself, it can be assumed that those morals and messages were ones that he himself intended readers to draw. In their oblique way they reveal all kinds of fascinating things about the artist, about how he thought of himself and how he wanted to be remembered. This is particularly true of Condivi’s life, which was written in such close association with Michelangelo himself that it might plausibly be regarded as an autobiography written under dictation. It is a kind of work of art – Michelangelo’s self-portrait, carved out in words rather than marble.

The two biographies occasionally disagree, both with each other and with the known historical facts, as they can be established from other documentary records of the time. But the lies that they perpetuate and the omissions of which they are guilty also shed light on Michelangelo’s personality. A good example is the account given by Condivi of the artist’s early training, which was clearly intended by Michelangelo as a corrective to the account that had been given by Vasari in the first edition of the Lives of three years earlier.

A self-portrait by Michelangelo, c. 1540s

Vasari had written that when Michelangelo was in his teens he was apprenticed to Domenico Ghirlandaio, one of the leading painters of late fifteenth-century Florence. Ghirlandaio was at that time working on his most celebrated work, a cycle of frescoes that can still be seen today, in the Tornabuoni Chapel in the church of Santa Maria Novella. This apparently harmless piece of information helps to explain how it was that Michelangelo, despite his insistence that he was essentially a sculptor rather than a painter, was able to tackle the painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling with such vigour and assurance. He had been taught the principles and methods of painting in buon fresco in the workshop of one of its leading exponents.

Yet Condivi goes to great lengths to refute the idea that Ghirlandaio played any role whatsoever in Michelangelo’s formation as an artist. In his telling of the story this was a myth put about by Ghirlandaio and his descendants, who were jealous of Michelangelo for having outshone them and told the lie so that they could bask in a little of his reflected glory. ‘I wanted to mention this,’ Condivi says, ‘because I am told that Domenico’s son attributes the excellence and divinità of Michelangelo to a great extent to his father’s teaching, whereas he gave him no help whatever.’1 For his part, Vasari was so enraged by the suggestion that he had got the story wrong that he marched off to Ghirlandaio’s workshop and dug out the original copy of Michelangelo’s contract of apprenticeship. In his second, revised life of the artist he quoted it chapter and verse with evident relish.

The truth is that Michelangelo was indeed taught the rudiments of painting in Ghirlandaio’s workshop, but wanted to conceal the fact. A number of possible motives suggest themselves. The idea that he was first and foremost a sculptor was always important to him. He told Condivi that sculpture was in his blood, relating that shortly after he was born, in 1475, he had been put out to a wet nurse in the little village of Settignano, near Arezzo in Tuscany. ‘She was the daughter of a stonemason, and the wife of a stonemason. For this reason Michelangelo is wont to say, perhaps facetiously or perhaps even in earnest, that it is no wonder that the chisel has given him so much gratification.’

A more pressing need for the lie about his apprenticeship may have been Michelangelo’s desire to preserve intact the aura of his own self-sufficiency. This pattern of suppression, revealing his desire to remove from the record any evidence that he was ever taught to paint or sculpt, was repeated when it came to the role played by Bertoldo di Giovanni in his early life. Whereas Vasari explicitly states that the artist was given lessons in sculpture by Bertoldo, in Condivi’s adjusted version of the truth Bertoldo has simply been removed from the picture.

In fostering the myth of his own untutored genius, Michelangelo was not merely trying to put himself in a good light. He was trying to communicate something that he felt was morally if not literally true. Even though he had attended Ghirlandaio’s workshop and even though Bertoldo had given him instruction, as far as Michelangelo was concerned, no one had the right to say they had taught him to be the artist that he became. He was different. He was unique.

Michelangelo told Giorgio Vasari a similar version of the story he related to Condivi about having been wet-nursed by a stonemason’s daughter. Vasari, who was himself from Arezzo, near Settignano, where the wet nurse had lived, recalled Michelangelo’s words: ‘Giorgio, if I have anything of the good in my brain, it has come from my being born in the pure air of your country of Arezzo, even as I sucked in with my nurse’s milk the chisels and hammers with which I make my figures.’² However playfully expressed, the story implies that Michelangelo’s conception of himself as an artist was tinged with uneasiness. He suggests not only that he has been marked out by fate, by God, to pursue a career in art. He also suggests an awareness that his destiny will not always be easy. Sucking in chisels and hammers — the artist makes his sense of vocation sound like something painfully ingested.

Little is known about Michelangelo’s real mother, save that her name was Francesca and that she died when he was six years old. It was common practice at the time for families of some education and social pretension, such as his, to pass newborn babies to wet nurses for the first two years or so of their lives. So it can be assumed that Michelangelo had returned to the family home in Florence in about 1477 — only for his true mother to die just four years later. Mortality rates in fifteenth-century Italy were high, especially among young, child-bearing women. But the artist’s early childhood was certainly traumatic, even by the standards of the time. Having been separated from his surrogate mother and lost his true mother in quick succession, he was soon to encounter difficulties in his relationship with his father.

Both Vasari and Condivi recount that Lodovico Buonarroti, recognising the boy’s intelligence, sent Michelangelo to a grammar school in Florence run by a certain Maestro Francesco from Urbino. But as Condivi tells the story, ‘nature and the heavens, which are difficult to withstand, were drawing him toward painting ; so that he could not resist running off here and there to draw whenever he could steal some time and seeking the company of painters ... On this account he was resented and quite often beaten unreasonably by his father and his father’s brothers who, being impervious to the excellence and nobility of art, detested it and felt that its appearance in their family was a disgrace.’³

There is probably an element of exaggeration here. Michelangelo was clearly a very well-educated man. Not only did he read Dante, he also wrote his own poetry, in fluent cursive handwriting. So it seems unlikely that he neglected his studies altogether. It is also clear that Michelangelo’s father, Lodovico, eventually became sufficiently resigned to his son’s inclinations to have him apprenticed to Domenico Ghirlandaio (although Condivi, of course, leaves that fact out). But there does nonetheless seem to have been a longstanding disapproval, within Michelangelo’s family, of his choice of career.

The cause, as Condivi’s choice of the word ‘disgrace’ suggests, was a form of snobbery. Although the status of artists had risen considerably in fifteenth-century Italy, in many quarters they were still commonly regarded as little better than glorified craftsmen. This seems to be have been so in Michelangelo’s family. The Buonarroti were once-prosperous moneylenders — a traditional Florentine occupation — who had fallen on hard times. Michelangelo’s grandfather, Lionardo, had squandered the family business, and by the time the artist was born the family estates had dwindled to no more than a little property in Florence and one small farm on a hillside in Settignano.

Yet still the Buonarroti persisted in thinking of themselves as rightful members of the leisured classes. They were landowners, albeit in a very small way, who preferred to subsist on the extremely poor revenues of their diminished estates rather than engage in anything as demeaning as manual labour. They might take on clerical duties in the counting houses of contemporaries such as the Strozzi, but working with their hands was out of the question.⁴ The artist’s father, Lodovico, must have hoped that the evidently gifted Michelangelo might one day restore the family fortunes. But in choosing to become an artist — to be an apprentice, to work with his hands — there was in his father’s eyes a clear danger that he might take the family even lower down the social scale than it had already fallen.

As things turned out, Michelangelo did more than restore the family fortunes. He became a rich man, frequenting the company of popes and cardinals. Throughout his meteoric rise he gave considerable financial support not only to his father but also to his varyingly feckless brothers, of whom he had four (one was a priest, who died young; the other three never amounted to much). Yet he always feared that his family would look down on him, despite his accomplishments.

More than three hundred of Michelangelo’s letters to and from his father and siblings survive. They are overwhelmingly concerned with practicalities, mostly financial — the purchase of property, the banking of sums of money. Michelangelo’s own letters testify to his sense of family duty and his considerable generosity, but they are constantly punctuated by complaints and lamentations. He lives wearied by gargantuan labours, he protests, again and again, and all for no thanks. A typical example is the letter he wrote to his father from Rome in October 1512, just after he had completed the Sistine Chapel ceiling, in which he concludes: ‘all this I have done in order to help you, though you have never either recognised or believed it — God help you.’⁵

The most extraordinary thing about Michelangelo’s letters to his family is the fact that he never once discusses his art with them in any moral or intellectual sense. It is ever-present in the background, as the cause of his exhaustion and source of whatever help he can give them. But that is all. Michelangelo may have felt that his family could never really understand who he was or what he was trying to accomplish. This may be another of the subtexts behind the story of the wet nurse and the miraculous capacities with which her milk had endowed the artist. Hellmut Wohl succinctly expresses this aspect of the story’s secret meaning in his analysis of Condivi’s Life of Michelangelo: ‘As a sculptor, he implies, he was not the child of his father and mother, but of his wet nurse; he had been reborn, set apart from his natural heritage, and invested with a creative power that was his alone.’

All this may help to explain Michelangelo’s extraordinary drive, his almost monastic dedication to work, his readiness to take on projects of such magnitude as to seem virtually unachievable — and, most of the time, actually to carry them off. He was motivated, in part, by a deep desire to prove his family wrong. It was an important part of his life’s work to convince even the most sceptical that art could indeed be the noblest of professions.

Where did Michelangelo acquire his deep-seated belief in the nobility and intellectual seriousness of art? Largely from Florence and the traditions he encountered there. Brunelleschi, Masaccio, Donatello and Ghiberti, the founders of early Renaissance style, had not only furnished the city with copious examples of their ingenuity and talent. They had also effected the beginnings of a sea-change in attitudes to art and artists across the entire Italian peninsula. By the second half of the fifteenth century, the role of the artist itself had undergone a profound metamorphosis. The most gifted painters, sculptors and architects — men such as Piero della Francesca, who wrote a treatise on mathematics, or Leonardo da Vinci, who became expert in numerous branches of scientific knowledge — were no longer content to be regarded as mere craftsmen. They were intellectuals, possessors of special skills and forms of knowledge often so arcane they liked to refer to them as ‘secrets’ — men capable of mastering the complexities of human anatomy, or making the detailed calculations necessary to create the illusions of perspective.

The new skills and ambitions of artists were in turn recognised and encouraged by a new breed of patron. The princes who ruled the city-states of Renaissance Italy — the Sforza in Milan, the Gonzaga in Mantua, the Este in Ferrara — had themselves undergone a sea-change. Having emerged from the ranks of merchants and mercenaries, their horizons had been suddenly broadened by an intellectual revolution that took place in their midst. They too had learned to value different forms of learning, in particular to share that interest in the classical past proselytised by the men hired to educate them. Their teachers were drawn increasingly from the ranks of humanist scholars, followers of Petrarch, united by a fascination for what he had called ‘the pure radiance of the past’. The princely patrons of Renaissance Italy themselves became intrigued by the past and consumed by the ambition to rival the glory of antiquity.

Michelangelo experienced this new world at first hand during his formative years, when he came into direct contact with the circle of the Medici, the principal family of Florence. At its head was Lorenzo de’ Medici, otherwise known as Il Magnifico, ‘The Magnificent One’, who gave much encouragement to the artist in his early years. Vasari tells the story behind their first meeting, which took place when Michelangelo was no more than fifteen years old, in convincingly circumstantial detail:

At that time the Magnificent Lorenzo de’ Medici kept the sculptor Bertoldo in his garden on the Piazza San Marco, not so much as custodian or guardian of the many beautiful antiques that he had collected and gathered together at great expense in that place, as because, desiring very earnestly to create a school of excellent painters and sculptors, he wished that these should have as their chief and guide the above-named Bertoldo, who was a disciple of Donato [Donatello] . Bertoldo, although he was so old that he was not able to work, was nevertheless a well-practised master and in much repute . . . Now Lorenzo, who bore a very great love to painting and to sculpture, was grieved that there were not to be found in his time sculptors noble and famous enough to equal the many painters of the highest merit and reputation, and he determined, as I have said, to found a school. To this end he besought Domenico Ghirlandaio that, if he had among the young men in his workshop any that were inclined to sculpture, he might send them to his garden, where he wished to train and form them in such a manner as might do honour to himself, to Domenico, and to the whole city. Whereupon there were given to him by Domenico as the best of his young men, among others, Michelangelo and Francesco Granacci . . .⁶

Some modern scholars have unaccountably chosen to regard Lorenzo’s sculpture garden as a fiction. But it certainly existed. It contained an avenue of cypresses and a loggia, as well as Lorenzo’s collection of classical statuary. Vasari goes so far as to call it an art academy, in which case it would have been one of the first such institutions, although his actual description makes it sound a little more informal than that — a place where young men could study sculpture in their own time and make their first attempts in the medium, sporadically supervised by Bertoldo, the ageing tutorcum-custodian. Lorenzo the Magnificent had a habit of turning up unannounced to inspect the progress of his young protégés.⁷ According to both of Michelangelo’s biographers, he took to Michelangelo more or less instantly.

Condivi tells the story of how Michelangelo decided to make his own copy of one of Lorenzo’s classical statues:

One day, he was examining among these works the Head of a Faun, already old in appearance, with a long beard and laughing countenance, though the mouth, on account of its antiquity, could hardly be distinguished or recognised for what it was; and, as he liked it inordinately, he decided to copy it in marble . . . He set about copying the Faun with such care and study that in a few days he perfected it, supplying from his imagination all that was lacking in the ancient work, that is, the open mouth as of a man laughing, so that the cavity of the mouth and all the teeth could be seen. In the midst of this, the Magnificent, coming to see what point his works had reached, found the boy engaged in polishing the head and, approaching quite near, he was much amazed, considering first the excellence of the work and then the boy’s age; and, although he did praise the work, nonetheless he joked with him as with a child and said, ‘Oh, you have made the Faun old and left him all his teeth. Don’t you know that old men of that age are always missing a few?’⁸

As soon as Lorenzo had left, Michelangelo got to work on the statue, removing an upper tooth from its mouth and drilling a hole in the gum to make it look as though it had come out by the root:

‘. . . the following day he awaited the Magnificent with eager longing. When he had come and noted the boy’s goodness and simplicity, he laughed at him very much; but then, when he weighed in his mind the perfection of the thing and the age of the boy, he, who was the father of virtù, resolved to help and encourage such great genius and to take him into his household; and, learning from him whose son he was, he said: ‘Inform your father that I would like to speak to him.’⁹

Michelangelo’s father does not emerge with much credit from the rest of Condivi’s account. When Lodovico hears that he has been summoned, he suspects that he is being manipulated by Michelangelo. He protests that he will never suffer his son to become a mere stonemason, and refuses to listen when it is explained to him ‘how great a difference there was between a sculptor and a stonemason’. However, he cannot refuse to meet Lorenzo the Magnificent, who is so much his social superior. Lorenzo asks him ‘whether he would be willing to let him have his son for his own’, in exchange for which he promises to grant him ‘the greatest favour in my power’. Lodovico agrees but, like some hapless character in a fairy story, immediately fails to take advantage of his fortunate situation. Offered, as if by magic, anything he might wish for, he asks for a minor job in the customs office. Lorenzo claps him on the shoulder and smiles at his naïveté, commenting, ‘You will always be poor.’¹⁰

The contrast between Lodovico’s lack of ambition and his son’s strength of purpose could hardly be greater. Concealed within this parable of a father who foolishly fails to understand the nature of his son’s genius, then even more foolishly fails to profit by it, lies a message from Michelangelo to his contemporaries. Lodovico, who cannot grasp the difference between a sculptor and a mere stonemason, represents all of those who would doubt the true dignity of the artist’s vocation. His objections, rooted in snobbery, are made to seem all the more absurd by the fact that it is a member of the noble house of the Medici who refutes them.

The Battle of the Centaurs

The moment when Lorenzo il Magnifico took him into his household was always regarded by Michelangelo as a milestone in his life. According to both Vasari and Condivi, Lorenzo treated the artist as if he were one of his own sons. Michelangelo ate at Lorenzo’s table and benefited from conversations with the many leading humanist authors who were part of the Medici circle. He is said to have been inspired to create one of his earliest works, a bas-relief on the classical theme of The Battle of the Centaurs (above), by the poet Angelo Poliziano. The work in question, which was not a commission but was created for the artist’s own satisfaction, remained in the hands of his heirs for centuries and can still be seen in the Casa Buonarroti in Florence. This study in writhing, intertwined human bodies is a testament to Michelangelo’s extraordinary abilities with a chisel, at the age of just sixteen or seventeen. It is also evidence of his volatility of temperament and his deep sensuality.

It has often been asserted that the artist fell under the sway of Neo-Platonic philosophy while in the Medici household. But there is no strong evidence for this. There is no supposedly Neo-Platonic reference, in his work either as an artist or as a poet, that cannot be more straightforwardly explained as an expression of Christian belief. The most clearly identifiable legacies of his early exposure to humanist scholarship were a fascination with the art of antiquity and a strongly independent cast of mind — a determination to approach every subject that he drew, painted or sculpted as if he were the first artist ever to treat it.

There has been much speculation about which particular humanist texts Michelangelo might have read in his youth. Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man has been cited so often, in relation to Michelangelo, as to suggest that it must have been a key influence on him, one of his intellectual touchstones. But there is no sign that he ever read it and no reason to think it ever mattered to him.

Humanist thought exerted its strongest influence on him through no particular, individual text, but through its radically new sense of what a text actually is. This amounted, also, to a whole new way of thinking. During the Middle Ages, classical texts ranging from the works of Cicero to those of Galen had been regarded as ‘authorities’, bundles of statements and beliefs hallowed by tradition and therefore to be taken on trust. The humanists revolutionised this attitude. They came to believe that every classical text was to be treated on its own merits, analysed on first principles, and evaluated accordingly. For Michelangelo’s contemporary, the celebrated scholar Desiderio Erasmus, the project of re-reading the past became connected with the need for spiritual reform across all Christendom. For too long had Scripture been the property of the Church. For too long had theologians been allowed to barnacle the words of the Old and New Testaments with their own complex interpretations and exegeses. It was time to recover God’s message in its purity — and to contemplate that message, as if for the first time, in a state of spiritual innocence and nakedness.

The same approach drives Michelangelo’s particular form of originality, which is not to be explained as some mysterious emanation of genius but as a phenomenon deeply rooted in the intellectual history of his time. He has a strong and inalienable belief in his own right to read and interpret the Bible, to find and express the messages that he feels God has put there for the enlightenment of mankind. This is not to say that he is so arrogant as to set at naught the interpretations of the Church fathers, nor indeed of the theologians of his own time. But he does not take their authority at face value. He has the same independence of mind as a Christian humanist and it is this — just as much as his brilliance of imagination and abilities with a paintbrush — that makes the paintings of the Sistine Chapel ceiling so powerful and unique.

Lorenzo il Magnifico died two years after inviting Michelangelo to live with him. Within a few years the Medici had been expelled from the city, and the garden in which the artist created some of his earliest sculptures had been looted and destroyed. But Michelangelo had been spotted. In Lorenzo’s informal academy, his horizons had been broadened far beyond the teachings of Maestro Francesco of Urbino, whose school he had once sporadically attended. He had been taught the rudiments of sculpture. He had shown such prodigious talent that it was already evident, to anyone who had seen him work, that he was destined for great things. He had taken the first steps along a path that would lead him, circuitously, to the door of the Sistine Chapel.

After the death of Lorenzo il Magnifico, Vasari says, Michelangelo returned to live in the house of his father, ‘in infinite sorrow’. Lorenzo’s son, Piero de’ Medici, showed a friendly interest in the young sculptor. He sought his advice when purchasing works of antique art. One winter, he is said to have asked Michelangelo to create a statue from snow in the courtyard of the Medici palace. It was ‘very beautiful’,¹¹ say both biographers, with tantalising vagueness. At around the same time, according to Vasari, he carved a wooden crucifixion for the church of Santo Spirito, ‘to please the Prior, who placed rooms at his disposal, in which he was constantly flaying dead bodies, in order to study the secrets of anatomy’.¹² Vasari adds that Piero ‘honoured Michelangelo on account of his talents in such a manner that his father, beginning to see that he was esteemed among the great, clothed him much more honourably than he had been wont to do’.¹³ Condivi says the same, adding that Lodovico ‘was by this time more friendly to his son’.¹⁴ The doubting father had at last learned the error of his ways.

During his early career, Michelangelo was to be singled out by one discerning patron after another until the pope himself, Julius II, would take him for his own and monopolise all his efforts and energies. The artist’s many stories about his youth make it clear that he saw the hand of fate behind this chain of worldly events. Before he was ever chosen by the Medici, or the pope, he had been chosen by God. It is important to recognise that Michelangelo did not believe this in any metaphorical way. In his mind, it was actually true. He felt that he had been given his gifts by God, and charged with serving the purposes of divine will. This is why, when he painted the Sistine Chapel, he depicted the Old Testament prophets with such sympathy and such a strong sense of identification. He felt that he had been called, just as they had, to spread the word of God.

The artist’s belief that God was actively present in his life is implicit in both biographies but particularly strong in Condivi’s text. For example, when the author tells the tale of how the young Michelangelo escaped harm when the population of Florence rose up against the Medici, it is clearly a parable of supernatural intervention. Condivi relates that the artist was friends with a member of Piero’s retinue, a musician named Cardiere. One day Cardiere confided to Michelangelo that he had been granted a vision: ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici had appeared to him with a black robe, all in rags over his nakedness, and had commanded him to tell his son that he would shortly be driven from his house, never to return again.’¹⁵

At this point in the story, the artist urges Cardiere to tell Piero himself about the ill-omened apparition. When Cardiere does so he is laughed down as a superstitious fool by Piero and his retinue. But Michelangelo, who trusts in the apparition of Lorenzo as surely as Hamlet trusts in the ghost of his father, flees Florence for the safety of Venice and then Bologna. Once there, he is given refuge in the house of Giovanni Francesco Aldovrandi, a prominent nobleman of the city who would later become a favourite of Pope Julius II.

Aldovrandi, like Lorenzo before him, instantly recognises the artist’s intelligence and talent. Like Lorenzo he takes on the role of the true father, the noble father that Michelangelo’s own nobility had deserved. ‘He was delighted with his intelligence, and every evening he had him read from Dante or Petrarch and sometimes from Boccaccio, until he fell asleep.’ This idyll is interrupted when Michelangelo learns that there has been a popular uprising in Florence. ‘At this point,’ says Condivi, ‘the Medici family with all their followers, who had been driven out of Florence, came on to Bologna ... thus Cardiere’s vision or diabolical delusion or divine prediction or powerful imagination, whatever it was, came true. This is truly remarkable and worth recording, and I have related it just as I heard it from Michelangelo himself.’¹⁶

Michelangelo stayed with Gianfrancesco Aldovrandi for little more than a year before returning to his native Florence. The city was by then in the throes of a great upheaval, having been whipped into a collective frenzy of penitence by the sermons of the hellfire Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola. Savonarola had been preaching in Florence, to increasing popular enthusiasm, since before the death of Lorenzo il Magnifico. His sermons had been instrumental in the uprising against the Medici that had been correctly predicted in the dark vision of Cardiere — indeed, the friar had created a climate of hysteria and spiritual emergency that made men prone to visions and hallucinations.

Savonarola identified the Rome of the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, with the forces of the anti-Christ. His doom-laden interpretation of St John the Divine’s visions in the Book of Revelation had led him to believe that the start of the sixteenth century marked the beginning of the end of the world — the start of the Final Conflict between the forces of good and evil. His call for spiritual reform was coloured by a deep sense of eschatological urgency. If the people of the world did not repent, if the Church did not mend its ways, and immediately, it would be too late. ‘I say to you the church of God must be renewed, and it will be soon.’¹⁷ Savonarola’s pious revolution was destined to be overthrown, its leader burned at the stake. But his impact on Michelangelo’s thought should not be underestimated. Even in old age, the artist said that the memory of Savonarola’s words remained vivid in his imagination.

Savonarola was removed from power partly at the instigation of the papacy. But although he was regarded as troublesome and dangerous, a threat both to the Church’s temporal power and to its spiritual authority, many of his ideas were reflected within the Vatican itself. He is sometimes regarded as a freak of history, when he was really a larger-than-life incarnation of attitudes extremely common at the time. Many others shared his apocalyptic view of the world.

Astronomers and theologians, Savonarola’s contemporaries, nervously scanned the skies for comets that might portend the Second Coming. Omens were found everywhere. Plagues, floods and other natural catastrophes were interpreted as eruptions of the wrath of God. It was even widely assumed that Columbus’s discovery of a new world must have been a sign from above, indicating the imminence of Armageddon — a heaven-sent opportunity for mass conversion of the heathen, and therefore God’s way of swelling his Christian armies, even as the satanic forces of Islam gathered in the East.¹⁸ Astrologers competed to put a precise date to the world’s final day. Italy at the end of the fifteenth century was extremely susceptible to eschatological terrors. As the historian Damian Thompson notes, ‘the conventional picture of Renaissance Italy, in which a cultivated elite turns away from superstition and towards the study of art, architecture, music and astronomy, is extremely selective. We do not see the prophets wandering through Florence and Rome proclaiming the end of an age; nor do we spot the figure of the anti-Christ lurking behind the doric columns of the renovatio.’¹⁹ In the art of the young Michelangelo — with its ‘elite’ references to classical antiquity and its deep, countervailing Christian piety — these very different attitudes are uniquely combined.

The greatest projects of the so-called High Renaissance, including the creation and decoration of the Sistine Chapel itself, were themselves bound up with a strong sense of ‘end time’. The renovation of Rome, the rebuilding of St Peter’s, the fortification of the Vatican — in papal circles these schemes were conceived not just as assertions of power and authority but as ways of readying the Church for the imminent judgement of the Last Day. One of the principal theologians at the court of Michelangelo’s greatest patron, Pope Julius II, was the vicar-general of the Augustinian order, Giles of Viterbo. Giles, who may also have sought to influence the iconography of Michelangelo’s paintings for the Sistine Chapel, gave explicit expression to this Messianic strain of thought. In a sermon preached in Julius’s presence in 1507 he portrayed the pope as a figure to be equated with Moses, Socrates and St Peter, one destined to play a great part in the unfolding of God’s awesome plan: ‘You, after more than 250 popes, after 1,500 years, after so many Christians and emperors and kings, you and you alone . . . will build the roof of the most Holy Temple so that it reaches heaven.’

The literal reference was to St Peter’s, but Giles had a larger meaning in mind too. Julius II was to preside over the creation of that greater Church, all of Christian humanity, drawn by Rome’s splendour, as by a beacon, to fight on the side of good against evil in fulfilment of St John the Divine’s visions of the apocalypse.²⁰ The commission to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling was accompanied by the same sense of spiritual urgency that had animated Savonarola, whose words had left such a strong impression on the young Michelangelo. The paintings for the ceiling would bear vivid traces of that apocalyptic anxiety.

The Drunkenness of Bacchus

The first triad: The Separation of Light and Darkness (bottom), The Creation of the Sun, Moon and Plants (centre and overleaf) and The Creation of Life in the Waters (top)

The central triad: The Creation of Adam (bottom and previous page), The Creation of Eve (centre) and The Temptation and Expulsion (top)

Above : The Creation of Eve

Overleaf : The Temptation and Expulsion

The Deluge (previous page and in detail above)

The Sacrifice of Noah (top) and The Drunkenness of Noah (below)

The third triad: The Sacrifice of Noah (bottom), The Deluge (centre) and The Drunkenness of Noah (top)

Michelangelo left Florence in the summer of 1496, two years before Savonarola’s downfall and execution. The cause of his departure was a fake. One of his works, a sleeping Cupid,²¹ had been passed off as an antiquity by an unscrupulous Florentine dealer. A prominent collector in Rome, Cardinal Riario, had been duped into believing it was of ancient Roman provenance, and had paid the princely sum of two hundred ducats for it. After discovering that he had been the victim of a confidence trick, the cardinal had sent an envoy to Florence. The messenger was given two tasks: first, to track down the crooked dealer and get a refund; second, to find the artist responsible for such fine work and bring him to Rome. Michelangelo was twenty-two years old. His career was about to take off.

Riario was intrigued to meet the young prodigy. He even put him up in his own house for a year, according to the artist’s biographers. Condivi says that although the cardinal gave Michelangelo no commissions, the artist ‘did not lack a connoisseur who did make use of him; for Messer Jacopo Galli, a Roman gentleman of fine intellect, had him make in his house a marble Bacchus ten palmi high’.²² The work in question, which unlike the faked Cupid still survives, is a life-size incarnation of the ancient god of wine, revelry and mystic orgies. Roundbellied and leering, the stone Bacchus (opposite) seems to stagger rather than walk, raising a glass as he teeters through space. Vasari wondered at the way in which Michelangelo had given the figure ‘both the youthful slenderness of the male and the fullness and roundness of the female’,²³ which has encouraged one or two subsequent commentators to find in it an early indication of the artist’s presumed homosexuality.

There is no documentary proof that Michelangelo found men more attractive than women. He had close friendships with members of both sexes — most notably, in his later years, with Vittoria Colonna, whose piety and interest in spiritual reform he shared, as well as with a young Roman nobleman called Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, to whom he dedicated some drawings and wrote letters that express his affections in the inscrutably formulaic language of courtly convention.

As he came towards the end of his biography of Michelangelo, Vasari felt the need to insist that the artist’s love of the beautiful male form was totally innocent and pure. This suggests that there must have been rumours to the contrary. Such gossip was rife in the overwhelmingly male city of Rome. Michelangelo, who was both unmarried and extremely famous, was a natural target. Where does the truth lie?

On the evidence of his painting and sculpture, he was more strongly drawn to the representation of the male than the female form. But it would be unwise to draw firm inferences about his sexual orientation on the basis of that. He was fascinated by the art of classical antiquity, by sculptures such as the Laocoön, unearthed in Rome before his very eyes. The heroic male nude is essential to classical sculpture, the most fundamental element of its language. It became the basic unit of Michelangelo’s expressive language as well, to the point where he could no more invent a composition without it than a writer could compose a sentence without words.

To complicate matters further, he wrote various love poems addressed to women when he was young. These include a comically coarse and erotically direct lyric, in three octave stanzas, in which he compares his beloved’s body, part by part, to the produce of a farm. Her face is more beautiful than a turnip, her teeth whiter than a parsnip. Her eyes are the colour of treacle and her breasts like ‘two ripe melons in a satchel’. ²⁴ The poem is a farmyard parody of the courtly love tradition, a peasant’s proclamation of desire for a dairymaid, so it should not be taken as a direct reflection of the artist’s own feelings. But it shows that he was not only and exclusively interested in men.

The only really strong evidence about Michelangelo’s sexuality indicates that he disapproved of sex altogether. The artist explicitly told his biographers that he preferred to have no intimate relationships at all, in order to preserve his energies for art. He repeated the sentiment in conversation with a friend: ‘I already have a wife who is too much for me; one who keeps me unceasingly struggling on. It is my art, and my works are my children.’²⁵

Michelangelo would spend almost his entire career creating art in the service of religion. Like a number of his other early works, the Bacchus is an exception. Perhaps that is why it seems to embody such a wild vitality, such an irrepressible sense of freedom. The strangely smiling figure, with distant unfocused eyes, is a dream of life as it might be lived without any sense of law or limit. The Bacchus exists outside the relentless arc of Christian time, outside its cycle of damnation and salvation. The figure is inscrutable, unjudgeable, unruly and alive. Michelangelo allows himself a reprieve from his own habits of spiritual solemnity — a sudden, drunken moment of release from the imperatives of his faith.

Shortly after creating the Bacchus, the artist carved the celebrated Pietà now in St Peter’s (overleaf). He received the commission from a French cardinal who never lived to see the wonder he had paid for. The subject, unusual in Italian Renaissance art but common in the painting and sculpture of Northern Europe, is the Virgin Mary cradling the dead Christ on her lap. Michelangelo’s Virgin is distant, so absorbed in her thoughts that she seems, paradoxically, to have less vitality than her dead son. She is withdrawn and remote, while his graceful form seems still to pulse, as if with the memory of life so recently stilled. She is swathed in stony draperies, while he is naked except for a loincloth. His body, carved with astonishing skill, has a deep pathos about it — the head that lolls back, the legs that dangle, but above all the limp right arm, gently squeezed at its juncture with Christ’s torso by the pressure of the Virgin’s hand, an arm rendered with such profound attention to each vein, every joint and bone and tendon, that it seems almost impossible that a human being armed only with hammer and chisel, let alone a young man of twentythree years, could have created such a thing.

The Pietà now in St Peter’s

Vasari, searching for words to express the extent of his admiration for the work, remarks that ‘it is a miracle that a stone without shape should be reduced to such perfection’. But the Pietà is unsettling too. Christ is as vulnerable, in his nakedness, as a baby. The draperies in Mary’s lap suggest a shell or cave, a womb-like enclosure. She might almost be contemplating the terrible miracle of a full-grown but stillborn son. Artists had often depicted the Virgin as a young mother troubled by the foreknowledge of the agonies her baby will endure as an adult. Here Michelangelo telescopes time in the other direction, to suggest that in the moment of Christ’s death Mary is remembering how she once cradled him as an infant.

Michelangelo had already been recognised by a few discerning connoisseurs as an artist of promise. But the Pietà made him famous. He was instantly acclaimed, not just as the most accomplished sculptor of his time but as a strange and truly marvellous phenomenon. How could an artist so extraordinarily young have produced a work of such astonishing complexity, such unprecedented truth to life? The myth of the ‘divine’ Michelangelo, sent down to earth by God himself, may have begun right at the start of his career.

The artist would himself grow to believe that he was an instrument of divine will. But he still wanted people to know that the Pietà had been shaped by his, by Michelangelo’s, hands. The work became a popular attraction, drawing many of the pilgrims who flocked to Rome. Vasari tells the story of an outraged Michelangelo overhearing a man from Lombardy casually informing the rest of his group that the work had been sculpted by a certain sculptor named ‘Giobbo’, from Milan. According to Vasari, the artist crept into the chapel that housed the statue that same night, and sculpted his signature into the girdle that divides the Virgin’s breasts. ‘Michelangelo fecit’ — Michelangelo made this. It was the first and last time that he ever deemed it necessary to sign his work.

In the spring of 1501, Michelangelo returned to Florence after five years in Rome. On his arrival, he agreed to sculpt a number of small statues for the tomb of Cardinal Piccolomini in Siena. He even signed a contract for the work, but soon asked for it to be set aside because he had a far more ambitious project in mind. In the workshops of the Duomo, Florence’s cathedral, a great piece of marble had been gathering dust for nearly forty years. The block had been acquired in 1464 in the hope that it might be carved into a giant figure of a prophet for one of the cathedral’s tribune buttresses. But the stone had defeated every sculptor’s attempts to form it, and now it stood misshapen and abandoned. According to Vasari, Michelangelo’s friends in Florence had told him that Piero Soderini, the Gonfalonier of the city, was keen to see one more attempt made on the abortive block. So the artist went to investigate.

‘Michelangelo measured it all anew,’ writes Vasari, ‘considering whether he might be able to carve a reasonable figure from that block by accommodating himself as to the attitude to the marble as it had been left all misshapen . . . and he resolved to ask for it from Soderini and the wardens [of the cathedral], by whom it was granted to him as a thing of no value, they thinking that whatever he might make of it would be better than the state in which it was at that time.’²⁶ They had made a wise decision. Within three years Michelangelo had transformed the botched block of stone into a flawless and monumental figure of David (overleaf).

Vasari’s own judgement of the work, pronounced some halfcentury after its creation, conveys some sense of the breathless amazement which ‘il Gigante’ —‘the Giant’, as the sculpture was instantly nicknamed by the people of Florence — elicited from those who first saw it:

He uncovered it, and it cannot be denied that this work has carried off the palm from all other statues, modern or ancient, Greek or Latin; and it may be said that neither the Marforio at Rome, nor the Tiber and the Nile of the Belvedere, nor the Giants of Monte Cavallo, are equal to it in any respect, with such just proportion, beauty and excellence did Michelangelo finish it . . . And, of a truth, whoever has seen this work need not trouble to see any other work executed in sculpture, either in our own or other times, by no matter what craftsman.²⁷

How did Michelangelo, still only in his mid-twenties, manage to create what Vasari rightly describes as one of the wonders of the world? This is one of the greatest mysteries concerning him. He had never been apprenticed to a sculptor. In fact there is nothing to suggest that he had ever received any extensive tuition in sculpture, aside from a few lessons from Bertoldo di Giovanni, the aged custodian of Lorenzo il Magnifico’s sculpture garden. He had studied anatomy, but he was by no means alone in that — Leonardo da Vinci had studied anatomy more deeply than Michelangelo, yet he never showed anything like Michelangelo’s abilities as a sculptor. Part of the answer would seem to be that Michelangelo was born with a rare and exceptionally strong form of spatial awareness, an ability to hold a particular three-dimensional form in his mind’s eye, with total accuracy and for long periods of time. But it was also allied to an extraordinary manual dexterity, an instinctive ability to shape with his hands the images in his mind.

David

Vasari says that before making the David, Michelangelo made a model for it in wax. It was in the transition from that model to the finished work that he displayed his unique talents. One problem was that of scale, of translating the small image of the model into the gigantic size of the great block. The other and yet more difficult problem was to recreate an image formed by one process, but using a totally different technique. When Michelangelo made his model he was using an additive method, making a form by adding wax to wax, shaping and kneading it until he had what he wanted. When he made the David itself, he had to do the opposite. To carve is to remove, to chip away, to make a form by many acts of reduction. Most sculptors lose and find the desired form, lose and find it again, change it by a process of trial and error — all this as they go along. But for Michelangelo it seems that the form was always there for him in the marble, permanent and unchanging, as if it were simply waiting for him to reveal it. Vasari says that he carved forms from stone as if he were pulling figures from water. This haunting metaphor sounds like one of the artist’s own phrases. It may have been his attempt to describe, as best as he could, the mystery of his processes.

To express the matter simply, Michelangelo’s brain was not the same as most people’s brains. He might be compared to certain individuals who are gifted with seemingly inexplicable mathematical skills, such as the ability to solve the square root of an enormous number in a fraction of second. Some of Michelangelo’s later architectural drawings, done at a time when he had been put in charge of the huge project of completing the new St Peter’s, show that he could effortlessly manipulate particularly complex forms, like heavily moulded architraves, drawing them from all angles without any sign of calculation or workings-out — as if he had the equivalent of a modern computer-modelling program installed in his mind.

Certain drawings for the Sistine Chapel suggest that he made use of the same skill in creating his paintings for the vault. He would produce numerous, apparently disjointed, sketches and studies for a particular composition — an arm, a leg, a torso, modelled often from life, in widely differing conditions of light and shade. Then, in the act of painting, he would resolve this conflictingly lit jigsaw of shapes into a single unified whole. No other Renaissance painter drew with the same disregard for a consistent lighting scheme, and none worked with the same freedom from sketch to finished painting. Michelangelo could do this because of the skills he had shown as a sculptor — because of his unique ability to hold all the elements of a picture in his mind as if they were physical, three-dimensional presences. By the time he came to paint the image, it already existed so completely for him that he no longer needed to depend on his drawings. His celebrated rival Raphael painted his frescoes on to meticulously squared-up drawings that had been transferred to the surface of the plaster. But towards the later stages of the Sistine ceiling, when he was at his most assured, Michelangelo was able to dispense with such laborious methods. He painted The Separation of Light and Darkness, for instance, freehand. Study of the plaster ground itself proves that he did it in a single session of no more than eight or nine hours.

Study for the ceiling

Studies for Haman

Michelangelo was extremely busy during the years that followed his return to Florence in 1501. He carried out several other commissions for sculpture, as well as demonstrating his formidable abilities in the field of painting. He painted the so-called Doni Tondo, a roundel of the Holy Family now in the Uffizi Galleries, for a wealthy Florentine named Angelo Doni. The patron is said to have baulked at the price of seventy ducats, whereupon the proud and volatile artist promptly doubled it. (Picasso, who greatly admired Michelangelo, was fond of playing the same trick on recalcitrant would-be collectors of his own work.) During these years Michelangelo also created a vast cartoon, or preparatory sketch, for a painting of a famous Florentine military victory, The Battle of Cascina. This was intended to be one of a pair of monumental frescoes for the main hall of assembly in Florence’s Palazzo della Signoria. The other painting, a depiction of The Battle of Anghiari, was commissioned from Leonardo da Vinci, but neither work got further than the drawing board.

Michelangelo’s enormous drawing, which survives only in the form of a later copy, now at Holkham Hall (overleaf), showed a group of soldiers surprised by the call to battle as they were bathing in the Arno. With characteristic independence, he had treated the commission for a battle painting as the pretext for a complicated homage to the art of antiquity – a frieze-like composition thronged with naked male figures, each in a different pose, all suddenly energised by the urgency of a moment of crisis. The drawing was long preserved in Florence, where, according to Vasari, it became a kind of school for artists. Eventually it fell victim to its own fame: ‘it was left with too little caution in the hands of the craftsmen, insomuch that ... it was torn up and divided into many pieces.’

The Battle of Cascina, after Michelangelo’s drawing

No such fate befell the statue of David. The sculpture of the young hero, sling at his shoulder, was regarded in Florence as an apt emblem of the city-state’s own resolute determination to preserve its independence. Vasari indicates that the artist had always intended the work to be interpreted in that way. He also tells a story about the David that reflects on Michelangelo’s ingenuity in getting his own way. It seems that when Michelangelo first unveiled the statue, Gonfaloniere Piero Soderini unwisely tempered his otherwise fulsome praise of the figure by commenting that its nose was too broad. The artist rushed to remedy the fault, or at least gave the appearance of doing so:

Michelangelo noticed that the Gonfalonier was beneath the Giant, and that his point of view prevented him from seeing it properly; but in order to satisfy him he climbed upon the staging, which was against the shoulders, and quickly took up a chisel in his left hand, with a little of the marble-dust that lay upon the planks of the staging, and then, beginning to strike lightly with the chisel, let fall the dust little by little, nor changed the nose a whit from what it was before. Then, looking down at the Gonfalonier, who stood watching him, he said, ‘Look at it now.’ ‘I like it better,’ said the Gonfalonier, ‘you have given it life.’ And so Michelangelo came down, laughing to himself at having satisfied that lord, for he had compassion on those who, in order to appear full of knowledge, talk about things of which they know nothing.²⁸

Shortly after Michelangelo performed this cunning trick, a commission was formed to decide exactly where the marble giant should stand. Its members included two state heralds and a trumpeter as well as every artist of distinction in the city. ²⁹ Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Piero di Cosimo and the San Gallo brothers, among others, attended. The senior of the two heralds suggested putting the statue at the entrance to the Palazzo della Signoria, the civic heart of Florence. The site was already occupied by Donatello’s bronze of Judith and Holofernes, another biblical allegory of the traditional Florentine disdain for despotism, which had been placed there as a warning to tyrants after Piero de’ Medici had been expelled from the city. But the herald argued that Donatello’s work had brought bad luck to Florence: ‘The Judith is a death-dealing sign,’ he said, ‘and it is not good for a woman to kill a man,’ adding that things had gone ‘from bad to worse’ for the city since it was placed there. What better replacement could there be than the magnificent new sculpture of David? After long and tortuous deliberations, the herald’s proposal was accepted.³⁰ At a stroke, Michelangelo’s colossus had become the most prominent work of art in Florence. He had supplanted Donatello and secured his fame in the city where he had grown up. No wonder he believed that sculpture, not painting, was his true vocation.

The David was set in its place on 28 May 1504. Six months earlier, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere had been elected Pope Julius II. Known to his contemporaries as ‘Il Terribile’, ‘The Terrible One’, he was a fierce and warlike pope who spent much of his ten-year pontificate marching up and down the Italian peninsula at the head of his army. He wore a suit of silver armour and a silver beard to match. The beard, a novelty for a Renaissance pope, was no mark of piety. Julius II wore it in emulation of his ancient Roman namesake, Julius Caesar, who had once sworn that he would remain unshaven until he had avenged himself on the Gauls for massacring his legions. Julius II’s beard was a pledge against his own numerous enemies — the French, the Bolognese, the Venetians, the Turks.³¹

‘Fuori i barbari!’ was the pope’s warcry — ‘Out with the barbarians! ’ He had been an implacable enemy of the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, and he was determined to recover the papal territories that had been lost to Borgia nepotism— to reclaim, in particular, the extensive lands in northern Italy that Alexander VI’s son, Cesare Borgia, had been allowed to carve into a state of his own. Julius II also fought to push back the Venetians, who had made steady incursions into the traditional papal territories of the Romagna. By the time of his death, in 1513, he had driven the French from Italy and brought Parma, Piacenza and Reggio Emilia into the papal states.

Pope Julius II by Raphael

Despite his advanced age — he was sixty years old when he became pope — Julius II was a man of enormous energy. He was determined not only to redraw the map of political power in Italy, but also to transform the physical fabric of the Holy City. Despite its elevated status as the capital of western Christendom, early sixteenth-century Rome was little more than a series of linked villages clustered around the banks of the Tiber. The fabled seven hills of the city of the Caesars had become grassy wooded slopes, where sheep and cattle grazed amongst the overgrown ruins of temple, forum and amphitheatre. The gap-toothed hulk of the Colosseum towered over all, memorial to an empire long since extinct.

The city was derelict because of the decline that it had suffered during the Middle Ages. When Julius was elected to the papacy, Rome had only been home to the popes for a little more than eighty years. Martin V, whose election in 1417 had ended the Great Schism, had returned there in 1420. According to Platina, the fifteenth-century author of The Lives of the Popes, ‘he found it so dilapidated that it bore hardly any resemblance to a city’.³² Intervening popes had done what they could to build and rebuild the city’s fortifications, streets, squares and fountains. Julius II’s own uncle, Sixtus IV, whose pontificate began in 1471 and ended in 1484, had established the Vatican Library and rebuilt the old Palatine Chapel of Nicholas III – which henceforth, in Sixtus’s memory, would be called the Sistine Chapel. Before that, a coherent vision of what the city might one day become had been set forth in a speech delivered in 1455 from his deathbed by Pope Nicholas V to his cardinals: ‘to create solid and stable convictions in the minds of the uncultured masses, there must be something that appeals to the eye: a popular faith, sustained only in doctrines, will never be anything but feeble and vacillating. But if the authority of the Holy See were visibly displayed in majestic buildings, imperishable memorials and witnesses seemingly planted by the hand of God himself, belief would grow and strengthen like a tradition from one generation to another, and all the world would accept and revere it.’³³

Julius II did more than any other Renaissance pope to turn this dream, a blueprint for the future magnificence of papal Rome, into reality. During his pontificate, the Vatican Palace was renovated and its new apartments decorated by Raphael with paintings that simultaneously celebrated the progress of human learning and the enlightened teachings of the Church. The Cortile del Belvedere was begun. New palaces were built, streets were widened and improved. Julius founded the Vatican museum and established Rome’s most significant collection of the art of antiquity. He laid the foundation stone for the new St Peter’s. He commanded his principal architect, Bramante, to improve access to the city for pilgrims by straightening the Via Lungara and building a parallel street on the other side of the Tiber — the Via Giulia, the longest straight road since Roman times.

He did all this, but at a cost. It was partly to raise the revenues for his many grand projects in Rome that Julius went to war so often. The territories he conquered became an important source of income, but the funds at his disposal could never match the scale of his ambition, so he resorted to other methods too. Simony and the traffic in indulgences — papally sanctioned pardons for sin, hawked across Europe by the agents of Rome — thrived under his pontificate. In the eyes of the pope and his advisers, the ends justified the means. Giles of Viterbo, favourite of Julius II and vicar-general of the Augustinian order, had a messianic vision of Rome becoming the new Jerusalem as the end of the world approached. Giles enthusiastically endorsed the sale of indulgences, never imagining the scale of the rebellion against the Church that this would soon inspire in Germany.³⁴ In 1517, only four years after Julius II’s death, Martin Luther composed his ninety-five theses objecting to the sale of indulgences, precipitating the Reformation.

Julius II made some reforms to the monastic orders and dispatched missionaries to America, India, Ethiopia and the Congo. But he was destined to be remembered as a pope whose temporal policy had eclipsed his spiritual office. His pontificate culminated in a tragic paradox. In trying to realise the most grandiose dream of the post-Schismatic papacy, he had only helped to shatter it for ever. Although he had striven with all his might to consolidate the papal states and assert the immutable authority of the one true Church, his unscrupulous methods had fanned the embers of the Reformation that would sunder the Church and transform the very landscape of European Christianity into a war zone.³⁵

In 1523, looking back at the pope’s achievements from a post-Reformation perspective, Erasmus published a bitterly comic satire entitled Julius Exclusus. It tells the story of Julius meeting St Peter at the entrance to heaven and finding the gate locked against him. The pope protests, listing his military victories and citing the magnificence he has brought to Rome, but the saint remains adamant that he will not enter: ‘You are a great builder: build yourself a new paradise.’³⁶

From the moment of his election, it had been inevitable that the ‘great builder’ would call on the services of Michelangelo. Rome already contained an impressive advertisement of the artist’s skills, in the shape of the Pietà, and stories about the marble colossus that he had created in Florence must soon have reached the pope’s ears. Here, plainly, was an artist who could work on the scale demanded by Julius II’s own enormous ambition.

The call came in the spring of 1505, when the pope summoned Michelangelo to Rome. Well aware that papal patronage would open a new world of opportunities for him, the artist was happy to obey. According to Condivi, the pope spent several months wondering how to make use of Michelangelo’s gifts before finally conceiving the idea of commissioning him to create his own tomb.

Michelangelo proposed a design of stunning scale and complexity, which Condivi describes in considerable detail: ‘to give some idea of it, I will say briefly that this tomb was to have had four faces: two were to have been eighteen braccia long to serve as the sides, and two of twelve braccia as head and foot, so that it came to a square and a half. All around the exterior there were niches for statues . . .’³⁷ There were to be more than forty of these statues. Some were to depict the liberal arts as slaves, indicating that with the death of Julius painting, architecture and sculpture and ‘all the artistic virtues’ had been reduced to a state of feeble passivity. Others were to represent angels, both sad and happy, to lament the passing of Julius and to rejoice at his entry into heaven. There was even to be a second monument within the monument, a great tomb resembling a temple to house the sarcophagus containing the pope’s remains.

So began what Michelangelo would, in later life, call ‘the tragedy of the tomb’. It was a project on which he embarked with the highest hopes, but that was destined to be beset by a thousand interruptions and delays — one that would preoccupy him not only for years, but for decades of his life, and that would only be realised, belatedly and long after Julius II’s death, in a much reduced form. It is hard, however, to share Michelangelo’s belief that the failure of the project, in the form that he first planned it, amounted to a tragedy.

The Louvre in Paris contains certain figures of the slaves, which the artist brought to varying states of completion, of an undeniable pathos and beauty. But the fact remains that the artist’s initial proposal was a megalomaniac fantasy, an obscene monument to ego, pride and power. The oppressive object described by Condivi would have been no mere tomb, but a self-sufficient building, combining the functions of chapel and sarcophagus. It would have towered fifty feet in the air and would have occupied an area of eight hundred square feet. Its exterior would have been decorated with a multitude of niches, each containing a life-size statue, while, as Condivi says, four more statues, each one a giant, would have crowned its marble summit. One of these was actually carved by Michelangelo, the frowning figure of Moses that dominates the much reduced memorial that was eventually erected in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli. It is a statue that still evokes the chilling grandeur of Michelangelo’s first idea for the tomb. Sigmund Freud was both fascinated and repelled by the work, and when he lived in Rome returned to it again and again, revelling masochistically in what he described as its grandiose repudiation of his merely mortal condition.

At a conservative estimate it would have taken Michelangelo between forty and fifty years to carve the monument’s statues alone. Yet such was the pope’s instant enthusiasm for the proposal that he allowed himself to be carried away by the artist’s Herculean confidence in his own abilities. Michelangelo was dispatched straight away to Carrara, with an advance of a thousand papal ducats, to quarry the immense amount of marble required for the project. Condivi records that he stayed in the mountains for more than eight months, with only two helpers and a horse for company. He also tells a story that vividly conveys Michelangelo’s frenetic state of mind at the time: ‘One day while there, he was looking at the landscape, and he was seized with a wish to carve, out of a mountain overlooking the sea, a colossus which would be visible from afar to seafarers.’³⁸

Once the quarrying was finished, Michelangelo returned to Rome, having arranged for the marble to be transported there by boat. It was unloaded at the port of Ripa Grande, then taken to the Piazza San Pietro, behind the church of Santa Caterina, near the artist’s own lodgings. ‘So great was the quantity of the blocks of marble,’ says Condivi, ‘that, when they were spread out in the piazza, they made other people marvel and rejoiced the pope, who conferred such great and boundless favours on Michelangelo that, when he had begun to work, he would go more and more often all the way to his house to see him, conversing with him there about the tomb and other matters no differently than he would have done with his own brother.’³⁹

The brotherly relationship soon turned sour. In the spring of 1506 Julius II cancelled the commission for the tomb. His reasons for doing so are impossible to establish with absolute certainty. Perhaps he simply thought better of it. Even a man of his pride and ambition may have baulked, on sober reflection, at the idea of such an immense and permanent magnification of his own hubris. But other priorities had also come to the fore. He was involved in costly military campaigns and he had committed himself to a huge new architectural project, the rebuilding of St Peter’s itself.

Michelangelo always believed that Bramante, Julius II’s favourite architect, had played a devious part in the whole affair. In Michelangelo’s version of the story, it was Bramante who had manipulated the pope into redirecting his energies towards the new St Peter’s; and it was Bramante, acting out of naked selfinterest, who had persuaded the pope that his money would be better spent on architecture than on the myriad sculptures of his multi-storied tomb. At his most paranoid, Michelangelo even believed that Bramante seeded the idea that he would be best employed painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling — part of a dastardly plot to make a fool of him by exposing his inadequacies as a painter of frescoes.

The truth is that Michelangelo himself may have been indirectly responsible for the pope’s change of heart. The tomb that he had designed for Julius II was intended, from the outset, to be housed in the old basilica of St Peter’s. But the plan for the monument was so grandiose that it could never have been accommodated within the relatively modest dimensions of that building. The pope may well have decided to enlarge St Peter’s, in the first place, to make room for his own memorial — and then have grown so absorbed by Bramante’s plan for the new building, and so aware of the enormous costs that it would involve, that he decided to shelve the tomb indefinitely.

Michelangelo only discovered what was going on by eavesdropping on one of the pope’s conversations at mealtime. He told the story in a letter to his friend, the Florentine architect Giuliano da Sangallo. ‘At table on Holy Saturday,’ he wrote, ‘I heard the pope say to a jeweller and to the master of ceremonies, to whom he was talking, that he did not wish to spend one baiocco more either on small stones or large ones.’⁴⁰ Michelangelo was alarmed at the remark, which he correctly took to imply that Julius II was no longer prepared to spend large sums on the marble for his tomb. He was also anxious because he had just parted with a considerable amount of his own money to pay off some of the workmen who had brought the marble from Carrara, in the expectation that he would be promptly reimbursed by the papal treasury. During the next few days, his worst fears were confirmed. Time after time he requested an audience with Julius II to settle the matter of his expenses, but on each occasion he was refused entry by the papal equerry. Again and again came the same answer: ‘Forgive me, but I have orders not to admit you.’ Finally, concluding that all was lost — that he would never get his money, that he had wasted eight months in the mountains of Carrara, that the project to which he had hoped to devote his life had been summarily terminated — the artist flew into a rage.

‘Michelangelo,’ writes Condivi,

to whom up to then no portiere had ever been drawn or door closed, seeing himself thus discarded, was angered by this turn of events and answered, ‘And you may tell the pope from now on, if he wants me, he can look for me elsewhere.’ So when he returned home he gave orders to two servants that he had that, when they had sold all the household furniture and collected the money, they were to follow him to Florence. He rode post and at two in the morning he reached Poggibonsi, a fortified town in the domain of Florence, some eighteen or twenty miles from the city. Here, being in a safe place, he alighted. Shortly afterwards, five couriers arrived from Julius, with orders to bring him back wherever they should find him. But they had come upon him in a place where they could do him no violence and, as Michelangelo threatened to have them killed if they attempted anything, they resorted to entreaties; these being of no avail, they did get him to agree that at least he would answer the pope’s letter, which they had presented to him, and that he would write specifically that they had caught up with him in Florence, in order for the pope to understand that they had not been able to bring him back against his will. The tenor of the pope’s letter was this: that, as soon as Michelangelo had seen the present letter, he was to return forthwith to Rome, under pain of his disfavour. To which Michelangelo answered briefly that he would never go back; that in return for his good and faithful service he did not deserve to be driven from the pope’s presence like a villain; and that, since His Holiness no longer wished to pursue the tomb, he was freed from his obligation and did not wish to commit himself to anything else. When he had dated the letter as we said and dismissed the couriers, he went on to Florence . . . ⁴¹

The precise contents of the pope’s letter are not known, but it may have contained the first of many demands that Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The subject had certainly been raised before Michelangelo stormed out of Rome — it is discussed in his correspondence of 1506⁴² — but it may only have inflamed the artist’s anger and sense of injustice. He had wanted to create a monument the like of which the world had never seen. As far as he was concerned, offering him the consolation prize of a mere fresco cycle was adding insult to injury.

Eventually, after months of sulking in his Florentine refuge, the artist was prevailed upon to make his peace with the pope. Julius II had suppressed the rebellious fiefdom of Bologna, bringing it once more under papal rule, and Michelangelo sought him out there. The pope rebuked the recalcitrant artist but then forgave him, sealing the new pact between them with a commission for a monumental sculpture in bronze. The work in question was to be a great statue of Julius II, three times the size of life. It was to be erected on the façade of the church of San Petronio, in the centre of Bologna, to remind the people of the city that their first loyalty should always be to the pope. Julius II specified that he should be shown holding a sword, rather than a book. Michelangelo, who seems to have approved of the idea, replied by explaining his own conception of the statue’s role: ‘It is threatening this populace, Holy Father, if they are not prudent.’⁴³

The commission turned out to be a poisoned chalice. The artist spent the best part of two years in Bologna, living four to a room with his assistants as he struggled with the difficulty of casting such a large work in bronze. After several abortive attempts, he succeeded in making the work, but within three years it was destroyed when the people of Bologna — brazenly defying the statue’s warning to be ‘prudent’ — rebelled against the ineffective rule of the papal legate, Cardinal Alidosi. The bronze was melted down and turned into a cannon, ‘La Giulia’, mockingly named after the pope. After paying the wages of his assistants and covering the cost of materials, Michelangelo was left with the grand total of four and a half ducats for all his efforts.

In February 1508, with little to show for the last three years of his life, Michelangelo returned to Florence. He may have hoped that the pope would leave him alone, but if so the hope was short-lived. In early spring he was summoned again to Rome. Once more, the pope urged him to undertake the painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Once more the artist resisted. But in the end he had no alternative but to swallow his disappointment about the tomb and do the pope’s bidding. ‘He went on refusing to such an extent, that the pope almost lost his temper,’ writes Condivi. ‘But when he saw that the pope was determined, he embarked on that work which is to be seen today in the papal palace to the admiration and amazement of the world, and which brought him so great a reputation that it set him above all envy.’

The chapel in which Michelangelo worked for the best part of four years is a simple rectangular building with heavily fortified walls. It was designed by a Florentine architect named Baccio Pontelli during the pontificate of Julius II’s uncle, Sixtus IV. Work began in 1477 and the building was finished by 1481, which suggests that its completion was viewed as a matter of considerable urgency by the papacy. The Sistine Chapel immediately became the principal place of worship for the capella papalis, or Papal Chapel, a corporate body consisting of the pope and about two hundred senior officials, drawn not only from the ranks of the Church hierarchy but also from the laity — it included cardinals, the generals of the monastic and mendicant orders, visiting archbishops and bishops, as well as qualifying members of the papal household such as the sacristan, the major domo, chamberlains, secretaries, notaries and auditors.⁴⁴

Sistine Chapel exterior

As well as serving as a place of worship, the chapel also housed the cardinals during the conclave in which every new pope was elected. A conclave lasted several days and nights, during which the cardinals would camp in the Sistine Chapel in temporary cells erected for the purpose. Two rows of wooden-framed cubicles were divided by a narrow passage. Each cubicle or cell was covered in coloured cloth, purple for those cardinals created by the recently deceased pope, green for the rest. According to a contemporary eyewitness, when all the preparations for a conclave had been made the Sistine Chapel resembled a hospital ward — a ‘dormitorio di hospitale’ — albeit one of a very splendid kind.⁴⁵

The shape and size of the building mirrored its importance. Its dimensions are those of Solomon’s Temple, as they are described in the Book of Kings. Its length is twice its height and three times its width. The surfaces of Solomon’s Temple were covered in cedar and gold, but the Sistine Chapel was intended from the outset to be decorated with paintings. As soon as the building was ready Sixtus IV had commissioned leading artists of the time, including Perugino, Signorelli and Botticelli, to paint two continuous fresco cycles on its walls. On one of the chapel’s long walls, they painted scenes from the life of Christ; on the other, scenes from the life of Moses. The meaning of this parallelism is underscored by inscriptions on the cornice declaring that Moses, to whom God gave the Ten Commandments, ‘is the bearer of the Old Law’, while Christ is ‘the bearer of the new Law’.⁴⁶

The pictures illustrated a commonplace of Christian theology, one that underpinned the authority of the Church itself. They insisted that the era of Mosaic law, or tempus legis, had been inevitably succeeded in God’s plan by the era of Christ’s unwritten law, which was the era of grace, or tempus gratiae. Directly above these frescoes, flanking the windows of the chapel, are depictions of the early popes. Arranged in chronological order, with each pope made to resemble a painted statue standing in a niche, they stress the continuity and legitimacy of the papal succession.

When Michelangelo was summoned by Julius II, the figurative paintings of the chapel stopped there. The shallow barrel vault of the ceiling was decorated with a rudimentary vision of heaven, an ultramarine sky with stars of gold that had been contributed by a minor artist called Piermatteo d’Amelia. But that was all.

The first scheme suggested to Michelangelo by the pope was surprisingly modest. It consisted principally of twelve depictions of the Apostles, to be painted on the twelve pendentives that run down between the six round-headed windows on each side of the chapel. Julius II, an enthusiastic connoisseur of the art of antiquity, also wanted Michelangelo to replace Piermatteo’s starry sky with a modern version of the decorated ceilings that had been discovered in the recently excavated Golden House of the emperor Nero. The relatively undemanding nature of the proposal may only have strengthened Michelangelo’s reluctance to carry it out. Twelve figures and a ceiling decorated with fashionably antique motifs, grotteschi and the like – this was hardly a fitting recompense for the loss of the commission for the great tomb.

By his own account, Michelangelo eventually plucked up his courage and told the pope exactly what he thought of his plan. It was, he said, ‘a poor thing’. Unless he were allowed to do something much more ambitious, he would be wasting his own time and the pope’s money. According to Michelangelo, Julius II capitulated, saying that the artist could do as he liked. Whether or not it happened exactly like that, it seems that Michelangelo was given considerable licence to reconceive the programme of paintings for the ceiling. Just as he had transformed a misshapen block of Carrara marble into the monumental David, so would he transform the pope’s inchoate proposal into one of the most ambitious works of painting ever seen.

The new programme was far more complicated and far more extensive than the initial proposal. Michelangelo instantly did away with the idea of an essentially abstract decoration of the vault. Instead, it was to be decorated with nine depictions of stories from the Book of Genesis. The twelve Apostles in the pendentives were to be replaced by figures of the prophets and the sibyls who had told of the coming of Christ. Michelangelo also wanted to paint the arches above the windows with scenes showing Christ’s ancestors. The artists employed by Sixtus IV had painted the lives of Christ and Moses, the eras of grace and of law. The theme of Michelangelo’s new programme was the very first era of history, from God’s creation of the world to the time of Noah. This was the era before that of Moses, known as ante legem, before the law. All in all, his scheme would both transform the chapel and complete it — turning the space into a total narrative of all human history as it was understood in Christian terms.

Michelangelo may have exaggerated when he said that the pope had given him licence to do as he liked. But like many of his other exaggerations and distortions, it may express something he felt to be morally if not literally true. The ceiling was his. He thought of it. He created it. It is very unlikely that he was actually given carte blanche in deciding the subject matter to be represented in the major chapel of the Vatican. The chances are that his proposals were at the very least vetted by Julius II and by one or more of the theologians in his circle. Yet the whole scheme bears the stamp of Michelangelo’s powerfully idiosyncratic artistic personality. This is not just a matter of its scale, with 175 separate pictorial units replacing the mere twelve originally proposed. Its form, too, could only have been conceived by Michelangelo. He unified the many different parts of his scheme by arranging all of its images within the framework of a vast imaginary architectural structure. It resembles a classical temple, but most of all it resembles Michelangelo’s earlier design for the project he had cherished above all others — that of the abandoned tomb for Julius II.⁴⁷

Having persuaded the pope to agree to the new scheme, Michelangelo finally committed himself to the project. He hired a group of assistants from Florence, although he later told Condivi and Vasari that he soon became so dissatisfied with their standards of timekeeping and work that he locked them out of the chapel altogether, painting alone and ‘without even the assistance of someone to grind his colours for him’. This cannot be strictly true, because even an artist as independent as Michelangelo cannot have dispensed with the services of a colour-grinder and a plasterer, whose job it would have been to prepare the intonaco, the layer of wet plaster on which each day’s painting was to be done. This is another of Michelangelo’s eloquent half-truths — his way of letting posterity know that he delegated little of the actual painting of the vault to anyone else, which was certainly the case.

Michelangelo was also responsible for the ingenious design of the scaffolding necessary for the work. He devised a structure which in Vasari’s description was ‘erected on supports which kept clear of the walls’ — a wooden platform resting on joists wedged into a series of holes cut into the walls above the chapel windows, which allowed the building to remain in use during the years that Michelangelo spent painting the vault. The platform was half the vault’s length, so halfway through the work it was moved from one end of the chapel to the other. According to Vasari, Michelangelo’s economical design replaced an earlier, unsuccessful structure, supported by ropes, that had been cobbled together by the pope’s architect Bramante. In this way, Vasari says, he ‘enabled a poor carpenter, who rebuilt the scaffolding, to dispense with so many of the ropes that when Michelangelo gave him what was left over he sold them and made enough money for a dowry for his daughter’.

Contrary to legend, Michelangelo did not paint the vault of the chapel lying down. There was room between platform and ceiling for the artist to stand, and that was how he worked, although such was the angle at which he had to crane his neck that he suffered constantly from cramps, spasms and headaches. He wrote a comical poem about the experience, which he dedicated to a friend, a man called Giovanni (John) who lived in Pistoia, but about whom nothing else is known; and he embellished it with a tiny caricature of a painter — himself — reaching upwards to the ceiling with his brush (see p. ii).

I’ve got myself a goitre from this strain,
As water gives the cats in Lombardy
Or maybe it is in some other country;
My belly’s pushed by force beneath my chin.

My beard toward Heaven, I feel the back of my brain
Upon my neck, I grow the breast of a Harpy;
My brush, above my face continually,
Makes it a splendid floor by dripping down.

My loins have penetrated to my paunch,
My rump’s a crupper, as a counterweight,
And pointless the unseeing steps I go.

In front of me my skin is being stretched
While it folds up behind and forms a knot,
And I am bending like a Syrian bow.

And judgement, hence, must grow,
Borne in the mind, peculiar and untrue;
You cannot shoot well when the gun’s askew.

John, come to the rescue
Of my dead painting now, and of my honour;
I’m not in a good place, and I’m no painter.⁴⁸

The rest of this book is about the paintings created by the man who thought he was no painter.