Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel (3 page)

In short, Michelangelo did not just invent a new kind of art, but a new idea of what art could be. He put his own sensibility, his own intellect, his own need and desire to fathom the mysteries of the Christian faith, centre stage. Before considering the ceiling’s many layers of meaning — the principal concern of this book — it will be helpful to consider Michelangelo’s personality, insofar as it can be understood, and to give some account of his life in the years leading up to its creation.

M
ichelangelo 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.