Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel (9 page)
Read Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel Online
Authors: Andrew Graham-Dixon
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
