Home	Michelangelo: The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti, Florentine Painter, Sculptor, and Architect [1475-1564]
	Michelangelo Buonarroti was the son of Ludovico di Lionardo di Buonarrota Simoni, a substantial Florentine, whose family history can be traced back to the early 13th century. He was born in the Casentino ( March 6, 1475), while his father was for a short time Podestà there, and on the return to Florence he was left to nurse with the wife of a stone-cutter in the hamlet of Settignano on the hills above Florence. Three periods are distinguished in Michelangelo's career: 1. That of his youth ( 1475-1508), a period of the most strenuous self-discipline; 2. That of his mature manhood (from his thirty-fourth to sixtieth year); 3. That of his somewhat disillusioned old age. Cox happily characterises them as the periods of realism, of style, and of mannerism. The child's predilection for art was at first opposed by his family, but finally, at the age of thirteen (in 1488), he was apprenticed to Ghirlandaio, who was engaged at the time on the Frescoes in the apse of S. M. Novella. Here he was treated with especial consideration, and was even allowed a small stipend, unusual for a beginner. No sounder technical training than Ghirlandaio's could be found in Florence. Though narrow, it was entirely adequate for monumental work, and its faithfulness and accomplished technique are evident even in Michelangelo's mature style. But much though Michelangelo doubtless gained from Ghirlandaio's training, he was of a different spirit, and within two years he had followed a comrade ( Francesco Granacci) into a sort of Academy held in the Medici gardens near S. Marco, where an old assistant of Donatello's--Bartoldo--was giving in struction from antique sculpture under the patronage of Lorenzo di Medici. Bartoldo was in the best tradition of Florentine naturalists, and the close study of the antique (even the GræcoRoman) chastened Michelangelo's somewhat romantic taste. The boy quickly attracted notice, and was given lodging ( 1490) in the court-like residence of Lorenzo himself, which was a centre for artists and literati attracted by Lorenzo's personal charm and generous patronage. To this circle Michelangelo owed his liberal education. His bent from the first was evidently for sculpture, of which there are a few early pieces. The earliest is a small relief of Centaurs and Lapiths 1 executed at this time, evidently inspired by the designs on Græco-Roman sarcophagi, and showing the anatomical research and expression in the human body apart from the face which were characteristic through life. As art it is unimportant, as the production of a boy not yet twenty it is remarkable. In 1492, when Michelangelo was seventeen years old, Lorenzo died, and in the confusion which succeeded with the accession to authority of his feeble son, Michelangelo left the Medici house for that of his own father, and soon after betook himself to Bologna, where he was brought into contact with the sculpture of della Quercia, and was fortunate in the cultivating influences of a noble humanist named Aldovrandi who befriended him. Through the kindness of this new patron he obtained his first commission ( 1495) for an Angel and a little figure of S. Petronius on the shrine of S. Domenic (Church of S. Domenico, Bologna). These have a distinctly classic treatment, a broad conception, and excellent workmanship, but are not important. PIETÀ.--He returned to Florence after more than a year's absence, only in a few months ( 1496) to proceed to Rome, in the first instance to collect a bad debt, but where he lingered four years, learning especially from the antique. Of this Roman sojourn we have a Bacchus ( 1497, Bargello, Florence), a private order from a Roman banker, Jacopo Gallo, a derivative and not pleasing work, though skilful in technique in the vein of inferior Græco-Roman sculpture. We have also his first important work, the Pietà ( 1498, S. Peter's), the most completely finished of the master's works, and also the most tender and lovely. The conception is fresh yet religious, poetic yet searching for natural truth. It combines classic reserve with a memory in the drapery of della Quercia. DAVID.--He returned to Florence in March 1501, when twenty-six years old, and the story of the following period is one of strenuous labours, of all-night studies in anatomy, of selfimposed discipline and growing fame, and from then until his death he was occupied with important public commissions. The first was for the David, which was commissioned in 1501, and set up in the Piazza Signoria in May 1504. The David, like the Pietà, is a consummate application of science to art. Its spirit is essentially the spirit of Donatello and Verrocchio, using truth to the actual model as a basis for ideal beauty. The standing youth with alert pose is described, to the veins beneath the skin. Some of the details would be even ugly without the suggestion of heroic act. Mr. Cox says that it is "the work of a student, surely the most wonderful student who ever lived, but still a student learning truth, not yet a supreme master expressing feeling." Yet even in his early sculpture knowledge is not an ultimate end. The somewhat literal David is dominated by a typical idea. It is an image not indeed of the Biblical David, but of athletic youth itself. The David was followed by other orders: the commission for twelve apostles to decorate the exterior of the Duomo, of which one only was begun--the S. Matthew--but this figure, partly hewn, is instinct with imaginative force which foretells the creations of the Julian and Medici tombs, a Madonna and Child in the round ( 1506), now at Bruges, two circular Madonna Reliefs (one in the Bargello, Florence, and one in London) and the tondo of the Holy Family (Uffizi), painted for the Doni family. This last, executed about 1503, while the artist was still working on the David, is his only existing finished panel painting. Though uninspired, it is interesting for its hint of his painting to come in the Sistine Chapel. The picture is a consciously academic study with Ghirlandaio's technique, his over-studied composition and hard colour, though without his elaboration of detail. He is not yet free except in the nude background figures, which are felt with a Greek suavity and ease, and in their breadth recall Signorelli. It is indeed not to Ghirlandaio, but to Signorelli and his forerunners, that Michelangelo's art must be traced. There is, of course, an infinite artistic gap between them and him. No single painter can be looked upon as a true forerunner of the master of the Sistine Ceiling. Yet Signorelli's mighty figures at Loreto are in the same kind, and lead us back to the majestic presences of Piero della Francesco and Masaccio. Even supreme genius is no accident. Michelangelo is the logical culmination of their initiative and breadth. PISAN WAR.--In 1504 he received the order for the decoration of one wall of the new Council Chamber in the Palazzo Vecchio, opposite the wall on which the veteran Leonardo was then working. Like Leonardo's, the Cartoon and a section of fresco was all that was ever finished. Yet the work took his countrymen by storm, and it was upon this as much as upon the David that his fame rested. It represented an incident of the war with Pisa of 1354, one of the outbursts of the chronic strife continually waging between the rival cities. Florentine soldiers surprised while bathing in the Arno--in the water, scrambling out, and hastily dressing on the bank--gave a theme for every possible attitude of the male nude, and the remaining sketches and copies indicate that all the anatomical science of Michelangelo's past years was called into play, but with the student's interest in the forms themselves rather than in any underlying imaginative idea. JULIAN TOMB.--The Cartoon was interrupted by Michelangelo's summons to Rome by Julius II early in 1505. From this time his career under the patronage of four successive Popes was one long series of colossal undertakings in Rome and Florence in sculpture, painting, and architecture, culminating in the dome of St. Peter's, each except the Sistine ceiling doomed to inadequate support and consequent incompletion. Julius' first commission was for a colossal tomb to symbolise the Church triumphant in the person of its latest pontiff. The tomb was planned for the chancel of the great St. Peter's which was to take the place of the old Basilica, of the 5th century, already being demolished. Michelangelo sketched a scheme 1 involving many figures in an imposing architectural setting, and he was hurried off to the quarries of Carrara to select the marble. There were delays and losses of material, and months elapsed before the artist was again in Rome and at work. He still held the enthusiastic confidence of Julius, and had the entrée of the Pope's most private hours. It was not strange, however, that with Michelangelo's irascibility and solitary habit he should have found scant favour among the politicians of the Papal Court. Raphael was introduced to the Pope, and became the centre of a rival faction. Julius was troubled by many affairs; he was contemplating a campaign against the recalcitrant Bolognese, and money was scarce; he was old, and there were those to warn him that a tomb built while living brought ill-augury. Thus harassed, he dropped the magnificent design, and broke with his great artist. Michelangelo, refused admission to the Vatican, returned in heat to Florence (spring of 1506), where he quietly finished the Cartoon of the Pisan War. It was some months later ( November 1596) that he was prevailed upon by Julius to join him in Bologna, just subdued to the Pope's rule. Here he was set to execute a colossal bronze Statue of Julius to stand over the entrance of the Church of S. Petronio; but again there were difficulties--the casting failed--and it was not in place until February 1508. SISTINE CEILING.--Returning from Bologna ( March 1508), Michelangelo, after a few months' interval in Florence, passed on to Rome, and sorely against his will abandoned the tomb, and commenced at the Pope's command the decoration of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which was to be his most successful work. It was composed of a multitude of figures of gigantic size. The first part was finished in a little over eight months, and the second half, begun January 1510, was finished in October 1512, in spite of the interruptions of brief journeys. We can picture the artist working alone except for mechanical aid, scarcely eating, sleeping undressed, and the aged Pope goading him on. Although the series begins with the creation at the altar end of the chapel, Michelangelo began to paint at the entrance, and his monumental sense grew as he proceeded, as may be seen in the increase in scale from the earlier to the later pictures-the smaller size of the figures in the Deluge, for example, and Jonah's great bulk. What especially distinguishes the work is the architectural framework and a peculiar monumental power in single figures and groups. As in much Greek art, the significance of the bodily structure is expressed apart from the head. As the master's first stage in his Florentine work was to realise the human body, the second step was to conceive the body in its heroic aspect, and in the end a passionate imagination entirely transcended the form. His ethical sense transfigures the physical presences with the glory of existence itself. The difficult compositional problem was solved with the finest decorative and architectural skill. He divided the long expanse of ceiling into nine scenes in rectangles, alternately large and small, which are supported and connected by athletes and genii--supreme examples of a decorative employment of movement--and by a painted architectural framework. Knitting and supporting this framework are great seated figures of prophets and sibyls. Below are subsidiary supporting scenes in the Old Testament story. The descriptive motive is the great drama of Creation and the Fall, the hope of salvation, and man's continued frailty. The compositions are full of meaning and variety--the whirling force of the early creation subjects; the grace of Adam touched with the finger of the Almighty, where the sublime moment of the Creator's work is expressed in the impact of spirit upon body, and the awakening of man, full of vigour, to his normal life on earth, frankly appeals on elemental physical grounds--the representation of Deity, if admitted at all, has no more noble type; the passion and tragedy of the Fall, the desperate human incidents and superhuman beauty in the Deluge, where the affinity between Michelangelo and Signorelli's composition and Myron-like action is especially notable. Prophets and wise women are conceived as great presences who have seen into divine mysteries. Pictorial accessories are subordinated, landscape, for example, being suggestive only. Yet what is more sheerly expressive than the tree and setting in the Fall, and the dreary waste of the Expulsion? Old compositions are sometimes used, as the Expulsion, which follows Masaccio almost line by line, and the figure of the Creator in the Creation of Adam is also Masaccio's. The Creation of Eve is taken from della Quercia, though the whole composition and intent are original. The quiet colour-tone, though sometimes lacking in his work, here in the Sistine ceiling is essential to the expression. Julius' successor, Leo X, son of Lorenzo di Medici, though friendly to Michelangelo, preferred the society of more genial spirits. Raphael, already established in the city, was a prime favourite, and work in Florence was proposed to Buonarroti. Hereafter, for some twenty years, his time passed in architectural and sculptural undertakings--in designing a sculptured façade (never executed) for the Church of S. Lorenzo in Florence; in building the Laurentian Library at its side; in constructing city defences; in designing the new Sacristy of S. Lorenzo, and executing there the great Medici tombs; in completing for members of the Rovere family the garbled design for Julius II's interrupted tomb. The Medici and the Julian tombs are the master's greatest sculptural undertakings. Indeed he always looked upon sculpture as his true vocation, and he is less original as a pictorial composer than in relating a plastic ensemble to its architectural setting, as in the Sacristy of S. Lorenzo, or as the builder of compact sculptured groups, as his late Deposition in Florence. Even when compelled to paint or to turn architect his mind was busy on vast sculptural projects. MEDICI TOMBS.--From 1524 to 1533 he was executing the two memorial tombs in the new Sacristy of S. Lorenzo in honour of the Medici princes, Giuliano and Lorenzo--the son and grandson of Lorenzo the Magnificent. The spacious chapel itself is wholly designed by Michelangelo and executed by his assistants. The two dukes are represented seated--Giuliano, Duke of Nemours, with the raised head of action, on the opposite wall Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, his face under its helmet in shadowed meditation. Reclining beneath Giuliano are the two colossal mysterious figures, male and female, of Day and Night. Below Lorenzo are the superb figures of Dawn and Evening. Against a third wall, opposite the altar, is placed a Madonna and Child, of the same heroic mould, and intended for a more complete setting. The figures are uneven in execution, in places left rough-hewn, in parts having the finest finish. There is the completest knowledge of the figure, together with impossible proportions and attitudes. Yet so noble is the design, so true the construction, so heart-searching the feeling, that one recognises a genius who, knowing all the laws, could dare when he needed to break them. They well illustrate the fact that Michelangelo in the bulk of his work cares more for the end than the means, and transcends all traditional canons. In the nervously tooled surface-textures and the handling in general of the master's later sculpture, as well as in the summary drawings and sweeping execution of the frescoes, one feels the grasp and touch of the trained hand let loose. Ideal effects are enhanced by leaving the work at times in the rough. The appeal is more and more to our imagination from the precision and finish of the Pietà and the David. Turning again to the Julian Tomb, Michelangelo proceeded with little heart, and after various delays and financial difficulties it was finally set up in S. Pietro in Vincoli in Rome ( 1545). Of this the upper part was executed by others, and the two statues called Rachel and Leah (worked on by assistants?) bear little of the marks of the master, but the seated Moses in the centre, begun and probably nearly finished by Michelangelo in the first two years of his conception of the tomb ( 1505-1506), which had rested for forty years in his studio, is worthy of the great enterprise it inaugurated. The intensity and loftiness of spirit of the Hebrew Lawgiver, foreseeing, profound, grand, is imagined as never elsewhere. Other statues which are referred to the original design for the tomb are the two so-called Slaves, of the Louvre, of extraordinary grace and beauty, an epitome of pathos; and the four Figures, barely suggested and still embedded in the marble, now in the Academy, Florence. LAST JUDGMENT. --The artist was recalled to Rome in 1535 by the new Pope, Paul III, who commissioned the completion of the Sistine Chapel by the decoration of the end opposite the entrance with a picture of the Last Judgment. The windows on the end wall were blocked up, the three pictures by Perugino and the lunettes by Michelangelo himself were destroyed, and the whole space was filled by the new fresco. It is easy to regard the work as decadent and baroque. This struggling mass of bodies is far enough removed from the lucidity and restraint of the ceiling above. Michelangelo's soul was not serene, and his hand was ageing. But gradually a motive appears in the disorder. The central figure of Christ appears with the shrinking Virgin. On each side are ranged the saints and martyrs; above a tumult of angels are carrying and presenting the instruments of the Passion. Below, on right and left, are the Redeemed and Lost. Below the throne, in the centre of a band of open sky, is a group of angels sounding the last trump, and in the lowest zone is a narrow fragment of solid earth on one side with opened graves and ascending bodies, and on the other Lucifer and his loathsome crew. He has again exalted the nude into a sheer type of imaginative expression. There is profuse variety and interplay of forms--foreshortened arms and legs, involved groups, surging and plunging figures--yet the composition is ordered, the groups close-knit, motion is regulated by large balancing curves. There are individual passages of sweetness, as the Blessed stooping to help their awakening friends, the lovely face of an angel, the solemn adoration of a martyr head near the throne, the radiant S. Sebastian (of the young Apollo type); and there is fine drawing, yet in general there is overaction and exaggeration in muscles, and figures suggesting the daring experiments of Tintoretto and Correggio. There is sombreness of conception: the Christ (a pagan type) is unrelenting, the martyrs rejoice in the fall of the damned, one sinking soul has a face of frozen horror, Lucifer is a hideous creation; yet there is power in the inevitable movement of groups upward and downward, and there remains something of the master's gospel of human dignity. Even the human agony at the final hour becomes an heroic catastrophe. As with Signorelli and the master of the Triumph of Death, humanity is the centre of Michelangelo's conception of the sublime resolution of the mysteries of life in a final adjudication. Deeply religious in temperament, although indifferent to theoretical theology, the master's sense for realities was too strong to admit of those graceful compromises common to current votive painting. He proclaims an heroic ideal of life as a religious motive, a faith painfully wrought out by a sorrowful, bewildered, and wearied spirit. If not Christian, it is deliberately religious. Michelangelo was now recognised as the Nestor of all the arts without a rival. He towers alone among the infelicities of inferior baroque painters and the reactionary policies of successive popes. Disillusioned by bitter disappointments, his health undermined by excessive labours, he yet lived for ninety years. On the death of Antonio da San Gallo in 1546 Pope Paul III created him Architect-in-chief of St. Peter's, and his construction of its dome. Outside of his profession Michelangelo had few interests. His reserved and concentrated character, the extreme labour demanded by his projects, and his isolated habit of life left little room for the more general interests which engaged contemporaries, as Leonardo and Botticelli. We recall his words of somewhat grim humour, "In my art I have only too much of a wife, and she has given me trouble enough; as to my children, they are the works that I shall leave." Of artistic friendships we hear little. He must have had an acquaintance with Leonardo, though hardly a sympathetic one, and must have learned from him. He knew Raphael working in the Vatican from 1508 to 1514, but at a distance. Sebastiano del Piombo, arriving in Rome from Venice while the Sistine ceiling was in progress, felt his influence and became a friend. But for the most part his followers, as Vasari, were inferior imitators. Yet he was a devoted son and brother, and was capable of intense affection, and though physically timid and of a nervous and melancholy temperament, he was consistently noble, disinterested, and courageous. His strongest personal attachment appears in his devotion to Vittoria Colonna, the widow of Prince Colonna, which dated from his sixtieth year. This passionate friendship (from 1536 to her death in 1547) was the softening and cheering influence of his later life, and he found himself at home in the circle she gathered about her, which was touched by the profound religious revival lingering half a century after Savonarola. To these years belong his poems, breathing strong emotions and profound religious feeling. Of his last works we need say little. There is a general agreement that ill-health, an isolation of mind, his disappointments, and an almost inevitable embitterment of temper show themselves here. The Crucifixion of S. Peter and the Conversion of S. Paul ( Vatican) are a reiteration of outworn motives without a hint of the master's power. They may well be forgotten. But in the Deposition of the Florence Duomo, his last sculptured work, we find the old fire still warm, and in the deep expression of overwhelming sorrow, it is to be compared to the early Pietà, of S. Peter's. When he died in Rome ( February 17, 1564) the whole city was stirred, and his followers carried his body secretly by night, lest they be prevented, to Florence, where, after extraordinary popular manifestations of regard, he was buried with pomp in S. Croce, the home of the illustrious Florentine dead. THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO Critics of Michelangelo have sometimes spoken as if the only characteristic of his genius were a wonderful strength, verging, as in the things of the imagination great strength always does, on what is singular or strange. A certain strangeness, something of the blossoming of the aloe, is indeed an element in all true works of art; that they shall excite or surprise us is indispensable. But that they shall give pleasure and exert a charm over us is indispensable too; and this strangeness must be sweet also--a lovely strangeness. And to the true admirers of Michelangelo this is the true type of the Michelangelesque-sweetness and strength, pleasure with surprise, an energy of conception which seems at every moment about to break through all the conditions of comely form, recovering, touch by touch, a loveliness found usually only in the simplest natural things--ex forti dulcedo. In this way he sums up for them the whole character of medieval art itself in that which distinguishes it most clearly from classical work, the presence of a convulsive energy in it, becoming in lower hands merely monstrous or forbidding, but felt, even in its most graceful products, as a subdued quaintness or grotesque. Yet those who feel this grace or sweetness in Michelangelo might at the first moment be puzzled if they were asked wherein precisely the quality resided. Men of inventive temperament--Victor Hugo, for instance, in whom, as in Michelangelo, people have for the most part been attracted or repelled by the strength, while few have understood his sweetness--have sometimes relieved conceptions of merely moral or spiritual greatness, but with little æsthetic charm of their own, by lovely accidents or accessories, like the butterfly which alights on the blood-stained barricade in Les Misérables, or those sea-birds for which the monstrous Gilliatt comes to be as some wild natural thing, so that they are no longer afraid of him, in Les Travailleurs de la Mer. But the austere genius of Michelangelo will not depend for its sweetness on any mere accessories like these. The world of natural things has almost no existence for him; "When one speaks of him," says Grimm, "woods, clouds, seas, and mountains disappear, and only what is formed by the spirit of man remains behind"; and he quotes a few slight words from a letter of his to Vasari as the single expression in all he has left of a feeling for nature. He has traced no flowers, like those with which Leonardo stars over his gloomiest rocks; nothing like the fretwork of wings and flames in which Blake frames his most startling conceptions; no forest-scenery like Titian's fills his backgrounds, but only blank ranges of rock, and dim vegetable forms as blank as they, as in a world before the creation of the first five days. Of the whole story of the creation he has painted only the creation of the first man and woman, and, for him at least, feebly, the creation of light. It belongs to the quality of his genius thus to concern itself almost exclusively with the creation of man. For him it is not, as in the story itself, the last and crowning act of a series of developments, but the first and unique act, the creation of life itself in its supreme form, off-hand and immediately, in the cold and lifeless stone. With him the beginning of life has all the characteristics of resurrection; it is like the recovery of suspended health or animation, with its gratitude, its effusion, and eloquence. Fair as the young men of the Elgin marbles, the Adam of the Sistine Chapel is unlike them in a total absence of that balance and completeness which express so well the sentiment of a selfcontained, independent life. In that languid figure there is something rude and satyr-like, something akin to the rugged hillside on which it lies. His whole form is gathered into an expression of mere expectation and reception; he has hardly strength enough to lift his finger to touch the finger of the creator; yet a touch of the finger-tips will suffice.