Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel (5 page)

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.