The Ugly Renaissance (23 page)

This was exciting in and of itself, but its implications were even more earth-shattering. From Manetti’s reasoning, it seemed that God had ensured that man would pursue the right path by making some things more enjoyable than others. What was necessary became pleasurable, and it was the pursuit of pleasure that had led humanity not only to survive but also to become civilized. As
Aurelio Lippo Brandolini (ca. 1454–97) argued in his
Dialogus de humanae vitae conditione et toleranda corporis aegritudine
(Dialogue on the condition of human life and on bearing bodily sickness),

Since a certain pleasure and delight has been attached by nature to those things which pertain to human nourishment and propagation lest anyone should neglect his life or his offspring through boredom or labour, and thereby cause the human race itself to come to an end, necessity is gradually converted into luxury; nor is only what is sufficient sought but what lust desires, and things by degrees have come to the point that men think that they can in no way live without wheat, wine, wool, buildings, and many even not without odours, unguents, plumes, and other delights. And apart from this condition there originated for men agriculture, navigation, construction of buildings, innumerable gainful arts, from this finally all labours so that they may be fed in elegance, abound in clothing and buildings, enjoy those pleasures which [are sometimes called] so miserable and so troublesome.

Physical pleasure was, in other words, an intrinsic part of human existence: men and women simply
had
to enjoy themselves in order to fulfill their roles in God’s plan for humanity. “
It will be difficult,” Manetti argued,

if not impossible, to say how greatly man is taken by the pleasures which arise from seeing beautiful bodies, from hearing sounds and harmonies and other great and varied things, from smelling flowers and other similar odours, from tasting sweet foods and suave wines, [and] from touching the softest substances … 
Therefore, if men … enjoyed more pleasures in life than they are tormented by troubles and anguish, they ought to be joyful and consoled, rather than complain and lament; especially since nature supplies more remedies for cold, heat, labours, pains, and diseases … that are soft, sweet, and abundantly pleasurable; for just as when we eat and drink in driving away hunger and thirst we are marvellously pleased, so when we get well, when we cool off, when we rest, likewise we have pleasure.

This was even more true when it came to sexual pleasure, and Manetti made use of quasi-Darwinian arguments in contending that sexual ecstasy had been created for a very definite reason:

Those [pleasures] which are generally and specifically perceived by the touch of the genitalia seem in a certain way more delightful than all other touchable things. The philosophers say that this was done by Nature … not blindly or by chance but by certain reasons and for evident purposes, so that far greater pleasures are received in eating and drinking because she gave priority to the preservation of the species over that of individuals.

If man did
not
enjoy physical pleasures, Manetti argued, he was not only forgetting his own nature but also harming both himself and humanity as a whole.

Exciting and inspiring though Manetti’s argument may have been, he nevertheless allowed his critics scope for disagreement. Even if it was accepted that humanity had an obligation to enjoy all the pleasures life had to offer, the fact that Manetti continued to distinguish between body and soul raised a question about whether there was, in fact, a
scale
of happiness. Physical pleasures were all well and good, a critic might have said, but the soul was still the noblest part of the whole man: this being so, it was only fair to ask whether the pleasures of the soul were not still superior to the pleasures of the body.

It was left to Manetti’s compatriot the priest-philologist
Lorenzo Valla (ca. 1407–57) to solve this problem.
Truculent, irascible, and powerfully argumentative, Valla patched up the gaps in Manetti’s thinking to offer a strong defense of physical pleasure in the
De voluptate
(1431).
Conceived as a dialogue between three friends, each of whom represents
a different school of philosophy, this work was devoted to exploring the relative merits of the lives of pleasure and contemplation and, in doing so, concentrated heavily on the nature of happiness.

Valla began by observing that
Aristotle had identified three ways of living—the life of pleasure, the civil or political life, and the contemplative life—and noted that each of these was pursued both for its own sake and for the sake of happiness. Yet, Valla argued, there was a problem inherent in this distinction. How could you say that
all three
modes of living were pursued for their own sake
and
for the sake of happiness at the same time? This suggested that happiness was both intrinsic to all three, yet somehow different. It couldn’t be both at once.
Since happiness had to be an absolute state, it was obvious to Valla that if happiness was to be found, all three ways of living had to be combined. None was superior to the others, and all was a part of the “good life.” Pleasure, in other words, was a necessary part of happiness.

Valla was, however, no fool. He knew that this view would arouse more than a little opposition. In particular, he anticipated that some of his stuffier friends would try to argue that even if “pleasure” was a part of happiness, there were different ways of understanding the concept. Indeed, Valla knew that someone would inevitably argue that intellectual pleasure was superior to physical pleasure and that “contemplation” was the ideal way of living. Determined to head critics off at the pass, Valla immediately smashed this argument to pieces.

Since the word “pleasure” is used to describe both intellectual and physical enjoyment, Valla believed that the two were identical: both formed a part of what pleasure really was. It was foolish, he believed, to draw an artificial distinction between the two: although corporeal enjoyment and spiritual enjoyment were subtly different modes of experience, both body and soul still enjoyed the same pleasure. It was thus impossible to defend a contemplative life as something distinct or better.
Even if one could speak of a contemplative life, Valla—like
Epicurus—argued that since all types of enjoyment are identical, contemplation actually aimed at pleasure, which was both intellectual and physical. When this was turned on its head, it was apparent that the pursuit of pleasure was, in fact, a part of contemplation, and thus it was obvious that sensuality was the best—indeed the only—virtuous way of life.

Between them, Valla and Manetti had produced a more positive and exciting vision of human existence and a workable theoretical justification
for the new spirit of sensual indulgence that had been described with such passion and joy by
Boccaccio and Lorenzo de’ Medici. Far from being infra dig, sex and pleasure were, in fact, the
essence
of human dignity. And it was a lesson that Michelangelo seems to have taken strongly to heart.

A
CT 4
: R
ESOLUTION

Having idealized
Tommaso de’ Cavalieri in imitation of Dante, tormented himself with sorrow and self-hatred in the manner of Petrarch, and given way temporarily to his lusts with all the enthusiasm of Boccaccio, Valla, and Lorenzo de’ Medici, Michelangelo finally found himself in a quandary. He was, in a word, torn. On the one hand, he loved the distant and occasionally cold Tommaso as the embodiment of all that was good and true, and was compelled by the imminence of death to shrink from all but the purest and most spiritual form of love. But on the other hand, he was also driven by an irrepressible sexual desire that he enjoyed, celebrated, and extolled. Drawing on rival traditions of Renaissance thought to give expression to the conflict, he was tearing himself apart. He needed to find a way of reconciling the two sides of his character. He needed to find a way of uniting love, sex, and death.

As 1533 drew on, Michelangelo had a revelation. There is no telling whether it dawned on him slowly or came all of a sudden, but the light of a solution began to shine through the clouds of his tortured relationship just as the sniping gossip of friends was beginning to bite. He began to see that there need not be any conflict at all. Earth and heaven were bound together in a chain of goodness and splendor that linked the body directly with God himself. What made Tommaso so beautiful—and so titillating—was not the fact that he
represented
all that was perfect but rather the fact that his beauty was itself a part of the divine. The pleasures of the flesh, the love of the ideal, and the longing for virtue could all come together at once. Michelangelo could love Tommaso physically
and
spiritually at the same time. Indeed, this new form of love seemed almost like an act of worship in itself. In a blaze of inspiration, Michelangelo scribbled it all down in one of his most revealing verses:

Here in your lovely face I see, my lord,

what in this life no words could ever tell;

with that, although still clothed in flesh, my soul

has often already risen up to God.

And if the foolish, fell, malevolent crowd

point others out as sharing their own ill,

I do not cherish less this yearning will,

the love, the faith, the chaste desire of good.

To wise men there is nothing that we know

more like that fount of mercy whence we come

than every thing of beauty here below;

nor is there other sample, other fruit

of heaven on earth; he who loves you with faith

transcends to God above and holds death sweet.

The same sentiments shone through in
The
Rape of Ganymede
(
Fig. 17
), the second of the two gift drawings that Michelangelo sent Tommaso at the very end of 1532. This depicted a tale of divine infatuation. As Tommaso would have known from
Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
, Ganymede was just a humble Trojan shepherd, but his extraordinary good looks had inflamed Zeus’s passion. Lustful and impulsive, the god had to have Ganymede for himself. In Michelangelo’s picture, Zeus, having transformed himself into an eagle, is shown carrying the lad up to Olympus to be his cup bearer.
But far from showing any surprise, Ganymede seems to be caught between a loving swoon and an expression of pure ecstasy. Here, Michelangelo seems to have pictured himself in the place of both characters at the same time. Like Zeus, he clearly burned with a powerful desire for the boy’s physical form and longed to snatch the handsome youth away for an eternity of platonic pleasure; and, like Ganymede, he felt himself carried heavenward by a love that he was powerless to resist. The love of the physical, in other words, became not merely an act of worship but also a transcendent experience. Everything—love, physical passion, spiritual closeness, religious belief—came together at once.

In this final “act” of the drama of his relationship with Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, Michelangelo was reenacting a part of his own youth.
As a young man in the household of Lorenzo de’ Medici, he had been welcomed into a circle of humanists, the most prominent members of which included
Marsilio Ficino and
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Avid students and translators of Greek philosophy, these
Neoplatonists (
or, as
Richard Mackenney has revealingly termed them, these
“Neo-Neo
platonists”) had succeeded in reconciling the disparate strands of Renaissance thought in an environment that was permeated not only by the reckless adoration of physical beauty but also by the inexorable expansion of intellectual horizons. And while there is no direct evidence of Michelangelo’s ever having studied their works in any depth, there can be little doubt that he was exposed to their ideas in the heady atmosphere of intellectual debate and sensory indulgence that filled the Palazzo Medici Riccardi. Years later, it was to the half-remembered reminiscences of adolescent discussions that Michelangelo turned in resolving his inner torments, and it was Ficino and Pico della Mirandola who served as the models for this last and most compelling phase in the evolution of his love for Tommaso de’ Cavalieri.

True “Renaissance” men by virtue of their immense learning and kaleidoscopic interests, Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94) were both eclectic, excitable, and intellectually vigorous individuals who were not insensible either to the colossal variety of creation or to the pleasures of the physical world. A student of the Greek scholar
Georgius Gemistus Plethon, Ficino was the first to translate the entirety of Plato’s works into Latin and, despite being in holy orders, nurtured strong but latent homoerotic desires that found expression in his passionate letters to
Giovanni Cavalcanti. So, too, the noble Pico not only became fluent in Latin and Greek at an early age but was also particularly unusual for his deep knowledge of Arabic and Hebrew. He pursued a remarkable form of syncretism that embraced everything from Plato and
Aristotle to the
Kabbalah and the writings of
Hermes Trismegistus at the same time as he was conducting a scandalous affair with one of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s married cousins and being accused of heresy by
Pope Innocent VIII. In contrast to Ficino, who died in his own bed at Careggi, Pico was poisoned, perhaps as a consequence of his close ties to Savonarola.

But of their amazingly wide interests, what attracted and influenced Michelangelo the most was the one that grew out of the social environment in which they gathered.
Although there has been some doubt whether it can be described as an academy, Ficino and Pico—along with others, including
Cristoforo Landino—formed part of a large group that would meet regularly at the Medici villa at Careggi at the invitation
of Lorenzo the Magnificent to discuss the very latest ideas. The atmosphere (of which Michelangelo saw only a pale shadow at the Pa- lazzo Medici Riccardi) was constantly abuzz with excitement. Fueled by the rediscovery and translation of Platonic and Neoplatonic texts, these most extraordinary of men were surrounded at Careggi by a veritable cult of beauty, a palpable sense of joy at the immense possibilities of the human mind, a love of friendship, a latent sexual tension, and a powerful desire for the new learning to be reconciled with the Christian faith. In these intellectually vibrant gatherings, Ficino and Pico encountered a broadening of the horizons of human experience beyond the limits of anything that had been imagined before, and—what was more—they felt an irrepressible need to bring everything together into one satisfying system of thought that both explained and justified the essence of all they found at Lorenzo’s villa.