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Although Michelangelo excelled as a sculptor, painter and architect, he was most ardently and consistently fond of sculpting: scultore was the only title he ever used. We therefore need to use this discipline as the baseline for mapping the biography and efforts of this prodigious artist. Among the wealth of publications devoted to Michelangelo, those of Condivi and Vasari deserve special mention.

19. Saint Proculus, from the arca of San Domenico, 1495. Marble. Church of San Domenico, Bologna.

20. Angel holding a candelabra, 1495. Marble. Church of San Domenico, Bologna.

Michelangelo is an infinitely more faithful representative of the modern era than his supremely serene fellow geniuses Da Vinci or Raphael, although he was older than the latter. He was a sublime misanthrope who sensed melancholy, fears, inner doubts and the soul’s rebelliousness against society, which he translated with a uniquely personal style of vehemence.

The most incisive research into the Florentine School is helpless to explain the genesis of Michelangelo: his career was stunning and unexpected in equal measure. After a fairly long period of decline in Italian statuary art, this supernatural being suddenly burst in, brushed away the past and revitalised the then present with the most prodigious temperament for statuary art that the Western world had seen since Phidias.

Michelangelo was born on 6 March, 1475 in Arrezo, in the province of Caprese near the Franciscan order’s famous La Vernia Monastery, immortalised by the visions of St. Francis of Assisi. The area has some of the roughest and mightiest terrain in Tuscany, generously endowed with bold naked rock, centuries-old beech forests, brisk clean air and some of the highest peaks in the Appenines.

At the time of Michelangelo’s birth, his father Lodovico Buonarroti (1444–1534) was district commissioner of the market towns of Chiusi and Caprese (not the Caprese between the Vatican State and Tuscany River). He belonged to a very old family that sixteenth-century genealogists linked to the counts of Canossa – belated ennoblements are always vaguely dubious and in turn somewhat laughable when they concern an ancestor like Michelangelo. At the end of his six-month appointment, Lodovico returned to Settignano outside Florence where he owned a small estate and put Michelangelo out to nurse with a stonecutter’s wife. At the age of six, his mother died. He then took up drawing under Granacci before apprenticing under the Ghirlandaio brothers in August 1488. Domenico Ghirlandaio helped decorate the Sistine Chapel in Rome and did a number of frescoes for the Santa Maria Novella Church in Florence.

Whatever his talents, Ghirlandaio was not the inquisitive sort of soul who could poke away at technique from different angles and revitalise art. His works are admirably assertive and precise and the style is clear-cut, but lack any inspiring principle or transcendent vision.

Michelangelo’s earliest schooling remains uninvestigated in any real depth and insufficiently understood. However, external influences exert little impact on such solid geniuses. From his first works in Florence through to the figures he painted and shaped in Rome with half frozen fingers, Michelangelo’s oeuvre shows overall unity despite the diversity of his output. As hard as you look, you cannot distinguish, say, a Florentine or Roman period in his works as you can with Raphael – not to mention any Umbrian one. At best, different time frames show only differences of quality but with no intrinsic change of character. In this way Michelangelo, the paradigm of iron will and personal convictions, resembles the sublimely imaginative Da Vinci. Each came into this world with a personal ideal, something Raphael only gradually developed from the role models around him. As Michelangelo aptly described his younger rival’s genius: “Raphael owed his superiority not to Nature but to studying.”

We would be going too far if we subscribed to Klaczko’s statement in Causeries Florentines – Dante et Michel-Ange (Paris 1880) that, “Michelangelo seems a haughty loner, unrelated to the School of his time, undescended from that of the past.” It is hard to believe in such a spontaneous generation. As we shall see, Michelangelo never hesitated to draw inspiration from his predecessors. It hardly belittles the unassailable master to seek affinities between his style and that of Donatello, Jacopo della Quercia and their like: the issue is to establish the roots that connect him to his era and any lost traditions he may have fingered and revived, however subconsciously.

The first models Michelangelo studied were those that attracted every young artist in Florence at the time, i.e. the marbles of Antiquity in the San Marco Gardens as well as the frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel of the Church of the Carmine – which is where the sculptor Pietro Torrigiano threw a punch that broke the young master’s nose, disfiguring him for life. A handful of drawings at the Louvre in Paris, the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich and the Albertina in Vienna show that Michelangelo borrowed from the works of Giotto, Masaccio and other fourteenth-century artists. In the Louvre drawing, he copied two figures from Giotto’s painting St. John’s Disciples Discovering the Empty Tomb at the Peruzzi Chapel in Santa Croce. In the Munich drawing, he copied characters from Masaccio’s Christ Ordering St. Peter to Pay the Tribute. And in the Albertina drawing, he reproduced a composition by a still earlier master.

21. Michelangelo, Crucifix, 1492–1494. Wood polychrome, Santo Spirito, Florence.

22. Virgin with Child and Saint John the Baptist as a Child or Tondo Taddei, 1504–1506. Marble, 104 × 167 cm. Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Although his style and manner were by now ripe and distinct, Michelangelo’s convictions remained vague. This transpires in the diversity of his studies. He had fun co-opting into paint the Temptation of St. Anthony, a print by the Alsatian painter and engraver Martin Schoen, although the theme lay well astray of his personal focus: what did this youthful lover of round fulsome forms have in common with Schoen’s skinny, tortured, almost caricatured figures?

Michelangelo soon moved on to other role models. Among the deceased, Donatello ranked topmost. His teachings carried on through both his works displayed across Florence and through the tradition fostered by his students such as Bertoldo, even as they leaned ever more heavily into Mannerism. Michelangelo could not have avoided the fascination of Donatello’s own powerful genius, with which he had so much in common. He studied this master with a passion, if not without an occasional glance of approval at Ghiberti’s masterpiece, the doors of the baptistery he called “fit to stand at Heaven’s gate”.

23. Virgin with Child and Saint John the Baptist as a child or Tondo Pitti, 1504–1505. Marble, 85 × 82.5 cm. Bargello, Florence.

Michelangelo imitated Donatello both deliberately and subconsciously. And it persisted with numerous interruptions from his early Madonna della Casa Buonarroti to his late Moses, inspired by Donatello’s St. John for the Cathedral of Florence. He managed to lock in the gist of style, his secret way of electrifying figures with life and vibrancy and of injecting passion and eloquence right into the drapery. In short, he captured the spirit of the deeply dramatic emotion and feverish agitation so distinctive in that era of change. Other borrowings are even more obvious: Donatello’s bronze door at San Lorenzo shows a standing figure facing to the right with the left arm outstretched to herald God the Father in the Creation of Adam and Creation of Eve at the Sistine Chapel. Here, Michelangelo only raises the hand a touch higher and arranges the drapery more carefully than his predecessor. Both heads move almost the same way and the rest is equally analogous. Strong resemblances also appear between the Bruges Madonna and Judith in the Lanzi Loggia as well as Michelangelo’s David and Donatello’s Saint George.

We should also mention here the strong influence of the sculptors Jacopo and Giacomo della Quercia (1371–1438 and 1412–1480 respectively) although it would only become manifest after Michelangelo’s stay in Bologna years later. Did Michelangelo borrow nothing from the charm, purity and refinement of his more recent fifteenth-century forebears? That might sound doubtful until stumbling on a series of St. Sebastian statues by Mino da Fiesole, Antonio Rossellino and Benedetto da Maiano. Though somewhat shaky, unaccentuated and non-committal, they herald the Dying Slave at the Louvre and each is a step along the path to either of the masterpieces. The prime comparison is between the Slave and Da Maiano’s St. Sebastian at the Misericordia Museum in Florence: the backward cocking heads and leg positions match. But Michelangelo unties the hands from behind the back, placing one on the chest and the other on the head – a stroke of genius that gives the figure astonishing eloquence and pathos. Another example is the Madonna of the Stairs, a straightforward copycat drawing of a low-relief attributed to Desiderio de Settignano.

24. Madonna and Child, 1503–1506. Marble, 121.9 cm. Notre Dame, Bruges.

25. Madonna and Child, 1503–1506, (detail). Marble, 121.9 cm. Notre Dame, Bruges.

However, the case of Luca Signorelli is trickier. Usually marked as a precursor of Michelangelo, he painted the Last Judgment in Orvieto. It is endlessly repeated that Michelangelo started out from Signorelli’s anatomical and muscular studies, assimilating the latter’s fascination for torso effects. The standard justification is the resemblance between the naked children in the background of Michelangelo’s Tondo Doni and those of Signorelli’s Madonna, both now in the Uffizi. In fact, Signorelli started his Final Judgment in 1499 and finished it in 1505 while Michelangelo had already demonstrated, with powerful relief, a fine command of human anatomy by 1492 in his Battle of the (Lapiths and) Centaurs. In fact, he only borrowed from Signorelli’s Last Judgment for his own Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel: note the swooping demon with a woman on his back whose general layout recalls a demon in Signorelli’s.

The blind force of destiny, however, had more to do with their meeting than any wilful choice of Michelangelo. He definitely never deliberately imitated Signorelli, whom the Renaissance widely considered outdated, the way he did Jacopo della Quercia or the masters of antiquity. And then Signorelli went on to copy his “plagiarist’s” Pietà in grisaille at St. Mark’s in Rome!

From this angle, we can spot Michelangelo’s forebears in Andrea Verrocchio and Antonio Pallaiuolo, whose dogged anatomical research spawned breakthroughs in anatomical studies. True, both had long left their home towns for Rome or Venice but, given the effervescence of Florence at the time, their teachings must have reached that city and deeply affected its art scene. Michelangelo was still a youth when he first studied anatomy at the Santa Maria Novella poorhouse in Florence before continuing the pursuit in Rome. In Oxford, one drawing shows him dissecting a cadaver by candlelight.

As Klaczko notes:

No master definitely ever outclassed or even equalled him in the science of the human body. How the athletic builds, extended necks, tortured poses and troubled facial expressions of these characters rattle our sense of reality nonetheless! How the entire corpus of anatomical science is helpless to inspire such occasionally crushing but invariably destabilising faith in the existence of this world of colossuses! It is rightly said that not a single figure of Michelangelo’s could stand up and walk without making the universe tremble and disrupt the very foundations of Nature.

In his Anatomie des Maîtres (1890), the eminent anatomist Mathias Duval adds a precious quip:

Although Michelangelo is an impeccable anatomist, as much cannot be said about him as a physiologist; all the muscles in his works are in a state of tetanus. In Nature, when one muscle contracts, the other relaxes.

So another conflict appears here between Michelangelo and his forebears: they worked from healthy living models while he used cadavers. Ghirlandaio, the so-called ‘master’, neither instructed nor influenced the so-called ‘student’. To date, we have only two Michelangelo drawings inspired by Ghirlandaio: one in the Louvre and one in the Albertina. Michelangelo’s stay with the Medici powerfully sharpened his thinking and education. Living amidst the family’s priceless collections, he developed an easy familiarity with the tiniest art secrets of Antiquity.

But if Antiquity so generously endowed the Renaissance master with ideas and themes, inspired him to worship form and stimulated his appetite for abstraction, Michelangelo’s ideals unswervingly opposed those of Ancient Greece. For example, he would subordinate every element in a composition to a single overriding impression: not just the hands, arms, legs, eyes and mouth that express the feelings and intentions of the soul, but also the torso and other somehow unconsciously expressive body parts. In short, we should underscore his habit of making the entire human form resonate with a single note, a note that expresses pathos, the strongest emotion. Does anything else clash more violently with the errant ways of the sculptors of Antiquity so concerned with pure and graceful curves before giving any thought to rendering the ripples of the soul?

26. The Virgin Mary with Child, 1512–1534. Marble. New Sacristy of San Lorenzo, Florence.

27. Pietà, 1498–1499. Detail. Marble, 174 cm. St. Peter’s, Vatican.

28. Pietà, 1498–1499. Marble, 174 cm. St. Peter’s, Vatican.

29. Bacchus, 1496–1497. Detail. Marble, 203 cm. Bargello, Florence.

We know luck led Michelangelo to Lorenzo de’ Medici. Lorenzo developed a fondness for the youth and took him under his wing after Michelangelo immediately broke a tooth off his marble mask of a faun because Lorenzo had remarked that the face was too old to have all its teeth. Thus, the artist became a part of his patron’s daily life in the Medici home on the Via Larga where he met Angelo Ambrogini, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola and other humanists of the Neo-Platonic School as well as a variety of poets, philosophers and intellectuals. Lorenzo himself was a man of exceptional cultivation.

Michelangelo’s first major work during his stay with the Medici was a low relief for what became the ‘Casa Buonarroti’ entitled Battle of the (Lapiths and) Centaurs.

Michelangelo’s full maturity as a sculptor was already obvious. His works not only demonstrate a mastery of anatomy that drove his rivals to despair and still dazzle posterity but go on to show a ferociously proud soul and even less imitable powers of dramatisation. Wholeheartedly swept up in ardent warfare, Michelangelo’s combatants are true athletes and masters of every palestral exercise, with muscles bulging and chests thrust forward and defiant stares that resonate physical and moral strength, adding a note of gripping pathos to each of Michelangelo’s works. Just as in the admirable Slave in the Louvre, which is perhaps the best example, his subjects not only brave their adversaries but the gods as well, and this is what makes them supremely eloquent representations of “being a free soul”.

Lorenzo de’ Medici’s death in April 1492 interrupted this enviable lifestyle. His arrogant son Piero had no real taste for the arts and sciences that were his father’s joy and glory. It appears he would have Michelangelo sculpt in snow or send him on errands for semi-precious stones. But the youth put his time to better use with his marble Hercules (long on display at the chateau in Fontainebleau until stolen in the seventeenth century) as well as with his wooden Crucifixion. The latter was executed as a gift to the priory of the Santo Spirito Convent in Florence for having hosted him there. Long missing, the Crucifix was found, restored and set up in the sacristy of the Santo Spirito Church.

30. Bacchus, 1496–1497. Marble, 203 cm. Bargello, Florence.

31. Sketch for a David with Catapult, 1501. Exhibition Room, The Louvre, Paris.

However, a storm was brewing that would bring down Medici rule. Cardiere, a singer in the Medici social circle, told Michelangelo of a vision, twice experienced, in which Lorenzo had appeared before him dressed only in a torn black shirt to ask him to tell his son Piero that he would soon be driven out of the city – upon which the young artist promptly fled to Bologna with a pair of friends. Given the extraordinary stress levels Michelangelo imposed on himself, these brusque depressions are not surprising. Nature, pushed to the limit, suddenly took its revenge. Likewise, he fled Rome in 1506 after imagining that Pope Julius II was going to have him killed. He went on to flee Florence just as suddenly during the siege of 1529, though only to return and stand tall among his fellow citizens once the initial panic had worn off.

In Bologna, Michelangelo netted a most flattering commission: the execution of several figures for the Arca (Shrine) di San Domenico in the church of the same name. This famous monument, started in the thirteenth century by Niccolo di Pisa and continued in the fifteenth century by Niccolo da Bari (a.k.a. Niccolo dell’ Arca), depicts the development of Tuscan sculpture from its beginning to its demise. Michelangelo’s contributions were the statues of St. Petronius and St. Proculus as well as the statuette Angel Holding a Candelabra. Until recently, the monument generated singular confusion over which sculptor did which work. However, there is no doubt about the statuette and close examination confirms material evidence from the archives: to carry a torch, this athletically-built child deploys the strength of Atlas carrying the Earth. This sombre-faced child with a gigantic torso, who looks like a miniature male adult, can only be the product of Michelangelo’s chisel. Admirable in its own right for its representation of sharply focused vitality, the Angel Holding a Candelabra offends credibility. Why pump up an angel into Hercules to lift a torch? The angel’s role and character call for suavity and Michelangelo’s predecessor, Niccolo dell’ Arca, fathomed the requirements for this subject very differently: his figure radiates inexpressible grace and charm. As for the St. Petronius, he stands barefoot and capped in a mitre as he holds forth a scale model of the church; the figure is much alive and almost tortured, with disappointing drapery effects. It resembles Jacopo della Quercia’s statue of the same saint, done for the façade of the San Petronio Church. Indeed, their busts show striking similarities in terms of looks, hairstyle and hang of the cloak. Michelangelo only recovers his own style in the lower half of the statue, where the comparison is not to his advantage. For its part, St. Proculus prefigures his David although the saint is shorter, stockier and more juvenile, with garments of lifelike pleating but an unpleasant look on his face, very unlike the one on his future masterpiece.

The most striking thing about the works done by Michelangelo in his youth, i.e. Battle of the (Lapiths and) Centaurs, the Domenico Angel in Bologna and the Tondo Doni, is the overemphasised muscles of his heroes. Instead of being round and pudgy, even the child figures have arms that look able to handle the heaviest chores and roughest fist-fights – this rebel genius yearned for a more robust humanity replete with more powerful limbs and more muscular bodies. Moving moral messages worried him little at the time: the facial features are usually morose or impassive. Like the Ancient Greeks, he was sacrificing faces to torsos.

The only period where Michelangelo excelled at representing childhood was 1494 to 1504. Chubby fulsome faces and natural life-like baby smiles are evident in the Holy Infant of the Tondo Doni, the Bruges Madonna, and in one low-relief marble Madonna at the Bargello National Museum in Florence and another at Royal Academy of Arts in London. But before 1494 and after 1504, all the children look very athletic. And his recourse to compressed relief betrays a debt to Donatello.

Once back in Florence, Michelangelo did a small marble of St. John the Baptist (a.k.a. Giovannino in Italy) for a poorer Medici. This statue has been linked to another found in Pisa a few years ago and now in a Berlin museum – it is a cold stilted piece of work and its attribution to Michelangelo is highly questionable. Returning to his home town Florence, Michelangelo entered his period of greatest serenity, or even perhaps impassiveness.

At the foot of the pulpit from which Savonarola bellowed out his sinister warnings, Michelangelo went on from St. John the Baptist to his Sleeping Cupid and Kneeling Cupid (Victoria and Albert Museum of London), Bacchus and Adonis Dying (Bargello National Museum) and finally his David in marble, i.e. those works that stand apart in his oeuvre by their total absence of any vehemence, passion or pathos. This abrupt plunge into introspection was the product of his exposure to Classical art at its zenith. The importance of this series of works cannot be overemphasised: they prove that, before steeping himself in tragedy, there was a quiet, congenial Michelangelo some what moonstruck by the beauty of Antiquity.

32. Study for the statue of David, circa 1501–1502. Drawn with quill, with annotated manuscript by Michelangelo. The Louvre, Paris.

33. David, 1501–1504. Marble, 410 cm. Galleria dell’Academia, Florence.

34. David, 1501–1504. Marble, 410 cm. Galleria dell’Academia, Florence.

35. Saint Matthew, 1505–1506. Marble, 271 cm. Galleria dell’Academia, Florence.

To understand the massive volume of work Michelangelo put out in the few years between attending Ghirlandaio’s workshop and completion of his Bacchus, Cupid and Adonis, or to grasp his speedy, decisive and almost miraculous emancipation of his art, we need only compare his works with those exiting the workshops of his most illustrious Tuscan peers at the time. Examination forces us to notice that, in comparison to the pure contours and fine relief of his works, theirs lack harmony, fullness and free movement – in short, they have those ‘charming flaws’ that typify the Primitives.

On the other hand, Michelangelo demonstrates the most enviable ignorance of all the difficulties that stumped his predecessors! He hews marble as if kneading soft wax. He twists and turns human figures with playful ease, trying out the most contorted poses and always choosing the right one. Without such touching integrity and conviction throughout his works, one would think he enjoyed poking fun at obstacles. In short, if sculpture still had a long way to go before his time, Michelangelo raised it to the extreme limits of perfection and, to this day, no one can claim to have covered as much ground as he did.