The Lost Battles Read online

  Even as Lisa del Giocondo posed for Leonardo da Vinci in the spring of 1503, Michelangelo Buonarroti was bringing to completion his own charismatic masterpiece. Florence was presented simultaneously with two of humanity’s supreme works of art.

  The Buonarroti were a poor but old Florentine family, proud of their gentility, and looked down on painters and sculptors as rude mechanics. Michelangelo’s father and uncles were upset that as a boy he wanted to be an artist. They tried to beat this socially disastrous inclination out of him. He was to prove them wrong about the social standing of artists, very quickly, in a spectacular way. When corporal punishment failed, his family got him an apprenticeship with the leading Florentine painter Domenico Ghirlandaio. At the time Ghirlandaio was taking on his masterpiece, a cycle of wall paintings narrating the life of the Virgin, in the Church of Santa Maria Novella. But master and apprentice didn’t hit it off—at least, Michelangelo refused to credit Ghirlandaio, whom he remembered as an envious man, with helping or influencing him in any way, even to the point of denying he had ever been an apprentice (thus provoking Vasari to produce in evidence an agreement signed by Ghirlandaio and Michelangelo’s father in his second edition of the Lives).

  Michelangelo found a better place to learn art. Lorenzo de’ Medici had established an informal academy of sculpture in Florence, in a garden near the monastery of San Marco. Michelangelo joked that he imbibed his feeling for stone with the milk of his wet nurse, a stonecutter’s wife in the quarrying village of Settignano outside the city. When he and his friend Francesco Granacci went along to the garden at San Marco where Lorenzo kept a collection of ancient Greek and Roman sculptures and encouraged young artists to study and copy them, his instant, natural talent for working marble with a chisel became obvious. This gifted, daring boy was particularly fond of one work in the garden, an ancient marble head of a faun, a strange old creature’s face worn away by time. It delighted him and he set out to copy it. Michelangelo managed to carve a good copy of the head, but he did more than that. The original was so worn and damaged that it had no mouth: Michelangelo gave his faun a laughing mouth full of teeth. One day Lorenzo visited the garden. Struck by the quality of the new head, he was amazed to see how young its creator was. But he teased Michelangelo, saying, “Oh, you have made this faun old and left him all his teeth. Don’t you know that in oldsters of such age some are always missing?”

  It seemed an eternity to the shamefaced Michelangelo until Il Magnifico went away and he could get his chisel and chip out one of the faun’s upper teeth, even making a hole as if it had been removed at the root. When Lorenzo returned the next day he laughed at this, but then, thinking about the brilliance of the boy’s work, decided to take him into his own household. He told Michelangelo to go and “tell your father I wish dearly to speak with him.” Michelangelo’s father was given an office in the Customs House, and his son went to live in the Medici palace on Via Larga while he perfected the art of sculpture in the garden up the road.

  Well, this is how Ascanio Condivi tells the story, and it must be how Michelangelo told it to him. It has a fairy-tale feeling so vivid that in the twentieth century the Medici sculpture garden at San Marco was debunked by self-consciously scientific art historians as a “legend.” More recent research has vindicated this “legend.” One pupil in the garden, years before Michelangelo, was Leonardo—it is mentioned in his notebooks. And a letter written in 1494 mentions Michelangelo the sculptor “from the garden.” So there really was such a place, Michelangelo did study there, and his own art and writings prove how much he was shaped by the culture that surrounded Lorenzo the Magnificent.

  Condivi says that Lorenzo allowed no hierarchy at his table. First comers sat where they liked—sometimes the young Michelangelo would sit near Lorenzo and his closest advisers. He became particularly friendly with the poet and humanist Angelo Poliziano, one of the true talents of the age, a star intellectual. Michelangelo told Condivi that the older poet became a mentor to the adolescent sculptor, always “spurring him on” and telling him stories from classical mythology. He also remembered how Lorenzo would show him gems and cameos in his study. Lorenzo was himself a poet, not as brilliant as Poliziano but not far off—and he was the poetic model Michelangelo chose to emulate throughout his life. Il Magnifico wrote melancholy, pensive lyrics and so did Michelangelo, as here, where, burning with love, he addresses the young nobleman Tommaso Cavalieri:

  That which in your beautiful face I long for and contemplate is badly understood by human intellects for he who wishes to know it must first come to death.

  Michelangelo’s education ended when Lorenzo de’ Medici died in 1492. Grieving as for a father, the young sculptor still got work from Il Magnifico’s son Piero, but it was scarcely the stuff of high art: he was asked to carve a snowman in the courtyard of the Medici Palace.

  One day, Cardiere, a musician in the household, told the young sculptor a hair-raising story. The previous night, said this man, he’d been visited by Lorenzo’s ghost, dressed in a torn black shroud over his naked body. The spectre had told him to warn Piero that he would soon be driven from his home and would never go back. Too scared to tell Piero, the musician met Michelangelo with a harrowed look the next day. Lorenzo’s shade had returned and hit him about the head for failing to do as it asked. Cardiere finally caught up with Piero, on a hunting outing as usual, and delivered the warning. Although Piero and his friends ridiculed the poor man, Michelangelo took the ghost seriously, leaving Florence for Bologna on the eve of the 1494 invasion and the Medici family’s fall.

  In fact it was too hot for him to stay in Savonarola’s Florence. He would later say that he admired the prophet and could still, as an old man, remember the exact sound of his voice. But a sculptor whose favourite theme was the male nude was not likely to get a lot of business in a city dominated by a preacher who denounced art as a sensual “vanity.” And it wasn’t just art Savonarola persecuted: under his sway Florence tightened its laws on homosexuality. Religious Michelangelo was; but as an artist and a human being he was inextricably sensual.

  After a brief return home from Bologna, he headed for the feasts of the south. Rome was starting its rebirth. Statues were rising from the ground, excavated easily in the gardens of cardinals and aristocrats. As for sensuality, Pope Alexander VI—Rodrigo Borgia—presided over wild parties at the Vatican, to put the tales of orgies and prostitutes that contemporaries told about the Borgia court at their mildest. Some of the stories must be true, for the Pope sired one, possibly two—traditionally three—children while in office. In 1501 Agostino Vespucci wrote to Machiavelli from Rome that he’d been told at least twenty-five women were brought into the Vatican palace every night to enliven the evenings of high-ranking clergy, and this, he said, was in addition to the Pope’s own permanent harem.

  Michelangelo, serious, angry, virtuous, was an incongruously moral visitor to this city, but he was no dullard: he bought his ticket to Rome with an act of wit. Egged on by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici—the leader of the lesser branch of the family who were spared exile and expressed their support for the new Republic by calling themselves Popolani—he played a joke on the art collectors of Rome who were so besotted by the city’s subterranean classical legacy. Just as he had amazed Il Magnifico with his ability as a boy to copy an ancient head of a faun, now he deliberately faked an “antique” statue of Cupid. Michelangelo carved the little figure as if asleep and made it look as if it had just been dug out of the ground. Then it was sent to Rome, where it was sold to Raffaele Riario, Cardinal San Giorgio, for 200 ducats. When the cardinal realised what had happened, he sent an emissary to Florence to find out the true provenance of the “ancient” Sleeping Cupid. Instead of being punished, Michelangelo was invited to Rome to live in Riario’s household. After arriving there in June 1496, the sculptor wrote home to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco that he’d spent his entire first day looking at Roman statues with the cardinal. Afterwards, in the cardinal’s new house,
“he asked my opinion of the things I had seen. I told him what I thought; and certainly I judged them beautiful things. Then the Cardinal asked me if I had enough spirit to make something beautiful. I replied that I might not make such great things, but he would see what I could do. We have purchased a piece of marble for a lifelike figure; and on Monday I will begin work.”

  Michelangelo’s Bacchus is the life-size marble figure he created. It has a lot in common with his lost pastiches of ancient art, the Faun and the Sleeping Cupid: it too is a kind of pastiche, or even a parody. The smooth, glassy body deliberately imitates not only the strengths of the statues he had been shown by the cardinal but their weaknesses too. A visitor to the Capitoline Museum in Rome, or the Vatican, or any old collection that has its share of classical nudes, will see many works that are, in the end, a bit routine in their smooth beauty. The statuary being excavated in 1490s Rome was not all of it marvellous. Sculpture in ancient Rome had been decoration for rich people’s houses, its style established centuries before and now virtually mass-produced. What has come to be called the “classical” style with its lifelike faces and well-proportioned limbs, its gracious marriage of realism and the ideal, came into being in ancient Greece in the fifth century B.C. It then continued, taken up by Rome, until the rise of Christianity; a millennium after the fall of the Roman Empire it was revived in Renaissance Italy. But the examples of ancient statuary Michelangelo could see in Rome were in effect mass-produced copies of lost Greek originals.

  In one of his letters, Cicero complains to his friend Fabius Gallus, who had bought too many statues for him: “Bacchantes indeed—where is the place for them in my house?… For I am accustomed to buy statues I can display as if in a public hall, to decorate a place in my palaestra. Mars indeed—what kind of statue is that for me, a teacher of peace? I rejoice there was no statue of Saturn—I would have thought those two together had got me into debt!” Cicero cared about the meaning of the statues he put in his house—and, light-heartedly, the astrological significance of Mars and Saturn. But there’s not much reverence for the work of art as an exalted revelation in his practical talk of where to put the damn things, and that almost utilitarian concept of sculpture is all too visible in lesser works of ancient nude statuary. In his great Bacchus the young Michelangelo mimics the very particular look of statues he saw in Roman collections and we can see in the Capitoline today—the sleek surface, the use of an extraneous support (in this case a young faun who sits on a tree stump behind Bacchus, munching at the grapes in a folded cloth in his hand—but just to describe that detail is to notice how he transfigures his materials). Even as he mockingly reproduces the pose of a Roman statue, he enriches it: the faun is such a strange, devilish creature, his face a horned mask of wickedness as he eats the grapes, each of which in its individual roundness is captured as a little stone sphere, in cascading abundance; the cloth that connects, in a comically complicated way, Bacchus, the grapes, and the faun is amazingly soft and mobile in appearance, anticipating all the flowing stone draperies of Baroque art; and this comedy of forms reaches a dazzling climax in the figure of Bacchus himself. His pose is not so smooth, after all. The god of wine is drunk: his perfect nude body rolls about, teeters on its glassy legs, the chest sloping back, the right arm curiously unfettered in its drunken delusion of grace.

  It could so easily be described as if it were a big joke—like the Sleeping Cupid—but no beholder of Michelangelo’s Bacchus has ever wanted to laugh. A travesty it may be, but it is seriously unsettling. The wine god’s head, with round little grapes in bunches in his hair, lolls grotesquely on his neck: this is the twist that transforms a mimicry of classical art into something new in the world. Suddenly something real is happening. This is not a coy figure of a drunken god but an intimation of some great spiritual dislocation. Bacchus is a being divided—his head is not at one with his body. His violent jerk of the neck is truly jarring. The face, moreover, is a mask, an oval that repels the gaze, with eyes that wander wildly, ecstatically. Their little pupils roll to the right, as Bacchus tilts his head in disorganised abandon.

  Florentine artists had started painting mythical worlds when Michelangelo was a child. Botticelli’s mythological paintings were scintillating essays in a new genre of art that would become the great palatial decor of the sixteenth century, taken to sumptuous heights by Titian and Correggio. Yet in sculpting Bacchus it is as if Michelangelo blew myth apart and made it his own, as if he at once entered into the being of Bacchus and assimilated the delirious god to some aspect of his own experience. This is no more an illustration of myth than it is a mere pastiche of classical sculpture. It is significant that Michelangelo starts with the generic and the received. In beginning a sculpture, the stone carver works on a raw block; yet here Michelangelo works on a cultivated tradition. His material is not only stone but the genre of the classical nude itself. Out of that he exposes something that throws off the anchors of genre, narrative, and anecdote. It becomes pure object and at the same time pure idea, an image that, as soon as you perceive it—that madly lolling head on the beautiful body—roots itself permanently in your consciousness. What has Michelangelo done? What magic has liberated Bacchus from the mortality of genres and myths?

  There is a permanent ambiguity to Bacchus’ expression, or rather his mask. His drunkenness can also be seen as a rapturous, an exalted loss of self. The frenzy that blinds him might be the furor of creativity in which—as the fifteenth-century Florentine thinker Marsilio Ficino explained in his commentaries on Plato—that Greek philosopher said the genius works. The strange, jarring face of Bacchus might be experiencing “divine frenzy,” a psychic journey into the unknown, to self-dissolution. This is not just some funny statue of a drunk—this is the most serious image of intoxication in art. It breathes danger. It breathes youth.

  Michelangelo is the first artist who had a youth. That is, he is the first artist whose works seem to express his youthful experience of life—the first artist to become personal enough to express the passion, energy, ambition, and risk with which he seethed in his twenties. He was twenty-two when he began Bacchus. It has a craving for danger in it—whatever he learned about “divine frenzy” from the Florentine philosophes does not come out here as intellectual commentary, but as lived experience. Michelangelo may even be telling what it’s like to get drunk, in Rome, far from his family’s eyes—or to indulge and risk wilder passions than a tipple. There’s fear in this figure, too: the faun nibbling at the grapes is a little devil; the face of Bacchus looks from another point of view deprived of vitality and sensitivity, stunned, opaque, and lost: it looks mad and evil.

  If the Bacchus portrays a being cut dangerously loose from the bounds of perception and thought, a mind slipping into the freedom or the death that is unreason, the face of the David is absolutely conscious of everything. David is pure alertness. He is pure will. Bacchus’ head is disjoined from his body. Every part of David is fluently in sympathy; he is a great chorus of voices, singing separately and yet in harmony. He is a community, a city, in one figure. But every nuance of his flowing form is subordinate to that great head, its eyes fixed in concentration where the eyes of Bacchus roll aimlessly. In carving Bacchus, Michelangelo had shown a body that is a dead, lumpen thing violently brought to life by the lolling of a grotesquely animated head: life, the kick of it, is discovered here through shock, and it is in an ecstasy close to undoing, to final oblivion, that energy is discovered. When he returned to Florence after the death of Savonarola to take on the challenge of a great block of stone in the Cathedral workshop, he conceived the absolute opposite: instead of a soul disintegrating in ecstasy or intoxication, losing itself in a perilous night of unreason, he set out to depict a soul so conscious of its own body and its place in the world that body and world became mere instruments of the imagination.

  First, however, he took the journey he’d begun with the Bacchus to its awful conclusion. There is a quality of dark adventure in the works he undertook in
the sensual Rome of the Borgias. When he was commissioned to carve a Pietà, a statue of the dead Christ supported in the arms of his mother, he completed the voyage into the psychic underworld he began with the Bacchus. He imagined dying.

  The young man’s body, naked except for a loincloth, that sprawls in Mary’s vast robed lap, its head slumping back, the thin, bony legs a touching picture of disarrangement, is Michelangelo’s most extraordinary work of pure realism. Christ’s body is seen with terrible candour in its failure, its death: the ankle bones sticking out, the flaccid mass of the exposed throat, the small but lethal wounds—a slash, a hole—and that gut-wrenching softness of the shoulder under which Mary holds it with her strong hand. It’s a work to twist the heart by making one see death: the exquisitely natural touches Michelangelo gives the bereft flesh, the dimples and long toes, the twist of the neck, the slender arm with its nail-hole in the hand, are so utterly truthful. He shows how much more powerful a calm naturalism can be than the gross excesses of Gothic sculptures of this moment of grief. The effect is absolutely to exact pity; to wrench out compassion. But that is because Michelangelo arouses the imagination. He does not portray a dead man with cool precision: while it can be mistaken for realism, this sculpture is not realistic at all. It is an ordeal of the imagination. The emotional power lies in the eerie, relaxed clarity with which the artist shows himself what it would be like to be dead: to be the man in Mary’s arms. It hits you, pricks you, the recognition of the fact of death: a fact Michelangelo has made himself know from the inside. After drinking with Bacchus, here he sleeps.