Miser turned master

One of the mysteries of the modern world is the intense personal sympathy many people seem to have for the stingy, crabb...ed, resentful Florentine sculptor whose real fame resides in only a handful of works: the ‘Pieta' in St Peter's, the ‘David' in Florence, the ‘Moses' in Rome's Church of San Pietro in Vincoli, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the ‘Last Judgment' and a series of unfinished ‘Captives' in Florence and the Louvre. But that handful is surely as illustrious as any in the history of Western art, and we feel so close to their maker that we address him freely by his first name: Michelangelo.

Although we now see Michelangelo as the Titan of Titans in his age of artistic giants, he was, in fact, like most Titans, an unpleasant man to know. Physically unattractive, especially after his fellow artist Jacopo Torrigiani broke his nose in a fistfight, Michelangelo seems to have made no effort to compensate for his lack of physical beauty by personal charm. Despite the wealth he accumulated with a miser's greedy desperation, he slept in his clothes, right down to the dogskin boots that became so encrusted to his legs that his skin came off on the rare occasions when he removed them. Jealousy consumed him, especially jealousy of Raphael, whose looks, social skills and instincts for mass marketing he lacked and whose boundless talent he grudgingly shared.

Yet in front of the ‘Pieta' or the ‘David', or beneath the Sistine Chapel ceiling, none of this matters. In portraying courage, pride, grief and spiritual vision, Michelangelo shows our humanity to us with clarity and a surprising gentleness. The old miser turned prodigal when it came to freeing a figure from its shroud of marble, and no less prodigal when he built up huge imaginary structures of painted plaster on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to populate with biblical heroes.

He learned to think artistically, however, through what his contemporaries called disegno, or drawing, the exercise that underlay every aspect of art in Renaissance Florence. On one of his drawings, Michelangelo jotted a note to his pupil Antonio Mini: “Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw – don't waste time.” As Antonio well knew, Michelangelo lived by his own advice. For almost 80 years (he was apprenticed at 12, and died at 88), he drew as if nothing were more important to him: in ink, in pencil-like black chalk and, most magnificently, in soft red chalk. With the help of a few white highlights, he could give his drawings such vibrant contrasts of light and shade that their two-dimensional figures invite a surreptitious touch as irresistibly as his sculpture.

With few exceptions, Michelangelo's drawings concentrated on two themes: classical architecture and the human figure, in his case almost exclusively the human male. In Rome, where Michelangelo spent half his life, ancient statues and monuments were so plentiful that they came to be seen as part of nature.

In his native Florence, Michelangelo collected Etruscan bronzes whose strange, exaggerated anatomy made them powerfully expressive. He also studied Leonardo da Vinci and Donato Bramante, the modern masters who had become classics by his time. Michelangelo may have been a notorious loner, but his artistic imagination thrived on contact with the work of other people, both living and long dead, and this may be why he continues to connect so unerringly with the generations after him.

The challenge that uncovered Michelangelo's true skill as a draftsman came in the form of Leonardo da Vinci, who was commissioned, like Michelangelo, to provide a fresco for the new Hall of the Great Council in the city hall of Florence. At the time of this commission, in 1504, Florence had just renewed its old republican government by casting out first the Medici family and then the Dominican firebrand Fra Girolamo Savonarola. Exhilarated by their sudden freedom from tyranny, the Florentines commissioned works of public art, beginning with Michelangelo's ‘David', a sculpted distillation of the pride and wariness that guided the new republican city-state.

The frescoes for the new Hall of the Great Council were to portray two Florentine military victories over neighbouring powers. Leonardo's incomparably lively sketches for the Battle of Anghiari inspired Michelangelo, then in his 30s, to draw knots of men and horses for his own Battle of Cascina. But Michelangelo never shared Leonardo's fascination with nature, or his elder's peerless facility with pen and ink. Leonardo's sketches of galloping horses kicking up the dust have a dynamism that Michelangelo simply could not equal.

It is no accident, then, that Michelangelo's cartoon for the Battle of Cascina focused instead on a moment in the conflict when a troop of Florentine soldiers, bathing in the river Arno, were startled by a sudden attack by the forces of Pisa; caught naked, they are climbing out of the water and putting on their armor. Neither fresco was ever completed; Michelangelo dropped work on the Battle of Cascina because he got a better offer from Rome.

That offer came from Pope Julius II, the famous papa terribile, a human whirlwind who, as a cardinal, had amassed the city's most phenomenal collection of ancient sculpture. He had also commissioned new sculptures, notably the bronze tomb of his uncle, Pope Sixtus IV. As pope, Julius envisioned his own tomb as something still grander than his uncle's: a small marble building set beneath the crossing of St Peter's basilica, the huge early Christian structure he had ordered razed and replaced by a wholly new church. He gave the commission for designing the new St Peter's basilica to Donato Bramante. He offered the commission of his tomb to Michelangelo, and shortly thereafter added on another assignment: frescoing the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

From closely observed figure studies to evanescent sketches of the mighty architectural scheme that melds the disparate scenes of the Sistine Chapel ceiling into a single coherent structure, Julius and his unerring patron's eye had provided Michelangelo with an artistic challenge as stiff as that posed by Leonardo.

After Julius's death in 1513, the papacy fell to Leo X, son of Lorenzo de Medici, who engineered a return of Medici rule in Florence. Tugging on Michelangelo's patriotism the artist was lured back to Florence by the prospect of a series of commissions. Michelangelo would eventually finish the vestibule for the Medici library with marvelously graceful stairs and leave his other assignments incomplete, for when Cardinal Giulio succeeded to the papacy in 1524 as Clement VII, Michelangelo once again returned to Rome.

His later years were taken up increasingly with architectural commissions. Decades after Bramante, he would become architect of St Peter's in his own right, modernising Bramante's design by doubling the height of the ornamental pilasters that give the present building its tremendous sense of scale. He also redesigned the site of Rome's city hall, the Campidoglio, the family palazzo of Pope Paul III (Palazzo Farnese), and a chapel for the Sforza family attached to the ancient basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore.

For all of these commissions he continued to draw. Like most other artists of his time, Michelangelo hoarded drawing paper – it was expensive. He turned sheets at right angles or upside down to use up every vacant space. Sometimes, when he set an architectural design on its head, he came up with a new idea, defying the fact that the individual elements that make up classical architecture, such as columns, mouldings and door and window frames, all have a definite up and down.

Strikingly, some of Michelangelo's pilasters for the Campidoglio and the Julius tomb reverse the basic laws of load and support to grow wider from bottom to top. The Julius tomb also has a range of outsize, upside-down brackets. 

During this period, Michelangelo became involved in one of the movements for religious reform that grew up within Catholicism after its break with Martin Luther in 1521. This is how he met the Roman noblewoman Vittoria Colonna, whom he provided with a series of devotional drawings as well as a series of vernacular sonnets; both of them were accomplished poets.

Like Titian, Michelangelo's virtual contemporary, the latter adopted a distinctive muddy style in his old age. Where Titian used muddy colours, Michelangelo resorted to muddy lines. Perhaps, as some have suggested, their hands hurt. Perhaps the change had nothing to do with the state of their hands but rather of the world they lived in.

Michelangelo led a melancholy, lonely life, marked indelibly by the early loss of his mother and his father's obsessive pretensions to aristocracy. He hoarded everything –  love, talent, wealth, success – and begrudged them to the rest of the world. The marble workers of Carrara called him a swindler. His father accused Michelangelo of turning him out of his own house. Yet the artist's letters show how often, and how generously, he made secret gifts to the poor.

For Michelangelo the bonds to his Etruscan heritage ran as deep as his bonds to the Tuscan soil that provided ravenous Renaissance appetites with wine, truffles and Etruscan artifacts. For 16th-century Tuscans, as for their 14th- and 15th-century predecessors, Etruscan aesthetics were as natural as eating or drinking, and we can see their effect on Michelangelo's work.

For all his heroic height, his big hands and imposing head, David has the body of a small, wiry man with long arms. These compact proportions and the springy tension that suffuses them are also what give Etruscan sculptures their crazy charm, and Michelangelo knew them well.

Michelangelo's Mountain, by the Italian writer Eric Scigliano, enters this visceral side of Michelangelo by literally climbing up into the blindingly white marble quarries of Carrara in order to present Michelangelo specifically as a sculptor, who was nursed by a stonecutter's wife and claimed to have imbibed stone along with her milk.

All his life, Michelangelo could hew marble with astonishing speed – another reason for his Titanic reputation – and he composed his thoughts as readily by pounding an iron chisel into stone as by making a drawing.

After carving a narrow, intractable block into ‘David', as Scigliano suggests, Michelangelo seems to have developed a craving to test his sculptural ingenuity, or adaptability, and take it to greater and greater extremes. As a result, he chiseled marble into forms that he could barely complete.

His ‘Captives' in the Accademia of Florence still emerge from their stone shrouds with such evocative force that we hardly notice their faults. And yet the blockheaded Captive who bends under his stony headgear like a weary Atlas carries marble enough for only part of his face; another Captive crowds so near the edge of his enclosing stone that he has no room left for his right arm.

Among Scigliano's contemporary portraits of Carrara quarrymen, moving mountains as a way of life, Michelangelo seems to fit right in as he never did in Florence or Rome. The only other person who could ever really keep him company was Julius II; and Julius may have chosen to sleep for all eternity in Michelangelo's marble, but he preferred to live with frescoes by Raphael.

© 2006 The New York Review of Books