Michelangelo [antikvár]

Introduction We have been admirers of the great Michelangelo many years now, since the fame of his genius depends no less on the peerless skill of his sculpture than on the unique and illustrious craftsmanship of his painting, and we ourselves have seen his works in various places and feel that no praise can ever be enough for them. Wherefore, we would wish to bestow a favour upon him we charge you to arrange that you meet him and tell him how highly we regard him and how kindly we are disposed towards him. Then ask him, on our behalf, as seems to you most effective and endearing, to be pleased to do us this honour, and agree to give us the pleasure öf anything from his own hand, either a sculpture or a painting, as he thinks fit. We do not prefer one to the other, just so long as it is from his own hand . . . This is our one especial and cherished wish. We have no thought of one material rather than another; nor is one subject dearer to us than another; we only desire to have a work of his great genius if he has nothing ready that he thinks we would be happy to have, ask him if he would at least let us have some drawing from his hand—even a charcoal drawing—so that in this way we can assuage our burning desire, our most heartfelt wish, until he can send us something finished. Let this be made as he wills, a statue or a painting. We are certain it can only give us the deepest delight. . . Never shall we forget so great a joy. The ingratiating tone of this plea, written in 1527 by the Marquis of Mantua to his Florentine agent, is not untypical of the attitude of Michelangelo's innumerable prospective patrons. Like many others, it was doomed to disappointment (even though the campaign persisted in this vein for eleven years). Although it often proved a considerable disadvantage to him, the extraordinary nature and power of Michelangelo's art was recognised by his contemporaries. The fact that Vasari not only made Michelangelo's work the climax of his three-volumed history of art, but also published a separate biography of him in 1568, is more than a token of personal esteem. In confidendy prophesying that 'it is impossible that we shall ever see anything better', Vasari was voicing the opinion of his time. To his contemporaries Michelangelo was the supreme example of a new kind of artist: an artist of divine genius, owing no obligation to a master, respected by rather than respecting his patrons and for whom art was a compulsive inner calling rather than a profession. The inevitable comparisons that we draw between him and his two fellow-giants of the High Renaissance, Leonardo and Raphael (both of whom he outlived by over forty years), only serve to emphasise Michelangelo's uniqueness. Leonardo, the multi-minded 'universal man', emphasises the single-minded determination with which Michelangelo saw painting, sculpture and architecture as one art involving the same prob- lems; Raphael, the superbly gifted public performer, whose facile talent could be turned, with the assistance of a large and smoothly run workshop, to meet any commission that arose, emphasises Michelangelo's increasingly introverted struggle for the realisation of his ideas—a struggle that was waged against demanding patrons, inadequate assistants and above all against the terrifying standards of his own ideals. Raphael's lucid, harmonious, Classical art bccame a copybook ideal for a succession of academies. Michelangelo's art was too personal to be successfully shared in any stylistic sense. Without the authority of his personality behind them, his characteristic forms, poses and gestures appear false and theatrical in the work of followers and copyists. From the start the themes which he treated and the means with which he treated them were relatively limited; it is the way in which he stretched these limited means almost to breaking point that explains his profound liberating influence. The artists who gained most from his work were those who, like Rubens and Bernini, could see that his greatness lay beyond his style and his personal mannerisms. For a native of fifteenth-century Florence, Michelangelo's early artistic career was exceptional in two important respects. It was customai'/ for great emphasis to be laid on draughtsmanship and customary to study the antique and the great Florentine masters. But not only did Michelangelo make an unfashionable choice in the artists he admired (Giotto, Masaccio and Donatello, rather than contemporary masters such as Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Pollaiuolo), he also adopted an attitude towards these early sources which was distinctly original. He rejected an art of great sophistication and refinement for an art which was at once monumental and intensely expressive and in doing so seems to have been instinctively seeking those qualities which were to constitute the personality of his mature style. The vigorously hatched—almost chiselled—drawings made from Masaccio's monumental figure paintings isolate and emphasise their structural mass and expressive force, and the Madonna of the Stairs relief (plate 1), full of Donatello's spatial subtlety and of his bitter-sweet melancholy, already shows that innate sense of scale and weight that found its final expression in the architecture of St Peter's. His debts to his masters, the painter Ghirlandaio and the sculptor Bcrtoldo, seem on the evidence of his work to have lain chiefly in acquiring technical proficiency. Michelangelo was a