The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (75 page)

Suger, Dante, and Giotto were admired for the awesome immortality of their works. Yet the word “divine” was rarely applied to living artists or poets before the sixteenth century. Alberti in his work on painting (1436) already saw in the artist a “divine” power. Leonardo, too, declared the painter’s work “nobler than that of nature” and his painter was “a second god.” The Portuguese painter Francisco de Hollanda observed in Rome in 1538, that “in Italy, one does not care for the renown of great princes, it’s a painter only that they call divine.”

During the Middle Ages the artist had been a man of trained skills and disciplined life. The earliest painters’ guilds in the late thirteenth century oversaw the lives and works of members, their religious activities, their contracts of apprenticeship, and their relation to patrons. In Florence after 1293 no one had civic rights who was not a member of his proper guild, and defiance of the guild was unusual. When Brunelleschi refused to pay his dues to the guild of building workers in 1434, he was imprisoned for eleven days, until the authorities secured his release to work at the cathedral. Guilds were losing their monopolies, but not until 1571 did a decree exempt members of the Florentine Academy from guild membership. The Protestant Reformation, wary of images in churches, deprived painters and sculptors of their best traditional patron. But about the same time merchant bankers like the Medici created a more varied demand, offering the artist a new chance to be original.

The roles of patron and of artist were being strangely reversed. When the marchioness Isabella d’Este of Mantua, collecting works by the best painters of her time, contracted with Perugino on January 19, 1503, for an allegorical picture to be delivered by the following June, she still specified every detail. “You are at liberty to omit figures but not to add anything of your own.” But we see the modern spirit in her dealings with Leonardo da Vinci. In 1501 she wrote to the Carmelite vicar-general of Florence, “Your Reverence might find out if he would undertake to paint a picture for our studio. If he consents, we would leave the subject and the time to him; but if he declines, you might at least induce him to paint a little picture of the Madonna, as sweet and holy as his own nature.” Giovanni Bellini in 1506 in Venice let her specify the size of the painting but insisted that all else be left to his imagination. In this same year Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg (1471–1528), who happened to be in Venice, was impressed by this independence of Italian artists. “Here I am a gentleman,” he wrote, “and at home a mere parasite.”

Even when court painters were exempt from guild restrictions they could not accept outside work without permission. They painted everything to order and, like other craftsmen, were paid by the hour. But by the end of the fifteenth century the best Italian artists were well-off and were paid like professionals. Leonardo received a substantial annual salary in Milan and later from the king of France. Raphael and Titian could afford a notoriously luxurious way of life. Michelangelo himself received three thousand ducats for the Sistine ceiling, and had a large income from his work. When he refused payment for his work on St. Peter’s he was already a wealthy man, which made his modest way of life all the more remarkable. Established artists like Giovanni Bellini and Titian could count on sinecures or salaried offices with few duties.

When the artist was no longer a mere craftsman trying to do better what others had already done, his life became interesting, worth writing and reading about. We know of no Western artist before Brunelleschi whose life was written by a contemporary. The new era, as we have seen, was emphatically announced in the copious and readable
Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects
(1550), by Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574). Commonly called the first Western historian of art, Vasari should more precisely be called the first historian of artists, for his work was a celebration of individual artist geniuses. At a lively dinner party in Rome in 1546 at Cardinal Farnese’s, Vasari was challenged to write an account of “all illustrious artists from the time of Cimabue up to the present.” Disciple and friend of Michelangelo (they wrote each other regularly when they were separated), and a competent artist, Vasari was at home with the leading artists of his day. No one saw more vividly the artist’s new role.

Vasari grouped his artists into three periods, each distinguished by its artist geniuses. The first, led by Cimabue and Giotto, marked “a new beginning, opening the way for the better work which followed; and if only for this reason I have to speak in their favour and to allow them rather more distinction than the work of that time would deserve if judged by the strict rules of art.” His second period, which included Uccello, Botticelli, and Mantegna, “was clearly a considerable improvement in invention and execution, with more design, better style, and a more careful finish.… Even so, how can one claim that in the second period there was one artist perfect in everything.… These achievements certainly belong to the third period, when I can say confidently that art has achieved everything possible in the imitation of nature and has progressed so far that it has more reason to fear slipping back than to expect ever to make fresh advances.” This third period opened with Leonardo. “It is inherent in the very nature of these arts to progress step by step from modest beginnings and finally to reach the summit of perfection”—in Michelangelo.

From printed sources, manuscripts, interviews, and travel reports enriched
by legend, anecdote, and rumor, Vasari produced two volumes in Florence in 1550 containing 133 lives. The success of this work and his growing intimacy with Michelangelo then led him to produce an enlarged and illustrated second edition (1568) of three volumes treating 161 lives. Here he provided the framework for art historians in later centuries. Vasari inspired the classic caricature of the typical artist in the
Autobiography
of Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571). And he led another Michelangelo disciple, Condivi, to write a corrective biography of their hero.

Climaxing his history of artists with a life of his teacher and idol Michelangelo that was several times as long as any of the others, Vasari depicted the genius artist, the modern creator, the Sovereign Self. His “Divine Michelangelo” ironically signaled a secular religion of art. Back in the days of Giotto “all artists of energy and distinction were striving to give the world proof of the talents with which fortune and their own happy temperaments had endowed them.”

There was little in his family or his circumstances to explain this ascent to divinity.

Michelangelo was born on March 6, 1475, to Lodovico Buonarroti, a substantial citizen and mayor of the village of Caprese, near Arezzo, of a family that boasted its descent from the counts of Canossa. “A fine nativity truly,” Condivi noted, “which showed how great the child would be and of how noble a genius; for the planet Mercury with Venus in seconda being received into the house of Jupiter with benign aspect, promised what afterwards followed, that the birth should be of a noble and high genius, able to succeed in every undertaking, but principally in those arts that delight the senses, such as painting, sculpture, and architecture.” The family soon moved to Florence. Michelangelo’s mother died when he was only six, and the artist liked to note that his nurse was the daughter of a stone carver and the wife of a stone carver. “If my brains are any good at all,” he told Vasari, “it’s because I was born in the pure air of your Arezzo countryside, just as with my mother’s milk I sucked in the hammer and chisels I use for my statues.”

Lodovico Buonarroti placed his other four sons with the wool and silk guilds, but he could afford to send Michelangelo to a grammar school. There the boy stole time from his studies to pursue his obsession with drawing, which his father and older brothers tried to cure by occasional beatings. Finally abandoning hope of forcing the boy to give up drawing for some more elevated pursuit, Lodovico apprenticed him at the age of fourteen to the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio. The precocious Michelangelo made copies of works by masters that were indistinguishable from the originals, then aged them with smoke, and exchanged them for the originals that he coveted.

After a year he left the painter’s workshop for a curious art school that Lorenzo the Magnificent had set up in the Medici gardens. Lorenzo, who had collected antique sculpture and employed a pupil of Donatello as teacher, now hoped by gathering young talents like Michelangelo to establish a new school of painters and sculptors. Even as a boy Michelangelo had sculpted masterly reliefs, his
Madonna of the Stairs
and the
Battle of the Centaurs
. Discovering Michelangelo’s rare talent in “the prime art,” sculpture, Lorenzo added the boy to his household. The philistine Lodovico Buonarroti still found it hard to see the difference between a stonemason and a sculptor and thought neither occupation suitable for a scion of the counts of Canossa. Another Medici apprentice, the envious Torrigiano, left his mark on the face of Michelangelo. In one of their many ill-tempered encounters for which Torrigiano was banished from Florence, Torrigiano’s fist broke Michelangelo’s nose. When Lorenzo de Medici died in 1492, the boy returned to live with his father, but, except for a brief interval, never ceased to be known as a Medici partisan in Florence’s turbulent politics.

While living with his father from 1492 to 1494, Michelangelo often heard the eloquent Savonarola (1452–1498) preach in the cathedral of Florence. The passionate and persuasive Savonarola was the declared enemy of the arts that made Florence great, and he mistrusted the ancient classics. “The only good thing which we owe to Plato and Aristotle,” Savonarola preached, “is that they brought forward many arguments which we can use against the heretics. Yet they and other philosophers are now in Hell. An old woman knows more about the Faith than Plato.” Savonarola drove the Medici from Florence in 1494 and established a “democratic” dictatorship with himself at the head. There in the Piazza della Signoria in 1497 he ignited his famous Bonfire of the Vanities, feeding it with carnival costumes and masks, wigs and cosmetics, mirrors, playing cards and musical instruments, every kind of work of art, along with volumes of “corrupt” Latin and Italian poets, including Boccaccio. When the Medici fled Florence, so did Michelangelo, first to Bologna and then in 1496 to Rome “as the widest field for a man to show his genius in.” There he took some commissions,
a Bacchus for a banker and for a cardinal the
Pietà
, which was his first important work on the Christian themes that would consume his life and would become one of St. Peter’s featured attractions. Meanwhile, in Florence, Savonarola, having exhausted the power of his eloquence, was tortured, hanged, and burned. When Michelangelo returned in 1501 the Republic of Florence commissioned him (at twenty-six) to do the
David
that became a symbol of the city, and in 1504 to do a fresco in the Palazzo Vecchio opposite Leonardo’s. This
Battle of Cascina
, like Leonardo’s battle piece, was never finished and never survived.

When the ambitious and impetuous Julius II (1443–1513) came to the papacy (1503–13), he became the patron and catalyst of Renaissance art and a dominant force in Michelangelo’s life. He brought Michelangelo back to Rome, commissioning him to design and build a tomb for him that would be the wonder of the world. Michelangelo remained in Rome until 1514, when the Medici pope Leo X sent him back to Florence, where Leo X and still another Medici pope Clement VII would set him at projects commemorating their family. In 1534 he left Florence for Rome, where projects for succeeding popes kept him occupied until his death in 1564.

The contrast between Leonardo and Michelangelo is an allegory of the arts in modern times. Leonardo left copious notes of his observations on nature and the world around him, but little about his feelings or his inner life. Michelangelo, in his letters, his poetry, in biographies by his friends and students Vasari and Condivi, in conversations with Francisco de Hollanda and others, left us vivid revelations and eloquent chronicles of himself. Leonardo, the self-styled “disciple of experience,” was a hero of the effort to re-create the world from the shapes and forms and sensations out there. But Michelangelo, prophet of the sovereign self, found mysterious resources within. These two greatest figures of Italian Renaissance art dramatized a modern movement from craftsman to artist. If Leonardo could be called the Aristotle—practical-minded organizer and surveyer of experience—Michelangelo would be the Plato, seeker after the perfect idea.

The same Platonism and Neoplatonism that must have discomfited Leonardo in Florence appealed to Michelangelo. The ideas of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola and others of the Platonic Academy whom he would have known in the household of Lorenzo de Medici he expressed in poems and letters to the handsome Tommaso Cavalieri, his earthly embodiment of “the divine idea.” But Leonardo’s was a religion of scientific skepticism, the faith of a discoverer. He seems to have been a disciple of the mathematical pioneer and heretic Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), who had proved the Donation of Constantine to be a forgery, invented a “total science” based on the knowledge of objects, tolerated religious diversity, and recognized the conjectural truth of all religions.

Michelangelo in his twenties had fallen under the spell of the fanatical Savonarola and never recovered. He was seduced into the most unlikely discipleship in the history of art. The
Pietà
of his first trip to Rome had signaled the leitmotif of his life. Michelangelo’s piety, despite the secular and sometimes vulgar interests of the popes he served, deepened with the years. While he combined pagan and Christian themes, he still shared Savonarola’s narrow Christian view of the ancients. Michelangelo’s faith was reinforced in Rome after 1536 by the brilliant and charming widow Marchioness Vittoria Colonna. Sixty years old when he met her, he was enamored of her “divine spirit,” and was “in return tenderly loved by her.” A disciple of the Spanish theologian Juan de Valdés (1500?–1541), and a partisan of German Reformation ideas, she seems to have converted him to the theological dogma of justification by faith. Michelangelo adored her in his later Roman years, and she fired his religious passion, attested by his poems and letters and drawings for her.