Durants' The Story of Civilization
Volume V
Michaelangelo. Pages 466-469
With all his versatile ability Michael found it hard to earn a living by art in a city where there were almost as many artists as citizens. An agent of Riario invited him to Rome, assuring him that the Cardinal would give him employment, and that Rome was full of wealthy patrons. So in 1496 Michaelangelo moved hopefully to the capital, and received a place in the household of the Cardinal. Here, almost at the outset, the artist distinguished his work by showing the figure in a moment and attitude of action. The Greek preference for repose in art was alien to him, except in the Pieta. Michaelangelo chose rather to portray an individual imaginary in conception, realistic in detail. He did not imitate the antique, except in costumes; His work was characteristically his own, no renaissance, but a unique creation.
The greatest product of his first stay in Rome was the Pieta that is now one of the glories of St. Peter’s. The contract for it was signed by Cardinal Jean de Villiers, French ambassador at the papal court (1498); the fee was to be 450 ducats; the time allowed one year. There are some blemishes in this glorious group of the Virgin Mother holding her dead Son in her lap: the drapery seems excessive, the Virgin’s head is small for her body, her left hand is extended in an inappropriate gesture; her face is that of a young woman clearly younger than her Son. To this last complaint Michaelangelo, as reported by Condivi, made answer:
Do you not know that chaste women maintain their freshness far longer than
The unchaste ? How much more would this be the case with a virgin into
whose breast there never crept the least lascivious desire which would affect
the body ! Nay, I will go further, and hazard the belief that this unsullied bloom
of youth, besides being maintained in her natural causes, may have been
miraculously wrought to convince the world of the virginity and perpetual
purity of the mother.
It is a pleasant and forgivable fancy. The spectator is soon reconciled to that gentle face, untorn by agony, calm in her grief and love, the bereaved mother resigned to the will of God, and consoled by holding for some final moments the dear body here cleansed of its wounds, freed from its indignities, resting in the lap of the woman that bore it, and beautiful even in death. All the essence and tragedy and redemption of life are in this simple group: the stream of births by which woman carries on the race; the certainty of death as the penalty for every birth; and the love that ennobles our mortality with kindness, and challenges every death with new birth. Francis I was right when he pronounced this the finest achievement of Michaelangelo. In all the history of sculpture no man has ever surpassed it, except, perhaps the unknown Greek who carved the Demeter of the British Museum.
The success of the Pieta brought Michaelangelo not only fame, which he humanly enjoyed, but money, which his relatives were ready to enjoy with him. His father had lost, with the fall of the Medici the little sinecure that Lorenzo the Magnificent had given him; Michael’s older brother had entered a Monastery; the two younger brothers were improvident, and Michael became now the main support of the family. He complained of this necessity, but gave generously.
Probably because the disordered finances of his relatives called him, he returned to Florence in 1501. A unique Assignment came to him in August of that year. The Operai or Board of Works at the cathedral owned a block of Carrara marble thirteen and a half feet high, but so irregularly shaped that it had lain unused for a hundred years. The board asked Michaelangelo could a statue be chiseled out of it. He agreed to try; and on Augusts 16 the Operai del Duomo and the Arte della Lana ( the wool Guild ) signed the contract:
That the worthy master Michaelangelo.... has been chosen to fashion, complete,
and finish to perfection that male statue called “Il gigante,” of nine cubits in height...
That the work shall be competed within two years from September, at a salary
of six golden florins per month...... and when the statue is finished Guild Consuls and the Operai ... shall estimate whether he deserve a larger recompense, and this shall be left to their consciences.
The sculptor toiled on the refractory material for two and a half years; with heroic labour he drew from it, using every inch of his height, his ‘David’. On January 25 1504 the Operai assembled a council of leading artists in Florence to consider where ‘IL gigante’ as they called the ‘David’, should be placed. They could not agree, and finally left the the matter to Michaelangelo, who asked it be placed on the platform of the Palazzo Vecchio. The task took forty men four days; a gateway had to be heightened by breaking a wall above it before the colossus could pass; and twenty one further days had to be spent in raising it into place. For 369 years it stood in the open and uncovered porch of the Palazzo, subject to weather, urchins, and revolution. The Medici, returning to power in 1513, left it untouched, but in the uprising that again deposed them (1527 ) a bench thrown from a window of the Palace broke the statue’s left arm. Two lads of sixteen, gathered and preserved the pieces, and a later Medici, Duke Cosimo, had the fragments put together and replaced. In 1873, after the statue had suffered erosion from the weather, David was laboriously transferred to the Accademia delle Belle Arti, where it occupies the place of honour as the most popular figure in Florence.
It was ‘a tour de force’ and as such can hardly be overpraised; the mechanical difficulties were brilliantly overcome. Esthetically one may pick a few flaws; the right hand is too large, the neck too long, the left leg overlong below the knee, the left buttock does not swell as any proper buttock should. Peri Soldering head of the republic thought the nose excessive; Vasari tells the story -- perhaps a legend -- how Michaelangelo, hiding some marble dust in his hand, mounted a ladder, pretended to chisel off a bit of the nose while leaving it intact, and let the marble dust fall from his hand before the Gondolier, who then pronounced the statue much improved. The total effect of the work silences criticism; the splendid frame, not yet swollen with the muscles of Michaelangelo’s later heroes, the finished texture of the flesh, the strong yet refined features, the nostrils tense with excitement, the frown of anger and the look of resolution subtly tinged with diffidence as the youth faces the fearsome Goliath and prepares to fill and cast his sling-- these share in making the ‘David’ with one exception * the most famous statue in the world. Vasari thought it surpassed all other statues ancient and modern, Latin and Greek.
* Which should be the ‘Hermes ‘ of Praxiteles but more probably is the Statue of Liberty.
