The Durants' SoC
Vol. V The Renaissance
Pages 498-501
Michelangelo and Leo X
Julius II had left funds to his executor for the completion, on a smaller scale, of the tomb that Michelangelo had designed for him. The artist worked at this task for the first three years of Leo’s pontificate, and received from the executors, in those years, 6100 ducats. Most of what remains of the monument was probably produced in this period, along with the ‘Christ Risen ‘ of Santamaria Sopra Minerva-- a handsome naked athlete whom later taste clothed in a loincloth of bronze. A letter written by Michelangelo in May 1518, tells how Signorelli came to his studio and borrowed eighty giulli ( $800?) which he never returned, and adds “he found me working on a marble statue four cubits in height, which has the hands bound behind the back”. A statue in the Louvre fits the description. Near it is a finer “Captive”, naked except for a narrow band about the breast: here the musculature is not exaggerated; the body a symphony of health and beauty; this is Greek perfection. Four unfinished Schiavi or Slaves in the Florence Academy were apparently intended as caryatids to support the superstructure of the tomb. The aborted tomb is now in Julius’ church of San Pietro in Vincoli: a magnificent massive throne, pillars elegantly carved, and a seated “Moses”-- an ill-proportioned monster of beard and horns and wrathful brow, holding the tables of the Law.
If we choose to believe an improbable story in Vasari, Jews could be seen on any Saturday entering the Christian church “ to worship this figure, not as a work of human hand, but as something divine.” The remaining figures of the tomb were indifferently carved by his aids: above the Moses and Madonna, and at her feet the half-recumbent effigy of Julius II, crowned with the papal tiara. The whole monument is a torso, a painfully interrupted work of scattered years from 1506 to 1545, confused, enormous, incongruous, and absurd.
While these figures were being chiselled out, Leo -- perhaps during a stay in Florence -- conceived the idea of finishing the church of San Lorenzo there. This was the shrine of the Medici, containing the tombs of Cosimo Lorenzo, and many other members of the family.Bruunellesco had built the church, but had left the facade unfinished. Leo asked Raphael, Giuliano da Sangallo, Baccio d’Agnolo, Andrea and Iacopo Sansovino to submit plans for completing the front. Michelangelo, apparently of his own accord sent in a plan of his own, which Leo accepted as the best; hence the Pope cannot be blamed, as so many have blamed him, for diverting Michelangelo from Julius’ Tomb. Leo sent him to Florence where he hired assistants for the work, quarrelled with them, sent them packing, and brooded inactively in his uncongenial role as architect. Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, Leo’s cousin, appropriated some of the idle marble for work on the Cathedral; Michael fumed, but still dallied. At last ( 1520 ) Leo freed from the contract, and required no accounting for the funds that had been advanced to the artist. Leo recognized Michelangelo’s supremacy in art, but, he said, “he is an alarming man, as you yourself see, and there is no getting on with him.” Sebastastino reported the conversation to Michelangelo adding: “I told his holiness that your alarming ways did no man any harm, and that it was only your devotion to the great work to which you have given yourself that made you seem terrible to others.”
Michelangelo was the least prepossessing figure in an age brilliant with proud beauty of person and splendour of dress. Middle height, broad shoulders, slim frame, large head, high brow, ears protruding beyond the cheeks, temples bulging out beyond the ears, drawn and sombre face, crushed nose, sharp, small eyes, grizzly hair and beard -- this was Michelangelo in his prime. He wore old clothing, and clung to it till it became almost part of his flesh; and he seemed to have obeyed half of his father’s advice: “ see that you do not wash. Have yourself rubbed down, but do not wash.” Though rich, he lived like a poor man, not only frugally but penuriously. He ate whatever he found at hand, sometimes dining on a crust of bread. At Bologna he and his three workmen occupied one room, slept in one bed. “ While he was in full vigour,” says Condivi, “ he usually went to bed with his clothes on, even to the tall boots, which he has always worn because of a chronic tendency to cramp.... At certain seasons he has kept these boots on for such a length of time that when he drew them off, the skin came away together with the leather.” As Vasari put it, “he had no mind to undress merely that he might have to dress again.”
While he prided himself on his supposed noble lineage, he preferred the poor to the rich, the simple to the intellectual, the toil of a worker to the leisure and luxuries of wealth. He gave most of his earnings to maintain his shiftless relatives. He liked solitude; he found it intolerable to make small talk with third rate minds; wherever he was, he followed his own train of thought. He cared little for beautiful women, and saved a fortune by continence. When a priest expressed regret that Michelangelo had not married and begotten children, he replied “ I have only too much of a wife in my art, and she has given me trouble enough. As to my children, they are the works that I shall leave; and if they are not worth much, they will at least live for a long time.” He could not bear women about the house. He preferred males both for companionship and for art. He painted women, but always in their maternal maturity, not in the bright charm of youth; it is remarkable that both he and Leonardo where apparently insensitive to the physical beauty of woman, who had seemed to most artists the very embodiment and fountain head of beauty. There is no evidence that he was homosexual; apparently all the energy that might have gone into sex was in his case used up in work. He had periods of apparent sluggishness, and then the sudden fever of creation would possess him again, and everything would be ignored, even the sack of Rome.
His bitter temper and sombre mood were his lifelong tragedy. At times he was melancholy to the edge of madness; and in his old age the fear of hell so obsessed him that he thought of his art as a sin, and he dowered poor girls to propitiate an angry God. A neurotic sensitivity brought him almost daily misery. As early as 1508 he wrote to his father: “It is now about fifteen years since I had a single hour of wellbeing.” He would not have many more, though he still had fifty-eight years to live.
