A history of Italian painting

by Frank Jewett Mather

I see my past and there I find not one—

In all, not one whole day that has been mine.”

These were the words of a man who was admired like a god and had achieved a lifework of unexampled copiousness and athleticism.

The great enigma, how Michelangelo converted what are usually weaknesses into sources of artistic strength, may best be faced in his life and works. He was born at Caprese in 1475, soon taken back to Florence and put to nurse with a stonecutter’s wife, with whose milk he later used to say he sucked in the mallets and chisels he wielded so powerfully. At thirteen he was articled to Ghirlandaio as a paid assistant and doubtless did some minor work on those prettiest of frescoes in the choir of Santa Maria Novella. Extricating himself from an uncongenial task, he became one of the protegés of Lorenzo de’ Medici, studying the antique marbles of the Medici Gardens under the kindly guidance of old Bertoldo. There he mingled freely for three years in the most learned and gentle society of the time. He mastered anatomy and modelling, searched the compositional secrets of Masaccio. Soon Savonarola’s revolution dismantled that artistic paradise which had been the Medici Gardens, and Michelangelo became what he frequently was afterwards, a fugitive and a solitary man, without either fixed friendships or abiding place.

Fig. 195. Michelangelo. Holy Family of the Doni.—Uffizi.

How he made himself great in sculpture is not our theme. He was thirty and already the master of the David and the Pietà before he began to be a painter. His first commission, in 1505, was for a Holy Family, Figure [195], in medallion form for Agnolo Doni, who at the same time was having his portrait painted by Raphael. The picture as we see it in the Uffizi shows a master who thinks in fresco. The brown flesh, the dull yellows and blues of the draperies could have come from the Brancacci chapel. Remarkable is the complete waiver of charm and sweetness. The superb figures are skilfully contorted into interesting poses, the circle is densely filled and the few interstices left by the main figures are filled with athletic nudes. The aim, which is successfully attained, is an austere grandeur. There is to be no ordinary human appeal in our youthful Lord and his parents.

Fig. 196. Michelangelo. Detail from Cartoon of the Bathers, by the contemporary engraver, Marcantonio.

At this moment Leonardo was already well advanced on the cartoon for the Battle of the Standard, treating it in terms of literal narrative. In 1505 Michelangelo received a signal honor in the commission for the companion fresco, the Battle of Pisa. Both were for the Hall of the Great Council. We can imagine Michelangelo casting about for a reason to abandon a narrative treatment and to find one that could be expressed by the nude. He found it in an incident in Leonardo Aretino’s Chronicle. It seemed that the trumpet found the Florentine men-at-arms bathing in the Arno. Here was the theme of what was properly called The Bathers. Great muscular forms are drawing themselves up the bank, and are hurrying into clothes and armor. We have not a fight, but its alarm and imminence, a fine imaginative substitute for the obvious event. The picture was never executed, and the cartoon, which was the marvel of its day, was soon destroyed, but Michelangelo’s sketches tells us something of the composition, and the contemporary engraver, Marcantonio, Figure [196], has left us a masterly print of the central group. It is plain that Michelangelo made a display of minute anatomy that put his contemporaries to shame, plain also that he subordinated this feature to monumental effect. The failure to execute the fresco and the destruction of the cartoon must count among the capital losses in the history of art.