Jana Stoughton STOUGHTON 1 Einstein’s Universe

Cooper

10 March 2005

The Advantage of the Patron

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti was arguably the most gifted and influential artist of his century. He was a part of a blossoming of artists in Florence under the rule of the Medici family during the sixteenth century, and became known as the symbol of the artistic movement of the Italian Renaissance. The Medici family used Michelangelo’s extraordinary talent and his iconic reputation under the reign of Lorenzo the Magnificent to increase their personal power. To the Medici and Florence, Michelangelo represented the “finest living proof of an age still fresh in the collective memory, a period hailed in Medici propaganda as a golden age: the decades in the late fifteenth century when the ‘old’ Medici, covertly governing the Republican city, had fostered an extraordinary blossoming of the arts, letters, and sciences” (Luchinat 10).

Lorenzo the Magnificent (1492-92) recognized Michelangelo’s talent and took him under his wing to take advantage of his talent, adding to the power of the Medici family (Mee). Lorenzo “personified the Renaissance spirit and devotion to the joys of Greek and Roman culture. A diplomat and a gentleman, he loved the people of Florence and respected their need for independence from tyranny. For this he was much loved by the citizens (Ottmann 15). Lorenzo was the “archetype of the Renaissance man” (Mee 138). He was a poet, patron, banker, diplomat, and composer of songs and nurtured a golden age in Florence (Mee).

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Michelangelo showed exceptional promise at a young age, training in painting for three years by the Florentine painter Ghirlandaio at the age of thirteen. The next year in 1488 Lorenzo created a school for promising young sculptors because he was worried that there were not any sculptors that were as good as the painters in Florence. The school was run by an old sculptor named Bertoldo di Giovanni and set up in the Gardens of San Marco, located near the Medici palace. Ghirlandaio suggested Michelangelo’s name to Lorenzo as a possible apprentice and was brought into the school where he further proved his exceptional promise and skills as a sculptor. His first sculpted pieces were done in Lorenzo’s sculpture garden, Madonna of the Stairs and Battle of the Centaurs, both reliefs (Luchinat). Both of these pieces show Michelangelo’s mastery of the fragile marble technique of the 15th century sculptors and his entrance into classical art (Ottmann). Battle of the Centaurs stands out particularly, a crowded scene that was inspired by the tradition of classical Roman battle scenes and gives a preview of Michelangelo’s advanced skill to “unfold passion and tragedy through the dense interaction of nude bodies” (Ottmann 23). Already by this time Michelangelo had established himself as an amazing sculptor and his skill of the marble was obvious. “Legend has it that the boy was learning to carve marble by copying the head of a satyr (antique faun). Lorenzo was impressed by the sculpture but teased the young Michelangelo by pointing out that old creature wouldn't have had a full set of teeth. Mortified, the young perfectionist hacked off a tooth and had Lorenzo reexamine it. Charmed, Lorenzo invited Michelangelo into his home” (PBS). By taking the boy in, Lorenzo exposed him to his family members so that Michelangelo grew attached to them.

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This way the Medici family established a concrete lasting connection with an artist with valuable skills that they could use to their advantage throughout Michelangelo’s lifetime (Mee).

Michelangelo was treated with “fatherly concern” , like one of Lorenzo’s own sons (Brion 105). “Michelangelo enjoyed special privileges, including lodging in the Palazzo Medici in via Larga, dining rights at the Medici table where he could absorb the conversation of Lorenzo’s friends, and a salary of five ducats per month” (Luchinat 11). Michelangelo was also on close terms with the two future Popes, Giuliano who became Clement VII in 1523, when they were all in Lorenzo’s household together. Both were patrons of Michelangelo’s for different projects at San Lorenzo, such as the Library, the facade and New Sacristy with the tombs, and would not have been Michelangelo’s patrons if it were not for the cunning foresight of their father Lorenzo (Beck 7).

After Lorenzo’s death in 1492 the future of Florence looked bleak. Michelangelo had lost his mentor and had no reason to stay in the Medici palace. He left Florence to go back to to his father’s house and didn’t return to Florence until 1501, meanwhile his ties to the Medici remained weak due to the death of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, the cousin of Lorenzo the Magnificent (Piacenti). While he was there he received an invitation from the monastery of Santo Spirito to observe the dissection of corpses and study the anatomy of the human body. The human body was already the focus of his pieces and watching and studying the body at Santo Spirito allowed him to more accurately capture the human figure in his art (Ottmann). One month after Michelangelo left Florence Piero de’ Medici’s (“the Unlucky One”), an ignorant man who never developed into the leader that

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his father had been for 23 years, lack of respect for the Florentines’ need of independence led him to be expelled and the Medici Palace in via Larga to be overthrown in 1494 as a result of the invasion of the French army in Florence. A new republican government was created and lasted until 1512, but the Medici family honor was upheld in Rome under the two Popes, Leo X and Clement VII. Michelangelo, fearing for his safety being closely associated with the Medici family fled to Venice in late 1494 and then to Bologna, where the aristocrat magistrate Gianfrancesco took Michelangelo in and helped him with a commission for sculpting three figures for the extravagant tomb of St. Dominic (Ottmann).

Michelangelo returned to Florence in 1495 where he befriended Cardinal Riario and went to live and work in Rome where he carved Bacchus (Ottmann). Bacchus was a huge, sensual statue of the Roman god of wine that “explored the forms of human flesh in a manner unprecedented since ancient times” (Ottmann 31). The Pope didn’t like the statue apparently and moved it in 1497 to the collection of Jacopo Gali, who became the artists main patron in Rome. Gali helped negotiate the contract between Michelangelo and Cardinal Jean Bilhere de Lagraulas. He wanted a monument in St. Peter’s cathedral in Venice, Rome. The heartbreakingly beautiful sculpture was Pieta, created between 1498-99 of the Virgin with dead Christ. Pieta became the most important work of Michelangelo’s early career, and the fact that he created it at 24 sealed Michelangelo’s celebrity status in Rome (Ottmann). “No sculptor, not even the most rare artist, could ever reach this level of design and grace, nor could he, even with hard work, ever finish, polish, and cut marble as skillfully as Michelangelo did here, for in this statue all of the

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worth and power of sculpture is revealed” said Giorgio Vasari, on Michelangelo’s Pieta, 1568 (Ottmann 37). In 1501 Michelangelo returned to Florence where the Committee of works in the Cathedral was interested in commissioning him to create an important sculpture. Michelangelo proposed the idea of sculpting a statue of the biblical hero David, slayer of Goliath. The Committee liked his idea and Michelangelo began the statue that consumed his life for two and a half years. The sculpture itself became a symbol of Florentine independence and defiance of tyranny (Ottmann). David was the first solid statement of the sculptor’s true genius and “established Michelangelo as the greatest living sculptor in Italy and dethroned Donatello’s famous... David” (Ottmann 42). Michelangelo’s David is made more impressive than Donatello’s David by “abandoning the self-contained compositions of the fifteenth-century David statues by giving David’s head the abrupt turn toward his gigantic adversary” (Kleiner 646). Michelangelo showed a departure from the High Renaissance and a step towards mannerism in David by “presenting towering pent-up emotion rather than calm ideal beauty” (Kleiner 637). Michelangelo managed to embody in David the feelings of civic pride at the time in Florence when there were constant threats of battle (Washington). The statue was such a powerful symbol of the Florentine Republic that at night the piece had to be protected from stone throwers, who were angry about the statue’s blatant nudity and by its political symbolism. Michelangelo challenged not only Donatello’s art but Leonardo Da Vinci’s as well, who was the most popular artist in Florence at the time for his Madonna paintings. Michelangelo produced a series of marble statues of the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child in response and a few Madonna paintings as well.

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In 1508 Pope Julius II, who had become Pope in 1503 and would commission some of the most important projects of the High Renaissance during his rule, insisted Michelangelo to do the frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. Even though Michelangelo considered himself a sculptor and not a painter he gave in to the Pope’s demands from 1508-1512. The original plan for the ceiling was to paint areas between the arches, but Michelangelo persuaded the Pope of a grander scheme. The entire project took four years, consisted of 350 human figures, and was on a vault surface that is 5,000 square feet. The pictures were frescoes, which are much more difficult to produce than normal paintings because they dry very quickly on the fresh plaster. The central-vault area is made up of scenes from the Book of Genesis and the other area depicts other Old Testament subjects (Ottmann). In the paintings the backgrounds are relatively plain and instead the human body is focused on and the story the people are expressing (Fermor). Michelangelo’s “focus on the very essence of the scene contributes much to the greatness of the ceiling as a work of narrative art” (Fermor 104). To this day, the Sistine Chapel is “the most spectacular confluence of architecture and painting. Never before had anyone produced such visual unity of architecture and art, or fused the principles of painting and sculpture so effortlessly” (Ottmann 62-3). The vault of the Sistine Chapel was a particularly difficult project for Michelangelo because he had only a small team of contractors to help him, which was made up of mainly assistants and apprentices. Also, the chapel had to remain in use by the cardinals and the papal court, no paint or plaster was allowed to drop on the chapel floors, and the vault was curved which caused a tricky perspective problem (Ottmann). After all of the challenges and difficulties

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the Sistine Chapel presented, Michelangelo “succeeded in weaving together more than three hundred figures in an ultimate grand drama of the human race” (Kleiner 648). The Sistine Chapel is the most famous work of Michelangelo’s career, establishing him as the leading painter of his time, despite his supposed distaste for the medium (Ottmann). Pope Julius II died four months after Michelangelo completed the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. The Pope’s estate contracted Michelangelo to begin to work on his tomb, a project that took 30 years to complete in 1945 (Ottmann). The most famous figure of the tomb is that of Moses: “The muscles bulge, the veins swell, and the great legs seem slowly to begin to move. If this titan ever rose to his feet, one writer said, the world would fly apart” (Kleiner 647).

In 1513 Giovanni di Lorenzo elected Pope Leo X, and with his leadership the Medici began to take back control of the city. This new generation of Medici desperately wanted to have the same glory as Lorenzo the Magnificent had during his time (Luchinat). To the Medici and Florence, Michelangelo represented the “finest living proof of an age still fresh in the collective memory, a period hailed in Medici propaganda as a golden age: the decades in the late fifteenth century when the ‘old’ Medici, covertly governing the Republican city, had fostered an extraordinary blossoming of the arts, letters, and sciences” (Luchinat 10). Leo X was followed by his cousin Giulio di Giuliano under the name of Clement VII. Both Popes concentrated on the church of San Lorenzo (which was already sacred to the memory of their dynasty) and commissioned Michelangelo to create glorious plans for it that were not fully thought through. The revitalized dedication to San Lorenzo showed the resurrection of projects that had been

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created by Lorenzo the Magnificent, one of the Pope’s efforts to bring about a “revival of a golden age” to Florence (Beck 25). “Michelangelo’s employment by the new generation of patrons in itself represented a link with the earlier Medici” (Luchinat 12). Leo X sent Michelangelo back to Florence, where from 1516 to 1517 he was told to complete the angular arcade of the Palazzo Medici in via Larga. In January of 1519 Leo X commissioned Michelangelo to create the facade for San Lorenzo, but he changed his mind only a short while after the foundations were laid and revoked the contract to the great disappointment of Michelangelo. The facade remains incomplete to this day (Luchinat). In 1519 the death of Lorenzo, duke of Urbino, one of the leaders of Florence shifted the attention of Michelangelo’s Medici patrons to produce

a funerary chapel called New Sacristy at San Lorenzo and an adjacent library for Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano the Magnificent to celebrate and further glorify the Medici dynasty. An important aspect of the plans for New Sacristy include a monument to Cosimo il Vecchio, placed directly in front of the high alter into a huge subterranean pier, which created “a balancing and unifying element between the two Medici generations” (Luchinat). This plan for New Sacristy proves that the new generation of the Medici (Leo X and Giulio di Giuliano) used art to increase their power, to associate themselves with the more prestigious, older generation in their family so that their glorious reign might be reflected back on them.

The Medici grand dukes of the new generation used Michelangelo strictly for his skills to aid their ultimate quest of personal power. One example of this is the Medici patronage of Michelangelo for the creation of their family funerary chapel. The Medici

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used Michelangelo’s artwork “as an authoritative visual language to be used for their own self-representation and promotion” (Darr 7). In the mid-sixteenth century art and artists had gained amazing cultural status in Florence. The status of art emerging as a huge cultural phenomenon triggered a heightened demand for painting. In the time of the Renaissance, “art was often valued for political and social rather than aesthetic reasons” (Gage 97). Patricians, like the Medici, became aware of the possibilities of their own self-representation through art (Goldthwaite). This is why Michelangelo was such an important component in their constant quest of increasing their power. Michelangelo overshadowed much of Florence’s cultural and artistic life at the time (Darr). Michelangelo was unique among artists of his time for several different reasons. Michelangelo did not believe in using mathematical methods as guarantees of proportion and beauty (Kleiner). He believed that measure and proportion should be “kept in the eyes” (Kleiner 645). Michelangelo also argued that artists should not be bound “except by the demands made by realizing the idea” (Kleiner 645). “In this context, Michelangelo created works in architecture, sculpture, and painting that departed from High Renaissance regularity. He put in instead a style of vast, expressive strength conveyed through complex, eccentric, and often titanic forms that loom before viewers in tragic grandeur. Michelangelo’s self-imposed isolation, creative furies, proud independence, and daring innovations led Italians to speak of the dominating quality of the man and his works in one word - terribilita, the sublime shadowed by the awesome and the fearful” (Kleiner 645). For the Medici to be associated with Michelangelo was very important to their dynasty and helped enforce their overwhelming influence and cultural dominance in

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the city of Florence. This is why the tomb was such a vital work to the new generation of Medici, and why they would only have Michelangelo create it. Michelangelo’s overall impressive reputation as an artist and his link with Lorenzo the Magnificent are the only reasons the Medici cared about him. The Medici’s concerns with Michelangelo did not extend beyond his art and reputation, so when Michelangelo took the opposite political side of the Pope he didn’t express opposition.

Pope Clement VII ruled Florence from afar, even after becoming Pope and the people of Florence were displeased with this arrangement. The Pope fled to Rome and a few weeks later the Medici were banished from Florence for the second time and a republican government was reinstated. The city was besieged by imperial forces for ten months in 1529 and Michelangelo, a passionate republican considering his connection with the Medici, sided with the unstable Florentine Republic against the Pope serving as an architect for the fortification of the city walls and bastions and directing Florence’s strengthening of their operation of the military (Luchinat). The Florentine Republic was defeated soon after and Michelangelo went into hiding fearing the wrath of the Pope, but his fears were unfounded, for “his personal choices were as irrelevant as his role in San Lorenzo was irreplaceable” (Luchinat 14). The temporary governor of Florence ordered Michelangelo to be assassinated because he was seen as an enemy of the Medici, but the Pope pardoned Michelangelo saving him from execution and placed him again as the leader of the San Lorenzo project (Luchinat), which proves that the new generation of Medici were only concerned with his artwork, cultural reputation, and his tie with the “golden age” under the reign of Lorenzo the Magnificent.

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Despite Michelangelo’s role in promoting the republic he was chosen by Clement VII in 1533 to paint the Last Judgment for the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Two days after Michelangelo arrived in Florence to begin working Pope Clement VII died and was succeeded by Pope Paul III who appointed Michelangelo to the post of Supreme Architect, Painter, and Sculptor to the Vatican household. Michelangelo worked on The Last Judgment from 1536-41. The scene was painted on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican. At 45 x 40’ it is the largest fresco ever painted, and it concentrated heavily on the human body, giving rise to the style of Mannerism. The picture used “elongated contorted figures, a crowded composition, confused scale and spatial relationships, and a flattening of the picture plane” (Ottmann 10). “When The Last Judgment was revealed in 1541, Pope Paul III was said to have dropped to his knees in prayer” (Ottmann 89). The next year Michelangelo left Florence for Rome and never returned. The Last Judgment kept Michelangelo in Rome for the remainder of his life, and although he spoke of his isolation with pride his ties with the Medici were never really severed, kept alive through a tight correspondence (Luchinat). He left New Sacristy unfinished, despite Cosimo de’ Medici’s many attempts to convince Michelangelo to return to Florence to finish it. Michelangelo left the project up to other artist to fill in the blanks of his plans. The interior was completed but the outside remains unfinished today (Luchinat). Michelangelo “rose closer to the status of ‘divine’ with each passing year, not only due to his legendary artistic talent, but also because of the breadth of his literary culture” (Luchinat 17).

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Michelangelo “left behind a lasting reputation and a broad influence that inspired numerous artistic followers and rivals such as Cellini, Baccio Bandonelli, Tribolo, Pierino da Vinci, Bronzino, Vasari, Buontalenti, and others, several of whom had also worked in Rome and adulated Michelangelo” (Luchinat 14). Michelangelo’s use of several different forms of art “was not unusual for the time, but his proficiency in everything he undertook was remarkable for all times” (Ottmann 112). The Medici family used Michelangelo as a tool to enhance their personal power in Florence . They were chiefly concerned with his amazing talent and his iconic reputation with Lorenzo the Magnificent, being the leader of the artistic movement of the Italian Renaissance. The new generation of the Medici, the Pope Leo X and Pope Clement VII, used Michelangelo’s artwork “as an authoritative visual language to be used for their own self-representation and promotion” (Darr 7).

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Works Cited

Beck, James, Antonio Paolucci, Bruno Santi. Michelangelo The Medici Chapel. New York: Thames and Hudson Inc., 1993.

Brion, Marcel. The Medici: A Great Florentine Family. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1969.

Darr, Alan P. “The Medici and the Legacy of Michelangelo in Late Renaissance Florence: An Introduction.” The Medici, Michelangelo, And The Art Of The Late Renaissance Florence. London: Yale University Press, 2002.

Fermor, Sharon. “The High Renaissance and Mannerism.” Art: The Critic’s Choice. New York: Watson - Guptill Publications, 1999.

Gage, John. Life In Italy At The Time Of The Renaissance. London: B.T. Batsford Ltd., 1968.

Goldthwaite, Richard A. “Artisans and the Economy in Sixteenth-century Florence.” The Medici, Michelangelo, And The Art Of The Late Renaissance Florence. London: Yale University Press, 2002.

Kleiner, Fred S., Christin J. Mamiya, Richard G. Tansey. Gardner’s Art Through The Ages. United States: Thomson Wadsworth, 2001.

Luchinat, Cristina Acidini. “Michelangelo and the Medici.” The Medici, Michelangelo, And The Art Of The Late Renaissance Florence. London: Yale University Press, 2002.

Mee, Charles L. Lorenzo De’ Medici And The Renaissance. New York: American Heritage Publishing Co., Inc., 1969.

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Michelangelo Buonarotti. PBS. 11 March 2005. <http://www.pbs.org/empires/medici/renaissance/michelangelo.html>

Ottmann, Klaus. The Essential Michelangelo. New York: The Wonderland Press, 2000.

Piacenti, Kirsten Aschengreen. “The Medici Grand-ducal Family and the Symbols of Power.” The Medici, Michelangelo, And The Art Of The Late Renaissance Florence. London: Yale University Press, 2002.

Washington, Charles J. Michelangelo: In The Footsteps Of The Master. Conneticut: Advantage Publishing, 2001.