Maybe no one really knows Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni anymore. It’s been so long, his works and his fame have outlasted the man and his contemporaries and maybe the not-quite hagiography has outpaced the historiography. (They called him the divine one, after all.) Painting, sculpture, architecture, his are among the most famous and enduring the works in the world. He was, perhaps the greatest living artist of his time, and carries a legacy that surpasses so many that have come after. He’s the archetype Renaissance Man.
But he was a solitary man, an uncouth man. He lived simply, slept in his clothes and apparently didn’t like people. Two biographies were published while Michelangelo was still alive, one by an apprentice and another by a man named Paolo Giovio. Giovio said Michelangelo’s “nature was so rough and uncouth that his domestic habits were incredibly squalid, and deprived posterity of any pupils who might have followed him.”
So then you stand before him and wonder. And this is as close as we can get. We can read the biographies and see his works and learn this and that, but then we see something that’s almost the real man. This bust was made by Daniele di Volterra, and it was made from Michelangelo’s death mask. There are three Volterra originals, and this one just came back on display from a restoration a few months ago.
He sits at the door before the Hall of Prisoners, named after the four large sculptures begun by Michelangelo for a project for the tomb of Pope Julius II della Rovere which was to have more than 40 statues. Money woes killed most of the project, and after the pope died the project changed altogether, but these were meant to be part of something that depicted the Old and New Testaments, and the Prisoners were to be an allegory of the Soul imprisoned in the Flesh, slave to human weaknesses.
After the artist died, these four Prisoners were found in his studio and his nephew donated them to the Medici family, and over the years they’ve come to us. Read a bit more about each of them.
Hey! Look! It’s David …
The artists gather:
And do their studies:
The right hand is interesting. It’s larger than it should be. The question is open as to whether that was a perspective decision or a metaphor for the action to be, or the action that was done, when David slung the stone.
Now, for his Prisoners, Michelangelo is said to have spent months in quarries looking for the right stones. There’s the famous line about him not carving a figure, but releasing what was inside. If that was the process, you can imagine this man shuffling around, studying the topography, peering into it, through it, for characters. He spent months doing that for the Prisoners.
The marble that held David, this hunk of stone that had perhaps the world’s most famous and important sculpture inside, was an abandoned chunk in a Florence courtyard. Michelangelo got permission from the Opera del Duomo to work it in 1501.
David was originally placed in the Palazzo Vecchio in Piazza Signoria, where it stayed and endured and was threatened and damaged and admired for a good long while.
In 1873 the statue was moved here, to the Tribune of the Galleria. A marble copy was installed back in the Palazzo in 1908. There’s also a prominent copper copy on display elsewhere in Florence. The city has long enjoyed the statue as both a mascot — tiny Florence fending off bigger foes — and, of course, a prominent tourist attraction.
Of course, the problem with David is his ankles:
These are plaster models on display. The models were part of the process of building a 19th century marble monument to Julie Clary Bonaparte. She was the queen consort of Naples and, later, Spain. (Her brother-in-law was Napoleon.)
Very neo-classical, no?
It’s funny how, today, even the practice works art works of art. It must have had some meaning beyond it’s original intention in the 1840s, since it was preserved and has survived. This one is “the genius of death crying over the urn,” and is a plaster study for a monument to Louis de Cambray-Digny, an architect and politician. It was created by Lorenzo Bartolini, who is famous for his giant Napoleon bust and a sculpture of Machiavelli.
A 24-year-old Cesare Mussini painted this oil on canvas. It is of Leonardo da Vinci dying. It basically won him a scholarship, and Mussini, a German-Italian, would become a professor, stay a painter and worked a lot in Florence and Russia.
The Tree of Life was a 14th century panel put in a Florence convent. It was inspired by Giovanni di Fidanza, Saint Bonaventure’s poem by the same name.
In the poem, the Tree of Life yields 12 harvests a year, providing man with gifts from God. Jesus is crucified on a tree of 12 branches, symbolizing those gifts. Moses, Saint Francis, Saint Clare and Saint John the Evangelist are on the panel. The medallions on the branches represent images of Jesus’ life. Stories from Genesis make an appearance in Pacino di Buonaguido’s painting. It’s believed to be a di Buonaguido. Not much is known about the man, and there’s only surviving work that he signed. But scholars rescued him from obscurity, starting in the 1930s or so, and have assigned about 50 other pieces to him, including this one. He is now considered the inventor of miniaturism. And this particular panel falls into the category of Florentine gothic.
The gothic style started in Northern France in the 12th century, an outgrowth of Romanesque art and a compliment of Gothic architecture. It spread to all of Western Europe, and much of the southern and central parts of the continent. But it didn’t see much success in Italy. They already had their style, much of which we’ve seen today. It was neat, today, to see where the two styles bumped into one all come together, and where the one style yielded to what it could not surpass.
