The life of Michelangelo offers one of the most striking examples of the influence that a great man can have on his time. At the moment of his birth in the second half of the fifteenth century the serenity of Ghirlandajo and of Bramante illuminated Italian art. Florentine sculpture seemed about to languish away from an excess of grace in the delicate and meticulous art of Rossellino, Disiderio, Mino da Fiesole, Agostino di Duccio, Benedetto da Maiano and Andrea Sansovino. Michelangelo burst like a thunder-storm into the heavy, overcharged sky of Florence. This storm had undoubtedly been gathering for a long time in the extraordinary intellectual and emotional tension of Italy which was to cause the Savonarolist upheaval. Nothing like Michelangelo had ever appeared before. He passed like a whirlwind, and after he had passed the brilliant and sensual Florence of Lorenzo de' Medici and Botticelli, of Verocchio and Lionardo, was ended forever. All that harmonious living and dreaming, that spirit of analysis, that aristocratic and courtly poetry, the whole elegant and subtle art of the "Quattrocento," was swept away at one blow. Even after he had been gone for a long time, the world of art was still whirled along in the eddies of his wild spirit. Not the most remote corner was sheltered from the tempest; it drew in its wake all the arts together. Michelangelo captured painting, sculpture, architecture and poetry, all at once; he breathed into them the frenzy of his vigour and of his overwhelming idealism. No one understood him, yet all imitated him. Every one of his great works, the David, the cartoon for the war against Pisa, the vault of the Sistine Chapel, the Last Judgment, St. Peter's, dominated generations of artists and enslaved them. From every one of these creations radiated despotic power, a power that came above all from Michelangelo's personality and from that tremendous life which covered almost a century.

No one work can be detached from that life and studied separately. They are all fragments of one monument, and the mistake that most historians make is to mutilate this genius by dividing it into different pieces. We must try to follow the entire course of the torrent from its beginning to its end if we are to have any comprehension of its formidable unity.

MICHELANGELO

Table of Contents

CHAPTER I

Table of Contents

Childhood and Youth
(1475-1505)

Michelangelo was born on the sixth of March, 1475, at Caprese, in Casentino, of the ancient family of the Buonarroti-Simoni, who are mentioned in the Florentine chronicles from the twelfth century. His father, Lodovico di Lionardo Buonarroti-Simoni, was then Podesta of Caprese and Chiusi. His mother, Francesca di Neri di Miniato del Sera, died when he was only six years old, and some years later his father married Lucrezia Ubaldini. Michelangelo had four brothers: Lionardo, who was two years his senior; Buonarroto, born in 1477; Giovan Simoni, born in 1479; and Sigismondo, born in 1481. His foster-mother was the wife of a stone-cutter of Settignano and in later years he used to jokingly attribute his vocation to the milk upon which he had been nourished. He was sent to school in Florence under Francesco da Urbino, but he busied himself only in drawing and neglected everything else. "Because of this he greatly irritated his father and his uncles, and they often beat him cruelly, for they hated the profession of an artist, and, in their ignorance of the nobility of art, it seemed a disgrace to have one in the house."[1]

The elder Buonarroti, however, was, like his son, more violent than obstinate, and he soon allowed the boy to follow his vocation. In April, 1488, Michelangelo, by the advice of Francesco Granacci, entered the studio of Domenico and David Ghirlandajo.

That was the most famous studio in Florence. Domenico was an indefatigable worker who "longed to cover with stories the entire circuit of the walls of Florence" and possessed of a calm, simple and serene spirit, satisfied merely to exist without tormenting itself over subtleties. This fortunate being, who died at forty-four, leaving an immense mass of completed work in which the magnificence and the moral force of Florence still live, was the best guide that could have been given to the young Michelangelo. Domenico was then, from 1486 to 1490, in the fulness of his power, and at work on his masterpiece, the paintings in the Tornabuoni Chapel in S. Maria Novella.

It has been said that his influence on Michelangelo amounted to nothing, and it is true that we find no direct trace of it except in two drawings in the Louvre and the Albertina. Still, exact imitation is very rare with Michelangelo. He was made of too stubborn stuff ever to be much affected by masters or surroundings. He felt contempt for Raphael because he was impressionable, "and drew his superiority not from nature, but from study." I do not believe, however, that the time he spent in the school of Ghirlandajo had no effect upon him. Even if it did not influence his style or his method of working, he must have gained from the master of S. Maria Novella and from his wholesome work a healthy point of view and a physical and moral vigour which could have been given him by no other artist in Florence—not even the two great sculptors, Pollajuolo and Verrocchio, who were indeed not there at that time—and which acted as a powerful balance to the neuroticism of the Botticellian school. I do not doubt that Ghirlandajo helped to lay the foundations from which arose the art of the young Michelangelo devoted to the expression of force and so contemptuous of morbid sentiment.

Ghirlandajo's school was enthusiastically open-minded toward everything interesting in art. It was eclectic and encouraged intellectual

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Michelangelo

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

MICHELANGELO

CHAPTER I

Childhood and Youth (1475-1505)

Childhood and Youth
(1475-1505)