Michelangelo

Michelangelo Buonarroti was born in 1475 in a small town near Arezzo, where his father was serving a short term as a local official, and he was brought up in Florence. As an infant he was placed with a wet-nurse in a village of stonecutters outside the city, and he is said to have joked in later life that he had taken in hammers and chisels along with his nurse's milk. The remark is almost certainly too neat to be true — it reaches us through the two contemporaries who wrote about him, both of them building a legend — but it points at something real. He wanted, from very early, to work stone. His father was against it. The Buonarroti considered themselves minor gentry, and to be a craftsman who cut marble for money was, to them, a step down. The boy was beaten for it, and went on drawing anyway.

At thirteen he was apprenticed to Domenico Ghirlandaio, the busiest fresco painter in Florence, whose workshop was covering church walls with crowded, elegant scenes. It was there that he learned how a fresco is actually made: the plaster, the speed, the impossibility of correcting a mistake. He stayed only a short time. Within a year or two he had been noticed and taken into the orbit of Lorenzo de' Medici, the banker-statesman who ruled Florence in all but name and had gathered a collection of antique sculpture in a garden near San Marco. He was given access to it, and to the older sculptor who supervised the young men there. For roughly three years he lived in the Medici household as something between a student and an adopted son. He ate at the family table, listened to poets and philosophers argue over dinner, and copied Greek and Roman marbles until he understood how the ancients had made stone look like breathing flesh.

That garden shaped everything. It gave him a patron of the first rank, a classical education he could never have bought, and a lifelong conviction that sculpture was the highest of the arts and that he himself was a sculptor — not a painter, whatever anyone else might want. It also gave him his broken nose: a fellow pupil, provoked once too often by Michelangelo's sharp tongue, struck him in the face, and the flattened nose is visible in every portrait of him afterwards. Then the world he had been let into collapsed. Lorenzo died in 1492; two years later the Medici were driven out of Florence, and the city fell under the influence of the fierce preacher Savonarola, whose sermons against luxury and worldly art stayed with Michelangelo for the rest of his life. The young sculptor left for Bologna, and then for Rome, carrying with him a habit that never left him: he described himself, in letter after letter, simply as Michelangelo, sculptor.

In Rome, still in his early twenties, he was commissioned by a French cardinal to carve a Pietà for a chapel in St Peter's: the dead Christ across his mother's knees, cut from a single block of Carrara marble and polished until the stone looked soft. It made him famous overnight, and it is the only work he ever signed. According to his early biographers, he overheard visitors attributing it to a rival from Milan, returned at night with a lamp and cut his name across the band over the Virgin's breast — then, ashamed of the vanity, never signed anything again. Back in Florence, he was offered a challenge nobody else wanted: an enormous block of marble quarried decades earlier, roughly worked by another sculptor, spoiled, and left in a cathedral yard so long that Florentines simply called it the Giant. Out of that awkward, damaged stone he chiselled the David, and when it was unveiled in 1504 the city set it not in the cathedral but outside the seat of government, a naked shepherd boy turned into a civic symbol of a small republic that had survived its giants.

Then came Pope Julius II, a patron as forceful as Michelangelo himself. In 1505 the artist was summoned to Rome and given a commission of extraordinary ambition: a free-standing tomb for the pope, crowded with dozens of marble figures. It should have been the work of his life. Instead it became what he is reported to have called the tragedy of the tomb. Julius lost interest, the money stopped, the design was cut down again and again, and the contract was renegotiated with the pope's heirs for the next forty years. What finally survives is a much smaller monument in a Roman church, dominated by a seated Moses, horned in the medieval fashion, muscles gathered as if he were about to stand. It is one of the greatest sculptures ever made, and Michelangelo regarded the whole project as a humiliation — decades of painstaking work and negotiation for a fraction of what had been promised.

Worse, from his point of view, Julius diverted him to paint. Between roughly 1508 and 1512 he was set to cover the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, a commission he did not want, in a medium he insisted was not his. He designed his own scaffolding, bridged across the chapel high above the floor, and worked from it standing, head tilted back and arm above him — not lying down, despite the picture most of us carry. He wrote a comic, self-mocking poem about what it was doing to his body: the beard pointing at heaven, the chin driven into the chest, the paint dripping onto his face. Above him grew the Creation, the Flood, the drunkenness of Noah, and around them the prophets and sibyls, hundreds of figures in all, painted in fresco with a boldness of colour and a physical force nobody had attempted on such a scale.

He came back to that chapel more than twenty years later, an older and darker man, to paint the Last Judgement across the altar wall. The Reformation had split Christendom; Rome itself had been sacked; and the new fresco showed it — a churning wall of naked bodies rising and falling around a merciless Christ, with the artist's own features widely thought to be worked into the flayed skin held by St Bartholomew. The nudity caused a scandal almost at once, and after the Council of Trent draperies were painted over parts of it by another artist, mocked ever afterwards as the breeches-maker. In old age Michelangelo turned to architecture. From 1546, past seventy, he was made architect of St Peter's, and it is his design that governs the great dome. He refused payment, treating the work as a duty owed to God rather than a commission, and although he did not live to see the dome completed, it was built substantially to his plan. He was devout, austere and careless of comfort; he quarrelled with popes, patrons and assistants; and he wrote hundreds of poems, barely known in his lifetime.

The rivalries mattered too. He and Leonardo da Vinci, a generation apart and temperamentally opposed, were once set to paint battle scenes on facing walls of the same hall in Florence; neither was finished, and the two men seem to have disliked each other thoroughly. Later the young Raphael, charming where Michelangelo was difficult, absorbed what he saw on the Sistine scaffolding and became a rival at the papal court. Michelangelo outlived them both by decades. He died in Rome in February 1564, a few weeks short of his eighty-ninth birthday, and his body was taken back to Florence, where it was buried in the church of Santa Croce. Within a few years his life had been written up twice, most influentially by Giorgio Vasari, who called him divine and used the word terribilità — an awe close to fear — for the effect of his work. That is the moment when something shifts. The artist stops being a skilled craftsman with a contract and becomes a solitary genius, unrivalled, answerable to nobody, touched by something not quite human.

We are still living inside that idea, and it is worth asking what it costs. Michelangelo was a working man who signed contracts, argued about payment, ran a team of assistants and had his marble hauled by teams of oxen; the myth quietly deletes all of that. The arguments continue in other forms. Between the early 1980s and the 1990s a long restoration stripped centuries of soot and glue from the ceiling, and the colours underneath were so bright that some art historians protested that a final layer of shadow, added by the artist himself, had been washed away with the dirt; others answered that only later grime and repair had gone. The dispute has never been settled. Meanwhile millions of visitors a year pass through the chapel, their breath and dust a slow threat managed by air-conditioning and crowd control. The ceiling is looked at more than any painting on earth, and seen, perhaps, less carefully than almost any.