LITMIR.BIZ

      Moreover, the exaggerated quest for suppleness and movement, backed by a passion for dazzling feats gave fatal impetus into Mannerism. What can be more pretentious and less monumental than these statues: Franc. Da Sangallo’s Julius II in St. Peter’s Basilica, the Paolo Giovio or the Piero de’ Medici amongst others. They may be extraordinary quickies, but what jerky, graceless lines and what dearth of elegance! Better than anywhere else, funerary art nicely reflects all the struggles, conflicts and excesses of the Renaissance. Let us briefly review examples of the output.

      In northern Italy, traditional architectural values still had followers such as Sansovino, San Micheli and the sculptor of the tomb of Jac. Soriano da Rimini at the Santo Stefano Church in Venice (1535) – it is a sort of funerary niche inhabited by a sarcophagus supporting a statue of the deceased between two columns.

      In central Italy, the tombs of Julius and the Medici, where architecture abdicates entirely before sculpture, were the rule. These monuments contain Michelangelo’s chief innovations: in the fifteenth century, allegorical figures of almost invariably small size were entirely subordinated to a statue of the deceased but became preponderant in Michelangelo’s works because they stimulated his imagination. For Italy, this was a new way of handling funerary art. Michelangelo’s colossuses contain high spiritualistic aspirations that incarnate a universe of abstract impressions. Need it be said that this is no longer the cold banal allegory of the fifteenth century, these are no longer the Theological Virtues, Cardinal Virtues, Arts or Sciences in relaxed poses or, it must be said, somehow parasitical motifs placidly lined up next to another. Michelangelo liked to penetrate deeper into the conception of a subject: to him all the allegorical characters bond intimately to the deceased whose virtues they celebrate. Indignant or humiliated prisoners, victors savouring the full joy of triumph and personifications of natural forces such as Rivers, Day, Night, Dusk and Dawn are all so many chords plucked by the soul of the deceased; each rings out its own sound in memory of his noble qualities, of the splendour of his victories and of the pain triggered by his premature death. In short, they are the actors of a tragedy whose hero is Julius II, Giuliano de’ Medici or his brother Lorenzo. How can such a conception not be more dramatic than that of the Primitives?!

      The need for movement soon made it impossible to settle for representing the deceased in a posture of eternal rest: the dead are now rubbing elbows, chatting or doing something else.

      As to the themes of the last Renaissance sculptors, the theory of art for art’s sake prevailed increasingly over art as a statement of great ideas and noble sentiments. Here no example is more edifying than a comparison between sculptures commissioned by the Medici with those of the Florentine Republic for the Piazza dei’ Signori or the Loggia de’ Lanzi. The Republic displayed Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes only after adding an inscription reminding viewers that the Jewish heroine’s exploit stood as a warning to all tyrants. In addition, it essentially commissioned Michelangelo to do a David because it saw the latter as an example of a young herdsman who had saved his country from the yoke of Philistine rule. But the concerns of the Medici lay elsewhere: they sought only to embellish the piazzas with beautiful sculptures free of any signification; in short, they were essentially platonic, e.g. Hercules and Cacus, Neptune, Perseus and the Rape of the Sabine Women. Official art must have singularly annihilated all patriotism for sixteenth-century Florence to have so hastily accepted compositions based merely on artistic merit instead of on the glorification of a saint, folk hero or military victory. When art becomes that contrived, what breathing space survives for emotions, inspiration or even personal convictions?!

      The Oeuvre

      Although Michelangelo excelled as a sculptor, painter and architect, he was most ardently and consistently fond of sculpting: scultore was the only title he ever used. We therefore need to use this discipline as the baseline for mapping the biography and efforts of this prodigious artist. Among the wealth of publications devoted to Michelangelo, those of Condivi and Vasari deserve special mention.

      19. Saint Proculus, from the arca of San Domenico, 1495. Marble. Church of San Domenico, Bologna.

      20. Angel holding a candelabra, 1495. Marble. Church of San Domenico, Bologna.

      Michelangelo is an infinitely more faithful representative of the modern era than his supremely serene fellow geniuses Da Vinci or Raphael, although he was older than the latter. He was a sublime misanthrope who sensed melancholy, fears, inner doubts and the soul’s rebelliousness against society, which he translated with a uniquely personal style of vehemence.

      The most incisive research into the Florentine School is helpless to explain the genesis of Michelangelo: his career was stunning and unexpected in equal measure. After a fairly long period of decline in Italian statuary art, this supernatural being suddenly burst in, brushed away the past and revitalised the then present with the most prodigious temperament for statuary art that the Western world had seen since Phidias.

      Michelangelo was born on 6 March, 1475 in Arrezo, in the province of Caprese near the Franciscan order’s famous La Vernia Monastery, immortalised by the visions of St. Francis of Assisi. The area has some of the roughest and mightiest terrain in Tuscany, generously endowed with bold naked rock, centuries-old beech forests, brisk clean air and some of the highest peaks in the Appenines.

      At the time of Michelangelo’s birth, his father Lodovico Buonarroti (1444–1534) was district commissioner of the market towns of Chiusi and Caprese (not the Caprese between the Vatican State and Tuscany River). He belonged to a very old family that sixteenth-century genealogists linked to the counts of Canossa – belated ennoblements are always vaguely dubious and in turn somewhat laughable when they concern an ancestor like Michelangelo. At the end of his six-month appointment, Lodovico returned to Settignano outside Florence where he owned a small estate and put Michelangelo out to nurse with a stonecutter’s wife. At the age of six, his mother died. He then took up drawing under Granacci before apprenticing under the Ghirlandaio brothers in August 1488. Domenico Ghirlandaio helped decorate the Sistine Chapel in Rome and did a number of frescoes for the Santa Maria Novella Church in Florence.

      Whatever his talents, Ghirlandaio was not the inquisitive sort of soul who could poke away at technique from different angles and revitalise art. His works are admirably assertive and

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