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 16th-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 precise and the style is clear-cut, but lack any inspiring principle or transcendent vision.
Michelangelo’s earliest schooling remains unresearched in any real depth and insufficiently understood. However, external influences exert little impact on such solid geniuses. From his first works in Florence through to the figures he painted and shaped in Rome with half frozen fingers, Michelangelo’s oeuvre shows overall unity despite the diversity of his output. As hard as you look, you cannot distinguish, say, a Florentine or Roman period in his works as you can with Raphael – not to mention any Umbrian one. At best, different time frames show only differences of quality but with no intrinsic change of character. In this way Michelangelo, the paradigm of iron will and personal convictions, resembles the sublimely imaginative Da Vinci. Each came into this world with a personal ideal, something Raphael only gradually developed from the role models around him. As Michelangelo aptly described his younger rival’s genius: “Raphael owed his superiority not to Nature but to studying.”
We would be going too far if we subscribed to Klaczko’s statement in Causeries Florentines – Dante et Michel-Ange (Paris 1880) that, “Michelangelo seems a haughty loner, unrelated to the School of his time, undescended from that of the past.” It is hard to believe in such a spontaneous generation. As we shall see, Michelangelo never hesitated to draw inspiration from his predecessors. It hardly belittles the unassailable master to seek affinities between his style and that of Donatello, Jacopo della Quercia, and their like: the issue is to establish the roots that connect him to his era and any lost traditions he may have fingered and revived, however subconsciously.
Crucifix, 1492.
Wood polychrome, 142 × 135 cm.
Santo Spirito, Florence.
Virgin with Child and St John the Baptist as a Child (Tondo Taddei), 1504–1505.
Marble, diameter: 106.8 cm.
Royal Academy of Arts, London.
The first models Michelangelo studied were those that attracted every young artist in Florence at the time, i.e. the marbles of Antiquity in the San Marco Gardens as well as the frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel of the Church of the Carmine – which is where the sculptor Pietro Torrigiano threw a punch that broke the young master’s nose, disfiguring him for life. A handful of drawings at the Louvre in Paris, the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich, and the Albertina in Vienna show that Michelangelo borrowed from the works of Giotto, Masaccio, and other 14th-century artists. In the Louvre drawing, he copied two figures from Giotto’s painting St John’s Disciples Discovering the Empty Tomb at the Peruzzi Chapel in Santa Croce. In the Munich drawing, he copied characters from Masaccio’s Christ Ordering St Peter to Pay the Tribute. And in the Albertina drawing, he reproduced a composition by a still earlier master.
Although his style and manner were by now ripe and distinct, Michelangelo’s convictions remained vague. This transpires in the diversity of his studies. He had fun co-opting into paint the Temptation of St Anthony, a print by the Alsatian painter and engraver Martin Schoen, although the theme lay well astray of his personal focus: what did this youthful lover of round fulsome forms have in common with Schoen’s skinny, tortured, almost caricatured figures?
Virgin with Child and St John the Baptist as a Child (Tondo Pitti), 1504–1505.
Marble, 85.8 × 82.5 cm.
Museo del Bargello, Florence.
Michelangelo soon moved on to other role models. Among the deceased, Donatello ranked topmost. His teachings carried on through both his works displayed across Florence and through the tradition fostered by his students such as Bertoldo, even as they leaned ever more heavily into Mannerism. Michelangelo could not have avoided the fascination of Donatello’s own powerful genius, with which he had so much in common. He studied this master with a passion, if not without an occasional glance of approval at Ghiberti’s masterpiece, the doors of the baptistery he called “fit to stand at Heaven’s gate”.
Michelangelo imitated Donatello both deliberately and subconsciously. And it persisted with numerous interruptions from his early Madonna della Casa Buonarroti to his late Moses, inspired by Donatello’s St John for the Cathedral of Florence. He managed to lock in the gist of style, his secret way of electrifying figures with life and vibrancy and of injecting passion and eloquence right into the drapery. In short, he captured the spirit of the deeply dramatic emotion and feverish agitation so distinctive in that era of change. Other borrowings are even more obvious: Donatello’s bronze door at San Lorenzo shows a standing figure facing to the right with the left arm outstretched to herald God the Father in the Creation of Adam and Creation of Eve at the Sistine Chapel. Here, Michelangelo only raises the hand a touch higher and arranges the drapery more carefully than his predecessor. Both heads move almost the same way and the rest is equally analogous. Strong resemblances also appear between the Madonna of Bruges and Judith in the Lanzi Loggia as well as Michelangelo’s David and Donatello’s Saint George.
Madonna of Bruges, 1501–1505.
Marble, height: 120.9 cm.
Church of Our Lady, Bruges.
Madonna of Bruges, detail, 1501–1505.
Marble, height: 120.9 cm.
Church of Our Lady, Bruges.
Medici Madonna, 1521–1531.
Marble, height: 226 cm.
New Sacristy of San Lorenzo, Florence.
We should also mention here the strong influence of the sculptors Jacopo and Giacomo della Quercia (1371–1438 and 1412–1480 respectively) although it would only become manifest after Michelangelo’s stay in Bologna years later. Did Michelangelo borrow nothing from the charm, purity, and refinement of his more recent 15th-century forebears? That might sound doubtful until stumbling on a series of St Sebastian statues by Mino da Fiesole, Antonio Rossellino, and Benedetto da Maiano. Though somewhat shaky, unaccentuated, and non-committal, they herald the Dying Slave at the Louvre and each is a step along the path to either of the masterpieces. The prime comparison is between the Slave and Da Maiano’s St Sebastian at the Misericordia Museum in Florence: the heads tilting backwards