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.
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 fourteenth-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.
21. Michelangelo, Crucifix, 1492–1494. Wood polychrome, Santo Spirito, Florence.
22. Virgin with Child and Saint John the Baptist as a Child or Tondo Taddei, 1504–1506. Marble, 104 × 167 cm. Royal Academy of Arts, London.
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?
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”.
23. Virgin with Child and Saint John the Baptist as a child or Tondo Pitti, 1504–1505. Marble, 85 × 82.5 cm. Bargello, Florence.
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 Bruges Madonna and Judith in the Lanzi Loggia as well as Michelangelo’s David and Donatello’s Saint George.
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 fifteenth-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 backward cocking heads and leg positions match. But Michelangelo unties the hands from behind the back, placing one on the chest and the other on the head – a stroke of genius that gives the figure astonishing eloquence and pathos. Another example is the Madonna of the Stairs, a straightforward copycat drawing of a low-relief attributed to Desiderio de Settignano.
24. Madonna and Child, 1503–1506. Marble, 121.9 cm. Notre Dame, Bruges.
25. Madonna and Child, 1503–1506, (detail). Marble, 121.9 cm. Notre Dame, Bruges.
However, the case of Luca Signorelli is trickier. Usually marked as a precursor of Michelangelo, he painted the Last Judgment in Orvieto. It is endlessly repeated that Michelangelo started out from Signorelli’s anatomical and muscular studies, assimilating the latter’s fascination for torso effects. The standard justification is the resemblance between the naked children in the background of Michelangelo’s Tondo Doni and those of Signorelli’s Madonna, both now in the Uffizi. In fact, Signorelli started his Final Judgment in 1499 and finished it in 1505 while Michelangelo had already demonstrated, with powerful relief, a fine command of human anatomy by 1492 in his Battle of the (Lapiths and) Centaurs. In fact, he only borrowed from Signorelli’s Last Judgment for his own Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel: note the swooping demon with a woman on his back whose general layout recalls a demon in Signorelli’s.
The blind force of destiny, however, had more to do with their meeting than any wilful choice of Michelangelo. He definitely never deliberately imitated Signorelli, whom the Renaissance widely considered outdated, the way he did Jacopo della Quercia or the masters of antiquity. And then Signorelli went on to copy his “plagiarist’s” Pietà in grisaille at St. Mark’s in Rome!
From this angle, we can spot Michelangelo’s forebears in Andrea Verrocchio and Antonio Pallaiuolo, whose dogged anatomical research spawned breakthroughs in anatomical studies. True, both had long left their home towns for Rome or Venice but, given the effervescence of Florence at the time, their teachings must have reached that city and deeply affected its art scene. Michelangelo was still a youth when he first studied anatomy at the Santa Maria Novella poorhouse in Florence before continuing the pursuit in Rome. In Oxford, one drawing shows him dissecting a cadaver by candlelight.
As Klaczko notes:
No master definitely ever outclassed