THE BACCHUS
The Cupid is lost but the big Bacchus survives. It is Michelangelo�s first important statue and one of the few he ever finished; and many of the people who love his work are sorry he did it. The empty, foolish look in the young Bacchus�s face, the way the head sits on the thick neck�as if it were stuck on wrong after having fallen off; the stiffness of the leg that carries the weight; the strange mixture (�A blend of sexes�, says Vasari) of brawn and flab�you would have thought Michelangelo was incapable of making such errors, such aesthetic errors. How could the man with the soundest artistic judgment of all times have let those pass? Sublime figures he left unfinished; this one he finished all too carefully and polished into silliness.
It�s just this figure, along with a few of the painted demons and damned on the wall of the Sistine Chapel, that turn a critic like John Ruskin away from Michelangelo. �What is the most important thing in a figure?� he says. �The face. We can�t relate to the rest of the body as we can the face. That�s the window to the spirit inside and it gives the whole character to the work. Michelangelo�s faces�look at them�are all coarse, unintelligent. They are the face of vice, even of crime.�
Even Michelangelo�s other biographer, Condivi, admits that �the eyes are dim and lewd�.
Stendhal thought the face was �coarse and without charm.�
Shelley, the English poet, wrote: �The countenance of this figure is the most revolting mistake of the spirit and meaning of Bacchus. It looks drunken, brutal, and narrow-minded, and has an expression of dissoluteness the most revolting.�
What went wrong? Perhaps Michelangelo made the mistake that nearly all artists make until they learn their lesson: to listen too closely to the customer instead of to themselves alone. Jacobo Galli wanted the figure for his garden. He no doubt wanted to evoke good old Roman decadence. The idea may have been his�he may have encouraged Michelangelo to do the foolish thing: to make a drunken statue of the god of wine�to make him look dizzy and off-balance. Michelangelo had been looking frantically for ways to put life into his figures and he may have let himself be convinced that Galli�s idea would work. The �blend of sexes� had often been done before�Bacchus is often represented as chubby and lewd. But a figure that looks tipsy?�that had never been tried.
The work looks very much like Roman statuary from the worst period. Up to then, everything the young Michelangelo had done (now he was twenty-two) was a take-off on, or a frank imitation of, Roman art. Cupids were obviously in fashion and he did Cupids. �You who did the Cupid so well, could you do me a Bacchus?� Galli asked him. �Look at the Bacchus on this old sarcophagus�that will give you an idea.� And while Michelangelo was working on the clay model Galli marvelled at it left and right but said: �Why don�t you make him drunk? He�s the god of wine, isn�t he? Did you ever see a drunk statue? I think that would be marvellous. But you�re the artist�I don�t understand these things. I suppose that couldn�t be done.�
And did Michelangelo say: � You better believe it can be done. I�ll make him stagger. I�ll make him stinking drunk, spilling his wine and ready to heave�?
It�s hard now to understand just how crazy people were about the past. It wasn�t only a fashion�it was a national psychosis. All the writers of the Renaissance hit you over the head with it. They worshipped old Rome; they considered it a magic world where people were wiser, braver, more beautiful. An example: In 1487, when Michelangelo was a boy in school, an old Roman grave was discovered with the body of a Roman matron�not the skeleton but the well-preserved body�the miraculously well-preserved and breath-takingly beautiful body. People flocked to see it. They were sure they would see (and when they looked they were sure they saw) a woman far more beautiful than any alive in their days. �She was more beautiful than can be said or written, and were it said or written, it would not be believed by those who had not seen her,� wrote one pilgrim. A Roman matron just had to be a prodigy of beauty and grace, even 1500 years dead.
Their standard praise for work from their own time was: �I truly believe that it can hold its own with anything done in classical times��but deep-down they believed they were going too far when they said that. Except Vasari, who when he says that Michelangelo surpassed the ancients, means it.
Lorenzo the Magnificent�s garden in Florence with dozens of old figures was a provincial copy of the ones in Rome, where all the gentleman had collections. Pope Julius II sent out expeditions of �archaeologists� to dig around and see what they could unearth. All Rome was an Easter egg hunt. Antique statues were found everywhere, some of them really beautiful but all of them venerated. The Cleopatra was found then; the Laoco�n; the Torso; the Apollo Belvedere. From all over Italy artists pilgrimaged to Rome to see these heavenly discoveries�and imitate them. They were the models of excellence. Art customers and patrons didn�t have to tell the artists what they wanted�everyone knew what was good. Actually, few knew.
Most of those old statues weren�t worth digging up. They were the silly�frivolous�coarse treatment of classical Greek gods and goddesses that the old Romans didn�t understand. The Romans were wonderful in their way. In the beginning they were a tough, moral, people who worked hard and shot straight. But they had no understanding for art and they admitted it. They gladly ceded to the Greeks that field, partly because they didn�t value it much. They were fascinated by the funny old Greeks and their stories of gods and goddesses who misbehaved so colorfully. They themselves had invented something greater, something that approached religion: they venerated virtues. They were the only people who made shrines to Bravery, Justice, Friendship, and so on. For themselves�to guide their own lives�these virtues were the serious things. In their leisure time they toyed with the Greek Parnassus of scandalous divinities and art. It came into old Rome in the form of vases and statues made by Italian-Greek craftsman and sold to rich Romans looking for curious decoration for their villas. Just like 1500 years later in the same places.
What did it mean to the patrons, old and modern? Most of them liked what you like when you don�t perceive and you don�t care: the anecdotical, the sexy, the silly, the quaintness, the money value. There wasn�t much demand on craftsmanship, which was poor, often pitiful. It was tricky or slick, given to a big bang effect�a lot like much art in our time. The good work was very rare, as always, and came direct from old Greece, where the whole business meant something�or had. All the great classical figures we know about, with a couple of exceptions of course, are from Greece. They are Roman copies of Greek statues. What the Romans did themselves is best forgotten�is best buried for, say, another 1500 years.
Michelangelo was equipped to know good sculpture from bad but he first had to get the sand out of his eyes. It takes time before you realize that your elders don�t know what they�re talking about, though they mean well. And no one is so big that he totally breaks out of the mind bands of his time. All his life Michelangelo paid lip service to the ancients�and probably heart service. �If you put my design into execution,� he told a group of Florentine artists when he was a very old man, unable to supervise it himself, �you will produce a work superior to anything done by either the Greeks or the Romans.� (�Words unlike any ever used by him,� says Vasari, � before or after, for he was a very modest man.�) Those ancient artists were still the ones he was trying to beat. But exactly what in them he was trying to beat changed as he discovered his own genius.
At first it was the Cupids and the Bacchuses, almost for their own sake. He imitated the old figures�started with the old figures and made a few personal little comments, so to say. His customers didn�t care for his comments�they wanted the figures to look as far as possible like the ancient ones. And he was predisposed to respect all the features of those old statues, whatever they were, out of piety. So he studied and copied, same as all the artists�harder than other artists�, and worked to get a certain antique look. Meanwhile he was becoming a formidable sculptor with a personal carving technique and a lot of ideas of his own.
Not many sculptors could do that Bacchus and, to tell the truth, few old Roman sculptors either. You have to look long and hard through all the antique junk to find statues or fragments of statues with such perfect modelling. Though his experiment of mixing genders hadn�t come off in the Bacchus, Michelangelo had already found the great subject or medium of his art�the male nude. He was looking at it �and making everyone else look at it�in a way no one ever had before. Soon, in the David, he would be putting into it a respect, a glory, an awesomeness (his famous terribilit�) that was never in any old Roman figure. It was as if Michelangelo had spotted where sculpture had taken a wrong turn (with the Romans) and was setting it once again�after 1800 years or more�on the right path.
