THE PIET�
A French cardinal was told about Galli�s Cupid and Bacchus, went to see them, and was impressed. He was an old man and he wanted to have a monument made in Rome in memory of himself. Nobody knows where the idea of a Piet� came from�it wasn�t a common subject for sculpture; but the cardinal gave Michelangelo the commission and the world got the wonderful statue. The best thing Michelangelo did was to get out of the classical gods and goddesses racket. Renaissance men didn�t know any more what to make of them than the old Romans had. He needed a deep subject and he got that from his religion. The ancients had never made a statue of the Virgin or Christ or of any of the great prophets. That he could do and do with the love and piety they deserved. The Piet� was one of the best things he ever carved. Now he could do a beautiful nude devoutly�no more tongue in cheek, no more playing around. The subject was finally right.
Context�the story behind a work of art�isn�t all but it is much. If you were told that the Piet� was a young woman mourning her brother who had been killed in a mining accident, the figure wouldn�t have the impact. In order to contemplate it with the awe it deserves you have to know that it is the Spotless Virgin mourning her son, the son of God Himself, killed so unjustly. That beautiful body on her knees is none other than....God.
What is more, a great, deep subject brings out the best and the deepest in the sculptor himself. Michelangelo would surely not have surpassed himself as he did in the Piet� for another Bacchus or a Cupid or a faun.
The Virgin is of course too young to be the mother of the thirty-odd-year old man who lies in her lap. Her face is as young and fresh as a girl�s. Was this a beginner�s mistake Michelangelo made? Did he get carried away with the idea of a beautiful face and forget that the sad woman he was carving had to be fifty years old or more for the sculpture to fit the Bible story? His critics seized on this striking �defect� of the Piet� and some people laughed, feeling richer in common sense than the artist. �Why did you do that?� Condivi asked Michelangelo once when he saw him in a good mood. Michelangelo came out with this very polished answer:
�Don�t you know that women who are chaste are much fresher than those who are not? How much more so a virgin who was never touched by even the slightest lascivious desire which might alter her body? Indeed, I will go further and say that this freshness and flowering of youth, apart from being preserved in her in this natural way, may also conceivably have been given divine assistance in order to prove to the world the virginity and perpetual purity of the mother. This was not necessary with the Son, in fact rather the contrary, because in order to show that the Son of God truly assumed human form as He did, and submitted to all that an ordinary man undergoes, except sin, there was no need for the divine to hold back the human, but it was necessary to let it follow its own course and order so that He would show exactly the age He was. Therefore you should not be surprised if, with this in mind, I made the Holy Virgin, mother of God, considerably younger in comparison with her Son than her age would ordinarily require, though I left the Son at His own age.� Condivi, p. 27
Condivi, in great admiration, calls this consideration worthy of a theologian, which it certainly is. It was a very astute way of shutting up critics who dared not show their skepticism at its plausibility because they risked revealing a lack of knowledge or of faith in Church doctrine (though the doctrine of the Virgin Birth was not made dogma until the nineteenth century). They could counter that it isn�t virginity that makes a woman age, since nuns age the same as married women; but they had to admit that the case of the Virgin Mary was unique in that she was the only woman ever born without the stain of Original Sin. The most they could claim was that they did not believe Michelangelo actually reasoned that way before conceiving the statue or that he wasn�t the man who was qualified to teach religion to the rest of us. Who did he think he was?
In fact, Condivi seems to believe that the Master was qualified to teach us. �This consideration would be.... perhaps extraordinary coming from others, but not from him who God and nature formed not only to do unique work with his hands but also to be a worthy recipient of the most sublime concepts, as can be recognized not only from this, but from very many of his thoughts and writings.�
And it is possible, even probable, that Michelangelo himself believed he worked with divine inspiration; and that through this statue, this portrait of the two most important humans, he was showing the world a fact that had been revealed to him as he worked.
A Girl�s Face
But couldn�t his critics be right? Isn�t it possible that Michelangelo did get carried away while carving the Virgin�s face�that it got younger and younger as he tried to make a more and more beautiful face? And then after carving it he invented its justification in theological terms?
No. Michelangelo carefully planned his figures. It is unbelievable that he �forgot� that the Virgin he was sculpting was no longer a girl. He certainly conceived the group in charcoal and in the clay or wax models just as it is, fresh face for the Virgin and all; and he was aware of its other weaknesses or problems, such as the strange difference in scale between the two figures. The Virgin�s narrow body did not have enough mass, even with all the drapery, to fill out the areas left and right of Christ�s body, which lay completely lengthwise in her lap. He had no choice but to widen her body and then hide its gigantic size as he could. And reduce in scale the body of Jesus, which is perfect according to its own laws but much too small�petit, call it�doll-like�by comparison with the Virgin�s. Michelangelo made other Piet�s after this, some in stone, some only drawings, but he ever after avoided this cross-shaped arrangement, though precisely its cross-shape was what initially he had thought worth trying. Had this first marble Piet� been a drawing only, or a painting, he would no doubt have shown the cross above the figures. Here, in the marble, he had to leave it out.
He had made a conceptual �mistake�on the very first figure he ever carved�on his copy of that ancient marble faun which he saw in Lorenzo D�Medici�s garden. He had set right to work as soon as he was given a piece of marble and he finished the faun in no time, then proudly showed it to the Duke�propped it up in the garden so that the Duke would be sure to discover it as he strolled through one morning. And when he saw it he was really amazed. It was a perfect copy and an astonishing achievement for a boy who had never carved before. But then, just to tease Michelangelo a bit, he told him there was one big error, did he know what it was. Michelangelo shook his head, crushed, angry at himself for the obvious error, whatever it was, angry at the Duke for smiling at it. �That�s an old faun,� said the Duke. �And an old faun wouldn�t look that good. He would probably have a few teeth missing, don�t you think? And the others would be worn down from all the years of chewing. But otherwise, your faun is very nice.�
Michelangelo couldn�t allow that mistake to stand forever in stone for everyone to see and grin at like the Duke; and as soon as he could�secretly, perhaps by night�he corrected it, chipping out a couple of the faun�s teeth and digging out holes in the gums. Later, when the Duke noticed the changes and that Michelangelo had taken so seriously his teasing�in childish simplicity, as he thought�he found the whole thing charming and told the story over and over again to his friends. It was one of the incidents that made him take notice of this strange and earnest boy who had come to his school, and which led to his adopting him for a few years, allowing him to live in his palace and receive the same education and upbringing as his own noble sons. The Duke thought the story was funny.
Michelangelo had salved over his lacerated vanity by showing more of his skill with the chisel, as well as his inventiveness in correcting the alleged flaw in his statue. But he had learned his lesson. In the future there would be no flaws in his work of a similar kind. He would plan them carefully and be able to explain each of their features according to solid logical, if not always common, sense. He wouldn�t be laughed at or smiled at again.
Later, as he got older and knew which criticism to listen to, he no longer cared about objections of the toothless-faun variety. His were aesthetic concerns. Did his figure look right, look beautiful?�that was what mattered. He learned to have absolute faith in the truth of his own conception. He drew and sculpted many other Virgins and they were all young�none of them much over twenty-five or thirty: the Bruges Madonna, the Medici Madonna, the Virgin on the wall of the Sistine Chapel, for example. Age and Mary�s spotless purity were incompatible to him. She was an ideal, after all, outside of time. Even the anguish at the scene of her Son�s execution couldn�t distort the sublimely serene and harmonious features of her girlish face. No; Michelangelo�s slick theological defense was no lie.