Renaissance Mix
A shuffling of pagan and Christian belief:
After working for months, Michelangelo finally showed Pope Julius what he had been painting on the Sistine ceiling and the pope gasped at the grandeur of the design and the brilliant colors. �Now could you explain it to me?� he asked the artist. �I recognize many of the heroes and prophets of the Old Testament. But who, for example, are those beautiful women with books along the base of the ceiling? Who do they represent?�
�Those are the Sibyls, Your Holiness,� said Michelangelo. �They had the same place in the Divine Plan as the Prophets of the Bible. They too foretold the coming of Christ.�
�Ah, yes,� said the pope. �They did indeed. Very good.� And he went on to inquire about other parts of the story on the ceiling.
Was it very good? Who were the Sibyls? Weren�t they pagan fortune-tellers�half-starved and half-crazy girls�who were kept like wild animals in the cellars of certain temples in Greece and Italy? Were these the �equivalent� of the great Old Testament prophets, Daniel, Ezequiel, Isaias? Who said they prophesied the Coming of Christ?
Well, this mixture of pagan and Christian culture was just what the Renaissance was all about and it had been going on long before Michelangelo and Julius were born. By the time they came along, Italy had gotten used to it, had grown fond of it; and dozens of brilliant men had made it respectable.
We have already seen how the Italians venerated the art of classical times, how they went about digging up their towns and cities looking for antique statues and other relics. They considered ancient Roman and Greek art to have an almost magical excellence. It seemed so far beyond what modern artists could achieve. Lorenzo de Medici�s garden, where the young Michelangelo studied, was full of statues and pieces of statues and other relics that had been recovered from another, a more perfect world. The secret of their perfection was what Renaissance artists tried to acquire.
And even before Michelangelo saw Lorenzo�s garden, when he was just stepping into the world, he was apprenticed to a painter named Domenico Ghirlandaio, who painted an Adoration of the Shepherds, a Nativity that took place on the ruins of Rome. In the painting Mary and Joseph are camped in a field full of Roman ruins. The shed where Mary gave birth to Christ is supported by Corinthian columns surviving from the Roman empire; the Magi come on horseback passing under a Roman triumphal arch; and the manger is a marble sepulchre with an inscription from the days of Augustus. Ghirlandaio thought those Old-World accretions, unlikely as they seem now, gave the story special charm. And a meaning: didn�t the Savior appear like a flower in the fertil soil of decomposing pagan culture? Ghirlandaio no doubt had a slick interpretation ready for whoever had commissioned the painting.
Because it wasn�t only ancient art that was admired: it was pagan everything. Learned men tried to discover in the ancient writers their buried secret to understanding the world and to leading a fruitful life. They began to study Latin and Greek and to read all the old pagan philosophers. They began to live in that Old World. They wrote Latin essays and poems, they put on Latin plays, they discussed the teachings of Plato and the Stoics, they toyed with the old myths. Gods, goddesses, fauns, centaurs, satyrs made a comeback after fifteen hundred years and once again filled people�s heads.
What was the first figure Michelangelo ever carved? An old faun. It was a copy of an antique statue standing in Lorenzo de Medici�s garden-school in Florence. What is a faun?�perhaps you can�t remember. No one knew a hundred and fifty years earlier either: that knowledge was long out of mind. It took these new philosophers�the Humanists, as they were called�to resurrect the old beasts.
The Humanists
Great lords in all the towns and cities hired the famous scholars to teach their sons not only Latin and Greek but even the precepts of pagan morality. Lorenzo de Medici brought the most outstanding of them to Florence, to his palace, where they lived and worked in a kind of permanent discussion group called an Academy: men like Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Politian.
They wrote and read poems to each other and to Lorenzo and his family and they discussed the ancient writers with great learning and enthusiasm.
This Academy was still active when Michelangelo came to Lorenzo�s palace, though the famous thinkers were all in the last years of their lives, like Lorenzo himself. Yet for at least two and maybe three years (Vasari says four, probably consciously exaggerating to please his patron, a Medici) the adolescent Michelangelo, sitting at table in the purple robe Lorenzo had given him, listened in deep silence and respect to the discourse of these teachers. It was his �Harvard and his Yale college�; and, short as it was, its influence lasted most of his life and can be seen in every work of art he made until his declining years, when he dumped Humanism for a more Counter-Reformation Catholicism.
Michelangelo had come to Lorenzo�s palace as an apprentice sculptor. Lorenzo was especially impressed by his intelligence and fervor and surprising aptitude, and asked his father to let him �keep him as one of his own sons�. He gave the boy a room of his own and had him looked after as one of the Medici household. �Michelangelo,� says Vasari, �always ate at Lorenzo�s table with the sons of the family and other distinguished and noble persons who lived with that lord, and Lorenzo always treated him with great respect.� (Vasari, p. 331)
Politian
Michelangelo also sat in on the Medici boys� classes. The official tutor was a man named Politian. He was a brilliant teacher, a learned philologist, who could write perfect Latin and Greek poems. He was one of the Humanists. He believed that the truths of the past were not obsolete; that all the wisdom of all time was valid and really one. He didn�t question the Salvation story of Christ but thought that it had been announced, however cryptically, in the great books of world culture, as well as the Bible. His student Pico della Mirandola had even written a work showing how Plato had actually announced the coming of Christ. Many of the old pagan myths contained truth in allegorical form�you only had to know how to understand them. The Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotole, thought by many to be on opposite poles, had really been saying the same things.
It was Politian who gave Michelangelo the idea for his first work�a high relief. What was the subject? The Battle between the Lapiths and the Centaurs at the wedding feast of Hippodamia and Pirithous, as told in Book 12 of Ovid�s Metamorphoses (Vasari calls it the �Battle between Hercules with the Centaurs�).
�Igitur, Domine?� Politian asked Michelangelo, after telling him the story. Bits of Latin kept coming out when he spoke. � What do you think?�could you illustrate that in stone�in petra, in marmore? You could put in lots of men in different postures and see if you could give them a classical touch. Do you think you can do as well as that?� he asked the boy, pointing to one of the Roman sarcophaguses in Lorenzo�s garden, with beautiful scenes of battles or the depiction of an old myth in high relief. Politian could think of nothing deeper or more �artistic� that sculpture like that. Michelangelo picked up his admiration. That�s what teachers hand down.
And when the boy�s relief was carved, Politian sighed with joy. �That�s almost as good as the old craftsmen would have done it,� he told Michelangelo, who may have beamed or burned, depending on how much of the praise he felt was being given to him. He was proud of the relief and treasured it all his life. Geniuses often find themselves early. Here already was Michelangelo�s subject�the male nude�carved with wonderful precision and knowledge. Politian told him to keep working: he thought he saw in the relief a touch of an old Muse. (Or an angel�he thought they were probably the same thing with different names; though he preferred to call the being a Muse.)
A Strange Attraction
What Michelangelo learned from those teachers at Lorenzo�s palace, besides their stories from Ovid, was a way to understand his own love for the human body. As far back as he could remember it had had a strange attraction for him. He could never say just what it was�he had heard others call it beauty and so he called it that too; though he could see that others didn�t feel the power of its charm the way he did. He could never get enough of it: when talking to someone, he would often find himself watching his hands or admiring the perfection of his ear. Everything seemed beautiful, the whole and every part, the proportions, the curves, the way one feature was bound to another. It was inexhaustably attractive, no matter what his relation to the model, what his mood or the urgency of some other matter. And it was every human body, big or little, conventionally pretty or ugly: they all were perfect in their way and they all recalled a greater perfection that he had never seen but the canons of which were inside him, mysteriously. He could never see a beautiful curve or line without wanting to draw it himself�or better still, to put it in clay or wax. It called to him, ordered him to reproduce it or record it somehow; and if he didn�t, because he was too tired or busy or lazy, he was punished by the feeling that he had missed some essential clue to the mystery, the vision.
He copied the figures in paintings by famous artists and that brought him part-way. They had been good observers, some of them; but, as far as he could see, they had all quit too early in their studies. There were hazy spots or downright errors in all the paintings�all of them. He decided to go to the town morgue, repellent as the idea was at first, and begin studying cadavers, dissecting them, drawing in notebooks for reference exactly what he saw. He simply had to understand the body completely: it wouldn�t do to slur over a doubtful area. He knew that if his drawing or his statue was to have any chance of casting the magical attraction of the real body it would have to be right even under the flesh.
Now these philosophers that Michelangelo heard at Lorenzo de Medici�s table�Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Politian and others�were called �Humanists� precisely because they had made a hero out of Man. They put aside the long and abstruse considerations of the Middle Ages about theology, about God, and concentrated on man, on his achievements and on his place in the divine plan of the cosmos. Everything from the �human� point of view, hence �humanism� their doctrine. What place does man occupy in the chain of being that God created, from angels down to the beasts? Why, he is the summit, the very purpose, of God�s creation. He is the link between the worlds, heaven and earth, the divine and the human. Even the angels up above had better envy him because he was made with the capacity to choose his destiny.
Here are some lines from Pico della Mirandola�s famous oration on Man�s destiny, often called the Manifesto of the Italian Renaissance:
�After thinking a long time, I have figured out why man is the most fortunate of all creatures and as a result worthy of the highest admiration and earning his rank on the chain of being, a rank to be envied not merely by the beasts but by the stars themselves and by the spiritual natures beyond and above this world. [ Who, pray, are they? What are they doing out there in space? What is their place in the chain of being? And the stars�can stars envy?].....
�What is this rank on the chain of being? God the Father, Supreme Architect of the Universe [Universe in caps, notice], built this home, this universe we see all around us, a venerable temple of his godhead, through the sublime laws of his Ineffable Mind. The expanse above the heavens he decorated with Intelligences [there they are again], the spheres of heaven with living, eternal souls. The scabrous and dirty lower worlds he filled with animals of every kind. However, when the work was finished, the Great Artisan desired that there be some creature to think on the plan of his great work, and love its infinite beauty, and stand in awe at its immenseness. Therefore, when all was finished, as Moses and Timaeus [those two proto-Christians] tell us, He began to think about the creation of man.......
Finally, the Great Artisan mandated that this creature who would receive nothing proper to himself shall have joint possession of whatever nature had been given to any other creature. He made man a creature of indeterminate and indifferent nature, and, placing him in the middle of the world, said to him �Adam, we give you no fixed place to live, no form that is peculiar to you, nor any function that is yours alone......All other things have a limited and fixed nature prescribed and bounded by our laws. You, with no limit or no bound, may choose for yourself the limits and bonds of your nature [this author�s italics]....To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the lower forms of life, the beasts, and to you is granted the power, contained in your intellect and judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, the divine.....Imagine! The great generosity of God! The happiness of man! To man it is allowed to be whatever he chooses to be!........ Who could not help but admire this great shape-shifter? In fact, how could one admire anything else?�
(Oration on the Dignity of Man by Pico della Mirandola)
The artist who could show this admirable, this godlike Man of the Humanists, hadn�t yet appeared: there was no real illustrator of Pico�s hero. Donatello and Verrocchio had shown him, as an Old Testament David, sleek, bashful, pretty with a Hermaphroditic charm; Leonardo had given him a new stature, a classical coldness and architecture; but no one had made a shining god out of him, an object of awe. That was to be Michelangelo Buonarroti�s mission; and the men he sculpted and painted were so Titanic, so superhuman, that they made the world gape. In a way they were too large for the world, who never knew what to make of them once the Humanist philosophy had died out. There wasn�t enough of tenderness in them or homey prettiness, not enough of the doll. So they stood twisting and flexing like magnificent heavenly orbs, far away and unintelligible.
Beauty�s Priest
Michelangelo sat and listened to those philosophers at Lorenzo�s table and began to understand his own love for the human body. He adored it�did he adore Man in the abstract? But it was all one. He himself was the young David; he felt strong, immortal. He was ready to choose the path of virtue, of reason. As an artist, he was freer than most men. Artists were loved, respected. Look at him: born a poor boy and now living in the palace of one of the most powerful men in Italy, listening to the wisest and most learned scholars. He read what they read and heard them praise Man. He was beginning, with their help, to understand the world, and his place in it. He would show them Man�s beauty. That would also be his choice, his path of ascent to heaven. Here is a poem he wrote with his decision:
Ravished by all that to the eyes is fair,
Yet hungry for the joys that truly bless,
My soul can find no stair
To mount to heaven, save earth�s loveliness.
Descends a glorious light
That lifts our longing to their highest height
And bears the name of love.
Nor is there aught can move
A gentle heart, or purge or make it wise
But beauty and the starlight of her eyes.
(Translated by George Santayana)
He would follow the light coming down the stairs�beauty�and so climb up to heaven.
Michelangelo�s David is the proud Man of the Renaissance�no longer a boy but newly a man, a man awakening from thousands of years of childhood, of servitude; a man independent, beautiful, and strong. He scowls as he makes a choice, the choice that is his own unique prerogative. Never again will man see himself so enlarged, so wonderful�never again could he. In the Middle Ages he was a part of an ashamed, sinful community, lowly as a worm, shapeless as a pig. Just look at the men and women in Giotto�s Final Judgment painting or at the poor wretches on the walls and choir stalls of the old Romanesque and Gothic churches. In fact, the artist couldn�t even look at them, at himself. None of those nameless artisans even seems to have looked closely at either sex, which were mere cartoons of man. They painted the Devil with more precision and curiosity.
Then in after-years Man became a captive again with no real options. By our time he was a bundle of complexes and a powerless pawn in some human scheme. We saw him starved, broken apart, tossed onto piles like garbage. He was nobody again, less than nobody. A modern David pounding his chest is as silly as King Kong.
