Michelangelo Buonarroti
Encyclopaedia Britannica
VI
The Medici Chapel
The immediate occasion for the chapel was the deaths of the two young
family heirs, named Giuliano and Lorenzo after their forebears, in 1516
and 1519. Michelangelo gave his chief attention up to 1527 to the marble
interior of this chapel, to both the very original wall design and the
carved figures on the tombs; the latter are an extension in organic form
of the dynamic shapes of the wall details. The result is the fullest
existing presentation of Michelangelo's intentions. Windows, cornices,
and the like have strange proportions and thicknesses, suggesting an
irrational, willful revision of traditional classical forms in
buildings.
Abutting these active surfaces, the two tombs on opposite walls of the
room are also very original, starting with their curved tops. A male and
a female figure sit on each of these curved bases; these are allegories
symbolizing on one tomb day and night, according to the artist's own
statement, and dawn and dusk on the other, according to early reports.
Such personifications had never appeared on tombs before, and they
refer, again according to Michelangelo, to the inevitable movement of
time, which is circular and leads to death.
The figures are among the artist's most famous and accomplished
creations. The immensely massive figures of “Day” and “Dusk” are
relatively tranquil in their mountainous grandeur, though “Day” perhaps
implies inner fires. Both female figures have the tall, slim proportions
and small feet considered beautiful at the time, but otherwise they form
a contrast: “Dawn,” a virginal figure, strains upward along her curve as
if trying to emerge into life; “Night” is asleep, but in a posture
suggesting stressful dreams.
These four figures are naturally noticed more immediately than the
effigies of the two Medici buried there, placed higher and farther back
in wall niches. These effigies, more usual in execution, also form a
contrast; they are traditionally described as active and thoughtful,
respectively. Rendered as standard types of young soldiers, they were at
once perceived not as portraits but as idealized superior beings, both
because of their high rank and because they are souls beyond the grave.
Both turn to the same side of the room. It has naturally been thought
that they focus on the “Madonna,” which Michelangelo carved and which is
at the centre of this side wall, between two saints. The heads of the
two effigies, however, are turned in differing degrees, and their common
focus is at a corner of the chapel, at the entrance door from the
church. On this third wall with the “Madonna” the architectural
treatment was never executed.
During the same years Michelangelo designed another annex to the same
church, the Laurentian Library, required toreceive the books bequeathed
by Pope Leo; it was traditionalin Florence and elsewhere that libraries
were housed in convents. The design for this one was constrained by the
existing buildings, and it was built on top of older structures. A small
available area on the second floor was used as an entrance lobby and
contains a staircase leading up to the larger library room on a new
third floor. The stair hall, known as the ricetto, contains
Michelangelo's most famous and original wall designs. The bold and free
rearrangement of traditional building components goes still further, for
instance, to place columns recessed behind a wall plane rather than in
front of it as is usual. This has led to the work's being cited
frequently as the first and a chief instance of Mannerism as an
architectural style, when it is defined as a work that intentionally
contradicts the classical and the harmonious, favouring expressiveness
and originality, or as one that emphasizes the factors of style for
their own sake. By contrast the long library room is far more
restrained, with traditional rows of desks neatly related to the rhythm
of the windows and small decorative detail in the floor and ceiling. It
recalls that Michelangelo was not invariably heavy and bold but modified
his approach in relation to the particular case, here to a gentler,
quiet effect. For that very reason it has often been less noticed in the
study of his work. At the opposite end of the long room, across from the
stairway, another door led to a space intended to hold the library's
rarest treasures. It was to be a triangular room, a climax of the long
corridor-like approach, but this part was never executed on the artist's
plan.
The sack of Rome in 1527 saw Pope Clement ignominiously in flight, and
Florence revolted against the Medici, restoring the traditional
republic. It was soon besieged and defeated, and Medici rule permanently
reinstalled, in 1530. During the siege Michelangelo was the designer of
fortifications. He showed understanding of modern defensive structures
built quickly of simple materials in complex profiles that offered
minimum vulnerability to attackers and maximum resistance to cannon and
other artillery. This new weapon, which had come into use in the middle
of the 14th century, had given greater power to the offense in war.
Thus, instead of the tall castles that had served well for defensive
purposes in the Middle Ages, lower and thicker masses were more
practical. The projecting points, which also assisted counterattack,
were often of irregular sizes in adaptation to specific hilly sites.
Michelangelo's drawings with rapid lively execution reflecting this
flexible new pattern have been much admired, often in terms of pure
form.
When the Medici returned in 1530, Michelangelo returned to work on their
family tombs. His political commitment probably was more to his city as
such than to any specific governmental form. Two separate projects of
statues of this date are the “Apollo” or “David” (its
identity is problematic), used as a gift to a newly powerful political
figure, and the “Victory,” a figure trampling on a defeated
enemy, an old man. It was probably meant for the never forgotten tomb of
Pope Julius because the motif had been present in the plans for the
Julius tomb. Victor and loser both have intensely complicated poses; the
loser seems packed in a block, the victor—like the “Apollo”—forms a
lithe spiral. The “Victory” group became a favourite model for younger
sculptors of the Mannerist group, who applied the formula to many
allegorical subjects.
In 1534 Michelangelo left Florence for the last time, though the always
hoped to return to finish the projects he had left incomplete. He passed
the rest of his life in Rome, working on projects in some cases equally
grand but in most cases of quite new kinds. From this time on a large
number of his letters to his family in Florence were preserved; many of
them concentrated on plans for his nephew's marriage, essential to
preserve the family name. Michelangelo's father had died in 1531 and his
favourite brother at about the same time; he himself showed increasing
anxiety about his age and death. It was just at this time that the
nearly 60-year-old artist wrote letters expressing strong feelings of
attachment to young men, chiefly to the talented aristocrat Tommaso
Cavalieri, later active in Roman civic affairs. These have naturally
been interpreted as indications that Michelangelo was a homosexual, but
such a reaction according to the artist's own statement would be that of
the ignorant. The idea seems even less likely when one considers that no
similar indications had emerged when the artist was younger. The
correlation of these letters with other new events seems consistent
instead with the view that he was seeking a surrogate son, choosing for
the purpose a younger man who was admirable in every way and would
welcome the role.
Michelangelo's poetry is also preserved in quantity from this time. He
apparently began writing short poems in a way common among
nonprofessionals in the period, as an elegant kind of letter, but
developed in a more original and expressive way. Among some 300
preserved poems, not including fragments of a line or two, there are
about 75 finished sonnets and about 95 finished madrigals, poems of
about the same length as sonnets but of a looser formal structure. In
English-speaking countries people tend to speak of “Michelangelo's
sonnets,” as though all of his poems were written in that form, partly
because the sonnets were widely circulated in English translations from
the Victorian period, partly because the madrigal is unfamiliar in
English poetry. (It is not the type of song well known in Elizabethan
music, but a poem with irregular rhyme scheme, line length, and number
of lines.) Yet the fact that Michelangelo left a large number of sonnets
but only very few madrigals unfinished suggests that he preferred the
latter form. Those written up to about 1545 have themes based on the
tradition of Petrarch's love poems and a philosophy based on the
Neoplatonism that Michelangelo had absorbed as a boy at Lorenzo the
Magnificent's court. They give expression to the theme that love helps
human beings in their difficult effort to ascend to the divine.
In 1534 Michelangelo returned after a quarter century to fresco
painting, executing for the new pope, Paul III, the huge “Last
Judgment” for the end wall of the Sistine Chapel. This theme had
been a favoured one for large end walls of churches in Italy in the
Middle Ages and up to about 1500, but thereafter it had gone out of
fashion. It is often suggested that this renewal of a devout tradition
came from the same impulses that were then leading to the Counter-Reformationunder
the aegis of Paul III. The work is in a painting style noticeably
different from that of 25 years earlier. The pervasive colour harmony is
a simple one of brown bodies against dark blue sky. The figures have
less energy and their forms are less articulate, the torsos tending to
be single fleshy masses without waistlines. At the top centre Christ as
judge lifts an arm to save those on his right and drops the other arm to
damn those on his left, suggesting in the idiom of the period a scale to
weigh men in the balance. The saved souls rise slowly through the heavy
air, as the damned ones sink. At the bottom of the wall skeletons rise
from tombs, a motif taken directly from medieval precedents. To the
right Charon ferries souls across the River Styx, a pagan motif which
Dante had made acceptable to Christians in his Divine Comedy and which
had been introduced into painting about 1500 by the Umbrian artist
Signorelli. Michelangelo admired this artist for his skill in expressing
dramatic feeling through anatomical exactitude.
