Divine Fury (17 page)

Whatever the actual condition of the body, claims of its incorruptibility and the vague suggestion of thaumaturgic power implicit in the laying on of hands called to mind the long-standing belief that the flesh of saints was impervious to decay. And that, in turn, further confirmed what Michelangelo’s contemporaries believed to be the immaculate state of the soul that it housed. Michelangelo claimed to have been born under the sign of Saturn. But could melancholy alone account for the extraordinary nature of his powers? Could mere nature explain the wonder of his work? For here, truly, was a man who could animate statues, endow stones with souls, and impart, as one observer marveled, “living form even to marble.” Everywhere Michelangelo’s magic evoked expressions of incredulity and awe—
stupendo, stupore, meriviglia, mirabilia
—words that testify eloquently to the inability of observers to fully believe their eyes. Surely, the
ingenium
that produced such marvels could not be wholly of this world. A miracle of perfection, this
ingenium
was, in a word, “divine.”
⁴⁹

That sacred epithet had once been reserved exclusively for the saints, but in the fifteenth century it was applied more broadly to characterize the
ingenium
of great men. Poets such as Dante, and humanists such as Petrarch, were described as “divine” well before the word was granted to those working in the plastic arts; Filippo Brunelleschi appears to have been the first of the latter, his “
divino ingegno
” invoked to explain the architectural brilliance that spanned the massive dome of Florence’s cathedral. Other “super-artists” were then duly sanctified as “divine”—Dürer, Leonardo, Titian, Raphael—drawing the epithet that Michelangelo drew like no other. Vasari described Michelangelo as
divino
no fewer than twenty times in the first edition of the
Lives of the Artist
, published in 1550 while Michelangelo was still alive (nearly forty times in the second edition of 1568). He was, the poet Ariosto famously punned, “Michael, better than a mortal, an archangel divine,” and at the moment
of his death, his saintly and angelic gifts appeared more radiant than ever. In keeping with custom, mourners affixed messages and fragments of verse to his coffin, spontaneously giving voice to their reverence for this angelic bearer of divine
ingenium
. “Unequalled through all ages past,” Michelangelo was a “true angel” (
vero Angelo
), a “divine angel” (
Angelo divino
), whose “lofty
ingegno
” was ready with its glance and wings for so high a flight. Later, at the official memorial services held at the Basilica of San Lorenzo—an honor hitherto reserved for princes—the humanist Benedetto Varchi pronounced a eulogy that soared to even greater heights. Michelangelo, endowed with the “very strongest” and “most capacious”
ingegno
, was not just a human being of the highest excellence, but a “celestial and divine man,” “more divine than human,” “singular and unique,” a producer of “marvels” and “miracles.” “Should I call him an angel,” Varchi wondered, “or an archangel even more divine?” “Not only can we believe,” he insisted, “but we must believe” that Michelangelo was “chosen in heaven, and sent to earth by God.”
⁵⁰

It is important to be sensitive to the rhetorical license of such pronouncements, bearing in mind a point that art historians have emphasized of late when they remind us that in 1550, for instance, the very year that Vasari published his apotheosis of Michelangelo, the “divine one” was still performing routine jobs, receiving six
scudi
to gild eight bedknobs on Pope Julius III’s bed. The point is that declarations of divinity need to be brought down to earth, understood in a social context in which artists were still shaking off the stigma of being artisans, manual workers, and hired help. To declare divinity in this setting was to affirm the power and prestige of artists with respect to patrons and social betters. It was an act of self-promotion and self-fashioning, a way of “inventing” oneself and one’s friends.
⁵¹

Not that Michelangelo himself was inclined toward self-love. Generally contemptuous of such praise, he was painfully aware of his own limitations. “Michelangelo had such a perfect and distinctive imagination,” Vasari explains, “and the works he envisioned were of such a nature that he found it impossible to express such grandiose and awesome conceptions with his hands.” He suffered as a result, his mind ranging beyond itself, haunted by the perfection that he conceived, but could not perfectly render. Leonardo da Vinci experienced this curse to an even greater extent: forever unsatisfied with his work, he slashed canvases, took hammers to marble, and struggled in isolation, locking himself in his studio for days. Michelangelo, too, withdrew from the company of men. Working constantly, he neglected food and drink and slept in his clothes, bathing so infrequently that when he removed his boots, the
skin came off. Independent and defiant, he refused the entreaties even of the pope.
⁵²

It was qualities like these—a proud and incessant striving coupled with a sense of tragic failure and anomie—that would later endear the artists of the Renaissance to the Romantics. “Oh sublime genius!” Delacroix declares in looking at a Michelangelo sketch. It was a common response, and seems natural to us today, for in fact the Romantics largely succeeded in imposing their own categories on the past. In the godlike artist of the Renaissance, they saw an image of themselves, an image of the genius who strives for originality, who creates in defiance of convention and the rules—an eccentric, a rebel, who suffers for his art, even unto madness and despair. Scholars influenced by the Romantics long reinforced the picture. It was in the Renaissance, they believed, that the Romantic genius was born, and they found evidence of that seminal creation in men of great
ingenium
, a word they translated invariably—as many do still—as “genius.”
⁵³

But neither Renaissance
ingenium
nor Renaissance
genii
can be equated with genius in its modern form.
Ingegno
was still too tightly bound by
ars
and
industria
; the power to create by the compulsion to imitate; the imagination by the example of the past. For all their talk of approaching God, Renaissance artists still inhabited a universe of limits. One might travel upward along the Great Chain of Being, but the links remained, separating and binding together the whole. And though a winged soul like Michael might appear to his fellows as an angel or a saint, and even assume a portion of their powers, it was rare to confuse such creatures with their Creator. Only when the
genii
were put to flight and God himself had receded and withdrawn would human beings occupy their sacred space. In the sixteenth century, a man could be said to possess genius, but even Michelangelo was not yet a genius himself.

Still, in their rumination on the angels and the demons,
ingenium
and the soul, melancholy and mind, Renaissance commentators did clear a space in which the modern genius could begin to assume form. Summoning the
genii
from the classical past, they shifted their shapes and transferred their powers to the souls of outstanding men, men who were moved by inspiration or endowed at birth with special gifts. And notwithstanding the rhetorical license, to describe a man of genius as “divine” was to say more than that he belonged in the company of the esteemed. As Vasari observed of Leonardo, another man whom posterity would call a genius before the time: “The greatest gifts often rain down upon human bodies through celestial influences as a natural process, and sometimes in a supernatural fashion a single body is lavishly supplied
with such beauty, grace, and ability that wherever the individual turns, each of his actions is so divine that he leaves behind all other men, and clearly makes himself known as a thing endowed by God (which he is) rather than created by human artifice.”
⁵⁴

Here was a creature set apart, elected and chosen, different in kind. Whereas once the feats of such men were chronicled exclusively in lives of the saints, they now featured in lives of the artists or other compendia of
viris illustribus
, of which Vasari’s was but a single, if prominent, example. Scholars, poets, and architects occupied a central place in works such as Paolo Giovio’s 1564 collection of the lives of illustrious individuals, the
Elogia doctorum virorum
(Sketches in praise of learned men), whereas Polydore Vergil’s vast 1499 treatise on discovery, the
De inventoribus rerum
(
On Discovery
), celebrated great inventors and their inventions throughout history, attributing to them the “glory” of being first. Their presence in the company of cardinals, commanders, and kings was evidence of innovation in itself. But the terms in which they were described were truly without precedent since the coming of Christ. The humanist critic Julius Caesar Scaliger could hail the poet as an
alter Deus
, like another God, whereas the great sixteenth-century poet Torquato Tasso maintained that “there are two creators, God and the poet.” Vasari, similarly, begins his
Lives
by drawing an explicit comparison between the artist and God, a comparison he extends throughout the work by using the term
artefice
for his subjects, in place of the more common Italian
artista
or
artigiano
(artisan). The word recalled the Latin
artifex
, long employed in theological writings to describe God the Creator. Just as God, by “shaping man, discovered in the pleasing invention of things the first form of sculpture and painting,” so did artists partake of godlike powers in performing acts of creation. In the case of Michelangelo, the analogy was abundantly clear. To a greater degree than any other artist, ancient or modern, he dispensed with precedent and imitation, doing away with the “measures, orders, and rules men usually employ” to guide their work. Michelangelo “broke the bonds and chains” that held other men down, freed himself to create ex nihilo. He was, in this sense, a “mortal god.”
⁵⁵

Staring upward at the Sistine Chapel—that “great picture,” as Vasari says, “sent by God to men on earth so that they could see how Fate operates when supreme intellects descend to earth and are infused with grace and divinity of knowledge”—viewers might well have countenanced the comparison. And as they did so, they might have recalled the words of Ficino: “Since this person sees the order of the heavens, whence they are moved, whither they proceed, with what measures, and to what they
give rise, who will deny that he has almost the same genius [
ingenio
], so to speak, as the author of the heavens, and that he is capable in a way of making the heavens, should he ever obtain the instruments and the celestial material.” Ficino worked in words, Michelangelo in plaster, paint, and stone. But together they and their contemporaries seeded a thought, at once exhilarating and terrifying. One day a genius might come who dared, like God, to fashion not only art, but the world itself in his own image.
⁵⁶

CHAPTER III

THE GENIUS OF THE MODERNS

T
OWARD THE END OF THE OPENING
section of René Descartes’s
Meditations on First Philosophy
, genius makes a spectacular, if fleeting, appearance. “I shall then suppose,” Descartes writes in this foundational work of modern thought, that “some evil genius not less powerful than deceitful, has employed his whole energies in deceiving me; I shall consider that the heavens, the earth, colours, figures, sound, and all other external things are nought but the illusions and dreams of which this genius has availed himself in order to lay traps for my credulity.” The “deceiver,” Descartes then supposes, is “very powerful and very cunning,” employing all its energy in deceiving him. Yet, despite its greatest efforts—or rather, despite Descartes’s worst imaginings—the malicious specter cannot shake him of the conviction that he is a
res cogitans
, “a thing that thinks.” “Ego sum, ego existo,” Descartes writes in a variation of his earlier (and more famous) statement in the
Discourse on Method
, “Cogito ergo sum” (I think therefore I am). “I am, I exist.” No demon deceiver can make him believe otherwise.
¹

First published in Latin in 1641, the
Meditations
’ specific reference to a
genius malignus
(
un mauvais génie
, in the French translation of 1647) is often treated today as a curious thought experiment designed to test the limits of radical skepticism. It was, in part, just that. Yet it is not at all surprising that Descartes should have resorted to the hypothesis of the demon deceiver, for the belief in demons was still very much alive. Descartes himself had experienced a series of dreams involving
genii
as a young man. And in the century or so since the Renaissance magi had attempted to conjure the classical
genius
and summon guardian angels from on high, Europeans had witnessed the great panic of the early-modern witch craze, with its feverish rumination on demons
and the occult. Gradually, Descartes convinced himself that demons were but phantoms of a fevered imagination, chimera that would disappear when one distinguished clearly between reality and illusion. And the
Meditations on First Philosophy
, like the earlier
Discourse on Method
, aimed to fulfill that end, seeking to eliminate all threats to the certainty of knowledge. The fictive evil genius, Descartes declares, might deceive us in everything save that we are thinking. And on the bedrock of that “clear and distinct” idea, he proceeds to rebuild the structures of thought that his doubts had torn down, positing the existence of a new mechanical world of cause and effect in which there would be no room for
genii
at all. The Cartesian universe retains a place for God as its architect and creator. But it admits of no
Mittelsmächte
, no mediating forces or occult powers of any other kind.
²