The Sistine Secrets (14 page)

An additional secret was disclosed by the Vatican itself in 1973. A madman attacked the statue in 1972, damaging Mary’s left arm, eyelid, and nose. During the repairs, the world’s top art restorers found that Michelangelo had hidden a capital
M
in her left palm, disguised as her palm lines, a plaintive attempt to ensure that posterity would not forget the name of the
Pietà
’s creator.

A NEW COLOSSUS

Soon after finishing the
Pietà,
in spite of his now-growing fame, Michelangelo wanted to get out of Rome. The Borgia clan had decided to conquer central Italy for their own profit, and were busy poisoning both relatives and rivals—anyone who stood in their path. While he had been happily lost in his work sculpting the
Pietà,
Florence had gone through yet another changeover. The fanatical Savonarola, believing himself to be a biblical prophet, had turned on the pope and the Vatican, denouncing Rome as the new Whore of Babylon, the new Sodom and Gomorrah. Both the pope and the Florentines had had enough of the monk’s bleak condemnations, and in 1498 he and his inner circle were hanged and burned in the town square, on exactly the spot where he had proudly overseen the Bonfire of the Vanities. Now Florence was a republic again, and wanted to celebrate the fact.

Michelangelo used the excuse of a commission in Siena to beat a hasty exit from Rome, and once more went back to work in Florence.

At this time, the Florentine city council decided to put two new oversized sculptures by two local artists high up on the cathedral buttresses to watch over the city, and to celebrate its recent liberation from the French and the fanatical Dominicans. Their choices were decidedly in the Neoplatonic Florentine style: a Hercules and a David—nothing from the standard Church repertoire of imagery. Hercules was to be shown defeating the giant Cacus, while David would of course be the usual image of the mighty hero standing with the severed head of the giant Goliath under his foot.

Michelangelo, with his love of the Hebrew Scriptures, was a natural choice for the sculptor of the
David.
Of course, it didn’t hurt that in the new position of Gonfaloniere (a sort of mayor-for-life) was Piero Soderini, an old friend of his. While Bandinelli, the artist chosen to make the Hercules, was given a fresh block of marble, Michelangelo selected a used piece. It was a huge but shallow block already heavily scarred by previous sculptors who had given up on carving this particularly difficult stone. Skeptics doubted that anyone could produce anything worthwhile from this battered and overworked chunk of marble, but Michelangelo saw something within it that nobody else could see. He set up a high scaffold around it, draped it all in heavy cloth, and set to work.

While making some preparatory sketches for the piece, Michelangelo wrote his first fragment of poetry that has come down to us today. Next to a design of David’s mighty right arm, he wrote:

Davicte cholla fromba

e io chollarcho—

Michelagniolo

Rocte lalta cholonna el ver…

Even in his first stab at creative writing, Michelangelo at twenty-seven is utilizing a kind of code. The lines, in a Tuscan dialect that reads just as he probably would have pronounced it, say:

David with his slingshot

And I with my bow—

Michelangelo

Broken is the tall column and the gree(n)…

An
arco
—in the second line’s word
chollarcho
—meant an archer’s weapon, or a violinist’s bow, but Buonarroti was neither an archer nor a musician. The last line is a quote from a well-known poem by Petrarch that begins, “Broken is the high column, and the green laurel [in Italian,
laura
] has fallen,” Petrarch’s ode of grief at the death of his beloved Laura. Michelangelo had learned Petrarch during his sojourn in Bologna, but why quote him here? And what does Petrarch’s mourning for his lady love have to do with the
David
?

The modern biographer of Michelangelo, Howard Hibbard, solves the puzzle by citing Charles Seymour’s explanation of the “
arco.
” A stonecutter or sculptor in the Renaissance would use a running drill to make the eyes and other fine holes in the marble. A running drill is a thin, pointed rod that spins into the stone thanks to a stringed bow that rotates it at a high speed, much like the bow used by Boy and Girl Scouts to make a fire in the wild. This is undoubtedly the kind of drill that Michelangelo would have used to create David’s unforgettable eyes. Michelangelo is giving himself a sort of “pep talk,” claiming that just as David, armed only with a sling, defeated his enemy, he (Michelangelo) would defeat all his foes with his talent. The “tall column” is the high block of scarred marble that his rivals could not conquer; but he, the ugly, broken-nosed Buonarroti, would show them all by “breaking” (taming or overcoming) the tall stone and winning the green laurel wreath of Victory.

And triumph he did. The David that he produced is nothing short of miraculous. It also broke with all traditional images. Instead of showing Goliath’s defeat, Michelangelo chose to depict the young shepherd boy at the exact moment of decision. His look is of concern but also of conviction. He is stark naked and unarmed except for a sling and pebbles. Goliath is nowhere to be seen. David is caught, as if in a snapshot, at the instant in which his faith in the Almighty is about to lead him into a battle that will change his life and the life of his people. He is in the act of turning toward the giant Philistine, which also allowed the sculptor to show off his deep knowledge of the male anatomy.

Particularly shocking to viewers at the time—and, in fact, to many visitors to the Accademia in Florence to this day—was Michelangelo’s addition of bushy pubic hair to David. In the Greco-Roman world, heroes were always displayed as hairless and with diminished genitalia, as a sign of their dignity and purity of spirit. Michelangelo was accentuating David’s crotch and calling attention to the fact that he was giving him a normal endowment. Perhaps this was an act of revenge against Savonarola’s puritanical reign of terror; perhaps it was to show the newly regained power of a cosmopolitan Florence. It definitely demonstrates Michelangelo’s love of the nude male. Indeed, the whole statue is a paean to the beauty of the masculine body.

Of course, this brings up the question: if he was so enamored of Jewish teaching, why didn’t Michelangelo give his David an authentic circumcised organ? There are several theories. The simplest explanation is that he quite likely had never seen a circumcised penis and did not want to portray anything that would probably be incorrect. More important, since the Inquisition was still going strong he did not want to be accused of the crime called Judaizing—propagating the Jewish faith and traditions. Furthermore, the commission expected the
David
to represent the city of Florence, not the only recently returned Jewish community.

David
did indeed symbolize Florence. Michelangelo designed him to go high up on the buttress facing toward Rome, as a silent sentinel watching over Florence and warning the Roman Church not even to think of threatening its newfound freedom. He made the hands, feet, and head oversized in order to show strength, especially when viewed from below on ground level.

Not commonly known is the remarkable secret about the eyes of David. Michelangelo drilled them extra deep and slightly too far apart. Yes, the great
David
is walleyed—but it was done on purpose, a brilliant way to make his gaze seem to go on into infinity. The extra depth of the eyes was also meant to catch the rays of the sun at just the right angle on that buttress perch, in order to make the statue seem truly alive, a sort of Hollywood special effect.

Michelangelo’s designs for his statue were undone by his talent. The city officials decided that the statue was too beautiful to be merely a part of twinned decorations high up on the cathedral. So, a special commission was formed to select a special place of honor for Florence’s new symbol. One of the experts called upon was none other than Leonardo da Vinci. The committee concluded that it had to go on a pedestal in front of the entrance to the city hall, where a well-known copy stands today. This was a great honor for Buonarroti, but the end of all his special effects hidden in the statue, meant to take advantage of its original location. Even today, when viewed inside the Accademia, the hands, feet, and eyes all seem strange and disproportionate to the puzzled viewers who are unaware of Michelangelo’s intent, which could only be realized where the
David
was supposed to be placed.

Ironically, even before it was unveiled in 1504, the statue had its share of troubles. According to his biographer Giorgio Vasari, Michelangelo was just putting some last touches on the statue when the Gonfaloniere Piero Soderini came inside the enclosure of the scaffolding for a private preview. To the headstrong artist, it didn’t matter if a person was the head of government or even a pope—he just wanted to be left alone with his artwork. Soderini viewed his commission with the presumption of one who knows nothing about the subject he is critiquing, and then announced to Michelangelo that something had to be done about the nose—it was too thick. (He might have meant that it looked too Jewish. Michelangelo’s
David,
like his Jesus in the Vatican
Pietà,
has decidedly Semitic features.) Michelangelo calmly took his hammer and chisel in his left hand and climbed the ladder up to the colossal statue’s face. As he ascended, he gathered marble chips and dust in his right hand, out of Soderini’s view. When he reached David’s nose, he hammered loudly on the chisel, without touching the statue’s surface at all, while letting a flurry of chips and dust rain down on the ruler’s head below. He then came back down to join Soderini, who proudly declared: “Ah, that did it—now you have brought it to life.” Michelangelo and his friends laughed about this (in private) for a long time.

The other trouble was far more serious. As the
David
was slowly being transported in a special conveyance to its place of honor, the statue was stoned and attacked by unknown assailants. Were they upset by its nudity or its Jewish theme? We will never know. We do know that in later political upheavals, the
David
was knocked off its perch and its right arm broken. Fortunately, another artist and supporter of Michelangelo salvaged the pieces and had the statue repaired when social order was restored. Finally, in 1873 it was decided that the
David
would be safer indoors, and a copy was set in its place.

A PAINTING?

The period in which Michelangelo carved the
David
was an extremely productive time for him. Although that statue alone would have kept any other artist fully occupied, Buonarroti still found time to carve four statues of saints to fulfill his contract with the Cathedral of Siena, plus a Madonna for the Church of Notre-Dame in Bruges, Belgium. All five pieces seem to have been partly done by assistants and are quite austere, straight up-and-down, and unemotional for a Michelangelo work. The definite Buonarroti touches are the heavily pleated clothes and the fact that all the figures are carrying a book. We shall see this proof of Michelangelo’s love of learning in the Prophets and Sibyls section of the Sistine as well.

He also did something quite out of character for him at the time—a painting.

Michelangelo—who would become one of the most famous painters who ever lived, thanks to the Sistine frescoes—actually hated the art form. He only appreciated the three-dimensional arts of metal-casting, sculpture, and architecture, and regarded daubing colors on a flat surface as both boring and inferior. He often signed his business letters “
Michelangelo, ischultore
”—Michelangelo, sculptor.

Why, then, did he accept a commission for a
painting
in the midst of so much other work? Quite simply, it was an offer he couldn’t refuse: the commission came from two of the most powerful families in Florence—the Doni and the Strozzi, the longtime rivals of the de’ Medicis. If anyone, especially an artist, wanted to stay in Florence and pursue a successful career, he did not want to incur the anger of either of these clans.

To celebrate a marriage uniting the two families, Michelangelo was hired to paint a Holy Family. There was a fifteenth-century Holy Family painting in the de’ Medici palace where he had grown up, done by Luca Signorelli, one of the original fresco painters of the Sistine. It was round and had nude boys in the background. Buonarroti’s prodigious visual memory served him well, and he made a similar round painting with nudes in the background. However, it was impossible for him to be a mere imitator. What he created is a controversial work that still puzzles, inspires, and offends to this day.

Here, in this painting, we can already see the Michelangelo that we know from the Sistine ceiling: the bright, almost metallic clothing; the muscular, masculine woman—a Virgin Mary who looks like a pagan sibyl who has been pumping iron; males who are more naked than nude, in affectionate, playful, almost erotic poses; a Neoplatonic balancing act of pagan boys in the background; an infant John the Baptist who looks more like a mythological faun than a Christian icon; a Jewish Joseph in the middle ground handing baby Jesus to Mary in the foreground—or taking him from her, depending literally on your point of view. Michelangelo is up to new tricks. He intertwines Mary’s and Joseph’s limbs in such a stylized, unnatural manner that at first glance it is almost impossible to distinguish whose limb is whose. Even in the frame, which many experts believe he designed, there is a circle of Hebrew prophets, Greco-Roman sibyls, and Jesus. Above all, there is the feeling that we are seeing painted
sculpture,
and not merely flat figures. It is almost as if fate has the artist unwittingly preparing for his work in the Sistine Chapel.