Original subtitles

Good afternoon.

Although the structure of this course means that only about one-third of Michelangelo's

75-year career is included, the immensity of what he achieved in 25 years will require

three lectures to introduce.

I remarked of Leonardo da Vinci that even genius has to have a beginning, i.e., a mentor.

Vasari, in his biography of Michelangelo, had no doubt that the artist received his talents

directly from God, who, quote, graciously looked down on earth and decided to have Michelangelo

born a Florentine, to perfect the artistic achievements for which Florence was already

renowned.

Well, of course, Vasari was a friend and an adoring disciple of Michelangelo, and he was

writing in the middle of the 16th century.

He wasn't born in the Quattrocento.

But nonetheless, he's looking back at the Quattrocento and recalling the artistic accomplishments that

had made Florence a renowned artistic center.

So his praise was in part a historical view, which would have been unlikely one or two centuries earlier, and in part a reflection of a new view of genius, of a divinely

inspired artist.

I might interject that we have the same thing with Leonardo.

And with Leonardo and Michelangelo, we are dealing with figures who were regarded in their

own lifetime at a different level and in a different way than artists before them had been, even the

very great artists.

It is a change in concept.

It is a change in the way artistic production is regarded and in the way that artists are regarded.

And it is something we will touch on during the coming lectures.

Vasari conceded that Michelangelo was apprenticed to Domenico Ghirlandaio at the age of 14.

But the idea of the divine Michelangelo was already established long before his death.

Vasari did emphasize that his hero made careful copies of Masaccio's frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel, and that his Madonna of the

Stairs was in the style of Donatello.

Michelangelo Buonarroti was born in 1475 in Caprese, a village some 40 miles due east of

Florence, near to Arezzo and even nearer to San Sepulcro, the home of Piero della Francesca.

Michelangelo lived nearly 90 years, dying in 1564.

Never married, he remained in close contact with his family, whom he frequently supported

for most of his life.

Since I remarked on how Leonardo's name should be said, Leonardo or Leonardo da Vinci, but

never da Vinci, I will say that with Michelangelo it is a different situation.

He is sometimes called Buonarroti, usually by Italians, and usually after Michelangelo has

been established.

But since it's his family name, that's all right to do.

More often, however, he is Michelangelo, and by the way, the pronunciation in Italian would

be Michelangelo.

Michelangelo is perfectly acceptable in English, and you'll hear me do both, and probably something

in between.

As a boy of about 14, having already served his apprenticeship to Ghirlandaio, Michelangelo

came under the protection of Lorenzo de' Medici.

He lived in the Medici palace.

He studied in workshops that Lorenzo had established in the Medici gardens, gardens that no longer

exist.

Yes.

They were near San Marco.

There, amid a collection of ancient sculptures owned by the Medici, which were there to study

for him and for other young artists, and the conversation of Renaissance humanists who

were friends of the Medici and associates of the Medici, and the instruction of older artists

and the fellowship of younger artists like himself, he found himself in a sort of academy for aspiring

artists.

It's called that, usually, and yet we know very little about it, in fact.

We have very few details, but it seems to have been a remarkably rich and nurturing situation,

one in which not just the skill of making sculpture or painting was taught, but rather

the intellectual basis of it, and the classical foundations of it in classical art, all of those

were there, and there was a large degree of freedom and experimentation.

You weren't bound, at that point, by the demands of a patron.

But you could do your own work, materials were supplied, and so forth.

It was quite a fine and auspicious beginning for a boy in whom great talent, high intelligence,

and religious devotion were all evident.

One of his early works is the Relief, which you see on the screen now.

The Relief is called the Madonna of the Stairs.

The Madonna of the Stairs was carved about 1491.

It is in the museum called Casa Buonarroti, the House of Buonarroti today.

And it is an image of the, well, I think we could call it the brooding Madonna.

He was perhaps 16 when he carved this, and it is very comparable in its style, the low-relief

style of carving, to the low-relief carvings of Donatello.

For example, and it's the main example that I have shown you, the St. George and the Dragon,

which was on the niche underneath the statue of St. George on Orsan Michele.

And Donatello had invented that low-relief carving called Schiacciato in Italian.

He'd invented it, and now we have Donatello being emulated by Michelangelo in this style.

The spirit of the piece, on the other hand, the mood, the projection that it puts out may

be already called Michelangelesque.

It's monumental and brooding.

It has a feeling quite unlike the sculpture of Donatello, the sheer weight of it.

This Madonna fills the height of the panel from top to bottom.

She, in her solemnity, also anticipates some of the sybils whom we'll be seeing that he

painted on the Sistine ceiling.

Those female prophetesses, well, that's redundant, those female prophets or prophetesses, from the

pagan world whom he painted on the ceiling.

She has this prophetic appearance, and she also has the scale and the weight of those figures.

Here, as a teenager, he's created this already.

It's been suggested, and you know we often get into these, and we certainly will here for

a moment, into the subtleties of interpretation.

Partly it's what you see, and partly it's what you can bring to bear on it, and what he

brought to bear on it, what we know that he could have known in interpreting these.

The Madonna is of a type called the Madonna lactans, a suckling Madonna.

She is suckling the child, ah, but is she?

She raises her cloak as though she were suckling the child.

But if you look closely at the child, he's limp almost, although that's a very broad back.

But if you look at the position of his right arm behind him, and of his head, he looks more

as though he's asleep.

And if you interpret it that way, you have not only the potential idea of the suckling

Madonna, but also that image that we've seen before in Madonna and child paintings, in which

the child, the death, the ultimate death of Christ is suggested, even in the Madonna and

child, lying there, in this case not lying but being held, and rather limply by the Madonna.

On the other hand, to return to the idea of the suckling child, you may have read that Michelangelo

was given a wet nurse when he was an infant.

And the wet nurse came from a family of stone cutters.

And he placed great importance by this in his later life.

He said that he imbibed his ability to carve stone from his mother's breast, from his wet nurse's

breast, and he didn't say it lightly.

He didn't say it as something humorous.

The stairs, which give this its title on the left, five steps going up quite steeply, quite

shallowly, in the sense that they really are quite close to the pictorial surface, though

the figures on them do seem to be smaller in proportion to their assumed place in space.

But the stairs may well, almost certainly do, have some symbolic meaning.

They may be there to suggest the ladder that was placed against the cross at the crucifixion.

They, and the children, who are wingless, but Michelangelo's angels usually are, may be

meant to be angels.

And indeed, if you look at the largest, most prominent one, you see that it is holding end

of a cloth.

And the end of the cloth continues over here, where a hand of an angel, and in fact a head,

I think, appear here, and it is being held on that side.

Well, what kind of a cloth?

Probably a shroud.

Christ's winding sheet.

So, again, as we've seen so often, in the image of the Christ child, you have the suggestion

of the sacrifice of Christ.

The steps may mean more than that, or something in addition to that, because symbolism is not

exclusive.

It can mean more than one thing.

You can have a whole group of ideas coalescing into an image.

For instance, there was a medieval text that was widely known at the time, attributed to

St. Augustine, in which Mary is compared to the stairs by which God descended in the person

of Christ to mankind, and by the same stairs we mortals can ascend to heaven, to salvation

afterward.

And in 1477, a book was published which was so popular that it was in a third edition, just

about the time this was carved, and the book was called Stairway to Heaven.

So these images, these ideas, and especially in the milieu in which Michelangelo had fortunately

been placed, an intellectual, not just a studio or workshop milieu, these ideas could well have

played their role here.

There are places where he's still a young artist, the right foot of the Madonna crossing

under.

It doesn't work too well, I suppose.

It's a little awkward, but it's an interesting idea as he crosses her feet.

She sits on a very square block, almost like a building block, like a foundation block, and

that could also, for reasons that are pretty apparent, become a, have symbolism, have Christian

symbolism or theological symbolism in this painting, in this sculpture, pardon me.

The Bacchus takes us a little by surprise, I think.

The Bacchus was, the Bacchus was carved between 1496 and 1498.

It is a supple and rather fleshy figure of Bacchus, and a little bit of a surprise because you think,

well, here he is, he's been studying ancient sculpture, he wants to emulate ancient sculpture,

but he creates something that has, has relatively little parallel in ancient sculpture in terms

of the tipsiness, if I can put it that way, of this Bacchus.

Now, Bacchus is a complicated figure, as you know.

Bacchus is, and it's called, he's known as Dionysus in Greek, and sometimes that is a more, a more

suggestive term because one thinks of Dionysian rites and so forth.

But whether he's Bacchus or Dionysus or Bacchus Dionysus is a, is not important, but he is a figure

who is associated with various, various rituals.

Here he's accompanied by a fawn, here at the lower right, behind him.

So I'll show you an image in which you can see the front view of the fawn here.

Bacchus, in his right hand, holds a cup.

In his left hand, he's clutching a kind of flayed skin, probably from a leopard, is the

usual interpretation, because it's associated with him.

And in that, that skin supports large bunches of grapes, which the fawn is eating.

It's probably meant to be a suggestion of life and death, because grapes are associated

with the Christian sacrament.

And the flayed skin of the animal speaks for itself.

The tipsiness is quite wonderful, because he really has caught it so marvelously.

The figure seems barely able to, to support himself.

Let me show you a closer detail of the, of the extraordinary little fawn.

And by the way, remind you that when you're, when he carved this, that fawn is, looks like

just a lovely figure.

It's out of the same piece of marble.

And of course, it's a large part of the support of the figure.

You have to, marble doesn't have a lot of ten, a lot of tensile strength.

And so you've got to have something to support, and frequently they'll put a tree trunk or something

behind a figure.

Here he uses that part of the marble, turns it into the supporting and wonderfully evocative fawn here.

The astonishing facility with which Michelangelo carved stone does seem to be an innate gift.

He studied with no significant sculptor, one minor sculptor, but nobody of importance.

He nurtured this innate gift through the study of earlier Renaissance sculpture, but more importantly,

ancient Roman sculpture as well.

His Bacchus was carved in Rome, not in Florence, though he had already done a wonderful little

cupid or eros, which he did in the antique style and buried it for a week or two so that it would

get stained in the soil and then passed it off as an ancient carving. And he fooled them. He sold it as

a piece of ancient work. Here, I think we have something that would not be mistaken for ancient

art because it has such a different feeling. And yet, it is a pagan god, and in time Michelangelo would

fuse pagan antiquity with the Christian faith in an original unity of intellectual and emotional power.

Bacchus is the god of wine, but he's also a fertility god. He's often depicted as soft and fleshy

as he is here, and his lassitude is a symbol of sensual indulgence, in contrast, for instance,

to the rational control of the god Apollo. I'd like to spend more time with him, but we'll bring him

back in another context later. Let me move to his next work in Rome.

Between 1498 and 1499, in a very short period of time, he carved this famous pieta, which was carved

for a chapel in St. Peter's and which is still in St. Peter's, though not in the same chapel. It was

commissioned by a French cardinal and ambassador to Rome, whose name was Jean de Biller. Jean de Biller,

for his burial chapel in St. Peter's. That chapel was later destroyed in the process of rebuilding St. Peter's,

necessitating the relocation of the sculpture, eventually ending up in the front of the first

chapel on the right-hand side when one enters the basilica. The theme of Mary, supporting her dead son,

originated in Northern Europe and spread to Italy. Northern examples tended to emphasize the suffering

of Christ and the anguish of the Virgin. But Michelangelo created a classical Stoic group. The

composition is a broad-based pyramid, a high Renaissance grouping. It possesses, in itself,

a sense of serenity and of nobility. But the emotional impact comes from the angular, broken body of

Christ laid above this massive groundswell of the Madonna's cloak below. It is the most wonderful and

startling composition. It is his first great religious sculpture. It is a visual dirge. It is a

poignant lament, sung over a sustaining ground base. And, to me at least, it is newly heart-rending at

every encounter. If you look at the Madonna and the wonderful cowl, the very delicate detail of her face,

the beautifully worked garments of her torso, which are so finely carved, so carved with such

detail, descriptive detail, there's a higher degree of surface polish on this piece than in any work he

ever did, I think. And more descriptive detail as well. It's also his only signed work. And the story is,

and one tends to believe it, that he was looking at it one day and some people came in and somebody

said, who did that? And another person said, oh, so-and-so from Gubbio. And Michelangelo knew it wasn't so-and-so.

So he came in when the church was closed and signed his name on the sculpture at that time. It is his,

I think, his only signed piece of sculpture. The youthfulness of Mary has always attracted comment.

According to Condivi, who was Michelangelo's biographer and amanuensis almost, he had the biography

dictated to him. Michelangelo explained that chaste women always kept their freshness longer,

and that the Virgin Mary's flower of youth was preserved so that the virginity and eternal purity

of the Mother of God could be demonstrated to the world. But the Son of God was made incarnate,

and it was better that he should appear to have the age that he really had.

And we have to accept that, I think, as what Michelangelo intended. I have never been bothered

by it, as some have throughout the centuries, because I find that it lends such a, the delicacy

of the Madonna and her youth lends a particular poignancy to it. I don't think of it in naturalistic

or realistic terms, but rather in the sense of sorrow and loss, and I think it enhances that.

I'm looking at it again, and looking at that great sweep of lower drapery, which

is just so extraordinary in its, in its expressiveness. You can hear it. It resonates so.

Back in Florence, in 1501, he was soon given the opportunity to finish an over life-size figure,

which had been begun by another sculptor nearly 40 years earlier. It was abandoned because it was a

shallow piece of marble, and the sculptor just couldn't work with it. It was a very, it was a

mammoth piece of stone, and it was very difficult, and so it had been put aside. He got the commission

to complete it, and it was begun almost certainly as a David, and, of course, as David. It was completed

in 1504. Michelangelo was able to surmount the difficulties that it, that it created. His David is

twice life-size. David is a symbol of Florence, one of its guardians, not precisely a patron saint,

but one of its guardians. But we're accustomed to Davids, we've seen three, who are young boys, life-size,

or even less. Donatello, Verrocchio, Castagno, those three Davids. Why is this one so huge? Well,

for one thing, originally, the figure had been intended for installation high on a buttress of

the cathedral, where it had to be seen from a great distance below, so it had to be large. It had to be

large to carry to the ground. But size aside, size aside, where the virgin of the Pietà that we just saw

is surprisingly young. So this David is more mature, not just larger, but more mature than the biblical

child hero that we've seen before. And it has been shown, I think convincingly, that Michelangelo

fused two heroes, both of whom were emblems of the Palazzo Vecchio, the city hall, and by extension,

emblems of the Florentine Republic established after the expulsion of the Medici in 1494. They were David and

Hercules. And, of course, the physique of this figure is very much that of Hercules, while the iconography

of it, the way the subject of it, is clearly David. When the completed David was seen, it was instantly

acclaimed, placed in front of the Palazzo Vecchio instead of on the buttress. And it stayed there for

a long time, and for the 19th century, with a canopy over it to protect it. Nonetheless, of course, it was

not wearing well under the elements and has for a long time been in the academy, the academia,

in a gallery of its own, where it is surrounded by tourists as though it were in the middle of a

subway rush hour. But at least it's above their heads. Let me describe it for just a moment. One is always

struck in this work by the size of the head and the size of the hands. And they could have been that size

to carry further, the idea being on the buttress, so you make those features larger to carry further.

They could also have had a reference, a very specific reference, to things which are to this

day on the Capitoline Hill. That is to say, fragments of colossal statues. There is a colossal head and a

colossal hand there today, and they could refer to that. Moreover, there is Pliny the Elder's description,

in the Wonders of the Ancient World, of the Colossus of Rhodes. And in that description, it specifically

says that a man couldn't encircle the thumb with both arms. And there were prints made showing the

imaginary colossus of Rhodes, which no longer existed. So that could have worked into this as well.

And I might say one quick word about contrapposto. Contrapposto. It means simply putting something

against, placing against, pushing against. In this case, with a body, it means putting all the weight

on one leg, letting the other leg, as it is here in the David, be relaxed. That throws one hip out and

throws the body into an S-curve at the same time. It also throws the shoulders out of line. It

introduces movement. It introduces the possibility of action and of interaction. And when you take

it a step further and twist the body, which he does not really here, only the head, but if you

twist the body on its hips and shoulders into two different planes and introduce that kind of torsion,

the contrapposto has been moved to another level. It is something that the ancient world had

discovered and is being, was being, being developed, redeveloped by artists during the Renaissance.

Let me compare the, just briefly here, the David with the Bacchus. Do you see how similar they are

in one sense? The poses are very similar. Right hand and left hand are reversed in a way. But they,

one of them holds one hand high, the other hand at the side. They are both in, in contrapposto poses,

with the weight supported on one leg only. And how fascinating it is that by just a few changes,

you, you, instead of having this figure full of lassitude, in which all the curves are a little

full and a little flabby and so forth, and everything just relaxes a shade too much and the head falls,

the neck turns out of its axis. Just by making a few changes, you get this hero. You get this extraordinary,

upright and irresistible hero of David. Michelangelo throughout his career shows a remarkable ability

to play variations on the human body and take a same pose and do something quite different with it,

just through adjustments of this, of this kind. Like the Mona Lisa, the David has suffered the indignity

of countless parodies and been packaged in plastic replicas, including the tiniest possible. He's

been marketed as a refrigerator magnet with interchangeable outfits of pants and shirts,

and worse. But still, that watchful head on that tensed neck is a, is the actual embodiment of

protective watchfulness. Michelangelo was a painter, but it wasn't his favorite occupation. He wanted to

be a sculptor more often and resisted painting. However, this is his, the only panel painting

by Michelangelo which is unquestionably his. There are two or three other works which have been claimed

for him. They may be authentic. If so, this one remains the only finished example of his early

forays into painting. It's a powerful and complex image whose exact meaning is unclear. It's often called

the Doni D-O-N-I, Doni Tondo, and was made about 1534. It is believed to have commemorated the wedding of

Agnolo Doni and Maddalena Strozzi, and the original frame here bears their coats of arms. It's superbly

heroic, a tightly intertwined holy family adapted to this circular format with extraordinary skill.

The Joseph is behind, the Madonna seated on the ground in a pose you certainly have never seen associated

with the Madonna before, and one which doesn't suggest the Holy Family pose at all. And the Joseph

seated behind her, his legs straddling her, and he hands the Christ child, as it were, to her over her

shoulder. Behind them is a wall-like enclosure containing the child John the Baptist, looking up at the

family. And nude male figures behind him, whose significance has been debated, they might, I think,

be interpreted as figures awaiting baptism, and admission to the realm of the new law on this side

of the wall, and its promised salvation. And of course, the Baptist, the child Baptist, is the in-between

figure in this event. If this is so, then they're akin to those nudes we saw in the Adoration of the Magi by

Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, the nude standing on a ruined wall beside a Roman archway in that

painting. The bright and startling palette, the orange here abutting rose, unbelievable colors but

very strong, heralds the colors that today are visible on the restored Sistine ceiling. And to me,

leave any doubt aside that these are the colors that were, from the beginning, we should have expected to

find on the Sistine ceiling. The Bruges Madonna, 153 to 155, is an exquisite sculpture. It is direct and touching in its

dignity, its simplicity, its unity of form. It's carved, was carved soon after his return to Florence, and it's the

only sculpture by Michelangelo that he sent out of Italy. It was either commissioned by or purchased by a Flemish wool

merchant in Florence, who placed it in a chapel of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Bruges, where it remains

today. The compact composition in which the standing child is completely enclosed by the mother's body

is so touching, and it's at once warmly maternal and theologically symbolic. Nothing could be more winning

than the relationship between mother and child here, it seems to me. And yet, the solemnity that

pervades their features and the slow rhythms of the enveloping drapery discloses the deeper conception

of this work. We have seen something similar in concept before. In Donatello's Virgin and Child,

enthroned on the high altar in the Santo in Padua, here as there, there is the suggestion of birth,

the enclosure even of the womb. In Donatello's Madonna, it was expressed with a kind of Byzantine

stylized oval or mandala around the Christ child. Here, it's expressed through the arrangement of the

Madonna's drapery far more naturally, far more humanly. And where Donatello had responded primarily

to the theological resonance of the Madonna and child, Michelangelo responds first to the feelingly human

woman, woman and child, and secondarily to the symbolic aspect. The work that Michelangelo accomplished

by the time he was thirty, would have sufficed to ensure his reputation forever, since they included

two works whose immediate fame has never waned, the Saint Peter's Pietà and the David. And yet,

this was only the beginning. Thank you.