The Best Artists

Probably the Cardinal, like the man who gave Michelangelo the head to copy years before, would never have smelled a rat. But one day what Vasari calls an “eyewitness” told him that the Cupid wasn’t old at all but had been made by a sculptor in Florence. This naturally made the Cardinal indignant and he sent a messenger, a spy, to Florence to ask around and see whether he could find out who had carved the statue. And after casually questioning several other sculptors, he came to Michelangelo’s door.

Condivi, who is telling Michelangelo’s own version of this story and who believes in his innocence, has the unsuspecting artist welcome the stranger without a twitch. He assumed he was a potential customer.
“Could I see some of your work?” asked the spy. “Do you have anything here in your workshop right now for me to see—to get an idea of the kind of thing you do?”
“Not right now,” said Michelangelo. But he wasn’t going to let the man go without impressing him and he quickly grabbed a pen and a piece of paper and drew his hand for him as proof of his ability, just as Giotto so many years before had drawn for another messenger a perfect circle.
“Very nice,” said the man. “Do you ever do any sculpture—anything in marble?”
Michelangelo told him about every figure he had ever carved, including the Cardinal’s Cupid.
“A Cupid? How big was it? Do you remember who you sold it to?”
“I didn’t sell it myself,” said Michelangelo. “I gave it to an art dealer named Baldassare del Milanese. I think he sold it to a cardinal in Rome.”

The Cardinal’s messenger now told Michelangelo who he was and why he had come. “Your Cupid was sold to my patron as an antique,” he said.

Here Condivi would have us imagine the poor, distraught, duped, Michelangelo. Such a possibility had never crossed his mind. How could anyone do such a thing? He had worked hard and his only real aim was to make people see that he could carve a figure as good as an ancient one. And what was his luck but to run into a scoundrel who took advantage of his skill to deceive someone.
Yet: what about the aging of the Cupid? Had he done that or not, and why? Did he confess that to the messenger? Did he tell him the whole story?
“May I ask how much your patron paid him for it?” he said finally.
“Two hundred ducats.”
“Two hundred ducats! But Milanese paid me thirty!”

The sympathetic messenger here made an offer to Michelangelo that changed his life. Years before, his copy of an old faun in Lorenzo de Medici’s garden had so impressed the Magnificent that he had invited him to live in his own palace. Now this Cupid was his ticket to Rome and to the center of the world, art and otherwise. “Come with me to Rome,” said the messenger. “You can stay at my house, which is near the Cardinal’s palace. I will explain everything to him and we will see that you get the money that you deserve for your figure.”

The Cardinal

What is striking in both biographers’ account of this fraud is their attack on the Cardinal. He wanted nothing to do with the statue once he had discovered it wasn’t antique. He was one of the first collectors of antique sculpture in Italy and basically he wasn’t interested in modern things, however fine. But neither Vasari nor Condivi has any mercy on him for returning the Cupid to Milanese; according to them, he should have seen the quality of the thing and bought it anyway. It was a Michelangelo, after all. “Some were critical of the Cardinal of San Giorgio in this affair because, if the work was seen by all the artists in Rome and by them all equally it was judged very beautiful, it did not seem that he should be so offended by its being modern as to deprive himself of it for the sake of two hundred scudi (ducats) when he was an affluent and very wealthy man.” (Condivi) And Vasari: “Cardinal San Giorgio cannot escape censure for what happened, since he failed to recognize the obviously perfect quality of Michelangelo’s work…… Every age produces the kind of man who pays more attention to appearances than to facts.”

Another surprise is that the Cardinal treated Michelangelo very kindly. He must not have believed that he was party to the fraud. He welcomed him to his palace and showed him his great collection. He even asked his opinion about certain works (“Are they frauds, in your opinion?”). Afterwards he gave the artist a room in the palace for over a year, though he never gave him a commission, for which Vasari and Condivi censure him again.

What became of the Cupid?

Michelangelo tried to get it back by returning the measly thirty ducats but Milanese told him to go to the devil. The story about the attempted fraud was known all over Rome and it had hurt the dealer’s reputation. “He answered me with great rudeness,” Michelangelo wrote to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco from Rome. “He said he would break the statue into a thousand pieces rather than return it to me; that it was his, that he had documents to prove he had had paid for it; and that he hadn’t the least intention of returning it. He strongly complained about you, Lorenzo, saying you had spoken ill of him….” (Letter 1, 1496)
Yet the resouceful Milanese had no trouble finding another buyer for the Cupid: he sold it to Cesare Borgia, who apparently didn’t care what year it was made.

Return to Was Michelangelo Crooked (Part 1)

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Baldassare del Milanese, the merchant who peddled the Cupid, knew very well how to make use of Michelangelo’s talent.

He took the Cupid straight to Cardinal San Giorgio’s palace. The Cardinal was a famous collector of antiques and always on the lookout for the real thing.
“This is not only one of the best Roman statues ever found,” the merchant told him, “it is certainly the best preserved. Look at it, Eminence: not a nick, not a scratch.” Here he cleaned away for the excited Cardinal some of the dirt and grass he or Michelangelo had plugged into a few of the recesses.
“Oh, even if it were missing a toe or a whole arm I wouldn’t mind!” exclaimed the Cardinal, a real connoisseur. “I can’t believe the craftsmanship. Those old sculptors really knew their business.”

Considering the rarity of the piece (and the Cardinal’s disposition) the merchant must have set the price at four or five hundred ducats. Then he let the old Cardinal, an experienced haggler, bring him down to two hundred. The Cardinal, taking no chances, had him paid right there on the spot.

The merchant sent Michelangelo thirty ducats. “Things didn’t go as well as I had expected,” he wrote him. “The Cardinal said he already has more antique marbles than he knows what to do with; and anyway right now he is up to his neck in debt. The most I could get from him—and not even that was easy!—was forty ducats. I know this is disappointing; I’ve decided to send you thirty ducats and to take only ten for myself instead of the 40% we had agreed on. I think we were just unlucky. In another moment we might have gotten three times that.”

Three Sleeping Cupids: an antique model; by Tintoretto; and by Giulio Romano

See Was Michelangelo Crooked? (Part 3) and learn how the fraud was discovered and what the Cardinal did.

Back to Was Michelangelo Crooked (Part 1)

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Like most young artists Michelangelo copied the works of the masters, but he was better at it than the rest. A pen-and-ink copy he made of a copper engraving by Martin Schongauer—a picture of St. Anthony being tormented by demons—impressed everyone. It was perfect.

He was so good at copying that he thought he’d have a little fun.
“At that same time,” writes Condivi, “another work of his aroused no less amazement, although it was spiced with a certain playfulness. Having been given a head to copy, he rendered it so precisely that, when he returned the copy to the owner in place of the original, at first the owner did not detect the deception, but discovered it only when the boy [Michelangelo] was telling a friend of his and laughing about it. Many wanted to compare the two, and they found no difference because, apart from the perfection of the copy, Michelangelo had used smoke to make it seem as old as the original. This gained him a considerable reputation.”
Did the temporarily-deceived owner laugh along and congratulate the young prankster and praise him for his skill? What did Michelangelo do with the imitation head? Sell it perhaps? As an antique perhaps?

Next we see Michelangelo taking this challenge of copying strangely far. “Michelangelo also copied the work of other masters, with complete fidelity,” says Vasari enthusiastically. “He used to tinge his copies and make them appear black with age by various means, including the use of smoke, so that they could not be told apart from the originals.”
Was he trying to delight some group of friends? Just whom was he trying to please with these little forgeries?
“He did this,” says Vasari, “so that he could exchange his copies for the signed originals, which he admired for their excellence and which he tried to surpass in his own works; and these experiments also won him fame.”
Presumably he returned the signed originals once he was finished copying them. Or was he tempted to keep them for awhile, just to see if their owner detected the forgery? Michelangelo wouldn’t have tried to actually sell them, would he?

A Crook?

One of the reasons Condivi wrote his Life of Michelangelo was to defend him against the charge of fraud in the notorious Cupid case. With stories like the ones above it can’t be said that he has prepared his readers to take the artist’s innocence for granted.
What was the Cupid case?
Michelangelo carved a marble figure of a Cupid and then, through a shady merchant, sold it to a cardinal as an original antique statue just unearthed in a Roman garden. There is no doubt that he did this. The only question is about his role in the scheme, his guilt. Whose idea was it?

Both Condivi and Vasari say it wasn’t his own—far be it from our hero! It was Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco d’Medici who put the idea into his head. “I’ve been thinking about your Cupid,” he told Michelangelo one afternoon. “You and I know it is as good or better than an antique statue. But people won’t pay much for a modern work, no matter how good it is. Do you think you could somehow treat it to make it look old?—do something with acids or smoke or dirt—maybe bury it or something? If you could, I would send it to Rome and there you could sell it as an antique original and fetch good money for it.”

Neither of the biographers denies that Michelangelo jumped at the idea. “Upon hearing this,” says Condivi, “Michelangelo, to whom none of the ways of genius were obscure, reworked it immediately so that it looked as if it had been made many years earlier.”
Says Vasari: “And this is not to be marvelled at seeing that he was ingenious enough to do anything.” The two biographer/worshippers of Michelangelo don’t seem able to see farther than the pleasing curiosity of Michelangelo’s now well-known skill in imitating other people’s works of art. But this is beyond fun and games: he and others were going to perpetrate a fraud: they were scheming to cheat someone and profit by the deception.

See Was Michelangelo Crooked? (Part 2) and read how they hoodwinked a famous art collector with the dirty little Cupid.

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Portrait of Agnolo Doni by Rafael Sanzio

Doni turned to a visitor who sat in the great atrium of his house, amused by the funny exchanges. “These artists are the most shameless people on earth. I think I’ll just send back his ugly painting. Florence is full of Holy Family paintings—does he think his is such a work of genius? He’d better be happy if he finds someone generous enough—charitable enough—to give him ten lousy ducats. I’ve reached my limit.”

And he ordered his servants to put the painting back into its wrapping and take it to Michelangelo’s messenger, who stood watching with a frown. “A fellow can only be pushed so far,” he told the guest, who had to conceal his smile.

The guest was Doni’s neighbor and also a collector of rare and beautiful things. He had made more of a fuss over the painting than Doni himself. As the servants toted the painting by Doni and his visitor to hand it back to Michelangelo’s messenger, it suddenly struck Doni that Michelangelo would now be free to sell the painting again. And his neighbor might—would his neighbor actually try?—to buy it himself, that filthy schemer. It wouldn’t be above him.

So Doni became jealous of the painting and changed his mind about returning it. “Come into my office,” he told the messenger quietly; and went off with him, out of earshot of the guest. “Tell your master I’ve reached my limit. Here are forty ducats more. That’s obviously much above what even the artist thinks the painting is worth because it is forty ducats more than he originally asked.”

The messenger did not put out his hand to take the money. “That won’t do, you know,” he said. “My master is furious with you. When I went with the news that you had given him forty instead of seventy, he looked as though the Devil had gotten inside him. He said that when you ordered the painting you promised to pay him whatever he asked; and that he asked a fair price and you tried to cheat him. Now in punishment he has doubled the price. I’m sure he won’t accept a penny less.”

Doni ended up shelling out the seventy more ducats. Vasari tells the story to show how small-minded patrons can be but also to have us admire Michelangelo’s toughness. It probably came from Michelangelo himself—where else?

Those old Renaissance personalities were tough as nails and God deliver us polite weaklings from Florence the Jungle. None of those artists and craftsmen were pushovers. Was Michelangelo tougher than most? No doubt. “Terribile,” said the very Pope Julius of Michelangelo. Pope Julius could be pretty awful himself.

Return to Michelangelo and the Cheapskate 1

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Even after he had carved the David and the Pietà, two of the greatest figures the world will ever see, Michelangelo had to scrounge around for commissions from a man like Doni.

Doni was a Florentine merchant. He commissioned Michelangelo’s only oil painting—the Tondo Doni—but then didn’t want to pay its price, which made Michelangelo turn marble-white with rage.

The Tondo Doni by Michelangelo

The story goes that when Michelangelo had finished painting the board (it was a wooden panel, not a canvas) he wrapped it up nicely and told a servant to deliver it to Doni . “Oh, beautiful!” he exclaimed when he opened it. “How much did your master say he wanted for it?”

“Seventy ducats.”

Silence. Doni was shocked at the price. He liked to have pretty pictures around his house but for seventy ducats he could buy some really useful things. Seventy ducats was way out of line. He had bought an old Roman copy of a faun for eighty ducats—and that was antique. This young artist who wasn’t even a painter but a sculptor had a lot of cheek to be asking so much for a simple painting.
“Here’s forty,” Doni told the servant. “That’s enough. You tell your master the painting is very pretty.”

A half hour went by while Doni waited for news. “That Michelangelo knew he was asking too much,” he thought. “When he sees those forty ducats, he’s going to be happy enough.”

Ring, ring. Michelangelo’s servant at the door with a message. “My master says you must return the painting or send along one hundred ducats.”

“Is your master nuts? He only asked for forty before.”

“Now he wants one hundred. You may also return the painting to him, Sir.”

Doni thought a while. He looked over at the picture, which sat propped up on a chair beside the window. It was a very original Holy Family picture—he’d never seen one like that, with St. Joseph lifting the baby Jesus to hand Him over to Mary, who is about to take Him in her arms. He had planned to surprise his guests with the new painting by putting it just above the dinner table. “All right,” he said. “Tell your master he’s a greedy man and that he’s lucky the rest of us value other things above money. Here’s thirty more ducats. Now he has his seventy.”

Fifteen minutes while Doni went over to the picture and began to study it up close. “That little boy looking up from behind St. Joseph must be St. John,” he thought. “And those nude boys in the background—what are they? Whatever. It’s a beautiful painting with some mystery to it—that’s what I like: novelty, mystery. The damn thing is probably worth two or three hundred ducats, so congratulate yourself, Mr. Doni.”

The doorbell. Michelangelo’s servant again. “My master says you must return the painting or give him the remaining seventy ducats. His price is one hundred forty ducats.”

Doni turned red. “But that’s twice the amount you told me at first. Does he think I’m crazy?”

Read Michelangelo and the Cheapskate 2 and see what happened.

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This is Michelangelo’s last drawing. It was made six or eight years before he died.

Soon he gave up drawing because his hand shook too much.

In the very last years of his life, he was occupied with architecture, not sculpture or painting. Vasari, his biographer, says: “For his architectural work, since his old age meant that he could no longer draw clear lines, Michelangelo made use of Tiberio Calcagni, who was a modest and well-mannered young man [the same who reconstructed the Pietà Michelangelo had broken to pieces].”
Calcagni helped him make his wooden model of St. Peter’s and the designs of the Porta Pía and the San Giovanni and Santa Maria degli Angeli churches.

About the time he made this drawing Michelangelo sent a letter to Vasari, along with various religious sonnets, “saying that he was at the end of his life, that he must take care where he directed his thoughts, that by reading what he wrote Vasari would see he was at his last hour and that the image of death was engraved on his every thought….’God wishes it, Vasari, that I should continue to live in misery for some years.’”

He was suffering not only from weakness but from harassment for his delay in the design of St. Peter’s. Some architects who wanted the job “were going about every day saying that he was in his second childhood,” says Vasari. “Angered by all this, Michelangelo would willingly have returned to Florence….. but he had grown so old and feeble that despite his resolve…his flesh betrayed his spirit.”

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One day Leonardo da Vinci’s dad knocked on his door. “Haven’t you finished that shield yet? The guy’s been waiting for it for over two months?”
Leonardo called from deep inside his room. “Just a minute!”
Not even his dad had ever entered. It was a wizard’s workshop and contained secrets. “All right! Come in.”
“Ugh!” said his dad, wincing as he walked in. “Stinks like the devil in here. Don’t you smell…..?”

And then he let go a howl of fear. “What is THAT?” His eyes were fixed on a strange monster wriggling in a corner of the room. It looked like no animal on earth—in fact, it looked like a dragon.

(Sorry–this dragon is by Michelangelo; I’m still looking for one by Leonardo)

“Fine,” said Leonardo, who had been watching his father’s reaction. He walked over to the monster, picked it up, and handed it to his dad. “You can take it now—I see that it works,” he told him.
It was a monster he had painted on the buckler, snarling and threatening, looking so real his father had been frightened. “Incredible!” his dad said, beginning to smile. “How did you make it?”

Leonardo opened the shutters of the only window in the room and let light fill the room. There on his work-table were the bodies and parts of bodies of a dozen animals. “I make my own monsters,” Leonardo explained. “I took the scales from this carp and the wings and teeth from this huge bat and the crest from this rooster and I glued them onto the body of the lizard here. I thought he needed a longer tail too, so I used this snake. When he was all assembled and propped up, I painted him on the shield. Before you came in here I set it up in the half-light to see if you would think it was real, and you did, so I’m satisfied. I hope your friend who ordered the buckler will like it.”

Leonardo was sorry his dragon wasn’t really alive, of course. One day a caretaker working in the Medici gardens found an enormous and strange-looking lizard and brought it to him. “This reminds me of one of your painted dragons,” he told him.
It reminded Leonardo too, and he started thinking how he could improve on this real dragon. First he made some wings for it, covered them with real scales, and glued them on its back. When the lizard moved the wings wagged. Then he gave the dragon a beard and horns and bigger eyes. He kept it in a box and “used to show it to his friends and frighten the life out of them,” says Vasari.

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Was it bad luck for Raffaello Sanzio to have been born while the two greatest artists who ever lived—Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci—were alive and working in Italy?
“Not at all,” he would have said. “I learned from both of them and improved my painting so much that I became Number Three in the world.”

Portrait of Agnolo Doni by Rafael

It’s not as though he had nothing of his own. Few in all of history could draw such graceful figures or invent such beautiful colors. But without Leonardo and Michelangelo as guides Rafael might have become only a better Perugino, his first master.

He learned most from Leonardo.
“Leonardo’s paintings left Rafael amazed and entranced,” says Vasari, his biographer. “Gradually abandoning what he had learned from Perugino… [he] tried to the best of his ability and knowledge to imitate Leonardo’s style.”
How far did he get?

“For all his diligence and study, however, in certain problems he was never able to surpass Leonardo. And although there were many who considered that he surpassed [him] in sweetness and in a kind of natural facility, nonetheless Rafael never achieved the sublimity of Leonardo’s basic conceptions or the grandeur of his art.”

Still, Vasari gives him second prize in painting: “In this context, however, where few can stand comparison with Leonardo, Rafael came nearer to him than any other painter, notably in grace of coloring.” That included Michelangelo.

He learned a lot from him too. Vasari says that because of the first style he had learned from Perugino, “he experienced great difficulty in learning the finer points of the nude and the technique for doing difficult foreshortenings from the cartoon that Michelangelo made for the Council Hall in Florence. No other artist, no matter how talented, would have been able to do what, convinced that he had so far been wasting his time, Rafael was then able to accomplish. For he rid himself completely of the burden of Perugino’s manner to learn from the work of Michelangelo a style that was immensely difficult in every particular; and he turned himself, as it were, from a master into a pupil once more.”

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Frank Lin asked:

Who do you think was the better sculptor, Bernini or Michelangelo? ….I’d say Bernini surpasses Michelangelo in skill, facile of skill, and dramatization. He has a larger body of work, was more prolific…

I agree. Bernini was a faster stone carver. He could run circles around Michelangelo. And Bernini had more ideas, more ease at expressing them, less hesitation.

Yet I think Michelangelo was the better artist. Why?

There is more of Michelangelo in his statues than there is of Bernini in his. Every stroke of the hammer seems to come after he has thought about it; and there is no part of his figure that he didn’t re-create. Nothing is merely copied from a real nude. He never just does “a toe” or “an arm for this gesture”. He transforms every single feature, makes it part of a very tight general design; and the design is a vision of his, not a model sitting on a stool.

There is something halting about Michelangelo’s style. Let’s say it is like Hemingway’s style versus Scott Fitzgerald’s. You see that each word of Hemingway’s is molded to fit a rhythm and a sound, and those words mean as much—or more than—the story. Fitzgerald writes well, but it is the story itself he is concerned with and there is no impression that he wouldn’t exchange any word for another, let alone a sound.

Michelangelo’s work is more abstract and so less bound to the real flesh and bone contraption.

His men are Renaissance architecture—they are governed by strict laws of symmetry and geometric design, which here and there he relaxes for surprise and grace. He turns the body into a sort of building. He sculpts broad masses and then decorates them with the accidents of flesh or cloth that serve his architecture.

Michelangelo exaggerated that (geometric) design, Bernini and the Baroque exaggerated gesture. It is typical of Michelangelo’s statues—it was even supposedly a rule of his—that they are compact, that no limbs protrude; and of Bernini’s, that arms and legs and drapery stick out everywhere.

Bernini shows them acting. Bernini entertains. His statues call. Bernini knows that no one will spend time looking at a statue unless it is spectacular, unless it comes half-way toward him.

Michelangelo makes his figure as deep and as beautiful as he can and leaves the viewer to his own resources. His figures meditate—it is as though you surprise them in thought and your look is indiscreet.

The one (Bernini) was an extrovert, the other (Michelangelo), a reclusive brooder. Michelangelo was always trying to please only himself. Bernini was like the stage director as well as the playwright, minding the show. Michelangelo sculpts a lyric poem, Bernini hammers out a catchy ballad.

Bernini’s beauty is of a fleshly kind. He never manages to get into another realm, try as he might—and he tries. His figures stay outside you. You look (since they are invariably DOING something, you watch), you admire. But the action or the detail they show anchors them forever to the material world. Their struggle doesn’t pass from them to you, the viewer.

Michelangelo’s was the stronger personality. Which of his figures could be done by another? Which parts of them?
None. Ever.

Our own time feels more affinity with Bernini’s sculpture, partly because its excellence is more easily reach-able. Michelangelo’s vast mental universe with all its Renaissance swagger and tragedy is long gone. His ideas of perfection too. No one has heard his muse in centuries.

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Nobody “ever achieved the sublimity of Leonardo da Vinci’s’s basic conceptions or the grandeur of his art… He had no equal in the expression of heads, both of men and women; and… in giving grace and movement to his figures [he] surpassed all other painters……” (Vasari)

That was the first art historian’s opinion of Leonardo da Vinci’s work. It seems to have been the opinion of all the critics of his time and maybe still of ours. What is it based on—which works?

A very, very few: the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper, the Annunciation.…an angel in a Verrocchio painting….a Rubens copy of someone’s copy of a battle fresco.

Painting was really just one of Leonardo’s pastimes. He spent his time horsing—tinkering—around. He was always cooking something up, he had a thousand ideas and for some of those he began drawings or models. Rarely did he ever finish anything at all. “I can do all kinds of things,” he wrote to the Duke of Milan in a letter of application for a job, and then listed the varied and surprising fields he felt himself qualified in.

Painting was way down the list. He experimented with colors and tints as though those were a problem as great as the composition of his picture. In that—in the composition—he was supreme but apparently he was not impressed.

You might wonder: but then, what was it really that gave him such a reputation? After all, his notebooks and other scribblings were mostly unknown to his contemporaries.

He seems to have invented and nourished his own myth. The super-genius, the guy who was always surprising with his genialidades, like Salvador Dalí.

But what DID he come up with? And does it really justify Vasari’s rating “the greatest of them all”? Can that be told from a half a dozen, mostly unfinished paintings in bad condition? Is it fair to all the artists who worked their tails off their whole lives and therefore necessarily created problems and made errors that the man who does nothing avoids?

Leonardo, says Vasari was loved by everyone. King Francis’s called him a great philosopher.

But was he the GREATEST PAINTER? Did he really beat them all for ever and ever? Of course he had a style and a natural grace; but so did Rafael Sanzio, who did not lack impressive powers of invention. He showed those in numerous frescoes and other paintings. And Michelangelo? Was Leonardo’s style as seen in those handful of works really more unique than his? Wasn’t Leonardo’s style as close to his master’s as Rafael’s was to his? Couldn’t it be seen as a carry-over from Verrocchio and Botticelli—the fuzzy sweetness of the Middle Ages, the smile of the Gothic Virgins?

“Grandeur”… “sublimity”…..even “grace”: how can those be measured? What are they? How can Leonardo’s superiority remain though the qualities that support his claim are no longer understood or invoked except by art historians?

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Michelangelo had trouble sleeping. He told his friends sleep gave him headaches. So he would get up in the middle of the night, put on his hat with candles, pick up his chisels, and work. He always had a block of marble in his shop and a figure going.

When he was seventy-five the figure he worked on at odd hours was the Duomo Pietà, which he meant for his own tomb. He came to hate it and broke it to pieces in frustration and anger.
The last one he began, when he was over eighty, was this Rondanini Pietà. It is in the Sforza Castle of Milan.

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“I watched him work all day on this figure,” his friend Daniele da Volterra wrote to a friend.
Two days later Michelangelo ran a fever. He wandered around the house in his restless fashion and finally went outdoors for a walk, though it was chilly. His fever was higher the next day and he sat in front of the fireplace, sweating and shivering. Finally he crawled into bed. He died just two days later.

Volterra doesn’t say what he thought of the figure he saw Michelangelo work on. Neither do his two biographer friends. Most critics have discreetly passed over it. Why?

It not only shows signs of the same frustration that made him ruin the Duomo Pietà;it shows signs of mental weakness and a pitiful loss of power and effectiveness.

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(These are thumbnails of the unique photos taken by Ludwig Goldscheider for his book Michelangelo: Paintings, Sculpture, Architecture, Phaidon Press Ltd.)

The legs, though nearly finished, are thin, graceless, commonplace. On Christ’s right are the remains of a finished, polished arm with recognizably Michelangelo-esque robustness and power. But it has been cut away and a new arm and shoulder started. Now it is hard to imagine just what Michelangelo meant to do with the remaining marble. Everything is out of whack. He has chipped away the marble that would have been needed to give Christ a full chest and now the shoulders can never be broad enough. And what was he going to make of the Virgin that stands like a child on a box behind him?

It looks like the old Master didn’t know himself where to go with the statue and was only fumbling around, waiting for his long-lost Muse to come and rescue it and him.

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Poked eyeballs. Though we find some old Greek statues with painted eyes or even gem eyes (semi-precious stones implanted in the eye-sockets), most of them had smooth hemispheres for eyeballs. There was no attempt at showing a glance, a look, except as could be inferred from the direction of the hemispheres, which were really drop-shaped, with the bulge where the pupils lay. That was in keeping with the Greek aim of showing only the outside of the body. You were supposed to look at it as a beautiful natural object, not as an individual personality with its fleeting moods. Though there is nothing in animated “real life” as moving as some looks are, those old marble statues weren’t meant to give you any.

At first Michelangelo either didn’t understand or didn’t accept that old Greek aim. Precisely because all he saw around him were sleepy or praying saints with their eyes closed or other statues with empty, blindman’s stares, he thought he would try to do something novel with the eyes of one of his first statues, the St. Proculus. Maybe they could be made to show some fire, some anger, some energy.

Sometimes in the past sculptors had drilled a little hole in the stone eyeballs of their statues just where, in a real eyeball, the pupil would be. This was an outright misrepresentation of the shape of the eyeball. A pupil (or rather, the lens) stands out—it is a little hill on the hemisphere of the eyeball, not a hole. Seen from the side, the poked eyeball looked sliced off right where it should bump. But those sculptors considered that this little lie might produce virtuous results if the shadows from the holes they drilled looked like black pupils.
The results were usually of a very discreet virtue, or none, or going toward actual vice. Depending on how the light shone on the figure, the holes looked good or bad. When they were bad, they spoiled the face altogether; when good, they got a five out of ten. After drilling the holes, the sculptor often couldn’t resist the temptation to scratch circles around them to represent the irises too. This was his second sculptural outrage. Iris circumferences aren’t round scratches on an eyeball.

When his Proculus was carved, Michelangelo, probably against the advice of his old teachers, drilled holes in its eyes with a gimlet. He must first have made many trial drillings on clay and wax models, just to see the effects. He can’t have liked them completely but he went ahead: he was courageous.

The result was—what—a five out of ten? A six? The eyes stare. They are open too wide. They look like glass eye protheses.

But were those the last gimlet holes Michelangelo drilled into the eyes of his statues? No. He didn’t give up on the trick until he had made it crown his work, not detract from it. He was brave enough—seeing the results who can any longer say “foolhardy enough”?—to drill the eyes of his colossal David. That was one of the riskiest things he ever did. No one could say how the eyes would look from below or from a distance, with the ever-shifting light of day upon them. By poking those eyes Michelangelo might easily have ruined his statue—very easily. It is anyway hard to imagine how he carved the big figure without being able to stand back every now and then to have a look at it. But his biographer Vasari states that Michelangelo built a scaffold around the stone and then covered it all with a tarp, so no one could see what he was doing. This meant that he himself was not able to stand back, say, twenty yards to check his carving. He had to trust absolutely in his model (where was that? how large was it?) and its gimlet-hole pupils.

Notice that the holes are not simply round bores. They are heart-shaped: there are two to an eye, and they tunnel upward. There are no rules for making these holes. You try one kind of hole, step back if you can, and see how it looks from the front and the sides. Michelangelo thought he had done reasonably well on his Proculus with this butterfly or Valentine bore and staked the success of his big David on one like it. And he won—it was right, it worked. David looks anxious, just as he is supposed to as he prepares to whip that pebble at Goliath.

Yet on his next poked-eye figure, the Bacchus, he gave up the gimlet and tried a more subtle treatment of the eye. See Michelangelo’s Statue of a Drunk.

After that he gave up making holes or depressions in the eyes. Except for one figure—and I hesitate to mention it, to draw attention to it, because it is one of his greatest. It is one of the greatest figures any sculptor ever carved anywhere. It is so awe-inspiring that few ever see and fewer admit through their piety that they are seeing a terrible flaw when they look squarely at it. The statue is the Moses and the flaw is the eyes. Judge for yourself:

The pupil rings are too small—beady. The holes are rough, awkward, digs without concern for the shadows they throw. In fact, they stop short—they are not deep enough, so that you see the flat wall down inside where they stop, which destroys the whole illusion. In a word, they are graceless, which is a most un-Michelangelo-like quality. I would like to believe that he didn’t make those holes but I lack any authority to do that. The Moses was put in place while he was still alive—he must have given it his final approval. It is hard to understand how a man who had given so much study to the problem and had invented so many ingenious solutions to it, could finally, in this figure of his maturity, have given up and simply drilled (or goughed out) those pupil-holes and scratched (actually: carved with a flat chisel) circles around them without experimenting first to see the results. Perhaps it was a case of overconfidence. He had (nearly) always been right. His eye was the best in the world.

(In this unfinished Victory Michelangelo finished only the right eye.  Why ?)

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It’s a shame Veronese is not better known. He was surely one of the greatest artists of all times.
And he didn’t have any of his friend Tintoretto’s defects.

Look at this portion of his great The Family of King Darius Before Alexander the Great, now in the Paris Louvre.

This is the right side of the picture. Alexander and his soldiers are seeing the most beautiful woman in the world—King Darius’ wife—and they look in awe, they stare, they covet. She belongs to Alexander now: his army has just defeated the Persians in a decisive battle and won their vast Empire. The queen is war booty.

Nowadays artists say they haven’t time to invent so much for a single painting, nor does their public have the time or patience to search out all the inventions. So Ruskin’s definition of great art—“the greatest number of the greatest ideas”—is no longer useful. But if you do have a moment, start to count how many there are here.

Veronese can just not stop inventing. True, the painting is the illustration of a story (from Plutarch) and Veronese borrowed the basic idea. But it is the enlargement of a single moment from the story, just as Shakepeare did in his historical plays, with as much truth as the painter knew how to put into it.

Psychological truth is what Veronese offers and other painters don’t. Titian, for instance, never did much in that way. Painters are usually interested first in the general design—the shapes, the colors. The attitudes and facial expressions of their painted people are conventional. Those people often look hypocritical or just silly. But with Veronese it’s hard to say what his priority was: an original design, brilliant colors, or people. He does them all, and with great authority and ease. You never see signs of hesitation or re-working. He just seems to cast his figures on the canvas like a wizard with a wand.

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Bacchus is Michelangelo´s first important statue and one of the few he ever finished; and many of the people who love his work are sorry he did it.

The empty, foolish look in the young Bacchus´s face, the way the head sits on the thick neck—as if it were stuck on wrong after having fallen off; the stiffness of the leg that carries the weight; the strange mixture (“A blend of sexes”, says Vasari) of brawn and flab—you would have thought Michelangelo was incapable of making such errors, such aesthetic errors. How could the man with the soundest artistic judgment of all times have let those pass? Sublime figures he left unfinished; this one he finished all too carefully and polished into silliness.

It´s just this figure, along with a few of the painted demons and damned on the wall of the Sistine Chapel, that turn a critic like John Ruskin away from Michelangelo. “What is the most important thing in a figure?” he says. “The face. We can´t relate to the rest of the body as we can the face. That´s the window to the spirit inside and it gives the whole character to the work. Michelangelo´s faces—look at them—are all coarse, unintelligent. They are the face of vice, even of crime.”
Even Michelangelo´s other biographer, Condivi, admits that “the eyes are dim and lewd”.
Stendhal thought the face was “coarse and without charm.”
Shelley, the English poet, wrote: “The countenance of this figure is the most revolting mistake of the spirit and meaning of Bacchus. It looks drunken, brutal, and narrow-minded, and has an expression of dissoluteness the most revolting.”

What went wrong? Perhaps Michelangelo made the mistake that nearly all artists make until they learn their lesson: to listen too closely to the customer instead of to themselves alone. Jacobo Galli wanted the figure for his garden. He no doubt wanted to evoke good old Roman decadence. The idea may have been his—he may have encouraged Michelangelo to do the foolish thing: to make a drunken statue of the god of wine—to make him look dizzy and off-balance. Michelangelo had been looking frantically for ways to put life into his figures and he may have let himself be convinced that Galli´s idea would work. The “blend of sexes” had often been done before—Bacchus is often represented as chubby and lewd. But a figure that looks tipsy?—that would be curious, funny.

The work looks very much like Roman statuary from the worst period. Up to then, everything the young Michelangelo had done (now he was twenty-two) was a take-off on, or a frank imitation of, Roman art. Cupids were obviously in fashion and he did Cupids. “You who did the Cupid so well, could you do me a Bacchus?” Galli asked him. “Look at the Bacchus on this old sarcophagus—that will give you an idea.”
And while Michelangelo was working on the clay model Galli marvelled at it left and right but said: “Why don´t you make him drunk? He´s the god of wine, isn´t he? Did you ever see a statue of a drunk? I think that would be marvellous. But you´re the artist—I don´t understand these things. I suppose that couldn´t be done.”
And did Michelangelo say: “ You better believe it can be done. I´ll make him stagger. I´ll make him stinking drunk, spilling his wine and ready to heave”?

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Here are some of the drawings Botticelli made to illustrate The Divine Comedy.

(Dante and Vergil see how those who sold indulgences are punished in hell.)

Printing was a new and exciting discovery in his time and Botticelli liked the idea of having his drawings engraved and printed in the new books. But, according to Vasari, he couldn’t afford the time. “He wasted a great deal of time on [these drawings], neglecting his work and thoroughly disrupting his life. He also printed many of his other drawings, but the results were inferior because the plates were badly engraved……”

(Dante, in the “dark forest” sees a panther, a lion, and a wolf.)

Vasari gives Botticelli a weak character. “Botticelli was a follower of Savonarola’s, and this was why he gave up painting and then fell into considerable distress as he had no other source of income.”

(Dante and his guide Vergil come across the chained Giants.)

Maybe he was a weak character. But as an artist he had the authority of a king: in his time there was no one above him.

Probably the lines of these drawings were made as cleanly as possible and without shading to facilitate the work of the engraver (who then botched the job). They are as masterly as the old Greek vase paintings. But their style is not that of a period but of a single man, never to be repeated. Artists are always proud of their “action” sketches—quick croquis of a figure in motion, in some familiar and suggestive posture. Here there are hundreds, drawn with incredible precision and care. And grace. That grace is the hallmark of a Botticelli. You would think it is a finery particularly inappropriate to this subject. Gustav Doré’s romantic bombast was probably more fitting. But Sandro couldn’t help it. That same etherial beauty that he gave to his famous Venus coming out of the sea and to his Virgins and angels—it wasn’t a pose or contrivement created for those paintings. It was a feature of his soul.

(The two poets see how the proud are punished in Purgatory.)

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One of the most surprising discoveries those Romans made when they began to dig in old Rome, looking for beautiful ruins, was the Laocoön. Michelangelo himself dropped what he was doing and hurried to see it lifted out of the dirt that had covered it for a thousand years.

It was a sculptural group from Hellenistic times showing the old priest and his sons being killed by snakes. Laocoön twists in agony and despair. But his body isn´t the miserable puppet or sack of sick-white flesh that the Italians of the Middle Ages might have made of him but the proud encarnation of the old gods, with all its noble “architecture” and dignity. It was the greatest example Michelangelo had ever seen of the sublime nude and it impressed him so much that there is a trace of this Laocoön in all his statues after the David.
Almost a hundred years later Bernini was still studying that old Greek Laocoön and getting ideas from it.

And when the artists were through with it along came the philosophers. A German called Winckelman wondered why the priest, Laocoön, whose whole body is tensed in pain, had been given such a philosophic face by the old sculptors (there were three of them, the work is signed). Why hadn´t they made him cry out in pain? Once they had done such a conscientious job showing the suffering in every inch of the limbs and torso, why had they stopped with his face, of all places? The face is precisely where you look to see what´s going on inside a man; and such a resigned face seems to contradict what the body is screaming. How easy it would have been for those great sculptors to carve the cords and bulging arteries in Laocoon´s neck and the swollen veins on his temples. And open his mouth for the biggest, loudest shout that sculpture ever showed. Wasn´t it odd that they hadn´t?

Wincklemann was a scholar of the old school, which means lots of Greek. He thought he could answer his own question. “Your Greek,” he said, “didn´t shout or wail. He controlled himself. Dignity. No matter what you did to him he kept his mouth shut. He knew how to bear the pain and the injustice of life. I wish more of us were like him.” He also said that those three sculptors must have been real philosophers who would have behaved the same way as Laocoön when the chips were down.

That answer got a response from another German named Lessing. He said he agreed with Winckelmann that the Greeks were noble, philosophical sufferers, but that´s not the reason Laocoön was silent—or only sighed a little. Actually, the Greeks had no objection to a good shout when something hurt. And he brought examples from Greek drama. According to him, all the big heroes had shouted all through the poems and plays and nobody thought that was improper. It was natural, was what it was; and, above all, the Greeks were natural. They weren´t ashamed of their feelings, even their weaknesses, but they didn´t let them keep them from being courageous when they had to be courageous. They weren´t like a lot of modern fellows he could mention who had the wrong idea of being human. Nowadays we prided ourselves on our stiff upper lip and taught our young men to show their bravery by keeping their fears and anguish to themselves.

No, said Lessing. The reason the marble Laocoön didn´t shout was not a MORAL one. Even Vergil in the Aeneid mentions his screaming (“clamores horrendos ad sideram tollit”). The reason was an AESTHETIC one. According to the Greek ideas of beauty, that shout would have been out of place. It would have killed the statue. Why?

Beauty and suffering don´t go together. In a beautiful picture or statue you leave everything that is unpleasant out. Violent expression has to be avoided because it disturbs the serenity that beauty requires; it distorts perfect proportions. For example, you won´t find rage or despair depicted in any of the old works. If those artists did have to depict suffering, they softened its effects on their figures in the interest of beauty.

The Greeks, said Lessing, took their beauty seriously. The state even made laws about it. In Thebes, for instance, you could be fined for drawing a caricature because that exaggerated the ugly, the grotesque side of life. Portraits were restricted because the government felt there shouldn´t be a proliferation of un-ideal faces everywhere around to see. There should be only models of perfection.

So the Laocoön was a very tricky subject for a statue. The story, which is in the Aeneid by Vergil, says that Laocoön, a Trojan priest at the time of the siege of Troy, had made the gods angry at him for doing what any patriot would do: he warned the Trojans about the Wooden Horse. Neptune sent serpents out of the ocean to kill him and his two sons, presumably by strangling them, though in our statue one of the snakes is biting Laocoön´s hip. How do you show this little episode and keep the cool required by beauty? Your subject is anguish.

The artists (all three of them) had a real problem. But they reached a consensus. They would take the bull by the horns and show Laocoön right at the moment of greatest distress. They would depict the climax of the story—his execution. They would dramatize the moment of panic with twisting and broad gesture. They would show anguish in all the muscles of his body. But when they came to his face—to that mirror to the soul—they would hold back. A wide-open mouth, a scream to the high heavens, though it would have been realistic, would have distorted the hero´s features in an almost disgusting way. Coming upon the statue, the viewer would have looked the other way, just as you do when your eyes fall on deformity, wailing, madness.
The sculptors softened the wild anguish in the face to a more distant and general grief with resignation, in the interest of beauty. Now we can look squarely at the scene and feel pity for poor Laocoön instead of revulsion.

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Sublime, sublime. Didn’t Michelangelo ever try to be funny?

Here are two grotesque masks that Michelangelo used as decoration on the cuirass (armor) of his great marble figure of Giuliano de’ Medici:

Perhaps they are Medusas—faces meant to frighten the enemy. Yet, because they are so silly, perhaps they were supposed to be insulting as well. Insulting?

The Renaissance idea of funny wasn’t like ours. Many jokes and stories were triumphantly mean. The man who was superior or felt himself superior pulled a good one over his enemy and then insulted him, mocked him. “[Already] in the Middle Ages we read how hostile armies, princes, and nobles provoked one another with symbolic insults, and how the defeated party was then loaded with symbolic outrage,” says Jakob Burckhardt in his study of Renaissance wit.
By Renaissance days, when many were trying to become great heroes and personalities, this victory wit had become popular. Italy was full of beffe and burle—clever tricks and remarks to put the other guy down or stamp on him when he was underfoot.

Today these do not seem very funny, though a mask like this one (not by Michelangelo) might make us crack a smile:

Could mockery have been the aim of this mask by Michelangelo on the keystone of the Porta Pia in Rome?

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You are a sculptor and Oscar Wilde’s friend Robert Ross asks you to make a monument for his grave. You remember his wit as you heard it in his play The Importance of being Ernest, and a story you read in school about Dorian Grey, whose portrait in the attic mysteriously recorded all the evil of his life. Maybe you know his fairy tales, too. The footnotes to a poem called the “Ballad of Reading Gaol” told you that Oscar had actually gone to prison for “corrupting” a youth, and had died in Paris shortly after his release, a broken man.

What sort of monument could you make to such a man—one of the most colorful men of letters of the nineteenth century, a dandy who lived among exquisite things?

Here is what the American-born sculptor Jacob Epstein came up with:

What the devil?
“I had in mind Oscar’s poem ‘the Sphinx’”, explained Epstein.
A little Egyptian, a little Aztec inspiration. Something as exotic as the sphinx Oscar talks about in that long poem (which almost no one has read).

Few people have ever been pleased with the big stone, though women love to give it a kiss and leave a print of lipstick there. The sphinx used to be complete with genitals and those were at first covered (even in famously prude-free France) and finally removed. Oscar’s poem did have a heavy erotic air and the work of Epstein mostly did too.

Was Epstein himself satisfied?
Probably not. He experimented all his life with styles—sometimes of the sort that whole cultures produce. “It looks as though this were made by a people rather than a single man,” said one of Epstein’s friends in admiration of Oscar’s monolith. And in fact some of Epstein’s big projects are so derivative or eclectic that his own personality went under, artisan-wise. He has no single masterpiece—as happened to so many of the artists of the twentieth century, nor a readily identifiable style.

Except in his wonderful portraits—some of the best that have ever been sculpted. Have a look at his bronze busts of Joseph Conrad, of Churchill, of the singer Paul Robeson, of the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, and others. Here is a model named Deirdre:

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When Leonardo was 26 he sent a letter of application for a job to the Duke of Milan. “I can be very useful to you,” he says and goes on to list the varied and surprising fields he feels himself qualified in.

He may have been the world’s greatest painter but in this letter he puts painting low on the list. It wasn’t simply the result of his tailoring the application to fit the patron’s needs. Leonardo loved warfare and obviously had spent hours and hours not only dreaming up war machines but making models too.
Here is a summary of the contents of the letter, partly paraphrased:

Most illustrious Lord:

I have studied the products of men who call themselves great inventors of war machines and I have seen that they are no different from the ones used everywhere. So now I would like to present my own secrets to your Excellency.

1) I have some extremely light and strong bridges which can be easily transported. With them you may pursue and at any time flee from the enemy; and others too, secure and indestructible by fire and battle, which are easy and convenient to lift and place. Also methods of burning and destroying those of the enemy.

2) I know how, when a place is besieged, to take the water out of the trenches, and make endless variety of bridges, and covered ways and ladders, and other machines pertaining to such expeditions.

3) If bombardment of a fortress is impossible because of its position or because its banks are too high, I am able to destroy it, even if it is built on a rock.

4) I have mortars which are most convenient and easy to carry; and with these one can fling small stones almost resembling a storm; and with the smoke from them cause great terror to the enemy, to his great detriment and confusion.

5) For the fight at sea I have many kinds of machines most efficient for offence and defence; and vessels which will resist the attack of the largest guns and powder and fumes [armored ships?].

6) I have ways of using secret and tortuous mines and other means to reach a designated place without noise, even if it were necessary to pass under a trench or a river.

7) [The first tanks, that Churchill was so proud of financing in World War I] I can make covered chariots, safe and unattackable which, when they enter among the enemy with their artillery, can destroy them, no matter how large the force. And behind these, infantry could follow quite unhurt and without any hindrance.

8) In case of need I will make big guns, mortars; and lighter and more useful forms, out of the common type.

9) If bombardment should fail, I would contrive catapults and other machines of marvellous efficacy and not in common use. And in short, according to the variety of cases, I can contrive various and endless means of offence and defence…….

Only at the end of the enumeration does he begin to mention architecture, painting, and sculpture:

10) In time of peace I believe I can give perfect satisfaction and equal any other man in architecture and the composition of buildings, both public and private; and in guiding water from one place to another.

11) I can carry out sculpture in marble, bronze or clay, and also in painting whatever may be done, and as well as any other, no matter who he is.

12) I will make a great bronze horse which is to be to the immortal glory and eternal honor of the prince your father of happy memory, and of the illustrious house of Sforza.
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If any one of the above-named things seem to any one to be impossible or not feasible, I am most ready to make the experiment in your park, or in whatever place may please your Excellency; to whom I commend myself with the utmost humility.

Signed:
Leonardo da Vinci

(Setting up a gigantic cannon in an armory–a drawing by Leonardo)

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Way back in 1430 a Florentine fresco painter named Cennini advised beginners to draw from nature. “Boys,” he wrote, “go out there and draw everything you see.”
In those days paper was scarce, so Cennini told them to spread some ground bone on a board and draw with a stylus. “…Draw something every day, for no matter how little it is it will be well worth while, and will do you a world of good.” (Cennini, Il Libro dell’ Arte)

What is surprising now, looking back, is that both the boys and their master thought they were getting down nature on their tablets. In fact, paintings from those early times don’t show much realism. The drawings look more like each other than like nature. Why? The artists all drew with their minds, not their eyes. They drew the tree in front of them not as they saw it but as their master had drawn it; and they didn’t even know. Nor did their master.
There’s nothing strange in that: we all do it. Even great artists do it for a while. It takes a genius to realize that he is doing it, and to stop.

Why were the boys supposed to go out and draw? Because “[Nature] outdoes all other models…. Do you realize what will happen to you if you practice drawing with a pen?” asks Cennini. “That it will make you expert, skilful, and capable of much drawing out of your own head.”

THAT was the aim: to draw out of your head, to invent your pictures. You copied nature for two reasons: to gain a sure hand and to stock your head with all kinds of details that would be of use when you invented.

A painting was an invented, not a copied thing; and invented according to traditions, conventions. Even the great Leonardo da Vinci kept most of his observations of nature out of his paintings. There are beautiful studies in red chalk of real horses by the master; but his painted animals look no realer than merry-go-round horses. He made hundreds of beautiful and original sketches, close studies from nature; but when he painted a picture, he never even consulted them; which is why more than one of his women have the Mona Lisa smile. Look at his St. Ann. That smile wasn’t on the model in front of him: it was a product of Leonardo’s imagination; and it floated in his mind like the cat’s smile in Alice in Wonderland.

Though all the artists went out and drew from nature, few of their practice drawings have survived, mainly because not even the artist himself thought of them as more than exercises or rough drafts for his “real” work, and tore them up when he cleaned out his workshop every five years or so.

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Giotto rescued and restored the art of painting—went the conventional art history of the sixteenth century—and Donatello brought back sculpture.

Donatello has always had great admirers. Look what the American sculptor Louis Slobodkin writes abou