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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Why do we insist our heros do no wrong? And for our artist heros we expect they started out creating perfect pieces from childhood. There can be no learning period or none of those just plain mistakes along the way.
Sports nuts are the same. They want Tiger to win everytime until he dies. If he 3 putts there is something not right in the universe.
Right,Bill. It is anyway unbelievable that anyone aged 23 could come up with the Pietá. He couldn’t have been carving more than about five years, and he lost some of that time as an exile in Bologna. Bernini began even earlier, though he had a father who taught him from childhood. There’s a very good St. Sebastian he did when he was seventeen.
This could be a poor effort, but my inclination would be he was just doing the best he could with bad instructions. As a graphic designer I’ve been in many situations where the client (the person who is paying me) wants things done in a way which isn’t groundbreaking, even ass-backwards, but being fixed on this path, my only resolve was to do it the best way possible in this direction…
Hi Frank. Yes, remember that the market demand in those days wasn’t so much for original work as for things that looked old Roman, like they had been dug up. Michelangelo had just gotten into trouble for sculpting a Cupid, aging it, and then trying to palm it off as an antique work. Of course he had to make a living somehow. Vasari said he was great at imitating styles–even of children’s drawings. This Bacchus does look like a strange antique and his banker client was delighted with it.
I thought this was one of his first works, that he was just trying his hand…I agree with Bill, all artist have bad days and I know some Van Gogh - and some Van Gogh which could be falses - pretty horrible…
As for aging the statues I remember (well I hope) a scene in Zola’s novel “L’Oeuvre” (yes, the one which put and end to the friendship with Cezanne) where claude lantois (?)the main character visits a sculptor friend who was “aging” some works of his pissing on them… It seems it gives a nice patina…
No, Danu, this was not his first try at all. He had done a few statues like those two small saints in Bologna–and an angel holding a candelstick which his admirers would gladly attribute to just anyone else if they could. Also that Cupid which he sold as an antique.
Sculptors work for months on a statue, so a “bad day” can’t really be used as an excuse for a lousy statue. Of course they might make a sketch in a single day but they would correct it or throw it out later after consideration.
Artists have always come up with all kinds of uses for urine. I’ve seen a lot of marble peed on but I never thought whether it looked old as a result. Of course the acid in urine would make a patina on bronze.
I don’t look at it that way. I look at it as the beginnings of a great talent, almost ready to bloom. Just look at the hands, the grace of the fingers, beautiful toes. What’s missing is the agressive, exagerrated proportions. And in this Bacchus I see that yes, he could do women if he wanted to. The face is quite feminine as it should be in a young Bacchus. If he’s tipsy, it goes with the theme. Nice to see the evolving of an extraordinary talent. The sculpture has a presence.
In your Laocoön elucidation you had given us some answers as why this figure didn’t “open his mouth for the biggest, loudest shout” any sculpture had ever uttered.
That time already “Der Schrei” came to my mind, “The Scream” - that famous painting by Edvard Munch - as an opposite example.
This time, again I remembered that painting, feeling tempted to dub this Bacchus “Der Rülpser”… “The Belch”.
Erika: It’s true that most of the quotes were by nineteenth-century writers with moral objections to the look of the Bacchus. Nobody today would even use the word “lewd”–it sounds almost funny. My idea was to make people look at these statues and jolt them from their piety with some reasonable negative judgments. But it’s easy to find beautiful details everywhere. In fact, I had to look hard to find a photo that brought out the bad in the statue (to show its awkward stance).
However: I do think the Bacchus is clumsy as a design and the idea of bringing the two sexes together didn’t come off, at least the result is not beautiful. You say it shows that Michelangelo could have made a beautiful woman. I don’t see that. The more I look at Bacchus the less female I see. Do you mean the high waist and the overhanging pectoral muscles? Maybe the softness of the flesh instead of muscles. We know Michelangelo could make a beautiful woman’s face.
And as to the real spirit of Bacchus or Dionysius that Shelley talks about, I’m not sure anyone knows what that is or was by Roman times, let alone Renaissance times. To a cinquecento banker like Galli I guess Bacchus was just a drinking Master of Ceremonies or a voluptuous plaything.
rich: That’s a good title, all right–The Belch. Now you can start a philosophical argument about why the artist didn’t actually make him wretch a little. He could have puckered his mouth and had him stretch his throat to release the gas. “Aesthetic reasons,” old Galli would have explained. In fact, the whole face is unexpressive, which might have been one of its merits for Winckelman and his Greeks but seems a flaw if the figure is to be good illustration. Imagine how Bernini would have made it. Of course Michelangelo was trying, in spite of his instructions from Galli, to be supremely beautiful, so he makes a bland, harmonious girl’s face. I still hate the way the head sits on the neck.
I’m with you 100swallows”! I’d rather put a “Gartenzwerg” in my garden than this statue. The way the head sits on the neck…. and anyhow, I find Shelley’s right.