Michelangelo’s First Two Statues

Michelangelo got his first commission in Bologna: two small statues of saints. He had been studying the human body and found that he liked it above all other subjects. He would have liked to carve a beautiful nude but with a fourth-century saint for a subject that was out of the question. The friars who ran the church wanted two saint statues like all the rest, dressed in long robes and looking saintly—that is, sleepy.
“Well,” he thought, “if I can’t do a nude, I’ll at least try to put some life into the little figures by messing up their habits.”

Folds can show you much of the body underneath a garment and mark its movements. Michelangelo decided he would as good as strip that old saint while leaving his habit on.
He would cover him all over with the reglamentary cloth (well, a little thinner than habits are supposed to be) and a cape too but that didn’t mean the man would be in a straight-jacket. You were going to see through that habit just where the legs were and how they moved. The habit would tell you what was going on underneath it by clinging to some parts and falling off others; by smoothing out over lifted or prominent areas and dropping in folds over recesses. The folds themselves could be made to have a life of their own: springy, swinging, falling, lying in great, relaxed rings. You could make them do capricious things like double over or bunch up so that they bother a pretty sense of order, like a boy’s cowlick or a disobedient flap of a bedspread. You could give the folds a rhythm, like the ripples in a lake. You could show them flying—still in the air after the movement that preceded them. You could do all kinds of things.

St. Petronius (height 64 cm.) In the Basilica of San Domenico, Bologna.

All in all, when the Petronius was finished, in spite of Michelangelo’s fold-work, it looked pretty much like just any of the saints in churches everywhere, except it was more restless.
For the other saint—the Proculus—Michelangelo made up his mind he was going to have things much more his way.

Michelangelo’s Jogging Saint

St. Proculus (height 59 cm.) In the Basilica of St. Domenico, Bologna

St. Proculus is almost comically—cartoonishly—alive. No habit on this little saint: he’s wearing the clothes of a contemporary Renaissance youth. And there are so many folds and wrinkles in his clothes and so much nervous movement everywhere that he is tiring to look at. He might almost be jogging. Rather than a saint, he looks like a young gallant ready for adventure; and the scowl, which is of course an ancestor of the frown of the great David, makes one suppose he is about to throw off that cape and run to avenge himself, dagger in hand.
Michelangelo couldn’t keep still. He couldn’t make a statue that kept still. He wanted the stone man to come alive, to seem to act.

Sculptors since way back in Greek times had been looking for ways to do that. A man standing stiffly with both feet together, such as it would be natural to carve out of a wooden pole or a stone pillar, is lifeless. That was all right for an idol, like the Egyptian idols or Indian or African totems, which are really just symbols; but now that the sculptor was trying to give you a man, a flesh and blood man, that kind of stiffness wasn’t good enough. Life is movement, tension, variety.

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