The Best Artists

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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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.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

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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Some of Rafael Sanzio’s greatest painting is on the wall of the so-called Heliodoro Room in the Vatican. Covering walls with frescoes has problems that the studio painter, sitting in front of his rectangular canvas or panel, never even encounters. Here Rafael had to paint the spaces around a big door, including the one above it. He wanted to illustrate the Bible story of the escape of St. Peter from prison and not let that door break up the unity of his composition or the mood.

Here is his first idea of how to tell his story around the door.

There are three episodes, three frames, of the Bible narrative, not however in chronological order.
In the middle the angel appears to the sleeping Peter in his cell.
On the right the angel leads him out of jail right past the sleeping guards.
And on the left, just at the first violet tinge of morning in the sky, the officer who has discovered Peter’s escape, alerts the drowsy guards.

And here is the final painted version.

Rafael has discarded a strict balance of the figures left and right of the door. While doing the cartoons he has had a lot of great ideas not only for the individual figures but also for the “atmosphere” of the story.
To the central picture he added prison bars. He worked hard on the angel and the soldiers in the escape scene on the right. And he had fun painting the gleam on the sleeping soldiers’ armor.

But the real inspiration came to him for the left-hand scene.

He has given it a psychological dimension. The officer who in the sketch had been alerting the guards of Peter’s escape, is now shouting at them, threatening them. The look of incomprehension on the face of the lowest guard and the sleep-confused fuss of the one coming down the steps, fumbling with his gear, show that Rafael could invent more than placid Virgins.

But one of the almost magic achievements in this fresco is the painted light. At the top there is the bright moon in a black sky. While you look at it you might forget about color altogether and picture a cold winter night. But lower your eyes a foot and you have the dim yellow light of morning. That is another mood, another moment not strictly compatible with the black night above. And yet Rafael has made them fit together. That’s two lights. Two lights but they are only background.
It is the officer’s TORCH that lights the great scene itself. It shines on all the figures and their armor and its intensity is somehow not lessened by the other two sources of light in the picture, not confused by them. Try to paint a picture with three sources of light, each with its mood, and see what YOU get.

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These must be two of the most famous angels in the world. They are reproduced everywhere.

They are by Rafael Sanzio, who put them at the bottom of this big painting (265 x 196 cm.) now in Dresden, called The Sistine Virgin.

Some scholars believe the painting was made to decorate the tomb of Pope Julius II—the same pope whose tomb Michelangelo finally sculpted. The two figures beside the Virgin, St. Sixtus and St. Barbara, are thought to be portraits of Julius and his niece, Julia Orsini, or of Lucrezia della Rovere, another niece.

Perhaps Julius asked Rafael to paint this picture after cancelling his project with Michelangelo for a great marble mausoleum. Michelangelo never got over his disappointment. To the end of his days he considered Rafael and the architect Bramante his enemies. He believed they were the ones who had persuaded the Pope to give up the marble tomb project and also the ones who had suggested that he, Michelangelo, paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, for which work he was not prepared. “They were sure I would botch the job and make a fool of myself,” he told his biographer Condivi.

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How many ways are there for a patron to mistreat an artist?
He can keep him without work, which is what Michelangelo’s first sponsors did.
He can give him work to do for months or even years and then cancel the project, as Pope Julius did with his tomb.
He can give the artist a task for which he is not prepared (painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling), as Julius also did.
He can neglect to pay him, thus keeping him worried and even hungry. This was one of Julius’s favorites.

Pope Leo, chose the second option. He grandly gave Michelangelo the second biggest commission of his life. “I want you to make a facade for our church,” he told him. He meant the Medici family church in Florence, the San Lorenzo, which had been standing around for two hundred years with no face. It was the design of a legendary architect named Brunelleschi but he had never finished it. As it stood, the great building was an eyesore.
“We’d like something magnificent. We saw your design for Pope Julius’s tomb, and we were thinking you could make us a lot of nice statues like those and put them in niches all over the facade.”

Michelangelo tried to decline. He had been afraid of just this kind of order. “As Your Holiness may know, I am very busy right now.”

“Busy?” Leo’s temper flared. You don’t refuse to work for the pope of Rome.

“I have to finish Pope Julius’ tomb, your Holiness.”
Pope Julius had ordered the world’s most magnificent tomb, sent Michelangelo to Carrara for the marble, had him work for more than a year on the statues, then called the whole thing off. His way of informing Michelangelo was to simply turn him away at the papal residence.
Then just before he died he asked Michelangelo to take it up again. Julius’ nephew, the Duke of Urbino, made a new contract with Michelangelo to finish the tomb; and now Michelangelo had been working hard the past two years designing and blocking out the major figures, such as the Slaves, now in the Louvre, and the Moses. From the beginning he had loved that tomb project and wanted nothing better than to finish it. Now here was the new pope threatening to interfere.

He did interfere. He made a deal with Julius’ nephew: they would share Michelangelo.

So for the next three and a half years Michelangelo tried to serve both patrons. He spent most of 1517 in Carrara, getting marble for both projects. But in 1518 Pope Leo complicated things for him: he told Michelangelo to stop going to Carrara for his marble. From now on, for the San Lorenzo church, he should quarry in Pietrasanta, which was under Florentine jurisdiction. So Michelangelo had to spend 1518 and 1519 partly in Carrara, getting marble for the Julius tomb and partly in Pietrasanta, getting marble for the San Lorenzo church. When he was not in the quarries he worked in Florence and Rome on the figures for both projects.

In 1520 Pope Leo suddenly annulled the contract for the San Lorenzo facade. He never gave Michelangelo a reason. He called him in again and dangled a new project before him: “We’d like you to make some fine figures for the tombs of my family,” he told Michelangelo, smiling. “We are sure you could do something worthy of those great men.”

When Michelangelo got home he found a letter from Pope Julius’s heirs. They said they were out of patience. If he didn’t finish their tomb in a hurry they would take him to court. What had he been doing the last three years?

..

What—No Place to Lie?

Pope Julius was pleased enough with Michelangelo’s paintings in the Sistine chapel. His uncle Sixtus could lie in his grave with a smile now, knowing that the world had such a monument to him. But what about himself—Julius? He was getting old and weak and he still didn’t have any impressive monument to himself. St. Peter’s was far from finished and what if after all his grand ideas they finally just stuck him in a niche in the wall like any other forgettable pope? Maybe he shouldn’t have ordered that damned ceiling fresco before Michelangelo had finished his tomb. Maybe there was still time to have him finish it.

So he called in Michelangelo. “Do you think you can still handle a chisel, old friend?” he said with a smile. “I’m still going to need a tomb.”
His voice was weak now—he had aged very much in the last years. He was ill all the time. Death couldn’t be far off. “As you can see for yourself, I’m no longer in condition to handle all the details with you, so I’ve put my nephew, Cardinal Urbino, in charge—he and Cardinal Santi Quattro.”

There was nothing Michelangelo wanted more than to pick up a chisel again. That was all he ever wanted. And the tomb project was the one he loved above all the rest. Many times on the scaffolding in the Sistine Chapel he had dreamed of the lost tomb and sighed to think that such a fine thing was never to be. He had spent hundreds of his best hours thinking about it, drawing sketches, making models for the giant figures. And what about the months in Carrara, cutting the marble blocks out of the mountain? He had even roughed out a couple of the statues in Rome. No wonder he had almost gone mad with rage and disappointment when the Pope suddenly called the whole thing off.

Now here was Julius, older and softer, ordering him one more time to do his tomb. It was a sheepish admission that he had been wrong to cancel the project in the first place.

“A tomb that magnificent takes a long time to complete,” Michelangelo told him with a touch of schadenfreude.

“Do you mean that I will croak before it’s finished? Well, then I will croak. What matters is that you live to finish it. They can always stash my old bones somewhere until it’s ready. I’ve set aside ten thousand crowns for the project. Do you think we can do something respectable with that?”

Here was Julius back with his big-time projects. Michelangelo excitedly described for him the fabulous tomb. He knew it all by heart: Julius had given up the tomb project years before but he never had. He was too fond of it to let it go. “I will do something worthy of Your Holiness,” he said.

The Pope smiled to see Michelangelo’s old enthusiasm come back. “Fine,” he said. “I knew I could count on you.”
He dismissed him abruptly, though with an apology. “I hope we can see each other again, my friend.” Michelangelo watched the Pope’s servants help the old man rise from his chair and walk away. Tears came to his eyes as he realized that this was perhaps the last meeting with his great patron.
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The old Romans and Greeks, if they had the money, turned their floors into mosaic pictures or designs. Archaeologists are happy to uncover those old floors but unless they are real pictures they no longer impress us much. They remind you of an old bathroom or gym shower-room floor. Nothing special about a geometrical design—a star, a flower, some pattern you make with a compass.

But architects who were real artists sometimes made beautiful or curious designs for their buildings. Here is a Roman mosaic floor from the first century.

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Giotto looking for a good idea for the floor of his Baptistery in Florence (1225) must have seen Roman mosaics like the one above and made his own version.

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Along came Michelangelo and tried his hand. This is what he came up with for the floor of the Laurenziana Library (1524).

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And this is his ingenious rosette for the pavement of the Capitoline Hill Square, with the statue of Marcus Aurelius in the center (1546). It seems to lift the statue right up in the air and put it on top of a globe.

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These photos are taken from Ludwig Goldscheider’s unsurpassable book on Michelangelo by Phaidon Press.

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This is an ancient Roman statue, one of the few original bronzes that have survived.

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How did it manage that?
For centuries the rider was thought to be Constantine, the emperor who made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. So it was not melted down like other pagan works.
By the time it was found out that the rider was the Stoic Marcus Aurelius, the old pagan world was actually venerated and those Renaissance Humanists were delighted to have not only a beautiful relic from their ideal world but the portrait of one of its greatest “philosopher-kings”.

Michelangelo’s design for Capitol Hill

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A replica stands in the middle of the main square of the Capitoline Hill of Rome. The whole square, including the facades of those buildings and the statue’s pedestal, was designed by Michelangelo. The statue makes a strange impression. The rider seems too big for the animal and his feet hang as though he were riding a donkey. Don’t forget that all the riders of the ancient world, including emperors, rode without stirrups, which hadn’t been invented. There is a twist or side-ways movement to the horse, as you sometimes see when real horses pass by in a parade; and it is easy to imagine you are standing there 1800 years ago, watching the emperor come.

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The Grand Canal and the Cannaregio by Canaletto

In the Royal Library of Windsor Castle (73/8 x 105/8 inches or 187 x 270 mm)

How did Canaletto draw such complex scenes? He seems to have helped himself with a device called a camera obscura. That was invented years before and used by the German artist Dürer. By means of mirrors and lenses, the camera projected on the artist’s paper an image of the scene he had before him. In this way, he could trace its lines.

The camera was an aid but it by no means explained the astounding results of his drawings. The projected images helped him fix the perspective lines and the relative sizes of buildings in his picture. But every single line, every cross-hatched shadow, was hand-drawn.
It was his aesthetic judgment that determined each stroke of the pen. It was his genius that kept the lines from becoming sterile, pedantic.

Canaletto doesn’t seem to have thought that the sureness of his hand was worth bragging about. But in old age his good eyesight surprised him. He signed one of his last drawings this way: “I made the present drawing…..at the age of sixty-eight, without glasses”.

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Leonardo da Vinci’s man in a circle is reproduced everywhere. What does it mean?
He was simply following Vitruvius’s measurements of good proportion.
And who was Vitruvius?
A Roman architect who lived at the time of Augustus (and Christ). He wrote a treatise on architecture that Renaissance artists considered almost a Bible. Great artists like Leonardo and Michelangelo never seemed to question his rules.
In a chapter called Symmetry, Vitruvius writes:
“…in the human body the central point is naturally the navel. For if a man be placed flat on his back, with his hands and feet extended, and a pair of compasses centered at his navel, the fingers and toes of his two hands and feet will touch the circumference of a circle described from it.
“And just as the human body yields a circular outline, so too a square figure may be found from it. For if we measure the distance from the soles of the feet to the top of the head, and then apply that measure to the outstretched arms, the breadth will be found to be the same as the height…..”

Leonardo drew an accurate and beautiful illustration. Here is another by Albrecht Dürer, following the same instructions.

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This is the Sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi as it looked at the time of Caesar.
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The zig-zag road up to the temple was lined with statues—thousands of them, some in gold and silver. They were votive offerings from pilgrims—kings and states as well as individuals.
The temple hill looked a little like some famous cemeteries, with rows of marble figures and family memorials with inscriptions on them.

The Temple was fabulously rich from donations. The Emperor Nero looted it when Rome overran Greece. He carried off, besides gold, five hundred statues. Yet just a few years later, when Pliny the Younger visited Delphi, there were still three thousand standing.
Of course everyone went to Delphi to consult the oracle.

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Pope Julius II, Michelangelo’s greatest patron, had waited years to become pope, politicking around, pulling all the strings, bribing cardinals for their vote, bearing arms even. He spent ten years outside of Italy, in exile, doing all he could to get that Spaniard Borgia off the papal throne.

He and Borgia understood each other perfectly: they were two of a kind. Both had had uncle popes who favored them, brought them to Rome, made rich princes out of them and introduced them to the power game.

Julius was rich, though he had started out as poor as a monk. In fact, he had started out as a monk. Luck had it, if there is luck, that his uncle had become pope when Julius was twenty. And right away the uncle, Sixtus IV, made the lad a cardinal and gave him a few bishoprics—six in France and three in Italy, plus some juicy abbeys and other church rents—so he might live as befits a cardinal, a Renaissance cardinal. Sixtus called the boy to Rome and taught him how to rule. He also told him to get an army together and battle a little for the papacy. Julius turned out to be not just good but brilliant at all these skills and he became the Pope’s confidant.

By the time his uncle died, Julius had learned what could be done at the top and he naturally wanted to try his hand. He knew he didn’t yet have the clout to become pope himself so he tried the next best thing: to get a man elected who would follow his advice. At that he succeeded: Innocent VIII became pope and Julius did the actual ruling for him. When Innocent died, in spite of all Julius’ politicking and pressuring and bribing, his arch-enemy Rodrigo Borja (Borgia, as he was called in Italy) was elected and Julius was in for several years of hard times and exile.

Borgia died finally, and suddenly, and Julius came running to Rome for the enclave. But again, the third time, he didn’t have his way. Borgia had stacked the College of Cardinals with his own kind (and kin), and there was a Medici in the running too. For days the cardinals couldn’t decide on a pope and finally elected an old cardinal by the name of Piccolomini (Pius III). He died twenty-seven days later.

This time Julius had his way with the cardinals. He was elected pope and right away started carrying out plans he knew so well he didn’t even have to write them down. He was going to get back for the papacy the pieces of Italy Borgia had let go and drive out all the foreign powers. He was going to rebuild St. Peter’s and make it the greatest temple in the world. Of course it would house his tomb. He would make some kind of monument to his Uncle Sixtus [the Sistine Chapel]. They told him about a Florentine sculptor named Michelangelo Buonarroti.

“…accurately speaking, no good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.

“This for two reasons….The first, that no great man ever stops working till he has reached his point of failure; that is to say, his mind is always far in advance of his powers of execution, and the latter will now and then give way in trying to follow it; besides that, he will always give to the inferior portions of his work only such inferior attention as they require; and according to his greatness he becomes so accustomed to the feeling of dissatisfaction with the best he can do, that in moments of lassitude or anger with himself he will not care though the beholder be dissatisfied also…..

“The second reason is, that imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life.  It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change…..All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the[ir] imperfections…..

“Accept this then for a universal law, that neither architecture nor any other noble work of man can be good unless it be imperfect; and let us be prepared for the otherwise strange fact, which we shall discern clearly as we approach the period of the Renaissance, that the first cause of the fall of the arts of Europe  was a relentless requirement of perfection…….”

from The Stones of Venice  by John Ruskin, nineteenth-century art critic

Ruskin was a famous defender of Gothic art, the one which preceded Renaissance art in Europe. To him, the great cathedrals, with all their surprising irregularities, their strangeness, their savageness, as he called it, were closer to the ideal of beautiful—or rather of artistic truth.   Renaissance art critics like Vasari, and most critics in Ruskin’s own time, despised Gothic art, considering it childish, disorganized, crude.

In modern times France is the land of good taste. The world listens to French pontifications on food and dress and even wit.
But that’s not how it used to be.

For a long time taste came from Italy and France had to call in Italian artists to get its beauty and even its judgments on beauty.
When the Louvre, now the famous museum in Paris, needed a facade, King Louis XIV asked Gianlorenzo Bernini to send a design and then come and direct construction. He even sent a nobleman named Chantelou to Italy to fetch the great artist and to accompany him to Paris.

Chantelou kept a diary that makes very good reading. He was fascinated by Bernini and fills his diary with details of their trip and Bernini’s eccentric ways, his remarks on what he saw, the reception he got, and so on.

Bernini turned up his nose at everything. When the King asked him what he thought of the Tuilleries Palace he said it “seemed a big little thing” and that it was like a “great squadron of tiny children”. The dome of the Val-de-Grâce was like “a little cap on a big head”. Paris seen from the height of Meudon was ugly. “All those chimneys! It looks like a carding comb,” he told his guide.Desperate to find something that would please him, Chantelou showed him a painting by an Italian. That did the trick. “This Annunciation by Guido Reni is worth half of your Paris,” Bernini told him; but he immediately corrected: “No, it’s worth more.”

But the biggest thrill for Bernini were the paintings by Poussin in Chantelou’s private collection. Poussin was a Frenchman but he had been living in Italy for years. Bernini spent an hour on the paintings, exclaiming “What devotion! What silence!”. When the prime minister Colbert heard about this he said: “I’m so glad the Master has found something in France that pleased him.”

“I know Michelangelo carved wonderful figures,” you might say. “What was he like as an ARCHITECT or a decorator?”
The Medici Chapel was built under his direction, his design. What stands out?

For one thing, his statues DO NOT. They don’t seem to be given the place of honor in the chapel. The architecture—the wall decoration—all those niches and Corinthian columns and thick moldings—seem to think they are what people come to look at.

The best statues in the world are treated almost as one more triangle in the general compassing off of the wall, which does not highlight them or make much reference to them. They could be removed from the chapel without doing any harm to the general design. They look merely added on after the chapel wall was dressed with rectangles and pillars and moldings. And the three figures on the adjacent wall—the Virgin and saints—actually look abandoned. They sit there like three odd figurines on a shelf, spaced to cover the shelf as best they can.
In spite of all its decoration, the chapel seems somehow empty, emptied. There’s nothing in all those niches. The spaces framed by the rectangles are bare wall. It looks as though someone had looted the place and carried off all the statues but Michelangelo’s seven.

What the devil? Didn’t Michelangelo know how good his figures were? Did he really consider them secondary to the general wall design—like an architect but not a sculptor?

The real star of the show in that chapel is the prodigious marble carpentry. It must have astounded marblers even in those times used to marvels. The walls are covered with the Renaissance’s version of Gothic vegetation. What is that? Dozens of identical rectangles (windows or niches), capped with triangular or curved entablatures; sham columns with their flutes; scrolls and marble moldings and decorative masks and geometrical patterns. The marblers must have worked for years. Notice the hundreds of little balls and identical masks and other laborious decoration running along the walls and behind the statues. The precision of the carving and the setting up is as amazing, almost, as Michelangelo’s work. There you see the immense infrastructure that supported the Renaissance works of art. The artisans and craftsmen were legion in the old Italian cities and the standards of workmanship were almost inhumanly high. How could they have been so perfect? Wasn’t it all slavework, though paid slavework? They worked under Michelangelo’s orders—was he a slavedriver?

Now maybe, for the first time, you feel tired of those neat projections of the mind, those a priori shapes that organize the mess of nature: the circle (modified to an oval), the rectangle, the square, and the triangle. For the first time you wish the circle were broken and the rectangle bent. You see the limits of Renaissance art. You see how oppressive it can get. You long for the simplicity of the old Greek buildings or even the earlier Tuscan ones, or then the unpredictability and variety of Gothic decoration.

This Medici chapel is the opposite of a Gothic one. The one is all brutal mathematical precision and architectural motifs without any message other than order. The other is a thicket of vegetable forms, rough, improvised figures, and story telling. The one bows (and scrapes) to reason, the other to feeling. The one is the city, the other, the woods. Now that you are in the city—wasn’t the woods a nice place?

Filippo set an egg rolling on the table of the Council Chamber. “Let’s have a little contest,” he told all the architects gathered there. “Whoever can make this egg stand upright on this table should be given the commission, since that will show that he is the most intelligent.”

What commission? Raising the dome of the Cathedral of Florence. No one could figure out how to do it without great wooden beams and earthworks and heavy stone ribs. Architects came to Florence from all over Europe to study the problem and give their solution.

At a first meeting they had each explained how they would proceed. Proud Filippo Brunelleschi listened and kept wagging his head to show that he disapproved. When it was his turn to speak he poked holes in the projects of all the others. He claimed he knew how to vault the dome easily and without much expense. But when he expounded his plan, it sounded so abstruse and complex that the others declared him a babbler and a fool. At that first meeting nothing was decided. The architects went home to construct wooden models of their plans.

The egg-test came at the second meeting. The other architects brought models to show how they would vault the cupola but Filippo came empty-handed. He refused to show them his model. He simply repeated that he knew how to do the trick and the rest didn’t, which exasperated everyone. That’s when he rolled his egg on the table—Brunelleschi’s Egg, as it was known ever after.

Of course none of those other architects could think of a way to make the egg stand. “OK, Brunelleschi,” they said finally, “it’s your turn. Show us how.”
Brunelleschi smashed down the egg on the tabletop and made it stand firmly upright.
“Oh, come on!” the architects cried. “It’s easy that way. We all would have known how to do THAT!”
“Exactly,” said Brunelleschi. “And you all would have known how to vault the dome once you’ve seen my model.”