The Best Artists

Horses don’t run like rabbits—they don’t hop; but you wouldn’t think artists knew that, even real horse lovers and good observers like Leonardo da Vinci.

Or George Stubbs, an eighteenth-century specialist, who showed his race-horses scampering over green English lawns in a way he knew they didn’t, they couldn’t.

Even in 1878 when Muybridge came out with his famous photographic studies of a horse’s gallop, proving that the traditional artist’s pose was nonsense, painters went right on showing horses flying through the air like cows jumping over the moon. Here is a painting by Degas who had seen the Muybridge photos and pretended not to.

Why did all these artists insist on perpetuating the error? Couldn’t they find a compromise between truth and beauty?

When you sit on a galloping horse, it FEELS as though you fly—that your horse is constantly jumping into the air, its legs spread out in front and behind, all four hooves off the ground. It is the most exciting moment of a ride. A horse shown diving into the air also transmits the feeling of excitement and speed better than any other. Aesthetically it is also the most satisfying because of the symmetry. In all the other phases of the gallop the legs are messy, apparently disorganized.
So much for aesthetics.

In fact, few of those experts, artists or otherwise, probably knew that the pose was a fiction. Muybridge’s photos proved that everyone was wrong—those who claimed the horse constantly dived through the air and those who contended that there was no moment when its feet were all off the ground. The photos showed that the horse did indeed jump into the air but when it did so its legs were all tucked UNDER its body, not stretched out ahead. THAT was the moment the rider felt he was flying.

Muybridge’s famous photographs, 1878

Once the truth was out, realist artists could no longer do hopping horses with a good conscience. Of course there were still plenty of artists who thought a horse galloping should look the way it feels, science be damned. “We aren’t painting a real horse galloping but the IDEA of a horse galloping,” they said.
“Well, when I make a horse,” said Frederick Remington, the American artist, “I don’t turn him into a cat.” And he painted and sculpted horses in all the real phases of a gallop, a trot, and a canter.

“He runs like a dog,” said the merry-go-round horse makers. “Do you think that’s pretty?”

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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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Everyone loves a beautiful sunset or a view of the countryside with mountains and rivers, don’t they?

No. And for most of man’s time on this earth, through countless generations, he never even gave them a second look.

“The Italians,” says Jakob Burckhardt in his The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, are the first among modern peoples by whom the outward world was seen and felt as something beautiful. The power to do so is always the result of a long and complicated development…”

Burckhardt then gives the ancient world, starting with Homer, as an example of one of the rare periods in history. The next one, he says, was the Italian Renaissance.

Storm by Leonardo da Vinci

“By the year 1200, at the height of the Middle Ages, a genuine, hearty enjoyment of the external world was again in existence, and found lively expression in the minstrelsy of different nations, which gives evidence of the sympathy felt with all the simple phenomena of nature—spring with its flowers, the green fields, and the woods. But these pictures are [as yet] all foreground without perspective. The epic poetry, which describes armor and customs so fully, does not attempt more than a sketch of outward nature……From these poems it would never be guessed that their noble authors in all countries inhabited or visited lofty castles commanding distant prospects.”

Burckhardt even goes so far as to claim that Dante, the poet of The Divine Comedy, was the first man since the days of antiquity “to make the ascent of lofty peaks, with the only possible object of enjoying the view”.

Believable?

Look at the work of a brilliant naturalist, painter, and writer at Drawing the Motmot and begin to sharpen your own perception of natural (and artistic)  beauty.

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Draw the outline of a figure. Shade one side of it. It looks three-dimensional!
That shading was invented in Greek times and was a great breakthrough in drawing and painting.

But soon after its discovery, vase painters were learning to give the impression of volume without shading.
They were doing that with lines alone.

They had started by using lines to decorate the figures on their beautiful vases.
They painted a black area on a red vase and then scratched lines in it with a stylus. The lines decorated the figures and also helped define them.
In time they began to indicate features of anatomy inside the black silhouettes. They drew a line to represent prominences, like bones, but also shadows. Somehow that worked and gave the figures depth. The folds of drapery that they drew also seemed to show them three-dimensionally.
In time the vase-artists became experts at showing volume with their lines. And when a new method of vase painting allowed them to paint in rather than scratch in their lines, they carried this kind of representation farther still and produced some of the most beautiful figure drawings in art.

Theseus slays the Minotaur, while Athena looks on–a Greek platter, about 425 BC

Drawing with the absolute minimum of lines and yet showing the whole volume of a figure has been a challenge to artists ever since. Artists like Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer experimented with these anatomy lines and produced beautiful figures. Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man is famous. Here is Dürer’s version of the man in a circle:

And here are other experiments (after Leonardo) by Albrecht Dürer:

In more recent times men like Picasso and Matisse excelled at this type of drawing too. Few are able to bring it off. Here are two portraits–the first of Stravinsky by Picasso; the second , called Woman in Russian Blouse II, by Matisse.

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Robert Mileham wrote:

I mean no disrespect for either of these two great sculptors. They, like Beethoven and Mozart, are pillars of our western art. Nevertheless I have reservations especially about Michelangelo. Neither an academic nor even well read in Art History I am a simple sculptor with strong but malleable views.
If you were an alien with no prejudices, no foreknowledge of these sculptors would you believe that Michelangelo’s David and Pieta were by the same artist?

But, Robert, our art isn’t for aliens. Culture is an accumulation of thought and works humans have come up with over the centuries–one builds on another. It is the meaning man has given his circumstances: education is “foreknowledge”.
I don’t know what you mean to imply here. Why shouldn’t the two works be so different? Creating always means experimenting.

If you knew the story of David and Goliath and were asked which of the two Michelangelo was trying to depict; using reason only, who would it be?

Only reason? But reason would have to take into account the facts one knows about the story and also the way the figure of David had changed into an icon of patriotism or independence. Michelangelo was more concerned with that symbol than with the actual story of the boy and the giant. And also with his own idea of beauty and the greatness of Man.

If you did not know what the Pieta was meant to depict, honestly would you believe it to be a Mother and Son subject?

But you do know what the Pietà is meant to depict–there’s no way out of that. The alien is just ignorant.

In the first I would argue that he is huge; facially very ugly and anatomically wrong (head and hands too big).

I understand that you mean to be the alien arguing here and not yourself. I’m sorry the little green fellow would get scared. You would have to explain to him that artists sometimes make colossal figures because humans are impressed by size. And if he is put off by the face, tell him it is Michelangelo’s unique conception of a beautiful, dramatic, face, but that some humans like you find it ugly. And explain that getting the anatomy “right” is a fine aim but that there are higher ones.

In the second, even if Mary had borne Jesus at the age of 16 she would have been approaching 50. The actress Sarah Barnhart was also a sculptress and produced this extraordinary work. Surely the great pillar of Renaissance sculpture could have come somewhat closer to the emotion framework Frank Lin mentions. I do not deny, it is very beautiful and moving but for a different story.

Michelangelo, taking that subject, found a way of sculpting a beautiful girl’s face and a beautiful nude and a reverie of beautiful folds. But he also managed to create a mood of great sadness. That’s at least a nine out of ten. Mere illustration anyone can do.

Now the first book of Samuel, chapter 16 vv 12 describes David ‘of a beautiful countenance, and goodly to look too.’ Judging by the number of intimate relations he subsequently had with women, how could we possibly doubt that? How also could we think that Michelangelo would have missed this? He was well able to create beautiful male faces!
Michelangelo’s attempts at sculpting women are a laugh, they are men with breasts.

Hey, Robert, judging by the number of intimate relations old Rasputin had with women, you’d think ugliness was the secret. Actually, I always thought David’s is as beautiful a face as any human ever made, though I wouldn’t choose beautiful if I had to pick just one word. The dramatic element–the frown, those rolling eyes, that glance–takes it out of the contest with quiet, classical Greek beauty. In any case, I don’t see how you could call such an idealized face, one with such regular, symmetrical features, ugly? Whereas, I do see how one might call Bernini’s David’s grimacing face ugly.
I don’t laugh at Michelangelo’s women figures. I always thought the Dawn and Night monsters, whatever sex they were, were of an otherworldly beauty.

Bernini’s work, like Mozart seems to pour out of him, unlike his great predecessor he does not destroy his work (does he?), or even cross anything out! He is streets ahead of him in animated action. Who could miss St Theresa’s passionate emotions either?

Bernini had greater natural facility–no doubt about it. In that he was like Mozart. But let’s not blame Michelangelo for his frustration. Admire one for the miraculous gift from heaven, the other for his hard work and suffering.
It’s true: no one could miss Theresa’s passionate emotions–Bernini saw to that. I agree that the figure is very successful but the patron watching the “show” from the wing is downright corny. That is the danger of trying to portray suffering or religious fervor by showing the blubbering face and the hanky. The viewer sees what is meant but keeps his distance, which is dangerous for the whining figure. Dangerous because it is too close to the comical or disagreeable. The exaggeration of Baroque art is its limitation.

It is not so much a matter of who is best, the guy who comes after is always at an advantage, he or she knows what they have to surpass. In their own way they were both ground breakers of sorts.
(On a more technical point, I understand that Michelangelo believed in carving from one block of marble where Bernini used multiple blocks joined together facilitating more difficult poses.)

There is such a difference between sculpture modelled and sculpture carved. Michelangelo was a stone sculptor and his designs are made with the compactness and hardness of stone in mind. Though Bernini was also a stone sculptor, he was so good that he treated stone as if it were NOT stone–as if it were wax or clay. They talk about the mystery of Michelangelo’s carving technique; much more interesting, more mysterious, is Bernini’s. How could anyone carve, for example, that Daphne without breaking the marble everywhere? Bernini was freer in stone than anyone who came before him. And so he began imagining figures with outspread limbs and other cantilevers and unsupported frills. This was previously considered (and still is) sculptural folly, mainly because stone breaks.
There is also the difference in each man’s conception of a powerful design. Michelangelo made his out of a triangle, a circle, a square. Bernini, freer, broke out of those constricting shapes.

Robert: Thanks for this. Your own sculpture is wonderful. I especially liked the sprightly nymphs.

Robert’s blog: http://dorsetsculpture.blogspot.com/

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Bill wrote:

I don’t think Picasso was a genius of any sort except maybe marketing. I heard a man on TV saying Picasso could paint representational art if he chose. But what little of his early work in representation form I’ve seen was mediocre at best. He certainly was not going to get famous painting that way.
Are his works masterpieces? What is the definition of a masterpiece? For me, if a painting is great, it is great no matter who painted it. I would like to see an experiment centered around Picasso’s work.
1. Take one of Picasso’s paintings and change the signature to “Sever Tisthammer”, a Wisconsin dairy farmer. Do you think you would hear, “Oh, isn’t this a great painting. He is a genius.”?
2. Take a scribble by a 5 year old and have Picasso sign and claim it.
His work sucks to put it bluntly.
Now, I’m not against abstract art. There is no reason a painting has to be about something. It can be about paint, color, form, etc. Some of it is beautiful, has wide emotional appeal, and although it may look simple, can indeed be very difficult to create, requiring unique individual skills. I have yet to see a work of Picasso that had any appeal beyond the fact that the creator had somehow fallen into celebrityhood.

Bill: If we were talking about some old painter you didn’t like—Turner maybe—this wouldn’t matter. You just skip him. But Picasso is too important for you to turn away from. You simply must give his work more thought. It won’t do to huff and join the crowd of common sense folks that say they aren’t dumb and won’t be fooled.

I don’t know what the man on TV said or the examples of early work you’ve seen. In a Barcelona museum there are drawings Picasso made when he was 12 or 13 that will convince you he could do competent representational work, as his father wanted. (In a strict sense, he always did representational work. He drew and painted things and people, he didn’t “go abstract”.) And what about those first two paintings: the First Communion and Science and Charity?

Science and Charity by Picasso, age 17

Do you know what happened when he showed them to his buddies at the 4 Cats Café? They turned up their noses just as you turn up yours at the painting in my post. They laughed him to shame. “That kind of art is dead,” they told him. “Don’t you see that the world doesn’t need another damn picture of happy middle-class customs or restful woods, much less one about your personal struggles or undeception as you grow up? And are you going to be someone’s political propaganda?”

Those buddies changed the direction of Picasso’s drawing. Few have ever drawn as well, as spontaneously. When he became convinced that “saying something” was silly or worn-out he gave his prodigious talent an outlet in endless graphic experiments.
I don’t believe you that you have never seen a good one. For my post I had to look around a long time to find a “bad” one as an illustration. One after another of those on the Net were good—each in a different way, of course, which is what creation is all about.

I used to drag my feet on the way to a Picaso exhibition. I supposed I would see a lot of predictable cock-eyed ladies and mis-assembled puzzle-piece people, all in gray or in simple unimaginative colors. But then I was always wrong. Each of the works was novel, ingeniously constructed, sometimes funny, and the colors were better and more subtle than I had expected. I always walked away telling myself ”The guy really IS somebody.” Though it is also true that I found most of the works hard to remember.

I’m sure you could tell the difference between a Picasso and the five-year-old’s scribble. Picasso’s work is the height of sophisticated draftsmanship and design. The kid’s scribble may be cute or psychologically revealing or suggestive, but it is CLUMSY. Picasso couldn’t be clumsy even blindfold and drunk.

Also, Bill, you shouldn’t blame Picasso for the way his work was commercialized. He took advantage of that—sure. Who wouldn’t? Chagall did too and Dalí and the other twentieth century greats. Picasso had lived through some very miserable years in Barcelona and Paris, where he had to sell paintings for food. It is proof of the genius of those men that they went right on painting, in spite of the easy money and the opportunity to live it up.

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“What did Joyce, Stravinsky, and Picasso have in common?

“They had nothing to tell us—or, rather, they didn’t want to tell us anything about themselves and their relation with reality; and, on the other hand, they had a lot to say about art and its relation with art. They were indifferent to the world, to which they denied any participation that wasn’t through art….they substituted the world for a museum and they took charge of its enormous inventory with the aim of appropriation and pillage.

“With the First World War and the consequent destruction of values, all art of the past…was instantly converted into museum. And with museum appears the idea of a relativity of styles, the plurality of forms, and the vanity of expression—ultimately, the idea of consumption understood as the transformation of creation into a product….By treating the art of the past as a mere repertory of manneristic stylizations they made massive sale possible.

“Thieves of forms, they killed the life of those forms, reducing them to patterns. They closed probably forever the era of artists who had something to tell us. With them begins the great Atlantic-type Alexandrian mannerism based on the consumer societies of Western Europe and the United States; the cemetery-museum-show-market-fair-exhibition-emporium of art definitively condemned to being forever contemporary and vanguard.”

From “The Explosion of Mannerism” –an essay by Alberto Moravia

Moravia is very hard on those three artists. And he is too pessimistic. No one believes artists will go on studying art’s own navel forever. And to tell the truth, not even Picasso did that. His best-loved works all have a sentimental or autobiographical touch to them.

And what about the origin of art’s strange sea-change? It was traditional in Moravia’s time to blame the horrible First World War for a “loss of values”. Afterwards came “the Lost Generation”. But even before the turn of the century Picasso was cooking up his idea of art along with the gang at the Four Cats Café in Barcelona . And he was famous in Europe before the Great War. Look what a critic said about a Picasso exhibition in Paris in 1902:

“Picasso is like a young god bent on remaking the world. But a sullen god: the hundreds of faces that he has painted gesticulate but not one of them smiles. His is an uninhabitable world, his very painting is sick….Isn’t this lad, so troublingly precocious, destined to make a masterpiece of the negative sense of life, of the evil that he himself suffers from, like the rest of us?”

Charles Morice, Exposition…en “Mercure de France”; Paris, December, 1902

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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 hard 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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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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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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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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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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One of the most famous paintings in the world—Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper—was never finished. Leonardo gave up on it. He could never decide how to paint the face of Christ.

According to Vasari, his first biographer, Leonardo finished all the apostles first. He had decided to illustrate the moment when Jesus announces that one of them will betray Him. “So in their faces,” says Vasari, “one can read the emotions of love, dismay, and anger, or rather sorrow, at their failure to grasp the meaning of Christ”.

Judas was the last he did. How do you make a face that will show so much obstinacy, hatred, and treachery? He thought and thought about it. He had the “habit of spending half a day at a time contemplating what he had done so far”; and he was so slow that he drove the prior of the monastery that ordered the fresco nuts. “If that man had had his way,” says Vasari, a fellow artist who sympathized with Leonardo, “Leonardo would have toiled like one of the laborers hoeing in the garden and never put his brush down for a moment.”

The prior kept badgering Leonardo, trying to hurry him. He became so obsessed with Leonardo’s pokiness that he complained to the Duke of Milan, saying Leonardo was clearly never going to finish. To appease him the Duke finally sent for Leonardo, though he admired him and understood that an artist needed to take his time.
Leonardo told the duke he was having great trouble with the last two heads: Christ’s and Judas’s. He said for Christ it was going to be next to impossible because he couldn’t use any human model but had to invent a perfect one—one of such beauty and divine grace.
As for the Judas, he wasn’t sure he would ever be able to imagine the features of a man who in spite of all the blessings he had been given would do what Judas did. However, if he didn’t finally manage to invent one, there was always the head of that nagging prior.

That made the duke “roar with laughter,” says Vasari.
“And the unfortunate prior retired in confusion to worry the laborers working in his garden, and left off worrying Leonardo, who skilfully finished the head of Judas and made it seem the very embodiment of treachery and inhumanity.”

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Cacagni’s Work

If you look closely at the statue you see joints everywhere. Michelangelo must have really tried to make it impossible for anyone to repair it. He smashed left and right, as if by destroying wholesale he might remove any clue as to the part that really vexed him. He destroyed both far-along carved limbs, such as Christ’s beautiful left arm, and only sketched-out ones, such as the long, right arm of the other Mary. In that limb you see at least four joints. Cacagni’s reconstruction of the group, though Vasari sighs about it, was the least of the harm he did, since he had Michelangelo’s wax models to guide him and many of the pieces of the puzzle before him. His real sacrilege was his picking up a chisel and carving on the figures and filing and polishing them with an aim to finish—that is, in his mind, to improve it. All the polishing is his doing, of course. That includes the shining of that offensively thin leg. Was it he who made it so thin? Unfortunately, no one can know that. But that he worked at all on it allows us to refuse to consider the Master responsible. For all we know, Cacagni removed the last eighth of an inch while filing and sanding it down. It wasn’t too thin on the little model.

The Duomo Pietà

The wax model

Comparing the stone Pietà with the wax model, you see several other differences; and the biggest is that faulty figure on Christ’s right. Condivi saw the Pietà while Michelangelo was still working on it, before he broke it; and he called the figure “one of the Marys”. What is striking in the marble version is its small size. It seems to be modelled according to another scale. It is very oddly proportioned and childish compared to the great Christ and the other Mary. Who reduced its size—Cacagni or Michelangelo?

The wax model doesn’t show this diminuition of the Mary. She is full-sized there and stands taller. Her head reaches as high as Christ’s lifted shoulder, as high as the Virgin’s head opposite, and balances it off. That made sense.

In the stone version she is shorter but her arm, which had to reach low in order to brace up Christ’s thigh and keep consonance with Michelangelo’s design, is just as long as in the wax model. Now it is perhaps too long. It is certainly strained and graceless. Christ’s hand, which originally fell to her waist, now reaches only her shoulder. Her stiff, pillar-like thigh—that’s also too long. What are we to think? Did Cacagni reduce the top half of the figure?

That would explain the triteness of the shoulders and of the head, which are particularly unexpressive. When he saw the group, Condivi was impressed by the “wonderful expression” of the figures. In the Pietà that we see it is hard to be impressed with this Mary’s expression because she doesn’t have any. Surely Cacagni chiselled it and polished it away.

Notice one more thing: Mary’s left leg, or rather, her thigh, since she is kneeling, is out of sight. In Michelangelo’s model it was side by side with her other one and right behind Christ’s lower leg, touching it, perhaps relieving with the contingent lines of a fold or two the long diagonal slash it made. In the marble statue, instead of a knee and cloth, there is only a dark hole. And that hole is partly responsible for setting off the skinny leg, exaggerating its nakedness, hiding with its shadow some of its flesh, such as the calf. Why did Cacagni dig out the marble from behind it? Perhaps to justify a new movement, a new posture, he had created when he lowered Mary’s upper half. She now leans outwards, away from Christ’s body.

Conclusion: We are justified in attributing all the bad, all the errors of this Pietà, to Tiberio Cacagni.
But what if some of them weren’t his? Could Michelangelo himself have made one or two?

See Michelangelo’s Little Secret

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Luckily, one of Michelangelo’s wax models of the Doumo Pietà has survived, so we can see a version he liked.
( in the Gigli Collection, Florence)

There is the lost leg in place and now we understand the importance it had in the composition. It balanced off the figure of the Magdalene opposite and made the group a triangle. A circle within a triangle. It also showed how Christ’s body was supported: that left leg, the thigh, and the pelvis rest solidly on the Madonna’s knee (or a rock). Nicodemus is only dealing with the top half of the body—centering it above its rock support. Now most of the downward thrust of the one-legged version is gone. Christ is not going to fall.

There was a third job for that left leg. It gave a dynamism to the lower half of the group which it now lacks in the big marble version. Though the legs are lifeless, the way they pivot and twist shows their flexibility and makes us believe that they are about to swivel again, or could. The right knee has fallen slightly lower in this model too, which gives the impression of greater tension, especially when taken together with the other leg, which is not simply parallel but is bent at another angle. The two legs “walk” a little.

And finally, the harshness of the right angle of the only surviving leg is mitigated when it is contemplated together with the less acute angle of the other leg. The eye is now led to a point where the two legs meet—the jutting left knee; and is thus brought again into the basic circle of the design instead of downwards.

These are happy discoveries because they mean that Michelangelo’s original statue did not have, or should not have had, the faults which cry out in the one that has come down to us. The old Master was still accountable—he hadn’t lost his judgment.
But there remains the biggest eyesore of all: that paralytic leg. It doesn’t look too thin in the model. Why did Michelangelo sculpt it so thin?

Here we come to the truly sad part of the story of this Pietà: Michelangelo let himself be talked into allowing a third-rate sculptor to repair and finish it.
Vasari says a servant of Michelangelo’s persuaded him to give or sell the broken statue to a rich man named Bandini; and to let a sculptor called Tiberio Cacagni finish it according to Michelangelo’s models. “This would mean that Michelangelo’s labours would not have been thrown away, [the servant] said. Michelangelo was happy with this arrangement, and he gave the block to them as a gift. It was immediately carried off and subsequently put together by Tiberio who added God knows how many pieces.” (Vasari, Life of Michelangelo)

So Michelangelo’s own angry destruction of the statue was only the first and the lesser tragedy. The Master’s mutilation, though a heart-breaking thing, need not have meant the destruction of all beauty. Accidental—even intentional—mutilation doesn’t necessarily kill a work of art.

No. The one real destruction, real mutilation, is a finishing job by another sculptor. Every one of his chisel strokes, even his polishing, erases forever the master’s delicate touch and all the clues of how he might have gone on