The Best Artists

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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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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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.”

Every time Bernini looked at Michelangelo’s David in the Piazza di Signoria it struck him as a bit static. It also seemed that more could be done in the way of realism. He had heard Michelangelo praised for bringing life to his figures and Bernini considered that it would be easy to give his own David more life. He read the Bible story and he could just see the young David in action. Michelangelo had a great imagination—everyone said so—but maybe he, Gianlorenzo Bernini, had a greater one. Michelangelo´s figure, when you came right down to it, didn´t really illustrate the story very well. You couldn´t actually picture any action. You only saw a handsome young man shifting his weight from one leg to the other. And who could guess, unless he knew the story, what the youth was doing with that strap over his shoulder. It looked more like he was carrying his jacket. It was bad illustration, if you could forget your piety for the Master and say so. And who knew that there was a stone in his big right hand or what it was for?

The longer Bernini thought about it the more excited he got. Of course he could do it better! He was going to carve a David that would make Michelangelo´s look sick. To start with he would take the shepherd boy at a better moment—a moment later than the one Michelangelo had chosen. He would do his David just when he was loading his sling and winding up to hurl the stone. That was another flaw in the Master´s figure: it was no good from the back and, truthfully, no good from at least one of the sides either. Bernini would twist his David so that you discovered wonderful things no matter where you stood to take it in.

And the face! Michelangelo´s David looked as though he were posing for his picture—so relaxed in spite of the frown. A man who was fighting for his life would be focused on his weapon and his adversary—there would be time to be indignant later. Bernini would follow nature—wasn´t that the rule?—and have his David strain and grimace—grunt—with the effort, the way he really would have! Bernini worked frantically on little models until he had the pose. He knew it would be the greatest David ever carved. People would gaze at it and know the Bible story. He would have brought it to life for them. And they would praise him for his intelligence as well as his artistry.

They did praise him and they still do. That´s a real David, all right—believable, realistic. Does it rank even with the Laocoön? Did he beat Michelangelo?

This is Bernini’s portrait of his old flame Constanza Bonarelli. She was the wife of one of his assistants and she became Bernini’s mistress after posing as his model. The bust could almost be by Houdon or one of the portrait sculptors of 100 years later—so naturalistic is it. Someone called it a “false dawn of naturalism”.  Constanza looks pretty scrumptious with her lips parted and her chemise so loosely open.
Bernini kept the bust around for a few years but then had to quickly get it out of the house when he finally married and brought his new wife, Caterina Tezio, home.  He gave it to a friend.

Not long after Michelangelo died the world’s second greatest sculptor was born. He was a child prodigy and had a sculptor father who guided him, just like Mozart and his violinist dad. In time Bernini developed an idea of sculpture that went beyond anything the ancients and even Michelangelo had ever imagined. Sculpture had traditionally been part of a building. It was displayed in a niche in the wall or up against a pillar. But can’t the building and the statue be complimentary? thought Bernini. Can’t the building be a theatre in which statuary drama is going on? Can’t the very walls and ceiling of the place take part—or seem to take part—in the “play”?

So wherever Bernini could, wherever the buildings allowed, he designed decoration around his marble statues to highlight them. He was a real showman. He realized that a beautiful figure, like a beautiful anything, might go unnoticed unless someone or something pointed it out. One of the most wonderful statues in the world—Michelangelo’s Moses—sat there pathetically in a marble niche (the final, silly, version of Pope Julius’ tomb) as if some third-rate artist and not the Master himself had been given the job of displaying it. “Had it been mine,” thought Bernini, “I’d have twisted the whole darn church to show it off. I’d have turned the sanctuary into Mt. Sinai and the side-altar into The Burning Bush. A statue that good is worth more than the whole building it’s in.”

And he would have too. He not only dramatized his marble figures with all kinds of theatralic highlights, such as golden rays radiating and flowers floating—he treated whole walls of a church as backdrops for his marble statues, making them part of a vast picture or setting to awe the spectator. For his unforgettable St. Teresa in the Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, he even opened a hole in the roof to let in light for his statue and bring heaven itself into the “show” And he put six or eight figures in fake balconies left and right in attitudes of surprise and awe at what was happening to the Saint.

Figures in the Cornaro Chapel witnessing St. Teresa’s Ecstacy

One of the most original arguments in the sculpture vs. painting debate came from Bernini, the Italian sculptor. He told the French Academy that the painter has this great advantage over the sculptor: he learns while he paints and can correct his work as he proceeds. His painting, therefore, is the result of all he has learned while painting it.

The sculptor, for his part, must stick with his original idea, since he cannot correct it. His statue, therefore, is a record of what he knew only before he started to carve.

That might have been true for Bernini, who carved his figures right off in marble, without solving all the problems first in a sketch. He hated to go to the trouble of finishing a model. “If I did the work in clay or wax first, then all I’d be doing in marble was copying myself. I want my marble to be the original work, not a copy.”

During his portrait sessions with the Sun King, for instance, he carved  the marble bust directly. No other sculptor would dare work directly in stone for a portrait. They all used sittings to make sketches or models and then copied them later in marble back in their studio.

Most of the old stone statues, because of their complexity, were copies of models the sculptor had finished completely. Nowadays, however, sculptors prefer to carve their figures right off if they can, with reference to only simple sketches, just like Bernini.

For centuries a debate went on over which was a “nobler” art: painting or sculpture.

The painters said they had to invent everything and the sculptor practically nothing. His material, stone, was already a finished work of nature—beautiful, imposing. Someone pretty sophistically even said the only thing the sculptor had to do was remove the stone from a figure that was already in the block.

“Oh, come on,” said the sculptors. “A statue is a greater problem, and therefore a greater achievement, because we have to come up with a figure that looks good from many points of view, whereas you painters have only one view to worry about.”

Painters smiled at that one and went on sucking their pipes. They had plenty of arguments in their bag. “We have to invent the very light in our picture; it is already given to you sculptors by heaven. All you have to do is take advantage of natural light.”

Sculptors smiled back—a dustier smile, of course. “Our art requires much greater discipline and skill because of the serious limitations of the medium. Sculpture is like a sonnet, with the rhyme, the meter, and the lines fixed. You painters don’t have many limitations—you can depict anything: clouds, rainy days, things floating through the air.”

And so, back and forth.