This is one of the 66 paintings Goya made for the tapestry factory in Madrid.

El Quitasol (The Parasol), 104 x 152 cm. In the Prado Museum, Madrid.

It was the model (called a cartoon) for a tapestry. The technicians at the factory would copy it as exactly as they could with their colored wool. Goya’s designs satisfied them at first but later they complained that his cartoons were not simple enough, that they had too many shades of color.

Who ordered all the tapestries? The royal family. They needed them to cover the cold stone walls of their palaces, such as the vast Escorial in the mountains northwest of Madrid. Tapestries keep down drafts and hold in the warmth.

Was Goya free to choose a subject?
The king’s son, the future Charles IV, was crazy about hunting. He wanted to see pictures that made him recall the good times he had out in the woods with his gun and his dogs.

Quail Hunting, 290 x 225 cm. Prado Museum, Madrid.

Goya had no trouble coming up with ideas to please the Prince. He himself was crazy about hunting. Here is an excerpt from a letter to his friend:

Dear Martin:
…Buddy, your last verse killed me because when you talk about hunting you won’t believe how much I envy you. God just doesn’t want me to be able to run away from here [his atelier in Madrid]—for me there is no greater fun in the whole world. I went out just once here but nobody does better than I did: in 19 shots I bagged 18 pieces, which were: 2 jackrabbits, 1 rabbit, 4 little partridges and one big one, and 10 quail. This was in one day—the one I missed was a quail. I was especially happy because I happened to be with two of the best hunters around here and I earned myself quite a reputation among them….
Goodbye now. Tell your room not to forget me and my chair with the cigarette paper and tobacco.

Madrid, October 6, 1781

And the Prince’s wife, the Italian Maria Luisa de Parma, liked scenes of common people dancing or singing or watching bullfights.

The Pelele (The Puppet) 267 x 160 cm. Prado Museum, Madrid

And there Goya had no trouble either: he had only to paint what fascinated him as well. He was a country boy who had only recently come to the capital, though he was no longer a boy at 29. Madrid was like another world to him—or like two. There was the secret world of the court and the nobles—one of wealth and power and beauty; and another equally exciting one of the common people, the majos and majas, in their way as proud as the nobles and whose life seemed even richer. Goya, whose imagination had no bounds (“I just never run out of ideas for a picture,” he wrote his friend), easily invented pictures that delighted both his royal patrons.

These cartoons fill large rooms of the Prado Musum in Madrid and stand out for their happy, placid scenes and bright colors. So the shock is greater when the visitor without warning walks suddenly into the rooms with Goya’s “black paintings”.

The Romería of San Isidro (the Annual Pilgrimage to the Shrine of St. Isidro, outside of Madrid) 140 x 438 cm. Prado Museum, Madrid

There he sees a dark, sinister world of monsters, cruelty, death. “What happened?” he asks himself. “How could these be by the same artist who painted the happy cartoons?”

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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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Michelangelo was not lazy but in his whole life—a long one—he finished only about twelve or fourteen statues. Why?

For one thing, he lost many years in the mountains of Carrara and Pietrasanta, quarrying the marble for his projects.

Pietrasanta

The city of Carrara and its white marble quarries

That was very hard and dangerous work which had nothing to do with aesthetics. He had to build a road out of the quarry of Pietrasanta to transport his blocks on oxcarts. Once he was nearly crushed when the chain holding a block broke. At night he had nothing to do but brood.

Here is a letter he sent from the Pietrasanta quarry to his helper Pietro Urbano in Florence.

April 20, 1519

Pietro: Things have gone very badly. On Saturday morning I began to raise a column as carefully as I could, forgetting no detail whatsoever. After it had been raised a hundred feet a link in the chain that held it snapped and it fell down into the river and broke into a hundred pieces. It was Donato who ordered that chain from his friend Lazzero the smith, and if it had been as strong as it should have, it could have held four columns that size. It looked fine from the outside—there was no reason to doubt it. After it broke we could see that it had been a fraud, since the inside wasn’t solid and was no thicker than the handle of a knife—and we wondered how it could have lasted so long. All of us who were working near it put our lives in danger and that beautiful stone was ruined….The iron was raw and of very poor quality and it was chosen by Donato together with his friend to be worked on the anvil. So you see how he filled my order and what patience I have to have. I won’t be home for this year’s fair but will stay here and, God willing, I will begin to work.
Michelangelo

To see what Pietrasanta is like today and how marble is quarried, go to this very interesting webpage made by Professor Levey. Michelangelo wouldn’t believe his eyes.

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No one knows who invented oil painting but it happened early in the fifteenth century. Suddenly, in just a few years, artists all over Europe were dropping the old egg-painting and doing their work in oil. Its chief advantage was that the oil permeated the colors and gave them both greater luminosity than egg and, if desired, greater opacity. Painters found that its relatively slow drying time, which at first they saw as a drawback, could be used to blend their colors better and also to make corrections. Oil paintings gave an appearance of great realism.

The Flemish painters were at the vanguard. Here is the first great masterpiece with the new oils—The Arnolfini Marriage by van Eyck in 1434. Of course it is a masterpiece NOT because of the oils but because van Eyck had a genius’ aesthetic sense.

Here is a close-up of the mirror in this painting:

What does a painter want?

He wants an empty wall, big as a church, that everyone will see, and freedom to fill it any way he chooses. The Sistine Chapel had two big windows in the wall above the altar but the Pope agreed right away to having them bricked up so Michelangelo wouldn’t have to paint around them and incorporate them in his design; he would have a nice, big, flat, empty wall to paint. And it would be right above the altar, where everyone faced, where they had to look. And the pictures would stand right-side up—not like the ceiling scenes, which made you spin around all the time to study them, and crane your neck. For once he was going to have things his way.

What was that—what was his way? He would make hundreds of male nudes in every posture and perspective he could think of. He would skip all the props: no more marble pedestals or moldings or any architectural motifs at all. No more drapery. Nothing but Promethean heroes, triumphing or falling. He wouldn’t worry about a background either: there would be none. Behind the multitude would be air, just empty space. He would paint it blue and the blue all over would unify the fresco. Lower down the wall, where Hell was, the blue would turn into a cheerless dim light.

The subject didn’t matter much. Originally it was going to be a Resurrection. He would have done a Resurrection. He would also have done an Ascension or a Crucifixion or an Assumption. At his age, these things didn’t matter. His style was fixed, he knew what he wanted. He knew it isn’t the “what” you paint so much as the “how”.

But it just so happened that this was a subject after his heart. He’d been reading Dante for years, ever since he was a boy at Lorenzo de Medici’s palace; and he knew The Divine Comedy by heart. Knowing your Dante was knowing all about the demons and the horror of Hades or Hell. The tumult, the excitement, the terror, of the Last Day was just right for a collection of the kind of swirling, rising, cringing, creatures Michelangelo liked to imagine.

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The two greatest painters of classical times—Zeuxis and Parhassius—met in a duel. Who was better?

Zeuxis with a smile of superiority showed his painting first—a bunch of grapes. They were astoundingly realistic. Some birds flew down to steal them, crashing up against Zeuxis’ wooden panel. A cheer rose up from the crowd of spectators. Top that!

Parhassius didn’t seem worried. “Draw back the veil on my painting,” he told Zeuxis, “and give the judges a look at what I came up with.”

Zeuxis didn’t like to be ordered like a servant but he walked up to Parhassius’ painting and put out his hand to draw back the veil. Zats! —there was no veil, only Parhassius’ painting of one; and it had fooled even Zeuxis. “You got me,” Zeuxis told Parhassius. “You win.”

And he did. The prize went to Parhassius, says the historian Plutarch, “because though Zeuxis’s painting had fooled the birds, Parhassius’s had fooled an artist”.

This is a wonderful story: the great contest between the best in the world. Parhassius’ clever deception is a nice touch: the prize goes to astuteness as well as to technical mastery.

Yet—wait a minute. What about the basic question of superior painting? Is either old Zeuxis or Parhassius a great painter because he can paint a realistic grape or a veil? Is that what makes a great painter?
Perhaps Plutarch, who wrote the story, couldn’t see any further than what Plato called the “deception” of painting. That the grapes on the board were a fake, not the real thing: they “misled” people. Plato never even talked about the problems of aesthetics that have since bothered painters.

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This man is an Englishman.

The great fresco painting of Giovanni Acuto by Paolo Uccello (1436)

What were the Italians doing painting an Englishman in 1436?
They adored him—they loved him though or rather because he was so cheeky. He was a soldier of fortune, highwayman, thief and extortioner, the big dickens. Sir John Hawkwood by name. He arrived in Italy around 1400 with a band of soldiers and started leasing himself and his army to princes at war. There were many city-states and as they were often at war with each other they needed soldiers. Hawkwood offered quality service at high prices. And when times were depressed and there were no wars Hawkwood and his men would gallop into a city-state, devastate a few farms, then graciously offer to retire for a fee. Never at a loss.

Having cut out a nice niche for himself, he stayed on in Florence and lived to a ripe old age. When he died the broken-hearted Florentines couldn’t help but go all out for him. They put on a big state funeral. And they commissioned this painting from Uccello, the great Renaissance artist, for the left wall of their Santa Maria del Fiore church.

They called Sir John “Giovanni Acuto”—transforming his hard-to-say English name into the Italian word for “clever”. The epitaph on the painting calls him an extremely valient commander, supremely skillful in warfare (rei militaris).

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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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One of the most memorable adventures in the whole Michelangelo legend is his famous flight out of Rome after Pope Julius refused to pay him.

He had gone to see the Pope to ask to be reimbursed for the money he had paid out of his own pocket to the workmen who had brought his marble blocks into St. Peter’s Square. Those blocks were going to become the statues for Julius’ tomb. Up to then he had always had easy access to the Pope’s chambers but now he was told that the Pope was too busy to receive him. He went back to the papal palace several times and was turned away each time. Finally a groom told him that he had orders from the Pope not to admit him. This made Michelangelo so uncontrollably angry that he decided right there to quit working for Julius, to sell his things in Rome, and to clear out immediately that night. He would not be treated by anyone like that, not even by the most powerful man in Christendom.

Vasari says Michelangelo set out on post-horses and rode all night until he reached a town called Poggibonzi in the territory of Florence, outside the Pope’s jurisdiction, where he felt safe. But soon five papal couriers turned up with orders to bring him back.

This far the story is the same in both biographies—it anyway follows Michelangelo’s own account which he gave in a letter to the Pope’s representative. Both Vasari and Condivi say Michelangelo, finally caught-up-with and cornered as he was in Poggibonzi, still refused to go back to Rome with those couriers. He was a tough customer, that Michelangelo.

But to make him even tougher, Condivi puts in this: “The couriers had come upon him in a place where they could do him no violence and, as Michelangelo threatened to have them killed if they attempted anything, they resorted to entreaties.” Is that right? Did he? Would he have? Who would do the killing?

After reading Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography you start to believe almost anything about Renaissance Italy. Men walked around with swords that they really drew in anger occasionally, and daggers too that they unsheathed when a quiet murder was required. The whole country was a jungle with fierce human animals at large. Cellini made glorious reading but you didn’t want to cross him. And now here we have Michelangelo threatening to kill five men, five emissaries of a very Renaissance Pope, if they don’t leave him alone. Liar though that old Benvenuto was, his homicides seem to have been real. Do we take Michelangelo—that is, Condivi his scribe—at his word here?

We should not. Most likely, the threat to kill the couriers was a later accretion to the story as Michelangelo told it over and over again to Condivi. It was warmed-over bluster, meant to show how brave Michelangelo was and how immovable in defense of what he considered right. “I stood up to the whole bunch of them (the couriers),” he told the wide-eyed Condivi at sandwich time in the shop. “I told them I’d kill the first one who laid a hand on me. You should have seen them look at each other. They knew I meant it. None of them was prepared to die—they hadn’t counted on a fight with a lion. They’d figured they would find a whining, penitent, artist-coward, begging for mercy. Well, they saw another side of Michelangelo Buonarroti.”

Vasari passed over this part of the adventure. He evidently did not believe it or felt that it would be indiscreet to put it in his book. It does shock. Michelangelo let it stand, perhaps because he had told it to Condivi so often he felt silly about retracting it. He was strong and proud and he had a temper. He certainly did things he regretted afterwards. But he was afraid of Pope Julius: both Vasari and Condivi say so. Look how he hesitated to go to Bologna to meet Julius finally and receive his punishment. Or how he hurriedly took down the scaffolding and quit painting the Sistine Chapel though he considered his fresco unfinished, because the pope had beaned him with his mace and threatened to have him thrown down if he didn’t.

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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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The Cupid fraud is the last one the biographers mention. Did Michelangelo learn his lesson and get back on the straight and narrow?

He stayed at the Cardinal’s palace for more than a year. The biographers say the blind-to-quality Cardinal never gave him a commission in all that time but a letter written by Michelangelo contradicts them. He says the Cardinal asked him if he was ready to carve a masterpiece and bought him a block of marble big enough to make a life-sized figure; and that he, Michelangelo, was about to begin to work that next Monday.

Whatever it was, that figure and three others—another Cupid, the Bacchus, and the Pietá—are the only works mentioned for the five years Michelangelo lived in Rome. The Cupid was life-size, the Bacchus was ten feet high, and the Pietá was an extremely complex work; but few biographers of the Master would believe that those works kept him busy for so long. He was slow and he was fast: most things he never finished; but those he did finish, he whipped off in no time. Of both the Pietá and the giant David Vasari says it was unbelievable that such works could have been carved in so short a time. Yet even if we allow a year of hard work for each of the three Roman statues—which is allowing very much for the young Michelangelo—two years of the five are still left unaccounted for. How did he keep body and soul together in Rome then? The supposition is that he did little sculptural odd-jobs for the occasional rich duke or wealthy banker like Jacopo Galli. Might he have fallen into temptation one or two more times and carved an “antique” statue for a fast ducat?

It ought to be said that not only sculptors and other craftsmen with a diffuse moral fiber stooped to this kind of deception. Most of the art collectors of the time probably deserved to be fooled because, like the Cardinal San Giorgio, it wasn’t that they didn’t know old from new but that they didn’t know good art from bad. The whole country was crazy about antiques and there were hundreds passed around for sale. The question isn’t so much “how many of them were forgeries?” as “how many of them were any good?” In the buyer’s mind age and quality were the same. Pretend you are a sculptor or a jeweler. No one will buy your statue because it is modern. What might you do to sell it? Any ideas?

As there were no surviving paintings from antiquity Renaissance painters couldn’t get into the antique racket. But every single sculptor or jeweler, especially a beginner without a reputation, must have tried or been tempted to try the experiment of tossing one of his rejected creations anonymously onto the pile of old junk, just to see how it made a collector’s eyes brighten. A collector with ducats to burn. Benvenuto Cellini, though naturally without directly incriminating himself, mentions two or three things of his own that others sold successfully as antiques and praised as something almost supernaturally excellent. He loved to hear that. Does anyone think Benvenuto would not have fooled a buyer á la Michelangelo?

Bernini’s earliest surviving statue may be a forgery like Michelangelo’s Cupid.

Howard Hibbard in his Bernini says: “The young Bernini, like Michelangelo, established his claim to artistic importance by rivalling antiquity; the Amalthea was long mistaken for an ancient work, although we do not know whether it was carved as a deliberate forgery. Its owner, Cardinal Borghese, was the greatest collector of antiquities of his time…”

Laocoön

But now recently a scholar has come up with the idea that Michelangelo quit doing little forgeries and pulled off the biggest one in history. Ms. Catterson says he made the famous Laocoön group, found in 1506 in Rome and supposed to be the ancient work mentioned by Pliny the Elder. She theorizes that he carved it while he was in Rome, about the time he made the Pietá, around 1498. Later he buried it and showed up very promptly eight years later when it was unearthed. He made a fuss over the figure—certainly the most spectacular sculpture ever recovered from ancient times—and recommended it to Pope Julius, who bought it for his collection. It is still in the Vatican collection.

I am not prepared to discuss her theory. There are certain features of style about the Laocoön which remind one of Michelangelo’s work—the great torso, for example. But there are others which seem to rule out his authorship, such as the very composition (“Michel Angelo has laid down the rule that a group should be so compactly composed that, if it is rolled down a hill, none of the limbs would break off….” (Edouard Lanteri, Sculpture), or the refined materialism of the carving: the anatomy of the figure is not rendered with the Master’s peculiar abstraction.

Did Ms. Catterson make a study of the marble used, which should not have come from Carrara? The Laocoön was carved not from a single block but from six. Did Michelangelo collect six big ancient pieces and stick them together to make this forgery? It sounds like a very complex scheme. How would the big statue have been transported from Michelangelo’s studio to the garden where it was discovered without anyone knowing? And who paid him and when?

The statue wasn’t dug up until six or seven years after he allegedly carved it. If that was according to his plan, the Laocoön was a very long-range scheme for a starving artist. A potboiler is never such an ambitious work.

Much against the forgery theory is that no one in Michelangelo’s time suspected him. After the Cupid swindle some people must have kept an eye on him.

Another giant obstacle in the way of believing that Michelangelo forged the Laocoön was his pride. It is very hard to imagine that he could keep his mouth shut while so many people raved about the statue. He wanted praise. Look what happened with the Pietá, which Ms. Catterson believes he carved at the same time:
“Michelangelo put into this work so much love and effort that (something he never did again) he left his name written across the sash over Our Lady’s breast. The reason for this was that one day he went along to where the statue was and found a crowd of strangers from Lombardy singing its praises; then one of them asked another who had made it, only to be told: ‘Our Gobbo from Milan.’
“Michelangelo stood there not saying a word, but thinking it very odd to have all his efforts attributed to someone else. Then one night, taking is chisels, he shut himself in with a light and carved his name on the statue.” (Vasari)

Back to Was Michelangelo Crooked? (Part 1)

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Picasso’s real home, the place he dreamed of going back to, was Barcelona.
His family moved there when he was 14. It was where he really grew up, where he stopped being a boy, and where his first friends were. Catalan became his language.

His father was a drawing teacher at the government art school. As soon as he discovered his son’s remarkable talent, he gave up his own painting and devoted himself to teaching him. He was able to convince the Fine Arts School in Barcelona to allow his son to take their entrance examination, though he was underage; and he passed it easily. And to give his boy a place to paint, Mr. Picasso even rented an apartment for him. He checked up on him twice a day to see that he was really working and not getting into trouble. Fourteen was very young for that kind of independence.

Pablo soon made friends at the art school and they would meet at a beer parlor called Els 4 Gats—the Four Cats. (Four cats in Catalán means “a disappointing or ridiculous few.” “I sent out dozens of invitations to the party but only four cats showed up,” someone might say. The artists who met at Els 4 Gats of course took pride in their small number.)
Here is a photo of The 4 Cats beer parlor taken in about 1900.

And here is Picasso’s drawing of the group. He is sitting in the front.

In the evening after drawing and painting all day, Picasso would go to The 4 Cats and sit with his friends, who were all excited about art and politics. The old world was falling apart. One of Picasso’s good friends was an anarchist. Some wanted independence for Catalonia. They had been reading their Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Spengler and talked nihilism and the end of Western civilization, though their own youth and talent made them feel the future was full of promise. Picasso sat and listened to the excited talk and couldn’t take his eyes off the pictures they showed him. His father’s old art world was falling apart too. The French Impressionists were ignoring traditional painting and finding new directions not only in the themes of art but its expression and perception. “Look at the latest experiments of Cezanne,” his pipe-smoking buddies told the boy. “See how he reduces everything to basic geometric shapes?”

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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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