The agony and the ecstas.., p.39
The Agony and the Ecstasy, page 39
He had a letter from his father, acknowledging the twenty-five florins. The mercer had accepted Michelangelo’s assurance of payment, but he wanted half of the fifty florins still owed him. Could he possibly send another twenty-five florins by the Saturday post?
Michelangelo sighed, donned a lightweight blouse, took twenty-five ducats to Jacopo Galli’s bank in the Piazza San Celso next to the bank of the Chigi family. Balducci was not in, so he went to Jacopo Galli’s desk. Galli looked up, gave no sign of recognition. Nor did Michelangelo recognize Jacopo Galli; the face was stern, cold, expressionless. He asked in an impersonal tone what Michelangelo desired.
“A credit… for twenty-five florins. To send to Florence.”
He put his coins on the desk. Galli spoke to a clerk nearby. The transaction was swiftly made. Galli returned his masked eyes and hard-set mouth to his papers.
Michelangelo was staggered. “What have I done to offend?” he demanded of himself.
It was dark before he could bring himself to return to the house. From his room he saw lights in the garden. He opened the door gingerly.
“Ah, there you are!” cried Galli. “Come have a glass of this fine Madeira.”
Jacopo Galli was sprawled relaxedly in his chaise. He asked whether Michelangelo had set up his shop, what more he would need. His change of manner was simply explained. Jacopo Galli apparently could not, or would not, establish a bridge between the halves of his life. At his bank he held himself rigid, brusque. His business associates admired the way in which he dispatched their affairs and brought them the most profitable result, but did not like him as a person. They said he was not human. When he reached home Galli shed this skin as though he were a lizard, was gay, indulgent, humorous. No word of business ever passed his lips. Here in the garden he talked art, literature, history, philosophy. The friends who dropped in each evening loved him, considered him overgenerous with his family and household.
For the first time since he reached Rome, Michelangelo began to meet interesting Romans: Peter Sabinus, professor of Eloquence at the university, who cared little for Galli’s sculptures but who had what Galli described as “an incredible number of early Christian inscriptions”; the collector Giovanni Capocci, one of the first Romans to attempt disciplined excavating at the catacombs; Pomponius Laetus, one of Galli’s old professors, an illegitimate son of the powerful Sanseverino family, who could have dawdled in idle elegance but lived only for learning, ill clad in buckskins and housed in a shack.
“I used to go to his lecture hall at midnight to get a seat,” Galli told Michelangelo. “Then we’d wait for dawn, until we saw him coming down the hill, lantern in one hand, old manuscript in the other. He was tortured by the Inquisition because our Academy, like your Plato Academy in Florence, was suspected of heresy, paganism, republicanism.” Galli chuckled. “All perfectly true charges. Pomponius is so steeped in paganism that the sight of an antique monument can move him to tears.”
Michelangelo suspected that Galli too was “steeped in paganism,” for he never saw a man of the Church at Galli’s, with the exception of the blind brothers, Aurelius and Raffaelle Lippus, Augustinians from Santo Spirito in Florence, who improvised Latin songs and poetic hymns on their lyres; and the French Jean Villiers de la Groslaye, Cardinal of San Dionigi, a wisp of a man in an elegantly trimmed white beard and scarlet cassock who had begun his religious life as a Benedictine monk and, beloved by Charles VIII for his devoutness and learning, had been made a cardinal through the king’s intervention. He had nothing to do with the corruption of the Borgias, living the same devout life in Rome that he had in the Benedictine monasteries, continuing his studies of the Church Fathers, on whom he was an authority.
Not all the scholars were aged. He made friends with Jacopo Sadoleto from Ferrara, twenty years old, a fine poet and Latinist; Serafino, an idolized poet in the court of Lucrezia Borgia, who never mentioned the Borgias or the Vatican when he visited at Galli’s, but read his historical poems while he accompanied himself on the lute; Sannazaro, forty, but seeming thirty, who mingled pagan and Christian images in his verse.
The Galli made the minimum number of gestures of conformity; they went to mass most Sundays and on the important holy days. Jacopo Galli confided that his anti-clericalism was the only gesture he could make against the corruption of the Borgias and their followers.
“From my reading, Michelangelo, I have been able to follow the rise, fulfillment, decay and disappearance of many religions. That is what is happening to our religion today. Christianity has had fifteen hundred years to prove itself, and has ended in … what? Borgia murders, greed, incest, perversion of every tenet of our faith. Rome is more evil today than Sodom and Gomorrah when they were destroyed by fire.”
“Even as Savonarola has said?”
“As Savonarola has said. A hundred years of Borgias and there will be nothing left here but a historic pile of stones.”
“The Borgias can’t rule for a hundred years, can they?”
Galli’s big, open face was creased by furrows.
“Caesar Borgia has just crowned Federigo as King of Naples, returned to Rome in triumph, and been consigned his brother Juan’s estate by the Pope. An archbishop has been caught forging dispensations. A bishop was caught with ten thousand ducats from the sale of offices in the Curia. And so it goes.”
Now all the drawings he had made for the Bacchus, the Greek god of joy, seemed superficial and cynical. He had tried to project himself backward into an Elysian age; but he was playing with a myth as a child plays with toys. His present reality was Rome: the Pope, Vatican, cardinals, bishops, the city plunged deep into corruption and decadence because the hierarchy battened off it. He felt a total revulsion for this Rome. But could he sculpture from hate? Could he use his pure white marble, which he loved, to depict the evil and smell of death that were destroying what had once been the capital of the world? Was there not the danger that his marble too would become hateful? He could not bring himself to abandon the Greek ideal of beauty- out-of-marble.
He slept fitfully. Often he went to Galli’s library, lit a lamp and took up writing materials, as he had at Aldovrandi’s after he had met Clarissa. It had been love that churned him then, made him pour out lines to “cool himself off.” Now it was hate, as searing an emotion as love, that caused him to pour out hundreds of lines until, at dawn, he had had his say.
Here helms and swords are made of chalices:
The blood of Christ is sold so much the quart:
His cross and thorns are spears and shields;
and short
Must be the time ere even his patience cease.
Nay, let him come no more to raise the fees
Of this foul sacrilege beyond report!
For Rome still flays and sells him at the court
Where paths are closed to virtue’s fair increase… .
God welcomes poverty perchance with pleasure:
But of that better life what hope have we,
When the blessed banner leads to nought but ill?
He went searching through the collections in Rome for ancient carvings. The only young Bacchus he could find was about fifteen years old, dead sober. From the way he held a bunch of grapes, negligently, he seemed bored with the fact that he had conceived this strangest of fruits.
His sculpture would have joy in it, try to capture the sense of fertility of Dionysus, the nature god, the power of the intoxicating drink that enabled a man to laugh and sing and forget for a while the sorrow of his earthly miseries. And then, perhaps, at the same time he could portray the decay that came with too much forgetfulness, that he saw all around him, when man surrendered his moral and spiritual values for the pleasures of the flesh. The Bacchus would be the central figure of his theme, a human being rather than a demigod; then there would be a child of about seven, sweet-faced, lovable, nibbling from a bunch of grapes. His composition would have death in it too: the tiger, who liked wine and was loved by Bacchus, with the deadest, dead skin and head conceivable.
He went to the baths to look for models, thinking he might put together a composite Bacchus as he had his Hercules from hundreds of Tuscans: a throat here, a forearm there, a belly in the next place. But when after a few weeks he welded his features together with hard silver pen, his composite portrait was not convincing. He took himself to Leo Baglioni.
“I need a model. Young. Under thirty. Of a high family.”
“And a beautiful body?”
“That once was, but is no longer. A figure that has been corrupted.”
“By what?”
“Wine. Sensuousness. Self-indulgence.”
Leo thought for a moment, flicking over in his mind the figures and features of the Roman youths he knew.
“I may know your man. The Count Ghinazzo. But he’s wealthy, of a noble family. What can we offer him by way of inducement?”
“Flattery. That he is to be immortalized as the great Greek god Bacchus. Or Dionysus, if he prefers.”
“That might work. He’s idle, and can give you his days … or what’s left of them after he awakens from his bacchanals of the night before.”
The count was delighted with his new role. When he had walked through the orchard with Michelangelo, stripped off his clothes and taken the pose Michelangelo requested, he said:
“You know, it’s a coincidence my being selected for this. I’ve always thought of myself as a kind of god.”
Michelangelo went to his drawing board, sucked in his breath with pleasure. If he had searched all of Italy he could not have found a more fitting subject than Leo had selected for him: the head a bit too small for the body, the belly soft and fleshy, the buttocks too large for the torso, the upper arm a touch flaccid, the legs as straight and firmly molded as a Greek wrestler’s. It was a figure desexed, the eyes unfocused from too much wine at dinner, the mouth dazedly half open; yet the arm that held the wine cup aloft flexed with muscular power, and over all a flawless satin-smooth skin glistened in the strong frontal sunlight that made him appear illumined from within.
“You’re perfect!” Michelangelo cried impulsively. “Bacchus to the very life.”
“Delighted you think so,” said Count Ghinazzo without turning his head. “When Leo first proposed serving as a model I told him not to be a bore. But this may prove to be interesting.”
“What time can I expect you tomorrow? And don’t hesitate to bring your wine with you.”
“That makes everything splendid. I can remain the entire afternoon. Without wine, the day is so dull.”
“You will never appear dull to me, messere. I will see you in a new light every minute.”
He cast the man in a hundred poses, his right leg bent sharply at the knee, toes barely touching the rough wooden base; the body slumped over on one leg, striving to stand up, the torso leaning backward; the small head thrust forward, turned one way and another, moving slightly, satiated with pleasure. And in the late afternoons, when Ghinazzo had drunk much wine, Michelangelo wound bunches of grapes through his hair, sketching him as though the grapes were growing there … which amused the Roman inordinately. Until one afternoon he drank too much of the wine, began to sway dizzily, fell off the wood block and hit his chin on the hard earth, knocking himself out. Michelangelo revived him by throwing a bucket of water over him. Count Ghinazzo shivered into his clothes, disappeared through the orchard and from Michelangelo’s life.
Jacopo Galli found him a lively boy of seven, with curling golden hair and large tender eyes, a delightful lad with whom Michelangelo made friends as he sketched. His only problem was to get the boy to maintain the difficult pose of holding his left arm in a contrapposto position against his chest, so that he could crush the bunch of grapes in his mouth. Next he went into the countryside, spending a whole day drawing the legs, hoofs and curling fur of the goats cropping the hillsides.
That was how his pen finally designed his sculpture: in the center the weak, confused, arrogant, soon to be destroyed young man holding cup aloft, behind him the idyllic child, cleareyed, munching his grapes, symbol of joy; between them the tiger skin. The Bacchus, hollow within himself, flabby, reeling, already old; the Satyr, eternally young and gay, symbol of man’s childhood and naughty innocence.
Sunday morning he invited Galli to the workshop to show him his drawing: the bowl held high in Bacchus’ hand, the intertwined grapes and leaves that made up his hair, and long, curving bunch of grapes that formed a structural bond between the Bacchus and the Satyr, the tree trunk on which the Bacchus leaned and the Satyr would be sitting, and lastly the tiger skin held in the Bacchus’ falling hand, winding down through the Satyr’s arm, its head hanging between the Satyr’s open-stanced goat’s hoofs, the hollow tiger head a picturization of what would happen to the Bacchus’ head, ere long.
Galli asked countless questions. Michelangelo explained that he would do some wax or clay modeling, some carving on scrap marble to test the component parts, “the way the Satyr’s head rests against the Bacchus’ arm, for instance.”
“And the way the boy’s thigh melts into the furry leg of the Satyr.”
“Exactly.”
Galli was fascinated. “I don’t know how to thank you.” Michelangelo laughed a little embarrassedly.
“There is one way. Could you send some florins to Florence?”
Galli hunched his huge shoulders over Michelangelo protectively.
“Would you like our correspondent in Florence to deliver a few florins each month to your father, I mean regularly? Then you won’t be distressed each time a packet of mail arrives. It will cost you no more that way; and we’ll keep a record for you against the commission price.”
“… it isn’t his fault, really,” Michelangelo proffered, his pride hurt. “My uncle is ill, there are some debts …”
7.
He lowered his column to a horizontal position on the ground, secured it on tightly wedged beams, then, using a point, bit into the corner where the wine cup would emerge. He concentrated on the frontal view, then started to join up the two sides to establish the visual flow. After heading for the high points of the fingers of the hand holding the cup, and the extended right kneecap, he struck in between to find the stomach, to establish the relationship between the highest projections and the deepest penetration. The intermediary forms would follow in natural sequence, as the forms of the side and back would take their cue from the front. He massed about the upper torso to indicate the reeling position of the upright figure, then turned the block over clockwise so that he could work on the width-plane, roughing out the cup-arm which was in the key position.
He summoned one of the Guffatti to help him set the column vertical again. Now the marble presented its personality: its size, proportion, weight. He sat in front of the block, studied it concentratedly, allowed it to speak, to establish its own demands. Now he felt fear, as though he were meeting an unknown person. To sculpture is to remove marble; it is also to probe, dig, sweat, think, feel and live with it until it is completed. Half the original weight of this block would remain in the finished statue; the rest would lie out in the orchard in chips and dust. His one regret was that he would sometimes have to eat and sleep, painful breaks when his work must stop.
The weeks and months of uninterrupted carving flowed by in a continuous stream. The winter was mild, he did not have to put back the roof of the shed; when the weather was sharp he wore his wool hat with its earmuffs, and a warm tunic. Thoughts, feelings, perceptions often came in a flash as the Bacchus and Satyr began to emerge, but to express these ideas in marble took days and weeks. Inside himself he had to grow as his sculpture grew and matured. The unfinished block haunted him at every hour of the night and day. It would be dangerous to release the bowl and the flexed knee in space; he would have to keep a webbing of marble between the outstretched bowl and forearm, between the knee and elbow, between the base and knee to give them support while he dug deeper. Now he was chiseling the side plane, the face and head, part of the neck and curls of grapes, now the depth of the left shoulder, thigh and calf. At the rear he evolved the Satyr, the stump he was sitting on, the grapes he was eating, the tiger cloth tying the two figures together. It was the most complicated piece he had yet attempted. He turned the Satyr’s head, arms and grapes adroitly to the Bacchus’ arm, yet ran out of marble.
His real battle began the moment a muscle became defined or a structural element began to emerge. Standing out from the rough blocking, he felt a thumping in his heart to shed away quickly the rest of the marble skin to reveal the human form below. The marble was tenacious; he was equally tenacious to achieve the delicate play of muscle under the fleshy stomach, the soft, claylike trunk of the tree, the spiral torsion of the Satyr, the grapes on the Bacchus’ head which seemed to be part of the vine of his hair. Each completed detail brought peacefulness to all of the faculties he had used in its creation; not only to his eyes and mind and bosom, but to his shoulders, hips and groin.
When unable to formulate a detail he dropped his tools, walked outside and gazed up through the trees to the skies. When he returned he approached the marble from a distance, saw its contours and masses, felt its continuity. The detail became part of the whole. He grabbed his tools again and worked furiously: one two three four five six seven strokes; then one two three four of rest, every few cycles stepping back to see what he had accomplished. His feelings were always ahead of his physical capacity to carve. If only he could work the four sides of the block at once!
When he was releasing a rounded kneecap, the hairy leg and hoof of the Satyr, the tiger skin, he strove to pull out as much wholeness as possible in one “Go.” Each day had to be fruitful, he had to find a handful of form for each session of carving before he could put aside his hammer and chisel. Upon awakening he was heavily charged with nervous energy and his hours were one long drive. He could not leave one finger of a hand in a more advanced state than the others, for he worked in units. Each day’s work was a full unit. It was these small bundles of intense entities throughout his sculpture that characterized his potency as a sculptor.
