The agony and the ecstas.., p.62
The Agony and the Ecstasy, page 62
He kneeled, kissed the Pope’s ring.
“It shall be as the Holy Father desires.”
Later, he stood by the front entrance of the Sistine Chapel, his mind aswirl with revulsion and self-incrimination. Sangallo was just behind him, his face haggard, looking as though he had been whipped.
“I did this to you. I persuaded the Pope to build himself a triumphal tomb, and to call you here to sculpture it. All you have had is grief …”
“You tried to help me.”
“I could not have controlled the Pope. No. But I could have been more realistic about Bramante. Come to grips with his … charm … his talent … Because of him I am no longer an architect and you are no longer a sculptor.”
Sangallo wept. Michelangelo shepherded him inside the protective doorway of the chapel, put an arm about the trembling shoulders.
“Pazienza, caro, patience. We will work our way out of this predicament.”
“You are young, Michelangelo, you have time. I am old. Nor have you heard the crowning indignity. I volunteered to erect the scaffolding for you, since I renovated the chapel and know it well. But even this I was denied. Julius had already arranged with Bramante to build it… . All I want now is to return to my home in Florence, enjoy a little peace before I die.”
“Do not speak of dying. Let us speak instead of how we can tackle this architectural monstrosity.” He threw both arms up in a despairing gesture that embraced the Sistine. “Explain this … edifice … to me. Why was it built this way?”
Sangallo explained that when it was first completed the building had looked more like a fortress than a chapel. Since Pope Sixtus had intended to use it for the defense of the Vatican in the event of war, the top had been crowned by an open battlement from which soldiers could fire cannons and drop stones on attackers. When the neighboring Sant’-Angelo had been strengthened as a fortress that could be reached by a high-walled passageway from the Papal palace, Julius had ordered Sangallo to extend the Sistine roof to cover the crenelated parapet. Quarters for the soldiers, above the vault that Michelangelo had been ordered to paint, were now unused.
Strong sunlight was streaming in from three tall windows, lighting the glorious frescoes of Botticelli and Rosselli opposite, shooting strong beams of light across the variegated marble floor. The side walls, one hundred and thirty-three feet long, were divided into three zones on their way up to the barrel vault, sixty-eight feet above: the lowest area was covered by tapestries, the frieze of frescoes filled the second and middle area. Above these frescoes was a cornice or horizontal molding, projecting a couple of feet out from the wall. In the topmost third wall area were spaced the windows, on either side of them portraits of the Popes.
Taking a deep breath, he craned his neck and looked up the more than sixty feet into the air at the ceiling itself, painted a light blue and studded with golden stars, the enormous area he was to fill with decorations. Arising out of the third level of the wall and going up into the curved vault were pendentives, which in turn were based on pilasters, column-like piers buried in the third tier. These pendentives, five on each wall and one at either end, constituted the open areas on which he was to paint the Twelve Apostles. Above each window was a semicircular lunette, outlined in sepia; the outer borders of the pendentives formed triangular spandrels, also colored in sepia.
The motive for the commission now became crushingly clear to him. It was not to put magnificent paintings on the ceiling that would complement the earlier frescoes, but rather to mask the structural supports which made the harsh transition from the top third of the wall into the barrel vault. His Apostles were not to be created for themselves but rather to capture the gaze of people on the floor so that their attention would be diverted from the ungainly architectural divisions. As an artist he had become not merely a decorator but an obliterator of other men’s clumsiness.
10.
He returned to Sangallo’s, spent the rest of the day writing letters: to Argiento, urging him to hurry to Rome; to Granacci, pleading with him to come to Rome and organize a bottega for him; to the Topolinos, asking if they knew of a stonehewer who might like to come and help him mass the marble columns. In the morning a groom arrived from the Pope, informing him that the house where his earlier marbles had lain these two years was still available to him. He went to the Guffatti stoneyard, hired the family to haul the marbles from the Piazza San Pietro to the house. Several of the smaller blocks had been stolen.
He could not find Cosimo, the carpenter; the neighbors thought he had died in Santo Spirito hospital; but that afternoon freckle-faced Piero Rosselli lurched in, laden with bundles, to cook his Livorno fish stew. While the cacciucco simmered in its orégano, Michelangelo and Rosselli examined the house, which had been unoccupied since Michelangelo abandoned it in haste two years before. The kitchen was of unpainted brick, small, but comfortable enough for cooking and eating. What had formerly been the family room could be converted into a tolerable workshop. The covered porch would hold all the marbles if they were carefully stacked; and the two unpainted brick bedrooms would sleep the bottega.
In May he signed his contract for the Sistine Chapel, was given five hundred large gold ducats from the papal purse. He paid his long-overdue debt to Balducci, returned to the furniture dealer in Trastevere to buy pieces that looked startlingly like the ones Balducci had sold back to the dealer eight years before. He hired a young Roman boy to take care of the house. The lad cheated on the market bills, so he let him go. The second boy stole several ducats out of Michel- angelo’s purse before he was caught.
Granacci arrived at the end of the week. He had stopped off at a barber’s to have his blond hair cut. He had already found the elegant men’s shops on the Piazza Navona and brought to Michelangelo’s house a new outfit of black trunk hose, a shirt, gold-embroidered hip-length cloak and a small ribbed cap, worn on the side of the head.
“I never was so glad to see anybody in my life!” cried Michelangelo. “You must help me draw up a list of assist ants.”
“Not so fast,” said Granacci, his light blue eyes dancing; “this is my first trip to Rome. I want to see the sights.”
“Tomorrow I’ll take you to the colosseum, baths of Caracalla, the Capitoline hill …”
“All in good time. But tonight I want to visit the fashionable taverns I’ve heard about.”
“What would I know of such things? I’m a workingman. But if you’re serious, I’ll ask Balducci.”
“I’m always serious about my pleasures.”
Michelangelo drew two chairs up to the kichen table.
“I’d like to assemble the painters we worked with at Ghirlandaio’s: Bugiardini, Tedesco, Cieco, Baldinelli, Jacopo.”
“Bugiardini will come. Tedesco, too, though I don’t think he knows much more about painting now than he did at Ghirlandaio’s. Jacopo will go anywhere on somebody else’s money. But Cieco and Baldinelli, I don’t know whether they’re still in the art.”
“Who can we get?”
“Sebastiano da Sangallo, first of all. He considers himself a follower of yours, copies before your Bathers every day, gives lectures on it to new painters. I’ll have to search for a fifth. It’s not easy to get five painters all free at the same time.”
“Let me give you a list of colors to send for. These Roman colors are no good at all.”
Granacci glanced shrewdly at his friend. “It appears to me that you don’t find anything good in Rome.”
“Does any Florentine?”
“I’m going to. I’ve heard about the sophisticated and beautiful courtesans who have the charming villas. As long as I must stay here to help you get that vault plastered, I’m going to find an exciting mistress.”
A letter brought him news that his uncle Francesco had died. Aunt Cassandra, after living with the family for forty years, had moved back to her parental home, starting suit against the Buonarroti to oblige them to return her dowry and to pay Francesco’s debts. Though there had never been any real friendship between Michelangelo and his uncle, he had a strong blood-loyalty. He was grieved to see the next to last of the elder Buonarroti go. He was also worried. His father obviously intended him to fight Cassandra’s lawsuit, hire a notary, see it through the courts… .
The next day he summoned up the courage to return to the Sistine. He found Bramante there, directing carpenters who were hanging a scaffolding from the ceiling by means of forty pipe-poles that had been driven through the cement vault and lashed together with ropes interlocked through the soldiers’ quarters above.
“There’s a scaffolding that will hold you securely for the rest of your life.”
“You’d like to think so, Bramante, but actually it will only be a matter of months.” Bramante stuck in his throat like a half-swallowed fly. The Pope by himself would hardly have thought of inflicting this ceiling on him. He inspected the scaffolding, knit his brows. “Just what do you intend to do with the holes in the ceiling after the poles come out?”
“Fill them.”
“How do we get up to the holes to fill them after the scaffolding is down? Ride on an eagle’s back?”
“… I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Nor of what we are to do with forty ugly cement fills in the middle of my painting after I have finished the job? Let’s discuss it with the pontiff.”
The Pope was dictating breves simultaneously to several secretaries. Michelangelo laid out the situation in a few clear words.
“I understand,” said Julius. He turned a puzzled expression to Bramante. “What did you intend to do with those holes in the ceiling, Bramante?”
“Just leave them, the way we leave holes in the sides of buildings when we pull out the poles that hold up the scaffolding. It can’t be helped.”
“Is that true, Buonarroti?”
“Assuredly not, Holy Father. I will design a scaffold which will never touch the ceiling. Then the painting will remain perfect.”
“I believe you. Take down Bramante’s scaffold and build your own. Chamberlain, you will pay the expenses for Buonarroti’s new scaffold.”
As Michelangelo turned away he saw Bramante biting the corner of his lip.
He ordered the carpenters to take down the scaffold. When all of the timber and rope had been lowered to the floor of the chapel, Mottino, the hunchbacked foreman of the car penters, said:
“You will be using these materials for your own scaffolding?”
“Not the rope. You may have it.”
“But it is valuable. You could sell it for a considerable sum.”
“It is yours.”
Mottino was ecstatic. “This means I will have a dowry for my daughter. Now she can be married! They say in Rome that you are a difficult man, Messer Buonarroti. Now I see it is a lie. May God bless you.”
“That’s precisely what I need, Mottino. God’s blessing. Come back tomorrow.”
That night he tackled the problem inside his own head, which he found to be his best workshop. Since he had never seen such a scaffolding as he had promised the Pope, he would have to invent one. The chapel itself was divided into two parts, separated by Mino da Fiesole’s carved screen: the half for laymen, which he was going to paint first, the larger division, or presbyterium, for cardinals. Then came the altar and the Pope’s throne. On the rear wall was the fresco of the Assumption of the Virgin by his erstwhile enemy Perugino. The walls were thick and strong; they could stand any amount of pressure. If he built with planks that were solidly wedged against them, then the more weight put on his scaffold the more pressure it would apply and the more secure his framework would be. The problem was how to anchor the ends of his planks, since he could not cut niches into the walls. Then he remembered the projecting cornice; this ledge would not be strong enough to carry the weight of the scaffolding and men, but it could give his planks anchorage.
“It might work,” said Piero Rosselli, who frequently had to build his own scaffolding. He directed Mottino in the bolting of the planks and construction of the bridge. Michelangelo and Rosselli tested it, summoned the carpenter crew, one by one. The more weight on the trestle, the stronger it became. They were jubilant. It was a tiny victory, really; yet it provided the impetus to begin the detested chore.
Argiento wrote that he could not leave his brother’s farm until the crops had been harvested. Neither could Granacci assemble a crew of assistants by mail.
“I’ll have to go to Florence and help them finish their commissions. It may take a couple of months, but I promise to bring back everyone you wanted.”
“I’ll do the drawings. When you get back we’ll be ready to start the cartoons.”
Summer clamped down. Miasmic vapors moved in from the marshes. No one could breathe. Half the city became ill with clogged heads and pain in the chest. Rosselli, his only companion during these stifling days, fled to the mountains. Michelangelo climbed the ladder to his trestle at dawn, savagely tormented for want of hammer and chisel in his hands. Instead he spent the airless days drawing scale models of the twelve pendentives where the Apostles would be painted, cutting out paper silhouettes of the lunettes and spandrels, which he would also have to fill with what the Pope had called customary decoration. By midmorning the vault was like a furnace, and he was gasping for breath. He slept as though drugged through the heat of the afternoon, then worked at night in the back garden, evolving designs for the nearly six thousand square feet of sky and stars that had to be replastered and made pretty.
The hot days and weeks passed in lonely suffocation, broken only by the arrival of a former Settignano stonecutter whom his father had found in Florence, Michi by name, who had always wanted to visit Rome. Michi was about fifty, gnarled and pock-marked, sparely spoken, with the chipped, staccato accent of the stonehewer. Michi knew how to cook a few Settignano dishes; before his arrival Michelangelo had gone for days on bread and a thin wine.
In September Granacci returned with a full bottega in tow. Michelangelo was amused by how much the former apprentices had aged: Jacopo was still slim, wiry, with darting black eyes to match the remnants of oily dark hair, and deeply etched laugh wrinkles; Tedesco, sporting a bushy beard several degrees more carroty than his hair, had become thick-set, with a ponderous manner that made him the natural butt for Jacopo’s jokes. Bugiardini, still moonfaced and round-eyed, showed a center patch of baldness that resembled a tonsure. Sebastiano da Sangallo, newcomer of the group, had developed a serious mien since Michelangelo had last seen him, which earned him the nickname of Aristotle. He wore luxuriant oriental mustaches which he grew in honor of his uncle Giuliano. Donnino, the only stranger to Michelangelo, had been brought by Granacci because “he’s a good draftsman, the best of the lot.” He was forty-two, looked like a hawk with a high-bridged thin nose in a long face with negligible slits for eyes and mouth.
That evening, after Granacci had made sure that his mistress, whom he had supported over the summer, was still waiting for him, the new bottega held a party. Granacci ordered in flagons of white Frascati wine and a dozen trays of food from the Trattoria Toscana. After three long pulls on the Frascati flagon, Jacopo told the story of the young man who went each evening to the Baptistery in Florence and prayed aloud for St. John to tell him about his wife’s behavior and his son’s future.
“I hid behind the altar and called out, ‘Your wife’s a bawd, and your son will be hanged!’ Do you know what he replied? ‘You naughty St. John, you always did tell lies. That’s why they cut your head off!’ ”
When the laughter subsided, Bugiardini insisted on drawing Michelangelo’s face. When he had finished, Michelangelo exclaimed, “Bugiardini, you still have one of my eyes in my temple!” Next they played the drawing game on Donnino, letting him win so that he would have to buy the next day’s dinner.
Michelangelo bought a second large bed in Trastevere. He, Bugiardini and Sangallo slept in the room off the workshop, while Jacopo, Tedesco and Donnino slept in the room down the hall. Bugiardini and Sangallo went out to buy sawhorses and planks, set up a worktable in the center of the room long enough for all six of them. At ten o’clock Granacci arrived. Jacopo cried, “Careful, everybody, don’t let Granacci pick up anything heavier than charcoal, or he’ll collapse in a heap.”
Officially baptized by this buffoonery, the studio set to work in earnest. Michelangelo laid out on the table before them the scale drawings of the ceiling. The large pendentives at either end of the chapel he reserved for St. Peter and St. Paul; in the five smaller pendentives on one side would be Matthew, John and Andrew, Bartholomew and James the Great, on the opposite wall James the Less, Judas called Thaddaeus, Philip, Simon and Thomas. He sketched one complete Apostle, sitting on a high-backed throne, pilasters on either side; above were winged caryatids on C-shaped volutes, with medallions in square fields and scroll-like orna ments.
By the first week in October the house had fallen into chaos, for no one thought to make a bed, wash a dish or sweep a floor. Argiento came in from Ferrara, was so delighted to find that he was to have six companions in the house that he washed and scrubbed and polished for days, in addition to cooking the meals, before he got around to being unhappy about Michelangelo’s commission.
“I want to work stone. Be a scultore.”
“So do I, Argiento. And so we shall, if only you’ll be patient and help me get that ceiling splashed with paint.”
To each of his six assistants he assigned a division of the vault for decoration: rosettes, cassettoni, circles and rectangles, trees and flowers with spreading foliage, wavelike movements of undulating lines, spirals. Michi, he discovered, was adept at grinding colors. He himself would do the final cartoons for most of the Apostles, but Granacci could paint a couple of them, and perhaps Donnino and Sangallo could each do one. He had already spent five months getting to this day, but now that he had them all together and started, he felt certain he could cover the whole ceiling in seven months. That would be another year out of his life. A total of four since he had first come to Rome to confer with Pope Julius. He would finish by May, and then either go to work on the marble figures for the tomb or return to the Hercules block which Gonfaloniere Soderini had brought to Florence for him.
