Michelangelo
was born in Florence in 1475. As a boy of thirteen he was apprenticed to
the workshop of the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449—1494). There his
talent was discovered and furthered by Lorenzo de' Medici, a great lover
and patron of the arts. As a young man Michelangelo was allowed to live
in the Medici palace as a guest, where he could study the ancient
statues in the garden and was instructed by the ruler, Lorenzo, himself.
However, by the time he reached the age of eighteen, that was not enough
for
Michelangelo
Buonarroti. How was a sculptor to represent a human body
in motion without knowing how the muscles functioned under the skin? He
wished to study anatomy, but he needed corpses to do so. He knew he
would not be admitted into a charnel house, as it went against his
contemporaries' sense of propriety and moral principles. The popular
American novelist Irving Stone — whose book about
Michelangelo,
The Agony and the Ecstasy
(1961), was a bestseller — allowed chance to drop a key into his hero's
hands: the key to the hospital of Santo Spirito. Eagerly, yet terrified
of being caught, he set to work at night. By the flickering light of a
candle, he carefully dissected corpses to study the way muscles were
formed and how they worked, how the spinal column was arranged and where
the organs were located. Without empirical observation and active study,
no matter how he may have gone about it,
Michelangelo
would never have become the model that he has been for subsequent
generations of artists. Nor would he have been revered in his own
lifetime as a sculptor, a painter, a writer of profoundly moving sonnets
and a thinker in the Platonic mould. To him the idea, the conception of
a work of art — and this was especially true of sculpture — was latent
in the material, waiting to be recognised by the artist and wrested from
it in the creative process.
Michelangelo's
Creation of Adam is surely one of the most sublime
portrayals of man ever achieved. On 10 May 1508 Michelangelo began to
work on this fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican.
Initially he had misgivings about accepting the commission because he
viewed himself primarily as a sculptor. He suffered agonies while
painting the Sistine ceiling, as his contemporary, Giorgio Vasari,
sympathetically relates: "From keeping his head bent back for months on
end to paint the vaulted ceiling, he ruined his eyes so that he was no
longer able to read even a letter and could not look at any object
without holding it up above his head." But that was not all.
Michelangelo, then thirty-five years old, had to placate his
sixty-seven-year-old patron, Pope Julius II, who "was of an impatient,
choleric temperament and could not wait until the work was finished". By
31 October 1512, Julius II was finally able to marvel at the completed
fresco, with its over 300 figures.
