Michelangelo Buonarroti

He is one of the greatest artists of all time, a man whose name has become synonymous with the word "masterpiece": Michelangelo Buonarroti.

As an artist he was unmatched, the creator of works of sublime beauty that express the full breadth of the human condition. Yet in a world where art flourished only with patronage, Michelangelo was caught between the conflicting powers and whims of the Medici family in Florence, and the Papacy in Rome. Unlike many artists of his time, his genius was recognized.

The idea of commissioning an enormous fresco, the largest ever painted in that century, depicting the Last Judgment, was probably suggested to Clement VII by the traumatic events that were undermining the unity of Christians at the time. After the pope's death, on September 25, 1534, and only two days after Michelangelo's arrival in Rome, his successor, Paul III Farnese confirmed the commission to Michelangelo, and in April 1535 scaffolding was put up in front of the altar wall.

All that had happened in the church in the years that preceded the Judgment, including the Reformation and the Sack of Rome, had a direct influence on the work's conception: painted on the altar wall, the Last Judgment was to represent humanity face to face with salvation.

The Scandal
Even before its official unveiling, the Judgment became the target of violent criticisms of a moral character. Vasari relates that Biagio da Cesena, the Vatican's master of Ceremonies, said that "it was mostly disgraceful that in so sacred a place there should have been depicted all those nude figures, exposing themselves so shamefully, and that it was no work for a papal chapel but rather for the public baths and taverns."

Michelangelo was not slow to take his revenge: the poor Biagio was portrayed in hell, in the figure of Minos, "shown with a great serpent curled around his legs, among a heap of devils."

Others accused the painter of heresy. These included Pietro Aretino, who, in a famous letter, even called for the fresco's destruction, the Dominican preacher Ambrogio Politi called Caterino, and Giovanni Andrea Gilio, who drew up a long statement of charges against Michelangelo in his Dialoghi.

But the nudity of the figures worried neither Paul III nor his successor Julius III. It was not until January 1564, and therefore about a month before Michelangelo's death, that the assembly of the Council of Trent took the decision to "amend" the fresco.

The Last Judgment, which Michelangelo finished in 1541 was the largest fresco of the Renaissance, it depicts Judgment Day. Christ, with a clap of thunder, puts into motion the inevitable separation, with the saved ascending on the left side of the painting and the damned descending on the right into a Dantesque hell. As was his custom, Michelangelo portrayed all the figures nude, but prudish draperies were added by another artist (who was dubbed the "breeches-maker") a decade later, as the cultural climate became more conservative. Michelangelo painted his own image in the flayed skin of St. Bartholomew. Although he was also given another painting commission, the decoration of the Pauline Chapel in the 1540s, his main energies were directed toward architecture during this phase of his life.

Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna
In 1538, three years before finishing the Last Judgment, Michelangelo had met Vittoria Colonna, a poetess and highly cultivated woman who was one of the most influential figures in the Viterbo Circle. The members of the Circle called for certain reforms to be made in the church, in the conviction that it was Divine Grace that should play the major role in Christian life, rather than the works of man.

Between Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna (he aged sixty-one, she forty-six) a deep friendship developed, one might almost say an absolutely pure love, inspired by poetry and faith, out of which were to emerge some of Michelangelo's finest lyric poems, overflowing with admiration and devotion. The most intense period of their relationship, described in the Dialogues of Francisco de Hollanda, lasted from 1544 until Colonna's death in 1547: years filled with long conversations on how faith should be understood and lived, with passionate exchanges of letters, and with frequent visits to the church of San Silvestro al Quirinale to listen to commentaries on the sacred texts. Art, too, cemented their communion: Michelangelo gave her three drawings (a Crucifixion sent to her in 1536, a Deposition of Christ, and a Mary Magdalen) and together they planned the construction of a monastery on the slopes of the Quirinal.

Poems for Vittoria Colonna
The sonnets and madrigals that Michelangelo wrote for Vittoria Colonna between 1538 and 1547 are characterized by a tranquil Platonism, that is by the attainment of bliss through admiration of a superior woman.

Along with lyric poems of a spiritual and mystical character, Michelangelo composed other poems that were more passionate and more in keeping with the style of the time, inspired by a "cruel and beautiful" woman, seen in these verses as the object of an unattainable desire.

Michelangelo's Solitude
Michelangelo's "unsociableness" has been seen as the typical attitude of what was known in the Renaissance as the vir melanchonicus, or the absorbed and solitary contemplator, wholly wrapped up in his art, for whom involvement in creative activity was transformed into suffering: "I am here in great distress and with great physical strain, and have no friends of any kind, nor do I want them; and I do not have enough time to eat as much as I need; my joy and my sorrow/my repose are these discomforts."

Michelangelo was perhaps one of the artists who paid the greatest price in terms of suffering for the divine gift of his art: "I am a poor man and of little worth, who is laboring in that art that God has given me in order to extend my life as long as possible" (January 29th, 1542).

Michelangelo Buonarroti