NAVIGATION
ALL ARTISTS
In
Rome (1496-1501) the rapidly developing Michelangelo produced monumental
marble statues: the Bacchus (Florence, Museo Nazionale), inspired by the
antique, the subtle unbalance and trancelike appearance of which tactfully
suggest a state of release through wine, as in the mystic rites of ancient
Dionysiac cults; and the beautiful Pieta, or Madonna with the Dead Christ
(Rome, St. Peter's), two interlocking curved figures composed with all
the clarity and logic of the classic art of the High Renaissance, and
with its characteristic idealism, its amplitude of forms, and its harmonious
calm; but Michelangelo's deep melancholy repudiates the predominant optimism
of the period. This classic phase of Michelangelo's art is continued in
the marble Madonna of Bruges, Belgium (c. 1501; except for two models,
all of his extant sculpture is in marble), and in three circular compositions
in which, as a typical artist of the High Renaissance, he eloquently orders
equilibrated masses within a round frame: two Madonna reliefs (c. 1504-1506;
Museo Nazionale and London, Royal Academy) and the Doni Madonna (c. 1504;
Florence, Uffizi), his only painting that has survived except for his
frescoes.
This classic phase is culminated in the colossal David, a splendid nude figure 14 feet high (1501 - 1504; Florence, Accademia), which established Michelangelo in the opinion of his contemporaries as the greatest artist who had ever lived. In it he provided the modern Occident with a new standard of physical beauty. The familiar "at ease" pose of antique sculpture, with weight primarily on one leg and with the whole figure therefore pleasingly relaxed yet securely balanced, produces, as in ancient statuary, a composition in which a single view, the front, is wholly predominant. But now Michelangelo begins to complicate the simple clarity of classic art, since the observer must then move to a compositionally very secondary view in order to read the meaning of the work, the furious defiance that flames forth from the heroic face. The dramatic contrast of posture suggesting external calm and physiognomy suggesting internal turmoil, developed from Donatello, is also at odds with the principles of classic art.
Michelangelo's next statue, the unfinished St. Matthew (1506; Accademia), constitutes a violent rejection of classic art. The pose that had traditionally expressed balanced repose, as still in the David, is now wrenched into the violent torsion called contrapposto, which expresses the opposite extreme, a painful and frustrating tension. Now Michelangelesque tragedy has its protagonist.
In Michelangelo's last sculptures the now deeply devout old artist turned again to the theme of the Pieta. During the very years (c. 1550 - 1555) when Michelangelo was working on the four-figure group planned for his own modest tomb (but placed in the cathedral of Florence), Michelangelo had written a beautiful sonnet ending with the lines, "Neither painting nor sculpture can now quiet the soul turned to that Divine Love which spread arms out wide to take us, on the Cross," a poetic image which he translated into a series of moving drawings of the Crucifixion (especially the example in the British Museum). The terrible despair, the torturing ambivalences, seem at last to have been dispelled by the power of this Divine Love; and in the same spirit, Michelangelo has carved his selfportrait in the figure of Nicodemus, who tenderly lowers the broken body of Christ into the Madonna's embrace. In the two-figure Rondanini Pieta (Milan, Castello), probably begun soon after the group in Florence, the theme is the tender intimacy of Mother and Son, expressed in a soaringly vertical composition of frailer forms; but shortly before his death at almost 90, he began to revise it radically, making them very much frailer still-wraithlike forms that recall the art of the Middle Ages. And though even today the heroic physical ideal of the Occident has remained the one formulated by Michelangelo, the old man himself had at last renounced it and "turned to that Divine Love."