Stories of Art: Michelangelo - The Birth of a Genius - Part 1

Welcome to Stories of Art. I'm James Fox. And I'm Alastair Sook. Not long after the beginning of time, God soars through a primeval sky. Wind rippling through his white beard, he descends towards a human figure slumped lifelessly on a patch of grass. Slowly, but certainly, the Lord outstretches his right hand, and rousing from his slumber, the human reaches out to touch it. Their hands get closer, closer still, their fingers on the cusp of touching, the spark of life about to pass from one to the other. Now that, Alastair, is my description of the creation of Adam, the most famous image on the Sistine Chapel ceiling and one of the defining images of Western culture. It was painted in Rome just over 500 years ago at the peak of the High Renaissance by the Florentine artist Michelangelo. And he is the subject of this, our latest and so far, longest series. But before we start, I just need to let listeners in on a little bit of a secret. I have been trying to do Michelangelo from the very beginning, and the guy sitting on the other side of the table has been doing his best to wriggle out of it. I know, I know. That wriggle is a bit harsh, but no, you're right, James. This is the big one, and I can attest you have indeed been suggesting this since the very start, when we were discussing this last year. And I think I should confess, I did feel... Ever so slightly daunted, because, you know, he is so important. He's the capstone, you know, the chief creator of the high renaissance. He's the big dog. He's the big dog. And, I mean, even in his lifetime, right, he's known as Il Divino, the divine one. I had a little look, just because I think we're doing something so classic. I went back to one of the classics, Civilization by Kenneth Clark. Opened this brilliant chapter, I think, what's it called? The Artist as Hero, the Heroic Artist, something like that. Talks about Michelangelo in that. And he refers to his famous marble David and the head containing this spiritual force that the ancient world never knew. And we must reckon the emergence of Michelangelo as one of... The great events in the history of Western man. Wow. I think that's an understatement, actually. No, I do think, you know, I'm going to put it out there. I think one of the reasons I've been desperate to do him is I think he is the greatest artist in history, at least Western history. I think there is no comparison. And I think for multiple reasons. I mean, first of all, the originality of his work, the ambition of his work, as we shall see over the subsequent episodes, there's nothing to compare. Mm-hmm. Second. He excels, unlike many artists, across many disciplines. Great sculptor, great painter, great architect, great draftsman. Pretty good poet, as we may see later on in the series. Is he? Interesting. He's a good poet as well. Longevity. I mean, Michelangelo makes his first good works in the 1490s. He makes his last great works on the final days of his life in the 1560s. So his career, Alistair, spans 70 years, when the life expectancy of an Italian is 35 years. And the final thing I think makes him such a great artist is... He's got X-factor, you know, the greatest of his works. If you stand at the base of David and you gaze up at the Sistine Chapel ceiling, it's goosebump territory. I think, what's the word that's often associated with him? Terribilità. Yes. Which is sort of English, you might say awesomeness. Yes. That sounds a bit rubbish, but this kind of force of grandeur, this awesome power. And I think maybe that's that sense of charisma. Can I, just for the sake of, we're embarking on a big journey here. We are. And perhaps in the course of it, I don't want to reveal anything, but maybe my views may change. But just because I think it might be interesting to play devil's advocate a little bit at the start. I have been trying to work out why I've been slightly, not ambivalent about doing him, but just working out why I was having that response. And perhaps as an art critic, I have an innate contrarian streak. And one of the things that I struggle with with Michelangelo is when you read the sources, They are so gushing. They're fawning. They're just so fawning and uncritical that quite quickly you can get a little bit like, oh, come on, he can't be that good. And it's interesting you talk about his range because you could argue the converse. You could say that in some ways he's a surprisingly limited artist because he's obsessed. Almost exclusively with the expressive power of the heroic male nude, and some people, even his contemporaries, had a problem with that. I think there's one quite hostile contemporary who said something along the lines of, once you've seen one Michelangelo, you've seen them all, which of course is a grotesque slur, but I wondered if there's something there. I also wonder about his personality. He and his work both have the charisma, but in lots of ways, he could be just a complete Oh, he was an arsehole. Not a nice, not a sympathetic character, an amazing character, a fascinating story. But yes, I'm glad that you put it like that. And last point for me, I'm thinking about why, just this is slightly trying to look back and justify why I had that response, but I wonder too whether his work is so embedded with the Christian church. He's working for the popes, it's in the Vatican. And we have grown up in an age which, okay, things may be changing now, but it's not quite the godless age, but certainly you've seen the decline of Christianity. And I wonder whether on some level, for people like our generation, who belong to our generation, we have a different response to say those of Kenneth Clarke's generation, partly because of that shift? I don't know. Yeah, that's really interesting. Well, I mean, he's remarkable in so many ways. And one of the things you say, yeah, we do know a great deal about him. And he's one of the first artists, in fact, he's the first artist we know a great deal about in terms of their life. Because as you suggest with these fawning accounts, there was not just one official biography effectively in his lifetime, but two biographies written in his lifetime by people who met him. And we also have hundreds of letters and poems written by him. So we have a really clear sense of the personality for the first time in Western art. I actually love some of the letters. Yes, they're great. I mean, ahead of this, he has a nephew. I mean, we'll come on to this, I'm sure, but just very briefly. This long-suffering nephew, Leonardo, who seems to bear the brunt of his uncle's, what, anger, irritation. He's really quite brutal to him, often, in his letters. Yeah, Michelangelo, as I will try to persuade you throughout the course of the next few episodes, I think he is an astonishing artist, but he is also... A really annoying guy. I mean, he's money obsessed, he's morose, he's narcissistic, he's self-obsessed, he falls out with everyone. He's not a pleasant man. But, you know, bad men can be great artists. This is true. And actually, it's interesting that the sources, you're talking about the two principal biographies. So it's Condivi, right? Ascanio Condivi and Giorgio Vasari. Vasari writes the first, and Michelangelo wasn't entirely happy with it. So then he sort of commissions Condivi to do the... Authorised official biography. And that in itself is quite remarkable. For an artist, relatively lowly status in the 1500s, that an artist would have an official biography written of them. So this official one from Condivi is, I think, in the early 1550s, so quite late in his life. I looked up Condivi because he was an artist himself. I think... In one of the art dictionaries I consulted, he was dispatched in the first line as, his work is unanimously considered mediocre, which is really not how you want to be remembered. So he's principally remembered for this fawning biography of Michelangelo, which then Vasari draws upon but also reacts against when he releases his later second edition of his Lives of the Artists, which is the foundation of Western art history, really. Yes, and we will draw on all of these sources and the letters. some extent the poems as well, to build this picture. And, you know, in my view, Alastair, Michelangelo is not just the greatest artist in Western history. His life story is astonishing. It really is astonishing. It's full of twists and turns. It's full of feuds and betrayals, triumphs and disasters. And it's people with this thrilling cast of characters in a very tumultuous period of history. So this, then, is the first part in our four-part series on the life and work of Michelangelo. Our story begins on the 6th of March, 1475, in a tiny Tuscan village called Caprese, which I'm sad to say, and I have done my research, has nothing to do with the salad. Oh, I was hoping this could be a great... That's so disappointing. I know, I was really hoping that could be... I thought that was going to be the newsworthy revelation of the podcast. Of course. Nothing to do with the salad. So, a few hours before dawn, or a few hours after dusk, we don't know exactly when... A boy called Michelangelo, that's how it was spelled and pronounced at the time, we called him Michelangelo, was born. His family aren't from that village, they're Florentines, and Michelangelo's father, Ludovico, who we'll hear a bit from over the subsequent episodes, he's from quite a noble family, but they've got no money whatsoever. And he's a really hapless individual, Michelangelo's father, he's a really useless man. But Ludovico earns his living by being a relatively lowly travelling magistrate, a podestà, so he goes from village to village, resolving disputes just for a short period of time. And a few weeks after Michelangelo's born, only three weeks after he's born, the family, the job comes to an end, and the family, so it's the father, the mother, Michelangelo's older brother, about whom we know nothing. He goes into the clergy, and the three-week-old Michelangelo get back onto a horse, and they travel back over the hills from Caprese to their home village of Settignano, which is just outside of Florence. I don't know if you've ever been to Settignano. I haven't, actually, no. I lost my sunglasses in Settignano. I was like, okay. It's a beautiful little village right outside of Florence. I was filming a sequence for the BBC in the cemetery, lovely cemetery there, took my sunglasses off, put them on the side of the wall, and, of course, never saw them again. But in Settignano, that is where the ancestral home of the Buonarroti family, which is Michelangelo's surname, if you like, that's where the ancestral home is. And it's an incredible house. Can I ask about this lineage? Because one thing that has struck me is that Michelangelo, I don't know about the dad, but... He's obsessed with his background, so one of the charges you could level against him is that he's a terrible snob. And in a lot of the sources, seemingly, he cites this, I mean you've referred already to it, did you use the word noble, this sort of noble lineage, his ancestors? He links his family clan back to the Counts of Canossa, is that right? To a big, important Italian, powerful, noble family from what, the 10th, 11th century? Very little evidence for this whatsoever. So what's going on? Is he being told that when he's a young boy? He's told that by his father. So his father, there had been some money a few generations back. The Buonarroti family had been relatively wealthy bankers and merchants in Florence. The money had been lost in the generation or so before Michelangelo's father was born. And so obviously when your family has declined in that way, You cannot understand the motives of clinging on to a kind of illustrious past. And so Michelangelo's father is constantly going on about, you know, what they're owed, how fantastic things were in the past. And Michelangelo absorbs this, and it's actually a great motivating force for him in his life. His greatness, his desire to be great, is partly an attempt to rehabilitate the family name. And he does receive some education, right? I mean, he is learning a bit of Latin. Yeah, well, we'll come to that. We've got a bit more backstory to do. So they return to the ancestral home when he's still an infant. The house is fantastic. I mean, if you're, for listeners, if you can just imagine that. The dream Tuscan Airbnb. This is the Buonarroti house. So they have a great house, but no money. It's a stone house. It's got a tower. It's got a lodger. It's surrounded by olive groves and rolling hills. Did I send you the link? No, you did not. You've already booked for the summer, clearly. The house still exists. And it was sold a few years ago for 8.8 million euros. Wow. So it's a... It's a beautiful property. And shortly after arriving back in the village, Michelangelo, like many boys of his status, if you like, is sent to a wet nurse. And I think this is the first really decisive moment in his artistic career. Yes. Because Settignano at this time... It's full of stone quarries. So it sits on this very large deposit of sandstone. And Florence, which is only a couple of miles away, is enjoying a building boom. You know, it's very wealthy at the time, Florence. We'll say more about this later. So cathedrals, palazzi, churches are going up and lots of the stone is coming from the Michelangelo's village. And this is really crucial. Michelangelo's wet nurse is the daughter and the wife of stonemasons. Yes. And he talks about this, doesn't he? He does talk about this. And in fact, he spends much of his childhood, early childhood, playing in the quarries, gallivanting around the stone, you know, the stones, playing with the stone masons, using chisels and mallets. I mean, it's an evocative phrase. I think it's in Vasari where he sort of says that Michelangelo sucked in the chisels and mallet of his trade with the milk of his wet nurse. Yeah. And I think it's meaningful. I think those formative experiences are him playing in quarries, working with stone. And I think, I'm completely guessing here, but I think if you had asked... A five-year-old Michelangelo, what do you want to do when you grow up? He wouldn't have said astronaut. He wouldn't have said professional footballer. He would have probably said stonemason. Well, it's also interesting because I think there is still considerable mystery about where he actually learns to carve stone. So if he's there from the very beginning, kind of imbibing it, that's interesting as context. It also makes me wonder, though, about his relationship with his mum. Who we don't know a tremendous amount about, I don't think. And I know there was a school, post-Freud, mid-20th century, sort of psychoanalytical take on Michelangelo, where people were like, well, hang on. I mean, you said, which I'm sure is correct, that it was fairly common for people of this sort of stature station to have a wet nurse, maybe for a period at this point. But is there some sort of rejection, if you like, by the mother, which may account for... later aspects of his work. For example, the fact that he barely depicts women. He does, of course, depict women, but the way he does does not feel tremendously engaged emotionally on the part of the artist, right? That's possible. I mean, his mother, we know very little about her, as you say. She suffered terrible health. She was bedbound for much of his early childhood. She died when he was six. So he really didn't have a particularly close relationship with her. Um, but. But I think it is a really important moment in his life. As we will see later in this series, he's never happier than when he's in quarries. That's what he really loves. But, you know, he probably wanted to be a stonemason, but his father is a terrible snob. We've already alluded to that. And when Michelangelo is eight, his mother, of course, is dead by this stage, he gets sent to a pretty exclusive grammar school in Florence. Right. He is a terrible student. I mean, very disobedient, very rude, not interested in his classes, playing truant. He's constantly being beaten by his master, by his father. The only thing he becomes interested in at this point is art. Yes. So he's actually not going to school, but going around Florence and looking at the art. And you think, the 1480s, I mean, the art that has been made in the previous 50 years in Florence is just astonishing. So Michelangelo, what could he have seen? He could have seen Masaccio's frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel. Well, he does become obsessed with them. He becomes obsessed. He sort of emulates them in some ways. He could have seen the Fra Angelico frescoes in San Marco, one of my favourite art books in history. He would have seen the sculptures of Donatello. Donatello, of course, very influential for him later on in his life. And so he's going around and he's making these drawings. I mean, just really briefly on this, because the other interesting thing about the wet nurse story is that there's a sort of... trope with Michelangelo, and you feel that he's putting this about, where it's almost as if he wants you to think he's influenced by nobody, that he's sort of untutored, this kind of almost this force of nature, this child of the quarries, if you like, and that that's where he's getting all of his stuff from. And he downplays, and his supporters in the biographies very much downplay, any influence on him from some of those artists that you've mentioned. I mean, is that again How do you sort of interpret that? Is that a sign of, given that he's sort of... Massive ego is what it's a sign of. But it's quite brittle. That's the thing that surprised me. He is the towering genius of Western art, and yet he seems to be quite defensive. Massive chip on his shoulder. He's very insecure. But I mean, there's also some truth in it, in that when you actually pick apart the biography, what you discover is that actually he didn't get much training. We will see as this first part of our episode moves on. He didn't get an enormous amount of training in either painting or sculpture, so it is a little bit of a mystery how he becomes so unbelievably good. So he's at school in the mid-1480s. And his dad is not really encouraging his artistic interest. No. So by this stage, Michelangelo has decided, I want to become an artist. And there are repeated arguments between him and his father. So Michelangelo keeps saying, I want to become a painter, I want to become an artist. His father's like, absolutely not. Be a lawyer, be a doctor. Well, exactly, because... The Buonarroti family have no money, and he is counting on his son to be able, because his other son has gone into the church, he's not earning any money, he's counting on, he's completely lazy and useless himself, the father, so he's counting on Michelangelo to be the breadwinner for the family. So he's, yeah, saying, you know, be a merchant, be a banker, be great like our ancestors. But Michelangelo doesn't want to do it, there are years of arguments, and eventually Michelangelo, who is a very determined individual, as we shall see. Wins the argument, and he becomes an artist. He takes up in 1488, when he's 13 years old. He becomes an apprentice to one of the great workshops, the great painting workshops in Florence, which is run by the Ghirlandaio brothers. Yes. So Domenico is one of them. Yeah, Domenico Ghirlandaio leads the workshop. And they're great. They're famous for their frescoes. They are very, very well respected. It's a really professionally run workshop. But two quite noteworthy things, Alistair, about this apprenticeship. First of all... As I say, Michelangelo is 13 when he takes it up. That might seem young to us. It's actually quite old at the time. So most apprentices were starting at age 10, age 11. So what does this suggest? That perhaps that tussle with the dad... It went on for a while. Yeah, I think that is what it reveals. And the second meaningful fact about this apprenticeship is that Michelangelo gets paid, or more accurately, his father probably gets paid to do the apprenticeship. Normally, you would pay to be an apprentice. So he's already good enough. To be of service to the workshop, is that the supposition? That's my, that's my theory, is that, you know, these drawings that Michelangelo was making when he should have been at school. He shows these drawings to the Ghirlandaio brothers and they go, bloody hell, these are good. I mean, it's interesting you say that these are good, because my memory of this is that, suppose, I mean, again, in the fawning biographies, Domenico Ghirlandaio does not come off all that well, right? I mean, he's called something like an envious little man, I think is that Condivi, and there is this idea that he's seeing these drawings and he's tremendously jealous. And the other thing I find quite interesting about the workshop Okay, it's a bustling enterprising place. I think it's also a transitional moment where artists, their status in society is changing. And for me anyway, that's one of the really big motifs of the wider Michelangelo story. And I think you start to see it there, and what's about to happen next will really amp that up, if you like. But also, this workshop specialises ultimately in painting. And although Michelangelo paints, He never really saw that as his primary occupation. So again, there's this interesting backstory moment where he is almost rejecting the kind of obvious training that everyone knows he has had to say, yeah, yeah, I'm a sculptor. Yes. Yeah, he doesn't like painting. He really resents it, as we shall see later on. And indeed, this apprenticeship at the painting workshop does not last very long, only a year. Within a year, so by the age of 14, He leaves the Ghirlandaio workshop. Now, this is quite an interesting and complex development, and it introduces, for the first time in this series, a family that will play a very major role in this series, which are the Medici family. Yes. Now, the Medici family are an extremely wealthy family of bankers and merchants. They kept their money, unlike the Buonarroti. They had dominated Florence's economy, what, for a century or so? And they had, over time, acquired a great deal of political power to such an extent that they became Effectively, the rulers of Florence. So de facto rulers here. De facto rulers of Florence. They're also incredible art patrons. Now, okay, I'm going to challenge you here, James. Because the one who's in charge at this moment is Lorenzo. I love Lorenzo. Il Magnifico. Lorenzo the Magnificent. And he's the Lord of Florence. And you are entirely right, of course, to say that he has his reputation for being an unbelievably gifted and important person. Patriot. But is that maybe Medici myth-making at work? Because we know that he was an astonishing collector of antiquities and he's himself a poet and has this great interest in the ancient world and he surrounds himself with humanist scholars, people who are part of that renaissance moment, this great intellectual reawakening in Italy at this moment. But he doesn't have the means, quite, of the great princes. He doesn't have the means, as we'll see later, of the papacy in order to create these extraordinary things. So I just wonder whether – I mean, challenge is maybe too strong – but is there a sense, perhaps, that – and bear in mind, Vasari, later on, writing his biographies of Michelangelo, is working for a later Medici ruler of Florence – is there a sense that it's a little bit Overhyped their importance as patrons. Well, Lorenzo isn't commissioning quite as much as his predecessors, as earlier Medici, slightly earlier in the 15th century. And actually, they are commissioning an enormous amount to such an extent that I think if you take away the Medici family, there's a great deal of the Florentine Renaissance that just... doesn't get made. It doesn't happen. Their motives are complex. So, you know, if you're a moneylender in Italy, within religious beliefs at the time, you are going, well, you're certainly not going to heaven. You could be going to purgatory or hell. And one of the ways of buying yourself out of purgatory or hell, if you're a moneylender or a banker, is to do lots of good works and commission lots of lovely paintings and extend churches and things like that. And that's why they did it. That's why, you know, Giotto's Arena Chapel By a moneylender. And you see the patron often. You see him in the works a lot. Will this be enough to get me out of eternal damnation? Thank But Lorenzo the Magnificent is a very... cultivated, intellectual person, and he is creating in his palace in Florence a kind you of academy. There are, as you say, poets, very antiquarians, philosophers, and humanists, and sculptors, and artists, and the theory is that one day Lorenzo the Magnificent is much. at the Ghirlandaia workshop, and he says, do you have any talented, young talented artists I could take on. And the Ghirlandaia is saying, actually we've got two fantastic, I can't remember the name of the other one, but they say one of them is Michelangelo. And so Michelangelo is swept out of the workshop. And plonked into Lorenzo's court. So, I mean, this is so important for the development of Michelangelo. Pivotal. And I, there's this, I see it as a slightly shadowy concept, sort of idyllic, really tantalising. But there's this so-called, as part of the Academy, this kind of the garden that Lorenzo creates. And it's an interesting part of the story to me, in part because it's overseen by this older artist. A sculptor called Bertoldo, who had trained in Donatello's workshop, I believe even inherited Donatello's workshop, and yet... This is a slight aside, but I feel a bit sorry for this guy, because he gets completely cut out of all the biographies. He doesn't have his own life in Vasari's Lives of the Artists, even though he's mentioned several times. And he, we seem to, what we sense, is that he's charged by Lorenzo with overlooking his collection of antiquities and other works of art, some of which would have been arranged in this beautiful idyllic, these gardens by, is it San Marco? And it feels like this kind of wonderful. Elysian university realm where you arrive and, you know, it's not kind of people being drinking loads down the local student kind of nightclub and being sick around the back of some antiquity. It seems perfect. Is it too good to be true? Did it exist, this place? It did exist. And we will discover in a few minutes that it did prove too good to be true. But for a while, it's fantastic. And Michelangelo goes in there at the age of 14 and he is trained by Bertoldo. He's seeing all these antiquities. I think this is a really important moment in his artistic education. It's the end of his painting education. It's now moving to sculpture, as we see. We'll see. And there are lovely stories, many of them probably exaggerated, that emerge from this particular moment. The most famous one is the faun. The good old faun. I love the faun story. Do you want to tell this or shall I? Well, I mean, I'm happy to jump in here. I mean, you can correct me if I get this wrong. So the idea is, here he is in these gardens and... 14 years old. 14 years old. And he sees an ancient head of a faun, correct? Which is a half goat, half man. Half goat, half man. Something like that. A mythological creature. Yes. And probably with sort of animalistic, bestial spirits. And, you know, that's what it's symbolising in a way. And he decides he's going to... Copy it. He's going to make an imitation head of a faun. And he starts carving a lump of marble, I assume. And he creates his own contemporary version of an antique, which is this brilliantly done head of a faun. And the next part of the story is that... Dear old Magnifico, Lorenzo himself, comes into his academy, he's walking through the gardens, and he sees this. And he can see it's been created by a child, and that it's unbelievably precocious as a work of art. And he's impressed, and presumably also feeling quite delighted and gratified that he's got some real talent in his academy. And he goes over and he chats to him. He starts to tease him because he says, hang on, this is the crucial detail. Sorry, James, James, I missed this. The crucial detail is that in the copy. Michelangelo supposedly improves on the antique by opening the mouth of the faun. So you can see inside, you can see his tongue, you can see the faun's teeth. And Lorenzo's looking at this, chuckling away, and says, but hang on, didn't you know that old men, they lose their teeth? They don't have all of their teeth. And you've given this faun this kind of immaculate set of dentures, well, teeth, faun's teeth. And Michelangelo, who's nothing if not proud, This criticism seems to stay with him, and as soon as Lorenzo scarpers, he's like, I've got to sort this out. And he gets his chisel, he gets his mallet, and he supposedly knocks out one of the teeth and drills into the gum, so it looks as though there's suddenly this socket and ages the fawn. And next time Lorenzo's in town, in the garden, he comes by, he shows him this head of the faun, or Lorenzo sees it. And my understanding anyway, reading Vasari, is that this is the moment that Lorenzo actually goes, you need to be in my household. Yes. You are so impressive as an artist. You have so much promise and talent. Actually come and live with me in my palace in Florence. And that seems to be totally game-changing. Absolutely. Can you imagine this? You know, as a 14, 15-year-old boy, you know, from a relatively poor background, frankly, come from nowhere, an apprentice sweeping the floors a year earlier in a workshop, and now he is living in Lorenzo the Magnificent's palace. He is taken under his wing. He's behaving like one of his sons. He's sitting by his side at the dining table. It's an unbelievable transformation. The sons, one of them becomes a pope. These are the people he's eating with. I just wonder whether we've already established the strain of snobbery, because I think you can see this as an unbelievable positive, in that he's suddenly at this court in this world of scholarship, intellectual, crackling life, and it's igniting his interest in antiquity. But the negative might be that he's perhaps sitting there, sitting with these future popes and illustrious rulers of Italy and thinking, oh, my God, I'm not quite on the same status and level. And is this the moment where really that sort of obsession with, oh, but I am the offspring of the Counts of Corsa, you know, maybe kicks in? I don't know. Maybe. And, you know, the deal that Michelangelo gets off the back of this. It extends even to his ne'er-do-well father. So, Lodovico gets offered a job by Lorenzo in the customs office. Oh, right. So, even he gets some money. So, you can imagine Michelangelo, his father, saying, we did it, Mikey, we're in the big time now. So, Michelangelo, really, you know, massive turning point for him. He's in an absolutely fantastic position. But, as I alluded to earlier, this does prove too good to be true. It doesn't last very long, because in 1492, Michelangelo is 17 years old. Lorenzo the Magnificent, who had been suffering from gout and poor health, he dies relatively young. And I think Bertoldo, the old sculptor who Must have been an influence on Michelangelo, even though that's totally downplayed. He's just died as well. Lorenzo is really sad about that. So suddenly these two surrogate father figures, I guess, have disappeared from his life. All changes. And the person who succeeds Lorenzo the Magnificent as the head of the Medici family, and as we say, the de facto ruler of Florence, is his son, Piero de Medici, who is not quite as magnifico as his father. I find him amusing. I find him amusing because he He, too, is a patron of Michelangelo. But the thing that he commissions from Michelangelo is not a... Well, it is a sculpture. It is a sculpture. But it's not a solid sculpture. There's a snowstorm in Florence in winter at this moment, in the 1490s, when Piero is now in charge. And disastrous Piero, who's about to... Well, basically run out of town. He decides that he wants someone to build him a little snowman, or maybe a big snowman. I think it's probably quite big, actually. Quite a big snowman. And he knows exactly who should do it. And the person he has in mind is Michelangelo. So Michelangelo, at this point, this is slightly kind of micro stuff, but he's actually, he's left the palace. He's back with his dad post Lorenzo's death. Piero's in charge. He decides in that sort of way of, you know, it sounds utterly extravagant. I need a sculpture of a snowman. He comes back to live with him and supposedly creates this. And there's a real absurdity to the idea that you have the greatest sculptor of all time in your town, working for you, and you get that person to create something totally ephemeral that's about to melt. I know. But wouldn't you like to see, wouldn't it be incredible to watch Michelangelo making a snowman? It would be amazing. There would be no carrots, no coals. It would just be extraordinarily, presumably very big. Yeah. But as you say, captures this, not just the ephemerality of the work, but the sense that Things aren't all that serious in the court any longer. And Piero is nowhere near as accomplished or as formidable or as canny an individual as his father. A sense maybe of decadence? Definite decadence. And then, of course, all of this comes to an end because in 1494, the Medici regime, which had dominated Florence really for a century, it unravels. So what happens is Charles VIII of France invades Italy. And his armies approach Florence. And Piero de' Medici is so desperate not to lose his control of Florence that he rides out. It's a very, very controversial, famous moment in Italian history. He rides out to meet Charles, and he basically sells Florence down the river so he can keep power. Right. And when the Florentines discover this kind of crazily bad deal that he has signed, there is an uprising. And as you say, the Medici are run out of town. I mean, they are exiled. And what happens after that is a new regime emerges within Florence, again a very controversial regime, run by this Dominican friar. called Savonarola. He's quite famous. Very famous individual who completely hates Medici-era Florence. He sees their love of antiquity as paganism. He's a very religious man, very ascetic man. He doesn't like the luxuries of art. He doesn't like the plutocracy that has governed Florence for the previous century. I mean, he is the man associated with the phrase the bonfire of the vanities. Yeah, so he has all these bonfires. And in fact, he often puts artworks On to bonfires. So it's like the Reformation a few decades later. Basically, artworks are being destroyed. And if you're an artist, you're thinking, this isn't good for me. Well, particularly one who's really associated with the Medici family. Exactly. And so Michelangelo, like a number of other artists associated with the Medici family, decides to leave. And so it's a very sad situation. Michelangelo at this point is 19 years old. Everything seemed to have been going so well for him, but now he has to leave his home and begin all over again somewhere else. So where does he go? Well, there's a really tantalising moment because he goes to Bologna. He then goes pretty quickly to Venice. And the tantalising thing is that Albrecht Dürer, the great German Renaissance artist, is in Venice at the same moment and there's no record whatsoever that they cross paths or overlap. But then quite quickly he's back in Bologna and he finds a new, I mean this I think is testament as well to something that you see often with Michelangelo, he attracts the interest of So in Bologna, he's suddenly being housed and has this patron who is, I believe, himself a poet, a senator, Giovanni Francesco Aldrovandi, who gives him quite a lot of work. He takes on a challenge at this point of creating a marble angel to complete a shrine in a church, San Domenico, in Bologna. Yeah. Um, But he doesn't stay there for... No, when the situation slightly calms down in Florence in 1495, so after the initial chaos, things get slightly calmer. He returns to Florence, and this is when he makes another quite notorious sculpture that ends up as another major turning point in his career, actually. So he makes this, he's carving this, a little bit like the faun, he's carving this sleeping cupid based on an antique model. And it's a lovely piece of work. And at one point, he's virtually finished it. This dealer comes along. And he says, oh, Michelangelo, that's lovely. Are you planning to sell it? And Michelangelo says, yes, I'm intending to sell it. But he needs the money at this point. And the dealer says, well, do you know what? If you were to, you know, sort of hush-hush, if you were to sort of maybe age it a little bit, maybe we could bury it somewhere in Rome and then maybe excavate it somewhere in Rome. You know, we could sell it as an antiquity and you'd get a lot more money for it. And Michelangelo, who's completely money obsessed throughout his life, if you read all the letters, as I have done. All he talks about is money, and all his father talks about is money. And you often think, oh, an artist should be above those material things. They're often not, and Michelangelo certainly wasn't. And so he thinks, oh, you know, the dollar signs or the ducat signs flash before his eyes. And he thinks, right, let's do it. And so he scuffs up the sculpture, and it's taken down to Rome, and it's buried somewhere in the ground, I think in an olive grove or something like that. I can't remember the exact details. And then a few weeks, a few months later, it's excavated as an antiquity. And this... ...work is sold for quite a significant sum of money. Because, I mean, it is worth saying that this is the Great Age. This is partly what the Renaissance is about. It's this reconnection, this rediscovery of ancient culture, ancient art. And there are these moments where these astonishing things are, as you say, being dug out of the ground. So it's not impossible at all that this thing might be ancient. I mean, a few years later, there is... One of the greatest ancient sculptures of all time, the Laocoon, which is dug out of the ground in Rome in 1506, and Michelangelo is there. He's there. So this is a thing that really happens. You can see why there is this kind of dealer ruse. Yes. It isn't great that Michelangelo's first interest is, yeah, absolutely, let's do this. Let's get this sort of acidic earth, sort of like scuff it up, make it look really old. And... There's another kind of aspect to the money story, isn't there? Because it does, once it's dug up, it is sold. It is sold. But there's a dispute over the price. Yes. It's sold to a cardinal called Cardinal Riario, who's a very powerful cardinal in Rome and has a big collection of antiquities. Because I always thought there was this slight, because you see this a lot in the Michelangelo literature, where it's Michelangelo getting one up on his social superiors, the biggest case being with the popes eventually. And that's a lot of fun. And I've sort of just assumed this was a similar story because this cardinal gets duped. Someone then pitches up, tips him off, that, hang on, that ancient sleeping Eros you've got, I saw some bloke making that in Florence. And once he realises his pride is dented, he becomes really furious and he goes back to get his money back. Yes. Well, I mean, I don't know the exact sequence of events, but he certainly recognizes quite quickly that this isn't, that this is a contemporary piece. And he hires some kind of PI, and this PI goes up to Florence and works out that Michelangelo has made this sculpture, this young guy has made this sculpture. And so the guy says to Michelangelo, you know, you need to come down to Rome, because the cardinal wants to see you. And so Michelangelo, in 1496, he travels down to Rome to meet... Cardinal Riario. So the forgery he does actually is a massive turning point in his career because without that forgery he might not have ended up going to Rome when he did. I mean, his career almost begins with a fake. Yes. He, I mean, this is the other sort of money subtext, subplot part to this story because supposedly that nefarious dealer is selling the ancient Eros, the ancient, in inverted commas, Eros to the cardinal for 200 gold ducats. But he only gives A certain amount to Michelangelo, much less. Something like, I think, maybe 30. And when Michelangelo gets wind of this, some people suggest that he goes to Rome to get his money. Yes. That would be consistent with his character. It would. Or a slur. Yeah. So he ends up going to Rome in the summer of 1496. He's just turned 21. I think we need to say that Rome at this point, although we now think of Rome because of its great imperial connotations, because it's the capital of Italy, we might think it's a cut above Florence. In the late 15th century, it is not anywhere near as sophisticated and wealthy and well put together as Florence. It's in ruins. I mean, the ancient monuments are kind of in tatters. There are wild animals and the streets have been overgrown. It's a kind of wasteland. It's full of criminals. And the other thing to say is that in this period, Italy wasn't a single country. Italy isn't united until the end of the 19th century, second half of the 19th century. So for Michelangelo to go from Florence to Rome, it's like going to another country. They have different dialect, different food, different laws, different governance structures, and all these other kinds of things. And he hates Rome. You know, it's very hot. He doesn't like the people. He's scared. He's homesick. He's away from his family, his brothers, his father. He has no money. He even says, I mean, one of his first letters of the many that he writes, he says, oh, I don't even have enough money for clothes, I don't have enough money for food. He's really, really unhappy there in the summer of 1496. Thank And he does a few little bits of work. So the Cardinal Riario commissions him to do a big sculpture of Bacchus. I'm quite fond of the Bacchus. Yeah, well, the Riario wasn't. you Right, because of its so-called sensuality? very Yes, yes. I mean, I don't think we need to get into this now, but one of the big questions that lots of people bring to Michelangelo much. is that question of his sexuality and his interest in the male nude being motivated by what exactly? Exactly. The interesting thing about this Bacchus is, so, ancient god, which he's representing, Uh, he looks drunk. So he's quite plump, quite soft flesh in the Bacchus sculpture. And I love the fact that, unlike maybe many ancient representations of Dionysus Bacchus, You really get a sense here of someone who, if he were to speak or sing, he would be slurring his words. Yeah, he can barely stand still. He can barely stand still. I mean, it's a great piece of work, actually. And it's for those reasons that Riario thinks, well, this doesn't seem a bit too decadent, a bit too inappropriate. Because it ends up in another collector's collection. Yeah, it does. But, you know, the real, the great breakthrough commission in Michelangelo's life comes a year or so later in 1498 When another cardinal... In Rome, a French cardinal, whose name I cannot remember, commissions Michelangelo to do a sculpture of the Pietà. Now, we should say a few things about the idea of the Pietà before we get to the work. The Pietà is an Italian word for pity, and it's a subject that describes a moment that actually isn't mentioned in the Bible, which is after Christ is crucified, he's brought down from the cross, the so-called deposition, and the Virgin Mary, his mother, has him on her lap, and she cradles him, and she's grieving for his death. So very affecting. Lovely emotional scene. Well, not lovely, but it's an emotional scene. Very common in Northern Europe, particularly in France, where this cardinal had come from. Well, I believe, and in Germany in particular. And in Germany. That's the sort of origin of it, right? But it's a very different take. Yes. The Germans are much more interested in, well, there are a few hallmarks of earlier German pietas. One is a massive interest in the pain. Yes. So you see a lot of lacerations, wounds. That side of things is really foregrounded in the sculpted representations of the Pietà, which will often be polychromed wooden sculptures, so coloured wooden sculptures. But the other thing is very typical of a German one is that Christ is sort of smaller than Mary and often almost sitting upright. So the idea being that for the viewer you're meant to It melds different moments in time, so you're imagining or made to recall when he would have been a child sitting on his mother's lap, amping up how affecting it really is, the poignancy of the idea. Yes. But these are things that Michelangelo doesn't really major on in his sculpture. No. I mean, we should say that it's a really awkward subject to depict if you're an artist, for For the quite obvious reason that... If you're trying to get a mother having her fully grown adult male son on her lap, it's a pretty difficult thing to do. And so when you look back through the history of art at these other pietas, it's often ludicrous. It's like she's holding this enormous figure, or like lumbering under the weight of this great adult male. And so lots of artists had real struggle to make it work. So Michelangelo, nevertheless, he gets commissioned to do this. The one thing in the contract says that it had to be, quote, The most beautiful work in marble in Rome. So, the bar is quite high. The bar is high, very high expectations. Can I say, because the French, you mentioned this guy, he's a French cardinal. His name is Jean Villiers de la Grotte. And he's commissioning this for his own tomb. It's a funerary monument, isn't it? Yeah. Very much right next to St. Peter's. It's almost connected to St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. And so Michelangelo, 1498, so he's now 23 years old, He goes out to... Carrara. This will play a very significant role in subsequent episodes. It's the great marble quarry in the west of Italy, where the finest white marble comes from. And he gets this enormous chunk of marble, he brings it back to Rome, and he spends the next part of two years or so making this sculpture, the Pietà, from that block. We've talked about the iconography. Do you want to describe the work, Alistair, to listeners? What are we looking at here? Yeah. Something. It's really exquisite. It's so beautiful, this work of art. I love it. And it's a transition between an older style of art and that Michelangelo future, if you like, which I think is very interesting. But what we're seeing are two people, a young, very beautiful woman who is sitting on a rock and arranged across her lap is an almost nude male figure, her son, Jesus Christ, who's now dead. And the body is slumped across her lap, her face is downcast. She looks sad. His limbs seem very heavy. There doesn't feel any life within his body at all. His head is slumped backwards. And one thing to realize about this is that you've identified the chief aesthetic problem of sculpting a pietà, which is the unbelievable awkwardness of putting an adult male on a woman's lap. And Michelangelo combats this in a very clever way, or several ways, which don't... make you think, hang on, that doesn't work. You just totally believe it. But one of the ways is that he makes Christ slightly smaller, slightly smaller scale than his mother. He's about 80% the size of his mother. Is that what it is? 80%. And then the other thing is that he clothes Mary in all of this phenomenal drapery, which is so brilliantly carved and creates this tremendous sense of ornament decoration all the way across the surface of this pyramid-like sculpture. And. Because there's all this drapery around her lap and around her legs, he, Michelangelo, creates this big sort of base for Christ. And then you get this pyramid-like structure that goes up to her head. And he makes another decision, which I find fascinating, because, of course, he, Christ, is her son. But in the sculpture, Mary looks... So young. I mean, she looks even younger than him, doesn't she? And we've got to remember, Christ, when he died, was at, what, 33? Something like that. Right. So she must have been, what, at least mid-40s, probably 50s. Yes. There's no way that a woman living under the heat and the sun of the Middle East at that time 2,000 years ago could look this good at age, say, 50. Yeah, it's a very good point because there's very, like, the most spurious arguments in the sources where clearly at the time, This work was criticised by contemporaries who were saying, yeah, beautiful piece and all that, but why is the Virgin so incredibly young? And the spurious argument is that, ah, but she was the Virgin. Oh yeah, this is what he says. Right, he's putting this out there. You don't have sex, you don't age. Yeah. And actually, interestingly, he lived for a very long time and was possibly chaste. So, you know, maybe there's something to it. I'm getting into it. But... But that strange, bizarre thing, and what we will see in future episodes when we look at Michelangelo, he's constantly taking liberties. It's part of his genius. He's constantly making little inventions and innovations and doing things that aren't quite right in order to amplify the effect of the work he's making. And so with this, I think that by making these two figures basically the same age, He's giving it. Even more emotional tenderness. He's actually giving it a kind of romantic quality. There's a sort of Romeo and Juliet-y quality to this work. It's sweet. He's actually sort of depicting two really hot, young Italian people and putting it in a very dramatic and a sort of world of suffering and pain. But crucially, that sort of German tradition of the Pietà, you do not find it here. There are signs, if you look really closely, of lacerations in Christ's body, pain and the suffering are not the things that are being emphasised. Instead, you've got sweetness and grace and a sort of idealising, almost classical beauty, which are being emphasised. And a sense, perhaps, of resignation. You can see the left hand of the Virgin is, she's gesturing with it and her palm is upturned. And it's almost as though she's presenting her son to the viewer, But also... to God. Yeah. And it's a sign of acceptance that this is your plan. I mean, obviously she doesn't want her son to be killed in this horrific way, but it's saying that's okay. Yeah. It's a deeply emotional work, as you've said. And I think one of the other things about representing her so young. And you have alluded to this before, it brings us back to another Christian subject matter, which is the Madonna and Child, the Virgin with the infant Christ. And I think in doing that... It reminds us, I think, of the human tragedy that really is often overlooked, but lies at the heart of Christianity, which is that a mother has lost her child. And that is... That is one of the reasons why this work is so unbelievably emotional and moving and tender and touching. And we'll find in later works by Michelangelo, you don't get that tenderness necessarily quite so much. You get lots of raw power. Not at all. Yeah, yeah. Monumental. But here, it's a very delicate... Technically, it is astonishing. I mean, the high polish on the body, but also that deep carving into the stone for the drapery, the technical solution of creating this a shelf and then hiding it with folds of fabric. It is a masterful piece of work. And he's still in his mid-twenties when he does this. Yeah, it's total. It's like, as a calling card, it's just complete dazzling virtuosity. And it's interesting, the carving. I think that's something that if you do see this, The depth of the folds, they create, and this is just interesting to think just purely artistically, thinking formally about how a work of art functions. You could have something with a very smooth surface, but here you don't. You have all of these ridges, these divots, these cavities, and what that creates is a sense of visual intrigue and sort of buzz and excitement. Partly because you get light and shade. So the polish of the marble is reflecting the light, but then you have these deep shadows which are offsetting that. And I think that's what I meant before about this hinge moment, this transition, because that interest in it creates this effect of visual ornament around it, decoration. And that's still a hallmark, if you like, of what's known as quattrocento. Italian Florentine art by which people mean essentially 15th century art and culture of Italian Renaissance and those artists were still interested very much in Michelangelo is going to leave that stuff behind, and you don't have quite that sense, as you say, of that surging, expressive, the pathos of just the naked human form, even though this is suffused with pathos. But nevertheless, I just love it. Oh, it's an incredible work, and at the time, it is extremely well received. People are astonished by it. They have never seen a sculpture in marble like this, Certainly since antiquity. And there is a story. There's a wonderful story. There are so many anecdotes that we're going to be telling over subsequent episodes about Michelangelo. There's a story that Michelangelo's in the chapel. The work has been installed, and he's standing at the back. I mean, he's such a narcissist. He probably spent a lot of time standing at the back and seeing what people said. And someone says, oh, this is a wonderful sculpture. And another person says, oh, yes, my friend, you know, I can't remember the name, Gobbo from... Bonjoe has done this. I mean, the name is important because it is Gobbo. Oh, is it Gobbo? It is Gobbo. Our Gobbo of Milan. Gobbo of Milan has done it. So he's overhearing that Gobbo of Milan's getting the credit for this incredible sculpture. Gobbo, it means hunchback. So it's referring to another artist, and his nickname was Gobbo. Ah, well, there we are. And I've always thought, I mean, I've just assumed that the real knife, there's sort of, you know, for Michelangelo, it must be to be called Gobbo. God, but something so incredibly beautiful that's been created is being associated with this hunchbacked artist. Must be so extravagantly disappointing that he does something, right? Yeah, he is so furious about this that he then asks, he gets himself locked in the chapel overnight and spends the night carving into the sash, with great anger and determination, his signature. So this is the only sculpture that is signed by Michelangelo. Yeah, he signs the words. Michelangelo Buonarroti Florentinus Faccibattu, which means Michelangelo Buonarroti. The Florentine made this. And, you know, the reason he never signed anything again is he really regretted doing that. Oh, right. He felt it was an expression of vanity to do that, and narcissism, which, of course, he had in enormous amounts. Look in the mirror, mate. Yeah, exactly. But I think after he did that, he thought that was not a classy thing to do. And so he never signed his work again. What do you make of this theory that I've come across, that part of it was not just about... Correcting the record to make sure that Gobbo wasn't credited with this beautiful piece of work. But in the way that you've alluded to, that a patron might commission a work of art in a religious setting and their likeness would appear within that work of art. And it was a way of signalling their proximity to God and perhaps also guaranteeing eventually their passage to heaven. Do you think something similar could be going on here with the signature? He's literally placing his name in this sacred... setting on this sacred sculpture and we know that Particularly as he ages, spirituality... Oh, he's a very devout man throughout his life, actually. Yeah, he's very religious. That could play a role. It's also, and you mentioned this at the very start of this episode, Alistair, it's probably expressive of this larger trend that is beginning to emerge at the very end of the 15th century, when artists who were previously relatively anonymous labourers, manual labourers who weren't particularly respected, are beginning to become... Yes. And we see this in the course of his lifetime happen, and various other artists who are his contemporaries experience the same thing. Can I just, just on that point, because my favourite example of this, it comes a little later, we spoke at the beginning of this episode about his long-suffering nephew, Leonardo. And Leonardo, this is a famous moment, but I think it just epitomises what you've just described. 1547, Leonardo the nephew sends his great-uncle by then incredibly famous, A brass rule, okay? A tool. And Michelangelo is furious about it. And he writes back and says, basically, why have you given me this brass rule as if I were a builder or a carpenter? I was ashamed to have it in the house and gave it away. And I think that sums up exactly what you're describing. There is a status shift. And he doesn't like to be reminded of the artisan-like nature of artists as they had previously been. I remember it's part of the Buonarroti story, isn't it? They think they've come from great things. They're aspirational. They're on the make. They're trying to improve their lot. I think that's part of it as well. It's a very personal family objective. So anyway, with the Pietà Alistair, which Michelangelo completed in 1499, Michelangelo has clearly announced himself as a great artist, perhaps even the greatest Italian sculptor since Donatello. But he has a long way to go. There are many twists and turns ahead of him and also a sculpture that will make the mighty Pietà look like small fry. So please join us to hear all about it in the next episode. Goodbye. Goodbye. If you've enjoyed this episode, please do follow Stories of Art wherever you get your podcasts and maybe even leave a review.