MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI (born Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, 1475–1564)

MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI (born Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, 1475–1564), Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet. Michelangelo achieved such renown in his lifetime that he was celebrated as Il Divino, the 'Divine One'. In five hundred years, his fame has scarcely diminished. Michelangelo is universally recognized as one of the greatest artists of all time. He established new and still unsurpassed standards of excellence in all fields of visual creativity—sculpture, painting, architecture—and was, in addition, an accomplished poet. Along with Dante and Shakespeare, Mozart, and Beethoven, he stands as one of the giants of Western civilization.

Michelangelo's career spanned from the final years of Lorenzo de' Medici's Florence to the first stirrings of the Counter-Reformation. He outlived thirteen popes and worked for nine of them. Although his art occasionally was criticized (he was accused of impropriety in the Last Judgment), Michelangelo's influence and reputation have always been acknowledged. Many of his works—including the Pietà, David, Moses, and the Sistine Chapel ceiling—are ubiquitous cultural icons. Despite the familiarity of Michelangelo's art, the large quantity of primary documentation (more than any previous artist), and a voluminous secondary literature, many aspects of Michelangelo's art and life remain open to interpretation.

In contrast to the romantic conception of the artist as lone genius, contemporary scholars tend to view Michelangelo in a broad historical and social context. In Italy and throughout European civilization, the family was fundamental to self-definition; a family's status established an individual's status. Michelangelo was one of just a handful of Renaissance artists, including Filippo Brunelleschi, Donatello, and Leon Battista Alberti, who were born into patrician families. It was not unreasonable, therefore, that Michelangelo's father resisted his son's artistic inclinations; the boy should have aspired to a more elevated profession, to political office, and to a socially advantageous marriage. The tension between his patrician birth and his fundamentally manual profession occasionally caused Michelangelo to experience doubt about his art (best expressed in his poetry), and to encounter conflict with his patrons.

Michelangelo's father was a distant cousin and contemporary of the great Renaissance Maecenas Lorenzo de' Medici (1449–1492). It was probably thanks to this familial relation that Michelangelo spent approximately two years in the Medici household, where he received the beginnings of a humanistic education alongside two of his future Medici patrons, Giovanni (Pope Leo X, reigned 1513–1521) and Giulio (Pope Clement VII, reigned 1523–1534). The Medici were especially important to Michelangelo's early career, providing him with commissions, opportunities, and letters of introduction that permitted the young man to pursue an untraditional course independent of the guild system and the highly competitive artisan profession. Rather, he lived on the basis of comparatively few commissions, obtained by means of skillfully navigating in a dense web of family, friendship, and patronage ties.

Appropriately for a family with social pretensions, Michelangelo was tutored by a grammarian and learned a modicum of Latin, a good hand, and how to write a proper letter. His penmanship was neat and regular, his orthography and grammar more self-consciously correct than that of many of his contemporaries. The sheer volume of Michelangelo's correspondence—more than 1,400 letters to and from the artist—distinguishes him from most artists of the early modern period. He took care in composing letters, often writing multiple drafts, and the very fact that he preserved his correspondence was characteristic of a member of the literate patrician class.

Even more important are Michelangelo's considerable labors as a poet. In the entire history of art, only William Blake has made a comparable contribution to both the poetic and visual arts. Michelangelo's poetry ranks among the greatest literary creations of the Renaissance, distinguishing him from most artists and many fellow patricians.

Michelangelo proudly declared that his family had paid taxes in Florence for three hundred years, thereby placing them among an elite group of "good families." The Buonarroti traced their citizenship back to the priorate of 1343, and in 1508 they had six members eligible for election to the Florentine government. But even more than the prestige of public office, wealth was the most certain measure of status, and property was the principal measure of wealth. Shortly after his commission to design the tomb of Pope Julius II (1505), Michelangelo began purchasing property in and around Florence. In addition to rental income, these various farm properties provided Michelangelo and his family with most of their basic needs, including grain, oil, wine, eggs, and firewood. By his death at the age of eighty-nine, Michelangelo was a millionaire; however, despite his affluence, he lived modestly, for he was, like his contemporaries, perpetually wary of gossip.

Wealth opened the door to a good marriage, which was an important means of securing longlasting social status. Of course, Michelangelo never married, but his brother Buonarroto married into the patrician Della Casa family. The children of this union also made good matches: Lionardo married into the Ridolfi family, and in 1537 Michelangelo's niece, Francesca, married Michele Guicciardini, scion of one of the oldest and most illustrious Florentine families. Michelangelo was preoccupied with the prestige and propagation of his family, which survived until the mid-nineteenth century.

Central to Michelangelo's self-perception and lifelong ambition was his firm belief that he was from a noble family who traced an ancient lineage from the famous counts of Canossa. It is scarcely important that we now doubt Michelangelo's claim; it was firmly believed by the artist and his contemporaries. His proud ancestry was affirmed in the opening lines of the biography written by his friend and pupil Ascanio Condivi: "Michelangelo Buonarroti . . . traced his origin from the counts of Canossa, noble and illustrious family of the territory of Reggio. . . ." After 1526 he stopped signing his name as "Michelangelo sculptore" and instead insisted on using his full family name, the "nome della casa."

From early in his career, Michelangelo's art was a privileged commodity made for a few select persons. Michelangelo's relations with his patrons were, for the most part, extensions of a well-established network of social bonds founded on favor, friendship, and family relations. Therefore, he was particularly sensitive about being treated like an artisan, and he adamantly denied ever running a traditional workshop (bottega): "I was never a painter or sculptor like those who run workshops," he wrote to his nephew Lionardo in 1548. Reminding Lionardo of the family's illustrious history, Michelangelo advised his young nephew that he did not provide the products and services typical of such establishments. Rather, his career is marked by a series of unique objects that are never repeated and scarcely imitable: Bacchus (1496), Pietà (1497–1499), David (1501–1504), the Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508–1512), Last Judgment (1534–1541), the tomb of Julius II (1505–1545), and St. Peter's (1546–).

Like Leonardo da Vinci before him, Michelangelo attempted to maintain a life as a sort of artistcourtier where mutually beneficial and reciprocal relations blurred the distinction between artist and patron, between professional and personal obligations. In his final years, Michelangelo considered it unseemly to be paid a daily wage for his work at St. Peter's. Instead, he accepted remuneration as a favor from the pope, mostly in the form of lucrative prebends.

Michelangelo's concerns with family and lineage coincided with a pan-European preoccupation with the true nature of nobility. His desire for wealth, landed security, and social status place Michelangelo squarely in a contemporary milieu, sharing the most cherished values of his fellow citizens. At the same time, these concerns distinguish him from most of his fellow artists, few of whom could claim noble birth, a coat of arms, or even a proper family name.

Michelangelo's claim to noble birth—about which he was most adamant—is precisely the part of his biography that we treat as a fantastic delusion or myth, whereas we willingly subscribe to the literary fiction about the artist's early life and predestined rise to fame. The tale of Michelangelo's genius is a convenient means of explaining his accomplishments. Otherwise, we are left trying to understand how and why this aristocrat became an artist, and how he created his greatest works. Indeed, it is the very magnitude of those accomplishments that tends to cast his aristocratic persona in the shade. More than any previous artist, Michelangelo's success as both an artisan and aristocrat was instrumental in advancing the social status of his profession, from craftsman to genius, from artisan to gentleman. In the words of his admiring contemporary Pietro Aretino: "The world has many kings and only one Michelangelo."

MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI (born Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, 1475–1564)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Secondary Sources