Michelangelo

A Rage to Create

Page II

To make this estimate, rather, one must first disabuse oneself of a contention that is wide-ranging in the study of art and is certainly assumed by this exhibition—that an astonishing number of the artists of the Italian Renaissance, and all the artists in this exhibition, were, in fact, excellent. An astonishing number were—enough that one must wonder on the very fact of a renaissance, on how such a moment can arise, how it has arisen in the arts and philosophy three times at least to our knowledge—but not as many as we tend to think, and not all that are represented here. Thereby the imbalance—despite Vasari’s claim in his famous book that Michelangelo had shown artists the means of excellence, and artists were then capable of producing what those prior to the master had been able only to work towards, we find that such excellence is not transferable, and the surface gloss of fine polish and studied technique does not institute the substructure of brilliant vision and conception. The genius of the thing lies elsewhere.

Simply, although there are many moments of astonishing execution here, there are also flaws that in many cases are outside the range of what one should expect in work of this renown.

Many examples found here are egregious and astounding once one prepares oneself to see them. For instance, the flaw in Francesco Salviati’s The Age of Gold is a remarkable example of a figure getting away from the artist. Examine the woman in the middle left foreground, sitting on a rock and against a tree trunk, reaching up to a hand descending from the tree. The stomach on the figure simply does not work. The navel is off the axial of the chest, positioned somewhere to the figure’s right side, if estimated from the position of the chest cavity. The planes that flow from the lower abdomen to the left hip make no sense—where we see a diagonal highlight indicating a plane that should face to the upper left of the drawing, the figure seems to drop away, as if a void appeared where mass should be, which is what happens when a plane does not seem to connect to those positioned next to it. What has happened, to all appearances, is that the upper and lower torso have not been properly established in relation to each other—each does not flow through the waist into the other; they simply abut, and at an angle that makes no sense. Or, more precisely, there is no waist—the upper and lower portions of the body just slam together, each facing in a direction slightly different from that of the other.

One might call this Mannerism, given that Salviati was a Mannerist. But there is a difference between bending the rules of figure composition and simply failing to observe them, between an altered arithmetic and a failure to lay out the parts so that they add up at all—there is a difference between a choreography of elements and an inability to dance. This appears not to be style—this appears to be a mistake.

A judgment similar to that regarding the distance between stylistics and ineptitude is called up with regard to Baccio Bandinelli’s Portrait of Cosimo I del Medici, but here the question is the dividing line between accuracy of rendition and clumsiness of execution. Or, more simply, could he really have looked like that? There is no point in comparing this work with other portraits, for the question is not accuracy with regard to this sitter but credibility with regard to the human form. Or, more simply still, could anyone really have looked like this?

The answer is fairly obvious—no, for the disembarkations from the idealized human face are not so much violations of the principles of beauty as they are violations of the principles of anatomy. The pop-eyed face is not merely pop-eyed—the eyeballs are so distorted, they are no longer spherical, or not close enough to spherical. In throwing Cosimo’s gaze forcefully to the left side of the sheet, Bandinelli has nearly pulled his eyes out of his head. And this is not quite surprising coming from the artist whose sculpture Hercules and Cacus, which still stands in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence and a sketch for which is included here, was described by Cellini as resembling “an old sack full of melons propped up against a wall,” rather than a perfected architecture of rippling musculature.

Pontormo, whose Two Studies of Male Figures is just splendid, has problems similar to those of Salviati in Eve’s Expulsion from Earthly Paradise. The lower abdomen faces the wrong direction, the navel is positioned off the axial, and the function of the waist has not been thought through. The thighs seem to be too small, out of scale with the rest of the figure. And the application of male anatomy to a female figure lacks the finesse—or the clear deliberateness of a lack of finesse, which is finesse of a different order—of he from whom Pontormo obtained it: the master. Distinctly masculine formations of musculature seem to have been slapped on piecemeal, without having been conceived into a whole figure, a coherent form.

The inconsistency in the drawings of Vasari would be no surprise to anyone familiar with this work. His St. John the Evangelist is unerring, if ultimately unimpressive—there are no glaring technical flaws, there is clear and solid skeletal and muscular structure worked out, line weight is delicately modulated and used precisely. However, the figure is fairly inexpressive in posture, indicative of no clear attitude or action, and indistinctive in outline, in the flat, two-dimensional form it cuts. In that regard, it is rather blob-like.

Even so, this work is Vasari at his strength. His nadir is witnessed in such as The Triumph of Cosimo I at Montemurlo. Examine the faces of the figures, which distort in all manner of error. Several of the captives in the foreground, which are situated in the lower third of the drawing, are inadvertently drawn along a curve—something that tends to happen when one holds the paper at an angle while sketching. The face of the figure immediately to the right of Cosimo collapses in on itself. Furthermore, the composition is done at deep perspective, but the perspective has not been worked through and is not carried out with consistency. The largest figures in the middle ground—found to the extreme right of the drawing—should be at a great distance, based on the scale. But there is nothing in the drawing that positions them so far away from the foreground—the orthogonal distance between the foreground figures and the middle ground figures has not been accounted for. They are not distant—they are simply too small. Given that, the line of figures extending back in the middle ground diminish by increments that are too small—there is no room for so many, they are bunched together too tightly, so tightly, the entire scene is not physically credible.

There are many other examples here of errors of execution comparable to these, and there are numerous instances of remarkable deftness and ability—demonstrations of what may be considered the ideal of the art of drawing, of what artists through the ages have labored and studied to achieve, instances of the paradigmatic of the mode. Notable in particular are Andrea del Sarto’s Studies of a Male Model Seated on the Ground and, on the verso, Study of Drapery; everything by Bronzino; Girolamo Macchietti’s Head of a Young Man; Alessandro Allori’s male nudes; Giovan Battista Naldini’s Seated Male Nude; and Poppi’s Four Heads.

And then there are the two drawings by Michelangelo, and even in comparison to these paradigmatic examples of draftsmanship, the difference is categorical. His Studies of a Male Leg is, for Michelangelo, fairly unfinished—what qualifies as a “sketch” for the master: loose, quick, inconsistently detailed, as if he filled in definition only on those portions of one leg that concerned him at that moment. Compared to everything else here, the drawing contains, even in the loosest sections, a wealth of observation of musculature and integration of parts, as if Michelangelo took more trouble than any of these other artists—although one suspects it is more a matter of knowledge than of ready dedication. But there is something else to this, something other than the issue of accuracy. There is a distinctive ratio here of means to effect, of the amount of drawing done, the sheer number of lines committed, to the quality of solidity and density of form achieved. The efficiency of visual expression is stunning. The form seems like rock, or marble if one likes—it has congealed on the paper out of a delicate netting of an almost countable number of lines with a force that is difficult to understand. Compared to this, almost all the other drawings in this exhibition seem ghostly, as if one could pass one’s hand right through what they render, as if the essential objective of drawing—to create the impression of a solid form out of an assembly of simple lines and tonal effects—had been only tepidly attempted.

However, Michelangelo’s Bust of a Woman, Head of an Old Man, and Bust of a Child is another matter still. The work is so polished, so finished, so refined and intricately detailed, so far past the qualities and intrinsic limitations of the apparatus of drawing, that one wants to say this is not a drawing at all, aside from the mere fact that it is. The principal element, the head of the woman, is fully realized, completely congealed on the paper—a seemingly solid object. Particular portions of the head appear impossibly present. The ear and the eye are as completely real as the finger one points at them in amazement. The tonality across the cheek and jaw is constantly modulated, following a surface that just has to be there, rather than the flat paper one knows—sort of knows—is there in fact.

This work is reminiscent of nothing so much as another drawing by Michelangelo—Studies for the head of Leda, c. 1530—which is not here but one wishes were, in some sense other than the sense in which one wishes there were nothing in the world but works by Michelangelo. The Leda drawing is in the Casa Buonarroti in Florence, and it is the most astonishing demonstration of drawing technique this writer has ever witnessed. The distinctly Leonardo-like head is in a posture similar to this one—left side facing us in nearly complete profile. The cheek and jaw are similarly shaded, one naturally presumes by Michelangelo working the “tooth” of the paper: brushing his implement across the paper with varying pressure, picking up the texture of the paper in apparent dots of varying size and darkness, to modulate the surface from light to dark, defining the shadows on the face. There should have been no other way to achieve that effect, and for any other artist there would not have been. But, on close inspection, it turns out there is little “tooth,” or texture, to the sheet. Michelangelo evidently created the textures on the face by stippling the sheet—making each dot manually, one at a time—controlling the size and density of each dot, one at a time, by hand. It seems humanly impossible to execute, aside from the mere fact that it is—perhaps. Michelangelo created the work in a manner no one else would have, or, one suspects, could. In short, he did the thing “totally differently.”

Given the crowds at the exhibition under consideration here, one could only marvel at what miracles of dexterity were demanded by this head of a woman.

The purpose of observations such as these is not to trash reputations or to be dazzled into unknowing and substitute breathlessness for some measure of understanding. It is rather to observe the staggered nature of achievement and to note the internal consistency of capability—more to the point, the internal consistency of conception, of vision, of imagination. There is an identifying stamp to the work of any artist, and any thinker, a manner of formulation, a style, and it is fractal—it is seen complete in every piece and portion of the conceiver’s work.

And not only is this as I tell you, but there is another wonder which seems greater, namely, that if a capable man merely makes a simple outline, like a person about to begin something, he will at once be known by it—if Apelles, as Apelles; if an ignorant painter, as an ignorant painter. And there is no necessity for more, neither more time, nor more experience, nor examination, for eyes which understand it and for those who know that by a single straight line Apelles was distinguished from Protogenes, immortal Greek painters.
—Michelangelo

With every line, with every line of thought—if Michelangelo, as Michelangelo; or as Einstein; or as Bach. For the principle at issue is a formal principle, the principle by which form is generated, by which structure is constructed. It is a principle of build, of growth, of implication, of how commissions entail, and combine to make a whole, and the principle of what manner of whole will be made. It is the principle of the quality and the caliber of the idea applied, and it is a principle of mind, for it is distinct as the mind that is brought to bear on the generation of the idea, and is as written into the idea as is that which the idea concerns.

This is why such observations matter. For what is at issue is not the quality of the reproduction but the integrity of the form. It is not the accuracy of appearances represented that is of significance in drawing, but the specificity and comprehensiveness of the form created. For the form is the idea, the thing foreseen and then committed, and the integrity of form is the result of and remark upon the clarity of inner vision and of the following through of implication.

Thus, this is not a principle of mind but the principle of thought itself. To think at all is to begin with and to follow through a form, a structure—a shape. The form is the manner in which one thing leads to another—the “track” upon which the development of the thought proceeds, the turning riverbed through which it flows. To think is to proceed with thought, for to think, one thing must lead to another. To think at all, to proceed with thought, is like running one’s finger along the edges of a geometric model—at certain points, the direction shifts, a sudden implication follows.

The way one thing leads to another is a formal property—not logic, but “a logic,” a property of resonances, a form by which things resolve together, like an overlay of wave patterns, a structure, a shape emerging out of the mists of random imaginings—a principle of implication, of the possibility of one thing relating to another. The principle is present in the first thought—like a seed crystal, the specific possibility of structure is innate and, from there, branches, ramifies. It is there from the beginning, as it is in the single straight line that is distinguished from all others by the imprint of its author, by the specifics of the mind that makes it. And when we say that something resonates with us, we speak better than we know.

From the period that preceded Michelangelo, from Leonardo, we are told that the human body is the standard of measure for formal integrity—the hub of the balance, the paradigm of integration and center for the development of the thought. It remained so, for it is, in every study and visual thought we see here, the foundation for the composition, for the idea. It is the body and the manner of its rendering as the organizing principle, and not the quality of the reproduction, that is the issue. From formal integrity in a new vision, new implications follow, new ideas emerge, spontaneously, like a crystalline growth, burst forth. And the measure of the formal integrity of a new thought is the wealth of thought that extends from it, the measure is the wealth of implication, of that which inevitably follows.

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