Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel by Andrew Graham-Dixon Read Free Book Online

staging, which was against the shoulders, and quickly took up a chisel in his left hand, with a little of the marble-dust that lay upon the planks of the staging, and then, beginning to strike lightly with the chisel, let fall the dust little by little, nor changed the nose a whit from what it was before. Then, looking down at the Gonfalonier, who stood watching him, he said, ‘Look at it now.’ ‘I like it better,’ said the Gonfalonier, ‘you have given it life.’ And so Michelangelo came down, laughing to himself at having satisfied that lord, for he had compassion on those who, in order to appear full of knowledge, talk about things of which they know nothing. 28
    Shortly after Michelangelo performed this cunning trick, a commission was formed to decide exactly where the marble giant should stand. Its members included two state heralds and a trumpeter as well as every artist of distinction in the city. 29 Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Piero di Cosimo and the San Gallo brothers, among others, attended. The senior of the two heralds suggested putting the statue at the entrance to the Palazzo della Signoria, the civic heart of Florence. The site was already occupied by Donatello’s bronze of Judith and Holofernes , another biblical allegory of the traditional Florentine disdain for despotism, which had been placed there as a warning to tyrants after Piero de’ Medici had been expelled from the city. But the herald argued that Donatello’s work had brought bad luck to Florence: ‘The Judith is a death-dealing sign,’ he said, ‘and it is not good for a woman to kill a man,’ adding that things had gone ‘from bad to worse’ for the city since it was placed there. What better replacement could there be than the magnificent new sculpture of David ? After long and tortuous deliberations, the herald’s proposal was accepted. 30 At a stroke, Michelangelo’s colossus had become the most prominent work of art in Florence. He had supplanted Donatello and secured his fame in the city where he had grown up. No wonder he believed that sculpture, not painting, was his true vocation.

    The David was set in its place on 28 May 1504. Six months earlier, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere had been elected Pope Julius II. Known to his contemporaries as ‘ Il Terribile ’, ‘The Terrible One’, he was a fierce and warlike pope who spent much of his ten-year pontificate marching up and down the Italian peninsula at the head of his army. He wore a suit of silver armour and a silver beard to match. The beard, a novelty for a Renaissance pope, was no mark of piety. Julius II wore it in emulation of his ancient Roman namesake, Julius Caesar, who had once sworn that he would remain unshaven until he had avenged himself on the Gauls for massacring his legions. Julius II’s beard was a pledge against his own numerous enemies — the French, the Bolognese, the Venetians, the Turks. 31
    ‘ Fuori i barbari! ’ was the pope’s warcry — ‘Out with the barbarians! ’ He had been an implacable enemy of the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, and he was determined to recover the papal territories that had been lost to Borgia nepotism— to reclaim, in particular, the extensive lands in northern Italy that Alexander VI’s son, Cesare Borgia, had been allowed to carve into a state of his own. Julius II also fought to push back the Venetians, who had made steady incursions into the traditional papal territories of the Romagna. By the time of his death, in 1513, he had driven the French from Italy and brought Parma, Piacenza and Reggio Emilia into the papal states.
    Pope Julius II by Raphael

    Despite his advanced age — he was sixty years old when he became pope — Julius II was a man of enormous energy. He was determined not only to redraw the map of political power in Italy, but also to transform the physical fabric of the Holy City. Despite its elevated status as the capital of western Christendom, early sixteenth-century Rome was little