The Stones of Florence by Mary McCarthy Read Free Book Online Page A

dissimulating his real sovereignty, he played the part of a retiring private citizen. ‘Too big a house for such a little family,’ he used to sigh, nevertheless, when he was a lonely pantaloon in the big silent rooms, and his children had disappointed him. He buried his parents in a plain marble box in the Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo.
    It was a bastard Medici—Pope Clement VII, illegitimate son of that Giuliano who was killed by the Pazzi Conspirators while hearing mass at the Duomo—who breached the tradition, ordering the New Sacristy in San Lorenzo from Michelangelo to glorify two members of his family who would better have been forgotten. These celebrated Medici Tombs have a curious theatrical quality, as of a stage production in Caesarean costumes, complete with helmets, armour, plumes; the chapel that contains this brilliant rodomontade is more like a stage set than like architecture—a travesty or cynical exaggeration of the Brunelleschi sacristy, which it copies, just as the two dukes, posed like actors in a tableau, are a travesty of Renaissance virtù. Michelangelo, who, in any case, as Vasari says, ‘detested to imitate the living person unless it were one of incomparable beauty,’ made no attempt at portraiture, such as was customary in funerary statues; his two dukes are two handsome leading men, type-cast in Renaissance parts. The statue had become the statuesque—no longer a pillar of the community, but a form of marble flattery.
    Michelangelo’s sculpture projects were expensive, and, as he grew older, only popes and tyrants could afford to patronize him. The gigantism of his later conceptions was out of scale, too, with the strict notions of measure and limit that governed his native city—notions peculiar to small, armed republics of the antique stamp. He himself lived in Rome, under the patronage of a series of papal princes, and even Cosimo I, the new Medici despot, could not entice him back to what then became the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. During the Siege of Florence, he had run away, briefly, to Venice, quitting his job as supervisor of the city’s fortifications in an access of panic, which he tried to justify afterward, when he wanted to return. He was no Cato or Brutus, yet in his way, like the embittered Dante in exile, he was a sour patriot. The four famous, somewhat rubbery symbolic figures of Night and Day, Twilight and Dawn, on the Medici Tombs are believed to express, in hidden language, his despair over the fall of the Republic and the triumph of the Medici dynasty. And in the statuary group called ‘Victory’ in Palazzo Vecchio, which shows an inane-looking young man crushing the back of an old man, who is bent double beneath him, the victim is supposed to have the features of Michelangelo. It is hard, however, to attribute Michelangelo’s personal sense of persecution (the other side of his megalomania) to patriotic motives. ‘I never had to do with a more ungrateful and arrogant people than the Florentines,’ he wrote in a letter.
    In other respects, he himself was a true Florentine—dry, proud, terse, thrifty. The correspondence of his later years is almost wholly concerned with money matters. Miserly with himself, he was buying up Tuscan real estate for his brothers and his nephew. One by one, through his agents, he picked up farms at good prices, and he finally achieved his ambition of establishing the Buonarroti family in a solid, unostentatious dwelling, now the Casa Buonarroti or Michelangelo museum, on Via Ghibellina, in the Santa Croce quarter. All his private incentives, his planning for the future, centred on Florence. Though he refused to come himself, he advised Cosimo through Vasari about his building projects for the city, and he tried to accumulate merit in the next world by providing dowries for poor Florentine girls of good family, to permit them to marry or buy their entry into convents.
    In his own day, he was often likened to the sculptors of antiquity,