imitated Donatello both deliberately and subconsciously. And it persisted with numerous interruptions from his early Madonna della Casa Buonarroti to his late Moses, inspired by Donatello’s St John for the Cathedral of Florence. He managed to lock in the gist of style, his secret way of electrifying figures with life and vibrancy and of injecting passion and eloquence right into the drapery. In short, he captured the spirit of the deeply dramatic emotion and feverish agitation so distinctive in that era of change. Other borrowings are even more obvious: Donatello’s bronze door at San Lorenzo shows a standing figure facing to the right with the left arm outstretched to herald God the Father in the Creation of Adam and Creation of Eve at the Sistine Chapel. Here, Michelangelo only raises the hand a touch higher and arranges the drapery more carefully than his predecessor. Both heads move almost the same way and the rest is equally analogous. Strong resemblances also appear between the Madonna of Bruges and Judith in the Lanzi Loggia as well as Michelangelo’s David and Donatello’s Saint George.
Madonna of Bruges, 1501–1505.
Marble, height: 120.9 cm.
Church of Our Lady, Bruges.
Madonna of Bruges, detail, 1501–1505.
Marble, height: 120.9 cm.
Church of Our Lady, Bruges.
Medici Madonna, 1521–1531.
Marble, height: 226 cm.
New Sacristy of San Lorenzo, Florence.
We should also mention here the strong influence of the sculptors Jacopo and Giacomo della Quercia (1371–1438 and 1412–1480 respectively) although it would only become manifest after Michelangelo’s stay in Bologna years later. Did Michelangelo borrow nothing from the charm, purity, and refinement of his more recent 15th-century forebears? That might sound doubtful until stumbling on a series of St Sebastian statues by Mino da Fiesole, Antonio Rossellino, and Benedetto da Maiano. Though somewhat shaky, unaccentuated, and non-committal, they herald the Dying Slave at the Louvre and each is a step along the path to either of the masterpieces. The prime comparison is between the Slave and Da Maiano’s St Sebastian at the Misericordia Museum in Florence: the heads tilting backwards and leg positions match. But Michelangelo unties the hands from behind the back, placing one on the chest and the other on the head – a stroke of genius that gives the figure astonishing eloquence and pathos. Another example is the Madonna of the Stairs, a straightforward copycat drawing of a low-relief attributed to Desiderio de Settignano.
However, the case of Luca Signorelli is trickier. Usually marked as a precursor of Michelangelo, he painted the Last Judgment in Orvieto. It is endlessly repeated that Michelangelo started out from Signorelli’s anatomical and muscular studies, assimilating the latter’s fascination for torso effects. The standard justification is the resemblance between the naked children in the background of Michelangelo’s The Holy Family (Tondo Doni) and those of Signorelli’s Madonna, both now in the Uffizi. In fact, Signorelli started his Final Judgment in 1499 and finished it in 1505 while Michelangelo had already demonstrated, with powerful relief, a fine command of human anatomy by 1492 in his Battle of the Centaurs. In fact, he only borrowed from Signorelli’s Last Judgment for his own Last Judgment) in the Sistine Chapel: note the swooping demon with a woman on his back whose general layout recalls a demon in Signorelli’s.
The blind force of destiny, however, had more to do with their meeting than any wilful choice of Michelangelo. He definitely never deliberately imitated Signorelli, whom the Renaissance widely considered outdated, the way he did Jacopo della Quercia or the masters of antiquity. And then Signorelli went on to copy his “plagiarist’s” Pietà in grisaille at St Mark’s in Rome!
From this angle, we can spot Michelangelo’s forebears in Andrea Verrocchio and Antonio Pallaiuolo, whose dogged anatomical research spawned breakthroughs in anatomical studies. True, both had long left their home towns for Rome or Venice but, given the effervescence of Florence at the time, their teachings must have reached that city and deeply affected its art scene. Michelangelo was still young when he first studied anatomy at the Santa Maria Novella poorhouse in Florence before continuing the pursuit in Rome. In Oxford, one drawing shows him dissecting a cadaver by candlelight.
As Klaczko notes:
No master definitely ever outclassed or even equalled him in the science of the human body. How the athletic builds, extended necks, tortured poses and troubled facial expressions of these characters rattle our sense of reality nonetheless! How the entire corpus of anatomical science is helpless to inspire such occasionally crushing but invariably destabilising faith in the existence of this world of colossuses! It is rightly said that not a single figure of Michelangelo’s could stand up and walk without making the universe tremble and disrupt the very foundations of Nature.
In his Anatomie des Maîtres (1890), the eminent anatomist Mathias Duval adds a precious quip:
Although Michelangelo is an impeccable anatomist, as much cannot be said about him as a physiologist; all the muscles in his works are in a state of tetanus. In Nature, when one muscle contracts, the other relaxes.
So another conflict appears here between Michelangelo and his forebears: they worked from healthy living models while he used cadavers. Ghirlandaio, the so-called ‘master’, neither instructed nor influenced the so-called ‘student’. To date, we have only two Michelangelo drawings inspired by Ghirlandaio: one in the Louvre and one in the Albertina. Michelangelo’s stay with the Medici powerfully sharpened his thinking and education. Living amidst the family’s priceless collections, he developed an easy familiarity with the tiniest art secrets of Antiquity.
Pietà, 1499.
Marble, height: 174 cm.
St Peter’s Basilica, Vatican.
Pietà (detail), 1499.
Marble, height: 174 cm.
St Peter’s Basilica, Vatican.
Bacchus (detail), 1497.
Marble, height: 203 cm.
Museo del Bargello, Florence.
But if Antiquity so generously endowed the Renaissance master with ideas and themes, inspired him to worship form and stimulated his appetite for abstraction, Michelangelo’s ideals unswervingly opposed those of Ancient Greece. For example, he would subordinate every element in a composition to a single overriding impression: not just the hands, arms, legs, eyes, and mouth that express the feelings and intentions of the soul, but also the torso and other somehow unconsciously expressive body parts. In short, we should underscore his habit of making the entire human form resonate with a single note, a note that expresses pathos, the strongest emotion. Does anything else clash more violently with the errant ways of the sculptors of Antiquity so concerned with pure and graceful curves before giving any thought to rendering the ripples of the soul?
We know luck led Michelangelo to Lorenzo de’ Medici. Lorenzo developed a fondness for the youth and took him under his wing after Michelangelo immediately broke a tooth off his marble mask of a faun because Lorenzo had remarked that the face was too old to have all its teeth. Thus, the artist became
