Birth of Venus. If Botticelli’s strength lay in rendering the beauty, balance, grace and harmony that typified fifteenth-century Florence, Michelangelo’s focus lay entirely elsewhere. After Masolino and Masaccio, Fra Filippo Lippi’s son Filippino, also a student of Botticelli, went on to work on the Brancacci Chapel. Lippi’s frescoes in the Santa Maria Novella Church were already heralding the shift from the Golden Age to the Mannerism of the Late Renaissance.
The fifteenth century was as intense for religion as for art. The Dominicans of San Marco exerted strong influence on art, as witnessed in the works of Fra Angelico. At the close of the century, the general mood in Florence was fast deteriorating with the death of Il Magnifico and the extremist preachings of the self-styled fundamentalist prophet and book burner, Girolamo Savonarola, who was out to eradicate immorality and corruption in the Medici family, clergy and general population until he was finally arrested by the Inquisition, tortured, excommunicated, hanged and then burnt at the stake for good measure. Moreover, the Medici went into exile. All of these events seriously mutilated the local art scene. One upshot was that Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, Benozzo Gozzoli and Michelangelo all veered into more dramatised depictions.
There was also the impact on fifteenth-century Florence of the Flemish School. Strong trade links to Flanders enhanced the arts of Florence too. The Flemings used oil paint with a particular approach to colour and addition of aerial perspective while the Florentines were discovering linear perspective. Influential Flemish masters include Jan van Eyck, Hugo van der Goes, Hans Memling and Rogier van der Weyden. Michelangelo’s early sixteenth-century Bruges Madonna was commissioned by Flemish merchants. But Michelangelo remained faithful to fresco painting though he once said that Flemish painting could make him cry, which Italian works did not.
Early in the fifteenth century, the figurative trend started by Fra Angelico at San Marco’s was picked up by fellow friar Fra Bartolomeo, a disciple of Savonarola’s. The style concentrated on incarnating religious ideals. Fra Bartolomeo’s Portrait of Girolamo Savonarola was one work that gave a neat, sharp picture of its feisty, fiery subject and this artist’s use of colour was to have an impact on Raphael, who would in turn pass on the influences to Michelangelo, some more obviously than others.
10. Raphael, Portrait of La Velata. Oil on canvas, 85 × 64 cm. Palazzo Pitti, Palatine Gallery.
The early sixteenth century was of capital importance to Florentine art, the unprecedented wealth and variety of the fifteenth century notwithstanding. Michelangelo was facing difficult years at the time when he studied under Ghirlandaio in 1488 before turning his attention to the works of Antiquity in the San Marco Garden under the patronage of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Responding intensely to Donatello, Giotto, Masaccio and Signorelli, Michelangelo scrutinised them and copied any gesture, pose, drapery arrangement or facial expression that took his fancy – something intellectual property lawyers would frown upon today. And he invariably refused to show any works in progress, even when the patron was the Pope himself: he copied prolifically but had no intention of being copied himself! He also hated reproducing the features of living persons unless he thought their beauty infinite. He was furthermore the first artist to claim beauty as the absolute baseline for his work. All his output was grounded in his imagination, in contrast to other art that followed the precepts of Raphael and the Primitives. All his life, Michelangelo would remain torn between Florence, where his career truly began, and Rome, where he decorated the Sistine Chapel for the Popes.
Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci were the nucleus of fifteenth-century Florentine art. Also worth citing is the painter and historian Giorgio Vasari, whose Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects first came out in 1550, with the enlarged edition appearing in 1568. Lastly, there was Michelangelo’s close friend and first biographer, Ascavio Condivi. Whatever the shortcomings of these two men’s works, they provide invaluable insight into the Florentine Renaissance and the people who made it happen.
Michelangelo and Da Vinci stood out as strong and mighty personalities with two irreconcilably opposed attitudes to art – yet Vasari reports a bond of deep understanding between them. Da Vinci was twenty years Michelangelo’s senior and each had his own set vision about art. Their fierce independence led to clashes whenever circumstances, such as simultaneous commissions for cartoons of the Palazzo Vecchio, brought them face-to-face. From Donatello and Verrocchio, Da Vinci had developed his sfumato style, best defined as “blending light and shadow without trait or sign, like smoke” and best witnessed in the Mona Lisa at the Louvre Museum of Paris. It obtains hazy contours and dark colours, opposite to Michelangelo’s technique seen in his Tondo Doni (a.k.a. The Holy Family) at the Uffizi in Florence. Da Vinci spent years under Verrocchio while Michelangelo had lasted just one at the Ghirlandaio workshop before studying under Bertoldo: Michelangelo saw himself primarily as a man who worked stone.
For Da Vinci, the essential concern was the long quest for truth while Michelangelo was dogged all his life by the meaning of art itself. Both had dissected cadavers to learn anatomy but for different reasons: Da Vinci was out to render the truth of a gesture in order to better represent action and emotion while Michelangelo simply had a hardwired interest in crafting nudes – Da Vinci never painted nudes. Michelangelo’s David standing in contrapposto is the direct result of his anatomical studies. In short, anatomy affected the two greats very differently.
These two rivals both also had a penchant for non finito, the abandonment artworks in progress. Da Vinci would regularly abandon canvasses while Michelangelo would leave off sculptures. Da Vinci blends non finito into sfumato until they become hard to distinguish while in Michelangelo non finito is only rarer in his paintings. Either Michelangelo abandoned a work because of pressure from other commissions or he was deliberately toying with a novel form of particularly dynamic and expressive art. After doing a model, he would apply himself erratically to the actual statue, with hyperactive frenzy powering him through some sessions and cool detachment through others. The fury he hurled at marble would pare away the excess and liberate the stone’s soul but he didn’t always follow through; non finito was a spin-off of his exceptional creative talent. Instead of aping his predecessors in Christian figurative painting, he opted to start off in stone. He even painted his Tondo Doni as if it were a work of stone. When Pope Julius II handed him the commission for the Sistine Chapel, Bramante, Raphael and other rivals were hoping he would wheedle his way out of it. Yet he made a success of it! In the end, Michelangelo demonstrated excellence in painting too. When it came to architecture, Michelangelo had amassed the maturity to integrate Bramante’s way of empowering buildings with dimensions proportionate to those of the human body.
Alongside him stood the slightly younger Raffaello Sanzio d’Urbino (a.k.a. Raphael) who died early at age thirty-seven. His personality too contrasted sharply with Michelangelo’s. For starters, Raphael was very sociable and he too had evolved a style of his own. Probably arriving in Florence in 1504 after solid training under Perugino, he mixed easily with his peers as he studied the cartoons of Michelangelo and Da Vinci at the Palazzo Vecchio and savoured Fra Bartolomeo’s palette of colours while borrowing odd touches from Ghirlandaio. After a few private commissions, he headed for Rome in 1508 (the same year as Michelangelo) where he painted the Vatican Stanze, the private apartments of Pope Julius II in the Vatican. Beyond his stunning flair for colours, Raphael excelled at rendering drape, velvet, damask and silk distinctively – La Velata at the Pitti Palace is a prime example. Yet the real rivalry between Raphael and Michelangelo was never aggressive – their technique and personalities were simply too different. Raphael’s early death was to leave Michelangelo with a true peer to miss. Given that Raphael’s works instilled the latter’s output with a certain gentle sweetness and way of handling skin colour and fabrics, Michelangelo had a passing to mourn indeed!
11. Rosso Fiorentino, Moses Defends Jethro’s Daughters, Oil on canvas, 160 × 117 cm. Uffizi, Florence.
