Michelangelo spent a lot of time painting the frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and I've just spent a lot of time looking at pictures of his works. I also saw many of them when I visited Italy.
Naturally the subject matter is divine, but looking at a collection of Michelangelo's works can seem like visiting some place between Boot Camp and La Leche League.
On the one hand, Michelangelo, believed to have been homosexual, sometimes seems to me to focus on male genitalia. For example, they are the focal point in a religious piece called Doni Madonna (Holy Family). They are possibly what the family members are all looking at.
In a war scene, his Battle of Cascina, Michelangelo chooses a moment in time when the soldiers have been swimming and must dress quickly for battle, a convenient way to combine nudity and male bonding in an event that looks like mud wrestling. (Not to mention the twenty nude youth on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.)
Frederick Hartt describes this fresco (Battle of Cascina) as an opportunity for Michelangelo to project "on a plane of intense physical action the emotional stresses of his early existence as well as [to demonstrate] his unchallenged mastery of the nude human body" Well, nude male human body, anyway. Hartt refers to Michelangelo's work in general as a mixture of "heroic grandeur" and "melodious sensuality".
What about
the "emotional stresses" of Michelangelo's early existence?
As a baby he was given to a woman in the nearby marble quarry to wet nurse.
This is where he claims he "drank in his love of stone" -- with
this mother's milk.
His own mother died when he was six. This is an emotionally devastating and psychologically insurmountable event for a child. Such children are unable to bond (form deep emotional attachments) later in life because they will not risk recreating the pain of this initial separation.
Michelangelo's father remarried when he was ten. Michelangelo had four brothers, one older, and an uncle who apparently also lived with them.
Michelangelo "was rudely masculine in his behavior and in the strength of his style and conceptions." explains Hartt. "He seems to have grown up ... with remarkably little feminine influence. The enormous mass of documents and sixteenth-century literary sources concerning the artist contain not a single reference -- beyond their mere names -- either of his mother or of the woman his father married when the boy was ten. From the very beginning, Michelangelo's character seems to have been shaped by the constant stress of a family of men .... The alternating phases of unbounded generosity and affection toward men, and sullen, silent suspicion, seem to reflect the rivalries of a male-dominated environment."
So why does the dominant male on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel wear a lavender dress?"
An artist's first works are very revealing. Sometimes it seems like everything after that is variation on a theme, although some artists go through several definite stages in their development where new material enters the life of their work.
Michelangelo's very first work was the Madonna of the Stairs. This is a wall sculpture of the virgin breast feeding a very earthy little baby. Perhaps a self portrait by the precocious sixteen year old.
Madonna of
the Stairs
Michelangelo's only signature on any work of art is carved into a band over the breast of the Madonna in the marble Pieta in St. Peter's. This is the story.
Just days after it was placed in Saint Peter's, Michelangelo overheard a pilgrim remark that the Pieta was done by Christoforo Solari, a compatriot from Lombard. That night in a fit of rage, Michelangelo took hammer and chisel and placed the following inscription on the sash running across Mary's breast in lapidary letters: MICHEL ANGELUS BONAROTUS FLORENT FACIBAT (Michelangelo Buonarroti, Florentine, made this). This is the only work that Michelangelo ever signed. Michelangelo later regretted his passionate outburst of pride and determined to never again sign a work of his hands.
His next two works are young nudes, Bacchus and the incomparable David. Surely David is an unconscious self portrait. Compare David's huge hands and arms with the portrait of Michelangelo in the Uffizi by an unidentified artist. They are the same hands and arms as David and surely the proper equipment for a sculptor of marble! They are also the hands and face of a very sensual person.
David
Let's take a look at Michelangelo's astrology chart to learn more about this man and his life.
Michelangelo's chart is a classic one for genius. It shows the inability to communicate verbally, which is characteristic of geniuses. Such people are rarely able to articulate their inspiration. Michelangelo, of course, expressed himself in his art. What was his message: the tension of being human?
And it shows as well, the ability to sublimate sexual energy which is also characteristic of genius, sometimes as in the case of Beethoven and others, because of necessity (syphilis has been called the "disease of geniuses").
Michelangelo's sexuality isn't particularly complicated but in order to understand him, his sexuality must be separated from his yearning for sensuality and his ability to assert himself (aggression), both of which were considerable.
It is likely that Michelangelo saw a good deal of aggression in his male family members and that he experienced them as threatening and phallic. Because of the lack of a female presence, he may have associated sex with this type of aggression and become unable to combine it properly with feelings an sentiments appropriate for heterosexual love making. This is probably what he is referring to when he speaks o his troublesome "PASSIONE" and he is right in not wanting to "perpetrate" it on a woman.
Most boys need to wrestle and make physical contact. It is this same energy which has to be shaped into love making as they progress through puberty. The boys in the Buonaroti household had little help with this. As a matter of fact, Michelangelo was likely extremely sensitive and could well differentiate between love, arousal, aggression and violence. But he likely couldn't put it all together properly because he had no model.
In his art, Michelangelo was working out his longing for a mother's love, particularly in the sensual sense of breast feeding, holding and caressing. It would seem that after the age of six he probably never had this gentle touch.
to be continued ...
However the work did not proceed as the master wished, and he soon fired all of his assistants, removed what had already been painted and, between the end of 1508 and January 1509, recommenced the whole demanding enterprise on his own. Condivi recalls that "as a result of having painted for so long a time, keeping his eyes fixed on the ceiling, he saw little when he looked down; if he had to read a letter or some other small thing, he was obliged to hold it above his head."
The project was physically and emotionally torturous for Michelangelo. Michelangelo recounts its effect on him with these words: "After four tortured years, more than 400 over life-sized figures, I felt as old and as weary as Jeremiah. I was only 37, yet friends did not recognize the old man I had become."
This comes from dangling from the ceiling–
I'm goitered like a Lombard cat
(or wherever else their throats grow fat)–
it's my belly that's beyond concealing,
it hands beneath my chin like peeling.
My beard points skyward, I seem a bat
upon its back, I've breasts and splat!
On my face the paint's congealing.Loins concertina'd in my gut,
I drop an arse as counterweight
and move without the help of eyes.Like a skinned martyr I abut
on air, and, wrinkled, show my fat.
Bow-like, I strain toward the skies.No wonder then I size
things crookedly; I'm on all fours.
Bent blowpipes send their darts off-course.Defend my labor's cause,
good Giovanni, from all strictures:
I live in hell and paint its pictures.Michelangelo Buonarroti
