Faced with an unforgiving lump of marble, the 80-year-old Michelangelo sent more splinters soaring (and at three times the speed) than three robust stone cutters could produce. Mad with loneliness (his lover, Vittoria Colonna, closest friend, Luigi del Riccio, and lifetime...
[more]Faced with an unforgiving lump of marble, the 80-year-old Michelangelo sent more splinters soaring (and at three times the speed) than three robust stone cutters could produce. Mad with loneliness (his lover, Vittoria Colonna, closest friend, Luigi del Riccio, and lifetime servant, Urbino, were all dead), the artist broke into the stone with such force that he risked destroying the entire piece. Night after night he waited impatiently for his assistants and servants to retire before strapping on the cardboard helmet with its affixed candle and dive into his solitary work. The result, the "Rondanini Piet'," was the last sculpture Michelangelo undertook before his death; like most of the works he created in his old age, it is incomplete.
A despairing interpretation of Mary struggling to hold with dignity her dead son, the "Rondanini Piet'" is a confusing merging of bodies: Christ, arms limp at his sides, almost appears to be supporting Mary on the curve of his back while she grips him around the chest. Their blurred faces are so alike that they seem to be the same person. Yet Christ's deathly downward gaze and sinuous body are contrasted by the agonized tension of Mary's effort.
Michelangelo felt the sculptor's role was "the making of men." Like some of his other late works, the "Rondanini Piet'" is men unpolished. Gravely different from his early "Piet'," in which a youthful, beautiful Mary resignedly holds her dead son across her lap, the "Rondanini Piet'" represents the artist's struggle to liberate human beings from rock '- and from each other. The resulting figures appear at once to emerge from and melt back into the stone.
Michelangelo described this ultimately unfinished process as follows: "For ten years of sleepless nights, I've been designing a Piet'. The body of our Lord was too heavy with death to be held up by his old Mother. His head... too earthy with matter, too real... so I cut away the Lord's head and shoulders, leaving only his arm as a model for a new one, and carved a new head from the Virgin's shoulder. He backs inward to fuse with his Mother's body, as she bends forward to raise him up. Mother and Son, the Living and the Dead, become One -- Death becomes a Resurrection."
At birth Michelangelo was placed in the care of a wet nurse who came from a family of stone cutters. Through this odd, indirect lineage emerged the man who would instill life into stone with a chisel. He would alter the direction of painting, as well, with the beautifully commanding frescoes of the Sistine Chapel, and take architecture to new heights with the rebuilding of St. Peter's.
The awesome masterpieces for which Michelangelo traded sanity -- "David," the Piet's, the Sistine Chapel, the "Bound Slave," and the "Dying Slave" -- didn't save him from sadness and bitterness. Michelangelo typified the 'virmelancholicus' (so the Renaissance termed the artist's condition of angst and crazed solitary contemplation).
He wrote poetically of the haunted sensibility that concluded a brilliant life: "I live alone and miserable, trapped as marrow under the bark of the tree. My voice is like a wasp caught in a bag of skin and bones. My teeth shake and rattle like the keys of a musical instrument. My face is a scarecrow. My ears never cease to buzz. In one of them, a spider weaves its web, in the other one, a cricket sings all night long. My rattling catarrh won't let me sleep. This is the state where art has led me, after granting me glory. Poor, old, beaten, I will be reduced to nothing, if death does not come swiftly to my rescue. Pains have quartered me, torn me, broken me and death is the only inn awaiting me."
Michelangelo reached the inn in his 89th year, but never counted on the immortality that would attach itself to his name.
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