Little new in this portrait

MICHELANGELO di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni is one of only a handful of artists whose achievements one might well describe as immortal.

Today, he is as celebrated for his statue of David as for his murals on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. In his own time, he was so well-regarded that he was the subject of two biographies before his death at 88, in 1564, the first Western artist to be so honoured.

Michelangelo has since been the subject of so many treatises and books that it is difficult to see why another might be necessary. Antonio Forcellino obviously feels otherwise.

His new biography, Michelangelo: A Tormented Life, is the product of a lifelong interest that has also seen the author and historian help restore one of the artist’s major works, his statue of Moses on the tomb of Pope Julius II in Rome.

The pity is, however, that Forcelloni has little new to add to what we already know of Michelangelo.

Indeed, the facts of Michelangelo’s existence have been raked over so often it seems unlikely he made a single move of any significance that has not been analysed to death. Broadly speaking, there were two great spectres in his life: his dread of poverty and his alleged homosexuality.

Michelangelo’s monastic living arrangements were the subject of much comment in his day. Despite being a wealthy man from an early age, he begrudged himself luxury of any kind. He lived in the simplest of dwellings, and often slept in his workshop. The reason for such austerity was simple; he feared falling into the trap of poverty that had so afflicted his father, the minor government official Lodovico, and preferred to save his hard-won earnings.

As for Michelangelo’s sexual orientation, that has been the subject of so much speculation that he would have had to out himself to end it definitively.

To many minds, he did just that, in his love poems to Tomasso Dei Cavalieri and Cecchino Dei Bracci. After Michelangelo’s death, his grand nephew interfered with these compositions to give the impression they had been written to women, and they were only restored to their true sense in the late 19th century.

Like many geniuses, Michelangelo made his labours seem effortless, trusting to his instinct where lesser talents might have balked at the challenges presented by some of the wealthiest patrons of his day.

He had the great fortune to live in an age when there was such an appreciation of art.

He was championed by the most powerful men in Italy, from Lorenzo de Medici in Florence to Julius II and his successors in Rome. Michelangelo had ambition to burn, and his admirers were more than happy to heap commissions upon him, indeed, the artist seems never to have known a moment’s idleness.

At an age when most would have been happy to slacken their pace, Michelangelo was still seeking fresh challenges. Forcellino describes admiringly how, at the age of 71, “Michelangelo Buonarroti held the Church of Rome hostage with his talent, especially as the Church was engaged in the greatest undertaking of the century: the building of the new St Peter’s”.

Michelangelo’s work on St Peter’s Basilica included designing its famous dome. Nor was that edifice his only architectural achievement, though it was surely his greatest; he also produced innovative designs for the Laurentian Library and the Medici Chapels in Florence.

Forcellino writes at length about Michelangelo’s death at his home in Rome, the city in which he dwelt and worked most of his life, but which he had never much warmed to.

In the days that followed his passing, the notary Roberto Ubaldini completed an inventory of his effects that listed his scant belongings.

There were, Focellino notes, “no pieces of furniture of any value, no pictures and no precious objects”; even the bed-linen the artist’s relatives had sent him had been put away as new. But Ubaldini uncovered a chest of gold beneath his bed, and numerous vessels full of gold coins the artist had secreted away about the house.

Michelangelo’s body had already been spirited out of Rome and removed to Florence by that city’s ruling de Medici prince, Cosimi I; in his hometown, the artist’s remains were venerated by all and sundry.

“From that night on,” Forcellino concludes, “all that remained of Michelangelo – his corpse, his memory and his art – belonged to the powerful, just as the powerful had always owned his miserable life”.

It seems a shame that Forcellino’s book, which is so authoritative on the life of Michelangelo, adds so little to our understanding of the man. Surely if there is another book to be written on this subject, it must ask whether Michelangelo and his contemporaries achieved so much for the glory of God that they have rendered virtuosity a sin in the art world today. Now that would be a truly daring narrative.