Michael Ayrton – Introduction to Michelangelo’s Sonnets

Michelangelo's contemporaries thought him the greatest artist who had ever lived and they called him 'divine'. His reputation as sculptor, architect, painter and draughtsman has not subsequently been surpassed and who is to say that his contemporaries were wrong? Their opinion has not dated. He was, and is, the archetype of genius in the visual arts. He is also the archetypal artist and the central paradox around which his life revolved is the basis of the mystique which surrounds that term.

That paradox, put simply, is one of success and failure, the failure of a super-human achievement in the light of an even more super-human ambition. In Michelangelo the man, it showed itself in a profound melancholy marching step by step with a vast public esteem until the man, raised to a status of demi-god, found himself forced further and further out of human intercourse and into an especial purgatory. Fortuitously but none the less certainly, it was Michelangelo even more than Raphael and Leonardo who raised the image-maker from craftsman to artist, that mysterious state of forlorn grace beyond normality.

In doing so, he changed the attitude of the spectator from one of simple satisfaction to one of awed disquiet.

Michael Ayrton – Introduction to Michelangelo’s Sonnets

 

Michelangelo …. was  the first man to count himself a failure in the very teeth of the greatest personal success ever won by an image-maker. His failure lay in his ambition and in the distant goal - far beyond the praises of a sequence of popes - he set himself to gain. ……In that process he initiated a struggle which has since become the norm. The artist dying in squalor, the misunderstood genius, the artist driven mad, the artist ahead of his times, haunted by immeasurable longings, persecuted by philistines, reaching towards the unattainable…..

Where in poetry he enjoys for a moment a fraction of the gigantic exaltation which is at the core of his visual images, he attributes his relief solely to the virtue or beauty of the loved object. He himself is nothing.  He walks from dark to dark, 'living on his death'. .. he repeatedly stresses his weakness, his baseness and his total reliance for survival upon forces outside himself.

Sonnets LXIV and LXX, for instance, show this abject humility yet they were written by the man whose ferocity and grandeur were famed in the word Terribilita, the man whom Pope Leo X called 'Terrifying' and to whom Sebastiano del' Piombo wrote, 'You frighten everyone, even Popes.'

Michael Ayrton – Introduction to Michelangelo’s Sonnets

Michelangelo's life before he settled in Rome in 1534 had consisted of a series of triumphs offset by a series of grandiose schemes which remained unrealised for external reasons beyond his control. Ultimately his very last works were to fail, if such a word could be applied to them except by their creator, for internal reasons equally beyond his control. The pattern of triumph and frustration had been constant throughout his life……

In the Gospel of Matthew, Eleazar, the son of Eliud, is listed in the
genealogy of Jesus as the great-grandfather of Joseph, husband of Mary.

In 1503, he began a series of twelve marble Apostles for the Cathedral of Florence. They were never completed. In 1504 he made numerous studies and a complete cartoon for a fresco representing an incident in the Pisan war. This fresco was intended for the Council Chamber in the Palazzo Vecchio and was to complement Leonardo's equally ill-fated Battle of Anghiari. Michelangelo’s cartoon for this painting, the so-called Cascina Cartoon, became one of the most influential works of the later Renaissance.

It was destroyed during his lifetime.

His failure to complete the fresco was caused by the importunate demands of Pope ]ulius II and Michelangelo left for Rome to begin the sculptures for a tomb which the Pope was anxious to have completed during his own lifetime. There were to be forty marble sculptures ornamenting the Papal resting place and on this project Michelangelo worked for forty years. It was never completed, although it was the subject of five successive contracts with four successive popes.

In 1506 he completed a colossal bronze of Julius II at Bologna.  In 1511 it was destroyed.

 In 1508 he returned to Rome and began to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and on this he worked in circumstances of great difficulty, virtually alone, until 1512. How he felt about this undertaking is described in Sonnet V, but at least it was finished. This work, at the age of thirty-seven, earned him the title 'divine'.

 

Julius II died and the new Pope Leo X was a Medici, the younger son of Lorenzo. He remained Michelangelo's master until his death in 1521, when another Medici became pope, Clement VII, who  continued to employ Michelangelo so that it was for the Medici family or for a Medici pope that he worked until 1534.

During that time he wasted four years on the facade of S. Lorenzo - which to this day has no facade - and carved the sculptures for the Medici Chapel, which remains incomplete. He also designed the Laurencian Library.

In 1527, the Medici were expelled from Florence and Michelangelo, an ardent republican, took part in the defence of the city until its capitulation in 1530. The Medici were reinstated and Michelangelo was pardoned, but after working for four more years on the sculptures for the Medici Chapel, he left Florence for good. It was the pattern of his life that in painting, an activity of which he thought little, his greatest designs were completed, with the exception of the fresco for the Palazzo Vecchio, whereas in sculpture, which he considered his proper profession, all his greatest projects failed to materialise or remained in some compromise form to mock him. He was the longest lived of the three masters who stand at the summit of the High Renaissance and who together created the artist in his new status. The pattern these giants present is one of a strangely blighted perfection, as if the gods had shown their jealousy towards men in the ancient fashion. Michelangelo, as we have seen, saw himself defeated; Leonardo da Vinci watched his grandest achievements destroyed or perish; Raphael failed in nothing, but he died at only thirty-seven.

Michael Ayrton – Introduction to Michelangelo’s Sonnets

The majority of Michelangelo's sonnets were written in the last thirty years of his life, that is to say, after he had finally settled in Rome in 1534. By this time, Leonardo and Raphael were dead and Michelangelo was without rivals. He was the surviving giant from a golden age, but he was also, in some sort, a refugee from his native city of Florence and from the tyranny of a Medici newly created 'Duke'.

As a man without rivals, with Spain, France, Flanders and Venice following his lead and with artists as great as Tintoretto and El Greco in his debt, employed by the fifth in the series of Popes to commission him and about to begin The Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel, he must have seemed to his contemporaries to have arrived at the summit of human ambition.

To read the sonnets is to see how little that meant to him, and to follow those last thirty years of his life is to watch a supreme master move towards the lonely and desperate condition of one who is answerable only to himself. And that is to watch a man embark upon a work which cannot be finished.

Sonnet LXXIII

Unburdened by the body's fierce demands,
And now at last released from my frail boat,
Dear God, I put myself into your hands;
Smooth the rough waves on which my ship must float.

The thorns, the nails, the wounds in both your palms,
The gentleness, the pity on your face -
For great repentance, these have promised grace.
My soul will find salvation in your arms.

And let not justice only fill your eyes,
But mercy too. Oh temper your severe
Judgment with tenderness, relieve my burden.

Let your own blood remove my faults and clear
My guilt, and let your grace so strongly rise
That I am granted an entire pardon.