Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel Read Free

that his destiny will not always be easy. Sucking in chisels and hammers — the artist makes his sense of vocation sound like something painfully ingested.
    Little is known about Michelangelo’s real mother, save that her name was Francesca and that she died when he was six years old. It was common practice at the time for families of some education and social pretension, such as his, to pass newborn babies to wet nurses for the first two years or so of their lives. So it can be assumed that Michelangelo had returned to the family home in Florence in about 1477 — only for his true mother to die just four years later. Mortality rates in fifteenth-century Italy were high, especially among young, child-bearing women. But the artist’s early childhood was certainly traumatic, even by the standards of the time. Having been separated from his surrogate mother and lost his true mother in quick succession, he was soon to encounter difficulties in his relationship with his father.
    Both Vasari and Condivi recount that Lodovico Buonarroti, recognising the boy’s intelligence, sent Michelangelo to a grammar school in Florence run by a certain Maestro Francesco from Urbino. But as Condivi tells the story, ‘nature and the heavens, which are difficult to withstand, were drawing him toward painting ; so that he could not resist running off here and there to draw whenever he could steal some time and seeking the company of painters ... On this account he was resented and quite often beaten unreasonably by his father and his father’s brothers who, being impervious to the excellence and nobility of art, detested it and felt that its appearance in their family was a disgrace.’ 3
    There is probably an element of exaggeration here. Michelangelo was clearly a very well-educated man. Not only did he read Dante, he also wrote his own poetry, in fluent cursive handwriting. So it seems unlikely that he neglected his studies altogether. It is also clear that Michelangelo’s father, Lodovico, eventually became sufficiently resigned to his son’s inclinations to have him apprenticed to Domenico Ghirlandaio (although Condivi, of course, leaves that fact out). But there does nonetheless seem to have been a longstanding disapproval, within Michelangelo’s family, of his choice of career.
    The cause, as Condivi’s choice of the word ‘disgrace’ suggests, was a form of snobbery. Although the status of artists had risen considerably in fifteenth-century Italy, in many quarters they were still commonly regarded as little better than glorified craftsmen. This seems to be have been so in Michelangelo’s family. The Buonarroti were once-prosperous moneylenders — a traditional Florentine occupation — who had fallen on hard times. Michelangelo’s grandfather, Lionardo, had squandered the family business, and by the time the artist was born the family estates had dwindled to no more than a little property in Florence and one small farm on a hillside in Settignano.
    Yet still the Buonarroti persisted in thinking of themselves as rightful members of the leisured classes. They were landowners, albeit in a very small way, who preferred to subsist on the extremely poor revenues of their diminished estates rather than engage in anything as demeaning as manual labour. They might take on clerical duties in the counting houses of contemporaries such as the Strozzi, but working with their hands was out of the question. 4 The artist’s father, Lodovico, must have hoped that the evidently gifted Michelangelo might one day restore the family fortunes. But in choosing to become an artist — to be an apprentice, to work with his hands — there was in his father’s eyes a clear danger that he might take the family even lower down the social scale than it had already fallen.
    As things turned out, Michelangelo did more than restore the family fortunes. He became a rich man, frequenting the company of popes and cardinals. Throughout his meteoric rise he