right arm of the Medici Madonna in the Medici Chapel of San Lorenzo Church.
Although polychrome enthusiasts became ever fewer, works of coloured marble sustained a following for some time. Juxtaposing marbles of different colours, Vasari argued, enabled sculpture to compete with painting.
Terracotta had few faithful disciples left. As for Della Robbia’s style of enamelled terracotta, it was definitely relegated to the countryside. Bronze castings held many surprises and disappointments. We know how Benvenuto Cellini’s picturesque and dramatising description immortalised the misadventures of casting his Perseus. As for Giambologna, he subcontracted the door casting for the Dome of Pisa, sculptures for the Salviati Chapel, and statues of Cosimo I.
Wood and ivory sculptures were almost non-existent and stuccos were earning wider appeal. Pasteboard was commonly used for copies of greater works and execution of ornaments. And finally, wax sculpture blossomed brilliantly. In Vasari’s time, no goldsmith would model effigies without it.
Michelangelo dominated and even snuffed out the rest of Late Renaissance sculpture with his style, and even more so with his technique. Given this dazzling superiority, need we add that his influence was more harmful than fertile? The master focused on sobriety and concision while his imitators mostly delivered empty output of remarkable poverty. He sought out robustly rounded forms and palpable contours; his imitators fell for clumsiness and exaggerated swelling. He exalted and exasperated everyone’s feelings: what was emotion and eloquence to him became bombastic through other chisels. He uplifted the manifestation of brute force into moral statements: in his wake, people swore by only the former. If the Primitives approximated the slender, distinct forms of their Ancient Greek peers and if Michelangelo became one with Phidias through the Medici tombs, the last heroes of the Renaissance had apparently taken example from the Farnese Hercules and other examples of Roman decadence.
Madonna of the Stairs, c. 1490.
Marble, 56.7 × 40.1 cm.
Casa Buonarroti, Florence.
Battle of the Centaurs, 1490–1492.
Marble, 80.5 × 88 cm.
Casa Buonarroti, Florence.
With such high moral ambitions, such moving emotional hang-ups, and all the morbid melancholic expression of Christian passion, the master pursued; the Slaves in the Louvre (pp. 60, 63), the Pensieroso and Moses were more beautiful for the feelings they capture than for their technique and none inspired a single attempt at imitation. It is as if, in the eyes of the Bandinellis, Ammannatis, Tribolos, and Benvenuto Cellinis, Michelangelo had never sculpted anything except his Bacchus (p. 48, 50), Adonis, and Cupid – in short, it is as if all his themes had been pagan. Here, the influences of antiquity and of Michelangelo combined to finish off the destruction of Italian art. Instead of drawing inspiration from modern feelings, the epigones worried only about representing the gods of Mount Olympus and heroes of Rome or Greece; in short, they depicted a dead world. So if the technique of these statues is so mannered and empty, and if expressiveness is totally absent, what remains? Nothing. Except maybe invincible boredom.
Moreover, the exaggerated quest for suppleness and movement, backed by a passion for dazzling feats gave fatal impetus into Mannerism. What can be more pretentious and less monumental than these statues: Giuliano da Sangallo’s Julius II in St Peter’s Basilica, the Paolo Giovio or the Piero de’ Medici amongst others. They may have been completed in an extraordinarily short amount of time, but what jerky, graceless lines and what dearth of elegance! Better than anywhere else, funerary art nicely reflects all the struggles, conflicts, and excesses of the Renaissance. Let us briefly review examples of the output.
In northern Italy, traditional architectural values still had followers such as Sansovino, San Micheli, and the sculptor of the tomb of Soriano da Rimini at the Santo Stefano Church in Venice (1535) – it is a sort of funerary niche inhabited by a sarcophagus supporting a statue of the deceased between two columns.
In central Italy, the tombs of Julius and the Medici, where architecture abdicates entirely before sculpture, were the rule. These monuments contain Michelangelo’s chief innovations: in the 15th century, allegorical figures of almost invariably small size were entirely subordinated to a statue of the deceased but became preponderant in Michelangelo’s works because they stimulated his imagination. For Italy, this was a new way of handling funerary art. Michelangelo’s colossuses contain high spiritualistic aspirations that incarnate a universe of abstract impressions. Need it be said that this is no longer the cold banal allegory of the 15th century, these are no longer the Theological Virtues, Cardinal Virtues, Arts, or Sciences in relaxed poses or, it must be said, somehow parasitical motifs placidly lined up next to each other. Michelangelo liked to penetrate deeper into the conception of a subject: to him all the allegorical characters bond intimately to the deceased whose virtues they celebrate. Indignant or humiliated prisoners, victors savouring the full joy of triumph and personifications of natural forces such as Rivers, Day, Night, Dusk, and Dawn are all so many chords plucked by the soul of the deceased; each rings out its own sound in memory of his noble qualities, of the splendour of his victories and of the pain triggered by his premature death. In short, they are the actors of a tragedy whose hero is Julius II, Giuliano de’ Medici, or his brother Lorenzo. How can such a conception not be more dramatic than that of the Primitives?
The need for movement soon made it impossible to settle for representing the deceased in a posture of eternal rest: the dead are now rubbing elbows, chatting, or doing something else.
As to the themes of the last Renaissance sculptors, the theory of art for art’s sake prevailed increasingly over art as a statement of great ideas and noble sentiments. Here, no example is more edifying than a comparison between sculptures commissioned by the Medici with those of the Florentine Republic for the Piazza dei’ Signori or the Loggia de’ Lanzi. The Republic displayed Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes only after adding an inscription reminding viewers that the Jewish heroine’s exploit stood as a warning to all tyrants. In addition, it essentially commissioned Michelangelo to do a David because it saw the latter as an example of a young herdsman who had saved his country from the yoke of Philistine rule. But the concerns of the Medici lay elsewhere: they sought only to embellish the piazzas with beautiful sculptures free of any signification; in short, they were essentially platonic, i.e. Hercules and Cacus, Neptune, Perseus and the Rape of the Sabine Women. Official art must have singularly annihilated all patriotism for 16th-century Florence to have so hastily accepted compositions based merely on artistic merit instead of on the glorification of a saint, folk hero or military victory. When art becomes that contrived, what breathing space survives for emotions, inspiration, or even personal conviction?
St Proculus, 1494.
Marble, height: 58.5 cm (with base).
Church of San Domenico, Bologna.
Angel Holding a Candelabra, 1495.
Marble, height: 51.5 cm.
Church of San Domenico, Bologna.
The Oeuvre
Although Michelangelo excelled as a sculptor, painter, and architect, he was most ardently and consistently fond of sculpting: scultore was the only title he ever used. We, therefore, need to use this discipline as the baseline for mapping the biography and efforts of this prodigious artist. Among the wealth of publications devoted to Michelangelo, those of Condivi and Vasari deserve special mention.
Michelangelo is an infinitely more faithful representative of the modern era than his supremely serene fellow geniuses Da Vinci or Raphael, although he was older than the latter. He was a sublime misanthrope who sensed melancholy, fears, inner doubts, and the soul’s rebelliousness against society, which he translated with a uniquely personal style of vehemence.
The most incisive research into the Florentine School is helpless to explain