CELLINI His Life and Times by Hone Michael

Author:Hone, Michael [Hone, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-01-08T16:00:00+00:00

Details of Michelangelo’s David

Now comes a strange interlude in Michelangelo’s life. We’ve learned that Charles VIII invaded Italy and appropriated Florence, to the humiliation of Piero de’ Medici who tried to deal with Charles but was turned away like a servant. He fled Florence and entered history as Piero the Unfortunate. In fear of Charles’ army, Michelangelo escaped to Bologna where he and two friends who accompanied him were jailed because they didn’t have the small sum of money needed to buy permission to stay in the city, an important source of taxes for towns like Bologna, one that permitted them to do things like medical dissections which, in Bologna, had been carried out in public for centuries. Somehow an important Bolognese personage recognized him as a Medici sculptor from Florence and paid for his release, taking the boy to his palazzo. Now, Michelangelo would be remembered throughout history as being tight-fisted in the extreme, rarely inviting friends to share a meal, and he never accepted gifts for fear of being placed in a person’s debt. But he was also generous to those he loved, literally giving them the shirt off his back. The paradox is that Michelangelo rarely went through life with the same people, no matter how much he had loved them in the past. Only when he was in the throes of love was he fierce and total. Da Vinci, on the other hand, kept loyal to friends and remained close to his lovers until the end, but in a way that may have been too cerebral in comparison to Michelangelo, who loved his boys fully and violently. Be that as it may, Michelangelo was said to have abandoned his two friends in prison and went off to live in such luxury that when Piero de’ Medici happened to come to Bologna, Michelangelo didn’t even make an effort to see him.

He and his new friend, Gian Francesco Aldrovandi, spent their nights reading Boccaccio--literature as erotic then as it is to us today. A friendship developed … and surely more. At any rate Michelangelo carved three small statues for Aldrovandi’s church, St Dominic, each around 2 feet high, of extreme beauty and intricacy, especially the angel. After a year Michelangelo returned to Florence where the political situation had stabilized, and then went to Rome where he sculpted the Pietà , Christ cradled on the legs of his mother, whose portrait is so young she could have been Christ’s sister. Michelangelo inscribed his name on a band across her breasts, the first and only time he ever signed a work. The perfection of the faces and the intricacy of Christ’s mother’s drapery are beyond human understanding as to how Michelangelo accomplished them. He was 25, the new and never to be toppled King of the World.

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