2 Controversy, censorship and the 'Fig-Leaf Campaign'

Michelangelo's The Last Judgement. Saint Bartholomew is shown holding the knife of his martyrdom and his flayed skin. The face of the skin is recognizable as Michelangelo

When the work was finished on the Last Judgment in ( October 1541), Michelangelo was accused of intolerable obscenity for his depictions of naked figures showing genitals (and inside the private chapel of the Pope). A violent censorship campaign was organized by Cardinal Carafa and Monsignor Sernini ( Magntua 's ambassador) to remove the frescoes, but the Pope resisted.

In coincidence with Michelangelo's death, a law was issued to cover genitals ("Pictura in Cappella Ap.ca coopriantur"). So Daniele da Volterra, an apprentice of Michelangelo, covered with sort of perizomas (briefs) the genitals, leaving unaltered the complex of bodies (see details [1]). When the work was restored in 1993, the restorers chose not to remove the perizomas of Daniele; however, a faithful uncensored copy of the original, by Marcello Venusti, is now in Naples, at the Capodimonte Museum.

Censorship always followed Michelangelo, once described as "inventor delle porcherie" (inventor of obscenities, in a sense that in Italian sounds like he had created genitals).

The " fig-leaf campaign" of the Counter Reformation to cover all representations of human genitals in paintings and sculptures started with Michelangelo's works. To give two examples, the bronze statue of "Cristo della Minerva" (church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome) was covered, as it remains today, and the statue of the naked child Jesus in "Madonna of Bruges" (Belgium) remained covered for several decades. A similar campaign occurred in Victorian Britain. Even today, the genital of 'David' in the Victoria and Albert Museum still gets covered with a stone fig leave during royal visits.

3 Michelangelo the architect

3.1 Medici Chapel

3.2 Laurentian Library

3.3 Palazzo Farnese

3.4 St Peter's Basilica

3.5 Michelangelo at the Campidoglio

Michelangelo's first designs for solving the intractable urbanistic, symbolic, political and propaganda program for the Campidoglio dated back in the 1530s. The commission was from the Farnese Pope Paul III, who wanted a symbol of the new Rome to impress Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, who was expected in 1538. The hill was the Capitoline, the heart of pagan Rome, though that connection was largely obscured by its other role as the center of the civic government of Rome, revived as a commune in the 11th century . The city's government was now to be firmly in papal control, but the Campidoglio was the former scene of many movements of urban resistance, such as the dramatic scenes of Cola di Rienzi's revived republic. Approximately in the middle, not to Michelangelo's liking, now stood the only equestrian bronze to have survived since Antiquity, Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher emperor. He apparently owed his suvival largely because popular culture had mistaken him for Constantine the Great, revered as the first Christian emperor by plebs and popes alike.

It was slow work: little was actually completed in Michelangelo's lifetime, but work continued faithfully to his designs and the Campidoglio was completed in the 17th century, except for the paving design.

Michelangelo provided new fronts to the two official buildings of Rome's civic government, which very approximately faced each other, the Palazzo dei Conservatori and the Palazzo Senatore, which had been built over the Tabularium that had housed the archives of ancient Rome. He devised a monumental stair (the "Cordonata") to reach the high piazza, so that the Campidoglio resolutely turned its back on the Forum that it had once commanded, and he gave the space a new building at the far end, to close the vista.

The Palazzo dei Conservatori was the first use of a giant order that spanned two storeys, here with a range of Corinthian pilasters and subsidiary Ionic columns flanking the ground-floor loggia openings and the second floor windows. Another giant order would serve later for the exterior of St Peter's. A balustrade punctuated by sculptures atop the giant pilasters capped the composition, one of the most influential of Michelangelo's designs. The sole arched motif in the entire design are the segmental pediments over the windows, which give a slight spring to the completely angular vertical-horizontal balance of the design.

The bird's-eye view of the engraving (illustrated, above right) shows, better than a photograph could, Michelangelo's solution to the problems of the space in the Piazza del Campidoglio. Even with their new facades centering them on the new palazzo at the rear, the space was a trapezoid, and the facades did not face each other squarely. Worse than that, the whole site sloped (to the left in the engraving). Michelangelo's solution was radical. Since no "perfect" forms would work, his apparent oval in the paving is actually egg-shaped, narrower at one end. The travertine design set into the paving is perfectly level: around its perimeter, low steps arise and die away into the paving as the slope requires. Its center springs slightly, so that one senses that one is standing on the exposed segment of a gigantic egg all but buried at the center of the city at the center of the world. An interlaced twelve-pointed star makes a subtle reference to the constellations. Michelangelo's historian Charles de Tolnay connected this design to the umbilicus— the navel of the world.

The paving design was never executed by the popes, who may have detected a subtext of less-than-Christian import. Benito Mussolini ordered the paving completed to Michelangelo's design— in 1940.

• Photographs of details at the Campidoglio

4 Michelangelo the man

Michelangelo, who was often arrogant with others and constantly unsatisfied with himself, thought that art originated from inner inspiration and from culture. In contradiction to the ideas of his rival, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo saw nature as an enemy that had to be overcome. The figures that he created are therefore in forceful movement; each is in its own space apart from the outside world. For Michelangelo, the job of the sculptor is to free the forms that, he believed, were already inside the stone. This can most vividly be seen in his unfinished statuary figures, which to many appear to be struggling to free themselves from the stone.

He also instilled into his figures a sense of moral cause for action. A good example of this can be seen in the facial expression of his marble statue David. Arguably his second most famous work (after David) is the fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel which is a synthesis of architecture, sculpture & painting. His Last Judgement, also in the Sistine Chapel, is a depiction of extreme crisis.

Several anecdotes reveal that Michelangelo's skill, especially in sculpture, was deeply appreciated in his own time. It is said that when still a young apprentice, he had made a pastiche of a Roman statue ( Il Putto Dormiente , the sleeping child) of such beauty and perfection, that it was later sold in Rome as an ancient Roman original. Another better-known anecdote claims that when finishing the Moses ( San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome), Michelangelo violently hit the knee of the statue with a hammer, shouting, "Why don't you speak to me?"

Fundamental to Michelangelo's art is his love of male beauty, which attracted him both aesthetically, and emotionally. Such feelings caused him great anguish, and he expressed the struggle between platonic ideals and carnal desire in his sculpture, drawing and his poetry, too, for among his other accomplishments Michelangelo was the great Italian lyric poet of the 16th century.

Michelangelo developed a romantic relationship with at least one man, Tommaso de' Cavalieri, who was 23 years old and Michelangelo 57 when they met in 1532. This infatuation caused Michelangelo to write a series of sonnets and madrigals that constitute the largest sequence of poems composed by Michelangelo; whether the relationship was merely a Platonic affectation, as modern apologists hasten to assert, the sonnets are the first large sequence of poems in any modern tongue that are addressed by one man to another. To ask whether Michelangelo was " gay" is to ask whether such modern social constructs genuinely apply to a 16th century Italian.

I feel as lit by fire a cold countenance

That burns me from afar and keeps itself ice-chill;

A strength I feel two shapely arms to fill

Which without motion moves every balance.

— (Michael Sullivan, translation)

The homoeroticism of Michelangelo's poetry was obscured when his grand nephew, Michelangelo the Younger, published an edition of the poetry in 1623 with the gender of pronouns changed. John Addington Symonds undid this change by translating the original sonnets into English and writing a two-volume biography, published in 1893.

• Michelangelo's Love Sonnets & Madrigals to Tommaso de Cavalieri translated by Michael Sullivan

5 See also

• List of painters
• List of Italian painters
• List of famous Italians

6 Compare

• Michaelangelo (Ninja Turtle) (a cartoon character named after him).
• Asteroid 3001 Michelangelo, named after the artist

7 Further reading

• Umberto Baldini, (photography Liberto Perugi), The Sculpture of Michelangelo (Rizzoli, 1982) is an excellent work with many fine photos, all in black and white.
• Michael H. Hart, The 100, Carol Publishing Group, July 1992, paperback, 576 pages, BooksEnthsiast.com
• Charles De Tolnay, Michelangelo: Scultor, Painter, Architect. Princeton University Press, 1975, page 119.
• Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy: A Biographical Novel of Michelangelo Publisher: Signet Book, paperback: 776 pages, BooksEnthsiast.com

8 External links

• Biography on Michelangelo.com (in English, very comprehensive)

Buonarroti, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Michelangelo Michelangelo

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