TALKING OF MICHELANGELO

...Papal couriers overtook him on the way, and presented him with a letter from the pope ordering him back to Rome...

...One discerns the immeasurable distance between Creator and creature in so slight a detail as their hands, which do not quite touch...

...Vasari, on the other hand, acknowledged his master's flaws and still honored him as the best of men: God "determined to give this artist the knowledge of true moral philosophy and the gift of poetic expression, so that everyone might admire and follow him as their perfect exemplar in life, work, behavior, and in every endeavor, and he would be acclaimed as divine...

...It is a gesture that can destroy as well as create...

...Burckhardt shows the multiform vitality of a time that elevated individual greatness—artistic, intellectual, military, political—above all else...

...The answer is to be found in Michelangelo's poems...

...So Beck, who calls his book "an interpretation of the personality of Michelangelo," gets the proportions wrong in portraying his hero...

...Michelangelo refused to go...

...There are flashes of exuberant carnality, as in his aching to hold my long desired sweet lord, / in my unworthy but eager arms, for ever...

...The drawing of the Crucifixion that Michelangelo did in 1539 for Vittoria Colonna, a saintly widow whom he loved with ardent purity and whom Burckhardt calls "the most famous woman of Italy," is the finest rendering of Christ on the Cross done during the Renaissance...

...Michelangelo told the guard that if the pope ever wanted him, he should look elsewhere than in Rome...

...And the answer to his need made even the David seem a slight thing...

...Painted by Cimabue and Giotto and Grunewald, sculpted by Ghiberti and Donatello, Christ just hangs there, dead: The Resurrection may be coming, but for now there is only death—decorous and peaceful in Donatello's portrayal, gruesome beyond description in Grune-wald's, but death in any event...

...In today's academic world, which has no place for great men, these are fighting words, and it takes audacity even for a tenured professor to write them...

...The pope had commissioned Michelangelo to make him a tomb like nobody else's...

...the artist's design contained some forty full-size sculpted figures, and he was bold enough to assert that the tomb would be the most extraordinary work of art ever made...

...All men are to be strengthened by Christ's display of human strength...

...Reverence for and pleasure in the grandeur of man are Renaissance hallmarks...

...Michelangelo, who seemed able to do anything he willed, was—along-side Leonardo da Vinci and Niccolo Machiavelli—as great a man as the Renaissance produced...

...For Michelangelo, however, the body's beauty is the way into the soul...

...Michelangelo forgave the pope, with a genial laugh, but he was not always so forgiving...

...A long, arcing, inexorably descending line runs from Christ's neck along his torso and thigh...

...Talking of Michelangelo By Algis Valiunas Sculptor, painter, architect, and poet, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) is probably the most famous artist ever to live, and his most famous works all depict man as a beautiful creature made for great things and deserving to rejoice in his own majesty...

...The heroic male nude was Michelangelo's lifelong preoccupation: Its most celebrated expressions are his fourteen-foot-tall marble David, which occupied the most prominent place in Florence's Piazza della Signoria for over three hundred years before it was moved indoors to the Accademia, and his painting Creation of Adam, which is the showpiece of the Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes in the Vatican...

...his left arm plunges straight down from the shoulder...

...Jacob Burckhardt's pathbreaking 1860 history, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, is an inspired elaboration of Alberti's motto...

...Where the human and the divine meet in Michelangelo's art, both the glories and the limitations of the human condition are revealed...

...the effect is of an unearthly serenity...

...Making it, however, proved more difficult than drawing it...

...but eternity is a great deal longer, especially if you happen to be damned...

...Michelangelo, for his part, observed of the Belvedere Torso, "This is the work of a man who knew more than nature...

...One is especially grateful then that John Frederick Nims, the author of eight books of poetry, former editor of the renowned magazine Poetry, who recently died at age eighty-five, saw the project of translating Michelangelo through to the end...

...In that early Pieta, Mary holds the dead Christ on her lap almost without effort...

...One sees it in a subsequent panel on the ceiling, as the angel wielding a sword drives Adam and Eve from Paradise...

...To his contemporaries, Michelangelo was known for his terribilita, an untranslatable word that refers to both the awesome splendor of his work and the monumental crankiness of his life...

...Taking revenge as only an artist can, Michelangelo painted Biagio's face on the figure of Minos, Prince of Hell...

...Brawnier than David, he looks as though he could wrench himself free of the nails...

...These are as different as can be from the signature piece that he made in his youth...

...Everyone, inside and outside academia, knows that men of genius are ruthless, irascible, unloving, and demonic...

...the breadth of chest and the contour of hip sketch a human endowment that is far richer than flesh alone...

...He casts his eyes toward heaven in agonized supplication, as a man, but in certainty of ultimate victory, as God...

...On another occasion, the pope impatiently demanded to know when Michelangelo would finish the ceiling, and Michelangelo impatiently responded, "When I can, Holy Father...

...Others are addressed to Vittoria Colonna, and some to an unknown "lady beautiful and cruel...

...Most Renaissance crucifixions emphasize the defeated humanity of Christ, and leave his triumphant divinity to the viewer's pious imagination...

...the terribilita business, however, does not go away so easily...

...At least for a time, his supreme ambitions were to make something more beautiful than nature and to excel those artists of classical antiquity who showed it could be done...

...Nature and antiquity were touchstones for Michelangelo...

...however, Vasari wrote, Julius presently thought better of his outburst, and sent an emissary to the artist with an apology and a handsome sum of money "to calm him down, as he was afraid that he would react in his usual unpredictable way...

...His Michelangelo was a thoroughly good man: devoted to his father and brothers, tender and loyal to friends, generous to fellow artists, chaste even in the face of strong erotic temptations, homosexual or heterosexual or both...

...There are intimations of love that transcends the strictly personal and lifts one heavenward: Drawn to each lovely thing, my doting eyes...

...Men can do all things if they will," declared Leon Battista Al-berti, another Italian of many talents...

...When Michelangelo returned to Rome after eight months in the marble quarries of Carrara, he went to the pope in order to be reimbursed for delivery of a shipment of stone...

...Pope Paul III's master of ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena, observed of Michelangelo's nearly completed Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel that, with its numerous nude figures, it would look better on the wall of a tavern or a bathhouse...

...Not necessarily the wicked, but the good man with the usual failings—what must he feel...

...Poets as great as Wordsworth and Rilke have undertaken translations and given up...

...Love, profane and sacred, is the predominant theme...

...Beck argues, not without cogency, that Michelangelo left Rome out of fear that Julius had lost interest in the tomb, which was true, and that his life was in danger, which was not true...

...the next morning, Michelangelo headed back to Florence...

...Rippling sinew bespeaks spiritual force...

...His extended, life-giving right arm is like a lightning bolt that strikes with the utmost delicacy...

...What, then, about the sinner...

...Many of the poems are addressed to the handsome and brilliant Roman nobleman Tommaso de' Cavalieri, whom Michelangelo met in 1532, when he was fifty-seven and Cavalieri twenty-three...

...It is far more likely that fear and anger both played their part in this episode, as Giorgio Vasari, Michelangelo's sometime apprentice and his first biographer, remarked in Lives of the Most Eminent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors...

...It would be six months before Michelangelo asked the pope to forgive his stalking off...

...that fear is evident in the sculptures of the dead Christ that he carved in the 1540s and 1550s: the Florentine Pietà and the Palestrina Pieta...

...passion provokes reflections on what sort of beings we are that we should have such feelings...

...He twists his suffering body to relieve the terrible weight, yet he remains the image of heroic endurance...

...Even art comes to seem a distraction, perhaps one fatal to the soul: Painting and sculpture soothe the soul no more, / its focus fixed on the love divine, outstretching / on the Cross, to enfold us closer, open arms...

...life...

...Michelangelo's Christ suggests the promise of salvation, but also demonstrates the virtue most necessary for men as they struggle to be saved: fortitude...

...Greatness is often a far cry from goodness, but, according to a new biography, Michelangelo was as good as he was great...

...The incident that really made Michelangelo's name as a terribile was a set-to he had with Pope Julius II...

...For the most part, Beck makes a convincing case...

...God, too, partakes of that grief...

...and one is relieved to find that Michelangelo continued to work on his sculpture almost to the last day of his long life...

...Beauty of this order makes demands on the beholder...

...The Creation of Adam shows the recumbent man and the deity virtually in parallel, and it is plain that Adam is made in God's image...

...Mary's thigh and Christ's lower leg form a diagonal aimed sharply toward the earth...

...No human strength can long resist this downward pull...

...Vasari related that when someone—possibly Pope Julius, in disguise—sneaked into the Sistine Chapel as Michelangelo was still working on the ceiling, the painter hurled planks from the scaffolding down at the intruder...

...Yet Michelangelo could not escape the fear that even heroic strength may not be enough...

...the pope left him cooling his heels for a week, until finally a guard told him that he had been ordered not to admit him...

...There are moments of disenchantment and even disgust with sensual pleasure, its core of ash and gall...

...The sheer physical beauty of David and Adam is unsurpassed, so that one wonders if people looking at them today see anything more than ripped abdomens and peerless proportions...

...But, ultimately, all those lovely things get in the way of the poet's deepest longing, which is for God...

...To suggest, in addition, that such achievements might be the work of a man who should be called civilized— that is, decent, humane, self-restrained, moral, good—is to invite contempt...

...They are, in effect, the civilization...

...The tip of God's right index finger, by contrast, is the focus of a masterful energy that gathers strength in a long diagonal and is discharged in a commanding gesture: Fiat homo...

...Both with the one same goal, / no way, but in treasuring loveliness, to rise...

...yet there can be no mistaking who is master here...

...This Crucifixion is Michelangelo's subtlest heroic portrait: Human magnificence, exemplified by God become man, consists of the divine life good men will enjoy after death and the ability to endure the worst earthly trials undefeated...

...The tomb was never completed in anything like the planned form...

...Rilke was exhorting his readers not to up the weight on their bench presses but to live nobly...

...Jacob Burckhardt writes of the atrophy of religious feeling among the "intellectual giants" of the Renaissance: "The need of salvation thus becomes felt more and more dimly, while the ambitions and the intellectual activity of the present either shut out altogether every thought of a world to come, or else caused it to assume a poetic instead of a dogmatic form...

...From these ambitions emerged Michelangelo's most renowned works, which have come to embody the Renaissance...

...Reminding one of John Donne's sonnet "Batter my heart, threeperson'd God," Michelangelo's sonnet "I wish I'd want what I don't want, Lord, at all" shows the poet's desire that God's love transform him into the kind of man who loves God as he should, without distraction or compromise...

...God is both tender and fearsome...

...Adam is as yet mere inert matter—already beautiful but lacking vital force—about to receive a soul...

...Of Michelangelo, precisely the opposite was true...

...Beck agrees entirely that there is terribilita in abundance in Michelangelo's art, but he prefers to think that the man who made such works was utterly different from the works he made...

...In these poems, the greatest artist of the human body finds himself wishing he were not encumbered by a body of his own...

...Drawn to its heavenly destiny, my soul...

...Michelangelo's drawing, in which Christ is alive, depicts not only Christ's triumph over death but also the human struggle with life at its most frightful...

...James Beck's Three Worlds of Michelangelo takes the artist up to age thirty-eight and the completion of the Sistine ceiling...

...his Michelangelo is positively swollen with goodness...

...Rainer Maria Rilke ends his poem on the Belvedere Torso—a mutilated but superb remnant of a male figure in marble from the first century— with the sternest yet most joyous of imperatives: "You must change your Algis Valiunas is a writer living in Florida...

...In some 300 poems, mostly sonnets and madrigals, about 250 of them written during the last thirty years of his life, Michelangelo explored many aspects of the human condition, but always returned to what he considered its most significant feature: man's distance from God...

...Human magnificence owes everything to God, and, once that truth is forgotten, man is never far from coming to grief...

...Adam's outstretched arm looks as powerful as God's own, but it is limp-wristed, and his fingers are diffidently curled...

...Michelangelo's own reputation places him among that crowd, as a prototype of the Romantic artist-hero...

...Still, the truth remains that one of the most remarkable of men found human magnificence simply not enough...

...In the Florentine Pieta, the holiest of human beings are on the verge of collapsing under the weight of human sinfulness...

...Furious at this insolence, the pope struck Michelangelo with a staff, and told him he would make him finish the job soon enough...

...In the Florentine Pieta, three people— the Virgin seated, Mary Magdelene kneeling, and Nicodemus standing— labor with all their might to keep the broken body of Christ from falling to the ground...

...Michelangelo's Christ is tortured and haggard, but he is, nevertheless, unbroken...

...Much of Michelangelo's poetry can be characterized as thoughtfully erotic...

...In this crucial respect, he was not a man of his time and place, but rather discovered in himself a need common to men of every time and place...

...By all accounts but Beck's, Michelangelo was a hothead...

...A professor of art history at Columbia, Beck writes "A handful of individuals in the history of Western culture have evolved into universal symbols for the entire civilization...

...no human burden is heavier than that which man bears for having put God to death...

...His poems can be so gnarled and knotty that even Italian editions provide paraphrases for the reader's benefit...

...However, Beck's contention that Michelangelo simply behaved like "a cautious, sensitive person worried about his security and his career" is too much to swallow...

...The heroic demonstrates what is possible for man and displays the full extent of his reach...

...a pair of ass's ears appear on the unfortunate churchman's head and a snake coiled about his legs clamps its mouth around his penis...

...Michelangelo's own severity might seem unconscionable, miserable, or even mad...

...Life is short, and art is long...

...Beck has his work cut out for him as he tries to rehabilitate Michelangelo's character...