From Marble to Flesh. The Biography of Michelangelo's David / COONIN

From Marble to Flesh The Biography of Michelangelo’s David

by A. Victor Coonin

Book and cover design: Marco Badiani Layout: Leo Cardini Editor and project manager: Alexandra Korey Editorial consultant: Helen Farrell Proofreaders: Mary Gray, Catriona Miller Image rights: Samantha Vaughn ISBN 978-88-97696-10-0 2014 B’Gruppo srl, Prato Collana The Florentine Press 1st edition: June 2014 Printed in Italy All rights reserved | Riproduzione vietata © A. Victor Coonin No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher and the authors.

Nessuna parte di questo libro può essere riprodotta o trasmessa in alcuna forma o in alcun modo, elettronico o meccanico, incluse le fotocopie, la registrazione e attraverso la catalogazione d’informazioni e sistema di recupero, senza permesso scritto dell’editore e degli autori.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface Acknowledgments Prologue The Attack Chapter One Origins

11 17

Conception 19 David’s First Cousins: A Prophet Lost and a Prophet Found

22

David’s Second Cousins: The Large White Man and The Golden Man

27

David’s First Parent: A Little Thief

32

Birth at Fantiscritti

37

The Perilous Journey Home

42

A New Parent: The Little Redhead

48

Chapter Two Adolescence 53 Adoption 55 Friends in High Places: David’s Godfathers

61

Michelangelo’s Contract

63

Michelangelo’s Two Poems

67

How to Carve the David 69 What was the David Worth?

75

David’s First Unveiling

76

A Home for David 77 Moving Days

84

Placing David on a Pedestal

87

The Makeover

90

Chapter Three Maturity

95

A New Renaissance Style

97

Imperfect Proportions

100

A Modest Endowment

105

David’s Weapon

108

The Biblical David 113 The Civic and Political David 117 The Bronze David 119 An Act of God

123

David’s Broken Arm

125

An Unworthy Companion

127

Chapter Four Midlife Crises

133

Critical Fortunes and Misfortunes

135

David in Peril

142

The First Commission to Save the David 150 The Second Commission

154

The Third Commission and the Dignity of the Nation

157

David’s New Home: The Accademia

158

Relocating the David 160 A Birthday Party for Michelangelo

161

The Tribune

164

The Moor David 169 The Third David 173

Chapter Five The Golden Years

179

David’s Sexuality and Censorship

181

The David and Homosexuality

187

Michelangelo’s Sexuality

189

To Preserve, Protect and Defend a Masterpiece

192

Will David Collapse?

198

Cloning the David through the 21 Century and Beyond st

201

Epilogue Who Owns the David?

214 notes 219 Bibliography 245 Index of Names and Places 259 Photo CreditS 263 EDITOR’S NOTE 266 ABOUT THE AUTHOR 269

CHAPTER ONE

ORIGINS

17

FIG 1.2 / Florence Cathedral viewed from Piazzale Michelangelo

CONCEPTION

Before birth, there is conception. The concept for Michelangelo’s David was the result of a desire to embellish the beautiful, new Cathedral of Florence (Fig. 1.2). This quest for beauty and perfection began more than a century before the marble for the David was quarried at Fantiscritti and must be understood for the statue’s early struggles to make sense. As with any life, even ancestors we have never met help to form us.

Florence Cathedral was begun in the latter years of the thirteenth century and a statue of David was envisioned as part of an extravagant decorative scheme long before Michelangelo was born. This fact conflicts with some popular notions about Michelangelo’s David, however, which suppose that he was always intended to stand in front of the government palace, the Palazzo della Signoria, a place where he resided for almost four centuries before being moved to the Accademia Gallery. It is also widely assumed that Michelangelo was the only sculptor who attempted to carve the David and that he sculpted it from pristine stone. These assumptions are incorrect.

Myths are powerful and satisfying. They make the complicated simple and the foreign seem familiar. Myths are creative distortions of reality that fill the voids in our imperfect understanding of nature and humanity. Michelangelo and the David have their own myths. We are accustomed to think of Michelangelo as an infallible artist and the David as his perfect masterpiece. Since the sixteenth century, Michelangelo has often been celebrated as the greatest artist who ever lived, after his first biographer wrote in earnest hyperbole, “But the man whose work transcends and eclipses that of every other artist, living or dead, is the inspired Michelangelo.”1 Michelangelo’s nickname became Il Divino, or “The Divine One.” The David has likewise been considered Michelangelo’s finest sculpture, formed

19

from perfect stone, and a popular guide book from the last century even tells us through at least six editions: This David is so fine a work in modeling, ideal beauty of the head, and the perfect harmony of the whole figure, that we do not dare to offer any criticism of it.2

In passages such as this, the great Michelangelo and his perfect David are not only beyond reproach, but their supremacy has become beyond question over time. It is easy and gratifying to believe the neatly formed myth. But it is just that: a myth.

The proper story of Michelangelo’s David begins with a building in messy progress. Florence Cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore, stands today as an unequaled source of pride for the citizens of this remarkable Tuscan city. Begun in 1296, it took about 170 years to complete. Only after more than a century and a half was its majestic dome topped with a lantern, a ball and a cross. The crowning masterpiece is, quite literally, the engineering of that dome, which rose between 1418 and 1434 under the direction of Filippo Brunelleschi.3 When it was finished, the great architect and humanist Leon Battista Alberti would later say that the dome “rose into the sky, so ample that it can cover all the people of Tuscany with its shadow.”4 He meant this literally and figuratively since the Cathedral itself was intended to showcase the brilliance of Florence, including its economic might, civic pride and unparalleled resolve to achieve the spectacular. The building accomplished this mission through its unprecedented architecture and its equally ambitious embellishments.

Like many cathedrals of its day, Santa Maria del Fiore is shaped like a lower case “t”, thus resembling the Christian cross. The two arms of this cross and the top are rounded, forming semicircles. Each of these three semicircles is called a tribune.

Today, it seems natural that a great dome should rise over the crossing of these spaces, and indeed a dome of some sort was planned from the start. The problem was that when Florence Cathedral was begun, there was no real knowledge of how to actually engineer such a large dome. The founders started anyway, leaving it to a future generation to solve this conundrum. Brunelleschi eventually provided the magnificent solution.

One thing the early architects had determined was that the dome needed to rest on an architectural base, which is called a drum. It resembles a simple barrel without a top or bottom and provides a sort of wedge to raise the dome above the Cathedral’s roofline. In this case, the drum is octagonal. From the exterior of the Cathedral one can easily see how a partial dome on top of each tribune abuts the lower part of the drum and functions as a brace for the forces that push outward. The tribune domes basically counteract the external forces that would normally cause the drum to explode under the enormous weight of the dome.

20

In turn, to make the tribunes more stable, four diagonal buttresses run down from each tribune and out to the external edge of the Cathedral.

The design of these tribune buttresses generates twelve protrusions, called spurs, situated at the edge of the Cathedral’s side.5 These spurs offer perfect plinths for statues, which could function as finials to the crown of the Cathedral’s already inimitable external appearance. This is where a statue of David was meant to reside with eleven other related statues, one on each spur (Fig. 1.3).

A formal plan to decorate the spurs went into action in 1408.6 Since there were a dozen spurs, the plan took the theme of twelve Old Testament prophets. They were to FIG 1.3 / Tribune spurs on be freestanding, life-sized figures.

Florence Cathedral Agreeing on a general scheme was the easy part; the hard part was executing the plan. Sculptors needed to be chosen, designs approved, marble quarried, workspace allocated, and other preparations made to transform this dream of sculptural enhancement into reality. A group of men would make these decisions as part of their responsibilities supervising the embellishment of the city’s Cathedral. They were called the Operai.

In the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance, Florence was a guild republic, meaning that in order to participate fully in commerce and government one had to be a member of a trade guild.7 These guilds functioned much like modern trade organizations, such as medical associations for doctors or bar associations for lawyers, whose main responsibility is to look out for the interests of their members—overseeing their training, guaranteeing quality control and restricting competition. The guilds engineered a favorable, if sometimes unfair, playing field to the benefit of their members. The system worked to guarantee jobs and income for Florence’s emerging professional classes and provided a great boon to the Renaissance artists who would receive their eager patronage.

Evolving from traditions established in the Middle Ages, by 1408 Florence

21

had seven major guilds and fourteen minor guilds. Most sculptors belonged to a minor guild, that of the workers of stone and wood (Arte dei Maestri di Pietra e Legname). Painters, on the other hand, belonged to the same major guild as doctors and pharmacists (Arte dei Medici e Speziali), since the pigments used came from the same animal, vegetal and mineral substances. Members of major guilds received special privileges, including group patronage rights to some of the city’s most prestigious structures, one of which was the Cathedral. These patronage rights offered immense opportunity as well as civic responsibility. The privilege of superintendency over work on the Cathedral, already in progress, was granted to the Arte della Lana (Wool Guild) in 1331. The Cathedral was the most prestigious site of civic patronage and had the potential to confer great honor on the group that cared for it. This guild was one of the most influential in Florence and included many of the city’s wealthiest and most powerful citizens. They were a dominant entity within the cloth industry, which itself was booming at that time. Its members were responsible for domestic wool production, from raw wool to finished bales of cloth, while a rival guild, called the Calimala, was primarily responsible for the importing and exporting of cloth. The Calimala oversaw the Baptistery, and there was a fair amount of competition between the two guilds in their conspicuous patronage, as well as a great deal of cooperation, as the guilds tended to prefer the same artists.

From the membership of the Arte della Lana, which included only males, a select few men were elected each year to be the overseers of the Cathedral works.8 Normally, three members, dubbed Operai, were elected for one-year terms, rotating on and off in either January or July.9 They formed a supervisory body, assisted by others, most notably a treasurer (camerlingo) and an appointed headmaster (capomaestro). The headmaster served for life and was acknowledged by this post, if not before, as the most prominent architect in the city. These elite Operai chose the artists and themes for the Cathedral’s decoration, and their successors would one day choose Michelangelo to complete the David.

On January 24, 1408, the first of the twelve prophets intended for the Cathedral spurs was commissioned from a father-and-son team of sculptors, Antonio and Nanni (short for Giovanni) di Banco.10 This inaugural statue was to depict the prophet Isaiah. Nanni eventually became the more famous sculptor and is now best known for a marble group of four sculptor-martyrs called the Quattro Coronati (Fig. 1.4), carved for the grain repository and church of Orsanmichele. The Quattro Coronati were not finished until 1416 or 1417, though they were probably begun shortly after the Isaiah. Among

David’s First Cousins:

A Prophet Lost and a Prophet Found

22