Reliving the Renaissance, Part 2

Early work by Michelangelo, plus a Gentileschi restored. Sort of. Minus the lady bits.

The Last Judgment by Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel, Vatican. Image from Wikipedia

Cari amici,

In last week’s letter about tracking Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli through his Ognissanti neighborhood in Florence, I lamented the lesser-than status he’s sometimes given in comparison to Michelangelo Buonarroti. Okay, so Michelangelo was a sculptor and a painter—it’s not really a matter for debate; an artist’s work speaks to you or it doesn’t. Yet as with any kind of art form, exposure and popular opinion will sway people who have no in-depth knowledge of the art in question. Which means if more people are Instagramming their selfies with Michelangelo’s David than with Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Michelangelo wins the popularity contest. So it goes. The thing is, there’s plenty of great art that doesn’t get Instagrammed, even some by Michelangelo. Let’s go!

Across town from Ognissanti, in the northwestern shadow of the Basilica di Santa Croce, is a small museum that’s probably not on anyone’s A list. Understandably, visitors flock to the Uffizi, Accademia, Bargello, Palazzo Pitti—and they should. But if Michelangelo is one of your faves, Casa Buonarroti, a museum housed in a 17th-century palazzo, has a few gems you’ll want to see that you’ve probably never heard of.

Casa Buonarroti is not, as one might think, the home Michelangelo grew up in; the house that bears that honor still stands in Caprese Michelangelo, a small town in the province of Arezzo, about 60 miles from Florence. (Guess where I’m going next?) Instead, Casa Buonarroti was the home of Michelangelo’s descendants, including his great-grand-nephew Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger (1568-1647) and the last of the line, Cosimo Buonarroti (1790-1858). To help you grasp the timeline, “our” Michelangelo died in 1564.

The point of the museum is to preserve and present the Buonarroti family’s cultural heritage, relevance to the greater art world, and personal collections. Along with some of Michelangelo’s other works such as drawings and models, there are two excellent reasons to visit this niche museum: his Madonna della Scala (Madonna of the Stairs) and his Battaglia dei Centauri (Battle of the Centaurs). Both of these bas relief sculptures are early works, and astonishing feats that telegraphed the artist’s already-there genius.

Michelangelo made Madonna della Scala (ca. 1490) when he was only 15 years old, a student at the Garden of San Marco, an art school created by Lorenzo de’ Medici. The young Michelangelo studied with Bertoldo di Giovanni, the last student (and collaborator) of the Florentine sculptor Donatello (1386-1466; real name Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi). Among his masterpieces is the bronze sculpture of a very androgynous David, now in the Bargello. He was also an innovator when it came to bas relief, and it’s his style in that mode of sculpture that Michelangelo’s exquisite Madonna della Scala evokes.

Madonna della Scala by Michelangelo, ca. 1490. This and all following photos © Cheryl A. Ossola

If you’ve been to Florence and seen the bronze doors of the Baptistery by Lorenzo Ghiberti, you’ve seen some spectacular 15th-century bas relief sculpture. Are you there now? Yes? Good, now trot on over to Orsanmichele, where you’ll find Donatello’s very classical statue of St. George (a copy; the original is in the Bargello) in a niche on the north wall. Admire it, then let your gaze drop to the bas relief below the base of the statue. It depicts St. George’s most famous act—killing a dragon before it could devour a young princess—and it does so in an unprecedented way. This is the first instance of Donatello’s bas relief technique called schiacciato (meaning “flattened out”), in which “the figures in the foreground emerge strongly but those in the background are increasingly compressed,” according to Elena Capretti in The Great Masters of Italian Art.

Okay, enough backstory. In the image above, you can see how much more prominent the Madonna and Child are than other figures in the scene. Look at the quiet beauty of Mary’s face, the fluidity in the folds of her mantle. Also remarkable is baby Jesus’ muscularity, so characteristic of Michelangelo’s sculpted bodies that it’s practically his calling card.

He was 15, for crying out loud! I gaped in front of this Madonna for quite some time.

The same room at Casa Buonarroti also holds the Battaglia dei Centauri (ca. 1491-92, also created in the Garden of San Marco), which, the museum states, depicts a myth about the labors of Hercules in which “the hero freed Deianira, his betrothed, from her marriage to the centaur Eurythion, who was killed in a furious brawl with the Centaurs.” What’s notable here, because of the sculpture’s varying degrees of completeness, is how Michelangelo worked the marble, from roughed-in areas to finished figures. I’m not sure if he deliberately left it unfinished, but maybe so—the museum says he “seems to have been pleased with [it].”

Battaglia dei Centauri by Michelangelo, ca. 1491-92

If there had been nothing else in this small museum, I would have been happy—these two works by a very young Michelangelo justified a visit. But as often happens in Italy, I stumbled upon another treasure, this one by an artist who was born 29 years after Michelangelo died. Her name? Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653), whom Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger commissioned to paint L’Allegoria dell’Inclinazione (Allegory of Inclination) for the ceiling of a gallery dedicated to events in the life of Michelangelo (the artist) and the ideals that, according to his descendants, he embodied.

All good so far. In 1616, Gentileschi painted a splendid Inclinazione to represent Michelangelo’s predisposition toward artistry—a beautiful woman, nude, seated on clouds and holding a compass.

L’Allegoria dell’Inclinazione by Artemisia Gentileschi, newly restored.

“Now wait just a minute!” you say. “She’s not nude!” Ah yes, you noticed. Well, she was nude for a while (about 64 years, in fact), up there on the ceiling in her rightful place and holding her own along with the other representations of various virtues. Then, around 1680, someone more uptight than Michelangelo the Younger (probably his nephew Leonardo Buonarroti) decided that her nudity was NOT OKAY and commissioned Baldassare Franceschini (aka Volteranno) to paint a strategically placed drape and veil.

Poor Artemisia. At least she didn’t live to see it. I’d get all hissy about the fact that it was a woman’s painting that a man decided must be changed (and who hired a man to do it), but there are other (worse) stories about changes made to art during more repressed times. In fact, it happened to Michelangelo—the genitals of the nude men in his Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel (see opening image) were masked with little drapes. (Thankfully, those bits of cloth were removed during the fresco’s 1993 restoration.) A story circulates that even the David, that most beautiful of male figures, had to wear a garland of fig leaves for a while; however, I’m skeptical. According to the Accademia (home to the David), the statue did indeed once wear a gilded garland, but they call it a victory garland, which I really doubt was draped around his hips. Then again, maybe the Accademia is being coy.

Perhaps the most entertaining of these attempts to censor art is the one a tour guide at the Vatican once told me about: that on the order of some pope or other (I’ve forgotten, but Google tells me it was Pope Paul IV in the late 1550s), nuns scurried around the Vatican with chisels, castrating statues. Supposedly a stash of the scandalous bits remains somewhere in the Vatican’s vast archives.

Anyway, back to Gentileschi. The reason I’ve singled out her work at Casa Buonarroti is that the museum did so—the Inclinazione was detached, placed in an adjacent room, and restored under the public eye between October 2022 and April 2023. It’s still there, so I got to see it close up. Unfortunately the restoration project didn’t include removing the drape and veil, I suppose because a Buonarroti ordered them to be added and the museum is Buonarroti turf. The museum says a “virtual restoration” has been done that reveals the original painting. Too bad that one’s not on display.

I may have to do research on art censorship, and how puny, puritanically minded people had the gall to go around altering the work of artistic geniuses. I’ll try to understand. I think I’ll fail.

Alla prossima,

Cheryl

© 2023 Cheryl A. Ossola

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Books of the week:

• Invisible Women: Forgotten Artists of Florence by Jane Fortune

• Broad Strokes: 15 Women Who Made Art and Made History (In That Order) by Bridget Quinn

• The Great Masters of Italian Art by Elena Capretti

P.S. My book! Which you can buy here or on the usual sites. Another fab option is to ask your local library to stock it.

If you read it and like it, please tell your friends and/or leave a few lines of praise on any bookish site. You’ll make me over-the-moon happy. Baci!