The Ugly Renaissance (13 page)

Lodovico was, however, also a little suspicious of Michelangelo, and one detects a hint of disapproval lurking beneath his affection. He was inordinately proud of his social status and deplored the fact that his son had chosen so insecure a career. He was something of a snob. He claimed ancestral ties with the Medici and, through his late wife, links with the powerful Rucellai and del Sera families. Although very far from wealthy, he hailed from a family that had made its money as bankers and cloth merchants (in true Florentine style) and that had a long history of public service.
Lodovico himself had served as the Florentine podestà of the commune of Chiusi, and his name had been drawn out of the hat for public office on at least thirty-five occasions between 1473 and 1506.
Although he felt that it was beneath his status as a gentleman to have an occupation, he had wanted Michelangelo to pursue a career in the cloth industry, or possibly law, and seems to have struggled to understand his son’s choice.
Happy as he was to accept Michelangelo’s money whenever it was offered, he never really lost an opportunity to snipe at his son’s choice of profession over family dinners. It’s all too easy to imagine Michelangelo forcing himself to bite his tongue as he listened to yet another diatribe about how much better it would have been had be been a banker.

Simultaneously, relations with the rest of his family were a predictable mixture of emotional closeness and pent-up frustration, and in his letters he alternates between joy and reproach. Buonarroto—who would later be elected a prior of Florence—was undoubtedly his favorite brother, but the others were a different matter. Giovansimone was a more difficult character. Although willing to throw himself into an investment venture with
Giovanni Morelli, he was evidently lazy and ill-suited to business. Only a few years later, he and Michelangelo would quarrel violently about money and Giovansimone’s willingness to leech off their father. The youngest brother of all, Gismondo,
was to be of a similar bent, but as yet he remained in the background. Other, more distant family members were another matter altogether. Although he never shirked from his obligations, Michelangelo was also not immune to bitterness, and after the death of Lodovico’s brother in 1508 he had no shame about describing his widowed aunt as “
that bitch.”

Friends

After family came friends. For Renaissance men, the bond of
friendship was tighter and more intimate than we might be inclined to think today. It was, indeed, regularly idealized. For Petrarch, a friend was “
much rarer and more precious than gold”:
he was “another self,” a mirror of the conscience, and a light of perfect virtue.
The ideal friend was chosen only for his inner merits: social standing had no place, and the bond, once formed, endured even beyond the grave. So close was the perfect friendship that
Boccaccio was even able to imagine two friends—Titus and Gisippus—being willing to trade a wife (on the wedding night, no less) or sacrifice a career for each other’s sake.

Friendship also had a deeply practical dimension.
As the lively correspondence between the notary
Lapo Mazzei and the Pratese merchant
Francesco di Marco Datini reveals, friends gave—and expected—material assistance. Mazzei, for example,
offered Datini extensive advice on how to handle his tax assessment, how to deal with the collection of debts, and how to manage his daughter’s marriage contract.
In return, Datini sent Mazzei a choice gift of anchovies, countless barrels of wine, and even firewood. So, too,
Petrarch recommended his friend Laelius (Lello di Pietro Stefano Tosetti) for a job with Emperor Charles IV in 1355, and the Florentine chancellor
Coluccio Salutati helped to secure positions at the papal court for his humanist friends Poggio Bracciolini and
Leonardo Bruni in 1403 and 1405. In the same vein,
Fra Bartolomeo of San Marco taught
Raphael the proper use of color, while Raphael taught his mendicant friend the principles of perspective.

Yet even more than this, friendship—as the framework for the exchange of news, views, and the odd bit of help—was the context for the development of habit, taste, humor, and outlook. As
Giorgione’s fondness for “
entertaining his many friends with his music” suggests, it was the setting for laughter and tears, celebration and commiseration,
guidance and reproach, and few artists would ever have become the men they were without their friends.

Michelangelo’s friends included an eclectic group. At the upper end of the social scale—close to his own familial status—were the merchant
Jacopo Salviati and later the cathedral chaplain
Giovanfrancesco Fattucci. These men were well-bred, and Michelangelo’s correspondence is full of elegant, well-turned phrases, but in face-to-face interactions there is little evidence of formality. As is common today, these friendships were probably marked by any amount of silly banter and coarse humor. In the
Decameron
, for example,
Boccaccio included a tale of how Giotto and his friend the renowned jurist
Forese da Rabatta jokingly laughed at each other on a journey, the one for being horribly untidy after being drenched by the rain, and the other for being “
deformed and dwarf-like … with a snub-nosed face that would have seemed loathsome alongside the ugliest Baronci who ever lived.” Michelangelo, who loved a joke, probably couldn’t resist indulging the same sort of good-spirited teasing with his well-heeled chums.

It is, however, telling that the majority of Michelangelo’s closest—and most enduring—friendships were with people of a lower social status. Unlike humanists such as Salutati, Bruni, and Bracciolini, who tended to form tight-knit (if occasionally fractious) circles from among their own sociocultural ranks, Michelangelo and many artists of the period often looked outside their profession for company.
Although in later life he was to befriend Sansovino, Pontormo, and Vasari, he consorted with few artists in this period (excluding
Francesco Granacci and
Giuliano Bugiardini) and none of his standard. Instead, he preferred the company of stonemasons like
Donato Benti,
Michele di Piero Pippo, and the amusingly incompetent
Topolino. Toiling together in the workshop or in the quarries of Settignano, they would also frequently have lunch together, and over a bottle of wine and a simple soup they would swap bawdy stories and the jokes of the street. The tenor of these friendships is indicated by a sheet of paper Michelangelo and his pupil-friend
Antonio Mini passed between them years later in Rome. Mini sketched an appallingly misshapen giraffe, while Michelangelo countered with a beautifully executed drawing of a man showing off the glories of his anus. High-minded these gatherings were most definitely not. It is perhaps sobering to think of Michelangelo roaring with laughter at similar sketches while the
David
was standing half-finished behind him.

The
Workshop Circle:
Patrons, Assistants, and Apprentices

Outside the world of family and friends, the bulk of Michelangelo’s social contacts inevitably related to work. But here again, we encounter an unexpected mixture of formal relationships and very human, often scatological behavior that reflects a combination of regimented obligations and irreverent habits that was typical of Renaissance artists.

Of greatest significance were, of course, the patrons. These included the consuls of the
Opera del Duomo, the
gonfaloniere a vita
,
Piero Soderini, and the merchants
Taddeo Taddei,
Bartolomeo Pitti, and
Agnolo Doni. They were all august men and—as surviving portraits suggest—highly conscious of their status. Despite being an old and wizened man, hunched over with age, Soderini commanded respect with the finery of his clothes and the piercing gaze that peered out over his large, beak-like nose, while Doni, a younger and infinitely more handsome man, had the haughty mien appropriate to the wealth displayed by the multitude of gold rings adorning his fingers. Their perceptions of their own status were important. Although Michelangelo had previously enjoyed a very close relationship with Lorenzo de’ Medici, his relations with patrons in this phase of his life were very much more businesslike.

The greater part of his time was, of course, taken up with detailed negotiations about major commissions, like the
David
. These could be tortuous.
Patrons not only habitually demanded sketches or models of what they wanted, but also insisted on sometimes exhaustively detailed contracts and occasionally interfered later to quibble over execution or similar details. But there were also a host of patrons popping into the workshop to ask for smaller, more everyday pieces of work—such as the
chimney decorations or wickerwork chests completed by
Donatello, or the
bronze knife that
Piero Aldobrandini was later to commission from Michelangelo—commissions that artists were compelled to accept to appease the rich and powerful.

Whether the commission was large or small, however, there was always trouble, and the appearance of a patron at the workshop was more often than not met with a sigh or a terse greeting muttered through gritted teeth. Payment was a particular difficulty.
In his autobiography, Cellini was scathing about tardy remuneration, and Vasari relates that
Donatello smashed a bronze bust to smithereens in frustration
at a Genoese merchant’s unreasonable quibbling over the bill. Paralleling the experience of artists, the incomparably catty humanist
Francesco Filelfo was even forced to beg his friend
Cicco Simonetta—a statesman and noted cryptographer—for a loan because the duke of Milan’s treasurer kept fobbing him off when he came to ask for his bill to be settled.

But there could also be more trivially irritating troubles.
While painting some scenes from the lives of the Fathers of the Church in the cloister of San Miniato, for example,
Paolo Uccello was aggrieved that the abbot would give him nothing but cheese for his meals. Cheese pies, cheese soups, cheese and bread: always cheese. Being “mild-mannered,” he initially said nothing, but after a little while the parsimonious monotony of the diet became too much. Uccello left the monastery and refused to work there until he was given something better to eat.

Michelangelo had even more frustrating experiences. After the completed
David
had been moved to its final resting place outside the Palazzo Vecchio, Michelangelo was atop a ladder making last-minute adjustments when
Piero Soderini himself appeared below him. With supreme self-confidence, Soderini complimented Michelangelo but wondered if the nose wasn’t perhaps a fraction too thick. Descending politely to “check,” Michelangelo discreetly picked up a handful of dust and ascended once again to make the “changes” Soderini had suggested. Pretending to tap with his chisel, he let the dust fall through his fingers. “
Now look at it,” he called to Soderini. “Oh, that’s
much
better!” came the reply. “Now you’ve really brought it to life.” Yet however irritating they may have been, patrons like Soderini paid the bills (in theory at least), and Michelangelo and his colleagues had to keep smiling.

Rather more pleasant—though not always so—were Michelangelo’s relationships with his assistants and apprentices. It is not known just how extensive his workshop was in 1501–4, but while he was painting the Sistine Chapel a few years later,
he employed a minimum of twelve people at any given time. Excepting old friends like
Topolino and Granacci, most of those who worked with Michelangelo were young, mostly adolescents, and frequently lived in. In later years, he wrote to his father from Rome asking for help in finding just such an assistant and, in doing so, gave us a good idea of the sorts of people he surrounded himself with in his workshop:

I should be glad if you would see whether there is some lad in Florence, the son of poor, but honest people, who is used to roughing it and would be prepared to come here to serve me and do all the things connected with the house, such as shopping and running errands, and who in his spare time would be able to learn.

The relationship was naturally based on work and hence could often be punctuated with squabbles or even dismissal. Michelangelo continually had trouble with his assistants and had to sack several for poor workmanship, laziness, or even—in one particular case—because the lad in question was “
a stuck-up little turd.” On occasion,
Michelangelo had to turn people away before they even got through the door: in 1514, for example, a father offered his son as an apprentice by recommending the boy as a sexual plaything rather than as an apprentice.

Usually, however, the relationship was close and frequently high-spirited. Even though a daydreaming assistant had ruined one of his portraits through inattention, Botticelli positively encouraged good humor.
On one occasion, he and one of his apprentices named Jacopo played a practical joke on his pupil Biagio by sticking paper hats onto the angels in one of Biagio’s paintings to make them look like miserable old men. Simple stuff, perhaps, but childlike amusements helped the hard work go quicker.

Over the Counter, Through the Wall

On top of all this, and perhaps most commonly ignored by historians, were the mass of incidental, almost forgotten social interactions that supported the basic necessities of life. These, too, constituted a circle of sorts, in much the same way as we may think of our next-door neighbors, local shop owners, and even the postman as part of the loose circle of our everyday existence today. As in the modern world, there was little or no formal or theoretical apparatus governing behavioral patterns in this area of social life, but the importance of dealings with the multitude of tradesmen, market-stall owners, and servants should not be minimized. Michelangelo’s correspondence—which is often addressed to family members care of a shop or a trading emporium—is littered with requests for bills to be settled or for orders to be placed, now for
wax and paper, now for shirts and shoes. Quality and price were always of central concern, but so was a sense of fair play and decency, and we can glimpse in Michelangelo’s letters hints of the chatty exchanges in the Mercato Vecchio or the angry arguments in shops that would have punctuated his days and defined his view of his place in the wider urban environment.