The Great Florentine

The Great Florentine MICHELANGELO (542 pp.)--Giovanni Papini--Dutton ($10).

Who lies here? One.

Which one? Buonarroti. THE One.

As his epitaph would indicate, Michelangelo Buonarroti was accepted by his contemporaries as almost superhuman. Most biographers, surveying the awesome remains of Michelangelo's genius, have decided that his contemporaries were right. Yet by doing more than human honor to the man, history has generally done less than human justice to his real achievement.

Giovanni (The Life of Christ) Papini tries to right this excess in his Michelangelo, but sometimes falls into the opposite error--he writes a little patronizingly of the man, almost as if he had paid rent on him. Yet the book gives a vital new contact with one of the fiercest poles of energy in human history.

The Terrible Temper. Michelangelo was born in 1475, the second son of a Florentine petty official. His mother died when he was six. The sickly boy was a trial to his practical father, the more so because he would not pay attention in school but was always doodling. It was such gifted doodling, however, that at 13 the scrawny Michelangelo was put to learn the painter's trade in the workshop of Ghirlandaio. Within a year the master himself was making jealous noises at his prodigious protege. Lorenzo de Medici, the Florentine dictator, was so impressed with the boy's genius that he adopted him and educated him as one of his own sons.

By 28, with the completion of his famous David, Michelangelo was clearly the first sculptor of Italy; by 33 he was acclaimed the equal of Phidias. But he had also begun to learn the inconstancy of patrons. Pope Julius II commissioned the artist to make him the finest tomb in history, then abruptly lost all interest in the project. Furious, Michelangelo took French leave of Rome, and it was seven months before he was reconciled. The Pope then put Michelangelo to work on a heroic bronze statue of himself and later to painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. This time he gave the painter no peace, coming day after day with questions and suggestions. Once the terrible-tempered Florentine threatened to throw the Pope down off the scaffold; once the Pope actually beat the painter with his cane.

For four years the work on the ceiling continued, in conditions best described by Michelangelo himself in an irritated sonnet:

My beard turns up to heaven; my napefalls in,

Fixed on my spine, my breastbone visibly

Grows like a harp; a rich embroidery

Bedews my face from brush-drops thick and thin.

My loins into my paunch like levers grind:

My buttock like a crupper bears my weight;

My feet unguided wander to and fro . . .

When the ceiling, often considered man's supreme achievement with the brush, was done, Michelangelo had a permanent crick in his neck and small thanks (3,000 ducats) from his grumpy boss.

The Universal Mind. Rarely during his long life was Michelangelo allowed by his patrons to work on the sculptures of his own intention, yet even of downright distasteful commissions he sometimes managed to make sculptures as fine as any since the Greeks. His style, as many critics think and Author Papini agrees, sprang from the tension between Greek and Christian elements in his spirit, between the demand to express the wholly human and the utterly divine in one form. In the result, he peopled Italy with a private race of demigods, a little too human to worship, a little too divine to love, but beautiful and absolute as ideas cored out of the universal mind.

Michelangelo, to his grief, seems to have tried to live his private life on the same superhuman scale, with the result that he was in some ways simply inhuman, and in most ways miserably unhappy. Infatuated with the superhuman, he all too often despised individual human beings; Author Papini provides dozens of instances of the man's colossal rudeness. Once, when Michelangelo was 17, he sneered so effectively at some drawings by his fellow students that one of them, a strong-armed fellow named Torrigiano, smashed his nose for him. Disfigured, Michelangelo withdrew more & more from life into art.

Women, he did without almost entirely. Ascanio Condivi, his friend and biographer, says that he was "continent." Of marrying, Michelangelo said, "I have too much of a wife in my art." Aside from his art, Michelangelo's affections were centered on a few friends, some of them nobly prepossessing young men. Homosexuals have therefore claimed him as their own, but Biographer Papini utterly rejects the notion.

The last years of the great man's life were spent in the clutter of the rising St. Peter's, where he supervised the builders. Snappish and repulsive as an old brown toad, the ancient Michelangelo hopped about the Holy City with "no thought that is not shaped by death." One day, in the presence of a visitor, he dropped a lamp. "I am so old," he muttered, "that death often pulls me by the cape and bids me go with him; some day I too shall fall, like this lamp, and the light of life will be extinguished."

In his 89th year, the light went out. It took three funerals to exhaust the grief of Italy at his passing: one in Rome, two in Florence, where he was entombed in the church of Santa Croce.

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