The Agony and the Ecstasy
By Irving Stone
Warning! Irving Stone’s oeuvre
The Agony and the Ecstasy will grip your attention and won’t let it go till the last page.
The eleven-part, 755 pages fictionalized account of the life and times of Michelangelo Buonarroti is rather a longish read. But the time spent, I assure you, is well rewarded. The book acquaints you with a five feet-four, wiry Florentine sporting a rich crop of hair, penetrating eyes and a broken nose – not a man you would consider handsome - who in 89 years of his action filled life (1475-1564) has left us with works of such unsurpassed beauty as the marble statue of David and the painting of the Last Judgment on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
More than a master artist, Michelangelo emerges a winner against all odds. Born to the family of an impoverished aristocratic family, he earned enough to support his father and four brothers, and died a millionaire. Sculpture was his first love, yet when forced to deviate from his chosen calling, he proved himself an excellent painter, a talented architect and even a successful military engineer – all the time protesting that he did not have aptitude for such tasks – ‘it is not my trade’! He served under nine Popes, including the much feared Pope Paul IV, who had brought to Rome the Spanish Inquisition, notorious for its ruthless tortures and executions. Michelangelo had differences with them all, at one time or the other and he still managed to win their respect and support. There was something uncompromising in his personality, which his contemporaries called terribilita – terribleness.
He was master of phenomenal ingenuity. The city state of Florence was at war with Pope Clements’s army. The mercenary general Malatesta had treasonously gone on to help the enemy. Michelangelo, as Governor General of the city’s fortifications, was faced with the seemingly impossible task of defending the recently repaired city walls – with cement still wet in them – against the heaving shelling of the Pope’s artillery. He came up with a solution which was amazingly simple, and as effective. Overnight he amassed all available wool and tough quilt covers in city. Having stuffed the quilts, he had them hung over stout bamboos projecting four feet from the walls. In the morning when the enemy started bombarding the wall, the shells collided against the wool filled quilts and fell on the ground without causing any harm to the walls.
Michelangelo was not the man to follow the trodden path. He risked incurring the displeasure of his powerful patrons – and even his life – rather than compromise his artistic scruples. As a teenager he had nightly stolen into a hospital mortuary to dissect cadavers to learn for himself the finer points of body structure - this at the time when he could well be punished to a painful death for desecration of the dead. God had created, he thought, male human body in the perfection of His own image. Why should he then drape his figures?
In 1540, Michelangelo had finished two-thirds of the Sistine Chapel fresco, the Last Judgment, when Pope Paul came visiting along with his Master of Ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena. Cardinal Cesena was aghast at the spectacle of so many nudes and exclaimed it would be scandalous to have such a painting in the Chapel. The Pope dismissed his caviling as so much gas. The next time Cesena went on his own to inspect the painting, he found that Michelangelo had caricatured him as the judge of the Hades ‘with the ears of an ass, and a monstrous snake coiled around the lower part of the torso:’ Now the self righteous holy man ran to the Pope complaining how he had been depicted as a denizen of hell, having a snake to cover his genitilia. A highly amused Pope declined to intervene, quipping that ‘from hell there is no redemption.’
Wholly devoted to art as Michelangelo was, he never got married. His love for Contessina Medici and Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa di Pescara was platonic, as was his adulation for Tomasso de’Cavalieri. Both the Marchesa and young Tomasso were paragons of male and female beauty and inspired Michelangelo to write moving sonnets in their praise.
Troubled by kidney stones and old age debility, Michelangelo died on February 18, 1564.
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