 |
| Marginal Benefit |
|
|
James Fenton
copyright © 2006
|
Originally published
in The Guardian
8 April 2006
|
It is well known that The Life of Michelangelo
by Ascanio Condivi, first published in 1553, was prompted by
the artist himself. Coming three years after the first edition
of Vasari's Lives, it was motivated in part by Michelangelo's
desire to present himself in a good light, particularly over
the question of his dealings with Pope Julius II and his unfinished
tomb. And people sometimes give the impression that Condivi
more or less took it down verbatim from the old man.
This gives a particular piquancy to Condivi's
short book (which is included in the Oxford World's Classics
volume, Michelangelo, Life, Letters and Poetry). When
we learn how, when Florence was under siege, Michelangelo arranged
for mattresses to be tied around the exterior of the tower of
San Miniato church to protect it from cannon-balls, we can take
it that this piece of military engineering was something he
took a particular pride in recalling, in his late 70s. Likewise,
when Condivi mentions that Michelangelo was asked by Piero,
the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, to make a snowman, we can
hear the sculptor himself telling the story.
But Condivi sometimes gets things wrong. There
exists a copy of his book with contemporary annotations, which
have been shown to be a record of Michelangelo's reactions to
the book. Tiberio Calcagni, a member of his close circle, wrote
down these reactions, perhaps in order to pass them on to Vasari,
for his second edition of Lives
They never reached Vasari, or he never made
use of them, and they were not published until 1966. There are
only 24 of these comments, but what is extraordinary about them
is the access they give us to Michelangelo's informal conversation.
For instance, at the end of his biography Condivi refers to
Michelangelo's practice of sexual abstinence. The marginal comment
records the artist's words to Calcagni: "This I have always
done, and if you want to prolong your life, do not [practise
coitus] or at least as little as possible."
This confirms a point made earlier in Condivi,
that all Michelangelo's relations with young men had been on
a purely platonic level, despite the gossip. You may believe
this or not, but it is worth remembering that Condivi makes
the point in no uncertain terms, and that Michelangelo is his
authority.
Some curious stories are given support in these
marginalia. For instance, Condivi tells us that Michelangelo,
when working in the mountains at Carrara, conceived an ambition
to make a colossus "that would be visible to mariners from
afar". The note tells us: "He said, this was a madness
that came over me, so to speak. But if I had been sure of living
four times longer than I have lived, I would have gone in for
it."
Another strange story: in 1504-6, 10 years
before he had actually built anything, he was approached by
the Ottoman Sultan, Bajazet II, to design a bridge over the
Golden Horn, to link Pera to Constantinople. He was seriously
tempted by the offer and the marginal note in Condivi reads:
"He said to me, that was true, and I had already made a
model of it." Leonardo da Vinci had also been approached
to build such a bridge, and there is a letter from Leonardo,
translated into Turkish, in the Topkapi archive. Leonardo's
drawing of this bridge is in the Louvre.
There is every reason to read Condivi's Life
of Michelangelo in the World's Classics edition, in George
Bull's translation, which also includes Peter Porter's versions
of a selection of the poems. But if you want the marginalia
and a full account of their significance, you need the Italian
edition of 1998, edited by Giovanni Nencioni, with essays in
English by Michael Hirst and Caroline Elam, published in a series
called Tabulae Artium.
From this you learn that Michelangelo denied
spending much effort on the study of perspective because "it
seems to me too much of a waste of time". He tells us,
also, that he never neglected his studies in order to learn
the lute or improvisation. From this, as I understand it, we
can conclude that he never set his own madrigals to music, or
indeed sang them himself. Two settings of his songs, by Jacques
Arcadelt, survive, but whether there are any other surviving
settings by his contemporaries my books do not tell me.
|
|
|
