Fictitious Biography of a Dark Period
William E. Wallace. Michelangelo, God’s Architect: The Story of His Final Years and Greatest Masterpiece. $29.95. 336pp, 6X9”, hardback. ISBN: 978-0691195490. Princeton: Princeton University Press, November 19, 2019.
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The “Preface” explains that the author, William E. Wallace had previously written two books on Michelangelo’s biography and had a sense of completion until having put the second work down he realized the final couple of decades of the artist’s life had not been adequately researched by past scholars, setting him on this present project. Wallace is a Distinguished Professor of Art History at Washington University. He starts “Chapter 1” just as all biographies should start with a detailed videographic description of the place where Michelangelo lived at the onset of this story. Without these details, I would imagine how he lived in worked in Rome very differently. When I visited Rome a couple of decades ago it was one of the busiest cities I had ever encountered and I grew up on Moscow and New York City trains. Amidst the ruins, modern Rome is crowded with residences. In contrast, Michelangelo lived in a two-story house with work studios on the ground floor, pantry and cellar in the basement, and a bedroom for him and another for his servant on the second floor, with fewer furniture and clothing items than I have, and I live in a tiny house. There was a little farm in the back with a mini garden, vineyard, chickens and nag. Apparently, he lived on a street known as a kind of butchery, as the local butcher and greengrocer lived on it. And it might have been as noisy despite the farm-style components as it is in Rome’s business districts today. And somebody kept shitting on Michelangelo’s door: “as if nobody who ate grapes or took laxatives ever found anywhere else to shit.” Wallace quotes a more delicate way of putting this from Michelangelo, but I think his own summary does it more justice. This was how the great artist lived while designing the dome of St. Peter’s, one of the greatest archeological achievements humanity has produced (ix-9). It seems humanity values artistic output because of its monetary capacities, but not the living artists who create it; this seems to be especially the case for the best rather than for the worst artists.
While this is a great bit of writing, there are a few digressions and imagined conversations across the book. For example, we are told what Michelangelo is thinking or that the pope, Paul, keeps remaining silent amidst this imaginative conversation in italics on single-sentence or single-word lines across Chapter 3 (66-70). There are several other imagined conclusions or value judgements that are not supported by documentary claims across the book, such as when Michelangelo relinquishes work on a statue “to his sympathetic assistant. The young man, whom Michelangelo much admired, did his best to repair the damage and salvage the group. Although Clacagni has received little credit for his effort, the measure of his success is to be found in the number of visitors who admire the sculpture in Florence’s Museo” (142). First, there is no way of knowing if this assistant was “sympathetic” or “admired”, or that he really did “his best”. It is possible he was not sympathetic of his elderly client. Michelangelo might have disliked him. And the youth might have attempted to sabotage the project. And what does “little credit” mean: either he was or he was not credited; if the latter, why mention him? The only seeming fact here is “the number of visitors” viewing the sculpture in question, but no actual number is given, so there might be two of them annually or a million. These types of uncertainties make me question if the author imagined rather than researched the types of house where Michelangelo lived in Rome, and if the “shit” on his door is an exaggeration. This is troubling because I don’t want to read a novel about Michelangelo: I want to know precisely what documentary proof has verified regarding his living situation and all other parts of his life. A single “imagined” detail, if it is not specified to be such, is very likely to be picked up and repeated by the next biographer as a fact with a quote to the earlier source without checking if any source supporting it might exist. If there was no “shit” on my favorite artist’s door and now whenever I write about him in my own scholarship I return to visualizing this shit, neither I nor what I write under false beliefs have benefited from reading this book.
“As he entered his seventies, the great Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo despaired that his productive years were past.” Now, I’m even doubting this statement. Was Michelangelo depressed or is Wallace projecting his own ennui onto him. “Anguished by the death of friends and discouraged by the loss of commissions to younger artists, this supreme painter and sculptor began carving his own tomb.” While carving one’s tomb is a bit morbid, on the other hand, all artists and scholars alike are in a way carving their own tombs as they attempt to finish works that will last for decades if not millennia after they are dead. A tomb on Michelangelo’s dimensions was probably a massive undertaking that would have been admired by those who came to his grave. If Michelangelo was otherwise impoverished, having the luxury of building a tomb as massive as those of top aristocrats of his time, this is not a sad note, but rather equivalent to a modern artist commencing work on a pyramid building with statues for an afterlife: more of a self-aggrandizement than a woeful depression. “It was at this unlikely moment that fate intervened to task Michelangelo with the most ambitious and daunting project of his long creative life.” Blaming “fate” for what must have been Michelangelo’s active solicitation of new work presumes religiosity instead of explaining how this came about. Any imaginings made in this book are particularly troubling because it is “the first book to tell the full story of Michelangelo’s final two decades, when the peerless artist refashioned himself into the master architect of St. Peter’s Basilica and other major buildings.” Did the author find primary evidence nobody else has uncovered before to compose this strangely undiscovered couple of decades, or did he guess what might have happened based on feelings, premonitions, or other supernatural revelations? Will biographers repeat these guesses as facts for thousands of years to come because of the lack of similar guesswork on this timeframe? “When the Pope handed Michelangelo control of the St. Peter’s project in 1546, it was a study in architectural mismanagement, plagued by flawed design and faulty engineering. Assessing the situation with his uncompromising eye and razor-sharp intellect, Michelangelo overcame the furious resistance of Church officials to persuade the Pope that it was time to start over.” If one steps back and considers the matter objectively, when is it ever a logical idea to discard everything a predecessor built and to start over? Imagine if an architect comes around 10 years into building a tunnel through the center of Boston, after the previous architect dies, and proposes abandoning the old tunnel and beginning a new tunnel that is near-identical in a parallel location, and then spending the next 20 years on it and failing to build it before he himself dies; if the decision to start over was right in the first instance, what if a third architect comes along and says Michelangelo’s tunnel is garbage, and starts a third identical tunnel in parallel to the two, and this keeps going until all traffic in Boston comes to a complete and final stop. Why are historians always excusing the actions of geniuses as faultless, while the actions of their rivals are always idiotic? This type of genius-bias is blocking honest scholarship that reports pure facts rather than emotion-based ideologies of perfection of a few, and the complete lack of value in the creations of the rest of humanity.
“The challenge of building St. Peter’s deepened Michelangelo’s faith, Wallace shows. Fighting the intrigues of Church politics and his own declining health, Michelangelo became convinced that he was destined to build the largest and most magnificent church ever conceived. And he was determined to live long enough that no other architect could alter his design.” Even in that early-medicine age, Michelangelo would have known that living in Rome in these conditions was likely to shorten rather than lengthen his life and health, so all of this is conjecture or fictional conclusions by Wallace rather than reflective of Michelangelo’s proven perspective. And “faith” contradicts “Church politics”; either Michelangelo had blind belief in the Church, or he was fighting it because he lacked faith in it to get what he wanted.
I desperately want to read a great biography that does justice to the known evidence of Michelangelo’s life because reading this account would help me understand how past artists have achieved great heights. But if any of this narrative is from the imagination of a modern historian, by following these examples, I will be mimicking the dreams of a history teacher, rather than the footsteps of a mastermind.