Excerpts from
The Agony & The Ecstasy: A Novel of Michelangelo (1961)
by Irving Stone
Julius was dressed in a white linen cassock, his pleated knee-length tunic had tight sleeves, while the elbow-length scarlet velvet cape was trimmed in ermine, as was the scarlet velvet skullcap.
"Ah, Buonarroti, you have returned to us. You are pleased with the statue in Bologna, are you not?"
"It will bring honor on us."
"You see," cried Julius triumphantly, throwing out his arms energetically to include the entire room. "You had no confidence in yourself. When I made this splendid opportunity available to you, you cried out, 'It is not my trade!'" The Pope's mimicking of Michelangelo's slightly hoarse voice brought appreciative laughter from the court. "Now you see how you have made it your trade, by creating a fine bronze."
"You are generous, Holy Father," murmured Michelangelo with a twinge of impatience, his mind occupied with the pile of stained marbles lying just a few hundred yards away.
"I intend to continue being generous," cried the Pope heartily. "I am going to favor you above all the painting masters of Italy."
" . . . 'painting' masters?"
"Yes. I have decided that you are the best artist to complete the work begun by your countrymen Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Rosselli, whom I myself hired to paint the frieze in the Sistine Chapel. I am commissioning you to complete my uncle Sixtus' chapel by painting the ceiling."
There was a slight patter of applause. Michelangelo was stunned. Nausea gripped him. He had asked Sangallo to make it clear to the Pope that he would return to Rome only to begin carving on the sculptures for the tomb. He cried passionately:
"I am a sculptor, not a painter!"
Julius shook his head in despair.
"I had less trouble conquering Perugia and Bologna than I have in subduing you!"
"I am not a Papal State, Holy Father. Why should you waste your precious time subduing me?"
The room went silent. The Pope glared at him, thrust out his bearded chin, demanded icily, "Where did you have your religious training, that you dare to question your pontiff's judgment?"
"As your prelate said in Bologna, Holiness, I am but an ignorant artist, without good manners."
"Then you can carve your masterpiece in a cell of Sant'Angelo."
All Julius had to do was wave a hand at a guard, and he could rot in a dungeon for years. He gritted his teeth.
"That would bring you little honor. Marble is my profession. Let me carve the Moses, Victors, Captives. Many would come to see the statues, offering thanks to Your Holiness for making them possible."
"In short," snapped Julius, "I need your sculptures to assure my place in history."
"They could help, Holy Father."
There was an audible gasp from those around the throne. The Pope turned to his cardinals and courtiers.
"Do you hear that, gentlemen? I, Julius II, who recovered the long-lost Papal States for the Church and brought stability to Italy, who have cleaned out the scandals of the Borgias, published a constitution abolishing simony and elevated the decorum of the Sacred College, achieved a modern architecture for Rome . . . . I need Michelangelo Buonarotti to establish my historical position."
Sangallo had gone deathly pale. Cardinal Giovanni stared out a window as though he were not there. The Pope loosened the collar of his cape against his own warmth, took a deep breath and started again.
"Buonarotti, my informants in Florence describe your panel for the Signoria as 'the school of the world' . . ."
"Holiness," interrupted Michelangelo, cursing himself for his envy of Leonardo that had led him into this trap, "it was an accident, something that could never be repeated. The Great Hall needed an accompanying fresco for the other half of the wall. . . . It was a diversion."
"Bene. Make such a diversion for the Sistine. Are we to understand that you will paint a wall for a Florentine hall, but not a ceiling for a papal chapel?"
The silence in the room was crushing. An armed courtier, standing by the Pope's side, said, "Your Holiness, give me the word and we will hang this presumptuous Florentine from the Torre di Nona."
The Pope glowered at Michelangelo, who stood before him defiant but speechless. Their eyes met, held in an exchange of immovability. Then a wisp of a smile drifted across the pontiff's face, was reflected in the tiny amber sparkle of Michelangelo's eyes, the barest twitching of his lips.
"This presumptuous Florentine, as you call him," said the Pope, "was described ten years ago by Jacopo Galli as the best sculpture master in Italy. So he is. If I had wanted him fed to the ravens I would have done so long ago."
He turned back to Michelangelo, said in the tone of an exasperated but fond father:
"Buonarotti, you will paint the Twelve Apostles on the ceiling of the Sistine, and decorate the vault with customary designs. For this we will pay you three thousand large gold ducats. We shall also be pleased to pay the expenses and wages of any five assistants you may choose. When the Sistine vault is completed, you have your pontiff's promise that you shall return to the carving of the marbles. My son, you are dismissed."
What further word could he say? He had been proclaimed supreme among his country's artists, made a promise that he would resume work on the tomb. Where could he flee? To Florence? To have Gonfaloniere Soderini cry out, "We cannot go to war with the Vatican because of you." To Spain, Portugal, Germany, England . . .? The Pope's power reached everywhere. The Pope demanded much, but a lesser pontiff might well have excommunicated him. And if he had refused to come back to Rome? He had tried that too, for a barren seven months in Florence. There was nothing to do but submit.
He kneeled, kissed the Pope's ring.
"It shall be as the Holy Father desires." . . .
He threw both arms up in a despairing gesture that embraced the Sistine. "Explain this . . .
edifice . . . to me. Why was it built this way?"
Sangallo explained that when it was first completed the building had looked more like a fortress than a chapel. Since Pope Sixtus [IV] had intended to use it for the defense of the Vatican in the event of war, the top had been crowned by an open battlement from which soldiers could fire cannons and drop stones on attackers. When the neighboring Sant'Angelo had been strengthened as a fortress that could be reached by a high-walled passageway from the Papal palace, Julius ordered Sangallo to extend the Sistine roof to cover the crenellated parapet. Quarters for the soldiers, above the vault that Michelangelo had been ordered to paint, were now unused.
Strong sunlight was streaming in from three tall windows, lighting the glorious frescoes of Botticelli and Rosselli opposite, shooting strong beams of light across the variegated marble floor. The side walls, one hundred and thirty-three feet long, were divided into three zones on their way up to the barrel vault, sixty-eight feet above: the lowest area was covered by tapestries, the frieze of frescoes filled the second and middle area. Above these frescoes was a cornice or horizontal molding, projecting a couple of feet out from the wall. In the topmost third wall area were spaced the windows, on either side of them portraits of the Popes.
Taking a deep breath, he craned his neck and looked up the more than sixty feet into the air at the ceiling itself, painted a light blue and studded with golden stars, the enormous area he was to fill with decorations. Arising out of the third level of the wall and going up into the curved vault were pendentives, which in turn were based on pilasters, column-like piers buried in the third tier. These pendentives, five on each wall and one at either end, constituted open areas on which he was to paint the Twelve Apostles. Above each window was a semicircular lunette, outlined in sepia; the outer borders of the pendentives formed triangular spandrels, also colored in sepia.
The motive for the commission now became crushingly clear to him. It was not to put magnificent paintings on the ceiling that would complement the earlier frescoes, but rather to mask the structural supports which made the harsh transition form the top third of the wall into the barrel vault. His Apostles were not to be created for themselves but rather to capture the gaze of people on the floor so that their attention would be diverted from the ungainly architectural divisions. As an artist he had become not merely a decorator but an obliterator of other men's clumsiness. [429-432]
"Holy Father, I have come to speak to you about the Sistine vault."
"Yes, my son?"
"I had no sooner painted one section than I realized it would turn out meanly."
"Why so?"
"Because the placing of the Apostles alone will have but a poor effect. They occupy too small an area of the total ceiling and become lost."
"But there are other decorations."
"I have begun those decorations, as you instructed me. They make the Apostles seem poorer than ever."
"This is your best judgment, that at the end we will emerge with a poor effect?"
"I have given the matter a great deal of thought, and that is my honest opinion. No matter how well the ceiling may be painted under the original plan, it can bring little honor to either of us."
"When you speak quietly this way, Buonarotti, I hear truth in you. I can also tell that you have not come to ask permission to abandon the work."
"No, Holy Father. I have a composition that will cover the entire vault with glory."
"I have confidence in you, and so shall not ask the nature of your design. But I shall come often to the chapel to watch your progress. You are involving yourself in three times as much work?"
" . . .or five or six."
The Pope stirred on his throne, rose, paced up and down the room, then came to a halt before Michelangelo.
"You are a strange one, Buonarotti. You screamed that fresco was not your profession, and almost knocked me down in your rage. Yet now, eight months later, you come back with a plan that will entail infinitely more time and labor. How is one to understand you?"
"I don't know," replied Michelangelo ruefully. "I hardly understand myself. I only know that since I must paint that vault I cannot bring you something mediocre, even if it is all you have asked for."
Julius shook his white-haired, white-bearded head in amused puzzlement. Then he put his hand on Michelangelo's head, blessed him.
"Paint your ceiling as you will. We cannot pay you five or six times the original three thousand ducats, but we will double it to six thousand." . . .
Now he knew what the vault must say and accomplish; the number of frescoes he could paint would be determined by his architectural reconstruction. He must create the content and the container simultaneously. He stared at the ceiling above him. The center space running the full length of the vault he would use for his major legends [from Genesis]: Dividing the Waters from the Earth, God Creating the Sun, the Moon. God Creating Adam and Eve, Expelling Them from the Garden, the legend of Noah and the Deluge. Now, at long last, he could pay his debt to Della Quercia for the magnificent biblical scenes carved in Istrian stone on the portal of San Petronio [in Bologna]. . . [443-445]
He began with the Deluge, a large panel toward the entrance of the chapel. By March he had the cartoon blown up and ready to be transferred to the ceiling. Winter had not released its grip on Rome. The Sistine was bitterly cold. A hundred braziers could not heat its lowest areas. He wore his warm wool stockings, brache and shirt.
Rosselli, who had left for Orvieto for a profitable commission, had trained Michi in the mixing of the plaster and the method of applying it. Michelangelo helped him carry the sacks of lime, sand and pozzolana, volcanic tufa dust, up the steep wall ladders to the top of the scaffolding. Here Michi made his mix . . . Michi laid an area of intonaco, then fixed the cartoon. Michelangelo used the charcoal bag, red ochre for connecting lines.
Michi descended, set to work grinding colors below. Michelangelo was now on his top platform, sixty feet above the floor. He had been thirteen when he stood for the first time on the scaffolding in Santa Maria Novella, alone on a peak above the chapel and the world. Now he was thirty-four, and now, as then, he suffered vertigo. The Sistine seemed so hollow from up here, with his head just one foot below the ceiling. He smelled the wet plaster, the pungence of his freshly ground paints. He turned from this view of the marble floor, picked up a brush, squeezed it between the fingers and thumb of his left hand, remembering that he would have to keep his colors liquid this early in the morning. . . .
He had watched Ghirlandaio paint enough panels to know the he should begin at the top and work his way downward on either side; but he lacked experience to paint professionally, and so he began at the dominant point, the one that interested him the most: the extreme left end, the last piece of green earth showing above the flood, the trunk of a storm-twisted tree extending toward what would later be Noah's Ark, with the last of perishing humanity climbing the banks . . .
He painted with his head and shoulders pulled sharply back, his eyes staring straight up. Paint dripped onto his face, the moisture of the wet plaster oozed out and dripped into his eyes. His arms and back tired quickly from the strain of the unnatural position. During the first week he allowed Michi to lay only modest areas of intonaco each day, proceeding cautiously, experimenting not only with the contortions of the figures but with a wide variety of flesh tones and the colors of the blue, green and rose robes of those who still retained their clothing. . . . He was content to feel his way slowly until he had mastered his medium.
At the end of the first week a biting north wind arose. Its whistling kept him awake most of the night. In the morning he walked to the Sistine with his scarf wound around his mouth, not sure, even as he climbed the ladder, whether he could get his hands warm enough to hold a brush. But when he reached the top . . . he saw that there was no need to do so: his panel was ruined. His plaster and paints were not drying. Instead, there was a moist dripping at the edges of his stormy tree . . . The oozing moisture was creating a mold which was creeping over the paint, slowly absorbing it. [447-448]
QUESTIONS:
1) What are some strengths and weaknesses of using a biographical novel like this to learn about historical characters like Michelangelo?
2) Based on these excerpts, how would you describe Michelangelo’s personality?
3) Based on these excerpts, how does the novel compare with the film from 1965?