Heretics and Heroes Read online

  These words are a defensible description of what we see. But the ultimate meaning of the allegory and especially its judgment on the human enterprise have been hotly debated for centuries, not surprising for a picture as suggestive as this one. Rather than pursue each of the vagaries of possible interpretation, I shall keep to the main road. And to do so, we shall need to invoke Plato, or rather Plato as seen through the eyes of his Christian interpreters—for Plato himself, who wished to banish all the witchery of poetry, art, and music from his ideal Republic, would never have countenanced such an extravagant display as Botticelli offers us here.

  In the course of the Christian centuries, and especially in the time of Lorenzo’s Platonic Academy, many of Plato’s central assertions had been softened, almost without anyone noticing. One could now think human flesh a fine thing—the creation, after all, of God himself—rather than simply a rotting appendage to one’s immortal soul. Beyond this, the dark, fated, gloomy world of the Greeks (on full display in their tragic dramas, which end always in ruin, catastrophe, and abomination) had been lightened by the Gospel of Jesus (the Word of God made flesh), in which our end was to be found in eternal light and love, which is why Dante’s great poem on the meaning of the human enterprise was entitled not Tragedy but Comedy7—a viewpoint that would have made no sense to the ancients. Christian readers of Plato, such as Lorenzo and his philosophical and artistic friends, had of course made connections of their own between the myths of the ancients and the stories of Christianity—to such an extent that the two sets of literature and legend were now woven together in a sort of confluent whole that neither the ancients nor the Christians of the first centuries, who looked upon the pagans merely as potential converts, could ever have imagined.

  How far we have come from more primitive Christian approaches to the body. To review this progress visually we have only to glance at a twelfth-century depiction of the Three Graces in an Austrian manuscript. Poor, shapeless ladies, hovering behind their blanket, their unattractive feet splayed out before us, their barely functional legs just visible through their very necessary covering. Please, ladies, whatever you do, don’t drop that blanket.

  (illustration credit 66)

  But back to Botticelli. Venus, the central figure, is no longer just the ancient goddess of Love; she is now Humanitas, humanness, humanity itself, her dress the expression of Botticelli’s own time (as all instances of humanity must be set in a particular time), her face observant, thoughtful, expectant, haloed by the arbored arch of Nature. Here is humanity at its best, embodiment of the ideal. This sense of ideality, this enfleshed symbolic presence, has been made possible by the combination of an ancient sense of symbolism, to be found especially in the writings of Plato, and of a more hopeful, optimistic outlook on the world than the ancients could ever have achieved. What humanity is observing is the repeatable drama of Nature, seen under the aspect of its ideal, springtime. Symbolic ideals are shown in the manner of the ancient Greeks, pretty much absolved of clothing or adorned with the kind of clothing that makes the figures almost nuder than if they were merely nude. And these barely but beautifully draped figures are not only female: they are voluptuously female, females such as any male, however windy, would wish to impregnate, Zephyr’s intended target winking alluringly through Flora’s transparencies.

  So why then is Mercury, the quick god with wings on his feet who delivers messages, turned away from all this sensuous fecundity? He’s using his caduceus, his famous serpent-entwined herald’s staff, to dispel rain clouds. More than this, it appears that he is summoning our eyes to something beyond. Indeed, the panel’s figures have been staged in such a way that our eyes are naturally drawn from right to left: from Zephyr’s importunate entrance to each of the six female figures to Mercury and past him to something outside the panel altogether.

  Horizontal panels such as this were normally created to hang above daybeds in elegant palaces—and Italian daybeds were not intended just for napping. Primavera was hung in a house of the Medici, and we have good reason to believe that to Mercury’s right there hung a smaller panel by Botticelli: Athena and the Centaur [Plate 13], in which Athena, the reasonable goddess of wisdom, tames a hairy centaur, the very figure of human animality, by pulling his hair. Athena’s beautiful, vine-encircled breasts, at least as prominent as her serious expression, seem almost to offer a possible escape from the picture’s main message, which is that human reason and wisdom should tame human bestiality. Shall we, relaxing on our daybed, be moved to imitate Zephyr and the breezy ladies who celebrate springtime? Or shall we contemplate more soberly the triumph of wisdom over our animal nature? Hmm.

  It seems clear that Botticelli himself was conflicted as to which resolution the siesta-takers should favor. At this point in his life, Athena is something less than his central ideal. Marginalized in a small panel beyond the fecund grove, she can hardly compete with the luscious Ludi Florales. But there is in Botticelli an ambivalence that twinkles at us through the translucencies.

  It appears in another guise in another daybed panel, the postcoital Venus and Mars [Plate 14], in which Mars, utterly spent, snores openmouthed, while Venus, neither satisfied nor disgusted, simply wonders: What was that about? Her expression is a masterpiece of ambiguity, as she contemplates him, their future, her future. Was Mars just too frenzied to undress her properly? Is this wham-bam, followed by insensate snoring, what life will be like? The little imps playing with Mars’s weapons of war seem to undercut whatever residual dignity might have accrued to him. Though one imp blows a conch shell straight into the war god’s ear, we know that not even the shrill sound of that horn can waken him.

  There is at least one more daybed panel, The Birth of Venus [Plate 15], Botticelli’s most famous painting, and in this one there is no ambiguity at all. Rather, The Birth of Venus seems so straightforward in its intention and so complete in its execution that it scarcely calls for commentary. Long ago I had a rather batty classics professor who always referred to this picture as Venus on the Half Shell, as if that were its actual title. It might as well be. The psychological connection between sex and food has never been more blatant. Venus is being served to us by chef Botticelli as the most exquisite morsel of his imagination. The face of Venus draws us. Neither as ambiguous as Venus contemplating the sleeping Mars nor as thoughtful as Venus observing the riot of Springtime, this Venus is at most calmly pensive, nearly smiling, and as sweetly content as any newborn.

  Botticelli would use his sensational model for this Venus in other pictures as well, most notably in his Madonna of the Pomegranate [Plate 16]. But here Venus-Madonna seems not at all content. If the infant Jesus looks dazed, his mother looks downright depressed. No doubt the task awaiting them—redeeming the human race—would be enough to give anyone pause; and the succulent pomegranate, which was then believed to be the fruit with which the serpent tempted Eve and she Adam, surely served as a reminder of what lay before them. After this, Botticelli would give us but one more female nude, as the severe symbol of Truth in his strange and elegant Calumny. After Venus on the Half Shell, all of Botticelli’s surviving pictures are religious, many of them complexly allegorical, all (except for Calumny’s Truth) featuring elaborately clothed females.

  What happened to Botticelli’s imagination? What became of his elegantly beautiful female nudes? Why did he excise them from his later work? It may be that only one word is needed by way of explanation: Savonarola. The crabbed Dominican friar changed Botticelli’s life and art as radically as any external force could possibly do, remaking Botticelli into a pious avoider of what he had formerly experienced as intense physical realities.

  But there is also a more complicated possibility. Botticelli, so obviously heterosexual, never married. In fact, he claimed the very idea of marriage gave him nightmares. (In this he seems to have been at one with his Venus contemplating the snoring Mars.) But there was a rumor circulating in his lifetime that he was madly in love with Simonetta Vespucci, the honey-hai
red, creamy-fleshed model for The Birth of Venus. By the time Botticelli painted her as the Madonna of the Pomegranate, she was long since dead. Botticelli, who outlived Simonetta by thirty-four years, certainly never forgot her, for he asked to be buried at her feet. And there to this day his body lies at the foot of Simonetta’s grave in Florence’s Ognissanti, the Church of All Saints.

  If any Renaissance artist—or, for that matter, any artist in history—is worthy of being approached on one’s knees, that artist is Michelangelo, il Divino, as he was hailed in his lifetime. He was born at Caprese, near Arezzo, in Tuscany; his parents were Florentines, and to Florence they returned within months of his birth. During his early childhood, however, his mother died, after which he was fostered out to the family of a stonecutter who lived in Settignano, a village with dramatic views, set on a hillside just northeast of Florence; and there he came in contact with the medium that would bring him such fame: marble. “If there is any good in me,” claimed Michelangelo to his biographer Vasari, “it is because I was born in the subtle atmosphere of your country of Arezzo. Along with the milk of my nurse I received the knack of handling chisel and hammer, with which I make my figures.”

  Whether those claims are true, romanticized, or a biographer’s inflation, the words sound very much like Michelangelo, a man capable of humility and arrogance in the same sentence. He cared not a whit for riches, nor even for food or clothing. Throughout his long life of eighty-nine years he remained lean and muscular, silently despising those who were otherwise. He often slept in his clothes, not even bothering to remove his boots, and he never bathed. He cared only for the perfection of his art. He believed that every block of marble already contained a perfect form within it and that it was the task of the sculptor to free that form by chipping away all excess. To fall short of releasing such perfection was a moral as well as an artistic failure. He was often as dissatisfied with himself as he could be with others. An unsmiling loner, he hardly encouraged apprentices to attach themselves to him. Another early biographer, Paolo Giovio, wrote that “his nature was so rough and uncouth that his domestic habits were incredibly squalid and deprived posterity of any pupils who might have followed him.”

  In many ways he was the opposite of Leonardo, the only other Renaissance artist who can approach him for greatness. Whereas Leonardo loved the natural world with the eye of a draftsman and the mind of a scientist, Michelangelo, Platonist to his core, saw little value in nature as such or even in the flesh as it actually is. The ideal form: that was what he wanted. Because of this, he looked down on painters as piddling draftsmen: they were as nothing compared to sculptors, who could release forms of such dynamic power as to remake mere nature and overwhelm the viewer completely.

  At thirteen, Michelangelo was apprenticed to the Florentine painter Domenico Ghirlandaio.8 By the age of fourteen, the boy was already being paid a salary by Ghirlandaio, a most unusual development. In the same year, Lorenzo de’ Medici called Michelangelo to be part of his court, to roam through his gardens, and to behold—and to touch—his precious collection of classical statuary, then under the supervision of old Bertoldo di Giovanni, who had long ago been a student of Donatello’s. Michelangelo, teaching himself by trial and error—copying earlier works, especially paintings by Masaccio, experimenting with the fashioning of clay figures—soon felt himself ready to sculpt. By the age of fifteen or sixteen he had already produced two extraordinary bas-reliefs, the Madonna of the Steps and the Battle of the Centaurs, completely different from each other and so assured that the viewer finds he can credit the artist’s youth only by an almost painful contortion of faith. The young loner had also had a savage fistfight with another teenage artista, leaving Michelangelo with a squished nose for the rest of his life.

  In the same period, the boy also carved in wood a slender and utterly nude Christ, nailed to his cross, a figure we may or may not still possess. This crucifixion was made as a gift to a local pastor who had allowed Michelangelo “a room to work in and bodies to study.” The bodies were, of course, corpses entrusted to the church for burial. Michelangelo was most grateful for the opportunity that the priest gave him to make this secretive study of anatomy—not an easy thing to pull off in those days—“for he could imagine nothing which would give him more pleasure” than to study these bodies.

  The study certainly paid off. By his early twenties, Michelangelo was sculpting some of his most startlingly accomplished works, including a plumply muscular and inebriated Bacchus, god of wine and dark dreams, uncertain of his footing and trailed by a small but scary faun. The faun, smiling his creepy smile and sucking on bunches of grapes, clutches the lion skin that Bacchus holds indifferently in his left hand. The lion skin, symbolic of death and opposed to the life-giving power of the grapes, elegantly underlines Michelangelo’s meaning: self-indulgence in life leads to death.

  Had Michelangelo been spending too much of his time amid corpses? Apparently not. His next work displays a grasp of human anatomy seldom if ever surpassed in the history of art: a Pietà [Plate 17], his first but hardly his last interpretation of the subject. The Italian word has many grades of meaning: pity, compassion, mercy, piety, devotion. Capitalized, however, it refers to a scene not found in the gospels but considered by medieval piety to be appropriate to the biography of Jesus: after the dead Jesus was taken down from the cross and before he was entombed by Joseph of Arimathea, it was imagined that his body would have been laid in the arms of his mother, Mary, who had followed him to his crucifixion (at least as reported in John’s Gospel). This unlikely scene is made even more unlikely by the difficulty of setting a grown man’s body in the lap of his (presumably) smaller and weaker mother. The medieval attempts at illustration are invariably awkward and unconvincing.

  Michelangelo’s solution is extraordinarily clever, to such an extent that viewers are seldom aware of the visual trickery. Jesus is slightly smaller than his mother, but her draperies and her wide-kneed position successfully mask that reality. Moreover, the body of Jesus, slouching loose-limbed in an intensely realistic imitation of death, serves—along with Mary’s pose and her ample skirts—to attract our attention and to further mask the difference in the respective weights of the two figures. Perhaps even more important, the anatomy of Jesus is so exquisitely detailed as to demand soon enough almost our whole attention. But if that attention should stray, it will inevitably stray to Mary’s once-nurturing breasts, emphasized by the cross-band that slices through them and by the gathered cloth, and to Mary’s ever youthful but spiritual face, just bending forward over the body, resigned but—mysteriously enough—not inconsolable. She knows what has happened and why this was necessary.

  Michelangelo was twenty-three when he finished this Pietà. His contempt for human self-indulgence and his sense of the need for human suffering will only grow as he ages. But it is worthy of note that this most loyal Platonist of all Renaissance artists, loving the reality of symbols, eschewing the follies of the flesh, is also an intensely loyal Christian, whose reverence for the episodes of the gospels and whose belief in the reality of the Redemption can be second to none. It is also worthy of note that Michelangelo’s piety takes at times an almost northern European turn. Before his Pietà, this grouping had been found almost exclusively north of the Alps, where it was called das Vesperbild (the Evening Image). As the respected contemporary critic Lutz Heusinger, professor of art history at Marburg, the original German Lutheran university, has written: “North of the Alps … the portrayal of pain had always been connected with the idea of redemption.” If Michelangelo’s Tuscan Platonism gives his Pietà a sinuosity that would be impossible for any German artist of this period, we should still bear in mind that Michelangelo’s mind and heart were open to very non-Italian and, from a strictly Roman Catholic viewpoint, dubiously orthodox Christian influences.

  In the summer of 1501, Florence, after a long period of political chaos, was declared a republic once more, and friends of Michelangelo entered the government.
Little more than a week after the declaration, Michelangelo was commissioned by Arte della Lana, the powerful wool guild, to sculpt a new David [Plate 18] that was to symbolize resurgent Florence. The result would be the most famous of all Davids, a historic symbol not only of Florence but of the human spirit. Michelangelo had spent his time well in the gardens of Lorenzo il Magnifico, where he seems to have learned all the secrets of the ancient Greek sculptors, none more valuable than their appreciation for what Italians came to call il contraposto (the opposition or antithesis), the art of sculpting a human body so that one half of it stands in opposition to the other half.

  The earliest sculpture of every culture is symmetrical. On my desk, for instance, sits an ancient Canaanite fertility goddess—only her head is missing. But from her necklace a vertical line can be drawn reaching down the middle of her body, from her clavicle to the soles of her feet. On either side of this line her body appears in perfect symmetry, left shoulder mirrored by right shoulder, left breast by right breast, left hip by right hip, left leg by right leg, left foot by right foot. The only movement is in her forearms and her hands, her left hand pointing to her vulva, her right hand offering her left breast. This movement is an innovation, setting off this figure from the oldest prehistoric fertility figures, such as the Venus of Willendorf, which were rigidly symmetrical in all aspects.

  The Greeks realized that such poses could quickly become static and boring and that the way to stir the viewer’s interest was to take even further such minimal movement as can be found in my Canaanite goddess and, in effect, force the sculpted body into a swivel, so that it will appear almost living. Thus, Michelangelo’s David stands in the Greek manner with his weight on his right foot, his whole right side at rest, even the right side of his face very nearly tranquil. But his left side is already moving forward, his left foot having taken its first step, his left buttock tensed, his left elbow jutting, his left hand (for like Leonardo, Michelangelo was left-handed) grasping the slingshot that will bring down the giant Goliath, the left side of his face resolute, ready, almost angry, even the curls of the left side of his head more tousled than those of his right.