By Hand and Brain Michelangelo

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MICHELANGELO Buonarotti (1475 - 1564), one of th most skilied artists of all tim was born exactly 500 years ago today.

His anniversary has called forth a deluge of ink from Fleet Street and the universities - much of which expresses less than a single pen-stroke of one of his most fragmentary drawings.

Why is this? Michelangelo was above all else a sculptor, a highly trained worker of stone. At the same time he was a supremely imaginative and profound thinker continually struggling to grasp and rework the inner significance of the figures which his hammer and chisel drew out of the marble.

He was a genius because this unity and conflict of manual and mental work was carried to a point from which he seemed to tower above his time; even his contempories called him 'Michelangel the divine Most of the 'art critics now spilling words over this or that aspect of his work are reduced to wor shipping him as an individual "spiritual genius, spicing their enthusiasm with anecdotes about his working methods or the eccentricities of his life and times.

At the same time they belittle him.

Michelangelo was a genius beczuse he was a man working, think. ing among men, not in spite of it. Only historical materialism, grasping the importance of the class division between mental and manual work, can begin rationally to celebrate him.

RENAISSANCE

When, in the early 1490's, Michel angelo was a young apprentice at the Florence palace of Lorenzo the Magnificent (head of the Med. ici banking family, and effectively king of the Florentine republic) the first neriod of the Italian Renaissance was reaching its peak.

Enormous weaith from trade and finance allowed cultivated and sell-contident patrons to spor sor circles of intellectuals: poets. philosophers, mathematicians, scientists - and for the first time a few artists, previously regarded as mere mechanicals.

To the uncouth young Michelangelo, coming in from the dust of the stone-yards to listen to talk of the Greek myths and Plato's "ideal forms" at Lorenzo's sumptuous table, life must have seemed fresh and bouyant.

But by the time he died Italy and Europe, had entered social upheavals on a scale unequalled until this century. Each war and crisis embroiled the Church, the Papacy (and therefore God).

In 1494 the monk Savonarola was haranguing the Florentines to burn all "voluptuous (ie.nude) paintines and to return the Churc from "luxury' to religion. In 1498 Florentine rationality reasserted itself and Savonarola was himself burnt having been previously excommunicated by Alexander VI).

Savonarola looked back towards the "simplicity' of the middle ages But he was the Italian preface to the German Reformation.

When Martin Luther returned from Rome to nail his famous ninety-five' theses' against priestly corruption on the church door at Wittenburg in 1517 (thesis 50 reads: *Christians must be taught that if the Pope knew of the exactions of the preachers of indulgences, he would rather have St. Peters basilica reduced to ashes than built with the skin, flesh and bones of his sheep.) he spoke for the advance-guard of the German bourgeoisie.

He also set the match to a century and a half of religious wars; and the reaction to him brought the Counter-Reformation, the Jesuits and the Inquisition. A side-effect (the result of disastrous Papal diplomacy) was the Sack of Rome in 1527.

MARY HOLDING THE DEAD CHRIST lichelangelo was in Florence : that time. But in 1534 he returned to Rome to work for the Papacy - still rich but now highly unstable- for the last thirty years of his life; in 1546 already aged 71) he took over the completion of St. Peter's.

UPHEAVALS REFLECTED angelo - both in his public works and in his more private thoughts. known to us mainly through his poetry and letters.

The abstract side of his thinking was concentrated within an intense religious belief. But the main subject, and symbol of his work was the human body - generally the male nude.

Tis relatively early drawing of he resurrected Christ, (illustrated can be seen in the excellent exhib ition of his drawings now on - fret - at the British Museum. The figure has an astonishing lite, retlecting the miracle of the resurrection It's proportions are perfect. It seems both to rest and to turn on a single, impossible point, a toc resting on nothing. The slightly exaggerated muscles give it a more than-human energy.

Even without knowing what it represents we can see Michelangelo intended to convey something miraculous.

And it does come, quite literally, from the dead - Michelangelo gained his knowledge of anatomy from corpses.

But Michelangelo understood his own knowledge of the human body mystically. As he wrote in a poem "I can never now perceive Thy eternal light within a mortal being without great longing.

For him it is faith, not his own training, that draws his pencil across the paper. But these two elements do not yet conflict; it is a work of youth and scif-confidence. (The drawing also has something of sculpture in it. It fills space out to become three-dimensional. But it does so with the limbs and muscles themselve - particularly the foreshortening of the right hand and leg - not with the painter's devices of perspective and background.)

ARTISTIC CRISIS In his later years Michelangelo went through a complex moral and artistic crisis. He was idolised by the rich and famous (he outlived twelve Popes, most of whon vied for his services).

He was surrounded by mediocre hangers-on and fame seekers. The commissions foisted on him outweighed even his energy, but perfectionism prevented his using many assistants.

He developed an intense emotional relationship with a handsome and intelligent young man. Tommaso de Cavalieri. Self-doul and guilt carried him towards an austere, reforming and sterile current of intellectuals within the Catholic Church.

By the time he came to paint his huge fresco of The Last Judgement (1534-41, Sistine Chapel, Rome) he could no longer usc idealised figures as his symbols -most of the bodies are heavy, and in a sense,ugly.

The composition as a whole has lost the balance and sanity of his earlier paintings on the ceiling of the same chapel. And he includes in The Last Judgement a grotesque portrait of himself (illustrated) as a damned soula wretched head and skin hung over the abyss.

Michelangelo never resolved this joint crisis of conscience and art. But his struggle to do so produced sculpture that reaches across the centuries to the same problems that face the best of today's sculptors- for example, Henry Moore, in his rocks carved into massive harmony with them selves.

SCULPTURE cut and finished to a partici have been in danger the whole work.')

Michelangelo was, at least in part, conscious of this need for an image adequate to the mater ial. He wrote that " the greatest artist has no conception which a single block of marble does not potentially contain within its mass, but only a hand obedient to the mind can penetrate to this imagc, and that the sculptor goes to the 'rugged live stone, then claims that which the chisel promised, and the conception lives again in such beauty that none may confine its spirit" (Poems, between 153 -1546).

The sculptor's mind, therefore must itself "be obedient' to the limits which confront his hand and chisel - that is to the qualities, the life', of the stone. He must consciously unite mental and manual labour in the sculpture as a whole. GROTESQUE In the late 'Pieta' (Mary holding the dead Christ; illustrated), left SELF-PORT unfinished when he died, Michelangelo was struggling for this unity.

He works within the images of his time - religious human figures shape and surface. It abstracts But the image is not accidentalfrom colour and movement to ly chosen. Only in a corpse can place all its meaning in shape. the pallor and cold of the marble But this shape is no pure tomm fully express itseif. it exists only through the stone. Its hardness lives in the stiffness If the form is to accord with the of the dead man's legs. The sculp content, the meaning of the scul- -ture is an experiment, and in pture must come not only from a sense a failure. The severed arm its shape, but from the qualities is the relic of an abandoned of the stone itself - in the case of form. And in his struggle to get marble, cold and hard. within the stone's nature MichThe true job of the sculptor, clangelo has almost forgotten therefore, is not to work up the anatomical realism, so that the stone into a semblance of being upper part of Christ's body is other than what it is, but to bring already far too thin. its essence out of it. But this "failure' shows a strugTo do this he must find, and gie far more intense than his form in his mind, a notion, an most virtuoso works. image which expresses the inner In our time, now that the scien nature of his material. Then he tific theory of Marxism shows must physically, materially, attack the material basis for the workthe stone to bring this notion into ing ciass to end class rule, and being - as Michelangelo did, wor- with it the false seperation of king quickly without scale models mental and manual labour, we (an eyewitness described how "he can see new significance in the attacked the work with such en- work of Michelangelo, who foug ergy and fire that I thought it to unite these two opposites. would fly to pieces. With one It is through this struggle,thoug blow he brought down fragments shackled as he was by mysticism three or four fingers in breadth, and religion, that Michelangelo and so exactly at the point mar- reaches out to us today. In this ked, that if only a tiny piece of sense the modern working class marble more had fallen, he would is the inheritor of Michelangelo THE RESURRECTED CHRIST

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by R. ROBERTS

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