MICHELANGELO
Michelangelo and His Family |
Except for the name, marriage and death, nothing is known
about Michelangelo’s mother, who died when he was six
(1481). As well as Vasari (1568), Condivi, Michelangelo’s pupil,
who published a short biography in the master’s lifetime
(1553), reports that Michelangelo was put out to nurse at
Settignano with a woman who was the wife and daughter of
stonecutters. Hence, these authors assert, Michelangelo used to
remark that it was no wonder he became a sculptor.
Condivi
adds that possibly he was joking, or possibly he knew that a
nurse’s milk might well introduce a new propensity.
It is important to understand that it was a new propensity
from which Michelangelo was not unwilling at times in his old
age to dissociate himself on other than religious grounds; new,
in the sense that it was foreign to the pretensions of his family.
The extant letters to his father and brothers do not mention any
aesthetic value of his work, whereas they often refer to the hardness
of his situation and to the money he earns.
These aspects
years of the Sistine undertaking. Michelangelo writes to Buonarroto
in October 1509: ‘It seems to me you don’t understand
how I am situated here. . . . I shall do what I can. It seems that
Gismondo is coming to expedite his business. Tell him not to
take me into his calculations, not because I don’t love him as a
brother but because I can’t help him in any way. I am taken up
with loving myself more than others and I can’t provide myself
with the necessaries of life. I am in need, worn out and without
friends, nor do I want any: nor have I the time to eat as much as I
should; so don’t let me have more troubles because I can’t stand
another ounce.
It is surely not strange that the prickly, unsociable
Michelangelo in whom there was overwhelming anger as well
as his generosity or his fear, who was notorious for deep melancholy,
should have become the cushion to mitigate the hard life
of others. Nor is it strange that we find in the massive, omnipotent
proportions of many of his figures, a full measure of passive
and patient receptivity.
There exists, of course, the other side, the resentment, the
explosiveness, the contempt. More than a third of all the surviving
letters are addressed to Michelangelo’s young nephew,
Lionardo, the son of Buonarroto: they were written between
1540 and December 1563, two months before Michelangelo
died. He was attached to the nephew, not perhaps for himself but
as the inheritor of the family. Yet on the whole, the letters reflect
a profound irritation. Lionardo becomes ‘them’, that is to say,
Michelangelo’s father and brothers (mostly dead) who never
asked him to spend money on himself. Thus, the old man writes
to the nephew: ‘About your rushing to Rome in such haste, I
don’t know whether you would have come so far if I were in the
utmost poverty and lacking bread. It’s enough to throw money
about that you haven’t earned. What a fear you have of losing theinheritance. . . . Yours is the love of a wood-worm.
If you really
loved me, you would have written: “Michelangelo, spend the
three thousand scudi on yourself: you have given us much and
it’s enough: we care more for your life than for your property.”’ ‘You all have lived off me now for forty years’, he adds in writing
to this young man of twenty-six, ‘and I haven’t had even a
good word from any of you in return.’ Two years
earlier he had written to the unfortunate Lionardo who had
come to Rome because of Michelangelo’s severe illness: ‘Don’t
my possessions in Florence suffice? You can’t deny you are just
like your father (Buonarroto) who drove me out of my house in
Florence.’ Lionardo, in spite of Michelangelo’s
innuendoes, does not strike us as an unusually calculating young
man. He appended as was his custom the date on which he
received this unaddressed letter. Doubtless he was in Rome but
was not allowed to make the visit which had been the object of
his journey, undertaken, it is likely, at the instance of Michelangelo’s friends.
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