The new Michelangelo sculptures are a sensation, but are they any good?
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Version 0 of 1. Related: Michelangelo bronzes discovered The discovery of two new sculptures by one of the greatest artists in history is a sensation of the highest order. For them to turn up in Cambridge, where they are on loan to the Fitzwilliam Museum from an anonymous private owner, is an amazing coup for the town and a tribute to the university’s art historians whose scholarship led to this recognition. But are they right or have they got carried away? What makes these little objects so special and do they really show Michelangelo at his best, or even convincingly look like they are by him at all? Michelangelo lived like a hero and made art as colossal as his character. In between defying popes, daring to declare his passion for men and fighting for the liberty of the Florentine republic he carved and painted on a stupendous scale – when he was 30 he created the “Giant”, better known as David, and when he died at the age of nearly 90 he was working on the dome of St Peter’s. So the ornamental bronzes newly attributed to this artist among artists may seem a bit of a come down from his usual works. They may also seem a bit silly. Michelangelo complained bitterly about having to build a snowman for the Medici palace courtyard. It was meant to be fun but he didn’t do fun. He may have felt equally insulted when asked to make a couple of frolicsome nudes sitting on wild cats for some rich man’s study. Perhaps the throwaway quality of the static and unexciting felines the men straddle is a clue to Michelangelo’s limited interest in the commission. Genius that he was, when he was bored he could – very occasionally – turn out hack work. But the bodies of the naked men are truly worthy of him. Renaissance bronze sculptures reimagine human flesh as green-brown metal. Artists such as Cellini and Giambologna cast small bronze human bodies with goat legs or grappling in struggle. Sex and violence energise these refined ornaments. But the nudity of most bronzes tends to be smooth, sophisticated and slick. The rippling muscles and bulging anatomies of Michelangelo’s two wild men are tough and real and totally different from any other artist. For Michelangelo the body is a marvel almost impossible to comprehend. From his masterpiece, created as a teenager, The Battle of the Centaurs with its struggle of writhing flesh to his extreme late Pietà in which the figures are etiolated to abstraction, he fights with the bodies he makes, he struggles for every lifelike nerve. The human back fills Michelangelo with as much hesitance and thought as Mont Sainte-Victoire inspired in Cézanne. All of that glorious tension pulses in the ribs and shoulders and twisted necks of these bronze men. When Michelangelo made them in about 1506 he had just been working on his planned fresco The Battle of Cascina that was full of colossal images of naked men trying to climb out of the river Arno. The strenuous poses of his two bronze nudes, raising their arms triumphantly, flexing their flanks, are born out of the straining drama of these mighty nudes. Michelangelo is inventing a new kind of art here: the art of the bizarre. Related: Michelangelo bronzes discovered – in pictures The Renaissance tried to restore the classical perfection of ancient Rome. Yet in these works Michelangelo rejects the soothing graciousness of classicism. These nudes are unclassical, even ungainly. The strange juxtaposition of men and beasts is itself part of that new dynamic style. This deliberate weirdness was to transform and free up European art and would become known as mannerism. It is no hyperbole to say that in these two works mannerism was born. Michelangelo is an artist who wants to trouble and disconcert. These characters are his view of men without souls – wild men, as savage as the beasts they ride, who have no sense of sin. Maybe he was even thinking of stories about the “savages” in the New World. Strange as they are, these brilliantly original works of art add to the very modern unease of Michelangelo. They come from his darkly erotic and shockingly melancholic mind. They are curiosities of the flesh created by one of the most uncompromising artists who ever lived. |