MICHELANGELO AND THE REINVENTION OF THE HUMAN BODY
by James HallChatto £25 pp256
The modern world has been so horrible to the creative greats of the Renaissance, understanding them only in its sordid ways, dumbing them down to its level. Look what it has done to poor Leonardo. Thanks to Dan Brown’s stupendously popular transformation of Leonardo’s art into the sorts of pseudo-mystical clues you find in a Harry Potter story, da Vinci has become the focus of a world-wide cult of believers in a huge dollop of new-age claptrap. But at least Leonardo gets talked about and thought about. Michelangelo, as a rule, doesn’t. Yes, we see those famous fingers of Adam regularly enough, tacked onto the fronts of late-night art documentaries and the like. And yes, the art-history industry continues to churn out long-winded adjustments to the details of Michelangelo’s career. But none of it adds up to a genuinely fresh insight, or a campaign for modern pertinence.
So I opened this book as if it were an eagerly awaited Christmas present. God, I was keen. The book’s central premise was such a tasty one. James Hall believes that Michelangelo is as relevant today as he ever was. “If we really want to understand our own culture, we need to understand Michelangelo” he insists at the outset. It’s a bold claim, repeated exactly in the blurb. I was, therefore, hoping that this aggressively revisionist tome would rescue Michelangelo from the makers of ornate BBC documentaries about men in tights and give us, instead, a proper artistic hero — timeless, universal, relevant, re-understood.
Foolish me. The opening claim turns out to be the book’s finest moment. Hall’s focus is on Michelangelo’s treatment of the human body. It is certainly true that “the body” is one of the most reliable obsessions of contemporary art, and that countless, tediously sensational explorations of it have been mounted in recent years by puerile and sex-obsessed modern imaginations. Blood, gore, penises, breasts and orifices are the bread and butter of the contemporary cultural feast. It is also true that, 500 years ago, Michelangelo demanded that new attention be paid to the human body by making it the primary focus of his art as well. So the opportunity exists to play snap across the ages and to see Michelangelo as some sort of direct precursor of our own modern body-maniacs. And Hall, alas, has seized it.
He has divided Michelangelo’s output into thematic chapters that seek simultaneously to follow a rough chronology. We go from Michelangelo’s earliest work to his latest, pausing at clunky intervals to change themes. The early madonnas are gathered in a chapter called Mothers. The huge David and other whoppers fill a section on Giants. And the Sistine ceiling is involved in a rumination upon Crowds that commences with the false claim that the chapel has always been overcrowded. Actually, it was used only every two or three weeks by the papal chapel in the past, and would usually have been empty.Today, of course, the Sistine Chapel is routinely clogged with gawpers. But surely nobody has ever looked up here and seen what this author sees: a ceiling-wide celebration of “the power of the penis”.
Michelangelo’s famous ignudi, the muscular male nudes scattered about the ceiling, hold up garlands of oak leaves and acorns in an obvious reference to the coat of arms of Julius II, the pope who commissioned the Sistine ceiling from Michelangelo, and whose family name, Della Rovere, actually means “of the oak”. Hall, however, suggests that Michelangelo may also have been making a deliberate visual pun on the similiarity between the acorns and the tips of men’s penises. “The ignudis’ big bundles of plump acorns are decidedly tumescent”, he decides. The Latin word, glans, means both acorn and the top of a penis. Thus the Sistine ceiling represents “an all-male pagan golden age”.
For heaven’s sake. We are in the single most Catholic spot on earth, the Pope’s private chapel. Is it really conceivable that Michelangelo would have dared on this occasion at this venue to devote his art to the making of penis jokes? Hall lost my trust completely when he placed the story of Moses on the chapel’s right wall and the story of Christ on the left. In fact, they are the other way round.
While nobody would seriously argue about the centrality of the human figure in Michelangelo’s output, there are acres of space for argument about the reasons for that centrality. Michelangelo’s supposed homosexuality, his flagellant pursuit of violence, his appetite for drama and catastrophe, all the stuff that Hall focuses on repeatedly and exaggerates so absurdly, is so crummily of today, so terribly YMCA, and so entirely un-Renaissance. So enraptured is the author by the sound of his own insights that he sometimes appears to have gone completely bonkers. Looking up at Eve being created on the Sistine ceiling we read: “The creation of Eve is set on a featureless seashore, so it is perhaps not too far-fetched to suggest that God is here meant, at some level, to evoke a primordial crustacean.” Parts of this book had me laughing out loud. The bulk of the journey is spent discussing specific works at great and often silly length (and it could therefore have done with a better set of illustrations than the fuzzy black-and-white plates slipped between these pages). Quoting copiously from a puzzling selections of ancient authors whom Michelangelo almost certainly never read, but whose ideas Hall claims rhyme plangently with his, he sets off on one absurd goose chase after another. The statue of Giuliano de’Medici in the New Sacristy in Florence has such well-developed pecs because he is a male version of a lactating virgin. Michelangelo is “the poet laureate of the male nipple”. And because he neglected his personal appearance, he may have been a weird flagellant who skinned the dogs he dissected and made shoes out of their hides.
Most of this book annoyed me. Very little of it felt properly relevant.All of it suffered from the projection of modern fantasies and contemporary fascinations — particularly in matters of sex — onto innocent slabs of another era. Looking up at the way that God has been imagined in the scene of the creation on the Sistine ceiling, we read that the Almighty’s pose “gives Michelangelo the opportunity to show God’s buttocks, revealingly clad in thin, skin-tight drapery”. In seeking to make Michelangelo relevant, Hall has made the serious mistake of repainting the past in the lurid colours of the present. Rarely can so many attempted insights have felt so outrageously and so obviously wrong.
THE RIVALS
The concentration by Michelangelo, on the male form led, explains Hall, “to him being compared repeatedly with his younger contemporary, Raphael. While Raphael was hailed as the genial all-rounder who mastered a whole range of genres and figure types, Michelangelo was increasingly regarded as brilliant but unbalanced . . . Michelangelo v Raphael became the greatest of all art historical ‘compare and constrasts’”.
Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £20 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585 and www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy
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websites:
http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/mich/
Trying to create a virtual David
