The Agony and the Ecstasy

The most perfect guide is nature. Continue without fail to draw something every day. (Location 834)

He wanted to spend hours at this work desk, redrawing models from a hundred different angles. (Location 905)

“Every artist assembles his own portfolio,” said Ghirlandaio, “according to his own tastes and judgment. I have made my collection over a period of twenty-five years. You build your own.” (Location 922)

He too wanted to learn how to set down accurately what he saw. But what.he felt about what he saw would always be more important. (Location 1055)

“Stupido! You have missed my point. No wonder Urbino had trouble teaching you. Drawing is learning. It is discipline, a measuring stick with which to see if there is honesty in you. It’s a confessional; it will reveal everything about you while you imagine you are revealing someone else. Drawing is the poet’s written line, set down to see if there be a story worth telling, a truth worth revealing.” (Location 1765)

Sculpture is hard, brutal labor. One should not become an artist because he can, but because he must. It is only for those who would be miserable without (Location 1849)

“But I like doing what you call trivia. Everything doesn’t have to be profound and eternal. A pageant or a party are important because people get pleasure from them, and pleasure is one of the most important things in life, as important as food or drink or art.” (Location 1861)

His intellectual concept was the unity of knowledge; his ambition, to reconcile all religions and philosophies since the beginning of time. Like Ficino, he aspired to hold in his mind the totality of human learning. (Location 2425)

Bertoldo’s lips trembled. “You will make more mistakes that way, caro, and continue in them longer.” “Isn’t that the best way to learn? To carry one’s mistakes to their logical conclusion?” (Location 2863)

changed. Where Lorenzo had met continually with his Signoria, gaining their agreement through the powers of persuasion, Piero ignored the elected Councils, made arbitrary decisions. Where his father had walked through the street with a friend or two, nodding and speaking to all, Piero never appeared except on horseback, surrounded by hired guards, recognizing no one as he scattered people, carts, donkeys, produce, on his majestic way in and out of the city to his villas. (Location 3800)

“Hercules was half man and half god, sprung from Zeus and the mortal Alcmene. He is the everlasting symbol that all of us are half man and half god. If we use that which is half god in us, we can perform the twelve labors every day of our lives.” (Location 3830)

“Each morning you come out to a different model as though you were going on an exciting adventure. Don’t you get tired drawing the same thing over and over again: head, arms, torso, legs…” “But, Leo, they are never the same! Every arm and leg and neck and hip in the world is different, with a true character of its own. Listen, my friend, all forms that exist in God’s universe can be found in the human figure. A man’s body and face can tell everything he represents. So how could I ever exhaust my interest in it?” (Location 5488)

“Isn’t it, for all artists? Every man sees truth through his own funnel. I feel about each new figure the way an astronomer does each time he discovers a new star: one more fragment of the universe has been filled in. Perhaps if I could draw every male on earth I could accumulate the whole truth about man.” “Well then,” said Leo, “I would recommend that you (Location 5497)

There was hardly a block, even in the heavily populated sections, without black gaping holes between buildings, like missing teeth in an old crone’s mouth. (Location 5532)

At his bank he held himself rigid, brusque. His business associates admired the way in which he dispatched their affairs and brought them the most profitable result, but did not like him as a person. They said he was not human. When he reached home Galli shed this skin as though he were a lizard, was gay, indulgent, humorous. No word of business ever passed his lips. Here in the garden he talked art, literature, history, philosophy. The friends who dropped in each evening loved him, considered him overgenerous with his family and household. (Location 5939)

The weeks and months of uninterrupted carving flowed by in a continuous stream. (Location 6049)

We are seeing a rebirth.” He laid a hand on Michelangelo’s shoulder. “You happen to be the midwife. Handle the baby well!” (Location 7152)

‘What you put into the ladies at night, you can’t put into the marble in the morning.’ (Location 7265)

Yet to him this was only a small part of the meaning of David, who could represent the daring of man in every phase of life: thinker, scholar, poet, artist, scientist, statesman, explorer: a giant of the mind, the intellect, the spirit as well as the body. Without the reminder of Goliath’s head, he might stand as the symbol of man’s courage and his victory over far more important (Location 7272)

This was the David he had been seeking, caught at the exultant height of resolution, still reflecting the emotions of fear, hesitation, repugnance, doubt; the man who wished to follow his own ways among the hills of Jerusalem, who cared little for the clash of arms and material reward. (Location 7289)

He was a victim of his own integrity, which forced him to do his best, even when he would have preferred to do nothing at all. (Location 8922)

But what about the quality of the work? It was in the marrow of his bones to create only the finest he could produce; to create far beyond his abilities because he could be content with nothing that was not new, fresh, different, a palpable extension of the whole of the art. He had never compromised with quality; his integrity as a man and an artist was the rock on which his life was built. If he split that rock by indifference, by giving less than the exhausting best of himself, if he were content merely to get by, what was left of him? (Location 9402)

The deeper he penetrated into the eon-old past of the volcanic hills and civilizations, the clearer his own problem became for him. His helpers would have to go. Many marble masters had permitted their apprentices and assistants to hew the marble block to within a safe margin of the central figure, but he had to hammer off the corners, mass the edges, work the four flat sides, remove every last crystal himself. He did not have the nature of a Ghirlandaio, able to do the main figures and focal scenes, allow the bottega to do the rest. He had to work alone. (Location 9463)

“I don’t know,” replied Michelangelo ruefully. “I hardly understand myself. I only know that since I must paint that vault I cannot bring you something mediocre, even if it is all you have asked (Location 9512)

He ate his soup-of-the-country in the silent house, thinking back to the month that it had been so noisy and gay, with Jacopo telling stories, Aristotle giving a lecture on the Bathers, Bugiardini singing love songs about Florence. It would be quiet here now; but it would be lonelier still, all alone on the scaffolding in the barren chapel. (Location 9567)

For thirty days he painted from light to darkness, completing the Sacrifice of Noah, the four titanic male nudes surrounding it, the Erythraean Sibyl on her throne, and the Prophet Isaiah in the pendentive opposite, returning home at night to enlarge the cartoon of the Garden of Eden. For thirty days he slept in his clothes, without taking off even his boots; and when at the completion of the section, utterly spent, he had Michi pull his boots off for him, the skin came away with them. He fed off himself. When he grew dizzy from standing and painting with his head and shoulders thrown back, his neck arched so that he could peer straight upward, his arms aching in every joint from the vertical effort, his (Location 9745)

eyes blurred from the dripping paint even though he had learned to paint through slits and to blink them shut with each brush stroke as he did against flying marble chips, he had Rosselli make him a still higher platform, the fourth on top of the scaffolding. He painted sitting down, his thighs drawn up tight against his belly for balance, his eyes a few inches from the ceiling, until the unpadded bones of his buttocks became so bruised and sore he could no longer endure the agony. (Location 9750)

The four-hour dinner seemed endless to Michelangelo. He was incapable of absorbing but the most modest amount of salted trout, roast capon, sweet rice cooked in milk of almonds. He writhed in his seat over the many wasted hours, wondering how soon he would be released. (Location 10297)

Raphael was always polite, interested, though forced to waste his work hours and to go without sleep. This was not for him. He was not a charming man. He would be eternally damned if he ever became one! (Location 10316)

By giving himself a sense of motion, by buying hundreds of marbles, he had created the illusion of direction. (Location 10790)

He had been standing still; for an artist, one of the more painful forms of death. (Location 10792)

“Jacopo, don’t let us part as enemies. I promise to help you get a commission. Then you will understand that a work of art cannot be a symposium; it must have the organic unity of one man’s mind and hands. Anything else is a Livornese fish stew.” (Location 10815)

Time was his quarry; from it he would excavate the pure white crystalline years. What else was there to mine in the craggy mountains of the future? Money? It had eluded him. Fame? It had entrapped him. Work was its own reward; there was no other. (Location 11491)

Was youth the Victor, since it was the only period in which one could imagine that one could be a Victor? (Location 11617)

Time was not a mountain but a river; it changed its rate of flow as well as its course. It could become swollen, overflow its banks, or dry to a trickle; it could run clean and pure along its bed or become laden with silt and throw up debris along the shore. When Michelangelo was young, every day had been particularized; it had had body, content, shape, stood out as an individual entity to be numbered, recorded and remembered. Now time was a soluble: the weeks and months merged in a continuous flow at an ever accelerated speed. He was getting as much work done but the very texture of time had altered for him, its arbitrary boundaries become indistinct. (Location 12072)

He was after absolute balance, perfection of line, curve, volume, mass, openness, density, elegance, the profundity of endless space. He aspired to create a work of art that would transcend the age through which he had lived. He laid aside his charcoal and drawing pens, started modeling, thinking that the maneuverability of the damp clay might bring him more freedom than the rigidity of the drawn line. Over the weeks and months he made a dozen models, destroying them, moving on to new designs. He felt he was coming closer to revelation, for he first achieved monumentality, then dimension, then majesty, then simplification; yet the results still derived from artistry rather than spirituality. At last it came, after eleven years of thinking, drawing, praying, hoping and despairing, experimenting and rejecting: a creature of his imagination, compounded of all his arts, staggering in size, yet as fragile as a bird’s egg in a nest; soaring, lilting heavenward, constructed of gossamer which carried effortlessly and musically upward its three-hundred-and-thirty-five-foot height, pear-shaped, as was the breast of the Medici Madonna… . It was a dome unlike any other. (Location 13561)

has arrived,” murmured Tommaso ecstatically, when he saw the completed drawings. “Where did it come from?” “Where do ideas come from, Tomao? Sebastiano asked that same question when he was young. I can only give you the answer I gave him, for I am no wiser at eighty-two than I was at thirty-nine: ideas are a natural function of the mind, as breathing is of the lungs. Perhaps they come from God.” (Location 13570)

Two days later, as he stood before his marble, deciding that it was now safe to cut away the superfluous arm and hand to further release the elongated figure in space, he was struck again. He dropped his hammer and chisel, stumbled to the bed, fell on his knees, with his face sideways on the blanket. (Location 13662)

“Grazie a Dio, thank God. No one will ever be able to change it now. But all the same, it’s sad to have to die. I would like to start all over again, to create forms and figures I have never dreamed of.” His amber-speckled eyes were unwavering. “I like best to work in white marble.” (Location 13677)

That night, as he lay sleepless in bed, he thought, “Life has been good. God did not create me to abandon me. I have loved marble, yes, and paint too. I have loved architecture, and poetry too. I have loved my family and my friends. I have loved God, the forms of the earth and the heavens, and people too. I have loved life to the full, and now I love death as its natural termination. Il Magnifico would be happy: for me, the forces of destruction never overcame creativity.” (Location 13680)

Dusk was falling. Alone in the room, Michelangelo began to review the images of all the beautiful works he had created. He saw them, one by one, as clearly as the day he had made them, the sculptures, paintings and architecture succeeding each other as swiftly as had the years of his life: (Location 13694)