“Outside my door, I find huge piles of excrement. From those who gorge themselves on grapes or take a purge. They couldn’t find a better place to empty their bowels.” -Michelangelo Buonarroti-
If one must speak of one of the great masters of the Renaissance, without a doubt, on a par with Leonardo da Vinci is the great mannerist Michelangelo Buonarroti. Marble was hard, noisy, and dirty work, but Michelangelo knew how to appreciate the stone, see every mark, and make adjustments in the angles with the chisel so that everything flowed perfectly and managed to bring to life wonderful sculptures. Painting was no stranger to him, because, with muscular characters, Michelangelo brought to life a new artistic current in which the important thing was to see the movements, the muscles contorting to make the painting much more dynamic and with more strength.
Sculptor, architect, painter, and poet, one of the most prolific artists of all time. His father, Ludovico, was a Florentine official and the local governor of the small towns of Caprese. He opposed his son’s work but eventually accepted that the artist’s vocation was to bring to life those works that we remember to this day. His mother died when he was 6 years old, and from that moment on, his loneliness formed in him a reluctant, grumpy, and sullen character.
Buonarroti’s letters and his poems dedicated to his partners make us think that he was gay. An identity that he tried to hide under Neoplatonic ideas and theories of love. “I am left burning in the dark only when the sun stripped me from the world of its rays: and after the other men take their pleasure, I make him weep, prostrate on the ground, lamenting and weeping.”
At first, Michelangelo loved his passion with desperation, then he hated to become the best painter of that time, he despised himself, and he saw with sadness the past of his life and what he had become. He knew the Medici thanks to his mother and had contact with the wisest men of the century. He had an education based on the greatest philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, and Seneca; he had a tenacious memory; he lived almost until he was 90 years old, so his work is one of the most complete and mature in the history of art, but his life is also one of the saddest.
An orphan since he was a child, tormented by an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder that many biographers talk about, which made him never take off his boots even to sleep (other biographers assure that it was Asperger’s Syndrome), a life in which the painter vibrant identity was forbidden, without friends, without family, accused by other painters, hated by the rest, sick of his kidneys and with a pain in his legs that tried to prostrate him in his bed without ever being able to do it.
Michelangelo always knew he was a genius. He detested flattery and mistreated everyone (many say because of his Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder). The pontiffs hated him but forgave his behavior when they needed his art to enhance or beautify a church, cathedral, or even the Vatican.
He lived to be almost 90 years old, but his existence was not plagued by recognition and fame, but rather by uncontrollable fights with other painters and kidney problems that he suffered until his death. Gouty arthritis, kidney stones. Michelangelo suffered, but his pain made him strong, ready to know his fluids: “Ho imparato a conocscere le urine” (I have learned to know urine). He had surely been poisoned by the lead in the paints, and the diet of bread and wine complicated the situation even more.
He became one of the most admired artists; he was possessed to create more and more, he rarely slept, but his passion needed no rest. Pietro Aretino, a satirical poet of the time, spread the rumor that the artist was gay. Everyone knew his reticent character, rough manners, and the strange way he lived for being the best-paid artist of that time: he only had a simple bed, a chair, and an old tunic.
The painter’s sexuality did not matter much, only the magnificent strokes he was able to draw. When he painted the Sistine Chapel, he fired all the students, because, he claimed, none of them met his demands. He sought to create truly monumental works.
He put all his effort into painting the chapel upside down all the time, and it brought him periods of eyestrain in which the painter was unable to read a letter or a book unless he was in that position. He slept very little, obsessed with creating more, one more stroke, one extra chisel. He would get up at night, take the chisel and put on a cardboard hat to place a lighted candle on it to illuminate what he was trying to see. He would sleep fully clothed, and the next day, instead of changing clothes, he would simply get up to continue working.
When he painted The Last Judgment, at the age of 65, he fell from a scaffold and hurt his leg, but he did not want anyone to take care of him. The painter tried to continue his life normally, but he suffered daily until Baccio, an excellent doctor, took pity on him and went to take care of him at his home.
Michelangelo was depressed, perhaps as another consequence of lead poisoning: “After four tortuous years and more than 400 life-sized figures, I felt as old and tired as Jeremiah. I was only 37 years old, but friends did not recognize the old man I had become,” which is why he portrayed himself as the old prophet in the Sistine Chapel. He painted and sculpted until he could no more: “Already at 16, my mind was a battlefield: my love for pagan beauty, the male nude, at war with my religious faith. A polarity of themes and forms, one spiritual and the other earthly.” The painter died consumed by a slow fever at home.
Not only Michelangelo lived a life full of obsessions and sadness, but other painters also used their paintings to escape from their mental disorders and problems: Van Gogh, Munch, Goya or Carrington are examples of some artists who used their work as a way out of the haunting of their minds.
Story written in Spanish by Julieta Sanguino in Cultura Colectiva
Read more:
The medical condition behind Leonardo da Vinci’s masterful talent