Finding Michelangelo by Mary Hoffman

Every now and again in a writer’s life there comes an experience that you have just exactly because you are a writer. You are doing your research and you stumble across something you didn’t know or someone tells you something unexpected. And this might lead to something amazing.

I’ve been lucky enough to have many of these, most of them in Italy, the land of my heart, but this post is specifically about two connected to Michelangelo.

The first happened in my first “Long Vacation” which is what they call the summer holidays at the University of Cambridge. It was a very long vacation indeed and my boyfriend had gone to India. I, on the other hand, had been given a bursary to spend a month in Florence, learning the language ay the British Institute.

Only in the mornings; the rest of the day was my own. It was not my first visit to Italy but it was my first to Florence. I arrived by train. My father was a railwayman and I never went anywhere you couldn’t get to by train.

I was staying in a pensione overlooking Piazza San Lorenzo, where there were three other students. The two men were also from Cambridge, a medical student and another reading English like me. Of the two women, one was reading English at Bristol and the other was an American of German origin on what we would now call a gap year.

Creative Commons: Saiiko

None of us was an art student and yet we all became passionate about art in that month, spending every afternoon exploring museums and galleries with our sketchbooks and meeting up for a cheap dinner every evening to share our discoveries.

One afternoon all five of us showed up at the Casa Buonarroti with our sketchbooks and 2B pencils but, alas, it was closed for renovation. “But we love Michelangelo!” we said. “And we are students here for only a short time.” We never actually claimed to be art students but our long faces did the trick and we were let in.

We saw Michelangelo’s two early marble relief panels: first The Madonna of the Stairs with the BVM represented as a strong peasant woman, who has just finished feeding her child. If she stood up, she would be a giantess. Then the Battle of Centaurs and Lapiths in which the artist discovered what would be his main theme for the rest of his life: depicting the athletic forms of naked young men.

Crative Commons: Carulmare

The third object I remember was a painted wooden crucifix with an almost childlike Christ, the whole thing about three-quarters life size. At that time there was a dispute about whether it really was an authentic Michelangelo early work. We were all very moved by it and quite convinced that it was.

The experts later agreed and it was returned to the church of Santo Spirito, Oltr’arno, where it had originally hung as a thank you from Michelangelo to the Prior Bichiellini, who had let him dissect unclaimed corpses that had been brought there from the hospital.

Scroll forward many decades and I am again in Florence in April of this year after more visits than I can count – more than thirty at least. This time I am a woman on a mission. I have been writing the story, In the Footsteps of Giants, that forms the basis of the app being developed for Time Traveler Tours & Tales and I am there with Sarah Towle, the American publisher and writer who set the company up.

We are developing an app to be used on IOS and Android phones in the city so that families with older children can take a tour of Florence, using Michelangelo as their Renaissance guide.

Creative Commons: David Gaya

A little bit of history: Michelangelo was born into a Florentine family, the second of five boys, and as a young teenager was taken under the wing of the great patron of the arts, Lorenzo de’ Medici. He was brought up with Lorenzo’s sons and nephew, two of whom later became Pope, but after Lorenzo died, Michelangelo had a fraught relationship with the family.

There were times when he worked for the Republic which had expelled the Medici and times when he took artistic commissions from members of the Medici family. As an adult he lived more in Rome than in Florence, thought the city of his adolescence and young manhood still contains some of his greatest works of art.

In 1527 he was appointed to oversee the fortifications of his home city, which was about the come under siege …from the Medici! So when the members of that family, in collaboration with the Imperial Army, attacked Florence so hard that the city surrendered in the summer of 1530, Michelangelo was a wanted man.

The New Sacristy, tomb of the lesser Lorenzo de' Medici

He went into hiding, in a place he knew well – San Lorenzo church. He had been building a chapel there to house the tombs of his old patron, Lorenzo de’ Medici and his murdered brother Giuliano, and two lesser Medici dukes who confusingly had the same forenames. These tombs were to be housed in a New Sacristy, designed to balance the Old Sacristy, which had been built earlier by one of Michelangelo’s heroes – Filippo Brunelleschi.

Brunelleschi was the gifted engineer and architect who had worked out how to fit a dome on Florence’s great cathedral and he had designed the whole church of San Lorenzo which was the family church of the Medici.

What Michelangelo knew and the Imperial forces didn’t was that there was a secret chamber under the New Sacristy. His friend Prior Figiovanni sneaked him in there and there he stayed in hiding from August till October.

And while he was there he drew on the walls with charcoal.

The room wasn’t found again until 1976, ten years after the great flood that damaged so much art in Florence in 1966. Obviously a lot more important spaces had priority for restoration over the room under the New Sacristy, which had been used for years to store coal. It was only when the walls were being cleaned up that the charcoal drawings began to emerge.

Here was the clue to where Michelangelo had been hiding in those missing weeks as summer turned into autumn in 1530. He had whitewashed the walls to cover up his drawings, we assume that he didn’t want to get Prior Figiovanni to get into trouble for showing him the hiding place.

The tour of Florence app, In the Footsteps of Giants, was loosely inspired by my novel David (Bloomsbury 2011, Greystones Press revised edition 2016) in which I imagined who the model might have been who posed for Michelangelo’s most most famous statue.

And the story of sculpting the Giant, as he was known in the earlier years of the sixteenth century in Florence, is still there in the app. But we decided to make the sculptor himself the narrator of the story, as he hid under San Lorenzo, sketching a kind of spiritual diary on the walls, looking both backwards and forwards.

So it was really important for Sarah and me to get into that secret underground chamber. The only trouble was it is not open to the public.

Without revealing any names or details, I will only say that Sarah is a very determined woman! The result was that we did in fact spend a full hour in that chilly underground room where one of our heroes had hidden in fear of his life nearly five hundred years ago. It was an unforgettable experience.

We took lots of photographs, which I can’t show you yet, because of copyright negotiations. But if you put “stanza segreta San Lorenzo” into your search engine, you will find plenty of images to give you an idea of what an overwhelming experience it was.

There is a well in one corner though the water would not have been any more drinkable than any other in Florence in 1530. You could probably have washed with it but I doubt Michelangelo bothered. One of things we know about him is that he washed rarely, didn’t change his clothes for ages and slept in his boots.

Much more interesting are the drawings on the walls, including sketches for the monument to the younger Giuliano de’ Medici, Duke of Nemours. You can tell it’s for that statue by the knees.

The funerary monuments in the New Sacristy were never completed, as Michelangelo was summoned back to Rome to work on the Last Judgment fresco in the Vatican. But he was pardoned by the Medici and his salary unfrozen, on condition he continued with the chapel. We don’t know for sure why he never returned to complete the plan.

What is certain is that visitors admired its extraordinary architecture and great sculptures for nearly four and a half centuries without knowing about that secret room under their feet, where the great man hid, not knowing if he’d ever be free to work on his art again.

(You can buy David: the Unauthorised Autobiography on this Amazon link (other booksellers are available))

And you can pre-order the story app here.

Rome at Christmas, by Carol Drinkwater

I am in Rome. I usually make the ‘pilgrimage’ at some point during the run-up to Christmas. The street illuminations are magnificent, the shopping is deliciously decadent and hectic and the Irish Catholic child in me thrills at St Peter’s Church and Square decked out in all its Nativity glory. Except that this year the crib is not ready. It looks like a building site. When I asked one of the volunteers keeping the flow of tourists moving when they expect it to be on display, she said they had high hopes it will be completed by the end of this week, which will be past Christmas Day. It rather confirms the cliché image of Italian punctuality.

I brought my 91-year-old mother this year, a dyed-in-the-wool Irish Catholic who never misses Mass and believes firmly in the infallibility of the Pope. As we stepped outside the great church, the largest religious building in the world, erected over the tomb of the Apostle Peter who was the first of an unbroken line of Popes, into the December sunshine, we stood gazing out across St Peter’s circular piazza with its towering Christmas tree and obelisk (taken by Caligula from Heliopolis in Egypt).

The Vatican City is an independent state, a walled enclave of 44 hectares, situated within the city of Rome. It counts approximately 840 inhabitants, including thirty female Vatican passport holders, which makes it the smallest internationally recognised independent state, both in size and population, in the world. Its monarch is the Bishop of Rome, the Pope. It is an independent economy, a free city in its own right with its own armed guards. Since the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981, security has been more vigilant. As well as the traditional halberd and sword, these men now carry guns.

                                                               Papal  Swiss Guard at Vatican

There is no charge to enter St Peter’s Basilica but one does pay to visit the Vatican museums and the Sistine Chapel. There is at least one bookshop – very well stocked with history and religious material, tourist mementos, postcards and Vatican stamps. The funds accrued from the sale of ticket entries and publications are, apparently, what keep Vatican City solvent. Its currency is the euro.

What surprised me was to learn that the Vatican City State only came into existence in 1929. I had assumed it would have been created during the period of Risorgimento or the Unification of Italy, which began in 1815 and was completed in 1871 when Rome was declared the capital of the Kingdom of Italy. However, the role of the Catholic Church including the Pope’s status within Italy was disputed for 58 years until an agreement was finally reached and signed in February 1929 becoming effective in June of that same year. The signatories were the Prime Minister, Benito Mussolini, representing the King and the Cardinal Secretary of State on behalf of Pope Pius XI. According to the signed treaty, the Holy See has “full ownership, exclusive dominion, sovereign authority and jurisdiction over its city-state”.

In 1984, UNESCO declared the Vatican City State a World Heritage Site.

Its genius and beauty were created by Michelangelo, Bernini, Raphael to name but three amongst many including the greatest Renaissance architects. It is considered to be a continuous artistic creation as well as the seat of Christendom. This is why I return again and again. To Rome, the Eternal City, yes, and to the Vatican City because there is always something to discover, to celebrate, to marvel at. The long queues to reach the Sistine Chapel, a Holy Grail of a journey, rewarded at its end by that ceiling which never fails to astound, to leave me silenced with wonder. I will never forget the first time I lifted my gaze upwards and saw that reach, those fingers, that look between the two figures and a frisson ran through me which never lessens no matter how many visits I make.

Or St Peter’s Baldachin, the sculpted bronze canopy that stands 95 feet tall beneath the basilica’s dome and over the spot where St Peter is buried. Yesterday, there was almost no one in front of the baldachin when I reached it. I had the view of its dark towering presence all to myself – my mother was resting, perched on a great marble plinth nearby because all the seats in the church had been removed.

I took a breath and momentarily closed my eyes. Somewhere in a remote corner of the building a Gregorian chant was being sung, possibly a recording   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dlr90NLDp-0 and then I glanced upwards at the dome. Michelangelo's work, his vision, but he died before it was completed. Still, he dedicated seventeen years of his life to this building. It humbles me to reflect on this fact.

Yesterday was the first time I have ever been in the basilica when no mass was taking place. Usually there are several going on all at once with priests crossing the marble floors in twos – one to say mass and one to serve – intent on one of many altars. My habit is usually to walk from my hotel in Prati, attend the first mass of the day which is performed at 7am. At this time of day, particularly in winter, there is rarely more than a handful of attendees. After mass, when I leave the church, day is breaking. I always take a moment outside to watch the sun rising up beyond the hills of Rome, breaking in golden streams across the colonnades and ruins of this immortal place.
The surrounding beauty, a combination of man-made and natural, swells up within me like an injection of warm liquid, leaving me drunk with joy and the knowledge that, in spite of everything, life is blessed, magnificent.

Beyond this, I rush about the city, seeing friends, choosing new leather shoes and handbag, eating plateloads of pasta, drinking Prosecco, buying panettone, huge chunks of fresh crumbly Parmesan before making one last stop at the Trevi Fountain. One euro tossed in the gushing water to guarantee my return, although it has been out of action for a while due to renovations. Next time, I might make the climb up to St Peter's cupola and see the city from this aerial viewpoint, which in over forty years' of visits, I have never done.


Happy holidays one and all. May 2016 bring some peace and sanity to our troubled, angry world. 

www.caroldrinkwater.com

The Michelangelo Trail by Mary Hoffman

The History Girls blog began nearly four years ago, on 1st July 2011, and had its origin in a desire on my part to let the world know I had written a novel about Michelangelo's sculpture of David. The sitehas grown to be so much more than that but it is quite satisfying to come full circle and write about the new suite of educational materials, based on that novel, that I am going to write for an innovative new company called Time Traveler Tours & Tales.

Photo credit: Jorg Bittner Unner, Creative Commons

The book was a historical novelist's joy to write because it offered the perfect opportunity for fiction. So much was known about this famous figure: we have the contract the sculptor was given, the date he made the first chisel cut, the minutes of the committee meeting to decide where the sculpture was to be displayed (where Leonardo da Vinci was present).

And in the middle a great big hole. Who was the model for this, probably the most famous sculpture in the world? Or was there even a model at all? Maybe this David sprang from the imagination of the sculptor, who, it is worth remembering, was twenty-six years old when he asked the Operai del Duomo for the old block of Carrara marble that two previous artists had abandoned and which just lay about for forty years  in a building behind the Duomo in Florence for people to trip over.

My first visit to Florence was at the end of my first year at university, when I spent a month there. It was probably the most influential four weeks of my life, directing my interests and enthusiasms from then on. I already knew I preferred Michelangelo to Leonardo but this sojourn, in a pensione overlooking Piazza San Lorenzo, confirmed it.

In my new project I'll be devising an app to take readers on a tour of the city visiting "hotspots" connected with the sculpture and the sculptor. And it occurred to me that readers of the History Girls blog might like an expanded version of my list - a sort of "print out and keep" guide to which works of art by Michelangelo you can see in the city I have now visited so many times I have  lost count.

Bronze of Michelangelo's head by Daniele di Volterra

• Casa Buonarroti Michelangelo never lived here but it houses two early works: the bas reliefs of The Madonna of the Stairs and The Battle of the Centaurs and Lapiths.

• The area behind Brunelleschi’s Dome on the Duomo (now the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo). This is where the workshop was where Michelangelo made the David statue. On the day it was moved from there to the Piazza della Signoria the doorway had to be broken down to allow the giant statue to be trundled out. It took three days to move it to its final position.

• Santa Croce church. Michelangelo is buried there (under a hideous tomb by Vasari) and lived near there. His mother is also buried there.

• Brancacci Chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine (Oltr’arno). The frescoes by Masaccio (Big Tom). It was here that Michelangelo’s nose was broken by Pietro Torrigiani when they were both teenagers and protégés of Lorenzo de’ Medici and were sent there to sketch the frescoes. (You can see the broken nose quite clearly in Volterra's bronze above.)

• Piazza della Signoria The David statue was here for hundreds of years. Also this is where Savonarola had his Bonfires of the Vanities and where he was executed.Michelangelo and several of his brothers were followers of Savonarola.

• San Marco convent Michelangelo’s older brother Lionardo was a friar there, as was Savonarola. It houses great art by Fra Angelico, Ghirlandaio etc.

• The Bargello for Davids by Donatello and Verocchio (Leonardo’s teacher) and Michelangelo’s Pitti Tondo, Brutus, Bacchus etc.

Brutus

• Palazzo Medici Riccardi Where Michelangelo lived with Lorenzo de’ Medici.

 

• Santo Spirito, Oltr’arno. Where Michelangelo dissected bodies. His wooden crucifix (the earliest recorded work) is in the Sacristy.

• Piazza Santa Trinita Where Michelangelo had his very public argument with Leonardo. 

• The Medici Chapels behind San Lorenzo church. Michelangelo designed the tombs for two of the de' Medici family. His statues of them are flanked by Dawn and Dusk, Night and Day.

• The Laurentian Library at San Lorenzo. This and the magnificent staircase to it were designed by Michelangelo.

• The Uffizi houses the Sacred Family painting by Michelangelo.

• And of course. The Accademia where the original David now stands. But don't neglect to look at the slaves/prisoners and St. Matthew who line the gallery leading up to David.

Photo credit: Jorg Bittner Unner, Creative Commons

On my first visit to Florence, I and some other students, none of us studying Art, managed to blag our way into the Casa Buonarroti, which was in restauro at the time and saw the two reliefs and the very touching little wooden crucifix, now in Santo Spirito, which was waiting to be authenticated. None of us was in any doubt.

On my last visit, a year ago, Sarah Towle of Time Traveler Tours and Tales and I went to the Medici Chapels at San Lorenzo and looked through the door leading to the underground hiding place that the sculptor used on a visit to the city, long after he had made the David. It is not open to the public but the whitewashed walls are covered with his drawings.

Michelangelo's relationship with Florence was fraught. As a protegé of Lorenzo de' Medici (the "Magnificent"), he was loyal to the family, but after Lorenzo's death became a Republican. Florence itself had an on/off love affair with the powerful de' Medici family, expelling them and welcoming them back more than once.

My relationship with Florence and Michelangelo has undergone no such upheavals. I can't wait to work with Sarah Towle to bring this Renaissance sculpture to life for 21st century children and teenagers. You can read more about the project below.

But in the meantime, if you are going to Florence this summer, do follow the Michelangelo Trail. I'm only sorry I won't be doing it with you!


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