GREATEST SON OF FLORENCE

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33965, 4 October 1975, Page 10

GREATEST SON OF FLORENCE

Michelangelo. By Howard Hibbard. Allen Lane. 316 pp. Notes, bibliography and index. N.Z. price $12.95. Biographers were at work on the life '>n Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni well before he died at the grand old age of 89 in 1564. Explaining interpreting, or describing his genius has been an industry ever since Like two of his great Florentine contemporaries — Leonardo da Vinci and Machiavelli — Michelangelo’s name has become a by-word; legends have grown around his life; the well of speculation never -eems to run dry. All the more valuable, then, that among the wave of new writings evoked b> the 500th anniversary of his birth should be this handsome, concise account of Michelangelo as artist Professor Hibbard and his publishers have produced a model of what an art history should be. Without recourse to the lure of colour plates, a matter of little concern when manv of Michelangelo's most important works are sculpture or architecture, they have produced a detailed account of the development and refinement of a great artist at work. The profuse illustrations are no mere decoration, but serve to illuminte skilfully the text on each page.

No more is made of the turbulence of Florentine and Papal politics in the Renaissance than is necessary to make sense of Michelangelo's work and his curious Ipve-hate relationship with his patrons, lay and ecclesiastic. Professor Hibbard also declines to explain the genius or the personal habits of his subject in any fashionable, psychological manner. The reader gets no more of Michelangelo’s private life than is necessary to make sense of the awe-inspiring public record of his art. And of his sexual proclivities, a favourite area of speculation, we are left feeling that whatever the artist’s inclinations, they were largely subjugated by his art. That clears away a good deal of biographical rubbish. The exposition of Michelangelo’s work, from the Sistine Chape to the strange Rondanini Pieta on which he was still working when he died, is all the better for it. Michelangelo was so much a man of his times, in retrospect something like a patron saint of the High Renaissance, that a clear account of what he carved, painted and designed to gain this reputationJs refreshing. At his best, in the Bruges Madonna

or the figures of Guiliano and Lorenzo de Medici which he carved for the family tomb, Michelangelo was a craftsman who remains unsurpassed in bringing forth the qualities inherent in a block of marble. As a painter or an architect he was, perhaps, equalled by his contemporaries, not least, of course, by Leonardo and Raphael. He lacked the vast fund of inquisitive persistence which led Leonardo into strange by-ways of knowledge; he was not so dedicated to painting as to achieve the finished grandeur of Raphael. In the Sistine Chapel, however, his telent for design came together with his acute sense of the human form, especially the male form. To decorate that huge ceiling he painted sculptures. As Professor Hibbard points out, the figures, their frames, and the whole intricate pattern of the chapel is designed to be seen from particular angles, as though it were a carving set before a palace or decorating a tomb. To achieve his effects, and especially to make his tableau comprehensible from the chapel entrance, Michelangelo foreshortened and tinkered with shapes. One of the best sections of the book deals with the content of these remarkable paintings in the sky, why Michelangelo chose the Biblical and pagan figures and incidents he did, why they are in the order as they appear. Michelangelo, the author argues, was serving as a propagandist of the Counter-Reformation, a defender of Papal dignity and legitimacy at a time when the incumbents of the Papacy were hardly calculated to

advance the cause of true religion. Yet even while he was achieving superb art in the interests of other causes, Michelangelo was the first artist to inspire in his public the concept of art for its own sake. He received requests for samples of his work, from the King of France, for example, not for its religious content, but for its aesthetic harmony — the first great step on the road to an individualist “art for art’s sake.” Professor Hibbard might not have intended such a result, but the strongest effect of his book is to remind the reader of the importance of lost knowledge. Few people today can have the easy familiarity with the Bible, with church history, and with classical learning, which even a modest appreciation of Michelangelo requires. The artist worked at a time of intense interest in lost knowledge, and of a revival in awareness of the wisdom of previous ages as well as optimism about the achievements of himself and his own time. Perhaps no city ever, not even Athens, has produced such a welter of brilliance in a generation as Florence did at the start of the sixteenth century. And the city was rather smaller than Christchurch is now. By comparison, ours is a new Dark Age when the accumulated wisdom of earlier times is dismissed or ignored, and when no new sense of optimism or potential illuminates men’s lives. To dip back to the Renaissance, through Michelangelo, is to catch a glimpse of the true civilising instinct of which the twentieth century seems to offer no more than a pale afterglow.