Michelangelo as Messi and more about the maestro

Dr Alan Pascuzzi is an esteemed arts educator and well-known artist based in Florence, Italy. His new book, Becoming Michelangelo: Apprenticing to the Master, and Discovering the Artist through His Drawing recounts Michelangelo’s journey from student to master.

Here, we share some of Alan’s extensive knowledge about the great artist, taken from a lecture he gave ahead of a recent workshop in England.

Learning about Michelangelo through head and hands

I literally enter into Michelangelo’s head and his hand in certain cases. I use natural iron gall ink and a quill pen, exactly what Michelangelo used as a small boy. Then I went to the black chalk and copied his black chalk drawings in the exact same manner using the exact same technique, and then his red chalk drawings using the exact same red chalk from a spot in Tuscany. I was trying to enter into all the difficulties Michelangelo had to encounter. 

Michelangelo as the Messi of the art world

If you look back at Maccabean articles you’ll see that basically Michelangelo never had a steady job. We’ve made him into this legend and a sort of divine genius.

This comes from Giorgio Vasari, who was one of the first to write stories about the artists from the Renaissance period. And it was true that near his end of his life, Michelangelo was called il Divino, “the divine one”, so there was also sort of hero worship, just like with Messi, Maradona or even Wayne Gretzky.

But not everyone bought into. Mark Twain in the Innocents Aboard, which is a wonderful travel blog of the 1890s, said about Michelangelo:

I used to worship the mighty genius of Michael Angelo–that man who was great in poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture–great in everything he undertook. But I do not want Michael Angelo for breakfast–for luncheon–for dinner–for tea–for supper–for between meals. I like a change, occasionally. In Genoa, he designed everything; in Milan he or his pupils designed everything; he designed the Lake of Como; in Padua, Verona, Venice, Bologna, who did we ever hear of, from guides, but Michael Angelo? In Florence, he painted everything, designed everything, nearly, and what he did not design he used to sit on a favorite stone and look at, and they showed us the stone. In Pisa he designed everything but the old shot-tower, and they would have attributed that to him if it had not been so awfully out of the perpendicular. He designed the piers of Leghorn and the customhouse regulations of Civita Vecchia. But, here – here it is frightful. He designed St. Peter’s; he designed the Pope; he designed the Pantheon, the uniform of the Pope’s soldiers, the Tiber, the Vatican, the Coliseum, the Capitol, the Tarpeian Rock, the Barberini Palace, St. John Lateran, the Campagna, the Appian Way, the Seven Hills, the Baths of Caracalla, the Claudian Aqueduct, the Cloaca Maxima – the eternal bore designed the Eternal City, and unless all men and books do lie, he painted everything in it! Dan said the other day to the guide, “Enough, enough, enough! Say no more! Lump the whole thing! say that the Creator made Italy from designs by Michael Angelo!”

I never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled with a blessed peace, as I did yesterday, when I learned that Michael Angelo was dead.

Mark Twain, The Innocents Aboard.

Deciphering the Michelangelo code

Michelangelo liked to change his own history. He burnt his own drawings and only left the things he wanted us to see. He even dictated his own biography in 1553.

So to learn more about Michelangelo’s progression as an artist, I had to piece things together. I went through Cennino Cennini’s The Craftsman’s Handbook (1399), various biographies and the drawings themselves. I also began to copy Michelangelo’s original drawings and, in one instance, I realised I was interpreting Leonardo’s drawings through Michelangelo’s hands.

The Sistine Chapel

My studio is in the artisan’s section of Florence and I was talking to one of these old artisans one day and he came up with a gem. He said:

“Craftsman worked better when they worked with the creativity of an artist and artists worked better when they work with the diligence of a craftsman.”

This cut right to the heart of Michelangelo’s work in The Sistine Chapel. I realised that for Michelangelo to do something so big he had to go back to the diligence of the craftsman, and the only craftsman he knew was the master he apprenticed with. The drawings from the Sistine Chapel show us how he approached the composition problem of 5,000 square metres, which was the size of the ceiling. He reverts initially to his master’s methods and then he starts to work out all the bugs and is almost self-taught.

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