Michaelangelo’s Shadow: Guiliano Bugiardini

Norman E. Land

Though he wrote of a host of painters, sculptors and architects in his Lives of the Artists (Florence, 1568), Giorgio Vasari focused on the best masters of the Italian Renaissance, among them Giotto, Donatello, Leonardo da Vinci and, above all, the hero of his book, Michelangelo. Still, he gave considerable atten- tion to a number of other, less formidable artists, one of whom is the Florentine painter, Giuliano di Piero di Simone Bugiardini (1475–1554).1 Although there is an on-going and objective assessment of Bugiardini’s life and works, scholars have not fully appreciated the figure of the artist in Vasari’s Lives.2 For Vasari, Bugiar- dini was a minor painter who did not play a leading role in the complex story of the progress of Renaissance art from its beginnings in the fourteenth century to its perfection in the sixteenth. Nevertheless, Bugiardini is an important figure in the Lives, for Vasari uses him to throw certain features of Michelangelo’s character and personality into relief. Bugiardini is also significant because, for Vasari, he was an example of a particular kind of artistic personality. He was a simple man who was long on self-confidence but short on self-knowledge. Vasari’s figure of Bugiardini reflects an actual person who was a friend and at times a close associate of Michelangelo and is often mentioned in documents re- lated to him. For example, as early as April 1508, a famous letter alludes to what was to become a professional relationship between Bugiardini and Michelangelo. The latter, then in Rome, wrote to Francesco Granacci asking for some Florentine artists to assist him in painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Bugiardini was one of those hired by Granacci and sent to Rome (Il Carteggio 1: 64–65, 374– 78).3 Over twenty years later Michelangelo and Bugiardini were still associates. In a letter dated September 1531 to Bartolommeo Valori, Giovanni Battista Mini mentions that Michelangelo had visited him in the company of Bugiardini and Antonio Mini, Giovanni’s nephew (Il Carteggio 3: 329–30). On October 8 of the same year, Giovanni Mini again wrote to Valori from Florence about Michelan- gelo and again mentions Bugiardini, who was working on a painting representing the abduction of Dina (Jacob’s daughter). This most worthy work, Mini says, had been designed by Fra Bartolommeo, and Michelangelo could not stop praising it (Gaye 2: 231).4 There is also a letter, dated in the fall of 1532, from Bugiardini to Michelan- gelo about a comet the former had seen and drawn. Interestingly, Michelangelo wrote drafts of three poems to Tommaso Cavalieri on this letter, suggesting that

EIRC 40.1&2 (2014): 182–95 182 Norman E. Land 183 he kept it close at hand (Il Carteggio 3: 433). Later, Michelangelo sent several letters that refer to Bugiardini from Rome to his nephew Lionardo Buonarroti. On September 24, 1547 Michelangelo instructed Lionardo to ask Messer Giovan Francesco to commend him to Bugiardini, “if he is alive” (Il Carteggio 4: 276). This letter suggests that Bugiardini might have been seriously ill or injured or perhaps that Michelangelo had not seen his friend for a good while. In any case, a year later Michelangelo sent a cover letter to Lionardo in which was enclosed another letter written directly to Bugiardini (Il Carteggio 4:304).Then, on April 13, 1549, Michelangelo wrote to Lionardo telling him not to include letters from other people with his own, adding in explanation “Bugiardini is a good person, but a simple man” (Il Carteggio 4: 321–22).5 Vasari surely noticed the several ways in which the actual circumstances of the lives of Michelangelo and Bugiardini followed a similar course.6 For example, he knew that, like Michelangelo who was a native of Caprese, Bugiardini was born outside Florence, near the Porta a Faenza, and although he does not specifically say as much, he must have realized that the two artists were born within the same year. More importantly, Vasari was aware that Bugiardini’s early artistic educa- tion was virtually the same as that received by Michelangelo. When they were young artists, they assisted Domenico Ghirlandaio in painting his frescoes in the Cappella Maggiore in S. Maria Novella, and both studied with Bertoldo di Giovanni in the Medici sculpture garden next to the Piazza di San Marco.7 Still, as the reader of Bugiardini’s vita soon understands, Vasari was interested in more than simply recounting the bare facts of the painter’s existence. Through a series of telling anecdotes, Vasari gives shape and meaning to Bugiardini’s life. In the Medici garden, Vasari explains, Michelangelo befriended Bugiardini and from then onward loved him, even though he did not see a profound manner of drawing in his friend. Rather, the friendship grew out of Michelangelo’s admi- ration for “the extraordinary diligence and love that Bugiardini showed towards art.” Michelangelo, who enjoyed Bugiardini’s conversation, was also “infinitely pleased” by “a certain natural goodness” in him and by his “simple way of liv- ing without malice or envy” (Lives 2: 310). Michelangelo, in short, admired his friend’s character, not his art. Significantly, in the Medici sculpture garden, the youthful Michelangelo also exhibited a certain simplicity, a quality of his personality that appealed to his illustrious patron, Lorenzo “Il Magnifico” de’ Medici, who befriended him. In- deed, some of the details of Vasari’s description of the friendship between Bugiar- dini and Michelangelo echo certain features of his well-known anecdote about the latter’s head of an old faun, which he carved while in the Medici garden.8 In this, his very first work in marble, as the story goes, Michelangelo, counterfeiting an antique sculpture already in the garden, carved the head with its mouth open, showing its tongue and a full set of teeth. In other words, like Narcissus, the youthful artist, as Vasari says, followed his own “fantasia” (Le vite 1204) rather than the example of the ancient work.9 When Lorenzo saw the head, he gently teased Michelangelo, pointing out that old men do not usually have all of their