Humanist A new series which looks at some of the Masterpieces world’s great Humanist cultural achievements 1. Michelangelo’s David Brian McClinton ITHOUT ANY DOUBT”, Here too, it unashamedly says, is a work wrote the painter and created by a divine genius. biographer Giorgio Vasari, What makes David so special? The first W“this figure has put in the shade every quality is its stunning beauty. Michelangelo other statue, ancient and modern, Greek was obsessed with the male body, and in the or Roman... such were the satisfying Biblical story he found a perfect subject. In 1 proportions and the beauty of the Samuel 16:12 David is described as ‘ruddy, finished work...To be sure, anyone who and withal of a beautiful countenance, and has seen Michelangelo’s David has no goodly to look to’. Moreover, Michelangelo need to see anything else by any other had an excuse for David’s nakedness sculptor, living or dead”. Or, we might (Donatello’s David is also nude, except for a add, yet to be born. For, 500 years on, hat and boots). In 1 Samuel 17:38 Saul gave its timeless, universal appeal is David his armour, but David replied: “I cannot undiminished. Every year, 2 million go with these; for I have not proved them” people flock to the city of Florence to (verse 39). So David took off the armour, see this enormous statue of a naked helmet and mail that Saul had given him. man, which yet remains the supreme Although the Bible does not say that David icon of modern western civilisation. went to face Goliath naked, Michelangelo To understand why, we have to seized the opportunity to portray naked beauty consider the predominant Christian and at the same time pay deference to classical concept of man before the Renaissance. Greek models, leaving him uncircumcised. He was seen as a depraved, sinful, In the event, he produced a God that helpless creature, born of ‘dirt’ and, in surpasses Apollo or Adonis. Just compare his St Augustine’s words, ‘crooked and David with Donatello’s (below), done about sordid, bespotted and ulcerous’. At best, 60 or 70 years earlier. The latter is a delicate, the ideal was represented as a beaten “I saw the angel in the marble and carved scrawny boy in his early teens with smooth and crucified Jesus, resigned to his until I set him free” skin and long curls, and the ridiculous preordained fate – a violent, sacrificial – Michelangelo Buonarroti shepherd’s hat he wears adds to his overall death. challenge and chiselled away in the effeminate appearance. His head is bowed and Renaissance Humanists wanted to cathedral workshop day and night for over two shaded so that at a distance we can hardly see create an entirely different image. In his years. It was originally intended for one of the his face behind the hat. Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), cathedral buttresses, so that people would look Michelangelo’s Pico Della Mirandola argues that God up at it, hence the larger upper body features David is in his late did not create a fixed human nature but such as the oversized hands. But in the event it teens, a gave us the freedom to fashion ourselves was considered so beautiful that it needed a blossoming, sensual in the form that we prefer. Far from more prominent position in front of the young man, with being a tortured soul trapped in a government building in the main square. It the face of a Greek deformed bodily prison, man is a took forty men four days to transport the god, toned muscles, rational, beautiful and heroic being, 17-foot high statue, dubbed ‘Il Gigante’, from pulsing chest and a worthy of happiness and capable of the cathedral workshop to the Piazza della lithe, strong body. great achievement. Signoria, where it remained until 1873 when it Vasari was right: Both Pico and the neoplatonist was moved inside the Galleria dell’Accademia “In it may be seen philosopher Marsilio Ficino had tutored to protect it from the ravages of time and the m o s t b e a u t i f u l Michelangelo while he lived as a weather (a copy was erected in the plaza in contours of legs, teenager in the palace of Lorenzo 1882). with attachments of de’Medici and he was undoubtedly What Michelangelo did in his David limbs and slender influenced by their ideas, for his entire masterpiece was to give the Humanist vision outlines of flanks art embodies the tension between pagan its first and most powerful artistic expression. that are divine; nor Humanist and Christian values. He didn’t merely free ‘the angel in the has there ever been When commissioned in 1501 by the marble’; in this Humanist tour-de-force he seen a pose so easy, Board of Works for Florence Cathedral chipped away the whole medieval conception or any grace to to sculpt David from a huge block of of humanity. Here was the new liberated man, equal that in this Carrara marble which two other at once beautiful and sublime, real and ideal, work, or feet, hands and head so well in sculptors had abandoned in a mutilated active and contemplative – man as indeed the accord, one member with another, in harmony, condition, Michelangelo rose to the measure of all things, the pinnacle of creation. design, and excellence of artistry”. The second quality is rationality. By depicting David before the fight, Michelangelo is able to present him as a thinking human being who is making a conscious choice to commit himself to act. He stands, with furrowed brow, anxiously yet resolutely gazing over his left shoulder into the distance at Goliath. He is preparing to kill, not by savagery and brute force but by intellect and skill. This David possesses the power to solve problems and achieve great things through the application of reason and the scientific method. He represents the Humanist ideal of the man who can become godlike by his own intelligence and strength of will. There is no indication of the nature of the battle because in a sense it is eternal and in every man. David also displays the key Renaissance value of civic virtue. In contrast to the contemplative, ascetic, otherworldly passivity of medieval culture, Humanists sought to revive the classical notion of It is a stroke of extreme daring and social duty. Michelangelo himself was arrogance right in the heart of western devoted to the Florentine Republic and Christendom to display the buttocks of the wanted its citizens to become aware of their Almighty to every Pope and Cardinal who responsibilities and commit themselves to looks upwards. And the iconic Creation of the defence of its freedom. So he carved his Adam scene, where the fingers of God and giant partly as a symbol of the proud Adam almost touch, seems to reinforce the independence of Florence which, though question: is God creating the universe or is threatened by more powerful states, was the Divine Michelangelo creating God? willing to take on all comers to protect its It has been said that before Michelangelo, liberty. He wrote in a diary: “A civic hero, there were craftsmen or skilful decorators; he was a warning... whoever governed after him, artists. He is the archetype of Florence should govern justly and defend it genius partly because he was probably the bravely”. first to use art to express his ideas about the David has another quality which is shared world. And his ideas were not at all by most of Michelangelo’s creations: an conventional, for he had a strong astounding vitality. In this instance the independence of mind. Despite their feature is enhanced by the fact that the act religious connotations, both the Sistine of defeating Goliath has not yet happened. Chapel paintings and the David sculpture It is not a finished product, as in most are statements about man. They transcend David statues, but in the process of their Biblical settings to proclaim that becoming. We almost expect David’s human beings are special, not least because pent-up energy to burst forth and for him to they have the power of creation. As Pico step off his pedestal and sling the stone at had suggested it in words, so Michelangelo Goliath’s forehead. And every viewing expresses it in his divine art: we have the seems to reveal something different from power through our free choice to create this multifaceted creation. ourselves for good or ill. Michelangelo believed that painting was The question is: has Michelangelo’s inferior to sculpture because it lacks a third artistic statement in David of the beauty, dimension. That is why his drawings and reason, courage and civic virtue of man paintings frequently show more and more of endured into the 21st century, or has it been each figure from different angles. A classic relegated to an excessively optimistic past? example is in the Sistine Chapel frescoes. In Is man a noble hero any more? Is he not the second scene, where God creates the now widely regarded as an ugly, corrupt, sun, the moon and plants, he moves in vast amoral being, trapped in an absurd and areas of space on the right, with his right meaningless universe? Can modern-day finger pointing at the sun and his left Humanists help to revive the Renaissance pointing at the moon. Then on the left of the conception so perfectly embodied in scene he has turned round to point his right Michelangelo’s divine statue? Or was it finger at the plants, and we see that his lilac only an artist’s dream – albeit the robe has slipped up his back to reveal – magnificent dream of an artist whose genius God’s bum! is quite simply without compare? .