7 Michelangelo, Tommaso De' Cavalieri and the Agency of the Gift

7 Michelangelo, Tommaso de’ Cavalieri and the Agency of the Gift-Drawing Alexander Lee Introduction Shortly after taking up residence in Rome in late August or early September 1532, the 57-year-old Michelangelo met Tommaso de’ Cavalieri for the first time.1 It is possible that they may have been introduced by a mutual friend, Pier Antonio Cecchini;2 but however they made each other’s acquaintance, their path to intimacy was smoothed by the younger man’s artistic temperament. The Cavalieri were noted collectors,3 and despite his youth (he was not yet twenty), Tommaso was a sensitive connoisseur with aspirations of his own.4 Before long, they were inseparable, and a bond was forged that would last until Michelangelo’s death more than thirty years later. The earliest documentary evidence of their burgeoning relationship is provided by three letters written between December 1532 and January 1533. The first is an undated draft written in a state of anxiety. Sometime earlier, Michelangelo had sent Tommaso a (now lost) message, together with a gift of two drawings, but having heard nothing since, he had begun to repent of his rashness and hastily scribbled the note asking to be forgiven for having written inconsideratamente.5 Before he could dispatch it, however, he received a letter of thanks from Tommaso brimming over with affection,6 and to which he then replied – with a palpable sense of relief – on 1 January 1533.7 The two ‘gift-drawings’ that elicited this exchange were the Rape of Ganymede (Cambridge, MA, Fogg Art Museum) – the original of which has been lost – and the Punishment of Tityus (Windsor, Royal Library).8 In both technical and narrative terms, they were ambitious works. Unlike many of Michelangelo’s earlier drawings – such as the Three Heads, the Fury and the Zenobia (Florence, Uffizi) sent to Gherardo Perini in the previous decade9 – they employed a ‘rich diversity of graphic tech- niques’ to articulate complex mythological scenes, while displaying a striking unity of conception.10 According to the 1568 version of Vasari’s Vite, the Ganymede and the Tityus may have been intended to teach Tommaso how to draw.11 As Maria Ruvoldt has recently pointed out, this claim should not be dismissed too lightly.12 Michelangelo was fond of using drawings as teaching aids,13 and it is possible that Cavalieri may have rec- ognised them as such, promising in his letter of thanks to study them each day.14 It was, indeed, not long before they were being admired as models of the graphic arts and copied accordingly, albeit not by Tommaso. In acknowledging receipt of a later gift, Cavalieri wrote that everyone, including Pope Clement VII and Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici, had clamoured to see the drawings.15 Ippolito was so enamoured, in fact, 104 The Agency of the Gift-Drawing that he took the Tityus with him in order to have it reproduced in rock crystal, and it had only been with the greatest difficulty that he had been prevented from taking the Ganymede as well.16 But they were evidently more than mere models for imitation. While Michelangelo may have known that they would be circulated among Cavalieri’s Roman coterie, they were nevertheless imbued with a deeply personal meaning, meant for Tommaso alone, a fact upon which Pietro Aretino was later to remark.17 Linked thematically as well as visually, they expressed the artist’s growing affection for the young nobleman in terms familiar to Florentine Neoplatonism.18 In the first, Ganymede, a Trojan shepherd of incomparable beauty, swoons with delight as he is carried aloft by the impassioned Zeus – in the form of an eagle – to become the cupbearer of the gods.19 Perhaps informed by Cristoforo Landino’s commentary on Dante, Purg. 9.22–4, the scene symbolised the amor sacro that had been kindled in Michelangelo’s heart.20 Powerless to resist the pure, spiritual love by which he had been seized, his soul was raised above the base concerns of the material world and carried in ecstasy towards the divine.21 The second is more subtle. Here, the giant Tityus lies bound to the Tartarean rocks, twisting in anticipated agony as a gigantic eagle bends to peck out his eternally recru- descent liver, a fitting punishment for his attempted rape of Zeus’ beloved Latona. For Michelangelo – as for Dante, Boccaccio, Landino and Battista Mantovano – the tale stood as an allegorical indictment of amor profano.22 Should free rein be given to sex- ual desire, it warned, the soul – like the giant – would be brought low and condemned to suffer eternally. As such, it served to reinforce the sense of purity and propriety with which Michelangelo sought to clothe his feelings. But it could also represent the ‘sweet sorrow’ that all lovers endure for their unrequited affections.23 Thus developing an allegorical reading found in the poetry of Girolamo Bologni, Jacopo Sannazaro and Antonio Tebaldeo, it could be read as a statement of the pain Michelangelo would suffer if his love were not returned.24 As such, the two scenes were both confessional and constitutive. Flattering Tommaso’s intellectual vanity with their use of classical mythology, they invited the young nobleman to recognise and reciprocate the spiritual love they articulated; and though the contents of Michelangelo’s heart were visible only through a glass darkly, they strove to establish a bond in which his amor sacro could be declared more plainly. The intimacy that the Ganymede and the Tityus were intended to establish was nurtured by their status as drawings. Far removed from the constraints of contractual relations, they inhabited a realm of free expression and personal experience open only to the individual for whom they had been composed. Small in size and unhindered by iconographical norms, they could be approached only through close study and solitary meditation, viewing practices which – by their very nature – generated an inescapable sense of privacy and secrecy.25 This paper will seek to explore the manner in which this same intimacy was also shaped and negotiated by their status as gifts. Although Vasari portrayed them as presents much like any others that Michelangelo gave to his friends, an examination of his letters alongside conventional forms of gift exchange and Reformist notions of the beneficium suggests that he intended them to perform a far more active role in constituting the bond he sought with Cavalieri. Granted an agency of their own, they allowed Tommaso to be co-opted into the very drama they allegorised, and – free from expectation and obligation – paved the way for the two men to refine the relationship into which they had been drawn as they saw fit. Alexander Lee 105 Michelangelo and the Culture of Gift-Exchange The giving of gifts was not unusual in sixteenth-century Italy. As in most other cultures throughout history, it was the oil that greased the wheels of social life. Through the exchange of carefully chosen items, new bonds were forged, existing ties consolidated and old alliances renewed.26 The contexts in which it could be practised were almost limitless, as were the purposes to which it could be put. It was a custom without which no respectable marriage was complete, and which accompanied such rites of passage as childbirth, baptism and even death.27 In much the same way, magistrates raided civic treasuries to offer lavish gifts to ambassadors;28 merchants gave notaries presents of anchovies, wine and firewood;29 and love-struck young men sent sweetmeats, rings and other highly decorated items to the women they admired.30 It was the expectation of reciprocity that gave gifts their potency. They were, after all, given so that they might be received, or – in some cases – so that a favour might be repaid, and it was by imposing or fulfilling an obligation that they fomented rela- tionships. Yet how this obligation was understood depended on the relative status of donor and recipient. In some contexts, such as marriage, gender was the dominant consideration; in others, it was often age; but in most cases, it was through the prism of wealth or social class that the practice was refracted. Michelangelo was highly attuned to the ritualism of gift-giving. He was the recipient of a great many presents throughout his life,31 and despite his reputation for miserli- ness, was generous in bestowing gifts on others.32 He knew all too well the obligations that giving or receiving entailed, and was sensitive to the strict sense of social stand- ing that governed the rituals of exchange. As Vasari reported, he was sometimes even reluctant to accept presents, because he feared that in doing so he would be forever beholden to those from whom they were received,33 and in later years, he found him- self subjected to a stinging rebuke from Aretino for not reciprocating the poet’s pushy ‘gift’ of praise with a drawing such as he had sent to Cavalieri.34 As the self-accusatory tone of his letters suggests, Michelangelo was conscious of having taken a risk in sending the Tityus and the Ganymede. In ordinary circum- stances, it would have been Tommaso who – by virtue of his nobility – would have been expected to have initiated a correspondence. On receipt of a letter, Michelangelo would have been in a position not only to reply, but also to send a gift in return. In the anthropological terms of Mauss and Leenhardt, such a gift could be characterised as a ‘prestation’, that is, a form of reciprocation offered out of obligation, repaying Cavalieri for the magnanimitas of his initial letter.35 As such, Tommaso could then have accepted the gift-drawings with perfect propriety, and viewed the exchange as a consolidation of a hierarchical relationship in which he was the superior.

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