Alfonso Masó : Awakening Yet Prisoner

ALFONSO MASÓ Michelangelo Buonarroti: Awakening Yet Prisoner – George Steiner: Real Presences Translated by Marta López‐Luaces, Mercedes Roffé, Edwin Lamboy

In the speculative intuitions of the aesthetic, the motions of spirit are not those of an arrow, but of the the spiral at once ascendant and retrogressive, as is the stairway in the library of Montaigne. (George Steiner) 1

All art keeps hidden within a whole bazaar of that which cannot be taken for granted, after feeling the attraction to a form and a narrative that exempt us, if that is what we want, from going further.

1. Francis Bacon, Figure With Meat, 1954. Michelangelo Buonarroti, Awakening (between 1513 and 1536)

1 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner

Every creative process implies a projection, a transferring onto the matter of the person who leads it . . . not trying to hide but to bare, beyond the visible flesh, the lives, the buried faces, presences probably unthought‐of by both himself and others; amplified, probably only partially softened, travestied, transsexualized, transubstantiated in a theatre of the world where it is possible to show oneself under the appearance of enlivened signs and objects.

Michelangelo discovered too many things about sculpture to be understood by his contemporaries. From there on, nothing is easier for the observer than making other people’s excuses his or her own, categories such as “perfection” or “the appropriate,” unknown to the standards of the artist’s times and even to his own intentions and possibilities, shackled by centuries of incomprehension; celebrated even for his biggest and most superficial sculpture, the , a work of youth and dissatisfaction, too much wrapping for such little content, such little life, such little contact with the world. A monumental anecdote that diverts attention away from the immediate drama where other less obvious presences strive to appear, to remain.

In Real Presences (1989), George Steiner argues that, at present, the endless outpouring of the unimportant2 has given way, in the academic‐journalistic production of the humanities, to the proliferation of exchanges of a tertiary order, where debates expand on what has been said about what has been said in suffocating, endogamic spirals. In this context, the possibility to access the real presence of the poem, the musical piece, the painting or the sculpture has died long ago.

It is vital to re‐educate ourselves for the direct contemplation of phenomena and the arts. Going out to “the encounter with immediacy and transcendence in the aesthetic is, of necessity, an argument on Logos and word” (idem, p. 50).

2 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner

Art prepares us to see, since the “best readings about art are art” (idem, p. 17). In order to be able to face artistic creation, it is essential to overcome the perplexity that comes when we are in direct contemplation, freeing ourselves from the headphones that continuously talk to us about the secondary and tertiary, about someone’s life and miracles, and avoid that which would keep hold of us, which would make us feel extremely uncomfortable as tourists of knowledge.3

The work of art awaits to question us, to be questioned, to be transformed and be able to transform us in the encounter, as long as we come ready to set out to the initiatic journey that is going to take place, inevitably, if we are willing to inhabit art like a living fragment of a history that includes us, and as such, remains unfinished.

Michelangelo is an amazing case of lack of appreciation even to this . There is always someone among us who considers himself or herself a learned person and yet is unable to remember Michelangelo except for the David; someone who has probably read somewhere that the artist left many sculptures “unfinished.” This theory of the unfinished and abandoned works, lacking any direct experience of the real presence, keeps recurring in all too many books and other academic sources.

In order to reach the unknown, the hidden, the postponed, the unutterable, and to imbue it with the necessary traits to show its unavoidability (since what we can’t see or we don’t want to see is also unavoidable) was part of Michelangelo’s conception of art, of what devoting his life to art—his inexcusable duty—meant to him.

An incorruptible honesty and commitment to those artistic principles are at the root of his enormous contributions; and yet, they are also the reason of his extreme loneliness in the face of the incomprehension toward his discoveries, and the lack of

3 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner a valid interlocutor. This lack of understanding becomes apparent in the vehement accusations of fickleness or senile eccentricity—as it was in the case of the Rondanini Pietà. In what sense was it unfinished? Michelangelo worked on it until four or five days before his death, as on so many other works, willingly, not in order to fulfill a commission. Here, he is not trying to reproduce the commonly accepted iconography of piety, but the deep emotions that witnessing such a moment would provoke, the immediate empathy with the grief of those two bodies—to find oneself, see oneself, experience oneself, simultaneously, in those two bodies that suffer and keep close to one another, to embody their own construction‐destruction.

Michelangelo was deeply religious. In this work he answers only to his God and himself. And for him, at that point in his life, it would have been insulting to present a dramatic tale that would prevail over the real presence of the extreme grief, the extreme abandonment of that moment, a moment he can only understand by embodying it, by being simultaneously those two beings—himself, abandoned in the arms of that brief life he still has left, and notwithstanding, still supporting, still upholding the dying one on his own shoulders; he himself being the piety, piety of himself, piety of the sorrow and the guilt, sorrow and guilt that pierce our invisible lives (whether or not it is at the expense of the divine).

Why that decision, why that image? Suddenly, titans are of no use anymore. It is necessary to lighten the weight for the task of leaving the immediacy of humanity. It is necessary to drain away the body, to erode it, to erase it, to blur it, to fragment it; it is necessary to offer one’s remains as part of an expiation, to scratch in it the body itself, punish it, punish‐compensate, furiously, fearfully, warmly, for the offences, the indelible faults, and to offer oneself, already a corpse, to support the weight of what cannot be effaced.

4 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner

Is it empathy with other distant remains, with other, very close, remains that we will never get to rebuild? Remains of ruins, like the ones in the ancient friezes, deep human remains. Ruins added here voluntarily, carefully tied to the side by a part whose only function is to join and hold—a right arm separated from the body, repeated (the other right arm is hidden behind the back), a second right arm, a remain as an axis, a remain whose remaining vigor contrasts with the other arms tied to the body, to the immediate torso, to which it couldn’t belong not even in a different time. Scratched, over scratched, the torso; surpassed the materic limit that could have allowed the construction of an anatomy, barely functional.

Through it, we get access to something more than just a representation. We are invited to be part of a living process, an active process of dematerialization that is not completely conquered by death as long as there is a persisting thread of breath to sustain itself, to sustain ourselves, to hold itself and to hold us; to transport one another, to be able to be, through grief, through the awareness of a separation, of a past, irreversible split.

In the face of the current erosion of death, there is no need for mirrors to hold the earthly beauty that mellowed the days; there is no longer a need for anatomic definition, but a spiritual intensification. Sustaining oneself in the unavoidable paradox demands not to lose the tension, the emotion, and the expression, unretainable by the representation resources known at the time. It demands to choose between gravity and the embrace, it demands to be at the same time weight and lightness so that the body, which is two bodies, faints while ascending and ascends while fainting—through the intense curve that helps to rise the combined matter, through the enormous weight that the disjointed arm (the extra arm) conveys to the legs, which have already left this life.

5 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner

We had seen remains from antiquity that were enormously expressive. Michelangelo unveils for us an aesthetic of remains and offers it to us from the union between a misunderstood expressionism and an unconceivable collage.

That right arm, which is also that of Michelangelo, had been waiting to reappear in the Rondanini Pietà at least for thirty years, as we can see in the Pietà he drew at the time (1520‐26): the arm of the given artist, recurrently defeated by the weight of death—something that reappears also in the Palestrina Pietà. In that drawing, the Virgin appears in the back, just sketched, holding, blurred, willingly relegated to the background, one more time. We find the same blurring‐fusion on both paper and stone . . . until his last Pietà. It was perhaps then that Michelangelo let himself die, having already given a closure to his last struggle, the answer finally found, breaking up the identification of beauty in art with beauty in the body, once he had reached his full strength and virtuosity in the mimesis of representation. 4

6 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner

2. Michelangelo Buonarroti. Pietà, 1530‐36

7 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner

3. Michelangelo Buonarroti. Rondanini Pietà, 1552‐ 64

8 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner

4. Michelangelo Buonarroti. Palestrina Pietà, 1550‐52

9 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner

We should search for the bases, the expressive advances that Michelangelo contributes to sculpture, which we can already find in the big medallions contemporary of the David, such as the Tondo Taddei, in regard to which the argument of the lack of time to finish the work was probably first heard.5 In them, different kinds of surfaces and finishes were used with the purpose and function of conveying the pulse of stone to the expressive devices of carving, and, by doing so, broadening the diversity and intensity of the melodic levels at play in the highly structured scores his art works will always be—volumes, mass, signs, traces, trails, embodied in the cadenzas of shadow and the replies of light. Almost simultaneously and in a similar seek‐and‐find spirit, he works on the S. Mateo (1504), for Sta. Maria de Fiore, in , although it wouldn´t be finally placed there; the “unfinished” quality of this sculpture is a preview of what he will do in the Slaves.

But before dealing with the Slaves or Prisoners, let’s consider the relevance of the off­scene when working on or interacting with the works of art we observe. An off‐ scene that begins long before these works exist, expands in the simultaneous time and extends without interruption up to our most immediate now, that’s why the recurrence and broadening of meaning continue to modify the works, updating them or even sometimes returning them to life as long as our dialog with them is kept alive. 6

Why else would Francis Bacon place, several centuries later, the untouchable figures of the vociferous Popes inside those blocks of translucent marble, enclosed, just like the Slaves were, but now without any possibility of being rescued?

Francis Bacon gets to the bottom of the imperious immediacy of everything affecting Michelangelo, completely identifying with him, summoned by the omnipresent, threatening, imperious faces that chased the artist not only while dreaming, but also

10 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner while awake, now that he doesn’t fear—improbable—excommunication. Bacon offers us a persistent gallery of vociferous popes that is not the product of a passing fancy but a long confrontation, a long struggle with something even beyond the matter he imprisons, with an external force intending to control your life, to judge you, to intimidate you, to harass you, to condemn you. The result is a struggle in which the artist needs to represent, once and again, that so‐called supreme authority, imprisoned by its own excesses, its own powers. It is a struggle that needs to be fought, over and over, so that it can overcome the power of its own representation, made with pencils, brushes, iron chisels . . . and, by doing so, change both present and history.

Each one of the represented popes is tied forever to his scream and his enveloping throne, fenced in with his own rope‐net, submerged, trapped inside a transparent block of marble unable to reach glory. That scream that seems to be a threat, is it the scream of the defeated, his own excommunication, the emergence of his own hell?

Is it possible to be at the summit and an outlaw at the same time? Francis Bacon shows us that it is possible, by showing us his many proscriptions that release him from following the rules, from suffering the prisons they impose, instead of other ones, apparently chosen and deeply assumed—the invisible prison that isolates you from your coetaneous when you chose to ignore the rule that lies, that overpraises, in order to maintain the categories prescribed by convenience.

Even though those in charge of disguising and repainting the private parts—being either physical or metaphysical—will always have their resources, Bacon knows how to make us not doubt. And he does it by grasping human abjection by its lapels and making it sit in the chair of the one being portrayed. That is how his popes get to fill the gallery of the chosen ones—howling.

11 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner

Power has changed sides. For a while, the supreme power belongs to painting, sculpture, drawing, representation . . . to the observers who stop being so when they assume the involvement and responsibility that a work of art allows to and demands from them.

Bacon sits the popes in the chair of the ones being portrayed and broadens, continues, and intensifies the reply that had been initiated by a Michelangelo harassed by incomprehension and intolerance, even if disguised as veneration.

Bacon places himself next to Michelangelo and shows us what is implicit in his works—an immediacy that was relegated to the background but, like it happens with any great work of art, is present in that which we will be able to see, even much later. In this scenario those who are off‐scene (the obs‐cene) are superimposed, captured from Michelangelo’s , the Prigioni and the last pieties. With his representations, Bacon gives us perspective in order to, among other things, arrive to a thorough comprehension of the clues regarding the works of Michelangelo that remain blocked in our contemporary minds due to the still alive myth of the unfinished work, defying the logic of all those who have eyes to see and willingness to read original documents—in painting, drawing or stone . . . the only valid testament from someone who embraced that kind of writing.

We can think of a germinal gesture, a piece of matter scraped by an intense desire to vivify, to make something appear. The word “emergence” arises from the intense, compelling need to appear, given the intuition and the desire that there will be others who will listen to us, beyond the confined moment we struggle to set free. We will suffer with the represented pain and will find out that there, in that initial grief, a threshold even more painful opens up, in the time of persistence, as a sign of life, since upon arriving we had not noticed the disturbance, the demands of that part of us that is troubled, as if it just began to discover that it belongs to something that is

12 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner clearly implied, but does not show itself completely. A part of us that, nonetheless, revives, biting, an exhausted “I,” almost stuck . . . to the walled caves of the unseen . . . where the pestiferous slime would start to beat, under the distant caress of a pair of newly discovered eyes as if they were ours.

There are art branches that prefer to avoid many or most of these considerations, which they would experience like prisons of other goals. We will bump into them, however, while considering doubts and resources, in some of the crossroads that will still remain forbidden.

5. Francis Bacon. Untitled (Pope) 1954

13 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner

6. Francis Bacon, Head VI, 1949

7. Francis Bacon, Study for the Head of a Screaming Pope, 1952

14 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner

8. Francis Bacon, Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953

15 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner

9. Francis Bacon, Study for Figures at the Base of a , 1944

“I shall be arguing that we crave remission from direct encounter with the ‘real presence’ . . . We flinch from the immediate pressures of mystery in poetic, in aesthetic acts of creation as we do from the realization of our diminished humanity, of all that is literally bestial in the murderousness and gadgetry of this age. The secondary is our narcotic . . . we are guarded by the numbing drone of . . . the

16 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner theoretical, from the often harsh, imperious radiance of sheer presence” (Steiner, p. 49).

10. Camille Claudel, Study for Avarice and Lust, 1885

11. Louise Bourgeois, Blooming Janus, 1968

12. Berlinde de Bruyckere, Into One­Another, 2010

17 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner

13. Berlinde De Bruyckere, We Are All Flesh, 2009

Why to bring up here the works of these sculptresses? Actually, it is a long story . . . the story of a long narrative, in progress, we have always said we lacked the words for—always blaming the messenger. We didn’t lack the words; we only lacked determination of knowledge. Words encountered an emptiness they can only fill with a simulacrum or addressing aspects that were peripheral. These images uncover sooner and better than us some of the most eloquent aspects of Michelangelo’s sculptures. Eloquent but not apparent to the immediacy of observation. These are aspects that are not present in the narrative that comes to meet us when we first face the work, but they are captured by the signs that are imbedded in the matter and beat behind its skin; because if that “behind,” which includes us, did not exist, neither would the deep space that art has always promised to open up for us behind the flatness of the evident.

Those works are part of a present‐day off‐scene that includes us as well, which after nourishing themselves on Michelangelo’s work, transform it, since they uncover and broaden some aspects that would seem fragmentary. What happened finally to the fragment in the arts? Louise Bourgeois as well as psychoanalysis showed us how the fragment—the Tao already knew it—ends up being or looking like or reflecting the whole. The small head that Claudel shows us is also a fragment. Both, Bourgeois’ Blooming Janus and this head by Claudel seize us in a net of common veins, of internal

18 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner fluids that confront us with the bestial quality of being, with an atavistic “I” that bites our lips to revive in us the distant taste of our own blood—astonished, shaken, forgotten witnesses of a struggle between a stuttering beast, with no traceable arguments, and a culture‐as‐master with an infinity of, evanescent reasonings.

Berlinde is even more clear about the brutal paradox of finding ourselves between the stage and the origin . . . and draws us and throws us into a sublime sense of belonging next to the borders of matter, like an identitary wrapping within a shared skin—with the dead animal, with the unbearable absence of a beloved one.

In images embodying other images, something is reborn; with a different face but preserving consciousnesses of past times that come to us with their memory intensified by recollections that kept on growing, even after the autonomy acquired by the work from the moment it was created. Something is reborn in the public intimacy, from the transference of an “I” that knows to be a collective “I,” to the matter that becomes a common skin, over the pain and the wretched fluid that it promises to lead to some kind of light.

Art will continue to have direct access to that open‐body genesis in which art itself originates, a gestation where the new beings are not built from unpredictable remains of the body but with living fragments, of overwritten matters, like translucid palimpsests. Were did we learn how to read matter? In art itself, in the works of art before our eyes and hands, in art about art and in the poetry about art. Nobody taught us the Prado Museum better than Rafael Alberti. He introduced us, quietly, to the Rembrandt’s half‐lights, when “light made its entrance in the deepest basements” (Alberti, 1967, p. 78)*. The Prado gone round despite the smell of wax and “just cried” resin (idem, p. 12‐14)7: before Steiner reminded us of the real presence.

* Except for Steiner’s Real Presences, quoted from the English edition, all other quotations will be rendered in our translation. (T.N.)

19 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner

The palimpsest, under the skin, under the immediately shown—the subtle remain, still present in the vestiges upon which it rebuilds itself. The Pietà is a palimpsest, scraped in order to find what is already, fleetingly written, in the stone itself. Louise Bourgeois, Camille Claudel, Jana Sterbach, Berlinde de Bruyckere will connect the Pietàs with the Prisons, as if the works they contribute with were the missing links.

The battle of the flesh with the flesh, the battle of that part of the body that has been castrated from us, pulled out, removed, condemned, by the vociferous pope. The battle to emerge. Art is the tool that humans found in order to restore and reach, but mostly to restore, to recover, what we feel was ours and was taken from us; to overcome the expulsion and the mutilation of the body and the knowledge plagued with monsters against reason, intuition, and innocence.

The body is dishonored by the blessed hand, penetrated by its tongue, pushed into a disproportionate shame for its incapability to control its internal streams, by the humiliation caused by the self‐inflicted remorse so mercilessly induced, sowed like bitter seeds, in the face of its awakening and feeling. Because it wasn’t born from what it should have been born, it was born already with its condemnation marked by iron and fire.

Louise Bourgeois, Camille Claudel, Jana Sterbach, Berlinde de Bruyckere, join together in order to expel an intrusion that shows, in front of many different types of stakes, their deed of ownership over the bodies and their “souls.” Each work we are showing here could also be entitled, “Awakening,” following Michelangelo’s sculpture’s metaphoric sense, and considering his sculpture’s meaning, which these sculptresses share as well. By doing so, they develop different ways to connect to distinct kinds of materialization—a materialization that both discloses and intensifies all the aspects‐feelings they share. (The languages, images and signs, and moreover, what lives behind them, gain more density with the connections they

20 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner establish, while what they represent keeps growing.) Michelangelo’s sculpture grows as its repercussions grow. And as a consequence of this correlation, those repercussions grow as well. The beating “lifeless” matter. A re‐signification in the constant embodiment of signification and metaphor.

We left far behind, because of its lack of meaning, the initial debate—finished‐ unfinished. Each work mentioned here will be unfinished as long as it exists, as long as we can continue enriching it—even diminishing it.

Something else is the need to analyze in order to tell apart understanding from misunderstanding, as if, every time, we were starting to open a piece of marble in order to solve the enigma—where should we stand, where should we to stop to consider, and up to where and why? Are all of Van Gogh’s paintings, Velázquez’s Meninas, the Victory of Samothrace, and so many other works of art that fulfill our collective imaginary, revealing one another, addressing one another, equally unfinished?

We will see better, inside the closed stone, the open stone, as long as we have learned to observe, in depth, what others have already seen. What did Michelangelo observe when he dared to break the limit of what was accepted in his time? He probably saw, perhaps in more depth than others , not the future, which nobody knows, but the past that was present in other works of art—the titans’ immense weakness, their dramatic impotence in front of so many divine intentions, the enormous weight of guilt, shouted at their faces by every emissary‐gargoyle, shouted by their own grief barely amputated each day.

Who can decide, in the field of art, the concept of finishing, whether or not it is appropriate to decide that an author doesn’t have anything else to contribute to his work? Why so much debate, regarding so many works of art, about whether they

21 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner are finished or not? Could it be because there can’t be any proof on an unfinished work, since common sense, there, in the depths, says: Everything that is just half‐ done, that was abandoned hastily or placidly, with the purpose of finishing it later, always presents an unavoidable disorder, a lack of agreement, misplacements of the elements in dialogue. All of these, while speaking about art, would materialize, without remission, in lack of harmony, rhythmic correspondences, in lack of balance between mass and emptiness, between tensions and energies, between pulito­ nonpulito, between lights and shadows, and between the figure and its surroundings or, as in these cases, confining matter. 8

And what if we only saw harmony in these works, and everything were balance, correspondence, tension, dialogue among its parts and elements, everything necessity . . . if everything found its place… in unceasing flows of meaning? What if we saw all this in each of the four large pieces Michelangelo worked on at the same time?

If you want to see a giant collapsing, try to remove, mentally, the matter that is supposedly spare—the one calculated and worked down to the last detail, and then courageously exposed to centuries of incomprehension.

When Jana Sterbach reminds us that the supposedly spare matter is also flesh, everything gains an unexpected dimension. It is then when we recall that, even if in a different way, Francis Bacon, Louise Bourgeois, Berlinde de Bruyckere, and Camille Claudel were telling us the same thing.

22 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner

14. Jana Sterbach, Vanitas, 1987. 15. Michelangelo Buonarroti, Awakening (between 1513 and 1536)

A slave who awakes is not immersed in half‐carved stone but in soft, heavy, slippery, sticky flesh that melts, reproachfully, with his own flesh, which illuminates it, and defeats it, and dignifies it, and possesses it . . . heavy, stuck, inseparable like guilt and origin, intensified in every nightmare of its present future.

23 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner

Notes: 1. “In the speculative intuitions of the aesthetic, the motions of spirit are not those of an arrow, but of the spiral at once ascendant and retrogressive as is the stairway in the library of Montaigne” (Steiner, pp. 36‐37).

2. “At present, in fact, the principal energies and animus of the academic‐journalistic outpouring in the humanities is of a tertiary order” (Steiner, pp. 39‐40).

3. “I shall be arguing that we crave emission from direct encounter with the ‘real presence’ (. . .) We seek the immunities of indirection. In the agency of the critic, reviewer or mandarin commentator, we welcome those who can domesticate, who can secularize the mystery and summons of creation” (Idem, p. 39).

4. About the last pietàs Giulio Carlo Argán says: “In his last sculptures, the main subject is the Pietà, understood not as a lamentation but as a presentation to the world, so that it feels ashamed of its guilt, of the body of the dead Christ. But the artist himself partially destroyed the Pietà of Santa Maria de Fiore (which was later restored by Tiberi Calgani), begun before 1550, probably because, although many of its sections were still unfinished, it didn’t reach the perfection of the Pauline Chapel paintings he was working on. A perfection he does reach, in contrast, in the Rondanini Pietà, through a very tormented process, judging from the visible regrets and destructions the artist imposed to a piece he still would work on a few days before his death, and which was supposed to be placed in his tomb. Here, the artist himself presents the piece as a fragment—almost a thought that cannot be expressed except by truncated phrases and unfinished accents, by sudden rhythmic outbursts that wane with a similar swiftness” (Argan, p. 76).

5. Against the exculpatory and often hagiographic theories that Michelangelo’s disciple and biographer Arsenio Condivi proposes, avoiding as much as possible dealing with the works he considers unfinished and on which Michelangelo doesn’t give any explanations, we can gather from the—scattered— data Condivi himself provides that Michelangelo had enough

24 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner uninterrupted time to work on the slaves initially destined to the tomb of Julius II. Proof of this is the fact that Michelangelo moved to Florence, his home town, the four large blocks while the pope was still alive (around 1511), and was able to go back to them until 1534, year in which he leaves Florence for good.

5.1. In order to know those possibilities we have chosen testimonies by Vasari and Condivi, the biographers who had personal access to Michelangelo. “During the pontificate of Adrian VI (January 1522—September 1523), Michelangelo chose to remain in Florence working on Julius II’s tomb” (Vasari, p. 49). Although, if we take into account what Vasari himself wrote right before, on page 46 about Leo X’s arrival in 1513, he should have actually said he chose not to interrupt his work on the tomb. When the pope commissioned from Michelangelo the façade of S. Lorenzo in Florence, he promised the artist “that he would also work on the sculptures of the tomb as long as he stayed in Florence, as in fact he had already started to do.”

5.2 Condivi shows us Michelangelo working on the Slaves “long before” the arrival of Adrian VI: “When he returned to Florence and confirmed, as it was stated, that the pope’s fervor was completely waned, Michelangelo felt so hurt that he was inactive for a while, not doing a thing, feeling unhappy of having wasted so much time in all those things. Nonetheless, he continued to work on the tomb with some marbles he had at home”—, 256 cm height, , 277 cm, Bearded Slave, 263 cm, Awakening Slave, 267 cm. (Condivi, p. 76).

5.3. Regarding these facts, Vasari writes, “Thus, Michelangelo spent several years extracting and choosing blocks of marble ( . . . ) From Carrara he returned to Florence, where he wasted a lot of time taking care of different affairs” (Vasari, p. 48). As we had read earlier, even if he doesn’t give any precise date, Vasari argues that, in the last years of Julius II’s papacy (1511‐1512), “and in order to work more comfortably, Michelangelo requested that some blocks of marble were moved to Florence, were sometimes he spent the summers, trying to escape ’s unhealthy air” (Vasari, p. 28).

25 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner

5.4 This period of continuous work on the Slaves would be briefly interrupted in 1525. “It was in 1525 when the Cardinal of Cortona brought the young to Florence, where he had the young man work as an apprentice in Michelangelo’s workshop. However, Michelangelo was asked to go back to Rome by Pope Clement” (p. 49). Clement sent him back to Florence so that he would finish S. Lorenzo’s Sacristy. We know of Michelangelo’s habit to work simultaneously on several pieces. The siege of Florence began in 1529, and it would last a whole year. Michelangelo took part in the planning of the defense and he remained in the city—except for some short absences—until 1534.

5.5. We can draw some conclusions from both testimonies. The first conclusion would be the amount of time Michelangelo had at his disposal to work, without significant interruptions and without pressure, on the marbles he had at home, that is, the blocks of the slaves. If we take into account that the Vatican’s piety was done in one year and that, according to Vasari, Michelangelo “needed less than one year” (p. 61) to finish the two sculptures for the tomb of St. Pietro in Cinvoli, which would go on both sides of the , that is, and (1535), we shouldn’t have any doubts that Michelangelo had the possibility to finish the Slaves with ease, especially when he had them in his own place. The same can be said if we take into account that “Michelangelo’s talent and genius were unable to stay inactive . . . Even more, as he himself used to say, using the hammer kept his body healthy” (Vasari, p. 68). Thus, it is impossible to believe that there were periods of boredom when he comes back from Carrara or Servezza, where he was extracting marble, or even in other times during his life. We know he kept working on the Rondanini Pietà up to four or five days before his death, when he was eighty‐nine years old.

5.6. The second conclusion we can draw is in regards to the almost non‐existent relevance that both Vasari and Condivi grant to the slaves, which they consider a few more unfinished statues, left like that by Michelangelo when he left Florence for good in September 1534. Actually, both biographers avoid dealing with these works, which they only mention in passing. Undoubtedly, this might have also determined the subsequent insensitivity toward these pieces, a thoughtlessness that continues up to now, especially the general

26 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner appreciation of the Slaves as inferior pieces in comparison to other works such as the David, or the Vatican’s Piety.

5.7. In very few occasions Vasari or Condivi stop to evaluate, aesthetically, the “un‐finished.” Vasari argues, about S. Lorenzo’s Sacristy: “The Madonna holds the child with only one hand; she leans on her other hand and bends forward to feed him. Although this statue was not completely finished (it was only sketched and the roughing down of the chisel is still visible on it), in its imperfect and unfinished block it is possible to recognize the perfection of the finished work of art” (Vasari, pp. 51‐52).

5.8. Referring to S. Lorenzo’s Sacristy as well, Condivi states: “It is true that they all lack a last touch, but by the way they are done it is possible to notice the artist’s excellence, and those parts that are only sketched do not diminish the work’s perfection and beauty” (Condivi, p. 80).

5.9. Condivi writes about the Pietà of Santa Mª de Fiore: “It would be impossible to describe the beauty and the expressions shown in the dismayed faces of all the characters, especially the disheartened mother. That is enough. At any rate, I do want to point out that this is a unique and accomplished work, among the many other ones that he had done so far” (Condivi, p. 92).

5.10. “Whatever his actual motive was, we must point out that Michelangelo only finished a few statues in his old age” (Vasari, p. 88). We must stress how valuable this statement is, coming from Vasari, because it entrails the reckoning of a number of Michelangelo’s goals, purposes and achievements that went beyond the understanding of his contemporaries. They went even beyond what he could entrust to his own biographers to liberate himself from the many pressures that would have prevented him from advancing toward the unconceivable contributions that would arise from his works.

5.11. The reasons sustained by his contemporary biographers, Vasari and Condivi, in order to justify the great number of “unfinished” sculptures are the arguments about

27 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner

Michelangelo being always too busy, about his commitments and obligations, his ambitious projects demanding all of his energy during decades on uninterrupted dedication. The quotation marks underscore the relative and disputable character of a term we cannot feel satisfied with, once we observe the works in question.

If we go over Michelangelo’s biographies, we can notice—despite the avidity in both cases, but even more so in Condivi’s, to excuse him and praise him—that the diversity of commitments and the geographical distance that often separated them, going back and forth from Florence to Rome, would cause Michelangelo multiple interruptions. Regarding this fact, it is crucial to observe the development of strategies to benefit from the situation and make it a sort of blessing in disguise. This ability to benefit from the obstacles one encounters has been all throughout history the basic principle at the origin of all innovations, not only in the field of arts, but also in any aspect of life in which it is necessary to find “creative solutions” to those crossroads that seem not to have a way out.

5.12. Michelangelo’s main strategy—any advance in the carving of the stone is always done with an eye on the whole, so that in every stage there is the kind of harmony and meaning of an accomplished work of art. This methodology demands an extra effort since, along the process, each work must be multiple works—entities that transform themselves to give room for another one. How far can this go? Is the availability of time always the decisive element? We have seen that it was not so, since his working method also included the acquired devices, the findings that appeared as the temporary trace was transformed in a definitive one, as seen in the pieces we have already analyzed, in which the progression toward the conventional finish, did not make any sense. Even more so, Michelangelo had denied himself that possibility, he had rejected it since the time he realized that sketches are only a point of departure to a journey whose ending he couldn’t know, because it is part of a plan in which the main commitment is the need to discover. We must not insult common sense by thinking that the person who finished the Pietà in St. Peter when he was just 24 years old, would later make such miscalculation in his last Piety, or in his previous pieces. Something different happened with his so‐called “regrets,” which in Michelangelo’s case

28 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner should not be understood only as the result of dissatisfactions but also as a consequence of some findings that lead him deeper into the unknown and showed him where to stop.

5.13. First sight evidences—If the vertical piece of marble at the right of Awakening, the part that keeps the shape of the cubic prism, were to be dismissed in the “finished” work, it would had been cut off, very easely, before starting to carve the body, since its presence there makes working on the part of the body it borders more difficult. But the crucial question should be—What is that piece of marble good for? What would his function be? It is the same question we would ask in regard to the mass of stone blending with the head of Atlas. In order to understand the Awakening, we have to take into account that the block itself, the cubic prism as such, as a block of stone, is what gives the meaning to the initial Platonic concept of emergence and origin that Michaelangelo takes a little further. The presence of the block was sought in order to imply both retention and envelopment, in order to transmit its own teluric energy in the process of creation, which in nature always takes the form of a struggle, an original struggle for power—a specular struggle of the one who will later become a presumable free human being. Like centuries later in minimalist art, the physical or virtual presence of the cubic prism will reappear again, in contrast to the frame that delimits the painting, implying the presence of a wholeness which is concentric and expansive at the same time.

5.14. To continue to use the word “unfinished” in reference to these works entails the renunciation to any effort that could lead beyond some specific aesthetic limitations—those aesthetic limitations that Michelangelo felt were too narrow. If we continue to use the term “unfinished” even when we are persuaded of the expressive intentions of these pieces, this misunderstanding will keep spreading even more. Quotation marks—any kind of them— are probably the most efficient tool to emphasize words and concepts, and lead to reflexion. Rather than trying to create a new term, quotation marks allow us to stress the unknown in what we believe we know.

5.15. “Sculpture doesn’t only represent an image, but also puts into practice, in its own production process, this passage from the material to the spiritual. The rough, unfinished

29 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner parts connect the figure with the natural space and light; the polished, finished parts take part in the trascendental light and space. That is why Michelangelo doesn’t want assistants— art is an experience that must be personally and painfully experienced. The sculptor does not use the stone to bring out an image that would express a concept. Through the image, but mainly through his own work, he liberates the block from his material inertia, and by doing so he carries out an exercise, an ascetic experience in which he symbolically liberates himself” (Argan, p. 64). And a little bit ahead, referring to the Medicis’ Sacristy, Argan writes, “but some parts of the figures are rough (for exemple, the face of Day), because the substance is ambiguous—on the one hand, it controls mortals’ destiny, and on the other, eternity itself. That is why the unfinished sometimes invades, partially, the shapes, which in other sections appear as polished as mirrors. It is like an earthly crust from which the figures have not yet completely freed themselves” (p. 67).

6. Regarding the “off‐scene.” For Michelangelo, poetry is a complementary tool. Through it, he offers us important clues to understand not only his moods but also his ideas, which will determine the way to confront the creation of his works. A good example of this is the following sonnet, in which Michelangelo cries out against the Church, against the powers that fund his work, against the pope himself, whom he compares to Medusa, the most dangerous of the gorgons.

6.1. The snakes around the body of Laocoön—that Michelangelo adopts for his Awakening—are too big and powerful now to be included in his work. In order to solve the problem of representation, Michelangelo chooses to resort to the off-scene. In this way, we can imagine the immense snakes, although they are not directly represented. It is the attitude of what, in effect, is represented, what leads us to them. His work connects us with what was left outside of it, not visible but present—starting this way the era of the virtual image.

6.2. Michelangelo (Come procedimento connesso a una nuova concezione dell’arte, segnò una svolta radicale: chiuse il ciclo dell’arte classica, di rappresentazione, e aprì quello dell’arte moderna, come espressione di stati dell’esistenza.) http://www.giuliocarloargan.org/oldsite/novita_2005michelangelo.htm

30 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner

6.3. In regard to the “off‐scene,” this sonnet by Michelangelo is specially meaningful.

Qua si fa elmi di calici e spade, e 'l sangue di Cristo si vend' a giumelle, e croce e spine son lance e rotelle; e pur da Cristo pazienza cade! Ma non c'arivi più 'n queste contrade, chè n'andré 'l sangue suo 'nsin alle stelle, poscia che a Roma gli vendon la pelle; e èci d'ogni ben chiuso le strade. S' i' ebbi ma' voglia a posseder tesauro, per ciò che qua opera da me è partita, può quel nel manto che Medusa in Mauro. Ma se alto in cielo è povertà gradita, qual fia di nostro stato il gran restauro, s'un altro segno ammorza l'altra vita?

*

Here helms and swords are made of chalices: The blood of Christ is sold so much the quart: His cross and thorns are spears and shields; and short Must be the time e’er even his patience cease. Nay, let him come no more to raise the fees Of this foul sacrilege beyond report! For Rome still flays and sells him at court, Where paths are closed to virtue’s fair increase. Now were fit tiem for me to scrape a treasure! Seeing that work and gain are gone; while he Who wears the robe, is my Medusa still. God welcomes poverty perchance with pleasure:

31 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner

But of that better life what hope have we, When the blessed banner leads to nought but ill?

From Ednah D. Cheney, 1885, p. 59. English translation of Sonnet IV by J. A. Symonds. In Sonnet IV, written in 1512, Michelagelo turns one more time, even if somehow cryptically, against the Pope.

7. “The Prado Museum! My God! I still had pinewoods in my eyes and the open sea . . . The aroma of varnish, of waxed wood, of a bunch of fresh resin, just cried” (Alberti, pp. 12‐14).

8. While the accusation of not finishing his works hounded Michelangelo, his actual concern was not to finish them in excess. What we intuit is much more that what we can express.

To define, to delimit, means to accept the loss as long as we can retain, at least, a minimum part of what may have been possible.

Poetry always comprises more than a definition, since it leaves room to the unwritten, which takes the form of silence.

Michelangelo learns, at the price of his loneliness, how to stop before the still unsaid that arises intact from the threatened darkness.

The paradox of poetry—even when it is poetry made in stone—is the ability of the absent to deeply move us, and to seem absent even when it is already within us.

References: Regarding Michelangelo, it is not part of this essay’s scope to establish the exact dates of his works, as neither of his first biographers do. Based on their work, we have included in each case the approximate dates they may have been started and finished. In the case of the slaves, this period starts in 1513, when the blocks were moved from Rome to Florence, and ends in 1536, when Michelangelo leaves Florence for good. In the case of the Rodanini Pietà,

32 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner the period ends, obviously, with the artist’s death, since we know he worked on this piece up to four or five days before dying.

Sculpture, Painting, Drawing:

12. Berlinde de Bruyckere. 2010, Into One-Another. Wax, epoxy, iron, wood, glass. 193 x 183 x 86 cm. 13. Berlinde de Bruyckere. 2009, We Are All Flesh. Wax, epoxy, iron, pillow and wood. 10. Camille Claudel. 1885, Study for Avarice and Lust. Bronze. 10.16 cm (height). Posthumous casting. 1. Francis Bacon. 1954, Figure with Meat. Oil on canvas. 129,9 x 121,9 cm. 5. Francis Bacon. 1954-55, Untitled (Pope). Oil on canvas. 152 x 94 cm. 6. Francis Bacon. 1949, Head VI. Oil on canvas. 93 x 76.5 cm. 7. Francis Bacon. 1952, Study for the Head of a Screaming Pope. Oil on canvas. 50 x 40.5 cm. 8. Francis Bacon. 1953, Study after Vélázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X. Oil on canvas. 153 x 181,1 cms. 9. Francis Bacon. 1944, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. Oil and pastel on board. Detail. 14. Jana Sterbak. 1987, Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic. Flank steak, mannequin, salt, thread, color photograph on paper, Dress size: 38. 11. Louise Bourgeois. 1968, Blooming Janus. Bronze. 25.7 x 31.8 x 21.3 cm. 1 y 14. Michelangelo Buonarroti. 1513-36, Awakening. Marble. 267 cms. 2. Michelangelo Buonarroti. 1530-36, Pietà. Drawing. 411 x 234 mm. 3. Michelangelo Buonarroti. 1552-64, Rondanini Pietà. Marble.195 cms. 4. Michelangelo Buonarroti. 1550-2, Palestrina Pietà. Marble. 250 cms.

Bibliography: Alberti, Rafael (1967) A la pintura. Losada, Buenos Aires.

33 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner

Argán, Giulio Carlo (1987) Renacimiento y barroco II, de Miguel Ángel a Tiépolo, Akal, Madrid. Condivi, Ascanio (2007) Vida de Miguel Ángel Buonarroti. Akal, Madrid. Cheney, Ednah D. Selected poems from Michelangelo Buonarroti, with translations from various sources. Boston: Lee and Shepard Publishers, 1885. Shulz, Juergen (1975) “Michelangelo’s Unfinished Works.” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 57 Nº 3. Steiner, George (1989) Real Presences, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Tolnay, Charles de. (1985) Miguel Ángel escultor, pintor y arquitecto. Alianza Editorial, Madrid. Vasari, Giorgio (1998) Vita de Michelangelo Buonarroti fiorentino pittore, scultore et architetto, 1568. Visor, Madrid.

34