tomb, a controversial naked Jesus Christ created when he was just a teenager, and a Bacchus rejected by
the man who commissioned it, for being too "raunchy". All three are in Florence, the birthplace of the
Renaissance, and a city which houses one-third of the world's most important works of art.
Michelangelo went to study in Florence at the age of 13, so he is inextricably linked to the city, perhaps
no more so than with his statue of David the very embodiment of Florence and everything it stood for.
He wasn't the only genius in town, even before he was born Dante Alighieri had written his
Divine Comedy and established the Italian language, Filippo Brunelleschi had completed
his 'impossible' dome for the cathedral, AND kick-started the Renaissance, and Lorenzo
Ghiberti gave us 'The Gates of Paradise'. No other place can rival Florence for the sheer quantity
of Masterworks, many of them still in the exact same site for which they were created.
It was the ruling Florentine Merchant family, the Medicis and their untold wealth, that funded this
explosion of the Arts, and Michelangelo as the star protegé at their Arts Academy would take advantage
of their financial clout. He was taken under the wing of Lorenzo de Medici when he was 13, for whom
he created 'The Madonna of the stairs' and 'Battle of the Centaurs when he was just 15.
Lorenzo died in 1492, and then Michelangelo was taken in by the monks at Santa Spirito Basilica where he
was allowed to continue his studies, and for the first time began dissecting bodies coming from the
convent's Hospital. It is a myth that dissecting was done in secret, he did so with the blessing
of the church. The expertise he picked up as a teenager would carry through his entire career.
The Basilica de Santa Spirito houses this controversial sculpture by Michelangelo, created
in 1492 when he was 17. The crucifix mysteriously went missing for 500 years and when a historian
did find it, it was studied for a further 50 years! Then in 2017 it was finally declared
a genuine Michelangelo. The church is designed by Brunelleschi - the same architect who created
the Dome of the Florence cathedral. The exterior of the church, quite plain and simple, in keeping with
Augustinian principles, hides a baroque interior so extravagant it is like seeing two different churches.
But the main reason to visit is to see teenage Michelangelo's, 55-inch wooden crucifix,
sculpted as a gift to the monks. Renaissance artists transformed the course of Western art
history by making the nude central to artistic practice, but nudity in sacred art was mainly used
to either represent the natural state of humanity before the fall often depicted in scenes connected
to Eden or Paradise, OR to represent the horror of lustful passions and vanity.
By this point, a naked Jesus Christ was unusual and even considered a bit shocking, but this wasn't a case of blasphemy,
as Michelangelo was a devout Catholic. Christ nudity or lack of clothes is actually something
in the scriptures. The removal of the clothing of Jesus Christ by Roman soldiers is mentioned
in the gospels, but the question as to whether a loincloth remained is debated by Biblical Scholars.
From what we know about first-century Roman crucifixions, Jesus could have been crucified
naked to maximize his humiliation. Part of the crucifixion was humiliation, and that was
heightened by public nakedness. The crucifix was made to decorate the high altar of the
Basilica, and the congregation would have only seen the front of it from a distance,
but now it is displayed in a side Chapel, we can see it from all sides and observe Michelangelo's
perfectionism. When it was found in 1962 it was covered with dust and hundreds of years of bad
paint jobs by amateur restorers. Although Christ's pose suggests a search for classical Harmony, he
is unusually skinny, lacking the muscular physique we know Michelangelo for. One of the reasons it
was disputed. The body is little more than an adolescent, Michelangelo's age when he carved it.
The bowed head is slightly older and the hips and legs are anatomical Perfection as Christ turns
sideways. It shows the moment of Christ's death and his body rests as it would naturally in death.
The overall feeling is one of Serenity. The details (unlikely to be seen close up by the
congregation) are extraordinary: the matted hair, the spear wound, the dripping blood.
In 2017, now declared genuine, it was finally returned to the church he created it for.
Thirty years later Michelangelo would sculpt another naked Christ, and a theological theory for
both sculptures is that the nudity of Christ is sometimes seen as a statement about his unfallen
nature. After the artist's death, this statue was given a strange metal veil to cover his genitals.
It is still in place 500 years later, perhaps still too shocking - even for the 21st-century Church!
But before creating this, the young Michelangelo would get his first break thanks to a forgery.
The 13th-century Bargello, was a prison until 1859 and is now a museum it has the largest collection of
Italian Gothic and Renaissance sculptures in the world. A star of the collection is this life-size
sculpture of Bacchus, the God of wine. Still only 21, this was Michelangelo's first large-scale work.
Cardinal Riario had commissioned the Bacchus for the garden of his Grand new house, but rejected
the finished statue. Why? He had met Michelangelo under strange circumstances a few years earlier.
As a new artist struggling to support himself, Michelangelo got involved in an art forgery,
selling a fake 'antique' statue he had sculpted and then aged artificially. The buyer turned out to be
the Cardinal, who realised it was in fact a fake, and demanded a refund. He did however immediately
recognize the genius of Michelangelo, and invited him to Rome to make a garden statue of Bacchus.
His Bacchus differs from what a classical God should look like. The god of wine is often shown
as an idealised naked youth, even gender-fluid, but this version is an unidealised youth, he is
feminine and too soft and flabby. Bacchus is sometimes portrayed as being a little tipsy,
but here he is extremely drunk, his eyes are rolling, his mouth is wide open, and although
his body IS in the traditional contrapposto pose, which usually adds a sense of control
and stability, here it has the opposite effect, and Bacchus appears to be about to fall over.
Just look for a bit and you start to see that as he leans back, he appears to sway and to wobble. To subvert
the contrapposto pose and achieve that subtle sense of movement - in Marble - is just astonishing.
Bacchus is dazed struggling to keep his balance with his protruding belly, softened by excess,
and can barely focus on the Goblet of wine he holds in his hand, which is tipping as if the
wine will spill out onto us. It is the kind of behaviour we have seen at many office parties.
The statue is not typical of Michelangelo, as being a garden statue it was designed to be seen in
the round, whereas most of his works were made for architectural settings - and a particular viewpoint.
The Satyr in half-goat form is gleefully enjoying every moment of Bacchus's drunkenness, and takes
the opportunity to steal some grapes, as he sculks behind the God. His hidden position
encourages the viewer to walk around the statue. One interpretation is that this is in
fact Michelangelo's critique of overindulgence, a moralistic Christian take on a pagan story,
in keeping with the Renaissance puritanical approach to the God of wine and Earthly pleasures.
If so, it was just too realistic and not 'antique' enough for the Cardinal, and in the
end he rejected Michelangelo's sculpture. In 1572 Bacchus was bought by the Medici family.
The humiliation over the rejection didn't affect Michelangelo's meteoric rise, and a
year later he was commissioned to carve his first and most well-known Pietà, a work that
would make him the most sought after artist in Christendom... at the age of 23.
He was a young optimistic artist when he sculpted his world-famous Pietà in
Rome, but an exhausted and unhappy man in his 70s, when he created this, his last sculpture.
Which some Scholars say he tried his best to destroy. Nowadays house in 'The Opera del Duomo',
once the workshop and the centre of operations for the construction of Florence's Cathedral and Bell
Tower, from 1296 to 1436. Today, it is a museum with an incredible collection of over 750 works
of art, covering seven centuries of History. 'Pietà' means pity or compassion, it is a popular theme
in Christian art and typically depicts just two figures, Jesus Christ and his mother the Virgin
Mary, supporting his dead body after he was taken down from the cross. However experts have debated
for years whether Michelangelo's last sculpture is a 'Pietà' , a 'Deposition' or an 'Entombment'.
The presence of the other figures argues against it being a Pietà. A deposition typically shows the dead
body of Jesus Christ being taken off The Cross by Nicodemus, as Mary Magdalene and the Virgin
Mary look on, and an entombment places us at the tomb of Christ where his body is being prepared
for burial, often surrounded by Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea or Saint John and the Virgin Mary.
Being Michelangelo, this could be a combination of all three. Most of the figures are obvious; Christ,
the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene. The fourth is debatable. I am inclined towards the theory that
the fourth figure is probably Nicodemus - and this is why. The sculpture was not commissioned by a client
but rather created by Michelangelo for his own tomb, and it is almost certain that
the face of Nicodemus is a self-portrait. It is not the first time the artist added his own face
to his works, most famously he did so in 'The Last Judgment' where San Bartolomeo is shown
holding his own flayed skin, with Michelangelo's face on it - and even his last painting had a
hidden self-portrait. If we briefly go back to Caravaggio's "Entombment", we see that he has not
only based his Christ on Michelangelo's Pietà, but has also transposed the master's self-portrait
as Nicodemus, to his own painting. Nicodemus was an early follower of Christ who was present at
the crucifixion, and has long been associated with sculptors, due to the legend that he carved this
wooden crucifix (shortly after the resurrection). Artists including their own portraits of Nicodemus
are not uncommon. These artists are not just identifying with the sculptor Nicodemus, but
also showing their own personal identification with Christ's sacrifice. Titian did something
similar, adding himself as Nicodemus holding the dead Christ's hand. Nicodemus's devotion
and tenderness are intended as a reflection of Michelangelo's own devout Catholicism, and he is
upholding his faith - literally the corpse of Jesus Christ - for all of us to see. Unusually all three
surrounding figures attempt to steady Christ's lifeless body, giving the statue a dynamic energy
and a classic triangular composition, which really emphasises the weight of Christ's body.
And yet, after eight years of intense work, at the age of 80 years old, he walked away. This wasn't out
of character, as the perfectionist artist left many unfinished sculptures. The story for years
was that he was so unhappy with the statue that in a moment of frustration, he tried to destroy it.
But in 2019 art restorers found no evidence of hammer blows, debunking the widespread myth.
In fact, as Michelangelo noted when he first received the 2.7 tonne block of marble it was deeply flawed,
with lots of veins and minute cracks. If you look at the work today, it is hard to imagine that anything
is wrong, as it looks so harmonious. That is until you realise that Christ only has one leg.
It is believed that Michelangelo intended the other leg to lifelessly hang over the virgin's lap, but it
was seen as too 'intimate', perhaps even 'romantic', and so to avoid confusion about his intentions
Michelangelo removed Christ's left leg, intending to carve a new one from a different piece of
marble, and reattach. Here we can see the hole in the groin, where Christ's new leg would have been attached.
After Michelangelo's death, another artist, Tiberio Calcagni, restored the work and reattached
the limbs of Mary Magdalene, the Virgin's fingers, Christ's left nipple, Christ's left arm and elbow, and
Christ's right arm and hand. You can clearly see here where Christ's left nipple was reattached.
The only thing that was not reattached, was Christ's left leg. To this day, the missing leg
is one of Art's great Mysteries and no-one knows what happened to it
When Michelangelo died in Rome on February the 18th 1564, at the age of 88, he was buried
in the Santi Apostoli Church in Rome. The artist however, had expressed his desire to be buried in
Florence, not Rome. And 20 days later in the middle of the night, the Florentines led by
his nephew, stole his body and had it smuggled out of the city hidden in a bale of merchandise.
He was then taken to Santa Crocé church in his beloved Florence, where his tomb is to this day.
Michelangelo Buonarotti was a difficult, complicated, and ultimately disappointed man.
We can only hope, that in his last days, the church gave him the kind of
spiritual support, that he gave to Christ... in the guise of Nicodemus.