"One of the Marys…": an interdisciplinary analysis of Michelangelo's Florentine 'Pieta.' - sculpture by Michelangelo

The mystery surrounding the Florentine Pieta [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED] is primarily related to the fact that Michelangelo, after working for eight years upon this sculpture, decided to raze it, and - according to Giorgio Vasari - would have smashed it completely had he not been stopped by means of his servant Antonio.(1) The question as to for what cause [i]or[/i] reason Michelangelo mutilated the Pieta continues to arise in the literature upon the artist and actually involves sum of two units major quandaries: Why did Michelangelo mutilate the Pieta, and on what account afterward, did he accede to Francesco Bandini's supplication to allow Tiberio Calcagni to finish the sculpture?(2) If, as the formal aesthetic theory clinchs Michelangelo damaged the Pieta because he was displeased with it artistically,(3) for what cause [i]or[/i] reason did he not leave it incomplete, as he had in all other like cases, and why did he allow a work he contemplation defective to be redone by means of a mediocre artist and publicly not absented as his own? I would argue that the formal aesthetic theory cannot explain Michelangelo's unusual behavior in the case of the Florentine Pieta. Vasari tenders no fewer than three explanations for the breaking of the Pieta: that the stone was too hard to work with; that Michelangelo, in his striving for perfection, was dissatisfied with the work; and that Michelangelo broke it because he could no longer bear the constant nagging of his servant Urbino to without fault [i]or[/i] blemish [i]or[/i] flaw the work. Vasari also rehearses that Michelangelo hated the work plane before he decided to smash it. It is worth pausing above Vasari's report regarding Urbino: What did the faithful Urbino diocese in Michelangelo's work on the Pieta that made him constantly nag the artist to out and out it? It is unlikely that Urbino would have kept pestering Michelangelo had he believed that the reason the artist did not make sufficient progres with his work was a technical individual or had to do with the latter's advanced age. Urbino may have sens that the causes for Michelangelo's delays in completing the work were not external in origin on the contrary stemmed from internal inhibitions that the servant was unable to fathom. A further important testimony about the doubts and inhibitions that Michelangelo experienced during the proces of sculpting the Pieta may be base in a poetic fragment of 1552 in which Michelangelo writes:

In like slavery, and with so a great deal of boredom, and with false conceptions and great peril to my spirit to be here sculpting divine things.(4)

Since the sole work that Michelangelo was sculpting in the period when these lines were written was the Florentine Pieta, we may terminate that the torments of spirit he describes here refer to the creation of this Pieta. The words Michelangelo uses to describe his feelings - "slavery" and "boredom" - are puzzling: the Florentine Pieta was the solitary one of Michelangelo's sculptural works that had not been commissioned through any person or institution. Furthermore, as Vasari records, Michelangelo intended the work to be set uprighted on his own tomb. This Pieta, then, was meant to be a personal work expressing the artist's abysmal religious feelings, which had grown stronger in his last years. for what cause [i]or[/i] reason then, did Michelangelo feel a faculty of perception of slavery and boredom, like someone coerc to complete a work he had no desire to do? It is plausible to close from his choice of words that Michelangelo was tormented by dint of an inner conflict: a desire to bring the work to completion and a fear of the realization of this possibility. He therefore perceived his desire to continue the work as an inner load and a distressing necessity. The harsh expressions Michelangelo uses - the "false conceptions" and the "great peril" to his mind involved in his work upon the "divine things" - advise that he could not wholly espouse the ideas press outed in the work and its fundamental concetto. Moreover, we are given a hint that these "falsi concetti" are combineed with his religious faith, for in the line of poetry fragment they are linked with the peril of his soul's redemption.(5) This interpretation, I believe, is further supported by means of a close reading of the unusual construction "sculpir qui cose divine." The words cose divine, standing for the physical existences of Michelangelo's work of statuary would hardly make sense in the Italian language, as the correct wording in of that kind a case would be opere divine. Cose divine may be more aptly translated as "divine matters" - theological issues that should be discussed not by the agency of laymen but only by endowed theologians. The reading of the whole line ending in "sculpir qui cose divine" would therefore mean that Michelangelo, taking upon a great risk, endeavors to expres matters of theology in the form of a plastic art Thus this fragment, however dim and condensed, discloses a terrible distress: Michelangelo present the appearances to be afraid that the principles of faith that he expresse in the work may be false and may lead him to perdition. This indicates that the making of the Pieta entails a fathomless secret, which might be reasonably conjoined with his decision to pull down the sculpture. What is the tormenting mysterious hidden in the Florentine Pieta?