It is easy to forget when looking celestially upward at the dizzying brilliance of the Sistine Chapel’s myriad ceiling panels that Michelangelo was at one time a complete and total hack.
At a recent exhibition at the British Museum, the public was invited for the very first time to examine the so-called genius’s early notebooks. A placard suggested that had
Michelangelo known these preliminary noodlings would be exhibited, he would have been horrified and enraged. No man wants to be seen in his underwear, and in the case of Michelangelo it’s all too clear that in the early years of 1475 to 1505 the dude was desperately in need of more practice.
One oversized parchment notebook was filled with eyes. Just eyes. Sketch after sketch after sketch. Opened, closed, lids half-mast, long eyelashes, short eyelashes, iris, cornea, capillaries criss-crossing the whites like an ice-skating surface.
Then ears. All ears. Scratched out in various stages of non-polish and for as many of them as there were most of them kind of sucked. A majority were drawn in haste, others simply abandoned. There were literally hundreds of these repetitive anatomical studies, all sucking really badly.
(Disclosure: I can’t draw or paint to save my life, but so what? I can’t play the harpsichord either, but I know if someone who is, shouldn’t be, so back off.)
The abdominal studies were abominable. There was a crowd around it, but I merely glanced. If the man couldn’t be bothered to draw a head and legs, a nice set of buttocks, then why should I be bothered to look?
How many poorly drawn pairs of hands are we supposed to find interesting? Page and pages of them? How about feet? Or Adam’s apples, scapulae, pelvic bones: all barely presentable. There was not a single completed drawing in the entire exhibit– I wanted my 9 pounds 50 back.
Still, the hoi poloi ooh’d and ahh’d and lined up to get in. But I, the wise if ugly America, strolled through without removing my iPod, formulating my own opinion: that Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (gimmie a break with the four names) was not only not perfect from birth, but at times, an impetuous scribbler, amateur draftsman and as evidenced by the notebooks, a flat-out quitter.
According to exhibit literature, he was born into an impoverished middle class family, (basically, anyone who had less than the Medici’s), and he didn’t start his apprenticeship with Ghirlandaio until he was 12 years old. What the hell he did up till then is a mystery. Most real geniuses—Mozart– was touring internationally at 5.
Then, in 1501, claiming he was “self taught” and ready for the real world, ambitious Mich, as close friends addressed him, left for Florence. It was there where he made the David. Volumes have been written about this sculpture, and granted, it is impressive… maybe the finest ass in all of marble.
But anyone able to spend that much time on that particular part of the body, has to be half a fairy. Not that there’s anything wrong it, or full fairiness for that matter, but just say so, and be done with it.
Instead, we hear about how inspired he was by some gal in a covenant named Vittoria, and their ostensibly “spiritual” relationship. His ”physical” relationship was with a hairy dude named Tommaso, who apparently didn’t love him back. But this was a family exhibit, so all the really juicy personal history was sufficiently white washed.
Freud was the first to purport that the truly epic artists were repressed homosexuals. His essay on da Vinci goes so far as to claim that Leonardo would have been a hack too had he actualized his sexual drives. Instead, he was forced to sublimate them, and in so doing, became an obsessional neurotic of the highest order: if he could not have a boyfriend in real life, he could at the very least sculpt his ideal in clay.
At one point, Mich was commissioned along with Leonardo da Vinci to paint a wall of battle drawings celebrating a famous Florentine victory, but after making a few preparatory sketches, he dropped the project. He claimed he’d been “summoned” by Pope Julius II to Rome to paint the inside of his tomb. What a Pope was doing with a tomb we have no idea. Chalk it up to yet another shady chapter in Catholicism’s sordid history when Pope’s thought they were pharaohs or somesuch.
Either way, it took Mich around 40 years to finish the crypt. As I’ve already stated, I’m no painter, but gimmie 30 years, and I’ll come damn close to whatever it was he did, I assure you. I haven’t seen it, mind you… I prefer museums to mausoleums.
It just goes to show you that even back then it was all about who you knew. After the tomb job, and several other under-documented hang-outs with high church officials, Pope Julius asked Mich to paint the ceiling of his chapel. Not inquiring about the details, Mich says sure.
Another anecdote unfortunately wiped from the exhibit was about when Mich shows up on day one with overalls, a drop cloth and a 3-pack of paint rollers, assuming as most Renaissance painters would, he was doing his Holiness a favor slapping a coat on the old church ceiling.
When he saw the 12,000 square feet of segmented, bowing roof surface, he said fuck this (in Latin) and walked out. Two bishops ran after him, laughing their mitres off, and explained that what the Pope really wanted were angels and saints, and God, if he was bold enough to take a crack at the big guy. They said take as much time as you need, though forty years was on the long side cause the Pope was on his way out and wanted to see what he was dropping all the church’s denarii for. The Chapel ended up being closed four years for “renovations”. A lot of empty prayer baskets his Holiness had to suck up.
Why the Pope wanted Mich so badly no one knows. There were legions of talented Italians, including Leo Da Vinci, who had more experience with frescos. But Mich got the commission and rode it to five centuries of celebrity, all while having shouting matches with the Head of the Catholic church about how to depict the all-being master of time space and dimension, like he knew better.
A simulated re-creation at the exhibit showed the order the ceiling was painted in. But it also shattered the legend that Michelangelo painted most of it on his back. The brush strokes reveal it was probably painted standing, forever ruining The Agony and The Ecstasy, Charlton Heston’s epic Michelangelo role.
Of course, Mich struggled with the 40-meter ceiling like you’d imagine a procrastinating, temperamental, non-painter would, and as he did in the past, walked off the job.
History books claim he left over artistic quarrels, but after seeing these books, it’s clear hadn’t a clue what to cover all the white space with. At one point, he told a phalanx of assistant to “fill it up with clouds and shit,” (In Latin).
Strolling around the exhibit was illuminating to say the least. We are tought to believe Michelangelo was one of the great tortured geniuses of all time, but what I saw was a little brat who had enough leisure time to fill up hundreds of notebooks with feeble practice sketches. Save a few things like the David and the Sistine Chapel, the guy was basically faking it.
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America has taken its share of lumps from the rest of the world as of late, and like all things American, they were extremely well earned, if not paid for in advance.
In the last ten years, we’ve authored wars, shaken the worlds economic foundation, backed out of global environmental commitments, and led in environmental disasters. Everyone loves to see a champion fall. 
As American superpowerdom wanes, snarky Europe prepares to celebrate. They’ve been through it before; the Greeks had their Gods renamed by the Romans and credit stolen for flat pita bread covered with tomato and cheese, olive oil and oregano.
The French fell to the Germans after centuries of fending off the Gauls. They were on a role with Napoleon there for a while. How they became the Continents’ great capitulators is a mystery sometimes attribute to de Gaulle’s close cropped moustache. even on the soccer field, no one takes a dive like the French.
The Brits were betrayed by the US after raising them from infancy. Instead of a thank you, we drank coffee instead of tea, and turned cricket into baseball. India and Africa followed our revolt. So sorry, ole chap.
Maybe for once, the fallen empire will have the last laugh. Not from any re-emergence to power, but simply because the next champion will be so intensely awful, the world will wish that the last ass were back in driver’s seat. It is a possibility when China’s behind the wheel.
I’m sorry was I proselytizing? No matter. We’ll all be doing their laundry soon enough, if we’re lucky… Others will be laying railroad track across their western frontier, just as they did on ours. It’s a land with innumerable demands.
