‘Made-to-order’ bronze statues reveal the fun side of Michelangelo
Mark Hudson takes a close look at two bronzes, as scholars confirm they are definitely by the great artist
That Michelangelo (1475-1564) is one of the greatest sculptors of all time goes without saying. Yet all his greatest sculptural works – from immaculately finished early pieces such as David to the deliberately rough-hewn final Pietà – are in marble. The thought that this unique artist had a parallel career working in bronze, a material that would have revealed a very different side to the artist, has haunted artists and art historians alike for centuries. Which makes the Fitzwilliam Museum’s claim this week that two Michelangelo bronzes have survived, a thrilling one.
Where figures in marble are created by a process of chiselling from the stone block, bronze figures are first moulded in clay, by hand in a much more immediate fashion. Where marble is cold and inert, bronze, with its reflective surface, can simulate the warmth and plasticity of human flesh in a way that has kept it at the forefront of artistic endeavour since the 15th century.
All of Michelangelo’s works in bronze, however, were previously believed to have been long since lost or destroyed. The largest, a 4m statue of his great patron, Pope Julius II, was smashed to pieces in 1511 by an anti-papal mob. If scholars have expended endless imaginative energy in trying to picture what this work might have looked like, the two works announced as being newly attributable to Michelangelo may give us our first view in centuries into a lost part of the oeuvre of the greatest artist of the Renaissance.
Two densely muscled bacchants – followers of Bacchus, god of wine
– sit astride panthers, raising an arm triumphantly. Each work is about a metre high. While these works, known as the Rothschild bronzes and made in the early 1500s, are without doubt superbly skilful, your initial impression is that these are not so much milestones as curiosities: evidence that Michelangelo was capable of producing not only epic statements, but what look like baroque table ornaments.
Whoever created these works had clearly never seen a real panther. That’s hardly surprising in 16th-century Italy, but there’s a generic, almost cartoonlike look to the near-identical, fang-baring faces that doesn’t tally with our idea of Michelangelo as an artist who wanted to see and express everything anew. The human faces, equally, have a classical-sculpture-to-order look.
It’s in the bodies, however, both human and animal, that they excel. There’s a typically Michelangeloesque heroic quality to the male figures, not just in the extraordinary detail with which the muscles knot together, but in the sense of scale. Looking at the back of the younger figure close up, the rhythm of the musculature has a fabulously mobile energy. Seen at lifesize these would be awe-inspiring.
When we come to a work by Michelangelo, we’re looking for something that is unique, that couldn’t have been created by “anyone else”. That isn’t quite what we get here. That doesn’t mean, given the collaborative nature of Renaissance art, that they aren’t essentially by him. But they feel very much of their time: a time when the elite – for whom Michelangelo worked – were filling their palaces with works such as these, designed to provoke many possible interpretations: do these men represent the innocent and mature sides of homosexual love, as has been claimed? Or the new golden age that Julius II was supposedly ushering in, as the Fitzwilliam experts believe.
To me, they feel like conversation pieces: designed to be fun. The “fun side” of Michelangelo. Now that feels quite a revelation in its own right.