Michelangelo: A Private Life

1564, Rome.

I am still at the marble. Let that stand first, before age is mentioned, before illness is invited in with its pious face, before any tidy-minded visitor imagines that a man who has worked eighty-eight years is now chiefly to be accounted for by weakness. The Pieta behind me is not finished because I have not finished with it, and though the hands shorten the day and the wrists no longer answer with the old violence, they still answer, and while they answer the work remains under my authority and not under that of time, physicians, friends with lowered voices, or those Florentines who arrive with notebooks and reverence and the secret hope that the old man, softened by approaching death, will at last reduce his life to a sequence of principles they can carry away like relics. They want maxims. They want the hidden key. They want an orderly Michelangelo, grateful for praise, willing to be interpreted by lesser men provided they bow first. I have never been available to them in that form.

The Rondanini stands in the room behind this one, taller than a man and less resolved than my enemies would find comfortable and my admirers would call ideal, if they had enough courage to be honest. Daniele comes in after I work and watches the surface with that disciplined stillness of his, as if by refusing expression he can spare me the knowledge that the stone has begun to record my slowing. It does record it. Stone is more candid than friendship. Each pass of the rasp, each turn of the chisel, each place where I would once have driven directly and now return more cautiously, remains visible whether or not the men around me choose to name it. But the visible fact is not the whole fact. A work can move more slowly and still move more deeply. The younger hand declares itself by force. The older hand, if it has not become merely timid, cuts with another kind of ambition, one less intoxicated by display and more dangerous because it is willing to strip away even those successes by which others think the work should be recognised. The Rondanini has been losing what another sculptor would have called completion, and I have permitted the loss because the earlier certainty belonged to an earlier error, the error of thinking that an image is perfected when all its parts stand fully apart and fully legible.

Last week a visitor from Florence came armed with introductions, compliments, and the stale appetite of men who have stood too long in the company of books and too little before difficult matter. He wished me to describe my method. I let him speak long enough to hear how he meant the word. Method, to his kind, means a staircase by which talent can be climbed after the fact, a sequence of correct habits that makes greatness look procedural and therefore less offensive to the mediocre. He expected, I think, some austere kindness from me, some old-master gravity willing to open its treasury before death shuts the lid. I dismissed him. Not angrily at first. I simply told him that the method is the work and the work is the material met under compulsion, and that if he wanted instruction he should choose a stone and fail against it for twenty years before asking his next question. He smiled as if I had spoken epigram rather than plain fact. That smile remained with me after he left. It is one of the reasons I have taken up the pen these mornings when the hand cannot yet endure the hammer, because the work alone does not prevent misreading. Sometimes it incites it. A figure stands in marble and the spectator, having contributed nothing to its making, behaves as if his admiration were the final and governing event.

I do not write for admirers. They are the most faithless readers of labour because they love only what they can safely repeat to themselves about it. I write because the judgment of my life has been carried too long in other mouths, in papal inventories, in Florentine gossip, in the glib comparisons of painters, in the little economies of favour and slight by which Rome and Florence both imagine they distribute glory rather than merely react to it. I know what I made. I know what I was prevented from making. I know which men used me rightly and which merely fed on proximity. I know how often praise arrived only after resistance had failed, as if men, having first opposed what they could not understand, later claimed superior discernment because they had eventually submitted to its existence. Let them have their stories elsewhere. Here I will set down what the stone required, what the popes compelled, what rivalry sharpened, what affection altered, what the body paid, and what remains under my name because no one else had the strength to bear it.