Irving Stoun - The Agony and the Ecstasy

THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY

He returned to the Sistine to look at the vault with sharper eyes. The architectural structure did not accommodate his new vision. He needed a new vault, a completely different ceiling which would appear to have been constructed solely for the purpose of showing his frescoes to their best advantage. But he knew better than to return to the Pope and ask for a million ducats to tear down brick, plaster, soldiers' rooms above, solid roof beyond. Serving as his own architect, he would have to rebuild that tremendous vault with the sole material available to him: paint.

Through sheer invention he must transform the ceiling, utilizing its shortcomings even as he had the gouge in the Duccio block, to force his creative powers into channels they might not otherwise have taken. Either he was the stronger, and could displace this vault space, or the force of the vault to resist would crush him.

He was determined to get a teeming humanity up on the ceiling, as well as God Almighty who created it; mankind portrayed in its breathless beauty, its weaknesses, its indestructible strengths: God in His ability to make all things possible. He must project a throbbing, meaningful vitality that would invert the universe: the vault would become the reality, the world of those looking at it would become illusion.

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by the same author

Lust for Life

Depths of Glory

IRVING STONE

The Agony

and The Ecstasy

Reprinted in Arrow Books 1997

19 20 18

Copyright Doubleday & Company Inc. 1961

The right of Irving Stone to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser First published in the United Kingdom in 1961 by William Collins Sons & Company Methuen London edition published in 1987

This edition first published in 1989 by Mandarin Paperbacks, reprinted 15 times The eighteen lines from Ovid's Metamorphoses, translated by Horace Gregory, are reprinted by permission of the publisher. Copyright 1958 by The Viking Press Inc.

The forty-five lines from Dante's Divine Comedy, translated by Lawrence Grant White, are reprinted by permission of the publisher. Copyright 1948 by Pantheon Books.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Papers used by Random House UK Limited are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berkshire ISBN 0 7493 0175 9

THE BOOKS

One:

THE STUDIO

7

Two:

THE SCULPTURE GARDEN

63

Three:

THE PALACE

104

Four:

THE FLIGHT

188

Five:

THE CITY

278

Six:

THE GIANT

360

Seven:

THE POPE

456

Eight:

THE MEDICI

550

Nine:

THE WAR

613

Ten:

LOVE

668

Eleven:

THE DOME

715

The interested reader will find a bibliography at the back of the book, as well as acknowledgments to the Michelangelo scholars, a glossary, and a listing of places where Michelangelo's works are to be found today.

THE LOVER AND THE SCULPTOR

The best of artists hath no thought to showwhich the rough stone in its superfluous shelldoth not include; to break the marble spellis all the hand that serves the brain can do.

THE ARTIST AND HIS WORK

How can that be, lady, which all men learnby long experience? Shapes that seem alive,wrought in hard mountain marble, will survivetheir maker, whom the years to dust return!

BEAUTY AND THE ARTIST

Beauteous art, brought with us from heaven,will conquer nature; so divine a power

belongs to him who strives with every nerve.

If I was made for art, from childhood givena prey for burning beauty to devour,

I blame the mistress I was born to serve.

MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI

B O O K O N E :

The Studio

He sat before the mirror of the second-floor bedroom sketching his lean cheeks with their high bone ridges, the flat broad forehead, and ears too far back on the head, the dark hair curling forward in thatches, the amber-colored eyes wide-set but heavy-lidded.

"I'm not well designed," thought the thirteen-year-old with serious concentration. "My head is out of rule, with the forehead overweighing my mouth and chin. Someone should have used a plumb line."

He shifted his wiry body lightly so as not to waken his four brothers sleeping behind him, then cocked an ear toward the Via dell'Anguillara to catch the whistle of his friend Granacci. With rapid strokes of the crayon he began redrafting his features, widening the oval of the eyes, rounding the forehead, broadening the narrow cheeks, making the lips fuller, the chin larger. "There," he thought, "now I look better. Too bad a face can't be redrawn before it's delivered, like plans for the faade of the Duomo."

Notes of a bird's song came fluting through the ten-foot window, which he had opened to the cool morning air. He hid his drawing paper under the bolster at the head of his bed and went noiselessly down the circular stone stairs to the street.

His friend Francesco Granacci was a nineteen-year-old youth, a head taller than himself, with hay-colored hair and alert blue eyes. For a year Granacci had been providing him drawing materials and sanctuary in his parents' home across the Via dei Bentaccordi, as well as prints borrowed surreptitiously from Ghirlandaio's studio. Though the son of a wealthy family, Granacci had been apprenticed to Filippino Lippi at the age of ten, at thirteen had posed as the central figure of the resurrected youth in St.

Peter Raising the Emperor's Nephew, in the Carmine, which Masaccio had left uncompleted, and was now apprenticed to Ghirlandaio. Granacci did not take his own painting seriously, but he had a sharp eye for talent in others.

"You're really coming with me this time?" Granacci demanded excitedly.

"It's my birthday present to myself."

"Good." He took the younger boy's arm, guiding him along the curving Via dei Bentaccordi which had been built on the oval site of the old Roman colosseum, past the high walls of the prison of the Stinche. "Remember what I told you about Domenico Ghirlandaio. I've been apprenticed to him for five years, and I know him well. Be humble. He likes his apprentices to appreciate him."

By now they had turned into the Via Ghibellina, just above the Ghibellina gate which marked the limits of the second wall of the city. On their left they passed the magnificent stone pile of the Bargello, with its colorful governor's courtyard, and then, after they had turned right on the Street of the Proconsul, the Pazzi palace. The younger boy ran his hand lovingly over the irregular roughhewn blocks of its walls.