Michelangelo Buonarroti - Michelangelos notebooks: the poetry, letters, and art of the great master

I am no painter, protested Michelangelo, recounting his travails as he slogged away at one of the most famous, and lauded, works of painting in Western civilizationthe Sistine Chapel ceiling. Yet as we all know, he was a painter, and a sculptor, and an architect.

Less well known, though, are his roles as a respected poet, with some three hundred poems to his name, and as an habitual and eloquent correspondent. Of his poems, seventy-seven are the sonnets included herefrom early works influenced by Dante and Petrarch, to impassioned entreaties to the young Tommaso de Cavalieri and protestations of spiritual love for Vittoria Colonna, to his late tortured introspections as death drew near.

Nearly five hundred letters written by him exist, of which a selection appears here. Some, to be sure, are fairly mundane, written to his father and brother, and, later, to his nephew about family matters. But he also corresponded with his friend and fellow artist, Sebastiano del Piombo, and the chronicler of artists lives Giorgio Vasari, not to mention such exalted figures as popes, dukes, and Francis I, the king of France. Even his letters about financial transactions, or shipments, or advice about marriage reveal aspects of his charactersometimes proud, sometimes cranky, sometimes discouraged, sometimes acerbic, sometimes incisively wise.

Yet, above all, he was an artist and, as an artist, he drew, and drew, and drew. He drew on fresh paper and on top of or on the backs of receipts, poems, letters hed received, and drafts of his own letters. After keeping one exquisite drawing (opposite) in his studio for twenty-five years, he folded it up only to jot lists on its back. Its as if he couldnt see a blank space without filling it, as if he lived by the advice he gave to his student Antonio Mini: Draw, Antonio, draw, Antoniodraw and dont waste time.

Somewhat paranoid, Michelangelo was convinced other artists wanted to see his drawings to learn his methods and steal his ideas. His letters include requests that his works be hidden or securely wrapped, andsadly for ushe destroyed many drawings, including throwing some onto a bonfire not long before his death. He suspected that his alleged enemiesparticularly the reviled rivals of his early career, Raphael and Bramantewere conspiring against him; even in his last years he fretted about the scandal-mongering rascals and scoundrels who spread lies about him.

Even today, Michelangelo has a reputation of having been surly, antisocial, suspicious, parsimonious, curmudgeonly, and just generally disagreeable. Yet he did have a sense of humor, as is clearly on display in his satirical letter dated December 1525 about a colossal statue of Pope Clement VII. And, as the letters show, he was fond of at least some of his family members, and he had numerous friends, many of whom were quite devoted to him.

Michelangelo lived to be eighty-nine years old, through a near-century of upheaval in politics, religion, society, and art. The Italian city-states were under constant threat of invasion, from one another in petty turf wars and from the great European powersFrance and the Holy Roman Empire with its feared German and Spanish armiesand Michelangelo, more than once, took flight to avoid impending warfare. This period also saw the rise of Martin Luther and the growing schism in Western Christianity. Yet it was also a time when artists were beginning to be seen as more than mere craftsman, and when the concept of the celebrity-artist arose. Michelangelo was hailed as a genius in his own time.

Michelangelos letters rarely discuss his theories about art. It is in his sonnets, such as Se ben concetto and Non ha lottimo artista, that he expresses his oft-quoted ideas about the making of sculpture. He believed that the original, ideal conceptconcettoof a work existed in the artists mind and, when he confronted a block of marble, his role was to uncover that image, to chip away at the stone until the work of art revealed itself. Drawings might be a way to explore and clarify the idea. The final work, though, since it is material, is forever inferior to the artists inspired conceptionone reason, perhaps, that he left so many works unfinished, their figures caught as if trying to emerge from the stone.

The sonnets appear in the 1878 translation by John Addington Symonds. (Some of Michelangelos poems are caudal sonnets, with an additional three or six lines.)

The letters are primarily from Robert W. Cardens 1913 Michelangelo: A Record of His Life as Told in His Own Letters and Papers; those of January 1, 1533, July 28, 1533, and August 1533 are from George Bulls 1987 Michelangelo: Life, Letters, and Poetry; and those of August 1, 1550 to Vasari, October 13, 1550, September 28, 1555, and December 18, 1556, are from Richard Duppas 1816 The Life of Michael Angelo Buonarroti. Also included are a few of Michelangelos Ricordi, memoranda about financial and contractual matters, which provide additional context for the letters. Text within brackets has been added for clarification either by Carden or by the present editor.

Quite a few of Michelangelos letters are dated incompletely or, for one reason or another, incorrectly. They have been sequenced here according to recent scholarship, forming a framework for the book. Many of the drawings are placed chronologically or near related works, but for varietys sake, others have been scattered throughout. Michelangelo wrote an abundance of poems from the early 1530s to the mid-1540s, fewer in other periods of his life, so to avoid congestion the sonnets have also been interspersed.