The Ugly Renaissance Read Online Free PDF

mass of daily experiences combined with beliefs, hopes, and systems of thought to produce the intellectual framework on which his art—and his broken nose—relied.

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    I N P ETER’S S HADOW
    W HAT SORT OF city did Michelangelo encounter before his fateful fight on that summer’s day in 1491?
    Although the documentary evidence for this early part of his life is comparatively sketchy, his day would certainly have started atBertoldo di Giovanni’s school in the gardens of the Piazza San Marco. Arriving there in the early morning, Michelangelo would have found it already buzzing with activity. Among the rich collection of ancient statues and the higgledy-piggledy blocks of un-carved marble sat his friends, each carving away or drawing diligently. He may have called a cheerful greeting toFrancesco Granacci—who would become a lifelong companion. Paper and chalk in hand, he would have approached Bertoldo to discuss the day’s work. Michelangelo made it clear that he intended to spend yet another day sketching at the Brancacci Chapel. Bertoldo—who appreciated the boy’s persistence but who understood the merits of good guidance—would likely have directed him to focus his attentions not on the more celebrated scenes but on one of the more compositionally challenging episodes from the cycle.Because he was already ailing from an unknown illness that would carry him to his grave only months later, it is difficult to believe that Saint Peter Healing the Sick with His Shadow ( Fig. 1 ) would not have been at the forefront of Bertoldo’s mind as he gave his advice. And so, dutifully assenting to his teacher’s counsel, Michelangelo would have set off for Santa Maria del Carmine.
    Although the peregrinations of any teenager are always hard to predict, his route throughFlorence would certainly have taken him past some of the city’s most famous landmarks. From San Marco, not far from Brunelleschi’s Ospedale degli Innocenti and the Medici family church of San Lorenzo, he would have passed his home in the Pa- lazzo Medici Riccardi, theBaptistery, and the cathedral of Santa Mariadel Fiore. Farther on was the great guild church of Orsanmichele and the Piazza della Signoria. His path would have taken him through the streets of the old city, across the Ponte Vecchio, and into the depths of Oltr’Arno before he reached his destination at Santa Maria del Carmine.
    In many ways, Michelangelo’s journey was a voyage through the history of the Renaissance itself. The buildings he would have passed are in many senses emblematic of the artistic and architectural achievements of the period. But while they are today treated very much as artifacts to be preserved and admired in pristine condition, Michelangelo would have seen them as buildings in constant use as religious, administrative, and communal structures in a living, breathing city that was the context for the art and culture of the Renaissance. Plunging into the heart of Florence, Michelangelo trod the streets in which the cultural innovations of the period emerged, and he passed visible proofs of the different influences that had conspired to drive those changes.
    After emerging as independent states following the collapse of imperial authority in the early eleventh century, the city-republics and despotisms of northern Italy had cultivated new cultural forms geared toward the celebration and preservation of autonomous self-government. The elegance of classical Latin was studied and imitated by the highly educated bureaucrats who handled the ever-increasing burden of legislation, taxation, and diplomacy.Public officials like the FlorentinesColuccio Salutati andLeonardo Bruni mined the ancient classics for a rhetoric of “republicanism,” while their counterparts in despotic states looked to the literature of the Roman Empire for models of illustrious princes. Particularly in the struggle to protect their independence from other states, the cities consciously fostered a sense of