If you leave out writers and composers, there are only two serious contenders for title of greatest artist in history: Michelangelo and Leonardo. They tie for the title of greatest painter; Michelangelo is in sole possession for the title of greatest sculptor. In fact only one Leonardo sculpture exists; a small wax model for a much larger sculpture that Leonardo never finished. Michelangelo, however, edges Leonardo for the title of most likely not to finish what he started.
Leonardo’s notebooks are, of course, stuffed with projects never carried out, and three of his most famous paintings—Milan’s Portrait of a Musician, The Adoration of the Magi and Saint Jerome are all unfinished. But he couldn’t hold a candle to Michelangelo in incompletion. In fact, virtually none of Michelangelo’s greatest works is finished.
The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and the Last Judgment beneath it are both finished, of course. So is the “David”, which is an immature work and (to be frank) overrated. Sitting in front of the David, in the Florence “Academia” is Michelangelo’s sculpture of St. Matthew—a much greater work, even though St. Matthew is still halfway inside his block of stone: the half-St. Matthew has ten times the life and energy of the cold, dead David. Surrounding the St. Matthew are Michelangelo’s four unfinished “Prisoners,” missing hands, legs, feet— a head—but each among the ten or fifteen greatest sculptures in the world; remarkably vital, contorting, struggling bodies, seeming to fight off the stone they’re enveloped by.
Then there’s Michelangelo’s second “David”—a much later, much smaller, much livelier and much better sculpture than David #1. It’s so inchoate that sometimes it’s identified as a statue of Apollo. “The Genius of Victory” is a statue of two figures, a young man—anthropomorphic Victory—who stands over an old, weary, vanquished foe. The foe is rough and unfinished, but you can take that as an intentional counterpoint to the polished Victory figure. There’s the Rondonini Pieta, which is, after the Last Supper, the greatest artwork in Milan, and which leaves Jesus and Mary without facial features, fingers or hair, and with only three arms between them. It’s still a breathtaking sculpture, known for thin, stretched out figures that are almost Giacomettian. And in Michelangelo’s defense, he died while he was working on it.
Just before he started work on the Rondonini Pieta, Michelangelo spent 8 years working on the Florence Pieta. It’s also called “The Deposition,” showing Christ’s descent from the cross; it’s a very, very strange sculpture, and it’s the greatest sculpture ever made. It’s a statue of four figures: Jesus, held up by Nicodemus behind him, Mary to his left and Mary Magdalene to his right. Michelangelo began work on it when he was 72, as a way of staying sharp and fit. He imagined it would someday sit on his tomb. After 8 years of working on it, he lost his temper with an unsightly vein in the marble, and smashed it to bits. Specifically, he took a hammer and smashed off Jesus’s arm, leg, and part of his chest.
Michelangelo didn’t die for another decade, but he never touched the Florence Pieta again. Even then, a Michelangelo was worth its weight in money, and Michelangelo gave the sculpture as a gift to one of his servants, who sold it to a collector, who hired a young sculptor named Tiberio Calcagni to repair it.
Calcagni reassembled and reattached Jesus’s arm. The leg was beyond hope, so the figure remains one-legged. Calcagni reattached Jesus’s left pectoral muscle, and then did something so unforgivable his name lives forever in infamy:
The Florence Pieta shows an almost impossible pose of Jesus collapsing onto his mother as Nicodemus holds him by the arms and Mary Magdalene reaches for his legs. Jesus’s face show’s an exhausted man at peace. Mary’s face is almost not there—it was barely carved—and still conveys a peculiar kind of serene anguish. Nicodemus’s face is one of extreme tenderness: it is rough and not-quite finished; it is the greatest face ever sculpted; it is a self-portrait of Michelangelo. You can stare up at in and imagine the man himself is staring back at you, which—really—can make you shiver. Mary Magdalene has a totally blank expression, and is much smaller than the other figures, because Calcagni decided he would finish Michelangelo’s work, and that involved so many mistakes and corrections and cuts that the final figure is lilliputian, dead, and hideous. It’s also polished, unlike the rest of the sculpture. The sculpture, however, is so remarkable that even this heart-breaking eye sore can’t ruin it.
Just about the only first-rate Michelangelo sculpture that’s truly complete is his Moses—another sculpture Michelangelo struck with his hammer: when he finished it, he smacked it on the knee and shouted, “now talk!” A small scar from the incident remains. The Moses was meant to be part of a monumental tomb for Pope Julius II, which was meant to be adorned by at least a dozen sculptures that Michelangelo never even started, along with Moses, Rachel and Leah, which he finished, and several incomplete statues—including the aforementioned Prisoners.
Michelangelo was always hard to pin down, frequently depressed, frequently flighty. He also tended to fight with people; in his childhood, his nose was crushed by a fellow art student whom he insulted. Michelangelo’s famously flat nose appears in every portrait of him. At least once, he fled from Florence to Rome, fearing for his life, and at least once, fearing for his life, from Rome to Florence.
But Michelangelo’s flighty inability to finish things wasn’t just confined to his own work. He actually infected other people and kept them from finishing their work. The two greatest painting that would ever have been made weren’t: a monumental fresco of The Battle of Anghiari on one wall of the great hall in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio; a monumental fresco of the Battle of Cascina on the other; the former to be painted by Leonardo, the latter by Michelangelo. They both started in 1504, and both stopped in 1505, when Michelangelo decided to go back to Rome, and Leonardo’s paint began to flake.
I’m not sure you can blame Michelangelo for Leonardo’s paint flaking, but you can blame him for ruining Florence’s cathedral. The Duomo, one of the five most famous buildings in the world, is incomplete. The Duomo‘s dome is octagonal; between the dome and the drum the dome sits on is a large strip of dull, exposed brick and masonry — except for one of the eight sides, facing south east, where the brick work is covered by an intricate marble balustrade.
The balustrade was designed by Baccio D’Agnolo. When it was 1/8th finished, Florence’s elders asked Michelangelo—still a young man but already a revered artist—what he thought of it. He said, “it looks like a cricket cage,” and all work ceased. So 500 years later it’s still unfinished, which—frankly—makes the whole building look a little silly.
This is my point: Deference to Michelangelo is appropriate, and commendable. He has a strong association with unfinished works, and admittedly, unfinished artwork has a certain je ne sais quoi about it. Michelangelo himself might have been the greatest architects who ever lived. But this isn’t Michelangelo’s work, it looks stupid, and it’s been 500 years. Actually, 510 years. Even taking Italy’s post-Roman work ethic into account, that’s too long.
Finish the balustrade, finish the building. Make Florence Great Again.
