The ‘Michelangelo Buonarroti, Florentine, Painter, Sculptor and Architect’ of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives, the only living artist to be included in this compendious work, at one time or another denied he was any of the above, except ‘Florentine’.
The only formal training he ever received was as a painter. But when Julius II called on him to fresco the Sistine chapel ceiling, the self-taught sculptor claimed he was unqualified for the task, recommending Raphael. When in 1546 Paul IV sought his advice on the Vatican’s defences, we find the artist maintaining that, while he ‘knew little of sculpture or painting’, fortifications were indeed very much his occupation. This bizarre affectation of ignorance was primarily a sarcastic salvo directed at his rival consultant Antonio da Sangallo, scion of Europe’s leading military engineering dynasty. Michelangelo added that he knew more about building bastions than ‘Sangallo and his whole family put together’.
In the same year, after over 30 years of designing monumental altar pieces, tombs, chapels, façades, a library and a square, Michelangelo was summoned by Paul to complete the plans and execution of St Peter’s; he initially refused, saying that ‘architecture was not his art’.
Michelangelo had a pathological fear of being categorised.
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