We've reached the first crucial turning point in Michelangelo's painting career: the moment his father finally allows him to become an apprentice to the painter Ghirlandaio.
Once again the scant information we have about this 1-2 year period comes mainly from the biographers Giorgio Vasari and Ascanio Condivi -- and the few pieces they give us don't quite fit together. But it is important to find the larger picture given that what happened with Ghirlandaio helps explain what happened 20 years later when Michelangelo began painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
Let's recap: As a boy, Michelangelo dreamed of being a painter, but his father Lodovico sent him to school to become a businessman. After 5-6 years of studying letters and commercial mathematics, Michelangelo began skipping class to spend time with painters -- for which his father beat him, saying that such a career would be a disgrace to the family. Then something happened, and Lodovico changed his mind and signed a three-year contract with Domenico Ghirlandaio to teach Michelangelo how to paint.
What's mysterious is that last part, because later Michelangelo (dictating to Condivi) made no mention at all of the Ghirlandaio contract. In fact, he told everyone he never studied under Ghirlandaio. But Vasari caught Michelangelo in the lie. In his second edition of The Lives (1568), Vasari writes:
Now he who wrote Michelangelo's life after the year 1550 [Condivi],has said that some persons [Vasari]have related things that never happened, and have left out many that are worthy to be recorded. He has touched on this circumstance in particular, charging Ghirlandaio with jealousy and saying that he never offered any assistance to Michelangelo. This is clearly false, as may be seen from an entry by the hand of Lodovico, the father of Michelangelo, written in one of Ghirlandaio's books, which book is now in the possession of his heirs.
Vasari had seen the contract which said Michelangelo would stay with Ghirlandaio for three years to learn to paint and that Lodovico would be paid a total of 24 gold florins, a significant amount of money given his limited means.
So why did Michelangelo lie about his relationship with Ghirlandaio? Obviously something important happened during those 1-2 years.
It's only one of many fascinating questions that need to be examined before we can move forward. What exactly did Michelangelo learn from Ghirlandaio? Was he ever allowed to pick up a paintbrush to work on a fresco during that time, or did he suffer through the usual toil, working the equivalent of slave labor like any other first-year apprentice? And why did Michelangelo leave Ghirlandaio's workshop to become a sculptor in the San Marco garden? Whose decision was that anyway: Michelangelo's or Ghirlandaio's?
All of these questions lead to the most important question of all: Did Michelangelo choose to give up his painting dream, or at the tender young age of 14, did he run away from it?
We can't just skip over the Ghirlandaio years, the way many biographies of Michelangelo have done. If we did, we'd never be able to understand the message the artist left on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
David Clark's quest to solve the Sistine Chapel mystery started after his wife was killed shortly after they began a piece jigsaw puzzle of the ceiling. After five years of extensive research, he realized the ceiling is a brilliant diversion that hides a secret message by overwhelming the eye. Like a jigsaw puzzle it lures us to pull its hundreds of pieces together to make sense of the whole. However, its meaning cannot be found by putting the pieces together, but through finding the one piece Michelangelo left missing: the piece he lacks in his own life story.
Michelangelo's Puzzle will be told in 90 weekly pieces that when put together will reveal the meaning of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling on November 1, 2012, the 500th anniversary of the ceiling's dedication. Follow the story at http://sistinepuzzle.com/.
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