Buonarroto

Although narrow and idiosyncratic, the father is capable of showing humility, not in the face of his son's genius but of his prudence and business sense, even at the age of seventy-seven in connection with a matter (the value of a farm) about which he, the father, probably with time on his hands, may well have been better informed. We prefer the father, Ludovico, on the evidence of the letters to the favorite brother, Buonarroto, who died of the plague in 1528, it is said, in Michelangelo's arms. Also Buonarroto, in spite of his two marriages, depended upon Michelangelo's judgment, eagerly fulfilled his commissions, identifying himself as closely with the Buonarroti interests.

The morose and tortured Michelangelo mothered and, indeed, fathered this motherless, sister less, narrow family. Ludovico, the father, married again, but women seem to have played little open part in the family stresses. The first point I want to emphasize in the matter of his family, is Michelangelo's prudence, his grip upon reality in spite of a great excess of temperament. Unlike pure visionaries, artists need whatever the size of their wings, a good stance for the ground. They seek to dissipate the depression that encloses them, to restore, to revive; better than most, they have recognized the constancy of death. Michelangelo was, of course, enslaved by his art in which he has restored the whole world. It happens that he was likewise enslaved by the family circle, however short the time he could give to them, however much with another part of his mind he resented the weight they put on him. Testimony comes in a letter to Buonarroto, probably of 1513. The letter's complaint is first of Buonarroto's extravagance. Michelangelo wants to know if he is keeping an account and he recalls an occasion when Buonarroto was in Rome and he had boasted of spending large sums of his own money:

Michelangelo had not unmasked him nor, indeed, was he surprised, because he knew his brother only too well. ‘If you have enough mind to be able to contemplate the truth, you would not have said: “I spent so and so of my own money”, nor would you have come here to press me over your affairs after all that I have done in the past: you would have said instead: “Michelangelo knows what he has written to us, and if he can't do something to help at once, there must be some difficulty for him about which we know nothing: and we must be patient because it is useless to spur a horse who is running with all his might and more”. But you don't know me and have never known me.

Other Similar Companies: