Michelangelo painted the Sistine ceiling in buon fresco, which means water ground pigment laid into fresh wet lime plaster. The plaster only stays workable for a few hours, so the vault went up one patch at a time and each patch had to be carried from start to finish that day. Nothing could be corrected afterwards. That is why the drawing came first: chalk studies from a hired model, then a full size cartoon, then the outline pushed through onto the wet plaster before a brush was loaded. He designed his own scaffold, sent the Florentine painters he had hired back home inside the first weeks, and finished it alone.
Finish today's patch today, because tomorrow it is stone
Painted the vault in buon fresco, water ground pigment into fresh wet lime, so only as much plaster went up each morning as one day of painting would reach, and the unpainted edge was cut away at nightfall.
Why it matters · Wet lime cures into a kind of limestone and locks the color into the wall as the crystal forms. That makes the color permanent and it makes revision impossible, so every decision has to be taken before the plaster goes up rather than found on the surface. A painter who has never worked to a hard drying clock does not know how much of their process is really postponement.
Giorgio Vasari, Life of Michelagnolo Buonarroti, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, de Vere translation, 1568 — Vasari records the cartoons made first, the Roman lime and pozzolana that bloomed with mould after the first third, and the a secco finishing he wanted and never applied.
The Libyan Sibyl on the vault of the Sistine Chapel. Her head, her shoulders and her hips all face different ways, both arms are up behind her head and the weight is on one foot, and every part of that twist had to be right in the drawing first, because the plaster she is painted into set the same evening it went up.
Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Libyan Sibyl, ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Vatican City, 1508 to 1512. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.
Settle the figure in chalk before any plaster goes up
Worked each figure out on paper in red and black chalk from a live model, then carried the resolved drawing to the wall at full size on a cartoon and pushed the outline through onto the wet intonaco.
Why it matters · The drawing problem and the painting problem are different problems, and fresco will not let you solve them at the same time. Solving the twist, the foreshortening and the weight on paper means the day on the scaffold is spent painting rather than deciding. The paper is where the mistakes are cheap.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, object record 24.197.2, Studies for the Libyan Sibyl — Red chalk with small accents of white chalk on the left shoulder of the main study, circa 1510 to 1511, sheet 28.9 by 21.4 cm.
Studies for the Libyan Sibyl, red chalk on a sheet about twenty nine by twenty one centimetres. The big study is the back and shoulders. Around it he went back for the parts that would not come: the left foot and its toes at the bottom, the shoulder again at the right, the hand twice, and a small seated figure at the top.
Michelangelo Buonarroti, Studies for the Libyan Sibyl (recto), circa 1510 to 1511, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 24.197.2, Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1924. Public domain (CC0), Wikimedia Commons.
Draw the man, then paint the woman
Posed a male model for the Libyan Sibyl and worked the whole twist out on his back and shoulders, then painted a woman into the same pose on the vault.
Why it matters · The model is not the subject. He was after the mechanics of a body turning under load, and he took those from whoever was in the room, then changed everything else at the wall. Copying the model exactly is a habit that keeps a painter from ever inventing a figure.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, object record 24.197.2, Studies for the Libyan Sibyl — The main study on the sheet is a male torso; the figure on the ceiling is a woman.
Darken by changing the hue, not by adding black
Turned a drapery into shadow by shifting it to a different color rather than by dulling it, so an orange runs to yellow in the light and to deep red in the dark, and a pink runs to near white and then to rose.
Why it matters · This is the move that keeps a shadow from going dead. Adding black to a color kills it twice, once in value and once in chroma. Changing the hue instead lets the shadow stay a real color while it drops in value. Fresco forced the habit on him, because the lime palette will not take many of the darkeners an oil painter reaches for, and he then carried it onto panel where he did not have to.
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Doni Tondo, Inv. 1890 no. 1456, tempera on panel, 120 cm — The Sistine vault carries the same shifts, and the panel is where they can be read at arm's length.
Lay the flesh in green before the flesh color
Underpainted flesh with a flat green layer in tempera and brought the color up over it afterwards, a stage normally buried and visible on the Manchester Madonna only because he stopped.
Why it matters · Flesh sitting on a cool green underlayer reads warmer than the same flesh on white, because the eye judges a color against what it is next to and what shows through it. The unfinished panel is worth more to a painter than a finished one, because it stops on the stage nobody normally gets to see.
The National Gallery, London, NG809, The Virgin and Child with Saint John and Angels, known as the Manchester Madonna — The Gallery records the picture as unfinished: the black modelling of the Virgin's cloak never got its coat of ultramarine, and the angels at the left were barely begun.
The Manchester Madonna, tempera on wood, left unfinished. The two angels at the left are still flat green with the drawn outline showing through and no flesh color on top. The two at the right are finished, so the same panel holds the stage and the result side by side.
Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Virgin and Child with Saint John and Angels (the Manchester Madonna), circa 1497, The National Gallery, London, NG809. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.
Build your own scaffold when the one you are handed is wrong
Refused Bramante's platform, which hung on ropes dropped through holes pierced in the vault, and asked what was to be done about the holes when the painting reached them.
Why it matters · The support decides what the work can be. A scaffold that puts holes in the surface you are about to paint is not a small inconvenience, it is a defect you will have to paint around forever. He built one that stood on props off the walls instead, and Condivi says it was arranged so that the more weight it carried the firmer it got.
Ascanio Condivi, Life of Michelangelo, 1553, Charles Holroyd translation, London, Duckworth, 1903, 1903 — Vasari tells the same story. The two accounts differ on the surplus rope: Vasari says the carpenter sold it and made up a dowry for his daughter, Condivi says it dowered two.
Throw the help off the job and finish it alone
Sent to Florence for experienced fresco painters, set them to work as a trial, then threw everything they had done to the ground one morning, shut himself in the chapel and would not open the door to them.
Why it matters · Fresco cannot be corrected, so a passage that is not good enough has to come off the wall entirely. That is the honest version of a standard he could not compromise on. It also cost him: Vasari says he carried the rest of the vault by himself, without even anyone to grind his colors.
Giorgio Vasari, Life of Michelagnolo Buonarroti, de Vere translation, 1568 — Vasari names them: Granaccio, Giuliano Bugiardini, Jacopo di Sandro, the elder Indaco, Agnolo di Donnino and Aristotile. They went back to Florence in shame.
Keep the compasses in the eyes, not in the hand
Made his figures nine, ten and even twelve heads tall, on the argument that the harmony belongs to the whole assembled figure and not to any measurement nature actually supplies.
Why it matters · Measuring gets a painter to accuracy and stops there. He was after a figure that holds together when you stand back, which is a judgement and not a number. Vasari gives the reasoning in his own words: the hands work and the eye judges.
Giorgio Vasari, Life of Michelagnolo Buonarroti, de Vere translation, 1568 — Vasari reports it as his standing saying, and adds that he used the same method in architecture.
Burn the drawings so nobody sees the labour
A little before he died he burned a great number of designs, sketches and cartoons, so that no one might see the work they had cost him.
Why it matters · Thousands of sheets went into the twenty or so surviving paintings, and he did not want the arithmetic known. It is worth naming plainly, because the impression of effortlessness that every young painter measures themselves against was in his case manufactured on purpose, by a man who had spent forty years failing on paper first.
Giorgio Vasari, Life of Michelagnolo Buonarroti, de Vere translation, 1568 — Vasari says he did it so he might not appear less than perfect, and kept some sheets found in Florence in his own book of drawings.
Studio
Light
Whatever the room gave him. On the Sistine vault he worked roughly twenty metres above the chapel floor, on his own scaffold, with the windows below him and the surface he was painting directly overhead.
Position
Standing, head tipped back, one arm up. Vasari says he laboured with his face upwards; Condivi says he painted so long with his eyes turned upwards that afterwards he could hardly see anything looking down.
Working distance
Arm's length from wet plaster. He did not see the vault whole from the floor until the scaffold came down, and the Pope had the first half thrown open before it was finished.
Session length
One giornata at a time. The intonaco went up each morning only as far as that day would reach, and the unpainted edge was cut away at nightfall. The second half of the vault took twenty months and was uncovered on the morning of All Saints' Day 1512.
Tools
A scaffold of his own design, standing on props off the walls, touching the vault nowhere · Full size cartoons, the drawing carried to the wall at final scale · Red chalk and black chalk for the studies · Brushes for pigment ground in plain water, laid into fresh lime
Notes
The sonnet he sent Giovanni da Pistoja from the scaffold is the best account of the working conditions we have from anyone: the goitre, the beard turned up at heaven, the nape jammed against the spine, and the brush overhead dripping onto his face.
Source: Ascanio Condivi, Life of Michelangelo, 1553, Charles Holroyd translation, 1903 — The scaffold, the ruined near sight and the payment; Vasari supplies the twenty months and the All Saints' Day unveiling. [link]
Palette
Ground
On the vault, fresh lime intonaco, spread one day's patch at a time over the rough undercoat and painted while still damp. Vasari names the mix that caused him trouble: Roman lime made from travertine, which dries slowly, cut with tawny pozzolana.
Colors
Ultramarine, ground lapis lazuli, the dearest pigment on the market. It will not hold in wet lime, so it goes on dry, and on both the Sistine vault and The Entombment it is the color that never arrived.
Medium
Buon fresco on the vault: pigment ground in plain water and painted into fresh wet lime, which binds the color into the wall as the lime cures back into a kind of limestone. On panel, tempera. The Uffizi records the Doni Tondo as tempera on panel and the National Gallery records the Manchester Madonna as tempera on wood.
Source: Giorgio Vasari, Life of Michelagnolo Buonarroti, 1568, de Vere translation; Galleria degli Uffizi Inv. 1890 no. 1456; The National Gallery, London, NG790 and NG809 — The public domain sources name the binder, the plaster mix and the ultramarine but do not give a pigment by pigment palette for him, so those slots are left empty rather than guessed.
Workflow, from blank canvas
1. Chalk studies from a live model
Each figure worked out on paper in red or black chalk, with the parts that would not come, a foot, a hand, a shoulder, drawn again separately on the same sheet.
Why: Fresco gives no second chance, so the twist and the weight have to be solved where a mistake costs a sheet of paper instead of a wall.
2. The cartoon, at full size
The resolved figure redrawn on paper at the scale it will be painted.
Why: A drawing that works at hand size can fall apart at four metres. Making the cartoon full size is the only way to find that out before the plaster is up.
3. Transfer onto the fresh plaster
The cartoon held against the wet intonaco and the outline pushed through, either by pouncing charcoal through pricked holes or by tracing the contour with a stylus so it prints into the soft surface.
Why: The day starts with the drawing already on the wall. Nothing about placement is being decided while the plaster is going off.
4. One day's patch, carried to a finish
Water ground pigment laid into the damp lime and worked until the section is done, then the unpainted edge cut away along a natural line before the plaster sets.
Why: The lime is curing the whole time and the color binds into it as it goes. Once it sets, the passage is stone and the only correction is a chisel.
5. The parts wet lime will not take
Anything the plaster could not carry, ultramarine above all, reserved for a dry pass afterwards.
Why: The alkali in wet lime destroys a long list of pigments. Splitting the work into what the wall will hold and what it will not is a material decision, not a stylistic one, and on the vault the dry pass never happened.
How they studied
He was paid to train, not charged for it. Vasari copied the entry out of Domenico Ghirlandaio's own book of accounts and printed it: on the first day of April 1488 Lodovico Buonarroti placed his son with Domenico and David di Tommaso di Currado for three years, to learn to paint and to exercise that vocation, and the brothers were bound to give him twenty four florins of full weight across the three, six the first year, eight the second and ten the third. What a Florentine fresco shop taught was the whole trade in order, from grinding pigment up to drawing, and Ghirlandaio was running the biggest fresco commission in the city at the time. Vasari says that one day, with Domenico out, the boy sat and drew the staging, the desks and the young men working on it from life, and that Domenico came back, looked at it, and said this boy knows more about it than I do. He left inside about a year for Lorenzo de' Medici's garden at San Marco, where Bertoldo di Giovanni, an old pupil of Donatello, had charge of the antiques. The rest he set himself. He borrowed an engraving of Saint Anthony beaten by devils from his friend Granacci and painted a copy of it, and Condivi says he would not color a single monster without going to look at the real thing first, so he went to the fish market and studied the scales, the fins and the color of the eyes. Then he spent months in the Carmine drawing after Masaccio, which is where the weight in his figures comes from.
Martin Schongauer, Saint Anthony Tormented by Demons, the engraving Granacci lent him. Everything in it is line: the wings, the scales and the hides are all built out of hatching cut into copper, and there is no color anywhere to copy.
Martin Schongauer, Saint Anthony Tormented by Demons, circa 1470 to 1475, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 41.1.28. Public domain (CC0), Wikimedia Commons.
The Torment of Saint Anthony, his copy of that engraving, painted at about thirteen and now the earliest painting given to him. He followed Schongauer's group closely and invented everything the print could not tell him: the color of a fin, the sheen on a scale, the pale green sky, and a whole river landscape underneath that is not in the engraving at all.
Michelangelo Buonarroti (attributed), The Torment of Saint Anthony, circa 1487 to 1488, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, AP 2009.01. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.
Masaccio, The Tribute Money in the Brancacci Chapel, the wall Vasari says he drew from for many months. Every figure stands on its own weight with one light coming from one side, and that is the thing he took out of the room and used for the next seventy years.
Masaccio, The Tribute Money (detail), circa 1424 to 1428, Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.
Source: The 1488 contract terms, the drawing of the staging at Santa Maria Novella, the Medici garden under Bertoldo, the Schongauer copy and the months of drawing after Masaccio in the Carmine: Giorgio Vasari, Life of Michelagnolo Buonarroti, 1568, Gaston du C. de Vere translation. The fish market and the refusal to color a monster without the natural object in front of him: Ascanio Condivi, Life of Michelangelo, 1553, Charles Holroyd translation, 1903, pages 7 and 8. Medium, date, dimensions and holding museum for each figure: read from the museum record through the Commons file.
Up close
Detail of the Libyan Sibyl sheet: the back and the shoulder are built out of short chalk strokes laid across one another, with the darkest note driven in under the shoulder blade. The line of the arm is drawn twice and the stronger one left standing, which is the drawing deciding where the form actually turns.
Michelangelo Buonarroti, Studies for the Libyan Sibyl (detail), circa 1510 to 1511, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 24.197.2. Public domain (CC0), Wikimedia Commons.
Detail of The Creation of Adam: the two hands do not touch, and the whole picture is built on that gap. The sky between them is not one surface either. The faint irregular joins crossing it are where one day's patch of wet plaster was butted against the next.
Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Creation of Adam (detail), ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Vatican City, circa 1511. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.
Detail of the Doni Tondo: watch one color at a time. The orange drape runs to yellow where the light hits it and to deep red in the shadow. The pink sleeve goes to white and then to rose. Nothing is darkened with black, the hue is changed instead, and the shadows stay colors.
Michelangelo Buonarroti, Holy Family with the Infant Saint John, the Doni Tondo (detail), circa 1506, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Inv. 1890 no. 1456. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.
Detail of The Entombment: the whole lower right of the picture is bare panel. The National Gallery reads that empty shape as the kneeling Virgin, whose mantle would have needed ultramarine, the most expensive pigment on the market. Beside it the green drape, the hand and the bare foot are carried to a finish.
Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Entombment (detail), circa 1500 to 1501, The National Gallery, London, NG790. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.
Detail of The Torment of Saint Anthony, painted at about thirteen: the red and green creature at the right has serrated fins, a row of orange spots down its flank and scales worked one by one. Condivi says he went to the fish market for it, to look at the scales, the fins and the color of the eyes.
Michelangelo Buonarroti (attributed), The Torment of Saint Anthony (detail), circa 1487 to 1488, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.
Watching him work
“When he had finished this work Michael Angelo, because he had painted so long a time with his eyes turned upwards towards the vault, could hardly see anything when looking down, so that when he had to read a letter or look at a minute object it was necessary for him to hold it above his head. Nevertheless, little by little, he became able to again read looking down. By this we are able to judge with how much attention and assiduity he had carried out his work.”
Ascanio Condivi, his pupil, who wrote the Life in 1553 with Michelangelo talking him through it, Life of Michelangelo (1553), in Charles Holroyd, Michael Angelo Buonarroti, London, Duckworth, page 49, 1903 [source]
Across media
Archers Shooting at a Herm, red chalk on a sheet about twenty two by thirty two centimetres. Almost none of the archers has a bow. He drew the bodies doing the thing and left the equipment out, so what is left on the paper is one action drawn over and over from a row of different angles.
Michelangelo Buonarroti, Archers Shooting at a Herm, circa 1530, Royal Collection, Windsor, RCIN 912778. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.
The Fall of Phaethon, black chalk, made as a gift for Tommaso de' Cavalieri. A finished drawing meant to be a finished work, not a study for anything: three registers stacked up the sheet, the eagle at the top, the chariot breaking apart in the middle, the river god and the sisters below.
Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Fall of Phaethon, circa 1533, Royal Collection, Windsor, RCIN 912766. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.
The Doni Tondo, tempera on panel, about 120 centimetres across, and the only panel painting he took all the way to a finish. Vasari says he asked seventy ducats for it, the buyer offered forty, and by the end of the argument he had been paid a hundred and forty.
Michelangelo Buonarroti, Holy Family with the Infant Saint John, the Doni Tondo, circa 1506, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Inv. 1890 no. 1456. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.
The Entombment, oil on panel, left unfinished. The picture stops at different points across its own surface: the woman at the left is carried to a finish, the heads at the right are blocked in and blank, the rock at the top has a hole in it, and the lower right corner is bare wood.
Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Entombment, circa 1500 to 1501, The National Gallery, London, NG790. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.
The record, deeper
The money
The shop paid the boy. The entry Vasari copied out of Ghirlandaio's book binds Domenico and David to give him twenty four florins of full weight across three years, six the first, eight the second and ten the third, and a second entry in his father's hand records two gold florins received on 16 April 1488.
Giorgio Vasari, Life of Michelagnolo Buonarroti, 1568, de Vere translation.
Vasari gives two figures for the Sistine ceiling and they are not the same. The Pope decreed fifteen thousand ducats for the whole cost of the work, a price fixed through Giuliano da San Gallo. Later in the same Life, Vasari records what actually reached him: three thousand crowns, paid on several occasions, of which he had to spend twenty five on colors.
Giorgio Vasari, Life of Michelagnolo Buonarroti, 1568, de Vere translation.
Condivi, who had it from him, puts it at three thousand ducats for the work and all his expenses, of which he says he heard Michelangelo say he spent about twenty or twenty five on colors.
Ascanio Condivi, Life of Michelangelo, 1553, Charles Holroyd translation, 1903, page 49.
He wrote to his father on 7 September 1510 that he was waiting on five hundred ducats from the Pope, well earned, and needed as much again to put up the scaffolding and go on with the other part of the work, and that the Pope had left Rome without leaving him any orders. The same letter says men are worth more than money.
Michelangelo to Lodovico di Buonarrota Simoni, Rome, 7 September 1510, printed in Charles Holroyd, Michael Angelo Buonarroti, 1903, pages 164 and 165.
The Doni Tondo price fight, as Vasari tells it: he sent the finished panel over with a note asking seventy ducats, the buyer sent back forty, he demanded a hundred or the picture, the buyer then offered the seventy, and he doubled his first price so that Agnolo Doni had to send a hundred and forty.
Giorgio Vasari, Life of Michelagnolo Buonarroti, 1568, de Vere translation.
The tomb of Julius II ran for decades and turned into a money quarrel. The agents of the Duke of Urbino accused him of having taken sixteen thousand crowns from Julius for it. Under the settlement he bound himself to pay for three of the statues out of his own pocket and deposited one thousand five hundred and eighty ducats with the Strozzi bank to do it.
Giorgio Vasari, Life of Michelagnolo Buonarroti, 1568, de Vere translation.
The reworks
He had the Florentine painters he sent for start some things as specimens, was not satisfied, and resolved one morning to throw to the ground everything that they had done. In fresco that is literal: bad work comes off the wall with the plaster it is in. He then shut himself in the chapel and would not open to them.
Giorgio Vasari, Life of Michelagnolo Buonarroti, 1568, de Vere translation.
A third of the way through, the vault broke out in spots of mould one winter when the north wind was blowing. Vasari names the cause: Roman lime made from travertine dries slowly, and mixed with pozzolana it makes a very watery bed that throws a salt bloom as it dries. He wanted to quit; Giuliano da San Gallo showed him how to take the spots off.
Giorgio Vasari, Life of Michelagnolo Buonarroti, 1568, de Vere translation.
To make room for the Last Judgment on the altar wall, three frescoes by Perugino were destroyed, the Assumption of the Virgin in the centre among them, together with two lunettes of his own from the ceiling campaign. He is said to have had the wall rebuilt in well baked brick.
Charles Holroyd, Michael Angelo Buonarroti, London, Duckworth, 1903, pages 166 and 216.
A little before he died he burned a great number of designs, sketches and cartoons made with his own hand, so that no one might see the labours he had endured and his ways of trying his genius, and that he might not appear less than perfect. The Florentine envoy who reported his death wrote the same thing back to the Duke.
Giorgio Vasari, Life of Michelagnolo Buonarroti, 1568, de Vere translation; the envoy's despatch printed in Charles Holroyd, Michael Angelo Buonarroti, 1903, page 293.
What they told students
He made his figures nine, ten and even twelve heads tall, seeking nothing but a harmony of grace across the whole figure, which nature does not present. Vasari gives his reason in his own words: it is necessary to have the compasses in the eyes and not in the hand, because the hands work and the eye judges.
Giorgio Vasari, Life of Michelagnolo Buonarroti, 1568, de Vere translation.
He meant to write an anatomy for artists and never did. Condivi says he wanted a treatise for sculptors and painters on the movements of the human body, its aspect, and the bones, worked out from long practice, and that he explained the whole thing to Condivi minutely.
Ascanio Condivi, Life of Michelangelo, 1553, Charles Holroyd translation, 1903, page 76.
His objection to Duerer, through Condivi: that Duerer treats only the proportions and the varieties of the body, for which fixed rules cannot be made, and so makes figures as regular as posts, and says nothing about human movements and gestures.
Ascanio Condivi, Life of Michelangelo, 1553, Charles Holroyd translation, 1903, page 76.
The studio
The scaffold stood on props off the walls and touched the vault nowhere. Condivi says it was so devised that the more weight it had to bear the firmer it became. Vasari adds that Michelangelo later taught the method to Bramante and others, and that there was so much rope left over from the platform he had taken down that the carpenter who rebuilt it sold the surplus and made up a dowry for his daughter.
Ascanio Condivi, Life of Michelangelo, 1553, Charles Holroyd translation, 1903, pages 82 and 83; Giorgio Vasari, Life of Michelagnolo Buonarroti, 1568, de Vere translation. Condivi says two daughters, Vasari one.
For the Church of Santo Spirito in Florence he carved a wooden crucifix to please the Prior, who in return put rooms at his disposal where he was constantly flaying dead bodies to study anatomy. Condivi says he gave dissection up in the end because it turned his stomach so that he could neither eat nor drink with benefit.
Giorgio Vasari, Life of Michelagnolo Buonarroti, 1568, de Vere translation; Ascanio Condivi, Life of Michelangelo, 1553, Charles Holroyd translation, 1903, page 76.
The physical cost is on the record twice. Vasari says the work was done with his face upwards, which so impaired his sight that for several months he could not read a letter or look at a drawing except with his head tipped back, and adds that he can bear witness, having painted five vaulted chambers himself. The sonnet he sent Giovanni da Pistoja describes the paint dripping onto his face while he worked.
Giorgio Vasari, Life of Michelagnolo Buonarroti, 1568, de Vere translation; the sonnet in John Addington Symonds, The Sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonarroti, 1878.
The materials
The ceiling was meant to have a second campaign that never happened. He wanted to go back over it a secco, as the old masters had done on the walls below, putting backgrounds, draperies and skies in ultramarine and ornaments in gold. Rebuilding the scaffold would have taken too long, so it was left as it is.
Giorgio Vasari, Life of Michelagnolo Buonarroti, 1568, de Vere translation.
Ultramarine is the pigment that keeps failing to arrive. It is ground lapis lazuli, the dearest color on the market, and it will not hold in wet lime, so it has to go on dry. The Sistine vault never got it, and on The Entombment the National Gallery reads the bare panel at the lower right as the kneeling Virgin whose mantle needed it.
Giorgio Vasari, Life of Michelagnolo Buonarroti, 1568, de Vere translation; The National Gallery, London, NG790 and NG809.
On panel he worked in tempera, not oil, at least for the two Madonnas. The Uffizi records the Doni Tondo as tempera on panel, about 120 centimetres across, and the National Gallery records the Manchester Madonna as tempera on wood.
Galleria degli Uffizi, Inv. 1890 no. 1456; The National Gallery, London, NG809.
The drawing kit was chalk. The Metropolitan Museum records the Libyan Sibyl sheet as red chalk with small accents of white chalk on the left shoulder of the main study; the Cavalieri presentation sheets at Windsor are red chalk and black chalk.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 24.197.2; Royal Collection, RCIN 912778 and RCIN 912766.
Refusals — what they would not do
Refused Bramante's scaffold, which hung on ropes through holes pierced in the vault he was about to paint.
Refused to keep the Florentine painters he had sent for, and threw their work off the wall inside the first weeks.
Refused to add the gold Julius II wanted on the finished ceiling: those who are painted here were poor men, and despised riches.
Refused to finish The Entombment without the pigment it needed, and left the panel bare where the Virgin should kneel.
Refused to leave the working drawings behind, and burned a great number of them shortly before he died.
Reference
Primary source
The living body, drawn from a hired model, usually male, whatever the sex of the finished figure. He also dissected, in rooms the Prior of Santo Spirito gave him, until he could not stand it any longer.
Exceptions
His first painting was a copy of somebody else's print, Schongauer's Saint Anthony, borrowed from Granacci.
For the demons in that copy he went to the fish market, because the print could not tell him what color a scale or a fin or an eye actually is.
For months he drew after Masaccio's frescoes in the Carmine rather than from life, and took the weight of the figures out of them.
Domenico Ghirlandaio · contracted 1 April 1488 for three years; left after about one — The biggest fresco shop in Florence, taking the boy through the trade in order and paying him twenty four florins across the term. Condivi plays the apprenticeship down; Vasari answers by printing the contract.
Bertoldo di Giovanni · from about 1489 — An old pupil of Donatello with charge of Lorenzo de' Medici's antiques in the garden at San Marco. Vasari says Lorenzo asked Ghirlandaio to send over any young men inclined to sculpture, and Ghirlandaio sent Michelangelo and Francesco Granacci.
Influences
Masaccio, drawn from for months in the Brancacci Chapel of Santa Maria del Carmine.
The antique marbles in Lorenzo de' Medici's garden, which he had the keys to.
Martin Schongauer, whose engraving of Saint Anthony he copied in paint as a boy.
Students
Ascanio Condivi, called his pupil on the title page of the Life published in 1553, which Michelangelo talked him through.
He never ran a teaching workshop the way Ghirlandaio ran his. The painters he hired to help on the Sistine vault were gone inside the first weeks, and he carried the rest of it alone.
In their own words
“I've grown a goitre by dwelling in this den... My beard turns up to heaven; my nape falls in, fixed on my spine: my breast-bone visibly grows like a harp: a rich embroidery bedews my face from brush-drops thick and thin.”
— Michelangelo Buonarroti, Sonnet to Giovanni da Pistoja, on the painting of the Sistine Chapel, translated by John Addington Symonds, 1878
The Italian opens I' ho gia fatto un gozzo in questo stento. Symonds dates it probably 1509, a year into the ceiling. The embroidery is paint dripping off the brush held above his face.
“Come then, Giovanni, try to succour my dead pictures and my fame; since foul I fare and painting is my shame.”
— Michelangelo Buonarroti, Sonnet to Giovanni da Pistoja, on the painting of the Sistine Chapel, translated by John Addington Symonds, 1878
The close of the same sonnet. Ser Giovanni da Pistoja was Chancellor of the Florentine Academy.
“It will be finished when I shall have satisfied myself in the matter of art.”
— Michelangelo Buonarroti, Recorded by Giorgio Vasari, Life of Michelagnolo Buonarroti, de Vere translation, 1568
His answer to Julius II, who kept asking when the ceiling would be done. The Pope replied that it was his pleasure to be satisfied in his own desire to have it done quickly, and finally threatened to have him thrown off the scaffolding.
“Holy Father, in those times men did not bedeck themselves with gold, and those that are painted there were never very rich, but rather holy men, on which account they despised riches.”
— Michelangelo Buonarroti, Recorded by Giorgio Vasari, Life of Michelagnolo Buonarroti, de Vere translation, 1568
Julius II kept saying the finished ceiling looked poor and wanted gold added. Condivi has the same exchange shorter: I do not see that men wear gold, and, those who are painted here were poor also.
“It was necessary to have the compasses in the eyes and not in the hand, because the hands work and the eye judges.”
— Michelangelo Buonarroti, Reported in indirect speech by Giorgio Vasari, Life of Michelagnolo Buonarroti, de Vere translation, 1568
Vasari gives it as his standing rule, in the same passage that records his figures running to nine, ten and even twelve heads.
“Men are worth more than money.”
— Michelangelo Buonarroti, Letter to his father, Lodovico di Buonarrota Simoni, Rome, 7 September 1510, 1510
Written from Rome mid ceiling, in the same letter that says he is waiting on five hundred ducats from the Pope. His brother was ill and he was offering to ride post to Florence in two days.
Buon fresco, which means pigment ground in plain water and painted into fresh wet lime plaster. As the lime cures it turns back into a kind of limestone and locks the color into the wall, so the color is permanent and nothing can be reworked. Because the plaster only stays damp for a few hours, the Sistine ceiling went up in patches, each one spread in the morning and finished before it set.
How did Michelangelo start a painting?
On paper, in chalk, from a live model. The Metropolitan Museum's sheet of studies for the Libyan Sibyl shows the method: a big study of the back and shoulders, then the parts that would not come, the foot, the toes, the hand, the shoulder again, drawn separately around it. The resolved figure was then redrawn at full size as a cartoon and the outline pushed through onto the wet plaster before any paint went down.
Did Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel lying on his back?
No. He built his own scaffold after refusing Bramante's, which hung on ropes dropped through holes pierced in the vault, and Condivi says it was arranged so that the more weight it carried the firmer it got. He worked standing, with his head tipped back and one arm overhead. Vasari says the work was done with his face upwards and that it wrecked his near sight for months.
What did the Sistine ceiling pay?
The accounts do not agree. Vasari says the Pope decreed fifteen thousand ducats for the whole cost of the work, then later in the same Life says Michelangelo was paid three thousand crowns on several occasions, of which twenty five went on colors. Condivi, who had it from Michelangelo, gives three thousand ducats covering the work and all expenses, with about twenty or twenty five spent on colors.
Why are Michelangelo's paintings unfinished?
Different reasons in each case, and the panels are honest about it. The Manchester Madonna stops with two angels still in flat green underpaint and the Virgin's cloak modelled in black but never given its ultramarine. The Entombment leaves a whole corner as bare wood where the kneeling Virgin should be, and the National Gallery links that to ultramarine again, the most expensive pigment on the market. He also left the Sistine ceiling without the dry pass of ultramarine and gold he had planned, because rebuilding the scaffold would have taken too long.
Did Michelangelo use assistants?
He sent to Florence for experienced fresco painters at the start of the ceiling, then threw everything they had done to the ground one morning, shut himself in the chapel and would not open the door to them. Vasari says he carried the rest of the vault by himself, without even anyone to grind his colors. He never ran a teaching workshop the way Ghirlandaio, who trained him, ran one.
What happened to Michelangelo's drawings?
He burned a great number of them shortly before he died. Vasari says he did it so that no one might see the labour they had cost him and his ways of trying his genius, and so that he might not appear less than perfect. The Florentine envoy who reported his death sent the same account back to the Duke. Thousands of sheets survive anyway, in the Casa Buonarroti, the British Museum, the Royal Collection at Windsor, the Ashmolean, the Teylers Museum and the Metropolitan Museum.
Who taught Michelangelo?
Domenico Ghirlandaio, under a contract dated 1 April 1488 that Vasari copied out of Ghirlandaio's own account book. It ran three years and paid the boy twenty four florins across the term, six the first year, eight the second and ten the third. He left after about a year for Lorenzo de' Medici's garden at San Marco, where Bertoldo di Giovanni, an old pupil of Donatello, had charge of the antiques.
If this painter is your match
You decide the picture before you touch the surface, and you would rather spend a week on drawings than find the composition in paint. You hold a hard standard and you would take a passage off the wall rather than leave it half right. The risk is the one he ran all his life: work abandoned at the point where the material, the money or the patience ran out.
Borrow this: Take one passage and give it a giornata. Decide the night before exactly what it covers, settle the drawing on paper first, then work that patch from start to finish in one session and do not touch it again. The point is not speed. It is finding out how many of your decisions you have been quietly postponing.
Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, volume 9, Life of Michelagnolo Buonarroti, Gaston du C. de Vere translation, 1568. Checked against the full text. Prints the 1488 Ghirlandaio contract copied out of Domenico's own account book, the Medici garden under Bertoldo, the months drawing after Masaccio in the Carmine, the Schongauer copy and the fish scales, the Bramante scaffold quarrel, the dismissed Florentine painters, the mould after the first third, the fifteen thousand ducats decreed and the three thousand crowns paid, the gold exchange with Julius II, the ruined near sight, the compasses in the eyes, the Doni Tondo price fight and the drawings burned before he died. Vasari knew him in the last years and the Life is also a piece of advocacy, which is worth holding in mind wherever it is the only source.[link]
Ascanio Condivi, Life of Michelangelo (1553), in Charles Holroyd, Michael Angelo Buonarroti, London, Duckworth, 1903. The authorised life. Condivi was his pupil and wrote it with Michelangelo talking him through it, partly to correct Vasari's first edition, which is why it plays the Ghirlandaio apprenticeship down. Source here for the fish market study, the scaffold that grew firmer under load, the three thousand ducats and the twenty to twenty five spent on colors, the ruined sight, the abandoned dissections and the unwritten treatise on the movements of the body. The Holroyd volume also prints the letter of 7 September 1510 and the destruction of three Perugino frescoes on the altar wall.[link]
John Addington Symonds, The Sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonarroti and Tommaso Campanella, now for the first time translated into rhymed English, 1878. The public domain English of the sonnet to Giovanni da Pistoja on painting the Sistine Chapel, sonnet V, translated from Cesare Guasti's 1863 text. Symonds dates it probably 1509 and identifies Ser Giovanni as Chancellor of the Florentine Academy.[link]
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, object record 24.197.2, Studies for the Libyan Sibyl. Read from the museum's open access record. Red chalk with small accents of white chalk on the left shoulder of the main study, circa 1510 to 1511, sheet 28.9 by 21.4 cm, Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1924.[link]
The National Gallery, London, NG790 The Entombment and NG809 the Manchester Madonna. The Gallery records both panels as unfinished, the Manchester Madonna with the Virgin's cloak still lacking its coat of ultramarine and the angels at the left barely begun, and reads the bare panel at the lower right of The Entombment as the kneeling Virgin.
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Doni Tondo, Inv. 1890 no. 1456. Tempera on panel, about 120 cm, circa 1506. The only panel painting he carried to a finish.
Royal Collection, Windsor, RCIN 912778 and RCIN 912766. Archers Shooting at a Herm, red chalk, about 21.9 by 32.3 cm, and The Fall of Phaethon, black chalk. Both belong to the run of finished presentation drawings he made as gifts for Tommaso de' Cavalieri.
