Michelangelo: Stone & Soul

🍭A. R. Whitaker🍭 6 stories

Story Notes

Summary

He carved angels from stone and painted God's hand reaching across the sky. But who was the man behind the marble? Stone & Soul is the confession of Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni — spoken in his own voice, from the stone-dusted hills of Settignano where a wet nurse's milk first gave him his obsession, to a cold Roman studio in February 1564, where an unfinished Pietà waits for hands that will never return. This is not the story of a genius. It is the story of a man at war — with marble that refused him, with popes who owned him, with a city he loved too much to go back to, and with the crushing distance between what he imagined and what he could make. It is the story of Lorenzo de' Medici's table and Savonarola's bonfires, of a broken nose and a forty-year tomb contract that nearly broke everything else. Of Vittoria Colonna, the one person who fully understood him, and Tommaso de' Cavalieri, who stayed for thirty-two years anyway. Michelangelo speaks of the Sistine ceiling not as a miracle but as four years of paint falling in his eyes. He speaks of the David as a block of marble everyone else had given up on. He speaks of faith, doubt, loneliness, the theology of beauty, and what it costs a body to spend a lifetime arguing with stone. The form is in the stone. It has always been in the stone. Go to the work.