The Sistine Secrets by Benjamin Blech, Roy Doliner Page B

laughed and proudly showed the grinning faun to his family and friends. He took a great personal liking to the boy and instead of having him lodge in crowded students’ rooms, he informally adopted the uncouth lad and brought him to live in the grand de’ Medici palace. Thus, Michelangelo, at the age of about thirteen or fourteen, suddenly found himself being raised with the richest offspring in Europe, taking all his meals with them and studying with the best private tutors in Italy. This would always be the happiest time in his very long life—and change his way of viewing God, religion, and art forever. It would also have a profound effect on the messages Michelangelo would eventually impart in his masterwork on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
    THE FORMAZIONE OF MICHELANGELO
     
    In Italian, the word for education is formazione, in the sense of “shaping, molding, forming” a young mind. It is a perfect word to describe the training of the young genius in the care of Lorenzo. Michelangelo’s experiences in Florence in his early teens would indeed shape his talent and mold his thinking for the rest of his long life and career. Through his artistic apprenticeships, his privileged private tutoring in the palace, his encounters with the greatest geniuses of his day, and his extraordinary daily life as part of the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent, he underwent an incredibly broad formazione that was not only unique for the fifteenth century but would be so even in our own time. It would be this wide range of cultural sources and references that he drew on when painting the Sistine Chapel. Its amazingly all-encompassing scope may well be one of the reasons that it has taken us all of five centuries to figure out what he was really saying in his magnificent frescoes.
    Ghirlandaio was Michelangelo’s first maestro, or master teacher. Even though Michelangelo would say years later that the great painter had taught him nothing, we can easily assume that at least he taught the boy the basics of making and mixing paints, of color and composition, and of the great development of fifteenth-century Florentine artwork—perspective. It is interesting to note, however, that we cannot find any “Michelangelesque” contributions in the frescoes that Ghirlandaio painted at that time. Once Michelangelo was transferred to the Garden of San Marco, Bertoldo did instruct him in some of the basics of the art of sculpture, but the prodigy surpassed his master in no time at all. Young Buonarroti really took his lessons from the great masters of the past, whose works could be seen and studied all over Florence: the frescoes of Fra Angelico and Masaccio, the sculptures of Donatello, the architecture of Brunelleschi and Alberti. Above all, he fell in love with pagan Greco-Roman art and design. He loved it for its simplicity, its kinetic quality, and its celebration of the muscular male nude. Between the sculptures in the garden and in the Palazzo de’ Medici, and the masterpieces all over town, Michelangelo’s voracious curiosity and photographic memory were exercised to their peak, and would serve him well to the end of his days.
    Combined with his artistic development, Michelangelo’s liberal arts education moved ahead at a prodigious pace. In the Florentine Republic in the fifteenth century, a well-rounded education was considered vital for every young man. A generation before Michelangelo, the ultimate example of the Florentine “Renaissance man” was the architect-painter-writer-athlete-musician-lawyer Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472). Alberti wrote: “The artist in this social context must not be a simple artisan, but rather an intellectual prepared in all disciplines and all fields.” Lorenzo firmly believed in this, and wanted his young sculpture prodigy to have the very best formazione that money could buy. Lorenzo’s children had been tutored from an early age by the great humanist poet and classicist Angelo Ambrogini of