The End of Life and His Artistic Legacy (1556–1564)
As Michelangelo became increasingly frail, he worked less
on sculpture and more on architectural designs and religious drawings.
His artistic output in the last years of his life consists of a
number of these drawings, many of the Crucifixion,
and two final pietas. Michelangelo worked on these intensely personal
pieces tenaciously, although he left most of them unfinished. Their
rough and unfinished states may be partly intentional, and they
are certainly more emotionally expressive because of their roughness.
Michelangelo began both the Palestrina Pieta and
the Rondanini (or Milan) Pieta in 1556, when he
was already in his eighties. Beleaguered by illnesses, including
kidney stones and ear problems, and by the constant interference
of various officials and bureaucrats, Michelangelo spent most of
his late years profoundly unhappy and lonely. His misery and wounded
pride were compounded by his fear of damnation and eternal spiritual
punishment. After the 1563 Council of Trent prohibited the use
of nude images in religious art, Pope Pius IV perpetrated the ultimate
affront by hiring Michelangelo's follower Daniele da Volterra to
paint drapery over much of the nudity in the Last Judgment. This
act would earn da Volterra and his assistants the derogatory title
of "panty-painters." Although daunted and exhausted, Michelangelo
worked feverishly until his death, trying in vain to compensate
for his dwindling faculties.
Michelangelo's final pietas represent a kind of personal
offering to Christ, and an expiation for the artist's own feelings
of guilt and his fear of death. The thick and clumsy Palestrina
Pieta was finished by a follower after Michelangelo abandoned
work on it, so it offers little indication of his intent, but it
is similar enough to the Rondanini Pieta to indicate
that Michelangelo was consciously returning to Medieval sculptural
form. Michelangelo mutilated the Rondanini Pieta in
frustration and despair, but even in its unfinished and broken
state, it is a profound expression of his emotional and psychological
state later in life. The elongated figures, warped and almost grotesquely
contorted, could not be further from the stately architectural
vision of Michelangelo's late work.
In 1564, Michelangelo suddenly became very ill, and he
died two days later, on February 14, with close friends, including
Tommaso de' Cavalieri, by his bed. Although Pope Pius IV ordered
that Michelangelo's body be buried in Rome in St. Peter's, Michelangelo's nephew
Leonardo, brought the corpse back to Florence, where it was buried
in Santa Croce in March. In July, huge crowds gathered to attend
an enormous commemorative service for the "divine" master held in
San Lorenzo.
Michelangelo and the other artists of the High Renaissance
had stretched the limits of the Classical form to their extreme,
and art had begun to evolve in new directions even before Michelangelo's death.
Several different trends emerged in Europe during the period of
the late Renaissance: Mannerism, which exaggerated High Renaissance
ideals and became a highly popular form of decorative art; and
Realism, which emphasized the depiction of everyday reality rather
than religious or Classical scenes. The Baroque emerged as a distinctive
style in Italy, Spain, and Northern Europe by the early seventeenth
century. This particular period in art and architecture entailed,
among other things, a dramatic reinterpretation of Michelangelo's
High Renaissance ideals, a renewed interest in science, and a conflicted,
multi-layered emphasis on human emotion and passion. Michelangelo's
influence, therefore, continued to shape European art, especially
during the periods that involved a reevaluation of Classicism,
religion, and the human form.
