4

THE WORKSHOP OF THE WORLD

WHILE MICHELANGELO was carving the David, his artistic life was undoubtedly structured by the shifting world of business, politics, and religion. But the institutional background only tells part of the story. However much the statue was imbued with meaning received from the tortuous inequalities of the period, the slow process of carving the David took place in the context of the mundane realities of day-to-day existence.

Michelangelo was admittedly a very secretive man in the years 1501–4. Having been given permission to carve the David in the workshops of the Opera del Duomo, near the cathedral, Michelangelo erected “a partition of planks and trestles around the marble, and worked on it constantly without anyone seeing it.” He was already an experienced sculptor, but it was tough work. Whether he was hammering away at his chisel or using his bowed drill, it was strenuous, noisy, and extremely dirty. As Leonardo da Vinci recorded, the sculptor’s work was

accompanied by great sweat which mingles with dust and becomes converted into mud. His face becomes plastered and powdered all over with marble dust, which makes him look like a baker, and he becomes covered in minute chips of marble, which makes him look as if he is covered in snow.

But despite his longing for secrecy, Michelangelo’s work life was far from secluded. He was continually surrounded by people, and his workshop was always bustling with comings and goings. Assistants and apprentices were constantly hurrying to and fro with materials, and friends—like the talentless stone carver Topolino (Domenico di Giovanni di Bertino Fancelli)—were forever popping in. Day after day, Michelangelo received impromptu visits from the operai, keen for updates on progress, from powerful communal figures, like the gonfaloniere a vita, Piero Soderini, or from prospective patrons like Taddeo Taddei, looking to commission yet more work or haggle over prices. Tradesmen brought their wares or demanded payment, tax assessors pressed awkward questions, or curious passersby nosed their way in for a peek. On top of this, there were the inescapable dinners with Lodovico and his brothers, family matters to attend to, or servants with whom to talk.

Michelangelo’s workshop in the period 1501–4 provides a snapshot of the daily life of the Renaissance artist in the raw. It’s a dimension of artistic production that is perhaps easy to forget when familiar conceptions of the “Renaissance” are called to mind. When we plunge into this social whirl, the worries and anxieties, the hopes and dreams, and the obligations and prejudices that conditioned the mind-set of the Renaissance artist and that shaped the content of much of the art of the period appear in vivid detail.

CIRCLES AND SODALITIES

Michelangelo’s workshop would have swarmed with people from every corner of the city. In this respect, he was by no means untypical. Although his contemporary Piero di Cosimo was notoriously misanthropic, artists could not but live surrounded by a vast network of people. As Vasari reported, Filippo Brunelleschi was “always having to contend with someone or other,” and Donatello was so plagued by requests and obligations that he claimed “he would rather die of hunger than have to think about such things.”

But the hordes of people with whom Michelangelo would have had daily contact in the period 1501–4 were more than just an amorphous mass of random individuals. The overwhelming majority fell within distinct circles of social activity, each of which reflected a different sphere of contemporary social existence, was governed by its own values and rules, and carried with it clear obligations that provided the framework not only for work but also for the patterns of everyday life. The dynamics of these circles were, however, anything but reflective of the pure, ideal world conjured up by familiar conceptions of the Renaissance, and Michelangelo’s sometimes pleasant, sometimes awful social world was typical of the period.

Family

The first and most important of Michelangelo’s social circles was his family. In Renaissance Italy, there was no more important bond than this, and its significance is attested to by the attention lavished on it in works such as Leon Battista Alberti’s dialogue On the Family. Much more so than today, the family was the primary determinant of the course and character of a person’s social life. It not only contributed dramatically toward perceptions of social status but also addressed “a comprehensive array of human needs: material and economic, social and political, personal and psychological.”

Returning to live in the family home in 1501, Michelangelo joined a bustling and busy household that was in many senses typical of a period in which the average size of the domestic sphere had grown in step with trends in population. Many artists of his age—particularly if unmarried—lived in households comprising an average of five people across two or even three generations in homes owned or in the names of the eldest male. Although his mother had died while he was still a child, his father continued to be in active control of the household, and Michelangelo had no fewer than five siblings, four of whom were still at home. The eldest brother, Lionardo, had entered the Dominican order some years before, but his sister, Cassandra, and his remaining three brothers—Buonarroto (1477–1528), Giovansimone (1479–1548), and Gismondo (1481–1555)—were just beginning to test their luck in the world under the umbrella of the family.

Michelangelo’s redoubtable father, the fifty-seven-year-old Lodovico, controlled everything in the eyes of the law. What Michelangelo earned, he kept, but if his father helped him in any material sense, Lodovico could legally claim half of all of the profits. By the same token, Michelangelo could not enter into any contract without Lodovico’s prior permission, and he could not even make a will without his father’s say-so. Indeed, it was not until Michelangelo was thirty-one that he was formally emancipated from his father’s control. That, at least, was the state of affairs in legal terms. In practice, things were more complex.

As is suggested by the letter he sent to Michelangelo in late 1500 warning him about his financial affairs (see previous chapter), Lodovico was an affectionate and doting father. But he also looked to his second son as the family’s primary breadwinner and expected to be looked after. Perceiving himself to be an old man, far advanced in years, he told Michelangelo, “I must love myself first, then others. Until now, I loved others more than myself.” Unmarried and happy to be welcomed back into the family fold, Michelangelo gladly undertook this obligation, and in this regard he somewhat resembled his contemporary Antonio Correggio, who, “for the sake of his family, … was a slave to his work.” Only on rare occasions did Michelangelo complain that his support was underappreciated.

Lodovico was, however, also a little suspicious of Michelangelo, and one detects a hint of disapproval lurking beneath his affection. He was inordinately proud of his social status and deplored the fact that his son had chosen so insecure a career. He was something of a snob. He claimed ancestral ties with the Medici and, through his late wife, links with the powerful Rucellai and del Sera families. Although very far from wealthy, he hailed from a family that had made its money as bankers and cloth merchants (in true Florentine style) and that had a long history of public service. Lodovico himself had served as the Florentine podestà of the commune of Chiusi, and his name had been drawn out of the hat for public office on at least thirty-five occasions between 1473 and 1506. Although he felt that it was beneath his status as a gentleman to have an occupation, he had wanted Michelangelo to pursue a career in the cloth industry, or possibly law, and seems to have struggled to understand his son’s choice. Happy as he was to accept Michelangelo’s money whenever it was offered, he never really lost an opportunity to snipe at his son’s choice of profession over family dinners. It’s all too easy to imagine Michelangelo forcing himself to bite his tongue as he listened to yet another diatribe about how much better it would have been had be been a banker.

Simultaneously, relations with the rest of his family were a predictable mixture of emotional closeness and pent-up frustration, and in his letters he alternates between joy and reproach. Buonarroto—who would later be elected a prior of Florence—was undoubtedly his favorite brother, but the others were a different matter. Giovansimone was a more difficult character. Although willing to throw himself into an investment venture with Giovanni Morelli, he was evidently lazy and ill-suited to business. Only a few years later, he and Michelangelo would quarrel violently about money and Giovansimone’s willingness to leech off their father. The youngest brother of all, Gismondo, was to be of a similar bent, but as yet he remained in the background. Other, more distant family members were another matter altogether. Although he never shirked from his obligations, Michelangelo was also not immune to bitterness, and after the death of Lodovico’s brother in 1508 he had no shame about describing his widowed aunt as “that bitch.”

Friends

After family came friends. For Renaissance men, the bond of friendship was tighter and more intimate than we might be inclined to think today. It was, indeed, regularly idealized. For Petrarch, a friend was “much rarer and more precious than gold”: he was “another self,” a mirror of the conscience, and a light of perfect virtue. The ideal friend was chosen only for his inner merits: social standing had no place, and the bond, once formed, endured even beyond the grave. So close was the perfect friendship that Boccaccio was even able to imagine two friends—Titus and Gisippus—being willing to trade a wife (on the wedding night, no less) or sacrifice a career for each other’s sake.

Friendship also had a deeply practical dimension. As the lively correspondence between the notary Lapo Mazzei and the Pratese merchant Francesco di Marco Datini reveals, friends gave—and expected—material assistance. Mazzei, for example, offered Datini extensive advice on how to handle his tax assessment, how to deal with the collection of debts, and how to manage his daughter’s marriage contract. In return, Datini sent Mazzei a choice gift of anchovies, countless barrels of wine, and even firewood. So, too,Petrarch recommended his friend Laelius (Lello di Pietro Stefano Tosetti) for a job with Emperor Charles IV in 1355, and the Florentine chancellor Coluccio Salutati helped to secure positions at the papal court for his humanist friends Poggio Bracciolini andLeonardo Bruni in 1403 and 1405. In the same vein, Fra Bartolomeo of San Marco taught Raphael the proper use of color, while Raphael taught his mendicant friend the principles of perspective.

Yet even more than this, friendship—as the framework for the exchange of news, views, and the odd bit of help—was the context for the development of habit, taste, humor, and outlook. As Giorgione’s fondness for “entertaining his many friends with his music” suggests, it was the setting for laughter and tears, celebration and commiseration, guidance and reproach, and few artists would ever have become the men they were without their friends.

Michelangelo’s friends included an eclectic group. At the upper end of the social scale—close to his own familial status—were the merchant Jacopo Salviati and later the cathedral chaplain Giovanfrancesco Fattucci. These men were well-bred, and Michelangelo’s correspondence is full of elegant, well-turned phrases, but in face-to-face interactions there is little evidence of formality. As is common today, these friendships were probably marked by any amount of silly banter and coarse humor. In theDecameron, for example, Boccaccio included a tale of how Giotto and his friend the renowned jurist Forese da Rabatta jokingly laughed at each other on a journey, the one for being horribly untidy after being drenched by the rain, and the other for being “deformed and dwarf-like … with a snub-nosed face that would have seemed loathsome alongside the ugliest Baronci who ever lived.” Michelangelo, who loved a joke, probably couldn’t resist indulging the same sort of good-spirited teasing with his well-heeled chums.

It is, however, telling that the majority of Michelangelo’s closest—and most enduring—friendships were with people of a lower social status. Unlike humanists such as Salutati, Bruni, and Bracciolini, who tended to form tight-knit (if occasionally fractious) circles from among their own sociocultural ranks, Michelangelo and many artists of the period often looked outside their profession for company. Although in later life he was to befriend Sansovino, Pontormo, and Vasari, he consorted with few artists in this period (excluding Francesco Granacci and Giuliano Bugiardini) and none of his standard. Instead, he preferred the company of stonemasons like Donato Benti, Michele di Piero Pippo, and the amusingly incompetent Topolino. Toiling together in the workshop or in the quarries of Settignano, they would also frequently have lunch together, and over a bottle of wine and a simple soup they would swap bawdy stories and the jokes of the street. The tenor of these friendships is indicated by a sheet of paper Michelangelo and his pupil-friend Antonio Mini passed between them years later in Rome. Mini sketched an appallingly misshapen giraffe, while Michelangelo countered with a beautifully executed drawing of a man showing off the glories of his anus. High-minded these gatherings were most definitely not. It is perhaps sobering to think of Michelangelo roaring with laughter at similar sketches while the David was standing half-finished behind him.

The Workshop Circle: Patrons, Assistants, and Apprentices

Outside the world of family and friends, the bulk of Michelangelo’s social contacts inevitably related to work. But here again, we encounter an unexpected mixture of formal relationships and very human, often scatological behavior that reflects a combination of regimented obligations and irreverent habits that was typical of Renaissance artists.

Of greatest significance were, of course, the patrons. These included the consuls of the Opera del Duomo, the gonfaloniere a vita, Piero Soderini, and the merchants Taddeo Taddei, Bartolomeo Pitti, and Agnolo Doni. They were all august men and—as surviving portraits suggest—highly conscious of their status. Despite being an old and wizened man, hunched over with age, Soderini commanded respect with the finery of his clothes and the piercing gaze that peered out over his large, beak-like nose, while Doni, a younger and infinitely more handsome man, had the haughty mien appropriate to the wealth displayed by the multitude of gold rings adorning his fingers. Their perceptions of their own status were important. Although Michelangelo had previously enjoyed a very close relationship with Lorenzo de’ Medici, his relations with patrons in this phase of his life were very much more businesslike.

The greater part of his time was, of course, taken up with detailed negotiations about major commissions, like the David. These could be tortuous. Patrons not only habitually demanded sketches or models of what they wanted, but also insisted on sometimes exhaustively detailed contracts and occasionally interfered later to quibble over execution or similar details. But there were also a host of patrons popping into the workshop to ask for smaller, more everyday pieces of work—such as the chimney decorations or wickerwork chests completed by Donatello, or the bronze knife that Piero Aldobrandini was later to commission from Michelangelo—commissions that artists were compelled to accept to appease the rich and powerful.

Whether the commission was large or small, however, there was always trouble, and the appearance of a patron at the workshop was more often than not met with a sigh or a terse greeting muttered through gritted teeth. Payment was a particular difficulty. In his autobiography, Cellini was scathing about tardy remuneration, and Vasari relates that Donatello smashed a bronze bust to smithereens in frustration at a Genoese merchant’s unreasonable quibbling over the bill. Paralleling the experience of artists, the incomparably catty humanist Francesco Filelfo was even forced to beg his friend Cicco Simonetta—a statesman and noted cryptographer—for a loan because the duke of Milan’s treasurer kept fobbing him off when he came to ask for his bill to be settled.

But there could also be more trivially irritating troubles. While painting some scenes from the lives of the Fathers of the Church in the cloister of San Miniato, for example, Paolo Uccello was aggrieved that the abbot would give him nothing but cheese for his meals. Cheese pies, cheese soups, cheese and bread: always cheese. Being “mild-mannered,” he initially said nothing, but after a little while the parsimonious monotony of the diet became too much. Uccello left the monastery and refused to work there until he was given something better to eat.

Michelangelo had even more frustrating experiences. After the completed David had been moved to its final resting place outside the Palazzo Vecchio, Michelangelo was atop a ladder making last-minute adjustments when Piero Soderini himself appeared below him. With supreme self-confidence, Soderini complimented Michelangelo but wondered if the nose wasn’t perhaps a fraction too thick. Descending politely to “check,” Michelangelo discreetly picked up a handful of dust and ascended once again to make the “changes” Soderini had suggested. Pretending to tap with his chisel, he let the dust fall through his fingers. “Now look at it,” he called to Soderini. “Oh, that’s much better!” came the reply. “Now you’ve really brought it to life.” Yet however irritating they may have been, patrons like Soderini paid the bills (in theory at least), and Michelangelo and his colleagues had to keep smiling.

Rather more pleasant—though not always so—were Michelangelo’s relationships with his assistants and apprentices. It is not known just how extensive his workshop was in 1501–4, but while he was painting the Sistine Chapel a few years later, he employed a minimum of twelve people at any given time. Excepting old friends like Topolino and Granacci, most of those who worked with Michelangelo were young, mostly adolescents, and frequently lived in. In later years, he wrote to his father from Rome asking for help in finding just such an assistant and, in doing so, gave us a good idea of the sorts of people he surrounded himself with in his workshop:

I should be glad if you would see whether there is some lad in Florence, the son of poor, but honest people, who is used to roughing it and would be prepared to come here to serve me and do all the things connected with the house, such as shopping and running errands, and who in his spare time would be able to learn.

The relationship was naturally based on work and hence could often be punctuated with squabbles or even dismissal. Michelangelo continually had trouble with his assistants and had to sack several for poor workmanship, laziness, or even—in one particular case—because the lad in question was “a stuck-up little turd.” On occasion, Michelangelo had to turn people away before they even got through the door: in 1514, for example, a father offered his son as an apprentice by recommending the boy as a sexual plaything rather than as an apprentice.

Usually, however, the relationship was close and frequently high-spirited. Even though a daydreaming assistant had ruined one of his portraits through inattention, Botticelli positively encouraged good humor. On one occasion, he and one of his apprentices named Jacopo played a practical joke on his pupil Biagio by sticking paper hats onto the angels in one of Biagio’s paintings to make them look like miserable old men. Simple stuff, perhaps, but childlike amusements helped the hard work go quicker.

Over the Counter, Through the Wall

On top of all this, and perhaps most commonly ignored by historians, were the mass of incidental, almost forgotten social interactions that supported the basic necessities of life. These, too, constituted a circle of sorts, in much the same way as we may think of our next-door neighbors, local shop owners, and even the postman as part of the loose circle of our everyday existence today. As in the modern world, there was little or no formal or theoretical apparatus governing behavioral patterns in this area of social life, but the importance of dealings with the multitude of tradesmen, market-stall owners, and servants should not be minimized. Michelangelo’s correspondence—which is often addressed to family members care of a shop or a trading emporium—is littered with requests for bills to be settled or for orders to be placed, now for wax and paper, now for shirts and shoes. Quality and price were always of central concern, but so was a sense of fair play and decency, and we can glimpse in Michelangelo’s letters hints of the chatty exchanges in the Mercato Vecchio or the angry arguments in shops that would have punctuated his days and defined his view of his place in the wider urban environment.

There were also neighbors to be considered, and they could not, in fact, be ignored in so community-minded a society as Renaissance Florence. Although often hidden from the historian’s view, these more mundane social interactions—beyond the bounds of family, friends, patrons, and workshop—occasionally shine through in the evidence. While undoubtedly harmonious in some cases, what testimony we possess points toward something resembling a soap opera. Botticelli, for example, was enraged when a cloth weaver moved in next door to him. Eliding home and business, the weaver set up shop with no fewer than eight looms on the go all day, every day. The noise was deafening, and, what was worse, the vibrations of the looms caused the walls to shake to a ridiculous degree. Botticelli quickly found himself unable to work. Anger took over. Rushing upstairs, Botticelli balanced a huge stone on the very top of his roof (which was somewhat higher than the weaver’s) and loudly proclaimed that it would fall unless the shaking stopped. Terrified of being crushed to death, the poor weaver had no option but to come to terms. Extreme though this incident may have been, there is no doubt that Michelangelo would have had to deal with similar sorts of concerns.

As Michelangelo’s social circles suggest, there was perhaps no clear, overall picture encapsulating the immediate society of the Renaissance artist, but a shifting web of overlapping, interlocking, and sometimes conflicting social networks. Formal obligations coexisted with idealized relationships, and bawdy jokes sat alongside angry arguments and ritualized but insincere expressions of respect. Duty to family and friends similarly interacted with fraught, or funny, relationships with apprentices and crossed the boundaries of class and social status as patrons entered the equation. Far from being elevated to the status of a high-minded, truly independent individual, far removed from the hustle and bustle of ordinary existence, Renaissance artists like Michelangelo were always being swept along by the shifting currents of the society in which they lived, pulled always this way and that, shaped by the tastes of one group, the humor of another, and the demands of a third.

Most important, these shifting relationships, obligations, and values shine through in the art of the period. On the one hand, there is a clear conceptual and creative link to be drawn. Concepts of family and even the conflicted experiences of family life are implicit in Michelangelo’s depiction of Mary, Joseph, and the infant Christ in the Doni Tondo and Ghiberti’s bronze rendering of the sacrifice of Isaac on the doors of the Baptistery; the artist’s dependent but fraught relationship with his patrons is glimpsed in Botticelli’s inclusion of a sly, slightly disdainful self-portrait alongside Cosimo, Piero, and Giovanni de’ Medici in the Adoration of the Magi (Fig. 5); the importance of friendship is seen in Taddeo Gaddi’s inclusion of the figure of Amicitia among the virtues in the Baroncelli Chapel in Santa Croce; and the value of workshop banter shines through not only in many of Vasari’s pen portraits of the artists but also in the multitude of playful details in larger artistic works that reflected the often fruitful relationship between the artist and his assistants. But on the other hand, the influence of these social circles can be seen at play beneath the surface of the artworks themselves. It was the obligations owed to family, friends, patrons, and even assistants that to a greater or lesser extent drove production itself; and it was the values thrashed out in the melting pot of these relations which shaped the form that production took.

WOMEN

Perhaps the most striking thing about the evidence for the composition of Michelangelo’s social circles in this period is the fact that it presents his social world as overwhelmingly male. With the fleeting exception of his elusive sister, Cassandra (whose date of birth is, tellingly, unknown), his “bitch” aunt, and the family housekeeper, women are all but invisible. He seems to have had almost nothing to do with them.

In some ways, Michelangelo’s story in the period 1501–4 is not altogether remarkable in this respect. It is not that his reputed disinterest in women at this time was common. Indeed, quite the contrary. The majority of artists—even the misanthropic Piero di Cosimo—either married or pursued continual affairs with unabated enthusiasm, as was the case with Raphael. Nor was Michelangelo cut off from women any more than any other artists. Given that they made up 50 percent of the population of the city, ordinary life was, quite naturally, swarming with women at every turn, and no artist, however immune to female charms, could avoid female interaction whether inside or outside the family. Rather, the comparative invisibility of women speaks to a certain facet of gendered existence in Renaissance Italy and its reflection in the male-dominated written culture of the period.

Women were commonly regarded with a mixture of pious idealism, paternalistic condescension, and legal misogyny. For a host of poets and literary figures, they were very definitely the weaker sex. Even when writing a work specifically designed to praise the achievements of women—the De mulieribus claris (1374)—Giovanni Boccaccio felt obliged to point out that the celebration of outstanding women was necessary given the natural and profound limitations of their gender. Indeed, such achievements as they could claim were only due to their assuming “male” characteristics. “If we grant that men deserve praise whenever they perform great deeds with the strength bestowed on them,” Boccaccio asked, “how much more should women be extolled—almost all of whom are endowed by nature with soft, frail bodies and sluggish minds—when they take on a manly spirit, [and] show remarkable intelligence and bravery?”

This view, which was entirely commensurate with contemporary religious opinion, found expression in legal norms. Until she married, a young girl like Michelangelo’s sister, Cassandra, was totally subservient to her father, and her function and status were determined in relation to the needs of the household. In the city’s wealthiest families a modicum of education was seen as befitting a girl who would be used as a marital pawn in forging advantageous familiar alliances, but beyond a smattering of training in languages, music, and dancing, little attention was given to learning. “Book learning” remained a man’s preserve. In less well-to-do families—perhaps including Michelangelo’s own, which lacked a mother figure—an unmarried girl was little more than an unpaid servant. Education was not a high priority, and that Paolo Uccello’s daughter “had some knowledge of drawing” alone was something of a surprise. In most Florentine households, the daughter might be expected to help with backbreaking domestic chores and contribute to the family income from an early age by selling produce at the market, working looms, or spinning wool with her mother. Above all else, however, she had to protect her most precious asset: her virginity.

Marriage was a woman’s ultimate goal: in the Renaissance mind, it was what a girl had been born for. Legally speaking, it was possible for her to marry at any point after her twelfth birthday, but the age at which a girl took the leap very much depended on her family’s socioeconomic status. If she hailed from a patrician background, her family would arrange for her to marry a suitable husband when she was between thirteen and fifteen, always with the goal of achieving a suitable familial match, and conventionally endowed with a satisfactory dowry. The girl seldom had any choice in the matter. Indeed, she could expect to have virtually no say in any part of the wedding arrangements either: in 1381, Giovanni d’Amerigo Del Bene complained that the satin gown desired by his future daughter-in-law was “too lavish” and sought to arrange a more suitable garment with her prospective husband, Andrea di Castello da Quarata. Although the poor girl’s mother was unhappy with the marriage, Giovanni simply dismissed her behavior as “bizarre” and undignified. Lower down the social scale, girls tended to marry when they were slightly older. But even here, few were given much say in the selection of a husband, and many found themselves hitched to much older men. At the average Florentine wedding, the groom could be expected to be twelve years older than his bride.

If anything, a woman’s legal status actually deteriorated after marriage. Like those of virtually every other city in Italy, Florence’s municipal statutes deprived a married woman of the right to enter into contract, to spend her own income, to sell or give away property, to draw up a will, or even to choose a burial place without her husband’s approval. Legal separation was virtually impossible to obtain, and complete divorce was simply not recognized, even in cases of brutality and manifest adultery.

At the same time, a young married girl also found herself subject to the exacting expectations of Florentine society. It was anticipated that she would devote herself entirely to her family, and most especially to her husband. A glimpse of what this entailed can be found in the Venetian Francesco Barbaro’s aptly named treatise On Wifely Duties, which he presented to Lorenzo de’ Medici and Ginevra Cavalcanti on the occasion of their marriage in 1416.

For Barbaro, there were three wifely duties necessary to a praiseworthy marriage: “love for her husband, modesty of life, and complete care in domestic matters.” Of these, perhaps the most important was the third, for which women, being “by nature weak,” were especially well suited. It was a demanding duty. A noblewoman like Ginevra was expected to manage the household, particularly by ordering her servants appropriately, appointing “sober stewards for the provisions,” arranging for food and accommodation for the household staff, and managing the domestic accounts. On top of this, there was the education of children, especially girls, to be attended to. In less august households, including those of artists such as Lorenzo Ghiberti and Paolo Uccello, but most particularly in the homes of the popolo minuto, the wife was expected to assume responsibility for everything: cooking, cleaning, washing, darning, and any other such tasks that her husband might select. Where money was needed, the wife could also be compelled to undertake some sort of menial occupation. Although millinery and lace-making had always been the preserve of women, most women were limited to spinning, laundering, nursing, and the like, or found work in cookshops and taverns or as domestic servants like the Buonarroti family’s longtime housekeeper, Mona Margherita. Whatever they did, they were poorly paid.

Modesty was a rather more complex obligation but no less regimented. In this regard, dress was particularly important. For Barbaro, a wife should “wear and esteem all those fine garments so that men other than their own husbands will be impressed and pleased,” and she was obliged virtually to forget her own tastes. This was a view that Michelangelo’s fellow artists clearly shared. Perugino, for example, took so much pleasure in his wife wearing nice clothes that “he very often attired her with his own hands.” What Perugino’s wife thought of the elegant but modest attire that was foisted on her is not recorded. The same degree of modesty, Barbaro claimed, applied to “behavior, speech, dress, eating, and”—saving the best until last—“lovemaking.” Even in the act of procreation (for which marriage was designed), the woman was expected to safeguard both her virtue and that of her husband. Ideally, she should remain covered—to the point of being fully dressed—while having sex. It hardly needs saying that sexual modesty was expected to include an absolute fidelity to the husband that could brook no question. As Matteo Palmieri expressed it, even the faintest hint of infidelity should be regarded as “the supreme disgrace” that was “worthy only of public humiliation.”

Love was similarly stringent. Far from being the romantic love of today, the idea of amore that was foisted upon women like Michelangelo’s poor sister, Cassandra, was in almost all senses equivalent to mere subservience. As Barbaro argued, a woman should

love her husband with such great delight, faithfulness, and affection that he can desire nothing more in diligence, love, and goodwill. Let her be so close to him that nothing seems good or pleasant to her without her husband.

Tellingly, this meant not complaining under any circumstances. Wives must, Barbaro believed, “take great care that they do not entertain suspicion, jealousy, or anger on account of what they hear.” If her husband was drunk or committed adultery or wasted the household income on gambling, she just had to smile and carry on.

Should the man find something to complain about, however, the situation was quite different. Boccaccio went to great lengths to praise the fictional Griselda for demurely enduring the almost ritualized humiliation doled out by her husband, a story commemorated in a series of three paintings (now in the National Gallery in London) designed for the decoration of a home by the “Master of the Story of Griselda” ca. 1494. Beatings and domestic violence were accepted and even encouraged. In hisTrecentonovelle, Franco Sacchetti blithely pointed out that “good women and bad women need to be beaten.” Although there are records of women petitioning the courts for redress after suffering brutality, such cases are rare.

If this picture is to be believed, Giorgione’s early-sixteenth-century painting The Old Woman (Accademia, Venice) (Fig. 6) provides us with an image of the fate of many women in Michelangelo’s Florence. Perhaps in her fifties (but possibly younger), Giorgione’s sitter exemplifies a careworn life of backbreaking labor and legal subjugation. Her thin hair, barely covered by a pitiful cloth cap, hangs down in strands over her wizened, wrinkled face. Her eyes are sallow, surrounded by bags, and her mouth hangs open in exhaustion to reveal numerous missing teeth. Her simple pinkish gown and white shawl are of poor quality, and their careless arrangement suggests that hope has been all but forgotten. She points to herself while holding a scroll reading “col tempo” (with time). It is almost a gesture of warning. Were any women from artisanal families to have seen this picture, this is how they could expect to look and feel as death drew near.

As with so much in the Renaissance, however, the theory didn’t quite match the reality, and while women are absent from accounts of Michelangelo’s life between 1501 and 1504, there is every indication that they played a much more diverse range of roles in daily existence than the biographies of Vasari and Ascanio Condivi suggest.

Although subject to legal restrictions, women often performed a wide number of economic functions, especially if they were widowed. On occasion, married women could be found taking on some of the administrative work in their husband’s workshops, and many records in the Florentine archives testify to women being involved in hiring workers, paying wages, and keeping accounts. More than that, we find women conducting business in their own names. Taking advantage of offers of credit, they engaged in numerous, and quite sizable, purchases; they borrowed money, and they made wills as they saw fit. Similarly, there are instances of married women acting as midwives, moneylenders, and artisans in some trades. Michelangelo did a good deal of business with women during his time working on the David, and later in life praised Cornelia Colonelli for managing the affairs of her deceased husband, Urbino, so well.

By the same token, women increasingly demonstrate a considerable degree of education and learning. Despite coming from humble stock and restricting herself predominantly to domestic subjects, Cornelia Colonelli was one of Michelangelo’s most devoted correspondents toward the end of his life. So, too, women often appear as independent cultural actors. Although scholars have paid increasing attention to women as autonomous patrons of art and literature in recent years, it is vital to recognize that women also increasingly figured as creative agents. Some years later, Michelangelo’s love interest Vittoria Colonna was not only charming but also eloquent and extremely well-read, and noblewomen such as Isabella d’Este are beginning to be appreciated as original and often daring thinkers. There are even incidents of Michelangelo’s encouraging women to engage in his own profession. As an old man, he warmly encouraged Sofonisba Anguissola to continue with her painting and was thanked in fulsome terms by her father.

Nor was marriage quite the bed of obedient roses that Barbaro depicted. Boccaccio’s tales are littered with examples of thoroughly independent brides giving their husbands what for, and it is not hard to find other examples from literature that testify to the same level of autonomy, especially in the management of domestic affairs. In a poetic letter to Iñigo d’Avalos and Lucrezia d’Alagno, for instance, the rather scabrous Francesco Filelfo observed that

A wife … wears out her husband’s ears with quarrelsome words. She inveighs against her maidservants. She falsely accuses her serving men: the estate manager brings the plough to the ground too late; the barn is broken and the wine is going bad, she reports. Never is there a moment of peace. First she grumbles and then she complains about her servants’ sleeping. She condemns as bad those things she knows are good. Nor does she think anything is enough. A wife is greedy in every way. She wants to fill her home with money.

Forbidding though such a wife might sound, she certainly wasn’t meekly subservient to her husband. There is a hint that Michelangelo’s “bitch” aunt may have been of the same mold.

Similarly, in married life, the obligations of modesty and love were not always observed to the letter. Despite Perugino’s fondness for dressing his wife, women could and did act as major agents of fashion and often dressed in a daring, not to say provocative, manner.

At various points in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Florence—like many other Italian cities—introduced sumptuary legislation designed specifically to place limits on the daring and luxurious nature of women’s dress, and this is testimony as much to the irrepressible tastes of contemporary women as to the occasional bigotry of communal government. In 1433, for example, the priors established a magistracy “to restrain female ornaments and dress” and highlighted the perceived need to prevent women from overexciting the men of the city with their racy clothes. The new officials were “to restrain the barbarous and irrepressible bestiality of women, who, not considering the fragility of their nature, but rather with that reprobate and diabolical nature, they force their men, with their honeyed poison, to submit to them. But it is not in accordance with nature for women to be burdened with so many expensive ornaments.” So, too, in the 1490s, Savonarola inveighed forcefully against female luxury, and at his bidding thefanciulli—marauding groups of young boys—would persecute women not wearing “decent” clothes. No end of “indecent” dresses, furs, and other accoutrements were thrown into the flames in Savonarola’s “Bonfire of the Vanities” on February 27, 1498.

Savonarola and sumptuary legislation aside, there is no doubt that women dressed with an eye both to fashion and to flirtation. In one of his more charmingly piquant verses, the usually broad-minded Giovanni Gioviano Pontano felt compelled jokingly to ask a certain Hermione to cover up:

Me, congealed already by cold age,

You’re heating up unpleasantly. And so

I’m telling you to clothe those shining breasts

And veil your bosom with a decent halter.

Those milky breasts, why carry them about,

Those very nipples, naked and exposed?

Are you really saying “Kiss these breasts,

Caress these glowing breasts.” Is that your meaning?

Such a verse conjures up images such as Piero di Cosimo’s portrait of the Genoese noblewoman Simonetta Vespucci (ca. 1453–76)—who was reputedly the most beautiful woman of the age and whom Michelangelo would certainly have heard of during his youth—in the guise of a virtually naked Cleopatra (Fig. 7).

While it may be true that Michelangelo had little romantic interest in women at this point in his life, therefore, his biographers’ silence about the fairer sex should be treated with some caution. This reticence appears to be more fully informed by constructions of the proper role of women than it is by Michelangelo’s actual social interactions with them.

As wives, mothers, and daughters, they were active and occasionally even dominant figures in the family life of artists like Michelangelo, enduring burdensome responsibilities and legal restrictions, it is true, but also giving shape to domestic life and assuming a powerful role as sources of financial and creative inspiration. In some cases, they were independent economic actors in their own right and were encountered by male artists either as formidable tradespeople to be reckoned with or as “partners” in making ends meet. But more than that, they were also far from being modest and repressed: they were the engines of fashion and the dynamos of passion.

Although Giorgione’s Old Woman represents one feature of female life experiences, the diverse roles played by women in Michelangelo’s Florence are also reflected in the multifarious ways in which they appear in art. Indeed, some works are unintelligible without recognizing that a woman’s place in Renaissance society went beyond the harsh restrictions of law and social convention. As many artists recognized, women were to be seen not merely as stereotyped sexual objects or matronly drudges but also as strong-minded, assertive beings in command of themselves.

The work of one of Michelangelo’s contemporaries illustrates this amply. Although Sandro Botticelli’s Portrait of a Lady Known as Smeralda Bandinelli (V&A, London) shows the demure, respectable matron described by Barbaro, his Return of Judith (Uffizi, Florence) and Portrait of a Young Woman (Städel, Frankfurt) reveal the complexity of the social picture. In the Portrait of a Young Woman, the subject—possibly Si- monetta Vespucci—is ravishingly beautiful and elaborately and inventively arrayed in the most fashionable clothing (Fig. 8). There is a hint of exoticism in the feather in her hair: few traces can be seen of conventional Florentine sumptuary laws. Similarly, her learning and humanistic tastes are revealed by the “seal of Nero” she wears on a pendant around her neck, while the “necklace” formed by her braided hair seems to suggest that she is the only person capable of binding herself to anything. She’s a woman in control of herself, a cultural agent in her own right, and a pioneer of daring fashion. So, too, in theReturn of Judith, the same characteristics are seen even more clearly (Fig. 9). Although the biblical figure of Judith was often held up as a symbol of chastity, justice, and fortitude as a consequence of her having beheaded the lustful and proud Assyrian general Holofernes, Botticelli invests his rendering of her return to the Israelites with a sense of female independence and perhaps even of sexual autonomy. Accompanied by a serving girl bearing Holofernes’s head, Botticelli’s Judith is strikingly beautiful yet also fully in control of her own femininity. Though a member of the “weaker sex,” she carries an inescapably “masculine” and empowering sword and strides with the assurance of one who is more than able to manage herself no matter how salacious or overbearing the male attention. She is her own mistress and clearly takes no messing around from anyone.

HOUSE AND HOME

In the same way as Michelangelo consorted with people from a wide range of social groups—from patricians to paupers—the homes that he and his acquaintances inhabited reveal multiple, rich layers of variation in patterns of domestic life, embracing everything from the sublime to the sordid, and testify to only one point of consistency—a reality quite distinct from familiar images.

Palazzi

To be sure, Michelangelo was no stranger to the palatial residences of Florence’s greatest families. Having lived in the Palazzo Medici Riccardi ten years before, he resumed his acquaintance with such grand buildings on his return to the city in 1501. Courting the favor of influential patrons and enjoying the companionship of powerful friends, he would have spent a good deal of time around palazzi, whether sitting outside on the banchi (wood or stone benches) that were erected around the sides of such homes for clients to await their patrons, or strolling around in the comparative intimacy of inner courtyards. He would, for example, certainly have visited Taddeo Taddei’s “most commodious and beautiful” palace in what is now the via de’ Ginori (just behind the Palazzo Medici Riccardi) to discuss a commission for a sculpted tondo depicting the Virgin and Child with the infant John the Baptist, and Bartolomeo Pitti’s rather unfashionable palazzo in Oltr’Arno—later to be purchased and enlarged by the Medici—to finalize the arrangements for a similar project.

The sole function of palazzi was to impress. Impossibly expensive to build, palazzi were “utterly non-productive as investments” and served only to glorify the wealth of the owner, as Leon Battista Alberti explained in his treatise on architecture. As such, even the most modest palazzo tended to be enormously large. A typical Florentine palace of the mid-fifteenth century had three main floors but stood as high as a modern ten-story building. Similarly, one of the finest examples of palatial architecture, the Palazzo Strozzi, covers an area more than twice that of the White House and utterly dwarfs the presidential residence.

But palazzi were not all that they seemed. The harmoniously proportioned buildings that can be seen in Florence today are generally the product of much later, post-Renaissance remodeling and belie the realities of the hundred or so “palaces” scattered around Renaissance Florence.

The exterior size of palazzi is particularly misleading. Although they were colossal in scale, they were actually built to house a relatively limited number of people and contained only a small number of rooms designed for living. In the majority of cases, each palazzo was intended to house only a single, nucleated family. Thus, the average palace comprised roughly a dozen habitable rooms, most of which were on the piano nobile (first floor). Each of these rooms was, however, on a monumental scale. In the words of one historian, the Renaissance palace was characterized principally by “the luxurious inflation of private space around the nucleus of a relatively modest-sized apartment.” The size of such rooms—including the bedroom—can be glimpsed in works such as Domenico Ghirlandaio’s fresco Birth of Mary in the Tornabuoni Chapel in Santa Maria Novella (Fig. 10).

Most misleading of all is the impression of order conveyed by some of the better-known palaces surviving today. Palazzi were hopelessly confused buildings until at least the middle of the sixteenth century. Even at the simplest level, the chaotic nature of Florentine building practices meant that it could often prove difficult to establish where a palace began and ended. Toward the end of the fourteenth century, for instance, Pagolo di Baccuccio Vettori found that the structure of his palazzo was so intertwined with that of his neighbors that he couldn’t say exactly where his property began and another’s ended.

Even at the level of functionality, Florentine palaces were quite confused places. Although the apartments on the piano nobile and above were almost exclusively residential, much of the ground floor could often be given over to different uses, and it was only by the time of Michelangelo’s death that palazzi became consolidated into cohesive residential structures. For much of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it was common—even normal—for palaces to have a series of archways giving onto the street that served as the entrances to shops housed within the building itself. For even the greatest men, home life was always accompanied by the sounds and smells of the trade conducted within their own walls, and the grand palace effectively blurred into the street.

The Buonarroti Family Home

Despite—or perhaps because of—the frequency with which Florence’s great families described their homes as palazzi, it was sometimes difficult to tell the difference between a relatively small palazzo and a large private house. Although there was certainly a disparity of scale, the houses of the well-to-do were in many ways similar to palazzi, and it was with a conscious effort to ape the ways of the powerful that professional men like the accountant Michele di Nofri di Michele di Mato (1387–1463)—whose description of his home is perhaps the only of its kind to survive—constructed their dwellings. Indeed, so strong are the similarities with regard to the character of rooms and the nature of furnishings that it has rightly been observed that “viewing the material worlds of different social strata as discrete separate entities is misleading.”

It was this sort of house that the Buonarroti family had inhabited in Florence during Michelangelo’s childhood and that he probably returned to in the period 1501–4. He was also to purchase three examples of this type of habitation for 1,050 large florins on March 9, 1508. In common with the palaces of his patrons, they were noisy buildings. Like the accountant Michele’s house—which was sandwiched between other residential properties and a silk workshop (filatoio)—the Buonarroti family home (and Michelangelo’s later properties) would have been nestled among a multitude of shops, inns, emporia, and worse. Only a few hundred meters away, on the site of today’s Teatro Verdi, was the Stinche, the prison most famous for housing convicted murderers and traitors prior to execution. On still nights, you can imagine the distant cries of the condemned mingling in the air with the stench of horse dung and rotting vegetables trodden into the streets.

Above street level, Michele the accountant’s house contained nine rooms. On the first floor, there was a living/reception room, a master bedroom, a study, and a smaller bedroom. Given the Renaissance penchant for mezzanine levels and Michele’s own rather confused description, it is difficult to determine the arrangement of the remaining floors with any precision. It is, however, clear that the second floor was dominated by a large kitchen (complete with imposing fireplace), a porch, and a terrace open to the elements. A third floor contained two or three rooms, including a servant’s room and a storeroom/pantry (anticamera). Their arrangement aside, the fact that Michele could distinguish between rooms on the basis of their function is telling. In earlier centuries, it had been uncommon to use any particular room for a fixed purpose, and any given area of a house of this variety could be devoted to a number of different tasks. It was only by the time Michele purchased his house that rooms were being set aside specifically for cooking and eating and that interior spaces such as the studio were being clearly identified as such.

The most revealing feature of Michele’s house is, however, its contents. The increasing clarity with which rooms were being defined had led to a new attitude toward interior decoration. As bedrooms, kitchens, and studies became established as such, there was a need for more, increasingly specialized furniture appropriate to the function of each room. Chairs, tables, and chests became more common and, especially when placed on the piano nobile, more elaborate. Cupboards—so common now that we barely give them a thought—started to come into fashion, initially as a luxury item. Michele also lists a daybed (lettuccio) with a decorated backboard (capellinaio) and a large, possibly painted, chest (cassone). These testify not merely to the increasing “domestication” of interior space in the homes of the comfortably off, but also to the rise of comfort and decoration as major concerns.

Most telling of all, however, is the presence of weapons. In contrast to the impression of security and stability conveyed by the proliferation of furniture, it is clear from Michele’s description that the Renaissance home was still liable to be attacked by violent mobs or caught up in the midst of destructive riots. Like his patrician acquaintances, Michele made sure that there were a number of weapons—especially swords—in strategic locations. On a mezzanine level above his study, he kept a cache of arms. He was, however, particularly eager to stress that a stash of weapons was also stored right next to the front door. It is an illustration of the brutality to which middle-class homes were vulnerable that many Renaissance treatises on ideal homes emphasize that this is thebestplace to keep arms. Comfort cost money; money carried risks; and risks demanded weapons.

The Artisan’s Home

Although Michele’s house provides a good indication of the nature of Michelangelo’s family home and his future properties, it gives little impression of how the majority of his friends and other artists actually lived between 1501 and 1504. While it may be reasonable to draw attention to continuities in certain features of material culture (tableware, devotional items, and so on), there was a world of difference between an accountant’s house and an artisan’s home. The people who were perhaps closest to Michelangelo—like Topolino and Michele di Piero Pippo—as well as a good many artists, would have lived in a much more modest way. Even so successful and renowned an artist as Donatello lived in “a poor little house which he had in the Via del Cocomero, near the nunnery of San Niccolò.”

Although naturally subject to even greater variation than palaces or larger homes, the houses inhabited by the majority of artisans had a number of common characteristics and can be thought of primarily along the lines of the buildings Michelangelo would have encountered on his journey through Oltr’Arno en route to Santa Maria del Carmine. Of basic and frequently ramshackle design, these houses were perhaps easier on the eye (and the nose) from the outside than they were inside. Made of densely packed earth or broad wooden boards, the floors were simple and dirty. There were few windows, and even then they were, for many centuries, protected from the elements only by wooden shutters and secured against unwanted entry by the occasional use of crude iron bars or grilles.

With only a few small doorways and windows, such houses were invariably dark and dingy. For the same reason, ventilation was variable: while they were open, windows and doors could allow air to circulate tolerably well, but when closed, they offered very little protection against the elements. During the intense heat of summer, it was sometimes possible to keep a house relatively cool, but in winter it was extremely difficult to keep out the perishing cold. This was a serious problem. In most households, there was only one fire—normally set in the middle of the largest room on the ground floor—which served both for cooking and for heating. The need to focus the fire for cooking left many parts of the building unheated, and the fact that cloths hung across doors or windows constituted the only form of insulation left most of the house freezing cold in winter months. But the more effort was made to conserve heat, the more unpleasant the atmosphere became.

For many artisans, such as weavers or spinners, a small and limited home was also a workshop. In some cases, guild-based workshops could make up the ground floor of a building, while the upper stories were given over to living quarters along much the same lines. But more commonly, there was often nothing to distinguish the workshop from the home at all. At the time Michelangelo returned to Florence, for example, his contemporary Piero di Cosimo was living and working in a house that his late father (a toolmaker of very modest means) had bought in the via della Scala, not far from Santa Maria Novella. It was also shortly after completing the David that the Opera del Duomo actually constructed a house for Michelangelo to provide him with somewhere to carve statues of the twelve apostles for the cathedral, and it is conceivable that he took up residence there.

When he ultimately left Florence for work in Bologna, Michelangelo told his younger brother Giovansimone that he was living in the most awful surroundings and had been forced to share his bed (the only bed in the house) with his three assistants. As this suggests, the houses that many artists—especially those less affluent than Michelangelo—lived in were very much like sardine cans, albeit with fractionally less privacy and order.

But most of all, the artisan’s home would have been a smelly and unpleasantly dirty place. With the stench of cooking, sweaty bodies, and animals filling the house, cleanliness was a natural concern. Although many accounts show housework to have been absolutely backbreaking, especially in houses with earth floors and rudimentary bedding, washing would have been a particularly troublesome chore. For the most part, the fact that the nearest source of water was often a well serving dozens of houses in the quarter made washing clothes a social activity. Wives and housekeepers would gather to rinse the dirt out of their simple clothes, swapping gossip, arranging marriages, and trading insults all the while. The “clean” washing was laid out to dry on the grass or, more likely in the center of Florence, hung on makeshift lines stretched between the ramshackle houses. In such a densely populated, dirty, and dusty city as Florence, it’s not hard to imagine that clothes would have been only very slightly cleaner after washing than they were to begin with.

In general, simple pragmatism meant that bodily cleanliness was not a major priority for ordinary folk, and a hot bath was a rare luxury. On the rare occasions when contemporary accounts speak of bathing, it is depicted as an activity limited to the upper classes (for whom it was often a ritual or social practice) or as confined to the bathhouses scattered around the larger towns, until their reputation for being harbors for disease and prostitution caused the majority of them to be shut down in the early seventeenth century. At most, Florentine men and women of modest means would have washed their hands occasionally, and splashed their faces with a little water if they wanted to impress. It is perhaps no surprise that body odor became a major indicator of social standing in Renaissance Florence. But it is arresting to note that until very late, most people actually had a horror of keeping clean, even in the face of abject poverty. After having been told of the straitened circumstances in which Michelangelo was living in Rome in 1500, for example, his father wrote to offer advice that testified to contemporary attitudes. “Live carefully and wisely,” he urged, “stay moderately warm, and never wash; give yourself rubdowns and don’t wash yourself.”

HEALTH AND SICKNESS

Given the cramped and unhygienic nature of many of Florence’s residential areas, it is no surprise that sickness and disease were permanent parts of everyday life, and it was entirely representative of ambient conditions that Lodovico should have drawn attention to Michelangelo’s poor health in urging him to return home.

Despite his longevity (he would live to be eighty-eight), Michelangelo suffered from a host of illnesses throughout his life, most of which were brought on by living conditions and diet. As a child he was somewhat sickly, and as an adult he frequently complained of illness. The painful swelling in his side that Lodovico had mentioned in 1500 was a taste of things to come. While painting the Sistine Chapel, he developed a goiter (usually caused, as he noted, by bad water in Lombardy) and by 1516 was lamenting that sickness had made him unable to work. By the time he was an old man in Rome, his condition really did begin to deteriorate. His face was “a sack for gristle and old bones,” a “ghastly” sight, and he couldn’t even sleep for his catarrh. What was worse, he developed a painful urinary problem that made going to the lavatory difficult and woke him up at awkward hours:

Urine! How well I know it—drippy duct

compelling me awake too early, when

dawn plays at peekaboo.

Around the time he wrote this self-mocking verse, he became so sick that friends began to fear for his life for the first time.

Michelangelo was certainly not untypical of his times. The high incidence of illness is visible in surviving portraiture and in a general fascination with the grotesque during the Renaissance. Leonardo’s sketch of a grotesque woman—later worked into a full portrait by the Dutch artist Quentin Matsys—is probably a depiction of a sufferer of Paget’s disease (a condition that causes the enlargement and deformation of the bones), while it has been speculated that the sitter’s peculiar hand gesture in Botticelli’s Portrait of a Youth (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) points to early-onset arthritis (Fig. 11). Similarly, Masaccio’s fresco Saint Peter Healing the Sick with His Shadow in the Brancacci Chapel depicts a kneeling figure severely disabled by a congenital disorder that has left his legs painfully withered.

While it is true that not all illness was quite as severe or as disfiguring, diseases and sickness were nevertheless rampant in Renaissance Florence, and Michelangelo’s own experiences were a testimony to the extent to which poor living conditions could wreak havoc with people’s lives, even among socioeconomic elites. In April 1476, for example, the noted beauty Simonetta Vespucci died from pulmonary tuberculosis at the age of only twenty-two, an illness that was perhaps exacerbated—if not brought on—by damp conditions. Inadequate diet frequently caused urinary or kidney problems comparable to those experienced by Michelangelo, and eye infections were especially common. Catarrh—from which Michelangelo complained of suffering—was prevalent and most commonly affected the elderly, sometimes with unexpectedly severe effects. According to Vasari, Piero della Francesca “went blind through an attack of catarrh at the age of sixty.” Similarly, dropsy (edema), caused by malnutrition, claimed the life of Michelangelo’s friend Jacopo Pontormo. It hardly needs saying that tooth decay—while clearly not fatal—was a serious problem and tormented Cellini severely.

But in the squalid and overcrowded residential areas of the city, there were a multitude of maladies that carried off hundreds every year. The streets themselves were occasionally host to disfigured lepers who wandered into the city in defiance of the long-standing prohibition on their entering the gates, and who rang bells to warn passersby of their presence. The home was, however, the principal site of illness. In winter, damp, cold houses were the ideal environment for bronchitis, pneumonia, and influenza. Infants and the elderly were especially vulnerable and died in droves. In the hot, sticky summers, dysentery—nurtured by the inadequacy of the water supply—was rampant, while diarrhea—caused by food that had gone off in the heat—regularly proved deadly to children.

Typhus—which was described by Girolamo Fracastoro in his treatise De contagione (1546)—was a constant threat. Possessing only a few sets of clothes and unable to keep houses properly clean, the Florentine poor were continually plagued by lice, and thus had no defense against typhus. When an epidemic struck—as it regularly did—it would spread from house to house, and from family to family, with breathtaking speed. In the pressure-cooker environment of the Stinche, typhus could wipe out hundreds in the blink of an eye. Michelangelo’s work on the David only just predates the worst outbreak of typhus in Italy, which extended from roughly 1505 to 1530.

In a similar vein, malaria was a depressingly regular feature of life, especially in areas like Florence and Ferrara that were surrounded by marshes and lakes which provided the ideal home for the mosquitoes that spread the disease. Especially in summer, it would hit the city with a vengeance. Often laboring in the fresh air and with little understanding of how the disease was communicated, working men and women regularly fell victim. It could occasionally prove fatal. As Alessandra Strozzi recorded in her correspondence, her son Matteo had died less than a month after contracting the disease. More often, it was merely painful, unpleasant, and incapacitating. One of its more prominent sufferers was Benvenuto Cellini, who may well have first contracted the illness in his youth in Pisa but who attributed the sickness to “unhealthy air.” Subsequent attacks left him “raving” in his delirium so severely that he inadvertently offended the duke of Mantua. Finding himself unable to work, he began to fear for his life.

Shortly before Michelangelo returned to Florence to begin work on the David, however, a new disease had arrived in Europe that was less susceptible to becoming an epidemic but was no less serious. Making its first appearance in Europe in the 1490s, courtesy of Columbus and those who had followed him to the Americas, syphilis rapidly took hold. It perplexed doctors seeking to diagnose Michelangelo’s patron Alfonso d’Este in 1497 and claimed the life of no less a figure than Francesco II Gonzaga, marquis of Mantua (1466–1519), who began an affair with Lucrezia Borgia in 1503. The disease caused panic, not only because of its unfamiliarity, but also because of its appalling effects. As the Veronese doctor Girolamo Fracastoro observed,

In the majority of cases, small ulcers begin to appear on the sexual organs … Next, the skin broke out with encrusted pustules … and they soon grew little by little until they were the size of the cup of an acorn … Next these ulcerated pustules ate away the skin … and they sometimes infected not only the fleshy parts but even the very bones. In cases where the malady was firmly established in the upper parts of the body, the patients suffered from pernicious catarrh which eroded the palate or the uvula or the pharynx or tonsils. In some cases the lips or eyes were eaten away, or in others the whole of the sexual organs … Besides all of the above symptoms, as if they were not bad enough, violent pains attacked the muscles [which were] persistent, tormented the sufferer chiefly at night, and were the most cruel of all the symptoms.

The sudden appearance and mysterious etiology of syphilis baffled and terrified the Florentine public, and it seemed that the contagion could only be explained as a punishment from God. But the truth was less complex. Transmitted principally through sexual contact, syphilis found its ideal home in the overcrowded houses of the Renaissance city, where brothels did swift business and people lived (quite literally) on top of one another. While it was liable to strike at random, it was a grim inevitability that it became endemic in Florence’s poorer quarters.

But by far the worst disease in Renaissance Florence was the bubonic plague. From its first appearance in 1348, plague epidemics were a regular and terrible feature of Florentine life. Carried by fleas jumping from rats to humans, the disease found a perfect breeding ground in the filth of the city’s unpaved streets and chaotic roads. In the absence of any useful medication, and in the cramped, unhygienic conditions in residential areas, infection spread quickly and with often devastating effects. Historians estimate that 30 percent of the Florentine population died in the Black Death (1348–50), and subsequent outbreaks regularly claimed hundreds, if not thousands, of lives. Although the epidemics of 1374 and 1383 appear not to have been quite so severe, the outbreak of 1400, for example, claimed the lives of more than 12,000 individuals and carried off 5,005 people in July alone.

Michelangelo and the artists of the Renaissance were acutely conscious of the risk. Only four years after he completed the David, for example, plague broke out with particular venom in Bologna, and letters flew back and forth between Michelangelo and his friends there. Giorgione fell victim to the pestilence in 1510 during his dalliance with a “certain lady” who had unknowingly contracted the malady. Michelangelo’s own brother Buonarroto would fall victim to the plague in October 1528. The disease brought terror.After sleeping with the adolescent maid of the Bolognese prostitute Faustina, Cellini fell ill with a sickness with similar symptoms and was petrified that he might have come down with plague. Death lurked around every corner, or, in some cases, in every bed.

SEX AND DESIRE

Despite the continual threat of sickness, the domestic world of the Renaissance was permeated by sex, and as the incidence of syphilis suggests, it would be no exaggeration to say that—religious sentiments and moral prejudices notwithstanding—the home was the workplace of desire. Even if Michelangelo himself appears to have had little appetite for sex (male or female) at this stage in his life, he was quite literally surrounded by it, and it could not but have influenced his outlook on existence.

Premarital Sex

However much ecclesiastical moralists like San Bernardino of Siena might have wished otherwise, sex was most definitely not restricted to the marital bond, and Michelangelo’s social circles would have been suffused with premarital liaisons.

Although forbidden, it was almost expected that unmarried men would indulge in a little light fornication. Typical of the attitude of the period in this regard was the behavior of a number of Michelangelo’s contemporaries and near contemporaries. Never one to contemplate marriage, Raphael, for example, conducted an endless stream of love affairs “with no sense of moderation” whatsoever. Even worse was Fra Filippo Lippi. Despite being in holy orders, Lippi was reported to be “so lustful that he would give anything to enjoy a woman he wanted if he thought he could have his way.” As Vasari reported,

His lust was so violent that when it took hold of him, he could never concentrate on his work. And because of this, one time or another when he was doing something for Cosimo de’ Medici in Cosimo’s house, Cosimo had him locked in so that he wouldn’t wander away and waste time. After he had been confined for a few days, Fra Filippo’s amorous or rather his animal desires drove him one night to seize a pair of scissors, make a rope from his bedsheets and escape through a window to pursue his own pleasures for days on end.

The same was no less true of girls, whose amorous adventures were just as pronounced. So rampant was the sexual experimentation of young females that in 1428 a law was promulgated in Belluno which stated that no woman over twenty could be assumed to be a virgin unless there was conclusive proof of her purity.

This sort of behavior might have been innocent enough, but it also had a more nefarious dimension. Mostly committed by men—or groups of men—outside wedlock, rape was a distressingly common feature of everyday life. There are, for example, endless accounts of humble women being hijacked in alleyways or on country roads by sexually predatory men, and it was partly to cater to the legions of abandoned illegitimate children born of rape that the Ospedale degli Innocenti had been founded. Far more terrifying was the high incidence of sexual predation against female children. Between 1495 and 1515, “over one-third of the forty-nine documented victims of convicted rapists were girls between the ages of six and twelve, and at least half were aged fourteen or under; numerous others were seduced without force or were sodomized.”

Marriage

Yet the paradigmatic setting for sex was, of course, the marriage bed. Although some rather extreme male writers, such as Gianmario Filelfo, advocated celibacy even within wedlock, procreation was generally considered to be the principal function of all women, and the production of children was perceived as the object of marriage. It was thus quite natural that sex should have been the central feature of married life. But while women—though bound by the “conjugal debt”—were supposed to refuse “illicit” sexual acts that aimed at pleasure rather than procreation, it is clear that married couples commonly enjoyed active and exciting sex lives. Even in his old age, Pontano was able to pen a verse to his wife, Ariane, which spoke to their healthy sexual relationship in their declining years:

Wife, your elderly husband’s delight,

Love and trust of our chaste bed,

You who keep my old age fresh,

Who set an old man’s cares to flight,

And help me triumph over old age,

A grey head singing of youthful passion;

But, as if fires of youth return

And you were at once first love and new,

First passion, headlong rush,

I want to fan those ancient flames.

Michelangelo’s father, Lodovico, was of the same cast of mind. After marrying for the second time, in May 1485, he gladly threw himself back into the universe of marital sex.

Within this context, contemporary religious teaching dictated that men were always supposed to be on top and that sex be restrained to the most basic activities. Oral sex was definitely taboo, and by the latter part of the fifteenth century heterosexual sodomy in particular was placed high on the list of carnal offenses. But as we might expect, the realities were quite different. Although the immediate context for his comments was somewhat removed from marriage, Beccadelli’s views on this subject might be taken as broadly representative of the practices of marital sex during the Renaissance. Not only was he a cautious enthusiast of women being on top, but he also spoke highly of sexual variety. “Why,” the character Lepidinus asked Beccadelli, “is a man never able to give it up once he’s fucked someone in the arse or mouth?” Whether Michelangelo agreed or not is open to speculation, but many of his friends would have asked themselves a similar question with a knowing smile.

The extent to which married couples indulged in such conjugal jollity presents us with a rather striking point. The nature of ordinary domestic life—even in “middle-class” houses—was not exactly oriented toward privacy. Small and cramped, with multiple generations under the same roof and many people sharing a room, Renaissance houses did not leave much space for discretion. Whatever happened between a husband and a wife would almost certainly have been heard—if not seen—by a host of other people, from children and servants to apprentices and lodgers. While shame was thus an integral part of the theory of wifely modesty, there could have been little shame about the sexual act in daily life at home.

Extramarital Sex

Marriage did not, however, mean fidelity. Infidelity among married men was so prevalent as to be almost a fact of life. Even a devoted husband like Pontano was painfully conscious that marriage could become something of a bore and that the sexual appeal of a long-beloved wife could wane. Men habitually looked elsewhere for amusement. Francesco II Gonzaga’s affair with Lucrezia Borgia, and Giuliano de’ Medici’s lustful attitude toward Simonetta Vespucci, were characteristic of the contorted sexual lives of socioeconomic elites, but there were also a host of other configurations. Female servants and slaves were particularly common targets of married men’s desires. A few years after the David was completed, Michelangelo’s brother Buonarroto only acquiesced in his wife’s request for a young female servant on the grounds that “a man can use a young woman to serve him in bed better than the old ones” and evidently expected his wife to put up with this blatant—but fairly common—act of domestic adultery.

Married women, too, were thought to have a “powerful yearning for semen,” and the lure of extramarital sex was all but irresistible. The sexual appetites of women—and especially married women—were almost proverbial, and many male writers despaired of a wife’s capacity for fidelity. As Domenico Sabino wrote in his dialogue On the Conveniences and Inconveniences of Wives (1474), “It is much easier to defend an unfortified citadel on a low plain than to keep a wife free from shameless lust”; in fact, it was, he lamented, “almost impossible to protect what everybody desires.” So common was female adultery that Cristoforo Landino felt able publicly to mock his friend Bindo “the one-eyed” for being cuckolded:

Is it any wonder, Marco, if, having but one eye,

you can’t keep adulterers away from your wife?

Once upon a time Junonian Argos had a hundred,

But still the nymph he guarded wasn’t guarded for long.

Even entrusting his rampant spouse to the care of the clergy offered little hope, for they would have been as willing to satisfy her pleasures as anyone else: as Landino put it, she was just “a lamb entrusted to a wolf.”

A sense of just how endemic female adultery was in Renaissance Florence can be gauged from the extent to which it figures in contemporary literature. In the Decameron, for example, Boccaccio titillates his reader with tales of passionate wives who are unsatisfied with their husbands and succeed in making their cuckolded husbands look foolish.

In one tale loosely derived from Lucius Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, a charming, beautiful woman named Peronella is married to a poor bricklayer. While her husband is away at work, she catches the eye of the young Giannello Scrignario, and they quickly begin an affair. The pleasure seems unbelievable, but one day she is terrified when her husband returns home unexpectedly. Fearful that he will discover her secret, the quick-thinking Peronella hurriedly hides Giannello in a tub while she goes to open the door. No sooner has her husband stepped across the threshold than she begins berating him for their poverty and bursts into tears to emphasize her point. In an attempt to pacify his wife, the bricklayer tells her that he has solved their money problems: he has sold the very tub Giannello is hiding in for 5 silver ducats. In a flash, Peronella flies on the offensive. How could he accept so little? She has, she claims, found a man who would pay 7! Pointing to the tub, she tells her husband that the client—Giannello—is busy inspecting it from the inside as they speak. Catching on, Giannello climbs out and informs Peronella and her husband that he’d be happy to buy it on the condition that the dirt is removed from the inside. Delighted, the bricklayer immediately offers to scrape it clear and clambers inside to begin work. While her husband is busy scraping away, Peronella leans over the mouth of the tub, as if to direct his work, while Giannello “in the manner of a hot-blooded stallion mounting a Parthian mare … satisfied his young man’s passion” from behind. Once they have finished, the cheeky Giannello gets the poor bricklayer to carry the tub all the way back to his house.

In another tale, one Madonna Filippa is actually discovered by her husband, Rinaldo de’ Pugliesi, in the arms of her handsome young lover, Lazzarino de’ Guazzagliotri. Restraining his desire to kill her on the spot, Rinaldo rushes to the city authorities to denounce his wife for adultery and is convinced that he has enough evidence to have her convicted and put to death. When the court is convened, however, Madonna Filippa plays a clever trick. Forcing her husband to admit that she had willingly granted him whatever he required in the way of sex, she then asks the magistrate a pointed question. “If he has always taken as much of me as he needed and as much as he chose to take,” she inquires, “what am I to do with the surplus? Throw it to the dogs? Is it not far better that I should present it to a gentleman who loves me more dearly than himself, rather than allow it to turn bad or go to waste?” With the onlookers rocking with laughter, the magistrate is compelled to admit that she has a point and sets her free, much to her embarrassed husband’s chagrin. The question of what to do with the “surplus” was evidently much on the minds of many women in Michelangelo’s Florence.

Prostitution

Prostitution was a major feature of urban life, and however chaste Michelangelo may have been while he was carving the David, it is inconceivable that his sexual attitudes were not at least touched by the sheer number of prostitutes whom he would have encountered while walking through the streets of Florence. Indeed, prostitutes played a prominent role in the everyday lives of many of the most prominent literary and artistic figures of the period. Beccadelli was apparently almost addicted to frequenting brothels, and his Hermaphrodite is dominated with paeans to his favorite whores. Cellini, too, was an avid patron of prostitutes and evidently thought the practice of paying for sex so commonplace that he had no shame whatsoever about admitting to his adventures in hisAutobiography. Similarly, Boccaccio’s Decameron includes at least two stories dedicated explicitly to prostitution and one in which the manipulation of sex for profit is implicit.

As with marital sex, views of prostitution were replete with double standards. Officially, of course, the Church strictly proscribed prostitution, and the cities of Renaissance Italy had begun by acknowledging that the sale of sex was an affront to public morality.Prostitutes were expelled from Venice in 1266 and 1314 and from Modena in 1327. But despite this, there was a strong tradition of viewing the practice as a necessary evil. Both Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas had recognized that since the cup of male desire would always run over, prostitution was necessary to prevent the spread of fornication or sodomy in a sexually frustrated society. Renaissance legislators were inclined to agree, and Filarete (Antonio di Pietro Averlino; ca. 1400–ca. 1469) even included a vast public brothel in his plan for an ideal city (Sforzinda).

Florence, in particular, moved relatively quickly toward the acceptance and then the regulation of the sex trade. Initially, tolerance was grudging. By 1384, the priors had acknowledged the presence of prostitutes but had obliged them to wear clothing (bells, high heels, and gloves) that marked them out both as a distinct group and as a source of the “contagion” of lust. Though prosecutions were not irregular, the integration of prostitution into the body social had become even more pronounced by around 1400. Sex workers were still forbidden to ply their trade in certain areas, but control—rather than stigmatization—became the watchword. On April 30, 1403, the city established a magistracy known as the Onestà (Office of Decency) that was explicitly charged with overseeing the affairs of prostitutes. Initially housed in the church of San Cristofano, at the corner of the via Calzaiuoli and the Piazza del Duomo, the Onestà was, by Michelangelo’s time, established a little farther south, in the alley now known as the vicolo dell’Onestà, near Orsanmichele. From here, the eight-man magistracy provided for the establishment of at least three public brothels (in 1403 and 1415) and presided over the “registration” of prostitutes. Barely thirty years later, seventy-six women had enrolled as state-sanctioned whores (most of them of foreign origin), and prostitutes were taxed at a special rate to help pay for Florence’s growing expenses. Moreover, prostitutes provided a valuable legal service. In situations in which a woman petitioned the courts for an annulment of her marriage on the grounds of non-consummation, a prostitute could be brought in to testify to the impotence of her unfortunate husband.

By 1566, the acceptance of prostitution had become so widespread that the great public brothel in the Mercato Vecchio was deemed a good investment and was purchased by three exceptionally respectable citizens: Chiarissimo de’ Medici, Alessandro della Tosa, and Albiera Strozzi. The year before, a complete catalog of the names and addresses of the best prostitutes had even been published in Venice (Catalogo di tutte le principale e più honorate cortigiane di Venezia).

The scale of the sex industry in Michelangelo’s Florence is, however, belied by the rather hopeful actions of the Onestà. The numbers of prostitutes working in the city by 1501 massively exceeded the “official” figures, and there is no doubt that unlicensed private brothels abounded, as is suggested by the art of the period. In Francesco del Cossa’s April in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, for example, scantily clad prostitutes are shown running quite publicly in the Palio, under the gaze of a young gentleman and a child (Fig. 12). Prosecutions for “unofficial” prostitution continued at a rapid pace, and there are ample records of men quite openly selling their wives and daughters into prostitution. As Beccadelli’s enthusiasm for the prostitute Ursa demonstrates, these women became not just sexual intimates but also friends and sources of inspiration.

Homosexuality

The apparently rampant heterosexual sex in Michelangelo’s Florence should not obscure the widespread incidence of homosexual relations in the period, and despite his comparative indifference at this point, it is worth noting that more than a few questions have been raised about Michelangelo’s own sexual orientation later in his life.

Like premarital and extramarital sex, homosexuality was commonly regarded as a heinous sin to be spoken of in tones of awe and horror. Normally grouped together with masturbation and bestiality, homosexual intercourse was frequently attacked by laymen like Poggio Bracciolini—who compared it to heterosexual fornication—as well as by churchmen of the day. The irascible Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444) was particularly vehement in his condemnation. In a series of Lenten sermons delivered at Santa Croce in 1424, Bernardino cataloged the sins to which Florence was most prone and devoted no fewer than three of his nine sermons exclusively to sodomy. He began comparatively gently, by tracing the origins of Florentine homosexuality to the population decline of the mid-fourteenth century. But by the time he reached his final sermon, Bernardino had whipped himself up into a foaming frenzy of hatred. Condemning both the sin of sodomy and those who attempted to have convicted sodomites released from prison, he cried, “To the fire! They are all sodomites! And you are in mortal sin if you seek to help them.” So powerful was his rhetoric that the congregation immediately rushed outside and started building a bonfire on which to roast the city’s homosexuals.

Although Bernardino’s sermons were remarkable for the sheer intensity of his grievance, he was nevertheless broadly representative of the Church’s position and of the Florentine government’s attitude toward the “pestiferous vice.” The city’s magistrates took a very dim view of homosexuality. Having established a special magistracy to root out homosexuality in 1432 (the Office of the Night), the city imposed harsh penalties on those convicted of homosexual practices, and a variety of punishments—including the death penalty—were permitted. A little before the magistracy came into existence, a certain Jacopo di Cristofano was found guilty of sodomizing two young boys: he was fined 750 lire, sentenced to be whipped through the streets of the city, and ordered to have his house burned down (if he owned it). Prosecutions were avidly pursued. During the seventy years the Office of the Night was active, it has been estimated that around seventeen thousand men were accused of sodomy, and it is not without reason that Florence has been described as having “carried out the most extensive and systematic persecution of homosexual activity in any premodern city.”

But, as with other areas of sexual activity, the severity of legal and moral strictures is perhaps more reflective of the sheer prevalence of homosexual activity than of anything else. Indeed, the Florentine authorities were prepared to indulge in a certain degree of official hypocrisy and a good deal of double standards.

While those who practiced homosexual acts were arrested and prosecuted with relentless zeal during the fifteenth and very early sixteenth centuries, their treatment was not quite as harsh as the letter of the law might lead us to expect. Although seventeen thousand men were accused of sodomy while the Office of the Night was in existence—including Leonardo da Vinci—fewer than three thousand were actually convicted, and those who were received punishments that were lenient in comparison with the sentences that could have been imposed.

In part, this is related to the fact that the majority of “homosexual” activity was actually practiced by men who either were married or would—in today’s language—self-identify as “straight.” It was not so much a matter of preference as of urges. A lot of men were simply too randy to limit themselves to one gender. In Domenico Sabino’s dialogue on wives, for example, the character Emilia observes that “men are not satisfied with servant girls, mistresses, or prostitutes, but resort to boys in order to relieve their wild and mad lust.” By the same token, Beccadelli’s Hermaphrodite discusses heterosexual and homosexual sex without any sense that a married man should limit himself to one or the other.

In part, however, it is also related to the variation that was perceived to exist within homosexuality itself. As a reflection of the moral distinction that contemporaries were wont to draw between active and passive partners, and between old and young lovers, by 1564, dominant older men were normally fined 50 scudi d’oro and imprisoned for two years, while the younger, passive partner was usually given fifty lashes. If they could find a reason to be more lenient, it seems that judges seized it with some enthusiasm.

But to a considerable extent, the Florentine magistrates’ willingness to turn the occasional blind eye to the homosexual practices they so forcibly condemned was a function of the Renaissance enthusiasm for the notion of platonic friendship. Through his commentary on Plato’s Symposium, Marsilio Ficino—Michelangelo’s youthful friend—gave new life to the idea of a close intellectual and spiritual friendship between men, a notion that rapidly became common currency among the circle of Florentine humanists known, somewhat misleadingly, as the Platonic Academy. While this intimate bond was defined primarily by the proximity of two souls in pursuit of the ideal, it was not unusual for it to be invested with a distinctly physical dimension. In the De amore (1484), for example, Ficino suggested that homoerotic attraction was an integral part of a true Platonic friendship and went so far as to suggest that love between men was almost more natural than love between men and women. Homoeroticism and male same-sex relations were thus given a form of intellectual justification that could facilitate and even excuse homosexual practice in a social environment that was officially opposed to such activity. Ficino himself was often suspected of being a homosexual, and there is more than a passing hint that Michelangelo absorbed some of his friend’s thought on the subject.

So distinct were legal and moral norms from the sexual realities that the Florentine Office of the Night seems to have concentrated its efforts more on policing rape and male prostitution than on exterminating homosexual acts, for which it appears to have indulged a pragmatic form of toleration. In the complex and intellectually charged world of Florentine homosexuality, men who professed fidelity to each other were occasionally regarded as “married” by the Office of the Night, especially if they had sworn an oath to that effect over a Bible in church. There is some evidence that same-sex unions even received a blessing in liturgical ceremonies in some places in central Italy, and there is reason to believe that similar practices may have been found in Florence.

There was, in fact, every reason not merely to tolerate but even to encourage homosexual relationships of this variety. Settled partnerships were often applauded by families who recognized that a homosexual “marriage” could be as socially advantageous as its heterosexual equivalent. Provided that the match was astutely made, it could bring with it influence, protection, and wealth. Friends frequently accepted gay marriages, and while there was no subculture as such, the formation of homosexual networks acted as a powerful vehicle for men to further each other’s interests in the world of work and business.

Despite Michelangelo’s apparent disregard for sex during the period 1501–4, the atmosphere of Florence would have been charged with sexual energy. The sparks flew in every direction. Regardless of the strictures of law and morality, people were at it all the time and from a remarkably young age. Frustrated young men, lusty young girls, bored housewives, and wandering husbands seem almost never to have passed up an opportunity to amuse themselves with others or to indulge the rich variety of the city’s brothels. So, too, same-sex relationships between men were—if anything—every bit as prevalent and flexible as in today’s world. And in the cramped world of Renaissance housing, nothing—but nothing—was ever private.

THE WORKSHOP OF THE WORLD

And so the drama of everyday life went on. The workshop—the nexus of Michelangelo’s life—was the epicenter of artistic production, but it was also a nodal point for social life, the setting for all of the cares and concerns that dominated ordinary existence. It was, in a sense, not so much a workshop as the workshop of the world of the Renaissance artist. Looking at the comings and goings in an average day, we can see that art was not just a matter of high-minded, abstract creativity but an enterprise overshadowed by the worries of home life, the pleasures of friendship, the troubles of business, the agonies of ill health, and the conflicting impulses of desire. As Michelangelo’s workshop shows, Renaissance art was much uglier, but also much more ordinary and human, than familiar conceptions of the period might suggest.