In September 1556, Michelangelo and his personal assistant, Sebastiano Malenotti, departed Rome, uncertain they would ever return. The two passed through Porta del Popolo and rode north on the ancient and well-traveled Via Flaminia. Their destination was Loreto, not only because Michelangelo had longed to make a pilgrimage to the Holy House of the Virgin, but also because his friend, Antonio Barberini, promised “good and beautiful” lodgings in nearby Ancona, far from the “tribulations of Rome.”Footnote ¹

Barberini’s characterization of Rome suffering from “tribulations” was a serious understatement. War had broken out between Pope Paul IV Carafa (r. 1555–59), allied with France, and Philip II of Spain (r. 1556–98).Footnote ² In September 1556, Fernando Alvarez of Toledo (1507–82), the Duke of Alba, invaded the Papal States and captured Ostia. In Rome, confusion turned to panic; the ill-prepared city feared another sack. Before the contending forces reached an eleventh-hour agreement, Michelangelo, along with many other citizens, had fled the city. This was the sixth time that politics had impinged upon the artist’s life and significantly disrupted his artistic projects. He was eighty-one years old. He had good reason to believe that his career was finished and this exile would be permanent.

Michelangelo and Malenotti could cover between thirty and forty kilometers a day, but they rested frequently since the octogenarian artist suffered from long hours in the saddle. Just north of Terni, the two travelers entered the lush, mountainous terrain of southern Umbria. The road steadily climbed and narrowed, following a twisting valley shrouded in mountain mists and cold drizzle. The weary travelers had been on the road for four days, staying in hostelries with primitive accommodations and worse food. Rather than face the prospect of another five or six days on the road through increasingly rugged mountains, Michelangelo elected to stop at Spoleto. The rest was not only welcome and restorative, but proved to be one of the most peaceful episodes in the artist’s life.

Michelangelo accepted the hospitality of the Franciscan hermits who lived in the monastery of Monteluco on a mountain overlooking Spoleto (figs. 1 and 2). In the Spartan accommodations of the hermitage, among the sacred wood, fresh spring-fed waters, and the isolation provided by the mountain retreat, Michelangelo experienced a rare tranquility. It is still a place of natural beauty, a landscape and sanctuary that might have reminded Michelangelo of La Verna and the wilds of the Casentino. Monteluco, moreover, had been favored by Saints Francis and Anthony, and more recently by Michelangelo’s friend and patron Pope Paul III (r. 1534–49), now sadly deceased.

Figure 1. Monastery of Monteluco, Spoleto. Author’s photo.

Figure 2. View toward Spoleto from Monteluco. Author’s photo.

Michelangelo spent nearly five weeks in the hermitage of Monteluco. Five weeks does not seem long considering the full span of the artist’s nearly eighty-nine years; however, his contentment and peace of mind are evident when, following his return to Rome, he wrote to Giorgio Vasari (1511–74): “Recently, at great inconvenience and expense, I have had the great pleasure of a visit to the hermits in the mountains of Spoleto, so that less than half of me has returned to Rome.” He then makes an unexpected comment: “peace is not really to be found save in the woods.”Footnote ³

The sentiment may seem incongruous, if only because of a widespread assumption that Michelangelo had little interest in landscape, and because of his well-known disparaging remarks regarding Flemish painting.Footnote ⁴ Was this peaceful interlude relevant to the artist’s life or art? Although Michelangelo may have believed that his life was nearing its end, he was, in fact, about to enter the final and most significant phase of his artistic career.

In the sixteen years between writing a monograph, Michelangelo at San Lorenzo: The Genius as Entrepreneur (1994), and a biography, Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man, and His Times (2010), I have become increasingly aware that the heroic story of the artist’s rise to fame has deflected attention from his very different but no less enterprising later life. This essay serves as a preliminary sketch for a book that examines Michelangelo’s final eighteen years, from his appointment as architect of St. Peter’s until his death in 1564, that is, from age seventy-one to a few weeks shy of eighty-nine. This period represents nearly a quarter of the artist’s approximately seventy-five-year artistic career, yet it remains the least familiar segment of Michelangelo’s long life. I am examining Michelangelo’s life and works from the perspective of his advanced age, with a focus on what the artist chose to accomplish in his final years. Thus, this study is not as much an investigation of late style (in the manner of Titian, Rembrandt, Goya, or Beethoven)Footnote ⁵ as a late life: how Michelangelo lived and worked in the face of recurring setbacks and personal losses, as well as the nearly constant expectation of his own death.

The overarching themes of Michelangelo’s late life are significantly different from his earlier career, which was characterized by the artist’s overweening ambition and spectacular rise to fame, manifested in a series of astonishing creations: Bacchus, Pietà, David, the Medici Chapel, the tomb of Pope Julius II, and the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo was no less active as he approached the end of his life, but he worked in a substantially different manner. He is no longer the artist who insisted on doing everything himself, or who, thirty years earlier at San Lorenzo in Florence, directed assistants with near-obsessive attention to detail.Footnote ⁶ What differentiates Michelangelo’s late life is a significant lack of comparable evidence of his day-to-day activity at the building site. The artist’s multiple architectural commissions were carried out in a fundamentally different fashion from those earlier in his career. And surprisingly, there is a complete absence of paintings and sculptures made for the public sphere.

After installing the tomb of Pope Julius II in 1545, and still with nearly two decades to live, Michelangelo completed no further sculptures. He carved the Florentine Pietà as his own grave memorial, but gave it away broken and unfinished. He worked on the Rondanini Pietà until several days before his death, but the sculpture remains radically incomplete. He lived with these unfinished sculptures in his house — as he previously had lived with Moses — for nearly two decades.Footnote ⁷ They were memento mori, perpetually reminding the artist of his impending death and, more poignantly, of a life littered with unfinished and abandoned work.

Michelangelo’s public life was now largely devoted to architecture. In his final years, he was associated with more than a dozen architectural projects and actively supervised half of them, including, most notably, new St. Peter’s. However, at the time of his death, not a single one of these projects was anywhere near completion. The two frescoes in the Pauline Chapel, completed in 1550, were the last works of art Michelangelo ever finished, whether in sculpture, painting, or architecture. We are faced with the seeming paradox of an aged artist who, despite a plethora of incomplete undertakings, never wavered in his devotion to work, whose power of expression never waned, and who continued to exercise a tremendous influence on the art and architecture of his time. How do we assess Michelangelo’s final accomplishments given that they are substantially different from the achievements of his earlier career? How do we account for the artist’s stature and prestige given the absence of completed work? Most importantly, how do we understand Michelangelo’s art in light of his growing preoccupation with death, sin, and salvation?

In order to illuminate these themes, I will focus on three life-altering episodes in the final years of Michelangelo’s life. The first spans a few months between 1546 and 1547 when a series of deaths devastated the artist at the very moment he became architect of new St. Peter’s. The second episode is marked by the death of his patron, Pope Paul III, and the publication of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Architects, Painters and Sculptors (1550) — dual events that forced the artist to take stock of his life and legacy. The final episode is the rarely considered political disruptions of 1556, which resulted in his flight from Rome to Spoleto and the suspension of every one of his artistic endeavors — in Michelangelo’s mind, probably forever.

Do such brief episodes have long-lasting resonance? What was the effect of the few weeks Johannes Brahms spent walking down the Rhine from Mainz to Bonn?Footnote ⁸ What about the six weeks Percy Bysshe Shelley was in France and Switzerland with Mary Wollstonecraft, or the nine days that Samuel Coleridge spent walking in the fells of the Lake District? Such moments stand out in memory and possibly change lives. For Michelangelo, the three episodes I will consider had long-term consequences for his life and art, and each was accompanied by significant personal losses, including the deaths of his closest friends, his greatest patron, and the last remaining members of his family. Yet even in the face of tragic loss and the constant expectation of his own death, and despite repeated disruptions to his artistic endeavors, Michelangelo remained committed to carrying forward the most important work of his career. Ultimately, these life-altering episodes helped Michelangelo define, and then pursue with increasing tenacity, the paramount goals of his late life: the perpetuation of his artistic and family legacies and the salvation of his soul.

Michelangelo’s late life begins in 1546, when the artist turned seventy-one years of age. Although old, the artist had ample reason to be content. With the installation of the tomb of Pope Julius II, the artist finally was free of his most burdensome obligation. Like his literary hero Petrarch, Michelangelo had just been made an honorary citizen of Rome; he was working for an enlightened patron in Pope Paul III; he enjoyed a tight-knit circle of extremely close friends; he had money to invest in property; and Lionardo Buonarroti (1522–99), his nephew and heir, had initiated the search for a suitable bride, thereby ensuring the continuation of the Buonarroti line. Michelangelo was finally realizing his lifelong ambition to “raise up” his family.Footnote ⁹ He enjoyed the patronage of princes, the protection of the pontiff, and the attentions of the rich and powerful.

Michelangelo’s closest friend at this time was Luigi del Riccio (d. 1546), a functionary in the Roman branch of the Strozzi bank, who efficiently handled the artist’s business affairs.Footnote ¹⁰ Del Riccio was, in Michelangelo’s words, “molto mio amico.”Footnote ¹¹ He was also an enthusiastic reader of the artist’s poetry, and actively assisted Michelangelo in publishing a volume of his verse. The publishing project was motivated, in part, by Michelangelo’s warm relationship with another friend and poetic muse, Vittoria Colonna (1490–1547). Colonna had given Michelangelo a “little book” of her poems, which he considered among his most treasured possessions.Footnote ¹² The publication of a selection of Michelangelo’s poetry would be a reciprocal gift and a means of thanking Colonna for her friendship and spiritual counsel.

Michelangelo and Luigi del Riccio selected eighty-nine of the artist’s poems; they were given final revisions, written out in fair copy, and placed in numbered order.Footnote ¹³ On the verge of going to press, Del Riccio died. Just three months later, Vittoria Colonna also was dead. These completely unexpected losses so profoundly affected Michelangelo that he entirely abandoned the publishing project. Adding to the dual blow were the further deaths of Michelangelo’s humanist friend Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) and the poet Jacopo Sadoleto (1477–1547), both in 1547. Not only was the publication project now defunct, but Michelangelo’s literary world had been decimated. In the last eighteen years of his life, the artist penned, at most, thirty-five poems and possibly as few as half that number. Most are fragments, and few had readers, as many of his closest friends and fellow poets were now dead.

But things got worse. In the span of just a few months between 1546 and 1547, death claimed more than a half-dozen persons of importance to Michelangelo, including — in addition to Vittoria Colonna, Luigi del Riccio, and Pietro Bembo — his friend and sometime collaborator Sebastiano del Piombo (ca. 1485–1547); his patron Ottaviano de’ Medici (1482–1546), for whose son Michelangelo acted as godfather; and the king of France, François I (1494–1547), an eager patron and the artist’s final hope for the liberation of Florence.Footnote ¹⁴ The artist was already older than most of these friends and patrons. With a deepening melancholy, Michelangelo wrote: “I am an old man and death has robbed me of the dreams of youth — may those who do not know what old age means bear it with what patience they may when they reach it, because it cannot be imagined beforehand.”Footnote ¹⁵ In the few verses he continued to write, he longed for death: “Di morte certo, ma non già dell’ora”:

The sonnet is a relentless drumbeat of pessimism: in addition to the repeated appearance of death and its cognates (“morte,” “mora,” “mortale”), we encounter the blind world (“Il mondo è cieco”), light extinguished (“spent’è la luce”), the triumph of error (“trionfa il falso”), a curtailing of hope (“tronca la speme”), the soul in mortal danger (“l’alma fa mortale”), and life without refuge (“senza alcun refugio”).Footnote ¹⁷ There are more than a half-dozen pessimistic expressions in the course of this single fourteen-line sonnet. Death was now omnipresent. As my mentor Howard Hibbard once quipped: “Michelangelo started dying at age forty, and continued for the next fifty years.”

It is difficult to measure the full impact of these multiple deaths, much less appreciate the implication for Michelangelo’s art, beyond their immediate effect of killing his literary aspirations. However, it is certain that from this moment forward, Michelangelo became increasingly preoccupied with his own death. In the medieval tradition of the ars moriendi, Michelangelo spent his final years preparing for death. But, unlike a medieval communicant, he did not retreat from the world. Rather, this was the moment he became architect of new St. Peter’s.

After more than forty years of demolition and new construction, St. Peter’s was a depressing sight. Vaults linked the four massive piers but the central crossing was still open to the sky. The grave of Saint Peter was protected from the elements by a temporary structure, but pilgrims would have had difficulty negotiating the chaotic work site or feeling any sense of veneration.Footnote ¹⁸ Broken pieces of the nave columns and entablature lay where they had been pulled down in ruinous haste by the first architect, Donato Bramante (1444–1514), occasionally maligned as “Bramante ruinante.”Footnote ¹⁹ The construction was encased in scaffolding, festooned with ropes, cranes, and hoists, and littered with disordered piles of building stone and equipment: clamps of old and new bricks, sand and pozzolana for mortar, carts, nails, rope, pulleys, wood, and mud everywhere. The foul stench of animals and refuse and the cacophony of work pervaded St. Peter’s. The largest construction site in the world looked more like a Roman ruin than a new church.

The building was granted a reprieve from further indignity when the architect Antonio da Sangallo (1484–1546) died in September 1546. After some wrangling over Sangallo’s successor, Pope Paul turned to Michelangelo. But why should Michelangelo, busy with the painting of the Pauline Chapel, enter the scene? He, after all, claimed that “architecture is not my profession,” and he was so busy with his multiple obligations that he didn’t even have time to write to his family.Footnote ²⁰ Pope Paul was undeterred by his artist’s “intense dismay,” and appointed Michelangelo supreme architect of St. Peter’s in January 1547.Footnote ²¹ The artist inherited a recalcitrant workforce as loyal to Sangallo as they were rightly skeptical of a comparatively inexperienced Michelangelo. Facing an entrenched bureaucracy and still painting the Pauline Chapel frescoes, Michelangelo took on the new obligation with understandable reluctance.

The sorry condition of the new church, the constellation of recent personal losses, Michelangelo’s advanced age, and his expectation of imminent death were more than enough to justify his hesitation. On the other hand, St. Peter’s gave new purpose and focus to his life, turning Michelangelo’s private concerns into his greatest public responsibility. St. Peter’s offered a final mission and the best reason not to yield to old age, despair, or death. His salvation, he came to realize, depended on restoring life to the dilapidated church. Thus, throughout the remaining years of Michelangelo’s life, St. Peter’s was the artist’s principal and ever-present concern. The church is the central narrative of his late life.

The second significant episode unfolds in 1550 when Michelangelo was seventy-five years old. In November 1549, Pope Paul III, the artist’s near contemporary and the person who had entrusted St. Peter’s to Michelangelo, died, causing the artist “the greatest sorrow.”Footnote ²² Given his advanced age, Michelangelo doubted that the new pope “would need me owing to my age.”Footnote ²³ But he was wrong; Pope Julius III (r. 1550–55) confirmed Michelangelo in his position as papal architect, and soon employed him in a number of additional tasks.Footnote ²⁴ Just a few months later, Michelangelo’s life became a matter of general interest with the publication of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Architects, Painters and Sculptors. Michelangelo’s problems with St. Peter’s and his current state of mind — sorrow at the loss of his friend and greatest patron, abject subjugation to God’s will, and a fervent desire for his own salvation — could hardly have contrasted more with the triumphant and laudatory picture presented in Giorgio Vasari’s encomium. The publication of Vasari’s book in 1550 forced Michelangelo to confront the disjunction between his private person and his burgeoning public reputation and responsibilities.

Vasari began his life of Michelangelo with a sentence of biblical proportions, a masterpiece of hagiographical hyperbole: “Meanwhile, the benign ruler of heaven graciously looked down to earth, saw the worthlessness of what was being done, the intense but utterly fruitless studies, and the presumption of men who were farther from true art than night is from day, and resolved to save us from our errors,” and on and on. The single sentence is 222 words in the original Italian, that is, three times longer than the opening of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. Vasari’s first sentence concludes with God deciding “to send into the world an artist who would be skilled in each and every craft, whose work alone would teach us how to attain perfection in design.”Footnote ²⁵ In short, a savior, a new Christ. When Vasari sent a copy of his book, Michelangelo reciprocated with a sonnet and a letter thanking the author for having “prolong[ed] the life of the living.”Footnote ²⁶ While Vasari’s Vita gave new life to the artist, it also prompted Michelangelo to reflect on the achievements and failures of his seventy-five years. Most importantly, Vasari’s book motivated Michelangelo to become an editor and author of his own biography.Footnote ²⁷

In our time, the life stories of celebrities and political figures appear with alarming rapidity. Biographies of Pope Francis appeared in bookstores within a month of his election. Prior to the modern age, however, biographies generally were written after the deaths of their subjects. The appearance of Vasari’s life in 1550 introduced the curious and unusual situation of the biographical subject reading his own biography. Michelangelo is among the first persons in history to read a biography of himself. Except for Petrarch, who likely read Boccaccio’s De Vita et Moribus Domini Francisci Petracchi (1340s), there are few precedents.Footnote ²⁸ Kings may sometimes have heard their deeds proclaimed in public, or read aloud to them, as we see, for example, in the Sistine Chapel pendentive that shows Ahasuerus in bed listening to the chronicles of his kingdom. But the famous subjects in Plutarch and Suetonious did not read their own biographies, nor did Charlemagne read Einhard’s Vita Caroli Magni, nor did Samuel Johnson read Boswell. The experience of reading his own biography prompted Michelangelo to become an active author of his own life.

Partly to correct Vasari, but mainly to tell his own story, Michelangelo prevailed upon his pupil Ascanio Condivi (1525–74) to write a life that appeared just three years later, in 1553.Footnote ²⁹ The most important difference between Vasari’s and Condivi’s lives must be attributed to Michelangelo himself, for it concerned his family history, which at this point was of intense interest to the septuagenarian artist. Only one of the five Buonarroti brothers ever married; therefore, the continuation of the family was wholly dependent on the artist’s nephew, Lionardo, the sole surviving male child. Michelangelo fully recognized Lionardo’s critical role, exhorting him “to remake and perpetuate the house,” “so that our existence may not come to an end.”Footnote ³⁰ In 1549, Michelangelo invited Lionardo to Rome to discuss property investments, improvements to the family house in Florence, and the young man’s marriage prospects. The aged artist clearly expected to die soon and, therefore, as he wrote, “I want to put my spiritual and temporal affairs in order.”Footnote ³¹

Michelangelo felt a deep obligation to his family lineage since, as he frequently reiterated, “we are citizens descended from one of the noblest families,”Footnote ³² and further, “it is well known that we are old Florentine citizens and as noble as any other family.”Footnote ³³ Michelangelo’s proud claim was founded on his family’s antiquity and their descent from the illustrious counts of Canossa. The traditional family belief had been confirmed in 1520, when the current Count of Canossa, Alessandro, addressed the artist: “My much loved and honored relative Messer Michelangelo Buonarroto of Canossa.” The count reported that a search among his family papers had established the connection between their families, and he invited Michelangelo to visit the ancestral home (“la casa vostra”).Footnote ³⁴ Nothing was more important to Michelangelo’s self-perception.Footnote ³⁵ His belief in his noble ancestry governed the manner in which Michelangelo conducted himself as a gentleman-artist, and it fully manifested itself in his rewriting of Vasari’s life.

In contrast to God’s divine plan as described in Vasari’s exaggeratedly rhetorical opening sentence, Condivi, writing at Michelangelo’s behest, penned this first line: “Michelangelo Buonarroti, that outstanding sculptor and painter, traced his origin from the counts of Canossa, noble and illustrious family of the territory of Reggio through their own quality and antiquity as well as their relationship with the imperial blood.”Footnote ³⁶ No major artist has ever claimed to have imperial blood in their veins, and, moreover, believed it. This incredible claim was followed by a lengthy description of the family’s origins, surname, and coat of arms — all upper-class attributes possessed by few artists. Condivi clearly was emphasizing what mattered most to Michelangelo: the artist’s noble birth, family history, and social status. The engraving by Giulio Bonasone that served as the frontispiece and only illustration in Condivi’s book may legitimately be regarded as the artist’s officially sanctioned portrait (fig. 3).Footnote ³⁷ The Latin inscription proudly proclaims Michelangelo a patrician and a Florentine, although it might also have been a poignant reminder that the artist had not seen his native city for nearly twenty years.

Figure 3. Giulio Bonasone. Portrait of Michelangelo. Engraving. 1546. Author’s photo.

Having two biographies published in his lifetime prompted Michelangelo to take stock of his career and to reflect on his many wasted years and many incomplete endeavors. He also was forced to recognize that his life and works were matters of public interest and fostered contemporary expectation.Footnote ³⁸ For example, toward the end of his narrative, Vasari briefly mentions some of Michelangelo’s works in progress, including the Campidoglio, St. Peter’s, and the unfinished Florentine Pietà, which he anticipates “will surpass every other work of his.”Footnote ³⁹ After observing that “it is enough to say that whatever he touches with his divine hand is given eternal life,”Footnote ⁴⁰ Vasari concludes with a rhetorical flourish: “When he departs this life, his immortal works will yet remain, the fame of which, known throughout the world, will live gloriously forever in men’s praise and the pens of writers.”Footnote ⁴¹ Such fulsome praise and promise of future glory must have jarred uncomfortably with the current state of affairs, since Michelangelo was acutely aware of his many incomplete endeavors. These included not only the three mentioned by Vasari — the Campidoglio, St. Peter’s, and the unfinished Pietà — but also the abandoned marble façade for San Lorenzo in Florence, the imperfectly realized Medici Chapel, the still-incomplete Laurentian Library, and a host of unfinished sculptures: St. Matthew, Dying Slave and Rebellious Slave (Louvre), four Accademia Gallery Prisoners, Victory, David/Apollo, and Medici Madonna — all unfinished and most languishing in his abandoned Florentine workshop.Footnote ⁴² Over the course of his seventy-five-year career, Michelangelo started some thirty-seven marble sculptures, but fully finished and delivered just eighteen of them, that is, less than half.Footnote ⁴³ Once he accepted the responsibilities of papal architect, the number of incomplete projects multiplied.

Perhaps to counter Vasari’s implied expectation that Michelangelo would complete many of these unfinished projects, Condivi wrote that the current pope, Julius III, “recognizes and relishes [Michelangelo’s] greatness, but he refrains from burdening him with more than he wishes to do. And this respect, in my judgement, enhances Michelangelo’s reputation more than any of the work all the other pontiffs employed him to do.”Footnote ⁴⁴ In other words, Condivi suggested that Michelangelo’s reputation and future glory would not depend solely on the artist’s works. Indeed, Condivi did not even mention the Campidoglio, and his brief discussion of St. Peter’s largely absolves Michelangelo of much responsibility for that commission since “he never wished to follow the profession of architect.” Condivi continues: “Indeed … when Pope Paul wished to appoint Michelangelo [as architect of St. Peter’s] … he refused this employment, alleging that it was not his craft; and he refused in such a way that the Pope had to order him to do so and issue a most ample motu proprio which was subsequently confirmed for him by Pope Julius III.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Altogether, Condivi wrote little about St. Peter’s, and nothing about the Capitoline. He eloquently described the Florentine Pietà, as Michelangelo was still carving it, but Condivi was unaware that the artist would soon abandon the work. Having read Vasari and having collaborated with Condivi on his biography, Michelangelo could hardly escape from reflecting on all that he had not accomplished.

We glean from Michelangelo’s poetry and correspondence an increasing pessimism regarding his art and career. He ruefully observed, “No one has full mastery before reaching the end of his art and his life.”Footnote ⁴⁶ He especially lamented his misguided efforts and the ultimate futility of art, which he had come to realize was a “mistaken notion.”Footnote ⁴⁷ With evident despair, he wrote, “art and death do not go well together.”Footnote ⁴⁸ These depressing observations were written on the same sheet and just below an incomplete draft of one of Michelangelo’s most famous sonnets, “Giunto è già’l corso della vita mia” (fig. 4).Footnote ⁴⁹ However, the sheet is less interesting for the sonnet fragment than for what it reveals of Michelangelo’s current agitated state of mind. The page also offers eloquent testimony of the artist’s creative process, which was discursive, fragmentary, nonlinear, and frequently incomplete — whether the medium was words or stone. Let us look more closely at what this single page reveals.

Figure 4. Michelangelo. Sonnet draft and miscellaneous poetic fragments. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana: Cod. Vaticano Latino 3211, fol. 95^r. Author’s photo.

Michelangelo drafted the first quatrain of the sonnet (fig. 4-a), but at line three of the second quatrain he began searching for words, writing three different versions of a couplet that expressed his realization that his life’s journey had been “laden with error” (“error carca”) (fig. 4-b).Footnote ⁵⁰ Without having resolved the compositional impasse, he gave vent to an overwhelming pessimism in writing, “In such servility! and all so boring! mistaken notions! and in deadly peril to my own soul, here chiseling things divine” (fig. 4-c).Footnote ⁵¹ At this point, the composition of the sonnet, which began, “Giunto è già’l corso della vita mia,” has been interrupted and temporarily abandoned.

In composing a poem whose subject was the voyage of life, Michelangelo inevitably would have recalled Dante’s own life journey as described in the Divine Comedy. While Dante loses his way in a dark wood, Michelangelo travels a tumultuous sea in a fragile bark — both pilgrims having lost their direction in life. Michelangelo’s sense that he has erred in life echoes Dante losing his way, “la diretta via era smarrita” (“the straight way was lost”).Footnote ⁵² However, Dante had the advantage and sympathy of his guides, Virgil and Beatrice, whereas Michelangelo is accompanied only by his Lord. Yet Michelangelo’s Lord is less a helpful companion than an unknown, expectant being, to whom the artist now cries out in plaintive appeal. In six more lines written toward the bottom of the page, Michelangelo poignantly expresses his sense of the futility of art in the face of impending death (fig. 4-d):

Finally, he turned the sheet ninety degrees and scribbled a fourth version of the line ending in “error carca,” thus reiterating his lament of a life “laden with error” (fig. 4-e).Footnote ⁵⁴

The disrupted composition of the sonnet and the writer’s descent into increasingly negative ruminations on art and life are not evident if we only read the finished, less depressing version of the sonnet that Michelangelo ultimately sent to Giorgio Vasari in September 1554:

Michelangelo’s accompanying letter further lightens the mood since he mocks himself as “old and crazy in wishing to write sonnets,” and admits that “many people say that I am in my second childhood.”Footnote ⁵⁶ The sonnet sent to Vasari is the version that Enzo Girardi published in his critical edition of 1960, and the one that most subsequent scholars have considered definitive.Footnote ⁵⁷ In contrast, the autograph draft reveals a complicated compositional history and a much more dispirited artist. For example, the final verse of the finished sonnet, “Painting and sculpture soothe the soul no more, its focus fixed on the love divine,” is less pessimistic than the same line in the first draft: “The soul means more, the more the world means less; art and impending death don’t go together.”Footnote ⁵⁸ The last line of the finished sonnet has Christ offering succor, “love divine, outstretching on the cross, to enfold us closer, open arms” (“amor divino c[h]’aperse, a prender no’, in croce le braccia”), which is more uplifting than the plangent lament of the draft: “so what are You still expecting, Lord, from me?” (“che convien più che di me dunche speri?”).Footnote ⁵⁹ Between draft and final version, Michelangelo transformed his despairing cry, “what are You still expecting, Lord, from me?” into a hope for salvation, with Christ on the cross reaching out to embrace the penitent artist in his open arms.

In the same way that we admire Michelangelo’s drawings and unfinished sculptures for what they supposedly reveal of the artist, we should pay comparable attention to the fragmentary and inchoate form of much of his poetry. Michelangelo’s drawings, sculptures, and writing all reveal the artist immersed in the laborious, and not always successful creative process.Footnote ⁶⁰ And while we rightly admire Michelangelo’s prodigious artistic accomplishments, it is well to recall that toward the end of his life, he looked upon art as false and futile, even a “deadly peril to my own soul.”Footnote ⁶¹ Art, once the artist’s “sovereign lord,” was now a “pack of lies.”Footnote ⁶² These unsettling sentiments were expressed shortly before Michelangelo fled Rome — the third of our significant episodes, and the one that forcefully confirmed his most pessimistic reflections on art and life.

The third event is the one with which I began: Michelangelo’s flight from Rome in 1556. This is the most fleeting of the three biographical episodes, and perhaps for that reason it has prompted little interest among scholars. Moreover, the long-term ramifications are not immediately obvious. What do five weeks matter in an artistic career that spanned seventy-five years? But five weeks is actually a significant amount of time for an eighty-one-year-old artist, and especially if we acknowledge that the long-term psychological implications were more important than its temporal extent. Let us put this episode in perspective.

The year 1556 began as one of the worst of Michelangelo’s life. He had been in charge of St. Peter’s for nearly ten years, but had made only limited progress. He had devoted most of that time to reinforcing Bramante’s crossing piers and eliminating the ill-conceived exterior ambulatory constructed under Antonio da Sangallo. Vasari praised Michelangelo for having “liberated St. Peter’s from the hands of thieves and assassins, and transformed that which was imperfect to perfection.”Footnote ⁶³ But there was nothing perfect about St. Peter’s. This was merely Vasari’s extravagant means of describing Michelangelo’s limited success in ridding himself of the most problematic members of the Sangallo claque and for having asserted a degree of control over a meddlesome bureaucracy. The truth is that, even after ten years, Michelangelo had little to show for his Sisyphean efforts, and few contemporaries, other than Vasari, recognized that he had made much progress. Moreover, private concerns intruded upon his public duties.

His brother Gismondo (1481–1555), the last surviving member of his immediate family, died in September 1555. Michelangelo accepted it with his usual Christian resignation, but his faith was severely tested when Urbino (d. January 1556), his beloved servant and confidant of twenty-six years, died less than three months later. Michelangelo, who loved Urbino “as if he were my own son,” was so emotionally distraught that he recorded the wrong month when he wrote to inform his nephew: “I must tell you that last night, Francesco, called Urbino, passed from this life to my intense grief, leaving me so stricken and troubled that it would have been easier to die with him … I now seem to be lifeless myself and can find no peace.”Footnote ⁶⁴ As he soon discovered, the only peace he would experience would be in the woods near Spoleto. However, he was now accompanied by the sad realization that, with the deaths of his brother and closest companion, he had lost the last remaining members of his immediate and extended family.

In departing Rome in September 1556, Michelangelo might have had no expectation of ever returning. The city was in turmoil, threatened by an advancing Spanish army. Work at St. Peter’s had been suspended, Michelangelo had dismissed his household servants, and his closest companion was dead.Footnote ⁶⁵ Michelangelo’s housemate and the current overseer at St. Peter’s, Sebastiano Malenotti, wrote of the troubled times to the artist’s nephew: “And God help us, for here one sees cruel things.”Footnote ⁶⁶ A week later, Malenotti again wrote: “Here we are in danger; and you can imagine that I am unable to leave Michelangelo much alone because I see him in the greatest vexation.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Shortly thereafter, the two left for Loreto. Michelangelo was eighty-one years old. What would become of his many unfinished projects? What sort of future could he reasonably expect?

Michelangelo had an invitation to seek refuge in Ancona, and another from a dear friend, Bishop Ludovico Beccadelli (1501–72), who encouraged the artist to escape Italy altogether and come to Ragusa in Dalmatia. Duke Cosimo de’ Medici (1519–74) also offered hospitality, enlisting Giorgio Vasari in a concerted campaign to lure the artist to Florence. Vasari employed all his rhetorical skill to persuade Michelangelo to escape “Babylonian Rome”: “like Petrarch, your fellow citizen, oppressed by similar ingratitude, who elected the peace of Padua; so I promise that you will find peace in Florence.”Footnote ⁶⁸

But while Michelangelo could safely escape the current crisis, the immediate debilitating effect of this episode has not been sufficiently calculated, nor its ultimately positive consequences. Earlier in his life, Michelangelo twice fled Florence — in 1494 with the exile of the Medici, and in 1529 during the turbulent last republic. He experienced three further significant disruptions to his artistic career: with the reinstatement of the Medici in 1512, the collapse of the last Florentine republic in 1530, and again when he exiled himself from Florence in 1534. Thus the flight from Rome in 1556 was the sixth time in his career that Michelangelo’s artistic endeavors were completely interrupted and he was forced to confront an extremely uncertain future. These repeated ruptures drove home the painful fact that he was not master of his own fate and that art was of little consequence in the face of war, politics, uncertain financing, and fickle patrons.

Meanwhile, what was he doing in the remote Franciscan hermitage of Monteluco? Other than a few letters exchanged with his exiled friends, there is little evidence of any activity other than his desire, as he stated, to make his devotions.Footnote ⁶⁹ Michelangelo lived more like a hermit than the world’s most famous artist. It is difficult to imagine Michelangelo with nothing to do, and with no reasonable prospect of renewing his career. We have little except his unexpected reflection that “peace is not really to be found save in the woods.”Footnote ⁷⁰

It is approximately a thirty-minute walk — perhaps slower for the octogenarian artist — from the hermitage of Monteluco (now fronted by Piazzale Michelangelo), where he likely lodged, to the mountain summit where the Franciscan brothers lived and observed their daily routines. He could have walked in the Sacro Bosco, where Saints Francis and Anthony found solace, and where the latter retreated to a tiny rock-cut cell overlooking the valley, with the distant sounds of farm life drifting on the clear mountain air. Perhaps at times during his stay, Michelangelo rode the seven kilometers down the steep mountain path into Spoleto — to visit the beautiful Romanesque duomo or to observe an important feast day, such as that of Saint Francis, which was celebrated on 4 October, shortly after his arrival. The duomo is decorated with impressive frescoes by Filippo Lippi (ca. 1406–69), and there, in the transept of the same church, one finds Lippi’s tomb, paid for by Michelangelo’s first patron, Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–92). One can imagine Michelangelo asking himself who would pay for his tomb, and how would it be marked, now that he had violently attacked and abandoned the Pietà sculpture meant to adorn it. Who was still alive to finance his burial and commemoration?

Michelangelo had intended to continue his journey to Loreto and possibly Dalmatia, but, as he subsequently reported to his nephew, “I was unable to carry out my intention, because someone was sent expressly to say that I must return to Rome.”Footnote ⁷¹ It might have been flattering to have been summoned back to Rome; on the other hand, it reminded Michelangelo that he was a papal servant. He tacitly admitted as much when he wrote to Vasari: “in order not to disobey, I set out for Rome.” But he also observed that “less than half of me has returned.”Footnote ⁷²

In returning to Rome, Michelangelo also returned to his many incomplete endeavors, which he surely now realized he would never live to see finished. Take, for example, the Campidoglio, his longest outstanding architectural commission.Footnote ⁷³ He had positioned the Marcus Aurelius and two river-gods, but more than a quarter of a century after beginning the project, the Capitoline was still far from complete. There was no façade on the Senate palace and no entrance ramp (the cordonnata) to the unpaved piazza. Only three of seven bays of the Palazzo dei Conservatori were under construction before Michelangelo’s death, and its mirror building was not even begun until 1603.Footnote ⁷⁴ The Campidoglio was a constant reminder, since Michelangelo lived nearby, of the molasses-like pace of Renaissance architectural construction and the near impossibility of realizing one’s vision, even if you lived as long as Michelangelo. The same pertained to every one of his current architectural projects: San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, the Sforza Chapel, Porta Pia, Santa Maria degli Angeli, and new St. Peter’s — all would be left incomplete, just like so many of his sculptures. The realization might easily have inspired despair. Rather, following his retreat to Monteluco, Michelangelo experienced a renewed sense of purpose and commitment to his and to God’s work.

After Michelangelo returned to Rome, it was still several months before funding was restored and work could be renewed at St. Peter’s. The building had been under construction for fifty years, yet it still looked much like Maarten van Heemskerk (1498–1574) drew it in the 1530s.Footnote ⁷⁵ Cosimo de’ Medici perceived this to be an opportune moment to redouble his overtures, suggesting the artist might wish to return to Florence and see his “sweetest homeland.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Cosimo’s chamberlain, Leonardo Marinozzi, who wrote this letter on behalf of his duke, joined the chorus: “Therefore, dear messer Michelangelo, now is the time for you to comfort our prince, help your family, and honor Florence with your presence.”Footnote ⁷⁷ But despite pressure and Cosimo’s repeated blandishments, Michelangelo never again left Rome. He devoted his remaining seven years to St. Peter’s. As he wrote: “many people believe, as I do myself, that I was put there by God” (“esservi stato messo da Dio”).Footnote ⁷⁸ Expressed shortly after his return from Spoleto, this sense of divine purpose was nourished during the weeks he spent in the woods “attending to my devotions.” Given the importance of Saint Francis in Michelangelo’s life, it is likely that the artist’s stay in the Franciscan hermitage inspired thoughts of that saint’s mission to rebuild the church — metaphorically as well as physically, as Francis did at San Damiano in Assisi.Footnote ⁷⁹ For Franciscans, the spiritual mission to “repair Christ’s house” and the physical building of churches were directly related; it was a message and a mission that Michelangelo appears to have imbibed deeply.

Michelangelo’s promise “not to fail St. Peter’s nor to fail myself” was encouraged by his friend Ludovico Beccadelli.Footnote ⁸⁰ Although fully aware of the incomplete state of St. Peter’s, Beccadelli described the building as “that magnificent temple, immortal sign of Your Lordship’s divine virtue.”Footnote ⁸¹ Beccadelli clearly realized, as did Michelangelo, that St. Peter’s gave compass to the artist’s life and endowed it with purpose. Informed of Michelangelo’s recent escape to Spoleto, Beccadelli wrote comfortingly of his own exile in Ragusa: “As regards matters of the flesh, I am in exile; but with regards to the spirit I thank God for having called me to his service.”Footnote ⁸² Michelangelo also felt called to God’s service: “I serve for the love of God,” he wrote, “in Whom is all my hope.”Footnote ⁸³ More than once, Michelangelo declared that he worked “for the love of God”; therefore, to abandon St. Peter’s “would be the cause of great ruin, a great shame and a great sin.”Footnote ⁸⁴

While Michelangelo hoped that his devotion to St. Peter’s would guarantee his personal salvation, he also worked for the greater glory of the church — as he said, for “God and St. Peter.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Michelangelo was indeed a servant, but to a higher purpose. Thus he prayed that God would “help and advise me.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Vasari ultimately came to better understand Michelangelo’s final mission, since, in the expanded 1568 edition of the Lives, he too linked God, Michelangelo, and St. Peter’s when he wrote: “God, who looks after good men, favoured Michelangelo during his lifetime and never ceased to protect both him and St. Peter’s.”Footnote ⁸⁷

Aside from the spiritual and salvific significance of St. Peter’s, there still remained the practical matter of getting the church built. Following Spoleto, in letter after letter — to his nephew, to Giorgio Vasari, and to Duke Cosimo himself — Michelangelo reiterated his commitment to St. Peter’s. Certain that he would not live long, Michelangelo repeatedly promised not to “leave here until I had brought the fabric of St. Peter’s to a stage at which my design could not be spoilt or altered.”Footnote ⁸⁸ He never again wavered from this resolve, which was as important to saving his soul as it was instrumental in shaping the future of the building. Having heard it repeatedly from Michelangelo himself, Vasari, in the expanded 1568 edition of the Lives, paraphrased the artist’s letters in writing that Michelangelo “continued working on various parts of St. Peter’s, with the object of making it impossible to change what was done,” and further: “for seventeen years, Michelangelo had devoted himself entirely to settling the essential features of the building.”Footnote ⁸⁹ In turn, Michelangelo wrote to Vasari expressing his commitment “to work here on the fabric of St. Peter’s until it had reached a stage at which it could not be altered into another form.”Footnote ⁹⁰ This was indeed the artist’s strategy, but he must have wondered what he could realistically expect to accomplish in the little time remaining to him.

At eighty-one years of age, and after six major disruptions in his life, Michelangelo fully realized he could no longer control or do everything himself. He also suffered from the excruciating pain of kidney stones, and some days was too feeble even to appear at the worksite. Moreover, the micromanagement that characterized his earlier career was not a practical means of overseeing a project as large as St. Peter’s, not to mention a half-dozen other architectural sites scattered across Rome. Rather, Michelangelo extended his reach and authority via a small group of individuals who understood his directives and trusted his vision. These friends and assistants are among the unsung heroes of Michelangelo’s old age, including the three successive overseers (soprastanti) who worked under his direction at St. Peter’s: Sebastiano Malenotti, Cesare Bettini, and Pierluigi Gaeta. They worked alongside Michelangelo, carrying out his plans and directions, but, just as often, they worked independently, as the master’s on-site representatives and with his full authority. Sebastiano Malenotti and Pierluigi Gaeta actually lived in Michelangelo’s household, therefore they were in constant contact with the master. In recommending Gaeta for the position as overseer, Michelangelo described their effective working relationship: he is “an honest and capable person suited to work at the fabric,” and, importantly, one who knows its “needs and requirements.” “Also,” added Michelangelo, “because he is accustomed to the work and lives in my house, he can explain to me in the evening what is to be done the next day.”Footnote ⁹¹ Work on St. Peter’s continued long after the day laborers had been dismissed. Note that it was Gaeta who knew the “needs and requirements” of the building, and it was his responsibility to explain the day-to-day progress of work to Michelangelo, not vice versa.

Most importantly, in the final eighteen years of his life, Michelangelo worked for five successive popes and every one gave the artist his unqualified support. Thanks to the authority that derived from this privileged position, Michelangelo could enlist influential individuals who served in the papal bureaucracy. Especially critical were the deputies of the Fabbrica, among whom were Michelangelo’s friends, Ludovico Beccadelli and Cardinal Rodolfo Pio da Carpi (1500–64), as well as Bishops Francesco Pallavicini and Bartolomeo Ferratini (1537–1606), all loyal supporters of the artist.

Cardinal Pio da Carpi proved to be a particularly important figure in Michelangelo’s final years. Carpi was an eminent and cultured man, an effective diplomat, and an influential deputy of the Fabbrica, whom Michelangelo considered a friend and addressed as “my most worshipful patron.”Footnote ⁹² It was Cardinal Carpi who encouraged Michelangelo to complete the wood model of the dome, and it was to Carpi that Michelangelo articulated his laconic theory of architecture: “one thing is certain: the parts of architecture are derived from the parts of man. Nobody who has not been or is not a good master of the human figure, and especially of anatomy, can hope to understand this.”Footnote ⁹³

In the same manner that he made drawings and carved sculpture, so Michelangelo concentrated on a building’s torso, its anatomical center and structure; the rest was appendage. Thus it mattered little that subsequent architects — most notably Giacomo della Porta and Carlo Maderno — deviated from Michelangelo’s designs since he had already fixed the principal form of the building’s core: plan, space, and proportions. As Vasari clearly recognized, Michelangelo “settled and established the form of the building.”Footnote ⁹⁴

Although Michelangelo’s goal was to define the plan and essential features of St. Peter’s, the slow pace of construction and numerous setbacks meant that he could never completely free himself of responsibility for the project.Footnote ⁹⁵ Thus, despite his express desire “to return to Florence with a mind to rest there in the company of death,”Footnote ⁹⁶ he never reneged on his commitment to St. Peter’s. The artist’s beloved Dante (1265–1321), a fellow exile, may have offered some consolation. In canto 5 of Paradiso, Beatrice addresses the poet’s concerns about unfulfilled vows, which resonated with Michelangelo’s regret for his many incomplete tasks and unfulfilled promises. Beatrice assures Dante, “You have both Testaments, the Old and New, you have the Shepherd of the Church to guide you; you need no more than this for your salvation.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Christ was Michelangelo’s shepherd and St. Peter’s his salvation. Michelangelo may have taken further comfort from Cicero’s essay on old age, De senectute, in which the aged Cato describes the elderly landowners planting and “working at things which they know they will not live to see.” Cato then quotes the poet Caecilius Statius, who wrote: “He plants trees for the use of another age.”Footnote ⁹⁸ The best that Michelangelo could do was plant the seeds for the future of St. Peter’s. And he did.

St. Peter’s was Michelangelo’s greatest achievement and, as he declared, his best hope for salvation and the forgiveness of his sins (fig. 5). Despite changes inflicted on the building during its 150-year construction history, we rightly think of the church as Michelangelo’s creation, and his masterpiece. One of his most brilliant contributions was to revive Bramante’s initial conception and correct its engineering deficiencies, thereby reinvesting the church with exterior and interior clarity. In removing much intervening construction, Michelangelo reversed nearly forty years of building history, which demanded enormous faith, courage, and vision on the part of both artist and a succession of papal patrons.Footnote ⁹⁹ In just seventeen years he corrected what had gone before and largely shaped what came afterward.

Figure 5. View of the dome of St. Peter’s, Rome. Author’s photo.

From the outside, the church is a compact sculptural mass; inside it is a luminous, expansive, uplifting space. The vertical rise is so majestic that only the substantial attic and emphatic cornices counteract the upward surge. The dome both continues and concentrates these vertical forces. From ground to lantern, the building rises in one continuous sweep. Although he did not live to see it built, the dome is the centerpiece of Michelangelo’s design and his greatest contribution to St. Peter’s. Its soaring magnificence dominates the skyline of Rome in a manner that its ancient predecessor — the Pantheon — never has. Michelangelo died deeply uncertain of his accomplishment, yet he did, in fact, succeed “in bringing the building to the stage at which [his] design could not be spoiled.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ St. Peter’s is the crowning achievement of Michelangelo’s art as well as the most prominent symbol of papal authority and the universal Catholic Church.

How many persons die before completing their life’s work? Michelangelo was painfully aware that his final project was yet another unfinished work. But while his life’s journey was ending, his greatest masterpiece was just coming to life, and here we are 450 years later marveling at that achievement.

It is paradoxical that in the final phase of his career, Michelangelo remained prodigiously creative and influential without being prolific, as he had been earlier in his career. His late life was concerned less with making things than with finding the courage and devotion to continue tasks that he knew he would never see to fruition, and despite the loss of his closest friends, greatest patron, and his entire family. Yet thanks to a succession of trusting papal patrons, influential friends, hand-picked supervisors, and the judicious appointment of subsequent architects sensitive to his intentions, Michelangelo ensured the eventual completion of his many architectural projects, even long after his death. His authorship is not dependent on how many bricks or travertine blocks were laid in his lifetime, but on the clarity and compelling quality of his conceptions. Thus we rightly give Michelangelo credit for the Campidoglio, Porta Pia, Santa Maria degli Angeli, Sforza Chapel, and, of course, new St. Peter’s. What most distinguishes Michelangelo’s late life is the number, scale, and importance of the projects for which he was simultaneously responsible. Thanks to what he accomplished in his final years, Rome once again could claim its place as Caput Mundi.