Michelangelo’s poems are more transparent than his sculptures. Most of them are prayers to God (with echoes of Augustine’s Confessions, which he probably knew well). What he mourned mostly was his struggle with sin (“Fain would I wish what my heart cannot will”) and the time wasted in futile pursuits, including his art (“What’s the use of making so many puppets, if they have brought me to the same end as the man who crossed the sea and drowned in snot?”). At least intuitively, he understood that “sculpting divine things” was accompanied by “false conceptions” and “great peril” to his soul.

Michelangelo’s last sculpture is puzzling – two imprecise figures of Jesus and Mary melting into one, with a fragment of Jesus’s right arm detached from his body. It’s the Pietà Rondanini, the third and last pietà sculpted by the artist, very far from his first and meticulously detailed Vatican Pietà. Some attribute the change to his old age, which had weakened his arm and eyesight. Most critics see it as an expression of his spiritual search, which intensified with time.

His Early Life

Born in 1475 in a small stone house on the Tuscan hills, Michelangelo moved to Florence as a child and eventually convinced his reluctant father to allow him to pursue an artistic career. In spite of promising beginnings first in the workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio and then at the court of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Michelangelo was struggling to survive in 1497, when the commission for the first Pietà came his way. This astonishing work made him famous.

His life runs parallel to the tumultuous events of the Protestant Reformation and is characterized by an equally turbulent search for God’s acceptance. Even if he remained within the Roman Catholic Church until the end, he is an interesting example of the pervasive effect of the Reformation in the lives of its contemporaries.

In the Medici court, Michelangelo became powerfully influenced by the sermons of Friar Girolamo Savonarola, who fiercely censured the greed and corruption of both church and rulers. They were sermons the artist couldn’t get out of his mind even in his old age, in spite of his disagreements with the friar on the dangers of classical art.

While his artistic career continued to soar (especially after the sculpture of the David in 1501 and the unveiling of his Sistine Chapel ceiling fresco in 1512), Michelangelo continued his spiritual search. His art moved away from an insistence on aesthetic perfection and became increasingly a mean of investigation and reflection on God.

Protestant Influences

By the 1530’s, Martin Luther had made a break with Rome and his teachings were spreading all over Europe. Heinrich Bullinger was organizing churches in Switzerland while Henry VIII gained authority to become Supreme Head of the church in England. It was an unprecedented upheaval of the Western church and consequently of the European culture and society which were deeply tied to it. The repercussions reached Italy, both in the form of publications and of frequent discussions.

The people mostly involved in this discussions were known as “spirituali.” Apparently, Michelangelo became involved in a group of spirituali in Viterbo, a city between Florence and Rome, and was particularly close to the poetess Vittoria Colonna, with whom he shared many conversations, letters, and poems. He also created some drawings specifically for her, including a new pietà with the somber inscription, “There is no reckoning of how much blood it cost” (a quotation from the poet Dante)[1].

Michelangelo, who had until then written tormented poems about death, seems to have found comfort in the doctrine of justification through faith alone (or at least in the centrality of faith as gift of God) which transpires in both his and Colonna’s poems.

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