Palazzo Fava dedicates an exhibition to Michelangelo’s trips to Bologna. The first, to make his contribution to the Arcadi San Domenico. And then, as a “traitor”, to pay homage to the Pope who conquered the city
Messer Giovan Francesco Aldovrandi, one of the sixteen members of the government, kept him with him for more than a year. And one day, Aldovrando, having taken him to see the tomb of San Domenico, made, as was said, by Giovan Pisano and then by maestro Niccolò dall’Arca, old sculptors, and missing an Angel holding a candlestick, and a San Petronio, figures of about an arm’s length, asked him if he had enough courage: he answered yes. So, having made him give the marble, he presented it to him, which are the best figures there are…”. This is how Giorgio Vasari remembers the first stay in Bologna of his idol, Michelangelo, which began in 1494 when the then twenty-year-old preferred to distance himself from the Medici protectors that a Dominican from Ferrara, Gerolamo Savonarola, was ousting under the accusation of sacrilegious paganism. It is in Bologna that Michelangelo was engaged in the first important public work of his career, the completion of the legendary Ark of San Domenico, in the church of the same name, which after the thirteenth-century intervention of Nicola Pisano, not Giovanni as Vasari claims, had found in Niccolò d’Antonio de Apulia, who had died a few months earlier when everyone was already calling him “dell’Arc”, the architect responsible for the upper part of the tomb. Michelangelo returned to Bologna in 1506, this time fleeing from Rome where he had entered the good graces of Julius II. Precisely the prolonged absences of the pontiff, more at ease on the battlefields than in the Vatican, had made the pusillanimous Buonarroti feel defenseless against the attacks of his competitors. Julius II brings him back into the ranks, commissioning him to forge a bronze in his honor in Bologna, which the Pope personally occupied for more than a year, symbolic of the submission imposed on the city.
An exhibition at Palazzo Fava is dedicated to Michelangelo’s trips to Bologna, curated by Cristina Acidini and Alessandro Cecchi (until February 15th). The initial Madonna della Scala (c.1490), created when Michelangelo, making use of a formation balanced between Domenico Ghirlandaio and perhaps Benedetto da Maiano as he entered the so-called “Garden of San Marco” promoted by Lorenzo the Magnificent, testifies to what his artistic culture was before 1495, concentrated on the model of the Donatello fence and on the rendering of the contracted perspective space, but with characteristics of originality in the matronly interpretation of Mary, as if the Greco-Roman myth were to be identified with the triumph of an exuberant corporeality. In Bologna governed by the Bentivoglios, Michelangelo compares himself with the “old sculptors” who, differently from how Vasari seems to treat them, he must consider fathers of a modernity in which the foundations have finally been laid to keep pace with the ancient. In Niccolò dell’Arca he presumably sees a Po Valley successor to Donatello, in particular the Sienese one, as suggested by the mirrored proximity of the Madonna del Perdono (c.1458) with the Niccolò one on the façade of the Palazzo d’Accursio in Bologna (1478). For the Ark, Michelangelo actually creates a candle-holder angel which, compared to its counterpart by Niccolò, almost nostalgic of the French Gothic in the asexual elegance of the forms, is keen to appear more male than ever and the son of a full-blown Romanity. However, when, again in the Ark, he had to set up a San Procolo, shattered and reconstituted in the mid-sixteenth century, he strengthened the layout of Niccolò’s San Francesco d’Assisi with Florentine vigor, perhaps also by virtue of what he had seen in Venice and perhaps also in Padua – equestrian monuments to Bartolomeo Colleoni and Gattamelata – before going to Bologna. Instead, in taking up a San Petronio, we see him respecting artificially embossed drapery as they appear in the paintings of Cosmé Tura, paying homage to an Emilian fifteenth century, without excessive distinctions between Bologna and Ferrara, which in his eyes evidently deserved due consideration. The San Petronio dell’Arca also reveals the other “old sculptor” that Michelangelo studied in Bologna, the Sienese Jacopo della Quercia, present in the exhibition with a probable Madonna and Child in painted terracotta (c.1430), who had left the best of himself in the basilica of San Petronio, in particular in the quadrangular reliefs of the Porta Magna which would prove indispensable in inspiring the biblical stories of the Sistine Chapel, above which the blessing Julius II mentioned above would have been placed in 1508. There was, of course, also another Niccolò dell’Arca, not so much that of the Eagles at San Giovanni in Monte and Palazzo d’Accursio, the second of which could have had a prototype in a work in my collection, with which, according to a certain rumor, Buonarroti would have rivaled, but that of the sensational Lamentation at Santa Maria della Vita, too expressionistic and medievally dramatic to fit into Michelangelo’s taste even after the stay of 1495-96, that, so to speak, of the Vatican Pietà, where everything would sound the opposite of the Bolognese masterpiece. But it would be difficult to conceive, in the Pietà, the austere and impassive ovation of Mary, already oblivious to her matronly features, without passing through the Sienese Donatello of the frescoes in the Baptistery, the same one who on site sees himself in a relationship with Jacopo della Quercia and who Niccolò, with the Madonna di Piazza, demonstrates he knows how to translate into local language. The circle closes anyway.
Despite the gratifications he received (another sixteenth-century biographer, Ascanio Condivi, reveals that he was also appreciated by Aldovrandi as a reader of the great Tuscan writers, Dante above all), Michelangelo left Bologna without too much hesitation which he must not have considered, with all due respect to the various Ercole de’ Roberti, Francesco del Cossa, Francesco Francia and Lorenzo Costa, adequate for his artistic ambitions. When he returns he does so as an ally of the enemy who drove out the guarantors of the city’s independence, those Bentivoglios who had welcomed him ten years earlier. The climate around him could not have been more favourable, which led him to dedicate himself strenuously to his work, given that never before had he had to design a fusion work almost four meters high. We can only get an idea of the result obtained through Alessandro Menganti’s Gregory XIII (1580), also on the façade of Palazzo d’Accursio, if it is true that its imperious pose recalls that of Julius II above the Porta Magna, destroyed in 1511 following the return of the Bentivoglio, whose fragments were used by the Este family to obtain armaments. It has nothing to do with his stays in Bologna, but a preparatory sketch for the troubled Roman tomb of Julius II, coming from the Casa Buonarroti in Florence (c.1516), is nevertheless presented in the exhibition: a brilliant invention at least three centuries in advance, with the naked corpse of the Pope, clean-shaven and sagging in the relaxation of his belly, which is held by an angel too small to support him. Left free to give an image only to his thoughts, the genius was even greater than he later demonstrated with his most celebrated works.
