Laboring side by side, Michelangelo and his assistants developed an easygoing camaraderie, especially during those periods when the master was engaged in the type of large-scale sculptural projects that he most enjoyed. “Almost half of his workforce had some sort of pet name: the Stick, the Basket, the Little Liar, the Dolt, Oddball, Fats, Thorny, Knobby, Lefty, Stumpy, and Gloomy,’’ Wallace notes. “Because he was his own bookkeeper, Michelangelo recorded their names, number of days worked, and the wage of every employee every week. Having grown up in the stoneworking town of Settignano, Michelangelo was personally acquainted with most of his assistants; he was familiar with their talents and employed their fathers, cousins, and neighbors. Such familiarity was a form of quality control and provided an unusual degree of labor stability.”
Michelangelo, redefined
This detailed portrait of the master brings to life the man but not his times
It is with this type of minutely, almost microscopically detailed narration that Wallace is at his best. Unfortunately, the larger picture sometimes gets lost as a result. If any single artist could be said to embody what Simon Schama has called “the big cake’’ of history, it would have to be Michelangelo, a towering figure, a man whose life story touches upon fundamental developments not only in the arts but in politics, religious history, and the history of ideas. For all of his zealous efforts to dispel misconceptions about his subject, Wallace tends to stint its grandeur, adopting an approach whose tight focus yields an intensely vivid picture of Michelangelo’s personality but only a hazy idea of the world that this incomparably creative man bestrode like a colossus.
Jonathan Lopez is a columnist for Art & Antiques and author of “The Man Who Made Vermeers,” a biography of the forger Han van Meegeren.