The maestro’s maestro

Michelangelo: A Life in Six Masterpieces. By Miles Unger. Simon & Schuster; 432 pages; $29.95. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

Michelangelo: Complete Works. By Frank Zöllner, Christof Thoenes and Thomas Pöpper. Taschen; 736 pages; $200 and £120. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

MILES UNGER’S biography of Michelangelo Buonarotti focuses on six of the great man’s greatest hits. In an appendix the author tells readers where to find them in Rome and Florence, but, in passing, he makes an arresting remark about the first of them, the “Pietà” in St Peter’s Basilica (pictured). Michelangelo was only 24 when he sculpted in marble the dead Christ lying in the lap of the Virgin Mary; and the intense humanity of his flesh made his reputation as an artist.

The “Pietà” was attacked with a geologist’s hammer in 1972, but has since been restored and is protected by bulletproof glass. Mr Unger, whose brother works for The Economist but was not involved in this review, suggests that the work is now best appreciated by studying a good photograph. This sounds faintly heretical, but it also applies to two more of the six—the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and the “Last Judgment” on the chapel’s altar wall. Being there among the crowds is an experience, but the artistic achievement is hard to appreciate on a ceiling that rises 68 feet (20.7 metres) above the viewer.

The brilliance of the fresco painting, the drama of the biblical story, and the extraordinary draughtsmanship and colour can arguably be better grasped by seeing every panel and lunette illustrated in accurate reproduction. This is now possible in a reissue of Taschen’s awesome “Michelangelo: Complete Works” in which the ceiling is reproduced on no fewer than 133 of its 736 folio pages. Photographs cannot, however, do such justice to the other works.

Mr Unger is a good, popular art historian who understands the moods of the artist and his times. In the case of “David”, for example, Michelangelo, anxious to prove himself in his home town, Florence, after his triumph in Rome, was keen to be asked to sculpt a giant piece of Carrara marble. For its part, the city’s insecure republican government saw a 17-foot statue of a giant-killer as a suitable standard-bearer for their administration.

The Medici mausoleum in the family church of San Lorenzo was also influenced by a melancholic mood in Florentine politics. The city was threatened by an invading French army (it decided to sack Rome instead), and Michelangelo’s elegiac memorial to two Medici dukes is reflected in the severity of the chapel’s architecture; doors were blocked, niches empty and windows blind. Flamboyance was history, though it reappeared not long after in the elegance of the steps at the entrance to the Laurentian Library nearby, which is possibly more deserving of a place among Mr Unger’s masterpieces.

Michelangelo became the seventh architect to supervise the construction of St Peter’s Basilica. It is the only marvel, says Mr Unger, in which his contribution is not immediately apparent, until you know that it was Michelangelo who insisted that St Peter’s should be crowned with a soaring dome on a high drum. His vision still dominates the Roman cityscape.