Michelangelo and the Reformation

Michelangelo's involvement with Reformation circles in Italy was public knowledge in his own lifetime. But recently scholars have begun to analyse Reformed influences in some of his most famous works, many of them commissioned by the papacy itself.

A movement for reform within the Roman Catholic church had been active in Italy from as early as 1485 when Savonarola began to preach in Florence. Some favoured only moral and administrative reform.

But others, like Savonarola, espoused the doctrine of salvation by grace, which they found in the writings of Augustine, and later made contact with Luther and Calvin. The Italian Reformation, however, was always opposed to schism and worked for reconciliation between a reformed Catholic church and the Protestants. The movement flourished until the 1540s when the Inquisition was re-instituted in Italy and the Council of Trent decided to oppose the Reformation head-on.

Michelangelo was actively involved in a Reformation group in the mid-1530s. It gathered around a Spaniard, Juan de Valdes, who had fled to Italy after incurring the wrath of the Spanish Inquisition over a treatise in which he argued for salvation by faith, and a personal Christian life which did not depend on sacraments but on the indwelling Holy Spirit. His group, which held to the authority of the Bible over church doctrine, included leading churchmen such as Cardinals Contarini and Pole.

Among Valdes' group was Vittoria Colonna, a woman of great social rank, literary reputation and moral character. She and Michelangelo became devoted friends, and their touching exchanges of letters and sonnets show the influence which Colonna had in helping Michelangelo to understand the significance of his own sin, his dependence on the grace of God to find forgiveness through the death of the Lord Jesus, and God's sovereignty even over humanity's notions of free will.

The Last Judgement

Michelangelo fervently expressed his new relationship with God in his private sonnets. But even in his paintings and sculptures, commissioned by the papacy, his new theological convictions began to find subtle forms of expression. The first example is the Last Judgement, his monumental painting on the altar-wall of the Sistine Chapel. This was commissioned in 1533 but not started until 1536, a crucial period in which Michelangelo was learning from Valdes' group, and we can see the results in his changing plans. The earliest drawings show Mary, the mother of Jesus, interceding between mankind and Christ, according to traditional Catholicism. In the final painting, she is seen closely supportive to Christ, but Christ alone is in control, raising and casting down by his own sovereign decision.

The early drawings also seem to show Michelangelo trying to find a design which did not obliterate the existing altarpiece on the end-wall, Perugino's Assumption of the Virgin Mary. In the final work, that painting has gone, replaced by the mouth of hell, before which stands only the cross on the altar. In a chapel which is dedicated to the Virgin Mary, this is a bold stroke.

Artistic hubris, however, is squashed out of the work. The heroic bodies of his early Sistine Ceiling have been replaced by the lumpen flesh of unheroic human bodies. Michelangelo painted his own face onto the flayed skin of St Bartholomew, confessing his humility and dependence in the presence of Christ's judgement.

The tendency of this painting did not go unnoticed: years later Pope Paul IV, instigator of the Counter-Reformation, tried to have the picture destroyed.

Pauline Chapel

No sooner had Michelangelo completed the Last Judgement in 1541 than the Pope ordered him to paint two large frescoes in the Pauline Chapel, recently built as the Pope's private chapel. Despite Michelangelo's protestations that, at 66, he was not physically or mentally up to the task, the pope insisted and Michelangelo was unable to refuse: 'I cannot deny anything to the pope - I shall paint with discontent, and my work will earn discontent.' (1)

Michelangelo chose an unusual combination of themes, The conversion of St Paul and The crucifixion of St Peter, which seem to speak of the individual Christian life - its entry and its exit. In the Conversion of Paul, Christ is again portrayed in supreme control, striking down from heaven at the helpless figure of Paul whose face is the artist's own self-portrait. Paul, though blinded and therefore unable to see Christ, yet knows his presence. Christ speaks to the individual directly, without intercessors. However, as one expert points out, there is a figure in the painting who is unprecedented in any previous treatment of this subject. A man is bending over Paul and helping him. Is Michelangelo thinking of how, as he frequently reflects in his sonnets, he owes his spiritual enlightenment to the help of Vittoria Colonna and others?

The Crucifixion of Peter is equally intriguing. Peter is shown, according to tradition, being crucified upside down. Previous artists tackling this theme had shown Peter already crucified, a victim. But Michelangelo chooses the moment when the cross is being raised up, and Peter turns his face to stare out of the picture at the viewer, not a victim, but a hero, spiritually active even at the time of his greatest weakness and humiliation. And who is the viewer? This is the private chapel of the pope, the one held to be successor to Peter, the first pope. Here, in the privacy of his own chapel, the pope is caught by the stern gaze of Peter who seems to say: 'This is the way the real Peter lived and died. Are you following in my footsteps?'

Florence Pieta

Michelangelo's last years were filled with loneliness and sadness. His closest friends were dead or had fled for fear of the Inquisition. Of Valdes' group, Michelangelo alone was spared persecution, presumably because of his international renown and his increasingly reclusive lifestyle. Rumours of his heretical views, however, continued to circulate. An anonymous letter circulating in Florence in 1549 described one of Michelangelo's works as a 'Lutheran caprice'.(2)

Busy with architectural work on St Peter's and the Capitoline Hill, he took no new commissions for painting or sculpture. But he remained active privately as a sculptor, working up to the week before his death in 1564. During this period he produced the work now known as the Florence Pieta.

Although it suffered some damage and another sculptor seems to have completed the figure of Mary Magdalene on the left, the work is still a deeply touching scene, speaking powerfully of Michelangelo's faith. In contrast to the many Renaissance humanist works in which the dead Christ seems physically almost unscathed by the crucifixion, Michelangelo emphasises the awkwardness of Christ's dead body, set against the emotional embrace of his followers. This subject had been treated many times in art, but, as one scholar writes: 'Michelangelo's group is distinguished from these earlier works above all by the intensity with which the reality of Christ's death is expressed.'(3)

The group is unusual in being dominated by the hooded Nicodemus, not Mary. Nicodemus traditionally featured only in a 'Deposition', the scene where Jesus' body is taken from the cross. But this is a Pieta - the scene of Mary's grief after the deposition. Why is Nicodemus here? First, because Michelangelo has once again introduced his own self-portrait, on the face of Nicodemus. The group is a Pieta in which the artist identifies himself with the death of the Lord.

Secondly, although modern-day evangelicals tend to look down on Nicodemus for the secrecy of his commitment to Jesus, many of the Italian Reformation circles identified with him, referring to themselves as 'Nicodemists'.(4) They, like Nicodemus in John 3, came with wonder to the idea of a second birth, and the extraordinary truth that salvation comes to anyone who believes in Jesus. But, like Nicodemus, they had to be careful in their expression of commitment to Christ, for fear of the religious authorities of which they themselves were part. Thus, as the Italian Reformation group was driven underground by the Inquisition, Michelangelo, in the guise of Nicodemus, reaffirmed his dedication to Christ, even if it had to be in secret.

An example to us all

As Michelangelo was compelled to work for one pope after another, it has been easy for Christians to assume he was a mainstream humanist and Roman Catholic. His case, however, seems more like that of Daniel, compelled to do his best work for rulers who did not share his faith, but without sacrificing his commitment to the way, the truth and the life. How he achieved this is just one aspect of his astonishing fertile mind, and his poetry, painting, sculpture and architecture all generously repay the study we give to them.

His deeply humbled, almost desperate, dependence on God whom he sees as utterly holy, all-powerful, but also entirely gracious and good, has a lot to say to the glib presumptuousness that sometimes characterises modern Christianity. His seriousness as a practising artist, even into his 90th year, is an example to every Christian involved in the arts today.

Abridged from a lecture given at the L'Abri Fellowship, Nov ember 1999. A tape of the whole lecture is available from L'Abri (01420 538436).

1. Quoted in Wilde, Johannes: Michelangelo: six lectures, ed. John Shearman and Michael Hirst (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978).

2. de Tolnay, Charles: Michelangelo: sculptor, painter, architect (Princeton University Press, 1975), p.114.

3. von Einem, Herbert: Michelangelo (London: Methuen, 1973), p. 246.

4. Shrimplin-Evangelidis, Valerie: Michelangelo and Nicodemism: The Florentine Pieta, Art Bulletin, LXXI (1) (March 1989), pp. 58-66.