The role of papal patronage in relation to the work of Michelangelo

Michelangelo lived through the reigns of thirteen popes and worked for seven of them but Pope Julius II is the one he is always associated with.
"One cannot live under pressure from patrons, let alone paint." Michelangelo.

Michelangelo was called by Julius to Rome in 1505 for his grandiose programme. Julius II is best remembered for the way his ambitions affected his patronage of the arts. While still a cardinal he had been a notable patron of art; for example, he owned the Apollo Belvedere. When he became Pope, he stepped up his patronage and set about attracting all the best artists of Italy to Rome, to decorate the buildings which were already there and to help build a new Christian Rome on the same scale as the monumental ancient city.

The first commission he gave Michelangelo was a tomb for himself. It was to be huge (about 7.2 x 10.8m) and high, with three levels and about forty figures. Due to a mounting shortage of money, the pope ordered him to put aside the tomb project in favour of painting the Sistine ceiling. At first, Michelangelo tried to turn down the commission, but in vain. Julius II let himself be swayed by Michelangelo's creative frenzy, and both were carried away by their enthusiasm over more and more ambitious plans.

The interval between the Sistine Ceiling and The Last Judgment coincided with the papacies of Leo X and Clement VII; both were members of the Medici family and preferred to employ Michelangelo in Florence. His activities centered on San Lorenzo, the Medici church, where Leo X had decided to build a chapel containing four monumental tombs for members of the family. Michelangelo worked on the project for fourteen years, completing the chapel and two tombs. Michelangelo's plans for the Medici tombs underwent so man changes while the work was under way that the present state of the monuments can hardly be the final solution; rather, the dynamic process of design was arbitrarily halted by the artist's departure for Rome in 1534.

In Rome, Michelangelo was able to count on the esteem, protection, and affection of Pope Clement VII who, shortly before his death, commissioned him to paint the fresco of the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. The idea of commissioning an enormous fresco, the largest ever painted in that century, depicting the Last Judgment, was probably suggested to Clement VII by the traumatic events that were undermining the unity of Christians at the time. After the pope's death, and only two days after Michelangelo's arrival in Rome, his successor, Paul III Farnese confirmed the commission to Michelangelo, and in April 1535 scaffolding was put up in front of the altar wall. All that had happened in the church in the years that preceded the Judgment, including the Reformation and the Sack of Rome, had a direct influence on the work's conception: painted on the altar wall, the Last Judgment was to represent humanity face to face with salvation.

Michelangelo received other commissions in Rome besides those from the Pope. The status of his other patrons shows how high his reputations were as artist. For example, Jacopo Galli, a rich banker, commissioned a marble Bacchus from him. Galli, as a prominent Humanist, would have ensured that Michelangelo was given the necessary information about what should be included in a statue of the Roman god of wine * the grapes, the flayed skin, the little satyr.

Another example would be a French Cardinal, Jean Villiers de Fezenzac, commissioned a marble Pieta from Michelangelo; Galli arranged this and guaranteed that the cardinal would receive the most beautiful work of marble in Rome, one that no living artist could better.*

During Michelangelo's long lifetime, he was an intimate of princes and popes, from Lorenzo de Medici to Leo X, Clement VIII, and Pius III (1439 *1503), as well as cardinals, painters and poets.


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