What Michelangelo Can Teach You About Changing The World
Michelangelo saw within the botched stone the potential to restore life.
Dear Friend,
By the time you read this letter, my generation (X) will be gone. I could speculate as to what challenges you face. However, given the current rate at which technology advances, information disseminates, and breakthroughs in science occur, your society will have far less in common with mine than we have with the Renaissance.
Even so, certain lessons remain timeless. To put them in perspective, we must study the past.
In particular, let us return for a moment to the belly of an elaborate scaffold, where we find hard at work a legendary and irascible sculptor at the turn of the sixteenth century in Florence, Italy. Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, whom we know simply as Michelangelo.
Giorgio Vasari, a late sixteenth-century biographer, architect, and painter traced the development of Italian art from the thirteenth century to the Golden Age of Renaissance Florence. He describes in great detail in his book The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1560, 1568)1 the fate of a block of marble that would leave an indelible imprint on western civilization. You know it.
The marble in question was eighteen feet high. It had begun to be carved by an otherwise historically forgettable Simone da Fiesole, who had hoped to carve a giant figure, but whose craftsmanship was so shoddy that “he had bored a hole between the legs, and had botched and bungled everything,”2 according to Vasari. The biographer had a way with words.
The wardens of Santa Maria del Fiore, where the block stood, paid it little heed and left it abandoned for years until Piero Soderini, who had been elected head of the Florentine Republic (Gonfalonier de Justizia) for life, noticed the massive stone. He offered it first to Leonardo da Vinci, who refused it. He then arranged to give it to Andrea Contucci of Monte Sansovino, an accomplished sculptor who was eager to have it.
At this point in the story, Vasari exercises considerable literary license, for he tells us only that the great Michelangelo learned of the marble, expressed interest, and acquired it. Vasari does not share the circumstances of this transfer, but perhaps we can surmise that Michelangelo may have held a bit more sway with Soderini than did his contemporaries.
Michelangelo thus obtained the massive block that had been “botched and bungled”3 by the otherwise forgettable Simone da Fiesole; ignored for years by its caretakers; turned away by Leonardo; and snatched by history from Contucci.
According to Vasari, Michelangelo measured the stone and calculated whether he could carve a satisfactory figure from the block “by adapting its power to the rock which had been mutilated by Master Simone[.]”4
Michelangelo’s vision of his uncarved masterpiece transcended the pocked stone that he inherited, for he saw within it the potential to restore life to that which had been left for dead. So emerged David, whose shadow still looms over every other statue in Western civilization.
What does this account have to do with you?
Everything. Like each prior generation, you will not inherit a perfect society, but rather one that is deeply flawed as a result of the decisions of your predecessors. It is useless to bemoan this. Embrace the fact that what you do with it is up to you. Look forward.
Each of you is responsible for deciding how you wish to shape the world. It doesn’t matter that many hold opposing views. There are very few inalienable truths. Most principles are constructs that evolve over time through debate and the planting of ideas today that become ideologies tomorrow.
Please participate actively. How do you want your world to look? In what sort of society do you want your children to grow and flourish? Pick a side. Arm yourself with the instruments necessary to sculpt your world, be they tools in law, teaching, trades, medicing, engineering – the fields of your choice. Think hard about how you wish to use your talents.
When you’ve picked your side, then fight hard for what you believe in. Pour your soul into it. At the same time, be certain that you are always receptive to your adversary, no matter the issue. History is littered with those who did not. You cannot win your fight without understanding your opponent. You need not embrace him, but you need to hear him clearly. Do not make this mistake.
I am sorry to tell you that you inherit from my generation and those that follow a world that is no less “botched and bungled”5 than the marble inherited by Michelangelo. Therein, however, lies your unlimited potential. Think hard about how you wish to sculpt it, for it is yours now, and remember that you merely hold it in trust for all who follow.
B.
(footnotes below)
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Giorgio Vasari, The Lives Of The Artists 414-489 (Oxford 1991).
Id. at 426.
Id.
Id. at 427.
Id. at supra note 2.
I saw the Statue of David earlier this year for the first time. As well as wanting to see one of the two most famous pieces of art of all time (perhaps second only to the Mona Lisa), I was also intrigued to see how I would feel upon seeing it in the (marble) flesh. Some images are so famous they are almost cliches by the time we actually get to see them, so I was fairly convinced that I would be underwhelmed.
I was wrong. Walking into the hall and seeing him up there on his pedestal, even from 50 feet away, was enough to give me goosebumps. Any images or copies of the statue don’t do it justice. Lit from above it’s like the personification of the ideal man. Not just in the way he looks - strong, fit, and handsome - but also in the posture, the way he holds himself, the posture, the confidence. It almost makes you want to be a better man to live up to Michelangelo’s ideal.
Kate, Thank you so much for your kind words. They mean a great deal to me. Ben