Raffaele Riario’s Bacchus, 1496–1497

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7 Raffaele Riario’s Bacchus 1496–1497

Michelangelo’s encounter with Cardinal Riario in June 1496 won him a commis­sion for an extra­or­di­nary new statue, the Bacchus (Figs 3–4 and 130–32). The Cardinal’s unusual request, desi­gned to capi­ta­lise on the sculptor’s unique talents and past expe­ri­ences, was to judge the beauty of ‘certain figures’—undoubtedly, antique figures—and then summon up the ‘spirit’ to create a statue in rivalry with them. This chapter explores which anti­qui­ties Riario might have sent Michel­an­gelo to see, with the assump­tion that with the commis­sion of the Bacchus the Cardinal wished to build and expand his own coll­ec­tions in compe­ti­tion with his peers. It will explore Michelangelo’s inven­tion, which, despite Riario’s request that it respond to anti­qui­ties, was by no means a strict imita­tion of clas­sical models. Indeed, a number of post-clas­sical reinter­pre­ta­tions of the antique were of parti­cular signi­fi­cance for Michelangelo’s Bacchus. These include Antonio Federighi’s statue of Bacchus in Siena, bronze statu­ettes the sculptor had known in Florence, and a short descrip­tion of Bacchus in the Libellus, a printed guide to the repre­sen­ta­tion of the pagan gods origi­nally composed in the late

fig. 130 Michel­an­gelo Buonar­roti, Bacchus, Florence, Museo Nazio­nale del Bargello, inv. 10 / Scul­ture. 1496–1497. Photo © bpk / Alinari Archives / George Tatge.

fig. 131 Michel­an­gelo Buonar­roti, Bacchus, Florence, Museo Nazio­nale del Bargello, inv. 10 / Scul­ture. 1496–1497. Photo © Kunst­his­to­ri­sches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck- Institut für Kunst­ge­schichte, Rome, photo­grapher: Roberto Sigismondi.

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four­te­enth or early fifte­enth century. Another topic that will be explored is the ques­tion of the statue’s intended setting. While a statue of Bacchus might seem an inde­co­rous choice for a cardinal, here it will be proposed that Riario ordered it to expand a sculp­ture coll­ec­tion he envi­sioned for the garden of San Lorenzo in Damaso. Like other cardi­nals in Rome, he may have planned for a coll­ec­tion that could be repre­sented as a divine realm, where mortals mingled with the gods. Finally, the discus­sion will turn to the widely accepted assump­tion that Cardinal Riario was disp­leased with and ‘rejected’ the Bacchus, a theory that finds no support in the contem­po­rary sources.

Certe figure

Accor­ding to the letter Michel­an­gelo wrote to Lorenzo di Pier­fran­cesco de’ Medici in July 1496 [Appendix ii.10], as soon as the sculptor arrived in Rome, he presented himself to Cardinal Riario, no doubt at the Riario palace near Sant’Apollinare. As was noted in Chapter 6, the Cardinal met Michel­an­gelo with the urgent request that he go to look at ‘certain figures’, and the artist occu­pied himself with this task for the rest of that day (‘volle inchon­ti­nente ch’io andasse a vedere certe figure, dove i’ ochupai tutto quello giorno’). On the follo­wing day, Riario went to the ‘new palace’ (the Palazzo San Giorgio then under cons­truc­tion), summoned Michel­an­gelo there, and asked the artist’s opinion of what he had seen. Michel­an­gelo replied that he had found the figures very beau­tiful (‘li dissi quello mi parea, e certo mi pare ci sia molte belle chose’). Riario then asked if Michel­an­gelo had the spirit to do some­thing beau­tiful for him (‘el Char­di­nale mi domandò se mi bastava l’animo di fare qual­chosa di bello’). Michel­an­gelo replied that he would not equal the figures he had studied, but the Cardinal would see what he could do (‘risposi ch’io non farei sì gran chose, ma che e’ vedrebe quello che farei’).

It is diffi­cult to imagine how the ‘certain figures’ Riario sent Michel­an­gelo to study could have been anything other than antique sculp­tures.¹ These figures were beyond compare, yet they were anony­mous, and their subjects were left unspe­ci­fied. If the sculp­tures had been contem­po­rary works, Michel­an­gelo would presu­mably have reve­aled to Lorenzo the names of the sculp­tors who had made them. The sculptor treated the figures with great rever­ence and was sure that any statue he might produce will fall short by compa­rison. The high regard Michel­an­gelo accords to the ‘certain figures’ leaves no doubt that they were antique statues that set a stan­dard of excel­lence no modern sculptor could be expected to surpass.² As Michel­an­gelo put it, ‘non farei sì gran’ cose’. In the lite­ra­ture, this phrase has some­times been inter­preted as a nego­tia­tion over the size of the statue Riario wanted to commis­sion. It has been suggested

fig. 132 Michel­an­gelo Buonar­roti, Bacchus, Florence, Museo Nazio­nale del Bargello, inv. 10 / Scul­ture. 1496–1497. Photo © Kunst­his­to­ri­sches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck- Institut für Kunst­ge­schichte, Rome, photo­grapher: Roberto Sigismondi.

that the patron wanted a larger figure than Michel­an­gelo was willing to under­take, perhaps even a colossal statue that could comple­ment Riario’s Muse.³ In the Italian of the time, however, the phrase ‘gran’ cose’ usually refers not to large things, but to achie­ve­ments that were espe­ci­ally signi­fi­cant or worthy.⁴

Michel­an­gelo described the commis­sion of the Bacchus as a test of the artist’s animo, a word that can be trans­lated as ‘spirit’, ‘strength’, or ‘courage’. The artist may have chosen this word in refe­rence to the poetry of Dante, speci­fi­cally to a passage in the Inferno in which Dante describes his struggle to reach the last trench of the eighth circle of hell. The bridge to the bolgia reserved for the punish­ment of thieves had been destroyed, and Virgil helps Dante climb over treache­rous rocks. Strugg­ling for breath, Dante stops to sit down. Virgil takes him to task and reminds him that no one arrives at fame resting on ‘feather cushions’. Dante must rise to his feet and summon the spirit—‘l’animo che vince ogni battaglia’—to move forward.⁵ The desire for fame should inspire him since, Virgil reminds Dante, without it one leaves ‘such a mark upon the world as smoke does on the air or foam on water’. This moment echoes Dante’s own struggle as a poet to live up to the example of Virgil, and in this sense offers a fitting parallel to Michelangelo’s chall­enge as sculptor of the Bacchus: to create a figure of great beauty, he must strive towards the unsur­pas­sable stan­dards set by the ancient masters. Though the task may seem impos­sible, he must find the ‘spirit’ to embrace it, spurred on by the desire to leave his mark upon the world.

Assuming that the ‘certain figures’ were anti­qui­ties, which objects were they, and where did Michel­an­gelo go to study them? In past discus­sions, it has been assumed that Riario sent the artist on a walk around Rome to absorb the lessons of the antique.⁶ Or, it has been suggested, Riario’s aim was for Michel­an­gelo to view antique Bacchuses that could serve as appro­priate proto­types for his statue.⁷ Certainly, there were rele­vant antique works that Michel­an­gelo could have observed; one that has been compared to the Bacchus is a satyr then in the house of the Sant­acroce, a life­sized statue of a youthful figure with a nebris (a fawn skin) (Fig. 133).⁸ Another is a satyr carrying fruits in his nebris (Fig. 134), which was likely visible in the coll­ec­tion of the Maffei at the time of Michelangelo’s arrival. Next to him is a small panther gnawing on grapes, a pairing echoed in Michelangelo’s inven­tion of the grape-eating satyr.⁹

Which statues the artist might have studied on that Saturday after­noon remains a matter of specu­la­tion. On the whole, however, as was noted in Chapter 1, efforts to match the Bacchus with a clearly reco­g­nisable antique visual or textual ‘sources’ have proven unsa­tis­fac­tory. The final result of Riario’s chall­enge demons­trates that Michelangelo’s task was to create a new

fig. 133 Satyr form­erly in the Sant­acroce coll­ec­tion (with a restored head), Copen­hagen, Ny Carls­berg Glyp­totek, inv. 1800. Hadrianic. Photo © Ny Carls­berg Glyp­totek, Copen­hagen. fig. 134 Satyr, Florence, Gallerie degli Uffizi, inv. 108. 2nd century ce. Photo © Minis­tero per i Beni e le Atti­vità Cultu­rali Soprin­ten­denza Speciale per il Patri­monio Storico, Artis­tico ed Etno­an­tro­po­lo­gico e per il Polo Museale della città di Firenze. All rights reserved.

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figure of his own inven­tion, rather than a quota­tion of ancient art, a forgery, or a copy.¹⁰ The Bacchus he created strays far from the antique: ancient sculp­tors, for example, never combined the god Bacchus with a Pan-like satyr with goat’s legs. Nor were antique satyrs and Pans shown as children, like Michelangelo’s young satyr, whose age is similar to that of a ­Floren­tine San Giovan­nino (see Figs 128 and 131).¹¹ Since Michelangelo’s Bacchus is so diffe­rent from ancient models, Cardinal Riario’s assign­ment could not have been desi­gned to ensure the clas­sical purity or icono­gra­phic accu­racy of Michelangelo’s statue. The Cardinal’s inte­rest in the certe figure should be unders­tood less in art-histo­rical terms and more in rela­tion to his iden­tity as a patron. Presu­mably, the gran­deur of Riario’s palace led to the aspi­ra­tion for a sculp­ture coll­ec­tion of compa­rable signi­fi­cance, one which could rate as the ‘best’ in Rome. If the Cardinal’s direc­tions to Michel­an­gelo were guided by his hopes for an ambi­tious sculp­ture display, he presu­mably would have asked Michel­an­gelo to help him expand a coll­ec­tion of sculp­ture he already owned, with refe­rence to the coll­ec­tions of his peers and rivals. The certe figure, then, were likely objects rele­vant to the Cardinal’s ambi­tions as a coll­ector, that is, sculp­tures already in his posses­sion, or enviable objects owned by others.

When Riario summoned Michel­an­gelo to discuss the Bacchus, they met at the buil­ding site of the Palazzo San Giorgio (as Michel­an­gelo writes, ‘el Char­di­nale venne nella chasa nuova e ffecemi doman­dare andai da llui’). Signi­fi­cantly, their meeting did not take place at the Palazzo Riario near Sant’Apollinare, nor at the Cardinal’s villa in Tras­te­vere, but at the ‘new’ Palazzo San Giorgio, even though the Cardinal was not living there at the time. The fact that Riario chose to meet the artist here strongly suggests that he intended the Bacchus to be displayed inside a coll­ec­tion planned for San Lorenzo.¹² At the same time, it is diffi­cult to imagine that Riario’s coll­ec­tion would have been left stan­ding in the midst of a buil­ding site. As was noted in Chapter 5, when Riario’s palace was under cons­truc­tion and the Cardinal was no longer living there, his anti­qui­ties and other valu­ables would likely have been moved off-site to a safe loca­tion. Anti­qui­ties required constant vigi­lance to protect them from theft;¹³ the Galli-Balducci account books record payments, for example, for a night guard who could watch over an antique column kept at the buil­ding site.¹⁴

During Riario’s absence from San Lorenzo, his anti­qui­ties were presu­mably not left unpro­tected, but stored with Jacopo Galli. While Riario awaited comple­tion of his palace, there would have been no better refuge for his prized anti­qui­ties than with Galli, Ria­rio’s trusted ‘manager’. The gardens and open areas in the Isola Galli would have been ideal ­spaces for safe­guar­ding statues. As is discussed below, Michel­an­gelo stored blocks of Carrara marble with Galli over a period of five years, while the artist was away from Rome. Michel­an­gelo presu­mably carved the Bacchus in Galli’s house in compe­ti­tion with the certe figure, and the

Bacchus seems to have remained in Galli’s house after its comple­tion. The most logical scenario, then, is that Riario asked Michel­an­gelo to go to Galli’s house to study his anti­qui­ties, and that the Bacchus the artist even­tually carved was kept in storage with Galli. The storage of Riario’s statues in Galli’s house, across the street from Riario’s buil­ding site, may even have played an important role in Riario’s commis­sion for the Bacchus. This scenario inevi­tably calls to mind the possi­bi­lity that Riario and Michel­an­gelo hoped to recreate the crea­tive atmo­sphere of the Medici sculp­ture garden at San Marco. Like the garden at San Marco, the Isola Galli seems to have combined the func­tions of a marble yard, an anti­qui­ties coll­ec­tion, a working space, and a storage area.¹⁵ In Galli’s house, anti­qui­ties were presu­mably arranged infor­mally, as is suggested by Maarten van Heemskerck’s capti­vating drawings from the 1530s (see Figs 215–16).¹⁶ Michel­an­gelo may have carved his Bacchus inspired by this open and stimu­la­ting envi­ron­ment, inven­ting some­thing new from a block of spolia in the spirit of the Medici garden where he had trained.

Riario’s request to observe the ‘certain figures’ took time; after his meeting with Riario, the artist spent the rest of the day on the task. Could Michel­an­gelo also have visited some of Rome’s other anti­qui­ties coll­ec­tions, alone or in the company of a guide? Did he study the Quirinal Horse­t­amers, or the nearby coll­ec­tions of the Della Valle, Sant­acroce, or Porcari? There are many possible desti­na­tions, yet the one that seems most probable is the coll­ec­tion of Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere at SS. Apos­toli. In 1496, Della Rovere was in exile from Rome, yet his statues were still visible at the Cardinal’s palace of SS. Apos­toli, which was then occu­pied by the Genoese Cardinal Paolo Campo­fregoso.¹⁷ The setting itself was of great signi­fi­cance for Riario, as it was the former resi­dence of his uncle Cardinal Pietro. And by the 1490s, as was noted in Chapter 5, SS. Apos­toli was home to the most important coll­ec­tion of life­sized antique marbles in Rome, thanks to Della Rovere’s efforts. The coll­ec­tion was renowned, above all, for the statue of Apollo Belve­dere (Fig. 135).

Riario would no doubt have envied Della Rovere his Apollo Belve­dere and the statue was also, argu­ably, the most significant

fig. 135 Apollo Belve­dere, Vatican, Musei Vati­cani, inv. mv.1015.0.0. c. 130–140 ce. Photo © bpk / Scala.

antique model for Michelangelo’s concep­tion of the Bacchus. Since its disco­very in 1489, the Apollo was so often praised, both inside and outside of Rome, that it reached a level of fame unmat­ched by any other statue in private hands. As a largely intact figure of the god of poetic inspi­ra­tion, it was a rare and enviable prize. The Cardinal’s Apollo was an object of inte­rest even in Savona, as can be seen in a quota­tion of the figure above a palace doorway (Figs 136– 37).¹⁸ It set a bench­mark as a nude, life­sized statue in contrap­posto, a type that was esteemed in anti­quity by the likes of Lysippus and Praxi­teles and was preferred in the late Quat­tro­cento to other genres such as relief sculp­ture, depic­tions of women, or portraits.¹⁹

The Bacchus that Michel­an­gelo made in rela­tion to the certe figure responds directly to the ideal set by the Apollo. He conceived the Bacchus, like the Apollo, as a life­sized, nude statue of an Olym­pian god of inspi­ra­tion. There are simi­la­ri­ties in the two figures’ height (the Bacchus c. 203 cm with its base, the Apollo 224 cm with its plat­form), their nudity, and the daring exten­sion of their limbs. The Apollo raises its left arm high in the air, a feat that the Bacchus seems to answer with the eleva­tion of the cup in the statue’s right hand.²⁰ Michel­an­gelo certainly knew and studied the Apollo at SS. Apos­toli: in a drawing now in the British Museum datable to c. 1503–1504, he repres­ents a move­mented figure inspired by the Apollo, paying atten­tion to the exten­sion of the figure’s arm (Fig. 138).²¹ As this drawing suggests, Michelangelo

fig. 136 Michele Carlone?, Portal of Palazzo Cerisola, Savona. c. 1500. Photo: Author. fig. 137 Michele Carlone?, Apollo Belve­dere, Portal of Palazzo Cerisola, Savona, detail of over­door. c. 1500. Photo: Author.

fig. 138 Michel­an­gelo Buonar­roti, Figure (Inspired by the Apollo Belve­dere), London, British Museum, inv. 1887,0502.117. c. 1503– 1504. Photo © The Trus­tees of the British Museum.

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fig. 139 Giovanni d’Aria, Frag­ment of the tomb of Antonio Sansoni, father of Raffaele Riario, Savona, Asso­cia­zione Savo­nese ‘A Campa­nassa’. 1490. Photo: Author, repro­duced by permis­sion of the Asso­cia­zione Savo­nese ‘A Campanassa’.

fig. 140 Giovanni and Michele d’Aria, Tomb of Leonardo della Rovere and Luchina Monleone, Savona, Cathe­dral, Cappella Sistina. 1481–1483. Photo: Author.

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unders­tood the statue as a para­digm of excel­lence, admired for its compo­si­tion and its repre­sen­ta­tion of the nude body.

Michelangelo’s life­sized, nude Bacchus, argu­ably, allowed Riario to obtain a statue similar in type and subject to the Apollo, without having to wait for it to be found by chance. If the Bacchus were Riario’s answer to the Apollo, the commis­sion would fit wider patterns of Della Rovere and Riario patro­nage and coll­ec­ting, which were closely intert­wined over decades, both in Savona and in Rome. Giuliano della Rovere, for example, built a palace in Savona that imitated the Palazzo San Giorgio in Rome (see Fig. 56). Cardinal Riario, for his part, followed Della Rovere patro­nage when he ordered a tomb for his father (Fig. 139) that mirrored the tomb of Sixtus IV’s parents in Savona’s Cappella Sistina (Fig. 140). In 1490, Riario and his brother Fran­cesco Sansoni ordered a tomb for their father Antonio Sansoni from the Lombard sculptor Giovanni d’Aria, one of the artists who had executed the tomb of Sixtus’s parents. The contract for the Sansoni tomb speci­fi­cally states that it must be of the same ‘height, width, form, mate­rials and charac­te­ristics’ as the Della Rovere monu­ment in the Cappella Sistina (Fig. 140).²² The inter­play between Riario and Della Rovere commis­sions is now diffi­cult to visua­lise, since many rele­vant works of art and archi­tec­ture, both in Rome and in Savona, have been destroyed or remo­delled. Such is the case at the basi­lica of SS. Apos­toli, discussed in Chapter 2, as well as at the basi­lica of Santa Maria del Popolo. Santa Maria del Popolo is known as a Della Rovere church, and it is all but forgotten that Raffaele Riario commis­sioned a fresco cycle there. Riario’s cycle, in the second cloister of the church, was carried out by the work­shop of Bernar­dino Pintu­ric­chio in 1502. The fres­coes were lost in 1811, when this cloister was demo­lished to make way for Giuseppe Valadier’s Piazza del Popolo. Drawings and a set of engra­vings made before its destruc­tion give a sense of the original appearance of the cycle, which included a sacra conver­sa­zione (Figs 141–42) in which Cardinal Riario kneels before the throne of the Virgin.²³

The compe­ti­tion between Riario and Della Rovere was centred on their battle for the papacy, a rivalry that Giuliano della Rovere won when he became Pope Julius II in 1503. Yet it expressed itself more diffu­sely in artistic matters. It is telling that when Della Rovere became pope, he employed Michel­an­gelo, an artist fostered by Riario, to sculpt his tomb and to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Soon after his elec­tion, Della Rovere began to move his anti­qui­ties to a statue-court desi­gned by Bramante at the Belve­dere, and it was here that Della Rovere would display the Apollo and other objects from his coll­ec­tion at SS. Apostoli.

fig. 141 Fran­cesco Gian­gi­a­como, Drawing of a Fresco Cycle in Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome, Isti­tuto centrale per la grafica, inv. D‑cl278. Post 1811. Photo © Minis­tero della Cultura. All rights reserved.

fig. 142 Fran­cesco Gian­gi­a­como, Engra­ving of a Fresco Cycle in Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome, Isti­tuto centrale per la grafica, inv. S‑cl2233_4224. Post 1811. Photo © Minis­tero della Cultura. All rights reserved.

In 1506, Julius II acquired the Laocoön, the most extra­or­di­nary anti­quity ever unear­thed in Rome.²⁴ In the after­math of the Laocoön’s disco­very, it seems that Cardinal Riario held out quixotic hopes of winning the statue for himself. These inten­tions are alluded to in a letter by Giovanni Saba­dino degli Arienti, one of Isabella d’Este’s agents in Rome. Writing to d’Este, he passes on news from his ‘friend’, an anony­mous person ‘kept busy by his most reverend patron, the Cardinal of San Giorgio’. This friend lists the conten­ders who were then spar­ring with the pope for posses­sion of the Laocoön: Cardinal Galeotto Fran­ciotti della Rovere and ‘Monsi­gnore nostro Reve­r­en­dis­simo’, presu­mably refer­ring to the friend’s bene­factor, Cardinal Riario.²⁵ While Riario ulti­m­ately lost his rivalry with Della Rovere for the Laocoön, his desire for the statue mirrors a broader, long­term contest between these two patrons and coll­ec­tors, a compe­ti­tion that seems to have inspired Riario in 1496 to chall­enge Della Rovere’s famous Apollo with Michelangelo’s Bacchus.

Qual­chosa di bello

When Michel­an­gelo carved the Bacchus, he was probably living with Jacopo Galli. Condivi asserts that Michel­an­gelo made the Bacchus in Galli’s house (‘messer Iacopo Galli, genti­luomo romano e di bello ingegno, gli fece fare in casa sua’ [Appendix ii.29]), and in September 1496, while Michel­an­gelo was working on the statue, Riario’s account was charged for two barrels of Fiano wine deli­vered to Galli ‘for Michel­an­gelo’.²⁶ Cardinal Riario also paid for the marble block used for the statue. As has often been noted, the price of the marble for the Bacchus was rela­tively low, only ten ducati di carlini.²⁷ The Galli-Balducci accounts show that around this time the Cardinal was brin­ging vast amounts of stone and marble to his buil­ding site: blocks of traver­tine stripped from the Colos­seum, ancient granite columns excavated from the Baths of Diocle­tian, and a ship­ment of Carrara marble brought by boat to Ostia.²⁸ Rather than from new Carrara marble, the Bacchus was carved from spolia, perhaps one of the blocks sourced for the cons­truc­tion site by Riario’s ‘chava­tori di marmi’.

The sculptor would have worked across the street from the buil­ding site, where teams of stone carvers, carpen­ters, and pain­ters were busy deco­ra­ting Riario’s new palace. Yet, in contrast to

the other artists on the Cardinal’s payroll, Michel­an­gelo was offered unusual freedom and an unusually high status. The commis­sion for the Bacchus was utterly excep­tional, and Michelangelo’s fee for the Bacchus (150 ducats) was above the norm. Riario received Michel­an­gelo like a cour­tier or fami­liar, and the Floren­tine seems to have been the only artist in Riario’s employ to open his own account at the Galli-Balducci bank.²⁹ Michel­an­gelo also enjoyed the privi­lege of having his own horse, which Riario paid to stable.³⁰ In the Galli-Balducci records, he is never referred to as a ‘Maestro’ like other artists, but instead as ‘Miche­lag­nolo’, ‘Miche­lag­nolo schul­tore’, ‘Miche­lag­nolo Buona­rotj’, or ‘Miche­lag­nolo di Lodo­vicho Bona­rotj’.³¹ These forms of desi­gna­tion were unusual, and they echo the artist’s state­ment later in life that he did not wish to be addressed as ‘Miche­lag­niolo scul­tore’, but as ‘Miche­lag­niolo Buonar­roti’. He was, after all, ‘never the kind of painter or sculptor who ran a work­shop’.³² William Wallace has insightfully argued that the special treat­ment Michel­an­gelo received, even in his youth, was a sign of his quasi-aris­to­cratic status and his blood ties to the Floren­tine nobi­lity. The commis­sion for the Bacchus, like his sculp­tures for the Arca di San Dome­nico in Bologna, was not a usual one, but a one-off, unique chall­enge arranged with the help of a close-knit network of friends and family.³³ Gian­fran­cesco Aldro­vandi had welcomed Michel­an­gelo in Bologna as a guest, or high-ranking fami­liar. When he requested figures for the tomb of St. Dominic (see Figs 149 and 164), Vasari writes, Aldro­vandi did not give the artist an order, but asked him if he could summon the ‘spirit’ to face a signi­fi­cant chall­enge (‘se gli bastasse l’animo di fargli’) [Appendix ii.34].³⁴ The situa­tion in Bologna is paral­leled by Michelangelo’s recep­tion in Rome, where he was invited into Riario’s house­hold and, in Michelangelo’s own words, asked if he had the ‘animo’ to accept Riario’s request. Accor­ding to the artist’s letter, Riario asked him not for a statue of Bacchus, but for ‘qual­chosa di bello’, inspired by the beauty of antique sculp­tures. It was a request that allowed Michel­an­gelo to create poeti­cally, with the sense of confi­dence in his own powers of inven­tion instilled in him in his youth by the likes of Angelo Poli­ziano.³⁵

Despite Michelangelo’s special status, however, Riario’s commis­sion of the Bacchus would presu­mably have required a written contract. Since the Cardinal paid for the statue in three inst­al­ments of fifty ducats, with the final payment depo­sited roughly a year after Michel­an­gelo began work, one can deduce that the contract dictated a payment sche­dule and a dead­line.³⁶ It perhaps also required that the artist not take on any other work before finishing

the Bacchus: his next known commis­sion was for a pain­ting on a wooden panel that he purchased on 27 June 1497, almost exactly one year after Cardinal Riario requested the statue.³⁷ Given Riario’s inte­rest in the ‘beauty’ of the Bacchus, the contract may also have included a special clause speci­fying that Michelangelo’s statue must be ‘beau­tiful’. Such clauses appear in the contracts the artist would later sign for the Vatican Pietà (see Figs 193–94) and the Picco­lo­mini monu­ment in Siena (see Fig. 198). The contract for the Pietà, signed in 1498, included Jacopo Galli’s guarantee that the final result would be ‘the most beau­tiful work in marble visible in Rome today, and no living master could do better’. In the case of the figures for the Picco­lo­mini altar, the contract speci­fied that the first two statues were to be assessed by two masters, who would decide if Michelangelo’s statues were indeed ‘better executed and finished, and of a higher degree of perfec­tion than any modern figures in Rome today’.³⁸ These phrases echo the discus­sion between Riario and Michel­an­gelo concer­ning the beauty of the figure of Bacchus that the sculptor was asked to carve. The contracts for the Pietà and for the Picco­lo­mini statues specify that Michel­an­gelo would be judged against the stan­dards set by modern sculp­ture, just as, for Riario, Michel­an­gelo promised to ‘do some­thing beau­tiful’, but would not be asked to surpass the antique (‘non farei sì gran chose’). As will be discussed further in Chapter 8, Jacopo Galli signed the contracts for the Pietà and for the Picco­lo­mini statues as Michelangelo’s finan­cial backer and guarantor. It seems possible, then, that in 1496 Galli was respon­sible for writing and coun­ter­sig­ning the contract for the Bacchus, and for pled­ging that it would fulfill the condi­tions set by a ‘beauty clause’.³⁹ Since Michel­an­gelo was probably living and working in Galli’s house, guaran­te­eing the timely deli­very and quality of the statue was a service that Galli could easily have provided.

The issue of the statue’s compe­ti­tion with the antique raises a ques­tion often asked of the Bacchus: did Michel­an­gelo, Riario, or Jacopo Galli deli­bera­tely age the statue to make it seem antique, or to make it fit into a coll­ec­tion of frag­mented marbles?⁴⁰ Maarten van Heemskerck’s drawing of the statue in the garden of the Galli in the 1530s (see Fig. 215) shows that the figure was even­tually displayed with its right hand broken off. The break in the hand repre­sented in van Heemskerck’s drawing is not a fiction, since the same frac­ture can still be seen in the figure’s right wrist. Breaks are also visible in the statue’s fingers and in the cup (Fig. 143). The Bacchus is, moreover, missing a penis, both in van Heemskerck’s drawing and today (Fig. 144). Another area of damage is found in the two small horns that sprout diago­nally from either side of a central tuft of hair, which are now broken off (Fig. 145; see also Figs 132, 148, 162).

Each of these breaks tells a diffe­rent story, and each seems to have occurred in diffe­rent circum­s­tances. Conside­ring the penis, in the area of the statue’s absent geni­tals there are clean rows of chisel marks, rather than more arbi­trary signs of acci­dental breakage (see Fig. 144). The most likely expl­ana­tion of this ‘break’, ther­e­fore, is that for the sake of decorum the artist deliberately

fig. 144 Michel­an­gelo Buonar­roti, Bacchus, Florence, Museo Nazio­nale del Bargello, inv. 10 / Scul­ture. 1496–1497, detail. Photo: Author, repro­duced by permis­sion of the Minis­tero della Cultura – Musei del Bargello.

fig. 145 Michel­an­gelo Buonar­roti, Bacchus, Florence, Museo Nazio­nale del Bargello, inv. 10 / Scul­ture. 1496– 1497, detail. Photo: The Cour­t­auld, Conway Library, cc-by-nc.

fig. 143 Michel­an­gelo Buonar­roti, Bacchus, Florence, Museo Nazio­nale del Bargello, inv. 10 / Scul­ture. 1496–1497, detail. Photo: Author, repro­duced by permis­sion of the Minis­tero della Cultura – Musei del Bargello.

Illus­tra­tion page. See the complete open-access PDF for the image.

repre­sented the statue as it now appears, with a missing, seemingly broken penis.⁴¹ The frac­tures in the horns and hand, however, appear to be enti­rely unin­ten­tional. It is not clear when the horns of the Bacchus were damaged; artists, inclu­ding van Heems­kerck, who drew the statue did not repre­sent them, possibly because they were diffi­cult to see, but they are fully present in a sixte­enth-century adapt­a­tion of the statue in Vienna (Fig. 146) and in a seven­te­enth-century bronze copy by Massi­mi­liano Soldani Benzi (Fig. 147).⁴² While the break in the right wrist is one of the most endu­ring myste­ries about the figure, as will be discussed in detail in Chapter 9, poems about the statue’s fate during the Sack of Rome in 1527 strongly suggest that the right hand of the Bacchus was acci­den­tally broken offwhen the statue was looted during the Sack.⁴³

fig. 146 Anony­mous after Michel­an­gelo, Bacchus, Vienna, Kunst­his­to­ri­sches Museum, Kunst­kammer, inv. 5589. 16th century. Photo © khm Museumsverband.

fig. 147 Massi­mi­liano Soldani Benzi after Michel­an­gelo, Bacchus, Vienna, Liech­ten­stein, The Prin­cely Coll­ec­tions, Vaduz- Vienna, inv. Sk 573. 1699–1701. Photo © Liech­ten­stein. The Prin­cely Coll­ec­tions, Vaduz- Vienna.

On the whole, evidence is minimal of any deli­be­rate breakage or ‘ageing’ of the statue by the artist himself. Now the figure shows its age, having survived decades of expo­sure to the elements in the houses of the Galli, and having been trans­ported as far away as South Tyrol by Hitler’s troops in 1944.⁴⁴ When Michel­an­gelo completed the Bacchus, however, it would have been polished and new. By seemingly fore­going the method of deli­be­rate breakage, the Bacchus does not attempt to disguise its own moder­nity. As was the case with the Cupid, Michel­an­gelo may have hoped that the Bacchus would trick viewers tempo­r­a­rily, indu­cing a delightful state of inganno through the momen­tary illu­sion that the statue is antique.⁴⁵ Yet with the Bacchus, like the Cupid, Michel­an­gelo would have expected to receive due credit for a statue that seemed to equal the antique in its beauty, perfec­tion, and excellence.

Another ques­tion often asked of the Bacchus is whether the wine cup curr­ently atta­ched to the statue is Michelangelo’s own work, or a later resto­ra­tion added to repair the broken hand. Edgar Wind, notably, considered it to be a resto­ra­tion by an infe­rior sculptor, reser­ving special disdain for the cup’s ‘insipid rosettes’.⁴⁶ There is every reason, however, to believe that the hand and cup now visible on the statue are original. They are fully inte­gral with

fig. 148 Michel­an­gelo Buonar­roti, Bacchus, Florence, Museo Nazio­nale del Bargello, inv. 10 / Scul­ture. 1496–1497, detail. Photo: The Cour­t­auld, Conway Library, cc-by-nc.

fig. 149 Michel­an­gelo Buonar­roti, St. Proclus, detail. Bologna, San Dome­nico, Arca di San Dome­nico. 1494–1495. Photo: The Cour­t­auld, Conway Library, cc-by-nc.

the compo­si­tion of the statue, and to the naked eye the marble of the hand closely matches that of the wrist.⁴⁷ There are also clear paral­lels between this cup and other inven­tions by Michel­an­gelo of the late Quat­tro­cento and early Cinque­cento. The repea­ting rosette deco­ra­tions, for example, recall the paterae on the cand­le­stick held by Michelangelo’s Knee­ling Angel in Bologna (see Fig. 164). The shape and propor­tions of the cup parallel the baptismal dish of the San Giovan­nino of Úbeda (see Fig. 128) as well as the wine cup in the Drun­ken­ness of Noah in the Sistine Ceiling.⁴⁸ Most convin­cingly, the rim of the cup bears an abstracted egg-and-dart motif (Fig. 148) that is very similar to one the artist had employed, soon before he made the Bacchus, on the garment of his St. Proclus in Bologna (Fig. 149).⁴⁹ The cup is a masterful inven­tion by Michel­an­gelo that defies Wind’s dismis­sive remarks. It reflects the artist’s know­ledge of antique pottery, since its shape echoes that of an ancient kylix, with its handles atta­ched verti­cally rather than hori­zon­tally. Antique examples were likely known to Michel­an­gelo. When compa­ring the cup held by Bacchus with an antique drin­king cup in the Metro­po­litan Museum (Fig. 150), notable simi­la­ri­ties can be observed in their deco­ra­tive elements and overall shape.

Bacchus’s inter­ac­tion with the cup, and his state of drun­ken­ness, offer a basis for the statue’s highly inven­tive, tech­ni­cally daring compo­si­tion. The Bacchus leans outwards, testing the limits of the marble block. Behind him, the small satyr func­tions as a coun­ter­weight, allo­wing Bacchus to tilt forward in a manner unpar­al­leled in antique or contem­po­rary marble statuary. In his left arm, Bacchus holds a heavy cup high in the air, in defi­ance of marble’s struc­tural vulnerabi­li­ties. The raised cup of Michelangelo’s Bacchus set a stan­dard of

fig. 150 Palmette Eye Cup, New York, Metro­po­litan Museum, Acces­sion Number 56.171.61, Flet­cher Fund, 1956. c. 510 bce. Photo: The Metro­po­litan Museum of Art, New York, public domain.

tech­nical diffi­culty that other sculp­tures would imitate, from Jacopo Sansovino’s Bacchus (see Fig. 171) to Benvenuto Cellini’s marble Gany­mede.⁵⁰ In the sixte­enth century, largely because of Michelangelo’s Bacchus and its rivals, the daringly raised and extended arm (the braccio spic­cato or braccio in aria) was regarded as one of the grea­test chal­lenges in the art of marble statuary. As Bene­detto Varchi would put it in his lecture to the Floren­tine Academy on the rela­tive merits of sculp­ture and pain­ting, ‘it is a great achie­ve­ment to create a fully detached limb, for example an arm in the air, and the diffi­culty becomes greater if the figure is holding some­thing in the hand, as we can see in the very beau­tiful, even mira­cu­lous Bacchus by Jacopo Sanso­vino’.⁵¹ Jacopo Pontormo, in his letter to Varchi compa­ring the arts of sculp­ture and pain­ting, had inspired these thoughts when he had written of the diffi­culty of sculp­ting ‘an arm in the air with some­thing in its hand’, given the risk of breakage.⁵²

Eva Hanke was the first to point out that Michel­an­gelo probably worked out the compo­si­tion of the Bacchus in a drawing in perspec­tive, which he then trans­lated into three-dimen­sional form. This approach is intuited from the subtle distor­tions that are only corrected if one observes the Bacchus from the front and slightly from the right. The domi­nance of the view from the front and from the right can best be discerned in a frontal photo­graph of the face (see Fig. 162): the left half of the face is wider than the right half. This distor­tion, the arran­ge­ment of the hair, and the posi­tion of the eyes assume that viewers will observe the statue from the right (see Fig. 130).⁵³ This prin­cipal view­point was reco­g­nised by fellow artists, as is seen in drawings by van Heems­kerck (see Fig. 215) as well as by the master of the ‘Cambridge Sketch­book’ (datable to c. 1536–1555) (Fig. 151).⁵⁴ Only from this perspec­tive is the viewer able to compre­hend the satyr’s playful theft of grapes from the inat­ten­tive wine god. The tech­nique visible in Michelangelo’s unfi­nished sculp­ture of St. Matthew (Fig. 152) backs up well-known state­ments by Vasari and Benvenuto Cellini regar­ding his preferred carving method: he began on the flat surface of a marble block, then worked down­wards as if carving a relief.⁵⁵ While it would be an over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion to imagine that the artist applied this method syste­ma­ti­cally in the Bacchus, the distor­tions present in the statue suggest that the prin­cipal view from the right (Fig. 130) is also close to the compo­si­tion that Michel­an­gelo would have first drawn on the surface of the block at its fullest width. He presu­mably began with this design, then worked into the marble, disco­ve­ring the Bacchus and satyr as figures occu­pying the block diagonally.

Despite the compo­si­tional and narra­tive domi­nance of the prin­cipal view, the Bacchus offers viewers an excep­tional multi­pli­city of perspec­tives.⁵⁶ It was highly unusual, if not unpre­ce­dented, for a marble statue of this size to be composed in a manner that encou­rages viewers

fig. 151 Anony­mous Flemish or Nether­landish Artist, Michelangelo’s Bacchus, Cambridge, Trinity College, Cambridge Sketch­book, mS R.17.3, fol. 16 r. Post 1536–ante 1555. Photo: Trinity College, Cambridge, cc By-Nc 4.0.

fig. 152 Michel­an­gelo Buonar­roti, St. Matthew, Florence, Galleria dell’Accademia, inv. Scult. n. 1077. 1505–1506. Photo: The Cour­t­auld, Conway Library, cc-By-Nc.

Illus­tra­tion page. See the complete open-access PDF for the image.

to move around it and to admire it from all sides.⁵⁷ If the Bacchus is approa­ched fron­tally, the figure appears almost as if it were an ideal nude in contrap­posto, as is empha­sised in a drawing of the statue by Girolamo da Carpi of c. 1550 (Fig. 153).⁵⁸ From this angle, Bacchus’s face is obscured by the cup and the satyr is hidden from view so that spec­ta­tors are encou­raged to adjust their posi­tion and move to the right. Once observed from the prin­cipal view to the right, the compo­si­tion is reve­aled, as well as the block’s fullest width (Fig. 130). The twis­ting pose of the satyr attracts inte­rest and invites viewers towards the statue’s left side (Fig. 4 and Fig. 9), until they have rounded the figure and gained a complete under­stan­ding of Michelangelo’s dynamic composition.

With its gravity-defying exten­sions and its versa­tile viewing angles, the statue differs signi­fi­cantly from the antique. By buil­ding into the statue a multi­pli­city of view­points, Michel­an­gelo relied not upon life­sized antique marbles, but instead upon the small-scale sculp­tures in the round he had known in Tuscany. As Paul Joann­ides has empha­sised, his Bacchus is a life­sized marble conceived largely in the spirit of bronze statu­ettes by Donatello, Bertoldo, and others artists that Michel­an­gelo had studied in the anti­qua­rian milieu of Medici Florence.⁵⁹ Fran­cesco Caglioti has shown that the pose of Michelangelo’s satyr in the Bacchus evokes Bertoldo di Giovanni’s Orpheus (Fig. 154), whose elegant compo­si­tion can be appre­ciated even in a flawed bronze cast: in both sculp­tures, the legs twist in one direc­tion, the shoulders in the other, and one arm is drawn across the turning body.⁶⁰ The Pan or Satyr by the sculptor Adriano Fioren­tino (Fig. 155), a colla­bo­rator and likely also a pupil of Bertoldo, is composed with broadly spaced, outstret­ched legs which, as Joann­ides notes, exem­pli­fies the type of tech­nical daring that Michel­an­gelo mimics in

fig. 153 Girolamo da Carpi, Michelangelo’s Bacchus and One of the Three Graces from the Ara Borg­hese, London, British Museum, inv. 1946–7‑13–308 recto. c. 1520–1556. Photo © The Trus­tees of the British Museum.

fig. 154 Bertoldo di Giovanni, Orpheus, Florence, Museo Nazio­nale del Bargello, inv. 349 / Bronzi e plac­chette. c. 1471. Photo © Minis­tero della Cultura – Musei del Bargello. All rights reserved.

fig. 155 Adriano Fioren­tino, Pan, Vienna, Kunst­his­to­ri­sches Museum, inv. Kunst­kammer, 5851. Before 1486. Photo © khm Museumsverband.

his outward-leaning Bacchus.⁶¹ Argu­ably, the Bacchus owes its concept of form, subject matter, and func­tion to these and other all’antica marble, bronze, and terra­cotta statu­ettes invented in the Quat­tro­cento, anti­qua­rian figures which—freed from the rest­ric­tions of reli­gious or civic iconography—delighted in arti­stry and compo­si­tional daring.⁶² Discus­sing the spirit of bronze statu­ettes in Michelangelo’s sculp­tures, Joann­ides has written that ‘whatever he may have planned to do with his marbles, whatever angu­la­ri­ties he may have wished to exploit, [he] always conceived his sculp­tures as, essen­ti­ally, a bron­zista would have conceived them, as complete, whole, and fully gras­pable’.⁶³ Trans­la­ting the all’antica bronze statu­ette into a new scale and mate­rial allowed Michel­an­gelo to compete with the antique in an enti­rely new way.

fig. 156 Antico (Pier Jacopo Alari Bona­colsi), Spinario, New York, The Metro­po­litan Museum of Art, 2012.157, Gift of Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, 2012. Probably modelled in 1496 and cast c. 1501. Photo: The Metro­po­litan Museum of Art, New York, public domain.

The Bacchus reflects a courtly, aris­to­cratic inte­rest in all’antica bronze statu­ettes, objects that respond artfully to the genre of life­sized anti­qui­ties in marble. It is signi­fi­cant that when Michel­an­gelo was working on the Bacchus in Riario’s house­hold, the Mantuan court artist Jacopo Alari Bona­colsi, known as ‘Antico’, was also present in Rome. His aim was to study ancient statues and trans­form them into inven­tive statu­ettes in bronze. Riario, as an ally of the Gonzaga, was possibly involved in hosting Antico or in supporting the artist’s work during his stay. When the sculptor was first docu­mented in Rome in 1495, he was in the employ of the Camera Apos­to­lica.⁶⁴ Perhaps at the request of the Camera, he restored the antique Quirinal Horse­t­amers, signing his name to the statue’s base.⁶⁵ Around the same time, he began to produce bronze statu­ettes modelled on anti­qui­ties visible in Roman coll­ec­tions. A post-mortem inven­tory of 8 October 1496 lists a number of statu­ettes by Antico which had been owned by his patron Gian­fran­cesco Gonzaga. Several of them are—either presu­mably or certainly—based on antique sculp­tures Antico encoun­tered in Rome: a Hercules, a Cupid with a quiver, and bronze statu­ettes inspired by the Spinario (Fig. 156) and an antique Mele­ager.⁶⁶ After Michel­an­gelo arrived in Rome in the summer of 1496, he and Bona­colsi likely became acquain­tances, and they may have been brought toge­ther by a common connec­tion to Riario’s house­hold. In the time that Michel­an­gelo was carving the Bacchus for Riario, the Cardinal’s asso­ciate Ludo­vico Agnelli took Bona­colsi to view antique figures, an assign­ment that seems to echo Michelangelo’s visit to the ‘certe figure’. On 5 February 1497, Antico wrote to the Marquis of Mantua, Fran­cesco II Gonzaga, than­king Gonzaga for having intro­duced him to Agnelli, who showed the sculptor ‘beau­tiful anti­qui­ties’.⁶⁷ In response to works he had observed on such visits, Antico cast a number of inven­tive bronzes and by the end of 1498, it seems, had completed statu­ettes inspired by the Apollo Belve­dere and by a Crou­ching Venus in the coll­ec­tion of the Massimi (Fig. 157).⁶⁸

All’antica figures like Bonacolsi’s bronzes were desi­gned to be displayed in coll­ec­tions toge­ther with genuine anti­qui­ties. They were charac­te­rised by their absence of func­tion, nudity, and pagan subject matter; they were works of art that lacked site-speci­fi­city and delighted in compo­si­tional inven­tion. Michelangelo’s Bacchus rivals the antique in similar ways,⁶⁹ and in this sense falls in line with the type of statu­ettes that inte­rested elite patrons outside of Rome—Lorenzo de’ Medici, Isabella d’Este, Fran­cesco II Gonzaga, or Federico da Monte­feltro. These patrons desired copies, pasti­ches, and imita­tions of pres­ti­gious antique objects to enrich and extend their anti­qui­ties coll­ec­tions. Outside of Rome, the limited avai­la­bi­lity of antique objects, combined with a sophisti­cated appre­cia­tion of para­gone, encou­raged the sort of expe­ri­mental methods of enga­ging with the antique that are seen in the Bacchus.⁷⁰ With the commis­sion for the Bacchus, Riario seems

fig. 157 Antico (Pier Jacopo Alari Bona­colsi), Knee­ling Nude, Lugano, Thyssen-Borne­misza Coll­ec­tion, inv. I1673. Before 1498. Photo: © Thyssen- Borne­misza Coll­ec­tion Foundation.

to have imitated the prac­tices of the courts of Nort­hern Italy which the Cardinal greatly admired. The Bacchus was highly original, however, since it was made not for a library or a studiolo but presu­mably for display within a coll­ec­tion of life­sized anti­qui­ties, of the sort found only in Rome.

When Michel­an­gelo carved the Bacchus, he had in mind the bronzes of Antico, of Bertoldo di Giovanni, and of Donatello; he would also have had in mind a parti­cular statue of Bacchus carved in marble by the Sienese sculptor Antonio Fede­righi around 1460 to 1470 (Fig. 158–59). Its pagan subject and nudity are extra­or­di­nary for a sculp­ture of this date.⁷¹ Although the intended setting of Federighi’s Bacchus is unknown, it was probably sculpted for a Sienese anti­qua­rian, perhaps—given its rela­tively small size (c. 51 cm)—for display in a study or library. The statue may have been made for a Picco­lo­mini patron, since Federighi

fig. 158–159 Antonio Fede­righi, Bacchus, Siena, Monte dei Paschi di Siena, inv. 3156. c. 1460. Photos © Mond­adori Port­folio / Electa / Grassi / Bridgeman Images.

is known to have worked for this family. Possibly, Cardinal Riario had the oppor­tu­nity to see the figure when he took refuge in Siena after his release from prison in Florence and was hosted by Tommaso del Testa Picco­lo­mini.⁷² Certainly, Michel­an­gelo knew Federighi’s Bacchus first-hand, probably before he carved the St. Proclus at San Dome­nico in Bologna (see Fig. 149). The intense facial expres­sion of Federighi’s Bacchus seems to have been present in Michelangelo’s memory when he carved the St. Proclus, the Bacchus, and then, later on, the marble David (see Fig. 214).

Michel­an­gelo deeply admired the expe­ri­mental compo­si­tions and subjects of Federighi’s work, which he refe­renced throug­hout his career,⁷³ and the inspi­ra­tion of Federighi’s statu­ette is clearly visible in Michelangelo’s life­sized Bacchus. Both statues repre­sent a nude Bacchus, with a visibly swollen belly and a crown of grapes on his head. They depict the god gazing intently at an attri­bute of wine that he holds high in the air—in Federighi’s sculp­ture, a bunch of grapes, and in Michelangelo’s, a wine cup. In both sculp­tures, Bacchus’s expres­sion is sear­ching, his brow furrowed, and his mouth slightly open. In Michelangelo’s statue, Bacchus’s intense facial expres­sion (see Fig. 148) echoes the act of ‘exami­na­tion’ taking place in Federighi’s, which shows Bacchus holding up and scru­ti­ni­sing a bunch of grapes that he is about to squeeze. Fede­righi and Michel­an­gelo depict Bacchus as an into­xi­cated figure, in contrast to typical repre­sen­ta­tions of Bacchus in antique art. As Andreas Emmer­ling-Skala has empha­sised, the post-clas­sical icono­graphy of the drunken Bacchus relies upon an alle­go­rical inter­pre­ta­tion inhe­rited from the fifth-century author Fulgen­tius: Bacchus should be shown naked, accor­ding to Fulgentius’s influ­en­tial text, ‘because the drun­kard lays bare the secrets of his mind’.⁷⁴ The drun­ken­ness and nudity of Federighi’s and Michelangelo’s statues seemingly relate to their common reli­ance on this mytho­gra­phic tradi­tion. Both statues of Bacchus rely, as well, on a stan­dard guide to the repre­sen­ta­tion of clas­sical divi­ni­ties, the Libellus de imagi­nibus deorum. This short Latin trea­tise was composed c. 1400 by an unknown author, and when it was first published in 1485, it was incor­rectly attri­buted to a twelfth-century monk named Albe­ricus. The text origi­nates in a summary and revi­sion of the four­te­enth-century Ovide mora­lisé by Petrarch’s asso­ciate Pierre Bersuire.⁷⁵

Accor­ding to the Libellus, Bacchus should be depicted with a ‘femi­nine’ face, a bare chest, and horns emer­ging from his head. He should wear a crown of grape­vines. The god should be shown riding on a tiger under­neath the shade of a grape­vine, and a monkey, a pig, and a lion should ‘circle the foot of ’ the vine. He should hold a wine cup in his left hand and pick succu­lent grapes with his right.⁷⁶ While Fede­righi and Michel­an­gelo preferred to sculpt the god as a free­stan­ding nude, their inven­tions echo the Libellus’s guide­lines. Federighi’s Bacchus stands next to a tree trunk wrapped in a fruit-bearing vine. He holds a bunch of grapes tightly in his right hand, as if inspec­ting them before squeezing out their juice. Compa­ring Michelangelo’s Bacchus to Federighi’s Bacchus and to the rele­vant passage in the Libellus, it seems that Michel­an­gelo has chosen to repre­sent Bacchus soon after the god has trans­formed grapes into wine. A bunch of grapes remains caught in his animal pelt, and his focus has turned to the cup he has just filled, allo­wing the young satyr to feast on the leftover remnants

fig. 160 Michel­an­gelo Buonar­roti, Bacchus, detail, Florence, Museo Nazio­nale del Bargello, inv. 10 / Scul­ture. 1496– 1497. Photo: The Cour­t­auld, Conway Library, cc-by-nc.

of his wine-making. Echoes of the Libellus can be seen in Michelangelo’s statue: the presence of a tree and a lion (in the form of the feline pelt, Fig. 160), the cup in Bacchus’s hand, the figure’s nudity, his crown of grapes, his horns, and the grapes he has recently picked. Argu­ably, the descrip­tion of a ‘monkey’ in the Libellus informed Michelangelo’s inven­tion of the mischie­vous satyr who ‘circles’ the tree stump and sneaks up on the god, an idea that may even have resur­faced in the ape the artist later began to carve in the support of his Dying Slave in the Louvre (Fig. 161).⁷⁷

The Libellus has received scant atten­tion in the art-histo­rical scho­lar­ship and, follo­wing Condivi’s state­ment that the Bacchus’s ‘form and appearance coin­cide in every way with the inten­tion of ancient writers’, the Bacchus is often related to exclu­si­vely clas­sical texts. In parti­cular, it has often been compared to descrip­tions by Pliny the Elder and Callistratus of a Dionysus by Praxi­teles.⁷⁸ Yet both of these sources are brief, and lack detail. While Michel­an­gelo was likely fami­liar with the passage in Pliny, which was available after 1476 in Cris­to­foro Landino’s Italian trans­la­tion, it is unli­kely he could have known Callistratus’s text, which was published in Greek only in 1503 and in Latin only in the seven­te­enth century.⁷⁹ The Libellus has often been over­looked since—following Panof­skyan principles—it repres­ents the type of text that was supposed to have become obso­lete when artists turned to genui­nely antique sources in ‘the Renais­sance’.⁸⁰ Yet the Libellus’s straight­for­ward, didactic approach was highly esteemed in fifte­enth-century huma­nist and artistic circles. It avoided alle­go­rical readings and instead offered a pared-down cata­logue of the clas­sical gods with instruc­tions as to how they should be ‘depicted’. For Fede­righi, Michel­an­gelo, and their patrons, it seems to have been regarded as an enti­rely legi­ti­mate autho­rity on the imagery of the pagan gods.

Neopla­to­nism and Prophecy

Edgar Wind’s Neopla­tonic inter­pre­ta­tion of the Bacchus, discussed in the intro­duc­tion, has provided the domi­nant para­digm for the analysis of the statue since the 1950s. For Wind, Michel­an­gelo created a work that cele­brates Bacchic furor, as it had been cano­ni­cally defined by Plato in the Phaedrus. Plato described four distinct types of divine ‘frenzy’, a state of madness granted directly by God. The inspi­ra­tion of the Muses was poetic, Apollo’s was prophetic, Dionysus’s mystic, and Venus’s amorous (Phaedrus 265 A–B). While Plato’s own posi­tion on Bacchic frenzy was ambi­guous, Ficino and his pupil Giovanni Pico della Miran­dola revived and expanded the concept in the fifte­enth century.⁸¹ Ficino’s commen­tary on Plato’s Phaedrus, drafted c. 1474 and published in 1484, hailed Bacchus as a leader of the Nymphs who induces an inspired state. In his commen­tary to the Sympo­sium of Plato, the De amore composed in 1469, Ficino considers four forms of inspired madness as ascen­ding steps towards the

divine: the first is the Muses’ poetic state which, by indu­cing a sense of harmony, unifies and calms the soul; the second, Bacchic state, conti­nues this process of unifi­ca­tion, but draws the soul away from the body and towards the higher sphere of the mind. The soul is inspired by Apollo, then Venus, progres­sing further towards a state of unity.⁸² In the De vita libri tres, composed in the early 1480s and published in 1489, Ficino asserts that wine and its scent have the ability to free the spirit, in keeping with Bacchus’s role as ‘Liber’.⁸³ Since Wind published the Pagan Myste­ries, these passages have often been cited as evidence that the Bacchus is an expres­sion of Michelangelo’s Neopla­to­nism.⁸⁴ It has been assumed that Michel­an­gelo absorbed the teachings of Marsilio Ficino in his youth, when he rubbed elbows with Ficino and other members of the intellec­tual elite in the Palazzo Medici.⁸⁵ Now, decades of rese­arch have shown that Floren­tine huma­nism in the late 1480s and early 1490s was more multi­faceted and less exclu­si­vely ‘Neopla­tonic’ than was previously thought. As a result, Ficino is no longer unders­tood to have been the domi­nant ‘Medici’ philo­so­pher during Michelangelo’s youth. As was noted in Chapter 2, Ficino was dange­rously close to the perpe­tra­tors of the Pazzi conspi­racy in 1476, and in its after­math, he strug­gled to regain his former stan­ding in the Medici house­hold.⁸⁶

At the same time, it is unde­niable that Neopla­to­nism was a major cultural move­ment that would have left a signi­fi­cant impres­sion on Michel­an­gelo during his youth in Florence. As is discussed below, Neopla­tonic under­curr­ents are disco­verable in the inven­tions of Bertoldo di Giovanni, custode of the Medici sculp­ture garden, as is seen in his Orpheus, which Michel­an­gelo esteemed and often imitated (see Fig. 154). They are legible in Michelangelo’s output from the 1490s and are expressed as a contrast between body and soul, the earthly and the spiri­tual. The Bacchus’s allu­sion to Ficino’s Bacchic furor has long seemed self-evident, while the artist’s Young Archer made for Jacopo Galli seems to allude to divine inspi­ra­tion and—with its upward-tilting motion—the soul’s desire to return to its heavenly origins. In sum, Neopla­to­nism is unde­ni­ably present in Michelangelo’s work, but has been applied too mono­li­thi­cally and abstractly to the inter­pre­ta­tion of the Bacchus.

Moreover, while the Floren­tine Neopla­tonic context has been a domi­nant topic in the discus­sion of Michelangelo’s Bacchus, the Neopla­to­nism that the artist encoun­tered in the Rome of Riario and Galli deserves further explo­ra­tion. Edgar Wind first observed in 1958 that Riario and Galli’s intellec­tual milieu was signi­fi­cant and forma­tive for the artist and, as was discussed in Chapter 4, Riario’s circle was deeply engaged with Fici­nian Neopla­to­nism, Platonic studies, and prisca theo­logia. The Bacchus was created, as Wind first empha­sised, at the time of a transfer of Ficino’s philo­sophy from Florence to Rome by Riario’s Augus­ti­nian circle, parti­cu­larly by Mariano da Genaz­zano, who arrived in the spring of 1495. Riario promoted Fra Mariano until he became prior general of the Augus­ti­nian order and, as was discussed in

fig. 161 Michel­an­gelo Buonar­roti, The Dying Slave, Paris, Musée du Louvre, Dépar­te­ment des Sculp­tures du Moyen Âge, de la Renais­sance et des temps modernes, inv. mr 1590. 1513–1516. Photo © Foto Marburg, Albert Hirmer and Irmgard Ernstmeier-Hirmer.

Chapter 4, Mariano and Riario recruited Mariano’s protégé Egidio da Viterbo to the Augus­ti­nians in Rome. In the spring of 1497, while Michel­an­gelo was at work on Riario’s Bacchus, Egidio defended the ‘great­ness of Plato’ during his exami­na­tion in theo­logy.⁸⁷

This move­ment of Ficino’s philo­sophy to Rome was driven not only by abstract intellec­tual inte­rests, but also by the desire to appro­priate Neopla­to­nism and re-engi­neer it for the poli­tical and propa­gan­di­stic purposes of the Church. For the intellec­tuals in Riario’s circle, Plato’s theo­logy was a prized form of Chris­tian prophecy, and its revival offered an oppor­tu­nity to enhance the glory of the Roman Curia.⁸⁸ Hebrew scrip­ture, the writings of Plato, and even the mate­rial remains of anti­quity could be inter­preted as signs of a divine plan for papal Rome.⁸⁹ Crucial for the recep­tion of anti­quity in the Curia, and in Riario’s house­hold, was the notion that Rome’s antique past seemed to predict its Chris­tian present. The concept has been explored in depth in the sixte­enth-century writings of Egidio da Viterbo, who would arti­cu­late the idea, for example, that the Jani­culum, an Etru­scan hill sacred to Janus, was a holy site predestined to become the home of the Vatican.⁹⁰ In the era of Pope Julius II, the theme of the return of a past Golden Age was ubiqui­tous in the visual and lite­rary arts, with frequent echoes of Virgil’s poetry.⁹¹ This approach is already evident in the 1490s in Riario’s circle, as is seen in the display of the over-life­sized Muse at San Lorenzo in Damaso. As Antonio Biax­ander would write in his poem on Riario’s Muse, the figure signals the return of the ‘blessed kingdom’ of Saturn under Cardinal Riario [Appendix ii.19].

The Bacchus, as well, reso­nates in the context of the Platonic theo­logy of Riario’s circle. In his article ‘Michelangelo’s Progress among Theo­lo­gians’, Wind argued that Michel­an­gelo sculpted the Bacchus at a critical junc­ture, when Fra Mariano led a Roman oppo­si­tion to Savo­na­rola. In a letter to Michelangelo’s brother Buonar­roto in March 1497, Michelangelo’s loyal assistant Piero d’Argenta reve­aled that Savo­na­rola was called a ‘rotten heretic’ in Rome, and that ‘Fra Mariano talks very badly’ about him.⁹² The letter, written from inside Riario’s and Michelangelo’s milieu in 1497, contex­tua­lises the Bacchus, a statue that seems to embody a Roman, anti­qua­rian oppo­si­tion to Savo­na­rola. For Savo­na­rola, the cult of anti­quity that had deve­loped in Florence and Rome was tanta­mount to heresy. Yet for Fra Mariano and for Riario’s circle, it was Savonarola’s claims to be a modern-day prophet that were here­tical.⁹³ From the anti-Savo­na­rolan point of view, the era of prophecy was not the present, but the time before Christ, when divine reve­la­tion was inter­woven into Hebrew scrip­ture and the writings of Plato and Virgil. Christ’s sacri­fice repre­sented the end and full­fill­ment of an era of prophecy, when commu­ni­ca­tion between God and human­kind had been porous and open.

From the perspec­tive of Riario’s theo­lo­gical circle, the Bacchus reso­nates with the cele­bra­tion of Chris­tian Rome with refe­rence to a past era of prophecy, as if to unders­core the idea that the glory of Riario’s court was fores­ha­dowed by pagan anti­quity. At Riario’s court, the traces of divine reve­la­tion were sought in antique statuary, poetry, and philo­sophy as a means of enri­ching contem­po­rary theo­logy and oratory. In the last years of the fifte­enth century, in

the after­math of the fall of Granada, the expec­ta­tion was ripe that ancient predic­tions would soon come to frui­tion; at this moment of opti­mism, as Riario’s palace was rising from the ground, anti­quity was cele­brated as the forerunner of an immi­nent Golden Age. The ushe­ring in of a new era through Chris­tian conquest over­seas was, as was seen, a major theme in the patro­nage of both Pietro Riario and Raffaele Riario. As Riario’s cour­tiers could argue, the Cardinal’s elec­tion as pope was the missing step needed to bring about the final achie­ve­ment of past prophe­cies. The allu­sion to Bacchic inspi­ra­tion and reve­la­tion in Michelangelo’s ­statue, argu­ably, over­laps with the cele­bra­tion of pre-Chris­tian prophecy in Riario’s circle. The nudity of the Bacchus empha­sises the concept of ‘naked truth’; as Vincenzo Cartari would later write in his Le Imagini de i dei de gli antichi, ‘repre­sen­ting [Bacchus] nude was a way of saying that wine and drun­ken­ness often reveal what was previously hidden’.⁹⁴ In Michelangelo’s statue, a state of drun­ken­ness induces the ‘other-worldly’ expres­sion on the figure’s face

fig. 163 Desi­derio da Settignano with Donatello, St. John the Baptist, detail of face, Florence, Museo Nazio­nale del Bargello, inv. 435 / Scul­ture. 1450s. Photo: The Cour­t­auld, Conway Library, cc-by-nc.

fig. 162 Michel­an­gelo Buonar­roti, Bacchus, detail of face. Florence, Museo Nazio­nale del Bargello, inv. 10 / Scul­ture. 1496–1497. Photo © Kunst­his­to­ri­sches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck- Institut, photo­grapher: Luigi Artini.

(Fig. 162), as if Bacchus were expe­ri­en­cing a divine vision. His trans­ported gaze and expres­sion call to mind a statue of a divi­nely inspired prophet that the artist knew well, the Martelli St. John the Baptist by Donatello and completed by Desi­derio da Settignano (Fig. 163).⁹⁵ The Bacchus’s open-mouthed, rhap­sodic look is also echoed by the small, knee­ling angel the artist carved for Aldro­vandi in Bologna, who seems simi­larly preoc­cu­pied by matters inac­ces­sible to ordi­nary mortals (Fig. 164).

It is intri­guing, moreover, to consider how the Bacchus   ’s Neopla­tonic over­tones might relate to Michelangelo’s compe­ti­tion with the antique, which was focused expli­citly on the goal of rival­ling the ‘beauty’ of ancient sculp­ture. In the Augus­ti­nian and Neopla­tonic tradi­tion which Summers has called the ‘Renais­sance reli­gion of the beau­tiful’, beauty is an earthly trace of the divine; to expe­ri­ence it offers satis­fac­tion to the divine human soul, which is attracted to beauty since it natu­rally seeks out God.⁹⁶ A passage in Ficino’s De amore discusses the rela­ti­onship between beauty and divi­nity: the divine is the source of beauty, a sple­ndour that draws the soul towards it by kind­ling a sense of reco­gni­tion and love.⁹⁷ In his commen­tary on the Phaedrus, Ficino evokes a passage in which Socrates describes his own posses­sion by ‘the Nymphs’, who induce in him the inspired state that allows him to speak poeti­cally. For Ficino, the passage leads to a conside­ra­tion of the effects of love, desire, and beauty, which he asso­ciates with the powers of Dionysus. ‘Socrates is enti­rely divi­nely inspired when he speaks

fig. 164 Michel­an­gelo Buonar­roti, Knee­ling Angel, detail, Bologna, San Dome­nico, Arca di San Dome­nico. 1494– 1495. Photo © Ortolf Harl.

fig. 165 Rome, Palazzo San Giorgio, cour­tyard. Photo © Giulio Riotta.

of love and beauty’, he writes, ‘for he is perso­nally more drawn to these, and visible beauty recalls invi­sible beauty to the mind, the love of which raptur­ously marries us to God’.⁹⁸ These passages reso­nate with Riario’s chall­enge to Michel­an­gelo; if the beauty of antique sculp­ture is a mani­fes­ta­tion of divine presence left over from the pre-Chris­tian world, it was this aspect of ancient sculp­ture that Michel­an­gelo was asked to discover and invoke. The anti­qui­ties of Rome were in this sense much more than icono­gra­phic models for the Bacchus. Their status derives seemingly from their divine source, which makes them unsur­pas­sable and, ulti­m­ately, denies Michel­an­gelo any hope of equal­ling them.

The Intended Setting of the Bacchus

An important issue for any inter­pre­ta­tion of Michelangelo’s Bacchus is the ques­tion of its intended setting. Where did Riario plan to display the Bacchus  ? In the current lite­ra­ture, most scho­lars favour a theory first proposed by Johannes Wilde. In the 1930s, Wilde correctly intuited that Cardinal Riario, rather than Jacopo Galli, was the patron of the Bacchus. In lectures published decades later, he elabo­rated further on this hypo­thesis, arguing that Riario intended to place the Bacchus ‘among the anti­ques in the cour­tyard of the Cardinal’s newly built palace, the Cancel­leria’.⁹⁹ When Wilde proposed this idea, the buil­ding history of the Palazzo San Giorgio was still poorly unders­tood, and he was not aware that the cour­tyard of Riario’s palace had not yet been cons­tructed when the Bacchus was commis­sioned. In 1999, in an essay written for the exhi­bi­tion Giovi­nezza di Michel­an­gelo, Chris­toph Frommel supported and expanded Wilde’s hypo­thesis, propo­sing that the Bacchus may have been intended for the arcades or the centre of the cour­tyard of the new palazzo (Fig. 165). Frommel cited the prece­dent of Donatello’s bronze David made for the cour­tyard of Palazzo Medici in Florence (Fig. 166).¹⁰⁰ Donatello’s David, fores­ha­dowing the Bacchus, was a nude, free­stan­ding figure desi­gned as the centre­piece of a palace cour­tyard. Although the cortile of the Palazzo San Giorgio was not yet finished in 1496, Frommel argued, its archi­tec­tural design would have already been planned, and Riario commis­sioned the Bacchus anti­ci­pa­ting its appearance. In keeping with his passion for the theatre, Riario’s aim was to place the Bacchus (the inventor of theatre) near the enormous Muse (see Fig. 103) and other figures in his cour­tyard to cele­brate the revival of clas­sical comedy and tragedy. Pomponio Leto, at the end of his life, might have advised Riario and Michel­an­gelo on the Bacchus, a figure that would have reso­nated with the belief that the palace occu­pied the same ground as the ancient Theatre of Pompey.¹⁰¹ Going further, Frommel proposed that the Bacchus and the Muse could have been intended as comple­ments to thea­trical perfor­mances held in Riario’s cour­tyard. Elite visi­tors could have been seated in front of a tempo­rary stage, while the public could have watched perfor­mances from the loggias above. At these events the Bacchus could have stood either for the centre of the cortile, between stage and spec­ta­tors, or under­neath a loggia with the Muse.¹⁰²

fig. 166 Donatello, David, Florence, Museo Nazio­nale del Bargello, inv. 95 / Bronzi e plac­chette. c. 1440s. Photo: The Cour­t­auld, Conway Library, cc-by-nc.

While Frommel’s inge­nious proposal that the Bacchus was intended for display in the cortile is appe­aling and has received wide­spread support,¹⁰³ there are several reasons to ques­tion it. Even if the future design of the cortile would have been known at the time of Michelangelo’s arrival in the summer of 1496, it did not exist, and the area where the cour­tyard now stands was still occu­pied by the left aisle of San Lorenzo in Damaso.¹⁰⁴ Also signi­fi­cant are the Bacchus’s size, subject matter, and nudity, all of which make it ill-suited for display in the grand setting of Riario’s cour­tyard. The Bacchus is no more than life­sized and was likely desi­gned to stand on the low plat­form repre­sented in Maarten van Heemskerck’s drawing (see Fig. 215).

fig. 167 Recon­s­truc­tion of the Cour­tyard of the Palazzo San Giorgio with Michelangelo’s Bacchus at centre.

fig. 168 Cour­tyard of the Palazzo Farnese showing two antique statues of Hercules, Speculum Romanae Magni­fi­cen­tiae, published by Antoine Lafréry, London, British Museum, inv. 1947,0319.26.143. 1560. Photo © The Trus­tees of the British Museum.

A sculp­ture intended for the cour­tyard would presu­mably have been much larger. Even if the Bacchus were raised up on a tall base, one half the statue’s height, its propor­tions would have been inade­quate for display in the Palazzo San Giorgio’s cortile, as can be intuited from a recon­s­truc­tion drawing (Fig. 167). Only a statue the size of Riario’s Muse would suitably fill an archi­tec­tural space of such gran­deur, as is seen in other, later examples. One is the cortile of the Palazzo Farnese, which housed the Hercules Farnese and other sculp­tures of monu­mental scale disco­vered in the Baths of Cara­calla (Fig. 168). Another is the Palazzo Borg­hese, which still exhi­bits three statues that were origi­nally part of the same antique group as Riario’s Muse, that is, an Apollo and two of the Muses form­erly displayed on the scaenae frons of the Theatre of Pompey (Fig. 169).¹⁰⁵ In both these later palazzi, colossal anti­qui­ties reaching the height of column capi­tals and framed by colon­nades were chosen to create a harmo­nious ensemble. It seems that a further, prac­tical impe­di­ment to the instal­la­tion of the Bacchus in the centre of Riario’s cortile would have been the drain that likely occu­pied this posi­tion. Now a large drain deco­rated with a sculpted rose is situated here, and on a sixte­enth-century drawing of

fig. 169 Rome, Palazzo Borg­hese, cour­tyard. Photo: Author.

fig. 170 Anony­mous French copyist after Italian draughtsman, Palazzo San Giorgio, Munich, Baye­ri­sche Staats­bi­blio­thek, Cod. Icon. 195, fol. 10 r <urn:nbn:de:bvb:12bsb00017404‑7>. 1530– 1540. Photo: Baye­ri­sche Staats­bi­blio­thek, Munich, NoC-nc/1.0.

fig. 172 Maarten van Heems­kerck, Garden of the Cesi, Berlin, smb, Kupfer­stich­ka­bi­nett, inv. 79.D.2, Album i, fol. 25 r. c. 1532–1537. Photo © bpk / Kupfer­stich­ka­bi­nett, smb / Dietmar Katz.

Illus­tra­tion page. See the complete open-access PDF for the image.

the palace, a drain is indi­cated by an unde­co­rated rondel (Fig. 170) at the centre of the cour­tyard.¹⁰⁶

Michelangelo’s nude Bacchus, moreover, lacks any of the heroic or civic over­tones one would expect for such a setting, and which might have made a nude David or Hercules an appro­priate choice for Riario’s cortile. Paolo Cortesi, in his De Cardi­nalatu (composed before 1510), discussed the type of artworks he expected to be displayed in the cour­ty­ards of cardi­nals, public spaces which ‘all visi­tors can see’: for Cortesi, appro­priate subjects were painted histo­ries showing ‘deeds performed by emperors in a Chris­tian manner’.¹⁰⁷ Although Cortesi’s text describes a high stan­dard of piety that was rarely matched, the display of the Bacchus would have defied expec­ta­tions to an extreme degree. Frommel could only resolve this problem with the circular argu­ment that the Cardinal might have trans­ferred the Bacchus to Jacopo Galli after the comple­tion of the new cortile, when he realised he did not want to place ‘a frivo­lous divi­nity’ in such a visible and domi­nant posi­tion.¹⁰⁸

Michelangelo’s Bacchus is argu­ably much better suited to a garden or outdoor setting, as a type reso­nant with notions of leisure, ferti­lity, and rege­ne­ra­tion. The villa of Gual­fonda in Florence was, for example, the chosen setting of Jacopo Sansovino’s Bacchus (1510–1512, Fig. 171), a statue closely related to Michelangelo’s work.¹⁰⁹ Scho­lars have often noted that Michelangelo’s Bacchus must have been intended for display in the open, given the statue’s in-the-round compo­si­tion and its rocky base.¹¹⁰ Follo­wing the descrip­tions of Roman coll­ec­tions by Ulisse Aldro­vandi and Jean-Jacques Bois­sard, who visited the city in the mid-Cinque­cento, statues of Pan, Bacchus, and satyrs were usually displayed outdoors, in gardens. Bacchic figures often deco­rated fountains—for example, the famous figure of a Silenus emptying water from a wine­skin into a basin at the garden of the Cesi, which inspired a drawing by Maarten van Heems­kerck (Fig. 172).¹¹¹ In his Life of Perino del Vaga, Vasari described the Bacchic imagery of the garden of the Podo­ca­tari when it was owned by Arch­bi­shop Livio Podo­ca­tari. On the walls of the garden, adorned with ‘statues and other anti­qui­ties’, Perino

fig. 171 Jacopo Sanso­vino, Bacchus, Florence, Museo Nazio­nale del Bargello, inv. 120 / Scul­ture. 1515. Photo © Raffa­ello Bencini / Bridgeman Images.

fres­coed scenes of ‘bacchantes, satyrs, fauns, and other sylvan subjects, all of which alluded to an antique statue of Bacchus seated next to a tiger’. He also deco­rated a loggetta in the garden ‘with small figures, various grot­tesche, and many land­scape scenes’.¹¹²

One logi­cally returns, then, to the giar­dino segreto of the Cardinal’s palace which, because of its seclu­sion, scale, and ambi­ence, was a suitable place for the display of a coll­ec­tion of anti­qui­ties, and of Michelangelo’s Bacchus. Before Frommel’s article, the garden was, indeed, often proposed as the most likely intended setting of the Bacchus.¹¹³ As was discussed in Chapter 5, given its pre-history and the func­tions of this site, the garden of the cardinal’s palace at San Lorenzo would have been the most probable setting for an anti­qui­ties coll­ec­tion before Riario rebuilt the palace.

The desire to augment a garden coll­ec­tion would help to explain why Riario and Michel­an­gelo decided upon Bacchus as the subject of the Cardinal’s statue. Michelangelo’s letter of 1496 does not mention a discus­sion with Riario about this topic, only Riario’s request for ‘qual­chosa di bello’. Even if Michel­an­gelo exag­ge­rated his own importance in a letter to his patron, it seems Riario granted him unusual freedom in selec­ting a theme. Michelangelo’s past expe­ri­ences in the Medici sculp­ture garden seem to have been an important factor in the choice of a subject: Condivi claimed that a Head of a Faun was Michelangelo’s first work, and all’antica sculp­ture in Quat­tro­cento Florence was often Diony­sian, as is seen in the satyrs and Pans often chosen as the subjects of small-scale bronzes. As has been empha­sised, sylvan or Bacchic themes such as half-human, half-goat satyrs evoke the crea­tive forces of the natural world, high­lighting the artist’s access to them.¹¹⁴ The Bacchus has thus been described as a tour-de-force state­ment of Michelangelo’s own Diony­sian inspi­ra­tion and ‘artistic-poetic self-forma­tion’.¹¹⁵ Its narrative—the young satyr’s theft of Bacchus’s grapes—seems quasi-biogra­phical since it looks back to a model Michel­an­gelo would have known from his youth: a statue of Priapus in the garden of the Palazzo Medici at via Larga, which was paired with a witty poem by Gentile de’ Becchi.¹¹⁶ In de’ Becchi’s short epigram, the god Priapus instructs a young girl not to steal from the garden’s trees, but to eat his fruits instead. A simi­larly erotic, and now homo­erotic, narra­tive can be found in the Bacchus, which Michel­an­gelo imagined as an encounter between Bacchus and an aroused satyr, shown as a little thief who delights in the taste of the god’s grapes. The abun­dance of fluids in the sculpture—the juice of the succu­lent grapes, the vessel of wine, and the figure’s bulging stomach hinting at the immi­nent release of pent-up fluid—are sugges­tive of ripeness and sexual readi­ness.¹¹⁷ How, however, can these conno­ta­tions of perfor­ma­ti­vity, ferti­lity, and sexua­lity be squared with the patro­nage of a cardinal? What would have been the signi­fi­cance of the Bacchus for Riario?

A statue of this import would have been desi­gned with the social and ritual func­tion of its setting in mind, and the Bacchus can be imagined as a fitting subject for a cardinal’s garden, as such places, as was discussed in Chapter 5, were sites for recep­tion, banque­ting, and the consump­tion of wine. While banque­ting to excess was a vice, banquets for kings or princes in gardens or loci amoeni, to honour guests who had come from far away, were virtuous and were part of the respon­si­bi­li­ties of Rome’s curial elite. The art of convi­vium was praised by Giovanni Pontano as one of the five ‘social virtues’. Many made the error of brin­ging too much ‘arro­gance and melan­choly’ to the table, Pontano advised, but ‘Virgil was right and sensible in wanting that Bacchus, giver of happi­ness, should be present at all banquets’.¹¹⁸ Cardinal Riario was known for his fond­ness for fine dining and costly wines. The Galli-Balducci accounts from the 1510s, when the Cardinal began to pay house­hold expenses through a conto corrente at the bank, record his enormous outlay for wine and table­ware, as well as payments to his creden­ziere for items such as silver. The accounts of 1507, for example, include a single payment to the Balducci bank of 600 cameral ducats for Greek wines purchased in Naples.¹¹⁹ In 1509, Riario’s house­hold was the largest of any cardinal in Rome, hosting 250 people. As has been observed, ‘it is hard to imagine how over 200 people could have been usefully employed unless enter­tain­ment was on a grand scale’.¹²⁰ Scat­tered refe­rences are made in the sources to the sple­ndour of Cardinal Riario’s table, for example in Paolo Giovio’s De Romanis piscibus libellus, the ‘Trea­tise on Roman Fish’ he published in 1524. In this text, Giovio discusses the appearance of a spec­ta­cular ombrina in a Roman fish market. By special prero­ga­tive, the Roman fish­mon­gers were obliged to offer to the Conser­va­tors of Rome the prized heads of these types of fish. When presented with this parti­cu­larly fine specimen, they decided to offer it to Cardinal Riario. Their decision was a wise one, a character in Giovio’s text relates, since there was no table more sple­ndid than Riario’s.¹²¹ Although few traces of ephemeral events in Riario’s house­hold remain, nume­rous payments in the Galli-Balducci accounts relate to a banquet Riario held in honour of Isabella d’Este during her visit to Rome in 1514, which she described as ‘una cena molto et molto sump­tuosa che vera­mente seria bastata a ogni gran Regina’.¹²²

The Bacchus reso­nates with the theme of the ‘feast of the gods’, evoking nume­rous visual parallels—for example, Giovanni Bellini and Titian’s Feast of the Gods from Alfonso d’Este’s Came­rino in his Ferrara palace,¹²³ or the Feast of the Gods from Agos­tino Chigi’s Villa Farne­sina (Fig. 173). The cup that Michelangelo’s Bacchus holds is an exqui­site all’antica vessel, one which recalls the elegant cups displayed in these pain­tings or presented on ­ credenze during banquets. It seems to fores­hadow the imita­tions of ancient drin­king cups in gold or bronze depicted on the credenza in Giulio Romano’s Sala di Amore e Psiche at the Palazzo Te in Mantua (Fig. 174). In Giulio Romano’s fresco, Bacchus has over­in­dulged, and he leans

fig. 173 Work­shop of Raphael, Feast of the Gods, Rome, Villa Farne­sina, Loggia di Psiche. 1517–1518. Photo © bpk / Scala.

fig. 174 Giulio Romano, Wedding of Cupid and Psyche, Mantua, Palazzo Te. 1526–1528. Photo © Palazzo Te, Mantua / Bridgeman Images.

Illus­tra­tion page. See the complete open-access PDF for the image.

against a table laden with cups to support his own weight, a witty invi­ta­tion to drink for those parti­ci­pa­ting in real banquets in this hall. Deco­ra­ting the vessel raised by Michelangelo’s Bacchus are rosettes that presu­mably allude to Cardinal Riario’s own insi­gnia of the rose (see Fig. 148), in the manner of the roses obses­si­vely refe­renced in Cardinal Pietro Riario’s banquets, in Flaminius’s poetry, and ever­y­where in- and outside the Palazzo San Giorgio (Fig. 175), even in Riario’s dish­ware (Fig. 176). The delights of Riario’s table and the exqui­site quality of his wine, the deco­ra­tion of the cup seems to suggest, would invite Bacchus himself to overindulge.

At a time when it was still presumed that the Bacchus was made for Jacopo Galli, Phyllis Bober asso­ciated the Bacchus with Galli’s lite­rary circle and with the tradi­tion of convi­vial banquets, events that stressed socia­bi­lity, lite­rary perfor­mance, and eloquence.¹²⁴ But the statue’s patro­nage by a cardinal shift s its asso­cia­tions towards meta­phors of ruler­ship that imagined the gods them­selves would wish to join the banquets of a divine host. The idea that Muses or gods could choose to alight in a palace that seemed preferable to the realms of heaven reap­pears ever­y­where in the design of cardi­nals’ palazzi as well as in poetry and coll­ec­tions of anti­qui­ties. In poems written in the voice of the Apollo Belve­dere, the statue declared its surroun­dings at the Palazzo SS. Apos­toli, or the Belvedere

banquets

seemed

palazzi

the

Apollo

fig. 175 Rome, Palazzo San Giorgio, arcades with heraldic roses. Photo © Giulio Riotta.

fig. 176 Dish­ware of Cardinal Raffaele Riario disco­vered during excava­tions of the cour­tyard of Palazzo San Giorgio. Early 16th century. Photo © Biblio­theca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunst­ge­schichte, Rome.

statue court, to be the god’s preferred home.¹²⁵ In Egidio Gallo’s De viridario Augus­tini Chigii vera libellus written in honour of Agos­tino Chigi’s Villa Farne­sina by the Tiber, the villa’s setting, its pain­tings, sculp­ture, and archi­tec­tural wonders inspired Venus herself to descend from Olympus to live there, gran­ting the site an eternal spring. ‘I will be here with you’, she declares in Gallo’s poem, ‘here I will come when­ever I will descend from the summit of Olympus. Here will be my most peaceful abode’.¹²⁶ Paolo Emilio Boccabella’s poem written for Pietro Riario’s banquet for Eleo­nora d’Aragona in 1473, noted in Chapter 2, imagines that Mercury had come to earth to search for the gods, whom Jupiter needed for a council on Olympus, only to find them helping Cardinal Pietro to prepare his feast in a palace that seemed preferable to the heavens. The gods hesi­tate to return, having expe­ri­enced Riario’s hospi­ta­lity.¹²⁷

Poetry that imagined the gods as parti­ci­pants in banquets over­laps closely with thea­trical perfor­mances by costumed actors who played the role of gods in elite enter­tain­ments. At the marriage of Costanzo Sforza and Camilla d’Aragona held in Pesaro in 1475, the god Bacchus intro­duced the dessert course to the bride and groom, then sent his compa­nion Silenus to serve it.¹²⁸ Borro­wing from Dido’s famous toast in the Aeneid, the festival book declares, ‘Because Bacchus is the god of happi­ness [Laetitia] and without what he and Ceres send from above, one could never cele­brate a banquet or a wedding. All happy occa­sions, fittingly, end with him’.¹²⁹ A parallel example is found in the banquet which Cardinal Ascanio Sforza

fig. 177 Rome, Western façade of the Palazzo San Giorgio. Photo © Biblio­theca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunst­ge­schichte, Rome.

presented in June 1492 for his nephew Ferdi­nand, prince of Capua and son of King Alfonso II of Naples. At this lengthy event cele­bra­ting a peace accord between Rome and Naples, divine charac­ters intro­duced each course. An actor dressed as Diana brought game she had hunted for the guests, inclu­ding a deer with gilded horns. Neptune entered on a chariot to present the fish course, Pan intro­duced the cakes, and Pomona brought fruits. Throug­hout the event, the gods inter­acted with the Cardinal’s guests, for example when one of Diana’s nymphs declared her own love for the Neapo­litan prince.¹³⁰

Parallel examples of outdoor sculp­ture coll­ec­tions in the gardens of Raffaele Riario’s peers— toge­ther with their use in elite recep­tions and in poetry and theatre that cast the gods as eager participants—suggest that Cardinal Riario would have desired Michelangelo’s Bacchus for a sculp­ture coll­ec­tion he intended to place in his own garden. Yet, if Riario and Michel­an­gelo conceived the Bacchus for the Cardinal’s garden, the ques­tion remains as to why the Bacchus was seemingly never brought there and why was it kept in the house of the Galli. When Riario left Rome late in 1499, the Bacchus was likely still with Jacopo Galli, while Riario’s garden was left incom­plete. Cons­truc­tion on the palace progressed slowly, and the western part of the palace was only finished after 1511.¹³¹ Riario’s garden was completed in the last phase of buil­ding work at the Palazzo San Giorgio, after 1514, when payments were still being made for masonry and for plan­ting orange trees.¹³² In the sixte­enth-century design, the func­tions of the garden were sepa­rated from those of the palace: while the fifte­enth-century palace had a loggia opening directly on the garden, the new palace featured a five-bay loggia over­loo­king the garden from the first floor. This loggia is still visible on the western façade, but has been walled-in (Fig. 177).¹³³ Perhaps the delay in the laying out of the garden, shifts in the func­tion of this space, and Riario’s failure to win any anti­quity of the calibre and fame of the works assem­bled by Julius II at the Belve­dere caused Riario to abandon his ambi­tions for an illus­trious sculp­ture coll­ec­tion in the palace garden. At the same time, in the years follo­wing Riario’s commis­sion for the Bacchus, Michel­an­gelo deve­loped a close rela­ti­onship with Jacopo Galli. Galli became Michelangelo’s patron and backer, ente­ring into a close part­ner­ship with the artist that would continue until Galli’s death in 1505. As will be discussed further in Chapter 8, there can be little doubt that the continued presence of Michelangelo’s Bacchus at Jacopo Galli’s house results in some way from the personal bond and profes­sional rela­ti­onship that deve­loped between them.

Rejec­tion?

Earlier art-histo­rical scho­lar­ship has offered a diffe­rent inter­pre­ta­tion of the transfer of the Bacchus to Jacopo Galli: namely, that Galli came to own the Bacchus because Cardinal Riario disliked the statue and refused it. The notion only emerged in the twen­tieth century and, although Condivi’s discus­sion of Riario’s rejec­tion of the Slee­ping Cupid has some­times been

conflated with the Cardinal’s ‘rejec­tion’ of the Bacchus, Michelangelo’s sixte­enth-century biographers never connected the Bacchus with Riario in any way. Condivi condemned Riario for his lack of artistic judge­ment in the matter of the Cupid and, follo­wing up on this episode, he added, ‘in all the time that Michel­an­gelo was with him, that is, about a year, [Riario] never commis­sioned anything from the artist. There is no shortage of those who did reco­g­nise his talent’, however, since Jacopo Galli, ‘a Roman gentleman of high intel­li­gence (di bello ingegno), asked Michel­an­gelo to make a marble Bacchus in his house’ [Appendix ii.29].

The academic discus­sion about the patro­nage of the Bacchus began in the nine­te­enth century, when art histo­rians began to reas­sess Condivi’s biography and other sources for Michelangelo’s early career. In 1879, Herman Grimm concluded that the Bacchus must have been a figure that the sculptor began in August 1497 for his own ‘plea­sure’.¹³⁴ In 1891, Hein­rich Wölf­flin like­wise asso­ciated the Bacchus with the figure that Michel­an­gelo had carved for ‘plea­sure’ in 1497. The hypo­thesis disas­so­ciated Michelangelo’s Bacchus from Jacopo Galli. If the artist created the Bacchus for himself, then, contrary to Condivi’s asser­tion, Galli did not commis­sion it, but merely acquired it.¹³⁵ The seeds of doubt thus planted, the discus­sion was taken up again in an article published in the 1930s by Johannes Wilde. As was noted in Chapter 1, in this article Wilde suggested that Riario, rather than Galli, commis­sioned the Bacchus. Long before Hirst published Riario’s payment to Michel­an­gelo for the ‘bacho’ in the Galli-Balducci archives, Wilde deduced that the Bacchus was the ‘life­sized’ figure made for Riario, which Michel­an­gelo described in his letter to Lorenzo di Pier­fran­cesco de’ Medici written in July 1496. To clarify Condivi’s asser­tion that Galli commis­sioned the Bacchus, and to explain Condivi’s condem­na­tion of Riario, Wilde imagined that the Bacchus had been ‘rejected by the Cardinal’.¹³⁶

fig. 178 ‘Eadì detto duc[ati] cinquanta d’oro in oro larghi pagati a miche­lag­nolo schul­tore per resto di paga­mento del bacho’, page from the Galli- Balducci bank accounts, Florence, Archivio di Stato, Eredità di Lemmo Balducci 2, fol. 63 r, detail. July 1497. Photo: Author, repro­duced with permis­sion of Minis­tero della Cultura.

The art histo­rian Giovanni Poggi was one of the few scho­lars to concur with Wilde’s conclu­sion. Poggi had disco­vered the payments from Riario to Michel­an­gelo in the Galli-Balducci accounts, inclu­ding the record of the third payment, expli­citly for the ‘bacho’ (Fig. 178), which was only published in 1981 by Hirst. Poggi’s personal notes, the ‘Carte Poggi’ now housed in the Isti­tuto Nazio­nale di Studi sul Rina­sci­mento in Florence, make it clear that he asso­ciated Riario’s payments with the ‘life­sized’ figure Riario commis­sioned from Michel­an­gelo, and that he suspected this figure was the Bacchus. In these notes, Poggi specu­lated that the Cardinal was perhaps ‘not pleased with the statue and gave it to Gallo’, a scenario that would explain Condivi’s accu­sa­tion that Riario knew nothing about the art of sculp­ture.¹³⁷ Poggi did not publish the payments from Riario to Michel­an­gelo he had disco­vered and did not air his opinions about Riario’s patro­nage of the Bacchus in print. Nor did his know­ledge of the payment records surface in his edition of the Cart­eggio di Michel­an­gelo, published post­hu­mously by Paola Barocchi and Renzo Ristori. The commen­tary to Michelangelo’s letter of July 1496 in the Cart­eggio, published in 1965, upholds Condivi’s asser­tion that Jacopo Galli was the patron of the Bacchus.¹³⁸

After Poggi’s death, a BA student at Yale Univer­sity, Harold Mancusi-Ungaro, succeeded in tracking down the Galli-Balducci archives and in 1971 published payments related to the Bruges Madonna (Fig. 201), the Picco­lo­mini monu­ment in Siena (Figs 198–200), and an altar­piece commis­sioned from Michel­an­gelo for Sant’Agostino in Rome.¹³⁹ Moving forward a decade, Michael Hirst returned to the Galli-Balducci accounts to study the records for the Sant’Agostino altar­piece in further detail. Along the way, he disco­vered Riario’s payments to Michel­an­gelo in 1496 and 1497, inclu­ding a final transfer of fifty ducats from Riario to Michel­an­gelo on 3 July 1497 for ‘the Bacchus’ (see Fig. 178).¹⁴⁰ In the publi­ca­tion of his findings in 1981 in The Burlington Maga­zine, Hirst was able to prove that Johannes Wilde had been correct in his assump­tion that Riario was the statue’s patron. In this article, Hirst also revived the second part of Wilde’s hypothesis—namely, that Riario had disliked and refused the Bacchus.¹⁴¹ After Hirst’s reve­la­tion, the rejec­tion thesis was widely accepted. Umberto Baldini’s Michel­an­gelo scul­tore, published in the same year, stated unequi­vo­cally that the Bacchus was ‘commis­sioned from Michel­an­gelo by Cardinal Riario, who however refused it. It was then bought by the banker Jacopo Galli’.¹⁴² In a short book on the Bacchus published in 1982, Paola Barocchi wrote that the ‘statue did not please the Cardinal’, who gave it to his neigh­bour Jacopo Galli.¹⁴³ Hirst’s contri­bu­tion to the influ­en­tial exhi­bi­tion cata­logue of 1994, Making & Meaning: The Young Michel­an­gelo, described the Bacchus as ‘a striking case of a Renais­sance work of art being rejected by the patron’.¹⁴⁴

The contem­po­rary sources, however, strongly contra­dict the theory of Riario’s imme­diate rejec­tion of the Bacchus. Writing to his father on 1 July 1497, Michel­an­gelo complained of a delay in his final payment from Cardinal Riario and informed him that he could not leave Rome as a result.¹⁴⁵ While this letter has often been taken as evidence of Riario’s dissa­tis­fac­tion with the Bacchus,¹⁴⁶ it gives no hint of a conflict with Riario and implies that the delay was a normal one; Michel­an­gelo expected the issue to be resolved quickly. ‘With such great men one has to proceed carefully’, he writes, ‘because they can’t be forced. But I believe in any case that ever­y­thing will be settled within this week’. The artist’s assump­tion proved correct, since only two days later, on 3 July, Riario depo­sited the final payment for the Bacchus.¹⁴⁷ The receipt of this last inst­al­ment implies that there was no dispute requi­ring further reso­lu­tion, nor any need to request expert opinions, as was usual prac­tice when patrons and artists disagreed.¹⁴⁸

There are funda­mental diffe­rences between Riario’s possible ‘rejec­tion’ of the Slee­ping Cupid, an object offered on the art market by a merchant-banker, and his commis­sion for the Bacchus, a bespoke object ordered directly from its sculptor. In the case of the Cupid, Bald­as­sare del Mila­nese attempted to sell Michelangelo’s work under false pretences, and it would not have been unusual for Riario to demand a refund of his money if he were tricked.¹⁴⁹ The ‘rejec­tion’ of the Bacchus, however, would have been an excep­tional occur­rence in this period. It is indeed diffi­cult to find a case in which a patron refused a commis­sioned work of sculp­ture.¹⁵⁰ Cases of arbi­tra­tion or renego­tia­tion are known when pain­tings were commis­sioned, for example when Rosso Fioren­tino was paid less for an altar­piece than initi­ally promised, or when Dome­nico Beccafumi was obliged to paint a second version of his St. Michael and the Fall of the Rebel Angels when the first did not please its patrons.¹⁵¹ Sculp­ture, however, is much more diffi­cult to reject, or revise. For this reason, contracts set out precise terms for works of sculp­ture, inclu­ding dead­lines for deli­very, speci­fi­ca­tions regar­ding mate­rials, and proce­dures that would be followed if the patron were dissa­tis­fied, for example with a sculpture’s level of finish or polish. Major visual aspects such as subject matter, icono­graphy, and decorum were agreed early on by means of a presen­ta­tion drawing.

It is true that in the first stages of Michelangelo’s work, Riario was likely unable to oversee his progress since, by early September 1496, the Cardinal fell gravely ill, to the extent that it was thought he would not live more than a few more months. Letters written between September and November of that year reveal discus­sions already underway to redistribute

Riario’s bene­fices, his office as head of the Camera, and his palazzo should he die.¹⁵² It is unthinkable, however, that the final appearance of the Bacchus could have surprised him. The survi­ving contracts and corre­spon­dence related to the Vatican Pietà and the Picco­lo­mini altar reveal that the patrons of these works sought to avoid surprises in the appearance of Michelangelo’s statues. Even before Michel­an­gelo had quar­ried the marble for the Pietà, Bilhères wrote a descrip­tion of his future statue as ‘una Vergine Maria vestita con Cristo morto, nudo in braccio’.¹⁵³ In the case of the Picco­lo­mini altar, a lengthy and exac­ting contract drawn up with Michel­an­gelo in 1501 included special provi­sions for figures Michel­an­gelo planned to carve in Florence, where the patron could not oversee his work. Cardinal Picco­lo­mini was shown the anti­ci­pated final form of the statu­ettes in a drawing, ‘so that one can see the drape­ries, gestures, and nudity requested and, if needed, before begin­ning the work in marble, add or remove as deemed neces­sary’.¹⁵⁴

Since 1981, the theory of a ‘hard’ rejec­tion has some­times been ques­tioned, notably by Antonio Forcel­lino, who argued that the hypo­thesis of a refusal by Riario was ‘unac­cep­table’ in light of the payments made to Michel­an­gelo when the statue had already reached an advanced state.¹⁵⁵ Other authors have argued in favour of a ‘soft’ rejec­tion, that is, a scenario in which Riario gradu­ally distanced himself from the Bacchus.¹⁵⁶ As was mentioned, in 1999 Frommel proposed that the Cardinal did not reject the statue imme­dia­tely, but only after the comple­tion of the cour­tyard, when it seemed too pagan for display in this setting.¹⁵⁷ A book on the Bacchus published in 2007 by Sergio Risa­liti and Fran­cesco Voss­illa offered another proposal. Also with the presump­tion that it was Riario’s inten­tion to display the Bacchus in the cortile to comple­ment thea­trical produc­tions, Risa­liti and Voss­illa argued that the Cardinal lost inte­rest in the Bacchus and allowed it to remain with Galli as prac­tical ques­tions emerged, and after the novelty of using the cortile as a theatre wore off.¹⁵⁸

It has recently been proposed that the Cardinal rejected the Bacchus due to a moral conflict arising from his parti­ci­pa­tion in a reform commis­sion. In an article published in Renais­sance Studies in 2013, Erin Minter specu­lated that Pope Alex­ander VI’s nomi­na­tion of Riario to a reform committee, just before Michel­an­gelo completed the Bacchus, inspired the Cardinal to reject the statue.¹⁵⁹ Pope Alex­ander VI convened this commis­sion as an act of repen­tance after the murder of his son, the Duke of Gandia. On the night of 14 June 1497, the Duke was killed in myste­rious circum­s­tances, his body thrown into the Tiber. During the ensuing hunt for the assassin, Rome was gripped by fear, and the papal court, as the Ferra­rese ambassador

put it, was ‘sotto­sopra’.¹⁶⁰ On 19 June, Alex­ander VI announced that the murder was an act of God that could be answered only by personal and insti­tu­tional reform.¹⁶¹ The pope set up a commis­sion to be headed by four consul­tants and six cardi­nals, inclu­ding Riario. It began its work on 20 June 1497, with the obli­ga­tion to meet every morning. Remar­kably, many of the committee’s notes survive, offe­ring insight into their inves­ti­ga­tions into possible reform measures.¹⁶² These notes reveal that the group considered wide-ranging propo­sals for the reform of cardi­nals’ house­holds, some related to enter­tain­ment, banque­ting, and the perfor­mance of plays. Buil­ding on the argu­ment that Riario intended to hold perfor­mances in the cortile of the new palazzo with the Bacchus as a centre­piece, Minter suggested that Bacchus would have lost its value if thea­trical perfor­mances were banned.¹⁶³ Riario joined the commis­sion less than two weeks before Michel­an­gelo received his final payment for the Bacchus, and ‘to avert scandal’, Minter argued, the Cardinal ‘paid the artist and let the sculp­ture remain [with Galli] where it had been carved’.¹⁶⁴

The argu­ment can be contex­tua­lised, however, by the fact that the recom­men­da­tions of Alexander’s reform committee relied directly upon earlier reform propo­sals going back several gene­ra­tions.¹⁶⁵ Many of the propo­sals origi­nated in the four­te­enth century, during the time of the Avignon papacy, when attempts had been made to curb the size of cardi­nals’ fami­ligie, as well as dining habits which had become more luxu­rious due to the influence of the French royal court.¹⁶⁶ Reform bulls addres­sing the need for Cardi­nals to dine mode­stly, to avoid scandal, or to limit the number of servants in their house­holds were proposed by ­fifte­enth-century coun­cils, but never promul­gated. The commis­sion in which Riario parti­ci­pated reused the wording of these past propo­sals, updating them with concerns about clas­sical come­dies, given reports of ‘Cardi­nals who went about at night in the city when it was dark or who parti­ci­pate in jousts or who allow plays (larvae) or come­dies in imita­tion of the anci­ents to be performed in front of them, which is diabo­lical’.¹⁶⁷

The commis­sion exposed contras­ting moral posi­tions about convivia and the revival of antique theatre, unders­coring the extent to which Riario may have tempted critique with his commis­sion of the Bacchus. Riario was aware of the need to be cautious in his public image: it is telling that the Muse was the only antique statue in his coll­ec­tion known to have been placed in the public eye. Riario’s commis­sion of the Bacchus would have taken into account the comple­xi­ties of balan­cing Chris­tian and pagan, public and private, follo­wing stra­te­gies that he and other cardi­nals had deve­loped over decades. His approach would, argu­ably, not have suddenly shifted when he was called to serve on Alex­ander VI’s commis­sion. A ‘rejec­tion’ of the Bacchus would repre­sent an unli­kely admis­sion by Riario of his own moral

defi­ci­en­cies, and the Cardinal had little to fear: the propo­sals made by the commis­sion were, like others that had preceded them, never published or enforced.¹⁶⁸

Alex­ander VI’s reform move­ment came to an end quietly. Michel­an­gelo, mean­while, remained within Riario’s trusted circle for years to come, forging a close rela­ti­onship with Jacopo Galli and then with Galli’s sons, who became Riario’s fami­liars. The Bacchus was displayed, over decades, inside the Cardinal’s own terrain and in the house of the Cardinal’s mana­gers and agents. If Riario had refused the Bacchus, why would the Galli have displayed the statue in their houses, and why would they have continued to show so much favour to Michel­an­gelo? Why would Riario’s dele­gates, inclu­ding Jacopo Galli, have hired him in 1500 to paint an altar­piece at Sant’Agostino, a church under the Cardinal’s protec­tion? Rather than rejec­tion, one must look for possible alter­na­tive propo­sals as to how and why the Bacchus came into Galli’s possession.

* * *

With the commis­sion for the Bacchus, the artist’s expe­ri­ences in Florence were brought into vivid dialogue with a new, Roman envi­ron­ment. The artist arrived in an intellec­tual milieu focused on huma­nist spiri­tua­lity and stimu­lated by the pre-Chris­tian past, one that in many ways resem­bled the circles he had known in Florence. An ambi­tious statuario in pursuit of fame, Michel­an­gelo eagerly accepted Riario’s chall­enge of crea­ting ‘some­thing beau­tiful’ in rivalry with the antique. The Bacchus responded to Riario’s request by pushing the tech­nical limits of life­sized statuary in marble. It was a pivotal commis­sion in Michelangelo’s career, cemen­ting his repu­ta­tion and elevating him to the highest levels of curial patro­nage. With the Bacchus, Michel­an­gelo also began what would prove to be a lasting and profi­table colla­bo­ra­tion with Riario’s agent, Jacopo Galli.