Michelangelo’s “thinking hand”

Michelangelo’s “thinking hand”

 

by

Eric Gibson

The New Criterion

December 2020

 

On Michaelangelo’s Pietà and the manifold meanings of its legendary gesture.

 

Photo©Musei Vaticani. All rights reserved

 

For the art historian Michael Hirst it is “one of the most familiar in the history of art”—the gesture Mary makes with her left hand in Michelangelo’s Pietà (1498–99) in Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. That sculpture, commissioned by a French Cardinal for his burial site, a chapel in the old Saint Peter’s, was the twenty-four-year-old artist’s breakout work, one that instantly established his fame throughout Italy. Yet perhaps because of its familiarity, Mary’s gesture is one of the least examined aspects of Michelangelo’s art. “We are prone to take the Pietà for granted as we do all the greatest works of art,” wrote Sir John Pope-Hennessy, while Howard Hibbard noted that the sculpture is “one of those famous works, like the Mona Lisa or the Venus de Milo, that it is almost impossible to see afresh.” True enough, for in the vast Michelangelo literature, Mary’s gesture receives scant mention. When it is discussed, the outswung arm and open hand are said to betoken two things: her final acceptance of God’s will in the sacrifice of her son, and the artist’s desire, through Mary’s simultaneous act of revelation, to include the viewer in the implied narrative of Christ’s Passion and maternal grief. No argument there. But looking afresh at this canonical masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture forces two conclusions: That the manifold implications of those observations have never been explored, and that Mary’s left hand tells us not two things, but five.

 

The Pietà as a subject had originated in fourteenth-century Germany, where it was known as the “Vesperbild.” One of the things that makes it so poignant a subject is that it depicts Mary grieving over the body of her deceased son while at the same time casting her mind back to when she held him as an infant. Carved in wood and conceived for private devotion, these sculptures are just a few feet tall. Mary sits with the dead Christ on her lap, his body either full-length and overspilling its assigned space or reduced to the size of a doll for a better fit. The subject was soon taken up in France (hence its interest to a French cardinal in Rome) before reaching Italy in the mid-to-late fifteenth century. There’s a German example in the Church of San Petronio, Bologna, a work Michelangelo could have encountered while executing a commission there a few years before the Pietà.

Pietà (Vesperbild), 1375–1400, Poplar, plaster, paint, gilt. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

 

Michelangelo’s treatment of the subject differs in its monumentality, material, and naturalism. The figures inhabit a unifying, pyramidal configuration, though with two departures from nature: Mary, her expression blank and withdrawn, is famously youthful-looking, and Christ’s body is slightly underscaled. There’s one more break with the past: Michelangelo puts Mary’s left hand to work.

 

Let’s stipulate, axiomatically, that it is one of four hands, each with its own character: The others are her right one, shown gripping and pulling Christ’s torso toward her while the splayed fingers direct our attention to his wound, and Christ’s two hands, which reflect his dual nature, human in the inert left hand of the deceased, crucified corpse, and divine in the right, which loosely fingers a fold in Mary’s robe and belongs to an arm whose toned muscles and engorged veins likewise bespeak the pulse of eternal life. But when hands in the Pietà have come up for discussion, it is Mary’s left that has most frequently been the focus.

 

As a subject the Pietà involves an active and an inactive hand. Typically, Mary’s right hand and arm cradle Christ’s torso. But with the rest of his weight on her lap, her left one is idle. So in the Vesperbilder we encounter what might be called the “homeless hand.” It lands everywhere—resting on one of Christ’s legs, clasping one of his hands, wrapping a thigh, and so on—as if the sculptors were unsure where it should go or what, if anything, it should be doing. But in Michelangelo’s aesthetic of the human body as a dynamic unity, an underutilized member was inconceivable. So he gives Mary’s a job. Hers is no throwaway action, though—no make-work occupation ginned up by the artist to get himself out of a tight spot. We know this for three reasons.

 

First, because when confronted with the same issue again in his next commission, the David, Michelangelo similarly addresses it head on, making the figure’s left hand hold one end of the sling.

 

The gesture is willfully ambiguous—just right for communicating the multiple meanings the artist intends for it.

 

Second, because its endless subtleties and nuances of human movement tell us that Mary’s must be the most carefully deliberated gesture in the history of art. The upper arm moves out slightly from the torso and the forearm projects forward, minimally widening the arc of implied embrace as it does so. Then the hand falls slack at the wrist, widening the arc a bit more. Its major action is to rotate to an angle of about forty-five degrees. Expressive purposes aside, this served a practical end, indicating the hand’s importance in Michelangelo’s mind. By perfectly positioning the palm to trap and reflect the light that came in from above in the sculpture’s original location, that angle would have ensured that the hand got noticed. The fingers complete the action, their positions equal parts extension and flexion—stretching out and curling in—conveying both revelation and relaxation. Mary’s gesture, then, is emphatic but not overly so, relaxed yet not idle. It is willfully ambiguous—just right for communicating the multiple meanings the artist intends for it.

 

Third, because it and the others are embedded in the theological, formal, and narrative structure of the sculpture. Theologically, the four hands chart the stages of an unfolding agency that enacts a metaphor of resurrection—Christ’s dead left; his stirring right; Mary’s reflexively reacting left; and the willed, proactive, fully alive action of her right. Formally, a firm geometry underpins the Pietà. Within the pyramid the sculpture is organized around a vertical–horizontal axis: down from Mary’s head and gaze to the two “mandorla” folds below Christ’s leg; and across in a line running between Mary’s hands and through Christ’s left. That axis forms the base of a smaller triangle within the pyramid with Mary’s head the apex of both, as well as one side of another triangle below it of which Christ’s right hand forms the third corner. On the narrative front, hands drive the story the sculpture tells, none more so than Mary’s left.

Giotto di Bondone, Raising of Lazarus, between 1303–05, Fresco. Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, Italy.

 

How do you sculpt thought? In his 1987 book Giotto and the Language of Gesture, the art historian Moshe Behrens described what he called the “speaking hand.” Rather than the face, he writes, the “organ visually showing speech was, and still remains, primarily the hand. The hand can show a great variety of moods. The pointing hand can be sharp and shrill, the caressing hand can be soft and flexible.” As a result, “The gestures Giotto most frequently represented are those accompanying and indicating speech.” As an example, he cites the Raising of Lazarus fresco (1303–05) in the Arena Chapel. In the Bible, Christ calls to the dead Lazarus “with a loud voice” to rise from the grave, with no mention of any gesture. But because there is no way to depict a voice in paint, loud or otherwise, Giotto shows Christ staring at Lazarus close-mouthed, his right hand raised as if in benediction. Behrens writes that, rather than a ritualistic act, Christ’s hand “indicates an elevated and intensive kind of speech.”

 

Michelangelo takes a similar approach in the Pietà, the artist representing cogitation with the “thinking hand.”

Giotto di Bondone, Lamentation, between 1303–05, Fresco. Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, Italy.

 

Renaissance artists depicted the feelings of anguish and despair associated with the Crucifixion by coordinating the actions of head, face, hands, and arms. Thus in the Lamentation in the Arena Chapel, Giotto has Saint John bend at the waist and crane forward, staring at the dead Christ and flinging his arms straight out behind him. Cause and effect are clear. But there was no way to express other, more nuanced forms of thought until Andrea del Verrocchio, the great Florentine sculptor between the generations of Donatello and Michelangelo. As I wrote of him on the occasion of the 2019 exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., “Verrocchio was the great sculptor of hands in the fifteenth century. . . . Where hands in art had always functioned as appendages that merely grip, point, strike, and bless, Verrocchio made them windows into the mind and heart of their owner. Nowhere more so than in Lady with Flowers (ca. 1475–80), where he has shifted the psychological center of gravity from the face, where it usually resides in portraiture, to the hands.”

Andrea del Verrocchio, Lady with Flowers, ca. 1475–80, Marble, National Museum of the Bargello in Florence

In that sculpture, now back at the Bargello Museum in Florence, a young woman gently holds a bouquet to her breast. She is lost in thought, as we know from her distant gaze and the tilt of her head. Unlike the coordinated actions in gestures of despair, hers are separated out. She is looking away from the flowers, not at them. Only the nascent smile at the left corner of her mouth suggests a cause-and-effect relationship between the actions of her fingers and those of her mind.

 

Michelangelo could not have failed to register the revelatory power of gesture in sculpture and its ability to drive narrative.

 

We cannot know if Michelangelo ever saw this work. But he didn’t need to have seen it. There would have been plenty of opportunities to witness such a state of absent-minded reflection in nature, among the denizens of Florence and Rome. As a young, aspiring artist in Florence, however, he could not have missed another work by Verrocchio, Christ and St. Thomas (1483), a life-sized bronze installed in a niche on the exterior of the Church of Orsanmichele. The work’s focal points are the disciple’s right hand reaching out to touch Christ’s revealed wound and the latter’s right hand raised in an act of blessing. In this work, Michelangelo could not have failed to register the revelatory power of gesture in sculpture and its ability to drive narrative. This is what the Pietà is all about. (For what it’s worth, if Christ’s blessing hand in the Verrocchio is rotated left to nine o’clock and then reversed, you get, almost exactly, Mary’s left hand in the Pietà.)

Andrea del Verrocchio, Christ and St. Thomas, 1483, Bronze, Church of Orsanmichele.

 

Like Verrocchio’s Lady, Michelangelo’s Mary has retreated from the world psychologically. Yet unlike her, Mary’s face betrays no clue as to what is going on in her mind. Similarly, while we know her hand expresses something, we cannot state with certainty what it is. We only can infer, there being no discernible cause-and-effect relationship between head and hand. To establish one, Michelangelo draws on the iconography of despair, turning and tilting Mary’s head so that, like Saint John in Giotto’s Lamentation, she looks at the dead Christ. The focus of her thoughts is thus made clear and the meaning of that resigned, accepting gesture instantly clarified: so be it.

 

But that was only half the story. There was still the matter of Mary reflecting on her youth and Christ’s infancy. For this the artists of the Vesperbild resorted to a rudimentary symbolism: reducing the body of the adult Christ to the size of a doll. Renaissance naturalism—not to mention Michelangelo’s—demanded more.

 

We have been conditioned to read Mary’s gesture exclusively as one of acceptance. But, isolated from its narrative and religious contexts, it looks almost generic, a casual hand toss, the kind of action we might witness or make in ordinary conversation. And that’s what it is. In another Giotto fresco, St. Francis Honored by a Simple Man (ca. 1307), in the Upper Church of the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, two men are shown in conversation at the right, who appear to be commenting on the act of veneration playing out before them. One holds his maroon cloak closed with his left hand while looking directly at his companion to his left. In the process, he throws out the other rhetorically in the direction of the action to his right, a gesture that is a mirror image of Mary’s left in the Pietà. We can’t assume Michelangelo saw this fresco, but, like the Lady with Flowers, he wouldn’t have had to. There would have been plenty of such gestures around him in nature, surely where Giotto found his.

Giotto di Bondone, Legend of St. Francis: Homage of a Simple Man, 1300, Fresco. Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi.

 

Like the Giotto, then, Mary’s is a conversational gesture. But her closed mouth indicates that she is in dialogue with herself. Since she is looking at Christ we can, again, only infer that the subject of this internal conversation is him. Because where with Giotto’s figure the coordinated actions of head and hand make cause and effect clear, the disconnect between them in the Pietà renders it impossible to know the precise nature of Mary’s thoughts. This is where the youthful Mary and underscaled Christ come in.

 

From the moment the Pietà was unveiled, Mary’s extreme youth was a source of comment and criticism. When asked about this by an early biographer, Michelangelo replied that “chaste women retain their fresh looks much longer than those who are not.” That sounds like a sarcastic comeback designed to deflect a questioner thought to be getting too close, like Picasso’s 1920 crack to an interviewer, “African art? Never heard of it.”

 

There is surely no more vivid representation of sheer dead weight in art.

 

Much of the pathos of the Pietà derives from Michelangelo’s depiction of Christ. There is surely no more vivid representation of sheer dead weight in art: in the snapped-back head; in the pinch of flesh at the right armpit pushed up by Mary’s resistant hand as the torso sags onto it; and, above all, when the composition is seen from the left three-quarter, in the lifeless body seemingly ready to slide onto the floor.

 

Yet this paradigm of Renaissance naturalism is unnaturalistic in one respect: scale. So absorbed do we become by the palpable realism of the deceased figure that we tend not to notice that the artist is toying with its proportions, ever so subtly drawing on the iconography of the Vesperbild to introduce the idea of a second, parallel Christ. The underscaled figure here serves the same purpose it does there, to tell us that the conversation the youthful Virgin is having with herself centers on her newborn son—the world of Mary’s imagination overlaying that of her lived experience.

 

What else does Mary’s left hand say to us? Three more ideas may be briefly sketched out:

 

While it’s an established fact that it exists to tell us that we are part of the story, Michelangelo’s involvement of the viewer in the Pietà’s implied narrative has generally been treated as an isolated incident, its implications left unexplored. In fact it is a leitmotif throughout his œuvre, one that in subjects such as this is central to his aesthetic. The intimations of physical instability in the Bacchus (ca. 1496–98) and the figures of Day, Night, Dawn, and Dusk on the Medici Tombs (1526–31)—Bacchus sways drunkenly and the four allegories seem about to slide off the sarcophagus lids—instill a Richard Serra–like sense of imminent calamity. In the Sistine Chapel, the monumentality and robust three-dimensionality of the prophets, sibyls, and ignudi makes them mediators between our space and that of the multiple, competing levels of illusion on the rest of the ceiling.

 

But it appears steady as a drumbeat in Michelangelo’s depictions of Mary and other Passion-related subjects: besides the Pietà we see it in the Pitti Tondo (1504–06) in the Bargello, where Mary’s nearly fully realized head extends beyond the edge of the relief, placing her partially in our space, and where the corner of the block she sits on juts out at us like an accusing finger; in the Unfinished Cartoon of the Virgin and Child (ca. 1524–26) in the Casa Buonarroti in Florence, where the torso and right arm of the infant Jesus are so tactilely modeled that they seem to project off the sheet; in the Pauline Chapel’s Crucifixion of St. Peter (1549), where the Apostle and others look out at us, and where the figures below are partially cropped out by the fresco’s bottom edge, implying a space that continues into the room; and finally in the Florence Pietà (1547–55) where the figure of Mary Magdalene looks straight at us. This consistency can be explained by the theology and aesthetics of the day, which called on artists to represent those subjects so as to transform the viewer from witness to participant. But it is also, surely, a reflection of Michelangelo’s profound personal identification with the subject of the Passion, most clearly expressed in his insertion of himself into the Florentine Pietà as Nicodemus.

 

Second, the hand constitutes a revealing index of grief. Michelangelo’s mother died in 1481 when he was six, his great mentor Lorenzo de’ Medici in 1492, and his stepmother in 1497, a year before he received the Pietà commission. All this must have been on his mind as he worked on perhaps the preeminent icon of grief in Western art. This is not to say the Pietà is an autobiographical work, but to propose that his own experience of grief informs the story it tells. There was no Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in the Renaissance to codify the various stages of grief. There didn’t need to be. Michelangelo would have known them from firsthand experience, known that at this stage of the cycle, after venting her emotions in paroxysms of grief at the Cross, an inner calm would have settled over Mary. That is the message of her slack hand. She is emotionally spent. She has arrived at her peace. An inner, psychic naturalism here joins with the outer, physical one in the service of maximum narrative truth.

 

Finally, Mary’s left hand makes an audacious claim to Michelangelo’s own tremendous powers as a sculptor. The young artist was vaultingly ambitious. The Pietà was the first marble sculpture since antiquity featuring an outstretched arm, and with good reason: because of stone’s limited tensile strength (in contrast to its considerable compressive strength), such a member could easily snap off under its own weight. Then there were those slender fingers to consider, any one of which could have been knocked off by a wayward swing of the hammer.

 

Michelangelo had assayed an outstretched arm in the earlier Bacchus, where the wine god raises a drinking vessel as if making a toast. But he had contrived to keep the stresses on the upper arm and forearm primarily vertical. Additionally, he exploited the physiological effects of Bacchus’ bibulous lifestyle—muscle going to fat—to give him a thick upper arm, thereby reinforcing the stone at its maximum stress point. In the Pietà, he goes all in, cantilevering the forearm straight out, deliberately courting maximum risk. To offset it, he plays tricks with our perception, manipulating the drapery covering both the adjacent portion of the torso and the upper arm so that, while our eye reads the latter as swinging out, it doesn’t separate from the mass of the block until about three-quarters of the way to the elbow. And where the upper-arm drapery is loose and full, that of the forearm is tightly wrapped to minimize the forearm’s weight. Finally, by moving it more toward the vertical, the downward angling of the hand lessens the stresses on the wrist joint. All this stands in contrast to the obvious caution with which he treats Christ’s long right leg, where the foot rests on a tree stump, as much for structural as symbolic reasons.

 

The Pietà is Michelangelo’s only signed work. The story goes that he was moved to carve his name into the band across the Virgin’s chest on overhearing a group of visitors attribute it to another artist. But her cantilevered forearm and hand are his real signature, a young artist’s brazen anything-you-can-do declaration of mastery before the whole world.

 

The thinking hand, both accepting and reflecting; the involving hand; the grieving hand; and the boasting hand: five ideas in a single gesture. How can one member support so many meanings? Because it was Michelangelo’s nature. In his book on the artist’s verse, the British scholar Christopher Ryan notes that William Wordsworth described the problem of translating the poems as “insurmountable” because, writes Ryan, “they packed so much excellent meaning into so little room.” Because it is of a piece with the many other dualities and multiplicities swirling through the Pietà, this last among them: Mary’s actions represent an impossibility, the simultaneous execution of two mutually exclusive gestures, one outwardly and the other inwardly directed. Finally, it can contain the multitudes it does because this is art we are dealing with, not life—a symbol, not a snapshot.

 

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Eric Gibson is the Arts in Review Editor of The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of The Necessity of Sculpture (Criterion Books).