The Seeds of Genius: Casa Buonarroti’s Restored Michelangelo Sculptures

The best restorations teach us something undiscovered about an artist, as well as shining new light on his or her work. Michelangelo’s earliest known sculptures, two marble reliefs belonging to the Museum of Casa Buonarroti, are a good example of this. The Madonna of the Steps and the Battle of the Centaurs, recently restored thanks to the generosity of the non-profit Friends of Florence, which also renovated the display setting for the sculptures, now provide new insight into the artist’s early career. In the intimate atmosphere of Casa Buonarroti, which Michelangelo purchased for his family, it’s possible to get within inches of the Renaissance master’s drawings and sculptures, experiencing them in a unique way that allows visitors to this very special museum the opportunity to appreciate the details of his masterpieces.

Michelangelo, whose 547th birthday was on March 6, was not your ordinary teenager, except maybe in his stubborn desire to go against his father’s career choice for him. The elder Buonarroti, a notary public, was hoping for a higher status profession than that of artist for his first-born son, but reluctantly bowed to Michelangelo’s determination to make art his life’s work. After an apprenticeship starting at age twelve in the workshop of Florentine Renaissance master Domenico Ghirlandaio, where he learned the fundamentals of drawing and painting, the 15 year old Michelangelo wanted to learn how to sculpt. So his teacher Ghirlandaio recommended him to Lorenzo de’ Medici, known as the Magnificent for his generous patronage of the arts and intellectual pursuits.

Under Medici sponsorship, the teenage Michelangelo began studying sculpture in the gardens of San Marco, where many of the antique marbles of the Medici collection were kept. The young boy learned alongside other promising young artists taught by the elderly sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni, who handed down the techniques and style of his master Donatello, the greatest innovator of Early Renaissance sculpture.   The Madonna of the Steps, created in the San Marco gardens when Michelangelo was only 15, echoes the lessons learned from Donatello’s collaborator. Michelangelo uses Donatello’s distinctive flat relief, known as stiacciato, but the young artist creates such a monumental image it is surprising to realize that the sculpture measures only 22 by 16 inches.

The artist fills all of the available space with his composition, giving us a regal Madonna shown in profile and carving the Christ Child in an unusual pose with his back turned towards the viewer and his curved right arm lying across his mother’s, as she bares her breast with her right hand and holds her child close. Four mysterious figures of children in the background,  which prefigure the enigmatic background figures in the Uffizi’s Doni Tondo, stand on the steps that give the relief its name. The Madonna’s soft drapery  is reminiscent of classical statuary.

The influence of classical sculpture is also on view in the second relief at Casa Buonarroti, the Battle of the Centaurs, created soon after the Madonna of the Steps. The quiet stateliness of the latter is in stark contrast to the writhing mass of bodies of the centaurs enmeshed in a fight with their rivals. The mythological subject of the piece was probably suggested to Michelangelo by the humanist scholar Poliziano, part of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s court and tutor to his children.  But the artist is less interested in explaining the story than in conveying the power and emotion expressed by the energetic movements of the muscular naked bodies, indicating that Michelangelo was looking at battle scenes depicted on the roman sarcophagi in the San Marco gardens. The central figure with his arm raised, seen only from the torso up, prefigures Michelangelo’s Christ in the Last Judgement  from the Sistine Ceiling, and seems to show that the sculpture was never far from the artist’s thoughts. In fact, the relief remained with Michelangelo his entire life and passed into his family’s collection at his death.

The Madonna of the Steps, which also remained with Michelangelo during his lifetime, was given by his descendant to the Grand Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici but was returned to Casa Buonarroti in 1616 by Cosimo II. It became a centerpiece of the collection showcased by Michelangelo’s grand-nephew, Michelangelo the Younger, in the museum he founded to glorify his famous ancestor.

The current restoration, which was accompanied by scientific analysis and diagnostic photographs, has now revealed the young Michelangelo’s mastery in full detail, and proves that the seeds of his later talents were already well planted right from the start of his career. The delicate cleaning process removed decades of dust deposits and earlier coatings to reveal the marble surface, making it possible to fully understand the working technique of the artist, and compare it with his later monumental pieces. For instance, in the Madonna of the Steps, the young Michelangelo used carving tools of varying dimensions, shown by the visible chisel marks, to create the volumes of his figures in four different planes, from the barely etched child in the right background to the full and polished forms of the Madonna and Christ Child in the foreground. All of this on a piece of marble less than an inch thick in some areas, which shows an exceptional  degree of sophistication and skill.

In the Battle of the Centaurs, Michelangelo deliberately varied the degree of finishing the figures in order to heighten the contrast between the volumes, leaving some areas of stone rough with chisel marks and some areas highly finished and polished. The restorers, Daniela Manna and Marina Vincenti, who in 2021 completed a decade-long restoration project of Michelangelo’s New Sacristy in the Basilica of San Lorenzo, found that Michelangelo used a similar technique on the sculptures in the New Sacristy. They view the restoration of the two reliefs at Casa Buonarroti, carried out during the pandemic, as a high point of their careers. “It doesn’t get any better than this; a mature dialogue with the sculptor” says a grateful Daniela Manna.  Marina Vincenti adds that “this was a restoration conducted “with kid gloves” or “on tiptoes” as the Italian expression puts it, conveying the extreme respect and delicacy with which the restorers carried out their job.

Museo di Casa Buonarroti, the Museum of Michelangelo’s home is open 10 am to 5 pm daily, closed Tuesday.  (elizabeth wicks)