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with hammer and chisel, let alone a young man of twentythree years, could have created such a thing.
    The Pietà now in St Peter’s

    Vasari, searching for words to express the extent of his admiration for the work, remarks that ‘it is a miracle that a stone without shape should be reduced to such perfection’. But the Pietà is unsettling too. Christ is as vulnerable, in his nakedness, as a baby. The draperies in Mary’s lap suggest a shell or cave, a womb-like enclosure. She might almost be contemplating the terrible miracle of a full-grown but stillborn son. Artists had often depicted the Virgin as a young mother troubled by the foreknowledge of the agonies her baby will endure as an adult. Here Michelangelo telescopes time in the other direction, to suggest that in the moment of Christ’s death Mary is remembering how she once cradled him as an infant.
    Michelangelo had already been recognised by a few discerning connoisseurs as an artist of promise. But the Pietà made him famous. He was instantly acclaimed, not just as the most accomplished sculptor of his time but as a strange and truly marvellous phenomenon. How could an artist so extraordinarily young have produced a work of such astonishing complexity, such unprecedented truth to life? The myth of the ‘divine’ Michelangelo, sent down to earth by God himself, may have begun right at the start of his career.
    The artist would himself grow to believe that he was an instrument of divine will. But he still wanted people to know that the Pietà had been shaped by his, by Michelangelo’s, hands. The work became a popular attraction, drawing many of the pilgrims who flocked to Rome. Vasari tells the story of an outraged Michelangelo overhearing a man from Lombardy casually informing the rest of his group that the work had been sculpted by a certain sculptor named ‘Giobbo’, from Milan. According to Vasari, the artist crept into the chapel that housed the statue that same night, and sculpted his signature into the girdle that divides the Virgin’s breasts. ‘Michelangelo fecit’ — Michelangelo made this. It was the first and last time that he ever deemed it necessary to sign his work.

    In the spring of 1501, Michelangelo returned to Florence after five years in Rome. On his arrival, he agreed to sculpt a number of small statues for the tomb of Cardinal Piccolomini in Siena. He even signed a contract for the work, but soon asked for it to be set aside because he had a far more ambitious project in mind. In the workshops of the Duomo, Florence’s cathedral, a great piece of marble had been gathering dust for nearly forty years. The block had been acquired in 1464 in the hope that it might be carved into a giant figure of a prophet for one of the cathedral’s tribune buttresses. But the stone had defeated every sculptor’s attempts to form it, and now it stood misshapen and abandoned. According to Vasari, Michelangelo’s friends in Florence had told him that Piero Soderini, the Gonfalonier of the city, was keen to see one more attempt made on the abortive block. So the artist went to investigate.
    ‘Michelangelo measured it all anew,’ writes Vasari, ‘considering whether he might be able to carve a reasonable figure from that block by accommodating himself as to the attitude to the marble as it had been left all misshapen . . . and he resolved to ask for it from Soderini and the wardens [of the cathedral], by whom it was granted to him as a thing of no value, they thinking that whatever he might make of it would be better than the state in which it was at that time.’ 26 They had made a wise decision. Within three years Michelangelo had transformed the botched block of stone into a flawless and monumental figure of David (overleaf).
    Vasari’s own judgement of the work, pronounced some halfcentury after its creation, conveys some sense of the breathless amazement which ‘ il Gigante ’ —‘the Giant’, as the sculpture was instantly nicknamed