“Whoever sees one figure of Michelangelo sees them all,” Aretino observes in 1557 in a fictional dialogue on art.This criticism is certainly true of Michelangelo’s female figures of Night and Dawn for the Medici tombs in San Lorenzo, Florence: Night, in particular, has the powerful thighs and muscular stomach of a man, with breasts like unripened pomegranates (they are also in the wrong place). Aretino, who disliked Michelangelo’s fresco of the Last Judgement for entirely prudish reasons, was closer to the mark when he complained that the artist’s nude figures failed to observe the differences in age and sex which Raphael had managed so well. Unfinished work attracts a different type of criticism – and one which is more easily deflected – than a completed work of art; and Michelangelo’s work was vulnerable to precisely the type of critique made by his older rival, Leonardo da Vinci, and by the poet Pietro Aretino.As early as 1502, when Michelangelo was only 27, Leonardo had attacked artists who “make their nudes woody and graceless so that they appear to see them as bags of nuts and bunches of radishes rather than muscular nudes”. Yet there is more interesting interpretation, which is that they fostered his notion of himself as a frustrated genius. Yet only five years before he had been forced to reach a settlement on another huge and unfinished project, 15 statues for the Piccolomini chapel in the duomo in Siena, for which he had been contracted as long ago as 1501, and which he had recklessly promised to complete in three years.What these grandiose schemes suggest at first is that Michelangelo continually overestimated his rate of production, particularly as a sculptor. The measurements of the base, 34.5 feet by 23, give some indication of how vast a project Michelangelo had undertaken.

In 1542, the Pope’s long-suffering heirs agreed that other artists should be allocated portions of the work as Michelangelo was too busy on other projects, and that he should pay a substantial sum towards its completion. At the time of this agreement, Michelangelo wrote a long, self-exculpatory letter in which he complained that “I have lost all my youth tied to this tomb” and “my trusting nature has gone unrewarded and been my ruin”. Michelangelo’s version, relayed by Condivi, was one of endless mishaps with shipments of marble from Carrara, as well as misunderstandings and even deceptions over the money promised him by the Pope’s heirs. The saga, which functions as a sort of anecdotal anaphora in George Bull’s biography, prompts questions about the artist’s tendency to procrastinate and his attraction to colossal and unrealisable projects.The tomb, as envisaged in 1505, was to consist of a free-standing marble monument adorned with more than 40 statues and several bronze scenes in bas-relief. Condivi claimed to be more “familiar” with Michelangelo’s life than previous authors and supplied a partisan account of one of its strangest episodes, the contract to design and build a monumental tomb in Rome for Pope Julius II.This project, commissioned by Julius himself, remained uncompleted 30 years later, in spite of wranglings between the artist and the dead Pope’s family and numerous revisions of the contract. The author, a young painter of no great talent called Ascanio Condivi, began with a letter to readers in which he said that his project was inspired by the failure of other (unnamed) writers to give a full and accurate account of “this rare man”. Vasari claimed that “Michele Agnolo” was given his name to mark the birth of a celestial and divine phenomenon and urged other painters “to imitate Michelangelo in everything you do”.

Although Michelangelo responded with an approving sonnet, Vasari’s extravagant praise does not seem to have satisfied him; according to his latest biographer, George Bull, he felt that it did not sufficiently emphasise the extent to which he stood alone, owing virtually nothing to the influence of other artists.
Three years later another book appeared, this time a 30,000-word biography of Michelangelo. IN 1550 Giorgio Vasari published the first edition of his Lives of Renaissance artists, an invaluable guide to painters and sculptors from Cimabue to the still-living Michelangelo Buonarroti. Vasari’s purpose was didactic as well as documentary, presenting his earlier subjects in the role of prophets preparing the way for the towering genius of Michelangelo. Like The Shipping News, this makes you feel you too have spent half a lifetime in a isolated community, fishing and toiling and peering at the neighbours.Just as we never suppose that Kabuo is anything but innocent – the racist attitudes racked against him are too deplorable – so we never really doubt that Ishmael will make good in the end. I’m not forcing his conclusions on the reader.”For all the book’s high moral tone and commitment to cultural relativity, it has its modish and saleable elements. There’s a grisly description of an autopsy, albeit one written with uncommon grace, and a brace of over-earnest sex scenes involving the po-faced and stereotypically enigmatic Hatsue Plus, of course, lots of fashionable research.