I generally avoid fiction when I am reading biographies since what I am looking for from a biography is some degree of analysis.
However, the truth is, fiction can sometimes achieve what non-fiction can't--that is, it can stray into the gray areas, the complications, the ambiguities and show us readers a person "in the round." I thought comparing fiction to biography was worth the attempt.
Fiction Book: Stone, Irving. The Agony and the Ecstasy. New American Library, 1961.
Subject: Julius II.
I decided to spare myself the agony and ecstasy of fully exploring Michelangelo. In truth, I may at some point. The book is quite impressive. I found myself reading alongside my keyboard as I googled work after work of Michelangelo and began to understand why he was unrivaled in his own time and unsurpassed in many mediums even today.
I stuck with Julius II to give myself a chance of finishing this post before, say, 2024.
The first book I tried, Julius II: The Warrior Pope by Christine Shaw had potential since it made interesting points about primary material. However, I gave up in the first chapter. If you have ever read Dante's Inferno and felt overwhelmed by all the political references/satirizations, that's how I felt. I couldn't for the life of me figure out what Cardinal Giulano della Rovere, also referred to as Vincula, was doing in and with the Papal States. Americans think their politics are complicated--yeah, right. Just check out politics in Italy during the Renaissance.
"The cardinal with lots of names went someplace and did something," I decided, which didn't strike me as a the best way for me to come to an understanding of a person.
I suspect that Christine Shaw's book, which came from Bates College, was written for people who have a clue who all the families and rivals and politics and religious problems were at that time. In this case, however, fiction wins. By presenting all events from Michelangelo's perspective, Stone made it easy for me to follow the problems in Florence and the rest of Italy. I got a lot of the names confused but the narrator does a fine job keeping the action focused where it should: Michelangelo's desire to sculpt and to sculpt out of his belief in God and his belief in his own powers. This isn't a pious throwaway. Michelangelo was exercising the pure, distilled, artistic need for expression that seems to inhabit the greats.
However, again, my goal was to learn about Julius II.
Biography: Norwich, John Julius. Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy. Random House, 2011, pp. 245-288.
Julius II was preceded by Rodrigo Borgia, Alexander VI, who, Norwich writes, "was witty, charming, and excellent company...What he lacked was the slightest glimmering of religious feeling" (264). However, Norwich deals quite responsibly with the Borgias, refuting many of the rumors that "find [their] way into serious histories" (273). He gives generous treatment to Lucretia Borgia, treatment which is echoed in Jennifer Wright's fantastic book It Ended Badly. He doesn't ignore that the Borgias likely assassinated a far amount of people, but hey, at least they did so intelligently! Due to the Borgias, Rome--such as it was--also survived.
Pius III came next and lasted 26 days. And then Julius II arrived. He is described thus by a contemporary:
No one has any influence over him...it is almost impossible to describe how strong and violent and difficult he is to manage...everything about him is on a magnified scale....He inspires fear rather than hatred, for there is nothing in him that is small or meanly selfish. (276)
He was the first pope in 500 years to lead his own troops into battle. "His world," writes Norwich, "was exclusively temporal...[and his goal] to establish the Papacy firmly as a temporal power...This involved, inevitably, a great deal of fighting" (277).
I should mention that I quite enjoyed Norwich's dry wit. I also greatly appreciated that when discussing Julius II's recovery from another battle with the French, he writes, "Now there suddenly occurred one of those extraordinary changes of political fortune which render Italian history as confusing to the reader as it is infuriating to the writer" (285). Thank you!
To continue, Julius II was "mercurial, vindictive, a poor organizer, and a deplorable judge of character...Eaten up by worldly ambition, he was utterly unscrupulous in the pursuit of his own ends" (283). For instance, he encouraged the French to attack Venice, then turned on the French (with Venetian help) when it suited his purpose. He allowed a corrupt Cardinal to control finances in Bologna because the man was a friend.
Norwich ends the chapter about Julius II by referring to his legacy in the arts. Not only did he "bully" Michelangelo into painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling, he commissioned the building of St. Peter's, he was a patron of Raphael, and he supported the digging up and preservation of ancient statues.
The details of the relationship between the two men was not my focus--I got that information from Stone's book. What mattered to me was, Did Stone depict Julius II with any degree of accuracy?
 |
| Michelangelo's St. Proclus--Stone claims |
| that Michelangelo, who wanted even his |
| angels to look like people, fashioned Proclus's |
| face on his own. Proclus does resemble |
| older portraits of the great sculptor. |
Julius II appears in The Agony and the Ecstasy at the end of the chapter, "The Giant." He occupies the entirety of the chapter, "The Pope." (The movie based on Stone's book focuses almost exclusively on these chapters.)
Throughout the book, Stone is more than honest about the peccadilloes and corruptness and power-hunger and great humanism of the Renaissance religious figures. He also relies almost entirely on "show don't tell" so I came to loathe Savonarola entirely for my own sake, not because Stone told me too.
So how does Stone portray Julius II?
Stone's Julius II is better than Rex Harrison's--but even Stone's version seems a bit lacking. The fact is, Julius II is a difficult protagonist--or even likeable antagonist--to write and act successfully. He's, let's face it, a kind of Trump character: big and loud and obnoxious yet unexpectedly kind to those he likes and willing to be pushed back against by those who speak his language.
Rex Harrison, from the movie, comes across as a peeved English headmaster trying to tame, oh, Eliza Doolittle. Stone's Julius seems closer to the mark but even there, Stone's desire to make Julius II a second mentor to Michelangelo doesn't ring true. While blithely accepting that some people think Michelangelo and Julius II had an intimate relationship, Norwich states bluntly, "On the whole, the idea seems improbable" (288).
It certainly is. A man who wants to shore up his power base versus a perfectionist who values his artistic rights over everything--this is more like Gilbert and Sullivan (with death threats) than lovers or even a father figure and son. These are two wholly dissimilar personalities who yet need each other and do have a point of contact in their enormous self-belief as well as their inherent realism. (Michelangelo appears to have been less tortured idealistic genius and more realistic craftsman genius who needed money to do what he wanted and acted tortured when he didn't get it.)
At a much later date, I will deal with the contention that Michelangelo was "arrogant." Stone portrays him as consumed by his art and constitutionally--rather than deliberately--indifferent to anything else. But I'm not currently in a position to argue a position except to repeat, as stated above, that it does take nerves or gumption or audacity or feckless indifference to go up against a Renaissance pope.
So does fiction solve what non-fiction cannot? I'm afraid the answer is, I think it depends on the writer, the actor, and the director.
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