Michelangelo’s vision was greater even than Shakespeare’s

It is 450 years since the birth of William Shakespeare. The anniversary has been hard to avoid in this country, which is entirely appropriate. Shakespeare helped to shape not only our language but also our conception of character and our understanding of the human condition. Our experience of love, of facing death, of loss and of glory, contains echoes of Shakespeare, even if we hardly ever read him or see his plays.

It is also 450 years since the death of Michelangelo. That anniversary has hardly been noticed here — although Michelangelo had as great an impact on visual arts in the West as Shakespeare has had on its literature. For centuries, every painter and sculptor felt the need either to emulate Michelangelo, or to escape his influence. Many still do.

Michelangelo did more than anyone else to create the idea of the artist as a solitary, divinely inspired individual, answerable to no one and nothing except his talent. Before him, painting and sculpture were viewed as a form of manual labour, and their practitioners were seen as artisans — and not particularly skilled or remarkable ones at that.

Michelangelo was the first artist who demanded to be treated as a special kind of person, outside the conventional social hierarchy; an individual who, because of his extraordinary abilities, stood on equal terms with his aristocratic patrons. He demanded not just their money, but their respect too. So eager were his patrons to persuade him to work for them that respect is what he got — even when he treated them, as he frequently did, with disdain bordering on contempt. Other artists were imprisoned for fraud when they failed to deliver work for which they had been paid. Michelangelo usually received another commission from a patron desperate to get something from the hand of the ‘Divine Master’.