Fear of failure

The ‘Michelangelo Buonarroti, Florentine, Painter, Sculptor and Architect’ of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives, the only living artist to be included in this compendious work, at one time or another denied he was any of the above, except ‘Florentine’.

The only formal training he ever received was as a painter. But when Julius II called on him to fresco the Sistine chapel ceiling, the self-taught sculptor claimed he was unqualified for the task, recommending Raphael. When in 1546 Paul IV sought his advice on the Vatican’s defences, we find the artist maintaining that, while he ‘knew little of sculpture or painting’, fortifications were indeed very much his occupation. This bizarre affectation of ignorance was primarily a sarcastic salvo directed at his rival consultant Antonio da Sangallo, scion of Europe’s leading military engineering dynasty. Michelangelo added that he knew more about building bastions than ‘Sangallo and his whole family put together’.

In the same year, after over 30 years of designing monumental altar pieces, tombs, chapels, façades, a library and a square, Michelangelo was summoned by Paul to complete the plans and execution of St Peter’s; he initially refused, saying that ‘architecture was not his art’.

Michelangelo had a pathological fear of being categorised. He became an artist in the face of family opposition and was ever conscious of his gentle birth. And, despite his universally recognised brilliance in every art he turned his hand to (including poetry), he seems to have been haunted by the improbable prospect of being mistaken for some rude mechanical. At the same time, he set himself almost impossibly high standards, this being the reason, as Vasari recorded Michelangelo saying of himself, ‘why he produced so few statues and pictures’. For beneath the proud and difficult exterior there lurked the autodidact, constantly in fear of failure.