Michelangelo's Lost Statue of Julius II ...

Author: * DIonysia Xanthippos - 3 Posts on this thread out of 193 Posts sitewide.
Date: Dec 7, 2007 - 22:39

and Bandinelli's Memorial to Clement VII.

by Silenos Socrates & Dionysia Xanthippos

In rage against Julius' occupation of Bologna, when he was driven out its citizens toppled Michelangelo's colossal bronze statue of him from its perch on the cathedral of San Petronio and smashed it to pieces. The drawing at the left is a "reconstruction of the portal of S. Petronio as it might have looked with Michelangelo's huge bronze statue of Julius II inserted into the tympanum. The doorway below is some 30 feet high."

This drawing by Baccio Bandinelli for a rejected tomb monument to pope Clement VII was inspired by Michelangelo's ill-fated bronze statue of Julius II. .

Unlike the statue that Julius actually ordered, and like the model that Michelangelo had urged him to accept, this one has a book (a Bible?), rather than a sword, in the pope's left hand. But what about the right hand? Does it, or did it, hold a sword?

Along with his beard, which Julius was the first pope to grow, Michelangelo's design later became the model for all the great papal statues that came later. But that trend did not start right away after Julius' death in 1513. It started in real life when Clement VII gew a beard as a sign of mourning after the sack of Rome in 1527. And we see him still wearing it in Bandinelli's design for his tomb. After Clement, all the popes wore beards until Innocent XII died in 1700.

For over a thousand years, Roman sarcophagi and ideas of the afterlife were modelled on those of Etruscan sarcophagi and burial urns, which in turn borrowed scenes and figures from Greek vases and myths. This is why the scene in relief on Clement's sarcophagus shows him attended by angels as he awaits the resurrection. Michelangelo designed a similar scene of the dead Julius supported by a pair of angels atop his tomb. But the scene itself goes back to Greek vases and Etruscan cremation urns that show a scene from Homer's Iliad in which Hypnos and Thanatos, the Greek spirits of Sleep and Death, bear the dead body of the Trojan hero Sarpedon from the battlefield into Hades. (Click HERE to see the illustrated article on them by Sin Utnapishtim, in the Etruria group here at Ancient Worlds.)

Note: This article is a supplement to our article on this thread, "Raphael's School of Athens"
Both drawings above, and the quote, are from Linda Murray, "Michelangelo, His Life, Work and Times," p54.