Michelangelo Vs. Bernini

Sculpture represents reality. Painting does not. Painting is about conveying a message or documenting the way something looks. But sculpture is far and beyond a mere recording of visual fact when it is done right. Good sculpture is nice: like a painting it can convey a message or document a living person, however the important difference—and the reason why sculpture will always be superior to painting—is that great sculpture has its own life: a realism that can never be matched in any other artistic expression. Michelangelo and Bernini were able to give personality, emotion, and quite nearly a soul to their best work. Michelangelo’s “Pieta” and “David”, and Bernini’s “Rape of Proserpina” and “Apollo and Daphne” all fool the viewer into wanting to believe they are "alive". The street performers that can be seen standing perfectly still on the street do this, but in reverse. They sit there and stare at you, playing with you, teasing you, and almost fools the viewer into thinking that they are works of art made of stone. But between these two fantastic sculptures, which one is superior? Michelangelo or Bernini?

Michelangelo is the Mozart of art. He was the young, snobbish, kid who was just naturally great at everything he ever tried to do. He had very little to no actual training and gained the favor of the Medici family very early on. They commissioned works from him for an extended time until the Pope caught sight of him and never let him go. Michelangelo's first noticeable work was some fine relief work--which is carving into a solid piece of marble, but only partially which is not meant to be seen “full circle” but only from the front, like a painting--and a rather ugly wooden crucifixion located in the Santa Spirito. Ironically enough, the piece that caught the attention of the Vatican was a sculpture he carved of "Cupid" (which has been lost) that was damaged, by the Medici, to make it appear as if it was an original ancient Roman piece. When it was discovered to be a fraud, the Medici got in trouble, but Michelangelo was invited to Rome to work for the pope. This is where things get weird. One of my favorite pieces of all time is created just after one of the most disappointing pieces of all time. Michelangelo sculpts a piece now located in the Bargello: Bacchus. It is a really funny looking sculpture, which has an oddly shaped face and no real life to it. It looks like a failure that was attempted to be passed of as a success. It is a piece that is meant to express the look of a drunkard. But it just doesn’t. It has narrow eyes, a weird mouth, and just simply does not look realistic. I wish I could say why it doesn’t work, but I can’t. Judge for your self, but even the man it was commissioned by, Cardinal Raffaele Riario, rejected the piece. I believe this was Michelangelo’s first real commission, and also his first failure. It must be because of this piece that he was so adamant about doing things his way afterwards and why he tried to destroy pieces he felt were failures. But, directly after this failure he finished a piece in 1497 that will stand above all others in sheer beauty for all of time: The Pieta. A perfectly executed classic pieta, it does everything proto-renaissance sculpture is suppose to do but presents it in a way that had never been seen before in Italy. Most notable is the Pieta’s beauty, specifically Mother Mary’s, which is actually odd. She looks as if she is a young women, probably in her early 20’s or younger. Which is, of course, not logical—Jesus was thirty three when he died. She is also sculptor much much larger than Jesus, which is meant to portray the look Michelangelo wanted: a month cradling her son. This is contrary to the scientific nature of the renaissance; it is an example of an artist taking “artistic liberties” to express what he wants the viewer to see rather than what actually happened. It is possibly Michelangelo’s most finished work, with a highly waxed exterior (which gives it that glossy look) and is the second sculpture in artistic history to perfectly capture a moment, never to be outdone (the first is Donatello’s Mary Magdalene). This is why it is so significant, it is nearly perfect. There is nothing to be done better, no flaws in the entire piece. The lifeless body of Jesus along with the flawlessly serene face of Mary is . . . perfect. The emotion that is evoked by looking at it overwhelms the viewer, a feeling of shock, horror, beauty, and love. It is simply stunning. Only two years later, in 1499, Michelangelo started his second perfect sculpture. It is my favorite piece of art: the David. Sculpted from what was called a ruined piece of carrara marble, no one thought it could be finished. The marble itself was flawed, and still Michelangelo spent the next five years working on it. The result is the most spectacular David, and most powerful piece of sculpture ever done at the time and still stands strong as the most impressive work because of its massive size and serene beauty. But my favorite part is not the size, or impressive nature, but rather the facial expression and how it changes as the viewer moves from right to left. From the right side he actually looks concerned and scared, but from the far left he looks like a true “mans man”, as confident as is humanly possible. If the viewer stands on the right side, and slowly moves to the left in a circle, they can actually watch as David makes up his mind that he IS going to face of with Goliath. It is the most fantastic thing I have ever seen, and again, it will never be out done. After this, Michelangelo did a couple of paintings (the Sistine chapel comes to mind) but for the sake of this comparison, I am going to stick to sculpture because that is what Bernini was great at. Funny enough, the rest of Michelangelo’s sculpture does not strike me any where near as great as these two mentioned. Maybe he got lucky, maybe he was temporarily anointed by God, or maybe he tried to do too much, but the rest of the sculpture (specifically the woman in the San Lorenzo New Baptistery) just looks off. Infact, all sculpture looks off after looking at the David and the Pieta (with the exception, of course, of Donatello’s Mary Magdalane). No one, not even Michelangelo himself, is able to come close to reaching this incredible mastery of the “perfection”  seen in the Pieta and David, that is until a young boy named Gian Lorenzo Bernini came along.

Bernini was literally called Michelangelo reincarnated. Similar to Michelangelo, he was spotted by the Vatican (specifically the Pope) at a very young age, but in direct contrast, Bernini worked faithfully for the Pope his entire life where as Michelangelo mostly worked against the Vatican. His story is much simpler, and therefore shorter. As a sculptor he produced five significant pieces that I am going to look at, starting with his most strange and least impressive, "Aeneas, Anchises, and Ascanius". It is a strange piece because it does not look realistic, and I want to look at it first because it is Bernini’s first significant piece and is similar to the Pieta in its unrealistic aspects. It shows Aeneas fleeing the burning city of troy with his son following and his father on his back. Realistically, you would hold someone on your back by letting them straddle you, but in this sculpture the grandfather is sitting on one shoulder as if it is a chair of sorts. He is also much smaller than Aeneas. This is done in order to show the main point of the piece, the three stages of life (youth, adulthood, and old age). Now, it is no where near as impressive as the Pieta, Bernini’s next four are, but this one is important because it does a couple of new things that Bernini will use more effectively in his next couple of statues. For one, you see a disregard for realism, meaning that Bernini wants to make a point more than make a piece realistic. Two, Bernini loves the very vertical, tall, and twisting motion in his sculpture. Almost as if to show a disregard for gravity, which is very different than Michelangelo’s Pieta, which is extremely stable and set with gravity. And third, Bernini uses very different effects on the marble to create extreme differences in texture. Michelangelo barely did this; which can be seen in the texture of David’s hair versus his body versus the tree trunk. Bernini begins to master this in this piece, expressing the roughness of the hair, the smooth quality of the young body and the old age of the elder’s skin. Most impressive is the face of Aeneas, which is very beautiful and soft…that’s right, soft. Which is an odd way to make a face look when it is carved out of stone, but Bernini will do that, he will make things look very peculiar. These three principles of Bernini’s can be seen much clearer in his next statue, “The Rape of Proserpina”. The first thing the viewer notices is the realistic qualities of the skin…I mean marble that is supposed to look like skin. The fingers pressing into Proserpina’s side, the wrinkles in her twisting body and the soft nature all are unlike anything that has even been seen before. You can see Bernini’s lack of strict detail in the expressions of the faces, specifically in the face of Pluto, who has a huge beard and, for lack of a better word, a bit cartoony of a face.  He also continues his vertical, twisting, contrapposto look of defying gravity. He tends to go vertical, and does so even more in the statue with hands, arms, hair and all other manners of objects sticking out in odd directions. He enhances his use of texture in the face, hair, dog, and most of all, skin of the piece. He creates a strong sense of life, and more than ever before it feels as if this piece was digitally created by Pixar and is simply paused; except, it is made of marble (which one continues to forget) and was done in the 17^th century. But, if the texture, movement, and lifelike nature is impressive in “The Rape” then it is perfectly done in his most famous, and my favorite work: “Apollo and Daphne”. The principle of realism is forgotten because, well, no woman ever turned into a tree in mid stride. But, somehow, it seems more realistic than the first two. This is Bernini at his best. He absolutely destroys the laws of physics, moving marble up and out as was never thought possible. Daphne’s hair, and hands, are hanging in mid air where one just wonders what is supporting all that weight. It is phenomenal to see it done that well, but almost as impressive is the incredibly realistic texture created by Bernini. The wood looks like wood, and the skin looks like skin. It is nearly impossibly to believe that it is actually crafted out of marble because it shouldn’t be possible. But he did it, and did it perfectly. It is a piece that stands so pure, and so impossibly, that any person could love it. The detail between her leg and what is becoming the tree is amazing, the way her hair is changing into leaves, and the MOTION that is created. Nothing has even been close, and nothing ever will be. It is perfectly done, just like Michelangelo’s Pieta and David. There is virtually nothing about the statue that makes sense because all of the basic principles of sculpting in marble are broken. It doesn’t look like marble, it looks like its too light to be marble, and no one can convey motion in a piece of stone like this. But Bernini did. His next two pieces are not nearly as impressive, yet are extremely amazing none the less. His “David”—which shows an in-between stage of David as he slings the rock, and expresses real motion in a piece of marble—and “Ecstasy of St. Theresa” which is a beautifully crafted in the Mannerist style (with extreme gold sunlight, and a busy atmosphere and a pricelessly beautiful face of St. Theresa and the angel).

But who is better between the two? Michelangelo was able to do the classic stuff like no one before and no one after. In my opinion he had two perfect statues that will never be bested. But, on the other hand, Bernini was able to do things with marble that shouldn’t of been possible. Where Michelangelo’s philosophy of sculpture was to free the being inside from the surrounding stone, Bernini’s was a step further. He actually wanted to free the being from the confines of being stone, turning it into something greater. Who is better? The answer is neither, they both are truly phenomenal artist’s who had very different styles and were able to master these styles never to be