Nicholas Penny

When, in the early hours, Michelangelo completed carving his name on the band which passes between the breasts of the Virgin in his first Pieta (the one now behind bullet-proof perspex in St Peter’s), he was surprised by a nun who took him for an intruder. Reassured, she begged for some marble chips, which the sculptor, touched, gave her. In return, she made him a frittata, which he ate on the spot. The prominence of this signature provides, as has long been recognised, startling evidence for the new status of the artist in this period – the sculpture declares itself ‘a Michelangelo’. But the nun wanted the chips not because they were associated with a genius but because they were associated with the Holy Family: she had, in fact, suggested that he give her some marble from Christ’s wound. Michelangelo’s sculpture certainly could appeal to unsophisticated worshippers. They have, for centuries, kissed the extended foot of his Risen Christ – the part Michelangelo was least happy with and which connoisseurs least admire.

Something, as Clark himself has acknowledged, is wrong with Civilisation: with the television series and the book which made him a household name. It is not that it contains a number of gross oversimplifications, of which the most astonishing is the observation that Leonardo thought of women ‘solely as reproductive mechanisms’. Nor is it that there is also an occasional failure of the historical imagination: the women on the Romanesque font of Winchester Cathedral certainly do look ugly and nasty to us, but this is not evidence that ‘women were thought of as squat, bad-tempered viragos’. That, however, is a parenthetical lapse and far less grave than the anachronistic and sentimental idea, entertained by the supposedly tough-minded John Berger in his television series, that Frans Hals intended his late group portraits to expose the true horror of bourgeois society.

‘Late one evening, leaving a dinner party at the American Embassy, I ran into David Carritt, who told me he had come across a circular bronze relief of the Virgin and Child in use as an ashtray.’ The narrator is Sir John Pope-Hennessy and his nocturnal encounter was with one of the most hawk-eyed art-dealers in Europe. ‘ “Was it double-sided?” I asked him. “Yes,” he replied, he thought it was. Next day it was brought to my office …’ And there Pope-Hennessy turned in his hands a bronze relief of the Virgin, her head bent tenderly towards that of the diminutive Saviour, surrounded by four still smaller, highly excited angels. From the crimped and crinkled surfaces, the nervous linearity, the extraordinary variety of the finish, it must have been immediately clear to him that he was holding an original masterpiece by one of the greatest of all European sculptors, Donatello. Furthermore, he was already familiar with the design.

Bernini’s sculpture of Daphne turning into a laurel tree at the touch of Apollo – completed for Cardinal Borghese’s villa on the Pincio in 1625 – has always excited wonder for the way such lightly-balanced and elaborate figures, such thin leaves, such fine, fluttering drapery and light, flying hair, were ever extracted from the marble block. The sculptor’s taste was as remarkable as his technique. Roots extend from the nymph’s toes and leaves from her fingers, and bark creeps up her legs, but because her limbs are not yet branches she is human enough to be beautiful and for us to share her terror and surprise. Apollo does not grab but touches his intended victim with reverence. In another group of the same period Bernini ensures that Pluto, although behaving in a beastly way, somehow retains the majesty of a god. In an earlier work he even convinces us that Aeneas would have carried his father from Troy in what is (if you try it out) an absurdly precarious position because in that way the old man does not look ridiculous – which he would have done if carried piggy-back, or slung over his son’s shoulder.