Michelangelo was an artist with an eye for the monumental, even to the extent of allegedly dreaming of sculpting an entire mountain, and it is therefore appropriate that the scale of the task confronting his biographers should be no less colossal. In their case it is a mountain not of marble but of paper that they need to shape and master: it consists of well over a thousand letters written by or sent to Michelangelo over his eighty-eight year lifetime (a small number of which evaded inclusion in Paola Barocchi’s and Renzo Ristori’s five-volume collected correspondence); over three hundred printed pages of financial ricordi; diverse artistic contracts; and notification of the transfer of funds between his bank accounts in Florence to Rome that generally presaged his move from one city to the other. Such overwhelming quantities of information cannot be processed quickly, not least because the uneven survival rate of the correspondence means that an understanding of the events and individuals mentioned in them has to be painstakingly teased out and pieced together. The inform­ation extracted from this close textual analysis then has to be mapped against the sometimes conflicting accounts provided by Michelangelo’s two principal contemporary biographers, Ascanio Condivi and Giorgio Vasari.

There is no scholar better qualified than Michael Hirst to write a biography of Michelangelo as his immersion in this material stretches back, at least in print, to a 1963 review in this Magazine on Michelangelo drawings in Florence. The roots of the book extend back even further to the author’s intellectual mentor at the Courtauld Institute, Johannes Wilde, and the Hungarian scholar’s influence still resonates through its pages in the clarity and succinctness of its presentation. In lesser hands the sheer quantity of factual information provided would be indigestible, but Hirst ensures that the narrative marches briskly along with the focus unwaveringly on Michelangelo. It is far from a dull read with memorably pithy observations, such as ‘Michelangelo was a solitary who needed company’, and the odd laconic aside as in the observation that the coach parties making the pilgrimage to the artist’s childhood home in Florence are actually gathering outside the wrong house.

The present volume is the first of a two-part biography, with the author electing to end on Michelangelo’s irrevocable move from his native Florence to Rome in 1534. Although three decades of activity in the papal city lie ahead, for a life narrated through documents the period covered in the first volume is infinitely richer largely due to the heavy traffic of letters between Michelangelo and his patron, Pope Clement VII, regarding a variety of Medicean projects in Florence. Michelangelo was also kept abreast of his affairs in Rome by correspondence with a loyal circle of friends that included Sebastiano del Piombo and the faithful Leonardo the Saddler, who recounted fruitless negotiations over his failure to complete Pope Julius II’s tomb, news of his detested rival Raphael, and more humdrum matters such as the selection of vegetables growing in his Roman garden. Hirst’s uncovering of the surname of Leonardo is one of numerous fresh details that enliven the familiar outlines of Michelangelo’s story. How such facts add a sense of texture and intimacy to our understanding of a figure who deliberately cultivated a sense of his extraordinariness can be felt in the shards of information regarding his infancy: for example, the notice of paternal payments made for shoes and a lace dress for the three-year-old Michelangelo, or the aged artist’s reminiscence to a friend of Vasari of witnessing from his father’s shoulders the public execution of the Pazzi conspirators in 1478. The author suggests that this early exposure to violent death might have contributed to Michelangelo’s propensity to flee from danger, both real and imagined, which is such a feature of the book. The pragmatic grounding in the realities of Michelangelo’s world is refreshing. We are thus reminded that he was not, as has sometimes been suggested, a budding humanist since he never learnt Latin, and that his famous pictogram shopping-list, reproduced as the book’s frontispiece, was more likely made because his assistants were illiterate rather than an exercise in semiotics.

This richly layered approach certainly delivers a compelling portrait of the artist, one that does not shy away from his complex and at times contradictory nature. The author is punctilious in keeping to a factual grounding in his interpretation of his subject, and his aversion to more speculative approaches can be sensed from the opacity of his contribution to the contentious issue of whether Michelangelo’s undoubted emotional attachment to a variety of young men ever had a physical dimension. In Hirst’s view the public nature of the artist’s expression of love for Perini and Cavalieri, that included the gift of highly wrought chalk drawings, probably signified that these were chaste relationships, but he adds that the same probably could not be said of ‘another friendship’ from the same period. There is not even a footnote to identify this friend, which only those familiar with the artist’s letters will recognise as the disgruntled young Florentine Febo di Poggio. The biography has definitely not been written with a Michelangelo neophyte in mind.

A more serious regret concerns the rarity and brevity of the author’s discussion of Michelangelo’s production as an artist, so that there are only occasional flashes of the insights that are such a feature of Hirst’s critical writings. For example, the intriguing suggestion that the large hands of the marble David were inspired by the tradition endorsed by Savonarola that the biblical hero was ‘fortis manu’, or the vivid analysis of the visual sources that inspired the unexpectedly earthy sexuality of the lost painting of Leda that the insolence of Alfonso d’Este’s Roman agent resulted in the artist giving away to his talentless assistant, Antonio Mini. Those interested in knowing the author’s views on much trumpeted recent discoveries of lost Michelangelo works will need to scan the copious footnotes to discover that the Temptation of St Anthony panel recently acquired by the Kimbell Art Museum and the Archer marble, currently on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, are both rejected. On the other hand he does accept Paul Joannides’s identification of a now sadly much abraded black-chalk drawing of a young man holding a medal in the Musée Bonnat, Bayonne, as Michelangelo’s portrait of Tommaso de’ Cavalieri. A colour illustration of the drawing is included among the fifty-three plates (Fig.28).

Hirst’s book covers the most momentous and productive period in the artist’s life when he recklessly took on sculptural commissions, most notably the grandiose tomb of Pope Julius II, that would have tested even the most productive sculptural studio, let alone an artist temperamentally unsuited to collaboration. The financial shenanigans, duplicity and anguish that resulted from these undertakings is vividly recounted, not least the artist’s understandable terror of Julius II’s nephew, Duke Francesco Maria della Rovere, whose murderous character had been shown by his fatal stabbing in 1511 of the artist’s youthful ally at the papal court, Cardinal Francesco Alidosi. The Duke is one of many significant players in the turbulent history of the period that had dealings with Michelangelo, and a particular strength of the book is the clear explanation of how political events and shifting alliances had an impact on the artist’s life. One theme that this biography brings to the fore is the dichotomy between Michelangelo’s republican, anti-Medicean political sympathies and the long-standing, multi-generational ties that existed between him and Florence’s ruling family which began with his lodging as a teenager in the Palazzo Medici during Lorenzo the Magnificent’s rule.

Among the supporting cast it is Lorenzo’s nephew, Clement VII, who emerges as Michelangelo’s most sympathetic and enlightened patron. His grasp and feeling for architecture was such that he persuaded Michelangelo to alter his designs and devise a single staircase for the Laurentian library, and he maintained a near-saintly forbearance in his dealings with the sculptor’s prickliness and treachery. It is characteristic of Clement’s patient pragmatism that he quickly forgave Michelangelo’s support of the Florentine Republic and slurs against him, putting him back to work on Medici projects just over two months after the city had surrendered. The creative collaboration between artist and papal patron is meticulously and engagingly detailed by Hirst, and is one of many reasons why his biography is destined to become, like Wilde’s British Museum catalogue of Michelangelo drawings, a near inexhaustible source of information that serious devotees of the artist will return to again and again.