The philosophers that Michelangelo heard at Lorenzo de Medici’s table were called “Humanists” because they made a hero out of Man. They put aside the abstruse considerations of the Middle Ages about God and concentrated on Man, on his achievements and on his place in the divine plan of the cosmos. Everything from the “human” point of view, hence “Humanism” their doctrine.
What place does man occupy in the chain of being that God created, from angels down to the beasts? Why, he is the summit, the very purpose, of God’s creation. He is the link between the worlds, heaven and earth, the divine and the human. Even the angels up above had better envy him because he was made with the capacity to choose his destiny.
Michelangelo’s David is that proud Man of the Humanists, of the Renaissance—no longer a boy but newly a man, a man awakening from thousands of years of childhood, of servitude; a man independent, beautiful, and strong. He scowls as he makes a choice, the choice that is his own unique prerogative. Never again will man see himself so enlarged, so wonderful—never again could he. In the Middle Ages he was a part of an ashamed, sinful community, lowly as a worm, shapeless as a pig. Just look at the men and women in Giotto’s hell:
Detail of Giotto’s Last Judgment in the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua (a Wikigallery public domain photo)
or at the poor wretches on the walls and choir stalls of the old Romanesque and Gothic churches. In fact, the artist couldn’t even look at them, at himself. None of those nameless artisans even seems to have looked closely at either sex, which were mere cartoons. They painted the Devil with more precision and curiosity.
And in after-years Man became a captive again with no real options. By our time he was a bundle of complexes and a powerless pawn in some human scheme. We saw him starved, broken apart, tossed onto piles like garbage. He was nobody again, less than nobody. A modern David pounding his chest is as silly as King Kong.
In a way, Michelangelo’s heroes were too large for the world, who never knew what to make of them once the Humanist philosophy had died out. There wasn’t enough of tenderness in them or homey prettiness, not enough of the doll. So they stood revolving, shining like magnificent heavenly orbs, far away and unintelligible.