As some of you know, this tale of thwarted artistic treachery is currently captivating my imagination. It appears in British author Rachel Cusk's The Last Supper, a travel memoir that also features commentary on Italian art.
At the time the story opens, Michelangelo was in the midst of sculpting a tomb for Pope Julius II.
While Michelangelo was out of Rome, [the artists] Bramante and Raphael set about trying to undermine his reputation. They suggested to Julius that to build his own tomb was to invite his own death. When Michelangelo returned, he was told by Julius that work on the tomb had been suspended. Instead, he was to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, a job at which Raphael and Bramante were confident he would fail, for Michelangelo was principally a sculptor, not a painter. Michelangelo locked himself into the Sistine Chapel: no one was allowed in, not even Julius. It seemed that to fetter Michelangelo was simply to make his myth the more powerful. Soon, all of Rome was fixated by the mystery of what lay behind that locked door. Then, according to Vasari, Michelangelo had to leave Rome for a few days, and while he was away Bramante got hold of the keys. He and Raphael went in to look. And what they saw, of course, was the preeminent artistic achievement of the Renaissance, and perhaps of the whole history of art, past, present, and future.
If only we could see the expressions on the faces of Bramante and Raphael at the moment they stepped into the Sistine Chapel . . .
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