Daniele da Volterra: Vigorous Truth

Daniele da Volterra - Portrait of Michelangelo - 1550-55 0 Leadpoint and black chalk, 295 x 219 mm - Teylers Museum, Haarlem (click photo for larger image)Italian Mannerist painter, stuccoist and sculptor, Daniele da Volterra (originally Daniele Ricciarelli) (1509-1566), first studied in the studios of Giovanni Antonio Bazzi (called Il Sodoma) (1477-1549) and Baldassare Peruzzi (1481-1537) at Siena. Because he was not well received there, he moved to Rome, where he found his earliest employment. He and Michelangelo became friends, and the great master assisted Daniele with commissions, and with ideas and suggestions. The portrait featured here shows Michelangelo when he was more than seventy years old.

Daniele’s art “is distinguished by beauty of coloring, clearness, excellent composition, vigorous truth, and curiously strange oppositions of light and shade. Where he approaches closely to Michelangelo, he is an artist of great importance; where he partakes of the sweetness of Il Sodoma, he becomes full of mannerisms, and possesses a certain exaggerated prettiness.” His Massacre of the Innocents — painted in 1557 for the church of San Pietro in Volterra — presents a nightmare scene in a very classically composed fashion. The central axis, recalling the construction of some of Raphael's frescoes in the Vatican, draws the eye deep into the dreadful space.

Daniele is also know—sadly, perhaps best known, as the man who painted loincloths on Michelangelo's Last Judgement nudes, at papal insistence (much to the chagrin of the Master). Michelangelo’s said of the Pope Pius IV’s request, “What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed?”