Madonna of the Stairs
Believed to be one of Michelangelo's earliest works, completed in or around 1491, Madonna of the Stairs is a sculpture created in the rilievo schiacciato technique.
Rilievo means relief, and schiacciato means "low" or "compressed". Donatello is most famous for using this technique and it is not believed that Michelangelo used this technique again.
The Madonna of the Stairs was created when Michelangelo was a teenager. It combines chiseled lines that are similar to a drawing, and carved away portions that are sculpted.
Taken from Simon Abrahams', "Michelangelo: Madonna of the Stairs":
"Michelangelo’s first truly mysterious work was made during his teenage years, the Madonna of the Stairs (above). Despite its small size, the young sculptor’s imagination was already working on a colossal scale. Yet even at first sight the scene looks strange, an immediate barrier to understanding that decades of scholarship has done little to dent. Why, for instance, does Christ have his back turned and why is he so muscled? What are the stairs for? Why is the nursing Virgin so impassive? The answers appear, and the incongruities resolve, only if one tries to think through Michelangelo’s mind."
It is here that I want to pause and have you consider the following words from Abrahams' analysis carefully. We will discuss this excerpt as a class:
"Michelangelo’s Christ-soul in the Madonna of the Stairs faces away from us because,
hidden under the veil of normal perception, he is hard at work carving a colossal
statue of the Madonna. That hand, curled behind his back, grips an unseen hammer
and will soon come over his shoulder to strike the “sculpture” of the Virgin with
force. This, in turn, explains her inanimate expression. She is “stone” while he is
active and “alive”. Moreover, this is said to be almost the first time in art that the
Virgin and Christ’s gazes are not linked in some way. By not linking them
Michelangelo signals that the two figures are indeed in separate realities: one
sculpture, the other sculpting. The third principal figure, Christ/Michelangelo’s alter
ego on the steps, also “chips away” at the Madonna’s figure using the stairs to reach
her face as a sculptor might use a ladder. Doubling, like the double self-portrait in
Jeremiah’s beard and those revealed in Balas’ Michelangelo’s Double Self-portraits, is a
common feature in his work. Here, even as infants, Michelangelo presents himself
in duplicate. His double on the stairs stretches an arm to hold himself up while the
other actively links him to the Madonna. As an archetype, stairs or a ladder (eg.,
Jacob’s Ladder) indicate the approach towards a higher state of consciousness:
above and beyond is fame, glory, and divinity. Christ moreover is placed at the
Virgin’s breast, then a rare scene in Florentine art, because on a mystical level
Michelangelo gains his power as a supreme artist by imbibing the Virgin’s milk.
Indeed he later claimed that the source of his genius was the stone-dust in his wet
nurse’s milk: he said she had been a stone-mason’s wife. He used the same basic
idea in the Medici Madonna (below)":
Michelangelo, Medici Madonna (1521-34)
Marble. San Lorenzo, Florence.
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