Portraits: Michelangelo Was No Beauty

Michelangelo Buonarroti, one of the greatest figures of western civilization, was an ugly and rather unclean man, according to a series of rare, contemporary portraits and writings on show in Florence.

View a slideshow of Michelangelo portraits.

Running at the museum of the Casa Buonarroti until the end of the month, the exhibition, "The Face of Michelangelo," mercilessly reveals that the artist did not use himself as a model for his celebration of male beauty when he sculpted David.

View video about the Michelangelo exhibit.

Art historians have long known that Michelangelo wasn't exactly handsome, but this is the first time that an exhibition focuses on the physical likeness of the Tuscan master as well as on rumors of his horrible personal habits and lack of hygiene.

"Movies have always portrayed Michelangelo as an attractive, good-looking man. On the contrary, he wasn't handsome at all," exhibition curator Pina Ragionieri, the director of Casa Buonarroti, a house the artist bought in 1508, told Discovery News. "Most of all, he was perfectly aware of his ugliness and did not want to be portrayed. Indeed, he left no documented self-portrait."

Portraits by contemporary artists, along with an unmerciful description by the 16th century painter and art historian Giorgio Vasari, are also on display. All the works leave no doubt about Michelangelo's reluctance to pose for portraits.

Disfigured at age 17 when a fellow student smashed his nose, Michelangelo had small eyes, large ears, thin lips and a forked, thin beard.

Nevertheless, over the centuries since his death, Michelangelo's image improved significantly and his ugliness almost disappeared. In posthumous portraits, the artist appeared elegantly dressed, with a penetrating gaze and imposing presence.

"These images are testament to myth and do not necessarily show the person as he looked in his lifetime. The individual assumes a more refined face, more elegant clothes, more courtly accoutrements, or a more stately pose," Columbia University art historian Lynn Catterson told Discovery News.

In reality, Michelangelo wasn't exactly a refined man. In fact, he likely smelled terribly bad. According to Vasari, "he wore stockings of dogskin constantly for months together, so that when he took them off the skin of the leg often came away with them."

"The fact that Michelangelo wasn't either handsome or particularly considerate about his personal care isn't so important. One should look at his letters and poems. They are his real, inner self-portraits," Ragionieri said.

The only known self-portrait of the artist is scratched into the margin of one of Michelangelo's poems, on show in Florence. The image is a sort of caricature of the artist, done during the years he was painting the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel in Rome.

"This portrait reveals much about Michelangelo -- that he is right-handed and that, in his artist's mind, bodies need no clothes, including his own," Catterson said.

"Moreover, the drawing reveals Michelangelo's sense of humor since the figure he is drawing is not one of the massive heroic participants from the stories of Genesis that would ultimately populate the ceiling, but rather, one with cartoon-like features including huge eyes and hair standing straight up on ends."

An extended version of the exhibition, which will include several works never before seen in the United States, will travel to New York City shortly. It will run at Syracuse University from Aug. 12 through Jan. 4, 2009.