Mistreated Masterpieces

My little children, for whom I am again in the pain of childbirth until Christ is formed in you. - Gal. 4.19

One of the best-known works of art in the world is Michelangelo’s “David.” What is less-well known is the story behind the sculpture. It almost never existed.

In 1464 the Wool Guild in Florence hired Agostino di Duccio to produce the statue for a local cathedral. Agostino was a hack. He was a competent sculptor but did not know marble. Cutting this delicate stone was an art in itself and the craftsmen who did such work in the quarries high in the mountains had their own trade secrets, standards, and even their own jargon. Agostino knew none of this. As a result, he chose a bad chunk of rock to begin with, and then had it cut far too narrowly for its height. He roughed out the statue at the quarry, as was standard practice. He endowed it with a vaguely human form but left it oddly shaped. The boulder’s sheer size made transportation to Florence a nightmare; the trip took two years, aging the stone, exposing it to the elements and at least one bad fall. The client took one look and gave the whole thing up as a lost cause. They fired Agostino on the spot and left the monstrosity lying on its side in the cathedral courtyard for more than three decades, again exposed to weather and birds, completely “cooking” the marble, to use the technical term. Locals mocked it as "the giant" and it became a sort of town curiosity.

Finally, impetus built to rescue "the giant." Leonardo DaVinci turned down the commission so the city fathers brought in Michelangelo, a kid in his mid-twenties cocky enough to take on the job. The difference between Michelangelo and Agostino was that Michelangelo understood his material intimately; he was a true marble-whisperer who knew the stone-cutting trade from mountain to monument. He insisted on working in solitude, so workmen constructed a massive open-air shed around his project. Inside that enclosure, genius took flight. Rather than fighting the stone’s flaws, Michelangelo embraced them. That is why his David is lean and twisting with life, rather than the upright and immobile muscle-men typical of the era. Michelangelo turned a mistake into a masterpiece. He turned limitation into perfection.

Paul seeks to perfect the image of Christ, the Son of David, from the flawed spiritual stone of the Galatian believers. To do this, Paul must be the saint-whisperer, someone who knows his material thoroughly. He invokes the metaphor of giving birth, the most intimate connection one human being can have to another. He knows the faults and flaws of his congregation, cut from the sinful stone of Adam, disastrously dropped in the Fall, and thoroughly “cooked” by exposure to the spirit of this world. These flaws drive him, not to despair, but to discipleship. Alone in the open-air cathedral of his prayer closet, Paul prays to see the living form of Christ emerge from the suffering stone.

The main work of the church is not to inform, but to form. Souls come to us, jarred by life’s catastrophes, often carelessly carved by ill-informed teachers and sometimes long-neglected, “cooked” by personal, institutional, or cultural elements of this world. Our job is not so much to fix their flaws as to find their flow, not to remake them into the image we imagine, but into the image of Christ as Christ may be seen in them alone. This will require that we know, not only our subjects, but our objects; that we take the time and trouble to build an intimate knowledge of their stories and character, and the unique opportunities presented by the odd shapes of their souls. And this will mean much work in the silence and stillness of our prayer closets. May the Holy Spirit remind us to seek to see the living Christ hidden in the neglected giants under our care.