Dying Slave
Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) · 1513-1515
A young man lifts one arm behind his head and lets his body sag into a long, swooning S curve, eyes closed, lips parted. A narrow band crosses his chest and another binds him below the shoulder, but the straps are so slight that they cannot be what holds him. Whether he is dying, sleeping or surrendering to something like ecstasy has been argued for four hundred years. Michelangelo's contemporaries called these figures prisoners; later writers saw the soul struggling free of the body, or the arts left captive by the death of a patron.
The marble is worked to different degrees across the block, and that is where much of the power lies. The torso and the raised arm are polished to a warm sheen that reads as living skin, while the rough support at the back and the unfinished shape behind the left leg keep the stone visibly stone. Walk slowly from left to right and watch the contour change: Michelangelo carved with the front plane in mind, as if releasing the figure forward out of the block, and the pose only fully resolves from a narrow range of viewpoints. The hips push out, the ribs stretch, and the whole weight is suspended rather than supported.
The figure was begun for the enormous tomb Pope Julius II commissioned in 1505 and repeatedly reduced in scale. When the plan shrank again, Michelangelo gave this slave and its companion to the Florentine exile Roberto Strozzi in Rome around 1546. Strozzi sent them to France, where they passed to Anne de Montmorency at Écouen and later to Cardinal Richelieu. Seized as national property during the Revolution, the pair entered the Louvre, and a cleaning completed in 2022 recovered the translucency of the surface.
Did You Know? Behind the figure's left leg Michelangelo left a barely blocked-out monkey, a creature traditionally read as an emblem of painting imitating nature, abandoned unfinished when the project collapsed.
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