Sculptorama

THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY (664 pp.)--Irving Stone--Doubleday ($5.95).

This book is written in blurbese, the language of record jackets, movie previews of coming attractions, and fictionalized biographies. Blurbese is prose with a glandular condition, but it often pays better than literature, as Author Irving Stone found out with such bestsellers as Lust for Life (Vincent Van Gogh), The President's Lady (Rachel Jackson) and Love Is Eternal (Mary Todd Lincoln). In the present fictionalized life of Michelangelo Buonarroti, Author Stone has transcended himself; The Agony and the Ecstasy raises blurbese to blurbissimo.

For the most part, Stone, who "studied quarries at close range" and learned how to carve marble for this novel, relies on his "research material, comprising some 5.000 typewritten pages." Out of this emerges the standard portrait of the boy who lost his mother at six and found his vocation before his teens. There is the taunt ("Big man, big wind") by the small Michelangelo to a large fellow artist that cost the hero a smashed nose and lifelong disfigurement. There is the early patronage and early death of Lorenzo de' Medici ("77 Magnifico"). There are the later duels of wills (with Pope Julius II) and skills (with Da Vinci, Bramante, Raphael). There is the unmarried Michelangelo's dutiful, lifelong support of his brothers and of a father who believed that "working with his hands" was beneath a Buonarroti's dignity. Michelangelo's possible homosexuality an iffy question for any biographer, is "skirted by Author Stone, but he fleetingly pursues the theory that Michelangelo combined the Greek pagan ideal of beauty with a profoundly Christian spirit. This will convince only those who find something specifically Christian in Michelangelo's works. It is equally possible to argue that the god of the Sistine Chapel comes from Olympus and that the finger he reaches out to Adam is a linking of minds between Renaissance man and his humanist Greek forebears across the medieval abyss.

Such questions, of course, pale beside blurbissimo writing. This is Michelangelo painting the figures of the Sistine Chapel ceiling: "Each one had to be pushed out of his artistic womb, pushed out by his own inarticulate frenzied force. He must gather within himself his galvanic might; his burgeoning seed must be generated each day anew within his vitals, hurtled into space, projected onto the ceiling, given life everlasting. Though he was creating God the Father, he himself was God the Mother ... on his lonely truckle bed high in the heavens, going through parturition to deliver a race of immortals." Out of tons of this quarried prose rises The Agony and the Ecstasy--a kind of sculptorama fashioned with a slipped chisel.

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