TOMB OF GIULIANO DE' MEDICI Chapel of the Medici in San Lorenzo, Florence (1524-1526 and 1530-1534).TOMB OF GIULIANO DE' MEDICIChapel of the Medici in San Lorenzo, Florence (1524-1526 and 1530-1534).
Without the favour of the pope he could not have held out for a moment against the enmity which his haughty and contemptuous ways roused against him. Therefore when Paul III died and Marcellus II succeeded him (April 9, 1555) Michelangelo was on the point of leaving Rome, but by the twenty-third of May Marcellus had died and Paul IV took his place. Michelangelo, again sure of the highest protection, went on with his fight. He would have thought himself dishonoured and would have feared for his salvation if he had given up the work.{115}"Against my will," he wrote in 1555, "I was entrusted with this task, and for eight years I have exhausted myself in vain in the midst of all kinds of trouble and weariness. Now that the construction is so far advanced that I can begin to vault the dome, to leave Rome would be to ruin the whole work, a great shame to me and for my soul a great sin."[90]
In 1557 Cosmo de' Medici begged him to come back to Florence "where honour and rest awaited him," but he answered firmly, "I can not leave here until I have carried the construction of St. Peter's so far that my plan can not be changed or destroyed and there will no longer be any possibility for thieves to begin their work again, as these scoundrels are only waiting for a chance to do. This is my resolve."
That same year his friends, who were afraid that he would carry his great designs with him into the grave, for none of them were written down, urged and besought until they succeeded in persuading him to execute a model in wood of the dome of St. Peter's.[91]He was still working on this in 1560.
The building went on, but not without many{116}difficulties. It was necessary in 1557 to rebuild almost the entire vault of the Chapel of the King of France because Michelangelo had been ill and unable to watch the work closely enough.
The attacks on him began again with fresh vigour at each mistake, and some of his best friends, like Cardinal Carpi, joined in them. Michelangelo heard from Francesco Bandini that the cardinal said everywhere that the work on St. Peter's could not be worse managed. Much hurt, he wrote to him at once that, "although he felt sure that the work was going on well, he feared that possibly his own enthusiasm and his age had blinded him and were, without his knowing it, a source of harm and danger to the building." In consequence he begged that they "would be so kind as to relieve him of the load which he had carried without pay for seventeen years under the orders of the popes." He offered his resignation. "A greater favour than its acceptance," he said, "could not be accorded him."[92]
His resignation was not accepted, and Pius IV in a pontifical letter gave him full powers and forbade that his plans should be set aside.
But Nanni di Baccio Bigio, indefatigable in his hate, moved heaven and earth to drive him away.{117}In 1562 Nanni appealed to Cosmo de' Medici for his aid in securing the appointment of architect of St. Peter's. Cosmo answered that he would do nothing about it while Michelangelo lived.
In 1563 the struggle became a tragic one. The head of the work at St. Peter's, Cesare de Casteldurante, was stabbed, and Pier Luigi Gaeta, Michelangelo's friend and one of his best aids, was thrown into prison on a false accusation of theft. Michelangelo responded to this by appointing Gaeta in Cesare's place. The committee of administration dismissed Gaeta and put Nanni in his place, and Michelangelo, beside himself with rage, no longer went to St. Peter's. His enemies did not lose this chance to spread the report that he was no longer willing to take charge of the building, and Michelangelo denied this in vain. The committee nominated a successor, and this successor was of course Nanni. Nanni cut loose at once from his master and began to give orders, for he thought that the old man of eighty-eight, weary at last of the struggle, would be forced either to submit or to resign. He did not know his antagonist. Michelangelo went at once to the pope and told him that if justice was not done he would leave Rome and go to Florence. The pope called the committee together and the members accused Michelangelo of having committed{118}errors which endangered the whole building. Michelangelo asked for an investigation and summoned Nanni to show the mistakes of which he accused him. Nanni could show nothing but his own bad faith, and was dismissed in disgrace.[93]
This did not prevent Nanni from sending, five months later, just after the death of Michelangelo, a letter by the Florentine ambassador to Cosmo de' Medici, asking again to be appointed his successor.
Until his last hour Michelangelo met with this fierce opposition over the work on St. Peter's, but his faith and his fighting spirit found in this only another reason for persevering.
While Michelangelo had taken Bramante's design for the church and rested on his authority, he had in the course of construction introduced many important modifications into the plan, and stamped the whole monument with the imprint of his own grandiose and heavy genius.
He kept the Greek cross with equal arms and four apses, at the same time hiding the apse of the façade in a rectangular mass against which he wished to{119}put a portico with four gigantic columns. He suppressed the salient angles and the towers which should have risen at the extremities of the four arms of the cross. The beautiful clean-cut lines of the curved ends of these arms, which in Bramante's plan stretched out in the form of a semicircular tribune, were smothered in a massive, vigorous envelope which gave the construction the effect of a fortified bastion.
The most beautiful part of the work was the famous dome, where the influence of Brunelleschi combined with the conception of Bramante. Michelangelo said once while he was working on S. Lorenzo in Florence that "it was possible to do differently from Brunelleschi, but not to do better."
He did not fail to remember the masterly dome of S. Maria de Fiore, for as soon as he was appointed to St. Peter's he had the exact measures of this dome from the lantern to the ground, and also the height sent to him. The dimensions that he chose for St. Peter's seem to have been inspired by them.[94]
Bramante in his design as shown by Burckhardt and de Geymueller[95]gave the principal importance to a circular colonnade crowned by statues on which{120}the dome seemed to rest. Michelangelo concentrated his attention on the dome itself, subordinating, as ever, grace and harmony to majesty and force. He accentuated the buttresses of the drum with pairs of columns and raised the outer dome of the cupola, whose beautiful curve possesses an impetuous quality which recalls, with less passion and more freedom, the huge octagonal dome of Brunelleschi, crouching on its base like a beast ready to spring.[96]The lofty serenity of the dome of St. Peter's is almost unique in the work of Michelangelo. He had lived so long with the thoughts of Raphael and Bramante that at last their smile was reflected in his work.[97]
Besides this great masterpiece other architectural works filled the end of his life—the rebuilding of the Capitol, the Porta Pia, S. Maria degli Angeli and S. Giovanni dei Fiorentini.
It was in 1548 that Michelangelo presided over{121}the erection of the statue of Marcus Aurelius in the square before the Capitol, but his first sketch for the palaces were no earlier than 1546, and when he died the buildings were far from finished.
He never saw the stairway or the colonnades. An engraving of Pérac's executed in 1559 after Michelangelo's own drawings, "ex ipso exemplari Michaelis Bonaroti," and reproduced in theSpeculum Romanie Magnificentiæof Lafreri, show exactly what his plan was and take from him all blame for the incoherencies and vulgarities put into the execution after his death. The beautiful double staircase of the Senatorial Palace and the fountain with the river gods is all his own; but he had meant to put a colonnade crowned by pilasters at the top of the stairway, the windows of the upper story should have been higher and the campanile crenellated.[98]The Porta Pia was at the end of a long{122}street which ran from the Monte Cavallo.[99]Michelangelo made three designs for it in 1561, of which Pius IV chose the most reasonable, according to Vasari. This was more to the credit of the pope than the artist, for the plan which was carried out shows, with a few remnants of massive and imperious power, a complete lack of good taste.
He also worked in 1560-1561 at the transformation of the great hall in the baths of Diocletian into the church of S. Maria degli Angeli, but it is almost impossible to judge this now, for his work was entirely changed and disfigured in 1746 by Vanvitelli.
He was no more fortunate with the Church of S. Giovanni dei Fiorentini at Rome, which was another of his great projects, undertaken with enthusiasm and ending in nothing. S. Giovanni had been begun under Leo X by Jacopo Sansovino. Antonio da San Gallo had worked on it later and had made a model of the church, and then the construction had been abandoned. In 1550, at the suggestion of Bindo Altoviti, Michelangelo determined to consecrate himself to this work and had almost persuaded Julius III, but the money was{123}lacking.[100]In 1559 the Florentines took up the idea again and decided to put a church of a new plan on the old foundations, and their procurators, Francesco Bandini, Uberto Ubaldini and Tommaso de' Bardi, asked Michelangelo to take charge of it in spite of his duties at St. Peter's. Cosmo de' Medici himself wrote a most flattering letter begging him to accept, and Michelangelo answered the duke that he "considered his wish an order" and had already shown the Florentine deputies several drawings, of which they had chosen the one which he considered the best.[101]"I am sorry," he added, "to be now so old and so little alive that I can not do all I would or all that is my duty to your lordship and the people. Nevertheless I will make the effort by directing everything from my house to accomplish what your lordship desires."[102]
DAWN Figure from the Tomb of Lorenzo de' Medici. Chapel of the Medici in San Lorenzo, Florence (1524-1526 and 1530-1534)DAWNFigure from the Tomb of Lorenzo de' Medici.Chapel of the Medici in San Lorenzo, Florence (1524-1526 and 1530-1534)
In spite of his age he began with the same enthusiasm with which he had undertaken the unlucky façade of S. Lorenzo. He told the commission that if they carried out his plans "neither the Greeks nor the Romans would have done anything like it." "Words," says Vasari, "of a kind that never came{124}from the mouth of Michelangelo before or after, for he was extremely modest."
The Florentines accepted his plans without change and gave the execution of them to Tiberio Calcagni.
"Michelangelo," says Vasari, "explained his project to Tiberio so that he could make a clear and accurate drawing of it. He gave him the profiles of the interior and exterior and made him a model in wax. Tiberio in ten days finished a model two feet high, and as it pleased all the people another model was made in wood which is now in the Consulate. It is a work of such rare art that there never was seen a church so beautiful, so rich and with such variety of fancy." The building was commenced and five thousand crowns spent; then the money gave out and the work stopped, to Michelangelo's most profound disappointment. Not only was the church not built, but the model disappeared with all the plans. This was the last artistic disappointment of his life.[103]{125}
He could no longer paint, but he still continued to work at his sculpture from a sort of physical need. Vasari says that "his genius and strength could not live without creation." He attacked a block of marble to cut from it four figures larger than life, of which one was a dead Christ.[104]He did this to amuse himself and to pass the time, and because he said that work with a chisel kept him in health. He worked at night[105]and slept very little, and had made himself a helmet of cardboard to hold a lighted candle on his head so that with both hands free he could light what he was doing. Even at that age he cut the marble with such impetuosity and vigour that it seemed to fly in pieces. He broke off in one blow great fragments four or five inches thick and left a line so pure that if he had gone a hair's breadth further he would have risked ruining the whole. This did happen to many of his works, which remained merely blocked out like the figures in the Boboli grotto, or half finished like the Madonna of the Medici chapel, or destroyed, as all but happened{126}to the admirable Descent from the Cross in the cathedral at Florence.
"He would break a work in pieces," says Vasari, "either because the block was hard and full of flaws and sparks shot out from under the chisel, or because the uncompromising judgment of this man was never contented with anything that he did, which is easily proved by the fact that so few of the works of his maturity are complete; the only finished ones dated from his youth."
The Florentine sculptor Tiberio Calcagni, who was a friend as well as his assistant at S. Giovanni dei Fiorentini, found the debris of a Pietà one day, and asked why he had destroyed "so admirable a work." Michelangelo told him that it was partly the fault of his servant Urbino, who urged him every day to finish it, when he was already annoyed by a flaw in the marble so that he had lost patience and had broken it. He would have destroyed it entirely but that his servant Antonio "had begged for what remained." Tiberio bought the marble from Antonio for two hundred gold crowns and asked Michelangelo's permission to finish it for their mutual friend Francesco Bandini. Michelangelo was entirely willing, and the group was restored by Tiberio, who completed several parts of it, but Bandini,{127}Michelangelo and Tiberio all died and it was never finished.[106]
It is all the more moving for that reason. In the half-shadow behind the high altar in Florence it stirs one with indescribable emotion. Perhaps no other work of Michelangelo is so human or speaks so directly to the soul. "From heart to heart," as Beethoven wrote at the end of his mass in D. It is the expression of those long nights when he was alone face to face with his sorrow and spoke only to himself. He represents himself in the form of an old man, in a monk's cowl, bending with infinite sadness and tenderness to support the sinking body of the dead Christ.
In this piece of stone hardly blocked out smoulders deep sorrow and an agony of pain. But what great love is in that suffering, in the scarcely modelled face of the mother with closed eyes and parted lips, and in the tender movement of the hand which rests on the naked breast of her son, whose head has sunk against her shoulder. How much Michelangelo has softened since his early work, how far this feeling is from the implacable heroism of his youth, how far it is indeed from the lovely Pietà of St. Peter's, where serene beauty rises above the sorrow. Here{128}he suffers and abandons himself to the suffering. What matters a lack of proportion and an uncertain composition?[107]The work is unique in its intimacy. It is his whole soul laid bare.
Michelangelo never lacked illustrious friends. From the time of his early youth, when he talked in the gardens of San Marco with Lorenzo de' Medici and Poliziano, he was always in close touch with the best among the nobles and princes, prelates and poets and artists of Italy.[108]He had a peculiarly close friendship with Francesco Berni and Sebastiano del Piombo[109]under Clement VII and with Luigi del Riccio, Donato Giannotti and Benedetto Varchi[110]under Paul III, and at the close of his life he was surrounded by the pious worship of pupils and admirers{129}like Benvenuto Cellini, Bronzino, Daniele da Volterra, Leone Leoni, Vasari and his biographer, almost his hagiographer, Condivi, whose book begins with these words:
"Since the hour when our Lord God by special mercy judged me worthy to not only see Michelangelo, which I could hardly have dared to hope for, but to enjoy his affection, his conversation and his confidence—grateful for such a great blessing, I have made all possible effort not only to collect and write down the instructions which he gave me on art, but all his words, actions and habits and all things in his life which seemed to me worthy of praise, admiration or emulation. This I do to pay back a little of the infinite obligation which I owe to him no less than to be useful to others by giving them the example of such a man."[111]
The artists were not the only ones who looked upon Michelangelo as a supernatural being, for princes bowed before his fame and his great virtue as Vasari calls it. Cosmo de' Medici, who tried in vain to recall him to Florence, even offering to make him a senator,[112]treated Michelangelo as an equal,{130}Cosmo's son Don Francesco received him with even greater respect (in October, 1561), his cap in his hand, "showing a reverence without limit for so extraordinary a man."
In spite of all this adulation, or perhaps because of it, he had as little intercourse as possible with the world. Popes and princes, men of letters and artists, held but small place in his life, except a few favourite pupils like Vasari, for whom he showed a fatherly affection, especially in his last years, when, growing more feeble day by day, he grew more demonstrative.
"I have been to see my great Michelangelo," Vasari wrote to Cosmo in 1560. "He did not expect me and showed as much feeling as a father who has recovered a lost son. He threw his arms around my neck and kissed me a thousand times, crying with pleasure" (lacrymando per dolcezza).[113]
TWILIGHT Figure from the Tomb of Lorenzo de' Medici. Chapel of the Medici in San Lorenzo, Florence (1524-1526 and 1530-1534).TWILIGHTFigure from the Tomb of Lorenzo de' Medici.Chapel of the Medici in San Lorenzo, Florence (1524-1526 and 1530-1534).
But the best of his heart was kept for his kin and for a few humble friends. Of his two remaining brothers, Giovan Simone died in 1548, and Gismondo, with whom he had never had much intercourse, in 1555. He turned to Lionardo and Francesca, the children of his favourite brother Buonarroto, for the family affection which he could not do without. He charged himself with the education of Lionardo,{131}who was nine years old at his father's death, and the long correspondence between them which has been preserved shows how seriously he took his responsibility as guardian. The children grew up and after they had married he found himself even more lonely than before.[114]
In his own house he had assistants who were devoted to him, but of no great ability. "He had trouble with those in his service," says Vasari, "for he never chanced to find men who could imitate him well." Pietro Urbano de Pistoia was intelligent, but would take no trouble; Antonio Mini was willing, but not intelligent; and Ascanio della Ripa Transone tried hard, but never succeeded in doing anything. It is possible that he deliberately chose mediocre assistants in order to have docile tools instead of collaborators, which indeed would have been quite legitimate; but Condivi says that it is not true that he refused to teach them, but, on the contrary, he did so willingly. "I myself am the proof of that, for he opened the secrets of his heart to me. The trouble was that he met with pupils that had no ability, or with able ones who were not persevering and who after a few months of his teaching thought themselves already masters. And though he took{132}a great deal of trouble to help them he did not want to have this known, for he loved rather to do good than to seem to do it."
His letters show what fatherly patience he had with these poor creatures. He forgave them any folly if they only showed a little good will and affection.
The one that he cared for the most was Francesco d'Amadore, called Urbino, the son of Guido di Colonello de Castel Durante, who was in his service from 1530 and had worked on the tomb of Julius II. Michelangelo was worried about what would become of Urbino after his own death, and one day, says Vasari, he asked him, "What will you do when I die?" When Urbino answered, "I will have to serve some other master," Michelangelo said, "Poor fellow, I am going to cure your poverty," and gave him two thousand crowns on the spot, "a gift such as only emperors and popes bestow."
It was Urbino who died first in 1555, and the day after Michelangelo wrote to his nephew Lionardo: "I must tell you that Urbino died yesterday at ten o'clock. He has left me so sad and troubled because of the love I had for him that it would have been easier to have died with him. He was a worthy man, loyal and faithful. Since he has gone{133}I do not seem to be alive and I can not recover my peace of mind."[115]
Lionardo and his wife Cassandra, anxious on account of his great grief, went to Rome and found him much weakened. But he drew new energy from the charge which Urbino had left him in the guardianship of his sons, one of whom was his godson and bore his name. He wrote to Cornelia, Urbino's wife, that he would like to take the little Michelangelo to live with him. He showed him more affection than even the children of his nephew, and had him taught all that Urbino had wished him to learn.[116]
He showed the most touching affection for his old servants, and also for those of his family whom he had taken in after his father's death, and for the workmen who had helped him at Carrara and in the Sistine Chapel.
His enemies accused him of avarice,[117]but Vasari{134}answers the charge with indignation and a list of his royal gifts to all his friends: "To Messer Tommaso dei Cavalieri, to Messer Bindo Altoviti, and Fra Bastiano (del Piombo) drawings of great value. To Antonio Mini all the drawings, cartoons and models in wax and clay and the painting of Leda; to Gherardo Perini some divinely beautiful heads drawn in pencil which passed later into the hands of Don Francesco, Prince of Florence, who rightly esteemed them among his treasures; to Bartolommeo Bettini a cartoon of Venus with Cupid kissing her, a divine work now in possession of his heirs in Florence; to the Marchese del Vasto a cartoon of thenoli me tangere, a beautiful work from which Pontormo made a painting as he did from the Venus and Cupid; to Roberto Strozzi the two Slaves in marble; to his servant Antonio and to Francesco Bandini the Pietà in marble which he broke. I do not understand how a man can be called avaricious who gives away such works of art worth many thousands of crowns."
His generosity was not limited to his friends, for{135}he gave much to the poor, especially the disreputable poor. He particularly remembered poor young girls and dowered them secretly, taking care that they should never know the name of their benefactor.
He was always ailing in health, and several times very near death, particularly in 1544, when he was nursed by his friend Riccio in the house of the Strozzi, and in his later years he suffered cruelly from gout and stone. His indomitable nervous energy supported him, and at eighty-five he inspected the works of St. Peter's on horseback. In spite of a severe attack of gout in August, 1561, he would let no one take care of him and he still lived alone. His nephew Lionardo was least of all allowed to interfere with these arrangements, for Michelangelo attributed his anxiety to an interest in his inheritance and did not hesitate to tell him so.
Both the Duke of Tuscany and the pope were anxious about the plans and drawings of his public works, which Michelangelo kept in his own house, for fear that they might be stolen after his death. So in June, 1563, at the instigation of Vasari, who saw that Michelangelo was failing rapidly, Cosmo de' Medici secretly directed his ambassador, Averado Serristori, to keep a strict watch on the domestic life of Michelangelo and on everyone who came to his house. In case of his sudden death an{136}inventory was to be taken of all his possessions, drawings, cartoons, models, silver, etc., and a watch to be kept that nothing was taken in the first confusion. All that had to do with the construction of St. Peter's or the sacristy or the Laurentian library was to be put carefully aside.
Weakened as he was, Michelangelo still worked. Since 1562 he had hardly written at all himself, and Daniele da Volterra did most of his correspondence, but he never relinquished his chisel. On February 12, 1564, he spent the whole day standing at work on his Pietà, and on the fourteenth, although he was seized with fever, he rode out on horseback into the country in the rain, and would not consent to stay in his bed until the sixteenth.
On the eighteenth of February he died in full consciousness, with Daniele da Volterra and his faithful friend Tommaso dei Cavalieri beside him.
Cosmo de' Medici was at once notified by his ambassador, and the next day the governor of Rome{137}made an inventory of Michelangelo's property in the presence of Pier Luigi Gaeta and Cavalieri. There was much less than had been expected, for he had burned almost all his drawings. They found a chest containing seven or eight thousand crowns and a trunk closed and sealed and full of papers, and also three statues, the unfinished Pietà,[119]a figure of Saint Peter just begun, and a little unfinished figure of Christ bearing the cross in the style of that in the Minerva, and yet different. There were besides ten cartoons as follows:
1. The plan of St. Peter's.
2. The façade of a palace(a small cartoon).
3. A window of St. Peter's.
4. The old plan for St. Peter's, after a drawing of San Gallo's.
5. Three sketches of little figures.
6. Windows.
7. A Pietà, merely sketched. A composition of nine figures.
8. Three large figures and twoputti.
9. Large figure (a study of an apostle for the figure of Saint Peter).
10. Farewell of Christ to his mother, drawn for Cardinal Morone.[120]{138}
This last drawing was given to Cavalieri as Michelangelo had wished. The rest went to Lionardo, who reached Rome three days after his uncle's death, and who acquired also some little sketches which Michelangelo had given to Michele Alberti and Jacopo del Duca—an annunciation and a prayer at Gethsemane. These show how much the thought of the gospel filled Michelangelo's mind.[121]
On February 19th Michelangelo's body was carried by the brotherhood to which he belonged, the Confratelli di S. Giovanni Pecolla, to the church of the SS. Apostoli for the funeral mass. The pope had meant to have the body placed in St. Peter's, but Michelangelo had expressed a desire to return to Florence dead, as he could not do so living,[122]and Lionardo was determined to carry out his last wishes in accordance with the orders of Cosmo de' Medici, who promised to erect a statue to him in the Florentine cathedral. The Romans would not allow the body to be taken away, so it was necessary to wrap{139}it secretly in a roll of cloth and to send it to Florence on the twenty-ninth as merchandise.
CHRIST AND THE SAINTS Detail from The Last Judgment (1536-1541). Sistine Chapel.CHRIST AND THE SAINTSDetail from The Last Judgment (1536-1541).Sistine Chapel.
Thus did Michelangelo return to his country on March 10, 1564. The next day the artists of Florence carried his body by torchlight to the church of Santa Croce. The crowd was so great that they could hardly force their way through the church. In the sacristy Vincenzo Borghini, Director of the Florentine Academy of Painters, had the coffin opened. The body was intact and Michelangelo seemed asleep. He was dressed in black velvet, a felt hat on his head, and on his feet boots and spurs, just as while living he had had the habit of sleeping, dressed and ready to rise and take up his work.[123]
The Academy of Florence had been preparing since March 2d for the solemn obsequies. Varchi was given the funeral oration, Bronzino, Vasari, Cellini and Ammanati the artistic arrangements. On the 14th of July, 1564, in the church of S. Lorenzo, a triumphant memorial service was held in the presence of a hundred artists and an innumerable crowd of people.[124]{140}
Between the two side doors arose a huge catafalque. Daniele da Volterra had wanted to use for the tomb the fine Victory and other sculptures of the Via Mozza, but this most reverent and appropriate idea for the glorification of the master was not accepted.[125]Instead, a huge arrangement, disproportionate and swollen, was erected, a real tower of Babel to which each sculptor of Florence brought his stone. It was undoubtedly, however, a fine thought to associate all the world of artists in a supreme homage to the man whom Italy considered the incarnation of her genius and the God himself of art.[126]The result of these combined efforts was only to prove more strikingly the contrast between the man who was dead and the men who claimed the right to succeed him. This agglomeration of sculpture recalls also that bitter saying of Michelangelo shortly before his end that "art and death do not go well together."
"L'arte e la morte non va bene insieme."
From 1564 to 1572 Vasari raised in Santa Croce, at the expense of Lionardo Buonarroti, and with the{141}collaboration of Borghini, Valerio Cioli and Battista Lorenzi, the monument to Michelangelo. Thode has proved that the so-called tomb of Michelangelo in the SS. Apostoli in Rome has nothing whatever to do with him. It is really the monument of a professor of medicine, Ferdinando Eustacio, and the false attribution dates only from 1823.{142}
"Ihaveno friend of any kind," said Michelangelo in 1509, "and I do not want any."[127]
Forty years later, in 1548, Michelangelo wrote again, "I am always alone and I speak to no one."[128]
"From his youth," says Condivi, "Michelangelo had consecrated himself not only to sculpture and painting, but to all the other arts with such devouring energy that he had to separate himself almost entirely from the society of men. For that reason many people considered him proud, and others eccentric or mad. In reality it was his love of work alone, his labour without respite, which made him solitary, for he was so filled by the joy and rapture which his work gave him that the society of men did not offer him any pleasure, but rather bored him by distracting him from his own thoughts. Like the{143}great Scipio, he was never less lonely than when he was alone."
That passionate solitude was the very soul of the genius and of the work of Michelangelo. He lived shut up in himself without any real connection with the art of his time. He despised Raphael because he said, "All his talent came from study and not from nature."[129]He himself declared that he derived all his inspiration from within, and if in his pride he underestimated what he was always studying with feverish and persistent ardour, yet it is true that he never sought in the study of the works of others a means of changing or of renewing his own personality, but only of still further emphasising it. In a way he sought from others not examples or lessons, but reasons for being still more himself. It is true that from the beginning to the end he fed on his own soul. Who knows the man, knows his work.
The most striking thing about this extraordinarily unified nature is that it was composed of hostile worlds; a brutal materialism and serene idealism, an infatuation with pagan strength and beauty and a Christian mysticism; a mixture of physical violence and intellectual abstraction; a platonic soul in an athlete's body. That indissoluble union of{144}opposing forces which undoubtedly caused part of his suffering was also the cause of his unique greatness. We feel that the supreme balance of his art is the result of a fierce struggle, and it is the sense of that struggle which gives to the work its heroic character. All is passion even to the abstract idea, so that idealism, which with many artists is a cause of coldness and death, is here a hearth burning with love and hate.[130]
There is undoubtedly a danger in that mystic faith which loses itself in inward visions of such charm that they often leave a feeling of only disgust and contempt for reality.
Varchi was quite right in recognising in Michelangelo the Socratic spirit.[132]Whether he gained these ideas from the teaching of the great Platonists with whom he had talked as a youth in the gardens of San Marco or whether that teaching had merely revealed to him his true nature there is certainly a close relationship between the theories on art of the school of Socrates and those of Michelangelo.
Parrhasius believed in representing only "the perspective, the light and the shadow, the softness, hardness and surface of bodies." Socrates taught him that the object of painting is to represent the soul and the innermost being.[133]"The fields and trees can teach me nothing," he says in the "Phædo"; "I only find what is useful to me among men in the towns." These very men only interested him because there was something eternal in them. The fugitive and changing side of their physiognomy, which for us makes the delicate charm of life and the object of painting, seemed to him an empty and wearisome illusion. Art creates illusions. The objects which it represents are "the dreams of the human imagination offered to people who can see. It is an image which one shows in the distance to{146}little children who can not reason, in order to create illusions for them. These illusions of the senses distract the soul from the only realities, eternal ideas."
Michelangelo reasoned thus in his disdain of all exact reproduction of nature. He had studied it with passion but, in order to discover its laws, he regarded it as an enemy which held the human spirit prisoner. He wanted to free himself from it, he wanted to make of it an instrument for his thought. That is why he sought for and discovered its machinery, and when he could guide it at will he outraged it; he made it produce unprecedented results. He constructed for himself out of his profound knowledge of anatomy a general idea of man, and thereafter, without having recourse to any observation of individuals, he recreated the whole of nature in the image of his ideas and in the likeness of God, source and originator of ideas.
"As heat can not be separated from fire, so beauty can not be from eternity; and my thought extols what comes from it and what resembles it."
CHARON'S BOAT Detail from The Last Judgment (1536-1541). Sistine Chapel.CHARON'S BOATDetail from The Last Judgment (1536-1541). Sistine Chapel.
He wanted to express in his work only what was{147}eternal, and he did not believe he could do this with external objects. He tried, therefore, to give to everything he did a character of compelling force. His Platonic idealism was lined with Christian pessimism. Like Vittoria Colonna, he was filled with the sense of the beauty of all human things, and he was obsessed with the idea of death.
He lived in an exhausted epoch which no longer had any happy sense of reality. In God was the only help, in the eternal and immutable perfection. Michelangelo was filled with dislike for all realism. Like Plato, he despised painting in comparison with sculpture.
"Painting seems to me the better the more it resembles sculpture, and the sculpture worse the more it resembles painting. Sculpture is the torch of painting, and between the two there is the same difference as between the sun and the moon."[134]
If he was above all things a sculptor it was because he found in sculpture the most appropriate expression of his abstract and concentrated genius.{148}
Moreover he reduced sculpture to its most simple form, the isolated statue. Michelangelo had little liking for bas-reliefs and groups, which he hardly ever made, and where he always shows some awkwardness. What we know, through Cellini and Vasari, of his manner of working would incline us to feel to-day that the basis of his sculpture and of all his art was drawing,[136]because that was most immaterial and closest to the form of his thought.
No one has ever drawn as Michelangelo did, and Charles Blanc is right in saying that "if he is unequal{149}in his sculptures and his frescoes, never does his drawing, even when apparently most careless and most summary, betray any feebleness of hand or distraction or hesitancy of spirit." Not only do we penetrate, then, into the mystery of his creativeness, into the dreams and soliloquies of his lonely soul, but we discover there also his most intimate and perfect expression. There he is altogether himself, as Beethoven is in his quartets and in his short pieces for the piano.[137]
I compare these two purposely; for the genius of each of them was solitary, intellectual and passionate, only realising itself completely in the most simple and abstract forms in which the senses had the least part and the spirit the greatest. All the voluptuous charm of art was not only foreign to Michelangelo, but antagonistic to him. The more art was aimed at the senses the more he despised it.{150}
Painting, therefore, seemed to him, as it did to Plato, less virile and less pure than sculpture, because of its seductive quality, its illusive magic which imitates the appearance of things and merely creates illusions. He disdained it inasmuch as it appealed through the attraction of colours at the expense of the idea. He could not endure painting in oils, which he said was only good for women.[139]He rejected landscape, and like Plato only saw in it a vague and deceiving illusion—a sport for children and ignorant people. He had a horror of portraits. They seemed to him a form of flattery for the gratification of vain curiosity and the imperfect illusion of the senses.[140]It is curious to contrast with these principles which were adopted by a part of the Italian school in the sixteenth century, the naïve confession of faith of Dürer at almost the same{151}period. "The art of painting is used in the service of the Church to show the sufferings of Christ and of many other models of virtue, and it also preserves the faces of men after their death." (1513)
That pious and bourgeois realism of Germany and Flanders filled Michelangelo with the same sort of contempt that many artists of to-day feel for subject-painting. "It is," he says, "an anecdotal and sentimental art, which aims only at success and obtains it easily, not by its own value, but by the choice of its subjects. These are pious figures for which tears are always ready, or else rags, ruins, very green fields shaded by trees, rivers and bridges—what they call landscapes—with many figures here and there. That sort of thing is always popular; the least artistic spirit can find something there that appeals to it; it is enough to be inquisitive and to have good eyes." Again—"Flemish painting seems beautiful to women, especially to those who are either old or very young, and to monks and nuns and to a few people of quality who are deaf to true harmony. Although it makes a good effect in the eyes of some people, in truth there is neither reason nor art in it, no proportion, no symmetry, no selection, and no grandeur. In fact, such painting is without body or vigour. The only real paintings are those done in Italy. These are not, like the Flemish{152}pictures, made for the pious.[141]They will never cause anyone to shed a tear."[142]
We can well understand that disdainful confession of faith. What artist is there who has not felt this same irritation at the success of mediocre work exploited by the sentimentality of an uncritical public and who will not understand Michelangelo's haughty refusal to share this too easy success? This pride, ennobling as it is to the character, is unfortunately perilous for art; it cuts it off from all simple souls, it isolates it in the arrogant feeling of inner perfection and of a secret ideal which very few can know or understand. As Michelangelo says:
"Good painting is noble and devout in itself, for among the wise nothing tends more to elevate the soul or to raise it toward devotion than the difficulty of that perfection which approaches God and becomes one with him. Good painting is but a copy of this perfection, a shadow of his pencil, a music, a melody, and only a very keen intelligence can feel{153}the difficulty of it. That is why it is so rare and why so few people can attain to it or know how to produce it. Painting is the music of God, the inner reflection of his luminous perfection."[143]