CHAPTER VIII--LIFE OF MICHAEL ANGELO

The life of Italian artists at the time of the Renaissance may be illustrated by two biographies. Michael Angelo Buonarroti and Benvenuto Cellini were almost opposite in all they thought and felt, experienced and aimed at. The one impressed his own strong personality on art; the other reflected the light and shadow of the age in the record of his manifold existence. Cellini hovered, like some strong-winged creature, on the surface of human activity, yielding himself to every impulse, seeking every pleasure, and of beauty feeling only the rude animal compulsion. Deep philosophic thoughts, ideas of death and judgment, the stern struggles of the soul, encompassed Michael Angelo; the service of beauty was with him religion. Cellini was the creature of the moment—the glass and mirror of corrupt, enslaved, yet still resplendent Italy. In Michael Angelo the genius of the Renaissance culminated; but his character was rather that of an austere Republican, free and solitary amid the multitudes of slaves and courtiers. Michael Angelo made art the vehicle of lofty and soul-shaking thought. Cellini brought the fervour of an inexhaustibly active nature to the service of sensuality, and taught his art to be the handmaid of a soulless paganism. In these two men, therefore, we study two aspects of their age. How far both were exceptional, need not here be questioned; since their singularity consists not so much in being different from other Italians of the sixteenth century as in concentrating qualities elsewhere scattered and imperfect.

Michael Angelo was born in 1475 at Caprese, among the mountains of the Casentino, where his father Lodovico held the office of Podestà. His ancestry was honourable: the Buonarroti even claimed descent, but apparently without due reason, from the princely house of Canossa.^[289] His mother gave him to be suckled by a stone-cutter's wife at Settignano, so that in after days he used to say that he had drawn in the love of chisels and mallets with his nurse's milk. As he grew, the boy developed an invincible determination towards the arts. Lodovico from motives of pride and prudence opposed his wishes, but without success. Michael Angelo made friends with the lad Granacci, who was apprenticed to Domenico Ghirlandajo, and at last induced his father to sign articles for him to the same painter. In Ghirlandajo's workshop he learned the rudiments of art, helping in the execution of the frescoes at S. Maria Novella, until such time as the pupil proved his superiority as a draughtsman to his teacher. The rupture between Michael Angelo and Ghirlandajo might be compared with that between Beethoven and Haydn. In both cases a proud, uncompromising, somewhat scornful student sought aid from a master great in his own line but inferior in fire and originality of genius.^[290] In both cases the moment came when pupil and teacher perceived that the eagle could no longer be confined within the hawk's nest, and that henceforth it must sweep the skies alone. After leaving Ghirlandajo's bottega at the age of sixteen, Michael Angelo did in truth thenceforward through his life pursue his art alone. Granacci procured him an introduction to the Medici, and the two friends together frequented those gardens of S. Marco where Lorenzo had placed his collection of antiquities. There the youth discovered his vocation. Having begged a piece of marble and a chisel, he struck out the Faun's mask that still is seen in the Bargello. It is worth noticing that Michael Angelo seems to have done no merely prentice-work. Not a fragment of his labour from the earliest to the latest was insignificant, and only such thoughts as he committed to the perishable materials of bronze or paper have been lost. There was nothing tentative in his genius. Into art, as into a rich land, he came and conquered. In like manner, the first sonnet composed by Dante is scarcely less precious than the last lines of the "Paradiso." This is true of all the highest artistic natures, who need no preparations and have no period of groping.

While Michael Angelo was thus engaged in studying antique sculpture and in listening to Pico and Savonarola, he carved his first bas-relief—a "Battle of Hercules with the Centaurs," suggested to him by Poliziano.^[291] Meantime Lorenzo died. His successor Piero set the young man, it is said, to model a snow statue, and then melted like a shape of snow himself down from his pedestal of power in Florence. Upon the expulsion of the tyrant and the proclamation of the new republic, it was dangerous for house-friends of the Casa Medici to be seen in the city. Michael Angelo, therefore, made his way to Bologna, where he spent some months in the palace of Gian Francesco Aldovrandini, studying Dante and working at an angel for the shrine of S. Dominic. As soon, however, as it seemed safe to do so, he returned to Florence; and to this period belongs the statue of the "Sleeping Cupid," which was sold as an antique to the Cardinal Raffaello Riario.

A dispute about the price of this "Cupid" took Michael Angelo in 1496 to Rome, where it was destined that the greater portion of his life should he spent, and his noblest works of art should be produced. Here, while the Borgias were turning the Vatican into a den of thieves and harlots, he executed the purest of all his statues—a "Pietà" in marble.^[292] Christ is lying dead upon his mother's knees. With her right arm she supports his shoulders; her left hand is gently raised as though to say, "Behold and see!" All that art can do to make death beautiful and grief sublime, is achieved in this masterpiece, which was never surpassed by Michael Angelo in later years. Already, at the age of four-and-twenty, he had matured his "terrible manner." Already were invented in his brain that race of superhuman beings, who became the hieroglyphs of his impassioned utterance. Madonna has the small head and heroic torso used by this master to symbolise force. We feel she has no difficulty in holding the dead Christ upon her ample lap and in her powerful arms. Yet while the "Pietà" is wholly Michael Angelesque, we find no lack of repose, none of those contorted lines that are commonly urged against his manner. It is a sober and harmonious composition, combining the profoundest religious feeling with classical tranquillity of expression. Again, though the group is forcibly original, this effect of originality is produced, as in all the best work of the golden age, not by new and startling conception, but by the handling of an old and well-worn motive with the grandeur of consummate style. What the genius of Italian sculpture had for generations been striving after, finds its perfect realisation here. It was precisely by thus crowning the endeavours of antecedent artists—by bringing the opening buds of painting and sculpture to full blossom, and exhausting the resources of a long sustained and common inspiration, that the great masters proved their supremacy and rendered an advance beyond their vantage ground impossible. To those who saw and comprehended this "Pietà" in 1500, it must have been evident that a new power of portraying the very soul had been manifested in sculpture—a power unknown to the Greeks because it lay outside the sphere of their spiritual experience, and unknown to modern artists because it was beyond their faculties of execution and conception. Yet who in Rome, among the courtiers of the Borgias, had brain or heart to understand these things?

In 1501 Michael Angelo returned to Florence, where he stayed until the year 1505. This period was fruitful of results on which his after fame depended. The great statue of "David," the two unfinished medallions of Madonna in relief, the "Holy Family of the Tribune" painted for Angelo Doni, and the Cartoon of the "Battle of Pisa" were now produced; and no man's name, not even Lionardo's, stood higher in esteem thenceforward. It will be remembered that Savonarola was now dead, but that his constitution still existed under the presidency of Pietro Soderini—the non mai abbastanza lodato Cavaliere, as Pitti calls him, the anima sciocca of Machiavelli's epigram.^[293] Since Michael Angelo at this time was employed in the service of masters who had superseded his old friends and patrons, it may be well to review here his attitude in general toward the house of Medici. Throughout his lifetime there continued a conflict between the artist and the citizen—the artist owing education and employment to successive members of that house, the citizen resenting their despotism and doing all that in him lay at times to keep them out of Florence. As a patriot, as the student of Dante and the disciple of Savonarola, Michael Angelo detested tyrants.^[294] One of his earliest madrigals, conceived as a dialogue between Florence and her exiles, expresses his mind so decidedly that I have ventured to translate it;^[295] the exiles first address Florence, and she answers:—

As an artist, owing his advancement to Lorenzo, he had accepted favours binding him by ties of gratitude to the Medici, and even involving him in the downfall of their house. For Leo X. he undertook to build the façade of S. Lorenzo and the Laurentian Library. For Clement VII. he began the statues of the Dukes of Urbino and Nemours. Yet, while accepting these commissions from Medicean Popes, he could not keep his tongue from speaking openly against their despotism. After the sack of Prato it appears from his correspondence that he had exposed himself to danger by some expression of indignation.^[296] This was in 1512, when Soderini fled and left the gates of Florence open to the Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici. During the siege of Florence in 1529 he fortified Samminiato, and allowed himself to be named one of the Otto di Guerra chosen for the express purpose of defending Florence against the Medici.^[297] After the fall of the city he made peace with Clement by consenting to finish the tombs of S. Lorenzo. Yet, while doing all he could to save those insignificant dukes from oblivion by the immortality of his art, Michael Angelo was conscious of his own and his country's shame. The memorable lines placed in the mouth of his "Night," sufficiently display his feeling after the final return of the Medici in 1530:^[298]—

When Clement VII. died, the last real representative of Michael Angelo's old patrons perished, and the sculptor was free to quit Florence for ever. During the reign of Duke Cosimo he never set foot in his native city. It is thus clear that the patriot, the artist, and the man of honour were at odds in him. Loyalty obliged him to serve the family to whom he owed so much; he was, moreover, dependent for opportunities of doing great work on the very men whose public policy he execrated. Hence arose a compromise and a confusion, hard to accommodate with our conception of his upright and unyielding temper. Only by voluntary exile, and after age had made him stubborn to resist seductive offers, could Michael Angelo act up to the promptings of his heart and declare himself a citizen who held no truce with tyrants. I have already in this work had occasion to compare Dante, Michael Angelo, and Machiavelli.^[299] In estimating the conduct of the two last, it must not be forgotten that, by the action of inevitable causes, republican freedom had become in Italy a thing of the past; and in judging between Machiavelli and Michael Angelo, we have to remember that the sculptor's work involved no sacrifice of principle or self-respect. Carving statues for the tombs of Medicean dukes was a different matter from dedicating the "Prince" to them.

This digression, though necessary for the right understanding of Michael Angelo's relation to the Medici, has carried me beyond his Florentine residence in 1501-1505. The great achievement of that period was not the "David" but the Cartoon for the "Battle of Pisa."^[300] The hall of the Consiglio Grande had been opened, and one wall had been assigned to Lionardo. Michael Angelo was now invited by the Signory to prepare a design for another side of the state-chamber. When he displayed his cartoon to the Florentines, they pronounced that Da Vinci, hitherto the undisputed prince of painting, was surpassed. It is impossible for us to form an opinion on this matter, since both cartoons are lost beyond recovery.^[301] We only know that, as Cellini says, "while they lasted, they formed the school of the whole world,"^[302] and made an epoch in the history of art. When we inquire what was the subject of Michael Angelo's famous picture, we find that he had aimed at representing nothing of more moment than a group of soldiers suddenly surprised by a trumpet-call to battle, while bathing in the Arno—a crowd of naked men in every posture indicating haste, anxiety, and struggle. Not for its intellectual meaning, not for its colour, not for its sentiment, was this design so highly prized. Its science won the admiration of artists and the public. At this period of the Renaissance the bold and perfect drawing of the body gave an exquisite delight. Hence, perhaps, Vasari's vapid talk about "stravaganti attitudini," "divine figure," "scorticamenti," and so forth—as if the soul of figurative art were in such matters. The science of Michael Angelo, which in his own mind was sternly subordinated to thought, had already turned the weaker heads of his generation.^[303] A false ideal took possession of the fancy, and such criticism as that of Vasari and Pietro Aretino became inevitable.

Meanwhile, a new Pope had been elected, and in 1505 Michael Angelo was once more called to Rome. Throughout his artist's life he oscillated thus between Rome and Florence—Florence the city of his ancestry, and Rome the city of his soul; Florence where he learnt his art, and Rome where he displayed what art can do of highest. Julius was a patron of different stamp from Lorenzo the Magnificent. He was not learned in book-lore: "Place a sword in my hand!" he said to the sculptor at Bologna: "of letters I know nothing." Yet he was no less capable of discerning excellence than the Medici himself, and his spirit strove incessantly after the accomplishment of vast designs. Between Julius and Michael Angelo there existed a strong bond of sympathy due to community of temperament. Both aimed at colossal achievements in their respective fields of action. The imagination of both was fired by large and simple, rather than luxurious and subtle thoughts. Both were uomini terribili, to use a phrase denoting vigour of character made formidable by an abrupt uncompromising temper. Both worked con furia, with the impetuosity of dæmonic natures; and both left the impress of their individuality graven indelibly upon their age.

Julius ordered the sculptor to prepare his mausoleum. Michael Angelo asked, "Where am I to place it?" Julius replied, "In S. Peter's." But the old basilica of Christendom was too small for this ambitious pontiff's sepulchre, designed by the audacious artist. It was therefore decreed that a new S. Peter's should be built to hold it. In this way the two great labours of Buonarroti's life were mapped out for him in a moment. But, by a strange contrariety of fate, to Bramante and San Gallo fell respectively the planning and the spoiling of S. Peter's. It was only in extreme old age that Michael Angelo crowned it with that world's miracle, the dome. The mausoleum, to form a canopy for which the building was designed, dwindled down at last to the statue of "Moses" thrust out of the way in the church of S. Pietro in Vincoli. "La tragedia della Sepoltura," as Condivi aptly terms the history of Giulio's monument, began thus in 1505 and dragged on till 1545.^[304] Rarely did Michael Angelo undertake a work commensurate with his creative power, but something came to interrupt its execution; while tasks outside his sphere, for which he never bargained—the painting of the Sistine Chapel, the façade of S. Lorenzo, the fortification of Samminiato—were thrust upon him in the midst of other more congenial labours. What we possess of his achievement, is a torso of his huge designs.

Giulio's tomb, as he conceived it, would have been the most stupendous monument of sculpture in the world.^[305] That mountain of marble covered with figures wrought in stone and bronze, was meant to be the sculptured poem of the thought of Death; no mere apotheosis of Pope Julius, but a pageant of the soul triumphant over the limitations of mortality. All that dignifies humanity—arts, sciences, and laws; the victory that crowns heroic effort; the majesty of contemplation, and the energy of action—was symbolised upon ascending tiers of the great pyramid; while the genii of heaven and earth upheld the open tomb, where lay the dead man waiting for the Resurrection. Of this gigantic scheme only one imperfect drawing now remains.^[306] The "Moses" and the "Bound Captives"^[307] are all that Michael Angelo accomplished. For forty years the "Moses" remained in his workshop. For forty years he cherished a hope that his plan might still in part be executed, complaining the while that it would have been better for him to have made sulphur matches all his life than to have taken up the desolating artist's trade. "Every day," he cries, "I am stoned as though I had crucified Christ. My youth has been lost, bound hand and foot to this tomb."^[308] It was decreed apparently that Michael Angelo should exist for after ages as a fragment; and such might Pheidias among the Greeks have been, if he had worked for ephemeral Popes and bankrupt princes instead of Pericles. Italy in the sixteenth century, dislocated, distracted, and drained of her material resources, gave no opportunity to artists for the creation of monuments colossal in their unity.

Michael Angelo spent eight months at this period among the stone quarries of Carrara, selecting marble for the Pope's tomb.^[309] There his brain, always teeming with gigantic conceptions, suggested to him a new fancy. Could not the headland jutting out beyond Sarzana into the Tyrrhene Sea be carved by his workmen into a Pharos? To transmute a mountain into a statue, holding a city in either hand, had been the dream of a Greek artist. Michael Angelo revived the bold thought; but to execute it would have been almost beyond his power. Meanwhile, in November 1505, the marble was shipped, and the quays of Rome were soon crowded with blocks destined for the mausoleum. But when the sculptor arrived, he found that enemies had been poisoning the Pope's mind against him, and that Julius had abandoned the scheme of the mausoleum. On six successive days he was denied entrance to the Vatican, and the last time with such rudeness that he determined to quit Rome.^[310] He hurried straightway to his house, sold his effects, mounted, and rode without further ceremony toward Florence, sending to the Pope a written message bidding him to seek for Michael Angelo elsewhere in future than in Rome. It is related that Julius, anxious to recover what had been so lightly lost, sent several couriers to bring him back.^[311] Michael Angelo announced that he intended to accept the Sultan's commission for building a bridge at Pera, and refused to be persuaded to return to Rome. This was at Poggibonsi. When he had reached Florence, Julius addressed, himself to Soderini, who, unwilling to displease the Pope, induced Michael Angelo to seek the pardon of the master he had so abruptly quitted. By that time Julius had left the city for the camp; and when Michael Angelo finally appeared before him, fortified with letters from the Signory of Florence, it was at Bologna that they met. "You have waited thus long, it seems," said the Pope, well satisfied but surly, "till we should come ourselves to seek you." The prelate who had introduced the sculptor now began to make excuses for him, whereupon Julius turned in a fury upon the officious courtier, and had him beaten from his presence. A few days after this encounter Michael Angelo was ordered to cast a bronze statue of Julius for the frontispiece of S. Petronio. The sculptor objected that brass-foundry was not his affair. "Never mind," said Julius; "get to work, and we will cast your statue till it comes out perfect."^[312] Michael Angelo did as he was bid, and the statue was set up in 1508 above the great door of the church. The Pope was seated, with his right hand raised; in the other were the keys. When Julius asked him whether he was meant to bless or curse the Bolognese with that uplifted hand, Buonarroti found an answer worthy of a courtier: "Your Holiness is threatening this people, if it be not wise." Less than four years afterwards Julius lost his hold upon Bologna, the party of the Bentivogli returned to power, and the statue was destroyed. A bronze cannon, called the "Giulia," was made out of Michael Angelo's masterpiece by the best gunsmith of his century, Alfonso Duke of Ferrara.

It seems that Michael Angelo's flight from Rome in 1506 was due not only to his disappointment about the tomb, but also to his fear lest Julius should give him uncongenial work to do. Bramante, if we may believe the old story, had whispered that it was ill-omened for a man to build his own sepulchre, and that it would be well to employ the sculptor's genius upon the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Accordingly, on his return to Rome in 1508, this new task was allotted him. In vain did Michael Angelo remind his master of the months wasted in the quarries of Carrara; in vain he pointed to his designs for the monument, and pleaded that he was not a painter by profession.^[313] Julius had made up his mind that he should paint the Sistine. Was not the cartoon at Florence a sufficient proof that he could do this if he chose, and had he not learned the art of fresco in the bottega of his master Ghirlandajo? Whatever his original reluctance may have been, it was speedily overcome; and the cartoons for the ceiling, projected with the unity belonging to a single great conception, were ready by the summer of 1508.^[314]

The difficulty of his new task aroused the artist's energy. If we could accept the legend, whereby contemporaries expressed their admiration for this Titanic labour, we should have to believe the impossible—that Michael Angelo ground his own colours, prepared his own plaster, and completed with his own hand the whole work, after having first conquered the obstacles of scaffolding and vault-painting by machines of his own invention,^[315] and that only twenty months were devoted to the execution of a series of paintings almost unequalled in their delicacy, and surpassed by few single masterpieces in extent. What may be called the mythus of the Sistine Chapel has at last been finally disproved, partly by the personal observations of Mr. Heath Wilson, and partly by the publication of Michael Angelo's correspondence.^[316] Though some uncertainty remains as to the exact dates of the commencement and completion of the vault, we now know that Michael Angelo continued painting it at intervals during four successive years; and though we are not accurately informed about his helpers, we no longer can doubt that able craftsmen yielded him assistance. On May 10, 1508, he signed a receipt for five hundred ducats advanced by Julius for the necessary expenses of the undertaking; and on the next day he paid ten ducats to a mason for rough plastering and surface-finishing applied to the vault. There is good reason to believe that he began his painting during the autumn of 1508. On November 1, 1509, a certain portion was uncovered to the public; and before the end of the year 1512 the whole was completed. Thus, though the legend of Vasari and Condivi has been stripped of the miraculous by careful observation and keen-sighted criticism, enough remains to justify the sense of wonder that expressed itself in their exaggerated statements. No one but Michael Angelo could have done what he did in the Sistine Chapel. The conception was entirely his own. The execution, except in subordinate details and in matters pertaining to the mason's craft, was also his. The rapidity with which he laboured was astounding. Mr. Heath Wilson infers from the condition of the plaster and the joinings observable in different parts, that the figure of Adam, highly finished as it is, was painted in three days. Nor need we strip the romance from that time-honoured tale of the great master's solitude. Lying on his back beneath the dreary vault, communing with Dante, Savonarola, and the Hebrew prophets in the intervals of labour, locking up the chapel-doors in order to elude the jealous curiosity of rivals, eating but little and scarcely sleeping, he accomplished in sixteen months the first part of his gigantic task.^[317] From time to time Julius climbed the scaffold and inspected the painter's progress. Dreading lest death should come before the work were finished, he kept crying, "When will you make an end?" "When I can," answered the painter. "You seem to want," rejoined the petulant old man, "that I should have you thrown down from the scaffold." Then Michael Angelo's brush stopped. The machinery was removed, and the frescoes were uncovered in their incompleteness to the eyes of Rome.

Entering the Cappella Sistina, and raising our eyes to sweep the roof, we have above us a long and somewhat narrow oblong space, vaulted with round arches, and covered from end to end, from side to side, with a network of human forms. The whole is coloured like the dusky, tawny, blueish clouds of thunderstorms. There is no luxury of decorative art;—no gold, no paint-box of vermilion or emerald green, has been lavished here. Sombre and aërial, like shapes condensed from vapour, or dreams begotten by Ixion upon mists of eve or dawn, the phantoms evoked by the sculptor throng that space. Nine compositions, carrying down the sacred history from the creation of light to the beginning of sin in Noah's household, fill the central compartments of the roof. Beneath these, seated on the spandrils, are alternate prophets and sibyls, twelve in all, attesting to the future deliverance and judgment of the world by Christ. The intermediate spaces between these larger masses, on the roof and in the lunettes of the windows, swarm with figures, some naked and some draped—women and children, boys and young men, grouped in tranquil attitudes, or adapting themselves with freedom to their station on the curves and angles of the architecture. In these subordinate creations Michael Angelo deigned to drop the terrible style, in order that he might show how sweet and full of charm his art could be. The grace of colouring, realised in some of those youthful and athletic forms, is such as no copy can represent. Every posture of beauty and of strength, simple or strained, that it is possible for men to assume, has been depicted here. Yet the whole is governed by a strict sense of sobriety. The restlessness of Correggio, the violent attitudinising of Tintoretto, belong alike to another and less noble spirit.