Therefore to him a well-shaped hand, or throat, or head, a neck superbly poised on an athletic chest, the sway of the trunk above the hips, the starting of the muscles on the flank, the tendons of the ankle, the outline of the shoulder when the arm is raised, the backward bending of the loins, the curves of a woman's breast, the contours of a body careless in repose or strained for action, were all words pregnant with profoundest meaning, whereby fit utterance might be given to the thoughts that raise man near to God. But, it may be asked, what poems of action as well as feeling are to be expressed in this form-language? The answer is simple. Paint or carve the body of a man, and, as you do it nobly, you will give the measure of both highest thought and most impassioned deed. This is the key to Michael Angelo's art. He cared but little for inanimate nature. The landscapes of Italy, so eloquent in their sublimity and beauty, were apparently a blank to him. His world was the world of ideas, taking visible form, incarnating themselves in man. One language the master had to serve him in all need—the language of plastic human form; but it was to him a tongue as rich in its variety of accent and of intonation as Beethoven's harmonies.

In the Sistine Chapel, where plastic art is so supreme, we are bound to ask the further question. What was the difference between Michael Angelo and a Greek? The Parthenon with its processions of youths and maidens, its gods and heroes, rejoicing in their strength, and robed with raiment that revealed their living form, made up a symphony of meaning as full as this of Michael Angelo, and far more radiant. The Greek sculptor embraced humanity in his work no less comprehensively than the Italian; and what he had to say was said more plainly in the speech they both could use. But between Pheidias and Michael Angelo lay Christianity, the travail of the world through twenty centuries. Clear as morning, and calm in the unconsciousness of beauty, are those heroes of the youth of Hellas. All is grace, repose, strength shown but not asserted. Michael Angelo's Sibyls and Prophets are old and wrinkled, bowed with thought, consumed by vigils, startled from tranquillity by visions, overburdened with the messages of God. The loveliest among them, the Delphic, lifts dilated eyes, as though to follow dreams that fly upon the paths of trance. Even the young men strain their splendid limbs, and seem to shout or shriek, as if the life in them contained some element of pain. "He maketh his angels spirits, and his ministers a flame of fire:" this verse rises to our lips when we seek to describe the genii that crowd the cornice of the Sistine Chapel. The human form in the work of Pheidias wore a joyous and sedate serenity; in that of Michael Angelo it is turbid with a strange and awful sense of inbreathed agitation. Through the figure-language of the one was spoken the pagan creed, bright, unperturbed, and superficial. The sculpture of the Parthenon accomplished the transfiguration of the natural man. In the other man awakes to a new life of contest, disillusionment, hope, dread, and heavenward striving. It was impossible for the Greek and the Italian, bearing so different a burden of prophecy, even though they used the same speech, to tell the same tale; and this should be remembered by those critics who cast exaggeration and contortion in the teeth of Michael Angelo. Between the birth of the free spirit in Greece and its second birth in Italy, there yawned a sepulchre wherein the old faiths of the world lay buried and whence Christ had risen.^[318]

After the death of Julius, Leo X., in character the reverse of his fiery predecessor, and by temperament unsympathetic to the austere Michael Angelo, found nothing better for the sculptor's genius than to set him at work upon the façade of S. Lorenzo at Florence. The better part of the years between 1516 and 1520 was spent in quarrying marble at Carrara, Pietra Santa, and Seravezza. This is the most arid and unfruitful period of Michael Angelo's long life, a period of delays and thwarted schemes and servile labours. What makes the sense of disappointment greater, is that the façade of S. Lorenzo was not even finished.^[319] We hurry over this wilderness of wasted months, and arrive at another epoch of artistic production.

Already in 1520 the Cardinal Giulio de' Medici had conceived the notion of building a sacristy in S. Lorenzo to receive the monuments of Cosimo, the founder of the house, Lorenzo the Magnificent, Giuliano Duke of Nemours, Lorenzo Duke of Urbino, Leo X., and himself.^[320] To Michael Angelo was committed the design, and in 1521 he began to apply himself to the work. Nine years had now elapsed since the roof of the Sistine chapel had been finished, and during this time Michael Angelo had produced little except the "Christ" of S. Maria sopra Minerva. This new undertaking occupied him at intervals between 1521 and 1534, a space of time decisive for the fortunes of the Medici in Florence. Leo died, and Giulio after a few years succeeded him as Clement VII. The bastards of the house, Ippolito and Alessandro, were expelled from Florence in 1527. Rome was sacked by the Imperial troops; then Michael Angelo quitted the statues and helped to defend his native city against the Prince of Orange. After the failure of the Republicans, he was recalled to his labours by command of Clement. Sullenly and sadly he quarried marbles for the sacristy. Sadly and sullenly he used his chisel year by year, making the very stones cry that shame and ruin were the doom of his country. At last in 1534 Clement died. Then Michael Angelo flung down his mallet. The monuments remained unfinished, and the sculptor set foot in Florence no more.^[321]

The Sacristy of S. Lorenzo was built by Michael Angelo and panelled with marbles to receive the sculpture he meant to place there.^[322] Thus the colossal statues of Giuliano and Lorenzo were studied with a view to their light and shadow as much as to their form; and this is a fact to be remembered by those who visit the chapel where Buonarroti laboured both as architect and sculptor. Of the two Medici, it is not fanciful to say that the "Duke of Urbino" is the most immovable of spectral shapes eternalised in marble; while the "Duke of Nemours," more graceful and elegant, seems intended to present a contrast to this terrible thought-burdened form.^[323] The allegorical figures, stretched on segments of ellipses beneath the pedestals of the two dukes, indicate phases of darkness and of light, of death and life. They are two women and two men; tradition names them "Night" and "Day," "Twilight" and "Dawning." Thus in the statues themselves and in their attendant genii we have a series of abstractions, symbolising the sleep and waking of existence, action and thought, the gloom of death, the lustre of life, and the intermediate states of sadness and of hope that form the borderland of both. Life is a dream between two slumbers; sleep is death's twin-brother; night is the shadow of death; death is the gate of life:—such is the mysterious mythology wrought by the sculptor of the modern world in marble. All these figures, by the intensity of their expression, the vagueness of their symbolism, force us to think and question. What, for example, occupies Lorenzo's brain? Bending forward, leaning his chin upon his wrist, placing the other hand upon his knee, on what does he for ever ponder? The sight, as Rogers said well, "fascinates and is intolerable." Michael Angelo has shot the beaver of the helmet forward on his forehead, and bowed his head, so as to clothe the face in darkness. But behind the gloom there is no skull, as Rogers fancied. The whole frame of the powerful man is instinct with some imperious thought. Has he outlived his life and fallen upon everlasting contemplation? Is he brooding, injured and indignant, over his own doom and the extinction of his race? Is he condemned to witness in immortal immobility the woes of Italy he helped to cause? Or has the sculptor symbolised in him the burden of that personality we carry with us in this life and bear for ever when we wake into another world? Beneath this incarnation of oppressive thought there lie, full-length and naked, the figures of Dawn and Twilight, Morn and Evening. So at least they are commonly called: and these names are not inappropriate; for the breaking of the day and the approach of night are metaphors for many transient conditions of the soul. It is only as allegories in a large sense, comprehending both the physical and intellectual order, and capable of various interpretation, that any of these statues can be understood. Even the Dukes do not pretend to be portraits: and hence in part perhaps the uncertainty that has gathered round them. Very tranquil and noble is Twilight: a giant in repose, he meditates, leaning upon his elbow, looking down. But Dawn starts from her couch, as though some painful summons had reached her sunk in dreamless sleep, and called her forth to suffer. Her waking to consciousness is like that of one who has been drowned, and who finds the return to life agony. Before her eyes, seen even through the mists of slumber, are the ruin and the shame of Italy. Opposite lies Night, so sorrowful, so utterly absorbed in darkness and the shade of death, that to shake off that everlasting lethargy seems impossible. Yet she is not dead. If we raise our voices, she too will stretch her limbs and, like her sister, shudder into sensibility with sighs. Only we must not wake her; for he who fashioned her, has told us that her sleep of stone is great good fortune. Both of these women are large and brawny, unlike the Fates of Pheidias in their muscular maturity. The burden of Michael Angelo's thought was too tremendous to be borne by virginal or graceful beings. He had to make women no less capable of suffering, no less world-wearied, than his country.

Standing before these statues, we do not cry. How beautiful! We murmur, How terrible, how grand! Yet, after long gazing, we find them gifted with beauty beyond grace. In each of them there is a palpitating thought, torn from the artist's soul and crystallised in marble. It has been said that architecture is petrified music. In the sacristy of S. Lorenzo we feel impelled to remember phrases of Beethoven. Each of these statues becomes for us a passion, fit for musical expression, but turned like Niobe to stone. They have the intellectual vagueness, the emotional certainty, that belong to the motives of a symphony. In their allegories, left without a key, sculpture has passed beyond her old domain of placid concrete form. The anguish of intolerable emotion, the quickening of the consciousness to a sense of suffering, the acceptance of the inevitable, the strife of the soul with destiny, the burden and the passion of mankind:—that is what they contain in their cold chisel-tortured marble. It is open to critics of the school of Lessing to object that here is the suicide of sculpture. It is easy to remark that those strained postures and writhen limbs may have perverted the taste of lesser craftsmen. Yet if Michael Angelo was called to carve Medicean statues after the sack of Rome and the fall of Florence—if he was obliged in sober sadness to make sculpture a fit language for his sorrow-laden heart—how could he have wrought more truthfully than thus? To imitate him without sharing his emotions or comprehending his thoughts, as the soulless artist of the decadence attempted, was without any doubt a grievous error. Surely also we may regret, not without reason, that in the evil days upon which he had fallen, the fair antique "Heiterkeit" and "Allgemeinheit" were beyond his reach.

Michael Angelo left the tombs of the Medici unfinished; nor, in spite of Duke Cosimo's earnest entreaties, would he afterwards return to Florence to complete them. Lorenzo's features are but rough-hewn; so is the face of Night. Day seems struggling into shape beneath his mask of rock, and Twilight shows everywhere the tooth-dint of the chisel. To leave unfinished was the fate of Michael Angelo—partly too, perhaps, his preference; for he was easily deterred from work. Many of his marbles are only just begun. The two medallion "Madonnas," the "Madonna and Child" in S. Lorenzo, the "Head of Brutus," the "Bound Captives," and the "Pietà" in the Duomo of Florence, are instances of masterpieces in the rough. He loved to fancy that the form dwelt within the stone, and that the chisel disencumbered it of superfluity. Therefore, to his eye, foreseeing what the shape would be when the rude envelope was chipped away, the marble mask may have taken the appearance of a veil or mantle. He may have found some fascination in the incompleteness that argued want of will but not of art, and a rough-hewn Madonna may have been to him what a Dryad still enclosed within a gnarled oak was to a Greek poet's fancy. We are not, however, justified in therefore assuming, as a recent critic has suggested, that Michael Angelo sought to realise a certain preconceived effect by want of finish. There is enough in the distracted circumstances of his life and in his temper, at once passionate and downcast, to account for fragmentary and imperfect performance; nor must it be forgotten that the manual labour of the sculptor in the sixteenth century was by no means so light as it is now. A decisive argument against this theory is that Buonarroti's three most celebrated statues—the "Pietà" in S. Peter's, the "Moses" and the "Dawn"—are executed with the highest polish it is possible for stone to take.^[324] That he always aimed at this high finish, but often fell below it through discontent and ennui and the importunity of patrons, we have the best reason to believe.

Michael Angelo had now reached his fifty-ninth year. Lionardo and Raphael had already passed away, and were remembered as the giants of a bygone age of gold. Correggio was in his last year. Andrea del Sarto was dead. Nowhere except at Venice did Italian art still flourish; and the mundane style of Titian was not to the sculptor's taste. He had overlived the greatness of his country, and saw Italy in ruins. Yet he was destined to survive another thirty years, another lifetime of Masaccio or Raphael, and to witness still worse days. When we call Michael Angelo the interpreter of the burden and the pain of the Renaissance, we must remember this long weary old age, during which in solitude and silence he watched the extinction of Florence, the institution of the Inquisition, and the abasement of the Italian spirit beneath the tyranny of Spain. His sonnets, written chiefly in this latter period of life, turn often on the thought of death. His love of art yields to religious hope and fear, and he bemoans a youth and manhood spent in vanity. Once when he injured his leg by a fall from the scaffolding in the Sistine Chapel, he refused assistance, shut himself up at home, and lay waiting for deliverance in death. His life was only saved by the forcible interference of friends.

In 1534 a new Eurystheus arose for our Hercules. The Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, a fox by nature and infamous through his indulgence for a vicious bastard, was made Pope under the name of Paul III.^[325] Michael Angelo had shed lustre on the reigns of three Popes, his predecessors. For thirty years the Farnese had watched him with greedy eyes. After Julius, Leo, and Clement, the time was now come for the heroic craftsman to serve Paul. The Pope found him at work in his bottega on the tomb of Julius; for the "tragedy of the mausoleum" still dragged on. The statue of Moses was finished. "That," said Paul, "is enough for one Pope. Give me your contract with the Duke of Urbino; I will tear it. Have I waited all these years; and now that I am Pope at last, shall I not have you for myself? I want you in the Sistine Chapel." Accordingly Michael Angelo, who had already made cartoons for the "Last Judgment" in the life of Clement, once more laid aside the chisel and took up the brush. For eight years, between 1534 and 1542, he laboured at the fresco above the high altar of the chapel, devoting his terrible genius to a subject worthy of the times in which he lived. Since he had first listened while a youth to the prophecies of Savonarola, the woes announced in that apocalypse had all come true. Italy had been scourged, Rome sacked, the Church chastised. And yet the world had not grown wiser; vice was on the increase, virtue grew more rare.^[326] It was impossible after the experience of the immediate past and within view of the present and the future, to conceive of God as other than an angry judge, vindictive and implacable.

The "Last Judgment" has long been the most celebrated of Michael Angelo's paintings; partly no doubt because it was executed in the plenitude of his fame, with the eyes of all Italy upon him; partly because its size arouses vulgar wonder, and its theme strikes terror into all who gaze on it. Yet it is neither so strong nor so beautiful as the vault-paintings of the Sistine. The freshness of the genius that created Eve and Adam, unrivalled in their bloom of primal youth, has passed away. Austerity and gloom have taken possession of the painter. His style has hardened into mannerism, and the display of barren science in difficult posturing and strained anatomy has become wilful. Still, whether we regard this fresco as closing the long series of "Last Judgments" to be studied on Italian church-walls from Giotto downwards; or whether we confine our attention, as contemporaries seem to have done, to the skill of its foreshortenings and groupings;^[327] or whether we analyse the dramatic energy wherewith tremendous passions are expressed, its triumph is in either case decided. The whole wall swarms with ascending and descending, poised and hovering, shapes—men and women rising from the grave before the judge, taking their stations among the saved, or sinking with unutterable anguish to the place of doom—a multitude that no man can number, surging to and fro in dim tempestuous air. In the centre at the top, Christ is rising from His throne with the gesture of an angry Hercules, hurling ruin on the guilty. He is such as the sins of Italy have made Him. Squadrons of angels, bearing the emblems of His passion, whirl around Him like grey thunder-clouds, and all the saints lean forward from their vantage ground to curse and threaten. At the very bottom bestial features take the place of human lineaments, and the terror of judgment has become the torment of damnation. Such is the general scope of this picture. Of all its merits, none is greater than the delineation of uncertainty and gradual awakening to life. The middle region between vigilance and slumber, reality and dream, Michael Angelo ruled as his own realm; and a painting of the "Last Judgment" enabled him to deal with this metaichmios skotos—this darkness in the interval of crossing spears—under its most solemn aspect.

When the fresco was uncovered, there arose a general murmur of disapprobation that the figures were all nude. As society became more vicious, it grew nice. Messer Biagio, the Pope's master of the ceremonies, remarked that such things were more fit for stews and taverns than a chapel. The angry painter placed his portrait in Hell with a mark of infamy that cast too lurid a light upon this prudish speech. When Biagio complained, Paul wittily answered that, had it been Purgatory, he might have helped him, but in Hell is no redemption. Even the foul-mouthed and foul-hearted Aretino wrote from Venice to the same effect—a letter astounding for its impudence.^[328] Michael Angelo made no defence. Perhaps he reflected that the souls of the Pope himself and Messer Biagio and Messer Pietro Aretino would go forth one day naked to appear before the judge, with the deformities of sin upon them, as in Plato's "Gorgias." He refused, however, to give clothes to his men and women. Daniel da Volterra, who was afterwards employed to do this, got the name of breeches-maker.

We are hardly able to appreciate the "Last Judgment;" it has been so smirched and blackened by the smoke and dust of centuries. And this is true of the whole Sistine Chapel.^[329] Yet it is here that the genius of Michael Angelo in all its terribleness must still be studied. In order to characterise the impression produced by even the less awful of these frescoes on a sympathetic student, I lay my pen aside and beg the reader to weigh what Henri Beyle, the versatile and brilliant critic, pencilled in the gallery of the Sistine Chapel on January 13, 1807:^[330] "Greek sculpture was unwilling to reproduce the terrible in any shape; the Greeks had enough real troubles of their own. Therefore, in the realm of art, nothing can be compared with the figure of the Eternal drawing forth the first man from nonentity. The pose, the drawing, the drapery, all is striking: the soul is agitated by sensations that are not usually communicated through the eyes. When in our disastrous retreat from Russia, it chanced that we were suddenly awakened in the middle of the dark night by an obstinate cannonading, which at each moment seemed to gain in nearness, then all the forces of a man's nature gathered close around his heart; he felt himself in the presence of fate, and, having no attention left for things of vulgar interest, he made himself ready to dispute his life with destiny. The sight of Michael Angelo's pictures has brought back to my consciousness that almost forgotten sensation. Great souls enjoy their own greatness: the rest of the world is seized with fear, and goes mad."

After the painting of the "Last Judgment," one more great labour was reserved for Michael Angelo.^[331] By a brief of September, 1535, Paul III. had made him the chief architect as well as sculptor and painter of the Holy See. He was now called upon to superintend the building of S. Peter's, and to this task, undertaken for the repose of his soul without emolument, he devoted the last years of his life. The dome of S. Peter's, as seen from Tivoli or the Alban hills, like a cloud upon the Campagna, is Buonarroti's; but he has no share in the façade that screens it from the piazza. It lies beyond the scope of this chapter to relate once more the history of the vicissitudes through which S. Peter's went between the days of Alberti and Bernini.^[332] I can but refer to Michael Angelo's letter addressed to Bartolommeo Ammanati, valuable both as setting forth his views about the structure, and as rendering the fullest and most glorious meed of praise to his old enemy Bramante.^[333] All ancient jealousies, even had they ever stirred the heart of Michael Angelo, had long been set at rest by time and death. The one wish of his soul was to set a worthy diadem upon the mother-church of Christianity, repairing by the majesty of art what Rome had suffered at the hands of Germany and Spain, and inaugurating by this visible sign of sovereignty the new age of Catholicity renascent and triumphant.

To the last period of Buonarroti's life (a space of twenty-two years between 1542 and 1564) we owe some of his most beautiful drawings—sketches for pictures of the Crucifixion made for Vittoria Colonna, and a few mythological designs, like the "Rape of Ganymede," composed for Tommaso Cavalieri. His thoughts meanwhile were turned more and more, as time advanced, to piety; and many of his sonnets breathe an almost ascetic spirit of religion.^[334] We see in them the old man regretting the years he had spent on art, deploring his enthusiasm for earthly beauty, and seeking comfort in the cross alone.

It is pleasant to know that these last years were also the happiest and calmest. Though he had lost his faithful friend and servant Urbino; though his father had died, an old man, and his brothers had passed away before him one by one, his nephew Lionardo had married in Florence, and begotten a son called Michael Angelo. Thus he had the satisfaction of hoping that his name would endure and flourish, as indeed it has done almost to this very day in Florence. What consolation this thought must have brought him, is clear to those who have studied his correspondence and observed the tender care and continual anxiety he had for his kinsmen.^[335] Wealth now belonged to him: but he had never cared for money; and he continued to live like a poor man, dressing soberly and eating sparely, often taking but one meal in the day, and that of bread and wine.^[336] He slept little, and rose by night to work upon his statues, wearing a cap with a candle stuck in front of it, that he might see where to drive the chisel home. During his whole life he had been solitary, partly by preference, partly by devotion to his art, and partly because he kept men at a distance by his manner.^[337] Not that Michael Angelo was sour or haughty; but he spoke his mind out very plainly, had no tolerance for fools, and was apt to fly into passions.^[338] Time had now softened his temper and removed all causes of discouragement. He had survived every rival, and the world was convinced of his supremacy. Princes courted him; the Count of Canossa was proud to claim him for a kinsman; strangers, when they visited Rome, were eager to behold in him its greatest living wonder.^[339] His old age was the serene and splendid evening of a toilsome day. But better than all this, he now enjoyed both love and friendship.

If Michael Angelo could ever have been handsome is more than doubtful. Early in his youth the quarrelsome and vain Torrigiani broke his nose with a blow of the fist, when they were drawing from Masaccio's frescoes in the Carmine together.^[340] Thenceforth the artist's soul looked forth from a sad face, with small grey eyes, flat nostrils, and rugged weight of jutting brows. Good care was thus taken that light love should not trifle with the man who was destined to be the prophet of his age in art. Like Beethoven, he united a loving nature, sensitive to beauty and desirous of affection, with a rude exterior. He seemed incapable of attaching himself to any merely mortal object, and wedded the ideal. In that century of intrigue and amour, we hear of nothing to imply that Michael Angelo was a lover till he reached the age of sixty. How he may have loved in the earlier periods of his life, whereof no record now remains, can only be guessed from the tenderness and passion outpoured in the poems of his latter years. That his morality was pure and his converse without stain, is emphatically witnessed by both Vasari and Condivi.^[341] But that his emotion was intense, and that to beauty in all its human forms he was throughout his life a slave, we have his own sonnets to prove.

In the year 1534 he first became acquainted with the noble lady Vittoria, daughter of Fabrizio Colonna, and widow of the Marquis of Pescara. She was then aged forty-four, and had nine years survived the loss of a husband she never ceased to idolise.^[342] Living in retirement in Rome, she employed her leisure with philosophy and poetry. Artists and men of letters were admitted to her society. Among the subjects she had most at heart was the reform of the Church and the restoration of religion to its evangelical purity. Between her and Michael Angelo a tender affection sprang up based upon the sympathy of ardent and high-seeking natures. If love be the right name for this exalted and yet fervid attachment, Michael Angelo may be said to have loved her with all the pent-up forces of his heart. None of his works display a predilection for girlish beauty, and it is probable that her intellectual distinction and mature womanhood touched him even more than if she had been younger. When they were together in Rome they met frequently for conversation on the themes of art and piety they both held dear. Of these discourses a charming record has been preserved to us by the painter Francis of Holland.^[343] When they were separated they exchanged poems and wrote letters, some of which remain. On the death of Vittoria, in 1547, the light of life seemed to be extinguished for our sculptor. It is said that he waited by her bed-side, and kissed her hand when she was dying. The sonnets he afterwards composed show that his soul followed her to heaven.

Another friend whom Michael Angelo found in this last stage of life, and whom he loved with only less warmth than Vittoria, was a young Roman of perfect beauty and of winning manners. Tommaso Cavalieri must be mentioned next to the Marchioness of Pescara as the being who bound this greatest soul a captive.^[344] Both Cavalieri and Vittoria are said to have been painted by him, and these are the only two portraits he is reported to have executed. It may here be remarked that nothing is more characteristic of his genius than the determination to see through nature, to pass beyond the actual to the abstract, and to use reality only as a stepping-stone to the ideal. This artistic Platonism was the source both of his greatness and his mannerism. As men choose to follow Blake or Ruskin, they may praise or blame him; yet, blame and praise pronounced on such a matter with regard to such a man are equally impertinent and insignificant. It is enough for the critic to note with reverence that thus and thus the spirit that was in him worked and moved.