THE PAPAL PAYMASTERS
Among its numerous artists of beauty Renaissance Italy produced one man
who did not find life a garden of pleasure; one man who, when he sinned,
did not do it with easy grace and cheerful heart; a man who faced the
mysteries of life, and took seriously the terrors which the medieval
mind has conjured for itself. This man was a rebel against the wanton
and cruel spirit of his age; a rebel also against nature, those
cruelties which time and death inflict upon our race. He was a lonely
man, pursued by the jealousies and greeds of his rivals, tortured by his
own sensuality and by fears of eternal torment. He lived a life of
futile and agonized revolt, and produced some magnificent and terrible
art.
In this book it is our task to study the artist in relation to the
masters of money; and we shall find no more tragic illustrations of the
waste that is wrought in the life of genius by the powers of greed, than
are revealed to us in the story of Michelangelo Buonarroti. He is ranked
as one of the greatest sculptors of all time; he was also one of the
greatest of painters, and a great poet. Like most of those who have
visioned the sublime and the colossal, he was a man of frail physique,
fear-haunted all his life. As a child he was beaten by his father, who
sought to break him of the desire to become an artist. At the age of
nine he was taken to hear the thunderings of Savonarola, another frail
prophet who had arisen to denounce the vices of the church in Florence.
When Michelangelo was twenty-three, Savonarola was publicly hanged,
after having been excommunicated by the Borgia pope. The young painter
at that time was beguiling himself with Greek beauty; but the terrible
fate of the prophet cannot have failed to impress him, and helps to
account for the religious fervors of his later years. Two worlds
struggled in his soul, the world of pagan beauty and luxurious pleasure,
and the world of heavenly raptures and fanatical asceticism.
This artist’s abilities were quickly recognized. The same pope, Julius
II, who was showering Raphael with golden ducats, adopted Michelangelo
as his chief glorifier, and the two of them spent a year or two
preparing colossal plans for the pope’s tomb, something greater than any
tomb ever seen on earth before, a perfect mountain of marble, with more
than forty statues of colossal size. Here we see Michelangelo’s fate;
one of the great masters of life, with a mighty message concerning the
destiny of man, he is obliged to get the money by which he lives, and
the marble which he carves, from a vain and greedy politician in
churchly raiment. He is permitted to make statues of David and of Moses,
of Day and Night and Morning and Evening, and other great symbolic
ideas; but he must carve them for the tomb of some pope or potentate,
and must spend the greater part of his life in quarreling--not merely
with this pope or potentate, but with officials and subordinates, all
hating, intriguing, threatening to stab or to poison.
In the sentimental rubbish which historians and art critic’s write about
the Middle Ages, we are told that mighty cathedrals and temples were
produced by the co-operative devotion and reverence of whole communities
of worshipers. When you come to investigate the facts, you find that
they were produced amid a chaos of wrangling and cheating and lying,
exactly as a modern public building, or a battleship, or a fleet of
aeroplanes is produced. The chief architect of Pope Julius II was a
dissipated and murderous rascal, who was putting rotten walls into the
Vatican buildings--walls which have had to be repaired incessantly ever
since. He carried on intrigues against Michelangelo, and succeeded in
persuading the pope that it was bad luck for anyone to build his own
tomb while he was alive. So the pope dropped the project, and
Michelangelo was left in debt, having to pay out of his own pocket the
costs of transporting the mountain of marble. The sculptor stormed the
Vatican and insisted upon being paid, and the pope had him put out by a
groom.
Next he was required to make a bronze statue of his most holy pope. He
protested that he did not know anything about casting bronze, but he
worked at it for more than a year, making a wretched failure of it, and
ruining his health. Then he was ordered to paint the ceiling of the
Sistine Chapel. He protested that he did not know how to paint ceilings,
it was hard and exhausting work; but again the pope insisted, and
Michelangelo spent four years at this, painting his colossal and
terrifying symbols upside down. Because he took so long at it, the pope
was enraged, insisting upon seeing the work and criticizing it, flying
into a fury and beating Michelangelo with his staff, then sending a
messenger with five hundred ducats to salve his feelings.
Julius II died and Leo X came in. Michelangelo had made a new contract
with the heirs of the dead pope to complete the tomb, and had started
work on thirty-two colossal statues. But the new pope wanted
Michelangelo’s fame for himself, and so for ten years the poor sculptor
was pulled and hauled between two rival groups. It was the fashion of
other sculptors and painters, when thus loaded down with work, to hire a
number of assistants and put the job through in a hurry. But
Michelangelo suffered from conscientiousness; he thought that nobody
else could do his work as he wanted it done, and he sweated and agonized
and groaned under the burden of these contracts. More marble was needed,
and he was dragged about between the rival owners of marble quarries.
The unsuccessful owners intrigued with the boatmen to make it impossible
for the marble to be moved; just like a certain teamsters’ strike which
I had occasion to investigate in Chicago some twenty years ago--the
riots and mobbings and showers of brick-bats and broken heads and
bullet-riddled bodies were caused by a great mail-order house having
paid for a strike against a rival mail-order house!
There came another pope, this time a Medici. He wanted a tomb to his
ancestors, who were splendid and wealthy merchants in Florence. Also
there was to be a colossus in the Medici gardens, a difficult matter,
because of the lack of room; Michelangelo discussed the problem in a
letter to a friend, which has come down to us. Read this picture of a
man of genius trying to please a wealthy and fastidious patron:
I have thought about the Colossus; I have indeed thought a great
deal about it. It seems to me that it would not be well placed
outside the Medici gardens because it would take up too much room
in the street. A better place, I think, would be where the barber’s
shop is. There it would not be so much in the way. As for the
expenses of expropriation, I think to reduce them we could make the
figure seated, and as it could be hollowed, the shop could be
placed inside so the rent would not be lost. It seems to me a good
idea to put in the hand of the Colossus a horn of abundance, and
this could be hollow and would serve as a chimney. The head could
also be made use of, I should think; for the poultryman, my very
good friend who lives on the square, said to me secretly that it
would make a wonderful dovecote. I have another and still better
idea--but in that case the statue must be made very much larger,
which would not be impossible, for towers are made with stone--and
that is that the head should serve as a bell-tower to S. Lorenzo,
which now has none. By placing the bells so that the sound would
come out of the mouth it would seem as if the giant cried for
mercy, especially on holidays when they use the big bells.
Michelangelo was in Florence when the republican revolution against the
Medici took place. The artist sympathized with the revolutionists,
against his patrons; he proposed to make for the revolutionists a
gigantic statue of David and Goliath, but they decided he had better use
his energies in fortifying the walls! When the city was taken, and the
slaughter of the rebels began, Michelangelo hid for a month or two. Then
he was commanded to come forth and resume his task of glorifying his
conquerors! He did so, and was put to work on the tomb of the Medici.
Needless to say, the figures on the tomb are not figures of serene
contentment and spiritual peace! Romain Rolland describes them as an
“outburst of despair” whereby the sculptor “drowned his shame at raising
this monument of slavery.”
Another pope came, and wanted Michelangelo for his chief glorifier. The
artist pleaded his old contracts, but the pope was furious, and
commanded him to tear them up. He was put to work on the ceiling of the
Sistine Chapel, and the result was the marvelous painting, “The Last
Judgment,” in which all the terrors and torments of the Middle Ages are
summed up. It was one of the world’s greatest paintings; but the pious
of the time were shocked, and the pope put some of his other painters
to putting panties on the nude saints. From time to time other shocked
ecclesiastics had this or that article of clothing painted into the
picture; and because they used any color they happened to have lying
about, we can now form little idea of Michelangelo’s vision of the Day
of Doom.
All this time the artist was being hounded by the heirs of his first
pope; but the present pope insisted that he should be the architect of
St. Peter’s; so here we see the old man, over seventy, still fighting
the grafters and hounded by conspirators. It appears that in Renaissance
Rome, when a grafter was caught, and threatened to expose his
fellow-grafters, he was shot, and the world was told that he had
committed suicide; exactly as it happens in Washington, D. C., in these
our days of oil-thieves and bootleggers! Michelangelo was still afraid,
as he had been all his life; but he was still more afraid of God, and
determined to finish St. Peter’s as a means of saving his soul at the
Last Judgment.
So he stuck and fought the grafters. There came yet another pope--the
artist had to win each one in turn, thwarting a whole new set of
intriguing enemies. We find him at the age of eighty-eight, exposing
thieves who are building the walls of St. Peter’s out of rotten
materials--and around him the thieves are stabbing each other. At last,
at the age of ninety, he lies on his death-bed, his terrific labors at
an end; and between his dying gasps he confides to a friend his one
regret, that he has to die just when he has succeeded in learning the
alphabet of his art!