The overthrow of the pagan religion was the deathblow of pagan Art. The
temples shook to their foundations, the statues of the gods shuddered,
a shadow darkened across the pictured and sculptured world, when
through the ancient realm was heard the wail, “Pan, great Pan is dead.”
The nymphs fled to their caves affrighted. Dryads, Oreads, and Naiads
abandoned the groves, mountains, and streams that they for ages had
haunted. Their voices were heard no more singing by shadowy brooks,
their faces peered no longer through the sighing woods; and of all the
mighty train of greater and lesser divinities and deified heroes to
whom Greece and Rome had bent the knee and offered sacrifice, Orpheus
alone lingered in the guise of the Good Shepherd.
Christianity struck the deathblow not only to pagan Art, but for a time
to all Art. Sculpture and Painting were in its mind closely allied
to idolatry. Under its influence the arts slowly wasted away as with
a mortal disease. With ever-declining strength they struggled for
centuries, gasping as it were for breath, and finally, almost in utter
atrophy, half alive, half dead,—a ruined, maimed, deformed presence,
shorn of all their glory and driven out by the world,—they found a
beggarly refuge and sufferance in some Christian church or monastery.
The noble and majestic statues of the sculptured gods of ancient Greece
were overthrown and buried in the ground, their glowing and pictured
figures were swept from the walls of temples and dwellings, and in
their stead only a crouching, timid race of bloodless saints were seen,
not glad to be men, and fearful of God. Humanity dared no longer to
stand erect, but groveled in superstitious fear, and lashed its flesh
in penance, and was ashamed and afraid of all its natural instincts.
How then was it possible for Art to live? Beauty, happiness, life, and
joy were but a snare and a temptation, and Religion and Art, which can
never be divorced, crouched together in fear.
The long black period of the Middle Ages came to shroud everything in
ignorance. Literature, art, poetry, science, sank into a nightmare of
sleep. Only arms survived. The world became a battlefield, simply for
power and dominion, until religion, issuing from the Church, bore in
its van the banner of chivalry.
But the seasons of history are like the seasons of the year. Nothing
utterly dies. And after the long apparently dead winter of the Middle
Ages the spring came again—the spring of the Renaissance—when liberty
and humanity awoke, and art, literature, science, poesy, all suddenly
felt a new influence come over them. The Church itself shook off
its apathy, inspired by a new spirit. Liberty, long downtrodden and
tyrannized over, roused itself, and struck for popular rights. The
great contest of the Guelphs and Ghibellines began. There was a ferment
throughout all society. The great republics of Italy arose. Commerce
began to flourish; and despite all the wars, contests, and feuds of
people and nobles, and the decimations from plague and disease, art,
literature, science, and religion itself, burst forth into a new and
vigorous life. One after another there arose those great men whose
names shine like planets in history—Dante, with his wonderful “Divina
Commedia,” written, as it were, with a pen of fire against a stormy
background of night; Boccaccio, with his sunny sheaf of idyllic tales;
Petrarca, the earnest lover of liberty, the devoted patriot, the
archæologist and philosopher as well as poet, whose tender and noble
spirit is marked through his exquisitely finished canzone and sonnets,
and his various philosophical works; Villari, the historian; and all
the illustrious company that surrounded the court of Lorenzo the
Magnificent—Macchiavelli, Poliziano, Boiardo, the three Pulci, Leon
Battista Alberti, Aretino, Pico della Mirandola, and Marsilio Ficino;
and, a little later, Ariosto and Tasso, whose stanzas are still sung
by the gondoliers of Venice; and Guarini and Bibbiena and Bembo,—and
many another in the fields of poesy and literature. Music then also
began to develop itself; and Guido di Arezzo arranged the scale and
the new method of notation. Art also sent forth a sudden and glorious
coruscation of genius, beginning with Cimabue and Giotto, to shake off
the stiff cerements of Byzantine tradition in which it had so long been
swathed, and to stretch its limbs to freer action, and spread its wings
to higher flights of power, invention, and beauty. The marble gods,
which had lain dethroned and buried in the earth for so many centuries,
rose with renewed life from their graves, and reasserted over the world
of Art the dominion they had lost in the realm of Religion. It is
useless to rehearse the familiar names that then illumined the golden
age of Italian art, where shine preëminent those of Leonardo, the
widest and most universal genius that perhaps the world has ever seen;
of Michel Angelo, the greatest power that ever expressed itself in
stone or color; of Raffaelle, whose exquisite grace and facile design
have never been surpassed; and of Titian, Giorgione, Veronese, and
Tintoretto, with their Venetian splendors. Nor did science lag behind.
Galileo ranged the heavens with his telescope, and, like a second
Joshua, bade the sun stand still; and Columbus, ploughing the unknown
deep, added another continent to the known world.
This was the Renaissance or new birth in Italy; after the long
drear night of ignorance and darkness, again the morning came and
the glory returned. As Italy above all other lands is the land of
the Renaissance, so Florence above all cities is the city of the
Renaissance. Its streets are haunted by historic associations; at
every corner, and in every byplace or piazza, you meet the spirits
of the past. The ghosts of the great men who have given such a charm
and perfume to history meet you at every turn. Here they walked and
worked centuries ago; here to the imagination they still walk, and
they scarcely seem gone. Here is the stone upon which Dante sat and
meditated,—was it an hour ago or six centuries? Here Brunelleschi
watched the growing of his mighty dome, and here Michel Angelo stood
and gazed at it while dreaming of that other mighty dome of St.
Peter’s which he was afterwards to raise, and said, “Like it I will
not, and better I cannot.” As one walks through the piazza of Sta
Maria Novella, and looks up at the façade that Michel Angelo called
his “sposa,” it is not difficult again to people it with the glad
procession that bore Cimabue’s famous picture, with shouts and pomp
and rejoicing, to its altar within the church. In the Piazza della
Signoria one may in imagination easily gather a crowd of famous men
to listen to the piercing tones and powerful eloquence of Savonarola.
Here gazing up, one may see towering against the sky, and falling as it
were against the trooping clouds, the massive fortress-like structure
of the Palazzo Publico, with its tall machicolated tower, whence the
bell so often called the turbulent populace together; or dropping
one’s eyes, behold under the lofty arches of the Loggia of Orcagna
the marble representations of the ancient and modern world assembled
together,—peacefully: the antique Ajax, the Renaissance Perseus of
Cellini, the Rape of the Sabines, by John of Bologna, and the late
group of Polyxines, by Fedi, holding solemn and silent conclave. In
the Piazza del Duomo at the side of Brunelleschi’s noble dome, the
exquisite campanile of Giotto, slender, graceful, and joyous, stands
like a bride and whispers ever the name of its master and designer.
And turning round, one may see the Baptistery celebrated by Dante, and
those massive bronze doors storied by Ghiberti, which Michel Angelo
said were worthy to be the doors of Paradise. History and romance
meets us everywhere. The old families still give their names to the
streets, and palaces, and _loggie_. Every now and then a marble slab
upon some house records the birth or death within of some famous
citizen, artist, writer, or patriot, or perpetuates the memory of some
great event. There is scarcely a street or a square which has not
something memorable to say and to recall, and one walks through the
streets guided by memory, looking behind more than before, and seeing
with the eyes of the imagination. Here is the Bargello, by turns the
court of the Podestà and the prison of Florence, whence so many edicts
were issued, and where the groans of so many prisoners were echoed.
Here is the Church of the Carmine, where Masaccio and Lippi painted
those frescoes which are still living on its walls, though the hands
that painted and the brains that dreamed them into life are gone
forever. Here are the _loggie_ which were granted only to the fifteen
highest citizens, from which fair ladies, who are now but dust, looked
and laughed so many a year ago. Here are the _piazze_ within whose
tapestried stockades gallant knights jousted in armor, and fair eyes,
gazing from above, “rained influence and adjudged the prize.” Here are
the fortifications at which Michel Angelo worked as an engineer and
as a combatant; and here among the many churches, each one of which
bears on its walls or over its altars the painted or sculptured work
of some of the great artists of the flowering prime of Florence, is
that of the Santa Croce, the sacred and solemn mausoleum of many of
its mighty dead. As we wander through its echoing nave at twilight,
when the shadows of evening are deepening, we may hold communion with
these great spirits of the past. The Peruzzi and Baldi Chapels are
illustrated by the frescoes of Giotto. The foot treads upon many a
slab under which lie the remains of soldier, and knight, and noble,
and merchant prince, who, centuries ago, their labors and battles and
commerce done, were here laid to rest. The nave on either side is lined
with monumental statues of the illustrious dead. Ungrateful Florence,
who drove her greatest poet from her gates to find a grave in Ravenna,
_patriis extorris ab urbe_, here tardily and in penitence raised to him
a monument after vainly striving to reclaim his bones. Here, too, among
others, are the statues and monuments of Michel Angelo, Macchiavelli,
Galileo, Lanzi, Aretino, Guicciardini, Alfieri, Leon Battista Alberti,
and Raffaelle Morghen.
Of all the great men who shed a lustre over Florence, no one so
domineers over it and pervades it with his memory and his presence as
Michel Angelo. The impression he left upon his own age and upon all
subsequent ages is deeper, perhaps, than that left by any other save
Dante. Everything in Florence recalls him. The dome of Brunelleschi,
impressive and beautiful as it is, and prior in time to that of
St. Peter’s, cannot rid itself of its mighty brother in Rome. With
Ghiberti’s doors are ever associated his words. In Santa Croce we all
pause longer before the tomb where his body is laid than before any
other—even that of Dante. The empty place before the Palazzo Vecchio,
where his David stood, still holds its ghost. All places which knew
him in life are still haunted by his memory. The house where he lived,
thought, and worked is known to every pilgrim of art. The least
fragment which his hand touched is there preserved as precious, simply
because it was his; and it is with a feeling of reverence that we enter
the little closet where his mighty works were designed. There still
stands his folding desk, lit by a little slip of a window; and there
are the shelves and pigeon-holes where he kept his pencils, colors,
tools, and books. The room is so narrow that one can scarcely turn
about in it; and the contrast between this narrow, restricted space and
the vastness of the thoughts which there were born, and the extent of
his fame which fills the world, is strangely impressive and affecting.
Here, barring the door behind him to exclude the world, he sat and
studied and wrote and drew, little dreaming that hundreds of thousands
of pilgrims would in after-centuries come to visit it in reverence from
a continent then but just discovered, and peopled only with savages.
But more than all other places, the Church of San Lorenzo is identified
with him; and the Medicean Chapel, which he designed, is more a
monument to him than to those in honor of whom it was built.
Here, therefore, under the shadow of these noble shapes, and in the
silent influence of this solemn place, let us cast a hurried glance
over the career and character of Michel Angelo as exhibited in his life
and his greatest works. To do more than this would be impossible within
the brief limits we can here command. We may then give a glance into
the adjoining and magnificent Hall, which is the real mausoleum of the
Medici, and is singularly in contrast with it.
Michel Angelo was born at Caprese, in the Casentino, near Florence, on
March 6, 1474 or 1475, according as we reckon from the nativity or the
incarnation of Christ. He died at Rome on Friday, February 23, 1564, at
the ripe age of eighty-nine or ninety. He claimed to be of the noble
family of the Counts of Canossa. He certainly was of the family of the
Berlinghi. His father was one of the twelve Buonomini, and was Podestà
of Caprese when Michel Angelo was born. From his early youth he showed
a strong inclination to art, and vainly his father sought to turn him
aside from this vocation. His early studies were under Ghirlandajo.
But he soon left his master to devote himself to sculpture; and he was
wont to say that he “had imbibed this disposition with his nurse’s
milk”—she being the wife of a stone-carver. Lorenzo the Magnificent
favored him and received him into his household; and there under his
patronage he prosecuted his studies, associating familiarly with some
of the most remarkable men of the period, enriching his mind with
their conversation, and giving himself earnestly to the study not
only of art, but of science and literature. The celebrated Angelo
Poliziano, then tutor to the sons of Lorenzo, was strongly attracted
to him, and seems to have adopted him also as a pupil. His early
efforts as a sculptor were not remarkable; and though many stories
are told of his great promise and efficiency, but little weight is
to be given to them. He soon, however, began to distinguish himself
among his contemporaries; and his Cupid and Bacchus, though wanting
in all the spirit and characteristics of antique work, were, for the
time and age of the sculptor, important and remarkable. After this
followed the Pietà, now in St. Peter’s at Rome, in which a different
spirit began to exhibit itself; but it was not till later on that the
great individuality and originality of his mind was shown, when from
an inform block of rejected marble he hewed the colossal figure of
David. He had at last found the great path of his genius. From this
time forward he went on with ever-increasing power—working in many
various arts, and stamping on each the powerful character of his mind.
His grandest and most characteristic works in sculpture and painting
were executed in his middle age. The Sistine Chapel he completed when
he was thirty-eight years old, the stern figure of the Moses when he
was forty, the great sculptures of the Medici Chapel when he was from
fifty to fifty-five; and in his sixty-sixth year he finished the Last
Judgment. Thenceforth his thoughts were chiefly given to architecture,
with excursions into poetry—though during this latter period he painted
the frescoes in the Pauline Chapel; and after being by turns sculptor,
painter, architect, engineer, and poet, he spent the last years of his
life in designing and superintending the erection of St. Peter’s at
Rome.
One of his last works, if not the last, was the model of the famous
cupola of St. Peter’s, which he never saw completed. In some respects
this was departed from in its execution by his successors; but in every
change it lost, and had it been carried out strictly as he designed
it, it would have been even nobler and more beautiful than it is.
Here was a long life of ceaseless study, of untiring industry, of
never-flagging devotion to art. Though surrounded by discouragements
of every kind, harassed by his family, forced to obey the arbitrary
will of a succession of Popes, and, in accordance with their orders,
to abandon the execution of his high artistic conceptions and waste
months and years on mere mechanic labor in superintending mines and
quarries—driven against his will, now to be a painter when he desired
to be a sculptor, now to be an architect when he had learned to be
a painter, now as an engineer to be employed on fortifications when
he was longing for his art; through all the exigencies of his life,
and all the worrying claims of patrons, family, and country, he kept
steadily on, never losing courage even to the end—a man of noble
life, high faith, pure instincts, great intellect, powerful will, and
inexhaustible energy; proud and scornful, but never vain; violent of
character, but generous and true,—never guilty through all his long
life of a single mean or unworthy act: a silent, serious, unsocial,
self-involved man, oppressed with the weight of great thoughts, and
burdened by many cares and sorrows. With but a grim humor, and none
of the lighter graces of life, he went his solitary way, ploughing a
deeper furrow in his age than any of his contemporaries, remarkable as
they were,—an earnest and unwearied student and seeker, even to the
last.
It was in his old age that he made a drawing of himself in a child’s
go-cart with the motto “Ancora imparo”—I am still learning. And one
winter day toward the end of his life, the Cardinal Gonsalvi met him
walking down towards the Colosseum during a snowstorm. Stopping his
carriage, the Cardinal asked where he was going in such stormy weather.
“To school,” he answered “to try to learn something.”
Slowly, as years advanced, his health declined, but his mind retained
to the last all its energy and clearness; and many a craggy sonnet
and madrigal he wrote towards the end of his life, full of high
thought and feeling—struggling for expression, and almost rebelliously
submitting to the limits of poetic form; and at last, peacefully, after
eighty-nine long years of earnest labor and never-failing faith, he
passed away, and the great light went out. No! it did not go out; it
still burns as brightly as ever across these long centuries to illumine
the world.
Fitly to estimate the power of Michel Angelo as a sculptor, we must
study the great works in the Medicean Chapel in the Church of San
Lorenzo, which show the culmination of his genius in this branch of art.
The original church of San Lorenzo was founded in 930, and is one of
the most ancient in Italy. It was burned down in 1423, and reërected in
1425 by the Medici from Brunelleschi’s designs. Later, in 1523, by the
order of Leo X., Michel Angelo designed and began to execute the new
sacristy, which was intended to serve as a mausoleum to Giuliano dei
Medici, Duke of Nemours, brother of Leo X., and younger son of Lorenzo
the Magnificent; and to Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, and grandson of the
great Lorenzo. Within this mausoleum, which is now called the Medici
Chapel, were placed the statues of Giuliano and Lorenzo. They are both
seated on lofty pedestals, and face each other on opposite sides of
the chapel. At the base of one, reclining on a huge sarcophagus, are
the colossal figures of Day and Night, and at the base of the other
the figures of Aurora and Crepuscule. This chapel is quite separated
from the church itself. You enter from below by a dark and solemn
crypt, beneath which are the bodies of thirty-four of the family,
with large slabs at intervals on the pavement, on which their names
are recorded. You ascend a staircase, and go through a corridor into
this chapel. It is solemn, cold, bare, white, and lighted from above
by a lantern open to the sky. There is no color, the lower part being
carved of white marble, and the upper part and railings wrought in
stucco. A chill comes over you as you enter it; and the whole place is
awed into silence by these majestic and solemn figures. You at once
feel yourself to be in the presence of an influence, serious, grand,
impressive, and powerful, and of a character totally different from
anything that sculpture has hitherto produced, either in the ancient
or modern world. Whatever may be the defects of these great works, and
they are many and evident, one feels that here a lofty intellect and
power has struggled, and fought its way, so to speak, into the marble,
and brought forth from the insensate stone a giant brood of almost
supernatural shapes. It is not nature that he has striven to render,
but rather to embody thoughts, and to clothe in form conceptions
which surpass the limits of ordinary nature. It is idle to apply here
the rigid rules of realism. The attitudes are distorted, and almost
impossible. No figure could ever retain the position of the Night at
best for more than a moment, and to sleep in such an attitude would be
scarcely possible. And yet a mighty burden of sleep weighs down this
figure, and the solemnity of night itself broods over it. So also the
Day is more like a primeval titanic form than the representation of a
human being. The action of the head, for instance, is beyond nature.
The head itself is merely blocked out, and scarcely indicated in its
features. But this very fact is in itself a stroke of genius; for the
suggestion of mystery in this vague and unfinished face is far more
impressive than any elaborated head could have been. It is supposed
he left it thus, because he found the action too strained. So be
it; but here is Day still involved in clouds, but now arousing from
its slumbers, throwing off the mists of darkness, and rising with a
tremendous energy of awakening life. The same character also pervades
the Aurora and Crepuscule. They are not man and woman, they are types
of ideas. One lifts its head, for the morning is coming; one holds its
head abased, for the gloom of evening is drawing on. There is no joy
in any of these figures. A terrible sadness and seriousness oppresses
them. Aurora does not smile at the coming of the light, is not glad,
has little hope, but looks upon it with a terrible weariness, almost
with despair—for it sees little promise, and doubts far more than it
hopes. Twilight, again, almost disdainfully sinks to repose. The day
has accomplished almost nothing: oppressed and hopeless, it sees the
darkness close about it.
What Michel Angelo meant to embody in these statues can only be
guessed—but certainly no trivial thought. Their names convey nothing.
It was not beauty, or grace, or simple truth to nature, that he sought
to express. In making them, the weight of this unexplained mystery of
life hung over him; the struggle of humanity against superior forces
oppressed him. The doubts, the despair, the power, the indomitable will
of his own nature are in them. They are not the expressions of the
natural day of the world, of the glory of the sunrise, the tenderness
of the twilight, the broad gladness of day, or the calm repose of
night; but they are seasons and epochs of the spirit of man—its doubts
and fears, its sorrows and longings and unrealized hopes. The sad
condition of his country oppressed him. Its shame overwhelmed him. His
heart was with Savonarola, to whose excited preaching he had listened,
and his mind was inflamed by the hope of a spiritual regeneration
of Italy and the world. The gloom of Dante enshrouded him, and the
terrible shapes of the “Inferno” had made deeper impression on his
nature than all the sublimed glories of the “Paradiso.” His colossal
spirit stood fronting the agitated storms of passions which then shook
his country, like a rugged cliff that braves the tempest-whipped
sea—disdainfully casting from its violent and raging waves, and longing
almost with a vain hope for the time when peace, honor, liberty, and
religion should rule the world.
This at least would seem to be implied in the lines he wrote under his
statue of Night, in response to the quatrain written there by Giovan’
Battista Strozzi. These are the lines of Strozzi:—
“La notte che tu vedi in si dolci atti
Dormire, fu da an angelo scolpita
In questo sasso; e, perchè dorme, ha vita
Destala, se no ’l credi, e parleratti.”