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MICHELANGELO
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF MICHELANGELO BY MARCELLO VENUSTI
Capitoline Museum, Rome.]
MICHELANGELO
BY
ROMAIN ROLLAND
_Author of "Beethoven," "Jean Christophe," etc._
Translated by FREDERICK STREET
_ILLUSTRATED_
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
DUFFIELD & COMPANY
1921
Copyright, 1915 by
DUFFIELD & COMPANY
NOTE
This life of Michelangelo is published in France in the series called
"Les Maîtres de l'Art," and is here translated into English for the
first time. It is entirely distinct from a study of Michelangelo by
Romain Rolland which appeared some time ago.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION xi
CHAPTER I--CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH (1475-1505) 1
CHAPTER II--MICHELANGELO AND JULIUS II (1505-1512) 26
CHAPTER III--THE FAILURE OF THE GREAT PLANS (1513-1534) 45
CHAPTER IV--VITTORIA COLONNA (1535-1547) 80
CHAPTER V--OLD AGE AND DEATH (1547-1564) 108
CHAPTER VI--THE GENIUS OF MICHELANGELO AND HIS INFLUENCE ON
ITALIAN ART 142
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 169
CATALOGUE OF THE PRINCIPAL WORKS OF MICHELANGELO IN PUBLIC
COLLECTIONS 175
NOTE ON THE DRAWINGS 179
BIBLIOGRAPHY 181
INDEX 185
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Portrait of Michelangelo by Marcello Venusti.
(Capitoline Museum, Rome.) _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Pietà. (St. Peter's, Rome.) 14
David. (Accademia delle Belle Arti, Florence.) 18
The Holy Family. Painted for Agnolo Doni.
(National Gallery, London.) 22
The Almighty Creating the Sun and the Moon.
(Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.) 30
The Creation of Man. (Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.) 36
The Prophet Ezekiel. (Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.) 40
The Libyan Sibyl. (Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.) 46
The Prophet Jeremiah. (Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.) 50
The Erythrean Sibyl. (Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.) 58
Jesse. A Figure in the Series of the "Ancestors of Christ."
(Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.) 64
Decorative Figure. (Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.) 70
Decorative Figure. (Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.) 76
Sketch for the Tomb of Julius II. Drawing. (Uffizi, Florence.) 84
Slave. Figure for the Tomb of Julius II. (Louvre.) 94
Moses. Figure for the Tomb of Julius II.
(San Pietro-in-Vinculi, Rome.) 104
Tomb of Giuliano de Medici.
(Chapel of the Medici in San Lorenzo, Florence.) 114
Dawn. Figure from the Tomb of Lorenzo de' Medici.
(Chapel of the Medici in San Lorenzo, Florence.) 122
Twilight. Figure from the Tomb of Lorenzo de' Medici.
(Chapel of the Medici in San Lorenzo, Florence.) 130
Christ and the Saints. Detail from The Last Judgment.
(Sistine Chapel.) 138
Charon's Boat. Detail from The Last Judgment. (Sistine Chapel.) 146
The Resurrection. Drawing. (Louvre.) 152
The Dome of St. Peter's. From the Original Model in Wood.
(Preserved in the Vatican.) 158
The Descent from the Cross. (Duomo, Florence.) 164
INTRODUCTION
The life of Michelangelo offers one of the most striking examples of the
influence that a great man can have on his time. At the moment of his
birth in the second half of the fifteenth century the serenity of
Ghirlandajo and of Bramante illuminated Italian art. Florentine
sculpture seemed about to languish away from an excess of grace in the
delicate and meticulous art of Rossellino, Disiderio, Mino da Fiesole,
Agostino di Duccio, Benedetto da Maiano and Andrea Sansovino.
Michelangelo burst like a thunder-storm into the heavy, overcharged sky
of Florence. This storm had undoubtedly been gathering for a long time
in the extraordinary intellectual and emotional tension of Italy which
was to cause the Savonarolist upheaval. Nothing like Michelangelo had
ever appeared before. He passed like a whirlwind, and after he had
passed the brilliant and sensual Florence of Lorenzo de' Medici and
Botticelli, of Verocchio and Lionardo, was ended forever. All that
harmonious living and dreaming, that spirit of analysis, that
aristocratic and courtly poetry, the whole elegant and subtle art of the
"Quattrocento," was swept away at one blow. Even after he had been gone
for a long time, the world of art was still whirled along in the eddies
of his wild spirit. Not the most remote corner was sheltered from the
tempest; it drew in its wake all the arts together. Michelangelo
captured painting, sculpture, architecture and poetry, all at once; he
breathed into them the frenzy of his vigour and of his overwhelming
idealism. No one understood him, yet all imitated him. Every one of his
great works, the David, the cartoon for the war against Pisa, the vault
of the Sistine Chapel, the Last Judgment, St. Peter's, dominated
generations of artists and enslaved them. From every one of these
creations radiated despotic power, a power that came above all from
Michelangelo's personality and from that tremendous life which covered
almost a century.
No one work can be detached from that life and studied separately. They
are all fragments of one monument, and the mistake that most historians
make is to mutilate this genius by dividing it into different pieces. We
must try to follow the entire course of the torrent from its beginning
to its end if we are to have any comprehension of its formidable unity.
MICHELANGELO
CHAPTER I
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH
(1475-1505)
Michelangelo was born on the sixth of March, 1475, at Caprese, in
Casentino, of the ancient family of the Buonarroti-Simoni, who are
mentioned in the Florentine chronicles from the twelfth century. His
father, Lodovico di Lionardo Buonarroti-Simoni, was then Podesta of
Caprese and Chiusi. His mother, Francesca di Neri di Miniato del Sera,
died when he was only six years old, and some years later his father
married Lucrezia Ubaldini. Michelangelo had four brothers: Lionardo, who
was two years his senior; Buonarroto, born in 1477; Giovan Simoni, born
in 1479; and Sigismondo, born in 1481. His foster-mother was the wife of
a stone-cutter of Settignano and in later years he used to jokingly
attribute his vocation to the milk upon which he had been nourished. He
was sent to school in Florence under Francesco da Urbino, but he busied
himself only in drawing and neglected everything else. "Because of this
he greatly irritated his father and his uncles, and they often beat him
cruelly, for they hated the profession of an artist, and, in their
ignorance of the nobility of art, it seemed a disgrace to have one in
the house."[1]
The elder Buonarroti, however, was, like his son, more violent than
obstinate, and he soon allowed the boy to follow his vocation. In April,
1488, Michelangelo, by the advice of Francesco Granacci, entered the
studio of Domenico and David Ghirlandajo.
That was the most famous studio in Florence. Domenico was an
indefatigable worker who "longed to cover with stories the entire
circuit of the walls of Florence" and possessed of a calm, simple and
serene spirit, satisfied merely to exist without tormenting itself over
subtleties. This fortunate being, who died at forty-four, leaving an
immense mass of completed work in which the magnificence and the moral
force of Florence still live, was the best guide that could have been
given to the young Michelangelo. Domenico was then, from 1486 to 1490,
in the fulness of his power, and at work on his masterpiece, the
paintings in the Tornabuoni Chapel in S. Maria Novella.
It has been said that his influence on Michelangelo amounted to nothing,
and it is true that we find no direct trace of it except in two drawings
in the Louvre and the Albertina. Still, exact imitation is very rare
with Michelangelo. He was made of too stubborn stuff ever to be much
affected by masters or surroundings. He felt contempt for Raphael
because he was impressionable, "and drew his superiority not from
nature, but from study." I do not believe, however, that the time he
spent in the school of Ghirlandajo had no effect upon him. Even if it
did not influence his style or his method of working, he must have
gained from the master of S. Maria Novella and from his wholesome work a
healthy point of view and a physical and moral vigour which could have
been given him by no other artist in Florence--not even the two great
sculptors, Pollajuolo and Verrocchio, who were indeed not there at that
time--and which acted as a powerful balance to the neuroticism of the
Botticellian school. I do not doubt that Ghirlandajo helped to lay the
foundations from which arose the art of the young Michelangelo devoted
to the expression of force and so contemptuous of morbid sentiment.
Ghirlandajo's school was enthusiastically open-minded toward everything
interesting in art. It was eclectic and encouraged intellectual
curiosity. Michelangelo while he was there studied passionately both the
old and the new Florentine painters and sculptors: Giotto,[2]
Masaccio,[3] Donatello, Ghiberti, Benedetto da Majano, Mino da Fiesole,
Antonio Rossellino and possibly, even at that time, Jacopo della Quercia
and also the Flemish and the German artists, then very much in vogue in
Italy, especially at the court of the Medici.[4] He made a copy in
colour of Martin Schongauer's Temptation of St. Anthony and went to the
Florentine fish-market to take notes for it. Later on he contemptuously
disowned Flemish realism, but a trace of it was left in him always and
in many of his drawings there appears a certain taste, extraordinary in
an idealist, for types of marked naturalism which are sometimes trivial
or almost caricature. Condivi asserts that these first attempts of
Michelangelo met with such success that Ghirlandajo grew jealous.
"To take from him the credit of this copy (of the Schongauer)
Ghirlandajo used to say that it came out of his atelier, as if he had
had a part in it. This jealousy showed very clearly when Michelangelo
asked him for the book of drawings wherein he had sketched shepherds
with their flocks and dogs, landscapes, monuments, ruins, etc., and he
refused to lend it to him. As a matter of fact, he always had the
reputation of being rather jealous, because of his disagreeable
treatment not only of Michelangelo, but also of his own brother, for
when he saw the latter making good progress and showing great promise,
he sent him to France, not so much for his benefit, as has been alleged,
as that he himself might remain first in his art at Florence. I have
mentioned this," adds Condivi, "because it has been said to me that
Domenico's son was in the habit of attributing the divine excellence of
Michelangelo to the training given by his father, who really did not
help him in any way. It is true that Michelangelo never complained of
him, but on the contrary praised him as much for his art as for his
conduct."
It is very difficult to say how much is true in this story. I am
reluctant to ascribe so contemptible a jealousy to Ghirlandajo, and
repeat it only because of the last line where Condivi is constrained to
remark on the esteem which Michelangelo, when he was an old man,
expressed for his former master. Such admiration for other artists is
too rare with him not to have especial weight in this case.
There is no doubt that a disagreement did arise between the master and
the scholar, for though Michelangelo had in 1488 signed a contract of
apprenticeship which stipulated that he should remain three years with
Ghirlandajo,[5] the very next year he went with his friend Granacci into
the school of Bertoldo.
Bertoldo, a pupil of Donatello, was director of the School of Sculpture
and of the Museum of Antiquities maintained by Lorenzo de' Medici in the
gardens of S. Marco. I think that the real reason why Michelangelo
separated himself from Ghirlandajo was that after a year of feeling his
way he had just discovered the essence of his genius and was drawn
toward sculpture with irresistible force. It was really from painting
that he was separating himself and never afterward did he consider it as
his art. We might almost say that if painting has immortalised him it is
in spite of himself. He never wished to be considered as anything but a
sculptor.[6]
Two things drew him to Bertoldo: the hope of finding the tradition of
Donatello and the fascination of the antique. He found something even
more valuable there in the friendship of the prince and of the élite of
the Florentine thinkers. Lorenzo took an interest in him, lodged him in
the palace and admitted him to his son's table, and in this way
Michelangelo found himself at the very heart of the Renaissance, in the
midst of the humanists and the poets and in intimate relation with all
whom Italy counted most noble; with Pico della Mirandola, with Pulci,
Benevieni and especially with Poliziano, "who loved him greatly and
urged him to study, although that was hardly necessary."[7]
Surrounded by this atmosphere of lofty paganism he became intoxicated
with the classic idea and became himself a pagan; he made the heroic
forms of Greece live again while putting into them his own savage
vigour. Following the suggestions of Poliziano he wrought the
bas-relief of the Combat of the Centaurs and the Lapithæ of the Casa
Buonarroti, in which the figures are athletic and struggling and the
faces impassive and proud. He carved the bestial face of the Laughing
Satyr with its violent and strained expression as of one who was not
used to laughter, and a little later the relief of Apollo and Marsyas.
Nevertheless this paganism did not touch his Christian faith at all. The
struggle that was to endure almost all his life had already begun within
him between those two hostile worlds which he vainly tried to reconcile.
In 1489 and 1490 Savonarola began in Florence his fiery sermons on the
Apocalypse and Michelangelo went to hear them with all the rest of
Lorenzo's circle. He had been brought up very religiously by his father,
a kind, God-fearing man of the old style, and his brother Lionardo in
1491, under the influence of Savonarola, entered the Monastery of the
Dominicans at Pisa.
He could not remain indifferent to the burning words of a prophet who
was like an elder brother of the prophets of the Sistine and whose
sombre visions and fiery purity must have pierced the heart of the youth
who listened to the preaching in S. Marco or the Duomo. I am convinced,
nevertheless, that historians have very much exaggerated the effect of
this influence on Michelangelo. In the beginning he certainly did not
feel very strongly the heroic grandeur of the frail little preacher who
from his high pulpit launched his lightnings against pope and princes.
His first impression seems to have been almost entirely one of terror;
he did not escape from the contagion of fear which seized the entire
city at the thunder of the gloomy prophecies which held the bloody sword
of God suspended over Italy and which filled the streets of Florence
with people weeping madly. When at last there came the new Cyrus,
foretold by the monk of S. Marco, Charles VIII, King of France,
Michelangelo was seized with panic and fled to Venice (1494).
These superstitious terrors, irrational and uncontrollable, which
reappeared more than once in Michelangelo's life do not prove anything
in favour of his Savonarolaism. It might be supposed on the contrary
that a true disciple of Savonarola would have remained beside his master
rather than have abandoned him in the hour of danger. These panics which
he could not control prove nothing but the unhealthy over-excitement of
his nerves, which his reason fought against in vain all his life. It
would be hard to find in his work at that period any appreciable effect
of the ideas of Savonarola. The impassive Virgin with the robust
child--the bas-relief in bronze of the Casa Buonarroti--is far more a
school piece by a pupil of Donatello than a religious work. What we know
of the little wooden crucifix, carved in 1494 for the prior of the
Convent of S. Spirito, shows us the artist without mysticism and with a
passion for the observation of nature, who was eagerly studying anatomy
from corpses until their putrefaction made him ill and forced him to
stop. At Bologna, where he lived in 1449 after his flight from Florence,
and where he heard of the results of Savonarola's preachings--the
expulsion of the Medici, the death of Pico della Mirandola and of
Poliziano and the scattering of the little circle of Florentine poets
and philosophers--he spent his time in reading Petrarch, Boccaccio and
Dante to his protector, the noble Gianfrancesco Aldovrandi, and when he
worked at the Arca (tabernacle) of S. Domenico it was to carve that
athletic angel, superb and expressionless, which contrasts so strikingly
with the pious figure of Niccolo dell'Arca to which it is the pendant.
He was evidently much more occupied in studying and assimilating the
imposing manner of Jacopo della Quercia, his indolent and heavy but
powerful Siennese precursor, than in meditating on the prophecies of
Savonarola.
He returned to Florence in 1495, and arrived in the midst of the
struggle of the two parties, the "Arrabtiati" and the "Piagnoni," at
the very height of the carnival. He was consulted about the construction
of the hall of the Grand Council in the Palace of the Signory. The
Virgin of Manchester which suggests the school of Ghirlandajo may be
attributed to this period, and also the Entombment of the National
Gallery, which with all its sad grandeur is proud and cold.
Michelangelo left Florence in June, 1496. He went to Rome and in that
town so full of classic memories he absorbed himself in classic works.
It is fair to say that he was never so pagan as from 1492 to 1497, the
years during which the tragedy of Savonarola was enacted. This is the
period of the colossal Hercules[8] in marble (1492), of the famous
sleeping Cupid, wrought in the very heart of mystical Florence--and sold
as an antique to Cardinal Riaro (1496)--of the large Cupid of the South
Kensington, of the Dying Adonis of the Museo Nazionale and of the
Drunken Bacchus which E. Guillaume calls the nearest to the antique of
all modern works. These last statues, made in Rome the very year of the
_Bruciamento delle Vanità_, when the Florentine "Piagnoni" danced in
fanatic zeal around bonfires of works of art, seem almost like a
defiance launched against the puritanism of Savonarola. His older
brother, Lionardo, a monk at Viterbo, who was forced to flee from his
monastery because of his Savonarolaist convictions, joined him in Rome
and Michelangelo gave him some money with which to return to Florence,
but he did not go with him. The ever-growing danger which threatened the
prophet and his followers did not draw him back to his country and
Savonarola's death--he was burnt in May, 1498--has not left a trace in
any of his letters.[9]
I do not mean to say that he was entirely untouched by that grand and
tragic drama. He was by nature silent and never spoke of what he felt
most deeply, and he was also prudent and afraid of compromising himself.
If Savonarola's ideas did have some influence on him it was at a later
time when, in his advanced age, under the influence of strong and deep
friendships, the disillusions of life and the fear of the hereafter,
religious preoccupations gained with him the place of first importance.
He was not among those who, like Botticelli, in 1498, consented to the
dethronement of the pagan pride of the Renaissance. Religious he
certainly was and a Christian as always, but his proud Christianity was
not that of the rest of the world. He was never understood by his own
time. Even when he was painting the Last Judgment, and his faith was
most ardent, he must have scandalised the devout. He was altogether a
Platonist. He could have said with Lorenzo de' Medici and his
illustrious friends of the gardens of S. Marco that "without studying
Plato one could neither be a good citizen nor an enlightened Christian."
Savonarola undoubtedly admired and loved Plato. Still he felt the object
of art to be religious edification and showed that ideal to artists in
"the face of a pious woman when she is praying, illuminated by a ray of
divine beauty."[10] Michelangelo despised that art made for the devout
and left it to the Flemings.[11] He had a horror of sentimentality and
almost of sentiment. "True painting," he said, "never will make any one
shed a tear."[12]
It should contain no expression of religion or worship, for "good
painting is religious and devout in itself. Among the wise nothing more
elevates the soul or better raises it to adoration than the difficulty
of attaining the perfection which approaches God and unites itself to
Him."[13] He believed himself to be more religious in creating
beautiful, harmonious human bodies than in searching for a psychological
or moral expression intended "for women, especially for the old or the
very young, or for monks, nuns and those who are deaf to true
harmony."[14] The Pietà of St. Peter's, undertaken the year of
Savonarola's death, has a more Christian character than the earlier
works of Michelangelo, but this Christianity is still far from
conforming to the expressive and pathetic ideal of the artists of the
fifteenth century, or from the tragic expression and agony of suffering
of the virgins of Donatello, Signorelli or Mantegna. Very different
indeed is the noble harmony of this group and the calm beauty of the
young Virgin on whose knees rests the supple body of Christ relaxed like
that of a sleeping child. Even though Michelangelo explained the eternal
youth of the Virgin[15] by an idea of chivalric mysticism it is
evident that at that time the desire for beauty was as strong in his
heart as any regard for faith and that there was a certain relationship
between these beautiful Gods of Calvary and those of Olympus whose charm
had intoxicated him.
[Illustration: PIETÀ
St. Peter's, Rome (1498-1500).]
Michelangelo spent two years on the Pietà.[16] In the spring of 1501 he
returned to Florence and there met Cardinal Piccolomini, with whom he
signed a contract to deliver in three years' time, for the sum of five
hundred ducats, fifteen figures of apostles and saints for the
Piccolomini altar in the Cathedral of Sienna. This was the first of
those overpowering commissions which Michelangelo never hesitated to
undertake in the first intoxication of his imagination without any just
estimate of his powers and which weighed on him all his life, like
remorse. In 1504 he had delivered only four of the figures and sixty
years later in 1561 he was still tormented by the thought of this
unfulfilled contract.
Another undertaking, more tempting to him by its very difficulty, took
entire possession of him a few months after he had made the agreement
with Cardinal Piccolomini.
A gigantic block of marble had been delivered in 1464 to Agostino di
Duccio by the Board of Works of S. Maria del Fiore to be used for the
statue of a prophet. The work had been interrupted at this point. The
Gonfalonier Soderini wanted to entrust the completion of it to Lionardo
da Vinci, but in August, 1502, it was given to Michelangelo and he set
to work on it at once. From that block of marble came forth the colossal
David. By January 25, 1504, the work was completed and a commission of
artists among whom were Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, Lionardo da Vinci
and Perugino was considering where it should be placed. They hesitated
between the Loggia dei Lanzi and the entrance of the Palace of the
Signory. The latter position was decided upon at the expressed
preference of Michelangelo. The architects of the Duomo, Simone del
Pollajuolo (Cronaca), Antonio da San Gallo, Baccio d'Agnolo and Bernardo
della Cecca were charged with the transportation of the enormous mass
of stone which was placed in position on the eighth of June, 1504, on
the left of the entrance to the Palazzo Vecchio where until then the
Judith of Donatello had stood.
To-day the David is in the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence. There
it is in too confined a space. That colossus needs the open air, he
stifles under the roof of a Palace and his disproportion to everything
around him is shocking. We can perhaps judge better what he really is
from the reproduction in bronze, which on the hill of San Miniato raises
its inspiring silhouette above the town. There the irregularity of the
details disappears in the impression of the whole. Incredible energy
emanates from that gigantic force in repose--from that great face in the
small head, and from that huge body with the slender waist, thin arms
and the enormous hands with swollen veins and heavy fingers.
All of Michelangelo is there in that mixture of proud nobility and
almost barbarous vulgarity. He is all there, and he only, entirely
regardless of his subject. The head of the David with its wrinkled
forehead, thick eyebrows and scornful lips--a type that he often used
afterward--is, like the heads of Lorenzo and of Giuliano de' Medici, a
lyric work into which Michelangelo poured his own sadness, disdain and
melancholy.
Michelangelo had not waited to finish this work before accepting other
commissions which he was to abandon along the way. In 1502 a David[17]
in bronze for Pierre de Rohan, Maréchal de Gié, the favorite of Louis
XII, which in the end was finished by Benedetto da Rovezzano in 1507 and
sent, after the disgrace of Rohan, to the new royal favourite, Florimond
Robertet, Secretary of Finance.
In 1503 he undertook twelve statues for the Cathedral of Florence, but
began only one, a St. Matthew, which was never finished and is now in
the Accademia delle Belle Arti. His vacillating, uncertain genius,
wherein discouragement succeeded to enthusiasm, drove him into planning
works with fierce energy and then almost immediately so diverted his
attention that he could not force himself to finish them.
[Illustration: DAVID
Accademia delle Belle Arti, Florence.]
In 1504 the Florentine Signory brought him into competition with another
great irresolute, Lionardo da Vinci, whose universal intellectual
curiosity was, no less than the temperament of Michelangelo, an eternal
obstacle to the achievement of his great undertakings. The two men seem
to have met about 1495. They could not have understood each other very
well, for they both stood alone, each in his own way. Lionardo was now
fifty-two years old. When he was thirty he had left Florence, where the
bitterness of the political and religious passions was unbearable to his
delicate and slightly timid nature and to his serene and sceptical
intelligence which was interested in everything but refused to take
sides. Driven back to Florence by the death or ruin of his protectors,
the Duke of Milan and Cæsar Borgia, he came into contact there from the
very first with Michelangelo entirely absorbed in his own faith and
passions, however changing they might be, and who, while he hated the
enemies of his party and of his faith, hated still more those who had
neither party nor faith. Brutally and publicly, on many occasions,
Michelangelo made Lionardo feel his aversion for him.
When the Gonfalonier Soderini put the two in direct competition in a
common work, the decoration of the Council Hall in the Palace of the
Signory, the rivalry was intense. In May, 1504, Lionardo began the
cartoon of the Battle of Anghiari. In August, 1504, Michelangelo
received the order for the cartoon for the Battle of Cascine. Florence
was divided into two camps keenly enthusiastic for one or the other of
the rivals. Time has made them equal, for both pictures have
disappeared. Michelangelo's cartoon, finished in March, 1505, was
apparently destroyed about 1512, during the disturbances in Florence
which resulted from the return of the Medici, and even the fragments
which in 1575 were still preserved by the Strozzi in Mantua have been
lost.[18]
As for Lionardo's fresco, he succeeded in destroying it himself. He took
it into his head to try to perfect the technique of fresco and he gave
himself up once more to his evil spirit of invention and once more
everything was lost. He tried a glaze of oil which did not hold, and the
painting which he abandoned in 1506 in discouragement by 1550 no longer
existed.
The two cartoons of Lionardo and Michelangelo had time, nevertheless, to
exert a blinding fascination over all Italian painting. They formed the
style and influenced the thought of artists from 1506 on but without
being able to transmit their own grandeur. Lionardo, who had a cavalry
combat to represent, reasoned out coldly, as nearly as we can tell,[19]
all the circumstances of a battle and then reproduced them with his
marvellous lucidity which was perhaps a little too analytic to interpret
the excitement of passion.
Michelangelo, who was given an episode of the war of 1364 against the
Pisans under the leadership of the condottiere John Hawkwood (Giovanni
Acuto) had intentionally turned his back on history and the real subject
and painted naked men bathing, noble in form and free in movement, in
the classic manner.[20]
The two masterpieces contained each of them the germ of a different
danger; in Lionardo's the excess of analysis, in Michelangelo's the
excess of abstraction. This last was the most dangerous of the two but
both were of the intellect and agreed in substituting for the charm of
life and of real and spontaneous movement the formula of types and of
logical action.
[Illustration: THE HOLY FAMILY
Painted for Agnolo Doni (between 1501-1505)
National Gallery, London.]
The influence of this work became at once universal and tyrannical.
Benvenuto Cellini says in 1559: "The cartoon of Michelangelo was placed
in the palace of the Medici, that of Lionardo in the Hall of the Pope.
As long as they remained there they were the school of the world."
Raphael copied them many times from October, 1504, until July, 1505. Fra
Bartolommeo was inspired by them and Andrea del Sarto, when he was very
young, spent whole days in studying them. Among the artists who taught
themselves in that school are Perino del Vaga, Rosso, Battista Franco,
Salviati, Vasari, Bronzino, Ridolfo Ghirlandajo, Cellini, Pontormo,
Jacopo Sansovino, Franciabigio, Aristotele da San Gallo, F. Granacci,
Bandinelli, Morto da Feltro, Lorenzetto--almost all the famous men of
the period. This influence was certainly more dangerous than useful. The
first fruits of it were the sudden unpopularity--almost like a decree of
exile of all the charming primitive painters, like Pinturicchio[21]
and Signorelli[22] at Rome (1508) just after their masterpieces at
Sienna and Orvieto and Perugino at Florence (1504) four years after the
exquisite decoration of the _Cambio_ of Perugia--and the loss of so much
grace, elegance and vigour sacrificed to a form of beauty undoubtedly
superior, but to which everyone can not attain. Instead of giving them a
broader point of view, the admiration for Lionardo and Michelangelo
narrowed and limited their followers. During 1508-1509 Pope Julius II
had the frescoes of Sodoma, Perugino, Signorelli and Piero della
Francesca put aside to leave space for Raphael. Thenceforth everyone was
governed by the same ideal, and whoever felt in himself fancy,
imagination and youth gave them up in favour of an attempt at breadth
and power which were not for him. Filippino Lippi renounced his serious
simplicity for pedantic dilettanteism and affected gestures. Instead of
being the first in the second rank Lorenzo di Credi, Ridolfo
Ghirlandajo, Raffaellino del Garbo and Piero di Cosimo preferred to be
the last of the first rank.
The same rivalry which had brought about the competition between
Michelangelo and Lionardo in the Council Hall appears again in a series
of works which belong to this Florentine period (1501-1505). These are
representations of the "Holy Family" in which Michelangelo attempts to
solve the same problem of composition as Lionardo and Fra Bartolommeo in
placing the figures in a circle. Such are the two circular bas-reliefs,
the Madonna and Child of the Museo Nazionale made for Taddeo Taddei and
the Holy Family of the Academy of Fine Arts in London made for
Bartolommeo Pitti. Chief of them all is the great picture in distemper
of the Holy Family of the Uffizi painted for Agnolo Doni--a heroic work
filled with the lofty serene life of Olympus and the Parthenon. The
painting is the most carefully executed of all Michelangelo's. The
colouring, blue, rose, orange and golden brown, has an effect that is
rather inharmonious, but young and fresh. The aerial perspective is
mediocre and the composition shows as usual Michelangelo's supreme
contempt for the sentiment of the subject. He has filled the background
with graceful nude figures simply because he considered them to be
beautiful--"per mostrare maggiormente l'arte sua essere grandissima,"
says Vasari, and except for the type of face used for St. Joseph there
is nothing religious about the group of the Holy Family. The impression
is religious, nevertheless, through its grace, sweetness and proud
strength. We feel that Michelangelo desired to contrast the puritan and
virile sobriety of this work with the voluptuous languor of the art of
Lionardo.
The calm Madonna of Bruges belongs also to this period. This was bought
in 1506 by two Flemish merchants, John and Alexander Mouscron, who
placed it in their chapel where Dürer had already seen it during his
travels in Belgium in 1521.