VITTORIA COLONNA
(1535-1547)
Michelangelo, worn out and discouraged, returned definitely to Rome on
September 23, 1534, and there he remained until his death. He was in a
condition of great mental unrest, his heart hungry for love. This was
the period of those strange violent and mystical passions for beautiful
young men like Gherardo Perini, Febo di Poggio and, most loved of all
and most worthily so, Tommaso dei Cavalieri. These attachments, about
which most historians have preferred to be silent, were an almost
religious delirium of love for the divinity of beauty and hold an
important place in the work of Michelangelo. It is to their inspiration
that most of his love-poems are due. For a long time this was either not
known or a stupid and unfortunate attempt was made to conceal it. Even
in 1623 Michelangelo's grandnephew in his first edition of the "Rime"
did not dare publish the poems to Tommaso dei Cavalieri with their real
titles, but dedicated them to a woman. This error persisted until Cæsare
Guasti, in his edition of 1863, re-established the exact text, but
nevertheless did not dare admit that Tommaso dei Cavalieri was a real
person and forced himself to believe that Vittoria Colonna was concealed
under the fictitious name. Mezières in his "L'OEuvre et la Vie de
Michelange," published in 1876, repeated this same mistake, which was
only finally denounced and corrected by Scheffler and Symonds in 1878.
Tommaso dei Cavalieri, according to Vasari and Varchi, was "a young
Roman gentleman, devoted to art and of incomparable personal beauty,"
whom Michelangelo met in the autumn of 1532. It is in 1533-1534 that
this friendship reached its height and inspired his most ardent poems
and letters. Cavalieri remained a faithful friend to Michelangelo to his
very last hour, at which indeed he was present. He made use of this
friendship only for the good of his friend. Not only did he take devoted
care of the old man in his last years, but he saw to the carrying out of
his wishes while he was alive and after his death. It was he who
persuaded him to complete the wooden model of the dome of St. Peter's
and who preserved his plans for the construction of the Capitol. Their
names would always be associated together even if his beauty had not
inspired some of Michelangelo's most perfect sonnets.[51]
All these attachments, however, were to be eclipsed by his friendship
with Vittoria Colonna. She was the daughter of Fabrizio Colonna, Lord of
Paliano, Prince of Tagliacozzo, and of Agnesena di Montefeltro, daughter
of the great Federigo, Duke of Urbino. She had married Ferrante
Francesco d'Avalos, Marquis di Pescara, the victor of Pavia, who treated
her badly, but whom she loved. A widow since 1525, she had turned for
consolation to religion and poetry. Her sonnets, in which she sang her
idealised love, had been well known throughout Italy since 1530 and had
won for her a fame unique among the women of her day. She was a friend
of all the great poets and great writers: Bembo, Castiglione who
entrusted to her the manuscript of his "Cortegiano," Ariosto who
celebrated her in his Orlando, Paul Jove, Bernardo Tasso and Ludovico
Dolce. But after 1534 religion absorbed her and she was carried away by
the movement for the reform and regeneration of the Catholic Church.
Although she was a friend of all the men who personified in Italy this
spirit of religious freedom, Cardinal Contarini and Cardinal Pole,
Giberti, Sadolet, Bernadino Ochino, Pietro Carnesecchi, and in touch
with Renée of Ferrara and Marguerite of Navarre, yet she could not, like
many of her friends, break away from the church of Rome, and later she
sacrificed her sympathies to her faith.
Michelangelo knew her about 1535, but their friendship did not really
begin until the end of 1538. She was then forty-six years old and he was
sixty-three.
It was a serious and devout friendship. They met on Sundays in the
church of S. Silvestro at Monte Cavallo, and there they had those noble
discussions which the Portuguese painter, Francis of Holland, has
preserved for us in his four "Dialogues sur la Peinture," which took
place in Rome in 1538-1539 and were written in 1548.
Then Vittoria, driven by her religious doubts, left Rome in 1541, to
retire first to Orvieto to the cloister of S. Paolo and later to Viterbo
to the cloister of S. Caterina near Cardinal Pole, her friend and
spiritual guide. She returned to Rome from time to time to see
Michelangelo and she wrote to him. We have only a very few of these
letters which Michelangelo sacredly preserved. They are affectionate,
but cold, and we feel that she was much more detached from him than he
was from her. He often complains that she does not answer him. She wrote
him:
"Magnificent Messer Michelangelo--I did not reply earlier to your letter
because it was, as one might say, an answer to my last; for I thought
that if you and I were to go on writing without intermission according
to my obligation and your courtesy, I should have to neglect the Chapel
of S. Catherine here, and be absent at the appointed hours for company
with my sisterhood, while you would have to leave the Chapel of S. Paul,
and be absent from morning through the day from your sweet usual
colloquy with painted forms, the which with their natural accents do not
speak to you less clearly than the living persons around me speak to me.
Thus we should both of us fail in our duty, I to the brides, you to the
vicar of Christ. For these reasons, inasmuch as I am well assured of our
steadfast friendship and affection, bound by knots of Christian
kindness, I do not think it necessary to obtain the proof of your
good-will in letters by writing on my side, but rather to await with
well-prepared mind some substantial occasion for serving you. Meanwhile
I address my prayers to that Lord of whom you spoke to me with so
fervent and humble a heart when I left Rome, that when I return thither
I may find you with His image renewed and enlivened by true faith in
your soul, in like measure as you have painted it with perfect art in my
Samaritan.[52] Believe me to remain always yours and your Urbino's."
[Illustration: SKETCH FOR THE TOMB OF JULIUS II
Drawing. Uffizi, Florence.]
In this way she merely made use of her powers to soothe her friend's
spirit and to stimulate him to work. Most of all she relit that light of
faith which had never ceased to burn in his soul, although enveloped in
a night of doubt and despair. Besides "The Samaritan Woman at the Well,"
which is spoken of in the letter from Vittoria, Michelangelo made for
her a drawing of a descent from the cross with these words of Dante,
"Non vi si pensa, quaneo sangue costa," and a tragic crucifixion in
which Jesus writhes as he implores Heaven. Perhaps the two admirable
drawings of the Resurrection in the Louvre and the British Museum are of
this same period.
Vittoria, in sending him, after 1539, her Sonetti Spirituali, also
opened before his poetical genius another path to immortality.
Ever since his childhood he had made verses from an impelling need of
expression. He covered his drawings, his letters and loose sheets of
paper with thoughts in verse which he took up again and again, corrected
and worked over ceaselessly. We have only a very few of these poems of
his youth, for he burned many of them in 1518 with some drawings. He did
not think them of value until he met the banker Luigi del Riccio and
Donato Giannotti, who advised him to publish a collection of them.
Donato took the matter up seriously about 1545. Michelangelo made a
selection from his poems and his friends recopied them. But the death of
Riccio in 1546 and perhaps also that of Vittoria in 1547 distracted him
from this thought of worldly fame, and the poems remained unpublished
until his death. Nevertheless they were passed from hand to hand and the
most famous composers of the time, G. Archadelt, Bartolommeo
Tromboncino, Costanzo Festa, Consilium--Italians, Frenchmen and
Flemings--set his madrigals to music. Cultured people admired them, and
Varchi, reading and commenting on one of these sonnets in 1546 before
the Academy of Florence, declared that it had the clarity of the
classic and the richness of the thought of Dante.
Michelangelo was in fact nourished on Dante. "No one understood him
better or knew his works more perfectly," says Donato Giannotti, who
placed him as arbiter in his dialogues on Dante in 1545.[53]
Michelangelo dedicated to Dante one of his most beautiful sonnets in
which he envied his exile and his glory:
Fuss'io pur lui! c'a tal fortuna nato,
Per l'aspro esilio suo con la virtute
Dare' del mundo il più felice stato.[54]
He knew equally well all the other classics of Italian lyric poetry,
Cavalcanti, Cino da Pistoia and Petrarch. His style is wrought from
theirs, but his thought is entirely his own.
"You speak words only, but he speaks in deeds," wrote Francesco Berni to
the poets of his time.
Tacete umquanco pallide viole
Et liquidi cristalli et fere snelli:
Et dice cose, e voi dite parole.[55]
It is true that this was not achieved without a great obscurity of
thought, remarked even by his contemporaries and which to us often makes
their reading very difficult.
"He writes what Phoebus, Euterpe and the divine fury dictate to him, and
afterward he hardly understands what he has written," says Lodovico
Martelli.[56]
The sonnet form cramped him, and characteristically he loved that form
because of its difficulty. He always delighted in doing violence to his
genius and in making himself suffer. His poetry has often been compared
to his sculpture. We can almost see him, as in Mariette's account,[57]
making the chips of marble fly under his chisel or tearing from the
block of his thought the idea that is haunting him, leaving it scarcely
freed from the matrix. Frey, in his admirable edition, which is the only
exact one of the "Rime" of Michelangelo, reveals the heroic fury with
which he composed. He strikes only the main chord on his instrument,
nothing more--no development, no variations. His dominant emotion once
expressed, there is nothing more to say, the idea is exhausted. Most of
his poems have remained in the condition of blocked-out torsos.
The most beautiful of these verses were written under the inspiration
of Vittoria Colonna and the religious ideas which she revived in him.
Separated from each other, they exchanged sonnets; she sent him forty
from Viterbo[58] and he answered her in verse.[59]
In 1544 Vittoria returned to Rome to live in the cloister of S. Anna and
remained there until her death on February 25, 1547. Her death
prostrated Michelangelo. "He remained for a long time stupefied and out
of his senses," says Condivi. But the faith which she had given back to
him never again left him. The death of his friend only deepened it, and
the two strange and powerful sonnets which celebrate that death[60] are
a hymn of triumphant faith and love.
When Michelangelo finally left Florence in 1534 and went to settle in
Rome he expected to be at last free and able to discharge his debt to
the memory of Julius II. But no sooner was the new pope elected than he
hastened to attach Michelangelo to himself. He was Paulo III Farnese, "a
choleric man, ambitious, daring, full of intelligence and cunning,
ostentatious, one of the last great popes of the Renaissance and the one
who perhaps did the most to beautify Rome, the great builder among the
popes of the sixteenth century."[61]
He summoned Michelangelo, overwhelmed him with promises, and asked him
to work for him.
Michelangelo wanted to decline, alleging as excuse his old contracts
with the heirs of Julius II, but Paul III was furious and declared that
he would tear up all those contracts and that Michelangelo should work
for him in spite of everything. Michelangelo thought of taking flight to
Urbino or to Genoa to his friend, the bishop of Almeria, but he gave in
as usual, too weak to resist. The pope, who came with ten of his
cardinals to see the statues already completed for the monument of
Julius II, went into ecstasies over them, especially over the Moses, of
which the Cardinal of Mantua said that "that figure alone would be
enough to honour the memory of Pope Julius," and he was even more
determined than before to reserve Michelangelo exclusively for his own
plans.
On September 1, 1535, he appointed him by official letters
architect-in-chief, sculptor and painter to the Apostolic Palace with a
salary for life of twelve hundred golden crowns a year, of which six
hundred were the revenue (uncertain and at once contested) of a
toll-bridge on the Po near Placentia.[62]
Ever since April, 1535, Michelangelo had agreed to work on the Last
Judgment. The idea of completing the decoration of the Sistine Chapel
with that fresco originated with Clement VII, who had already talked to
Michelangelo about it in 1533. At that time the plan also included a
Fall of Lucifer[63] on the entrance wall of the Sistine.
The first thing to be done was to destroy the frescoes of Perugino which
covered the great wall below the altar.[64]
This did not, of course, trouble Michelangelo, who despised Perugino and
called him a "blockhead." He worked on the Last Judgment from 1536 to
1541.[65]
While he was working at it probably in 1539 he fell from the scaffold
and injured himself seriously in the leg. Still he completed his immense
task by December 25, 1541, the day when the public was admitted to see
it.
No one of his works has been more diversely judged. Before considering
it at all, we should remember that it was the work of an old man between
sixty and sixty-six. The vitality which this "terrible" man still
possessed after a life of exhausting labours and troubles is, whatever
we may think of the work, something superhuman. The first thing which
strikes us in that colossal fresco twenty metres high and ten wide and
swarming with hundreds of figures, is order, reason and imperious will,
controlled and almost cold. The innumerable human bodies, a throng which
produces at first a sense of stifling discomfort, are gathered in a
dozen groups which balance each other and are all drawn along in a
dizzying whirl from right to left around the Christ.
If we turn to the drama itself we are overwhelmed by an impression of
brutal force. Force alone rules. There is no soul; nothing but
unreasoning physical force and the terror of it. The moment chosen is
terrible. Through the thunder of the trumpets blown to bursting by the
angels, the herculean Christ curses.
"Now there is no longer any time for pity or room for pardon."[66]
Before that implacable gesture which launches eternal death all the army
of gigantic bodies swerves and bows, a prey to one feeling--that of
fear; crushing, horrible fear relieved by no reasoning thought, a fear
of blows like that of a dog under the whip. The tremendous vigour of
these trembling athletes throws more harshly into relief their abject
helplessness. The martyrs in order to recall to the Master their claims
on His mercy exhibit servilely the instruments of their martyrdom. St.
Laurence covers himself with his gridiron; St. Blaise waves his rack;
St. Bartholomew holds out his bloody skin and lifts his bare knife with
such ferocity that he appears rather to be the flayer than the flayed.
The Virgin withdraws into the background so as not to see. Abel hides
behind Adam, and one of his sisters throws herself, terrified, on Eve's
knees and buries her face in the arms of her mother. The tempest howls
above. The heavy flight of angels rolls through space, head over heels,
bearing with an exaggerated and forced violence the column, the cross
and the instruments of the Passion. Below at the right is a savage mêlée
of souls and angels in a hand-to-hand struggle. At the left the bodies
rise heavily from Purgatory like inflated balloons drawn up by the sun.
At the bottom is the monstrous harvest of the earth giving up its dead;
Hell, full of the atrocious horror of suffering and the still more
atrocious joy of creating suffering. "Charon with eyes like burning
coals, who smites with his oars." The maddened damned, crowded together
like a herd of sheep, demons grabbing shrieking souls who hide their
eyes and ears with horror, the falling of bodies which come down like
masses of lead, and in the extreme right-hand corner Minos, evil and
undisturbed.
There is in such a work a mass of wrath, vengeance and hate which is
suffocating. If it was not purified by colossal and almost elementary
force it would be insupportable.
[Illustration: SLAVE
Figure for the tomb of Julius II (1513-1516). Louvre.]
This, then, is what the Prophets and the Sibyls are looking forward to,
this is what the convulsive agony of the paintings of the ceiling
predicts. This implacable conclusion of human history conformed
perfectly to the essence of Christian thought, but the expression of
it was so audacious and so stripped of all compromise that it revolted
the majority of Christians, whom Michelangelo, aristocratic in his faith
as in his whole spirit, never considered at all.
It was not only Biagio da Cesena,[67] Master of Ceremonies to Paul III,
who declared the painting to be "improper"--"opera da stufe o d'osterie"
(work fit only for a bagnio or an inn), but the majority of Catholic
opinion agreed. Aretino sounded the alarm. He might not seem to be very
well qualified to do this, but he wanted to revenge himself on
Michelangelo, who had not shown that regard for him which the Master
Singer knew how to exact even from kings.[68] The author of "The
Hypocrite,"[69] the prototype of Tartuffe, was also the model.
"Messire," he wrote in November, 1545, "as a baptised man I am ashamed
of the license which you have permitted yourself in expressing your
conception of that end toward which turn all the aspirations of our true
faith. Now behold that this Michelangelo, a man of such astounding fame
and universally admired, has exposed to the world as much impiety and
irreligion as perfection of painting. Is it possible that you, who,
being divine, do not condescend to have commerce with men, is it
possible that you have done this in the greatest temple of God, above
the highest altar of Christ, in the most sacred chapel in the world,
where the great hinges of the church, the venerable pontiffs, the Vicars
of Christ, by the Catholic ceremonies and holy prayers confess,
contemplate and adore His body and blood? In so lofty a representation
you draw saints and angels, the first without any terrestrial decency
and the others deprived of all celestial honours. Remember the Pagans,
who, when they made statues of Diana, clothed her and even made the
naked Venus cover with her hands those parts which should not be shown,
and behold here a Christian, who, placing art above faith, holds it a
royal spectacle not to observe equal decency toward the martyrs and the
virgins, and shows gestures so coarse that even women of the street
would shut their eyes so as not to see them. Such a style belongs only
in a voluptuous bagnio and not in the most holy chapel. It would be a
lesser crime not to believe than to attack in such a way the faith of
others. Already the excellence of these indiscreet wonders has been
punished, since they have accomplished the miracle of killing your
glory. Therefore regain your honour by placing flames of fire over the
shameful parts of the damned, and rays of sunlight over those of the
saved, or, still better, imitate the modesty of the Florentines, who hid
under golden leaves the belly of your beautiful colossal David, even
though that stood in a public square and not in a sacred place. May God
forgive you. I do not say this to you through resentment at not having
received what I asked you for, although you should have sent me what you
agreed, and you would have done well to have taken the greatest possible
trouble about it, for you would in that way put an end to the rumours
which say that no one can get anything from you but Gherardi and
Tomai.[70] But if the treasure which Julius II left you so that his
remains should be placed in a monument carved by you, has not been
enough to make you keep your promises, what could I expect? Anyway, it
is a fact that your failure to redeem that debt is considered as a
theft.... But since our souls have more need of faith than of
lifelikeness of drawing, may God inspire his Holiness, Paul III, as He
inspired the blessed Gregory who decided to strip Rome of the superb
statues of the idols rather than to do harm through them to the respect
due to the humble images of the saints! Finally, to sum up, if you had
taken counsel in your composition of the universe, the abyss and
paradise of the glorious and terrible sketch which I sent you and of my
instructions, and of the knowledge which the world has so praised in me,
I dare say that no one would have regretted it."[71]
This venomous letter was, unluckily, not a simple act of vengeance and
of blackmail. It was the hypocritical echo of many sincere
protestations. A Florentine in 1549 called Michelangelo "the creator of
that vileness, irreproachable in art but not in faith," and he added,
"All the modern painters and sculptors imitate such Lutheran
abominations.[72] They paint and carve even in the least important
churches only such figures as are calculated to destroy faith and
devotion; but I hope that some day God will send His saints to overthrow
such idolatries." The trial of Veronese in a certain measure justifies
these accusations. Brought before the Inquisition on July 18, 1573, for
the indecency of his Feast in the House of Simon, Veronese did not fail
to intrench himself behind the example of the Last Judgment.[73] It is
true that the Inquisition undertook nobly the defense of Michelangelo
against him.
"Do you not know that in representing the Last Judgment, in which we can
not imagine any clothing, there was no ground for painting any? But what
is there in those figures that is not inspired by the Holy Spirit? There
are neither buffoons nor dogs, nor arms or other mockeries...."
But Rome had not so lofty a spirit; the ideas of Biagio and Aretino made
their way. Neither the European glory of Michelangelo nor his favour
with the popes nor the respect inspired by the nobility of his life and
his well-known faith succeeded in protecting the Last Judgment from the
zeal of the bigots. Paul IV Caraffa had for a while the idea of
covering up the entire fresco. By his order Daniele da Volterra clothed
the nakedness which wounded Aretino's modesty (in 1559-1560) and gained
for this the surname of "Braghettone."
Under Pius V in 1566 Girolamo da Fano continued this holy work. This was
not enough to satisfy the wrath of the good people, for in 1596 Clement
VIII Aldobrandini again wanted to have the Judgment painted out. He was
prevented by a protest from the Academy of St. Luke.[74] Indeed, until
the eighteenth century the work of Michelangelo was shamelessly
redressed, retouched and repainted.[75] It is therefore impossible to
judge to-day exactly of the original appearance and especially of the
colour, the harmony of which has been outrageously destroyed.[76]
Michelangelo, unmoved, watched the mutilation of his work. He was asked
his opinion, and he answered without anger and with calm contempt: "Say
to his Holiness that this is a little thing which can easily be put in
order. Let him attend to putting the world in order; to reform a
painting is not much trouble."
In spite of everything the Last Judgment was the school of the world.
Men came from all over Italy and from abroad to be present at its
unveiling on December 25, 1541. Hosts of Italian, French, Flemish and
German artists followed each other without respite through the Sistine
Chapel, copying zealously the entire fresco, and the glory of
Michelangelo, far from being diminished as Aretino predicted, became
colossal on account of it.
"That sublime painting," writes Vasari, "should serve as a model in our
art. Divine Providence made this present to the world to show how much
intelligence she could bestow on certain men whom she sends to the
earth. The most learned draughtsman will tremble when he sees those bold
outlines and those marvellous foreshortenings. In the presence of that
celestial work our senses are paralysed and we ask ourselves what will
exist of the works which were made before this and the works that will
be made after it. One can call oneself happy when one has seen this
prodigy of art and of genius. O fortunate Paul III! Heaven has allowed
you to be the patron of that glory. Your name will live forever beside
that of Buonarroti whose fame fills the universe."
The fresco of the Sistine was hardly finished when the insatiable Paul
III insisted that Michelangelo, in spite of his extreme old age, should
paint the frescoes of the Pauline Chapel. With a great effort he
completed the conversion of St. Paul and the Crucifixion of St. Peter
which, begun in 1542, injured after 1545 by a fire, interrupted by two
severe illnesses in 1544 and 1546, were finally completed in 1549-1550.
"He complained," says Vasari, "that he had suffered greatly in executing
these works. Painting, and especially fresco, is not fitted for an old
man." He was, as a matter of fact, seventy-five years old. Both frescoes
to-day have almost disappeared. In spite of the exaggeration of the
attitudes and the abuse of virtuosity, Michelangelo had preserved in them
his rough vigour, and we can still see there a tumultuous force which
struggles in darkness.[77]
During this fifteen years' work the old man had lost all hope of ever
finishing the monument of Julius II, and had with great difficulty
prevented Paul III from taking some of the statues to serve as ornaments
of the Pauline Chapel. He had had to sign, on August 20, 1542, a fifth
and last contract with the heirs of Julius II. By this agreement he
relinquished for the time being three statues, which must have been the
Moses and the two Slaves.[78] Then he decided that the Slaves were not
any longer fitted to the tomb and he began two other figures, Active
Life and Contemplative Life.[79]
In addition, Michelangelo agreed to give fourteen hundred crowns[80] to
his pupil Urbino and to Raffaello da Montelupo for finishing the
monument, after which he was to be free from all obligation forever.
But he had not reached the end of his troubles, for the heirs of Julius
II continued persecuting the poor man with insulting demands for money
which they pretended to have previously disbursed to him. Michelangelo
went almost mad, as he had done in the time of Clement VII over the
Medici Chapel, and it was in vain that Paul III commanded him not to
think about it, but to give himself up entirely to his painting of the
Pauline Chapel.
He answered, "You paint with your head and not with your hands. Who does
not think for himself dishonours himself. That is why I can do nothing
good so long as I have these preoccupations. I have been chained to this
trouble all my life," he continued, bitterly, "I have lost my youth over
it; I have been ruined by my too great conscientiousness. It is my fate;
I see many people who live tranquilly on an income of two or three
thousand crowns and I have only succeeded after a terrible struggle in
being poor."[81]
To satisfy his creditors he finished with his own hands the statues of
Active Life and Contemplative Life,[82] although he was not obliged to
do so.
At last the monument of Julius II was finished and shown in the Church
of S. Pietro in Vinculi in February, 1545. What was left of the
beautiful original plan? Only the Moses which had become the central
figure after having been merely one of the details. Would the complete
work have been a prodigy analogous for sculpture to what the Sistine
Chapel is for painting? Certainly no prophet of the Sistine Chapel
attains to the sovereign perfection of the Moses.
[Illustration: MOSES
Figure for the Tomb of Julius II (1513-1516).
San Pietro-in-Vinculi, Rome.]
The Moses is a supernatural and savage apparition half beast, half god.
Pagan? Christian? No one knows. Two horns pierce the narrow skull, a
flowing beard descends from his face to his knees like a parasitical
vine attached to a great tree. He seems calm, but in his terrible jaw
with close-shut teeth and projecting lower lip is wrath which shatters
and crushes like the first chords of the overture to "Coriolanus." An
implacable and murderous force, a tumult of rage and contempt wars in
the silence of that arrogant being, with his huge bulk, his knotted
arms--less brutal than those of most of Michelangelo's heroes, and with
strong and beautiful hands--and left leg bent ready to rise. The dress
is a barbarous one. No other work of Michelangelo is as completely
finished. We feel that he had lived with it more than thirty years
without being willing to let it go. He could see himself in it as in a
superb mirror which gave him back the image that he had divined of his
own soul. For the Moses is not only the most perfect artistic expression
of his genius, but also its highest moral expression. Nowhere else has
he so completely realised the majestic balance of a violent and
passionate soul controlled by an iron will. Everywhere else passion is
let loose and the human being is given into its hands. Here the savage
elements are in suspense, ready to fuse. It is a thunder-cloud charged
with lightning.
Beside that superhuman creation rich with the whole life of
Michelangelo, the two gracious figures of Leah and Rachel, the work of
his old age, seem a little cold and affected.
"I seemed in a dream to see a lady, young and beautiful, going through a
meadow, gathering flowers, and singing she was saying, 'Let him know,
whoso asks my name, that I am Leah, and I go moving my fair hands around
to make myself a garland. To please me at the glass here I adorn me, but
my sister Rachel never withdraws from her mirror, and sits all day. She
is as fain to look with her fair eyes as I to adorn me with my hands.
Her seeing, and me doing, satisfies.'"[83]
The perfume of these lovely verses of Dante penetrates Michelangelo's
two statues, which are rather apart from the rest of his work. If it
were not for the largeness of their conception they would recall by
their "morbidezza" and their cold grace the style of Civitale and
Rossellino. Michelangelo seems here to be softened and a little tamed.
The symbolical meaning of these figures is obscure, as usual with him.
His intellectual quality was rarely strong enough or rather clear enough
to impose itself on his artistic conceptions. It is placed in
juxtaposition to them in a puerile and accessory way as in the
allegorical attributes of the Medici tombs, and we can take it away
without hurting the strength of the work.
As for the rest of the monument of Julius II, it is not worth
mentioning.[84] It is a caricature of the great project, but at least it
was finished. Michelangelo was delivered from the nightmare of his whole
life.