away, for it cannot be doubted that his views have been embraced by
enlightened Catholics from his day to ours,--by such men as Pascal,
Fenelon, and Lacordaire, and thousands like them, who prefer
ritualism and auricular confession, and penance, monasticism, and
an ecclesiastical monarch, and all the machinery of a complicated
hierarchy, with all the evils growing out of papal domination, to
rationalism, sectarian dissensions, irreverence, license, want of
unity, want of government, and even dispensation from the marriage
vow. Which is worse, the physical arm of the beast, or the maniac
soul of a lying prophet? Which is worse, the superstition and
narrowness which darken the mind and the spirit, or that unbounded
toleration which smiles on those audacious infidels who cloak their
cruel attacks on the faith of Christians with the name of a
progressive civilization?--and so far advanced that one of these
new lights, ignorant, perhaps, of everything except of the fossils
and shells and bugs and gases of the hole he has bored in, assumes
to know more of the mysteries of creation and the laws of the
universe than Moses and David and Paul, and all the Bacons and
Newtons that ever lived? Names are nothing; it is the spirit, the
animus, which is everything. It is the soul which permeates a
system, that I look at. It is the Devil from which I would flee,
whatever be his name, and though he assume the form of an angel of
light, or cunningly try to persuade me, and ingeniously argue, that
there is no God. True and good Catholics and true and good
Protestants have ever been united in one thing,--IN THIS BELIEF,
that there is a God who made the heaven and the earth, and that
there is a Christ who made atonement for the sins of the world. It
is good morals, faith, and love to which both Catholics and
Protestants are exhorted by the Apostles. When either Catholics or
Protestants accept the one faith and the one Lord which
Christianity alone reveals, then they equally belong to the grand
army of spiritual warriors under the banner of the Cross, though
they may march under different generals and in different divisions
and they will receive the same consolations in this world, and the
same rewards in the world to come.
AUTHORITIES.
Villari's Life of Savonarola; Biographie Universelle; Ranke's
History of the Popes. There is much in "Romola," by George Eliot.
Life of Savonarola, by the Prince of Mirandola.
MICHAEL ANGELO.
A.D. 1475-1564.
THE REVIVAL OF ART.
Michael Angelo Buonarroti--one of the Great Lights of the new
civilization--may stand as the most fitting representative of
reviving art in Europe; also as an illustrious example of those
virtues which dignify intellectual pre-eminence. He was superior,
in all that is sterling and grand in character, to any man of his
age,--certainly in Italy; exhibiting a rugged, stern greatness
which reminds us of Dante, and of other great benefactors; nurtured
in the school of sorrow and disappointment, leading a checkered
life, doomed to envy, ingratitude, and neglect; rarely understood,
and never fully appreciated even by those who employed and honored
him. He was an isolated man; grave, abstracted, lonely, yet not
unhappy, since his world was that of glorious and exalting ideas,
even those of grace, beauty, majesty, and harmony,--the world which
Plato lived in, and in which all great men live who seek to rise
above the transient, the false, and puerile in common life. He was
also an original genius, remarkable in everything he attempted,
whether as sculptor, painter, or architect, and even as poet. He
saw the archetypes of everything beautiful and grand, which are
invisible except to those who are almost divinely gifted; and he
had the practical skill to embody them in permanent forms, so that
all ages may study those forms, and rise through them to the realms
in which his soul lived.
Michael Angelo not only created, but he reproduced. He reproduced
the glories of Grecian and Roman art. He restored the old
civilization in his pictures, his statues, and his grand edifices.
He revived a taste for what is imperishable in antiquity. As such
he is justly regarded as an immortal benefactor; for it is art
which gives to nations culture, refinement, and the enjoyment of
the beautiful. Art diverts the mind from low and commonplace
pursuits, exalts the imagination, and makes its votary indifferent
to the evils of life. It raises the soul into regions of peace and
bliss.
But art is most ennobling when it is inspired by lofty and
consecrated sentiments,--like those of religion, patriotism, and
love. Now ancient art was consecrated to Paganism. Of course
there were noble exceptions; but as a general rule temples were
erected in honor of heathen deities. Statues represented mere
physical strength and beauty and grace. Pictures portrayed the
charms of an unsanctified humanity. Hence ancient art did very
little to arrest human degeneracy; facilitated rather than retarded
the ruin of states and empires, since it did not stimulate the
virtues on which the strength of man is based: it did not check
those depraved tastes and habits which are based on egotism.
Now the restorers of ancient art cannot be said to have contributed
to the moral elevation of the new races, unless they avoided the
sensualism of Greece and Rome, and appealed purely to those eternal
ideas which the human mind, even under Pagan influences, sometimes
conceived, and which do not conflict with Christianity itself.
In considering the life and labors of Michael Angelo, then, we are
to examine whether, in the classical glories of antiquity which he
substituted for the Gothic and Mediaeval, he advanced civilization
in the noblest sense; and moreover, whether he carried art to a
higher degree than was ever attained by the Greeks and Romans, and
hence became a benefactor of the world.
In considering these points I shall not attempt a minute criticism
of his works. I can only seize on the great outlines, the salient
points of those productions which have given him immortality. No
lecture can be exhaustive. If it only prove suggestive, it has
reached its end.
Michael Angelo stands out in history in the three aspects of
sculptor, painter, and architect; and that too in a country devoted
to art, and in an age when Italy won all her modern glories,
arising from the matchless works which that age produced. Indeed,
those works will probably never be surpassed, since all the
energies of a great nation were concentrated upon their production,
even as our own age confines itself chiefly to mechanical
inventions and scientific research and speculation. What railroads
and telegraphs and spindles and chemical tests and compounds are to
us; what philosophy was to the Greeks; what government and
jurisprudence were to the Romans; what cathedrals and metaphysical
subtilties were to the Middle Ages; what theological inquiries were
to the divines of the seventeenth century; what social urbanities
and refinements were to the French in the eighteenth century,--the
fine arts were to the Italians in the sixteenth century: a fact too
commonplace to dwell upon, and which will be conceded when we bear
in mind that no age has been distinguished for everything, and that
nations can try satisfactorily but one experiment at a time, and
are not likely to repeat it with the same enthusiasm. As the mind
is unbounded in its capacities, and our world affords inexhaustible
fields of enterprise, the progress of the race is to be seen in the
new developments which successively appear, but in which only a
certain limit has thus far been reached. Not in absolute
perfection in any particular sphere is this progress seen, but
rather in the variety of the experiments. It may be doubted
whether any Grecian edifice will ever surpass the Parthenon in
beauty of proportion or fitness of ornament; or any nude statue
show grace of form more impressive than the Venus de Milo or the
Apollo Belvedere; or any system of jurisprudence be more completely
codified than that systematized by Justinian; or any Gothic church
rival the lofty expression of Cologne cathedral; or any painting
surpass the holy serenity and ethereal love depicted in Raphael's
madonnas; or any court witness such a brilliant assemblage of wits
and beauties as met at Versailles to render homage to Louis XIV.;
or any theological discussion excite such a national interest as
when Luther confronted Doctor Eck in the great hall of the
Electoral Palace at Leipsic; or any theatrical excitement such as
was produced on cultivated intellects when Garrick and Siddons
represented the sublime conceptions of the myriad-minded
Shakspeare. These glories may reappear, but never will they shine
as they did before. No more Olympian games, no more Roman
triumphs, no more Dodona oracles, no more Flavian amphitheatres, no
more Mediaeval cathedrals, no more councils of Nice or Trent, no
more spectacles of kings holding the stirrups of popes, no more
Fields of the Cloth of Gold, no more reigns of court mistresses in
such palaces as Versailles and Fontainbleau,--ah! I wish I could
add, no more such battlefields as Marengo and Waterloo,--only
copies and imitations of these, and without the older charm. The
world is moving on and perpetually changing, nor can we tell what
new vanity will next arise,--vanity or glory, according to our
varying notions of the dignity and destiny of man. We may predict
that it will not be any mechanical improvement, for ere long the
limit will be reached,--and it will be reached when the great mass
cannot find work to do, for the everlasting destiny of man is toil
and labor. But it will be some sublime wonders of which we cannot
now conceive, and which in time will pass away for other wonders
and novelties, until the great circle is completed; and all human
experiments shall verify the moral wisdom of the eternal
revelation. Then all that man has done, all that man can do, in
his own boastful thought, will be seen, in the light of the
celestial verities, to be indeed a vanity and a failure, not of
human ingenuity and power, but to realize the happiness which is
only promised as the result of supernatural, not mortal, strength,
yet which the soul in its restless aspirations never ceases its
efforts to secure,--everlasting Babel-building to reach the
unattainable on earth.
Now the revival of art in Italy was one of the great movements in
the series of human development. It peculiarly characterized the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was an age of artistic
wonders, of great creations.
Italy, especially, was glorious when Michael Angelo was born, 1474;
when the rest of Europe was comparatively rude, and when no great
works in art, in poetry, in history, or philosophy had yet
appeared. He was descended from an illustrious family, and was
destined to one of the learned professions; but he could not give
up his mind to anything but drawing,--as annoying to his father as
Galileo's experiments were to his parent; as unmeaning to him as
Gibbon's History was to George III.,--"Scribble, scribble,
scribble; Mr. Gibbon, I perceive, sir, you are always a-
scribbling." No perception of a new power, no sympathy with the
abandonment to a specialty not indorsed by fashions and traditions,
but without which abandonment genius cannot easily be developed.
At last the father yielded, and the son was apprenticed to a
painter--a degradation in the eyes of Mediaeval aristocracy.
The celebrated Lorenzo de' Medici was then in the height of power
and fame in Florence, adored by Roscoe as the patron of artists and
poets, although he subverted the liberties of his country. This
over-lauded prince, heir of the fortunes of a great family of
merchants, wishing to establish a school for sculpture, filled a
garden with statues, and freely admitted to it young scholars in
art. Michael Angelo was one of the most frequent and enthusiastic
visitors to this garden, where in due time he attracted the
attention of the magnificent Lord of Florence by a head chiselled
so remarkably that he became an inmate of the palace, sat at the
table of Lorenzo, and at last was regularly adopted as one of the
Prince's family, with every facility for prosecuting his studies.
Before he was eighteen the youth had sculptured the battle of
Hercules with the Centaurs, which he would never part with, and
which still remains in his family; so well done that he himself, at
the age of eighty, regretted that he had not given up his whole
life to sculpture.
It was then as a sculptor that Michael Angelo first appears to the
historical student,--about the year 1492, when Columbus was
crossing the great unknown ocean to realize his belief in a western
passage to India. Thus commercial enterprise began with the
revival of art, and was destined never to be separated in its
alliance with it, since commerce brings wealth, and wealth seeks to
ornament the palaces and gardens which it has created or purchased.
The sculptor's art was not born until piety had already edifices in
which to worship God, or pride the monuments in which it sought the
glories of a name; but it made rapid progress as wealth increased
and taste became refined; as the need was felt for ornaments and
symbols to adorn naked walls and empty spaces, especially statuary,
grouped or single, of men or animals,--a marble history to
interpret or reproduce consecrated associations. Churches might do
without them; the glass stained in every color of the rainbow, the
altar shining with gold and silver and precious stones, the pillars
multiplied and diversified, and rich in foliated circles, mullions,
mouldings, groins, and bosses, and bearing aloft the arched and
ponderous roof,--one scene of dazzling magnificence,--these could
do without them; but the palaces and halls and houses of the rich
required the image of man,--and of man not emaciated and worn and
monstrous, but of man as he appeared to the classical Greeks, in
the perfection of form and physical beauty. So the artists who
arose with the revival of commerce, with the multiplication of
human wants and the study of antiquity, sought to restore the
buried statues with the long-neglected literature and laws. It was
in sculptured marbles that enthusiasm was most marked. These were
found in abundance in various parts of Italy whenever the vast
debris of the ancient magnificence was removed, and were
universally admired and prized by popes, cardinals, and princes,
and formed the nucleus of great museums.
The works of Michael Angelo as a sculptor were not numerous, but in
sublimity they have never been surpassed,--non multa, sed multum.
His unfinished monument of Julius II., begun at that pontiff's
request as a mausoleum, is perhaps his greatest work; and the
statue of Moses, which formed a part of it, has been admired for
three hundred years. In this, as in his other masterpieces,
grandeur and majesty are his characteristics. It may have been a
reproduction, and yet it is not a copy. He made character and
moral force the first consideration, and form subservient to
expression. And here he differed, it is said by great critics,
from the ancients, who thought more of form than of moral
expression,--as may be seen in the faces of the Venus de Medici and
the Apollo Belvedere, matchless and inimitable as these statues are
in grace and beauty. The Laocoon and the Dying Gladiator are
indeed exceptions, for it is character which constitutes their
chief merit,--the expression of pain, despair, and agony. But
there is almost no intellectual or moral expression in the faces of
other famous and remarkable antique statues, only beauty and
variety of form, such as Powers exhibited in his Greek Slave,--an
inferior excellence, since it is much easier to copy the beautiful
in the nude statues which people Italy, than to express such
intellectual majesty as Michael Angelo conceived--that intellectual
expression which Story has succeeded in giving to his African
Sibyl. Thus while the great artist retained the antique, he
superadded a loftiness such as the ancients rarely produced; and
sculpture became in his hands, not demoralizing and Pagan,
resplendent in sensual charms, but instructive and exalting,--
instructive for the marvellous display of anatomical knowledge, and
exalting from grand conceptions of dignity and power. His
knowledge of anatomy was so remarkable that he could work without
models. Our artists, in these days, must always have before their
eyes some nude figure to copy.
The same peculiarities which have given him fame as a sculptor he
carried out into painting, in which he is even more remarkable; for
the artists of Italy at this period often combined a skill for all
the fine arts. In sculpture they were much indebted to the
ancients, but painting seems to have been purely a development. In
the Middle Ages it was comparatively rude. No noted painter arose
until Cimabue in the middle of the thirteenth century. Before him,
painting was a lifeless imitation of models afforded by Greek
workers in mosaics; but Cimabue abandoned this servile copying, and
gave a new expression to heads, and grouped his figures. Under
Giotto, who was contemporary with Dante, drawing became still more
correct, and coloring softer. After him, painting was rapidly
advanced. Pietro della Francesca was the father of perspective;
Domenico painted in oil, discovered by Van Eyck in Flanders, in
1410; Masaccio studied anatomy; gilding disappeared as a background
around pictures. In the fifteenth century the enthusiasm for
painting became intense; even monks became painters, and every
convent and church and palace was deemed incomplete without
pictures. But ideal beauty and harmony in coloring were still
wanting, as well as freedom of the pencil. Then arose Da Vinci and
Michael Angelo, who practised the immutable principles by which art
could be advanced; and rapidly following in their steps, Fra
Bartolommeo, Fra Angelico, Rossi, and Andrea del Sarto made the age
an era in painting, until the art culminated in Raphael and
Corregio and Titian. And divers cities of Italy--Bologna, Milan,
Parma, and Venice--disputed with Rome and Florence for the empire
of art; as also did many other cities which might be mentioned,
each of which has a history, each of which is hallowed by poetic
associations; so that all men who have lived in Italy, or even
visited it, feel a peculiar interest in these cities,--an interest
which they can feel in no others, even if they be such capitals as
London and Paris. I excuse this extravagant admiration for the
wonderful masterpieces produced in that age, making marble and
canvas eloquent with the most inspiring sentiments, because, wrapt
in the joys which they excite, the cultivated and imaginative man
forgets--and rejoices that he can forget--the untidiness of that
World Capital, the many reminders of ages of unthrift, which stare
ordinary tourists in the face, and all the other disgusting
realities which philanthropists deplore so loudly in that
degenerate but classical and ever-to-be-hallowed land. For, come
what will, in spite of past turmoils it has been the scene of the
highest glories of antiquity, calling to our minds saints and
martyrs, as well as conquerors and emperors, and revealing at every
turn their tombs and broken monuments, and all the hoary remnants
of unsurpassed magnificence, as well as preserving in churches and
palaces those wonders which were created when Italy once again
lived in the noble aspiration of making herself the centre and the
pride of the new civilization.
Da Vinci, the oldest of the great masters who immortalized that
era, died in 1519, in the arms of Francis I. of France, and Michael
Angelo received his mantle. The young sculptor was taken away from
his chisel to paint, for Pope Julius II., the ceiling of the
Sistine Chapel. After the death of his patron Lorenzo, he had
studied and done famous work in marble at Bologna, at Rome, and
again at Florence. He had also painted some, and with such
immediate success that he had been invited to assist Da Vinci in
decorating a hall in the ducal palace at Florence. But sculpture
was his chosen art, and when called to paint the Sistine Chapel, he
implored the Pope that he might be allowed to finish the mausoleum
which he had begun, and that Raphael, then dazzling the whole city
by his unprecedented talents, might be substituted for him in that
great work. But the Pope was inflexible; and the great artist
began his task, assisted by other painters; however, he soon got
disgusted with them and sent them away, and worked alone. For
twenty months he toiled, rarely seen, living abstemiously, absorbed
utterly in his work of creation; and the greater portion of the
compartments in the vast ceiling was finished before any other
voice than his, except the admiring voice of the Pope, pronounced
it good.
It would be useless to attempt to describe those celebrated
frescos. Their subjects were taken from the Book of Genesis, with
great figures of sibyls and prophets. They are now half-concealed
by the accumulated dust and smoke of three hundred years, and can
be surveyed only by reclining at full length on the back. We see
enough, however, to be impressed with the boldness, the majesty,
and the originality of the figures,--their fidelity to nature, the
knowledge of anatomy displayed, and the disdain of inferior arts;
especially the noble disdain of appealing to false and perverted
taste, as if he painted from an exalted ideal in his own mind,
which ideal is ever associated with creative power.
It is this creative power which places Michael Angelo at the head
of the artists of his great age; and not merely the power to create
but the power of realizing the most exalted conceptions. Raphael
was doubtless superior to him in grace and beauty, even as Titian
afterwards surpassed him in coloring. He delighted, like Dante, in
the awful and the terrible. This grandeur of conception was
especially seen in his Last Judgment, executed thirty years
afterwards, in completion of the Sistine Chapel, the work on which
had been suspended at the death of Julius. This vast fresco is
nearly seventy feet in height, painted upon the wall at the end of
the chapel, as an altar-piece. No subject could have been better
adapted to his genius than this--the day of supernal terrors (dies
irae, dies illa), when, according to the sentiments of the Middle
Ages, the doomed were subjected to every variety of physical
suffering, and when this agony of pain, rather than agony of
remorse, was expressed in tortured limbs and in faces writhing with
demoniacal despair. Such was the variety of tortures which he
expressed, showing an unexampled richness in imaginative powers,
that people came to see it from the remotest parts of Italy. It
made a great sensation, like the appearance of an immortal poem,
and was magnificently rewarded; for the painter received a pension
of twelve hundred golden crowns a year,--a great sum in that age.