chiefly to cartoons and designs, which, scattered far and wide,
were reproduced by other artists. His most famous cartoon was the
Battle of Pisa, the one executed for the ducal palace of Florence,
as pendant to one by Leonardo da Vinci, then in the height of his
fame. This picture was so remarkable for the accuracy of drawing,
and the variety and form of expression, that Raphael came to
Florence on purpose to study it; and it was the power of giving
boldness and dignity and variety to the human figure, as shown in
this painting, which constitutes his great originality and
transcendent excellence. The great creations of the painters, in
modern times as well as in the ancient, are those which represent
the human figure in its ideal excellence,--which of course implies
what is most perfect, not in any one man or woman, but in men and
women collectively. Hence the greatest of painters rarely have
stooped to landscape painting, since no imaginary landscape can
surpass what everybody has seen in nature. You cannot improve on
the colors of the rainbow, or the gilded clouds of sunset; or the
shadows of the mountain, or the graceful form of trees, or the
varied tints of leaves and flowers; but you can represent the
figure of a man or woman more beautiful than any one man or woman
that has ever appeared. What mortal woman ever expressed the
ethereal beauty depicted in a Madonna of Raphael or Murillo? And
what man ever had such a sublimity of aspect and figure as the
creations of Michael Angelo? Why, "a beggar," says one of his
greatest critics, "arose from his hand the patriarch of poverty;
the hump of his dwarf is impressed with dignity; his infants are
men, and his men are giants." And, says another critic, "he is the
inventor of epic painting, in that sublime circle of the Sistine
Chapel which exhibits the origin, progress, and final dispensation
of the theocracy. He has personified motion in the cartoon of
Pisa, portrayed meditation in the prophets and sibyls of the
Sistine Chapel and in the Last Judgment, traced every attitude
which varies the human body, with every passion which sways the
human soul." His supremacy is in the mighty soaring of his
intellectual conceptions. Marvellous as a creator, like
Shakspeare; profound and solemn, like Dante; representing power
even in repose, and giving to the Cyclopean forms which he has
called into being a charm of moral excellence which secures our
sympathy; a firm believer in a supreme and personal God;
disciplined in worldly trials, and glowing in lofty conceptions of
justice,--he delights in portraying the stern prophets of Israel,
surrounded with an atmosphere of holiness, yet breathing compassion
on those whom they denounce; august in dignity, yet melting with
tenderness; solemn, sad, profound. Thus was his influence pure and
exalted in an art which has too often been prostituted to please
the perverted taste of a sensual age. The most refined and
expressive of all the arts,--as it sometimes is, and always should
be,--is the one which oftenest appeals to that which Christianity
teaches us to shun. You may say, "Evil to him who evil thinks,"
especially ye pure and immaculate persons who have walked
uncorrupted amid the galleries of Paris, Dresden, Florence, and
Rome; but I fancy that pictures, like books, are what we choose to
make them, and that the more exquisite the art by which vice is
divested of its grossness, but not of its subtle poisons,--like the
New Heloise of Rousseau or the Wilhelm Meister of Goethe,--the more
fatally will it lead astray by the insidious entrance of an evil
spirit in the guise of an angel of light. Art, like literature, is
neither good nor evil abstractly, but may become a savor of death
unto death, as well as of life unto life. You cannot extinguish it
without destroying one of the noblest developments of civilization;
but you cannot have civilization without multiplying the
temptations of human society, and hence must be guarded from those
destructive cankers which, as in old Rome, eat out the virtues on
which the strength of man is based. The old apostles, and other
great benefactors of the world, attached more value to the truths
which elevate than to the arts which soften. It was the noble
direction which Michael Angelo gave to art which made him a great
benefactor not only of civilization, but also of art, by linking
with it the eternal ideas of majesty and dignity, as well as the
truths which are taught by divine inspiration,--another
illustration of the profound reverence which the great master minds
of the world, like Augustine, Pascal, and Bacon, have ever
expressed for the ideas which were revealed by Christianity and the
old prophets of Jehovah; ideas which many bright but inferior
intellects, in their egotistical arrogance, have sought to subvert.
Yet it was neither as sculptor nor painter that Michael Angelo left
the most enduring influence, but as architect. Painting and
sculpture are the exclusive ornaments and possession of the rich
and favored. But architecture concerns all men, and most men have
something to do with it in the course of their lives. What boots
it that a man pays two thousand pounds for a picture to be shut up
in his library, and probably more valued for its rarity, or from
the caprices of fashion, than for its real merits? But it is
something when a nation pays a million for a ridiculous building,
without regard to the object for which it is intended,--to be
observed and criticised by everybody and for succeeding
generations. A good picture is the admiration of a few; a
magnificent edifice is the pride of thousands. A picture
necessarily cultivates the taste of a family circle; a public
edifice educates the minds of millions. Even the Moses of Michael
Angelo is a mere object of interest to those who visit the church
of San Pietro in Vincoli; but St. Peter's is a monument to be seen
by large populations from generation to generation. All London
contemplates St. Paul's Church or the Palace of Westminster, but
the National Gallery may be visited by a small fraction of the
people only once a year. Of the thousands who stand before the
Tuileries or the Madeleine not one in a hundred has visited the
gallery of the Louvre. What material works of man so grand as
those hoary monuments of piety or pride erected three thousand
years ago, and still magnificent in their very ruins! How imposing
are the pyramids, the Coliseum, and the Gothic cathedrals of the
Middle Ages! And even when architecture does not rear vaulted
roofs and arches and pinnacles, or tower to dazzling heights, or
inspire reverential awe from the associations which cluster around
it, how interesting are even its minor triumphs! Who does not stop
to admire a beautiful window, or porch, or portico? Who does not
criticise his neighbor's house, its proportions, its general
effect, its adaptation to the uses designed? Architecture appeal
to the common eye, and have reference to the necessities of man,
and sometimes express the consecrated sentiments of an age or a
nation. Nor can it be prostituted, like painting and sculpture; it
never corrupts the mind, and sometimes inspires it; and if it makes
an appeal to the senses or the imagination, it is to kindle
perceptions of the severe beauty of geometrical forms.
Whoever, then, has done anything in architecture has contributed to
the necessities of man, and stimulated an admiration for what is
venerable and magnificent. Now Michael Angelo was not only the
architect of numerous palaces and churches, but also one of the
principal architects of that great edifice which is, on the whole,
the noblest church in Christendom,--a perpetual marvel and study;
not faultless, but so imposing that it will long remain, like the
old temple of Ephesus, one of the wonders of the world. He
completed the church without great deviation from the plan of the
first architect, Bramante, whom he regarded as the greatest
architect that had lived,--altering Bramante's plans from a Latin
to a Greek cross, the former of which was retained after Michael
Angelo's death. But it is the interior, rather than the exterior
of St. Peter's, which shows its vast superiority over all other
churches for splendor and effect, and surprises all who are even
fresh from Cologne and Milan and Westminster. It impresses us like
a wonder of nature rather than as the work of man,--a great work of
engineering as well as a marvel of majesty and beauty. We are
surprised to see so vast a structure, covering nearly five acres,
so elaborately finished, nothing neglected; the lofty walls covered
with precious marbles, the side chapels filled with statues and
monuments, the altars ornamented with pictures,--and those pictures
not painted in oil, but copied in mosaic, so that they will neither
decay nor fade, but last till destroyed by violence. What feelings
overpower the poetic mind when the glories of that interior first
blaze upon the brain; what a world of brightness, softness, and
richness; what grandeur, solidity, and strength; what unnumbered
treasures around the altars; what grand mosaics relieve the height
of the wondrous dome,--larger than the Pantheon, rising two hundred
feet from the intersection of those lofty and massive piers which
divide transept from choir and nave; what effect of magnitude after
the eye gets accustomed to the vast proportions! Oh, what silence
reigns around! How difficult, even for the sonorous chants of
choristers and priests to disturb that silence,--to be more than
echoes of a distant music which seems to come from the very courts
of heaven itself: to some a holy sanctuary, where one may meditate
among crowds and feel alone; where one breathes an atmosphere which
changes not with heat or cold; and where the ever-burning lamps and
clouds of incense diffusing the fragrance of the East, and the rich
dresses of the mitred priests, and the unnumbered symbols, suggest
the ritualism of that imposing worship when Solomon dedicated to
Jehovah the grandest temple of antiquity!
Truly was St. Peter's Church the last great achievement of the
popes, the crowning demonstration of their temporal dominion;
suggestive of their wealth and power, a marble history of pride and
pomp, a fitting emblem of that worship which appeals to sense
rather than to God. And singular it was, when the great artist
reared that gigantic pile, even though it symbolized the cross, he
really gave a vital wound to that cause to which he consecrated his
noblest energies; for its lofty dome could not be completed without
the contributions of Christendom, and those contributions could not
be made without an appeal to perversions which grew out of
Mediaeval Catholicism,--even penance and self-expiation, which
stirred the holy indignation of a man who knew and declared on what
different ground justification should be based. Thus was Luther,
in one sense, called into action by the labors of Michael Angelo;
thus was the erection of St. Peter's Church overruled in the
preaching of reformers, who would show that the money obtained by
misinterpreted "indulgences" could never purchase an acceptable
offering to God, even though the monument were filled with
Christian emblems, and consecrated by those prayers and anthems
which had been the life of blessed saints and martyrs for more than
a thousand years.
St. Peter's is not Gothic, it is a restoration of the Greek; it
belongs to what artists call the Renaissance,--a style of
architecture marked by a return to the classical models of
antiquity. Michael Angelo brought back to civilization the old
ideas of Grecian grace and Roman majesty,--typical of the original
inspirations of the men who lived in the quiet admiration of
eternal beauty and grace; the men who built the Parthenon, and who
shaped pillars and capitals and entablatures in the severest
proportions, and fitted them with ornaments drawn from the living
world,--plants and animals, especially images of God's highest
work, even of man; and of man not worn and macerated and dismal and
monstrous, but of man when most resplendent in the perfections of
the primeval strength and beauty. He returned to a style which
classical antiquity carried to great perfection, but which had been
neglected by the new Teutonic nations.
Nor is there evidence that Michael Angelo disdained the creations
especially seen in those Gothic monuments which are still the
objects of our admiration. Who does not admire the church
architecture of the Middle Ages? Of its kind it has never been
surpassed. Geometry and art--the true and the beautiful--meet.
Nothing ever erected by the hand of man surpasses the more famous
cathedrals of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in the richness
and variety of their symbolic decorations. They typify the great
ideas of Christianity; they inspire feelings of awe and reverence;
they are astonishing structures, in their magnitude and in their
effect. Monuments are they of religious zeal and poetical
inspiration,--the creations of great artists, although we scarcely
know their names; adapted to the uses designed; the expression of
consecrated sentiments; the marble history of the ages in which
they were erected,--now heavy and sombre when society was enslaved
and mournful; and then cheerful and lofty when Christianity was
joyful and triumphant. Who ever was satisfied in contemplating the
diversified wonders of those venerable structures? Who would lose
the impression which almost overwhelmed the mind when York minster,
or Cologne, or Milan, or Amiens was first beheld, with their lofty
spires and towers, their sculptured pinnacles, their flying
buttresses, their vaulted roofs, their long arcades, their purple
windows, their holy altars, their symbolic carvings, their majestic
outlines, their grand proportions!
But beautiful, imposing, poetical, and venerable as are these hoary
piles, they are not the all in all of art. Suppose all the
buildings of Europe the last four hundred years had been modelled
from these churches, how gloomy would be our streets, how dark and
dingy our shops, how dismal our dwellings, how inconvenient our
hotels! A new style was needed, at least as a supplement of the
old,--as lances and shields were giving place to fire-arms, and the
line and the plummet for the mariner's compass; as a new
civilization was creating new wants and developing the material
necessities of man.
So Michael Angelo arose, and revived the imperishable models of the
classical ages,--to be applied not merely to churches but to
palaces, civic halls, theatres, libraries, museums, banks,--all of
which have mundane purposes. The material world had need of
conveniences, as much as the Mediaeval age had need of shrines.
Humanity was to be developed as well as the Deity to be worshipped.
The artist took the broadest views, looking upon Gothic
architecture as but one division of art,--even as truth is greater
than any system, and Christianity wider than any sect. O, how this
Shakspeare of art would have smiled on the vague and transcendental
panegyrics of Michelet or Ruskin, and other sentimental admirers of
an age which never can return! And how he might have laughed at
some modern enthusiasts, who trace religion to the disposition of
stones and arches, forgetting that religion is an inspiration which
comes from God, and never from the work of man's hands, which can
be only a form of idolatry.
Michael Angelo found that the ornamentations of the ancient temples
were as rich and varied as those of Mediaeval churches. Mouldings
were discovered of incomparable elegance; the figures on
entablatures were found to be chiselled accurately from nature; the
pillars were of matchless proportions, the capitals of graceful
curvatures. He saw beauty in the horizontal lines of the
Parthenon, as much as in the vertical lines of Cologne. He would
not pull down the venerable monuments of religious zeal, but he
would add to them. "Because the pointed arch was sacred, he would
not despise the humble office of the lintel." And in southern
climates especially there was no need of those steep Gothic roofs
which were intended to prevent a great weight of rain and snow, and
where the graceful portico of the Greeks was more appropriate than
the heavy tower of the Lombards. He would seize on everything that
the genius of past ages had indorsed, even as Christianity itself
appropriates everything human,--science, art, music, poetry,
eloquence, literature,--sanctifies it, and dedicates it to the
Lord; not for the pride of builders, but the improvement of
humanity. Civilization may exist with Paganism, but only performs
its highest uses when tributary to Christianity. And Christianity
accepts the tribute which even Pagan civilization offers for the
adornment of our race,--expelled from Paradise, and doomed to hard
and bitter toils,--without abdicating her more glorious office of
raising the soul to heaven.
Nor was Michael Angelo responsible for the vile mongrel
architecture which followed the Renaissance, and which disfigures
the modern capitals of Europe, any more than for the perversion of
painting in the hands of Titian. But the indiscriminate adoption
of pillars for humble houses, shops with Roman arches, spires and
towers erected on Grecian porticoes, are no worse than schoolhouses
built like convents, and chapels designed for preaching as much as
for choral chants made dark and gloomy, where the voice of the
preacher is lost and wasted amid vaulted roofs and useless pillars.
Michael Angelo encouraged no incongruities; he himself conceived
the beautiful and the true, and admired it wherever found, even
amid the excavations of ruined cities. He may have overrated the
buried monuments of ancient art, but how was he to escape the
universal enthusiasm of his age for the remains of a glorious and
forgotten civilization? Perhaps his mind was wearied with the
Middle Ages, from which he had nothing more to learn, and sought a
greater fulness and a more perfect unity in the expanding forces of
a new and grander era than was ever seen by Pagan heroes or by
Gothic saints.
But I need not expatiate on the new ideas which Michael Angelo
accepted, or the impulse he gave to art in all its forms, and to
the revival of which civilization is so much indebted. Let us turn
and give a parting look at the man,--that great creative genius who
had no superior in his day and generation. Like the greatest of
all Italians, he is interesting for his grave experiences, his
dreary isolations, his vast attainments, his creative imagination,
and his lofty moral sentiments. Like Dante, he stands apart from,
and superior to, all other men of his age. He never could sport
with jesters, or laugh with buffoons, or chat with fools; and
because of this he seemed to be haughty and disdainful. Like
Luther, he had no time for frivolities, and looked upon himself as
commissioned to do important work. He rejoiced in labor, and knew
no rest until he was eighty-nine. He ate that he might live, not
lived that he might eat. For seventeen years after he was seventy-
two he worked on St. Peter's church; worked without pay, that he
might render to God his last earthly tribute without alloy,--as
religious as those unknown artists who erected Rheims and
Westminster. He was modest and patient, yet could not submit to
the insolence of little men in power. He even left the papal
palace in disdain when he found his labors unappreciated. Julius
II. was forced to bend to the stern artist, not the artist to the
Pope. Yet when Leo X. sent him to quarry marbles for nine years,
he submitted without complaint. He had no craving for riches like
Rubens, no love of luxury like Raphael, no envy like Da Vinci. He
never over-tasked his brain, or suffered himself, like Raphael,--
who died exhausted at thirty-seven,--to crowd three days into one,
knowing that over-work exhausts the nervous energies and shortens
life. He never attempted to open the doors which Providence had
plainly shut against him, but waited patiently for his day, knowing
it would come; yet whether it came or not, it was all the same to
him,--a man with all the holy rapture of a Kepler, and all the
glorious self-reliance of a Newton. He was indeed jealous of his
fame, but he was not greedy of admiration. He worked without the
stimulus of praise,--one of the rarest things,--urged on purely by
love of art. He loved art for its own sake, as good men love
virtue, as Palestrina loved music, as Bacon loved truth, as Kant
loved philosophy,--satisfied with itself as its own reward. He
disliked to be patronized, but always remembered benefits, and
loved the tribute of respect and admiration, even as he scorned the
empty flatterer of fashion. He was the soul of sincerity as well
as of magnanimity; and hence had great capacity for friendship, as
well as great power of self-sacrifice. His friendship with
Vittoria Colonna is as memorable as that of Jerome and Paula, or
that of Hildebrand and The Countess Matilda. He was a great
patriot, and clung to his native Florence with peculiar affection.
Living in habits of intimacy with princes and cardinals, he never
addressed them in adulatory language, but talked and acted like a
nobleman of nature, whose inborn and superior greatness could be
tested only by the ages. He placed art on the highest pinnacle of
the temple of humanity, but dedicated that temple to the God of
heaven in whom he believed. His person was not commanding, but
intelligence radiated from his features, and his earnest nature
commanded respect. In childhood he was feeble, but temperance made
him strong. He believed that no bodily decay was incompatible with
intellectual improvement. He continued his studies until he died,
and felt that he had mastered nothing. He was always dissatisfied
with his own productions. Excelsior was his motto, as Alp on Alp
arose upon his view. His studies were diversified and vast. He
wrote poetry as well as carved stone, his sonnets especially
holding a high rank. He was engineer as well as architect, and
fortified Florence against her enemies. When old he showed all the
fire of youth, and his eye, like that of Moses, never became dim,
since his strength and his beauty were of the soul,--ever
expanding, ever adoring. His temper was stern, but affectionate.
He had no mercy on a fool or a dunce, and turned in disgust from
those who loved trifles and lies. He was guilty of no immoralities
like Raphael and Titian, being universally venerated for his stern
integrity and allegiance to duty,--as one who believes that there
really is a God to whom he is personally responsible. He gave away
his riches, like Ambrose and Gregory, valuing money only as a means
of usefulness. Sickened with the world, he still labored for the
world, and died in 1564, over eighty-nine years of age, in the full
assurance of eternal blessedness in heaven.
His marbles may crumble down, in spite of all that we can do to
preserve them as models of hopeless imitation; but the exalted
ideas he sought to represent by them, are imperishable and divine,
and will be subjects of contemplation when
"Seas shall waste, the skies to smoke decay,
Rocks fall to dust, and mountains melt away."
AUTHORITIES.
Grimm's Life of Michael Angelo; Vasari's Lives of the Most
Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects; Duppa's Life of
Michael Angelo; Bayle's Histoire de la Peinture en Italie.
MARTIN LUTHER.
A. D. 1483-1546.
THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION.
Among great benefactors, Martin Luther is one of the most
illustrious. He headed the Protestant Reformation. This movement
is so completely inter-linked with the literature, the religion,
the education, the prosperity--yea, even the political history--of
Europe, that it is the most important and interesting of all modern
historical changes. It is a subject of such amazing magnitude that
no one can claim to be well informed who does not know its leading
issues and developments, as it spread from Germany to Switzerland,
France, Holland, Sweden, England, and Scotland.
The central and prominent figure in the movement is Luther; but the
way was prepared for him by a host of illustrious men, in different
countries,--by Savonarola in Italy, by Huss and Jerome in Bohemia,
by Erasmus in Holland, by Wyclif in England, and by sundry others,
who detested the corruptions they ridiculed and lamented, but could
not remove.