Venice offered Michael Angelo all possible inducements to remain, and
Francis I. of France eagerly besought the artist to live at his court;
but his heart was in Florence, and thither he returned, and bravely
helped to defend her to the last. When the Medici were again triumphant,
and freedom was dead, the artist being too great a man to imprison or
kill, he was publicly pardoned by the pope, and went sadly to his work
on the monuments in the Medici Chapel of San Lorenzo.
Here he labored day and night, eating little and sleeping less, ill in
body and suffering deeply in heart for his beloved Florence; working
into the speaking stone his sorrow and his hopes. In 1534 the Medici
Chapel was completed,--a massive piece of architecture, executed at an
almost fabulous expense. On one side is the tomb of Giuliano de' Medici,
the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, with his statue in a sitting
posture, holding in his hand the baton of a general. Beneath him, over
the tomb, are the statues Day and Night. Opposite is the tomb of Lorenzo
de' Medici, the grandson of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and the father of
Catherine de' Medici. It is clad in armor, with a helmet overshadowing
the grave features. The Italians call it Il Pensiero ("Thought," or
"Meditation").
Hawthorne said of this statue, "No such grandeur and majesty have
elsewhere been put into human shape. It is all a miracle--the deep
repose, and the deep life within it. It is as much a miracle to have
achieved this as to make a statue that would rise up and walk.... This
statue is one of the things which I look at with highest enjoyment, but
also with grief and impatience, because I feel that I do not come at all
to that which it involves, and that by and by I must go away and leave
it forever. How wonderful! To take a block of marble, and convert it
wholly into thought, and to do it through all the obstructions and
impediments of drapery."
Some authorities believe that the statue usually called Lorenzo was
intended for Giuliano. Michael Angelo himself, when remonstrated with
because the portraits were not correct likenesses, replied that he "did
not suppose people a hundred years later would care much how the dukes
looked!"
Under this statue are Dawn and Twilight. Ruskin calls these, with Night
and Day, "Four ineffable types, not of darkness nor of day--not of
morning nor evening, but of the departure and the resurrection, the
twilight and the dawn, of the souls of men."
Day is a gigantic figure of a man; Night, of a woman in a profound
sleep, with her foot resting on a thick bundle of poppy-heads. When this
statue was exhibited for the first time, Giovanni Batista Strozzi wrote
a verse, and attached it to the marble:--
"Carved by an Angel, in this marble white
Sweetly reposing, lo, the Goddess Night!
Calmly she sleeps, and so must living be:
Awake her gently; she will speak to thee."