I
The Sistine Chapel was built in 1473 by Baccio Pontelli, a Florentine
architect, for Pope Sixtus IV. It is a simple barn-like chamber, 132
feet in length, 44 in breadth, and 68 in height from the pavement. The
ceiling consists of one expansive flattened vault, the central portion
of which offers a large plane surface, well adapted to fresco
decoration. The building is lighted by twelve windows, six upon each
side of its length. These are placed high up, their rounded arches
running parallel with the first spring of the vaulting. The ends of
the chapel are closed by flat walls, against the western of which is
raised the altar.
When Michelangelo was called to paint here, he found both sides of the
building, just below the windows, decorated in fresco by Perugino,
Cosimo Rosselli, Sandro Botticelli, Luca Signorelli, and Domenico
Ghirlandajo. These masters had depicted, in a series of twelve
subjects, the history of Moses and the life of Jesus. Above the lines
of fresco, in the spaces between the windows and along the eastern end
at the same height, Botticelli painted a row of twenty-eight Popes.
The spaces below the frescoed histories, down to the seats which ran
along the pavement, were blank, waiting for the tapestries which
Raffaello afterwards supplied from cartoons now in possession of the
English Crown. At the west end, above the altar, shone three
decorative frescoes by Perugino, representing the Assumption of the
Virgin, between the finding of Moses and the Nativity. The two last of
these pictures opened respectively the history of Moses and the life
of Christ, so that the Old and New Testaments were equally illustrated
upon the Chapel walls. At the opposite, or eastern end, Ghirlandajo
painted the Resurrection, and there was a corresponding picture of
Michael contending with Satan for the body of Moses.
Such was the aspect of the Sistine Chapel when Michelangelo began his
great work. Perugino's three frescoes on the west wall were afterwards
demolished to make room for his Last Judgment. The two frescoes on the
east wall are now poor pictures by very inferior masters; but the
twelve Scripture histories and Botticelli's twenty-eight Popes remain
from the last years of the fifteenth century.
Taken in their aggregate, the wall-paintings I have described afforded
a fair sample of Umbrian and Tuscan art in its middle or
_quattrocento_ age of evolution. It remained for Buonarroti to cover
the vault and the whole western end with masterpieces displaying what
Vasari called the "modern" style in its most sublime and imposing
manifestation. At the same time he closed the cycle of the figurative
arts, and rendered any further progress on the same lines impossible.
The growth which began with Niccolò of Pisa and with Cimabue, which
advanced through Giotto and his school, Perugino and Pinturicchio,
Piero della Francesca and Signorelli, Fra Angelico and Benozzo
Gozzoli, the Ghirlandajo brothers, the Lippi and Botticelli,
effloresced in Michelangelo, leaving nothing for aftercomers but
manneristic imitation.
II
Michelangelo, instinctively and on principle, reacted against the
decorative methods of the fifteenth century. If he had to paint a
biblical or mythological subject, he avoided landscapes, trees,
flowers, birds, beasts, and subordinate groups of figures. He eschewed
the arabesques, the labyrinths of foliage and fruit enclosing pictured
panels, the candelabra and gay bands of variegated patterns, which
enabled a _quattrocento_ painter, like Gozzoli or Pinturicchio, to
produce brilliant and harmonious general effects at a small
expenditure of intellectual energy. Where the human body struck the
keynote of the music in a work of art, he judged that such simple
adjuncts and naïve concessions to the pleasure of the eye should be
avoided. An architectural foundation for the plastic forms to rest on,
as plain in structure and as grandiose in line as could be fashioned,
must suffice. These principles he put immediately to the test in his
first decorative undertaking. For the vault of the Sistine he designed
a mighty architectural framework in the form of a hypaethral temple,
suspended in the air on jutting pilasters, with bold cornices,
projecting brackets, and ribbed arches flung across the void of
heaven. Since the whole of this ideal building was painted upon
plaster, its inconsequence, want of support, and disconnection from
the ground-plan of the chapel do not strike the mind. It is felt to be
a mere basis for the display of pictorial art, the theatre for a
thousand shapes of dignity and beauty.
I have called this imaginary temple hypaethral, because the master
left nine openings in the flattened surface of the central vault. They
are unequal in size, five being short parallelograms, and four being
spaces of the same shape but twice their length. Through these the eye
is supposed to pierce the roof and discover the unfettered region of
the heavens. But here again Michelangelo betrayed the inconsequence of
his invention. He filled the spaces in question with nine dominant
paintings, representing the history of the Creation, the Fall, and the
Deluge. Taking our position at the west end of the chapel and looking
upwards, we see in the first compartment God dividing light from
darkness; in the second, creating the sun and the moon and the solid
earth; in the third, animating the ocean with His brooding influence;
in the fourth, creating Adam; in the fifth, creating Eve. The sixth
represents the temptation of our first parents and their expulsion
from Paradise. The seventh shows Noah's sacrifice before entering the
ark; the eighth depicts the Deluge, and the ninth the drunkenness of
Noah. It is clear that, between the architectural conception of a roof
opening on the skies and these pictures of events which happened upon
earth, there is no logical connection. Indeed, Michelangelo's new
system of decoration bordered dangerously upon the barocco style, and
contained within itself the germs of a vicious mannerism.
It would be captious and unjust to push this criticism home. The
architectural setting provided for the figures and the pictures of the
Sistine vault is so obviously conventional, every point of vantage has
been so skilfully appropriated to plastic uses, every square inch of
the ideal building becomes so naturally, and without confusion, a
pedestal for the human form, that we are lost in wonder at the
synthetic imagination which here for the first time combined the arts
of architecture, sculpture, and painting in a single organism. Each
part of the immense composition, down to the smallest detail, is
necessary to the total effect. We are in the presence of a most
complicated yet mathematically ordered scheme, which owes life and
animation to one master-thought. In spite of its complexity and
scientific precision, the vault of the Sistine does not strike the
mind as being artificial or worked out by calculation, but as being
predestined to existence, inevitable, a cosmos instinct with vitality.
On the pendentives between the spaces of the windows, running up to
the ends of each of the five lesser pictures, Michelangelo placed
alternate prophets and sibyls upon firm projecting consoles. Five
sibyls and five prophets run along the side-walls of the chapel. The
end-walls sustain each of them a prophet. These twelve figures are
introduced as heralds and pioneers of Christ the Saviour, whose
presence on the earth is demanded by the fall of man and the renewal
of sin after the Deluge. In the lunettes above the windows and the
arched recesses or spandrels over them are depicted scenes setting
forth the genealogy of Christ and of His Mother. At each of the four
corner-spandrels of the ceiling, Michelangelo painted, in spaces of a
very peculiar shape and on a surface of embarrassing inequality, one
magnificent subject symbolical of man's redemption. The first is the
raising of the Brazen Serpent in the wilderness; the second, the
punishment of Haman; the third, the victory of David over Goliath; the
fourth, Judith with the head of Holofernes.
Thus, with a profound knowledge of the Bible, and with an intense
feeling for religious symbolism, Michelangelo unrolled the history of
the creation of the world and man, the entrance of sin into the human
heart, the punishment of sin by water, and the reappearance of sin in
Noah's family. Having done this, he intimated, by means of four
special mercies granted to the Jewish people--types and symbols of
God's indulgence--that a Saviour would arise to redeem the erring
human race. In confirmation of this promise, he called twelve potent
witnesses, seven of the Hebrew prophets and five of the Pagan sibyls.
He made appeal to history, and set around the thrones on which these
witnesses are seated scenes detached from the actual lives of our
Lord's human ancestors.
The intellectual power of this conception is at least equal to the
majesty and sublime strength of its artistic presentation. An awful
sense of coming doom and merited damnation hangs in the thunderous
canopy of the Sistine vault, tempered by a solemn and sober
expectation of the Saviour. It is much to be regretted that Christ,
the Desired of all Nations, the Redeemer and Atoner, appears nowhere
adequately represented in the Chapel. When Michelangelo resumed his
work there, it was to portray him as an angered Hercules, hurling
curses upon helpless victims. The August rhetoric of the ceiling loses
its effective value when we can nowhere point to Christ's life and
work on earth; when there is no picture of the Nativity, none of the
Crucifixion, none of the Resurrection; and when the feeble panels of a
Perugino and a Cosimo Rosselli are crushed into insignificance by the
terrible Last Judgment. In spite of Buonarroti's great creative
strength, and injuriously to his real feeling as a Christian, the
piecemeal production which governs all large art undertakings results
here in a maimed and one-sided rendering of what theologians call the
Scheme of Salvation.
III
So much has been written about the pictorial beauty, the sublime
imagination, the dramatic energy, the profound significance, the exact
science, the shy graces, the terrible force, and finally the vivid
powers of characterisation displayed in these frescoes, that I feel it
would be impertinent to attempt a new discourse upon a theme so
time-worn. I must content myself with referring to what I have already
published, which will, I hope, be sufficient to demonstrate that I do
not avoid the task for want of enthusiasm. The study of much
rhetorical criticism makes me feel strongly that, in front of certain
masterpieces, silence is best, or, in lieu of silence, some simple
pregnant sayings, capable of rousing folk to independent observation.
These convictions need not prevent me, however, from fixing attention
upon a subordinate matter, but one which has the most important
bearing upon Michelangelo's genius. After designing the architectural
theatre which I have attempted to describe, and filling its main
spaces with the vast religious drama he unrolled symbolically in a
series of primeval scenes, statuesque figures, and countless minor
groups contributing to one intellectual conception, he proceeded to
charge the interspaces--all that is usually left for facile decorative
details--with an army of passionately felt and wonderfully executed
nudes, forms of youths and children, naked or half draped, in every
conceivable posture and with every possible variety of facial type and
expression. On pedestals, cornices, medallions, tympanums, in the
angles made by arches, wherever a vacant plane or unused curve was
found, he set these vivid transcripts from humanity in action. We need
not stop to inquire what he intended by that host of plastic shapes
evoked from his imagination. The triumphant leaders of the crew, the
twenty lads who sit upon their consoles, sustaining medallions by
ribands which they lift, have been variously and inconclusively
interpreted. In the long row of Michelangelo's creations, those young
men are perhaps the most significant--athletic adolescents, with faces
of feminine delicacy and poignant fascination. But it serves no
purpose to inquire what they symbolise. If we did so, we should have
to go further, and ask, What do the bronze figures below them, twisted
into the boldest attitudes the human frame can take, or the twinned
children on the pedestals, signify? In this region, the region of pure
plastic play, when art drops the wand of the interpreter and allows
physical beauty to be a law unto itself, Michelangelo demonstrated
that no decorative element in the hand of a really supreme master is
equal to the nude.
Previous artists, with a strong instinct for plastic as opposed to
merely picturesque effect, had worked upon the same line. Donatello
revelled in the rhythmic dance and stationary grace of children. Luca
Signorelli initiated the plan of treating complex ornament by means of
the mere human body; and for this reason, in order to define the
position of Michelangelo in Italian art-history, I shall devote the
next section of this chapter to Luca's work at Orvieto. But Buonarroti
in the Sistine carried their suggestions to completion. The result is
a mapped-out chart of living figures--a vast pattern, each detail of
which is a masterpiece of modelling. After we have grasped the
intellectual content of the whole, the message it was meant to
inculcate, the spiritual meaning present to the maker's mind, we
discover that, in the sphere of artistic accomplishment, as distinct
from intellectual suggestion, one rhythm of purely figurative beauty
has been carried throughout--from God creating Adam to the boy who
waves his torch above the censer of the Erythrean sibyl.
IV
Of all previous painters, only Luca Signorelli deserves to be called
the forerunner of Michelangelo, and his Chapel of S. Brizio in the
Cathedral at Orvieto in some remarkable respects anticipates the
Sistine. This eminent master was commissioned in 1499 to finish its
decoration, a small portion of which had been begun by Fra Angelico.
He completed the whole Chapel within the space of two years; so that
the young Michelangelo, upon one of his journeys to or from Rome, may
probably have seen the frescoes in their glory. Although no visit to
Orvieto is recorded by his biographers, the fame of these masterpieces
by a man whose work at Florence had already influenced his youthful
genius must certainly have attracted him to a city which lay on the
direct route from Tuscany to the Campagna.
The four walls of the Chapel of S. Brizio are covered with paintings
setting forth events immediately preceding and following the day of
judgment. A succession of panels, differing in size and shape,
represent the preaching of Antichrist, the destruction of the world by
fire, the resurrection of the body, the condemnation of the lost, the
reception of saved souls into bliss, and the final states of heaven
and hell. These main subjects occupy the upper spaces of each wall,
while below them are placed portraits of poets, surrounded by rich and
fanciful arabesques, including various episodes from Dante and antique
mythology. Obeying the spirit of the fifteenth century, Signorelli did
not aim at what may be termed an architectural effect in his
decoration of this building. Each panel of the whole is treated
separately, and with very unequal energy, the artist seeming to exert
his strength chiefly in those details which made demands on his
profound knowledge of the human form and his enthusiasm for the nude.
The men and women of the Resurrection, the sublime angels of Heaven
and of the Judgment, the discoloured and degraded fiends of Hell, the
magnificently foreshortened clothed figures of the Fulminati, the
portraits in the preaching of Antichrist, reveal Luca's specific
quality as a painter, at once impressively imaginative and crudely
realistic. There is something in his way of regarding the world and of
reproducing its aspects which dominates our fancy, does violence to
our sense of harmony and beauty, leaves us broken and bewildered,
resentful and at the same moment enthralled. He is a power which has
to be reckoned with; and the reason for speaking about him at length
here is that, in this characteristic blending of intense vision with
impassioned realistic effort after truth to fact, this fascination
mingled with repulsion, he anticipated Michelangelo. Deep at the root
of all Buonarroti's artistic qualities lie these contradictions.
Studying Signorelli, we study a parallel psychological problem. The
chief difference between the two masters lies in the command of
aesthetic synthesis, the constructive sense of harmony, which belonged
to the younger, but which might, we feel, have been granted in like
measure to the elder, had Luca been born, as Michelangelo was, to
complete the evolution of Italian figurative art, instead of marking
one of its most important intermediate moments.
The decorative methods and instincts of the two men were closely
similar. Both scorned any element of interest or beauty which was not
strictly plastic--the human body supported by architecture or by rough
indications of the world we live in. Signorelli invented an intricate
design for arabesque pilasters, one on each side of the door leading
from his chapel into the Cathedral. They are painted _en grisaille_,
and are composed exclusively of nudes, mostly male, perched or grouped
in a marvellous variety of attitudes upon an ascending series of
slender-stemmed vases, which build up gigantic candelabra by their
aggregation. The naked form is treated with audacious freedom. It
appears to be elastic in the hands of the modeller. Some dead bodies
carried on the backs of brawny porters are even awful by the contrast
of their wet-clay limpness with the muscular energy of brutal life
beneath them. Satyrs giving drink to one another, fauns whispering in
the ears of stalwart women, centaurs trotting with corpses flung
across their cruppers, combatants trampling in frenzy upon prostrate
enemies, men sunk in self-abandonment to sloth or sorrow--such are the
details of these incomparable columns, where our sense of the
grotesque and vehement is immediately corrected by a perception of
rare energy in the artist who could play thus with his plastic
puppets.
We have here certainly the preludings to Michelangelo's serener, more
monumental work in the Sistine Chapel. The leading motive is the same
in both great masterpieces. It consists in the use of the simple body,
if possible the nude body, for the expression of thought and emotion,
the telling of a tale, the delectation of the eye by ornamental
details. It consists also in the subordination of the female to the
male nude as the symbolic unit of artistic utterance. Buonarroti is
greater than Signorelli chiefly through that larger and truer
perception of aesthetic unity which seems to be the final outcome of a
long series of artistic effort. The arabesques, for instance, with
which Luca wreathed his portraits of the poets, are monstrous,
bizarre, in doubtful taste. Michelangelo, with a finer instinct for
harmony, a deeper grasp on his own dominant ideal, excluded this
element of _quattrocento_ decoration from his scheme. Raffaello, with
the graceful tact essential to the style, developed its crude
rudiments into the choice forms of fanciful delightfulness which charm
us in the Loggie. Signorelli loved violence. A large proportion of the
circular pictures painted _en grisaille_ on these walls represent
scenes of massacre, assassination, torture, ruthless outrage. One of
them, extremely spirited in design, shows a group of three
executioners hurling men with millstones round their necks into a
raging river from the bridge which spans it. The first victim
flounders half merged in the flood; a second plunges head foremost
through the air; the third stands bent upon the parapet, his shoulders
pressed down by the varlets on each side, at the very point of being
flung to death by drowning. In another of these pictures a man seated
upon the ground is being tortured by the breaking of his teeth, while
a furious fellow holds a club suspended over him, in act to shatter
his thigh-bones. Naked soldiers wrestle in mad conflict, whirl staves
above their heads, fling stones, displaying their coarse muscles with
a kind of frenzy. Even the classical subjects suffer from extreme
dramatic energy of treatment. Ceres, seeking her daughter through the
plains of Sicily, dashes frantically on a car of dragons, her hair
dishevelled to the winds, her cheeks gashed by her own crooked
fingers. Eurydice struggles in the clutch of bestial devils; Pluto,
like a mediaeval Satan, frowns above the scene of fiendish riot; the
violin of Orpheus thrills faintly through the infernal tumult. Gazing
on the spasms and convulsions of these grim subjects, we are inclined
to credit a legend preserved at Orvieto to the effect that the painter
depicted his own unfaithful mistress in the naked woman who is being
borne on a demon's back through the air to hell.
No one who has studied Michelangelo impartially will deny that in this
preference for the violent he came near to Signorelli. We feel it in
his choice of attitude, the strain he puts upon the lines of plastic
composition, the stormy energy of his conception and expression. It is
what we call his _terribilità_. But here again that dominating sense
of harmony, that instinct for the necessity of subordinating each
artistic element to one strain of architectonic music, which I have
already indicated as the leading note of difference between him and
the painter of Cortona, intervened to elevate his terribleness into
the region of sublimity. The violence of Michelangelo, unlike that of
Luca, lay not so much in the choice of savage subjects (cruelty,
ferocity, extreme physical and mental torment) as in a forceful,
passionate, tempestuous way of handling all the themes he treated. The
angels of the Judgment, sustaining the symbols of Christ's Passion,
wrestle and bend their agitated limbs like athletes. Christ emerges
from the sepulchre, not in victorious tranquillity, but with the clash
and clangour of an irresistible energy set free. Even in the
Crucifixion, one leg has been wrenched away from the nail which
pierced its foot, and writhes round the knee of the other still left
riven to the cross. The loves of Leda and the Swan, of Ixion and Juno,
are spasms of voluptuous pain; the sleep of the Night is troubled with
fantastic dreams, and the Dawn starts into consciousness with a
shudder of prophetic anguish. There is not a hand, a torso, a simple
nude, sketched by this extraordinary master, which does not vibrate
with nervous tension, as though the fingers that grasped the pen were
clenched and the eyes that viewed the model glowed beneath knit brows.
Michelangelo, in fact, saw nothing, felt nothing, interpreted nothing,
on exactly the same lines as any one who had preceded or who followed
him. His imperious personality he stamped upon the smallest trifle of
his work.
Luca's frescoes at Orvieto, when compared with Michelangelo's in the
Sistine, mark the transition from the art of the fourteenth, through
the art of the fifteenth, to that of the sixteenth century, with broad
and trenchant force. They are what Marlowe's dramas were to
Shakespeare's. They retain much of the mediaeval tradition both as
regards form and sentiment. We feel this distinctly in the treatment
of Dante, whose genius seems to have exerted at least as strong an
influence over Signorelli's imagination as over that of Michelangelo.
The episodes from the Divine Comedy are painted in a rude Gothic
spirit. The spirits of Hell seem borrowed from grotesque bas-reliefs
of the Pisan school. The draped, winged, and armed angels of Heaven
are posed with a ceremonious research of suavity or grandeur. These
and other features of his work carry us back to the period of Giotto
and Niccolò Pisano. But the true force of the man, what made him a
commanding master of the middle period, what distinguished him from
all his fellows of the _quattrocento_, is the passionate delight he
took in pure humanity--the nude, the body studied under all its
aspects and with no repugnance for its coarseness--man in his crudity
made the sole sufficient object for figurative art, anatomy regarded
as the crowning and supreme end of scientific exploration. It is this
in his work which carries us on toward the next age, and justifies our
calling Luca "the morning-star of Michelangelo."
It would be wrong to ascribe too much to the immediate influence of
the elder over the younger artist--at any rate in so far as the
frescoes of the Chapel of S. Brizio may have determined the creation
of the Sistine. Yet Vasari left on record that "even Michelangelo
followed the manner of Signorelli, as any one may see." Undoubtedly,
Buonarroti, while an inmate of Lorenzo de' Medici's palace at
Florence, felt the power of Luca's Madonna with the naked figures in
the background; the leading motive of which he transcended in his Doni
Holy Family. Probably at an early period he had before his eyes the
bold nudities, uncompromising designs, and awkward composition of
Luca's so-called School of Pan. In like manner, we may be sure that
during his first visit to Rome he was attracted by Signorelli's solemn
fresco of Moses in the Sistine. These things were sufficient to
establish a link of connection between the painter of Cortona and the
Florentine sculptor. And when Michelangelo visited the Chapel of S.
Brizio, after he had fixed and formed his style (exhibiting his innate
force of genius in the Pietà, the Bacchus, the Cupid, the David, the
statue of Julius, the Cartoon for the Battle of Pisa), that early bond
of sympathy must have been renewed and enforced. They were men of a
like temperament, and governed by kindred aesthetic instincts.
Michelangelo brought to its perfection that system of working wholly
through the human form which Signorelli initiated. He shared his
violence, his _terribilità_, his almost brutal candour. In the fated
evolution of Italian art, describing its parabola of vital energy,
Michelangelo softened, sublimed, and harmonised his predecessor's
qualities. He did this by abandoning Luca's naïvetés and crudities;
exchanging his savage transcripts from coarse life for profoundly
studied idealisations of form; subordinating his rough and casual
design to schemes of balanced composition, based on architectural
relations; penetrating the whole accomplished work, as he intended it
should be, with a solemn and severe strain of unifying intellectual
melody.
Viewed in this light, the vault of the Sistine and the later fresco of
the Last Judgment may be taken as the final outcome of all previous
Italian art upon a single line of creative energy, and that line the
one anticipated by Luca Signorelli. In like manner, the Stanze and
Loggie of the Vatican were the final outcome of the same process upon
another line, suggested by Perugino and Fra Bartolommeo.
Michelangelo adapted to his own uses and bent to his own genius
motives originated by the Pisani, Giotto, Giacopo della Quercia,
Donatello, Masaccio, while working in the spirit of Signorelli. He
fused and recast the antecedent materials of design in sculpture and
painting, producing a quintessence of art beyond which it was
impossible to advance without breaking the rhythm, so intensely
strung, and without contradicting too violently the parent
inspiration. He strained the chord of rhythm to its very utmost, and
made incalculable demands upon the religious inspiration of its
predecessors. His mighty talent was equal to the task of transfusion
and remodelling which the exhibition of the supreme style demanded.
But after him there remained nothing for successors except mechanical
imitation, soulless rehandling of themes he had exhausted by reducing
them to his imperious imagination in a crucible of fiery intensity.
V
No critic with a just sense of phraseology would call Michelangelo a
colourist in the same way as Titian and Rubens were colourists. Still
it cannot be denied with justice that the painter of the Sistine had a
keen perception of what his art required in this region, and of how to
attain it. He planned a comprehensive architectural scheme, which
served as setting and support for multitudes of draped and undraped
human figures. The colouring is kept deliberately low and subordinate
to the two main features of the design--architecture, and the plastic
forms of men and women. Flesh-tints, varying from the strong red tone
of Jonah's athletic manhood, through the glowing browns of the seated
Genii, to the delicate carnations of Adam and the paler hues of Eve;
orange and bronze in draperies, medallions, decorative nudes, russets
like the tints of dead leaves; lilacs, cold greens, blue used
sparingly; all these colours are dominated and brought into harmony by
the greys of the architectural setting. It may indeed be said that the
different qualities of flesh-tints, the architectural greys, and a
dull bronzed yellow strike the chord of the composition. Reds are
conspicuous by their absence in any positive hue. There is no
vermilion, no pure scarlet or crimson, but a mixed tint verging upon
lake. The yellows are brought near to orange, tawny, bronze, except in
the hair of youthful personages, a large majority of whom are blonde.
The only colour which starts out staringly is ultramarine, owing of
course to this mineral material resisting time and change more
perfectly than the pigments with which it is associated. The whole
scheme leaves a grave harmonious impression on the mind, thoroughly in
keeping with the sublimity of the thoughts expressed. No words can
describe the beauty of the flesh-painting, especially in the figures
of the Genii, or the technical delicacy with which the modelling of
limbs, the modulation from one tone to another, have been carried from
silvery transparent shades up to the strongest accents.
VI
Mr. Ruskin has said, and very justly said, that "the highest art can
do no more than rightly represent the human form." This is what the
Italians of the Renaissance meant when, through the mouths of
Ghiberti, Buonarroti, and Cellini, they proclaimed that the perfect
drawing of a fine nude, "un bel corpo ignudo," was the final test of
mastery in plastic art. Mr. Ruskin develops his text in sentences
which have peculiar value from his lips. "This is the simple test,
then, of a perfect school--that it has represented the human form so
that it is impossible to conceive of its being better done. And that,
I repeat, has been accomplished twice only: once in Athens, once in
Florence. And so narrow is the excellence even of these two exclusive
schools, that it cannot be said of either of them that they
represented the entire human form. The Greeks perfectly drew and
perfectly moulded the body and limbs, but there is, so far as I am
aware, no instance of their representing the face as well as any great
Italian. On the other hand, the Italian painted and carved the face
insuperably; but I believe there is no instance of his having
perfectly represented the body, which, by command of his religion, it
became his pride to despise and his safety to mortify."
We need not pause to consider whether the Italian's inferiority to the
Greek's in the plastic modelling of human bodies was due to the
artist's own religious sentiment. That seems a far-fetched explanation
for the shortcomings of men so frankly realistic and so scientifically
earnest as the masters of the Cinque Cento were. Michelangelo's
magnificent cartoon of Leda and the Swan, if it falls short of some
similar subject in some _gabinetto segreto_ of antique fresco, does
assuredly not do so because the draughtsman's hand faltered in pious
dread or pious aspiration. Nevertheless, Ruskin is right in telling us
that no Italian modelled a female nude equal to the Aphrodite of
Melos, or a male nude equal to the Apoxyomenos of the Braccio Nuovo.
He is also right in pointing out that no Greek sculptor approached the
beauty of facial form and expression which we recognise in Raffaello's
Madonna di San Sisto, in Sodoma's S. Sebastian, in Guercino's Christ
at the Corsini Palace, in scores of early Florentine sepulchral
monuments and pictures, in Umbrian saints and sweet strange
portrait-fancies by Da Vinci.
The fact seems to be that Greek and Italian plastic art followed
different lines of development, owing to the difference of dominant
ideas in the races, and to the difference of social custom. Religion
naturally played a foremost part in the art-evolution of both epochs.
The anthropomorphic Greek mythology encouraged sculptors to
concentrate their attention upon what Hegel called "the sensuous
manifestation of the idea," while Greek habits rendered them familiar
with the body frankly exhibited. Mediaeval religion withdrew Italian
sculptors and painters from the problems of purely physical form, and
obliged them to study the expression of sentiments and aspirations
which could only be rendered by emphasising psychical qualities
revealed through physiognomy. At the same time, modern habits of life
removed the naked body from their ken.
We may go further, and observe that the conditions under which Greek
art flourished developed what the Germans call "Allgemeinheit," a
tendency to generalise, which was inimical to strongly marked facial
expression or characterisation. The conditions of Italian art, on the
other hand, favoured an opposite tendency--to particularise, to
enforce detail, to emphasise the artist's own ideal or the model's
quality. When the type of a Greek deity had been fixed, each
successive master varied this within the closest limits possible. For
centuries the type remained fundamentally unaltered, undergoing subtle
transformations, due partly to the artist's temperament, and partly to
changes in the temper of society. Consequently those aspects of the
human form which are capable of most successful generalisation, the
body and the limbs, exerted a kind of conventional tyranny over Greek
art. And Greek artists applied to the face the same rules of
generalisation which were applicable to the body.
The Greek god or goddess was a sensuous manifestation of the idea, a
particle of universal godhood incarnate in a special fleshly form,
corresponding to the particular psychological attributes of the deity
whom the sculptor had to represent. No deviation from the generalised
type was possible. The Christian God, on the contrary, is a spirit;
and all the emanations from this spirit, whether direct, as in the
person of Christ, or derived, as in the persons of the saints, owe
their sensuous form and substance to the exigencies of mortal
existence, which these persons temporarily and phenomenally obeyed.
Since, then, the sensuous manifestation has now become merely
symbolic, and is no longer an indispensable investiture of the idea,
it may be altered at will in Christian art without irreverence. The
utmost capacity of the artist is now exerted, not in enforcing or
refining a generalised type, but in discovering some new facial
expression which shall reveal psychological quality in a particular
being. Doing so, he inevitably insists upon the face; and having
formed a face expressive of some defined quality, he can hardly give
to the body that generalised beauty which belongs to a Greek nymph or
athlete.
What we mean by the differences between Classic and Romantic art lies
in the distinctions I am drawing. Classicism sacrifices character to
breadth. Romanticism sacrifices breadth to character. Classic art
deals more triumphantly with the body, because the body gains by being
broadly treated. Romantic art deals more triumphantly with the face,
because the features lose by being broadly treated.
This brings me back to Mr. Ruskin, who, in another of his treatises,
condemns Michelangelo for a want of variety, beauty, feeling, in his
heads and faces. Were this the case, Michelangelo would have little
claim to rank as one of the world's chief artists. We have admitted
that the Italians did not produce such perfectly beautiful bodes and
limbs as the Greeks did, and have agreed that the Greeks produced less
perfectly beautiful faces than the Italians. Suppose, then, that
Michelangelo failed in his heads and faces, he, being an Italian, and
therefore confessedly inferior to the Greeks in his bodies and limbs,
must, by the force of logic, emerge less meritorious than we thought
him.
VII
To many of my readers the foregoing section will appear superfluous,
polemical, sophistic--three bad things. I wrote it, and I let it
stand, however, because it serves as preface to what I have to say in
general about Michelangelo's ideal of form. He was essentially a
Romantic as opposed to a Classic artist. That is to say, he sought
invariably for character--character in type, character in attitude,
character in every action of each muscle, character in each
extravagance of pose. He applied the Romantic principle to the body
and the limbs, exactly to that region of the human form which the
Greeks had conquered as their province. He did so with consummate
science and complete mastery of physiological law. What is more, he
compelled the body to become expressive, not, as the Greeks had done,
of broad general conceptions, but of the most intimate and poignant
personal emotions. This was his main originality. At the same time,
being a Romantic, he deliberately renounced the main tradition of that
manner. He refused to study portraiture, as Vasari tells us, and as we
see so plainly in the statues of the Dukes at Florence. He generalised
his faces, composing an ideal cast of features out of several types.
In the rendering of the face and head, then, he chose to be a Classic,
while in the treatment of the body he was vehemently modern. In all
his work which is not meant to be dramatic--that is, excluding the
damned souls in the Last Judgment, the bust of Brutus, and some keen
psychological designs--character is sacrificed to a studied ideal of
form, so far as the face is concerned. That he did this wilfully, on
principle, is certain. The proof remains in the twenty heads of those
incomparable genii of the Sistine, each one of whom possesses a beauty
and a quality peculiar to himself alone. They show that, if he had so
chosen, he could have played upon the human countenance with the same
facility as on the human body, varying its expressiveness _ad
infinitum_.
Why Michelangelo preferred to generalise the face and to particularise
the body remains a secret buried in the abysmal deeps of his
personality. In his studies from the model, unlike Lionardo, he almost
always left the features vague, while working out the trunk and limbs
with strenuous passion. He never seems to have been caught and
fascinated by the problem offered by the eyes and features of a male
or female. He places masks or splendid commonplaces upon frames
palpitant and vibrant with vitality in pleasure or in anguish.
In order to guard against an apparent contradiction, I must submit
that, when Michelangelo particularised the body and the limbs, he
strove to make them the symbols of some definite passion or emotion.
He seems to have been more anxious about the suggestions afforded by
their pose and muscular employment than he was about the expression of
the features. But we shall presently discover that, so far as pure
physical type is concerned, he early began to generalise the structure
of the body, passing finally into what may not unjustly be called a
mannerism of form.
These points may be still further illustrated by what a competent
critic has recently written upon Michelangelo's treatment of form. "No
one," says Professor Brücke, "ever knew so well as Michelangelo
Buonarroti how to produce powerful and strangely harmonious effects by
means of figures in themselves open to criticism, simply by his mode
of placing and ordering them, and of distributing their lines. For him
a figure existed only in his particular representation of it; how it
would have looked in any other position was a matter of no concern to
him." We may even go further, and maintain that Michelangelo was
sometimes wilfully indifferent to the physical capacities of the human
body in his passionate research of attitudes which present picturesque
and novel beauty. The ancients worked on quite a different method.
They created standard types which, in every conceivable posture, would
exhibit the grace and symmetry belonging to well-proportioned frames.
Michelangelo looked to the effect of a particular posture. He may have
been seduced by his habit of modelling figures in clay instead of
going invariably to the living subject, and so may have handled nature
with unwarrantable freedom. Anyhow, we have here another demonstration
of his romanticism.
VIII
The true test of the highest art is that it should rightly represent
the human form. Agreed upon this point, it remains for us to consider
in what way Michelangelo conceived and represented the human form. If
we can discover his ideal, his principles, his leading instincts in
this decisive matter, we shall unlock, so far as that is possible, the
secret of his personality as man and artist. The psychological quality
of every great master must eventually be determined by his mode of
dealing with the phenomena of sex.
In Pheidias we find a large impartiality. His men and women are cast
in the same mould of grandeur, inspired with equal strength and
sweetness, antiphonal notes in dual harmony. Praxiteles leans to the
female, Lysippus to the male; and so, through all the gamut of the
figurative craftsmen, we discover more or less affinity for man or
woman. One is swayed by woman and her gracefulness, the other by man
and his vigour. Few have realised the Pheidian perfection of doing
equal justice.
Michelangelo emerges as a mighty master who was dominated by the
vision of male beauty, and who saw the female mainly through the
fascination of the other sex. The defect of his art is due to a
certain constitutional callousness, a want of sensuous or imaginative
sensibility for what is specifically feminine.
Not a single woman carved or painted by the hand of Michelangelo has
the charm of early youth or the grace of virginity. The Eve of the
Sistine, the Madonna of S. Peter's, the Night and Dawn of the Medicean
Sacristy, are female in the anatomy of their large and grandly
modelled forms, but not feminine in their sentiment. This proposition
requires no proof. It is only needful to recall a Madonna by Raphael,
a Diana by Correggio, a Leda by Lionardo, a Venus by Titian, a S.
Agnes by Tintoretto. We find ourselves immediately in a different
region--the region of artists who loved, admired, and comprehended
what is feminine in the beauty and the temperament of women.
Michelangelo neither loved, nor admired, nor yielded to the female
sex. Therefore he could not deal plastically with what is best and
loveliest in the female form. His plastic ideal of the woman is
masculine. He builds a colossal frame of muscle, bone, and flesh,
studied with supreme anatomical science. He gives to Eve the full
pelvis and enormous haunches of an adult matron. It might here be
urged that he chose to symbolise the fecundity of her who was destined
to be the mother of the human race. But if this was his meaning, why
did he not make Adam a corresponding symbol of fatherhood? Adam is an
adolescent man, colossal in proportions, but beardless, hairless; the
attributes of sex in him are developed, but not matured by use. The
Night, for whom no symbolism of maternity was needed, is a woman who
has passed through many pregnancies. Those deeply delved wrinkles on
the vast and flaccid abdomen sufficiently indicate this. Yet when we
turn to Michelangelo's sonnets on Night, we find that he habitually
thought of her as a mysterious and shadowy being, whose influence,
though potent for the soul, disappeared before the frailest of all
creatures bearing light. The Dawn, again, in her deep lassitude, has
nothing of vernal freshness. Built upon the same type as the Night,
she looks like Messalina dragging herself from heavy slumber, for once
satiated as well as tired, stricken for once with the conscience of
disgust. When he chose to depict the acts of passion or of sensual
pleasure, a similar want of sympathy with what is feminine in
womanhood leaves an even more discordant impression on the mind. I
would base the proof of this remark upon the marble Leda of the
Bargello Museum, and an old engraving of Ixion clasping the phantom of
Juno under the form of a cloud. In neither case do we possess
Michelangelo's own handiwork; he must not, therefore, be credited with
the revolting expression, as of a drunken profligate, upon the face of
Leda. Yet in both cases he is indubitably responsible for the general
design, and for the brawny carnality of the repulsive woman. I find it
difficult to resist the conclusion that Michelangelo felt himself
compelled to treat women as though they were another and less graceful
sort of males. The sentiment of woman, what really distinguishes the
sex, whether voluptuously or passionately or poetically apprehended,
emerges in no eminent instance of his work. There is a Cartoon at
Naples for a Bacchante, which Bronzino transferred to canvas and
coloured. This design illustrates the point on which I am insisting.
An athletic circus-rider of mature years, with abnormally developed
muscles, might have posed as model for this female votary of Dionysus.
Before he made this drawing, Michelangelo had not seen those frescoes
of the dancing Bacchantes from Pompeii; nor had he perhaps seen the
Maenads on Greek bas-reliefs tossing wild tresses backwards, swaying
virginal lithe bodies to the music of the tambourine. We must not,
therefore, compare his concept with those masterpieces of the later
classical imagination. Still, many of his contemporaries, vastly
inferior to him in penetrative insight, a Giovanni da Udine, a Perino
del Vaga, a Primaticcio, not to speak of Raffaello or of Lionardo,
felt what the charm of youthful womanhood upon the revel might be. He
remained insensible to the melody of purely feminine lines; and the
only reason why his transcripts from the female form are not gross
like those of Flemish painters, repulsive like Rembrandt's, fleshly
like Rubens's, disagreeable like the drawings made by criminals in
prisons, is that they have little womanly about them.
Lest these assertions should appear too dogmatic, I will indicate the
series of works in which I recognise Michelangelo's sympathy with
genuine female quality. All the domestic groups, composed of women and
children, which fill the lunettes and groinings between the windows in
the Sistine Chapel, have a charming twilight sentiment of family life
or maternal affection. They are among the loveliest and most tranquil
of his conceptions. The Madonna above the tomb of Julius II. cannot be
accused of masculinity, nor the ecstatic figure of the Rachel beneath
it. Both of these statues represent what Goethe called "das ewig
Weibliche" under a truly felt and natural aspect. The Delphian and
Erythrean Sibyls are superb in their majesty. Again, in those numerous
designs for Crucifixions, Depositions from the Cross, and Pietàs,
which occupied so much of Michelangelo's attention during his old age,
we find an intense and pathetic sympathy with the sorrows of Mary,
expressed with noble dignity and a pious sense of godhead in the human
mother. It will be remarked that throughout the cases I have reserved
as exceptions, it is not woman in her plastic beauty and her radiant
charm that Michelangelo has rendered, but woman in her tranquil or her
saddened and sorrow-stricken moods. What he did not comprehend and
could not represent was woman in her girlishness, her youthful joy,
her physical attractiveness, her magic of seduction.
Michelangelo's women suggest demonic primitive beings, composite and
undetermined products of the human race in evolution, before the
specific qualities of sex have been eliminated from a general
predominating mass of masculinity. At their best, they carry us into
the realm of Lucretian imagination. He could not have incarnated in
plastic form Shakespeare's Juliet and Imogen, Dante's Francesca da
Rimini, Tasso's Erminia and Clorinda; but he might have supplied a
superb illustration to the opening lines of the Lucretian epic, where
Mars lies in the bed of Venus, and the goddess spreads her ample limbs
above her Roman lover. He might have evoked images tallying the vision
of primal passion in the fourth book of that poem. As I have elsewhere
said, writing about Lucretius: "There is something almost tragic in
these sighs and pantings and pleasure-throes, these incomplete
fruitions of souls pent within their frames of flesh. We seem to see a
race of men and women such as never lived, except perhaps in Rome or
in the thought of Michelangelo, meeting in leonine embracements that
yield pain, whereof the climax is, at best, relief from rage and
respite for a moment from consuming fire. There is a life elemental
rather than human in those mighty limbs; and the passion that twists
them on the marriage-bed has in it the stress of storms, the rampings
and roarings of leopards at play. Take this single line:--
_et Venus in silvis jungebat corpora amantum._
What a picture of primeval breadth and vastness! The forest is the
world, and the bodies of the lovers are things natural and unashamed,
and Venus is the tyrannous instinct that controls the blood in
spring."
What makes Michelangelo's crudity in his plastic treatment of the
female form the more remarkable is that in his poetry he seems to feel
the influence of women mystically. I shall have to discuss this topic
in another place. It is enough here to say that, with very few
exceptions, we remain in doubt whether he is addressing a woman at
all. There are none of those spontaneous utterances by which a man
involuntarily expresses the outgoings of his heart to a beloved
object, the throb of irresistible emotion, the physical ache, the
sense of wanting, the joys and pains, the hopes and fears, the
ecstasies and disappointments, which belong to genuine passion. The
woman is, for him, an allegory, something he has not approached and
handled. Of her personality we learn nothing. Of her bodily
presentment, the eyes alone are mentioned; and the eyes are treated as
the path to Paradise for souls which seek emancipation from the flesh.
Raffaello's few and far inferior sonnets vibrate with an intense and
potent sensibility to this woman or to that.
Michelangelo's "donna" might just as well be a man; and indeed the
poems he addressed to men, though they have nothing sensual about
them, reveal a finer touch in the emotion of the writer. It is
difficult to connect this vaporous incorporeal "donna" of the poems
with those brawny colossal adult females of the statues, unless we
suppose that Michelangelo remained callous both to the physical
attractions and the emotional distinction of woman as she actually is.
I have tried to demonstrate that, plastically, he did not understand
women, and could not reproduce their form in art with sympathetic
feeling for its values of grace, suavity, virginity, and frailty. He
imported masculine qualities into every female theme he handled. The
case is different when we turn to his treatment of the male figure. It
would be impossible to adduce a single instance, out of the many
hundreds of examples furnished by his work, in which a note of
femininity has been added to the masculine type. He did not think
enough of women to reverse the process, and create hermaphroditic
beings like the Apollino of Praxiteles or the S. Sebastian of Sodoma.
His boys and youths and adult men remain, in the truest and the purest
sense of the word, virile. Yet with what infinite variety, with what a
deep intelligence of its resources, with what inexhaustible riches of
enthusiasm and science, he played upon the lyre of the male nude! How
far more fit for purposes of art he felt the man to be than the woman
is demonstrated, not only by his approaching woman from the masculine
side, but also by his close attention to none but male qualities in
men. I need not insist or enlarge upon this point. The fact is
apparent to every one with eyes to see. It would be futile to expound
Michelangelo's fertility in dealing with the motives of the male
figure as minutely as I judged it necessary to explain the poverty of
his inspiration through the female. But it ought to be repeated that,
over the whole gamut of the scale, from the grace of boyhood, through
the multiform delightfulness of adolescence into the firm force of
early manhood, and the sterner virtues of adult age, one severe and
virile spirit controls his fashioning of plastic forms. He even
exaggerates what is masculine in the male, as he caricatures the
female by ascribing impossible virility to her. But the exaggeration
follows here a line of mental and moral rectitude. It is the
expression of his peculiar sensibility to physical structure.
IX
When we study the evolution of Michelangelo's ideal of form, we find
at the beginning of his life a very short period in which he followed
the traditions of Donatello and imitated Greek work. The seated
Madonna in bas-relief and the Giovannino belong to this first stage.
So does the bas-relief of the Centaurs. It soon becomes evident,
however, that Michelangelo was not destined to remain a continuator of
Donatello's manner or a disciple of the classics. The next period,
which includes the Madonna della Febbre, the Bruges Madonna, the
Bacchus, the Cupid, and the David, is marked by an intense search
after the truth of Nature. Both Madonnas might be criticised for
unreality, owing to the enormous development of the thorax and
something artificial in the type of face. But all the male figures
seem to have been studied from the model. There is an individuality
about the character of each, a naturalism, an aiming after realistic
expression, which separate this group from previous and subsequent
works by Buonarroti. Traces of Donatello's influence survive in the
treatment of the long large hands of David, the cast of features
selected for that statue, and the working of the feet. Indeed it may
be said that Donatello continued through life to affect the genius of
Michelangelo by a kind of sympathy, although the elder master's
naïveté was soon discarded by the younger.
The second period culminated in the Cartoon for the Battle of Pisa.
This design appears to have fixed the style now known to us as
Michelangelesque, and the loss of it is therefore irreparable. It
exercised the consummate science which he had acquired, his complete
mastery over the male nude. It defined his firm resolve to treat
linear design from the point of view of sculpture rather than of
painting proper. It settled his determination to work exclusively
through and by the human figure, rejecting all subordinate elements of
decoration. Had we possessed this epoch-making masterpiece, we should
probably have known Michelangelo's genius in its flower-period of
early ripeness, when anatomical learning was still combined with a
sustained dependence upon Nature. The transition from the second to
the third stage in this development of form-ideal remains imperfectly
explained, because the bathers in the Arno were necessary to account
for the difference between the realistic David and the methodically
studied genii of the Sistine.
The vault of the Sistine shows Michelangelo's third manner in
perfection. He has developed what may be called a scheme of the human
form. The apparently small head, the enormous breadth of shoulder, the
thorax overweighing the whole figure, the finely modelled legs, the
large and powerful extremities, which characterise his style
henceforward, culminate in Adam, repeat themselves throughout the
genii, govern the prophets. But Nature has not been neglected. Nothing
is more remarkable in that vast decorative mass of figures than the
variety of types selected, the beauty and animation of the faces, the
extraordinary richness, elasticity, and freshness of the attitudes
presented to the eye. Every period of life has been treated with
impartial justice, and both sexes are adequately handled. The
Delphian, Erythrean, and Libyan Sibyls display a sublime sense of
facial beauty. The Eve of the Temptation has even something of
positively feminine charm. This is probably due to the fact that
Michelangelo here studied expression and felt the necessity of
dramatic characterisation in this part of his work. He struck each
chord of what may be called the poetry of figurative art, from the
epic cantos of Creation, Fall, and Deluge, through the tragic odes
uttered by prophets and sibyls down to the lyric notes of the genii,
and the sweet idyllic strains of the groups in the lunettes and
spandrels.
It cannot be said that even here Michelangelo felt the female nude as
sympathetically as he felt the male. The women in the picture of the
Deluge are colossal creatures, scarcely distinguishable from the men
except by their huge bosoms. His personal sense of beauty finds
fullest expression in the genii. The variations on one theme of
youthful loveliness and grace are inexhaustible; the changes rung on
attitude, and face, and feature are endless. The type, as I have said,
has already become schematic. It is adolescent, but the adolescence is
neither that of the Greek athlete nor that of the nude model. Indeed,
it is hardly natural; nor yet is it ideal in the Greek sense of that
term. The physical gracefulness of a slim ephebus was never seized by
Michelangelo. His Ganymede displays a massive trunk and brawny thighs.
Compare this with the Ganymede of Titian. Compare the Cupid at South
Kensington with the Praxitelean Genius of the Vatican--the Adonis and
the Bacchus of the Bargello with Hellenic statues. The bulk and force
of maturity are combined with the smoothness of boyhood and with a
delicacy of face that borders on the feminine.
It is an arid region, the region of this mighty master's spirit. There
are no heavens and no earth or sea in it; no living creatures,
forests, flowers; no bright colours, brilliant lights, or cavernous
darks. In clear grey twilight appear a multitude of naked forms, both
male and female, yet neither male nor female of the actual world;
rather the brood of an inventive intellect, teeming with
preoccupations of abiding thoughts and moods of feeling, which become
for it incarnate in these stupendous figures. It is as though
Michelangelo worked from the image in his brain outwards to a physical
presentment supplied by his vast knowledge of life, creating forms
proper to his own specific concept.
Nowhere else in plastic art does the mental world peculiar to the
master press in so immediately, without modification and without
mitigation, upon our sentient imagination. I sometimes dream that the
inhabitants of the moon may be like Michelangelo's men and women, as I
feel sure its landscape resembles his conception of the material
universe.
What I have called Michelangelo's third manner, the purest
manifestation of which is to be found in the vault of the Sistine,
sustained itself for a period of many years. The surviving fragments
of sculpture for the tomb of Julius, especially the Captives of the
Louvre and the statues in the Sacristy at S. Lorenzo, belong to this
stage. A close and intimate _rapport_ with Nature can be perceived in
all the work he designed and executed during the pontificates of Leo
and Clement. The artist was at his fullest both of mental energy and
physical vigour. What he wrought now bears witness to his plenitude of
manhood. Therefore, although the type fixed for the Sistine
prevailed--I mean that generalisation of the human form in certain
wilfully selected proportions, conceived to be ideally beautiful or
necessary for the grand style in vast architectonic schemes of
decoration--still it is used with an exquisite sensitiveness to the
pose and structure of the natural body, a delicate tact in the
definition of muscle and articulation, an acute feeling for the
qualities of flesh and texture. None of the creations of this period,
moreover, are devoid of intense animating emotions and ideas.
Unluckily, during all the years which intervened between the Sistine
vault and the Last Judgment, Michelangelo was employed upon
architectural problems and engineering projects, which occupied his
genius in regions far removed from that of figurative art. It may,
therefore, be asserted, that although he did not retrograde from want
of practice, he had no opportunity of advancing further by the
concentration of his genius on design. This accounts, I think, for the
change in his manner which we notice when he began to paint in Rome
under Pope Paul III. The fourth stage in his development of form is
reached now. He has lost nothing of his vigour, nothing of his
science. But he has drifted away from Nature. All the innumerable
figures of the Last Judgment, in all their varied attitudes, with
divers moods of dramatic expression, are diagrams wrought out
imaginatively from the stored-up resources of a lifetime. It may be
argued that it was impossible to pose models, in other words, to
appeal to living men and women, for the foreshortenings of falling or
soaring shapes in that huge drift of human beings. This is true; and
the strongest testimony to the colossal powers of observation
possessed by Michelangelo is that none of all those attitudes are
wrong. We may verify them, if we take particular pains to do so, by
training the sense of seeing to play the part of a detective camera.
Michelangelo was gifted with a unique faculty for seizing momentary
movements, fixing them upon his memory, and transferring them to
fresco by means of his supreme acquaintance with the bony structure
and the muscular capacities of the human frame. Regarded from this
point of view, the Last Judgment was an unparalleled success. As such
the contemporaries of Buonarroti hailed it. Still, the breath of life
has exaled from all those bodies, and the tyranny of the schematic
ideal of form is felt in each of them. Without meaning to be
irreverent, we might fancy that two elastic lay-figures, one male, the
other female, both singularly similar in shape, supplied the materials
for the total composition. Of the dramatic intentions and suggestions
underlying these plastic and elastic shapes I am not now speaking. It
is my present business to establish the phases through which my
master's sense of form passed from its cradle to its grave.
In the frescoes of the Cappella Paolina, so ruined at this day that we
can hardly value them, the mechanic manner of the fourth stage seems
to reach its climax. Ghosts of their former selves, they still reveal
the poverty of creative and spontaneous inspiration which presided
over their nativity.
Michelangelo's fourth manner might be compared with that of Milton in
"Paradise Regained" and "Samson Agonistes." Both of these great
artists in old age exaggerate the defects of their qualities.
Michelangelo's ideal of line and proportion in the human form becomes
stereotyped and strained, as do Milton's rhythms and his Latinisms.
The generous wine of the Bacchus and of "Comus," so intoxicating in
its newness, the same wine in the Sistine and "Paradise Lost," so
overwhelming in its mature strength, has acquired an austere aridity.
Yet, strange to say, amid these autumn stubbles of declining genius we
light upon oases more sweet, more tenderly suggestive, than aught the
prime produced. It is not my business to speak of Milton here. I need
not recall his "Knights of Logres and of Lyonesse," or resume his
Euripidean garlands showered on Samson's grave. But, for my master
Michelangelo, it will suffice to observe that all the grace his genius
held, refined, of earthly grossness quit, appeared, under the
dominance of this fourth manner, in the mythological subjects he
composed for Tommaso Cavalieri, and, far more nobly, in his countless
studies for the celebration of Christ's Passion. The designs
bequeathed to us from this period are very numerous. They were never
employed in the production of any monumental work of sculpture or of
painting. For this very reason, because they were occasional
improvisations, preludes, dreams of things to be, they preserve the
finest bloom, the Indian summer of his fancy. Lovers of Michelangelo
must dedicate their latest and most loving studies to this phase of
his fourth manner.
X
If we seek to penetrate the genius of an artist, not merely forming a
correct estimate of his technical ability and science, but also
probing his personality to the core, as near as this is possible for
us to do, we ought to give our undivided study to his drawings. It is
there, and there alone, that we come face to face with the real man,
in his unguarded moments, in his hours of inspiration, in the
laborious effort to solve a problem of composition, or in the happy
flow of genial improvisation. Michelangelo was wont to maintain that
all the arts are included in the art of design. Sculpture, painting,
architecture, he said, are but subordinate branches of
draughtsmanship. And he went so far as to assert that the mechanical
arts, with engineering and fortification, nay, even the minor arts of
decoration and costume, owe their existence to design. The more we
reflect upon this apparent paradox, the more shall we feel it to be
true. At any rate, there are no products of human thought and feeling
capable of being expressed by form which do not find their common
denominator in a linear drawing. The simplicity of a sketch, the
comparative rapidity with which it is produced, the concentration of
meaning demanded by its rigid economy of means, render it more
symbolical, more like the hieroglyph of its maker's mind, than any
finished work can be. We may discover a greater mass of interesting
objects in a painted picture or a carved statue; but we shall never
find exactly the same thing, never the involuntary revelation of the
artist's soul, the irrefutable witness to his mental and moral
qualities, to the mysteries of his genius and to its limitations.
If this be true of all artists, it is in a peculiar sense true of
Michelangelo. Great as he was as sculptor, painter, architect, he was
only perfect and impeccable as draughtsman. Inadequate realisation,
unequal execution, fatigue, satiety, caprice of mood, may sometimes be
detected in his frescoes and his statues; but in design we never find
him faulty, hasty, less than absolute master over the selected realm
of thought. His most interesting and instructive work remains what he
performed with pen and chalk in hand. Deeply, therefore, must we
regret the false modesty which made him destroy masses of his
drawings, while we have reason to be thankful for those marvellous
photographic processes which nowadays have placed the choicest of his
masterpieces within the reach of every one.
The following passages from Vasari's and Condivi's Lives deserve
attention by those who approach the study of Buonarroti's drawings.
Vasari says: "His powers of imagination were such, that he was
frequently compelled to abandon his purpose, because he could not
express by the hand those grand and sublime ideas which he had
conceived in his mind; nay, he has spoiled and destroyed many works
for this cause; and I know, too, that some short time before his death
he burnt a large number of his designs, sketches, and cartoons, that
none might see the labours he had endured, and the trials to which he
had subjected his spirit, in his resolve not to fall short of
perfection. I have myself secured some drawings by his hand, which
were found in Florence, and are now in my book of designs, and these,
although they give evidence of his great genius, yet prove also that
the hammer of Vulcan was necessary to bring Minerva from the head of
Jupiter. He would construct an ideal shape out of nine, ten and even
twelve different heads, for no other purpose than to obtain a certain
grace of harmony and composition which is not to be found in the
natural form, and would say that the artist must have his measuring
tools, not in the hand, but in the eye, because the hands do but
operate, it is the eye that judges; he pursued the same idea in
architecture also." Condivi adds some information regarding his
extraordinary fecundity and variety of invention: "He was gifted with
a most tenacious memory, the power of which was such that, though he
painted so many thousands of figures, as any one can see, he never
made one exactly like another or posed in the same attitude. Indeed, I
have heard him say that he never draws a line without remembering
whether he has drawn it before; erasing any repetition, when the
design was meant to be exposed to public view. His force of
imagination is also most extraordinary. This has been the chief reason
why he was never quite satisfied with his own work, and always
depreciated its quality, esteeming that his hand failed to attain the
idea which he had formed within his brain."
XI
The four greatest draughtsmen of this epoch were Lionardo da Vinci,
Michelangelo, Raffaello, and Andrea del Sarto. They are not to be
reckoned as equals; for Lionardo and Michelangelo outstrip the other
two almost as much as these surpass all lesser craftsmen. Each of the
four men expressed his own peculiar vision of the world with pen, or
chalk, or metal point, finding the unique inevitable line, the exact
touch and quality of stroke, which should present at once a lively
transcript from real Nature, and a revelation of the artist's
particular way of feeling Nature. In Lionardo it is a line of subtlety
and infinite suggestiveness; in Michelangelo it compels attention, and
forcibly defines the essence of the object; in Raffaello it carries
melody, the charm of an unerring rhythm; in Andrea it seems to call
for tone, colour, atmosphere, and makes their presence felt. Raffaello
was often faulty: even in the wonderful pen-drawing of two nudes he
sent to Albrecht Dürer as a sample of his skill, we blame the knees
and ankles of his models. Lionardo was sometimes wilful, whimsical,
seduced by dreamland, like a god born amateur. Andrea allowed his
facility to lead him into languor, and lacked passion. Michelangelo's
work shows none of these shortcomings; it is always technically
faultness, instinct with passion, supereminent in force. But we crave
more of grace, of sensuous delight, of sweetness, than he chose, or
perhaps was able, to communicate. We should welcome a little more of
human weakness if he gave a little more of divine suavity.
Michelangelo's style of design is that of a sculptor, Andrea's of a
colourist, Lionardo's of a curious student, Raffaello's of a musician
and improvisatore. These distinctions are not merely fanciful, nor
based on what we know about the men in their careers. We feel similar
distinctions in the case of all great draughtsmen. Titian's
chalk-studies, Fra Bartolommeo's, so singularly akin to Andrea del
Sarto's, Giorgione's pen-and-ink sketch for a Lucretia, are seen at
once by their richness and blurred outlines to be the work of
colourists. Signorelli's transcripts from the nude, remarkably similar
to those of Michelangelo, reveal a sculptor rather than a painter.
Botticelli, with all his Florentine precision, shows that, like
Lionardo, he was a seeker and a visionary in his anxious feeling after
curve and attitude. Mantegna seems to be graving steel or cutting into
marble. It is easy to apply this analysis in succession to any
draughtsman who has style. To do so would, however, be superfluous: we
should only be enforcing what is a truism to all intelligent students
of art--namely, that each individual stamps his own specific quality
upon his handiwork; reveals even in the neutral region of design his
innate preference for colour or pure form as a channel of expression;
betrays the predominance of mental energy or sensuous charm, of
scientific curiosity or plastic force, of passion or of tenderness,
which controls his nature. This inevitable and unconscious revelation
of the man in art-work strikes us as being singularly modern. We do
not apprehend it to at all the same extent in the sculpture of the
ancients, whether it be that our sympathies are too remote from Greek
and Roman ways of feeling, or whether the ancients really conceived
art more collectively in masses, less individually as persons.
No master exhibits this peculiarly modern quality more decisively than
Michelangelo, and nowhere is the personality of his genius, what marks
him off and separates him from all fellow-men, displayed with fuller
emphasis than in his drawings. To use the words of a penetrative
critic, from whom it is a pleasure to quote: "The thing about
Michelangelo is this; he is not, so to say, at the head of a class,
but he stands apart by himself: he is not possessed of a skill which
renders him unapproached or unapproachable; but rather, he is of so
unique an order, that no other artist whatever seems to suggest
comparison with him." Mr. Selwyn Image goes on to define in what a
true sense the words "creator" and "creative" may be applied to him:
how the shows and appearances of the world were for him but
hieroglyphs of underlying ideas, with which his soul was familiar, and
from which he worked again outward; "his learning and skill in the
arts supplying to his hand such large and adequate symbols of them as
are otherwise beyond attainment." This, in a very difficult and
impalpable region of aesthetic criticism, is finely said, and accords
with Michelangelo's own utterances upon art and beauty in his poems.
Dwelling like a star apart, communing with the eternal ideas, the
permanent relations of the universe, uttering his inmost thoughts
about these mysteries through the vehicles of science and of art, for
which he was so singularly gifted, Michelangelo, in no loose or
trivial sense of that phrase, proved himself to be a creator. He
introduces us to a world seen by no eyes except his own, compels us to
become familiar with forms unapprehended by our senses, accustoms us
to breathe a rarer and more fiery atmosphere than we were born into.
The vehicles used by Michelangelo in his designs were mostly pen and
chalk. He employed both a sharp-nibbed pen of some kind, and a broad
flexible reed, according to the exigencies of his subject or the
temper of his mood. The chalk was either red or black, the former
being softer than the latter. I cannot remember any instances of those
chiaroscuro washes which Raffaello handled in so masterly a manner,
although Michelangelo frequently combined bistre shading with pen
outlines. In like manner he does not seem to have favoured the metal
point upon prepared paper, with which Lionardo produced unrivalled
masterpieces. Some drawings, where the yellow outline bites into a
parchment paper, blistering at the edges, suggest a rusty metal in the
instrument. We must remember, however, that the inks of that period
were frequently corrosive, as is proved by the state of many documents
now made illegible through the gradual attrition of the paper by
mineral acids. It is also not impossible that artists may have already
invented what we call steel pens. Sarpi, in the seventeenth century,
thanks a correspondent for the gift of one of these mechanical
devices. Speaking broadly, the reed and the quill, red and black
chalk, or _matita,_ were the vehicles of Michelangelo's expression as
a draughtsman. I have seen very few examples of studies heightened
with white chalk, and none produced in the fine Florentine style of
Ghirlandajo by white chalk alone upon a dead-brown surface. In this
matter it is needful to speak with diffidence; for the sketches of our
master are so widely scattered that few students can have examined the
whole of them; and photographic reproductions, however admirable in
their fidelity to outline, do not always give decisive evidence
regarding the materials employed.
One thing seems manifest. Michelangelo avoided those mixed methods
with which Lionardo, the magician, wrought wonders. He preferred an
instrument which could be freely, broadly handled, inscribing form in
strong plain strokes upon the candid paper. The result attained,
whether wrought by bold lines, or subtly hatched, or finished with the
utmost delicacy of modulated shading, has always been traced out
conscientiously and firmly, with one pointed stylus (pen, chalk, or
matita), chosen for the purpose. As I have said, it is the work of a
sculptor, accustomed to wield chisel and mallet upon marble, rather
than that of a painter, trained to secure effects by shadows and
glazings.
It is possible, I think, to define, at least with some approximation
to precision, Michelangelo's employment of his favourite vehicles for
several purposes and at different periods of his life. A broad-nibbed
pen was used almost invariably in making architectural designs of
cornices, pilasters, windows, also in plans for military engineering.
Sketches of tombs and edifices, intended to be shown to patrons, were
partly finished with the pen; and here we find a subordinate and very
limited use of the brush in shading. Such performances may be regarded
as products of the workshop rather than as examples of the artist's
mastery. The style of them is often conventional, suggesting the
intrusion of a pupil or the deliberate adoption of an office
mannerism. The pen plays a foremost part in all the greatest and most
genial creations of his fancy when it worked energetically in
preparation for sculpture or for fresco. The Louvre is rich in
masterpieces of this kind--the fiery study of a David; the heroic
figures of two male nudes, hatched into stubborn salience like pieces
of carved wood; the broad conception of the Madonna at S. Lorenzo in
her magnificent repose and passionate cascade of fallen draperies; the
repulsive but superabundantly powerful profile of a goat-like faun.
These, and the stupendous studies of the Albertina Collection at
Vienna, including the supine man with thorax violently raised, are
worked with careful hatchings, stroke upon stroke, effecting a
suggestion of plastic roundness. But we discover quite a different use
of the pen in some large simple outlines of seated female figures at
the Louvre; in thick, almost muddy, studies at Vienna, where the form
emerges out of oft-repeated sodden blotches; in the grim light and
shade, the rapid suggestiveness of the dissection scene at Oxford. The
pen in the hand of Michelangelo was the tool by means of which he
realised his most trenchant conceptions and his most picturesque
impressions. In youth and early manhood, when his genius was still
vehement, it seems to have been his favourite vehicle.
The use of chalk grew upon him in later life, possibly because he
trusted more to his memory now, and loved the dreamier softer medium
for uttering his fancies. Black chalk was employed for rapid notes of
composition, and also for the more elaborate productions of his
pencil. To this material we owe the head of Horror which he gave to
Gherardo Perini (in the Uffizi), the Phaethon, the Tityos, the
Ganymede he gave to Tommaso Cavalieri (at Windsor). It is impossible
to describe the refinements of modulated shading and the precision of
predetermined outlines by means of which these incomparable drawings
have been produced. They seem to melt and to escape inspection, yet
they remain fixed on the memory as firmly as forms in carven basalt.
The whole series of designs for Christ's Crucifixion and Deposition
from the Cross are executed in chalk, sometimes black, but mostly red.
It is manifest, upon examination, that they are not studies from the
model, but thoughts evoked and shadowed forth on paper. Their
perplexing multiplicity and subtle variety--as though a mighty
improvisatore were preluding again and yet again upon the clavichord
to find his theme, abandoning the search, renewing it, altering the
key, changing the accent--prove that this continued seeking with the
crayon after form and composition was carried on in solitude and
abstract moments. Incomplete as the designs may be, they reveal
Michelangelo's loftiest dreams and purest visions. The nervous energy,
the passionate grip upon the subject, shown in the pen-drawings, are
absent here. These qualities are replaced by meditation and an air of
rapt devotion. The drawings for the Passion might be called the
prayers and pious thoughts of the stern master.
Red chalk he used for some of his most brilliant conceptions. It is
not necessary to dwell upon the bending woman's head at Oxford, or the
torso of the lance-bearer at Vienna. Let us confine our attention to
what is perhaps the most pleasing and most perfect of all
Michelangelo's designs--the "Bersaglio," or the "Arcieri," in the
Queen's collection at Windsor.
It is a group of eleven naked men and one woman, fiercely footing the
air, and driving shafts with all their might to pierce a classical
terminal figure, whose face, like that of Pallas, and broad breast are
guarded by a spreading shield. The draughtsman has indicated only one
bow, bent with fury by an old man in the background. Yet all the
actions proper to archery are suggested by the violent gestures and
strained sinews of the crowd. At the foot of the terminal statue,
Cupid lies asleep upon his wings, with idle bow and quiver. Two little
genii of love, in the background, are lighting up a fire, puffing its
flames, as though to drive the archers onward. Energy and ardour,
impetuous movement and passionate desire, could not be expressed with
greater force, nor the tyranny of some blind impulse be more
imaginatively felt. The allegory seems to imply that happiness is not
to be attained, as human beings mostly strive to seize it, by the
fierce force of the carnal passions. It is the contrast between
celestial love asleep in lustful souls, and vulgar love inflaming
tyrannous appetites:--
_The one love soars, the other downward tends;
The soul lights this, while that the senses stir,
And still lust's arrow at base quarry flies._
This magnificent design was engraved during Buonarroti's lifetime, or
shortly afterwards, by Niccolò Beatrizet. Some follower of Raffaello
used the print for a fresco in the Palazzo Borghese at Rome. It forms
one of the series in which Raffaello's marriage of Alexander and
Roxana is painted. This has led some critics to ascribe the drawing
itself to the Urbinate. Indeed, at first sight, one might almost
conjecture that the original chalk study was a genuine work of
Raffaello, aiming at rivalry with Michelangelo's manner. The calm
beauty of the statue's classic profile, the refinement of all the
faces, the exquisite delicacy of the adolescent forms, and the
dominant veiling of strength with grace, are not precisely
Michelangelesque. The technical execution of the design, however,
makes its attribution certain. Well as Raffaello could draw, he could
not draw like this. He was incapable of rounding and modelling the
nude with those soft stipplings and granulated shadings which bring
the whole surface out like that of a bas-relief in polished marble.
His own drawing for Alexander and Roxana, in red chalk, and therefore
an excellent subject for comparison with the Arcieri, is hatched all
over in straight lines; a method adopted by Michelangelo when working
with the pen, but, so far as I am aware, never, or very rarely, used
when he was handling chalk. The style of this design and its exquisite
workmanship correspond exactly with the finish of the Cavalieri series
at Windsor. The paper, moreover, is indorsed in Michelangelo's
handwriting with a memorandum bearing the date April 12, 1530. We have
then in this masterpiece of draughtsmanship an example, not of
Raffaello in a Michelangelising mood, but of Michelangelo for once
condescending to surpass Raffaello on his own ground of loveliness and
rhythmic grace.