Critics of Michelangelo have sometimes spoken as if the only
characteristic of his genius were a wonderful strength, verging, as in
the things of the imagination great strength always does, on what is
singular or strange. A certain strangeness, something of the blossoming
of the aloe, is indeed an element in all true works of art; that they
shall excite or surprise us is indispensable. But that they shall give
pleasure and exert a charm over us is indispensable too; and this
strangeness must be sweet also--a lovely strangeness. And to the true
admirers of Michelangelo this is the true type of the
Michelangelesque--sweetness and strength, pleasure with surprise, an
energy of conception which seems at every moment about to break through
all the conditions of comely form, recovering, touch by touch, a
loveliness found usually only in the simplest natural things--ex forti
dulcedo.
In this way he sums up for them the whole character of medieval art
itself in that which distinguishes it most clearly from classical work,
the presence of a convulsive energy in it, becoming in lower hands
merely monstrous or forbidding, but felt, even in its most graceful
products, as a subdued quaintness or grotesque. Yet those who feel this
grace or sweetness in Michelangelo might at the first moment be puzzled
if they were asked wherein precisely the quality resided. Men of
inventive temperament--Victor Hugo, for instance, in whom, as in
Michelangelo, people have for the most part been attracted or repelled
by the strength, while few have understood his sweetness--have sometimes
relieved conceptions of merely moral or spiritual greatness, but with
little aesthetic charm of their own, by lovely accidents or accessories,
like the butterfly which alights on the blood-stained barricade in Les
Miserables, or those sea-birds for which the monstrous Gilliatt comes to
be as some wild natural thing, so that they are no longer afraid of him,
in Les Travailleurs de la Mer. But the austere genius of Michelangelo
will not depend for its sweetness on any mere accessories like these.
The world of natural things has almost no existence for him; "When one
speaks of him," says Grimm, "woods, clouds, seas, and mountains
disappear, and only what is formed by the spirit of man remains behind";
and he quotes a few slight words from a letter of his to Vasari as the
single expression in all he has left of a feeling for nature. He has
traced no flowers, like those with which Leonardo stars over his
gloomiest rocks; nothing like the fretwork of wings and flames in which
Blake frames his most startling conceptions; no forest-scenery like
Titian's fills his backgrounds, but only blank ranges of rock, and dim
vegetable forms as blank as they, as in a world before the creation of
the first five days.
Of the whole story of the creation he has painted only the creation of
the first man and woman, and, for him at least, feebly, the creation of
light. It belongs to the quality of his genius thus to concern itself
almost exclusively with the creation of man. For him it is not, as in
the story itself, the last and crowning act of a series of developments,
but the first and unique act, the creation of life itself in its supreme
form, off-hand and immediately, in the cold and lifeless stone. With him
the beginning of life has all the characteristics of resurrection; it is
like the recovery of suspended health or animation, with its gratitude,
its effusion, and eloquence. Fair as the young men of the Elgin marbles,
the Adam of the Sistine Chapel is unlike them in a total absence of that
balance and completeness which express so well the sentiment of a
self-contained, independent life. In that languid figure there is
something rude and satyr-like, something akin to the rugged hillside on
which it lies. His whole form is gathered into an expression of mere
expectation and reception; he has hardly strength enough to lift his
finger to touch the finger of the creator; yet a touch of the
finger-tips will suffice.
This creation of life--life coming always as relief or recovery, and
always in strong contrast with the rough-hewn mass in which it is
kindled--is in various ways the motive of all his work, whether its
immediate subject be Pagan or Christian, legend or allegory; and this,
although at least one-half of his work was designed for the adornment of
tombs--the tomb of Julius, the tombs of the Medici. Not the Judgment but
the Resurrection is the real subject of his last work in the Sistine
Chapel; and his favourite Pagan subject is the legend of Leda, the
delight of the world breaking from the egg of a bird. As I have already
pointed out, he secures that ideality of expression which in Greek
sculpture depends on a delicate system of abstraction, and in early
Italian sculpture on lowness of relief, by an incompleteness, which is
surely not always undesigned, and which I suppose no one regrets, and
trusts to the spectator to complete the half-emergent form. And as his
persons have something of the unwrought stone about them, so, as if to
realise the expression by which the old Florentine records describe a
sculptor--master of live stone--with him the very rocks seem to have
life; they have but to cast away the dust and scurf that they may rise
and stand on their feet. He loved the very quarries of Carrara, those
strange grey peaks which even at mid-day convey into any scene from
which they are visible something of the solemnity and stillness of
evening, sometimes wandering among them month after month, till at last
their pale ashen colours seem to have passed into his painting; and on
the crown of the head of the David there still remains a morsel of uncut
stone, as if by one touch to maintain its connexion with the place from
which it was hewn.
And it is in this penetrative suggestion of life that the secret of that
sweetness of his is to be found. He gives us indeed no lovely natural
objects like Leonardo or Titian, but only the coldest, most elementary
shadowing of rock or tree; no lovely draperies and comely gestures of
life, but only the austere truths of human nature; "simple persons"--as
he replied in his rough way to the querulous criticism of Julius the
Second, that there was no gold on the figures of the Sistine
Chapel--"simple persons, who wore no gold on their garments"; but he
penetrates us with a sense of that power which we associate with all the
warmth and fulness of the world, and the sense of which brings into
one's thoughts a swarm of birds and flowers and insects. The brooding
spirit of life itself is there; and the summer may burst out in a
moment.
He was born in an interval of a rapid midnight journey in March, at a
place in the neighbourhood of Arezzo, the thin, clear air of which, as
was then thought, being favourable to the birth of children of great
parts. He came of a race of grave and dignified men, who, claiming
kinship with the family of Canossa, and some colour of imperial blood in
their veins, had, generation after generation, received honourable
employment under the government of Florence. His mother, a girl of
nineteen years, put him out to nurse at a country house among the hills
of Settignano, where every other inhabitant is a worker in the marble
quarries, and the child early became familiar with that strange first
stage in the sculptor's art. To this succeeded the influence of the
sweetest and most placid master Florence had yet seen, Domenico
Ghirlandajo. At fifteen he was at work among the curiosities of the
garden of the Medici, copying and restoring antiques, winning the
condescending notice of the great Lorenzo. He knew too how to excite
strong hatreds; and it was at this time that in a quarrel with a
fellow-student he received a blow on the face which deprived him for
ever of the comeliness of outward form. It was through an accident that
he came to study those works of the early Italian sculptors which
suggested much of his own grandest work, and impressed it with so deep a
sweetness. He believed in dreams and omens. One of his friends dreamed
twice that Lorenzo, then lately dead, appeared to him in grey and dusty
apparel. To Michelangelo this dream seemed to portend the troubles which
afterwards really came, and with the suddenness which was characteristic
of all his movements, he left Florence. Having occasion to pass through
Bologna, he neglected to procure the little seal of red wax which the
stranger entering Bologna must carry on the thumb of his right hand. He
had no money to pay the fine, and would have been thrown into prison had
not one of the magistrates interposed. He remained in this man's house a
whole year, rewarding his hospitality by readings from the Italian poets
whom he loved. Bologna, with its endless colonnades and fantastic
leaning towers, can never have been one of the lovelier cities of Italy.
But about the portals of its vast unfinished churches and its dark
shrines, half hidden by votive flowers and candles, lie some of the
sweetest works of the early Tuscan sculptors, Giovanni da Pisa and
Jacopo della Quercia, things as winsome as flowers; and the year which
Michelangelo spent in copying these works was not a lost year. It was
now, on returning to Florence, that he put forth that unique presentment
of Bacchus, which expresses, not the mirthfulness of the god of wine,
but his sleepy seriousness, his enthusiasm, his capacity for profound
dreaming. No one ever expressed more truly than Michelangelo the notion
of inspired sleep, of faces charged with dreams. A vast fragment of
marble had long lain below the Loggia of Orcagna, and many a sculptor
had had his thoughts of a design which should just fill this famous
block of stone, cutting the diamond, as it were, without loss. Under
Michelangelo's hand it became the David which stood till lately on the
steps of the Palazzo Vecchio, when it was replaced below the Loggia.
Michelangelo was now thirty years old, and his reputation was
established. Three great works fill the remainder of his life--three
works often interrupted, carried on through a thousand hesitations, a
thousand disappointments, quarrels with his patrons, quarrels with his
family, quarrels perhaps most of all with himself--the Sistine Chapel,
the Mausoleum of Julius the Second, and the Sacristy of San Lorenzo.
In the story of Michelangelo's life the strength, often turning to
bitterness, is not far to seek; a discordant note sounds throughout it
which almost spoils the music. He "treats the Pope as the King of France
himself would not dare to treat him"; he goes along the streets of Rome
"like an executioner," Raffaelle says of him. Once he seems to have shut
himself up with the intention of starving himself to death. As we come
in reading his life on its harsh, untempered incidents, the thought
again and again arises that he is one of those who incur the judgment of
Dante, as having "wilfully lived in sadness." Even his tenderness and
pity are embittered by their strength. What passionate weeping in that
mysterious figure which, in the Creation of Adam, crouches below the
image of the Almighty, as he comes with the forms of things to be, woman
and her progeny, in the fold of his garment! What a sense of wrong in
those two captive youths, who feel the chains like scalding water on
their proud and delicate flesh! The idealist who became a reformer with
Savonarola, and a republican superintending the fortification of
Florence--the nest where he was born, il nido ove naqqu'io, as he calls
it once, in a sudden throb of affection--in its last struggle for
liberty, yet believed always that he had imperial blood in his veins and
was of the kindred of the great Matilda, had within the depths of his
nature some secret spring of indignation or sorrow. We know little of
his youth, but all tends to make one believe in the vehemence of its
passions. Beneath the Platonic calm of the sonnets there is latent a
deep delight in carnal form and colour. There, and still more in the
madrigals, he often falls into the language of less tranquil affections;
while some of them have the colour of penitence, as from a wanderer
returning home. He who spoke so decisively of the supremacy in the
imaginative world of the unveiled human form had not been always, we may
think, a mere Platonic lover. Vague and wayward his loves may have been;
but they partook of the strength of his nature, and sometimes, it may
be, would by no means become music, so that the comely order of his days
was quite put out: par che amaro ogni mio dolce io senta.
But his genius is in harmony with itself; and just as in the products of
his art we find resources of sweetness within their exceeding strength,
so in his own story also, bitter as the ordinary sense of it may be,
there are select pages shut in among the rest--pages one might easily
turn over too lightly, but which yet sweeten the whole volume. The
interest of Michelangelo's poems is that they make us spectators of this
struggle; the struggle of a strong nature to adorn and attune itself;
the struggle of a desolating passion, which yearns to be resigned and
sweet and pensive, as Dante's was. It is a consequence of the occasional
and informal character of his poetry, that it brings us nearer to
himself, his own mind and temper, than any work done only to support a
literary reputation could possibly do. His letters tell us little that
is worth knowing about him--a few poor quarrels about money and
commissions. But it is quite otherwise with these songs and sonnets,
written down at odd moments, sometimes on the margins of his sketches,
themselves often unfinished sketches, arresting some salient feeling or
unpremeditated idea as it passed. And it happens that a true study of
these has become within the last few years for the first time possible.
A few of the sonnets circulated widely in manuscript, and became almost
within Michelangelo's own lifetime a subject of academical discourses.
But they were first collected in a volume in 1623 by the great-nephew of
Michelangelo, Michelangelo Buonarroti the younger. He omitted much,
re-wrote the sonnets in part, and sometimes compressed two or more
compositions into one, always losing something of the force and
incisiveness of the original. So the book remained, neglected even by
Italians themselves in the last century, through the influence of that
French taste which despised all compositions of the kind, as it despised
and neglected Dante. "His reputation will ever be on the increase,
because he is so little read," says Voltaire of Dante.--But in 1858 the
last of the Buonarroti bequeathed to the municipality of Florence the
curiosities of his family. Among them was a precious volume containing
the autograph of the sonnets. A learned Italian, Signor Cesare Guasti,
undertook to collate this autograph with other manuscripts at the
Vatican and elsewhere, and in 1863 published a true version of
Michelangelo's poems, with dissertations and a paraphrase.*
*The sonnets have been translated into English, with much poetic taste
and skill, by Mr. J. A. Symonds.
People have often spoken of these poems as if they were a mere cry of
distress, a lover's complaint over the obduracy of Vittoria Colonna. But
those who speak thus forget that though it is quite possible that
Michelangelo had seen Vittoria, that somewhat shadowy figure, as early
as 1537, yet their closer intimacy did not begin till about the year
1542, when Michelangelo was nearly seventy years old. Vittoria herself,
an ardent neo-catholic, vowed to perpetual widowhood since the news had
reached her, seventeen years before, that her husband, the youthful and
princely Marquess of Pescara, lay dead of the wounds he had received in
the battle of Pavia, was then no longer an object of great passion. In a
dialogue written by the painter, Francesco d'Ollanda, we catch a glimpse
of them together in an empty church at Rome, one Sunday afternoon,
discussing indeed the characteristics of various schools of art, but
still more the writings of Saint Paul, already following the ways and
tasting the sunless pleasures of weary people, whose hold on outward
things is slackening. In a letter still extant he regrets that when he
visited her after death he had kissed her hands only. He made, or set to
work to make, a crucifix for her use, and two drawings, perhaps in
preparation for it, are now in Oxford. From allusions in the sonnets, we
may divine that when they first approached each other he had debated
much with himself whether this last passion would be the most
unsoftening, the most desolating of all--un dolce amaro, un si e no mi
muovi; is it carnal affection, or, del suo prestino stato (Plato's
ante-natal state) il raggio ardente? The older, conventional criticism,
dealing with the text of 1623, had lightly assumed that all or nearly
all the sonnets were actually addressed to Vittoria herself; but Signor
Guasti finds only four, or at most five, which can be so attributed on
genuine authority. Still, there are reasons which make him assign the
majority of them to the period between 1542 and 1547, and we may regard
the volume as a record of this resting-place in Michelangelo's story. We
know how Goethe escaped from the stress of sentiments too strong for him
by making a book about them; and for Michelangelo, to write down his
passionate thoughts at all, to make sonnets about them, was already in
some measure to command, and have his way with them--
La vita del mia amor non e il cor mio,
Ch'amor, di quel ch'io t'amo, e senza core.
It was just because Vittoria raised no great passion that the space in
his life where she reigns has such peculiar suavity; and the spirit of
the sonnets is lost if we once take them out of that dreamy atmosphere
in which men have things as they will, because the hold of all outward
things upon them is faint and thin. Their prevailing tone is a calm and
meditative sweetness. The cry of distress is indeed there, but as a mere
residue, a trace of bracing chalybeate salt, just discernible in the
song which rises as a clear, sweet spring from a charmed space in his
life.
This charmed and temperate space in Michelangelo's life, without which
its excessive strength would have been so imperfect, which saves him
from the judgment of Dante on those who "wilfully lived in sadness," is
then a well-defined period there, reaching from the year 1542 to the
year 1547, the year of Vittoria's death. In it the lifelong effort to
tranquillise his vehement emotions by withdrawing them into the region
of ideal sentiment, becomes successful; and the significance of Vittoria
there is, that she realises for him a type of affection which even in
disappointment may charm and sweeten his spirit. In this effort to
tranquillise and sweeten life by idealising its vehement sentiments,
there were two great traditional types, either of which an Italian of
the sixteenth century might have followed. There was Dante, whose little
book of the Vita Nuova had early become a pattern of imaginative love,
maintained somewhat feebly by the later followers of Petrarch; and since
Plato had become something more than a name in Italy by the publication
of the Latin translation of his works by Marsilio Ficino, there was the
Platonic tradition also. Dante's belief in the resurrection of the body,
through which, even in heaven, Beatrice loses for him no tinge of
flesh-colour, or fold of raiment even--and the Platonic dream of the
passage of the soul through one form of life after another, with its
passionate haste to escape from the burden of bodily form
altogether--are, for all effects of art or poetry, principles
diametrically opposite; and it is the Platonic tradition rather than
Dante's that has moulded Michelangelo's verse. In many ways no sentiment
could have been less like Dante's love for Beatrice than Michelangelo's
for Vittoria Colonna. Dante's comes in early youth: Beatrice is a child,
with the wistful, ambiguous vision of a child, with a character still
unaccentuated by the influence of outward circumstances, almost
expressionless. Vittoria is a woman already weary, in advanced age, of
grave intellectual qualities. Dante's story is a piece of figured wood,
inlaid with lovely incidents. In Michelangelo's poems, frost and fire
are almost the only images--the refining fire of the goldsmith; once or
twice the phoenix; ice melting at the fire; fire struck from the rock
which it afterwards consumes. Except one doubtful allusion to a journey,
there are almost no incidents. But there is much of the bright, sharp,
unerring skill, with which in boyhood he gave the look of age to the
head of a faun by chipping a tooth from its jaw with a single stroke of
the hammer. For Dante, the amiable and devout materialism of the middle
age sanctifies all that is presented by hand and eye. Michelangelo is
always pressing forward from the outward beauty--il bel del fuor che
agli occhi piace--to apprehend the unseen beauty; trascenda nella forma
universale--that abstract form of beauty, about which the Platonists
reason. And this gives the impression in him of something flitting and
unfixed, of the houseless and complaining spirit, almost clairvoyant
through the frail and yielding flesh. He accounts for love at first
sight by a previous state of existence--la dove io t'amai prima.
And yet there are many points in which he is really like Dante, and
comes very near to the original image, beyond those later and feebler
followers of Petrarch. He learns from Dante rather than from Plato, that
for lovers, the surfeiting of desire--ove gran desir gran copia affrena,
is a state less happy than misery full of hope--una miseria di speranza
piena. He recalls him in the repetition of the words gentile and
cortesia, in the personification of Amor, in the tendency to dwell
minutely on the physical effects of the presence of a beloved object on
the pulses and the heart. Above all, he resembles Dante in the warmth
and intensity of his political utterances, for the lady of one of his
noblest sonnets was from the first understood to be the city of
Florence; and he avers that all must be asleep in heaven, if she, who
was created "of angelic form," for a thousand lovers, is appropriated by
one alone, some Piero, or Alessandro de' Medici. Once and again he
introduces Love and Death, who dispute concerning him; for, like Dante
and all the nobler souls of Italy, he is much occupied with thoughts of
the grave, and his true mistress is death; death at first as the worst
of all sorrows and disgraces, with a clod of the field for its brain;
afterwards, death in its high distinction, its detachment from vulgar
needs, the angry stains of life and action escaping fast.
Some of those whom the gods love die young. This man, because the gods
loved him, lingered on to be of immense, patriarchal age, till the
sweetness it had taken so long to secrete in him was found at last. Out
of the strong came forth sweetness, ex forti dulcedo. The world had
changed around him. The New-catholicism had taken the place of the
Renaissance. The spirit of the Roman Church had changed: in the vast
world's cathedral which his skill had helped to raise for it, it looked
stronger than ever. Some of the first members of the Oratory were among
his intimate associates. They were of a spirit as unlike as possible
from that of Lorenzo, or Savonarola even. The opposition of the
Reformation to art has been often enlarged upon; far greater was that of
the Catholic revival. But in thus fixing itself in a frozen orthodoxy,
the Roman Catholic Church has passed beyond him, and he was a stranger
to it. In earlier days, when its beliefs had been in a fluid state, he
too might have been drawn into the controversy; he might have been for
spiritualising the papal sovereignty, like Savonarola; or for adjusting
the dreams of Plato and Homer with the words of Christ, like Pico of
Mirandola. But things had moved onward, and such adjustments were no
longer possible. For himself, he had long since fallen back on that
divine ideal, which above the wear and tear of creeds has been forming
itself for ages as the possession of nobler souls. And now he began to
feel the soothing influence which since that time the Roman Church has
often exerted over spirits too independent to be its subjects, yet
brought within the neighbourhood of its action; consoled and
tranquillised, as a traveller might be, resting for one evening in a
strange city, by its stately aspect, and the sentiment of its many
fortunes, just because with those fortunes he has nothing to do. So he
lingers on; a revenant, as the French say, a ghost out of another age,
in a world too coarse to touch his faint sensibilities too closely;
dreaming, in a worn-out society, theatrical in its life, theatrical in
its art, theatrical even in its devotion, on the morning of the world's
history, on the primitive form of man, on the images under which that
primitive world had conceived of spiritual forces.
I have dwelt on the thought of Michelangelo as thus lingering beyond his
time in a world not his own, because, if one is to distinguish the
peculiar savour of his work, he must be approached, not through his
followers, but through his predecessors; not through the marbles of
Saint Peter's, but through the work of the sculptors of the fifteenth
century over the tombs and altars of Tuscany. He is the last of the
Florentines, of those on whom the peculiar sentiment of the Florence of
Dante and Giotto descended: he is the consummate representative of the
form that sentiment took in the fifteenth century with men like Luca
Signorelli and Mino da Fiesole. Up to him the tradition of sentiment is
unbroken, the progress towards surer and more mature methods of
expressing that sentiment continuous. But his professed disciples did
not share this temper; they are in love with his strength only, and seem
not to feel his grave and temperate sweetness. Theatricality is their
chief characteristic; and that is a quality as little attributable to
Michelangelo as to Mino or Luca Signorelli. With him, as with them, all
Is serious, passionate, impulsive.
This discipleship of Michelangelo, this dependence of his on the
tradition of the Florentine schools, is nowhere seen more clearly than
in his treatment of the Creation. The Creation of Man had haunted the
mind of the middle age like a dream; and weaving it into a hundred
carved ornaments of capital or doorway, the Italian sculptors had early
impressed upon it that pregnancy of expression which seems to give it
many veiled meanings. As with other artistic conceptions of the middle
age, its treatment became almost conventional, handed on from artist to
artist, with slight changes, till it came to have almost an independent,
abstract existence of its own. It was characteristic of the medieval
mind thus to give an independent traditional existence to a special
pictorial conception, or to a legend, like that of Tristram or
Tannhaeuser, or even to the very thoughts and substance of a book, like
the Imitation, so that no single workman could claim it as his own, and
the book, the image, the legend, had itself a legend, and its fortunes,
and a personal history; and it is a sign of the medievalism of
Michelangelo, that he thus receives from tradition his central
conception, and does but add the last touches, in transferring it to the
frescoes of the Sistine Chapel.
But there was another tradition of those earlier more serious
Florentines, of which Michelangelo is the inheritor, to which he gives
the final expression, and which centres in the sacristy of San Lorenzo,
as the tradition of the Creation centres in the Sistine Chapel. It has
been said that all the great Florentines were preoccupied with death.
Outre-tombe! Outre-tombe!--is the burden of their thoughts, from Dante
to Savonarola. Even the gay and licentious Boccaccio gives a keener edge
to his stories by putting them in the mouths of a party of people who
had taken refuge from the danger of death by plague, in a country-house.
It was to this inherited sentiment, this practical decision that to be
pre-occupied with the thought of death was in itself dignifying, and a
note of high quality, that the seriousness of the great Florentines of
the fifteenth century was partly due; and it was reinforced in them by
the actual sorrows of their times. How often, and in what various ways,
had they seen life stricken down, in their streets and houses! La bella
Simonetta dies in early youth, and is borne to the grave with uncovered
face. The young Cardinal Jacopo di Portogallo dies on a visit to
Florence--insignis forma fui et mirabili modestia--his epitaph dares to
say. Antonio Rossellino carves his tomb in the church of San Miniato,
with care for the shapely hands and feet, and sacred attire; Luca della
Robbia puts his skyeyest works there; and the tomb of the youthful and
princely prelate became the strangest and most beautiful thing in that
strange and beautiful place. After the execution of the Pazzi
conspirators, Botticelli is employed to paint their portraits. This
preoccupation with serious thoughts and sad images might easily have
resulted, as it did, for instance, in the gloomy villages of the Rhine,
or in the overcrowded parts of medieval Paris, as it still does in many
a village of the Alps, in something merely morbid or grotesque, in the
Danse Macabre of many French and German painters, or the grim inventions
of Duerer. From such a result the Florentine masters of the fifteenth
century were saved by their high Italian dignity and culture, and still
more by their tender pity for the thing itself. They must often have
leaned over the lifeless body, when all was at length quiet and smoothed
out. After death, it is said, the traces of slighter and more
superficial dispositions disappear; the lines become more simple and
dignified; only the abstract lines remain, in a great indifference.
They came thus to see death in its distinction; and following it perhaps
one stage further, dwelling for a moment on the point where all that
transitory dignity must break up, and discerning with no clearness a new
body, they paused just in time, and abstained, with a sentiment of
profound pity.
Of all this sentiment Michelangelo is the achievement; and first of all,
of pity. Pieta--pity--the pity of the Virgin Mother over the dead body
of Christ, expanded into the pity of all mothers over all dead sons, the
entombment, with its cruel "hard stones"--that is the subject of his
predilection. He has left it in many forms, sketches, half-finished
designs, finished and unfinished groups of sculpture; but always as a
hopeless, rayless, almost heathen sorrow--no divine sorrow, but mere
pity and awe at the stiff limbs and colourless lips. There is a drawing
of his at Oxford, in which the dead body has sunk to the earth between
the mother's feet, with the arms extended over her knees. The tombs in
the sacristy of San Lorenzo are memorials, not of any of the nobler and
greater Medici, but of Giuliano, and Lorenzo the younger, noticeable
chiefly for their somewhat early death. It is mere human nature
therefore which has prompted the sentiment here. The titles assigned
traditionally to the four symbolical figures, Night and Day, The
Twilight and The Dawn, are far too definite for them; for these figures
come much nearer to the mind and spirit of their author, and are a more
direct expression of his thoughts, than any merely symbolical
conceptions could possibly have been. They concentrate and express, less
by way of definite conceptions than by the touches, the promptings of a
piece of music, all those vague fancies, misgivings, presentiments,
which shift and mix and define themselves and fade again, whenever the
thoughts try to fix themselves with sincerity on the conditions and
surroundings of the disembodied spirit. I suppose no one would come to
the sacristy of San Lorenzo for consolation; for seriousness, for
solemnity, for dignity of impression, perhaps, but not for consolation.
It is a place neither of terrible nor consoling thoughts, but of vague
and wistful speculation. Here, again, Michelangelo is the disciple not
so much of Dante as of the Platonists. Dante's belief in immortality is
formal, precise, and firm, as much so almost as that of a child, who
thinks the dead will hear if you cry loud enough. But in Michelangelo
you have maturity, the mind of the grown man, dealing cautiously and
dispassionately with serious things; and what hope he has is based on
the consciousness of ignorance--ignorance of man, ignorance of the
nature of the mind, its origin and capacities. Michelangelo is so
ignorant of the spiritual world, of the new body and its laws, that he
does not surely know whether the consecrated Host may not be the body of
Christ. And of all that range of sentiment he is the poet, a poet still
alive, and in possession of our inmost thoughts--dumb inquiry over the
relapse after death into the formlessness which preceded life, the
change, the revolt from that change, then the correcting, hallowing,
consoling rush of pity; at last, far off, thin and vague, yet not more
vague than the most definite thoughts men have had through three
centuries on a matter that has been so near their hearts, the new
body--a passing light, a mere intangible, external effect, over those
too rigid, or too formless faces; a dream that lingers a moment,
retreating in the dawn, incomplete, aimless, helpless; a thing with
faint hearing, faint memory, faint power of touch; a breath, a flame in
the doorway, a feather in the wind.
The qualities of the great masters in art or literature, the combination
of those qualities, the laws by which they moderate, support, relieve
each other, are not peculiar to them; but most often typical standards,
or revealing instances, of the laws by which certain aesthetic effects
are produced. The old masters indeed are simpler; their characteristics
are written larger, and are easier to read, than their analogues in all
the mixed, confused productions of the modern mind. But when once we
have succeeded in defining for ourselves those characteristics, and the
law of their combination, we have acquired a standard or measure which
helps us to put in its right place many a vagrant genius, many an
unclassified talent, many precious though imperfect products of art. It
is so with the components of the true character of Michelangelo. That
strange interfusion of sweetness and strength is not to be found in
those who claimed to be his followers; but it is found in many of those
who worked before him, and in many others down to our own time, in
William Blake, for instance, and Victor Hugo, who, though not of his
school, and unaware, are his true sons, and help us to understand him,
as he in turn interprets and justifies them. Perhaps this is the chief
use in studying old masters.
1871.