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