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