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 [79] 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
[80] 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," Raphael
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 [81] 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 [82] 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
[83] 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.*
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 [84] 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 care for
external 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 sì e no mi muovi. Is it
carnal affection, or, del suo prestino stato (of 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 [85] 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 express them in a sonnet, was
already in some measure to command, and have his way with
them--
La vita del mia amor non è il cor mio,
Ch' amor, di quel ch' io t' amo, è 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
uncertain. 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 like 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 [86] 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 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. Now 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 [87] 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, on the other hand, is a woman
already weary, in advanced age, of grave intellectual qualities.
Dante's story is a piece of figured work, 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; while 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 [88] is really like
Dante, and comes very near to the original image, beyond those
later and feebler followers in the wake 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 poverty with abundance 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 [89] 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 Church had 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 [90]
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 very 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 [91] 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 and
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 Tannhäuser, or even to the very thoughts and
substance of a book, like the Imitation, so that no single workman
could [92] 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 in a country-house from the danger of death by plague. It
was to this inherited sentiment, this practical decision that to be
preoccupied 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 [93] 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 skyiest 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
Dürer. From such a result the Florentine masters of the fifteenth
century were saved by the nobility of their Italian 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. Then following it perhaps one [94] stage further,
dwelling for a moment on the point where all this 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. Pietà, 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":--this
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 [95] 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 are defined 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 consoling nor of
terrible 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, almost as much so 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 [96]
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.