[Page heading: MICHELANGELO]
The great Florentine artists, as we have seen, were, with scarcely an
exception, bent upon rendering the material significance of visible
things. This, little though they may have formulated it, was the
conscious aim of most of them; and in proportion as they emancipated
themselves from ecclesiastical dominion, and found among their employers
men capable of understanding them, their aim became more and more
conscious and their striving more energetic. At last appeared the man
who was the pupil of nobody, the heir of everybody, who felt profoundly
and powerfully what to his precursors had been vague instinct, who saw
and expressed the meaning of it all. The seed that produced him had
already flowered into a Giotto, and once again into a Masaccio; in him,
the last of his race, born in conditions artistically most propitious,
all the energies remaining in his stock were concentrated, and in him
Florentine art had its logical culmination.
[Page heading: ANTHROPOMORPHISM IN ART]
Michelangelo had a sense for the materially significant as great as
Giotto's or Masaccio's, but he possessed means of rendering, inherited
from Donatello, Pollaiuolo, Verrocchio and Leonardo,--means that had
been undreamt of by Giotto or even by Masaccio. Add to this that he saw
clearly what before him had been felt only dimly, that there was no
other such instrument for conveying material significance as the human
nude. This fact is as closely dependent on the general conditions of
realising objects as tactile values are on the psychology of sight. We
realise objects when we perfectly translate them into terms of our own
states, our own feelings. So obviously true is this, that even the least
poetically inclined among us, because we keenly realise the movement of
a railway train, to take one example out of millions, speak of it as
_going_ or _running_, instead of _rolling on its wheels_, thus being no
less guilty of anthropomorphising than the most unregenerate savages. Of
this same fallacy we are guilty every time we think of anything
whatsoever with the least warmth--we are lending this thing some human
attributes. The more we endow it with human attributes, the less we
merely know it, the more we realise it, the more does it approach the
work of art. Now there is one and only one object in the visible
universe which we need not anthropomorphise to realise--and that is man
himself. His movements, his actions, are the only things we realise
without any myth-making effort--directly. Hence, there is no visible
object of such artistic possibilities as the human body; nothing with
which we are so familiar; nothing, therefore, in which we so rapidly
perceive changes; nothing, then, which if represented so as to be
realised more quickly and vividly than in life, will produce its effect
with such velocity and power, and so strongly confirm our sense of
capacity for living.
[Page heading: VALUE OF THE NUDE IN ART]
Values of touch and movement, we remember, are the specifically artistic
qualities in figure painting (at least, as practised by the
Florentines), for it is through them chiefly that painting directly
heightens life. Now while it remains true that tactile values can, as
Giotto and Masaccio have forever established, be admirably rendered on
the draped figure, yet drapery is a hindrance, and, at the best, only a
way out of a difficulty, for we _feel_ it masking the really
significant, which is _the form underneath_. A mere painter, one who is
satisfied to reproduce what everybody sees, and to paint for the fun of
painting, will scarcely comprehend this feeling. His only significant is
the obvious--in a figure, the face and the clothing, as in most of the
portraits manufactured nowadays. The artist, even when compelled to
paint draped figures, will force the drapery to render the nude, in
other words the material significance of the human body. But how much
more clearly will this significance shine out, how much more
convincingly will the character manifest itself, when between its
perfect rendering and the artist nothing intervenes! And this perfect
rendering is to be accomplished with the nude only.
If draperies are a hindrance to the conveyance of tactile values, they
make the perfect rendering of movement next to impossible. To realise
the play of muscle everywhere, to get the full sense of the various
pressures and resistances, to receive the direct inspiration of the
energy expended, we must have the nude; for here alone can we watch
those tautnesses of muscle and those stretchings and relaxings and
ripplings of skin which, translated into similar strains on our own
persons, make us fully realise movement. Here alone the translation,
owing to the multitude and the clearness of the appeals made, is
instantaneous, and the consequent sense of increased capacity almost as
great as can be attained; while in the draped figure we miss all the
appeal of visible muscle and skin, and realise movement only after a
slow translation of certain functional outlines, so that the sense of
capacity which we receive from the perception of movement is increased
but slightly.
We are now able to understand why every art whose chief preoccupation is
the human figure must have the nude for its chief interest; why, also,
the nude is the most absorbing problem of classic art at all times. Not
only is it the best vehicle for all that in art which is directly
life-confirming and life-enhancing, but it is itself the most
significant object in the human world. The first person since the great
days of Greek sculpture to comprehend fully the identity of the nude
with great figure art, was Michelangelo. Before him, it had been
studied for scientific purposes--as an aid in rendering the draped
figure. He saw that it was an end in itself, and the final purpose of
his art. For him the nude and art were synonymous. Here lies the secret
of his successes and his failures.
[Page heading: MICHELANGELO]
First, his successes. Nowhere outside of the best Greek art shall we
find, as in Michelangelo's works, forms whose tactile values so increase
our sense of capacity, whose movements are so directly communicated and
inspiring. Other artists have had quite as much feeling for tactile
values alone,--Masaccio, for instance; others still have had at least as
much sense of movement and power of rendering it,--Leonardo, for
example; but no other artist of modern times, having at all his control
over the materially significant, has employed it as Michelangelo did, on
the one subject where its full value can be manifested--the nude. Hence
of all the achievements of modern art, his are the most invigorating.
Surely not often is our imagination of touch roused as by his Adam in
the "Creation," by his Eve in the "Temptation," or by his many nudes in
the same ceiling of the Sixtine Chapel,--there for no other purpose, be
it noted, than their direct tonic effect! Nor is it less rare to quaff
such draughts of unadulterated energy as we receive from the "God
Creating Adam," the "Boy Angel" standing by Isaiah, or--to choose one or
two instances from his drawings (in their own kind the greatest in
existence)--the "Gods Shooting at a Mark" or the "Hercules and the
Lion."
And to this feeling for the materially significant and all this power of
conveying it, to all this more narrowly artistic capacity, Michelangelo
joined an ideal of beauty and force, a vision of a glorious but possible
humanity, which, again, has never had its like in modern times.
Manliness, robustness, effectiveness, the fulfilment of our dream of a
great soul inhabiting a beautiful body, we shall encounter nowhere else
so frequently as among the figures in the Sixtine Chapel. Michelangelo
completed what Masaccio had begun, the creation of the type of man best
fitted to subdue and control the earth, and, who knows! perhaps more
than the earth.
[Page heading: LAST WORKS OF MICHELANGELO]
But unfortunately, though born and nurtured in a world where his
feeling for the nude and his ideal of humanity could be appreciated, he
passed most of his life in the midst of tragic disasters, and while yet
in the fulness of his vigour, in the midst of his most creative years,
he found himself alone, perhaps the greatest, but alas! also the last of
the giants born so plentifully during the fifteenth century. He lived on
in a world he could not but despise, in a world which really could no
more employ him than it could understand him. He was not allowed,
therefore, to busy himself where he felt most drawn by his genius, and,
much against his own strongest impulses, he was obliged to expend his
energy upon such subjects as the "Last Judgment." His later works all
show signs of the altered conditions, first in an overflow into the
figures he was creating of the scorn and bitterness he was feeling, then
in the lack of harmony between his genius and what he was compelled to
execute. His passion was the nude, his ideal power. But what outlet for
such a passion, what expression for such an ideal could there be in
subjects like the "Last Judgment," or the "Crucifixion of
Peter"--subjects which the Christian world imperatively demanded should
incarnate the fear of the humble and the self-sacrifice of the patient?
Now humility and patience were feelings as unknown to Michelangelo as to
Dante before him, or, for that matter, to any other of the world's
creative geniuses at any time. Even had he felt them, he had no means of
expressing them, for his nudes could convey a sense of power, not of
weakness; of terror, not of dread; of despair, but not of submission.
And terror the giant nudes of the "Last Judgment" do feel, but it is not
terror of the Judge, who, being in no wise different from the others, in
spite of his omnipotent gesture, seems to be _announcing_ rather than
_willing_ what the bystanders, his fellows, could not _unwill_. As the
representation of the moment before the universe disappears in
chaos--Gods huddling together for the _Götterdämmerung_--the "Last
Judgment" is as grandly conceived as possible: but when the crash comes,
none will survive it, no, not even God. Michelangelo therefore failed in
his conception of the subject, and could not but fail. But where else
in the whole world of art shall we receive such blasts of energy as from
this giant's dream, or, if you will, nightmare? For kindred reasons, the
"Crucifixion of Peter" is a failure. Art can be only life-communicating
and life-enhancing. If it treats of pain and death, these must always
appear as manifestations and as results only of living resolutely and
energetically. What chance is there, I ask, for this, artistically the
only possible treatment, in the representation of a man crucified with
his head downwards? Michelangelo could do nothing but make the
bystanders, the executioners, all the more life-communicating, and
therefore inevitably more sympathetic! No wonder he failed here! What a
tragedy, by the way, that the one subject perfectly cut out for his
genius, the one subject which required none but genuinely artistic
treatment, his "Bathers," executed forty years before these last works,
has disappeared, leaving but scant traces! Yet even these suffice to
enable the competent student to recognise that this composition must
have been the greatest masterpiece in figure art of modern times.
That Michelangelo had faults of his own is undeniable. As he got older,
and his genius, lacking its proper outlets, tended to stagnate and
thicken, he fell into exaggerations--exaggerations of power into
brutality, of tactile values into feats of modelling. No doubt he was
also at times as indifferent to representation as Botticelli! But while
there is such a thing as movement, there is no such thing as tactile
values without representation. Yet he seems to have dreamt of presenting
nothing but tactile values: hence his many drawings with only the torso
adequately treated, the rest unheeded. Still another result from his
passion for tactile values. I have already suggested that Giotto's types
were so massive because such figures most easily convey values of touch.
Michelangelo tended to similar exaggerations, to making shoulders, for
instance, too broad and too bossy, simply because they make thus a more
powerful appeal to the tactile imagination. Indeed, I venture to go even
farther, and suggest that his faults in all the arts, sculpture no less
than painting, and architecture no less than sculpture, are due to this
self-same predilection for salient projections. But the lover of the
figure arts for what in them is genuinely artistic and not merely
ethical, will in Michelangelo, even at his worst, get such pleasures as,
excepting a few, others, even at their best, rarely give him.
* * * * *
[Page heading: CONSTANT AIMS OF FLORENTINE ART]
In closing, let us note what results clearly even from this brief
account of the Florentine school, namely that, although no Florentine
merely took up and continued a predecessor's work, nevertheless all,
from first to last, fought for the same cause. There is no opposition
between Giotto and Michelangelo. The best energies of the first, of the
last, and of all the intervening great Florentine artists were
persistently devoted to the rendering of tactile values, or of movement,
or of both. Now successful grappling with problems of form and of
movement is at the bottom of all the higher arts; and because of this
fact, Florentine painting, despite its many faults, is, after Greek
sculpture, the most serious figure art in existence.