France, to oppose the power of the Emperor Charles V., Michael
Angelo was appointed Military Architect and Engineer, to superintend
the erection of the necessary works. He visited Bologna to inspect
its celebrated fortifications, and, on his return, constructed a
fortification on the heights of San Miniato, which commands the city
and environs of Florence. On the 24th of October, 1529, the Prince
of Orange, general of Charles V., encamped on the hills surrounding
the city, and his first operation was to throw up a rampart to
storm the bastion of San Miniato. His design was frustrated by the
providence of Michael Angelo. Michael made such good resistance, that
the Prince directed the artillery to demolish the tower. The artist
hung mattresses of wool on the side exposed to the attack, and by
means of a bold projecting cornice, from which they were suspended,
a considerable space was left between them and the wall. This simple
expedient was sufficient, and the Prince was obliged to turn his
siege into a blockade.
After an active and successful service to the city for six months,
Michael Angelo was informed of a treachery that was ripening within
the walls. He communicated it to the government with his advice upon
it; but was mortified by receiving from the government reproaches
at his credulity and fear. He replied, “that it was useless for him
to take care of the walls, if they were determined not to take care
of themselves,” and he withdrew privately from the city to Ferrara,
and thence to Venice. The news of his departure occasioned a general
concern in Florence, and he was instantly followed with apologies
and importunities to return. He did so, and resumed his office. On
the 21st of March, 1530, the Prince of Orange assaulted the city by
storm. Michael Angelo is represented as having ordered his defence so
vigorously, that the Prince was compelled to retire. By the treachery
however of the general of the Republic, Malatesta Baglioni, all his
skill was rendered unavailing, and the city capitulated on the 9th
of August. The excellence of the works constructed by our artist has
been approved by Vauban, who visited them and took a plan of them.
In Rome, Michael Angelo was consulted by Pope Paul III. in building
the fortifications of San Borgo. He built the stairs of Ara Celi
leading to the Church once the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; he
arranged the piazza of the Capitol, and built its porticoes. He
was charged with rebuilding the Pons Palatinus over the Tiber. He
prepared, accordingly, a large quantity of blocks of travertine,
and was proceeding with the work, when, through the intervention of
his rivals, this work was taken from him and intrusted to Nanni di
Bacio Bigio, who plays but a pitiful part in Michael’s history. Nanni
sold the travertine, and filled up the piers with gravel at a small
expense. Michael Angelo made known his opinion, that the bridge could
not resist the force of the current; and, one day riding over it on
horseback, with his friend Vasari, he cried, “George, this bridge
trembles under us; let us ride faster lest it fall whilst we are upon
it.” It fell, five years after it was built, in 1557, and is still
called the “Broken Bridge.”
Versatility of talent in men of undoubted ability always awakens
the liveliest interest; and we observe with delight, that, besides
the sublimity and even extravagance of Michael Angelo, he possessed
an unexpected dexterity in minute mechanical contrivances. When the
Sistine Chapel was prepared for him that he might paint the ceiling,
he found the platform on which he was to work, suspended by ropes
which passed through the ceiling. Michael demanded of San Gallo, the
Pope’s architect, how these holes were to be repaired in the picture?
San Gallo replied; “That was for him to consider, for the platform
could be constructed in no other way.” Michael removed the whole,
and constructed a movable platform to rest and roll upon the floor,
which is believed to be the same simple contrivance which is used
in Rome, at this day, to repair the walls of churches. He gave this
model to a carpenter, who made it so profitable as to furnish a dowry
for his two daughters. He was so nice in tools, that he made with his
own hand the wimbles, the files, the rasps, the chisels and all other
irons and instruments which he needed in sculpture; and, in painting,
he not only mixed but ground his colors himself, trusting no one.
And not only was this discoverer of Beauty, and its teacher among
men, rooted and grounded in those severe laws of practical skill,
which genius can never teach, and which must be learned by practice
alone, but he was one of the most industrious men that ever lived.
His diligence was so great that it is wonderful how he endured its
fatigues. The midnight battles, the forced marches, the winter
campaigns of Julius Cæsar or Charles XII. do not indicate greater
strength of body or of mind. He finished the gigantic painting of
the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in twenty months, a fact which
enlarges, it has been said, the known powers of man. Indeed he toiled
so assiduously at this painful work, that, for a long time after,
he was unable to see any picture but by holding it over his head. A
little bread and wine was all his nourishment; and he told Vasari
that he often slept in his clothes, both because he was too weary to
undress, and because he would rise in the night and go immediately
to work. “I have found,” says his friend, “some of his designs in
Florence, where, whilst may be seen the greatness of his genius, it
may also be known that when he wished to take Minerva from the head
of Jove, there needed the hammer of Vulcan.” He used to make to a
single figure nine, ten, or twelve heads before he could satisfy
himself, seeking that there should be in the composition a certain
universal grace such as nature makes, saying, that “he needed to
have his compasses in his eye, and not in his hand, because the
hands work whilst the eye judges.” He was accustomed to say, “Those
figures alone are good, from which the labor is scraped off, when the
scaffolding is taken away.”
At near eighty years, he began in marble a group of four figures for
a dead Christ; because, he said, to exercise himself with the mallet
was good for his health.
And what did he accomplish? It does not fall within our design to
give an account of his works, yet for the sake of the completeness
of our sketch we will name the principal ones. Sculpture he called
_his_ art, and to it he regretted afterwards he had not singly
given himself. The style of his paintings is monumental; and even
his poetry partakes of that character. In sculpture, his greatest
work is the statue of Moses in the Church of Pietro in Vincolo, in
Rome. It is a sitting statue of colossal size, and is designed to
embody the Hebrew Law. The lawgiver is supposed to gaze upon the
worshippers of the golden calf. The majestic wrath of the figure
daunts the beholder. In the Piazza del Gran Duca at Florence, stands,
in the open air, his David, about to hurl the stone at Goliah. In
the Church called the Minerva, at Rome, is his Christ; an object of
so much devotion to the people, that the right foot has been shod
with a brazen sandal to prevent it from being kissed away. In St.
Peter’s, is his Pietà, or dead Christ in the arms of his mother. In
the Mausoleum of the Medici at Florence, are the tombs of Lorenzo
and Cosmo, with the grand statues of Night and Day, and Aurora and
Twilight. Several statues of less fame, and bas-reliefs, are in Rome
and Florence and Paris.
His Paintings are in the Sistine Chapel, of which he first
covered the ceiling with the story of the creation, in successive
compartments, with the great series of the Prophets and Sibyls in
alternate tablets, and a series of greater and smaller fancy-pieces
in the lunettes. This is his capital work painted in fresco. Every
one of these pieces, every figure, every hand and foot and finger,
is a study of anatomy and design. Slighting the secondary arts of
coloring, and all the aids of graceful finish, he aimed exclusively,
as a stern designer, to express the vigor and magnificence of his
conceptions. Upon the wall, over the altar, is painted the Last
Judgment.
Of his designs, the most celebrated is the cartoon representing
soldiers coming out in the bath and arming themselves; an incident of
the war of Pisa. The wonderful merit of this drawing, which contrasts
the extremes of relaxation and vigor, is conspicuous even in the
coarsest prints.
Of his genius for Architecture, it is sufficient to say that he
built St. Peter’s, an ornament of the earth. He said he would hang
the Pantheon in the air; and he redeemed his pledge by suspending
that vast cupola, without offence to grace or to stability, over the
astonished beholder. He did not live to complete the work; but is
there not something affecting in the spectacle of an old man, on the
verge of ninety years, carrying steadily onward with the heat and
determination of manhood, his poetic conceptions into progressive
execution, surmounting by the dignity of his purposes all obstacles
and all enmities, and only hindered by the limits of life from
fulfilling his designs? Very slowly came he, after months and years,
to the dome. At last he began to model it very small in wax. When it
was finished, he had it copied larger in wood, and by this model it
was built. Long after it was completed, and often since, to this day,
rumors are occasionally spread that it is giving way, and it is said
to have been injured by unskilful attempts to repair it. Benedict
XIV., during one of these panics, sent for the architect Marchese
Polini, to come to Rome and examine it. Polini put an end to all the
various projects of repairs, by the satisfying sentence; “The cupola
does not start, and if it should start, nothing can be done but to
pull it down.”
The impulse of his grand style was instantaneous upon his
contemporaries. Every stroke of his pencil moved the pencil in
Raphael’s hand. Raphael said, “I bless God I live in the times of
Michael Angelo.” Sir Joshua Reynolds, two centuries later, declared
to the British Institution, “I feel a self-congratulation in knowing
myself capable of such sensations as he intended to excite.”
A man of such habits and such deeds, made good his pretensions to
a perception and to delineation of external beauty. But inimitable
as his works are, his whole life confessed that his hand was all
inadequate to express his thought. “He alone,” he said, “is an artist
whose hands can perfectly execute what his mind has conceived;” and
such was his own mastery, that men said, “the marble was flexible in
his hands.” Yet, contemplating ever with love the idea of absolute
beauty, he was still dissatisfied with his own work. The things
proposed to him in his imagination were such, that, for not being
able with his hands to express so grand and terrible conceptions, he
often abandoned his work. For this reason he often only blocked his
statue. A little before he died, he burned a great number of designs,
sketches and cartoons made by him, being impatient of their defects.
Grace in living forms, except in very rare instances, did not satisfy
him. He never made but one portrait (a cartoon of Messer Tommaso di
Cavalieri), because he abhorred to draw a likeness unless it were of
infinite beauty.
Such was his devotion to art. But let no man suppose that the images
which his spirit worshipped were mere transcripts of external grace,
or that this profound soul was taken or holden in the chains of
superficial beauty. To him, of all men, it was transparent. Through
it he beheld the eternal spiritual beauty which ever clothes itself
with grand and graceful outlines, as its appropriate form. He called
eternal grace “the frail and weary weed, in which God dresses the
soul which he has called into Time.” “As from the fire, heat cannot
be divided, no more can beauty from the eternal.” He was conscious
in his efforts of higher aims than to address the eye. He sought,
through the eye, to reach the soul. Therefore, as, in the first
place, he sought to approach the Beautiful by the study of the True,
so he failed not to make the next step of progress, and to seek
Beauty in its highest form, that of Goodness. The sublimity of his
art is in his life. He did not only build a divine temple, and paint
and carve saints and prophets. He lived out the same inspiration.
There is no spot upon his fame. The fire and sanctity of his pencil
breathe in his words. When he was informed that Paul IV. desired he
should paint again the side of the chapel where the Last Judgment
was painted, because of the indecorous nudity of the figures, he
replied, “Tell the Pope that this is easily done. Let him reform the
world and he will find the pictures will reform themselves.” He saw
clearly that if the corrupt and vulgar eyes, that could see nothing
but indecorum in his terrific prophets and angels, could be purified
as his own were pure, they would only find occasion for devotion in
the same figures. As he refused to undo his work, Daniel di Volterra
was employed to clothe the figures; hence ludicrously called _Il
Braghettone_. When the Pope suggested to him that the chapel would
be enriched if the figures were ornamented with gold, Michael Angelo
replied, “In those days, gold was not worn; and the characters I have
painted were neither rich nor desirous of wealth, but holy men, with
whom gold was an object of contempt.”
Not until he was in the seventy-third year of his age, he undertook
the building of St. Peter’s. On the death of San Gallo, the architect
of the church, Paul III. first entreated, then commanded the aged
artist, to assume the charge of this great work, which though
commenced forty years before, was only commenced by Bramante,
and ill continued by San Gallo. Michael Angelo, who believed in
his own ability as a sculptor, but distrusted his capacity as an
architect, at first refused and then reluctantly complied. His heroic
stipulation with the Pope was worthy of the man and the work. He
required that he should be permitted to accept this work without any
fee or reward, because he undertook it as a religious act; and,
furthermore, that he should be absolute master of the whole design,
free to depart from the plans of San Gallo and to alter what had been
already done.
This disinterestedness and spirit,—no fee and no interference,—reminds
one of the reward named by the ancient Persian. When importuned to
claim some compensation of the empire for the important services he
had rendered it, he demanded, “that he and his should neither command
nor obey, but should be free.” However, as it was undertaken, so was
it performed. When the Pope, delighted with one of his chapels, sent
him one hundred crowns of gold, as one month’s wages, Michael sent
them back. The Pope was angry, but the artist was immovable. Amidst
endless annoyances from the envy and interest of the office-holders
and agents in the work whom he had displaced, he steadily ripened
and executed his vast ideas. The combined desire to fulfil, in
everlasting stone, the conceptions of his mind, and to complete his
worthy offering to Almighty God, sustained him through numberless
vexations with unbroken spirit. In answer to the importunate
solicitations of the Duke of Tuscany that he would come to Florence,
he replies that “to leave St. Peter’s in the state in which it now
was, would be to ruin the structure, and thereby be guilty of a great
sin;” that he hoped he should shortly see the execution of his plans
brought to such a point that they could no longer be interfered with,
and this was the capital object of his wishes, “if,” he adds, “I do
not commit a great crime, by disappointing the cormorants who are
daily hoping to get rid of me.”
A natural fruit of the nobility of his spirit is his admiration of
Dante, to whom two of his sonnets are addressed. He shared Dante’s
“deep contempt of the vulgar, not of the simple inhabitants of lowly
streets or humble cottages, but of that sordid and abject crowd of
all classes and all places who obscure, as much as in them lies,
every beam of beauty in the universe.” In like manner, he possessed
an intense love of solitude. He lived alone, and never or very rarely
took his meals with any person. As will be supposed, he had a passion
for the country, and in old age speaks with extreme pleasure of his
residence with the hermits in the mountains of Spoleto; so much so
that he says he is “only half in Rome, since, truly, peace is only
to be found in the woods.” Traits of an almost savage independence
mark all his history. Although he was rich, he lived like a poor man,
and never would receive a present from any person; because it seemed
to him that if a man gave him anything, he was always obligated to
that individual. His friend Vasari mentions one occasion on which
his scruples were overcome. It seems that Michael was accustomed
to work at night with a pasteboard cap or helmet on his head, into
which he stuck a candle, that his work might be lighted and his hands
at liberty. Vasari observed that he did not use wax candles, but a
better sort made of the tallow of goats. He therefore sent him four
bundles of them, containing forty pounds. His servant brought them
after night-fall, and presented them to him. Michael Angelo refused
to receive them. “Look you, Messer Michael Angelo,” replied the man,
“these candles have well nigh broken my arm, and I will not carry
them back; but just here, before your door, is a spot of soft mud,
and they will stand upright in it very well, and there I will light
them all.”—“Put them down, then,” returned Michael, “since you shall
not make a bonfire at my gate.” Meantime he was liberal to profusion
to his old domestic Urbino, to whom he gave at one time two thousand
crowns, and made him rich in his service.
Michael Angelo was of that class of men who are too superior to the
multitude around them to command a full and perfect sympathy. They
stand in the attitude rather of appeal from their contemporaries to
their race. It has been the defect of some great men, that they did
not duly appreciate or did not confess the talents and virtues of
others, and so lacked one of the richest sources of happiness and
one of the best elements of humanity. This apathy perhaps happens
as often from preoccupied attention as from jealousy. It has been
supposed that artists more than others are liable to this defect.
But Michael Angelo’s praise on many works is to this day the stamp
of fame. Michael Angelo said of Masaccio’s pictures that when
they were first painted they must have been alive. He said of his
predecessor, the architect Bramante, that he laid the first stone of
St. Peter’s, clear, insulated, luminous, with fit design for a vast
structure. He often expressed his admiration of Cellini’s bust of
Altoviti. He loved to express admiration of Titian, of Donatello, of
Ghiberti, of Brunelleschi. And it is said that when he left Florence
to go to Rome, to build St. Peter’s, he turned his horse’s head on
the last hill from which the noble dome of the Cathedral (built by
Brunelleschi) is visible, and said, “Like you, I will not build;
better than you I cannot.” Indeed, as we have said, the reputation
of many works of art now in Italy derives a sanction from the
tradition of his praise. It is more commendation to say, “This was
Michael Angelo’s favorite,” than to say, “This was carried to Paris
by Napoleon.” Michael, however, had the philosophy to say, “Only an
inventor can use the inventions of others.”
There is yet one more trait in Michael Angelo’s history, which
humanizes his character without lessening its loftiness; this is his
platonic love. He was deeply enamored of the most accomplished lady
of the time, Vittoria Colonna, the widow of the Marquis di Pescara,
who, after the death of her husband, devoted herself to letters, and
to the writing of religious poetry. She was also an admirer of his
genius, and came to Rome repeatedly to see him. To her his sonnets
are addressed; and they all breathe a chaste and divine regard,
unparalleled in any amatory poetry except that of Dante and Petrarch.
They are founded on the thought that beauty is the virtue of the
body, as virtue is the beauty of the soul; that a beautiful person is
sent into the world as an image of the divine beauty, not to provoke
but to purify the sensual into an intellectual and divine love.
He enthrones his mistress as a benignant angel, who is to refine
and perfect his own character. Condivi, his friend, has left this
testimony; “I have often heard Michael Angelo reason and discourse
upon love, but never heard him speak otherwise than upon platonic
love. As for me, I am ignorant what Plato has said upon this subject;
but this I know very well, that, in a long intimacy, I never heard
from his mouth a single word that was not perfectly decorous and
having for its object to extinguish in youth every improper desire,
and that his own nature is a stranger to depravity.” The poems
themselves cannot be read without awakening sentiments of virtue.
An eloquent vindication of their philosophy may be found in a paper
by Signor Radici in the London “Retrospective Review,” and, by the
Italian scholar, in the Discourse of Benedetto Varchi upon one sonnet
of Michael Angelo, contained in the volume of his poems published by
Biagioli, from which, in substance, the views of Radici are taken.
Towards his end, there seems to have grown in him an invincible
appetite of dying, for he knew that his spirit could only enjoy
contentment after death. So vehement was this desire that, he says,
“my soul can no longer be appeased by the wonted seductions of
painting and sculpture.” A fine melancholy, not unrelieved by his
habitual heroism, pervades his thoughts on this subject. At the age
of eighty years, he wrote to Vasari, sending him various spiritual
sonnets he had written, and tells him he “is at the end of his life,
that he is careful where he bends his thoughts, that he sees it is
already twenty-four o’clock, and no fancy arose in his mind but
DEATH was sculptured on it.” In conversing upon this subject with
one of his friends, that person remarked, that Michael might well
grieve that one who was incessant in his creative labors should have
no restoration. “No,” replied Michael, “it is nothing; for, if life
pleases us, death, being a work of the same master, ought not to
displease us.” But a nobler sentiment, uttered by him, is contained
in his reply to a letter of Vasari, who had informed him of the
rejoicings made at the house of his nephew Lionardo, at Florence,
over the birth of another Buonarotti. Michael admonishes him that
“a man ought not to smile, when all those around him weep; and that
we ought not to show that joy when a child is born, which should be
reserved for the death of one who has lived well.”
Amidst all these witnesses to his independence, his generosity, his
purity and his devotion, are we not authorized to say that this
man was penetrated with the love of the highest beauty, that is,
goodness; that his was a soul so enamored of grace, that it could
not stoop to meanness or depravity; that art was to him no means of
livelihood or road to fame, but the end of living, as it was the
organ through which he sought to suggest lessons of an unutterable
wisdom; that here was a man who lived to demonstrate that to the
human faculties, on every hand, worlds of grandeur and grace are
opened, which no profane eye and no indolent eye can behold, but
which to see and to enjoy, demands the severest discipline of all the
physical, intellectual and moral faculties of the individual?