A History of Sculpture

by Ernest Henry Short

CHAPTER X

MICHAEL ANGELO AND THE FLOOD TIDE
OF RENAISSANCE SCULPTURE
1490-1530 a.d.

The year 1475 a.d. has been reached. We have seen the conclusion of the struggle of the sculptors to make marble and bronze bear once more the impress of every imagination of the human heart. Nothing now remains save to estimate the fruits of the victory—a task which entails the appreciation of one man, Michael Angelo.

There is no exaggeration in focussing our attention on one artist. The apotheosis of Italian sculpture connects itself as inevitably with Michael Angelo as the topmost peak of Elizabethan drama—Shakespeare—connects itself with the dramatic hills and hillocks which led up to it. The first fifty years of Angelo’s life were to Renaissance sculpture what the age of Phidias and Polyclitus had been to Greek art. He and he alone found means to express in marble the deepest thoughts upon nature and humanity which the Italian Renaissance had aroused.

As had been the case with the Greek sculptors before Salamis, the pre-Angelesque artists had never quite made their message articulate. Indeed, the whole fifteenth century was a period of probation and experiment. In the sister art of painting, the draftsmen and colourists were realizing the possibilities of line and paint. The consequences of their efforts were Raphael, Leonardo, Titian and Correggio. What Angelico, Mantegna, Botticelli and Bellini were to the great painters, Ghiberti, della Robbia, Donatello, Pollaiuolo and Verocchio were to Michael Angelo.

But for the fact that Donatello and Ghiberti had raised the plastic arts for the time far above the graphic, it might well have been that sculpture would have been only a minor art to Michael Angelo. As things were in his boyhood, though painting was every year reducing the lead of the sister art, sculpture had still a far greater body of achievement to its credit. From the first it was clear that sculpture was the art by which his nature most naturally expressed itself. In after life he was wont jestingly to remind his friends of his earliest years among the mill-stone quarries of Settignano. He had been given to the wife of a stonecutter to be nursed, and, as he put it, “with the milk of my foster-mother I sucked in the chisels and mallets wherewith I now make my figures.”

We do not propose to attempt the narration of even the main events of Angelo’s life. We can put aside all that is merely personal. Our object is rather to show how he came into contact with the main political and social factors of his age, and how these, in turn, reacted upon his art. Three circumstances single themselves out as all-important—the sculptor’s connection with the Medici family in his early youth, with the city of Florence in his early manhood, and with the Papacy in the prime of life.

MICHAEL ANGELO

DAVID

Academy of Fine Arts, Florence

These three powers practically brought into being all that is greatest in Italian art. From our sculptor’s association with them we can understand the influences which were spurring Angelo’s few compeers and his many inferiors to their greatest efforts.

THE FLORENTINE PERIOD

Like many another scholar and artist, Michael Angelo entered the household of Lorenzo de Medici, the merchant-despot of Florence, as a boy. Until his patron’s death he fared like a scion of the family. While it would have been impossible for an impressionable youth to grow up without imbibing something of the spirit of the place, Angelo never thoroughly absorbed the influence of the Medicean court. The time was too short. Before he was twenty it was a thing of the past. But for some years the memory of these joy-days persisted, and it was under their inspiration that the earliest of Angelo’s great works were produced. Of these, the “[David],” begun in 1501 and finished in 1503, stands out pre-eminently as embodying the humanist creed.

But the statue of the great loose-limbed youth has an even more vital interest. Nothing could more happily illustrate the relation a great Renaissance artist bore to his countrymen than the circumstances attending the carving of the “[David].” It was commissioned by the State of Florence. The first contract signed by the sculptor and the representative of the town sets forth that “the worthy master, Michael Angelo, son of Lodovico Buonarroti, Citizen of Florence, has been chosen to fashion, complete, and perfectly finish the male statue, already rough-hewn and called ‘The Giant,’ 13 feet 6 inches high, now existing in the workshop of the Cathedral, badly blocked out aforetime by Master Agostino di Duccio of Florence.” In other words, Angelo’s “[David]”—one of the masterpieces of the world—was cut from a great block of marble that had been so maltreated by an earlier worker that no artist of rank could be found to risk his reputation in finishing it. This alone would be sufficient proof of the immense technical skill of this youth of twenty-six. In addition, Michael Angelo did not even model a full-sized clay figure. He worked with no guidance except a few drawings and wax models some eighteen inches high. His remuneration for this was fixed at £2 6s. a month—workmen, scaffolding, &c., being supplied. “When the said statue is finished,” continues the contract, “the consuls and operai shall estimate whether he deserve a larger recompense, and this shall be left to their consciences.”

History does not record whether the art committee of the Florentine County Council eventually did add to the rather meagre remuneration mentioned in the contract. We have ample evidence, however, that the representatives of the citizens did not shirk their critical duties. Vasari tells of a certain Gonfaloniere, who essayed to justify the opinion that the nose of the David was too big. Angelo listened for a while, and then ascended the scaffolding under which his critic was standing. Taking a chisel in the one hand and a few pinches of marble-dust in the other, the sculptor began to tap lightly around the doubtful spot. From time to time he let fall a little of the dust, but of course did not alter the nose. “Look at it now,” cried Angelo to the Gonfaloniere below. “You have given it life,” replied his victim, rubbing the dust out of his eyes.

MICHAEL ANGELO

MONUMENT OF LORENZO

Medici Chapel, Florence

MICHAEL ANGELO

“THE PIETA”

St. Peter’s, Rome

On January 25, 1503, a solemn conclave of artists resident in Florence met in the Opera del Duomo to decide where the great figure should be placed. Piero di Cosimo—readers of Romola will remember him—Cosimo Rosselli, Botticelli, then a man of sixty-six, Filippino Lippi, and Da Vinci were among those present. Francesco Monciatto, a wood-carver, began by advancing the proposition that the statue should be put up before the Duomo, the site proposed for the original work in fact. Cosimo Rosselli and Botticelli supported the proposal. Giuliano di San Gallo then suggested the Loggia dei Lanzi as an alternative on the ground that the marble had been softened by exposure and might not last. The “Second Herald” objected to this, fearing that ceremonies in the Loggia would be interfered with, and his remarks called Leonardi da Vinci to his feet. Finally Piero di Cosimo, a man of the soundest common sense in spite of his reputation for freakishness, with the aid of Salvestro, a jeweller, and Filippino Lippi, carried the proposal that the choice should be left to the sculptor himself on the ground that “he would know better how it should be.” Angelo’s decision was for the steps at the entrance of the Palazzo Vecchio. The curious may see it in position in the portrait of Francesco Ferruccio, the Florentine general, in which Cosimo used the square in front of the Palace as a background. The work is numbered 895 in the National Gallery collection.

But let us return for a moment to the Court of Lorenzo de Medici and its galaxy of scholars and artists. The creed of the Court of the Magnificent is summed up for ever in the great right hand of the “[David].” The sculptor purposely emphasized its size. Michael Angelo desired to lay stress upon the part which the boy took in the struggle rather than to portray him as a mere instrument. To have been at one with the spirit of the biblical narrative, the weakness of the human agent would have been emphasized—as it was, indeed, in the “[David]” of Donatello. But the right hand of Angelo’s “[David]” stands for a new view—the Greek view—of the part mankind must play in the world. Human endeavour, rather than divine interference, is now to perfect man. By his own effort, by the exercise of his own free will, man is to work out his end.

The influence of this new conception upon the art of Michael Angelo is equally noticeable in the “[Pieta],” a rather earlier sculpture, and the first work of our artist’s maturity.

The Virgin Mother is seated upon the stone on which the cross had been erected. The dead Christ lies before her. The scene corresponds with nothing in the biblical account. It illustrates no single verse. But it does more. It breathes the very spirit of the Christian narrative, for it interprets its inner meaning in its most vital and useful sense. We can see at once that Angelo would have been false to his art had he been more faithful to the current conception of Christian truth. He was no preacher. He was not expounding a faith. What he took from the Bible story was the divine grief of a mother for an all-perfect son. His task was to translate that without the loss of one iota of physical or moral beauty. Condivi tells us that there were many who complained that the mother was too young when compared with her son, and that he himself laid the matter before Michael Angelo for explanation. The sculptor’s answer is an example of what a perfect humanist—and that is very near to saying a perfect man—would have said. It is so characteristic of the sculptor that no apology for quoting it at length is necessary. “One day,” says Condivi, “I was talking to Michael Angelo of this objection.”

MICHAEL ANGELO

MOSES

(TOMB OF JULIUS II.)

“Do you not know,” he said, “that chaste women retain their fresh looks much longer than those who are not chaste? How much more, therefore, a virgin in whom not even the least unchaste desire ever arose? And I tell you, moreover, that such freshness and flower of youth besides being maintained in her by natural causes, it may possibly be that it was ordained by the Divine Power to prove to the world the virginity and perpetual purity of the Mother. It was not necessary in the Son; but rather the contrary; wishing to show that the Son of God took upon himself a true human body, subject to all the ills of man, excepting only sin; he did not allow the divine in him to hold back the human, but let it run its course and obey its laws, as was proved in his appointed time. Do not wonder then, that I have for all these reasons, made the most Holy Virgin, Mother of God, a great deal younger in comparison with her Son than she is usually represented. To the Son I have allotted his full age.”

The “[Pieta]” and the “[David]” are the typical works of Angelo’s first period—that in which the influences of humanism were paramount. But it is in the sculptures of his second period that we can detect the workings of the deep philosophical poetry which inspired the most characteristic of his works—the tomb of Julius II. and the monuments in the Medici chapel at Florence.

Neither was ever finished. The Medici monuments are the more complete, for the majesty of the sculptor’s first conception for the tomb of Julius II. can now be only guessed from a few rough sketches, half a dozen measurements and the well-known “[Moses].” Yet it occupies a unique place in the history of Italian art as the foremost work by an Italian sculptor which arose directly out of the ambition of the Church to make the Pope’s temporal authority equal his spiritual.

The principle of utilizing the painter, the sculptor, and the architect for this purpose had been enunciated fifty years earlier. Recognizing that the earlier aim, which had sought to enforce a spiritual despotism by making the belief in a God-inspired pontiff universal, had failed, Nicholas V. determined to try the effect of making the Pope into a king. His court was to be the centre of European culture. With the aid of the vast wealth poured into the papal coffers during the Jubilee of 1450, Nicholas began by making the Vatican quarter of Rome a veritable stronghold for the sovereign pontiff. His full ambition was disclosed when his will was read to the princes of the church assembled round his deathbed. In this Nicholas V. showed that the Popes could be secured from internal revolution and external force by one thing only. That was by making the seat of the papacy so splendid in the eyes of Christendom that it would possess the sanctity that had attached to Imperial Rome itself. It was this great aim that Michael Angelo spent the best years of his life in forwarding. The personal ambition of each Pope interfered with the free progress of the great ideal, but it furnished a strong motive for many years, and actuated both of Angelo’s great patrons, Julius II. and Leo X.

After finally settling in Rome Michael Angelo’s first task was the sculptured mausoleum of Julius II. Nicholas himself had started to rebuild the old basilica of St. Peter, in which Julius designed to set up his great tomb. Angelo suggested a great marble monument symbolical of the victory of human energy over death. Upon the lower tiers of a great pyramid the sculptor showed the arts and sciences which the Pope had loved to patronize. Above were the prophets and graces, of which the great statue of “[Moses]” was one. The apex of the pyramid was a group in which the earth and the heavens upheld the open tomb where the dead pope awaited the Resurrection hour. In all forty figures. The vastness of the conception can best be realized from the fact that the sculptor spent eight months among the marble mines at Carrara quarrying the necessary stone. The space covered by the design was about twenty-five feet by forty. It was soon found that the basilica was not large enough to contain the monument. “What would be the cost of rebuilding?” asked Julius. “100,000 scudi,” said the sculptor. “Let it be 200,000.” And Michael Angelo set to work.

This great dream was never realized. The sculptor worked upon it for some years and then Julius was persuaded to entrust him with a task at least as great—that of decorating the vault of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican.

THE MEDICI TOMBS

For almost twenty years Michael Angelo produced no great sculpture. Then came what are perhaps the greatest works of Renaissance sculpture, the monuments in the Medici Chapel at Florence. They were executed at the command of Clement VII., the second Medicean pope. His purpose was to build an abiding testimony to the greatness of his house, which had now become supreme in Italy by making itself as powerful in Rome as it had been in Florence.

Evicted from Florence, the Medici had turned to Rome. Leo X., a son of the Magnificent, had succeeded Julius. He in turn was followed by Clement VII. To Clement came the idea of building a sacristy in San Lorenzo in honour of the Medici family. His intention was that monuments of Cosimo, Lorenzo, Giuliano, Duke of Nemours, Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, Leo X. and himself should be placed in the sacristy. Only two—those to the Dukes of Nemours and Urbino—were finished. A grim commentary upon the Medicean record, this. The two groups actually completed are identified, not with the memory of Lorenzo the Magnificent and Leo X., but with two illegitimate scions of the house.

The whole building was designed by Michael Angelo himself and was panelled to receive the sculptures, every architectural feature being planned to enhance the emotional effect of the great marble groups. In these, Michael Angelo cast aside the pretty compliments upon which he had exercised his fancy when planning the vast tomb of Julius II.—the sorrowing arts and sciences, for instance. His aim was to create a perfectly beautiful resting-place for the mighty dead. This, and nothing more.

Let us endeavour to follow the train of Michael Angelo’s imagination as it gradually found the definite forms which were to realize its deepest beliefs: “A perfectly beautiful resting-place for the mighty dead.” Could anything be more fraught with all the mingled emotions and thoughts which human philosophy has tried in vain to unravel? Yet Michael Angelo was never surer of anything than that sculptured marble was capable of expressing it all. Even the feelings aroused by this mystery of mysteries—death—were not beyond the cold stone and hot chisel of the sculptor. Allied to this faith—that there was no thought too profound for marble to express—was his favourite fancy that the form of his finished work dwelt in the rough block. His chisel did but release it from its marble tomb. He was not the author, only the agent through whom his work saw the light. As he himself wrote in one of the sonnets:

“The best of artists hath no thought to show Which the rough stone in its superfluous shell Doth not include; to break the marble spell Is all the hand that serves the brain can do.”

MICHAEL ANGELO

THE DUKE LORENZO

The Medici Chapel, Florence

Moreover, he held that this could be done without the use of symbolism. The simplest natural objects, transfigured by the artist-poet, would carry the profoundest truth.

Let us see how Michael Angelo proved his belief in the all-sufficiency of the art of sculpture in this respect. Choose two typical figures from the groups we are considering.

“Marble griefs, Hewn from a Titan’s heart,”

some one has called them. Say those of “[Dawn]” and “[Night].” Both are female nudes, and illustrate a vital feature in Michael Angelo’s technique—his preference for the male over the female form. The Greek sculptors before Praxiteles had the same preference. The male form made a more vital appeal to them than the female. With its infinitely greater variety of surface and its greater diversity of posture, it expressed more directly the vast complexity of human energies which their age had seen spring into being. Two thousand years later the times gave rise to thoughts no less profound and to emotions of no less intensity. And Michael Angelo found that they were too heavy a burden for a woman’s form to bear. That the full sentiment aroused by his conception of “[Night]” may find expression, the sculptor has lengthened the trunk and the limbs. He has twisted the torso upon the hips. He has added, as it were, a masculine character to the feminine form. He has treated the female nude in the male key. This is a direct reversion of the Praxitelean method by which profoundly beautiful sensuous effects were obtained through treating the male figure in the female key—the “Hermaphroditus,” for instance.

And yet it cannot be denied that the Praxitelean method is what we should have expected Angelo to follow. If the figure of “[Dawn]” had conveyed nothing save the virgin fairness of form which Giorgione’s “Venus” at Dresden embodies, it would have been more in accord with the popular taste of the first quarter of the sixteenth century. As the political and social situation in Italy grew more desperate (and it was never more desperate than during the years in which the monuments in the Medici chapel were being carved) painting and sculpture had become more joyous. The themes which the artists treated became less and less religious and more and more pagan. This has always been the case. In times of the greatest stress, when the enemy is beating at the very gates, men cannot sustain the soul-tearing emotions which they welcome in their art during times of prosperity. The defeat of the Athenians at Ægospotami did not bring to birth a greater Æschylus who should give shape to the fearful emotions which the men of the earlier age had been spared. No! tragedy vanished. Comedy arose. So it was with sculpture. Men turned from the griefs of a Niobe and found consolation in the sheer sensuous beauty of Praxiteles’ “[Aphrodite].” They preferred the manly charms of Hermes to the awful sublimity embodied in the brow of Phidias’ Zeus. And so in our period, when the horrors which had overtaken the Greek cities were threatening their heirs in Italy, the same thing took place. We find that the typical work is not the brooding figure of “[Lorenzo of Urbino]” or the “[Night],” which Michael Angelo sculptured beneath the figure of Giuliano, but the melodious dreams that floated from the brush of a Correggio. At this very time Allegri was at work upon the decoration of the great chamber of the Abbess of the Convent of St. Paul, Parma. He chose to depict no titanic forms charged with emotion, but covered his ceiling with a vast trellis of vine-leaves and fruit, and in the oval apertures which these formed he placed his groups of genii toying with the implements of the chase. Correggio’s was the manner of his time. His end was sensuous delight and through it, not the dramatic, but the lyrical note, continually sounds.

MICHAEL ANGELO

NIGHT

DAWN

From The Medici Chapel, Florence

But Michael Angelo was too true a man to dole out lies which should pander to a joyous carelessness. It was his task to echo, not one emotion, but all the emotions which had stirred the Italy of his age. As a mere boy he had seen the men and women who flocked to the Duomo at Florence to listen to the denunciations of Savonarola. He had seen them pass from the Church speechless—“more dead than alive”—because of the great fear which was upon them. Before he was twenty, he had witnessed the coming of the “Scourge,” which the fate had foretold. Then he had passed to “the Eternal City,” the home of the Princes of the Church, the centre of Christendom, only to find that, to borrow Symonds’s phrase, “the very popes rose from the beds of harlots to unlock or bolt the gates of heaven and purgatory.” It has been said that Michael Angelo worked upon the Medici tombs during the siege of Florence in 1528. He may have been carving these marbles when the artillery of a Medicean army was actually thundering against the Florence that Lorenzo had made immortal. As his thoughts were thrown back by his subject upon his boyhood days, memories of Savonarola—the Jeremiah of the Renaissance—must have come back in a flood. Well may the sculpture in the sacristy of San Lorenzo have been termed

“Marble griefs, Hewn from a Titan’s heart.”

We shall not attempt to translate Angelo’s message into words, but a happy chance has preserved a story which enables us to realize what the sculptor intended to convey by the figure of the sleeping woman we call “[Night].” We might have guessed that the firm hips, contrasting as they do with the long limbs and narrow form of the virgin “[Dawn],” symbolized the end of a life of suffering. Those worn breasts have suckled many, and the mother, who has watched her children struggling through the cruel breakers of life, is now herself at rest. The figure of “[Night]” was never intended to carry the gay, sunny message that a Botticelli felt and longed to give forth when he painted such a picture as the “Birth of Venus” or the “Coming of Spring.” The story goes that Giovanni Battista Strozzi wrote the following epigram, which he placed beneath the marble figure. It ran:

“The Night, that thou seest so sweetly sleeping, Was by an angel carved in the rude stone. Sleeping, she lives; if thou believ’st it not, Wake her, and surely she will answer thee.”

Angelo, seeing this, wrote in reply:

“Sweet is my sleep, more sweet to be mere stone, So long as ruin and dishonour reign. To hear nought, to feel nought, is my great gain; Then wake me not; speak in an undertone.”

It is by the light of such an agonized philosophy that we must interpret the life-work of Michael Angelo. He lived in the midst of a society that was morally rotten. He saw a foreign foe at the very gates of his native city. Could one, to whom “Art’s the witness of what is behind this Show,” throw out careless hints as to the struggle the spirit of man must face before it is released? The almost unnatural poses in such sculptures as those in the Medici Chapel tell of the vehement emotion with which the soul of their author contemplated the “riddle of this painful world.” Michael Angelo would have been false to his mission had he been content to aim at the graceful repose which satisfied Praxiteles. His glory was to make sculpture—the most limited of the arts in this respect—a vehicle for the expression of the greatest of emotions and passions of which the human heart is capable.

---