CHAPTER I
GREAT PAINTERS: RAPHAEL
Any attempt at proper consideration of the book of the arts of Columbus' Century must begin with the three great names of Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. They are the greatest trio in the history of art--all their names associated with a single city at the beginning of their lives but deeply influencing the world of art before the end of them. Of the three as a painter Raphael is undoubtedly the greatest, though surely here, if anywhere in the history of art, comparisons are odious. Each of these geniuses in his own department of painting was supreme,--as a religious painter Raphael, as a portrait painter Leonardo, as a great decorative artist Michelangelo. Raphael rivals Leonardo, however, in the painting of portraits and some of Leonardo's religious paintings are almost the only ones worthy to be placed besides Raphael's great religious visions. Michelangelo, however, could on occasion, as he showed in the Sistine, prove a rival of either of them in this mode.
As is so true of the men of this time as a rule, all three of these men were much more than painters. Raphael died at the early age of thirty-seven, yet he reached distinction as an architect and as an archaeologist, besides accomplishing his great painting. Leonardo insisted on not being thought of as a painter, but as an engineer and architect, though he has painted the greatest portrait ever made and beat Michelangelo once in a competition in sculpture. Michelangelo reached supremacy in all four of the greatest modes of art. He is a painter second to none in all that he attempted, he is the [{2}] greatest sculptor since the time of the Greeks, he is one of the greatest architects of all time, yet with all this, by what might seem almost an impossible achievement, he was one of the greatest of poets and has written sonnets that only Dante and Shakespeare have equalled. These men of Columbus' Century not only were never narrow specialists but quite the contrary; they were extremely varied in their interests and felt in contradiction to what seems the prevalent impression in our time that such breadth of interest only increased their powers of expression in anything that they attempted.
Of the three probably Raphael has had the widest popular influence. His paintings have all unconsciously to most people colored and visualized for them the Biblical scenes, especially of the New Testament, and since his time painters have been greatly influenced by his compositions. He has deeply affected all the world of art and as for several centuries now some of his greatest works have been held outside of Italy, they have been producing their effect and giving artists the thought of how well deepest vision could be expressed.
This man, who by universal consent was the greatest painter that ever lived, was about nine years old when Columbus discovered America. According to tradition he died on his birthday at the age of thirty-seven in 1520. In less than two decades of active artist life he had painted a series of pictures that were a triumph even in that glorious period of marvellous artistic accomplishment. They have been the subject of loving study and affectionate admiration ever since. Many of them have been the despair of the artists who came after him. But Raphael is not an artists' artist in any exclusive sense of the word. He is as popular an idol with those who confess to having no critical knowledge of art as he is the hopeless model of those whose lives are devoted to art.
RAPHAEL, DRAWING OF SLAUGHTER OF INNOCENTS (tapestry, VATICAN)
Unlike many a genius, though his family was poor his early years were surrounded by conditions all favorable for the development of his talents. Raphael is his baptismal name and his family name was Santi. (The name Sanzio often attributed to him has no warrant in history.) His father Giovanni Santi filled the post of art expert, so far as that office was formally constituted at that time, to Duke Frederick, [{4}] reigning Prince of Urbino, and it was here that Raphael was born. The Duke was one of the most distinguished and perhaps the most discriminating of the great Renaissance patrons of art as well as of letters, and a series of well-known painters, among them Piero della Francesca, Melozzo da Forli and Justus of Ghent, were in his service at this time. Duke Frederick's interest in everything artistic had made the capital of his little principality one of the most important art centres of this time and his palace is still the Mecca for visitors to Italy who are interested in the development of art, for it possesses some of the great masterpieces of the Renaissance painters. Raphael in his boyhood had in a more limited way almost as favorable surroundings as Michelangelo enjoyed in Florence, but with his father's favor of his studies instead of the opposition that this Florentine contemporary encountered. Urbino was indeed almost as much of a centre of intellectual influence and progress at this time as the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent, at which Michelangelo was brought up. It was at Urbino that Baldassare Castiglione wrote "Il Cortigiano," the book of The Gentleman, the elegant setting forth of what was represented by that term in the Renaissance period.
When Raphael was about eleven his father died, but fortunately the maternal uncle under whose guardianship he passed was quite as favorable to art as his father had been. Yielding to the wishes of the boy he permitted him to enter the studio of Timoteo Viti, a pupil of the artist Francia, who had lately returned from his studies in other portions of Italy to take up his residence in his native country. During the next few years Raphael devoted himself to that training in drawing which was to mean so much for him. Just about a century ago a sketchbook was found, now in the Academy of Venice, having been purchased for the city, in which there are over a hundred pen-and-ink drawings of various pictures copied by Raphael, and competent critics declare that the masterly genius of the artist can already be recognized in them.
Besides these he painted a series of pictures in Timoteo's studio. Some of these have been preserved. Probably the best known is "St. George and St. Michael," now in the Louvre, though the "Dream of the Knight" in the National Gallery, [{5}] London, has been the admiration of young folk particularly for many generations. There are some who claim that the most charming of these early pictures painted at Urbino is the "Three Graces of the Tribune of Chantilly."
RAPHAEL, DREAM OF THE KNIGHT
After this Raphael studied for a time, probably for some four years, with Perugino at Perugia. This period of his life is mainly interesting from the fact that while he acquired Perugino's technique, Raphael went far beyond his master, though for a time his development was probably hindered rather than helped by that master's influence. Only one of the paintings made at Perugia, "The Coronation of the Virgin," painted for the Franciscans of that city, and now to be seen in the Vatican, reveals as art critics declare the real genius of Raphael shining through and above the qualities that he had borrowed from his Perugian master.
After Raphael's years of fruitful student work in the Hill Country so dear to students of Italian culture for its four periods of great art, there came his Florentine period, which represents a new and wonderful evolution of his artistic genius. Here, when he arrived in 1504, Leonardo da Vinci in his productive forties and the young Michelangelo in his revealing later twenties were at work at their famous historical cartoons, and the atmosphere of the city was deeply imbued with the Renaissance spirit. It is a little difficult now to think of Raphael as merely a young struggling artist, making his living by painting portraits for rather commonplace people, and executing his earlier Madonnas for private oratories, partly from love of his work but mainly because he needed the money, yet this constituted his occupation. [Footnote 1]
[Footnote 1: As pointed out by Grimm in his "Life of Michelangelo" the patrons of the Renaissance painters at the beginning of that period, and indeed until after the climax of its development had been reached, were either of the middle class or consisted of the religious orders and ecclesiastical authorities intent on the decoration of churches. The town folk ordered pictures for their homes or for the decoration of churches. The artist was a craftsman, like the goldsmith or any other. When artists became the favorites of princes and kings and rulers, when they came to occupy positions at courts, it was not long before decadence began. Lives at court were not calculated to bring out what was best nor to encourage profound thinking nor provide the leisure which is necessary for great art, and truth lost its attraction in jealous rivalry and the desire to please a patron.]
His Madonnas soon made him famous. At the end of his first year in Florence came one of his masterpieces, the "Madonna of the Grand Duke," still to be seen at the Pitti. At this [{6}] time Raphael was under the influence of the great Dominican painter Fra Bartolommeo, though undoubtedly the specimens of Fra Angelico's work so frequent in Florence had their power over him. The sweetness and mystical beauty which, added to the human tenderness of his lovely mothers, make his Madonnas so charming are the fruit of Raphael's studies in Florence. Under the influence of the two Dominican painters such great pictures as "La Belle Jardinière," of the Louvre, the "Madonna of the Goldfinch" now in the Uffizi, Florence, and the "Madonna of the Meadow," one of the treasures of the Vienna collection, were produced.
Just before he left Florence he painted for Atlanta Baglioni an "Entombment" which is his first attempt at an historic picture. The critics declare that it was spoiled somewhat by overwork at it and overanxiety to rival some of the great paintings of this kind from Leonardo and Michelangelo which Raphael had so much admired. However that may be, it is undoubtedly one of the world's greatest pictures, especially when the age of the artist, twenty-five, is taken into account. Just after he finished it he was summoned to Rome by that discerning patron of genius Pope Julius II. His great opportunity had arrived. Only a little more than ten years of life lay ahead of him, but in that ten years the art of the world was to receive almost its greatest treasures. In their "Italian Cities" the Blashfields have told the story of his Roman career:--
"Raphael's conquest of his surroundings was almost magical: he arrived a youth, well spoken of as to skill, yet by reputation hardly even par inter pares; in ten short years--how long if we count them in art history--he died, having painted the Vatican, the Farnesina, world-famous altar-pieces, having planned the restoration of the entire urbs, having reconciled enemies and stimulated friends, and having succeeded without being hated.
"He achieved this success by his great and manifold capacity, but, most of all, because in art he was the greatest assimilator and composer who ever lived. The two words are each other's complements; he received impressions, and he put them together; his temperament was exactly suited to this marvellous forcing house of Rome, for a Roman school never really existed, it was simply the Tusco-Umbrian school throned upon seven hills and growing grander and freer in the contemplation of Antiquity.
"To this contemplation, Raphael brought not only a brilliant endowment but an astonishing mental accumulation; the mild eyes of the Uffizi portrait were piercing when they looked upon nature or upon art, and behind them was an alembic in which the things that entered through those eyes fused, precipitated, or crystallized as he willed."
Pope Julius II, himself one of the great geniuses of history, with a dream of a united Italy long before there was any possibility of its accomplishment, and with an appreciation of genius that alone would have given him a commanding place among the world's great rulers, had summoned to Rome for the decoration of the apartments of the Vatican some of the greatest painters of the time. Even from distant Flanders came Reuisch and then there were Perugino, Raphael's old master, now advanced in years, and Signorelli, quite as old, and Lotto and Sodoma and Peruzzi and others. It was beside these that Raphael had to do his work. Within a year of Raphael's coming he, the youngest of them all, not yet twenty-six years of age, was selected by the Pope--how well advised he was--as the one to whom all the important decorations should be entrusted. Then came the opportunity to do the Camera della Segnatura, that triumph of decorative art. "This chamber of the Vatican" became, as Raphael's biographer in the Catholic Encyclopaedia says, "a sort of mirror of the tendencies of the human mind, a summary of all its ideal history, a sort of pantheon of spiritual grandeurs. Thereby the representation of ideas acquired a dramatic value, being no longer as in the Middle Ages the immovable exposition of an unchangeable truth but the impassioned search for knowledge in all its branches, the moral life of humanity."
His decorations of the Camera de la Segnatura are probably among the greatest contributions to decorative art ever made. They are certainly among the most interesting. Only Michelangelo's wonderful decorations in the Sistine Chapel rival them and there are some critics who would concede the palm to Raphael. Here we have the index not only of his power to paint marvellously but also of his intellectual genius and his judgment of values in the history of literature and philosophy. Such pictures as the "Disputa" and the "School of Athens" are real contributions to the history of human thought. Only a man who was himself of profound intellectuality on a plane of equality with the great intellectual geniuses whom he was painting could have conceived and completed these magnificent groups of the world's greatest men successfully. It has been well said that to appreciate properly the pictures of the Segnatura is of itself an education. To be able to take them in their full significance as essays in art and in the history of literature and philosophy is to have gone far on the road to culture. Raphael's achievement here is that of a great mind gifted with a wonderful power of comprehension as well as an almost unrivalled faculty of expression. No decorative pictures of the modern time, however great, can be placed beside them.
It has often been a source of wonder how Raphael was able to paint so appropriately the figures of Plato, Socrates, Aristotle and others in his great picture of the "School of Athens." Only the genius that gives men intuition, that enabled Shakespeare to portray wonderfully the character of the men of all times and the blind Homer to give us an enduring picture of man could have enabled him to do it. It was the time of the New Learning and the recently aroused interest in the classics, but no mere accumulation of information would ever have made him capable of such a representation. As Gladstone once said of Homer, a whole encyclopaedia of information with regard to the Greeks of Homer's time would not have told us as much about them as Homer has given us. At the time when he did the painting Raphael was not much more than thirty and his life had been occupied with painting and not with the accumulation of erudition. Henry Strachey in [{9}] his sketch of Raphael calls attention to the fact that none of the great contemporary Italian humanists were in Rome at this time. Neither Bembo nor Bibbiena nor Castiglione were where they might be readily consulted, and it was only Raphael's genius insight that enabled him to accomplish so wonderfully the task he had been set. For while the subjects were probably chosen for him he had to work out the details for himself, and indeed these wonderful compositions show this very clearly.
Raphael, School of Athens
Raphael revealed for us in the "Camera della Segnatura," as almost no one else has done, the attitude of mind of his period with regard to the meaning of life. Years of scholarly devotion to the study of pagan antiquity and especially the great Greek philosophers and poets, as well as the remains of its sculpture, had awakened in men's minds a broader view of life and its significance than had been possible for centuries. Raphael has summed this up in the wonderful documents that he has left in the Vatican and put on canvas what the great scholars of the time tried to express in words. The late Professor Kraus of Munich in his chapter on Medicean Rome in the second volume of the Cambridge modern History has told the story of this:
"The four pictures of the camera represent the aspirations of the soul of man in each of its faculties; the striving of all humanity towards God by means of aesthetic perception (Parnassus), the explanation of reason in philosophical inquiry and all scientific research (the School of Athens), order in Church and State (Gift of Ecclesiastical and Secular Laws) and finally Theology. The whole may be summed up as a pictorial representation of Pico della Mirandola's celebrated phrase, philosophia veritatem quaerit, theologia invenit, religio possidet; and it corresponds with what Marsilio says in his Academy of Noble Minds when he characterized our life's work as an ascent to the angels and to God."
Artists and poets and writers have vied with each other in saying strong words of high praise with regard to these decorations. The Blashfields in their "Italian Cities" have told the story of the limitations under which he worked, those of the room, lighted from two sides with two walls pierced by [{10}] windows, and then the fact that to a great extent probably his subjects were dictated, yet he must needs body them forth in concrete form and clearly. How well the young artist not only overcame these difficulties but out of the very difficulties created the most marvellous portions of his masterpieces the Blashfields have also told.
In one paragraph they have detailed the story of Raphael's associations with the artists of Rome at that period. Because it gives some idea of the wealth of artistic genius existent in this time it concerns us deeply here. They say: "The Urbinate (Raphael) strong as he was, had felt the need of strengthening himself still further by acquiring the friendship of other artists, and creating a kind of little court. We are told that almost nightly at his table there met, Luca Signorelli, Pietro Perugino, Baldassare Peruzzi, Giovanantonio Bazzi and Lorenzo Lotto. What an age! when a single supper party could furnish such an assemblage of world-famous artists, who in turn, as they went from their quarters in the Borgo Vecchio, might meet Michelangelo returning from the Vatican with the contingent of Florentines, Bugiardini, Granacci, Aristotile da Sangallo, and l'Indaco, who were helping him in the Sistine Chapel."
So much has been said of the Camera della Segnatura that it is sometimes forgotten that there are other rooms at the Vatican decorated by Raphael, only less wonderful than this. If they existed anywhere else they would be prized very highly, and if they were by any other artist would place him among the great artists of all time. The Camera del Incendio, so called because of the representation of "The Fire in the Borgo," has in this scene one of the most dramatic pictures ever painted. There are other great dramatic subjects finely treated here, as "The Oath of Leo III" and the "Coronation of Charlemagne." In this work Raphael was probably assisted to a noteworthy extent by pupils and associates, yet all of it is stamped with his genius. There are in the Camera del Eliodoro such pictures as "Jacob's Dream," the "Sacrifice of Isaac" and the "Burning Bush," which show Raphael's wonderful power of composition and at the same time the readiness of genius which enabled him to turn from one subject to another, accomplishing [{11}] so much that one is astounded to think of how ideas must have crowded on him and yet how well all is done considering that the artist so often needs above all the element of time to perfect his work. Had Raphael been spared to the ordinary length of life or to such years as Michelangelo's four score and ten or Titian's almost five score, what an abundance of his art there would be in the world.
One of Raphael's greatest works at Rome is comparatively little appreciated except by those whose attention has been particularly called to it. This was his making of the cartoons for the series of tapestries to be hung in the Sistine Chapel. These tapestries were to be manufactured in the Low Countries, but the Pope wanted the subjects that were to be represented to come from Raphael. Raphael consented to make the cartoons for them, though he knew that they would be cut into rolls some two inches wide to be handed over to the weavers. He had no idea that they would ever be exhibited except in the imperfect way in which tapestry can represent painting. Most artists of high rank would probably refuse such a commission. Certainly it seemed rather derogatory to his dignity as an artist to think that he should furnish only copies that were themselves to have no place among his collected works and prove at most a dubious addition to his fame. Under these circumstances it would not have been surprising if the composition and the manner of execution of the cartoons had been far below that of his works in painting and fresco.
He gave himself to the commission, however, whole-heartedly and executed a series of designs that are among the greatest compositions that have ever come from an artist's hand. These cartoons, after having been copied in tapestry, lay in the narrow rolls into which they had been slit in the tapestry factory in the Low Countries until, resurrected almost in our own time, they became the most precious treasures of the South Kensington Museum in London. Here they have been the favorite study of artists from all countries and have added laurels to Raphael's crown of artistic glory. He had the artist's true sense of joy in work and the artistic conscience to satisfy the canons of his own judgment and taste, even in a task that was to represent him only at second hand. Almost [{12}] never in history has the great artist consented thus to make himself subsidiary to the artisan, and that Raphael, the greatest of artists, should have done it shows the genuine spirit of true art as developed at this time.
Some of these cartoons, as "St. Paul Preaching to the Athenians," are considered among Raphael's greatest works. Raphael has well been called the greatest decorator who ever lived, yet he consented to add his mite to the decoration of the Sistine Chapel, in which Michelangelo's triumphant work stood out so grandly above, in order that the hangings on the walls might be worthy of that wonderful chapel that a great Pope had planned and had had the happy faculty of securing the greatest men of all time as collaborators in finishing.
Perhaps nothing shows the wonderful artistic power and influence of Raphael more than the fact that his compositions have dictated practically all the interpretation of Bible scenes for the after time. Quite unconsciously men have adopted his way of looking at things. He did not costume Biblical characters in the clothes of his own time, but on the other hand, in spite of his wide knowledge as an archaeologist, he did not attempt to make his pictures true to the genuine life of the times and the costuming of the older period. The set of cartoons particularly illustrate how well he visualized the scenes and yet the Apostles are dressed in garments that they never wore. As I write there is before me an engraving of Paul preaching to the Athenians. That Unknown God whom they had worshipped he is come to preach to them. It is a wonderful composition. Probably nothing has ever excelled it. There is probably not a single feature in it, however, that in any way represents what is true to history in the scene or the people. After his time for centuries his visualization satisfied people's minds, so much is genius able to impose itself on humanity.
The Sistine Madonna, the only picture of Raphael's painted on canvas, is usually considered to be the greatest religious painting that ever was executed and one of the most wonderful realizations of vivid poetic imagination that the world possesses. Everything in it is full of sublime suggestion. The majestic attitude of the Madonna posed upon the clouds, her face of perfect beauty, her far-away gaze of rapt veneration [{13}] and absorption in her motherhood, but motherhood of the Divine, proclaim her a vision from Heaven. No more wonderful conception of the human mother of the Divinity has ever been reached and yet critics and artists are a unit in proclaiming that the Virgin Mother is surpassed in wondrous realization of profound imagination by the Divine Child Whom she holds so tenderly in her arms. He looks out into the world from those arms with solemn sacred eyes that somehow give the idea of His profound interest in all that He sees and of an all-embracing vision. Then there is the rugged, bearded Pope Sixtus gazing upward with rapt devotion and the graceful, beautiful Saint Barbara adequately representative of the modest virgins who all over the world, for all the time since the coming of Christ, modestly cast their eyes down before the Virgin Mother and her child. Below are the two exquisite boy angels, whose charming childish attitudes of rapture have always roused so much interest.
It is said that these were the portraits of two little boys who came to gaze, boy fashion, curiously into the window of the studio while Raphael was painting. His transformation of the mischievous, inquisitive, supremely boyish faces into the look of angelic rapture is one of the triumphs of the picture that have always made it of the greatest interest. Painted originally for an Italian Church it is now the treasure of the gallery of Dresden, where it occupies a room by itself that is more like a shrine to which devout worshippers come from all over the world and in which as in some sacred place the visitor distinctly lowers his voice and walks on tiptoe. Nothing tells more of what the picture means than to watch the crowds that come from all over the world to see it and the way in which it is almost worshipped by those whose opinion is worth the most.
After the Sistine Madonna, unfortunately for art, Raphael's attention was drawn more and more from its special sphere of work as a painter and his time was taken up and his attention absorbed by the larger, wider pursuits of art director and archaeologist. This would not have been so sad perhaps only for the brevity of the life destined to be his. Had he lived to three score and ten the ten years devoted to these [{14}] phases of art work, as they may well be called, would probably have proved beneficial to his development. As it was we are likely to think of it as time wasted by a great genius painter. His art directorship proves the genius of the man. His workshop at Rome gradually took on the character of a school of art. In this designs were prepared not only for fresco but for mosaic work, for tapestry, for the carving of wood and stone and even for engraving and other phases of art. Vasari mentions fifty scholars who were employed as pupils and assistants in this workshop. In the meantime Raphael's interest in art history and his passion for classical art led him to dispatch artists to Naples and Athens, to make drawings of noteworthy antiquities that had been discovered. His manifold interests serve to show how broad were his own sympathies with everything artistic.
Towards the end of his life, though Raphael at thirty-five had no idea that death was impending, he devoted himself to the study of Roman antiquities and to the direction of the archaeological excavations which were then being carried on in Rome. He had conceived the design of reconstructing an entire plan of ancient Rome, based partly on the discoveries of the excavators and partly on the descriptions of classical writers. For this he made numerous plans and sketches with his own hand, and though these have unfortunately perished, there is in the Library at Munich a copy of the report which he drew up on this subject. It is in the form of a Latin letter to Pope Leo X, showing how deeply the Pope was interested in the scheme and that very probably it was due to his urging that Raphael took it up. This letter has been declared a monument to the industry and the archaeological learning of the artist. Ordinarily in the modern time we are likely to think that the artist devotes himself to his painting and leaves to the professional scholar such work as this. We do not look for many-sidedness in the artist. Raphael, however, like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, evidently had a magnificent breadth of intellect that would have given the most precious fruits of the spirit in many lines besides painting, had he only lived to anything like the years of so many of his great contemporaries.
RAPHAEL, POETRY (MOSAIC, VATICAN)
CHAPTER II
LEONARDO DA VINCI
When it was announced that the "Mona Lisa" had been stolen from the Louvre a thrill of solicitude that was almost dismay went through the civilized world. Its recovery has been a triumph. It is only a woman's portrait, herself of no importance, with what some might call a conventional landscape behind it, all on a comparatively small canvas, with its colors rather dimmed by time and by unfortunate surroundings during its somewhat over four hundred years of existence, yet it was looked upon as one of the most precious art treasures of the race. Critics with a right to an opinion have often declared that it was probably the greatest portrait of a human being that had ever been painted. When we recall how magnificently Rembrandt portrayed the Dutch burghers of his time, with what marvellous expression Raphael painted some of the personages he knew and how wondrously Velasquez painted some of his contemporaries; the placing of Leonardo's "Mona Lisa" above them by good critics shows what a supreme place must be accorded to it in the history of art. Art critics have expressed themselves in almost unmeasured terms as to the significance of the expression on the face of the "Mona Lisa." They do not hesitate to proclaim that Leonardo painted the very soul and not merely the bodily features of a woman. Walter Pater in his "The Renaissance" has written an almost dithyrambic description of it that is well known and yet deserves to be quoted again if only to show how a really great critic can be carried away by a favorite work of art:--
"'La Gioconda' is, in the truest sense, Leonardo's masterpiece, the revealing instance of his mode of thought and work. In suggestiveness, only the 'Melancholia' of Dürer is comparable to it; and no crude symbolism disturbs the effect of its subdued and graceful mystery. We all know the face [{16}] and hands of the figure, set in its marble chair, in that cirque of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea. Perhaps of all ancient pictures time has chilled it least.
"The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years man had come to desire. Here is the head upon which all 'the ends of the world are come,' and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed? All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands."
While the "Mona Lisa" was undoubtedly the greatest of Leonardo's portraits, perhaps the best possible idea of Leonardo's power as an artist is to be found in the "Last Supper." Instead of making a placid group he has chosen the moment just after the Lord had said that one of the Twelve will betray Him and when all are asking "Is it I, Lord?" He represents not only the individual shock but also the natural grouping that occurred as a consequence of the announcement There are four groups of three each, separate and with very distinct interest and yet they are so arranged as not to break the unity of the picture. On the left side the outer three [{17}] are all intently gazing on the Lord while the external group on the other side are gazing away from Him, but their hands all point towards Him. The inner three on the right are talking directly to Him while the corresponding three on the left are occupied among themselves and yet evidently intent on Him. There was probably never put together a more expressive set of faces. Each one is eminently individual, and each one shows marvellously the character of the Apostle represented. It has been said that it is as if the painter had made a condensed biography of each one of them with his brush. All the special characteristics of the different Apostles that we know are here to be seen in their faces. He has painted the souls and characters of the men in the imaginary portraits that he makes.
There is an old tradition mentioned by Vasari, that charming gatherer of legends with regard to the old painters, that Leonardo, unable to satisfy himself with the head and face of Jesus, left it unfinished. This would indeed have been a sad loss to art. Leonardo hesitated for long, wondering above all whether he should follow a model, but finally made his peace with tradition, accepted the type of head for the Lord that had been created by Giotto, and refining it still more succeeded in giving a look of mystic superhumanity to it that would evoke the idea of divinity. It is easy to see how much he borrowed but it is harder to realize how much he added, yet artists who have studied it have felt that here indeed was a triumph and that, as far as possible, Leonardo had represented the human face divine. He followed his model strictly in the case of the Apostles' heads and none knew better than he how to select models, but in the head of Christ he turns from the model and works out his design from ideals of the human face of which so many existed in his well-stored fancy. The face of Christ was left somewhat vague, trembling, undissolved like faces seen in cloud or in the fire. Leonardo himself once counselled his students to look for suggestions in curious cloud and fire shapes and even to study the vague forms that occur in imitation of human faces on cracked and stained surfaces of ruined walls, and some of his own devotion to this seems to have been of help to him in this marvellous face.
Much has been said about the head of Judas in this picture. According to Vasari, Leonardo fairly outdid himself on this face and head and he talks about "the force and truth with which the master has exhibited the imperious determination, hatred and treachery of Judas." According to another legend he had haunted the purlieus of Florence for months, searching for a head and face expressive enough in its malignity for his Judas. Possibly one might expect to find a human monster then in the Apostle traitor. In spite of Vasari's traditions, who here seems to have indulged his fancy for the sensational, Judas has a very interesting human face, rather weak than strong, but with redeeming qualities in it. After all it must not be forgotten that the face had to recall or at least not negative the fact that this man had been for three years in the company of the Lord, chosen as one of the Twelve, with possibilities of as great accomplishment for good as the others if he had not turned aside. Judas was not foreordained to be a traitor, but he made himself such. It was not his nature that compelled him to the crime, but his failure to control certain elemental passions, above all the craving for money, that led him into it. Many a good man since has been led off the same way. We have the face of a man who might have been one of the honored Apostles. That he was not is his own fault. It is said that the same model was used by Leonardo for Peter and Judas. If so, surely it was a stroke of genius. Peter too was weak. He even denied the Master, but had it in him to realize his weakness and repent. Peter's face is in the light, Judas' face in the shadow of Leonardo's picture. If Leonardo had not given Judas the bag to carry, thrown his face out of the line of the Apostles near him who are in the light, and made him ominously upset the salt while reaching for a better quality of bread than that near him, it would have been rather difficult to pick him out from among the others.
One thing is absolutely true in this great work of art. All the faces of the Apostles, with the possible exception of John's, are rudely strong. The men who were to carry on the work of the Master and convert the world to Christianity were not effeminate in any sense, and above all they had been the rough [{19}] fishermen of Galilee. Their costumes are modernized, their beards are probably less unkempt than if they were really Judeans, but here is a group of men whose very strength of feature makes them striking.
As has been well said, Leonardo broke up the old formality and immobility of the earlier painters and brought life and action into the scene. For the first time the personages are deprived of their halos and there is nothing to make the group of men anything more than human beings deeply interested in a great purpose and disturbed to the depths of their beings by the suggestion from the Master Himself that now that purpose was to be thwarted by the treason of one of their number. This conception seems all the more natural when we recall that none of them had as yet been confirmed in grace, that one was to deny, another betray and all were to be hesitant and cowardly in a great moment of trial.
With all this of thought in Leonardo's picture it might be expected that all of his attention would be given to the faces and little to the composition itself and to the setting of the picture. The exact contrary is what happens. The composition is probably the most wonderful ever done. The room itself is so arranged that everything leads the eye toward the centre of the picture where the Master sits, while behind Him the middle one of three windows, with an arched casement, frames Him apart from the Apostles. Through these three windows at the back can be seen one of the varied mountainous landscapes that Leonardo delighted in. The extent of the landscape which can be seen shows that the supper was held in an "upper room." The bare beams of the ceiling in that coffered arrangement common in Italy, the walls ornamented with large panel spaces filled in with a damasked pattern are all worked over with artistic completeness of detail. It is details of this kind one might expect the painter of the Last Supper to have overlooked in his intentness on the sublime moment and the characters. The tablecloth, moreover, is beautifully worked and the linen and the pattern of it and the folds are done with as meticulous care as one might expect from a genre painter of tissues. The glasses and table service are very carefully drawn and every detail was executed with [{20}] an artistic conscience and eye to perfection, even of trifles, that reveals the thoroughness and all-embracing skill of the artist.
The more one knows of Leonardo's power to paint detail and of his devoted study of nature, the less surprise is there at the traditions with regard to his head of Medusa. It was much for an artist to attempt to make a picture of this hideous head on which were the writhing serpents, the sight of which, according to tradition, turned beholders to stone, but he has succeeded in accomplishing a presentation of the horrible as far as it is possible. The writhing serpents are done with a devotion to detail and a lifelike naturalness that only a great observer of nature could have reached. Besides the serpents in all their varieties there are bats and lizards and vermin of many kinds in the picture, while the cloudy mephitic breath which can be seen issuing from the mouth completes the picture. The intense realism of these details of low animal life is a surprise at that period, but above all a surprise that it should have been done by a man who had such wonderful power of idealization when he wished to use it. It is this combination of qualities so opposite in themselves and often thought mutually exclusive that makes the never-ending surprise of Leonardo's genius. That the painter of the "Last Supper" and the charming "Madonna of the Rocks" should have also made this "Head of Medusa" is indeed difficult to understand, and yet not more than might be expected from one of the greatest of the artists of the Renaissance who is at the same time almost the world's most manifold genius.
LEONARDO DA VINCI, MADONNA OF THE ROCKS (LONDON)
With all this of magnificent accomplishment in painting, which sets him on a pinnacle by himself in this great department of art, it might be thought that Leonardo's main claim to recognition was because of his painting. He himself, however, would have been the first to object to estimation of him on any such grounds. He probably scarcely considered himself to be a painter at all, or at least occupied himself with painting only in his leisure moments. He beat Michelangelo once in a competition in sculpture, but doubtless thought less of himself as a sculptor than as a painter. He made what his generation declared to be the greatest equestrian statue [{21}] ever modelled and his generation knew what they meant by that, for they had before them two such triumphs of equestrian statuary as Donatello's "Gatamelata" and Verrocchio's "Colleoni." Just as in painting, when he wanted to do sculpture he could do it with a supreme perfection that is unrivalled. Strange as it may seem, Leonardo thought of himself as an engineer. He actually took on himself the contract for extending the canal system around Milan and accomplished it so well that his work still remains in use. During the course of this he invented the wheelbarrow, the movable derrick, the self-dumping derrick, various modes of moving rock, locks for canals and a system for maintaining a navigable level of water in rivers which were usually nearly dry in the summer time.
Leonardo had the thorough appreciation of himself that genius is so likely to have and that in smaller men seems conceit. He knew that there was practically nothing to which he cared to turn his hand in which he could not work out original ideas. He was only in his middle twenties when he wrote the letter to Ludovico Sforza in which he tells his future patron very calmly all the things he might be expected to do if the Duke should have need of them.
"MOST ILLUSTRIOUS LORD.--Having studied and estimated the works of the present inventors of warlike engines, I have found that in them there is nothing novel to distinguish them. I therefore force myself to address your Excellency that I may disclose to you the secrets of my art. 1. I have a method of bridges, very light and very strong; easy of transport and incombustible. 2. New means of destroying any fortress or castle (which hath not foundations hewn of solid rock) without the employment of bombards. 3. Of making mines and passages, immediately and noiselessly, under ditches and streams. 4. I have designed irresistible protected chariots for the carrying of artillery against the enemy. 5. I can construct bombards, cannon, mortars, passavolanti; all new and very beautiful. 6. Likewise battering rams, machines for the casting of projectiles, and other astounding engines. 7. For sea combats I have contrivances both offensive and defensive; ships whose sides would repel stone and iron balls, and explosives, unknown to any soul. 8. In [{22}] days of peace, I should hope to satisfy your Excellency in architecture, in the erection of public and private buildings, in the construction of canals and aqueducts. I am acquainted with the arts of sculpture and painting, and can execute orders in marble, metal, clay or in painting with oil, as well as any artist. And I can undertake that equestrian statue cast in bronze, which shall eternally glorify the blessed memory of your lordship's father and of the illustrious house of Sforza.
"And if any of the above seem extravagant or beyond the reach of possibility, I offer myself prepared to make experiment in your park; or in whatsoever place it may please your Excellency to appoint; to whose gracious attention I most humbly recommend myself."
Was there ever a more confident genius? There was never a man who fulfilled all his promises better.
What Leonardo was able to accomplish as an engineer can be seen in the canal some 200 miles in length still in existence by which he conducted the waters of the Adda over the arduous passes of the Valtellina to the gates of Milan. In its own way and considering the conditions under which he had to work and the obstacles that he had to overcome, this was as great an engineering feat as the digging of the Panama Canal, certainly a much greater engineering project than the completion of the Suez Canal, though until Panama came to shroud the glory of that our generation was inclined to be rather proud of that achievement.
So far from being merely an artistic mind Leonardo da Vinci had typically the scientific and inquiring mind. Whenever a scientific problem came up to him, no matter how others had solved it before him and above all no matter how his contemporaries were solving it, he solved it for himself and almost inevitably in the true light of science. For instance while he was engineer, in charge, to use our modern term, of the canals of central Italy, the cuttings necessary for them brought to light a series of fossils. These were mainly shells resembling the seashells of his time, though not exactly like them. Before this a number of such finds had been made and man had found it very hard to explain them. They were usually [{23}] uncovered beneath a rather thick layer of earth. They looked like shells that belonged to creatures that had lived on a seashore. How could their presence be explained far from the sea and completely covered up? Occasionally, when found near the surface on the tops of rather high mountains a distance from the sea, the explanation had been offered and generally accepted that they had been deposited there by the Deluge. The buried shells and especially those deeply buried could not be thus explained. Scientists, and let us not forget that it was scientists in the true sense of the term who were especially concerned with such objects, men who knew their mathematics and principles of science very well and who had made valuable observations in other departments of science, evolved a learned theory of their presence. These were incomplete beings occurring in the earth because of a surplusage of creative power that had not quite finished its work. Their development had been arrested as it were before they actually became living creatures. When Leonardo da Vinci ran across the shells in the cuttings for his canals, he suggested another and a simpler explanation as it seemed to him. These were actually marine shellfish, which had been deposited where they now were at a time when this portion of land was submerged by the sea. They had become covered during the process of sedimentation and transformation of the land which had gradually pushed the sea far away. It always requires a genius to offer so simple an explanation as that, and as a rule it seems quite out of the question to most of his contemporaries, because of its very simplicity. They usually express their disdain for such simple-mindedness or wrong-headedness rather forcibly, though after a time they come to accept the explanation of it, but usually refuse to give the inventor any credit for his idea, because it now seems so obvious that they cannot think of it as so very new, after all.
We know that Leonardo had made a series of studies of the shells of the seashore, though ordinarily it was presumed that his studies had been directed rather to their artistic beauty than to scientific knowledge with regard to them. Apparently his very familiarity with them, however, led him to lay the foundation stone of the science of palaeontology. There are [{24}] sketches of a number of the spiral shells to be found in his notebooks. These are all charming in their pretty curves, and they caught his artistic eye. Nature never makes anything merely useful. This strong outwardly rude cover of shell for the amorphous ugly shellfish--that is, ugly according to most human standards--is very pretty in its forms and its color. The fine use that Leonardo made of his study in seashells was pointed out by someone who studied some of the spiral staircases for the corners of palaces in Northern Italy which Leonardo is said to have planned. These were only private stairways leading usually from the ladies' apartments to the gardens of the castles and were probably designed to be useful as fire escapes. They projected sometimes from the angles of the building. We know what hideous things fire escapes can be. These were very pretty and effectively decorative. They were planned in imitation of the spirals of some of the whorl seashells that Leonardo had been studying.
Everywhere we find that mixture of the devotion to the useful and the practical as well as the aesthetic, to the scientific as well as the artistic. He made a series of dissections. These dissections were made at a time when, if we would believe certain of our modern historians of science in its relation to religion, the Church had absolutely forbidden dissection. Such declarations are all the more incomprehensible because not only did all the anatomists and surgeons of this century do dissection quite freely, and the greatest dissections were done in Rome by the Papal Physicians in the Papal Medical School, but every artist of the time studied anatomy for art purposes through dissections. We have dissections from Raphael and from Michelangelo and from many others as well as from Leonardo da Vinci.
Leonardo proposed after making a large number of dissections to write a text-book of anatomy. Ordinarily it might seem that such a text-book from an artist's hands would be eminently superficial and not at all likely to further the science of anatomy, though it might be helpful for students of art, especially in their dissection work. During the past twenty years, however, a series of Leonardo's sketches made from his dissections have been republished from a number of [{25}] collections of the originals in important libraries in Europe. The collection at Windsor Castle in England is particularly valuable and the sketches are very complete. Anyone who looks over these republications will realize at once that had Leonardo written his text-book of anatomy and illustrated it with his own drawings, it would have been an epoch-making landmark in the history of anatomy and of medicine.
It was not until a quarter of a century after the artist's death that Vesalius, but five years old when Leonardo died, published his great anatomical text-book. At the time Vesalius was only twenty-seven years of age, but his work revolutionized anatomy and he is rightly greeted as the father of modern anatomy. Had Vesalius had the opportunity to consult Leonardo's work, his own would have been greatly facilitated. It was not merely anatomy for art purposes but for all purposes, scientific as well as artistic, that Leonardo with characteristic thoroughness had studied.
There are studies of his in zoology, made evidently for the sake of his work in sculpture, that represent important additions to this scientific department. The same thing is true with regard to botany. Flowers caught his artistic eye, but they appealed quite as much to the scientific sense and so we find sketches of many varieties of them that are very interesting but also very startling from a scientific standpoint because they show a knowledge of the parts of the flowers in detail not usually supposed to exist at that time. One is not surprised to hear that he did distinguished work in mathematics. Somehow the exact scientific bent of his mind and its literalness in all matters pertaining to science would lead us to expect that. There probably never has been a mind so thoroughly rounded out as his. Aristotle had greater scientific precision and wider knowledge, but lacked something at least of Leonardo's power to execute his artistic ideas, or we would surely have some great art from him or traditions of it. It is even not startling, with this knowledge of the scientific side of Leonardo's mind, to find that he advanced a theory of evolution. That generalization far from being new, as is often imagined, has appealed to many great investigating minds down the centuries, according to the title of a modern [{26}] scientist's history of the theory all the way "From the Greeks to Darwin."
One of the most interesting anticipations of a set of ideas that are definitely considered quite modern, and indeed have developed so recently that we are not quite sure of all their significance as yet, is Leonardo da Vinci's occupation with muscular movements and the saving of time and labor by carefully regulating these movements. He suggested that each different kind of work done by human muscular labor should be carefully studied, with the idea of simplifying and reducing the number of movements necessary for its accomplishment in order to save both time and effort. In a word he anticipated practically the modern ideas of the efficiency engineer of the present time though, as I have said, we are rather prone to think these ideas quite new and recent.
The personality of this universal genius is one of the most interesting that mankind has to study. Every detail is of special import. Leonardo da Vinci was born of the noble Florentine house of Vinci in the Val d'Arno. He was a precocious child, attracting attention by his beauty of feature and by his winning ways. There are stories of his improvising music and songs even when he was very young. A little later we hear of him pitying the caged songbirds and buying them and setting them free. As a growing boy he liked colors; indeed, they may almost be said to have had a fascination for him, and the bright dresses of the Florentine girls and of the peasants from the vicinity caught his eye. Tradition also connects him with a fancy for spirited horses. As if these were not enough to show an artistic temperament, while still scarcely more than a boy he began to design and sketch and even mould objects that he was interested in. Vasari's stories of him show that even at this early date, when he was only a boy, his sketches and plastic work had for subjects smiling women.
His vocation seemed clear and his father took him for education to the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, then the greatest artist in Florence and one whose work has always maintained an influence over succeeding generations. Those of us who have seen his "Colleoni" in Venice are likely to think [{27}] of him as a great sculptor. Undoubtedly he was one of the great sculptors of the world, but he had the broad artistic spirit of the men of the Renaissance, and there was no form of art in which he was not interested and in which he did not accomplish things worthy of his great time to be the admiration of succeeding generations. Verrocchio was a great painter as well as a sculptor, but he was also a worker in metals and, as so many of these artists of the Renaissance, quite ready to design household objects for even ordinary use, provided only he was allowed to put beauty in them. Drinking vessels, instruments of music, gates, wooden doors and above all any objects that were meant for sacred uses he was glad to take commissions for.
It was just the place to train such a many-sided genius as Leonardo, though rather let us say it was just the place for such a many-sided genius to find and train himself. Certainly the young Leonardo must have owed very little except suggestion and some minor directions in technics to anyone else. He very soon came to surpass his master in painting at least, and the master recognized that fact apparently without any jealousy. According to the story as we have it, Verrocchio was employed by the Brethren of Vallombrosa to paint the "Baptism of Christ." Leonardo was given by the master permission to paint an angel in the left-hand corner. There was such a striking contrast between the fresh youthful work of the pupil and the labored work of the master that Verrocchio is said to have painted no more, or at least made no more ambitious attempts at great pictures. Sculpture was always the favorite of the old master, however, so that it was not so much of a tragedy.
It was after this, in his early manhood, that Leonardo became interested in the things of nature around him and made many investigations into their meaning. He took up astronomy for a time and anticipated some of the thoughts that Copernicus was to put in order in his great theory. Such ideas in astronomy were in the air at that time. Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa had more than hinted at them when, about the middle of the fifteenth century, he declared that the earth moved in the heavens like the other stars. Astronomical subjects were [{28}] favorite speculations for intellectual genius. Regiomontanus, who died before he was forty, was alive in Leonardo's boyhood, and after having begun that series of astronomical leaflets which later were to influence so deeply Columbus and the Portuguese navigators, was invited down to Rome to reform the calendar. Toscanelli made the observations on comets, out of which later their orbits were confirmed. Every form of natural observation caught the inquiring Leonardo's eye, and he studied the plants around him and meditated on crystal formation and occupied himself with all the forms of living things. Somehow his feeling seemed to be that such broadening of his intelligence would help him to breadth of expression in art, though probably it was only his native curiosity occupying itself in the insatiable youthful years with everything that came to hand. His achievements in science are sketched hurriedly in the chapter on Physical Science.
Leonardo seems to have occupied himself much with mechanical toys. He made mechanical birds that flew, mechanical lions that walked and a lizard which crawled and whose horns and eyes moved while the oscillating wings were constantly in motion. Every one of these contrivances, however, was the result of serious study. He took up with great assiduity the problem of flying and was quite sure that he would be able to make a machine by which men would accomplish locomotion through the air. He studied the wings of birds very carefully, and anticipated the knowledge of most of the principles of flight as they developed in later years. He used his mechanical lion as a bait to catch the attention of Francis I. The beast is said to have walked across the audience chamber towards the monarch until, when close to him, it stood up and disclosed the fact that the "Lily of France" was stamped upon its heart. Leonardo's own name is derived from lion and this was supposed to be his declaration of patriotic affection and loyalty to the French King.
Something of the busyness of his mind can be understood from the gossip that one hears about him in the letters of the time or even from what may be concluded from his own diary. It is said, for instance, that in the midst of the painting of the "Last Supper" there was quite an interruption in the work [{29}] because Leonardo became very much interested in the invention of a new machine for mincing meat and making sausages. The head of one of the Apostles was left unfinished for a time because Leonardo could not get the blades of the new machine fixed so as to make them more to his satisfaction. Unfriendly critics said that he would do anything so as to get away from his painting. Those who least understood declared that this was because he was trivial of mind and incapable of concentrating his attention. Anyone who has done artistic work of any kind, or indeed has devoted himself to literary work of any description, is likely to understand Leonardo's ways in such matters. The time comes when the particular vein of thought is exhausted for the moment and new ideas come slowly and with difficulty. The serious self-critical writer or artist recognizes that what he does at such times has not the significance he would like it to have and that he is likely to have to erase or greatly modify most of it afterwards or to regret it if he does not. If he is wise, then, he turns aside and gives his mind a complete rest by devoting it to something quite different from that in which he has been engaged before. If he insists on continuing his work after inspiration ceases or his particular vein of thought runs out, it becomes more and more difficult and more and more of a drudgery. Finally, unless he is almost entirely without proper self-appreciation, he literally has to give up the work that has become so difficult.
Leonardo did not wait for this, but after a certain set of ideas had run out devoted himself to other and quite different things. He had had trouble with cleaning his brushes, and had found that a rather strong lye could be extracted from fowls' droppings. He at once devoted considerable time to finding out whether the material thus obtained could not also be used for the washing of linen. Indeed, his attention to inventions for the relief of domestic difficulties stamps him as quite modern in his notions. Besides his sausage-making machine he invented a spit for the roasting of pigs and designed various forms of utensils that would be handier than those commonly in use at that time.
Some of Leonardo's expressions are well worth chronicling [{30}] because they show us so well the character of the man. He did not write any moral essays, but a number of expressions of his that have been preserved show that he had decided and very definite opinions with regard to many important human interests. His greatest picture was probably the "Battle of the Standards," in which, according to the descriptions preserved for us, he pictured all the horrors of war. He depicted the frenzy of contest at its fiercest. In one of his famous expressions he disposes of war in two words as pazzia bestialissima. I find it a little hard to translate that in the force of the original, but I suppose it would be something like "the climax of animal frenzy." Even that is not as strong as that superlative bestialissima in Italian.
The ease with which he transferred his services from one distinguished noble master to another has led some to suggest that he was lacking in loyalty, or at least was quite satisfied with life so long as he found someone to pay him for his work. As a matter of fact he often spent much more in experiments of various kinds than he was paid for the results of his labors, and money seems to have meant very little to him. He was known to be generous to his friends, and he once said "the poor are those who have many wants." He realized very well that poverty is entirely relative, and if a man is dissatisfied with what he has he is poor, no matter how much he has. As might be expected, above all Leonardo realized the preciousness of work. For him indeed blessed was the man who had found his work. His expression was "as a day well spent gives joyful sleep, so does a life well spent give joyful death."
With the disturbed conditions in Italy in his time he probably had to suffer many injustices, frequently had his labors interrupted, his work often undone, and it is easy to understand how much the jealousy of smaller men around him must have irritated him. He realized, however, that happiness depends on not permitting one's self to be bothered by such trifles. The only satisfaction is to go on with one's works. As he said, "The best shield against injustice is to double the cloak of longsuffering." His philosophy of life was in many ways ideal, then. Something of a stoic one needs must be to follow [{31}] it, but why should the petty trivialities of foolish human squabbling disturb a man who has all of art and science spread out before him and who knows so much more than others of his generation, but whose knowledge surely must have made it very clear to him how little after all he knew of all that was to be known?
Like his Italian contemporaries, generally, Leonardo remained faithful in his adhesion to the old Church. His charming "Madonna" and his "Last Supper" could scarcely have come from one who was not a believer. If these things were mere matters of imagination for the artists of the Renaissance, they would not have been expressed with such marvellous reality. We do not know much about his life, though we know so much about his work and thought. When he came to die, however, he left a legacy for masses for his soul. This was the custom of the time and might very well be considered only a conventional acknowledgment of his adhesion to the customs of his contemporaries. Besides, however, he left a sum of money for candles to be burnt at the shrine of the Blessed Virgin in the little village where he had been raised as a boy and where he had often prayed. This would seem to indicate that the faith of his childhood was still precious to him or had come back in its boyish tenderness at the end of his life. His whole career is that of a wonderfully-rounded man who could scarcely fail to recognize the place of the spiritual in life and its significance for man's understanding of the universe.
Burckhardt concludes one of the chapters of his work on "The Renaissance in Italy" with words that probably sum up better than any others Leonardo's character. No one was better fitted to know whereof he spoke than the great German historian of the Renaissance. "The colossal outlines of Leonardo's nature can never be more than dimly and distantly conceived."
CHAPTER III MICHELANGELO
Probably the greatest artistic genius that the world has ever known, certainly the man who was best able to express his thoughts most perfectly in every mode of art, with chisel, pencil, brush and pen, was the son of Lodovico de Leonardo Buonarroti-Simoni, whom succeeding generations have known as Michelangelo. He was a member of a noble Italian family much reduced in the world. They claimed to be related to the celebrated Counts of Canossa in Northern Italy, and when Angelo became famous there was a recognition of the relationship by the head of the Canossa family of that day. Nobility is usually willing to be related to great genius, but genealogists have not been able to trace the relationship. When Michelangelo was born (March 6, 1475), his father was the governor of the Castle of Caprese, which stood on the crest of a bold and rocky ridge of the Catenaian Alps, overlooking the wild and rugged hills in which the Tiber and Arno rise. He died two months before Shakespeare's birth in 1564, when another month of life would have brought him to his ninetieth year. He is another typical example of the fact that genius usually inhabits long-lived bodies. Great men may be short-lived by accident, but as a rule the over-abounding vitality, which enables a great mind to express itself greatly, also enables the personality with which it is associated to reach longevity.
It is fortunate for us, seeing that Angelo was such a great genius, that as Lilly said: [Footnote 2] "There are few great men of whom we possess so many and such authentic documents." His works are the living monuments of his genius, but we have, besides even minute details of all his long life, his struggles, [{33}] his triumphs, his friendships, his patrons and above all the fire of trial through which his genius passed in order to secure its expression of itself.
[Footnote 2: W. S. Lilly: "Renaissance Types." Macmillan, 1904.]
Michelangelo's mother died when he was very young, her only place in his life being that she gave him his name because she saw something divine in him, though perhaps that is not rare. When his father's term of office expired he returned to Florence, but left his infant son at Caprese in the care of a wet nurse, the daughter of a stone mason and the wife of another stone mason. Michelangelo often said that he imbibed a love for marble and stone-cutting with his first nourishment. The chisel and mallet were his early play-toys, and though he was but six when taken to Florence, there is a tradition of rude charcoal sketches made on the walls by him in his country home. In Florence he was sent to the school of the famous grammarian, Francesco Venturino of Urbino, the teacher of the New Learning, who was also some years later a teacher of Raphael. Michelangelo, according to tradition, paid little attention to his books, however, but was constantly to be found with a pencil in his hand, making sketches of all kinds. He became associated with some art pupils and artists, and before long most of his time was given up to drawing and sketching.
While Michelangelo lived in the Renaissance time, and was undoubtedly influenced very deeply by the humanistic movement, this influence was exerted in very different fashion from what is usually supposed by those who think of the Renaissance as the time when the re-discovery of the Greek classics made for book-knowledge and a consequent deepening and sharpening of the intellectuality of man. Michelangelo had very little interest in books at any time, probably despised scholarship, had little Latin, though it would have been so easy for him to have learned it, seeing that his native tongue was Italian, and had probably no Greek. He died, as I have said, the year that Shakespeare was born, and much has been made of the supposed impossibility of Shakespeare's wonderful conception of the universe of man without more knowledge in the sense of scholarship. Shakespeare had little Latin and less Greek, but undoubtedly the man who best deserves place beside him is Michelangelo, who was similarly situated. [{34}] Condivi tells us that books were to Michelangelo "a dull and endless strife." He was very often dreadfully beaten--as the artist tells it himself, bene spesso stranamente battuto--for wandering in the workshops of artists instead of going to school, or sketching for himself instead of studying his books.
His father had intended that his son should go into the silk and woollen business. When he discovered his artistic proclivities, of course he forbade such foolish waste of time and punished the lad severely. It seemed a disgrace that a member of the respectable Buonarroti family should take up so non-lucrative and little-considered occupation as that of a painter on canvas and worker in marble. There was the usual result. Michelangelo could not overcome his native genius, and after some trying scenes his father finally consented to permit him to enter the studio of Domenico Ghirlandajo, who was at the moment the most distinguished painter in Italy. It was not long, moreover, before Angelo was correcting his master's drawing. At first Ghirlandajo was disturbed by this, but he was won inevitably by the distinction of Angelo's work until one day he declared, though altogether Angelo was only a year in his studio, "this young man knows more of art than I do myself." Then he was given a place in the Academy of Lorenzo de' Medici, Ghirlandajo having been asked to nominate two of his best pupils for the Academy and selecting as one Angelo. Surely this selection proved that the teacher was not, as some have said, jealous of the pupil.
At Lorenzo's academy Michelangelo came in contact with some of the most distinguished men of Italy of that day. There were Lorenzo's two sons, Giovanni and Giulio, who afterwards became Popes Leo X and Clement VII; Pico della Mirandola, the poet and scholar; Politian, the poet, classicist and philosopher; Ficino, the head of the Platonic academy at Florence of that day, and Bibbiena and Castiglione, the latter subsequently the author of the famous book "Il Cortigiano." The two last-named were Raphael's great friends when a few years later he was studying in Florence. It is not surprising that under these circumstances Angelo became very much interested in antique sculpture, nor that his first independent work was a bas-relief, representing a battle between Hercules [{35}] and the Centaurs. This is still preserved in the Casa Buonarroti, and with its crowded figures reveals the genius and the assured artistic grasp of the future great sculptor who executed it.
Angelo, however, soon realized that if he was to do sculpture successfully he must study not only the outside of the human body and the antique sculptures, but he must know all the structures of the body. Accordingly he had dead bodies conveyed from the hospital to a special room provided for him in the convent of Santo Spirito, and dissected them carefully. It has often been said in the modern time that at this period dissection was forbidden by the Church, but there is absolutely no trace of any such legislation, and every artist of the latter part of the fifteenth century did dissection. Michelangelo rewarded the prior of the monastery for his help in these studies by carving for him a crucifix out of wood, which revealed the benefit derived from his dissections. With such zeal for art it is not surprising that the young man soon found himself capable of doing sculpture of great artistic significance. We have traditions of a statue of "Hercules," a high relief of the "Madonna" and a "Sleeping Cupid," which had an eventful history. A dealer buried it in the earth for a time and then sold it as an antique. Cardinal Riario, who purchased it, finding out the trick, invited the sculptor, who knew nothing of the deception, to Rome, and some of his first important work was done there.
His earliest Roman work was of antique subjects, a "Cupid," which has been lost, and a "Bacchus," now in the Bargello. His first great commission, however, came from the Cardinal de St. Denis, the French Ambassador at Rome. This was of a "Madonna" with the dead Saviour on her knees, just after His taking down from the Cross. The group is now in St. Peter's at Rome, and though executed when Michelangelo was less than twenty-five years of age, has come to be looked upon as one of the great sculptures of the world. Copies of it are now to be seen in most of the important museums, so that a good idea of his youthful genius can be readily obtained by anyone desirous of knowing it.
Some critics have objected that the "Madonna" in the [{36}] group is entirely too young to be the mother of the dead son, who lies across her knees. Michelangelo's own answer to that objection is, of course, the only one that will interest those who love the group and would like to know just his meaning. We have it from Condivi, to whom Michelangelo confided it:
"Don't you know," he said, "that chaste women keep their youthful looks much longer than others? Isn't this much more true in the case of a Virgin who had never known a wanton desire to leave its shade upon her beauty! ... It is quite the contrary with the form of the 'Son of God,' because I wanted to show that He really took upon Him human flesh, and that He bore all the miseries of man, yet without sin."
The "Pietà" is probably one of the supreme sculptures of all time, but Michelangelo's next important work was to place him beyond all doubt in the rank of world sculptors. This was his "David." It is all the more interesting because of the difficulties under which he executed it. A huge block of marble of the finest vein lay in the works at Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence, which several sculptors had designed to make use of and at least two or three had begun work on, but then had given up. Michelangelo saw it and saw in it the possibilities of a heroic statue. He offered his design, it was accepted by the authorities, and he set to work. He built a workshop on the spot and shut himself up for eighteen months, absolutely refusing to let anyone see his work. The result was the "David" so well known. A copy of it was afterwards made in bronze and may be seen on the hill above Florence. It has often been said that the difference in impressiveness between the bronze and marble statues shows how much better adapted marble is for the expression of the human figure. The triumph of the artist, not only in the execution of this triumphant expression of youth, but also over the strict limitations of his materials, shows the eminently practical genius of the man who, at the age of thirty, was able to accomplish such a work.
RAPHAEL, POPE JULIUS II
After these great sculptures, Michelangelo entered into a competition in painting and was chosen as a rival of Leonardo to decorate one side of the Council Hall of the Signory. Leonardo was already at work when Michelangelo received his [{37}] commission. Unfortunately neither of the paintings was ever completed. Only a portion of Leonardo's cartoon remains for us, though Michelangelo's, representing some Pisan soldiers surprised by Florentines while bathing in the Arno, is now at Holkham Hall in England and has been well engraved by Schiavonetti. This cartoon was the subject of much study by contemporaries, and Raphael particularly was greatly influenced by it.
After this work Michelangelo was summoned to Rome by Pope Julius II and commissioned to make that great tomb which occupied so much of Angelo's attention for the next quarter of a century, caused him so many difficulties and disturbances of mind and was destined eventually to remain unfinished or at least to be of nothing like the significance that was originally planned. If one looks a little into Michelangelo's life at this time, surrounded as he was by the jealousies of his colleagues, disturbed at his work by political animosities of various kinds, by the slights of those who failed to appreciate and the open envy of those who favored his rivals, some idea of the difficulties of his artistic soul will be understood.
In the midst of his preparations for the making of the great tomb of Pope Julius, for which he spent nearly a year in the quarries up at Carrara obtaining the proper kind of marble and working out three or four statues while the men of the quarries were getting out the other marble that he wished, the execution of the tomb was put off. Fortunately the work done at this time was not entirely lost. The two galley slaves at the Louvre, which are among the greatest sculptures of their kind ever made, attest Michelangelo's industry, as well as genius, and they have been favorite studies of artists of all kinds ever since.
When the execution of the tomb was put off Michelangelo was summoned to paint the vault of the Sistine Chapel. It is said that he owed this commission to the jealousy of rivals who hoped to discredit him. The Sistine Chapel is a most difficult room for effective decoration, since it is simply an oblong box with a low-vaulted ceiling. It was this ceiling that Michelangelo was supposed to decorate in fresco. He [{38}] refused at first to accept the commission, saying that he was no fresco painter, but the Pope insisted. For over three years, except when eating and sleeping, he was hidden behind the scaffolding, lying on his back most of the time painting above him, so that he could not read without placing his book above his head after a while. When the scaffold was taken down, the triumphant manifestation of his genius revealed one of the most superb monuments of art that the world possesses.
As Grimm says, "If a man wants to get an idea of the art of Giotto and his pupils, architecture and painting together, he must go to the Campo Santo at Pisa; if he wants the masterpiece of the following art period, the extensive development that lies between Masaccio and Michelangelo, he must go to the Sistine Chapel."
Fortunately for the after-time it is one of the few great decorative works of this time that can be studied as the artist left it, or at least without having to make allowance for the well-meant additions of restorers. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel has been sadly injured by smoke and by water percolation from the roof and it has faded somewhat with time under the conditions of use of the chapel, but it has been spared from the misguided efforts of men by its position. A great Pope is said to have said, "There are two ways of ruining a work of art, by destruction and by restoration." He might well have added, especially in the light of what has happened even in the Vatican to Raphael and others, "and of the two the latter is the worse." From this Michelangelo's great work has happily been saved, and as a result it remains even in its damaged condition one of the acknowledged triumphs of human art, undoubtedly the greatest decorative work that has ever been done since the time of the Greeks.
Some of Michelangelo's greatest work was done for the Julian tomb, and the triumph of his genius at this time is the "Moses," which was to have been one of four prophets that were to have found a place on the monument. It would not be difficult to collect some of the most effusive expressions of artistic enthusiasm over the "Moses." Men who are themselves great sculptors have declared that it is the triumph of man's power over marble. It is extremely difficult, artists have [{39}] declared, to give a work in marble a decided facial expression, yet Michelangelo succeeded in doing it in the "Moses," but, as has also been said, every portion of the statue partakes of this wonderful power that he had of making it profoundly expressive. Men whose opinions are valuable because of their own significant work have been unstinted in their praise of the now famous knee of the statue and the wonderful way in which the foot of the right leg rests upon the ground. All these are but details, however. One must have seen the statue many times and have had its meaning in every part grow by repetition of impression, and then something of the wonderful genius of its sculptor comes home to the beholder. We cannot but regret that Michelangelo was not permitted in peace to finish the great tomb as he had planned it, for with the "Moses" as an example we would surely have had in it the greatest triumph of modern genius in sculpture, if not indeed of all time.
This is probably one of the most striking figures ever made. It has made the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli, in which it is, a place of pilgrimage for artists from all over the world, and for all those interested in art ever since. Michelangelo has taken the moment when Moses, descending from the Mount with the tables of the law in his hands, sees before him the procession of the Golden Calf. In Exodus it is said, "he waxed hot with wrath." Moses has just come from communion with the Most High, and his wrath is tempered and sublimated by religious enthusiasm and by the majesty which the consciousness of his high mission imparts to him. Every portion of the statue breathes with the wrath of justice, yet with the sublime feeling of the awfulness of the crime that has just been committed against the Most High and that His servant must pitilessly condemn.
And yet, had the artist been allowed to work on uninterrupted at the Julian tomb, we might have missed some or all of the great work that he accomplished under the direction of the Medici Popes in Florence. While the "Moses" is looked upon as the finest expression of his powers in mature years, as the "David" is of his younger life, there are good critics who have not hesitated to say that Michelangelo's most [{40}] interesting work is to be found in the series of statues the very consummation of the sculptor's skill which are in the sacristy of San Lorenzo. There are four allegorical figures, "Dawn and Twilight," "Day and Night," which recall the principal phases and the rapid course of man's destiny, in which Michelangelo has expressed in imperishable marble his thoughts with regard to life and its significance. There are, besides, two statues of the "Medici," one, that of "Lorenzo"--not the great Lorenzo, but his son--and the other, "Giuliano," the younger son of il Magnifico. So little are these considered, however, now as portrait statues of the Medici that one of them is known as il pensiero, the thinker, and its fellow is likewise thought of as expressing an ideal rather than a person. Michelangelo himself had said that in a hundred years no one would care whom these statues represented, so looking through the temporal with a great artist's vision they became in his hands symbols of immortal moods of humanity.
Michelangelo's crowning work of a great lifetime came in his later years when he devoted himself to architecture. In this department of art he was as great as in any other and probably greater than anyone who had ever preceded him. Some of his smaller works, as the "Porta del Popolo" and the twin churches near it, are admirable in themselves, yet simple and admirably suited to their surroundings. Millet once said that the essence of beauty in art consists in the adaptation of truth so as to suit the conditions. The triumph of Michelangelo's architecture came in the great dome of St. Peter's. As the great basilica was unfortunately finished in the after-time, no proper conception of this can be obtained from the plaza of St. Peter's. Close up only from the roof of the great Church itself does one get a true idea of its marvellous beauty and stupendous size. It was intended, of course, to be seen from a long distance, and when thus seen it stands out with wondrous effectiveness. In the old days, when men came in carriages over the mountains to Rome, the Dome of St. Peter's was the first thing to be seen from twenty miles away, and, thus seen, profoundly impressed the beholder. From Tivoli, for instance, when nothing else is visible above the horizon except Michelangelo's mighty dome, and all of Rome, [{41}] even on her seven hills, is lost to sight, its stupendous size and wondrous charm can be properly appreciated. It then appeals to the beholder not as a work of man, but seems more like some great natural wonder from the hand of the Creator Himself.
How Michelangelo succeeded in building it with the materials that he had at hand, with the assistance--material and personal--that he could command, and in spite of all the obstacles that were placed in his path, the misunderstandings, the jealousies, the petty rivalries of smaller artists, is indeed a wonder. Some of his biographers have been astonished that he should have known enough of mathematics to be able to plan and construct it properly. They frankly confess that he had no opportunity as a young man to make the mathematical studies necessary for such work and apparently forget that whenever Michelangelo would do anything he somehow found in himself the power to accomplish his purpose with absolute thoroughness. He had set out to put the Pantheon above St. Peter's tomb, and he succeeded in his ambition, for the great dome, though it does not begin to curve into a dome until it is more than a hundred feet above the pavement, is somewhat larger in diameter than the great vault of the Pantheon, the triumph of Roman power to build, which had been hailed as one of the wonders of the world.
One further phase of Michelangelo's accomplishment must be mentioned. This greatest of sculptors, boldest and most successful of architects and finest of decorative painters, was also one of the greatest of poets. "Four-souled" is the apt epithet that has been coined to express this versatility. It has been said that only Dante and Shakespeare have equalled him in the writing of sonnets, and there is no doubt at all that he is one of the most important contributors to Italian literature, even in the glorious Age of Leo X. Addington Symonds declared his sonnets to be the rough-hewn blocking out of poems rather than finished works of art, and the great Italian critic, Bembo, declared "he says things, while other poets say words." His friend and biographer, Condivi, said, "he devoted himself to poetry rather for his own delight than because he made a profession of it, always depreciating himself and accusing his [{42}] ignorance." His poems were scribbled on the backs of old letters or drawings or other papers that chanced to be around, and only occasionally copied and sent off to his friends. Although often urged by his friends, he would never consent to make any collection of his poems during his lifetime. Many of them were faithfully preserved, however, and of some of them the various readings and corrections show that his artistic sense would not allow him to let things go from him without, to some extent at least, giving them a form worthy of the thought.
Nowhere can one find the character of Michelangelo better expressed than in his sonnets, and there is a deep religious vein in them which reveals the profound belief of this greatest of men in all the great truths of Christianity and his sense of personal devotion to the Creator and his dependence on Him and the necessity for doing everything for Him that is extremely refreshing. For Michelangelo this was the solution of the mystery of life.
Perhaps the best idea of his sonnets can be obtained from his lines on Dante. It had come to be the custom during the Renaissance to think that the only literature worth while thinking about was the classical, and above all Greek, and that the Middle Ages had produced nothing of significance in art or letters. Even Dante was not thought to be a great exception to this rule, though it was admitted that he stood far above his contemporaries. The word Gothic, as applied to the architecture, the art and the literature of these rude ancestors, the descendants of the Gothic barbarians, was invented by the critics of the Renaissance to express to the full their contempt for the products of the earlier period. Michelangelo had no illusions with regard to comparative values. Above all he recognized the surpassing character of Dante's poetry. His sonnet tells the rest and sympathetically insists that he would have been willing to have borne even Dante's years of suffering and exile to produce such marvellous poetry.
"Into the dark abyss he made his way;
Both nether worlds he saw, and in the might
Of his great soul beheld God's splendor bright,
And gave to us on earth true light of day:
Star of supremest worth with his clear ray,
Heaven's secrets he revealed to our dim sight,
And had for guerdon what the base world's spite
Oft gives to souls that noblest grace display,
Full ill was Dante's life work understood,
His purpose high by that ungrateful state.
That welcomed all with kindness but the good.
Would I were such, to bear like evil fate.
To taste his exile, share his lofty mood!
For this I'd gladly give all earth calls great."
The bitter rivalries and jealousies that surrounded him have sometimes produced the impression that Michelangelo must himself have been of a carping disposition, not ready to acknowledge the merits of other artists, though it is felt in extenuation, as it were, that in this he only shared the spirit of the time. Any such impression would be quite unjustified by what we know of Michelangelo. His admiration for the ancients was unbounded. It was he who, when they were first excavated, stepped up to the horses that are now on the Capitoline in Rome, and patting one of them on the back said "get up," as if they seemed to him so true to life that they ought to walk off. A single paragraph from the sketch of Michelangelo in the Artists' Biographies [Footnote 3] will show how thoroughly he appreciated some of his immediate predecessors:
[Footnote 3: Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1878.]
"Angelo was a great admirer of the three famous Florentine artists who had preceded him. Of Ghiberti's 'Gates to the Baptistry,' he said, 'They are so beautiful that they are worthy of being the gates of Paradise.' Standing before Donatello's statue of St. Mark, he cried out, 'Mark, why don't you speak to me?' and on another occasion he said, 'If St. Mark looked thus we may safely believe what he has written.' When he was advised to vary the lantern on the Medici Chapel from that which Brunelleschi had built on the old sacristy of San Lorenzo, he remarked, 'It may be varied, but not improved.' Of other artists he spoke no less pleasantly, saying of Gentile da Fabriano that his name corresponded with the grace of his [{44}] style; and of Cesari's medals, that 'art has reached its last hour, for beyond this it cannot go.'"
If there ever was a man who had a right to pride himself a little on his powers and his achievements, surely it was Michelangelo. He had succeeded in bodying forth thoughts too deep for words in every mode of human expression, even making words serve his purpose greatly though inadequately; men of genius had so admired his work and been influenced by it that all during life he had that sincerest of flattery, imitation, from men who themselves were among the notable geniuses of his generation, yet it was he who, in his sonnet towards the end of his life, begged pardon of his God if he had ever used his powers as if they were his own and not for the glory of the Creator who had given them. We have any number of stories of his patient study of art and architecture, even until the end of his life. Once Cardinal Farnese met him, when he was past sixty, in solitary contemplation amid the ruins of the Coliseum. To his question as to why he was there and alone, Angelo replied, "I am still at school taking my lessons so that I may continue to learn." He once drew a picture of an old man, somewhat resembling himself, seated in a child's carriage with the motto, "I still learn."
His anatomical studies begun in his early youth at Florence were never given up, and when other subjects were lacking he dissected domestic animals and above all welcomed the opportunity to dissect several horses. Dürer in Germany and Da Vinci in Italy had been faithful dissectors, and Michelangelo kept up the tradition.
The personality of this greatest of geniuses that the world has ever known can scarcely fail to be interesting. Michelangelo is the true type of one of the greatest periods of human history, and as such every detail of his life appeals to men. Like many great geniuses, Michelangelo was what is called a handy man, that is, one who could fashion implements and objects skilfully with his hands. It is said that all through his life he preferred not to entrust the making of the implements of his art to any other hand. He used to make his own chisels, files, and piercers and to mix his own colors. Even to an advanced age he continued to use the chisel for himself and was [{45}]ever famous for his audacious skilfulness with it. At the age of sixty he is described as bringing down more scales from a very high block of marble in a short time than three young marble-cutters could in three or four times that space. With a single blow, Vigenero described him as bringing down scales of marble three or four inches in breadth and with such precision to the line that if he had broken away, even a very little more, he risked the ruin of his work.
How lonely he was in the midst of all his great work, and how many material difficulties there were to weigh on his spirit and keep him from intoxication with that joy of the artist in accomplishment, which might even have hurt the work or at least the striving of even so great an artist as he, can be very well understood through quotations from some letters to his father, in which, not querulously, but as if needing someone as a confidant, he pours out his inmost feelings:
"I stand here in intense anxiety and with the greatest fatigue of body. I have no friends of any sort, nor do I wish any; and I have not time enough to eat what is needful. Let no more annoyances be added to me, for I cannot bear another ounce." In the summer of 1508 he wrote, "I am sick at heart, ill, and worn out with fatigue, helpless and penniless." A year later he wrote again: "The Pope has not given me a groat for a year; and I do not ask for it, for I feel that I have not merited it, and this because painting is not the sort of work which is my profession. And yet I waste my time without fruits--God help me!"
Michelangelo's views with regard to matrimony are well known. To a priest who asked him one day why he never married he said, "I have a wife who is too much for me already; one who unceasingly persecutes me. It is my art; and my works are my children." And yet his tenderness of soul and his affection for children was not eclipsed by his absorption in his art, for Grimm tells the story of a child stopping him on the street and asking him to make a drawing, and the artist took the sheet of paper offered him and fulfilled the wish.
When Michelangelo was an old man of seventy-five, however, he was ready to give advice to his grandnephew Leonardo in the matter of marriage. That advice is interesting [{46}] from a good many standpoints, but especially because Michelangelo thought that the choice of a wife was something to pray and ask for special aid from on High about:
"Leonardo, I wrote thee about taking a wife, and told thee of three girls which have been here mentioned to me. ... I do not know any of them, and cannot say either good or evil of them, nor advise you about one more than the other. ... Giov. Francesco might give you good advice; he is old and knows the world. [Michelangelo himself was seventy-five years young at this time.] Remember me to him. Above all, seek the counsel of God, for it is a great step. Remember that the husband should be at least ten years older than the wife, and that she should be healthy." Again he wrote, "Leonardo, I sent thee in my last a note as to marriageable girls, which had been sent me from Florence. ... Thou needst a wife to associate with, and whom thou canst rule, and who will not care about pomps, and run about every day to parties and marriages. It is easy for a woman to go wrong who does these things. Nor is it to be said by anyone that thou wishest to ennoble thyself by marriage, for it is well known that we are as ancient and noble citizens of Florence as those of any other house. Recommend thyself to God and He may aid thee." [Footnote 4]
[Footnote 4: It may be interesting to know that the grand-nephew did take a wife, one of those recommended by his grand-uncle, and that Michelangelo dictated the names of the children, often went to see them, loaded them with presents and was their mother's best friend and confidant.]
The great artist did not escape the disturbing cares of family life by his bachelorhood, however, for it became the custom of his brothers to turn to him for aid whenever there was trouble. His family had objected to his becoming a sculptor because it was beneath the dignity of their nobility, but now that he was successful they were quite willing to use his money freely. He had a scapegrace younger brother who was particularly a thorn in his side, ever getting into trouble and being helped out, above all constantly demanding money. Michelangelo once wrote to him while he was at work on the great ceiling of the Sistine.
"If you take care to do well, and to honor and revere your [{47}] father, I will aid you like the others, and will soon establish you in a good shop. ... I have gone about throughout all Italy for twelve years, leading a dog's life, bearing all manner of insults, enduring all sorts of drudgery, lacerating my body with many toils, placing my life itself under a thousand perils solely to aid my family, and now that I have commenced to raise it up a little, thou alone wishest to do that which shall confound and ruin in an hour everything that I have done in so many years and with so many fatigues."
Michelangelo's letters of consolation to his brother's (Leonardo's) daughter, who was delicate and ailing, show how tender were his family affections. He has sometimes been pictured as the self-centred bachelor, occupied only with his art. Any such picture of him is but one of the many one-sided false impressions of these geniuses of the Renaissance, all of whom, when known intimately, prove to be whole-hearted human beings with all the human interests deeply developed.
One of the most interesting incidents in Michelangelo's life is his association with Vittoria Colonna. This is one of the most charming episodes of platonic friendship with wonderful mutual influence for good chronicled in history. Vittoria was an inspiration to Michelangelo in his work, and his tributes to her are full of the loftiest admiration and almost saintlike worship. On the other hand, no one could have held a higher place in the esteem of Vittoria than Michelangelo. She had suggested the subjects for certain pictures and Michelangelo painted them. She wrote in thankfulness and said with regard to one of them:
"I had the greatest faith in God, that He would give you a supernatural grace to paint this 'Christ'; then I saw it, so wonderful that it surpassed in every way my expectations. Being emboldened by your miracles, I desired that which I now see marvellously fulfilled--that is, that it should stand in every part in the highest perfection, and that one could not desire more nor reach forward to desire so much. And I tell you that it gave me joy that the angel on the right hand is so beautiful; for the Archangel Michael will place you, Michelangelo, on the right hand of the Lord at the Judgment Day. And, meanwhile, I know not how to serve you otherwise than to [{48}] pray to this sweet 'Christ,' Whom you have so well and perfectly painted, and to entreat you to command me as altogether yours in all and through all."
This friendship of Michelangelo and Vittoria has become so celebrated that to many it may seem that time has woven a romantic halo around it, far transcending the reality. Only a little study of contemporary documents, however, is needed to show that the facts are interesting beyond even the stories that are told. Modern biographers have enriched the tradition with many details, and Grimm has given a most beautiful picture of this most famous of friendships between man and woman which reflects so much honor on both the participants. Nothing that I know contradicts so many false notions as to the Renaissance that are widely disseminated and that are only too often taken as a criterion of modes of thinking and of conduct in this period. All the so-called Pagan tendencies of the Renaissance are contradicted by it.
Condivi, Angelo's pupil, who wrote about his master during his master's lifetime and who was intimately associated with him for many years, pays an affectionate tribute to Michelangelo's purity of mind and speech. The great master was a model of magnanimity, and Condivi says:
"I have often heard him speak about love; and others who have listened to him on this subject will bear me out in saying that the only love of which he spoke was the kind which is spoken of in Plato's works. For my part I do not know what Plato says, but one thing I, who have lived with him so long and so intimately, can assert, that I have never heard any but the purest words issue from his mouth."
He was one of the most abstemious of men. He literally thought nothing about creature comforts. Often he would take a piece of bread in his hand while at his work and that would be all during the course of a long day. His meals were likely to be irregular, and he paid very little attention to them. As for his sleep, he was noted even among the strenuous livers of his time for his ability to work without sleep and for the small amount that he took. When he was deeply interested in some work he would lie down in his clothes, and after a few hours get up to work again. The surprise is that he should [{49}] have lived to the age of nearly ninety under such living conditions, but work never kills, and if the original vitality is extensive men live on to the limit of existence much better by consuming their energy than by allowing it to react within them, as it so often does. Some repentant expressions of his had been taken to indicate, be it said by modern writers, never by his contemporaries, that he was of a passionate nature and had given rein to his impulses in youth. Except these words of repentance, however, which are rather conventional in his time and indicate a falling below ideals rather than actual serious faults, we have absolutely no evidence. On the other hand, we have some expressions of his which indicate how much difficulty he found in curbing his passions in youth and how glad he is that he used the effort, since it saved him from regrets in after life.
The thought of death was a favorite one with him, and he seems frequently to have dwelt on it and to have considered that there was no thought that was better for a man. Not only did it prove chastening, but above all it helped a man to eliminate the quest of the trivial and the merely selfish in life. He held the thought of death as the only consideration that makes us know ourselves and saves us from becoming a prey to kindred, friends or masters, to ambition, and to the other vices and sins which rob a man of himself. That was his main purpose in life, to live it for accomplishment and not merely for the trifles which easily satisfy so many men. Whenever he was tempted to permit himself to derogate from his highest aims in life for the sake of the distinction of the moment, the thought of death was sobering, and the time when the darkness cometh and no man can labor brought him back to his best work, no matter what the difficulties might be in doing it.
Angelo's relation to religion is all the more interesting because it is often said that the great men of the Renaissance, because of their profound study of pagan antiquity, had become touched with paganism. There is not a trace of this in Michelangelo, however, and surely he must be considered as the typical great man of the Renaissance. All his life he had thought of his relation to his Creator and of the necessity for accomplishing work, not for himself alone nor for selfish [{50}] purposes, but with great aims that would be worthy of the talents that had been given him. Once, when he was having great difficulties because of opposition to his plans and interference with designs that he felt must be carried out, he said to Pope Paul III, "Holy Father, you see what I gain; if these fatigues which I endure do not benefit my soul I lose both time and labor." The Pope, with whom Michelangelo was a great favorite and who loved above all his sincere, straightforward simplicity and his deep feeling of religion, laid his hands paternally on the great artist's shoulders and said, "Have no doubt. You are benefiting both soul and body."
Toward the end of his life his mind became more and more occupied with religious thoughts, and there was a charmingly simple piety that he cultivated. This had been expressed often before in his great works of art, both paintings and sculptures, and still more clearly in his sonnets. Some seem to think that an artist, because of his occupation, may express beautiful thoughts on religious subjects, even though he does not feel them. Somehow it is supposed to be the artist's business to work himself into such moods and then express them, as if it were possible to express greatly in art, what one does not really feel. Most people, however, seem to think that formal expression in words must mean more in such matters, and for them Michelangelo's sonnets will doubtless be proofs of his absolute sincerity in religious matters. Towards the end of his life most of his poetry is deeply religious in character. He sent two sonnets to Vasari when he was about seventy-five, as he told the biographer "that you may see where I keep my thoughts." A more lofty expression of Christian humility and the spirit of prayerfulness has perhaps never been made. One of them, because it expresses his recognition of the fact that the trifles of the world had carried even him away, that fascinatio nugacitatis quae obscurat bona of the Scriptures, is worth quoting as a summation of his religious life and feelings:
"The fables of the world have filched away
The time I had for thinking upon God;
His grace lies buried 'neath oblivion's sod,
Whence springs an evil crop of sins alway.
What makes another wise, leads me astray,
Slow to discern the bad path I have trod:
Hope fades, but still desire ascends that God
May free from self-love, my sure decay.
Shorten half-way my road to heaven from earth!
Dear Lord, I cannot even half-way rise
Unless Thou help me on this pilgrimage.
Teach me to hate the world so little worth.
And all the lovely things I clasp and prize.
That endless life, ere death, may be my wage."
Angelo's last work in sculpture was a group very like his first great religious group, the "Pietà." It consisted of the Blessed Virgin with the dead Christ and two other figures. Only the "Christ" was ever finished. His intention was that this group should be placed on an altar over his tomb, but his wish was never fulfilled. The circumstances of his work at it are interesting. Like many an old man, he often found himself wakeful at night and needed something to occupy his thoughts. When he arose this way he used to work in solitude and silence at these figures with loving recollection and care and with the thought that it would be his monument after death. He had come to look upon death rather as a friend than an enemy, saying once that "life, which had been given to us without our asking, had wonderful possibilities of good in it, and death, which came unsummoned from the same Providential hand, could surely not prove less full of blessing."
Towards sunset on the eighteenth of February, 1564, Michelangelo turned to his friends and said, "I give my soul to God, my body to the earth and my worldly possessions to my nearest of kin, charging them through life to remember the sufferings of Jesus Christ." In making a will some years before, he left as alternative heir the Church, on condition that the "income was to be given for the love of God to the modest poor."
While Leonardo da Vinci was indeed a universal genius well deserving of the high title, it must not be forgotten that the age in which he lived was the age of Michelangelo. The "divine master," his compatriot artists have loved to call him ever since his own day. It is probable that he must be [{52}] conceded to have carried human nature as far in its power of expression of the beauty and truth of life as any man that ever lived. The divine in human nature nowhere shines out so conspicuously as in Michelangelo's achievements. There was no form of art, no mode of expression, no field of thought in which he did not excel. It must be confessed that his thoughts were often too high and too deep for human nature's limitations, and that he did not always succeed in completing his work in such a way as he himself would have wished, and above all such as would have made it thoroughly comprehensible to ordinary mortals. His works give us a better idea of human nature's possibilities, yet Vittoria Colonna, who knew him so well, declared that those who admire Michelangelo's works admire but the smallest part of him. She had come to realize how much more there was in him than even his works made manifest. Often the artist is a disappointment after his works. Michelangelo's personality made one disappointed with his works as if there should be much more in them.
As his contemporaries knew him then, he was, if possible, greater than he is revealed to us in his works. Probably no larger man in all the best sense of that term has ever lived, painter, sculptor, architect, poet, simple, humble, devout, in friendship a model, as a teacher deeply beloved--this man, who succeeded so marvellously in everything that he attempted, is one of human nature's proudest boasts, yet himself realized poignantly how little he could really accomplish of all that surged up in his soul. No career in history so makes it clear that the breath of the Creator is in His creatures to inspire and exalt. How deeply a creature may influence his kind, Michelangelo illustrates as perhaps no other. There are certainly not more than a few chosen spirits to be numerated on the fingers of one hand whom we think of in the same breath with him when we count up man's beneficent geniuses, and we can scarcely foresee an end to that influence apart from the complete destruction of our modern civilization. As Grimm said at the end of his sixth edition of Michelangelo's life, "It is not thinkable that the influence on the artistic work of mankind which has proceeded from him should not continue to wax with the course of time."
FRA ANGELICO, ST. FRANCIS