Michael Angelo, like all young artists who have had the opportunity, drew and studied in the Brancacci Chapel of the Church of the Carmine, containing the frescoes of Masaccio and his followers; the result of these studies may be seen in some of the compositions, and especially in the draperies of the Sistine ceiling. There are two pen-drawings in Vienna that show us the sort of work Michael Angelo did at this time: one represents a kneeling figure, evidently from a picture by Pesellino; the other, two standing figures, that might be after Ghirlandaio. The draperies have been specially studied. Another pen-drawing, in the Louvre, is a careful study from Giotto's fresco of the Resurrection of St. John in the Cappella Peruzzi at Santa Croce.
A gloom was cast over all Italy by the death of Lorenzo de' Medici on April 8, 1492. Michael Angelo lost his best friend and returned to his father's house; here he worked upon a statue of Hercules that stood in the Strozzi Palace until the siege of Florence in 1530, when Giovanni Battista della Palla bought it and sent it into France as a present to the French King. It is lost.
In the year 1495, whilst living with Aldovrandi at Bologna, as Condivi tells us, Michael Angelo, for the sum of thirty ducats, completed the drapery of a San Petronio, begun by Nicolo di Bari on the arca or shrine of San Domenico, and carved the very beautiful and highly finished statuette of an angel holding a candlestick, still to be seen there.[68]
[pg 106]When Michael Angelo returned to Florence a government had been established by Savonarola. No doubt, like all the other citizens, the master listened to the voice of the preacher, but we have no evidence that he was particularly influenced by his teaching, though many of his biographers would have us believe that Savonarola made him Protestant, Lutheran, or what not, according to the sect of the biographer. Michael Angelo loved the sermons of the eloquent Frate as works of art; no doubt, if the prophets of the Sistine could speak, they would preach with the voice of Savonarola.
Michael Angelo set to work and carved a San Giovannino for Lorenzo di Pier Francesco, a cousin of the exiled Medici. The Berlin Museum acquired, in 1880, a marble statue of a young St. John, which had been placed in the palace of the Counts Gualandi Rosselmini, at Pisa, in 1817, and was rediscovered there in 1874. It is supposed to be this San Giovannino by Michael Angelo, though it has nothing of the large quality of Michael Angelo's work. Donatello has been suggested as the author, but it has still less of the square planes and ascetic character of the great Donato. It is a charming, almost a cloying statue. St. John seems to find his honeycomb distinctly sweet.
CHAPTER II
THE BACCHUS, AND THE MADONNA DELLA PIETÀ OF SAINT PETER'S
The story of a Cupid, carved and coloured in imitation of the antique, is given by Condivi.[69] It was the cause of Michael Angelo's first visit to Rome. As soon as he reached the Eternal City he set to work at his sculpture, as the purchase of a piece of marble mentioned in his letter to Pier Francesco de' Medici, sent to Florence under cover to Sandro Botticelli,[70] indicates. During the whole of this very important visit he worked in marble. We have, however, one record of a cartoon by him for a Saint Francis receiving the Stigmata, to be painted by a certain barber; but that is all. He studied the works of antique art and imitated the finish and softness of the Hellenic style: marbles of debased Greek workmanship abound to this day in the Roman collections. Messer Jacopo Gallo, a Roman gentleman and a banker, commissioned a Bacchus, now in the Bargello at Florence, and a Cupid, said to be the statue now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington. Condivi records these commissions.[71] [pg 108]This Bacchus is the least dignified work that Michael Angelo ever executed. Perhaps, like a young artist struggling to get on, he listened too much to the wishes and suggestions of his intelligent patron. The finish and the truth to nature of the unpleasant youth are exquisite. The folds of the skin and the softness of the flesh are perfectly rendered, but the work is repulsive, save for the mischievous little Satyr who steals the grapes; he seems to take us out into the open air, and away from the fumes of the wine shop. Condivi calls the second statue a Cupid,[72] but Springer points out[73] that Ulisse Aldovrandi, who saw the statue in Messer Gallo's house at Rome, talks of an Apollo quite naked, with a quiver at his side and an urn at his feet. The work, Cupid or Apollo, at Kensington, is not so finely finished as the other statues of this first Roman period; the head is like a copy of the head of the David, the division between the pectoral muscles is weak, and their attachments to the breast-bone are round, regular, and without distinction, very different from either the naturalism of the Bacchus, the delicate truth of the Pietà, or the dignified abstraction of the David, done very shortly afterwards. This work at Kensington was discovered some fifty years ago in the cellars of the Gualfonda (Rucellai) Gardens by Professor Miliarini and the sculptor Santarelli. The left arm was broken, the right hand damaged, and the hair unfinished, as may be seen to-day; Santarelli restored the arm. The statue is like the work of a poor imitator. A work by Michael Angelo may easily have been destroyed in troublous times, but can never have been lost and forgotten. He has always had lovers in every age; unlike the [pg 109]primitives and the quattrocentisti, he has never been out of fashion.