So with hindrances enough, private and public, we must imagine the great artist climbing his scaffolding to the vault of the Pope's chapel, followed by his assistants, and setting them their task, transferring his full-size outline cartoons, prepared from the general designs, to the roof. We may fancy L'Indaco, Buggiardini, and the rest, staring with amazement at the huge figures and the great flowing lines before them, and trying to fit their dry manner of painting to the new grandeur of design. It could but end in one way. The clause prepared beforehand by Michael Angelo in the contracts came into effect, and they had to be sent away, with plenty of grumbling on their part, no doubt. Michael Angelo was too exacting in the perfection of his taste to allow any work short of the absolute ideal he had imagined. Unlike Raphael, who was working in the neighbouring stanze, and who was contented to pass, and some would have us believe to execute, ill-turned foreshortenings and false drawing, so long as his general effect was preserved and the work done [pg 156]in reasonable time. Perhaps his gentle and sunlike genius could not bear to use harsh words and shut the door against the mediocre men with whom he was surrounded. Michael Angelo could brook no imperfection of whatever kind, so that he destroyed all that his assistants had done and shut himself up alone in the chapel. He was the only man who could do the work to his satisfaction; so he did it, alone and unaided, as to the actual painting, and produced a work unequalled in perfection since Phidias worked in Athens.
The dismissal of his assistants appears to have begun about the New Year 1509. It is hinted at in this letter:—
"Dearest Father,—I have to-day received one of yours. When I read it I was sufficiently displeased. I doubt that you are more timid and fearful than you need be. I should like you to tell me what you imagine they can do to you, that is, if it should come to the worst. I have no more to say. It grieves me that you should be in such fear, so I comfort you by advising you to be well prepared against their power, with good advice, and then think no more about it; for if they took away all you have in the world you should not lack means to be comfortable as long as I was there. Therefore be of good cheer. I am still in a great quandary, for it is now a year since I received a groat from the Pope, and I do not ask for it, for my work does not go forward in such a fashion as to deserve it, as it seems to me. And this is because of the difficulty of the work, and also that it is not my profession. And so I lose my time fruitlessly. God help me. If you are in [pg 157]need of money go to the Spedalingo[108] and make him give you anything up to fifteen ducats, and let me know what remains. Jacopo,[109] the painter whom I brought here, has just left, and as he has been grumbling here about my doings, I expect he will grumble there also. Turn a deaf ear to him. It is enough. For he is a thousand times in the wrong. I have good reason to complain of him. Take no notice of him. Tell Buonarroto that I will reply to him another time.
"The day twenty 7 of January.
"Michael Angelo, in Rome."[110]
ATHLETE
SISTINE CHAPEL, ROME
(By permission of the Fratelli Alinari, Florence)
Buggiardini appears to have fared better than L'Indaco. He painted a portrait of Michael Angelo with a towel tied round his head like a turban, now in the Casa Buonarroti, at Florence. From the age of the sitter it appears to belong to this period; the towel may have been used to protect the hair and head of the artist from falling colour as he painted the roof above him. It is an energetic head, with jet black hair and sallow complexion, with many lines and wrinkles for so young a face, determined, sad, and scornful in expression; a slight weakness and affectation may be due to the personality of the painter. Buggiardini also executed a painting from the cartoon of the master, the Madonna and Child with Angels, number 809, of the National Gallery. The beauty and grandeur of the lines of this design are far above the imagination of any one except Michael Angelo, but the details of the [pg 158]execution of the hands and the feet are inferior to any authentic work of his. The hatchings in the shadows, especially of the draperies, are made up of short and feeble lines, and do not express the form of the folds at all in the same way as we are accustomed to see Michael Angelo express them, even in his earlier drawings, the copies from Giotto and the primitives. The form of the mouths, and the expression and shape of the heads, especially in the second angel on the right, are similar to the work of Buggiardini as seen in Florence, Milan, and the Cathedral of Pisa. Buggiardini is the only one of the assistants who seems to have reaped any benefit, beyond their wages, from the work they did for the great master. This trouble with his assistants was not the only difficulty that Michael Angelo had to contend with in the execution of his work. Vasari says that he shut himself alone in the chapel, without any one to help him even in the grinding of his colours; but, as he adds, that he took great precautions to prevent the workmen informing the public as to what he was doing, we must assume that Vasari was repeating a fable that had grown up about the marvellous work forty years after it was executed, much as we might at this day repeat stories of the making of the Wellington Monument by Alfred Stevens. The carpenters and plasterers Michael Angelo employed would soon learn to perform the more mechanical part of his work, such as laying the intonaco, pricking the cartoons, and grinding colours, and as they could not have inserted into the work any tradition contrary to the new manner of the artist, would be preferred by him to second-rate artist assistants; no doubt, too, the boy he employed in household work would be made to help. The trouble he had [pg 159]in his household arrangements before the time of his trusted servant, Urbino, may be illustrated by a letter relating to the boy he got from Florence about this time. He never would have a woman to work for him in any way.