Although he lived in an age when tradition was almost an artistic canon, and when the pupil felt in duty bound to follow his master's methods, even his early works reveal a singular originality and freedom from all imitative tendencies. Take for instance his Battle of the Centaurs and Lapithae, which he carved when working under Bertoldo at the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent: it has nothing in common with the school of Donatello, but is instinct with the spirit of antique art, showing that the young sculptor derived infinitely more profit from the close study of the antique masterpieces which Lorenzo had collected in the gardens of San Marco than from Bertoldo's precepts. That he succeeded in mastering the style and manner of the ancients to perfection is proved by such works as the Sleeping Cupid, now unfortunately lost, but which was bought by Cardinal Riario as an antique, and was the cause of Michelangelo's first coming to Rome; the Bacchus, hardly inferior to the Dancing Faun of the Capitol, and the beautiful statues of the Medicean tombs, which might easily be mistaken for the work of a Greek chisel.
It is certain that during the first years of his long sojourn in Rome he gave himself up enthusiastically to the study of its ancient monuments and works of art. When the famous group of the Laocoon was discovered in 1506, Michelangelo greeted it as a "miracle of art," affirming that the only statue worthy of being compared with it was the torso of Hercules, which he was never tired of drawing, and evidently had before his mind when painting the magnificent ignudi of the Sistine Chapel. In the Wicar Museum at Lille there are several copies by Michelangelo of various decorative motives in the Baths of Titus, showing how deeply he studied ancient art even in minor details. But he was far from being a servile imitator; indeed his powerful originality is never so strikingly manifest as in those of his masterpieces which appear to be conceived in a purely classical spirit.
Although deeply religious, even to the point of regarding his art, especially during the latter part of his life, more as a devotional exercise than as a stepping-stone to glory, Michelangelo had one essential point in common with Pagan artists, namely, a boundless and reverent cult for beauty in all its forms, and especially in its highest and most wonderful manifestation, the human frame. "He loved the beauty of the human body," says Condivi, "as one who best understands it, and likewise every beautiful thing—a beautiful horse, a beautiful dog, a beautiful country, a beautiful plant, and every place and thing beautiful and rare after its kind, admiring them all with a marvellous love; thus choosing beauty in nature as the bees gather honey from the flowers, and using it afterwards in his works." In one of his sonnets Michelangelo thus expressed his highest idea of beauty—man created in the image of God:
Nor hath God deigned to show Himself elsewhere
More clearly than in human forms sublime,
Which, since they image Him, alone I love.[[1]]
[[1]] J. A. Symonds, "The Sonnets of Michelangelo and Campanella," n. lvi. p. 90.
It is certain that he studied anatomy far more deeply than any of his contemporaries, not excluding Leonardo da Vinci, and devoted so much time to dissecting that "it turned his stomach so that he could neither eat nor drink with benefit. Nevertheless," adds Condivi, "he did not give up until he was so learned and rich in such knowledge that he intended to write a treatise on the movements of the human body, its aspect, and concerning the bones, with an ingenious theory of his own, devised after long practice."
Michelangelo has been accused by some critics, not wholly without reason, of having somewhat ostentatiously availed himself of his anatomical knowledge. In some figures of his Last Judgment, for instance, the muscular masses, the bones and tendons and other anatomical details are hardly concealed by the skin, as if he had painted from the subject on the dissecting-table rather than from the living model. The result is undoubtedly striking and terrible, and we may even hazard the conjecture that the master purposely exaggerated his efforts in a picture representing the final resuscitation of the flesh, the awesome reconstruction and starting back into life of bodies long since reduced to dust. This "stupendous defect," if such it may be called, is far more apparent in Michelangelo's frescoes than in his works of sculpture.
Having taken the human frame as the highest possible standard of beauty, Michelangelo made use of it in all his works not only as the principal theme, but as a decorative element. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, with its magnificent nude Athletes and allegorical figures, is the apotheosis of the human frame as the noblest means of decoration. By introducing nude figures in his tondo of the Holy Family and by his powerful but utterly unconventional treatment of the angels and saints in the Last Judgment, Michelangelo once more affirmed his faith in the beauty and purity of the "human form divine" as a decorative element of religious art. He went even further, for in a letter to Cardinal Ridolfo da Carpi, which he wrote when engaged on the construction of St. Peter's, Michelangelo hazards the strange theory that the study of the human figure is indispensable not only to sculptors and painters, but to architects as well: "For it is very certain that the members of architecture depend upon the members of man. Who is not a good master of the figure, and especially of anatomy, cannot understand it."
Michelangelo's system of working was as powerful and original as his art. Before he began a statue he could already discern the finished masterpiece lurking within the rough-hewn block of marble, which he would attack with reckless assurance, great splinters flying in all directions as he feverishly cut away the waste stone, and saw the figure spring slowly into life under his magic chisel. A contemporary, writing in 1550, when Michelangelo, then seventy-five years of age, was carving the Pietà which he intended for his tomb, thus describes the master at his work: "I have seen him, although over seventy years of age and no longer strong, cut away more splinters from a block of very hard marble in fifteen minutes than three young men could have done in a couple of hours, and with such fierce recklessness that I thought the whole work must fall to pieces. For he knocked off splinters the size of a hand, following the line of his figures so closely, that the slightest mistake would have irreparably spoilt the whole group."
In one of his finest sonnets Michelangelo mentions this wonderful gift of the true artist to penetrate dull marble and to perceive, as through a veil, the perfect work of art within: