THE COLLEONI MONUMENT
Venice
CHAPTER X
MICHAEL ANGELO AND THE FLOOD TIDE
OF RENAISSANCE SCULPTURE
1490-1530 a.d.
The year 1475 a.d. has been reached. We have seen the conclusion of the struggle of the sculptors to make marble and bronze bear once more the impress of every imagination of the human heart. Nothing now remains save to estimate the fruits of the victory—a task which entails the appreciation of one man, Michael Angelo.
There is no exaggeration in focussing our attention on one artist. The apotheosis of Italian sculpture connects itself as inevitably with Michael Angelo as the topmost peak of Elizabethan drama—Shakespeare—connects itself with the dramatic hills and hillocks which led up to it. The first fifty years of Angelo’s life were to Renaissance sculpture what the age of Phidias and Polyclitus had been to Greek art. He and he alone found means to express in marble the deepest thoughts upon nature and humanity which the Italian Renaissance had aroused.
As had been the case with the Greek sculptors before Salamis, the pre-Angelesque artists had never quite made their message articulate. Indeed, the whole fifteenth century was a period of probation and experiment. In the sister art of painting, the draftsmen and colourists were realizing the possibilities of line and paint. The consequences of their efforts were Raphael, Leonardo, Titian and Correggio. What Angelico, Mantegna, Botticelli and Bellini were to the great painters, Ghiberti, della Robbia, Donatello, Pollaiuolo and Verocchio were to Michael Angelo.
But for the fact that Donatello and Ghiberti had raised the plastic arts for the time far above the graphic, it might well have been that sculpture would have been only a minor art to Michael Angelo. As things were in his boyhood, though painting was every year reducing the lead of the sister art, sculpture had still a far greater body of achievement to its credit. From the first it was clear that sculpture was the art by which his nature most naturally expressed itself. In after life he was wont jestingly to remind his friends of his earliest years among the mill-stone quarries of Settignano. He had been given to the wife of a stonecutter to be nursed, and, as he put it, “with the milk of my foster-mother I sucked in the chisels and mallets wherewith I now make my figures.”