A History of Sculpture

by Ernest Henry Short

The influence of this new conception upon the art of Michael Angelo is equally noticeable in the “[Pieta],” a rather earlier sculpture, and the first work of our artist’s maturity.

The Virgin Mother is seated upon the stone on which the cross had been erected. The dead Christ lies before her. The scene corresponds with nothing in the biblical account. It illustrates no single verse. But it does more. It breathes the very spirit of the Christian narrative, for it interprets its inner meaning in its most vital and useful sense. We can see at once that Angelo would have been false to his art had he been more faithful to the current conception of Christian truth. He was no preacher. He was not expounding a faith. What he took from the Bible story was the divine grief of a mother for an all-perfect son. His task was to translate that without the loss of one iota of physical or moral beauty. Condivi tells us that there were many who complained that the mother was too young when compared with her son, and that he himself laid the matter before Michael Angelo for explanation. The sculptor’s answer is an example of what a perfect humanist—and that is very near to saying a perfect man—would have said. It is so characteristic of the sculptor that no apology for quoting it at length is necessary. “One day,” says Condivi, “I was talking to Michael Angelo of this objection.”

MICHAEL ANGELO

MOSES

(TOMB OF JULIUS II.)

“Do you not know,” he said, “that chaste women retain their fresh looks much longer than those who are not chaste? How much more, therefore, a virgin in whom not even the least unchaste desire ever arose? And I tell you, moreover, that such freshness and flower of youth besides being maintained in her by natural causes, it may possibly be that it was ordained by the Divine Power to prove to the world the virginity and perpetual purity of the Mother. It was not necessary in the Son; but rather the contrary; wishing to show that the Son of God took upon himself a true human body, subject to all the ills of man, excepting only sin; he did not allow the divine in him to hold back the human, but let it run its course and obey its laws, as was proved in his appointed time. Do not wonder then, that I have for all these reasons, made the most Holy Virgin, Mother of God, a great deal younger in comparison with her Son than she is usually represented. To the Son I have allotted his full age.”

The “[Pieta]” and the “[David]” are the typical works of Angelo’s first period—that in which the influences of humanism were paramount. But it is in the sculptures of his second period that we can detect the workings of the deep philosophical poetry which inspired the most characteristic of his works—the tomb of Julius II. and the monuments in the Medici chapel at Florence.

Neither was ever finished. The Medici monuments are the more complete, for the majesty of the sculptor’s first conception for the tomb of Julius II. can now be only guessed from a few rough sketches, half a dozen measurements and the well-known “[Moses].” Yet it occupies a unique place in the history of Italian art as the foremost work by an Italian sculptor which arose directly out of the ambition of the Church to make the Pope’s temporal authority equal his spiritual.

The principle of utilizing the painter, the sculptor, and the architect for this purpose had been enunciated fifty years earlier. Recognizing that the earlier aim, which had sought to enforce a spiritual despotism by making the belief in a God-inspired pontiff universal, had failed, Nicholas V. determined to try the effect of making the Pope into a king. His court was to be the centre of European culture. With the aid of the vast wealth poured into the papal coffers during the Jubilee of 1450, Nicholas began by making the Vatican quarter of Rome a veritable stronghold for the sovereign pontiff. His full ambition was disclosed when his will was read to the princes of the church assembled round his deathbed. In this Nicholas V. showed that the Popes could be secured from internal revolution and external force by one thing only. That was by making the seat of the papacy so splendid in the eyes of Christendom that it would possess the sanctity that had attached to Imperial Rome itself. It was this great aim that Michael Angelo spent the best years of his life in forwarding. The personal ambition of each Pope interfered with the free progress of the great ideal, but it furnished a strong motive for many years, and actuated both of Angelo’s great patrons, Julius II. and Leo X.