THE DUKE LORENZO
The Medici Chapel, Florence
Moreover, he held that this could be done without the use of symbolism. The simplest natural objects, transfigured by the artist-poet, would carry the profoundest truth.
Let us see how Michael Angelo proved his belief in the all-sufficiency of the art of sculpture in this respect. Choose two typical figures from the groups we are considering.
“Marble griefs, Hewn from a Titan’s heart,”
some one has called them. Say those of “[Dawn]” and “[Night].” Both are female nudes, and illustrate a vital feature in Michael Angelo’s technique—his preference for the male over the female form. The Greek sculptors before Praxiteles had the same preference. The male form made a more vital appeal to them than the female. With its infinitely greater variety of surface and its greater diversity of posture, it expressed more directly the vast complexity of human energies which their age had seen spring into being. Two thousand years later the times gave rise to thoughts no less profound and to emotions of no less intensity. And Michael Angelo found that they were too heavy a burden for a woman’s form to bear. That the full sentiment aroused by his conception of “[Night]” may find expression, the sculptor has lengthened the trunk and the limbs. He has twisted the torso upon the hips. He has added, as it were, a masculine character to the feminine form. He has treated the female nude in the male key. This is a direct reversion of the Praxitelean method by which profoundly beautiful sensuous effects were obtained through treating the male figure in the female key—the “Hermaphroditus,” for instance.
And yet it cannot be denied that the Praxitelean method is what we should have expected Angelo to follow. If the figure of “[Dawn]” had conveyed nothing save the virgin fairness of form which Giorgione’s “Venus” at Dresden embodies, it would have been more in accord with the popular taste of the first quarter of the sixteenth century. As the political and social situation in Italy grew more desperate (and it was never more desperate than during the years in which the monuments in the Medici chapel were being carved) painting and sculpture had become more joyous. The themes which the artists treated became less and less religious and more and more pagan. This has always been the case. In times of the greatest stress, when the enemy is beating at the very gates, men cannot sustain the soul-tearing emotions which they welcome in their art during times of prosperity. The defeat of the Athenians at Ægospotami did not bring to birth a greater Æschylus who should give shape to the fearful emotions which the men of the earlier age had been spared. No! tragedy vanished. Comedy arose. So it was with sculpture. Men turned from the griefs of a Niobe and found consolation in the sheer sensuous beauty of Praxiteles’ “[Aphrodite].” They preferred the manly charms of Hermes to the awful sublimity embodied in the brow of Phidias’ Zeus. And so in our period, when the horrors which had overtaken the Greek cities were threatening their heirs in Italy, the same thing took place. We find that the typical work is not the brooding figure of “[Lorenzo of Urbino]” or the “[Night],” which Michael Angelo sculptured beneath the figure of Giuliano, but the melodious dreams that floated from the brush of a Correggio. At this very time Allegri was at work upon the decoration of the great chamber of the Abbess of the Convent of St. Paul, Parma. He chose to depict no titanic forms charged with emotion, but covered his ceiling with a vast trellis of vine-leaves and fruit, and in the oval apertures which these formed he placed his groups of genii toying with the implements of the chase. Correggio’s was the manner of his time. His end was sensuous delight and through it, not the dramatic, but the lyrical note, continually sounds.
MICHAEL ANGELO
NIGHT