A History of Sculpture

by Ernest Henry Short

DAWN

From The Medici Chapel, Florence

But Michael Angelo was too true a man to dole out lies which should pander to a joyous carelessness. It was his task to echo, not one emotion, but all the emotions which had stirred the Italy of his age. As a mere boy he had seen the men and women who flocked to the Duomo at Florence to listen to the denunciations of Savonarola. He had seen them pass from the Church speechless—“more dead than alive”—because of the great fear which was upon them. Before he was twenty, he had witnessed the coming of the “Scourge,” which the fate had foretold. Then he had passed to “the Eternal City,” the home of the Princes of the Church, the centre of Christendom, only to find that, to borrow Symonds’s phrase, “the very popes rose from the beds of harlots to unlock or bolt the gates of heaven and purgatory.” It has been said that Michael Angelo worked upon the Medici tombs during the siege of Florence in 1528. He may have been carving these marbles when the artillery of a Medicean army was actually thundering against the Florence that Lorenzo had made immortal. As his thoughts were thrown back by his subject upon his boyhood days, memories of Savonarola—the Jeremiah of the Renaissance—must have come back in a flood. Well may the sculpture in the sacristy of San Lorenzo have been termed

“Marble griefs, Hewn from a Titan’s heart.”

We shall not attempt to translate Angelo’s message into words, but a happy chance has preserved a story which enables us to realize what the sculptor intended to convey by the figure of the sleeping woman we call “[Night].” We might have guessed that the firm hips, contrasting as they do with the long limbs and narrow form of the virgin “[Dawn],” symbolized the end of a life of suffering. Those worn breasts have suckled many, and the mother, who has watched her children struggling through the cruel breakers of life, is now herself at rest. The figure of “[Night]” was never intended to carry the gay, sunny message that a Botticelli felt and longed to give forth when he painted such a picture as the “Birth of Venus” or the “Coming of Spring.” The story goes that Giovanni Battista Strozzi wrote the following epigram, which he placed beneath the marble figure. It ran:

“The Night, that thou seest so sweetly sleeping, Was by an angel carved in the rude stone. Sleeping, she lives; if thou believ’st it not, Wake her, and surely she will answer thee.”

Angelo, seeing this, wrote in reply:

“Sweet is my sleep, more sweet to be mere stone, So long as ruin and dishonour reign. To hear nought, to feel nought, is my great gain; Then wake me not; speak in an undertone.”

It is by the light of such an agonized philosophy that we must interpret the life-work of Michael Angelo. He lived in the midst of a society that was morally rotten. He saw a foreign foe at the very gates of his native city. Could one, to whom “Art’s the witness of what is behind this Show,” throw out careless hints as to the struggle the spirit of man must face before it is released? The almost unnatural poses in such sculptures as those in the Medici Chapel tell of the vehement emotion with which the soul of their author contemplated the “riddle of this painful world.” Michael Angelo would have been false to his mission had he been content to aim at the graceful repose which satisfied Praxiteles. His glory was to make sculpture—the most limited of the arts in this respect—a vehicle for the expression of the greatest of emotions and passions of which the human heart is capable.