A history of Italian painting

by Frank Jewett Mather

Fig. 205. Michelangelo. The Last Judgment.

In framing his great work out of nudes relieved by draped figures, Michelangelo renewed the Grecian practice. Precisely the difference between the Sistine ceiling and the metopes of the Parthenon, or the frieze of Pergamon, raises the question—What does the nude of Michelangelo express? I do not find in it, at least in the Sistine ceiling, much of that terribleness, terribiltà, which has been remarked by critics from Vasari to Henri Beyle. It seems to me rather an art of lassitude and relaxation, the reluctantly awaking Adam being the clue to the mood. Except for the gestures of God and Eve, the gestures and poses are unspecific. The lithe bodies of the slaves are twisted only that they may attain consciousness of powers which have no use. The relaxation which marks nearly all the nudes, whether in the stories or in the incidental ornament, is not that of fatigue after action, nor yet that of preparation for an ordeal. In barren lassitude we have expressed powers which do not imply action or use, but breathe a great melancholy. We are far from the splendors of passion and achievement, we see humanity confused at a fate that calls itself God, a passive factor in an arbitrary process that makes the glory of the flesh a vain thing. As a humanist, Michelangelo asserts that failing glory, as a Christian he accepts the nothingness of mankind and the rightness of God’s inscrutable and apparently cruel designs. Perhaps the spell of Michelangelo, his æsthetic, to put it pedantically, is simply the noble resignation with which the humanist accepts the Christian pessimism as regards this world. And here I may note that Rodin has significantly shown that even the forms of Michelangelo are not uprising and resilient like the antique, but compressed and yielding like those of the Christian Gothic sculptors.

Twenty-one years after the Sistine ceiling was unveiled, Michelangelo began reluctantly the great fresco of the Last Judgment, Figure [205]. He worked on it for seven years, and it was unveiled on Christmas Day of 1541. How the choristers had the heart to chant the angelic message of peace and good will before it, I cannot imagine. Michelangelo was sixty-six years old, a disillusioned and embittered man, an alien in the corrupt and pleasure loving Rome of Paul III. He has put into the Christ all his contempt for mankind. The Christ who earlier wrathfully hurled the darts in the Umbrian plague banners has become a far darting Apollo, Figure [206], rejoicing in his dire task. Behind him the murky air is full of hurtling contorted angels, in aspect quite indistinguishable from fiends, who bear the implements of the Passion. Below, the just and unjust rise or fall in knots and festoons of writhing nude bodies all equally sinister. The conception is violently corporeal, and never elsewhere in painting has the human body been used with such ingenuity and power. But it is a power that defeats itself. I believe the spectator is not so much appalled as confused before the Last Judgment. Its vehemence seems so unrelieved and insensate. If this be indeed the goal of mankind, no wonder moody Adam in the ceiling above faces his Creator with doubt and a hint of distrust.

Fig. 206. Michelangelo. Christ with the Virgin and the Apostles. From the Last Judgment.

Its sheer display of force won all contemporaries, and the French critic and superman, Stendhal, has highly praised the work for its burning energy. While not sharing his enthusiasm, I gladly refer the reader to his admirable pages. In my own opinion the creative ardor of Michelangelo had waned by this time. He offers, instead, his spleen, which is more valuable than most men’s genius, and his amazing technical skill. Michelangelo has become Michelangelesque. That is deplorably true in the frescoes for the Pauline Chapel which were finished in 1547, his seventy-second year. Nothing is left but sensationalism, and the Pope does well not to exhibit these works. As regards humanity, Michelangelo’s vein is completely exhausted. He still is capable of exquisite calculation, as in the design for the dome of St. Peter’s, still retains a dæmonic capacity for work and emotion, but the sculptor in him is nearly dead and the painter completely so. The poet of the rugged sonnets has superseded them both. When he died at 89, in 1564, the little ill-favored body was honored like that of a king. His sheer power had swept the whole rising generation of artists under his sway. To their own hurt and to the bankruptcy of the Golden Age.

Such forms as Michelangelo’s are tolerable only when possessed by that melancholy poetry of his which gives them meaning. If the serene intelligence of a Raphael had not found emotions to fill such forms, if Michelangelo himself in his later years falls back on a monotonous formula of terribleness, what hope was there for such uninspired imitators as the Venustis, Volterras, and Vasaris? One and all, they entertained monstrous delusions of effortless attainment—cleverly contorted their nudes, shrewdly calculated their terrors. And the Roman art of the Golden Age, forgetting both the wise humility of Umbria and the reasonable pride of Florence, suddenly collapsed in the ugliest and most irrational ostentation. Michelangelo had passed—to fulfill and to destroy.

ILLUSTRATIONS FOR CHAPTER VI

A Contemporary List of Great Artists, before 1510

In an offhand mention in The Courtier Baldasarre Castiglione tells us who seemed to be great artists to a cultured and well-informed gentleman about the year 1508. Titian had not yet emerged and of the older men only Leonardo da Vinci and Mantegna are remembered. As seniors, they are the first mentioned.