GIOVANNI AND FEDERICO, ELECTORS OF SAXONY

After the Portraits by Cranach, once in the Ducal Collection at Urbino, now in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence

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No one, perhaps, fully aware of Michael Angelo's celebrity, ever looked for the first time upon one of his principal works without a shade of disappointment. Inventions appealing to the intellect without sympathy from the feelings,—attitudes struggling with difficulty rather than aiming at elegance,—muscular masses, rugged as the blocks from which they are rudely hewn; such things surpass the comprehension of superficial observers, and disenchant common minds. Yet there is a spell around all of them which arrests the most careless, and recalls the most disappointed, and the longer they are examined, especially by persons of cultivated understanding, the more certain will be the final tribute to their transcendent qualities, the more unreserved the avowal that their author stands out among the foremost geniuses whom the world has seen. Feebleness or insipidity had no place in his conceptions, and no individual ever left the impress of his vigorous mind upon so many various arts. He was a poet of no mean pretensions. His architecture is as successful as bold. It is difficult to say whether his frescoes or his sculptures are the more admirable. Even his oil paintings are worthy of more notice than they have met with; and, the few ascertained specimens display a mastery of finish little to be looked for from their wayward and impetuous author, and develop in their execution, as well as in their design, an extraordinary pictorial science. The trite assertion that he never painted but three easel pictures seems fully negatived by the mechanical perfection which, notwithstanding a certain languor of colouring and flatness of surface, these exhibit, and which must have been gained by extensive practice. In his house, even a miniature on parchment is shown as his work; and not a few tiny productions in bronze and ivory bear the stamp of his invention, if not of his hand. These were probably labours of those early days when, with equal verity and shrewdness the Gonfaloniere Soderini recommended him to the Roman court as "a fine young man, unequalled in his art throughout Italy, or perhaps the world. He will do anything for good words and caresses; indeed, he must be treated with affection and favour, in which case he will perform things to astonish all beholders."[228] In the sacristy of S. Lorenzo, at Florence, these anticipations were amply realised on the monuments of two of the Medici, with whom an earlier portion of these pages has made us acquainted. These works were, however, no labour of love to the sculptor, whose sympathies had been alien to that race from the days when Pietro ceased to walk in the ways of his fathers. Accordingly, their greatest fault is, that the artist absorbs our interest almost to the exclusion of the personages commemorated, to whom the allegorical compositions appear to have no reference. It is, indeed, only their portraits that recall the purpose of the monuments. That of the elegant and gentle Giuliano awakens no association that might not be suggested by the statue of some nameless warrior of the classic age. More appropriate is the bearing of Lorenzo, the usurper of Urbino. The stern gloom that broods over his casque, and shadows his repulsive features, scowling upon the world from whose sympathies he seems a voluntary alien, is an enduring index of his unamiable character. But it is in the Sistine chapel that Buonarroti sits pre-eminent. Who that stands beneath its grand frescoes can doubt the daring, the originality, and grasp of his genius, who triumphantly called into existence forms and movements before which ordinary minds shrink into pigmy dimensions? Yet, who that observes the rapid decline of the Michael-Angelesque school into mannered contortion and extravagant caricature, can question its mischievous influence, or the danger of opening up such fields to uninspired labourers? On both sides of the Alps, its followers or imitators, mistaking extravagance for energy, manner for power, and servilely substituting exceptional attitudes for the sublimity of nature and the dignity of repose, have copied his design without imbibing his spirit, and have embodied feeble conceptions in preposterous forms.

Freely have we spoken of a name to whom all honour is due, whose failings may be noted as a warning, without diminishing our respect for his manifold attainments. Our readers may appreciate his success as a poet through Mr. Glassford's felicitous version of a sonnet worthy the noblest of art's disciples.[*229]

"Now my fair bark through life's tempestuous flood
Is steered, and full in view that port is seen,
Where all must answer what their course has been,
And every work be tried, if bad or good.
Now do those lofty dreams, my fancy's brood,
Which made of Art an idol and a queen,
Melt into air; and now I feel, how keen!
That what I needed most I most withstood.
Ye fabled joys, ye tales of empty love,
What are ye now, if twofold death be nigh?
The first is certain, and the last I dread.
Ah! what does Sculpture, what does Painting prove,
When we have seen the Cross, and fixed our eye
On Him whose arms of love were there outspread!"

The home patronage of the della Rovere dukes was, however, by no means limited to their subjects, and Titian[*230] enjoyed high favour from the first two sovereigns of that dynasty. The coronation of Charles V., in 1532, having attracted to Bologna a concourse of distinguished persons, Titian, then in his fifty-fifth year, was honoured by an imperial invitation to join the throng. The monarch, himself reputed no mean craftsman, delighted to pass what time he could snatch from business, in conversing with the painter, and observing his progress, till one day, having picked up a fallen pencil, he returned it, saying, "Titian deserves to be waited on by an Emperor." The Duke of Urbino, who may have known the Venetian in his native city, was among the sovereigns and cardinals whose commissions on that occasion contended for preference, and but a short time, probably, elapsed ere his own and his consort's portraits were produced,[*231] although Vasari and Ridolfi have erroneously fixed their date in 1543, five years after Francesco Maria's death.