The century of Columbus

by James J. Walsh

CHAPTER III MICHELANGELO

Probably the greatest artistic genius that the world has ever known, certainly the man who was best able to express his thoughts most perfectly in every mode of art, with chisel, pencil, brush and pen, was the son of Lodovico de Leonardo Buonarroti-Simoni, whom succeeding generations have known as Michelangelo. He was a member of a noble Italian family much reduced in the world. They claimed to be related to the celebrated Counts of Canossa in Northern Italy, and when Angelo became famous there was a recognition of the relationship by the head of the Canossa family of that day. Nobility is usually willing to be related to great genius, but genealogists have not been able to trace the relationship. When Michelangelo was born (March 6, 1475), his father was the governor of the Castle of Caprese, which stood on the crest of a bold and rocky ridge of the Catenaian Alps, overlooking the wild and rugged hills in which the Tiber and Arno rise. He died two months before Shakespeare's birth in 1564, when another month of life would have brought him to his ninetieth year. He is another typical example of the fact that genius usually inhabits long-lived bodies. Great men may be short-lived by accident, but as a rule the over-abounding vitality, which enables a great mind to express itself greatly, also enables the personality with which it is associated to reach longevity.

It is fortunate for us, seeing that Angelo was such a great genius, that as Lilly said: [Footnote 2] "There are few great men of whom we possess so many and such authentic documents." His works are the living monuments of his genius, but we have, besides even minute details of all his long life, his struggles, [{33}] his triumphs, his friendships, his patrons and above all the fire of trial through which his genius passed in order to secure its expression of itself.

[Footnote 2: W. S. Lilly: "Renaissance Types." Macmillan, 1904.]

Michelangelo's mother died when he was very young, her only place in his life being that she gave him his name because she saw something divine in him, though perhaps that is not rare. When his father's term of office expired he returned to Florence, but left his infant son at Caprese in the care of a wet nurse, the daughter of a stone mason and the wife of another stone mason. Michelangelo often said that he imbibed a love for marble and stone-cutting with his first nourishment. The chisel and mallet were his early play-toys, and though he was but six when taken to Florence, there is a tradition of rude charcoal sketches made on the walls by him in his country home. In Florence he was sent to the school of the famous grammarian, Francesco Venturino of Urbino, the teacher of the New Learning, who was also some years later a teacher of Raphael. Michelangelo, according to tradition, paid little attention to his books, however, but was constantly to be found with a pencil in his hand, making sketches of all kinds. He became associated with some art pupils and artists, and before long most of his time was given up to drawing and sketching.

While Michelangelo lived in the Renaissance time, and was undoubtedly influenced very deeply by the humanistic movement, this influence was exerted in very different fashion from what is usually supposed by those who think of the Renaissance as the time when the re-discovery of the Greek classics made for book-knowledge and a consequent deepening and sharpening of the intellectuality of man. Michelangelo had very little interest in books at any time, probably despised scholarship, had little Latin, though it would have been so easy for him to have learned it, seeing that his native tongue was Italian, and had probably no Greek. He died, as I have said, the year that Shakespeare was born, and much has been made of the supposed impossibility of Shakespeare's wonderful conception of the universe of man without more knowledge in the sense of scholarship. Shakespeare had little Latin and less Greek, but undoubtedly the man who best deserves place beside him is Michelangelo, who was similarly situated. [{34}] Condivi tells us that books were to Michelangelo "a dull and endless strife." He was very often dreadfully beaten--as the artist tells it himself, bene spesso stranamente battuto--for wandering in the workshops of artists instead of going to school, or sketching for himself instead of studying his books.

His father had intended that his son should go into the silk and woollen business. When he discovered his artistic proclivities, of course he forbade such foolish waste of time and punished the lad severely. It seemed a disgrace that a member of the respectable Buonarroti family should take up so non-lucrative and little-considered occupation as that of a painter on canvas and worker in marble. There was the usual result. Michelangelo could not overcome his native genius, and after some trying scenes his father finally consented to permit him to enter the studio of Domenico Ghirlandajo, who was at the moment the most distinguished painter in Italy. It was not long, moreover, before Angelo was correcting his master's drawing. At first Ghirlandajo was disturbed by this, but he was won inevitably by the distinction of Angelo's work until one day he declared, though altogether Angelo was only a year in his studio, "this young man knows more of art than I do myself." Then he was given a place in the Academy of Lorenzo de' Medici, Ghirlandajo having been asked to nominate two of his best pupils for the Academy and selecting as one Angelo. Surely this selection proved that the teacher was not, as some have said, jealous of the pupil.

At Lorenzo's academy Michelangelo came in contact with some of the most distinguished men of Italy of that day. There were Lorenzo's two sons, Giovanni and Giulio, who afterwards became Popes Leo X and Clement VII; Pico della Mirandola, the poet and scholar; Politian, the poet, classicist and philosopher; Ficino, the head of the Platonic academy at Florence of that day, and Bibbiena and Castiglione, the latter subsequently the author of the famous book "Il Cortigiano." The two last-named were Raphael's great friends when a few years later he was studying in Florence. It is not surprising that under these circumstances Angelo became very much interested in antique sculpture, nor that his first independent work was a bas-relief, representing a battle between Hercules [{35}] and the Centaurs. This is still preserved in the Casa Buonarroti, and with its crowded figures reveals the genius and the assured artistic grasp of the future great sculptor who executed it.

Angelo, however, soon realized that if he was to do sculpture successfully he must study not only the outside of the human body and the antique sculptures, but he must know all the structures of the body. Accordingly he had dead bodies conveyed from the hospital to a special room provided for him in the convent of Santo Spirito, and dissected them carefully. It has often been said in the modern time that at this period dissection was forbidden by the Church, but there is absolutely no trace of any such legislation, and every artist of the latter part of the fifteenth century did dissection. Michelangelo rewarded the prior of the monastery for his help in these studies by carving for him a crucifix out of wood, which revealed the benefit derived from his dissections. With such zeal for art it is not surprising that the young man soon found himself capable of doing sculpture of great artistic significance. We have traditions of a statue of "Hercules," a high relief of the "Madonna" and a "Sleeping Cupid," which had an eventful history. A dealer buried it in the earth for a time and then sold it as an antique. Cardinal Riario, who purchased it, finding out the trick, invited the sculptor, who knew nothing of the deception, to Rome, and some of his first important work was done there.

His earliest Roman work was of antique subjects, a "Cupid," which has been lost, and a "Bacchus," now in the Bargello. His first great commission, however, came from the Cardinal de St. Denis, the French Ambassador at Rome. This was of a "Madonna" with the dead Saviour on her knees, just after His taking down from the Cross. The group is now in St. Peter's at Rome, and though executed when Michelangelo was less than twenty-five years of age, has come to be looked upon as one of the great sculptures of the world. Copies of it are now to be seen in most of the important museums, so that a good idea of his youthful genius can be readily obtained by anyone desirous of knowing it.