Contrast of Michael Angelo and Cellini—Parentage and Boyhood of Michael Angelo—Work with Ghirlandajo—Gardens of S. Marco—The Medicean Circle—Early Essays in Sculpture—Visit to Bologna—First Visit to Rome—The "Pietà" of S. Peter's—Michael Angelo as a Patriot and a Friend of the Medici—Cartoon for the Battle of Pisa—Michael Angelo and Julius II.—The Tragedy of the Tomb—Design for the Pope's Mausoleum—Visit to Carrara—Flight from Rome—Michael Angelo at Bologna—Bronze Statue of Julius—Return to Rome—Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—Greek and Modern Art—Raphael—Michael Angelo and Leo X.—S. Lorenzo—The new Sacristy—Circumstances under which it was designed and partly finished—Meaning of the Allegories—Incomplete state of Michael Angelo's Marbles—Paul III.—The "Last Judgment"—Critiques of Contemporaries—The Dome of S. Peter's—Vittoria Colonna—Tommaso Cavalieri—Personal Habits of Michael Angelo—His Emotional Nature—Last Illness.
The life of Italian artists at the time of the Renaissance may be illustrated by two biographies. Michael Angelo Buonarroti and Benvenuto Cellini were almost opposite in all they thought and felt, experienced and aimed at. The one impressed his own strong personality on art; the other reflected the light and shadow of the age in the record of his manifold existence. Cellini hovered, like some strong-winged creature, on the surface of human activity, yielding himself to every impulse, seeking every pleasure, and of beauty feeling only the rude animal compulsion. Deep philosophic thoughts, ideas of death and judgment, the stern struggles of the soul, encompassed Michael Angelo; the service of beauty was with him religion. Cellini was the creature of the moment—the glass and mirror of corrupt, enslaved, yet still resplendent Italy. In Michael Angelo the genius of the Renaissance culminated; but his character was rather that of an austere Republican, free and solitary amid the multitudes of slaves and courtiers. Michael Angelo made art the vehicle of lofty and soul-shaking thought. Cellini brought the fervour of an inexhaustibly active nature to the service of sensuality, and taught his art to be the handmaid of a soulless paganism. In these two men, therefore, we study two aspects of their age. How far both were exceptional, need not here be questioned; since their singularity consists not so much in being different from other Italians of the sixteenth century as in concentrating qualities elsewhere scattered and imperfect.
Michael Angelo was born in 1475 at Caprese, among the mountains of the Casentino, where his father Lodovico held the office of Podestà. His ancestry was honourable: the Buonarroti even claimed descent, but apparently without due reason, from the princely house of Canossa.[[289]] His mother gave him to be suckled by a stone-cutter's wife at Settignano, so that in after days he used to say that he had drawn in the love of chisels and mallets with his nurse's milk. As he grew, the boy developed an invincible determination towards the arts. Lodovico from motives of pride and prudence opposed his wishes, but without success. Michael Angelo made friends with the lad Granacci, who was apprenticed to Domenico Ghirlandajo, and at last induced his father to sign articles for him to the same painter. In Ghirlandajo's workshop he learned the rudiments of art, helping in the execution of the frescoes at S. Maria Novella, until such time as the pupil proved his superiority as a draughtsman to his teacher. The rupture between Michael Angelo and Ghirlandajo might be compared with that between Beethoven and Haydn. In both cases a proud, uncompromising, somewhat scornful student sought aid from a master great in his own line but inferior in fire and originality of genius.[[290]] In both cases the moment came when pupil and teacher perceived that the eagle could no longer be confined within the hawk's nest, and that henceforth it must sweep the skies alone. After leaving Ghirlandajo's bottega at the age of sixteen, Michael Angelo did in truth thenceforward through his life pursue his art alone. Granacci procured him an introduction to the Medici, and the two friends together frequented those gardens of S. Marco where Lorenzo had placed his collection of antiquities. There the youth discovered his vocation. Having begged a piece of marble and a chisel, he struck out the Faun's mask that still is seen in the Bargello. It is worth noticing that Michael Angelo seems to have done no merely prentice-work. Not a fragment of his labour from the earliest to the latest was insignificant, and only such thoughts as he committed to the perishable materials of bronze or paper have been lost. There was nothing tentative in his genius. Into art, as into a rich land, he came and conquered. In like manner, the first sonnet composed by Dante is scarcely less precious than the last lines of the "Paradiso." This is true of all the highest artistic natures, who need no preparations and have no period of groping.
Lorenzo de' Medici discerned in Michael Angelo a youth of eminent genius, and took the lad into his own household. The astonished father found himself suddenly provided with a comfortable post and courted for the sake of the young sculptor. In Lorenzo's palace the real education of Michael Angelo began. He sat at the same table with Ficino, Pico, and Poliziano, listening to dialogues on Plato and drinking in the golden poetry of Greece. Greek literature and philosophy, expounded by the men who had discovered them, and who were no less proud of their discovery than Columbus of his passage to the Indies, first moulded his mind to those lofty thoughts which it became the task of his life to express in form. At the same time he heard the preaching of Savonarola. In the Duomo and the cloister of S. Marco another portion of his soul was touched, and he acquired that deep religious tone which gives its majesty and terror to the Sistine. Much in the same way was Milton educated by the classics in conjunction with the Scriptures. Both of these austere natures assimilated from pagan art and Jewish prophecy the twofold elements they needed for their own imaginative life. Both Michael Angelo and Milton, in spite of their parade of classic style, were separated from the Greek world by a gulf of Hebrew and of Christian feeling.
While Michael Angelo was thus engaged in studying antique sculpture and in listening to Pico and Savonarola, he carved his first bas-relief—a "Battle of Hercules with the Centaurs," suggested to him by Poliziano.[[291]] Meantime Lorenzo died. His successor Piero set the young man, it is said, to model a snow statue, and then melted like a shape of snow himself down from his pedestal of power in Florence. Upon the expulsion of the tyrant and the proclamation of the new republic, it was dangerous for house-friends of the Casa Medici to be seen in the city. Michael Angelo, therefore, made his way to Bologna, where he spent some months in the palace of Gian Francesco Aldovrandini, studying Dante and working at an angel for the shrine of S. Dominic. As soon, however, as it seemed safe to do so, he returned to Florence; and to this period belongs the statue of the "Sleeping Cupid," which was sold as an antique to the Cardinal Raffaello Riario.
A dispute about the price of this "Cupid" took Michael Angelo in 1496 to Rome, where it was destined that the greater portion of his life should he spent, and his noblest works of art should be produced. Here, while the Borgias were turning the Vatican into a den of thieves and harlots, he executed the purest of all his statues—a "Pietà" in marble.[[292]] Christ is lying dead upon his mother's knees. With her right arm she supports his shoulders; her left hand is gently raised as though to say, "Behold and see!" All that art can do to make death beautiful and grief sublime, is achieved in this masterpiece, which was never surpassed by Michael Angelo in later years. Already, at the age of four-and-twenty, he had matured his "terrible manner." Already were invented in his brain that race of superhuman beings, who became the hieroglyphs of his impassioned utterance. Madonna has the small head and heroic torso used by this master to symbolise force. We feel she has no difficulty in holding the dead Christ upon her ample lap and in her powerful arms. Yet while the "Pietà" is wholly Michael Angelesque, we find no lack of repose, none of those contorted lines that are commonly urged against his manner. It is a sober and harmonious composition, combining the profoundest religious feeling with classical tranquillity of expression. Again, though the group is forcibly original, this effect of originality is produced, as in all the best work of the golden age, not by new and startling conception, but by the handling of an old and well-worn motive with the grandeur of consummate style. What the genius of Italian sculpture had for generations been striving after, finds its perfect realisation here. It was precisely by thus crowning the endeavours of antecedent artists—by bringing the opening buds of painting and sculpture to full blossom, and exhausting the resources of a long sustained and common inspiration, that the great masters proved their supremacy and rendered an advance beyond their vantage ground impossible. To those who saw and comprehended this "Pietà" in 1500, it must have been evident that a new power of portraying the very soul had been manifested in sculpture—a power unknown to the Greeks because it lay outside the sphere of their spiritual experience, and unknown to modern artists because it was beyond their faculties of execution and conception. Yet who in Rome, among the courtiers of the Borgias, had brain or heart to understand these things?
In 1501 Michael Angelo returned to Florence, where he stayed until the year 1505. This period was fruitful of results on which his after fame depended. The great statue of "David," the two unfinished medallions of Madonna in relief, the "Holy Family of the Tribune" painted for Angelo Doni, and the Cartoon of the "Battle of Pisa" were now produced; and no man's name, not even Lionardo's, stood higher in esteem thenceforward. It will be remembered that Savonarola was now dead, but that his constitution still existed under the presidency of Pietro Soderini—the non mai abbastanza lodato Cavaliere, as Pitti calls him, the anima sciocca of Machiavelli's epigram.[[293]] Since Michael Angelo at this time was employed in the service of masters who had superseded his old friends and patrons, it may be well to review here his attitude in general toward the house of Medici. Throughout his lifetime there continued a conflict between the artist and the citizen—the artist owing education and employment to successive members of that house, the citizen resenting their despotism and doing all that in him lay at times to keep them out of Florence. As a patriot, as the student of Dante and the disciple of Savonarola, Michael Angelo detested tyrants.[[294]] One of his earliest madrigals, conceived as a dialogue between Florence and her exiles, expresses his mind so decidedly that I have ventured to translate it;[[295]] the exiles first address Florence, and she answers:—
"Lady, for joy of lovers numberless
Thou wast created fair as angels are.