Which, since they image Him, compel my love.
Therefore to him a well-shaped hand, or throat, or head, a neck superbly poised on an athletic chest, the sway of the trunk above the hips, the starting of the muscles on the flank, the tendons of the ankle, the outline of the shoulder when the arm is raised, the backward bending of the loins, the curves of a woman's breast, the contours of a body careless in repose or strained for action, were all words pregnant with profoundest meaning, whereby fit utterance might be given to the thoughts that raise man near to God. But, it may be asked, what poems of action as well as feeling are to be expressed in this form-language? The answer is simple. Paint or carve the body of a man, and, as you do it nobly, you will give the measure of both highest thought and most impassioned deed. This is the key to Michael Angelo's art. He cared but little for inanimate nature. The landscapes of Italy, so eloquent in their sublimity and beauty, were apparently a blank to him. His world was the world of ideas, taking visible form, incarnating themselves in man. One language the master had to serve him in all need—the language of plastic human form; but it was to him a tongue as rich in its variety of accent and of intonation as Beethoven's harmonies.
In the Sistine Chapel, where plastic art is so supreme, we are bound to ask the further question. What was the difference between Michael Angelo and a Greek? The Parthenon with its processions of youths and maidens, its gods and heroes, rejoicing in their strength, and robed with raiment that revealed their living form, made up a symphony of meaning as full as this of Michael Angelo, and far more radiant. The Greek sculptor embraced humanity in his work no less comprehensively than the Italian; and what he had to say was said more plainly in the speech they both could use. But between Pheidias and Michael Angelo lay Christianity, the travail of the world through twenty centuries. Clear as morning, and calm in the unconsciousness of beauty, are those heroes of the youth of Hellas. All is grace, repose, strength shown but not asserted. Michael Angelo's Sibyls and Prophets are old and wrinkled, bowed with thought, consumed by vigils, startled from tranquillity by visions, overburdened with the messages of God. The loveliest among them, the Delphic, lifts dilated eyes, as though to follow dreams that fly upon the paths of trance. Even the young men strain their splendid limbs, and seem to shout or shriek, as if the life in them contained some element of pain. "He maketh his angels spirits, and his ministers a flame of fire:" this verse rises to our lips when we seek to describe the genii that crowd the cornice of the Sistine Chapel. The human form in the work of Pheidias wore a joyous and sedate serenity; in that of Michael Angelo it is turbid with a strange and awful sense of inbreathed agitation. Through the figure-language of the one was spoken the pagan creed, bright, unperturbed, and superficial. The sculpture of the Parthenon accomplished the transfiguration of the natural man. In the other man awakes to a new life of contest, disillusionment, hope, dread, and heavenward striving. It was impossible for the Greek and the Italian, bearing so different a burden of prophecy, even though they used the same speech, to tell the same tale; and this should be remembered by those critics who cast exaggeration and contortion in the teeth of Michael Angelo. Between the birth of the free spirit in Greece and its second birth in Italy, there yawned a sepulchre wherein the old faiths of the world lay buried and whence Christ had risen.[[318]]
The star of Raphael, meanwhile, had arisen over Rome. Between the two greatest painters of their age the difference was striking. Michael Angelo stood alone, his own master, fashioned in his own school. A band of artists called themselves by Raphael's name; and in his style we trace the influence of several predecessors. Michael Angelo rarely received visits, frequented no society, formed no pupils, and boasted of no friends at Court. Raphael was followed to the Vatican by crowds of students; his levées were like those of a prince; he counted among his intimates the best scholars and poets of the age; his hand was pledged in marriage to a cardinal's niece. It does not appear that they engaged in petty rivalries, or that they came much into personal contact with each other. While Michael Angelo was so framed that he could learn from no man, Raphael gladly learned of Michael Angelo; and after the uncovering of the Sistine frescoes, his manner showed evident signs of alteration. Julius, who had given Michael Angelo the Sistine, set Raphael to work upon the Stanze. For Julius were painted the "Miracle of Bolsena" and the "Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple," scenes containing courtly compliments for the old Pope. No such compliments had been paid by Michael Angelo. Like his great parallel in music, Beethoven, he displayed an almost arrogant contempt for the conventionalities whereby an artist wins the favour of his patrons and the world.
After the death of Julius, Leo X., in character the reverse of his fiery predecessor, and by temperament unsympathetic to the austere Michael Angelo, found nothing better for the sculptor's genius than to set him at work upon the façade of S. Lorenzo at Florence. The better part of the years between 1516 and 1520 was spent in quarrying marble at Carrara, Pietra Santa, and Seravezza. This is the most arid and unfruitful period of Michael Angelo's long life, a period of delays and thwarted schemes and servile labours. What makes the sense of disappointment greater, is that the façade of S. Lorenzo was not even finished.[[319]] We hurry over this wilderness of wasted months, and arrive at another epoch of artistic production.
Already in 1520 the Cardinal Giulio de' Medici had conceived the notion of building a sacristy in S. Lorenzo to receive the monuments of Cosimo, the founder of the house, Lorenzo the Magnificent, Giuliano Duke of Nemours, Lorenzo Duke of Urbino, Leo X., and himself.[[320]] To Michael Angelo was committed the design, and in 1521 he began to apply himself to the work. Nine years had now elapsed since the roof of the Sistine chapel had been finished, and during this time Michael Angelo had produced little except the "Christ" of S. Maria sopra Minerva. This new undertaking occupied him at intervals between 1521 and 1534, a space of time decisive for the fortunes of the Medici in Florence. Leo died, and Giulio after a few years succeeded him as Clement VII. The bastards of the house, Ippolito and Alessandro, were expelled from Florence in 1527. Rome was sacked by the Imperial troops; then Michael Angelo quitted the statues and helped to defend his native city against the Prince of Orange. After the failure of the Republicans, he was recalled to his labours by command of Clement. Sullenly and sadly he quarried marbles for the sacristy. Sadly and sullenly he used his chisel year by year, making the very stones cry that shame and ruin were the doom of his country. At last in 1534 Clement died. Then Michael Angelo flung down his mallet. The monuments remained unfinished, and the sculptor set foot in Florence no more.[[321]]
The Sacristy of S. Lorenzo was built by Michael Angelo and panelled with marbles to receive the sculpture he meant to place there.[[322]] Thus the colossal statues of Giuliano and Lorenzo were studied with a view to their light and shadow as much as to their form; and this is a fact to be remembered by those who visit the chapel where Buonarroti laboured both as architect and sculptor. Of the two Medici, it is not fanciful to say that the "Duke of Urbino" is the most immovable of spectral shapes eternalised in marble; while the "Duke of Nemours," more graceful and elegant, seems intended to present a contrast to this terrible thought-burdened form.[[323]] The allegorical figures, stretched on segments of ellipses beneath the pedestals of the two dukes, indicate phases of darkness and of light, of death and life. They are two women and two men; tradition names them "Night" and "Day," "Twilight" and "Dawning." Thus in the statues themselves and in their attendant genii we have a series of abstractions, symbolising the sleep and waking of existence, action and thought, the gloom of death, the lustre of life, and the intermediate states of sadness and of hope that form the borderland of both. Life is a dream between two slumbers; sleep is death's twin-brother; night is the shadow of death; death is the gate of life:—such is the mysterious mythology wrought by the sculptor of the modern world in marble. All these figures, by the intensity of their expression, the vagueness of their symbolism, force us to think and question. What, for example, occupies Lorenzo's brain? Bending forward, leaning his chin upon his wrist, placing the other hand upon his knee, on what does he for ever ponder? The sight, as Rogers said well, "fascinates and is intolerable." Michael Angelo has shot the beaver of the helmet forward on his forehead, and bowed his head, so as to clothe the face in darkness. But behind the gloom there is no skull, as Rogers fancied. The whole frame of the powerful man is instinct with some imperious thought. Has he outlived his life and fallen upon everlasting contemplation? Is he brooding, injured and indignant, over his own doom and the extinction of his race? Is he condemned to witness in immortal immobility the woes of Italy he helped to cause? Or has the sculptor symbolised in him the burden of that personality we carry with us in this life and bear for ever when we wake into another world? Beneath this incarnation of oppressive thought there lie, full-length and naked, the figures of Dawn and Twilight, Morn and Evening. So at least they are commonly called: and these names are not inappropriate; for the breaking of the day and the approach of night are metaphors for many transient conditions of the soul. It is only as allegories in a large sense, comprehending both the physical and intellectual order, and capable of various interpretation, that any of these statues can be understood. Even the Dukes do not pretend to be portraits: and hence in part perhaps the uncertainty that has gathered round them. Very tranquil and noble is Twilight: a giant in repose, he meditates, leaning upon his elbow, looking down. But Dawn starts from her couch, as though some painful summons had reached her sunk in dreamless sleep, and called her forth to suffer. Her waking to consciousness is like that of one who has been drowned, and who finds the return to life agony. Before her eyes, seen even through the mists of slumber, are the ruin and the shame of Italy. Opposite lies Night, so sorrowful, so utterly absorbed in darkness and the shade of death, that to shake off that everlasting lethargy seems impossible. Yet she is not dead. If we raise our voices, she too will stretch her limbs and, like her sister, shudder into sensibility with sighs. Only we must not wake her; for he who fashioned her, has told us that her sleep of stone is great good fortune. Both of these women are large and brawny, unlike the Fates of Pheidias in their muscular maturity. The burden of Michael Angelo's thought was too tremendous to be borne by virginal or graceful beings. He had to make women no less capable of suffering, no less world-wearied, than his country.
Standing before these statues, we do not cry. How beautiful! We murmur, How terrible, how grand! Yet, after long gazing, we find them gifted with beauty beyond grace. In each of them there is a palpitating thought, torn from the artist's soul and crystallised in marble. It has been said that architecture is petrified music. In the sacristy of S. Lorenzo we feel impelled to remember phrases of Beethoven. Each of these statues becomes for us a passion, fit for musical expression, but turned like Niobe to stone. They have the intellectual vagueness, the emotional certainty, that belong to the motives of a symphony. In their allegories, left without a key, sculpture has passed beyond her old domain of placid concrete form. The anguish of intolerable emotion, the quickening of the consciousness to a sense of suffering, the acceptance of the inevitable, the strife of the soul with destiny, the burden and the passion of mankind:—that is what they contain in their cold chisel-tortured marble. It is open to critics of the school of Lessing to object that here is the suicide of sculpture. It is easy to remark that those strained postures and writhen limbs may have perverted the taste of lesser craftsmen. Yet if Michael Angelo was called to carve Medicean statues after the sack of Rome and the fall of Florence—if he was obliged in sober sadness to make sculpture a fit language for his sorrow-laden heart—how could he have wrought more truthfully than thus? To imitate him without sharing his emotions or comprehending his thoughts, as the soulless artist of the decadence attempted, was without any doubt a grievous error. Surely also we may regret, not without reason, that in the evil days upon which he had fallen, the fair antique "Heiterkeit" and "Allgemeinheit" were beyond his reach.