Michael Angelo left the tombs of the Medici unfinished; nor, in spite of Duke Cosimo's earnest entreaties, would he afterwards return to Florence to complete them. Lorenzo's features are but rough-hewn; so is the face of Night. Day seems struggling into shape beneath his mask of rock, and Twilight shows everywhere the tooth-dint of the chisel. To leave unfinished was the fate of Michael Angelo—partly too, perhaps, his preference; for he was easily deterred from work. Many of his marbles are only just begun. The two medallion "Madonnas," the "Madonna and Child" in S. Lorenzo, the "Head of Brutus," the "Bound Captives," and the "Pietà" in the Duomo of Florence, are instances of masterpieces in the rough. He loved to fancy that the form dwelt within the stone, and that the chisel disencumbered it of superfluity. Therefore, to his eye, foreseeing what the shape would be when the rude envelope was chipped away, the marble mask may have taken the appearance of a veil or mantle. He may have found some fascination in the incompleteness that argued want of will but not of art, and a rough-hewn Madonna may have been to him what a Dryad still enclosed within a gnarled oak was to a Greek poet's fancy. We are not, however, justified in therefore assuming, as a recent critic has suggested, that Michael Angelo sought to realise a certain preconceived effect by want of finish. There is enough in the distracted circumstances of his life and in his temper, at once passionate and downcast, to account for fragmentary and imperfect performance; nor must it be forgotten that the manual labour of the sculptor in the sixteenth century was by no means so light as it is now. A decisive argument against this theory is that Buonarroti's three most celebrated statues—the "Pietà" in S. Peter's, the "Moses" and the "Dawn"—are executed with the highest polish it is possible for stone to take.[[324]] That he always aimed at this high finish, but often fell below it through discontent and ennui and the importunity of patrons, we have the best reason to believe.
Michael Angelo had now reached his fifty-ninth year. Lionardo and Raphael had already passed away, and were remembered as the giants of a bygone age of gold. Correggio was in his last year. Andrea del Sarto was dead. Nowhere except at Venice did Italian art still flourish; and the mundane style of Titian was not to the sculptor's taste. He had overlived the greatness of his country, and saw Italy in ruins. Yet he was destined to survive another thirty years, another lifetime of Masaccio or Raphael, and to witness still worse days. When we call Michael Angelo the interpreter of the burden and the pain of the Renaissance, we must remember this long weary old age, during which in solitude and silence he watched the extinction of Florence, the institution of the Inquisition, and the abasement of the Italian spirit beneath the tyranny of Spain. His sonnets, written chiefly in this latter period of life, turn often on the thought of death. His love of art yields to religious hope and fear, and he bemoans a youth and manhood spent in vanity. Once when he injured his leg by a fall from the scaffolding in the Sistine Chapel, he refused assistance, shut himself up at home, and lay waiting for deliverance in death. His life was only saved by the forcible interference of friends.
In 1534 a new Eurystheus arose for our Hercules. The Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, a fox by nature and infamous through his indulgence for a vicious bastard, was made Pope under the name of Paul III.[[325]] Michael Angelo had shed lustre on the reigns of three Popes, his predecessors. For thirty years the Farnese had watched him with greedy eyes. After Julius, Leo, and Clement, the time was now come for the heroic craftsman to serve Paul. The Pope found him at work in his bottega on the tomb of Julius; for the "tragedy of the mausoleum" still dragged on. The statue of Moses was finished. "That," said Paul, "is enough for one Pope. Give me your contract with the Duke of Urbino; I will tear it. Have I waited all these years; and now that I am Pope at last, shall I not have you for myself? I want you in the Sistine Chapel." Accordingly Michael Angelo, who had already made cartoons for the "Last Judgment" in the life of Clement, once more laid aside the chisel and took up the brush. For eight years, between 1534 and 1542, he laboured at the fresco above the high altar of the chapel, devoting his terrible genius to a subject worthy of the times in which he lived. Since he had first listened while a youth to the prophecies of Savonarola, the woes announced in that apocalypse had all come true. Italy had been scourged, Rome sacked, the Church chastised. And yet the world had not grown wiser; vice was on the increase, virtue grew more rare.[[326]] It was impossible after the experience of the immediate past and within view of the present and the future, to conceive of God as other than an angry judge, vindictive and implacable.
The "Last Judgment" has long been the most celebrated of Michael Angelo's paintings; partly no doubt because it was executed in the plenitude of his fame, with the eyes of all Italy upon him; partly because its size arouses vulgar wonder, and its theme strikes terror into all who gaze on it. Yet it is neither so strong nor so beautiful as the vault-paintings of the Sistine. The freshness of the genius that created Eve and Adam, unrivalled in their bloom of primal youth, has passed away. Austerity and gloom have taken possession of the painter. His style has hardened into mannerism, and the display of barren science in difficult posturing and strained anatomy has become wilful. Still, whether we regard this fresco as closing the long series of "Last Judgments" to be studied on Italian church-walls from Giotto downwards; or whether we confine our attention, as contemporaries seem to have done, to the skill of its foreshortenings and groupings;[[327]] or whether we analyse the dramatic energy wherewith tremendous passions are expressed, its triumph is in either case decided. The whole wall swarms with ascending and descending, poised and hovering, shapes—men and women rising from the grave before the judge, taking their stations among the saved, or sinking with unutterable anguish to the place of doom—a multitude that no man can number, surging to and fro in dim tempestuous air. In the centre at the top, Christ is rising from His throne with the gesture of an angry Hercules, hurling ruin on the guilty. He is such as the sins of Italy have made Him. Squadrons of angels, bearing the emblems of His passion, whirl around Him like grey thunder-clouds, and all the saints lean forward from their vantage ground to curse and threaten. At the very bottom bestial features take the place of human lineaments, and the terror of judgment has become the torment of damnation. Such is the general scope of this picture. Of all its merits, none is greater than the delineation of uncertainty and gradual awakening to life. The middle region between vigilance and slumber, reality and dream, Michael Angelo ruled as his own realm; and a painting of the "Last Judgment" enabled him to deal with this metaichmios skotos—this darkness in the interval of crossing spears—under its most solemn aspect.
When the fresco was uncovered, there arose a general murmur of disapprobation that the figures were all nude. As society became more vicious, it grew nice. Messer Biagio, the Pope's master of the ceremonies, remarked that such things were more fit for stews and taverns than a chapel. The angry painter placed his portrait in Hell with a mark of infamy that cast too lurid a light upon this prudish speech. When Biagio complained, Paul wittily answered that, had it been Purgatory, he might have helped him, but in Hell is no redemption. Even the foul-mouthed and foul-hearted Aretino wrote from Venice to the same effect—a letter astounding for its impudence.[[328]] Michael Angelo made no defence. Perhaps he reflected that the souls of the Pope himself and Messer Biagio and Messer Pietro Aretino would go forth one day naked to appear before the judge, with the deformities of sin upon them, as in Plato's "Gorgias." He refused, however, to give clothes to his men and women. Daniel da Volterra, who was afterwards employed to do this, got the name of breeches-maker.
We are hardly able to appreciate the "Last Judgment;" it has been so smirched and blackened by the smoke and dust of centuries. And this is true of the whole Sistine Chapel.[[329]] Yet it is here that the genius of Michael Angelo in all its terribleness must still be studied. In order to characterise the impression produced by even the less awful of these frescoes on a sympathetic student, I lay my pen aside and beg the reader to weigh what Henri Beyle, the versatile and brilliant critic, pencilled in the gallery of the Sistine Chapel on January 13, 1807:[[330]] "Greek sculpture was unwilling to reproduce the terrible in any shape; the Greeks had enough real troubles of their own. Therefore, in the realm of art, nothing can be compared with the figure of the Eternal drawing forth the first man from nonentity. The pose, the drawing, the drapery, all is striking: the soul is agitated by sensations that are not usually communicated through the eyes. When in our disastrous retreat from Russia, it chanced that we were suddenly awakened in the middle of the dark night by an obstinate cannonading, which at each moment seemed to gain in nearness, then all the forces of a man's nature gathered close around his heart; he felt himself in the presence of fate, and, having no attention left for things of vulgar interest, he made himself ready to dispute his life with destiny. The sight of Michael Angelo's pictures has brought back to my consciousness that almost forgotten sensation. Great souls enjoy their own greatness: the rest of the world is seized with fear, and goes mad."
After the painting of the "Last Judgment," one more great labour was reserved for Michael Angelo.[[331]] By a brief of September, 1535, Paul III. had made him the chief architect as well as sculptor and painter of the Holy See. He was now called upon to superintend the building of S. Peter's, and to this task, undertaken for the repose of his soul without emolument, he devoted the last years of his life. The dome of S. Peter's, as seen from Tivoli or the Alban hills, like a cloud upon the Campagna, is Buonarroti's; but he has no share in the façade that screens it from the piazza. It lies beyond the scope of this chapter to relate once more the history of the vicissitudes through which S. Peter's went between the days of Alberti and Bernini.[[332]] I can but refer to Michael Angelo's letter addressed to Bartolommeo Ammanati, valuable both as setting forth his views about the structure, and as rendering the fullest and most glorious meed of praise to his old enemy Bramante.[[333]] All ancient jealousies, even had they ever stirred the heart of Michael Angelo, had long been set at rest by time and death. The one wish of his soul was to set a worthy diadem upon the mother-church of Christianity, repairing by the majesty of art what Rome had suffered at the hands of Germany and Spain, and inaugurating by this visible sign of sovereignty the new age of Catholicity renascent and triumphant.
To the last period of Buonarroti's life (a space of twenty-two years between 1542 and 1564) we owe some of his most beautiful drawings—sketches for pictures of the Crucifixion made for Vittoria Colonna, and a few mythological designs, like the "Rape of Ganymede," composed for Tommaso Cavalieri. His thoughts meanwhile were turned more and more, as time advanced, to piety; and many of his sonnets breathe an almost ascetic spirit of religion.[[334]] We see in them the old man regretting the years he had spent on art, deploring his enthusiasm for earthly beauty, and seeking comfort in the cross alone.
Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest
My soul, that turns to His great love on high,