The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti

by John Addington Symonds

IV

Of all previous painters, only Luca Signorelli deserves to be called the forerunner of Michelangelo, and his Chapel of S. Brizio in the Cathedral at Orvieto in some remarkable respects anticipates the Sistine. This eminent master was commissioned in 1499 to finish its decoration, a small portion of which had been begun by Fra Angelico. He completed the whole Chapel within the space of two years; so that the young Michelangelo, upon one of his journeys to or from Rome, may probably have seen the frescoes in their glory. Although no visit to Orvieto is recorded by his biographers, the fame of these masterpieces by a man whose work at Florence had already influenced his youthful genius must certainly have attracted him to a city which lay on the direct route from Tuscany to the Campagna.

The four walls of the Chapel of S. Brizio are covered with paintings setting forth events immediately preceding and following the day of judgment. A succession of panels, differing in size and shape, represent the preaching of Antichrist, the destruction of the world by fire, the resurrection of the body, the condemnation of the lost, the reception of saved souls into bliss, and the final states of heaven and hell. These main subjects occupy the upper spaces of each wall, while below them are placed portraits of poets, surrounded by rich and fanciful arabesques, including various episodes from Dante and antique mythology. Obeying the spirit of the fifteenth century, Signorelli did not aim at what may be termed an architectural effect in his decoration of this building. Each panel of the whole is treated separately, and with very unequal energy, the artist seeming to exert his strength chiefly in those details which made demands on his profound knowledge of the human form and his enthusiasm for the nude. The men and women of the Resurrection, the sublime angels of Heaven and of the Judgment, the discoloured and degraded fiends of Hell, the magnificently foreshortened clothed figures of the Fulminati, the portraits in the preaching of Antichrist, reveal Luca's specific quality as a painter, at once impressively imaginative and crudely realistic. There is something in his way of regarding the world and of reproducing its aspects which dominates our fancy, does violence to our sense of harmony and beauty, leaves us broken and bewildered, resentful and at the same moment enthralled. He is a power which has to be reckoned with; and the reason for speaking about him at length here is that, in this characteristic blending of intense vision with impassioned realistic effort after truth to fact, this fascination mingled with repulsion, he anticipated Michelangelo. Deep at the root of all Buonarroti's artistic qualities lie these contradictions. Studying Signorelli, we study a parallel psychological problem. The chief difference between the two masters lies in the command of aesthetic synthesis, the constructive sense of harmony, which belonged to the younger, but which might, we feel, have been granted in like measure to the elder, had Luca been born, as Michelangelo was, to complete the evolution of Italian figurative art, instead of marking one of its most important intermediate moments.

The decorative methods and instincts of the two men were closely similar. Both scorned any element of interest or beauty which was not strictly plastic—the human body supported by architecture or by rough indications of the world we live in. Signorelli invented an intricate design for arabesque pilasters, one on each side of the door leading from his chapel into the Cathedral. They are painted en grisaille, and are composed exclusively of nudes, mostly male, perched or grouped in a marvellous variety of attitudes upon an ascending series of slender-stemmed vases, which build up gigantic candelabra by their aggregation. The naked form is treated with audacious freedom. It appears to be elastic in the hands of the modeller. Some dead bodies carried on the backs of brawny porters are even awful by the contrast of their wet-clay limpness with the muscular energy of brutal life beneath them. Satyrs giving drink to one another, fauns whispering in the ears of stalwart women, centaurs trotting with corpses flung across their cruppers, combatants trampling in frenzy upon prostrate enemies, men sunk in self-abandonment to sloth or sorrow—such are the details of these incomparable columns, where our sense of the grotesque and vehement is immediately corrected by a perception of rare energy in the artist who could play thus with his plastic puppets.

We have here certainly the preludings to Michelangelo's serener, more monumental work in the Sistine Chapel. The leading motive is the same in both great masterpieces. It consists in the use of the simple body, if possible the nude body, for the expression of thought and emotion, the telling of a tale, the delectation of the eye by ornamental details. It consists also in the subordination of the female to the male nude as the symbolic unit of artistic utterance. Buonarroti is greater than Signorelli chiefly through that larger and truer perception of aesthetic unity which seems to be the final outcome of a long series of artistic effort. The arabesques, for instance, with which Luca wreathed his portraits of the poets, are monstrous, bizarre, in doubtful taste. Michelangelo, with a finer instinct for harmony, a deeper grasp on his own dominant ideal, excluded this element of quattrocento decoration from his scheme. Raffaello, with the graceful tact essential to the style, developed its crude rudiments into the choice forms of fanciful delightfulness which charm us in the Loggie. Signorelli loved violence. A large proportion of the circular pictures painted en grisaille on these walls represent scenes of massacre, assassination, torture, ruthless outrage. One of them, extremely spirited in design, shows a group of three executioners hurling men with millstones round their necks into a raging river from the bridge which spans it. The first victim flounders half merged in the flood; a second plunges head foremost through the air; the third stands bent upon the parapet, his shoulders pressed down by the varlets on each side, at the very point of being flung to death by drowning. In another of these pictures a man seated upon the ground is being tortured by the breaking of his teeth, while a furious fellow holds a club suspended over him, in act to shatter his thigh-bones. Naked soldiers wrestle in mad conflict, whirl staves above their heads, fling stones, displaying their coarse muscles with a kind of frenzy. Even the classical subjects suffer from extreme dramatic energy of treatment. Ceres, seeking her daughter through the plains of Sicily, dashes frantically on a car of dragons, her hair dishevelled to the winds, her cheeks gashed by her own crooked fingers. Eurydice struggles in the clutch of bestial devils; Pluto, like a mediaeval Satan, frowns above the scene of fiendish riot; the violin of Orpheus thrills faintly through the infernal tumult. Gazing on the spasms and convulsions of these grim subjects, we are inclined to credit a legend preserved at Orvieto to the effect that the painter depicted his own unfaithful mistress in the naked woman who is being borne on a demon's back through the air to hell.

No one who has studied Michelangelo impartially will deny that in this preference for the violent he came near to Signorelli. We feel it in his choice of attitude, the strain he puts upon the lines of plastic composition, the stormy energy of his conception and expression. It is what we call his terribilità. But here again that dominating sense of harmony, that instinct for the necessity of subordinating each artistic element to one strain of architectonic music, which I have already indicated as the leading note of difference between him and the painter of Cortona, intervened to elevate his terribleness into the region of sublimity. The violence of Michelangelo, unlike that of Luca, lay not so much in the choice of savage subjects (cruelty, ferocity, extreme physical and mental torment) as in a forceful, passionate, tempestuous way of handling all the themes he treated. The angels of the Judgment, sustaining the symbols of Christ's Passion, wrestle and bend their agitated limbs like athletes. Christ emerges from the sepulchre, not in victorious tranquillity, but with the clash and clangour of an irresistible energy set free. Even in the Crucifixion, one leg has been wrenched away from the nail which pierced its foot, and writhes round the knee of the other still left riven to the cross. The loves of Leda and the Swan, of Ixion and Juno, are spasms of voluptuous pain; the sleep of the Night is troubled with fantastic dreams, and the Dawn starts into consciousness with a shudder of prophetic anguish. There is not a hand, a torso, a simple nude, sketched by this extraordinary master, which does not vibrate with nervous tension, as though the fingers that grasped the pen were clenched and the eyes that viewed the model glowed beneath knit brows. Michelangelo, in fact, saw nothing, felt nothing, interpreted nothing, on exactly the same lines as any one who had preceded or who followed him. His imperious personality he stamped upon the smallest trifle of his work.

Luca's frescoes at Orvieto, when compared with Michelangelo's in the Sistine, mark the transition from the art of the fourteenth, through the art of the fifteenth, to that of the sixteenth century, with broad and trenchant force. They are what Marlowe's dramas were to Shakespeare's. They retain much of the mediaeval tradition both as regards form and sentiment. We feel this distinctly in the treatment of Dante, whose genius seems to have exerted at least as strong an influence over Signorelli's imagination as over that of Michelangelo. The episodes from the Divine Comedy are painted in a rude Gothic spirit. The spirits of Hell seem borrowed from grotesque bas-reliefs of the Pisan school. The draped, winged, and armed angels of Heaven are posed with a ceremonious research of suavity or grandeur. These and other features of his work carry us back to the period of Giotto and Niccolò Pisano. But the true force of the man, what made him a commanding master of the middle period, what distinguished him from all his fellows of the quattrocento, is the passionate delight he took in pure humanity—the nude, the body studied under all its aspects and with no repugnance for its coarseness—man in his crudity made the sole sufficient object for figurative art, anatomy regarded as the crowning and supreme end of scientific exploration. It is this in his work which carries us on toward the next age, and justifies our calling Luca "the morning-star of Michelangelo."

It would be wrong to ascribe too much to the immediate influence of the elder over the younger artist—at any rate in so far as the frescoes of the Chapel of S. Brizio may have determined the creation of the Sistine. Yet Vasari left on record that "even Michelangelo followed the manner of Signorelli, as any one may see." Undoubtedly, Buonarroti, while an inmate of Lorenzo de' Medici's palace at Florence, felt the power of Luca's Madonna with the naked figures in the background; the leading motive of which he transcended in his Doni Holy Family. Probably at an early period he had before his eyes the bold nudities, uncompromising designs, and awkward composition of Luca's so-called School of Pan. In like manner, we may be sure that during his first visit to Rome he was attracted by Signorelli's solemn fresco of Moses in the Sistine. These things were sufficient to establish a link of connection between the painter of Cortona and the Florentine sculptor. And when Michelangelo visited the Chapel of S. Brizio, after he had fixed and formed his style (exhibiting his innate force of genius in the Pietà, the Bacchus, the Cupid, the David, the statue of Julius, the Cartoon for the Battle of Pisa), that early bond of sympathy must have been renewed and enforced. They were men of a like temperament, and governed by kindred aesthetic instincts. Michelangelo brought to its perfection that system of working wholly through the human form which Signorelli initiated. He shared his violence, his terribilità, his almost brutal candour. In the fated evolution of Italian art, describing its parabola of vital energy, Michelangelo softened, sublimed, and harmonised his predecessor's qualities. He did this by abandoning Luca's naïvetés and crudities; exchanging his savage transcripts from coarse life for profoundly studied idealisations of form; subordinating his rough and casual design to schemes of balanced composition, based on architectural relations; penetrating the whole accomplished work, as he intended it should be, with a solemn and severe strain of unifying intellectual melody.

Viewed in this light, the vault of the Sistine and the later fresco of the Last Judgment may be taken as the final outcome of all previous Italian art upon a single line of creative energy, and that line the one anticipated by Luca Signorelli. In like manner, the Stanze and Loggie of the Vatican were the final outcome of the same process upon another line, suggested by Perugino and Fra Bartolommeo.

Michelangelo adapted to his own uses and bent to his own genius motives originated by the Pisani, Giotto, Giacopo della Quercia, Donatello, Masaccio, while working in the spirit of Signorelli. He fused and recast the antecedent materials of design in sculpture and painting, producing a quintessence of art beyond which it was impossible to advance without breaking the rhythm, so intensely strung, and without contradicting too violently the parent inspiration. He strained the chord of rhythm to its very utmost, and made incalculable demands upon the religious inspiration of its predecessors. His mighty talent was equal to the task of transfusion and remodelling which the exhibition of the supreme style demanded. But after him there remained nothing for successors except mechanical imitation, soulless rehandling of themes he had exhausted by reducing them to his imperious imagination in a crucible of fiery intensity.