Beacon Lights of History, Volume 3 part 2: Renaissance and Reformation

by John Lord

Michael Angelo not only created, but he reproduced. He reproduced the glories of Grecian and Roman art. He restored the old civilization in his pictures, his statues, and his grand edifices. He revived a taste for what is imperishable in antiquity. As such he is justly regarded as an immortal benefactor; for it is art which gives to nations culture, refinement, and the enjoyment of the beautiful. Art diverts the mind from low and commonplace pursuits, exalts the imagination, and makes its votary indifferent to the evils of life. It raises the soul into regions of peace and bliss.

But art is most ennobling when it is inspired by lofty and consecrated sentiments,—like those of religion, patriotism, and love. Now ancient art was consecrated to Paganism. Of course there were noble exceptions; but as a general rule temples were erected in honor of heathen deities. Statues represented mere physical strength and beauty and grace. Pictures portrayed the charms of an unsanctified humanity. Hence ancient art did very little to arrest human degeneracy; facilitated rather than retarded the ruin of states and empires, since it did not stimulate the virtues on which the strength of man is based: it did not check those depraved tastes and habits which are based on egotism.

Now the restorers of ancient art cannot be said to have contributed to the moral elevation of the new races, unless they avoided the sensualism of Greece and Rome, and appealed purely to those eternal ideas which the human mind, even under Pagan influences, sometimes conceived, and which do not conflict with Christianity itself.

In considering the life and labors of Michael Angelo, then, we are to examine whether, in the classical glories of antiquity which he substituted for the Gothic and Mediaeval, he advanced civilization in the noblest sense; and moreover, whether he carried art to a higher degree than was ever attained by the Greeks and Romans, and hence became a benefactor of the world.

In considering these points I shall not attempt a minute criticism of his works. I can only seize on the great outlines, the salient points of those productions which have given him immortality. No lecture can be exhaustive. If it only prove suggestive, it has reached its end.

Michael Angelo stands out in history in the three aspects of sculptor, painter, and architect; and that too in a country devoted to art, and in an age when Italy won all her modern glories, arising from the matchless works which that age produced. Indeed, those works will probably never be surpassed, since all the energies of a great nation were concentrated upon their production, even as our own age confines itself chiefly to mechanical inventions and scientific research and speculation. What railroads and telegraphs and spindles and chemical tests and compounds are to us; what philosophy was to the Greeks; what government and jurisprudence were to the Romans; what cathedrals and metaphysical subtilties were to the Middle Ages; what theological inquiries were to the divines of the seventeenth century; what social urbanities and refinements were to the French in the eighteenth century,—the fine arts were to the Italians in the sixteenth century: a fact too commonplace to dwell upon, and which will be conceded when we bear in mind that no age has been distinguished for everything, and that nations can try satisfactorily but one experiment at a time, and are not likely to repeat it with the same enthusiasm. As the mind is unbounded in its capacities, and our world affords inexhaustible fields of enterprise, the progress of the race is to be seen in the new developments which successively appear, but in which only a certain limit has thus far been reached. Not in absolute perfection in any particular sphere is this progress seen, but rather in the variety of the experiments. It may be doubted whether any Grecian edifice will ever surpass the Parthenon in beauty of proportion or fitness of ornament; or any nude statue show grace of form more impressive than the Venus de Milo or the Apollo Belvedere; or any system of jurisprudence be more completely codified than that systematized by Justinian; or any Gothic church rival the lofty expression of Cologne cathedral; or any painting surpass the holy serenity and ethereal love depicted in Raphael's madonnas; or any court witness such a brilliant assemblage of wits and beauties as met at Versailles to render homage to Louis XIV.; or any theological discussion excite such a national interest as when Luther confronted Doctor Eck in the great hall of the Electoral Palace at Leipsic; or any theatrical excitement such as was produced on cultivated intellects when Garrick and Siddons represented the sublime conceptions of the myriad-minded Shakspeare. These glories may reappear, but never will they shine as they did before. No more Olympian games, no more Roman triumphs, no more Dodona oracles, no more Flavian amphitheatres, no more Mediaeval cathedrals, no more councils of Nice or Trent, no more spectacles of kings holding the stirrups of popes, no more Fields of the Cloth of Gold, no more reigns of court mistresses in such palaces as Versailles and Fontainbleau,—ah! I wish I could add, no more such battlefields as Marengo and Waterloo,—only copies and imitations of these, and without the older charm. The world is moving on and perpetually changing, nor can we tell what new vanity will next arise,—vanity or glory, according to our varying notions of the dignity and destiny of man. We may predict that it will not be any mechanical improvement, for ere long the limit will be reached,—and it will be reached when the great mass cannot find work to do, for the everlasting destiny of man is toil and labor. But it will be some sublime wonders of which we cannot now conceive, and which in time will pass away for other wonders and novelties, until the great circle is completed; and all human experiments shall verify the moral wisdom of the eternal revelation. Then all that man has done, all that man can do, in his own boastful thought, will be seen, in the light of the celestial verities, to be indeed a vanity and a failure, not of human ingenuity and power, but to realize the happiness which is only promised as the result of supernatural, not mortal, strength, yet which the soul in its restless aspirations never ceases its efforts to secure,—everlasting Babel-building to reach the unattainable on earth.

Now the revival of art in Italy was one of the great movements in the series of human development. It peculiarly characterized the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was an age of artistic wonders, of great creations.

Italy, especially, was glorious when Michael Angelo was born, 1474; when the rest of Europe was comparatively rude, and when no great works in art, in poetry, in history, or philosophy had yet appeared. He was descended from an illustrious family, and was destined to one of the learned professions; but he could not give up his mind to anything but drawing,—as annoying to his father as Galileo's experiments were to his parent; as unmeaning to him as Gibbon's History was to George III.,—"Scribble, scribble, scribble; Mr. Gibbon, I perceive, sir, you are always a- scribbling." No perception of a new power, no sympathy with the abandonment to a specialty not indorsed by fashions and traditions, but without which abandonment genius cannot easily be developed. At last the father yielded, and the son was apprenticed to a painter—a degradation in the eyes of Mediaeval aristocracy.

The celebrated Lorenzo de' Medici was then in the height of power and fame in Florence, adored by Roscoe as the patron of artists and poets, although he subverted the liberties of his country. This over-lauded prince, heir of the fortunes of a great family of merchants, wishing to establish a school for sculpture, filled a garden with statues, and freely admitted to it young scholars in art. Michael Angelo was one of the most frequent and enthusiastic visitors to this garden, where in due time he attracted the attention of the magnificent Lord of Florence by a head chiselled so remarkably that he became an inmate of the palace, sat at the table of Lorenzo, and at last was regularly adopted as one of the Prince's family, with every facility for prosecuting his studies. Before he was eighteen the youth had sculptured the battle of Hercules with the Centaurs, which he would never part with, and which still remains in his family; so well done that he himself, at the age of eighty, regretted that he had not given up his whole life to sculpture.

It was then as a sculptor that Michael Angelo first appears to the historical student,—about the year 1492, when Columbus was crossing the great unknown ocean to realize his belief in a western passage to India. Thus commercial enterprise began with the revival of art, and was destined never to be separated in its alliance with it, since commerce brings wealth, and wealth seeks to ornament the palaces and gardens which it has created or purchased. The sculptor's art was not born until piety had already edifices in which to worship God, or pride the monuments in which it sought the glories of a name; but it made rapid progress as wealth increased and taste became refined; as the need was felt for ornaments and symbols to adorn naked walls and empty spaces, especially statuary, grouped or single, of men or animals,—a marble history to interpret or reproduce consecrated associations. Churches might do without them; the glass stained in every color of the rainbow, the altar shining with gold and silver and precious stones, the pillars multiplied and diversified, and rich in foliated circles, mullions, mouldings, groins, and bosses, and bearing aloft the arched and ponderous roof,—one scene of dazzling magnificence,—these could do without them; but the palaces and halls and houses of the rich required the image of man,—and of man not emaciated and worn and monstrous, but of man as he appeared to the classical Greeks, in the perfection of form and physical beauty. So the artists who arose with the revival of commerce, with the multiplication of human wants and the study of antiquity, sought to restore the buried statues with the long-neglected literature and laws. It was in sculptured marbles that enthusiasm was most marked. These were found in abundance in various parts of Italy whenever the vast debris of the ancient magnificence was removed, and were universally admired and prized by popes, cardinals, and princes, and formed the nucleus of great museums.