“If friends of yours, then are they friends of mine.
Pardon me, gentlemen. But when I entered
I saw but the Marchesa.”
Vittoria tells the master that the Pope has granted her permission to build a convent, and Michael Angelo replies:—
“Ah, to build, to build!
That is the noblest art of all the arts.
Painting and sculpture are but images,
Are merely shadows cast by outward things
On stone or canvas, having in themselves
No separate existence. Architecture,
Existing in itself, and not in seeming
A something it is not, surpasses them
As substance shadow. . . .
. . . Yet he beholds
Far nobler works who looks upon the ruins
Of temples in the Forum here in Rome.
If God should give me power in my old age
To build for Him a temple half as grand
As those were in their glory, I should count
My age more excellent than youth itself,
And all that I have hitherto accomplished
As only vanity.”
To which Vittoria responds:—
“I understand you.
Art is the gift of God, and must be used
Unto His glory. That in art is highest
Which aims at this.”
The poet, with his characteristically delicate divination, has entered into the inner spirit of these two immortal friends.
Walter Pater, writing of Michael Angelo, truly says:—
“Michael Angelo is always pressing forward from the outward beauty—il bel del fuor che agli occhi piace—to apprehend the unseen beauty; trascenda nella forma universale—that abstract form of beauty about which the Platonists reason. And this gives the impression in him of something flitting and unfixed, of the houseless and complaining spirit, almost clairvoyant through the frail and yielding flesh.”
Again we find Pater saying:—