Sonnets and madrigals of Michelangelo Buonarroti

by Michelangelo Buonarroti

With this group can be certainly classed only one sonnet of a different character (No. XX). This was penned on a letter of December, 1507, addressed to Michelangelo at Bologna, where he was then leading a miserable life, engaged on the statue of Julius; this work, on which he wasted three years, was finally melted into a cannon, in order that the enemies of the pope might fire at the latter by means of his own likeness. The verse is a spontaneous and passionate outburst of admiration for a beautiful girl. With this piece might be associated two or three undated compositions of similar nature, which serve to show the error of the supposition that the artist was insensible to feminine attractions. It may be affirmed that the reverse was the case, and that the thoughtful temper of the extant poetry[x] is due solely to the sobering influences of time.

The verse which might have exhibited the transition from early to later manhood has not been preserved; during twenty years survive no compositions of which the date is assured. Subsequently to that time, assistance is derived from the fortunate accident that several of the sonnets were written on dated letters. It is true that this indication is far from furnishing secure testimony. Even at the present day, when paper is so easily obtained, I have known a writer of rhyme who was in the habit of using the backs of old letters. That Michelangelo sometimes did the same thing appears to be demonstrated by the existence of a sonnet (No. L), which, though written on the back of a letter of 1532, professes to be composed in extreme old age. The evidence, therefore, is of value only when supported by the character of the piece. Nor is internal testimony entirely to be depended on. It is to be remembered that all makers of verse remodel former work, complete imperfect essays, put into form reminiscences which essentially belong to an earlier stage of feeling. Attempts to classify the productions must follow a subjective[xi] opinion, very apt to err. Nevertheless something may be accomplished in this direction.

The nephew states that two sonnets (Nos. XXIV and XXV) were found on a leaf containing a memorandum of 1529. Extant is another sonnet, certainly written on a page having an entry of that year. These three sonnets seem to breathe the same atmosphere; the emotion is sustained by a direct impulse, the verse is apparently inspired by a sentiment too lyric to be unhappy; the employment of theologic metaphor and Platonic fancy is still subsidiary to emotion. Allowing for the imaginative indulgence of feeling common to lyrical poets, it seems nevertheless possible to perceive a basis of personal experience. With these pieces may be associated a number of sonnets and madrigals, among the most beautiful productions of the author, which may conjecturally be assigned to the period before his permanent Roman residence, or at any rate may be supposed to represent the impressions of such time. As compared with the work which may with confidence be dated as produced within the ensuing decade, these correspond to an earlier manner. Wanting the[xii] direct and impetuous passion of the few youthful verses, they nevertheless show a spiritual conception of sexual attachment, not yet resolved into religious aspiration. They suggest that the inflammable and gentle-hearted artist passed through a series of inclinations, none of which terminated in a permanent alliance.

At the end of 1534, near his sixtieth year, Michelangelo came to live in Rome; and to that city, three years later, Vittoria Colonna came for a long visit, in the twelfth year of her widowhood, and the forty-seventh of her life. An acquaintance may have been established in the course of previous years, when the lady visited Rome, or possibly even at a prior time. Whatever was the date of the first encounter, allusions in the poems seem to imply that the meeting produced a deep impression on the mind of the artist (Madrigals LIV, LXXII). At all events, the relations of the two grew into a friendship, hardly to be termed intimacy. Only a very few of the poems are known to have been addressed to Vittoria; but the veiled references of several pieces, and the tone of the poetry, appear to justify the opinion that admiration for this[xiii] friend was the important influence that affected the character of the verse written during the ten years before her death in 1547.

In Rome, the Marchioness of Pescara made her home in the convent of San Silvestro, where she reigned as queen of an intelligent circle. A charming and welcome glimpse of this society is furnished by Francis of Holland, who professes to relate three conversations, held on as many Sunday mornings, in which the sculptor took a chief part. It is not difficult to imagine the calmness and coolness of the place, the serious and placid beauty of the celebrated lady, the figure of Michelangelo, the innocent devices by which the sympathetic Vittoria contrived to educe his vehement outbursts on artistic questions, the devout listening of the stranger, hanging on the chief artist of Italy with the attention of a reporter who means to put all into a book. So far as the conversation represents a symposium on matters of art, no doubt the account is to be taken as in good measure the method adopted by Francis to put before the world his own ideas; but among the remarks are many so consonant to the character of the sculptor that it is impossible to doubt the essential correctness of the narration.[xiv] In the language of Michelangelo speaks haughty reserve, the consciousness of superiority, accompanied by a sense that his most precious qualities exceeded the comprehension of a world which rendered credit less to the real man than to the fashionable artist, and whose attention expressed not so much gratitude for illumination as desire of becoming associated with what society held in respect.

All students who have had occasion to concern themselves with the biography of Vittoria Colonna have become impressed with the excellence of her character. After the loss of a husband to whom she had been united in extreme youth, she declared her intention of forming no new ties; and it must have been an exceptional purity which the censorious and corrupt world could associate with no breath of scandal. She had been accounted the most beautiful woman in Italy, of that golden-haired and broadbrowed type recognized as favorite; but her intelligence, rather than personal attractions or social position, had made her seclusion in Ischia a place of pilgrimage for men of letters. The attraction she possessed for the lonely, reserved, and proud artist is a testimony that to her belonged especially the inexplicable attraction[xv] of a sympathetic nature. Such disposition is a sufficient explanation of her devotion to the memory of a husband who appears to have been essentially a condottiere of the time, a soldier who made personal interest his chief consideration. She may also be credited with a sound judgment and pure ethical purpose in the practical affairs of life.

Yet to allow that Vittoria Colonna was good and lovable does not make it necessary to worship her as a tenth muse, according to the partial judgment of her contemporaries. Unfortunately, time has spared her verses, respecting which may be repeated advice bestowed by Mrs. Browning in regard to another female author, by no means to indulge in the perusal, inasmuch as they seem to disprove the presence of a talent which she nevertheless probably possessed. In the case commented on by the modern writer, the genius absent in the books is revealed in the correspondence; but epistolary composition was not the forte of the Marchioness of Pescara, whose communications, regarded as pabulum for a hungry heart, are as jejune as can be conceived. Neither is she to be credited with originality in her attitude toward political or religious problems. It does[xvi] not appear that she quarreled with the principles of the polite banditti of her own family; nor was she able to attain even an elementary notion of Italian patriotism. She has been set down as a reformer in religion; but such tendency went no further than a sincere affection toward the person of the founder of Christianity, a piety in no way inconsistent with ritual devotion. When it came to the dividing of the ways, she had no thought other than to follow the beaten track. Nor in the world of ideas did she possess greater independence; with all her esteem for Michelangelo as artist and man, it is not likely that she was able to estimate the sources of his supremacy, any more than to foresee a time when her name would have interest for the world only as associated with that of the sculptor. It may be believed that a mind capable of taking pleasure in the commonplaces of her rhyme could never have appreciated the essential merits of the mystic verse which she inspired. Here, also, Michelangelo was destined to remain uncomprehended. Vittoria presented him with her own poems, neatly written out and bound, but never seems to have taken the pains to gather those of the artist. Intellectually, therefore,[xvii] her limitations were many; but she was endowed with qualities more attractive, a gentle sympathy, a noble kindness, a person and expression representative of that ideal excellence which the sculptor could appreciate only as embodied in human form.

While earlier writers of biography were inclined to exaggerate the effect on Michelangelo of his acquaintance with Vittoria Colonna, later authors, as I think, have fallen into the opposite error. To Vittoria, indeed, whose thoughts, when not taken up with devotional exercises, were occupied with the affairs of her family or of the church, such amity could occupy only a subordinate place. One of her letters to Michelangelo may be taken as a polite repression of excessive interest. But on the other side, the poetry of the artist is a clear, almost a painful expression of his own state of mind. We are shown, in the mirror of his own verse, a sensitive, self-contained, solitary nature, aware that he is out of place in a world for which he lacks essential graces and in which he is respected for his least worthy qualities. That under such circumstances he should value the kindness of the only woman with whom he could intelligently converse, that he should[xviii] feel the attraction of eyes from which seemed to descend starry influences, that he should suffer from the sense of inadequacy and transitoriness, from the difference of fortune and the lapse of years, the contrasts of imagination and possibility, was only, as he would have said, to manifest attribute in act, to suffer the natural pain incident to sensitive character.

In the most striking of the compositions devoted to the memory of Vittoria Colonna Michelangelo speaks of her influence as the tool by which his own genius had been formed, and which, when removed to heaven and made identical with the divine archetype, left no earthly substitute. That the language was no more than an expression of the fact is shown by the alteration which from this time appears in his verse. Poetry passes over into piety; artistic color is exchanged for the monotone of religious emotion. One may be glad that the old age, of whose trials he has left a terrible picture, found its support and alleviation; yet the later poems, distressing in their solemnity, pietistic in their self-depreciation, exhibit a declining poetic faculty, and in this respect are not to be ranked with their forerunners.

The verse of Michelangelo has been lauded[xix] as philosophic. The epithet is out of place; if by philosophy be meant metaphysics, there is no such thing as philosophic poetry. Poetry owes no debt to metaphysical speculation, can coexist as well with one type of doctrine as with another. The obligation is on the other side; philosophy is petrified poetry, which no infusion of adventitious sap can relegate to vital function. Like all other developments of life, philosophic theories can be employed by poets only for colors of the palette. If Platonic conceptions be deemed exceptional, it is because such opinions are themselves poetry more than metaphysics, and constitute rather metaphorical expressions for certain human sentiments than any system of ratiocination. For the purposes of Michelangelo, these doctrines supplied an adequate means of presentation, quite independent of the abstract verity of the principles considered as the product of reasoning.