“Les images peints du corps humain, dans les figures où domine par trop le savoir anatomique, en révèlant trop clairement à l’homme les secrets de sa structure, lui en découvrent aussi par trop ce qu’on pourrait appeler le point de vue matériel, ou, si l’on veut, animal.”
This is the fault of Michal-Angelo; yet I have sometimes thought that his very materialism, so grand, and so peculiar in character, may have arisen out of his profound religious feeling, his stern morality, his lofty conceptions of our mortal, as well as immortal destinies. He appears to have beheld the human form only in a pure and sublime point of view; not as the animal man, but as the habitation, fearfully and wondrously constructed, for the spirit of man,—
| “The outward shape, And unpolluted temple of the mind.” |
This is the reason that Michal-Angelo’s materialism affects us so differently from that of Rubens. In the first, the predominance of form attains almost a moral sublimity. In the latter, the predominance of flesh and blood is debased into physical grossness. Michal-Angelo believed in the resurrection of THE BODY, emphatically; and in his Last Judgment the dead rise like Titans, strong to contend and mighty to suffer. It is the apotheosis of form. In Ruben’s picture of the same subject (at Munich) the bodily presence of resuscitated life is revolting, reminding us of the text of St. Paul—“Flesh and blood shall not inherit the kingdom of God.” Both pictures are æsthetically false, but artistically miracles, and should thus be considered and appreciated.
I have never looked on those awful figures in the Medici Chapel without thinking what stupendous intellects must inhabit such stupendous forms—terrible in their quietude; but they are supernatural, rather than divine.
| “Heidnische Ruhe und Christliche Milde, sie bleiben Dir fremde; Alt-testamentisch bist Du, Zürnender, wie ist Dein Gott!” |
John Edward Taylor, in his profound and beautiful essay “Michael-Angelo, a Poet,” says truly that “Dante worshipped the philosophy of religion, and Michael-Angelo adored the philosophy of art.” The religion of the one and the art of the other were evolved in a strange combination of mysticism, materialism, and moral grandeur. The two men were congenial in character and in genius.
