No one has so deeply felt or so truly expressed this as the Florentine sculptor who, amidst a world of love and laughter, lived in wilful sadness, learning how man from his death-grapple in the darkness can emerge victor and how the soul, by her passion of pain, is perfected. He was interested in but one thing, man, because only man is tragic. He would paint no portraits—or but one or two—because no living person came up to his ideal. All his figures are strong because strength only is able to suffer as to do. Nine-tenths of them are men rather than women, because the beauty of the male is strength, whereas the strength of the woman is beauty. Only in a few of his early figures does he attain calm,—in a Madonna, in David or in the Men Bathing, all of them, including the Madonna with its figures of men in the background, intended to exhibit the perfection of athletic power.
But save in these early works almost all that Michelangelo set his hand to is fairly convulsed with passion. Leda embraces the swan at the supreme moment of conception; Eve, drawn from the side of Adam, is weeping bitterly; Adam is rousing himself to the hard struggle that is life; the slaves are writhing under their bonds as though they were of hot iron; Moses is starting from his seat for some tremendous conflict. Every figure lavished on the decoration of the Sistine Chapel reaches, when it does not surpass, the limit of human physical development. Sibyl and Prophet, {682} Adam and Eve, man and God are all hurled together with a riot of strength and "terribilità."
The almost supernatural terror of Michelangelo's genius found fullest scope in illustrating the idea of predestination that obsessed the Reformers and haunted many a Catholic of that time also. In the Last Judgment [Sidenote: The Last Judgment] the artist laid the whole emphasis upon the damnation of the wicked, hurled down to external torment by the sentence, "Depart from me, ye cursed," uttered by Christ, not the meek and gentle Man of Sorrows, but the rex tremendae majestatis, a Hercules, before whom Mary trembles and the whole of creation shudders. A quieter, but no less tragic work of art is the sculpture on the tomb of Lorenzo de' Medici at Florence. The hero himself sits above, and both he and the four allegorical figures, two men and two women, commonly called Day and Night, Morning and Evening, are lost in pensive, eternal sorrow. So they brood for ever as if seeking in sleep and dumb forgetfulness some anodyne for the sense of their country's and their race's doom.
But it is not all pain. Titian has not made joy nor Raphael love nor Leonardo wonder so beautiful as Michelangelo has made tragedy. His sonnets breathe a worship of beauty as the symbol of divine love. He is like the great, dark angel of Victor Hugo:
Et l'ange devint noir, et dit:—Je suis l'amour.
Mais son front sombre était plus charmant que le jour,
Et je voyais, dans l'ombre où brillaient ses prunelles,
Les astres à travers les plumes de ses ailes.
The contrast between the fertility of Italian artistic genius and the comparative poverty of Northern Europe is most apparent when the northern painters copied most closely their transalpine brothers. The taste for Italian pictures was spread abroad by the many {683} travelers, and the demand created a supply of copies and imitations. Antwerp became a regular factory of such works, whereas the Germans, Cranach, Dürer and Holbein were profoundly affected by Italy. Of them all Holbein [Sidenote: Hans Holbein the Younger, 1497-1543] was the only one who could really compete with the Italians on their own ground, and that only in one branch of art, portraiture. His studies of Henry VIII, and of his wives and courtiers, combine truth to nature with a high sense of beauty. His paintings of More and Erasmus express with perfect mastery the finest qualities of two rare natures.
[Sidenote: Albert Dürer, 1471-1528]
Dürer seldom succeeded in painting pictures of the most beautiful type, but a few of his portraits can be compared with nothing save Leonardo's studies. The whole of a man's life and character are set forth in his two drawings of his friend Pirckheimer, a strange blend of the philosopher and the hog. And the tragedy is that the lower nature won; in 1504 there is but a potential coarseness in the strong face; in 1522 the swine had conquered and but the wreck of the scholar is visible.
As an engineer and as a student of aesthetics Dürer was also the northern Leonardo. His theory of art reveals the secret of his genius: "What beauty is, I know not; but for myself I take that which at all times has been considered beautiful by the greater number." This is making art democratic, bringing it down from the small coterie of palace and mansion to the home of the people at large. Dürer and his compeers were enabled to do this by exploiting the new German arts of etching and wood-engraving. Pictures were multiplied by hundreds and thousands and sold, not to one patron but to the many. Characteristically they reflected the life and thoughts of the common people in every homely phase. Pious subjects were numerous, because religion bulked large in the common thought, {684} but it was the religion of the popular preacher, translating the life of Christ into contemporary German life, wholesome and a little vulgar. The people love marvels and they are very literal; what could be more marvellous and more literal than Dürer's illustrations of the Apocalypse in which the Dragon with ten horns and seven heads, and the Lamb with seven horns and seven eyes are represented exactly as they are described? Dürer neither strove for nor attained anything but realism. "I think," he wrote, "the more exact and like a man a picture is, the better the work. . . . Others are of another opinion and speak of how a man should be . . . but in such things I consider nature the master and human imaginations errors." It was life he copied, the life he saw around him at Nuremberg.
But Dürer, to use his own famous criterion of portraiture, [Sidenote: 1513-14] painted not only the features of Germany, but her soul. Three of his woodcuts depict German aspirations so fully that they are the best explanation of the Reformation, which they prophesy. The first of these, The Knight, Death and the Devil, shows the Christian soldier riding through a valley of supernatural terrors. "So ist des Menchen Leben nichts anderes dann eine Ritterschaft auf Erden," is the old German translation of Job vii, 1, following the Vulgate. Erasmus in his Handbook of the Christian Knight had imagined just such a scene, and so deeply had the idea of the soldier of Christ sunk into the people's mind that later generations interpreted Dürer's knight as a picture of Sickingen or Hutten or one of the bold champions of the new religion.