But he had not reached the end of his troubles, for the heirs of Julius II continued persecuting the poor man with insulting demands for money which they pretended to have previously disbursed to him. Michelangelo went almost mad, as he had done in the time of Clement VII over the Medici Chapel, and it was in vain that Paul III commanded him not to think about it, but to give himself up entirely to his painting of the Pauline Chapel.[{104}]
He answered, "You paint with your head and not with your hands. Who does not think for himself dishonours himself. That is why I can do nothing good so long as I have these preoccupations. I have been chained to this trouble all my life," he continued, bitterly, "I have lost my youth over it; I have been ruined by my too great conscientiousness. It is my fate; I see many people who live tranquilly on an income of two or three thousand crowns and I have only succeeded after a terrible struggle in being poor."[81]
To satisfy his creditors he finished with his own hands the statues of Active Life and Contemplative Life,[82] although he was not obliged to do so.
At last the monument of Julius II was finished and shown in the Church of S. Pietro in Vinculi in February, 1545. What was left of the beautiful original plan? Only the Moses which had become the central figure after having been merely one of the details. Would the complete work have been a prodigy analogous for sculpture to what the Sistine Chapel is for painting? Certainly no prophet of the Sistine Chapel attains to the sovereign perfection of the Moses.
[{105}] The Moses is a supernatural and savage apparition half beast, half god. Pagan? Christian? No one knows. Two horns pierce the narrow skull, a flowing beard descends from his face to his knees like a parasitical vine attached to a great tree. He seems calm, but in his terrible jaw with close-shut teeth and projecting lower lip is wrath which shatters and crushes like the first chords of the overture to "Coriolanus." An implacable and murderous force, a tumult of rage and contempt wars in the silence of that arrogant being, with his huge bulk, his knotted arms—less brutal than those of most of Michelangelo's heroes, and with strong and beautiful hands—and left leg bent ready to rise. The dress is a barbarous one. No other work of Michelangelo is as completely finished. We feel that he had lived with it more than thirty years without being willing to let it go. He could see himself in it as in a superb mirror which gave him back the image that he had divined of his own soul. For the Moses is not only the most perfect artistic expression of his genius, but also its highest moral expression. Nowhere else has he so completely realised the majestic balance of a violent and passionate soul controlled by an iron will. Everywhere else passion is let loose and the human being is given into its hands. Here the savage elements are in suspense,[{106}] ready to fuse. It is a thunder-cloud charged with lightning.
Beside that superhuman creation rich with the whole life of Michelangelo, the two gracious figures of Leah and Rachel, the work of his old age, seem a little cold and affected.
"I seemed in a dream to see a lady, young and beautiful, going through a meadow, gathering flowers, and singing she was saying, 'Let him know, whoso asks my name, that I am Leah, and I go moving my fair hands around to make myself a garland. To please me at the glass here I adorn me, but my sister Rachel never withdraws from her mirror, and sits all day. She is as fain to look with her fair eyes as I to adorn me with my hands. Her seeing, and me doing, satisfies.'"[83][{107}]
The perfume of these lovely verses of Dante penetrates Michelangelo's two statues, which are rather apart from the rest of his work. If it were not for the largeness of their conception they would recall by their "morbidezza" and their cold grace the style of Civitale and Rossellino. Michelangelo seems here to be softened and a little tamed.
The symbolical meaning of these figures is obscure, as usual with him. His intellectual quality was rarely strong enough or rather clear enough to impose itself on his artistic conceptions. It is placed in juxtaposition to them in a puerile and accessory way as in the allegorical attributes of the Medici tombs, and we can take it away without hurting the strength of the work.