"I have no friend of any kind," said Michelangelo in 1509, "and I do not want any."[127]
Forty years later, in 1548, Michelangelo wrote again, "I am always alone and I speak to no one."[128]
"From his youth," says Condivi, "Michelangelo had consecrated himself not only to sculpture and painting, but to all the other arts with such devouring energy that he had to separate himself almost entirely from the society of men. For that reason many people considered him proud, and others eccentric or mad. In reality it was his love of work alone, his labour without respite, which made him solitary, for he was so filled by the joy and rapture which his work gave him that the society of men did not offer him any pleasure, but rather bored him by distracting him from his own thoughts. Like the[{143}] great Scipio, he was never less lonely than when he was alone."
That passionate solitude was the very soul of the genius and of the work of Michelangelo. He lived shut up in himself without any real connection with the art of his time. He despised Raphael because he said, "All his talent came from study and not from nature."[129] He himself declared that he derived all his inspiration from within, and if in his pride he underestimated what he was always studying with feverish and persistent ardour, yet it is true that he never sought in the study of the works of others a means of changing or of renewing his own personality, but only of still further emphasising it. In a way he sought from others not examples or lessons, but reasons for being still more himself. It is true that from the beginning to the end he fed on his own soul. Who knows the man, knows his work.
The most striking thing about this extraordinarily unified nature is that it was composed of hostile worlds; a brutal materialism and serene idealism, an infatuation with pagan strength and beauty and a Christian mysticism; a mixture of physical violence and intellectual abstraction; a platonic soul in an athlete's body. That indissoluble union of[{144}] opposing forces which undoubtedly caused part of his suffering was also the cause of his unique greatness. We feel that the supreme balance of his art is the result of a fierce struggle, and it is the sense of that struggle which gives to the work its heroic character. All is passion even to the abstract idea, so that idealism, which with many artists is a cause of coldness and death, is here a hearth burning with love and hate.[130]
There is undoubtedly a danger in that mystic faith which loses itself in inward visions of such charm that they often leave a feeling of only disgust and contempt for reality.
| Non vider gli occhi mei cosa mortale |
| * * * * * |
| E se creata a Dio non fusse eguale |
| Altro che 'l bel di fuor, ch'à gl'occhi piace, |
| Più non vorria; ma perch'è si fallace, |
| Tracende nella forma universale.[131] |
Varchi was quite right in recognising in Michelangelo the Socratic spirit.[132] Whether he gained these ideas from the teaching of the great Platonists with whom he had talked as a youth in the gardens of San Marco or whether that teaching had merely revealed to him his true nature there is certainly a close relationship between the theories on art of the school of Socrates and those of Michelangelo.
Parrhasius believed in representing only "the perspective, the light and the shadow, the softness, hardness and surface of bodies." Socrates taught him that the object of painting is to represent the soul and the innermost being.[133] "The fields and trees can teach me nothing," he says in the "Phædo"; "I only find what is useful to me among men in the towns." These very men only interested him because there was something eternal in them. The fugitive and changing side of their physiognomy, which for us makes the delicate charm of life and the object of painting, seemed to him an empty and wearisome illusion. Art creates illusions. The objects which it represents are "the dreams of the human imagination offered to people who can see. It is an image which one shows in the distance to[{146}] little children who can not reason, in order to create illusions for them. These illusions of the senses distract the soul from the only realities, eternal ideas."
Michelangelo reasoned thus in his disdain of all exact reproduction of nature. He had studied it with passion but, in order to discover its laws, he regarded it as an enemy which held the human spirit prisoner. He wanted to free himself from it, he wanted to make of it an instrument for his thought. That is why he sought for and discovered its machinery, and when he could guide it at will he outraged it; he made it produce unprecedented results. He constructed for himself out of his profound knowledge of anatomy a general idea of man, and thereafter, without having recourse to any observation of individuals, he recreated the whole of nature in the image of his ideas and in the likeness of God, source and originator of ideas.