| Come dal foco 'l cald' 'esser' diviso |
| Nom puo 'l bel dall' eterno; e la mia stima |
| Esalta che ne scende, e chi 'l somiglia. |
"As heat can not be separated from fire, so beauty can not be from eternity; and my thought extols what comes from it and what resembles it."
He wanted to express in his work only what was[{147}] eternal, and he did not believe he could do this with external objects. He tried, therefore, to give to everything he did a character of compelling force. His Platonic idealism was lined with Christian pessimism. Like Vittoria Colonna, he was filled with the sense of the beauty of all human things, and he was obsessed with the idea of death.
He lived in an exhausted epoch which no longer had any happy sense of reality. In God was the only help, in the eternal and immutable perfection. Michelangelo was filled with dislike for all realism. Like Plato, he despised painting in comparison with sculpture.
"Painting seems to me the better the more it resembles sculpture, and the sculpture worse the more it resembles painting. Sculpture is the torch of painting, and between the two there is the same difference as between the sun and the moon."[134]
If he was above all things a sculptor it was because he found in sculpture the most appropriate expression of his abstract and concentrated genius.[{148}]
| Non ha l'ottimo artista alcun concetto, |
| Ch'un marmo solo in se non circonscriva |
| Col suo soverchio, et solo à quello arriva |
| La man, che ubbidisce all'intelleto.[135] |
Moreover he reduced sculpture to its most simple form, the isolated statue. Michelangelo had little liking for bas-reliefs and groups, which he hardly ever made, and where he always shows some awkwardness. What we know, through Cellini and Vasari, of his manner of working would incline us to feel to-day that the basis of his sculpture and of all his art was drawing,[136] because that was most immaterial and closest to the form of his thought.
No one has ever drawn as Michelangelo did, and Charles Blanc is right in saying that "if he is unequal[{149}] in his sculptures and his frescoes, never does his drawing, even when apparently most careless and most summary, betray any feebleness of hand or distraction or hesitancy of spirit." Not only do we penetrate, then, into the mystery of his creativeness, into the dreams and soliloquies of his lonely soul, but we discover there also his most intimate and perfect expression. There he is altogether himself, as Beethoven is in his quartets and in his short pieces for the piano.[137]