Michelangelo as Sculptor
The character of this great man’s sculpture was as vast, as strong, as eagerly bent on the exhibition of science and the representation of violent action, as were his wonderful paintings; but the plastic art was still less fitted than the pictorial, for being guided by these principles uncontrolled. Though he adored the antiques for their anatomy, he was blind to their beauty and repose: his own ideal was a ruder one, which neither his skill nor that of any other was qualified fully to express; and yet his vigour and feeling do in a few instances overcome all material obstacles, leading him to the very verge of sublimity, and not far from the true path of art.
His purest works are those of his youth, executed while his imagination was still filled by the Grecian statues, which, with Ghirlandajo’s other pupils, he had studied in the gardens of the Medici. There is much antique calmness in the fighting groups on the bas-relief which, preserved by the Buonarroti family in Florence, is the earliest of his known specimens; and his Bacchus with the young Faun in the Uffizi, an effort of his twenty-fourth year, possessing indifferent and somewhat inaccurate forms, approaches, in its softly waving lines and gentleness of expression, nearer to the Greek than any other work of its author. The Pieta of St. Peter’s is characterised, especially in the figure of the mother, by much of the same temper, which is not lost even in the colossal David of the Florentine Piazza del Granduca.
His genius had free scope in the three greatest of his works: the Monument of Pope Julius II, and the Tombs of Julian and Lorenzo de’ Medici. The first of these, planned by the old priest himself with his characteristic boldness and magnificence, but curtailed in its execution by the parsimony of his heirs, furnished occupation to the artist, at intervals, during many years. Statues merely blocked out, which were intended to belong to it, are now in the gardens of the Pitti palace; two slaves are in the Louvre; the remainder of the monument, being the only part that was finished by the master, consists of the celebrated sitting figure of Moses, in the Roman church of San Pietro in Vincoli. The lawgiver of the Hebrews, a massy figure in barbaric costume, with tangled goat-like hair and beard, and horns like Ammon or Bacchus, rests one arm on the tables of the law, looking forward with an air of silent and gloomy menace. The strength of the work is unquestionable; its value as being, with the Victory, the most characteristic of its author’s works, is equally clear; its sublimity admits of greater doubt. The tombs of the two Medici, finished earlier than the Moses, are works of a far higher and purer strain; being really the finest that Michelangelo ever produced. Upon each of the two sarcophagi rests a sitting figure in armour, the likeness of the dead man who reposes within. On each side of Lorenzo is a reclining statue, the one representing Twilight, the other Dawn; and Julian’s tomb is in like manner flanked by the recumbent figures of Night and Day. The statue of Lorenzo is a fine and simple portrait: that of Julian has scarcely ever been surpassed for its air of dignified and thoughtful repose. The Dawn is a majestic female; the Twilight is a grand male figure, looking down. The Day is unfinished, but fine—a bold male form; the Night is a drooping, slumbering, sad-looking female.
The Dead Christ in the Arms of the Virgin
(By Andrea del Sarto, a famous Florentine contemporary of Michelangelo)
RAPHAEL
The one great rival of Michelangelo, and the one painter whom posterity has been disposed to rank even above him in genius is Raphael. This wonderful man was the son of an obscure painter in Urbino. He studied under Perugino, and is believed to have profited largely also through study of the works of Leonardo and of Michelangelo, but particularly from Narcaccio.[a] To Michelangelo’s cartoons as well as to his Sistine ceiling, Raphael certainly owed deep obligations. In his twenty-sixth year, invited by his kinsman Bramante, he migrated to Rome, where he laboured with unwearied industry from that time till his death, which took place when he was thirty-seven years old, and about to be raised by Leo X to the rank of a cardinal.
Raphael found the mechanism of art nearly complete, and its application no longer exclusively ecclesiastical. These two circumstances gave full play to that union of powers, which his mind possessed to an unequalled extent. Far less correct than Michelangelo in drawing and anatomy, less profound in his study of the antique, and less capable of dealing with those loftiest themes that may be said to hover on the very brink of impracticability, he yet possessed knowledge of a high order, an elevated sense of sublimity and energy within his own sphere, an extensive and felicitous invention, and a feeling of beauty and grace which was the very purest and most divine that art has ever boasted. The idealism of his genius was united to a perception of character and expression, and a dramatic power of representing human action, which he used with the happiest effect when his subject called for their exercise. His admirers are influenced more by their own prepossessions than by his peculiar merits, when they give the preference to his Madonnas, saints, angels, or apostles, to his portraits, or to his historical and epic compositions.