Julius II died and Leo X came in. Michelangelo had made a new contract with the heirs of the dead pope to complete the tomb, and had started work on thirty-two colossal statues. But the new pope wanted Michelangelo’s fame for himself, and so for ten years the poor sculptor was pulled and hauled between two rival groups. It was the fashion of other sculptors and painters, when thus loaded down with work, to hire a number of assistants and put the job through in a hurry. But Michelangelo suffered from conscientiousness; he thought that nobody else could do his work as he wanted it done, and he sweated and agonized and groaned under the burden of these contracts. More marble was needed, and he was dragged about between the rival owners of marble quarries. The unsuccessful owners intrigued with the boatmen to make it impossible for the marble to be moved; just like a certain teamsters’ strike which I had occasion to investigate in Chicago some twenty years ago—the riots and mobbings and showers of brick-bats and broken heads and bullet-riddled bodies were caused by a great mail-order house having paid for a strike against a rival mail-order house!
There came another pope, this time a Medici. He wanted a tomb to his ancestors, who were splendid and wealthy merchants in Florence. Also there was to be a colossus in the Medici gardens, a difficult matter, because of the lack of room; Michelangelo discussed the problem in a letter to a friend, which has come down to us. Read this picture of a man of genius trying to please a wealthy and fastidious patron:
I have thought about the Colossus; I have indeed thought a great deal about it. It seems to me that it would not be well placed outside the Medici gardens because it would take up too much room in the street. A better place, I think, would be where the barber’s shop is. There it would not be so much in the way. As for the expenses of expropriation, I think to reduce them we could make the figure seated, and as it could be hollowed, the shop could be placed inside so the rent would not be lost. It seems to me a good idea to put in the hand of the Colossus a horn of abundance, and this could be hollow and would serve as a chimney. The head could also be made use of, I should think; for the poultryman, my very good friend who lives on the square, said to me secretly that it would make a wonderful dovecote. I have another and still better idea—but in that case the statue must be made very much larger, which would not be impossible, for towers are made with stone—and that is that the head should serve as a bell-tower to S. Lorenzo, which now has none. By placing the bells so that the sound would come out of the mouth it would seem as if the giant cried for mercy, especially on holidays when they use the big bells.
Michelangelo was in Florence when the republican revolution against the Medici took place. The artist sympathized with the revolutionists, against his patrons; he proposed to make for the revolutionists a gigantic statue of David and Goliath, but they decided he had better use his energies in fortifying the walls! When the city was taken, and the slaughter of the rebels began, Michelangelo hid for a month or two. Then he was commanded to come forth and resume his task of glorifying his conquerors! He did so, and was put to work on the tomb of the Medici. Needless to say, the figures on the tomb are not figures of serene contentment and spiritual peace! Romain Rolland describes them as an “outburst of despair” whereby the sculptor “drowned his shame at raising this monument of slavery.”
Another pope came, and wanted Michelangelo for his chief glorifier. The artist pleaded his old contracts, but the pope was furious, and commanded him to tear them up. He was put to work on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and the result was the marvelous painting, “The Last Judgment,” in which all the terrors and torments of the Middle Ages are summed up. It was one of the world’s greatest paintings; but the pious of the time were shocked, and the pope put some of his other painters to putting panties on the nude saints. From time to time other shocked ecclesiastics had this or that article of clothing painted into the picture; and because they used any color they happened to have lying about, we can now form little idea of Michelangelo’s vision of the Day of Doom.
All this time the artist was being hounded by the heirs of his first pope; but the present pope insisted that he should be the architect of St. Peter’s; so here we see the old man, over seventy, still fighting the grafters and hounded by conspirators. It appears that in Renaissance Rome, when a grafter was caught, and threatened to expose his fellow-grafters, he was shot, and the world was told that he had committed suicide; exactly as it happens in Washington, D. C., in these our days of oil-thieves and bootleggers! Michelangelo was still afraid, as he had been all his life; but he was still more afraid of God, and determined to finish St. Peter’s as a means of saving his soul at the Last Judgment.
So he stuck and fought the grafters. There came yet another pope—the artist had to win each one in turn, thwarting a whole new set of intriguing enemies. We find him at the age of eighty-eight, exposing thieves who are building the walls of St. Peter’s out of rotten materials—and around him the thieves are stabbing each other. At last, at the age of ninety, he lies on his death-bed, his terrific labors at an end; and between his dying gasps he confides to a friend his one regret, that he has to die just when he has succeeded in learning the alphabet of his art!
CHAPTER XXXII
WHO IS CRAZY?
When civilization emerged from the Dark Ages, the fighting man went about with a hard-shell covering, like a crab, and was called a knight. Both he and his horse underwent a long training, and when it was finished he was a fighting engine which could roll over anything else existing in the world. He went on crusades, and drove back the Saracen and the Turk from Europe. In these days of real and cruel danger he produced a genuine Art of Power: for example, “The Song of Roland,” an eleventh century French poem, telling of a terrific all-day battle against invading infidel hordes.
But afterwards, when chivalry had become established, it developed its Art of Beauty; a fantastic literature about ideal beings, who conformed to an artificial and complicated code of etiquette, and spent their time rescuing beautiful young ladies from the claws of various monsters. There grew up a whole genealogy of these literary knights, and enormous long poems were composed about them. When I was at Columbia University, acquiring culture, one of the tasks set me was the reading of Ariosto, an Italian poet of the sixteenth century, and I valiantly struggled through a dozen cantos of these absurd adventures. They resemble a Griffith moving picture, in which there is a villain engaged in an elaborate process of raping a beautiful virgin, while the gallant hero is galloping on his way to a rescue. But Ariosto regales us with more details of the attempted rape; for in these old times people were not afraid of the animal aspects of life.