"Perchè d'ogni mia speme il verde è spento."
He exclaims even that he has rarely enjoyed the presence on which his happiness depends:—"You know neither custom nor opportunity have served my affection: it is very rarely that my eyes kindle themselves at the fire which burns in yours, guarded by a reserve to which desire scarcely dares to approach—
——'gli occhi vostri
Circonscritti ov' appena il desir vola.'
A single look has made my destiny, and I have seen you, to say truly, but once."—(Madrigale 5.)
It has been said that the "divine hand" of Michel Angelo painted the portrait of Luigia de' Medici. This is the name given, in reality, during the last century, to the head of a young female, "handsome rather than really beautiful," writes father Della Valle—a work in which Buonarotti's drawing was said to be recognised, with a softer and more lively colouring than obtains in the other pictures from his easel. Angelo's repugnance to paint portraits is one of the best established traits of his character. But he sculptured several—among those positively known are that of Julius II., lost in the chateau of Ferrara, and another of Gabriel Faërne, preserved in the Museum Capitolinum. We know, besides, that he consented to paint the portrait of the noble and witty Messer Tomasso de' Cavalieri, (see Vasari,) of the natural size; but that was a rare favour. "For," said he, "I abhor the obligation to copy that which, in nature, is not of infinite beauty." In another place, sonnet nineteen, addressing the object of his tenderness, Michel Angelo reminds her, that works of art are endowed, so to say, with eternal life and youth. "Perhaps," he adds, (Sonnetto 19 ,) "I shall be able to prolong thy life and mine beyond the tomb, by employing, if thou wilt, colour, or marble, if thou preferest, to fix the lines of our features and the resemblance of our affection!"
Again he writes—"While I paint her features, why cannot I convey to her face the pallor which disfigures mine, and which comes from her cruelty to me?"—(Madrigale 24.) But in some others of Angelo's poems, mention is made of a statue, or more probably of a bust, on which the young artist worked with an impassioned mixture of zeal and faint-heartedness.
"I fear," he says, "to draw from the marble, instead of her image, that of my features worn, and void of grace."—(Madrigale 22. ) And when he drew near the term of his labour—"Behold," he exclaims, "an animated stone, which, a thousand years hence, will seem to breathe! What, then, ought heaven to do for her, its own work, while the portrait only is mine; for her whom the whole world, and not myself alone, regard as a goddess rather than a mortal? Nevertheless the stone remains, while she is about to depart."—(Madrigale 39.)
It was probably on this occasion that Michel Angelo wrote those charming, and mysterious verses, whose sense it is otherwise difficult to determine:-
"Qui risi e piansi, e con doglia infinita,
Da questo sasso vidi far partita
Colei ch 'a me mi tolse, e non mi volse."
(Sonnetto 29.)
The bust of Luigia de' Medici, if it really came from the hands of Angelo, has shared the fate of many other chefs-d'œuvres, of which his contemporaries appear to have spoken with such great enthusiasm, only to increase our regret; while the most diligent researches have led to no recovery since their disappearance, caused by the disasters that visited Florence, and by the culpable negligence which, throughout the whole of Italy, followed the period of which Buonarotti was the principal ornament.