What Michel Angelo meant to embody in these statues can only be guessed—but certainly no trivial thought. Their names convey nothing. It was not beauty, or grace, or simple truth to nature, that he sought to express. In making them, the weight of this unexplained mystery of life hung over him; the struggle of humanity against superior forces oppressed him. The doubts, the despair, the power, the indomitable will of his own nature are in them. They are not the expressions of the natural day of the world, of the glory of the sunrise, the tenderness of the twilight, the broad gladness of day, or the calm repose of night; but they are seasons and epochs of the spirit of man—its doubts and fears, its sorrows and longings and unrealized hopes. The sad condition of his country oppressed him. Its shame overwhelmed him. His heart was with Savonarola, to whose excited preaching he had listened, and his mind was inflamed by the hope of a spiritual regeneration of Italy and the world. The gloom of Dante enshrouded him, and the terrible shapes of the “Inferno” had made deeper impression on his nature than all the sublimed glories of the “Paradiso.” His colossal spirit stood fronting the agitated storms of passions which then shook his country, like a rugged cliff that braves the tempest-whipped sea—disdainfully casting from its violent and raging waves, and longing almost with a vain hope for the time when peace, honor, liberty, and religion should rule the world.
This at least would seem to be implied in the lines he wrote under his statue of Night, in response to the quatrain written there by Giovan’ Battista Strozzi. These are the lines of Strozzi:—
“La notte che tu vedi in si dolci atti
Dormire, fu da an angelo scolpita
In questo sasso; e, perchè dorme, ha vita
Destala, se no ’l credi, e parleratti.”
Which may be thus rendered in English:—
“Night, which in peaceful attitude you see
Here sleeping, from this stone an angel wrought.
Sleeping, it lives. If you believe it not,
Awaken it, and it will speak to thee.”
And this was Michel Angelo’s response:—
“Grato mi è il sonno, e piu l’ esser de sasso
Mentre che il danno e la vergogna dura
Non veder non sentir m’ è gran ventura
Però, non mi destar; deh! parla basso.”
“Grateful is sleep—and more, of stone to be;
So long as crime and shame here hold their state,
Who cannot see nor feel is fortunate—
Therefore speak low, and do not waken me.”
This would clearly seem to show that under these giant shapes he meant to embody allegorically at once the sad condition of humanity and the oppressed condition of his country. What lends itself still more to this interpretation is the character and expression of both the statues of Lorenzo and Giuliano, and particularly that of Lorenzo, who leans forward with his hand raised to his chin in so profound and sad a meditation that the world has given it the name of Il Pensiero—not even calling it Il Pensieroso, the thinker, but Il Pensiero, thought itself; while the attitude and expression of Giuliano is of one who helplessly holds the sceptre and lets the world go, heedless of all its crime and folly, and too weak to lend his hand to set it right.