Excursions in Art and Letters

by William Wetmore Story

“I have seen Michel Angelo, although sixty years of age, and not one of the most robust of men, smite down more scales from a very hard block of marble in a quarter of an hour, than three young marble-cutters would in three or four times that space of time. He flung himself upon the marble with such impetuosity and fervor, as to induce me to believe that he would break the work into fragments. With a single blow he brought down scales of marble of three or four fingers in breadth, and with such precision to the line marked on the marble, that if he had broken away a very little more, he risked the ruin of the work.”

This is pitiable. This was not the work for a great genius like him, but for a common stone-cutter. What waste of time and energy to no purpose,—nay, to worse than no purpose,—to the danger, often the irreparable injury, of the statue. A dull, plodding, patient workman would have done it far better. It is as if an architect should be employed in planing the beams or laying the bricks and stones of the building he designed. In fact, Michel Angelo injured, and in some cases nearly ruined, most of his statues by the very impatience of his genius. Thus the back head of the Moses has been struck away by one of these blows, and everywhere a careful eye detects the irreparable blow beyond its true limit. This is not the Michel Angelo whom we are to reverence and admire; this is an abbozzatore roughing out the work. There is no difficulty in striking off large cleavings of marble at one stroke—any one can do that; and it is pitiable to find him so engaged.

Where we do find his technical excellence as a sculptor is when he comes to the surface—when with the drill he draws the outline with such force and wonderful precision—when his tooth-chisel models out, with such pure sense of form and such accomplished knowledge, the subtle anatomies of the body and the living curves of the palpitant flesh; and no sculptor can examine the colossal figures of the Medici Chapel without feeling the free and mighty touch of a great master of the marble. Here the hand and the mind work together, and the stone is plastic as clay to his power.

It was not until Michel Angelo was sixty years of age that, on the death of Antonio San Gallo, he was appointed to succeed him as architect, and to design and carry out the building of St. Peter’s, then only rising from its foundations. To this appointment he answered, as he had before objected when commissioned to paint the Sistine Chapel, “Architecture is not my art.” But his objections were overruled. The Pope insisted, and he was finally prevailed upon to accept this commission, on the noble condition that his services should be gratuitous, and dedicated to the glory of God and of His Apostle, St. Peter; and to this he was actuated, not only by a grand sentiment, but because he was aware that hitherto the work had been conducted dishonestly, and with a sole view of greed and gain. Receiving nothing himself, he could the more easily suppress all peculation on the part of others.

He was, as he said, an old man in years, but in energy and power he had gained rather than lost, and he set himself at once to work, and designed that grand basilica which has been the admiration of centuries, and to swing, as he said, in air the Pantheon. That mighty dome is but the architectural brother of the great statues in the Medicean Chapel, and the Titan frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. Granted all the defects of this splendid basilica, all the objections of all the critics, well or ill founded, and all the deformities grafted on it by his successors—there it is, one of the noblest and grandest of all temples to the Deity, and one of the most beautiful. The dome itself, within and without, is a marvel of beauty and grandeur, to which all other domes, even that of Brunelleschi, must yield precedence. It is the uplifted brow and forehead that holds the brain of papal Rome, calm, and without a frown, silent, majestic, impressive. The church within has its own atmosphere, which scarcely knows the seasons without; and when the pageant and the pomp of the Catholic hierarchy passes along its nave, and the sunlight builds its golden slanting bridge of light from the lantern to the high altar, and the fumes of incense rise from the clinking censer at High Mass, and the solemn thrill of the silver trumpets sounds and swells and reverberates through the dim mosaicked dome where the saints are pictured above, cold must be his heart and dull his sense who is not touched to reverence. Here is the type of the universal Church—free and beautiful, large and loving; not grim and sombre and sad, like the northern Gothic cathedrals. We grieve over all the bad taste of its interior decoration, all the giant and awkward statues, all the lamentable details, for which he is not responsible; but still, despite them all, the impression is great. When at twilight the shadows obscure all these trivialities, when the lofty cross above the altar rays forth its single illumination and the tasteless details disappear, and the towering arches rise unbroken with their solemn gulfs of darkness, one can feel how great, how astonishing this church is, in its broad architectural features.

At nearly this time Michel Angelo designed the Palazzo Farnese, the Church of Sta Maria degli Angeli in the ruins of the Baths of Diocletian, the Laurentian Library and the palaces on the Capitol, and various other buildings, all of which bear testimony to his power and skill as an architect.

For St. Peter’s as it now stands Michel Angelo is not responsible. His idea was to make all subordinate to the dome; but after his death, the nave was prolonged by Carlo Maderno, the façade completely changed, and the main theme of the building was thus almost obliterated from the front. It is greatly to be regretted that his original design was not carried out. Every change from it was an injury. The only point from which one can get an idea of his intention is from behind or at the side, and there its colossal character is shown.

We have thus far considered Michel Angelo as a sculptor, painter, and architect. It remains to consider him as a poet. Nor in his poetry do we find any difference of character from what he exhibited in his other arts. He is rough, energetic, strong, full of high ideas, struggling with fate, oppressed and weary with life. He has none of the sweet numbers of Petrarca, or the lively spirit of Ariosto, or the chivalric tones of Tasso. His verse is rude, craggy, almost disjointed at times, and with little melody in it, but it is never feeble. It was not his art, he might have said, with more propriety than when he thus spoke of painting and architecture. Lofty thoughts have wrestled their way into verse, and constrained a rhythmic form to obey them. But there is a constant struggle for him in a form which is not plastic to his touch. Still his poems are strong in their crabbedness, and stand like granite rocks in the general sweet mush of Italian verse.

Such, then, was Michel Angelo,—sculptor, painter, architect, poet, engineer, and able in all these arts. Nor would it have been possible for him to be so great in any one of them had he not trained his mind to all; for all the arts are but the various articulations of the self-same power, as the fingers are of the hand, and each lends aid to the other. Only by having all can the mind have its full grasp of art. It is too often insisted in our days that a man to be great in one art must devote himself exclusively to that; or if he be solicited by any other, he must merely toy with it. Such was not the doctrine of the artists of old, either in ancient days of Greece or at the epoch of the Renaissance. Phidias was a painter and architect as well as a sculptor, and so were nearly all the men of his time. Giotto, Leonardo, Ghiberti, Michel Angelo, Verrocchio, Cellini, Raffaelle,—in a word, all the great men of the glorious age in Italy were accomplished in many arts. They more or less trained themselves in all. It might be said that not a single great man was not versed in more than one art. Thence it was that they derived their power. It does not suffice that the arm alone is strong; the whole body strikes with every blow.

The frescoes in the Sistine Chapel at Rome, and the statues in the Medicean Chapel at Florence, are the greatest monuments of Michel Angelo’s power as an artist. Whatever may be the defects of these great works, they are of a Titanic brood, that have left no successors, as they had no progenitors. They defy criticism, however just, and stand by themselves outside the beaten track of art, to challenge our admiration. So also, despite all his faults and defects, how grand a figure Michel Angelo himself is in history, how high a place he holds! His name itself is a power. He is one of the mighty masters that the world cannot forget. Kings and emperors die and are forgotten,—dynasties change and governments fall,—but he, the silent, stern worker, reigns unmoved in the great realm of art.