Part 3

It is not surprising that the artist should have wept tears of bitter disappointment, for we learn from a letter to his brother Buonarroto, dated June 15th, 1515, that at this time not only had he completed the Moses and the Captives in marble, but the panels in relief were ready for casting. Had he been left in peace, Michelangelo would certainly have finished the monument to Pope Julius in its modified form in half the time which he wasted quarrying marble from Carrara and Pietrasanta for the façade of San Lorenzo. For over two years Michelangelo was engaged in the tedious work of roadmaking and quarrying. In August, 1518, he wrote: "I must be very patient until the mountains are tamed and the men are mastered. Then we shall get on more quickly. But what I have promised, that will I do by some means, and I will make the most beautiful thing that has ever been done in Italy if God helps me."

He had evidently warmed to his work, and it is melancholy to think that Fate again interposed to prevent its completion. Giuliano de' Medici, the Pope's only brother, and Lorenzo, his nephew, having died at this time, Leo X. ordered Michelangelo to interrupt the façade of San Lorenzo and to build a new sacristy in which he proposed to erect a monument to their memory. The document exonerating Michelangelo from all duties and obligations in connection with the façade is dated March 10th, 1520.

Michelangelo only now found time to carry out a commission which he had received seven years previously from a Roman gentleman, Metello Vari, namely a nude statue of Christ bearing the cross. It was finished in the summer of 1521 and sent to Rome, the extremities being left in rough to prevent their being broken during the journey. Pietro Urbino accompanied the statue to Rome, with orders to complete it, and very nearly spoiled it by his careless and inferior workmanship. The _Risen Christ_, now in the church of the Minerva, is one of the most noble and majestic of religious statues in existence; the torso and arms are particularly fine, but the hands and feet, which were spoiled by Urbino, are stumpy and defective.

Leo X.'s pontificate, which, although short, was one of the most glorious and eventful in the history of art, came to an abrupt conclusion on December 1st, 1521. By a strange irony of fate, the magnificent patron of art and letters was succeeded by a pious and simple-minded Dutch prelate, who regarded statues as pagan idols, and said that the Sistine Chapel was "nothing but a room full of naked people." There is little doubt that he secretly longed to have it whitewashed. Fortunately for art and artists, his pontificate was of brief duration, and in 1523 Cardinal Giulio de' Medici was elected in his stead, under the name of Clement VII.

In the following year Michelangelo finished the new sacristy of San Lorenzo, and immediately set to work on the Medicean tombs. But he was constantly worried and interrupted by new commissions from the Pope, who wanted him, among other things, to build a library in which to place the famous collection of books and manuscripts begun by Cosimo de' Medici: "I cannot work at one thing with my hands and at another with my brain!" exclaimed the artist in despair. Nevertheless he undertook to build the library, and carried on both works at the same time, constantly urged on by Pope Clement, who wrote to him in an autograph letter: "Thou knowest that Popes have no long lives, and we cannot yearn more than we do to behold the chapel with the tombs of our kinsmen, and so also the library."

These were troublous times for Italy. After the disastrous battle of Pavia, in which he had lost everything "except honour," Francis I. concluded with the Sforza of Milan, with Venice, Florence, and Pope Clement VII. a league against Charles V., which proved fatal to all who took part in it. In 1527, a rabble of German and Spanish soldiers of fortune, led by the renegade Connétable de Bourbon, took and pillaged Rome, and the Pope himself was besieged in the Castle of Saint Angelo for nine months. The Florentines availed themselves of this opportunity to shake off the despotic yoke of the Medici, but two years later, Charles V. concluded the peace of Barcelona with Clement VII., one of the conditions being that he should re-establish the Medicean rule in Florence. But the citizens would not give up their newly-acquired liberty without a struggle, and prepared for a desperate resistance. Michelangelo was appointed Commissary-General of defence, and showed himself worthy of the confidence placed in him by his fellow-citizens.

It was in a great measure due to the skill with which he fortified the town, and more especially the hill of San Miniato, that Florence was enabled to withstand the attacks of the Imperial troops for twelve months. But the treachery of Malatesta Baglioni, who commanded the troops of the Republic, paralyzed the efforts of Michelangelo and of its other brave defenders, and in August, 1530, the city fell. Alessandro de' Medici returned in triumph to Florence, and would certainly have beheaded Michelangelo, who only saved himself by hiding in the bell-tower of San Nicolò beyond the Arno, until the first fury of his enemies was over.

In spite of his important military duties, Michelangelo continued working at the Medicean tombs during the siege, and also painted a panel picture, representing _Leda and the Swan_, originally intended for the Duke of Ferrara, but which he afterwards gave to his pupil Antonio Mini, together with many cartoons and drawings, that he might dower two sisters with the proceeds. It was sold to the King of France and hung at Fontainebleau until the time of Louis XIII., one of whose ministers ordered it to be destroyed as an improper picture. According to another version, however, it was only hidden, and afterwards brought to England. The _Leda and the Swan_ now in the National Gallery is regarded by some as the damaged and much restored original of Michelangelo's famous picture. Clement VII.'s anger soon abated, and Michelangelo was able to return to his work, thanks chiefly to the kind offices of Baccio Valori, the Papal envoy in Florence, to whom the sculptor presented, out of gratitude, the fine statue of _Apollo,_ now in the National Museum at Florence.

The Medicean tombs progressed but slowly, for all this time Michelangelo was worried almost to death by the Duke of Urbino, a nephew of Julius II., who insisted upon his finishing the famous tomb, while Clement VII., on the other hand, threatened the artist with excommunication if he neglected his work in the new sacristy for anything else. Probably the first statue to be finished was the beautiful Madonna suckling the Child Jesus, represented as a strong boy straddling across her knee. It is one of Michelangelo's noblest works, possessing all the majestic simplicity of his earlier Madonnas enhanced by greater power.

To give an adequate description of the tombs of Giuliano and Lorenzo de' Medici would be impossible within the narrow limits of this little book. Suffice it to say that the princes are represented in the garb of ancient warriors, each seated in a niche above a sarcophagus, on which two allegorical figures recline. Lorenzo appears to be plunged in sorrowful meditation; at his feet recline the colossal statues of _Evening_, represented by a powerful male figure, apparently on the point of falling asleep, and _Dawn_, symbolized by a beautiful young woman in the act of awaking, not to joy and hope, but to another day of sorrow. The beauty of this last figure cannot be described; it is such as the imagination of the ancient Greeks might have endowed a goddess with. The statue of _Dawn_ was finished in 1531, soon after the fall of Florence and the return of the Medici, and there is little doubt that Michelangelo intended his mournful figures to express sorrow at the loss of Florentine liberty, rather than at the death of the two young princes. The same idea is evident in the tomb of Giuliano, with the two figures of _Night_, symbolized by a sleeping woman of singular beauty and power, and _Day_, a vigorous bearded giant just rising to his work and looking over his shoulder as if dazzled by the glare of the rising sun. Although the head of _Day_ is unfinished, it is a striking example of how Michelangelo was able to give life and expression to his work from the first stroke of his chisel.

THE LAST JUDGMENT

In 1534 Michelangelo left Florence for the last time. His proud and independent spirit was unable to tolerate Alessandro's petty tyranny. The unfinished bust of Brutus, now in the Bargello, a vigorous and striking piece of work, is another proof of his intense longing for liberty. On arriving in Rome he found that Clement VII. had died two days previously, and that Paul III., Farnese, had been elected Pope.

Michelangelo had finally come to an understanding with the executors of Julius II., the agreement being that he should make a tomb with one façade only, using the marbles already carved for the quadrangular tomb and supplying six statues from his own hand, the rest of the work to be completed by other artists under his supervision. He therefore hoped to finish the tomb which had embittered thirty years of his life, but once more he was doomed to disappointment, for Paul III. immediately appointed him chief architect, sculptor and painter of the Vatican, with a pension of 1,200 golden crowns, and ordered him to carry out a commission which Clement VII. had given him shortly before his death. It was no less a task than to paint the end wall of the Sistine Chapel. Prayers and remonstrance were alike unavailing, and the doors of the Sistine closed once more upon the master, not to be opened again until the Christmas of 1541, when his _Last Judgment_ was uncovered "to the admiration of Rome and of the whole world."

Thirty years earlier Michelangelo had depicted the Creation on the vault of this same chapel; he now took for his subject the final doom of all things created. The colossal work which cost him eight years' labour is a magnificent but almost terrifying pictorial rendering of the _Dies Irae_, the Day of Wrath, when "even the just shall not feel secure." Awe and terror are equally apparent among the spirits of the blessed crowding round the dread Judge, and on the despairing countenances of the condemned souls dragged down by hideous demons towards the infernal river, where Charon in his boat "beckons to them with eyes of fire and beats the delaying souls with uplifted oar." The rendering of the subject is thoroughly Dantesque, and very different from the conventional treatment of the same theme by all preceding artists. The composition, however, and indeed several individual groups and figures, remind us forcibly of the Campo Santo at Pisa.

Although all true artists received this work with enthusiasm, as Vasari says, and came from every part of Italy to study it, Michelangelo's enemies, including Pietro Aretino, the most immoral writer of his age, criticised it as a highly improper painting, because most of the figures were nude. So incensed was Michelangelo at this that he revenged himself by painting one of his critics, Messer Biagio da Cesena, as Minos surrounded by a crowd of devils. Some years later Paul IV. obtained Michelangelo's consent to partly drape most of the figures, and the work was done with commendable discretion by Daniele da Volterra, who thereby earned the nickname of Il Braghettone, or the breeches-maker.

Unfortunately the smoke from the altar candles and censers, and the dust of centuries have darkened and almost completely destroyed the original colour of this fresco; ominous cracks have also appeared in several places, but it is to be hoped that time will spare one of the greatest masterpieces of modern art for many centuries to come.

No sooner had Michelangelo finished the _Last Judgment_, than Paul III. set him to work on the side walls of the chapel which Antonio da San Gallo had just completed, and which is now known as the Cappella Paolina. Michelangelo was nearly seventy years old at this time, and fresco painting over a large surface is a fatiguing task even for a young man, but the veteran artist obeyed, and in 1549 he completed what was to be his last pictorial work, the two frescoes representing the _Conversion of St. Paul_ and the _Martyrdom of St. Peter_.

The composition of these pictures is as masterly as ever, and the drawing, especially in the fore-shortened figures, faultless, but for the first time we are aware of something cold and unnatural, very different from the glorious life and power with which the frescoes of the Sistine literally glow. Michelangelo was getting old, and even his Titanic frame could not withstand the insidious attacks of time. He was seventy-five years of age when he carried these frescoes to completion, and he himself confessed to Vasari that he did so "with great effort and fatigue." Nevertheless he found sufficient time and strength to complete the famous monument of Pope Julius II. during the intervals of his fresco painting, and in 1545 the tragedy of the tomb finally came to an end.

It must have been with feelings of mingled relief and bitterness that Michelangelo surveyed the much modified tomb in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli. The mighty design which had fired his youthful ambition forty years previously had dwindled down to a comparatively unimposing monument, but everybody will agree with Condivi when he says that "although botched and patched up, it is the most worthy monument to be found in Rome, or perhaps in the world; if for nothing else, at least for the three statues that are by the hand of the master." Of the central figure, representing Moses, we shall have occasion to speak later on; the remaining statues by Michelangelo to which Condivi alludes are two female figures of rare beauty, representing Active and Contemplative Life. The rest of the tomb was finished by Raffaello da Montelupo and by other assistants under the master's supervision.

Having, as best he could, fulfilled his sacred pledge to the memory of Julius II., Michelangelo appeared to consider his artistic career as practically at an end. He was always inclined to sadness, but a cloud of deeper melancholy seemed to settle over him, and like Titian, Tintoretto, and other artists who attained to great old age, he turned his thoughts almost exclusively to religious speculation. In one of his sonnets he beautifully expresses the yearning for peace and rest which had taken possession of his storm-tossed soul:

Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest My soul, that turns to His great love on high, Whose arms to clasp us on the Cross were spread.[2]

[2] "The Sonnets of Michelangelo." By J. A. Symonds, No. lxv.

Henceforward he regarded his art as a devotional exercise more than anything else. The unfinished marble group of the _Deposition_, now in the Duomo at Florence, and which he intended should be placed over his tomb, was carved by the master during these years of serene preparation for his approaching end.

Throughout his long and laborious career, devoted to the threefold worship of God, art and his country, Michelangelo had constantly refused to think of other ties, remarking that he had "espoused the affectionate fantasy which makes of art an idol." From some of his sonnets, however, it would appear that while at the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent he had secretly cherished a deep and hopeless passion for the beautiful Luigia de' Medici, who died in 1494. Forty years were to elapse ere in his heart, yet youthful at the approach of age, another woman, and she the first of her era, Vittoria Colonna, occupied the place left vacant by Luigia de' Medici. The friendship between these two lofty spirits, based upon mutual admiration and esteem, is one of the most beautiful romances in history, and inspired Michelangelo with some of his finest poems. It was brought to a close in 1547 by Vittoria Colonna's death, which left Michelangelo "dazed as one bereft of sense." "Nothing," says Condivi, "grieved him so much in after years as that when he went to see her on her death-bed he did not kiss her on the brow or face, as he did kiss her hand."

ST. PETER'S

It will be remembered that Pope Julius II. had ordered Bramante to rebuild the church of St. Peter's on a more magnificent scale, in order that his tomb should derive additional grandeur from its stately surroundings. Bramante was succeeded by Raphael, Peruzzi and Antonio da Sangallo, and when the latter died in October, 1546, Paul III. conferred the post of architect-in-chief upon Michelangelo. But the aged master at first refused, saying that architecture was not his art, and it was only when the Pope issued a peremptory _motu proprio_ that he set to work, on condition that he should receive no payment for his services.

Michelangelo returned to Bramante's original design of the Greek cross, which had undergone considerable alterations, his object being to erect a perfectly symmetrical building in such a manner that its dominant feature, both from within and without, should be the cupola. He began by demolishing most of Sangallo's work, and severely putting a stop to all jobbery, thereby creating a number of enemies who did all in their power to have him removed from his post. But Julius III., who succeeded Paul III. in 1549, had implicit faith in Michelangelo, and the colossal work proceeded so rapidly, in spite of intrigues and opposition, that in 1557 the great cupola was commenced.

The master was now unable, owing to his extreme old age, to personally superintend the building, so that he constructed a wooden model, still preserved at the Vatican, after which his assistants carried on the work. From the window of his house Michelangelo used to watch for hours together the huge cupola slowly rounding itself against the sky, and wondered, perhaps, in how many years after his death it would be finished. The evening of Michelangelo's long life was saddened by the loss of nearly all who were near and dear to him. His two remaining brothers (for Buonarroto had died of the plague in 1528) passed away in Florence, and the only representative of the family, besides the aged artist, was his nephew Leonardo, only son of his favourite brother, Buonarroto. Although a confirmed bachelor himself, Michelangelo prevailed upon his nephew to marry, and Leonardo became the head of the still existing branch of the Buonarroti family. Another terrible loss to Michelangelo was the death of his faithful servant Francesco Urbino, of whom he wrote to Vasari: "While Urbino living kept me alive, in dying he has taught me to die, not unwillingly, but rather with a desire for death. The better part of me has gone with him, and nothing is left to me now but endless sorrow."

In spite of old age, illness and afflictions, Michelangelo's last years were perhaps the busiest of a life of uninterrupted work. To this period must be attributed the plan for the improvements upon the Capitol; the design for the church of San Giovanni del Fiorentini; the drawing for the monument to Giangiacomo de' Medici which Leone Leoni erected in the Milan Cathedral; the plans for the conversion of the Baths of Diocletian into the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, and a number of other drawings and sketches for palaces, statues, monuments, which other artists carried out. He found time for all these things while actively superintending the construction of St. Peter's, and yet his restless spirit was not satisfied. In a beautiful sonnet, beginning with the words

Giunto è gia' il corso della vita mia,

he laments the loss of his former creative power, and says that he has already felt the pangs of one death, while another is fast approaching. Nothing could be more pathetic than the spectacle of this strong creative spirit, already imprisoned in the iron embrace of death, yet struggling, like a Laocoon, against inevitable dissolution. Although nearly ninety years of age, Michelangelo would still walk abroad in all weathers, taking no precaution whatever. On February 14th, 1564, a friend of the master, Tiberio Calcagni, met him in the street on foot. It was raining hard, and Calcagni affectionately upbraided the old man for going about in such weather: "Leave me alone," cried Michelangelo fiercely, "I am ill, and cannot find rest anywhere."

He spent the next four days in an armchair near the fire, not complaining of any particular suffering, "quite composed and fully conscious," as Diomede Leoni wrote to Leonardo, "but oppressed with continual drowsiness." In order to shake it off, the brave old man tried to mount his horse and go for a ride, but he was too weak. Without a word he sat down again in his armchair, and on the afternoon of February 18th, 1564, a little before five o'clock, Michelangelo peacefully breathed his last. "He made his will in three words," says Vasari, "committing his soul into the hands of God, his body to the earth, and his goods to his nearest relatives."

Leonardo arrived in Rome three days after his uncle's death. He had some difficulty in fulfilling Michelangelo's wish to be buried in his native town, as the Romans, who had conferred the citizenship on the artist, would not allow his body to be removed. At last the remains were smuggled out of Rome in a bale of merchandise and conveyed to Florence, where they were buried with great pomp and solemnity in the church of Santa Croce. For some unaccountable reason the group of the Pietà which Michelangelo had intended for his monument, was not placed over his tomb. The present very ugly monument was designed by Vasari at Leonardo's request. It bears the following inscription:

D. O. M. MICHAELI ANGELO BONAROTIO VETUSTA . SIMONIORUM . FAMILIA SCULPTORI . PICTORI . ET . ARCHITECTO FAMA . OMNIBUS . NOTISSIMO LEONARDUS . PATRUO . AMANTISS . ET . DE . SE . OPTIME . MERITO TRANSLATIS . ROMA . EJUS . OSSIBUS . ATQUE . IN . HOC . TEMPLO MAJORUM . SUORUM . SEPULCRO . CONDITIS COHORTANTE. SEREN. COSMO. MED. MAGNO. ETRUR. DUCE. P. C. ANN. SAL. M. D. LXX VIXIT. ANN. LXXXVIII. M. XI. D. XV.

Other monuments to Michelangelo exist in the church of the Santissimi Apostoli at Rome, and on the hill of San Miniato, overlooking Florence, which he so bravely defended. But the noblest monument of Michelangelo the artist are his undying works, and the highest praise of Michelangelo the man and the Christian is contained in these simple words of a contemporary, Scipione Ammirato, "During the ninety years of his life, and in spite of numberless temptations, Michelangelo never did or said anything that was not pure and great."

THE ART OF MICHELANGELO

In the history of Art, Michelangelo stands isolated, a colossal figure looming terrible and majestic, a Titan towering far above the sons of men. Yet his was an age of giants. When Michelangelo came before the world the glorious tide of the Renaissance was still rising; sculpture and architecture had been brought to an unprecedented degree of excellence by such men as Lorenzo Ghiberti, Donatello and Brunelleschi, and following in Masaccio's footsteps, a host of great painters had successfully striven to renovate and perfect their art until it culminated in a Raphael. Leonardo da Vinci was already famous before Michelangelo had touched chisel or brush, but neither Leonardo's encyclopaedic achievements nor Raphael's meteorlike career can be regarded as the ultimate expression, the high-water mark of the Italian Renaissance.