Excursions in Art and Letters — Context and Discussion

irth in Italy; after the long drear night of ignorance and darkness, again the morning came and the glory returned. As Italy above all other lands is the land of the Renaissance, so Florence above all cities is the city of the Renaissance. Its streets are haunted by historic associations; at every corner, and in every byplace or piazza, you meet the spirits of the past. The ghosts of the great men who have given such a charm and perfume to history meet you at every turn. Here they walked and worked centuries ago; here to the imagination they still walk, and they scarcely seem gone. Here is the stone upon which Dante sat and meditated,—was it an hour ago or six centuries? Here Brunelleschi watched the growing of his mighty dome, and here Michel Angelo stood and gazed at it while dreaming of that other mighty dome of St. Peter’s which he was afterwards to raise, and said, “Like it I will not, and better I cannot.” As one walks through the piazza of Sta Maria Novella, and looks up at the façade that Michel Angelo called his “sposa,” it is not difficult again to people it with the glad procession that bore Cimabue’s famous picture, with shouts and pomp and rejoicing, to its altar within the church. In the Piazza della Signoria one may in imagination easily gather a crowd of famous men to listen to the piercing tones and powerful eloquence of Savonarola. Here gazing up, one may see towering against the sky, and falling as it were against the trooping clouds, the massive fortress-like structure of the Palazzo Publico, with its tall machicolated tower, whence the bell so often called the turbulent populace together; or dropping one’s eyes, behold under the lofty arches of the Loggia of Orcagna the marble representations of the ancient and modern world assembled together,—peacefully: the antique Ajax, the Renaissance Perseus of Cellini, the Rape of the Sabines, by John of Bologna, and the late group of Polyxines, by Fedi, holding solemn and silent conclave. In the Piazza del Duomo at the side of Brunelleschi’s noble dome, the exquisite campanile of Giotto, slender, graceful, and joyous, stands like a bride and whispers ever the name of its master and designer. And turning round, one may see the Baptistery celebrated by Dante, and those massive bronze doors storied by Ghiberti, which Michel Angelo said were worthy to be the doors of Paradise. History and romance meets us everywhere. The old families still give their names to the streets, and palaces, and _loggie_. Every now and then a marble slab upon some house records the birth or death within of some famous citizen, artist, writer, or patriot, or perpetuates the memory of some great event. There is scarcely a street or a square which has not something memorable to say and to recall, and one walks through the streets guided by memory, looking behind more than before, and seeing with the eyes of the imagination. Here is the Bargello, by turns the court of the Podestà and the prison of Florence, whence so many edicts were issued, and where the groans of so many prisoners were echoed. Here is the Church of the Carmine, where Masaccio and Lippi painted those frescoes which are still living on its walls, though the hands that painted and the brains that dreamed them into life are gone forever. Here are the _loggie_ which were granted only to the fifteen highest citizens, from which fair ladies, who are now but dust, looked and laughed so many a year ago. Here are the _piazze_ within whose tapestried stockades gallant knights jousted in armor, and fair eyes, gazing from above, “rained influence and adjudged the prize.” Here are the fortifications at which Michel Angelo worked as an engineer and as a combatant; and here among the many churches, each one of which bears on its walls or over its altars the painted or sculptured work of some of the great artists of the flowering prime of Florence, is that of the Santa Croce, the sacred and solemn mausoleum of many of its mighty dead. As we wander through its echoing nave at twilight, when the shadows of evening are deepening, we may hold communion with these great spirits of the past. The Peruzzi and Baldi Chapels are illustrated by the frescoes of Giotto. The foot treads upon many a slab under which lie the remains of soldier, and knight, and noble, and merchant prince, who, centuries ago, their labors and battles and commerce done, were here laid to rest. The nave on either side is lined with monumental statues of the illustrious dead. Ungrateful Florence, who drove her greatest poet from her gates to find a grave in Ravenna, _patriis extorris ab urbe_, here tardily and in penitence raised to him a monument after vainly striving to reclaim his bones. Here, too, among others, are the statues and monuments of Michel Angelo, Macchiavelli, Galileo, Lanzi, Aretino, Guicciardini, Alfieri, Leon Battista Alberti, and Raffaelle Morghen.

Of all the great men who shed a lustre over Florence, no one so domineers over it and pervades it with his memory and his presence as Michel Angelo. The impression he left upon his own age and upon all subsequent ages is deeper, perhaps, than that left by any other save Dante. Everything in Florence recalls him. The dome of Brunelleschi, impressive and beautiful as it is, and prior in time to that of St. Peter’s, cannot rid itself of its mighty brother in Rome. With Ghiberti’s doors are ever associated his words. In Santa Croce we all pause longer before the tomb where his body is laid than before any other—even that of Dante. The empty place before the Palazzo Vecchio, where his David stood, still holds its ghost. All places which knew him in life are still haunted by his memory. The house where he lived, thought, and worked is known to every pilgrim of art. The least fragment which his hand touched is there preserved as precious, simply because it was his; and it is with a feeling of reverence that we enter the little closet where his mighty works were designed. There still stands his folding desk, lit by a little slip of a window; and there are the shelves and pigeon-holes where he kept his pencils, colors, tools, and books. The room is so narrow that one can scarcely turn about in it; and the contrast between this narrow, restricted space and the vastness of the thoughts which there were born, and the extent of his fame which fills the world, is strangely impressive and affecting. Here, barring the door behind him to exclude the world, he sat and studied and wrote and drew, little dreaming that hundreds of thousands of pilgrims would in after-centuries come to visit it in reverence from a continent then but just discovered, and peopled only with savages.

But more than all other places, the Church of San Lorenzo is identified with him; and the Medicean Chapel, which he designed, is more a monument to him than to those in honor of whom it was built.

Here, therefore, under the shadow of these noble shapes, and in the silent influence of this solemn place, let us cast a hurried glance over the career and character of Michel Angelo as exhibited in his life and his greatest works. To do more than this would be impossible within the brief limits we can here command. We may then give a glance into the adjoining and magnificent Hall, which is the real mausoleum of the Medici, and is singularly in contrast with it.

Michel Angelo was born at Caprese, in the Casentino, near Florence, on March 6, 1474 or 1475, according as we reckon from the nativity or the incarnation of Christ. He died at Rome on Friday, February 23, 1564, at the ripe age of eighty-nine or ninety. He claimed to be of the noble family of the Counts of Canossa. He certainly was of the family of the Berlinghi. His father was one of the twelve Buonomini, and was Podestà of Caprese when Michel Angelo was born. From his early youth he showed a strong inclination to art, and vainly his father sought to turn him aside from this vocation. His early studies were under Ghirlandajo. But he soon left his master to devote himself to sculpture; and he was wont to say that he “had imbibed this disposition with his nurse’s milk”—she being the wife of a stone-carver. Lorenzo the Magnificent favored him and received him into his household; and there under his patronage he prosecuted his studies, associating familiarly with some of the most remarkable men of the period, enriching his mind with their conversation, and giving himself earnestly to the study not only of art, but of science and literature. The celebrated Angelo Poliziano, then tutor to the sons of Lorenzo, was strongly attracted to him, and seems to have adopted him also as a pupil. His early efforts as a sculptor were not remarkable; and though many stories are told of his great promise and efficiency, but little weight is to be given to them. He soon, however, began to distinguish himself among his contemporaries; and his Cupid and Bacchus, though wanting in all the spirit and characteristics of antique work, were, for the time and age of the sculptor, important and remarkable. After this followed the Pietà, now in St. Peter’s at Rome, in which a different spirit began to exhibit itself; but it was not till later on that the great individuality and originality of his mind was shown, when from an inform block of rejected marble he hewed the colossal figure of David. He had at last found the great path of his genius. From this time forward he went on with ever-increasing power—working in many various arts, and stamping on each the powerful character of his mind. His grandest and most characteristic works in sculpture and painting were executed in his middle age. The Sistine Chapel he completed when he was thirty-eight years old, the stern figure of the Moses when he was forty, the great sculptures of the Medici Chapel when he was from fifty to fifty-five; and in his sixty-sixth year he finished the Last Judgment. Thenceforth his thoughts were chiefly given to architecture, with excursions into poetry—though during this latter period he painted the frescoes in the Pauline Chapel; and after being by turns sculptor, painter, architect, engineer, and poet, he spent the last years of his life in designing and superintending the erection of St. Peter’s at Rome.

One of his last works, if not the last, was the model of the famous cupola of St. Peter’s, which he never saw completed. In some respects this was departed from in its execution by his successors; but in every change it lost, and had it been carried out strictly as he designed it, it would have been even nobler and more beautiful than it is.

Here was a long life of ceaseless study, of untiring industry, of never-flagging devotion to art. Though surrounded by discouragements of every kind, harassed by his family, forced to obey the arbitrary will of a succession of Popes, and, in accordance with their orders, to abandon the execution of his high artistic conceptions and waste months and years on mere mechanic labor in superintending mines and quarries—driven against his will, now to be a painter when he desired to be a sculptor, now to be an architect when he had learned to be a painter, now as an engineer to be employed on fortifications when he was longing for his art; through all the exigencies of his life, and all the worrying claims of patrons, family, and country, he kept steadily on, never losing courage even to the end—a man of noble life, high faith, pure instincts, great intellect, powerful will, and inexhaustible energy; proud and scornful, but never vain; violent of character, but generous and true,—never guilty through all his long life of a single mean or unworthy act: a silent, serious, unsocial, self-involved man, oppressed with the weight of great thoughts, and burdened by many cares and sorrows. With but a grim humor, and none of the lighter graces of life, he went his solitary way, ploughing a deeper furrow in his age than any of his contemporaries, remarkable as they were,—an earnest and unwearied student and seeker, even to the last.

It was in his old age that he made a drawing of himself in a child’s go-cart with the motto “Ancora imparo”—I am still learning. And one winter day toward the end of his life, the Cardinal Gonsalvi met him walking down towards the Colosseum during a snowstorm. Stopping his carriage, the Cardinal asked where he was going in such stormy weather. “To school,” he answered “to try to learn something.”

Slowly, as years advanced, his health declined, but his mind retained to the last all its energy and clearness; and many a craggy sonnet and madrigal he wrote towards the end of his life, full of high thought and feeling—struggling for expression, and almost rebelliously submitting to the limits of poetic form; and at last, peacefully, after eighty-nine long years of earnest labor and never-failing faith, he passed away, and the great light went out. No! it did not go out; it still burns as brightly as ever across these long centuries to illumine the world.

Fitly to estimate the power of Michel Angelo as a sculptor, we must study the great works in the Medicean Chapel in the Church of San Lorenzo, which show the culmination of his genius in this branch of art.

The original church of San Lorenzo was founded in 930, and is one of the most ancient in Italy. It was burned down in 1423, and reërected in 1425 by the Medici from Brunelleschi’s designs. Later, in 1523, by the order of Leo X., Michel Angelo designed and began to execute the new sacristy, which was intended to serve as a mausoleum to Giuliano dei Medici, Duke of Nemours, brother of Leo X., and younger son of Lorenzo the Magnificent; and to Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, and grandson of the great Lorenzo. Within this mausoleum, which is now called the Medici Chapel, were placed the statues of Giuliano and Lorenzo. They are both seated on lofty pedestals, and face each other on opposite sides of the chapel. At the base of one, reclining on a huge sarcophagus, are the colossal figures of Day and Night, and at the base of the other the figures of Aurora and Crepuscule. This chapel is quite separated from the church itself. You enter from below by a dark and solemn crypt, beneath which are the bodies of thirty-four of the family, with large slabs at intervals on the pavement, on which their names are recorded. You ascend a staircase, and go through a corridor into this chapel. It is solemn, cold, bare, white, and lighted from above by a lantern open to the sky. There is no color, the lower part being carved of white marble, and the upper part and railings wrought in stucco. A chill comes over you as you enter it; and the whole place is awed into silence by these majestic and solemn figures. You at once feel yourself to be in the presence of an influence, serious, grand, impressive, and powerful, and of a character totally different from anything that sculpture has hitherto produced, either in the ancient or modern world. Whatever may be the defects of these great works, and they are many and evident, one feels that here a lofty intellect and power has struggled, and fought its way, so to speak, into the marble, and brought forth from the insensate stone a giant brood of almost supernatural shapes. It is not nature that he has striven to render, but rather to embody thoughts, and to clothe in form conceptions which surpass the limits of ordinary nature. It is idle to apply here the rigid rules of realism. The attitudes are distorted, and almost impossible. No figure could ever retain the position of the Night at best for more than a moment, and to sleep in such an attitude would be scarcely possible. And yet a mighty burden of sleep weighs down this figure, and the solemnity of night itself broods over it. So also the Day is more like a primeval titanic form than the representation of a human being. The action of the head, for instance, is beyond nature. The head itself is merely blocked out, and scarcely indicated in its features. But this very fact is in itself a stroke of genius; for the suggestion of mystery in this vague and unfinished face is far more impressive than any elaborated head could have been. It is supposed he left it thus, because he found the action too strained. So be it; but here is Day still involved in clouds, but now arousing from its slumbers, throwing off the mists of darkness, and rising with a tremendous energy of awakening life. The same character also pervades the Aurora and Crepuscule. They are not man and woman, they are types of ideas. One lifts its head, for the morning is coming; one holds its head abased, for the gloom of evening is drawing on. There is no joy in any of these figures. A terrible sadness and seriousness oppresses them. Aurora does not smile at the coming of the light, is not glad, has little hope, but looks upon it with a terrible weariness, almost with despair—for it sees little promise, and doubts far more than it hopes. Twilight, again, almost disdainfully sinks to repose. The day has accomplished almost nothing: oppressed and hopeless, it sees the darkness close about it.

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.”

Which may be rendered:—

“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.”