The Colleoni Monument
Venice
Chapter X Michael Angelo and the Flood Tide of Renaissance Sculpture 1490-1530 A.d
The year 1475 a.d. has been reached. We have seen the conclusion of the struggle of the sculptors to make marble and bronze bear once more the impress of every imagination of the human heart. Nothing now remains save to estimate the fruits of the victory—a task which entails the appreciation of one man, Michael Angelo.
There is no exaggeration in focussing our attention on one artist. The apotheosis of Italian sculpture connects itself as inevitably with Michael Angelo as the topmost peak of Elizabethan drama—Shakespeare—connects itself with the dramatic hills and hillocks which led up to it. The first fifty years of Angelo’s life were to Renaissance sculpture what the age of Phidias and Polyclitus had been to Greek art. He and he alone found means to express in marble the deepest thoughts upon nature and humanity which the Italian Renaissance had aroused.
As had been the case with the Greek sculptors before Salamis, the pre-Angelesque artists had never quite made their message articulate. Indeed, the whole fifteenth century was a period of probation and experiment. In the sister art of painting, the draftsmen and colourists were realizing the possibilities of line and paint. The consequences of their efforts were Raphael, Leonardo, Titian and Correggio. What Angelico, Mantegna, Botticelli and Bellini were to the great painters, Ghiberti, della Robbia, Donatello, Pollaiuolo and Verocchio were to Michael Angelo.
But for the fact that Donatello and Ghiberti had raised the plastic arts for the time far above the graphic, it might well have been that sculpture would have been only a minor art to Michael Angelo. As things were in his boyhood, though painting was every year reducing the lead of the sister art, sculpture had still a far greater body of achievement to its credit. From the first it was clear that sculpture was the art by which his nature most naturally expressed itself. In after life he was wont jestingly to remind his friends of his earliest years among the mill-stone quarries of Settignano. He had been given to the wife of a stonecutter to be nursed, and, as he put it, “with the milk of my foster-mother I sucked in the chisels and mallets wherewith I now make my figures.”
We do not propose to attempt the narration of even the main events of Angelo’s life. We can put aside all that is merely personal. Our object is rather to show how he came into contact with the main political and social factors of his age, and how these, in turn, reacted upon his art. Three circumstances single themselves out as all-important—the sculptor’s connection with the Medici family in his early youth, with the city of Florence in his early manhood, and with the Papacy in the prime of life.
MICHAEL ANGELO
Academy of Fine Arts, Florence
These three powers practically brought into being all that is greatest in Italian art. From our sculptor’s association with them we can understand the influences which were spurring Angelo’s few compeers and his many inferiors to their greatest efforts.
The Florentine Period
Like many another scholar and artist, Michael Angelo entered the household of Lorenzo de Medici, the merchant-despot of Florence, as a boy. Until his patron’s death he fared like a scion of the family. While it would have been impossible for an impressionable youth to grow up without imbibing something of the spirit of the place, Angelo never thoroughly absorbed the influence of the Medicean court. The time was too short. Before he was twenty it was a thing of the past. But for some years the memory of these joy-days persisted, and it was under their inspiration that the earliest of Angelo’s great works were produced. Of these, the “David,” begun in 1501 and finished in 1503, stands out pre-eminently as embodying the humanist creed.
But the statue of the great loose-limbed youth has an even more vital interest. Nothing could more happily illustrate the relation a great Renaissance artist bore to his countrymen than the circumstances attending the carving of the “David.” It was commissioned by the State of Florence. The first contract signed by the sculptor and the representative of the town sets forth that “the worthy master, Michael Angelo, son of Lodovico Buonarroti, Citizen of Florence, has been chosen to fashion, complete, and perfectly finish the male statue, already rough-hewn and called ‘The Giant,’ 13 feet 6 inches high, now existing in the workshop of the Cathedral, badly blocked out aforetime by Master Agostino di Duccio of Florence.” In other words, Angelo’s “David”—one of the masterpieces of the world—was cut from a great block of marble that had been so maltreated by an earlier worker that no artist of rank could be found to risk his reputation in finishing it. This alone would be sufficient proof of the immense technical skill of this youth of twenty-six. In addition, Michael Angelo did not even model a full-sized clay figure. He worked with no guidance except a few drawings and wax models some eighteen inches high. His remuneration for this was fixed at £2 6s. a month—workmen, scaffolding, &c., being supplied. “When the said statue is finished,” continues the contract, “the consuls and operai shall estimate whether he deserve a larger recompense, and this shall be left to their consciences.”
History does not record whether the art committee of the Florentine County Council eventually did add to the rather meagre remuneration mentioned in the contract. We have ample evidence, however, that the representatives of the citizens did not shirk their critical duties. Vasari tells of a certain Gonfaloniere, who essayed to justify the opinion that the nose of the David was too big. Angelo listened for a while, and then ascended the scaffolding under which his critic was standing. Taking a chisel in the one hand and a few pinches of marble-dust in the other, the sculptor began to tap lightly around the doubtful spot. From time to time he let fall a little of the dust, but of course did not alter the nose. “Look at it now,” cried Angelo to the Gonfaloniere below. “You have given it life,” replied his victim, rubbing the dust out of his eyes.
MICHAEL ANGELO
Medici Chapel, Florence
MICHAEL ANGELO