The Duke Lorenzo
The Medici Chapel, Florence
Moreover, he held that this could be done without the use of symbolism. The simplest natural objects, transfigured by the artist-poet, would carry the profoundest truth.
Let us see how Michael Angelo proved his belief in the all-sufficiency of the art of sculpture in this respect. Choose two typical figures from the groups we are considering.
“Marble griefs,
Hewn from a Titan’s heart,”
some one has called them. Say those of “Dawn” and “Night.” Both are female nudes, and illustrate a vital feature in Michael Angelo’s technique—his preference for the male over the female form. The Greek sculptors before Praxiteles had the same preference. The male form made a more vital appeal to them than the female. With its infinitely greater variety of surface and its greater diversity of posture, it expressed more directly the vast complexity of human energies which their age had seen spring into being. Two thousand years later the times gave rise to thoughts no less profound and to emotions of no less intensity. And Michael Angelo found that they were too heavy a burden for a woman’s form to bear. That the full sentiment aroused by his conception of “Night” may find expression, the sculptor has lengthened the trunk and the limbs. He has twisted the torso upon the hips. He has added, as it were, a masculine character to the feminine form. He has treated the female nude in the male key. This is a direct reversion of the Praxitelean method by which profoundly beautiful sensuous effects were obtained through treating the male figure in the female key—the “Hermaphroditus,” for instance.
And yet it cannot be denied that the Praxitelean method is what we should have expected Angelo to follow. If the figure of “Dawn” had conveyed nothing save the virgin fairness of form which Giorgione’s “Venus” at Dresden embodies, it would have been more in accord with the popular taste of the first quarter of the sixteenth century. As the political and social situation in Italy grew more desperate (and it was never more desperate than during the years in which the monuments in the Medici chapel were being carved) painting and sculpture had become more joyous. The themes which the artists treated became less and less religious and more and more pagan. This has always been the case. In times of the greatest stress, when the enemy is beating at the very gates, men cannot sustain the soul-tearing emotions which they welcome in their art during times of prosperity. The defeat of the Athenians at Ægospotami did not bring to birth a greater Æschylus who should give shape to the fearful emotions which the men of the earlier age had been spared. No! tragedy vanished. Comedy arose. So it was with sculpture. Men turned from the griefs of a Niobe and found consolation in the sheer sensuous beauty of Praxiteles’ “Aphrodite.” They preferred the manly charms of Hermes to the awful sublimity embodied in the brow of Phidias’ Zeus. And so in our period, when the horrors which had overtaken the Greek cities were threatening their heirs in Italy, the same thing took place. We find that the typical work is not the brooding figure of “Lorenzo of Urbino” or the “Night,” which Michael Angelo sculptured beneath the figure of Giuliano, but the melodious dreams that floated from the brush of a Correggio. At this very time Allegri was at work upon the decoration of the great chamber of the Abbess of the Convent of St. Paul, Parma. He chose to depict no titanic forms charged with emotion, but covered his ceiling with a vast trellis of vine-leaves and fruit, and in the oval apertures which these formed he placed his groups of genii toying with the implements of the chase. Correggio’s was the manner of his time. His end was sensuous delight and through it, not the dramatic, but the lyrical note, continually sounds.
MICHAEL ANGELO
From The Medici Chapel, Florence
But Michael Angelo was too true a man to dole out lies which should pander to a joyous carelessness. It was his task to echo, not one emotion, but all the emotions which had stirred the Italy of his age. As a mere boy he had seen the men and women who flocked to the Duomo at Florence to listen to the denunciations of Savonarola. He had seen them pass from the Church speechless—“more dead than alive”—because of the great fear which was upon them. Before he was twenty, he had witnessed the coming of the “Scourge,” which the fate had foretold. Then he had passed to “the Eternal City,” the home of the Princes of the Church, the centre of Christendom, only to find that, to borrow Symonds’s phrase, “the very popes rose from the beds of harlots to unlock or bolt the gates of heaven and purgatory.” It has been said that Michael Angelo worked upon the Medici tombs during the siege of Florence in 1528. He may have been carving these marbles when the artillery of a Medicean army was actually thundering against the Florence that Lorenzo had made immortal. As his thoughts were thrown back by his subject upon his boyhood days, memories of Savonarola—the Jeremiah of the Renaissance—must have come back in a flood. Well may the sculpture in the sacristy of San Lorenzo have been termed
“Marble griefs,
Hewn from a Titan’s heart.”
We shall not attempt to translate Angelo’s message into words, but a happy chance has preserved a story which enables us to realize what the sculptor intended to convey by the figure of the sleeping woman we call “Night.” We might have guessed that the firm hips, contrasting as they do with the long limbs and narrow form of the virgin “Dawn,” symbolized the end of a life of suffering. Those worn breasts have suckled many, and the mother, who has watched her children struggling through the cruel breakers of life, is now herself at rest. The figure of “Night” was never intended to carry the gay, sunny message that a Botticelli felt and longed to give forth when he painted such a picture as the “Birth of Venus” or the “Coming of Spring.” The story goes that Giovanni Battista Strozzi wrote the following epigram, which he placed beneath the marble figure. It ran:
“The Night, that thou seest so sweetly sleeping,
Was by an angel carved in the rude stone.
Sleeping, she lives; if thou believ’st it not,
Wake her, and surely she will answer thee.”
Angelo, seeing this, wrote in reply:
“Sweet is my sleep, more sweet to be mere stone,
So long as ruin and dishonour reign.
To hear nought, to feel nought, is my great gain;
Then wake me not; speak in an undertone.”
It is by the light of such an agonized philosophy that we must interpret the life-work of Michael Angelo. He lived in the midst of a society that was morally rotten. He saw a foreign foe at the very gates of his native city. Could one, to whom “Art’s the witness of what is behind this Show,” throw out careless hints as to the struggle the spirit of man must face before it is released? The almost unnatural poses in such sculptures as those in the Medici Chapel tell of the vehement emotion with which the soul of their author contemplated the “riddle of this painful world.” Michael Angelo would have been false to his mission had he been content to aim at the graceful repose which satisfied Praxiteles. His glory was to make sculpture—the most limited of the arts in this respect—a vehicle for the expression of the greatest of emotions and passions of which the human heart is capable.