Michael Angelo Buonarroti Part 8

A DETAIL, SISTINE CHAPEL, ROME (_Reproduced by permission from a photograph by Sig. D. Anderson, Rome_)

Truly his family did all they could to disturb his mind during this important period of the development of his greatest work. The mind that wrote the following letter to Giovan Simone cannot have been in a good state for work; but as he never lets a thought about his art appear in his letters, so, no doubt, when once the mood of work was upon him, all other thoughts were left without the workshop door:

"ROME, _July_ 1508.

"GIOVAN SIMONE,-It is said that when one does good to a good man it makes him become better, but a bad man becomes worse. I have tried now many years with words and deeds of kindness to bring you to live honestly and in peace with your father and the rest of us.

You grow continually worse. I do not say that you are a bad man, but you are of such sort that you have ceased to please me or anybody. I could read you a long lesson on your ways of living, but they would be idle words, like all the rest that I have wasted on you. To cut the matter short, I will tell you for a certain truth that you have nothing in the world. What you spend and your house-room I give you, and have given you these many years, for the love of G.o.d, believing you to be my brother like the rest.

Now, I am sure that you are not my brother, else you would not threaten my father. Nay, you are a beast; and as a beast I mean to treat you. Know that he who sees his father threatened or roughly handled is bound to risk his own life in this cause. Enough, I tell you that you have nothing in the world; and if I hear the least thing about your goings on, I will come post-haste and show you your error, and teach you to waste your substance and set fire to houses and farms you have not earned. Indeed, you are not where you think yourself to be. If I come, I will open your eyes to what will make you weep hot tears, and let you know on what false grounds you found your pride.

"I have something else to say to you which I have not said before.

If you will endeavour to live rightly, and to honour and revere your father, I will help you like the rest, and make you able shortly to open a good shop. If you do not do so, I shall come and settle your affairs in such a fashion that you will know what you are better than you ever did, and will understand what you have in the world, and it will be seen in every place where you may go. No more. What I lack in words I will supply with deeds.

"MICHAEL ANGELO, in Rome.

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ATHLETE

SISTINE CHAPEL, ROME (_By permission of the Fratelli Alinari, Florence_)

"I cannot refrain from adding two lines. It is this: I have gone these twelve years past, drudging about through all Italy, borne every shame, suffered every hardship, worn my body in every toil, put my life into a thousand dangers, solely to help the fortunes of my house, and now that I have begun to raise it up a little, you alone choose to destroy and ruin in one hour all that I have done in so many years, and with such labours. By Christ's body this shall not be! for I am the man to confound ten thousand such as you whenever it be needed. Be wise in time then, and do not try one who has other things to vex him."

So with hindrances enough, private and public, we must imagine the great artist climbing his scaffolding to the vault of the Pope's chapel, followed by his a.s.sistants, and setting them their task, transferring his full-size outline cartoons, prepared from the general designs, to the roof. We may fancy L'Indaco, Buggiardini, and the rest, staring with amazement at the huge figures and the great flowing lines before them, and trying to fit their dry manner of painting to the new grandeur of design.

It could but end in one way. The clause prepared beforehand by Michael Angelo in the contracts came into effect, and they had to be sent away, with plenty of grumbling on their part, no doubt. Michael Angelo was too exacting in the perfection of his taste to allow any work short of the absolute ideal he had imagined. Unlike Raphael, who was working in the neighbouring stanze, and who was contented to pa.s.s, and some would have us believe to execute, ill-turned foreshortenings and false drawing, so long as his general effect was preserved and the work done in reasonable time.

Perhaps his gentle and sunlike genius could not bear to use harsh words and shut the door against the mediocre men with whom he was surrounded.

Michael Angelo could brook no imperfection of whatever kind, so that he destroyed all that his a.s.sistants had done and shut himself up alone in the chapel. He was the only man who could do the work to his satisfaction; so he did it, alone and unaided, as to the actual painting, and produced a work unequalled in perfection since Phidias worked in Athens.

The dismissal of his a.s.sistants appears to have begun about the New Year 1509. It is hinted at in this letter:-

"DEAREST FATHER,-I have to-day received one of yours. When I read it I was sufficiently displeased. I doubt that you are more timid and fearful than you need be. I should like you to tell me what you imagine they can do to you, that is, if it should come to the worst. I have no more to say. It grieves me that you should be in such fear, so I comfort you by advising you to be well prepared against their power, with good advice, and then think no more about it; for if they took away all you have in the world you should not lack means to be comfortable as long as I was there.

Therefore be of good cheer. I am still in a great quandary, for it is now a year since I received a groat from the Pope, and I do not ask for it, for my work does not go forward in such a fashion as to deserve it, as it seems to me. And this is because of the difficulty of the work, and also that it is not my profession. And so I lose my time fruitlessly. G.o.d help me. If you are in need of money go to the Spedalingo(108) and make him give you anything up to fifteen ducats, and let me know what remains. Jacopo,(109) the painter whom I brought here, has just left, and as he has been grumbling here about my doings, I expect he will grumble there also. Turn a deaf ear to him. It is enough. For he is a thousand times in the wrong. I have good reason to complain of him. Take no notice of him. Tell Buonarroto that I will reply to him another time.

"The day twenty 7 of January.

"MICHAEL ANGELO, in Rome."(110)

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ATHLETE

SISTINE CHAPEL, ROME (_By permission of the Fratelli Alinari, Florence_)

Buggiardini appears to have fared better than L'Indaco. He painted a portrait of Michael Angelo with a towel tied round his head like a turban, now in the Casa Buonarroti, at Florence. From the age of the sitter it appears to belong to this period; the towel may have been used to protect the hair and head of the artist from falling colour as he painted the roof above him. It is an energetic head, with jet black hair and sallow complexion, with many lines and wrinkles for so young a face, determined, sad, and scornful in expression; a slight weakness and affectation may be due to the personality of the painter. Buggiardini also executed a painting from the cartoon of the master, the Madonna and Child with Angels, number 809, of the National Gallery. The beauty and grandeur of the lines of this design are far above the imagination of any one except Michael Angelo, but the details of the execution of the hands and the feet are inferior to any authentic work of his. The hatchings in the shadows, especially of the draperies, are made up of short and feeble lines, and do not express the form of the folds at all in the same way as we are accustomed to see Michael Angelo express them, even in his earlier drawings, the copies from Giotto and the primitives. The form of the mouths, and the expression and shape of the heads, especially in the second angel on the right, are similar to the work of Buggiardini as seen in Florence, Milan, and the Cathedral of Pisa. Buggiardini is the only one of the a.s.sistants who seems to have reaped any benefit, beyond their wages, from the work they did for the great master. This trouble with his a.s.sistants was not the only difficulty that Michael Angelo had to contend with in the execution of his work. Vasari says that he shut himself alone in the chapel, without any one to help him even in the grinding of his colours; but, as he adds, that he took great precautions to prevent the workmen informing the public as to what he was doing, we must a.s.sume that Vasari was repeating a fable that had grown up about the marvellous work forty years after it was executed, much as we might at this day repeat stories of the making of the Wellington Monument by Alfred Stevens. The carpenters and plasterers Michael Angelo employed would soon learn to perform the more mechanical part of his work, such as laying the intonaco, p.r.i.c.king the cartoons, and grinding colours, and as they could not have inserted into the work any tradition contrary to the new manner of the artist, would be preferred by him to second-rate artist a.s.sistants; no doubt, too, the boy he employed in household work would be made to help.

The trouble he had in his household arrangements before the time of his trusted servant, Urbino, may be ill.u.s.trated by a letter relating to the boy he got from Florence about this time. He never would have a woman to work for him in any way.

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SISTINE CHAPEL, ROME (_By permission of the Fratelli Alinari, Florence_)

"_To_ LODOVICO DI BUONARROTA SIMONI, _in Florence_.

"ROME (_January_ 1510).

"MOST REVERED FATHER,-I answered you about the business of Bernardino, as I wished first to settle the affairs of my household as you know, and so I now reply to you. I sent first for him because I was promised that within a few days he would be ready and that I might get to work. Afterwards I saw that it would be a long business; in the meantime I am seeking another suitable one to get out of it. I won't have any work done until I am ready, but tell him how the matter stands. About the boy who came, that rascal of a muleteer did me out of a ducat. He took an oath that he had agreed for two broad golden ducats, and all the lads who come here with the muleteers do not give more than ten carlinos. I was more angry than if I had lost twenty-five ducats, because I see it is the fault of the father, who wanted to send him on muleback in state. Oh! I had never such good fortune! not I.

Although the father declared, and the son likewise, that he would do anything, attend to the mule, and sleep on the ground if necessary; and now I have to look after him. Did I need any more bothers than I have had since my return? Here I have my boy, whom I left here, ill since the day I returned until now. He is now better it is true, but he has been between life and death, given up by the doctors, so that for about a month I have not been in bed, let alone many others. Now I have this nuisance of a boy, who says, and says again, that he does not want to lose time, that he must learn. And he told me that he would be satisfied with two or three hours a day. Now all day is not enough, so that he will be drawing all night also. These are counsels of the father. If I say anything he would declare that I did not wish him to learn. I want some one to mind the house, and if he did not feel like doing it they should not have put me to this expense. But they are no good, no good at all, and are working for their own ends; but enough. I beg you to have him taken away from before me, for he annoys me so much that I cannot stand him any longer. The muleteer has had so much money that he can very well take him back again; he is a friend of his father's. Tell the father to send for him. I'll not give him another farthing, for I have no money, I will have patience until he sends for him, and if he is not sent for I will turn him out, for I have done so already, on the second day after his arrival and other times as well, and he won't believe it.

"For the business of the shop I will send you a hundred ducats next Sat.u.r.day. With this, if you see that they are diligent and do well, give it to them and make me their creditor, as I was to Buonarroto when he went away. If they are not diligent, and do badly, place it to my account at Santa Maria Nuova. It is not yet time to buy.

"Your MICHAEL ANGELO, in Rome.

"If you are speaking to the father of the boy, put the matter nicely, mannerly; that he is a good lad, but too genteel, and that he is not fit for my work, and that he must send for him."(111)

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SISTINE CHAPEL, ROME (_By permission of the Fratelli Alinari, Florence_)

The more gentle tone of the postscript is very characteristic. Outwardly he would be rough, consumed with anger and indignation; but inwardly his nature was kindly to a degree to those he had about him.

Condivi tells us of the delay in the works in the Sistine due to the mould on the surface of the fresco, and of the haste of Julius. The progress was fast enough, one would have thought, even for that exacting Pontiff; for although the whole work consists, on counting heads, of some three hundred and ninety-four figures, the majority ten feet high; the prophets and sibyls, twelve in number, would be eighteen feet high if they stood up; yet by the following letters to his brother Buonarroto, of October 1509, we know he had finished the first half, consisting probably of some two hundred figures, even then; or a.s.suming that he began to paint when the a.s.sistants were dismissed in January 1509, he worked at the rate of about a figure a day.

_To_ BUONARROTO DI LODOVICO DI BUONARROTA, _in Florence_.

_From_ ROME, _the 17th of October, 1509._

"BUONARROTO,-I got the bread: it is good, but it is not good enough to make a trade of, for there would be little gain. I gave the knave five carlini, and he would hardly hand it over. I learn by your last how Lorenzo(112) will pa.s.s this way, and how I am to give him a good reception. It appears you do not know how I am situated here, all the same I excuse you. What I can do, I will.

About Gismondo and how he intends to come here to advance his business, tell him from me not to have any designs on me, not because I do not love him as a brother, but because I am unable to help him in anything. I am obliged to love myself more than others, and I have not enough for my own needs. I live here in great distress and with the greatest fatigue of body, and have not a friend of any sort, and do not want one, and have not even enough time to eat necessary food; therefore, do not annoy me any more, for I cannot bear another ounce.

For the shop I encourage you to be careful. It pleases me to hear that Giovanni Simone begins to do well. Endeavour to advance a little, or, at least, maintain what you have got, so that you will know how to manage larger affairs afterwards; for I have a hope, when I return to you, that you will be men enough to manage for yourselves. Tell Lodovico that I have not replied to him because I had not the time, and not to wonder if I do not write.

"MICHAEL ANGELO, Sculptor, in Rome."(113)