The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti Part 22

But now, transcending what those laurels bore Of pride and beauty for our age and zone.

You climb of poetry the third high throne, Singing love's strife and-peace, love's sweet and sore.

O wise, and dear to G.o.d, old man well born, Who in so many, so fair ways, make fair This world, how shall your dues be dully paid?

Doomed by eternal charters to adorn Nature and art, yourself their mirror are, None, first before, nor second after, made."_

In the above translation of Varchi's peroration I have endeavoured to sustain those long-winded periods of which he was so perfect and professed a master. We must remember that he actually read this dissertation before the Florentine Academy on the second Sunday in Lent, in the year 1546, when Michelangelo was still alive and hearty.

He afterwards sent it to the press; and the studied trumpet-tones of eulogy, conferring upon Michelangelo the quintuple crown of pre-eminence in painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, and loving, sounded from Venice down to Naples. The style of the oration may strike us as _rococo_ now, but the accent of praise and appreciation is surely genuine. Varchi's enthusiastic comment on the sonnets x.x.x, x.x.xi, and lii, published to men of letters, taste, and learning in Florence and all Italy, is the strongest vindication of their innocence against editors and scholars who in various ways have attempted to disfigure or to misconstrue them.

CHAPTER XIII

I

The correspondence which I used in the eleventh chapter, while describing Michelangelo's difficulties regarding the final contract with the Duke of Urbino, proves that he had not begun to paint the frescoes of the Cappella Paolina in October 1542. They were carried on with interruptions during the next seven years. These pictures, the last on which his talents were employed, are two large subjects: the Conversion of S. Paul, and the Martyrdom of S. Peter. They have suffered from smoke and other injuries of time even more than the frescoes of the Sistine, and can now be scarcely appreciated owing to discoloration. Nevertheless, at no period, even when fresh from the master's hand, can they have been typical of his style. It is true that contemporaries were not of this opinion. Condivi calls both of them "stupendous not only in the general exposition of the histories but also in the details of each figure." It is also true that the technical finish of these large compositions shows a perfect mastery of painting, and that the great designer has not lost his power of dealing at will with the human body. But the frigidity of old age had fallen on his feeling and imagination. The faces of his saints and angels here are more inexpressive than those of the Last Judgment. The type of form has become still more rigidly schematic. All those figures in violent att.i.tudes have been invented in the artist's brain without reference to nature; and the activity of movement which he means to suggest, is frozen, petrified, suspended. The suppleness, the elasticity, the sympathy with which Michelangelo handled the nude, when he began to paint in the Sistine Chapel, have disappeared. We cannot refrain from regretting that seven years of his energetic old age should have been devoted to work so obviously indicative of decaying faculties.

The Cappella Paolina ran a risk of destruction by fire during the course of his operations there. Michelangelo wrote to Del Riccio in 1545, reminding him that part of the roof had been consumed, and that it would be necessary to cover it in roughly at once, since the rain was damaging the frescoes and weakening the walls. When they were finished, Paul III. appointed an official guardian with a fixed salary, whose sole business it should be "to clean the frescoes well and keep them in a state of cleanliness, free from dust and other impurities, as also from the smoke of candles lighted in both chapels during divine service." This man had charge of the Sistine as well as the Pauline Chapel; but his office does not seem to have been continued after the death of the Farnese. The first guardian nominated was Buonarroti's favourite servant Urbino.

Vasari, after describing these frescoes in some detail, but without his customary enthusiasm, goes on to observe: "Michelangelo attended only, as I have elsewhere said, to the perfection of art. There are no landscapes, nor trees, nor houses; nor again do we find in his work that variety of movement and prettiness which may be noticed in the pictures of other men. He always neglected such decoration, being unwilling to lower his lofty genius to these details." This is indeed true of the arid desert of the Pauline frescoes. Then he adds: "They were his last productions in painting. He was seventy-five years old when he carried them to completion; and, as he informed me, he did so with great effort and fatigue--painting, after a certain age, and especially fresco-painting, not being in truth fit work for old men."

The first of two acute illnesses, which showed that Michelangelo's const.i.tution was beginning to give way, happened in the summer of 1544. On this occasion Luigi del Riccio took him into his own apartments at the Casa Strozzi; and here he nursed him with such personal devotion that the old man afterwards regarded Del Riccio as the saviour of his life. We learn this from the following pathetic sonnet:--

_It happens that the sweet unfathomed sea Of seeming courtesy sometimes doth hide Offence to life and honour. This descried, I hold less dear the health restored to me.

He who lends wings of hope, while secretly He spreads a traitorous snare by the wayside, Hath dulled the flame of love, and mortified Friendship where friendship burns most fervently.

Keep then, my dear Luigi, clear and fare, That ancient love to which my life I owe, That neither wind nor storm its calm may mar.

For wrath and pain our grat.i.tude obscure; And if the truest truth of love I know, One pang outweighs a thousand pleasures far._

Ruberto Strozzi, who was then in France, wrote anxiously inquiring after his health. In reply, Michelangelo sent Strozzi a singular message by Luigi del Riccio, to the effect that "if the king of France restored Florence to liberty, he was ready to make his statue on horseback out of bronze at his own cost, and set it up in the Piazza."

This throws some light upon a pa.s.sage in a letter addressed subsequently to Lionardo Buonarroti, when the tyrannous law, termed "La Polverina," enacted against malcontents by the Duke Cosimo de'

Medici, was disturbing the minds of Florentine citizens. Michelangelo then wrote as follows: "I am glad that you gave me news of the edict; because, if I have been careful up to this date in my conversation with exiles, I shall take more precautions for the future. As to my having been laid up with an illness in the house of the Strozzi, I do not hold that I was in their house, but in the apartment of Messer Luigi del Riccio, who was my intimate friend; and after the death of Bartolommeo Angelini, I found no one better able to transact my affairs, or more faithfully, than he did. When he died, I ceased to frequent the house, as all Rome can bear me witness; as they can also with regard to the general tenor of my life, inasmuch as I am always alone, go little around, and talk to no one, least of all to Florentines. When I am saluted on the open street, I cannot do less than respond with fair words and pa.s.s upon my way. Had I knowledge of the exiles, who they are, I would not reply to them in any manner. As I have said, I shall henceforward protect myself with diligence, the more that I have so much else to think about that I find it difficult to live."

This letter of 1548, taken in connection with the circ.u.mstances of Michelangelo's illness in 1544, his exchange of messages with Ruberto degli Strozzi, his gift of the two Captives to that gentleman, and his presence in the house of the Strozzi during his recovery, shows the delicacy of the political situation at Florence under Cosimo's rule.

Slight indications of a reactionary spirit in the aged artist exposed his family to peril. Living in Rome, Michelangelo risked nothing with the Florentine government. But "La Polverina" attacked the heirs of exiles in their property and persons. It was therefore of importance to establish his non-complicity in revolutionary intrigues. Luckily for himself and his nephew, he could make out a good case and defend his conduct. Though Buonarroti's sympathies and sentiments inclined him to prefer a republic in his native city, and though he threw his weight into that scale at the crisis of the siege, he did not forget his early obligations to the House of Medici. Clement VII. accepted his allegiance when the siege was over, and set him immediately to work at the tasks he wished him to perform. What is more, the Pope took pains and trouble to settle the differences between him and the Duke of Urbino. The man had been no conspirator. The architect and sculptor was coveted by every pope and prince in Italy. Still there remained a discord between his political instincts, however prudently and privately indulged, and his sense of personal loyalty to the family at whose board he sat in youth, and to whom he owed his advancement in life. Accordingly, we shall find that, though the Duke of Tuscany made advances to win him back to Florence, Michelangelo always preferred to live and die on neutral ground in Rome. Like the wise man that he was, he seems to have felt through these troublous times that his own duty, the service laid on him by G.o.d and nature, was to keep his force and mental faculties for art; obliging old patrons in all kindly offices, suppressing republican aspirations--in one word, "sticking to his last," and steering clear of shoals on which the main raft of his life might founder.

From this digression, which was needful to explain his att.i.tude toward Florence and part of his psychology, I return to the incidents of Michelangelo's illness at Rome in 1544. Lionardo, having news of his uncle's danger, came post-haste to Rome. This was his simple duty, as a loving relative. But the old man, rendered suspicious by previous transactions with his family, did not take the action in its proper light. We have a letter, indorsed by Lionardo in Rome as received upon the 11th of July, to this effect: "Lionardo, I have been ill; and you, at the instance of Ser Giovan Francesco (probably Fattucci), have come to make me dead, and to see what I have left. Is there not enough of mine at Florence to content you? You cannot deny that you are the image of your father, who turned me out of my own house in Florence.

Know that I have made a will of such tenor that you need not trouble your head about what I possess at Rome. Go then with G.o.d, and do not present yourself before me; and do not write to me again, and act like the priest in the fable."

The correspondence between uncle and nephew during the next months proves that this furious letter wrought no diminution of mutual regard and affection. Before the end of the year he must have recovered, for we find him writing to Del Riccio: "I am well again now, and hope to live yet some years, seeing that G.o.d has placed my health under the care of Maestro Baccio Rontini and the trebbian wine of the Ulivieri."

This letter is referred to January 1545, and on the 9th of that month he dictated a letter to his friend Del Riccio, in which he tells Lionardo Buonarroti: "I do not feel well, and cannot write.

Nevertheless I have recovered from my illness, and suffer no pain now." We have reason to think that Michelangelo fell gravely ill again toward the close of 1545. News came to Florence that he was dying; and Lionardo, not intimidated by his experience on the last occasion, set out to visit him. His _ricordo_ of the journey was as follows: "I note how on the 15th of January 1545 (Flor. style, _i.e._ 1546) I went to Rome by post to see Michelangelo, who was ill, and returned to-day, the 26th."

It is not quite easy to separate the records of these two acute illnesses of Michelangelo, falling between the summer of 1544 and the early spring of 1546. Still, there is no doubt that they signalised his pa.s.sage from robust old age into a period of physical decline.

Much of life survived in the hero yet; he had still to mould S.

Peter's after his own mind, and to invent the cupola. Intellectually he suffered no diminution, but he became subject to a chronic disease of the bladder, and adopted habits suited to decaying faculty.

II

We have seen that Michelangelo regarded Luigi del Riccio as his most trusty friend and adviser. The letters which he wrote to him during these years turn mainly upon business or poetical compositions. Some, however, throw light upon the private life of both men, and on the nature of their intimacy. I will select a few for special comment here. The following has no date; but it is interesting, because we may connect the feeling expressed in it with one of Michelangelo's familiar sonnets. "Dear Messer Luigi, since I know you are as great a master of ceremonies as I am unfit for that trade, I beg you to help me in a little matter. Monsignor di Todi (Federigo Cesi, afterwards Cardinal of S. Pancrazio) has made me a present, which Urbino will describe to you. I think you are a friend of his lordship: will you then thank him in my name, when you find a suitable occasion, and do so with those compliments which come easily to you, and to me are very hard? Make me too your debtor for some tartlet."

The sonnet is No. ix of Signor Guasti's edition. I have translated it thus:--

_The sugar, candles, and the saddled mule, Together with your cask of malvoisie, So far exceed all my necessity That Michael and not I my debt must rule.

In such a gla.s.sy calm the breezes fool My sinking sails, so that amid the sea My bark hath missed her way, and seems to be A wisp of straw whirled on a weltering pool.

To yield thee gift for gift and grace for grace, For food and drink and carriage to and fro, For all my need in every time and place, O my dear lord, matched with the much I owe, All that I am were no real recompense: Paying a debt is not munificence._

In the chapter upon Michelangelo's poetry I dwelt at length upon Luigi del Riccio's pa.s.sionate affection for his cousin, Cecchino dei Bracci.

This youth died at the age of sixteen, on January 8, 1545.

Michelangelo undertook to design "the modest sepulchre of marble"

erected to his memory by Del Riccio in the church of Araceli. He also began to write sonnets, madrigals, and epitaphs, which were sent from day to day. One of his letters gives an explanation of the eighth epitaph: "Our dead friend speaks and says: if the heavens robbed all beauty from all other men on earth to make me only, as indeed they made me, beautiful; and if by the divine decree I must return at doomsday to the shape I bore in life, it follows that I cannot give back the beauty robbed from others and bestowed on me, but that I must remain for ever more beautiful than the rest, and they be ugly. This is just the opposite of the conceit you expressed to me yesterday; the one is a fable, the other is the truth."

Some time in 1545 Luigi went to Lyons on a visit to Ruberto Strozzi and Giuliano de' Medici. This seems to have happened toward the end of the year; for we possess a letter indorsed by him, "sent to Lyons, and returned upon the 22nd of December." This doc.u.ment contains several interesting details. "All your friends are extremely grieved to hear about your illness, the more so that we cannot help you; especially Messer Donato (Giannotti) and myself. However, we hope that it may turn out to be no serious affair, G.o.d willing. In another letter I told you that, if you stayed away long, I meant to come to see you.

This I repeat; for now that I have lost the Piacenza ferry, and cannot live at Rome without income, I would rather spend the little that I have in hostelries, than crawl about here, cramped up like a penniless cripple. So, if nothing happens, I have a mind to go to S. James of Compostella after Easter; and if you have not returned, I should like to travel through any place where I shall hear that you are staying.

Urbino has spoken to Messer Aurelio, and will speak again. From what he tells me, I think that you will get the site you wanted for the tomb of Cecchino. It is nearly finished, and will turn out handsome."

Michelangelo's project of going upon pilgrimage to Galicia shows that his health was then good. But we know that he soon afterwards had another serious illness; and the scheme was abandoned.

This long and close friendship with Luigi comes to a sudden termination in one of those stormy outbursts of petulant rage which form a special feature of Michelangelo's psychology. Some angry words pa.s.sed between them about an engraving, possibly of the Last Judgment, which Buonarroti wanted to destroy, while Del Riccio refused to obliterate the plate:--

"Messer Luigi,--You seem to think I shall reply according to your wishes, when the case is quite the contrary. You give me what I have refused, and refuse me what I begged. And it is not ignorance which makes you send it me through Ercole, when you are ashamed to give it me yourself. One who saved my life has certainly the power to disgrace me; but I do not know which is the heavier to bear, disgrace or death. Therefore I beg and entreat you, by the true friendship which exists between us, to spoil that print (_stampa_), and to burn the copies that are already printed off. And if you choose to buy and sell me, do not so to others. If you hack me into a thousand pieces, I will do the same, not indeed to yourself, but to what belongs to you.

"Michelangelo Buonarroti.

"Not painter, nor sculptor, nor architect, but what you will, but not a drunkard, as you said at your house."

Unfortunately, this is the last of the Del Riccio's letters. It is very probable that the irascible artist speedily recovered his usual tone, and returned to amity with his old friend. But Del Riccio departed this life toward the close of this year, 1546.

Before resuming the narrative of Michelangelo's art-work at this period, I must refer to the correspondence which pa.s.sed between him and King Francis I. The King wrote an epistle in the spring of 1546, requesting some fine monument from the ill.u.s.trious master's hand.

Michelangelo replied upon the 26th of April, in language of simple and respectful dignity, fine, as coming from an aged artist to a monarch on the eve of death:--

"Sacred Majesty,--I know not which is greater, the favour, or the astonishment it stirs in me, that your Majesty should have deigned to write to a man of my sort, and still more to ask him for things of his which are all unworthy of the name of your Majesty. But be they what they may, I beg your Majesty to know that for a long while since I have desired to serve you; but not having had an opportunity, owing to your not being in Italy, I have been unable to do so. Now I am old, and have been occupied these many months with the affairs of Pope Paul. But if some s.p.a.ce of time is still granted to me after these engagements, I will do my utmost to fulfil the desire which, as I have said above, has long inspired me: that is, to make for your Majesty one work in marble, one in bronze, and one in painting. And if death prevents my carrying out this wish, should it be possible to make statues or pictures in the other world, I shall not fail to do so there, where there is no more growing old. And I pray G.o.d that He grant your Majesty a long and a happy life."

Francis died in 1547; and we do not know that any of Michelangelo's works pa.s.sed directly into his hands, with the exception of the Leda, purchased through the agency of Luigi Alamanni, and the two Captives, presented by Ruberto Strozzi.

III

The absorbing tasks imposed upon Buonarroti's energies by Paul III., which are mentioned in this epistle to the French king, were not merely the frescoes of the Cappella Paolina, but also various architectural and engineering schemes of some importance. It is clear, I think, that at this period of his hale old age, Michelangelo preferred to use what still survived in him of vigour and creative genius for things requiring calculation, or the exercise of meditative fancy. The time had gone by when he could wield the brush and chisel with effective force. He was tired of expressing his sense of beauty and the deep thoughts of his brain in sculptured marble or on frescoed surfaces. He had exhausted the human form as a symbol of artistic utterance. But the extraordinary richness of his vein enabled him still to deal with abstract mathematical proportions in the art of building, and with rhythms in the art of writing. His best work, both as architect and poet, belongs to the period when he had lost power as sculptor and painter. This fact is psychologically interesting. Up to the age of seventy, he had been working in the plastic and the concrete. The language he had learned, and used with overwhelming mastery, was man: physical mankind, converted into spiritual vehicle by art. His grasp upon this region failed him now. Perhaps there was not the old sympathy with lovely shapes. Perhaps he knew that he had played on every gamut of that lyre. Emerging from the sphere of the sensuous, where ideas take plastic embodiment, he grappled in this final stage of his career with harmonical ratios and direct verbal expression, where ideas are disengaged from figurative form. The men and women, loved by him so long, so wonderfully wrought into imperishable shapes, "nurslings of immortality," recede. In their room arise, above the horizon of his intellect, the cupola of S. Peter's and a few imperishable poems, which will live as long as Italian claims a place among the languages. There is no comparison to be inst.i.tuted between his actual achievements as a builder and a versifier. The whole tenor of his life made him more competent to deal with architecture than with literature. Nevertheless, it is significant that the versatile genius of the man was henceforth restricted to these two channels of expression, and that in both of them his last twenty years of existence produced bloom and fruit of unexpected rarity.

After writing this paragraph, and before I engage in the narrative of what is certainly the final manifestation of Michelangelo's genius as a creative artist, I ought perhaps to pause, and to give some account of those survivals from his plastic impulse, which occupied the old man's energies for several years. They were entirely the outcome of religious feeling; and it is curious to notice that he never approached so nearly to true Christian sentiment as in the fragmentary designs which we may still abundantly collect from this late autumn of his artist's life. There are countless drawings for some great picture of the Crucifixion, which was never finished: exquisite in delicacy of touch, sublime in conception, dignified in breadth and grand repose of style. Condivi tells us that some of these were made for the Marchioness of Pescara. But Michelangelo must have gone on producing them long after her death. With these phantoms of stupendous works to be, the Museums of Europe abound. We cannot bring them together, or condense them into a single centralised conception. Their interest consists in their divergence and variety, showing the continuous poring of the master's mind upon a theme he could not definitely grasp. For those who love his work, and are in sympathy with his manner, these drawings, mostly in chalk, and very finely handled, have a supreme interest. They show him, in one sense, at his highest and his best, not only as a man of tender feeling, but also as a mighty draughtsman. Their incompleteness testifies to something pathetic--the humility of the imperious man before a theme he found to be beyond the reach of human faculty.

The tone, the _Stimmung_, of these designs corresponds so exactly to the sonnets of the same late period, that I feel impelled at this point to make his poetry take up the tale. But, as I cannot bring the cloud of witnesses of all those drawings into this small book, so am I unwilling to load its pages with poems which may be found elsewhere.

Those who care to learn the heart of Michelangelo, when he felt near to G.o.d and face to face with death, will easily find access to the originals.

Concerning the Deposition from the Cross, which now stands behind the high altar of the Florentine Duomo, Condivi writes as follows: "At the present time he has in hand a work in marble, which he carries on for his pleasure, as being one who, teeming with conceptions, must needs give birth each day to some of them. It is a group of four figures larger than life. A Christ taken from the cross, sustained in death by his Mother, who is represented in an att.i.tude of marvellous pathos, leaning up against the corpse with breast, with arms, and lifted knee.

Nicodemus from above a.s.sists her, standing erect and firmly planted, propping the dead Christ with a st.u.r.dy effort; while one of the Maries, on the left side, though plunged in sorrow, does all she can to a.s.sist the afflicted Mother, failing under the attempt to raise her Son. It would be quite impossible to describe the beauty of style displayed in this group, or the sublime emotions expressed in those woe-stricken countenances. I am confident that the Pieta is one of his rarest and most difficult masterpieces; particularly because the figures are kept apart distinctly, nor does the drapery of the one intermingle with that of the others."

This panegyric is by no means pitched too high. Justice has hardly been done in recent times to the n.o.ble conception, the intense feeling, and the broad manner of this Deposition. That may be due in part to the dull twilight in which the group is plunged, depriving all its lines of salience and relief. It is also true that in certain respects the composition is fairly open to adverse criticism. The torso of Christ overweighs the total scheme; and his legs are unnaturally attenuated. The kneeling woman on the left side is slender, and appears too small in proportion to the other figures; though, if she stood erect, it is probable that her height would be sufficient.