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PAGE

INTRODUCTION xi

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 169

CATALOGUE OF THE PRINCIPAL WORKS OF MICHELANGELO IN PUBLIC COLLECTIONS 175

NOTE ON THE DRAWINGS 179

BIBLIOGRAPHY 181

INDEX 185

FACING PAGE

Piet?. 14

David. 18

The Holy Family. Painted for Agnolo Doni. 22

The Almighty Creating the Sun and the Moon. 30

The Creation of Man. 36

The Prophet Ezekiel. 40

The Libyan Sibyl. 46

The Prophet Jeremiah. 50

The Erythrean Sibyl. 58

Jesse. A Figure in the Series of the "Ancestors of Christ." 64

Decorative Figure. 70

Decorative Figure. 76

Tomb of Giuliano de Medici. 114

Dawn. Figure from the Tomb of Lorenzo de' Medici. 122

Twilight. Figure from the Tomb of Lorenzo de' Medici. 130

Christ and the Saints. Detail from The Last Judgment. 138

Charon's Boat. Detail from The Last Judgment. 146

The Resurrection. Drawing. 152

The Dome of St. Peter's. From the Original Model in Wood. 158

The Descent from the Cross. 164

INTRODUCTION

The life of Michelangelo offers one of the most striking examples of the influence that a great man can have on his time. At the moment of his birth in the second half of the fifteenth century the serenity of Ghirlandajo and of Bramante illuminated Italian art. Florentine sculpture seemed about to languish away from an excess of grace in the delicate and meticulous art of Rossellino, Disiderio, Mino da Fiesole, Agostino di Duccio, Benedetto da Maiano and Andrea Sansovino. Michelangelo burst like a thunder-storm into the heavy, overcharged sky of Florence. This storm had undoubtedly been gathering for a long time in the extraordinary intellectual and emotional tension of Italy which was to cause the Savonarolist upheaval. Nothing like Michelangelo had ever appeared before. He passed like a whirlwind, and after he had passed the brilliant and sensual Florence of Lorenzo de' Medici and Botticelli, of Verocchio and Lionardo, was ended forever. All that harmonious living and dreaming, that spirit of analysis, that aristocratic and courtly poetry, the whole elegant and subtle art of the "Quattrocento," was swept away at one blow. Even after he had been gone for a long time, the world of art was still whirled along in the eddies of his wild spirit. Not the most remote corner was sheltered from the tempest; it drew in its wake all the arts together. Michelangelo captured painting, sculpture, architecture and poetry, all at once; he breathed into them the frenzy of his vigour and of his overwhelming idealism. No one understood him, yet all imitated him. Every one of his great works, the David, the cartoon for the war against Pisa, the vault of the Sistine Chapel, the Last Judgment, St. Peter's, dominated generations of artists and enslaved them. From every one of these creations radiated despotic power, a power that came above all from Michelangelo's personality and from that tremendous life which covered almost a century.

No one work can be detached from that life and studied separately. They are all fragments of one monument, and the mistake that most historians make is to mutilate this genius by dividing it into different pieces. We must try to follow the entire course of the torrent from its beginning to its end if we are to have any comprehension of its formidable unity.

MICHELANGELO

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

Michelangelo was born on the sixth of March, 1475, at Caprese, in Casentino, of the ancient family of the Buonarroti-Simoni, who are mentioned in the Florentine chronicles from the twelfth century. His father, Lodovico di Lionardo Buonarroti-Simoni, was then Podesta of Caprese and Chiusi. His mother, Francesca di Neri di Miniato del Sera, died when he was only six years old, and some years later his father married Lucrezia Ubaldini. Michelangelo had four brothers: Lionardo, who was two years his senior; Buonarroto, born in 1477; Giovan Simoni, born in 1479; and Sigismondo, born in 1481. His foster-mother was the wife of a stone-cutter of Settignano and in later years he used to jokingly attribute his vocation to the milk upon which he had been nourished. He was sent to school in Florence under Francesco da Urbino, but he busied himself only in drawing and neglected everything else. "Because of this he greatly irritated his father and his uncles, and they often beat him cruelly, for they hated the profession of an artist, and, in their ignorance of the nobility of art, it seemed a disgrace to have one in the house."

The elder Buonarroti, however, was, like his son, more violent than obstinate, and he soon allowed the boy to follow his vocation. In April, 1488, Michelangelo, by the advice of Francesco Granacci, entered the studio of Domenico and David Ghirlandajo.

That was the most famous studio in Florence. Domenico was an indefatigable worker who "longed to cover with stories the entire circuit of the walls of Florence" and possessed of a calm, simple and serene spirit, satisfied merely to exist without tormenting itself over subtleties. This fortunate being, who died at forty-four, leaving an immense mass of completed work in which the magnificence and the moral force of Florence still live, was the best guide that could have been given to the young Michelangelo. Domenico was then, from 1486 to 1490, in the fulness of his power, and at work on his masterpiece, the paintings in the Tornabuoni Chapel in S. Maria Novella.

It has been said that his influence on Michelangelo amounted to nothing, and it is true that we find no direct trace of it except in two drawings in the Louvre and the Albertina. Still, exact imitation is very rare with Michelangelo. He was made of too stubborn stuff ever to be much affected by masters or surroundings. He felt contempt for Raphael because he was impressionable, "and drew his superiority not from nature, but from study." I do not believe, however, that the time he spent in the school of Ghirlandajo had no effect upon him. Even if it did not influence his style or his method of working, he must have gained from the master of S. Maria Novella and from his wholesome work a healthy point of view and a physical and moral vigour which could have been given him by no other artist in Florence--not even the two great sculptors, Pollajuolo and Verrocchio, who were indeed not there at that time--and which acted as a powerful balance to the neuroticism of the Botticellian school. I do not doubt that Ghirlandajo helped to lay the foundations from which arose the art of the young Michelangelo devoted to the expression of force and so contemptuous of morbid sentiment.

Ghirlandajo's school was enthusiastically open-minded toward everything interesting in art. It was eclectic and encouraged intellectual curiosity. Michelangelo while he was there studied passionately both the old and the new Florentine painters and sculptors: Giotto, Masaccio, Donatello, Ghiberti, Benedetto da Majano, Mino da Fiesole, Antonio Rossellino and possibly, even at that time, Jacopo della Quercia and also the Flemish and the German artists, then very much in vogue in Italy, especially at the court of the Medici. He made a copy in colour of Martin Schongauer's Temptation of St. Anthony and went to the Florentine fish-market to take notes for it. Later on he contemptuously disowned Flemish realism, but a trace of it was left in him always and in many of his drawings there appears a certain taste, extraordinary in an idealist, for types of marked naturalism which are sometimes trivial or almost caricature. Condivi asserts that these first attempts of Michelangelo met with such success that Ghirlandajo grew jealous.

"To take from him the credit of this copy Ghirlandajo used to say that it came out of his atelier, as if he had had a part in it. This jealousy showed very clearly when Michelangelo asked him for the book of drawings wherein he had sketched shepherds with their flocks and dogs, landscapes, monuments, ruins, etc., and he refused to lend it to him. As a matter of fact, he always had the reputation of being rather jealous, because of his disagreeable treatment not only of Michelangelo, but also of his own brother, for when he saw the latter making good progress and showing great promise, he sent him to France, not so much for his benefit, as has been alleged, as that he himself might remain first in his art at Florence. I have mentioned this," adds Condivi, "because it has been said to me that Domenico's son was in the habit of attributing the divine excellence of Michelangelo to the training given by his father, who really did not help him in any way. It is true that Michelangelo never complained of him, but on the contrary praised him as much for his art as for his conduct."

It is very difficult to say how much is true in this story. I am reluctant to ascribe so contemptible a jealousy to Ghirlandajo, and repeat it only because of the last line where Condivi is constrained to remark on the esteem which Michelangelo, when he was an old man, expressed for his former master. Such admiration for other artists is too rare with him not to have especial weight in this case.

There is no doubt that a disagreement did arise between the master and the scholar, for though Michelangelo had in 1488 signed a contract of apprenticeship which stipulated that he should remain three years with Ghirlandajo, the very next year he went with his friend Granacci into the school of Bertoldo.

Bertoldo, a pupil of Donatello, was director of the School of Sculpture and of the Museum of Antiquities maintained by Lorenzo de' Medici in the gardens of S. Marco. I think that the real reason why Michelangelo separated himself from Ghirlandajo was that after a year of feeling his way he had just discovered the essence of his genius and was drawn toward sculpture with irresistible force. It was really from painting that he was separating himself and never afterward did he consider it as his art. We might almost say that if painting has immortalised him it is in spite of himself. He never wished to be considered as anything but a sculptor.

Two things drew him to Bertoldo: the hope of finding the tradition of Donatello and the fascination of the antique. He found something even more valuable there in the friendship of the prince and of the ?lite of the Florentine thinkers. Lorenzo took an interest in him, lodged him in the palace and admitted him to his son's table, and in this way Michelangelo found himself at the very heart of the Renaissance, in the midst of the humanists and the poets and in intimate relation with all whom Italy counted most noble; with Pico della Mirandola, with Pulci, Benevieni and especially with Poliziano, "who loved him greatly and urged him to study, although that was hardly necessary."

Surrounded by this atmosphere of lofty paganism he became intoxicated with the classic idea and became himself a pagan; he made the heroic forms of Greece live again while putting into them his own savage vigour. Following the suggestions of Poliziano he wrought the bas-relief of the Combat of the Centaurs and the Lapithae of the Casa Buonarroti, in which the figures are athletic and struggling and the faces impassive and proud. He carved the bestial face of the Laughing Satyr with its violent and strained expression as of one who was not used to laughter, and a little later the relief of Apollo and Marsyas.

Nevertheless this paganism did not touch his Christian faith at all. The struggle that was to endure almost all his life had already begun within him between those two hostile worlds which he vainly tried to reconcile. In 1489 and 1490 Savonarola began in Florence his fiery sermons on the Apocalypse and Michelangelo went to hear them with all the rest of Lorenzo's circle. He had been brought up very religiously by his father, a kind, God-fearing man of the old style, and his brother Lionardo in 1491, under the influence of Savonarola, entered the Monastery of the Dominicans at Pisa.

These superstitious terrors, irrational and uncontrollable, which reappeared more than once in Michelangelo's life do not prove anything in favour of his Savonarolaism. It might be supposed on the contrary that a true disciple of Savonarola would have remained beside his master rather than have abandoned him in the hour of danger. These panics which he could not control prove nothing but the unhealthy over-excitement of his nerves, which his reason fought against in vain all his life. It would be hard to find in his work at that period any appreciable effect of the ideas of Savonarola. The impassive Virgin with the robust child--the bas-relief in bronze of the Casa Buonarroti--is far more a school piece by a pupil of Donatello than a religious work. What we know of the little wooden crucifix, carved in 1494 for the prior of the Convent of S. Spirito, shows us the artist without mysticism and with a passion for the observation of nature, who was eagerly studying anatomy from corpses until their putrefaction made him ill and forced him to stop. At Bologna, where he lived in 1449 after his flight from Florence, and where he heard of the results of Savonarola's preachings--the expulsion of the Medici, the death of Pico della Mirandola and of Poliziano and the scattering of the little circle of Florentine poets and philosophers--he spent his time in reading Petrarch, Boccaccio and Dante to his protector, the noble Gianfrancesco Aldovrandi, and when he worked at the Arca of S. Domenico it was to carve that athletic angel, superb and expressionless, which contrasts so strikingly with the pious figure of Niccolo dell'Arca to which it is the pendant. He was evidently much more occupied in studying and assimilating the imposing manner of Jacopo della Quercia, his indolent and heavy but powerful Siennese precursor, than in meditating on the prophecies of Savonarola.

He returned to Florence in 1495, and arrived in the midst of the struggle of the two parties, the "Arrabtiati" and the "Piagnoni," at the very height of the carnival. He was consulted about the construction of the hall of the Grand Council in the Palace of the Signory. The Virgin of Manchester which suggests the school of Ghirlandajo may be attributed to this period, and also the Entombment of the National Gallery, which with all its sad grandeur is proud and cold.

I do not mean to say that he was entirely untouched by that grand and tragic drama. He was by nature silent and never spoke of what he felt most deeply, and he was also prudent and afraid of compromising himself. If Savonarola's ideas did have some influence on him it was at a later time when, in his advanced age, under the influence of strong and deep friendships, the disillusions of life and the fear of the hereafter, religious preoccupations gained with him the place of first importance. He was not among those who, like Botticelli, in 1498, consented to the dethronement of the pagan pride of the Renaissance. Religious he certainly was and a Christian as always, but his proud Christianity was not that of the rest of the world. He was never understood by his own time. Even when he was painting the Last Judgment, and his faith was most ardent, he must have scandalised the devout. He was altogether a Platonist. He could have said with Lorenzo de' Medici and his illustrious friends of the gardens of S. Marco that "without studying Plato one could neither be a good citizen nor an enlightened Christian." Savonarola undoubtedly admired and loved Plato. Still he felt the object of art to be religious edification and showed that ideal to artists in "the face of a pious woman when she is praying, illuminated by a ray of divine beauty." Michelangelo despised that art made for the devout and left it to the Flemings. He had a horror of sentimentality and almost of sentiment. "True painting," he said, "never will make any one shed a tear."

It should contain no expression of religion or worship, for "good painting is religious and devout in itself. Among the wise nothing more elevates the soul or better raises it to adoration than the difficulty of attaining the perfection which approaches God and unites itself to Him." He believed himself to be more religious in creating beautiful, harmonious human bodies than in searching for a psychological or moral expression intended "for women, especially for the old or the very young, or for monks, nuns and those who are deaf to true harmony." The Piet? of St. Peter's, undertaken the year of Savonarola's death, has a more Christian character than the earlier works of Michelangelo, but this Christianity is still far from conforming to the expressive and pathetic ideal of the artists of the fifteenth century, or from the tragic expression and agony of suffering of the virgins of Donatello, Signorelli or Mantegna. Very different indeed is the noble harmony of this group and the calm beauty of the young Virgin on whose knees rests the supple body of Christ relaxed like that of a sleeping child. Even though Michelangelo explained the eternal youth of the Virgin by an idea of chivalric mysticism it is evident that at that time the desire for beauty was as strong in his heart as any regard for faith and that there was a certain relationship between these beautiful Gods of Calvary and those of Olympus whose charm had intoxicated him.

Michelangelo spent two years on the Piet?. In the spring of 1501 he returned to Florence and there met Cardinal Piccolomini, with whom he signed a contract to deliver in three years' time, for the sum of five hundred ducats, fifteen figures of apostles and saints for the Piccolomini altar in the Cathedral of Sienna. This was the first of those overpowering commissions which Michelangelo never hesitated to undertake in the first intoxication of his imagination without any just estimate of his powers and which weighed on him all his life, like remorse. In 1504 he had delivered only four of the figures and sixty years later in 1561 he was still tormented by the thought of this unfulfilled contract.

Another undertaking, more tempting to him by its very difficulty, took entire possession of him a few months after he had made the agreement with Cardinal Piccolomini.

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