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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.

To-day the David is in the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence. There it is in too confined a space. That colossus needs the open air, he stifles under the roof of a Palace and his disproportion to everything around him is shocking. We can perhaps judge better what he really is from the reproduction in bronze, which on the hill of San Miniato raises its inspiring silhouette above the town. There the irregularity of the details disappears in the impression of the whole. Incredible energy emanates from that gigantic force in repose--from that great face in the small head, and from that huge body with the slender waist, thin arms and the enormous hands with swollen veins and heavy fingers.

All of Michelangelo is there in that mixture of proud nobility and almost barbarous vulgarity. He is all there, and he only, entirely regardless of his subject. The head of the David with its wrinkled forehead, thick eyebrows and scornful lips--a type that he often used afterward--is, like the heads of Lorenzo and of Giuliano de' Medici, a lyric work into which Michelangelo poured his own sadness, disdain and melancholy.

In 1503 he undertook twelve statues for the Cathedral of Florence, but began only one, a St. Matthew, which was never finished and is now in the Accademia delle Belle Arti. His vacillating, uncertain genius, wherein discouragement succeeded to enthusiasm, drove him into planning works with fierce energy and then almost immediately so diverted his attention that he could not force himself to finish them.

In 1504 the Florentine Signory brought him into competition with another great irresolute, Lionardo da Vinci, whose universal intellectual curiosity was, no less than the temperament of Michelangelo, an eternal obstacle to the achievement of his great undertakings. The two men seem to have met about 1495. They could not have understood each other very well, for they both stood alone, each in his own way. Lionardo was now fifty-two years old. When he was thirty he had left Florence, where the bitterness of the political and religious passions was unbearable to his delicate and slightly timid nature and to his serene and sceptical intelligence which was interested in everything but refused to take sides. Driven back to Florence by the death or ruin of his protectors, the Duke of Milan and Caesar Borgia, he came into contact there from the very first with Michelangelo entirely absorbed in his own faith and passions, however changing they might be, and who, while he hated the enemies of his party and of his faith, hated still more those who had neither party nor faith. Brutally and publicly, on many occasions, Michelangelo made Lionardo feel his aversion for him.

When the Gonfalonier Soderini put the two in direct competition in a common work, the decoration of the Council Hall in the Palace of the Signory, the rivalry was intense. In May, 1504, Lionardo began the cartoon of the Battle of Anghiari. In August, 1504, Michelangelo received the order for the cartoon for the Battle of Cascine. Florence was divided into two camps keenly enthusiastic for one or the other of the rivals. Time has made them equal, for both pictures have disappeared. Michelangelo's cartoon, finished in March, 1505, was apparently destroyed about 1512, during the disturbances in Florence which resulted from the return of the Medici, and even the fragments which in 1575 were still preserved by the Strozzi in Mantua have been lost.

As for Lionardo's fresco, he succeeded in destroying it himself. He took it into his head to try to perfect the technique of fresco and he gave himself up once more to his evil spirit of invention and once more everything was lost. He tried a glaze of oil which did not hold, and the painting which he abandoned in 1506 in discouragement by 1550 no longer existed.

The two cartoons of Lionardo and Michelangelo had time, nevertheless, to exert a blinding fascination over all Italian painting. They formed the style and influenced the thought of artists from 1506 on but without being able to transmit their own grandeur. Lionardo, who had a cavalry combat to represent, reasoned out coldly, as nearly as we can tell, all the circumstances of a battle and then reproduced them with his marvellous lucidity which was perhaps a little too analytic to interpret the excitement of passion.

Michelangelo, who was given an episode of the war of 1364 against the Pisans under the leadership of the condottiere John Hawkwood had intentionally turned his back on history and the real subject and painted naked men bathing, noble in form and free in movement, in the classic manner.

The two masterpieces contained each of them the germ of a different danger; in Lionardo's the excess of analysis, in Michelangelo's the excess of abstraction. This last was the most dangerous of the two but both were of the intellect and agreed in substituting for the charm of life and of real and spontaneous movement the formula of types and of logical action.

The same rivalry which had brought about the competition between Michelangelo and Lionardo in the Council Hall appears again in a series of works which belong to this Florentine period . These are representations of the "Holy Family" in which Michelangelo attempts to solve the same problem of composition as Lionardo and Fra Bartolommeo in placing the figures in a circle. Such are the two circular bas-reliefs, the Madonna and Child of the Museo Nazionale made for Taddeo Taddei and the Holy Family of the Academy of Fine Arts in London made for Bartolommeo Pitti. Chief of them all is the great picture in distemper of the Holy Family of the Uffizi painted for Agnolo Doni--a heroic work filled with the lofty serene life of Olympus and the Parthenon. The painting is the most carefully executed of all Michelangelo's. The colouring, blue, rose, orange and golden brown, has an effect that is rather inharmonious, but young and fresh. The aerial perspective is mediocre and the composition shows as usual Michelangelo's supreme contempt for the sentiment of the subject. He has filled the background with graceful nude figures simply because he considered them to be beautiful--"per mostrare maggiormente l'arte sua essere grandissima," says Vasari, and except for the type of face used for St. Joseph there is nothing religious about the group of the Holy Family. The impression is religious, nevertheless, through its grace, sweetness and proud strength. We feel that Michelangelo desired to contrast the puritan and virile sobriety of this work with the voluptuous languor of the art of Lionardo.

The calm Madonna of Bruges belongs also to this period. This was bought in 1506 by two Flemish merchants, John and Alexander Mouscron, who placed it in their chapel where D?rer had already seen it during his travels in Belgium in 1521.

MICHELANGELO AND JULIUS II

But this favour did not last. The character of Julius II was as passionate and as changeable as that of Michelangelo. His mind, always in a ferment, took up in rapid succession and ever with the same eagerness the most varied projects. Another idea drove the plan for the tomb from his mind. In order that he might gain immortal glory by one gigantic work he decided to reconstruct St. Peter's. He was encouraged in this by enemies of Michelangelo, who himself writes in 1542:

"All the difficulties which arose between the pope and myself were the work of Bramante and of Raphael. It was their jealousy that kept him from having his tomb made while he was still alive. They tried to ruin me. Raphael had good reason for doing this, since all that he knew of art he learnt from me."

It is not easy to say how far Raphael was carried along by the party of Bramante, who was his friend and fellow-countryman, but there is no doubt that Bramante was chiefly responsible for the check to Michelangelo's great undertaking and that he profited by his absence in Carrara to destroy his influence over the pope.

"The marks of his favour which Julius II had showered on Michelangelo," says Condivi, "resulted, as often happens at courts, in exciting jealousy against him, and, following the jealousy, endless persecution. Bramante, the architect, who was dear to the pope, made him change his plans. He reminded him of the popular superstition that it was of bad augury to build your tomb while you were still alive, and other stories of the same kind. Bramante was driven to do this, not only through jealousy, but from fear that Michelangelo's knowledge would reveal his own mistakes. For Bramante, as everyone knows, was much given to pleasure and very dissipated. The salary he received from the pope, though it was great, was not nearly enough for him, so that he tried to make more out of his work by constructing walls of bad material and neither solid nor strong enough for their height and thrust. Anyone can prove this by the construction of St. Peter's, or the Belvedere gallery, or the cloister of S. Pietro in Vinculi and other buildings which he erected and which it has been necessary to support all over again and to strengthen with buttresses, either because they have fallen down or because they very soon would have done so. Bramante realised that Michelangelo would have discovered his mistakes, and so he always tried to keep him away from Rome and to deprive him of the pope's favour and of the influence which he had gained over the pope by his works. For it is clear that if the tomb of Julius II had been actually undertaken Michelangelo would have stood out supreme over all other artists, however famous they might be, for he would then have had a vast field in which to show what he could do."

Bramante succeeded. In January, 1506, Julius II ordered the reconstruction of St. Peter's. The tomb was abandoned and Michelangelo was not only humiliated and disappointed, but in debt, according to what he says himself:

"When the pope changed his mind and the boats arrived with the marble from Carrara I had to pay the charge of transport myself. And as at this same time the stone-cutters who had come from Florence for the tomb also arrived at Rome and I had had the house which Julius had given me behind S. Caterina prepared for them, I found myself without money and greatly embarrassed. I urged the pope as strongly as I could to continue the construction of the tomb and then one morning when I wished to talk with him about it he had me put out by a groom."

Then it was that the famous flight to Florence took place. Michelangelo, outraged by this affront, took horse and fled from Rome and refused to return in spite of the messengers which the pope sent after him. The indignity of the affront was not, by his own account, the only reason for his flight. In a letter to Giuliano da San Gallo he implies that his life was in danger from Bramante's threats.

"That was not the only reason for my leaving. There was still another which I would rather not speak about. It is enough to say that it made me think that if I stayed in Rome that town would more likely be my tomb than that of the pope. And that was the reason for my sudden departure."

Nothing justifies us in believing that Bramante had thought of having recourse to a crime, but it was enough that Michelangelo believed him to be capable of it and, in one of those accesses of sudden terror which contrast so strangely with the stubborn boldness of his genius, he ran away. Moreover, Bramante understood perfectly how to terrorise his rivals and to make life near him impossible for them. Only a little while after Michelangelo Giuliano da San Gallo, who was Bramante's last rival at St. Peter's, also had to flee.

There was, however, still another reason for the sudden departure of Michelangelo, and though he himself has taken good care to say nothing about it, I am surprised that the historians have not brought it out more clearly. Michelangelo fled on the seventeenth of April, 1506. On the eighteenth of April there took place the solemn ceremony of the laying of the first stone of St. Peter's. This is the true reason for his sudden withdrawal; he did not want to be present at the triumph of his enemy.

He had hardly left before Bramante so arranged matters that he could not come back. He ruined his work and his fortunes.

"That affair," writes Michelangelo, "caused me a loss of more than a thousand ducats. When I left Rome there arose a great riot because of the shame put upon the pope, and almost all the blocks of marble which I had on the square of St. Peter's were taken from me, especially the smaller pieces, which made it necessary for me later on to begin the whole work over again."

Nevertheless Julius II was furious at the revolt of his sculptor and sent letter after letter to the Signory of Florence where Michelangelo had betaken himself. The Signory, anxious not to compromise themselves, tried to persuade Michelangelo to take once more the road to Rome, but he would do nothing of the kind. He had tranquilly taken up his work on the cartoon of The Battle, the Twelve Apostles for the cathedral and the Madonna of Bruges, and he stubbornly persisted in his unwillingness to return. He proposed his own terms and pretended to be working on the tomb of Julius II at Florence. When, toward the end of August, 1506, Julius II went to war with Perugia and Bologna and grew more importunate in his demands Michelangelo had the idea of expatriating himself. He thought of going to Turkey, where the Sultan, through the Franciscans, invited him to come to Constantinople and build a bridge at Pera.

In the end he had to give in, and in the latter part of November, 1506, he went, much against his will, to Bologna, where Julius II had just entered the town as a conqueror. There took place that famous interview when the pope, angry and scolding, divided between the desire of punishing the rebel and the fear of losing the artist whom he valued, poured out his wrath on an unlucky bishop who was present, and forgave Michelangelo.

Unfortunately, Michelangelo in order to make his peace with the pope, had to submit to his caprices and to that all-powerful will which had now turned in a new direction. It was no longer a question of the tomb, but of a colossal bronze statue which Julius wished to have raised to himself in Bologna.

In vain Michelangelo protested that he understood nothing about the casting of bronze. He had two assistants, Lopo and Lodovico, come from Florence, and a foundryman, Bernadino d'Antonio dal Ponte. But he could never get along with any assistant. He fell out with Lodovico and Lopo, who stole from him; then the foundryman turned out to be incapable and in June, 1507, the casting failed.

"The figure came out only as far down as the waist. Everything had to be done over again."

Fifteen months were spent in the midst of all kinds of troubles and mortifications. Michelangelo was busy with his work until February, 1508. He nearly ruined his health over it, and he wrote to his brother that he would never be in condition to make such an effort again during his life. For so great a struggle, the result was miserable. The statue of Julius II, raised on February 21, 1508, in front of the fa?ade of S. Petronio remained there only four years. In December, 1511, it was destroyed on the return of the Bentivogli, and Alphonso d'Este had his bombardier Quirino cast a cannon from its fragments.

Michelangelo returned to Rome and Julius II laid upon him another task not less unexpected and not less hazardous. He ordered the sculptor, who never painted except with reluctance and who knew nothing of the technique of fresco, to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He had already talked with him about it before the rupture in 1506 and the disinclination of Michelangelo for this work had something to do with his flight to Florence. This may be inferred from the letter of a friend of Michelangelo written in May, 1506, which shows that Bramante, satisfied by the withdrawal of his rival, justified him for refusing the burden of this heavy undertaking.

"Last Saturday evening," writes Pietro Rosselli, "when the pope was supping, he called Bramante and said, 'San Gallo is going tomorrow to Florence and he will bring back Michelangelo.' Bramante answered, 'Holy Father, Michelangelo will do nothing of the kind. I have talked a great deal with him and he has often said to me that he would not undertake the chapel which you wished to entrust to him. He asks to be allowed with your permission to devote himself entirely to sculpture, for he wants to have nothing to do with painting.' He added, 'Holy Father, I do not think he has the courage to undertake the work, for he has had little experience in the painting of figures, and these must be painted on the ceiling and foreshortened, which is very different from painting on the ground.' The pope answered, 'If he does not come he will be treating me badly, and for that reason I think he will return.' I threw myself into the conversation and there in the pope's presence replied properly to that fellow and spoke for you as you would surely have spoken for me. Bramante remained silent, realising that he had made a mistake in saying what he had. I went on in these words: 'Holy Father, that man has never exchanged a word with Michelangelo, and if what he says is true you can cut my head off. He has never talked with him, and I am sure that Michelangelo will come back if Your Holiness wishes it.'" When Michelangelo returned Bramante changed his tactics. As Michelangelo's friends had imprudently asserted that he could accomplish this task for which, as Bramante knew better than any one else, he was entirely unprepared, Bramante pretended to believe this and forced his rival into a position where he had to accept the commission. A failure would have been particularly serious to Michelangelo just then since in that same year, 1508, Raphael began his incomparable painting of the Stanze and Michelangelo had either to surpass him or be entirely eclipsed. This at least is what Condivi asserts.

The tremendous task began on May 10, 1508. The first plan was simply to represent the figures of the twelve apostles in the lunettes and to fill the rest of the space with an ornamental decoration. Bramante raised a scaffolding in the chapel and several painters who had had practical experience in fresco painting were brought from Florence. We have already said that Michelangelo could only work alone. He began by declaring that Bramante's scaffolding was of no use and replaced it with one of his own invention. As for the Florentine painters who Francesco Granacci had recruited for him, Giuliano Bugiardini, Jacopo di Sandro, the elder Indaco, and Agnolo di Donnino, he took a dislike like to them and sent them away. He remained alone, shut up in the chapel with a few workmen, like Giovanni Michi, and far from allowing the great difficulty of the undertaking to dampen his courage he enlarged his plan and decided to paint not only the ceiling, but the walls of the chapel down to the old frescoes.

It is dangerous to attempt to describe the "Last Judgment"; it is indeed impossible. Analyses and commentaries have been multiplied, but they kill the spirit by taking it in detail. We must face the vision squarely and lose ourselves in the abyss of that spirit. It is terrifying and, if regarded calmly, incomprehensible--it must be hated or adored. It stifles and excites; there is no nature, no landscape, no atmosphere, no tenderness, almost nothing human; the symbolism of a primitive and the science of a decadent; an architecture of naked convulsed bodies; a barren, savage and devouring thought, like a south wind over a sandy desert. There is no corner of shade, no spring to slake the thirst; it is a whirling spout of fire, the vertigo of a delirious emotion, with no goal except the God in which it loses itself. The whole calls on God, fears Him and proclaims Him. A whirlwind blows across this throng of giants--the same whirlwind which sweeps through space the God who has created the sun and hurled it like a ball of fire into the ether. There is no escape from the groaning of the tempest which surrounds and deafens you. Either you must hate this brutal force or abandon yourself to it without resistance like those souls of Dante whirled along by an eternal cyclone. When we realise that that hell was for four years the very soul of Michelangelo we understand why his life was burnt out by it and why for a long time afterward he remained like a soil exhausted by too much use and no longer productive. Above that ceiling and those vaults built up of huge bodies, where tumultuous confusion and powerful unity combine to evoke the monstrous dream of a Hindu and the imperious logic and iron will of ancient Rome, there blooms a beauty that is natural and pure. There has never been anything like it. It is at once both bestial and divine, the exquisite perfume of Hellenic grace mingles with the savage odour of primitive humanity. These giants with their Olympian shoulders and huge thighs and loins wherein we feel, as the sculptor Guillaume said, "the weight of heavy entrails" are as yet hardly free from their double origin, their two progenitors, the beast and the god. A series of drawings at Oxford University shows in what springs of realism the genius of Michelangelo bathed itself and of what common clay his heroes are moulded.

On the flat part of the vault, in the centre, are the nine scenes from Genesis, AEschylean visions: the divine solitude, the dreadful moment of the creation, the athletic god carried by clouds of spirits, man just rousing from the sleep of earth and regarding as an equal, face to face, the God who awakes him--both in silent readiness for the struggle--the calm and powerful woman in whom sleeps humanity--those human frames like temples of flesh and blood, torsos like trunks of trees, arms like columns and great thighs; those beings great with power and passion and crime and the results and punishments of their crimes--the Temptation, Cain and the Deluge.

At the angles of the cornice which frames these scenes are the twenty savage Ignudi, living statues, either struggling in convulsions of fear and fury or falling back, overwhelmed and exhausted--a symphony of mad force which sweeps in every direction and beats against the walls.

As gigantic supporters of the ceilings are seated in the pendentives twelve prophets and sibyls who suffer and dream; disdainful Lybica; Persica, purblind and restless; Cumaea, with huge arms and pendent breasts; the beautiful Erythraea, strong, calm and scornful; Delphica, the virgin with the lovely body and fierce eyes; Daniel, his lips compressed, his eyes fixed; Isaiah, bitter and contemptuous; Ezekiel, at war with himself and with a Genius of sombre beauty who seems to be pointing out to him the one who is to come; Jeremiah, plunged in the depths of silence, and Jonah, panting and breathless, cast out from the jaws of death--all those tragic torches of thought which burned in the night of the pagan and Jewish world; all the human knowledge which awaited the Saviour.

Above the twelve windows the Precursors and Ancestors of Christ also wait and dream in the midst of the storm. The night is long and full of evil visions. They try to sleep, they try to forget how long they must wait; they are silent and they ponder, anxious and overwhelmed. A seated woman alone dares to look squarely in the face of the menacing future. In her fixed and dilated eyes I can see that secret feeling which weighs on all these beings, a burden they dare not acknowledge--fear. At the four angles of the ceiling are displayed the sinister acts which saved the people of God--David slaying Goliath, Judith bearing the head of Holofernes, the Hebrews writhing under the bites of the serpents of Moses, and Haman crucified. Fierce barbaric stories of murderous fanaticism--a roundhead in Cromwell's time would have chosen no other subjects.

Fear, sadness, suspense. We who know how thirty years later Michelangelo completed with the Last Judgment the cycle of his idea, we know what they awaited--the Christ who comes to destroy.

Michelangelo had suffered terribly during this gigantic labour. His letters show intense discouragement which even his wonderful visions could not help. "This is not my profession," he complained. "I waste my time without any results. God help me."

These were years of desperate efforts in the midst of enemies who spied upon him and hoped for his failure. He nearly gave up the work and fled again. Just as he began to paint the Deluge the whole ceiling began to grow mouldy so that the figures could hardly be distinguished. Michelangelo seized that as an excuse for giving up, but San Gallo discovered that the trouble came from the lime, which had too much water in it, and the pope ordered the artist to go on with his work.

Julius II was irritated by Michelangelo's slowness and by the fact that he persisted in hiding his work from him. There was constant friction between them.

"One day," says Condivi, "the pope asked him when he would finish and Michelangelo answered, according to his custom, 'When I can.' The pope, who was irritable, struck him with his staff, saying, 'When I can, when I can!' Michelangelo rushed home and began to make his preparations to leave Rome. Luckily the pope sent hurriedly after him an amiable young man named Accursio, who gave him five hundred ducats, soothed him as well as he could and apologised for Julius II and Michelangelo accepted the excuses. The next day, however, they began again and when the pope threatened to have him thrown from his scaffolding Michelangelo had to give way. He had the scaffolding removed and uncovered the ceiling sooner than he had intended. 'That is why,' he said, 'that that work was not carried on as far as I would have wished. The pope's impatience prevented.'"

The first part of the paintings was finished on September 1st, 1510, and the pope was able to see the four chief compositions of the ceiling before his departure for Bologna. In January and February, 1511, Michelangelo drew the cartoons for the "teste e faccie attorno di ditta capella," the pictures for the corners and the lunettes, and the second period of the work began. On August, 1511, Julius II celebrated mass in the Sistine Chapel, "ut picturas novas ibidem noviter detectas videret"; and the entire work was finished in October, 1512. On October 31, 1512, the Sistine Chapel was opened to the public.

Soon after, on February 21, 1513, Julius II died.

THE FAILURE OF THE GREAT PLANS

Julius II in his will had charged Cardinal d'Agen, Lionardo Grossi della Rovere and the Prothonotary Lorenzo Pucci to continue the enterprise. He had stipulated that the monument should not be executed in the colossal proportions which were originally determined on. But it does not appear that his executors complied with this request. Michelangelo writes in 1524 "at the death of Pope Julius and the beginning of Leo's reign Aginensis wished to enlarge the monument and to make the work more considerable than was my first design and a contract was made."

For three years Michelangelo devoted himself almost exclusively to this work and from that period of vigour and maturity, of relative calm and satisfying accomplishment, came his most perfect piece of sculpture, the Moses. This statue, originally intended for one of the six colossal figures crowning the upper story of the tomb, in the end was itself the complete expression of the whole monument. The Moses is the older brother of the Prophets of the Sistine, sprung from the same vehement and passionate inspiration, but more commanding, more sure and more master of himself . The two Slaves now in the Louvre, who were to be placed against the pilasters of the lower story, immortal symbols of the weariness of living and of the revolt against life,--the voluptuous hero with his beautiful body overcome by deadly torpor and the athlete, vanquished but unsubdued, who writhes in his bonds, "bent like a spring," gathering himself together and hurling his scorn into the face of heaven--both belong to this period. Probably the Caryatid of the Hermitage at St. Petersburg, which was certainly meant for one of the groups of conquerors in the niches, was made at this time as well as the models for many statues.

The general subject of the monument according to Condivi and to Vasari who preserved the sayings of Michelangelo himself, was an allegory cold, abstruse and courtier-like, as we must admit the subjects of his undertakings very often were. His nature was timid and lacked independence, but fortunately the force of his passionate feeling carried everything before it. Vainly did he bind himself to lifeless and commonplace programs, vainly attempt to force himself to glorify the established order and the powers that be. At the very first step he took all false pretenses fell away and a furious cry of revolt against the baseness of the world and the bondage of life broke forth. So the statues of this monument which was to express with stale flattery that "all the virtues were prisoners of death now that the pope was dead" became, unconsciously perhaps to their creator, hymns of heroic scorn and expressions of moral grandeur crushed by force yet rising unconquered.

But the peculiar quality of these figures compared with the work which was to follow is that they preserve in all their passionate agony a balance and a certain melancholy serenity which the artist of the tombs of the Medici no longer possessed.

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