The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 08 · Chapter 24Painting of the Sistine Chapel
This chapter is not translated yet. You are reading the original.
In the history of the Renaissance the revival of art adds a new glory to that of letters, and among the masters of that revival there is none greater than Michelangelo Buonarroti, sculptor, painter, architect, poet, and heroic man. He was descended from an ancient but not distinguished Florentine family, and was born at Caprese, Italy, March 6, 1475. In 1488 he was apprenticed to the painter Ghirlandajo. He studied antique marbles in the garden of San Marco, where he was discovered by Lorenzo de' Medici, who in 1489 took him into his palace. There the young student remained until his patron's death (1492), improving the great opportunities presented to him. The Mask of a Faun was sculptured during this time.
Before the expulsion of the Medici he went to Bologna, and there executed several works. Returning to Florence in 1495, he was called next year to Rome, where he lived till 1501, producing works which displayed his extraordinary genius, the most important of them being the Pieta di San Pietro (1498). Again returning to Florence, he carved his first David from an immense block of Carrara marble. In 1505 he was summoned again to Rome, by Pope Julius II, to design his tomb, and this work occupied Michelangelo, from time to time, throughout the remainder of his life. He was forced—probably through the intrigues of Bramante, his rival in architecture—to leave Rome, and once more (1506) returned to Florence. In the intervals between all these dates he produced many of his masterpieces.
From this period the historian follows Michelangelo through an important stage of his active career, showing how "the hand that rounded Peter's dome," and created so many other of the greatest works of art, toiled on with patient heroism, in spite of hinderances almost incredible. The painting of the Sistine Chapel, upon which his fame so largely rests, is here described in language that reveals the manhood no less clearly than the artistic genius of Michelangelo.
In 1508 Michelangelo returned to Rome and resumed his labors on the mausoleum. He had soon again to abandon them. Bramante had persuaded the Pope that it was unlucky to have his tomb erected, but advised him to employ Michelangelo in painting the chapel built by his uncle Sixtus IV. It was, in effect, in the beginning of this year that he commenced this gigantic decoration, which was destined to be his most splendid work. We shall see the resistance he first opposed to Julius' desire, and the ardor with which he undertook and the rapidity with which he accomplished the work, once he made up his mind to accept it; but first, since, at the period we have come to, most of the statues which now adorn the tomb of Julius II at San Pietro in Vinculo, and those more numerous that belonged to the original project, but which have been dispersed, were blocked out or finished, I wish to give, in order not to return to the subject, a general idea of this monument, to show what, from reduction to reduction, the original design has become, and what annoyances it occasioned its author.
The original magnificent design remained unmodified until 1513; but on Julius' death, his testamentary executors, the Cardinals Santiquatro and Aginense and the Duke of Urbino, reduced to six the number of statues that were to form the decoration, and reduced from ten thousand to six thousand ducats the sum to be employed on it.
From 1513 to 1521 Leo X, who cared less to complete his predecessor's monument than to endow his native city, Florence, with the works of the great artist, employed Michelangelo almost exclusively in building the façade and sacristy of San Lorenzo. During the short, austere pontificate of Adrian VI, Michelangelo again devoted himself to the sculptures of the monument, but under Clement VII he had again to abandon them in order to execute in Florence the projects of Leo X, which the new Pope had adopted. Toward 1531 the Duke of Urbino at last obtained permission for Michelangelo to suspend the works at San Lorenzo in order to finish the tomb so long since begun. Nevertheless it does not appear that he was allowed much time to devote to it. At last, on the death of Clement VII, he thought he had regained his liberty, and could, after such long involuntary delay, fulfil his engagements; but hardly was Paul III installed than he sent for him, gave him the most cordial reception, and begged him to consecrate his talents to his service. Michelangelo replied that it was impossible; he was bound by treaty to terminate the mausoleum of Julius II Paul flew into a rage and said: "Thirty years have I desired this, and now that I am pope I am not to be allowed to satisfy it! I shall tear up this contract. I mean that you shall obey me." The Duke of Urbino loudly complained, openly accusing Michelangelo of want of good faith.
The sculptor, not knowing which way to turn, besought the Pope to allow him to complete the work he was pledged to. He formed the wildest projects in order to escape the amicable compulsion of Paul, among others that of retiring to Carrara, where he had passed some tranquil years among the mountains of marble. The Pontiff, to put an end to all these discussions, issued a brief, dated September 18, 1537, wherein he declared Michelangelo, his heirs and successors, released from all obligations resulting from the different contracts entered into on the subject of the monument. This fashion of terminating things could not satisfy the Duke of Urbino nor relieve Michelangelo. The negotiations were again resumed, and it ended in their agreement that the monument should be raised in the form in which we now see it in the Church of San Pietro in Vinculo, and should be composed of the statue of "Moses" executed entirely by the hand of Michelangelo; of two figures personifying "Active Life" and "Contemplative Life," which were already much advanced, but were to be finished by Rafaello de Monte Lupo; of two other statues by this master—a "Madonna," after a model by Michelangelo, and the figure of "Julius," by Maso del Bosco.
Such is the very abridged history of this monument, which was not entirely completed till 1550, after having caused for nearly half a century real torment to Buonarroti. The Duke of Urbino was not satisfied, neither was Michelangelo. The figures, originally intended to form part of a colossal whole under the great roof of St. Peter's, appear too large for the place they now occupy. The importance of the statue of "Moses" misleads the mind, suggesting the idea that the monument itself is raised to the memory of the Hebrew legislator, rather than to that of the warrior-pope. At all events, in this statue is centred the principal, we may say the unique, interest of the tomb. This prodigious work must be in the memory of all. Amid the masterpieces of ancient and modern sculpture the "Moses" remains ever unparalleled, a type, not irreproachable, but the most striking, of a new art. I do not speak of the consummate science which Michelangelo displays in the modelling of this statue; the Greeks were learned in another fashion, but were so equally with him. Whence comes it, nevertheless, that in spite of bizarreries needless to defend or to deny, and although this austere figure is far from attaining or pretending to the serene and tranquil beauty which the ancients regarded as the supreme term of art, whence is it that it produces upon the most prejudiced mind an irresistible impression? It is that it is more than human, that it lifts the soul into a world of feelings and ideas of which the ancients knew less than we do. Their voluptuous art, in deifying the human form, held down thought to earth. The "Moses" of Michelangelo beheld God, heard that voice of thunder, and bears the terrible impress of what he saw and heard on Mount Sinai: his profound eye is scrutinizing the mysteries he vaguely sees in his prophetic dreams. Is it the Moses of the Bible? I cannot say. Is it in this way Praxiteles and Phidias would have represented Lycurgus and Solon? We may deny it boldly. The legislators in their hands would have been the embodiment of law; they would have represented an abstraction in a form whose harmonious beauty nothing could alter. Moses is not merely the legislator of a people. Not thought alone dwells beneath this powerful brow; he feels, he suffers, he lives in a moral world which Jehovah has opened to him, and, although above humanity, is a man.
On his return to Rome in 1508, Michelangelo had found Julius II not cooled toward him, but preoccupied by new projects. The Pope made no allusion to his monument, and was absorbed in the reconstruction of St. Peter's, which he had confided to Bramante. Raphael was beginning at the same time the frescoes of the Stanza della Segnatura; and two biographers of Michelangelo, whose testimony, it is true, on this point may be suspected, agree in saying that the architect of St. Peter's, jealous of the superiority of the Florentine sculptor, fearing lest he should discover the mistakes committed in his recent constructions, and the malversations of which perhaps he was not innocent, advised the Pope to confide to him the painting of the ceiling of the chapel built by Sixtus IV, hoping to compromise and ruin him by engaging him in works of which he had no experience.
Julius adopted the idea, sent for Michelangelo, and ordered him to begin forthwith. Buonarroti had had no practice in fresco-painting since his student days under Ghirlandajo. He knew that the painting of a ceiling was not an easy matter. He pleaded every excuse, proposed that the commission should be given to Raphael, saying that for his part, being but a sculptor, he could not succeed. The Pope was inflexible, and Michelangelo began the ceiling on May 10, 1508, the most prodigious monument perhaps that ever sprang from the human mind.
Julius had ordered Bramante to construct the necessary scaffoldings, but the latter did it in so inefficient a manner that Michelangelo was obliged to dispense with his assistance, and construct the whole machinery himself. He had sent for some of his fellow-students from Florence, not, as Vasari, by some strange aberration, states, because he was ignorant of fresco-painting, since all the artists of the time understood it, and the pupil of Ghirlandajo had himself practised it, but because his fellow-students had had more experience in it, and he wished to be helped in a work of this importance. He was, however, so dissatisfied with their work that he effaced all that they did, and, without any assistance, if we are to believe his biographer, even grinding his own colors, he shut himself up in the chapel, beginning at dawn, quitting at nightfall, often sleeping in his clothes on the scaffolding, allowing himself but a slight repast at the end of the day, and letting no one see the works he had begun.
Hardly had he set to work when unforeseen difficulties presented themselves, which were on the point of making him relinquish the whole thing. The colors, while still fresh, were covered with a mist, the cause of which he was unable to discover. Utterly discouraged, he went to the Pope and said: "I forewarned your holiness that painting was not my art; all I have done is lost, and, if you do not believe me, order someone to come and see it." Julius sent San Gallo, who saw that the accident was caused by the quality of the time, and that Michelangelo had made his plaster too wet. Buonarroti, after this, proceeded with the utmost ardor, and in the space of twenty months, without further accident, finished the first half.
The mystery with which Michelangelo surrounded himself keenly excited public curiosity. In spite of the painter's objection, Julius frequently visited him in the chapel, and notwithstanding his great age ascended the ladder, Michelangelo extending a hand that he might with safety reach the platform. He grew impatient; he was eager that all Rome should share his admiration. It was in vain that Michelangelo objected that all the machinery would have to be reconstructed, that half the ceiling was not completed; the Pope would listen to nothing, and the chapel was accordingly opened to the public on the morning of November 1, 1509. Julius was the first to arrive before the dust occasioned by the taking down of the scaffolding was laid, and celebrated mass there the same day.
The success was immense. Bramante, seeing that his evil intentions, far from succeeding, had only served to add to the glory of Michelangelo, who had come triumphant out of the trap he had laid for him, besought the Pope to permit Raphael to paint the other half of the chapel. Notwithstanding the affection he bore his architect, Julius adhered to his resolution, and Michelangelo resumed, after a brief interruption, the painting of the ceiling; but rumors of these cabals reached him. They troubled him, and he complained to the Pope of Bramante's conduct. It is probable that the coolness which always existed between Raphael and Michelangelo dates from this period.
The second part of the ceiling, by much the most considerable, was finished in 1512. It is difficult to explain how Vasari, confusing the dates, and appearing to apply to the whole what referred only to the first part, could have stated that this immense work was completed in the space of twenty months. If anything could astonish, it is that Michelangelo was able in four years to accomplish so gigantic a work. It is needless, for the purpose of exciting our admiration, to endeavor to persuade us that it was done in a space of time materially insufficient.
Such was the impatience of Julius that again he nearly quarrelled with Michelangelo. The latter, requiring to go to Florence on business, went to the Pope for money. "When do you mean to finish my chapel?" said the Pope. "As soon as I can," answered Michelangelo. "'As soon as I can! as soon as I can!'" replied the irascible Pontiff; "I'll have you flung off your scaffoldings;" and he touched him with his stick. Michelangelo went home, set his affairs in order, and was on the point of leaving, when the Pope sent him his favorite Accursio with his apology and five hundred ducats.
This time, again, Michelangelo was unable to finish his work as completely as he would have wished. He desired to retouch certain portions; but, seeing the inconvenience of reërecting the scaffoldings, he determined to do nothing more, saying that what was wanting to his figures was not of importance. "You should put a little gold on them," said the Pope; "my chapel will look very poor." "The people I have painted there," answered Michelangelo, "were poor." Accordingly nothing was changed.
These paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine transcend all description. How give an idea of these countless sublime figures to those who have not trembled and turned pale in this awful temple? The immense superiority of Michelangelo is manifest in this chapel itself, where are paintings of Ghirlandajo, of Signorelli, which pale near those of the Florentine as the light of a lamp does in the light of the sun. Raphael painted about the same time, and under the influence of what he had seen in the Sistine, his admirable "Sibyls of the Pace"; but compare them! He also no doubt attained in some of his works—the "St. Paul" of the cartoon, the "Vision of Ezekiel," the "Virgin" of the Dresden Museum—the summit of sublime art; but that which is the exception with Sanzio is the rule with the great Buonarroti. Michelangelo lived in a superhuman world, and his daring, unexpected conceptions are so beyond and outside the habitual thoughts of men that they repel by their very elevation, and are far from fascinating all minds as do the wonderful and charming creations of the painter of Urbino.
It is necessary, however, to combat the widespread opinion that Michelangelo understood only the extreme feelings, and could express these only by violent and exaggerated movements. All agree that his figures possess the highest qualities of art—invention, sublimity of style, breadth and science in the drawing, appropriateness and fitness of color, and this character, so striking in the ceiling of the Sistine that it is not of the painter that the paintings make you think, that looking at it you say to yourself, "This tragic heaven must have come thus all peopled with its gigantic forms"; and it is by an effort of the mind only we are brought to think of the creator of this sublime work. But it is denied that he understood grace, young and innocent beauty, the forms which express the tender and delicate feelings, those which the divine pencil of Raphael so admirably represented. I own that he took little heed of the pleasurable aspect of things; his austere genius was at ease only in grave thoughts; but I do not agree that he was always a stranger to gentle beauty, to feminine beauty in particular. I shall not cite the "Virgin" of the London Academy, nor in another order the admirable "Captive" of the Louvre Museum; but, without quitting the Sistine, could we dream of anything more marvellously beautiful than his "Adam" awaking for the first time to light? or more chaste, more graceful, more touching than his young "Eve" leaning toward her Creator, and breathing in through her half-opened lips the divine breath that is giving her life?
What is the meaning of this terrible work? What means this long evolution of human destiny? Why did these two beings that we see beautiful and happy in the beginning, why did they people the earth with this ardent, restless, at once gigantic and powerless race? Ah! Greece would have made this ceiling an Olympus, inhabited by happy and divine men! Michelangelo put there great unhappy beings, and this painful poem of humanity is truer than the wondrous fictions of ancient poetry and art. "Michelangelo," says Condivi, "especially admired Dante. He also devoted himself earnestly to the reading of the Scriptures and the writings of Savonarola, for whom he had always great affection, having preserved in his mind the memory of his powerful voice." Besides, the country of the great Florentine, the glorious Italy of the Renaissance, was in a state of dissolution. Such studies, such reminiscences, such and so sad realities, may explain the visions that passed through the mind of the great artist during the four years of almost complete solitude he passed in the Sistine. The precise meaning of these compositions will probably never be known, but so long as men exist they will, as is the object of art, attract minds toward the dim world of the ideal.
The year that followed the opening of the Sistine, and which preceded the death of Julius, appears, as do the first two of Leo X's pontificate, to have been the happiest and calmest of Michelangelo's life. The old Pope loved him, "showing him," says Condivi, "attentions he showed no other of those who approached him." He honored his probity, and even that independence of character of which he himself had more than once had experience; Michelangelo, on his side, forgave him his frequent outbursts of impetuosity, that were ever atoned for by prompt and complete acknowledgment.
Michelangelo's sight, greatly enfeebled by this persistent work of four years, compelled him to take almost absolute repose. "The necessity he was under," says Vasari, "during this period of work of keeping his eyes turned upward, had so weakened his sight that for several months after he could not look at a drawing nor read a letter without raising it above his head." He enjoyed an uncontested glory in this interval of semirepose which followed his great effort. It is probable that his thoughts were now concentrated upon the sepulchral monument of his patron, the works for which he had been forced to postpone. But Leo X had other views. He was all-powerful in Florence, where, by the aid of Julius and the League of Cambray, he had reinstated his family in 1512; he now wished to endow his native city with monuments which, by recalling to the vanquished citizens of this glorious republic the magnificence of their early patrons, might help them to forget the institutions they had lost for the second time. The Church of San Lorenzo, built by Brunelleschi, where several members of his family were buried, had not been completed; he now determined to have the façade constructed. Several artists, among others San Gallo, the two Sanzovino, and Raphael, sent in plans for this important work, but Michelangelo's was preferred, and in 1515 he went to Carrara to order the necessary marbles.
Leo did not leave him there long in quiet. Being informed that at Serrayezza, in the highest part of the mountains of Pietra Santa on the Florentine territory, there was marble equal in quality to that of Carrara, he ordered Michelangelo to go to Pietra Santa and work these quarries. In vain the latter pointed out the enormous expense of opening them, of cutting roads through the mountains, and making the marshes passable, besides the inferior quality of the marble. Leo would not listen. Michelangelo set out, made the roads, raised the marbles, remained from 1516 to 1521 in this desert, and the four years he passed there, in the full force of his age and genius, resulted in the transport of five columns, four of which remained on the seashore, and the fifth of which lies still useless and buried among the rubbish of the piazza of San Lorenzo.
Without meaning to contest the debt which the arts owe Leo X, there are certain reservations that we must make on this score. A man of letters, of amiable manners, astute, somewhat of a mischief-maker, ever fluctuating between France and the Emperor, ever on the watch to provide for his family, and, to redeem these defects, having neither heroism nor the undoubted though mistaken love that Julius II bore to Italy, his political career cannot, I think, be defended. He had the merit of being the patron of Raphael, whose facile, flexible character pleased him, and who, thanks to his protection, marked every instant of his short life by some chef d'oeuvre. It must not be forgotten that it was by the most extravagant largesses, by making a traffic of everything, that he encouraged the pleiad of artists who shed such glory upon his name. His obstinacy in employing Michelangelo for so many years, in spite of his reluctance and entreaties, on a work which his own fickleness and the war in Lombardy ought to have made him abandon, has, there can be no doubt, deprived us of some admirable works. But for it Michelangelo would have finished the tomb of Julius II, and we should now possess a gigantic monument that would, no doubt, have rivalled the grandest works of ancient statuary.
A few words of Condivi's show the grief and discouragement which the capriciousness of Leo, and the inutility of the work the master was employed on, caused Michelangelo. "On his return to Florence he found Leo's ardor entirely cooled. He continued a long time weighed down by grief, unable to do anything, having hitherto, to his great displeasure, been driven from one project to another." It was, however, about this period (1520) that Leo ordered the tombs of his brother Giuliano and his nephew Lorenzo, for the sacristy of the Church of San Lorenzo, which were not executed till ten years later; also plans for the library for the reception of the valuable manuscripts collected from Cosmo and Lorenzo the Magnificent, and which had been dispersed during the troubles of 1494. He was at Florence when the Academy of Santa Maria Novella, of which he was a member, proposed to have transported from Ravenna to Florence the ashes of Dante, and addressed the noble supplication to the Pope which has been preserved by Gore, signed by the most illustrious names of the time, and among others that of Michelangelo, with this addition: "I, Michelangelo, sculptor, also beseech your holiness, and offer myself to execute a suitable monument for the divine poet in some fitting part of the city." Leo did not receive this project favorably, and it was abandoned.
The statue "The Christ on the Cross," that had been ordered by Antonio Matelli, and which is now in the Church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, was, it is probable, executed during Michelangelo's rare visits to Rome under Leo's pontificate. His discouragement had become such that he had it finished and put up, at the end of 1521, by a Florentine sculptor of the name of Federigo Frizzi. The statue of "Christ," one of the most finished, and displaying most knowledge, that issued from the hands of Michelangelo, is far, to my mind, from equalling other works of the great sculptor. Yet it was the rapidly acquired celebrity of the work terminated by Federigo Frizzi that decided Francis I on sending Primaticio to Italy, commissioning him to make a cast of the "Christ" of the Minerva, and to ask Michelangelo to execute a statue for him; also to deliver to him the flattering letter preserved in the valuable collection at Lille.
Leo X died on December 1, 1521, a year after Raphael. His successor, the humble and austere Adrian VI, knew nothing about pictures, except those of Van Eyck and Albert Dürer. His simple manners formed a striking contrast to the ostentatious habits of Leo. During his pontificate, all the great works were stopped at Rome and slackened at Florence. While Michelangelo was obscurely working at the library of San Lorenzo, the great age of art was drawing to its close; Raphael and Leonardo were dead, and their pupils were already hurrying on to a rapid decadence.
Characters were beginning to decline at the same time that talent did, and Michelangelo, who, as it were, opened this grand era, was destined to survive alone, like those lofty summits that first receive the morning light, and which are still lit up while all around has grown obscure and night is already profound.