Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D
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theology in the Disputa, is the glorification of philosophy: Plato
of the Jovelike brow, deep eyes, flowing white hair and beard, with
a finger pointing upward to his perfect state; Aristotle walking
quietly beside him, thirty years younger, handsome and cheerful,
holding out his hand with downward palm, as if to bring his master's
soaring idealism back to earth and the possible; Socrates counting off
his arguments on his fingers, with armed Alcibiades listening to him
lovingly; Pythagoras trying to imprison in harmonic tables the music
of the spheres; a fair lady who might be Aspasia; Heraclitus writing
Ephesian riddles; Diogenes lying carelessly disrobed on the marble
steps; Archimedes drawing geometries on a slate for four absorbed
youths; Ptolemy and Zoroaster bandying globes; a boy at the left
running up eagerly with books, surely seeking an autograph; an
assiduous lad seated in a corner taking notes; peeking out at the
left, little Federigo of Mantua, Isabella's son and Julius' pet;
Bramante again; and hiding modestly, almost unseen, Raphael himself,
now sprouting a mustache. There are many more, about whose identity we
shall let leisurely pundits dispute; all in all, such a parliament
of wisdom had never been painted, perhaps never been conceived,
before. And not a word about heresy, no philosophers burned at the
stake; here, under the protection of a Pope too great to fuss about
the difference between one error and another, the young Christian
has suddenly brought all these pagans together, painted them in
their own character and with remarkable understanding and sympathy,
and placed them where the theologians could see them and exchange
fallibilities, and where the Pope, between one document and another,
might contemplate the co-operative process and creation of human
thought. This painting and the Disputa are the ideal of the
Renaissance- pagan antiquity and Christian faith living together in
one room and harmony. These rival panels, in the sum of their
conception, composition, and technique, are the apex of European
painting, to which no man has ever risen again.
A third wall remained, smaller than the other two, and so broken
by a casement window that unity of pictorial subject seemed impossible
there. It was a brilliant choice to let that surface picture poetry
and music; so a chamber heavily laden with theology and philosophy was
made light and bright with the world of harmonious imagination, and
gentle melodies could sing silently through the centuries across
that room where unappealable decisions gave life or death. In this
fresco of Parnassus, Apollo, seated under some laurel trees atop the
sacred mount, draws from his viol "ditties of no tone"; and at his
right a Muse reclines in graceful ease, baring a lovely breast to
the saints and sages on the adjacent walls; and Homer recites his
hexameters in blind ecstasy, and Dante looks with unreconciled
severity even at this goodly company of graces and bards; and
Sappho, too beautiful to be Lesbian, strums her cithara; and Virgil,
Horace, Ovid, Tibullus, and other singers chosen by time mingle with
Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Sannazaro, and lesser voices of more
recent Italy. So the young artist suggested that "life without music
would be a mistake," `051721 and that the strains and visions of
poetry might lift men to heights as lofty as the myopia of wisdom
and the impudence of theology.
On the fourth wall, also pierced by a window, Raphael honored the
place of law in civilization. In the lunette he painted figures of
Prudence, Force, and Moderation; on one side of the casement he
represented civil law in the form of The Emperor Justinian
Promulgating the Pandects, and on the other, canon law in the
person of Pope Gregory IX Promulgating the Decretals. Here, to
flatter his irascible master, he pictured Julius as Gregory, and
achieved another powerful portrait. In the circles, hexagons, and
rectangles of the ornate ceiling he painted little masterpieces like
The Judgment of Solomon, and symbolic figures of theology,
philosophy, jurisprudence, astronomy, and poetry. With these and
similar cameos, and some medallions left by Sodoma, the great
Stanza della Segnatura was complete.
Raphael had exhausted himself there, and never attained to such
colossal excellence again. By 1511, when he began the next room- now
called the Stanza d'Eliodoro from its central picture- the
conceptual inspiration of Pope and artist seemed to lose force and
fire. Julius could hardly be expected to dedicate his entire apartment
to a glorification of a union between classic culture and
Christianity; it was natural now that he should devote a few walls
to commemorating scenes in Scriptural and Christian story. Perhaps
to symbolize his expected expulsion of the French from Italy, he chose
for one side of the chamber the vivid description, in the Second
Book of Maccabees, of how Heliodorus and his pagan cohorts, attempting
to abscond with the treasury of the Jerusalem Temple (186 B.C.),
were overwhelmed by three angel warriors. Against an architectural
background of great pillars and receding arches the high priest Onias,
kneeling at the altar, begs divine aid. On the right a mounted
angel, with irresistible wrath, tramples down the robber general,
while two other heavenly rescuers advance to attack the fallen
infidel, whose stolen coins spill out upon the pavement. On the
left, with sublime disdain of chronology, Julius II sits enthroned
in calm majesty, watching the expulsion of the invaders; at his feet a
crowd of Jewish women mingle incongruously with Raphael (now bearded
and solemn) and his friends Marcantonio Raimondi the engraver and
Giovanni di Foliari, a member of the papal secretariat. It is hardly
as exalting a fresco as the Disputa or The School of Athens; it is
too visibly devoted, at the cost of compositional unity, to the
celebration of one pontiff and a passing theme; but it is still a
masterpiece, vibrating with action, stately with architecture, and
almost rivaling Michelangelo in the display of angry and muscular
anatomies.
On another wall Raphael painted The Mass of Bolsena. About 1263
a Bohemian priest of Bolsena (near Orvieto), who had doubted that
the sacramental wafer was really transformed into the body and blood
of Christ, was amazed to see drops of blood ooze from the Host that he
had just consecrated in the Mass. In commemoration of this miracle
Pope Urban IV ordered the erection of a cathedral at Orvieto, and
the annual celebration of the Corpus Christi feast. Raphael painted
the scene with brilliance and mastery. The priestly skeptic gazes at
the bleeding Host, while the acolytes behind him start at the sight;
women and children at one side, Swiss guards at the other, unable to
see the miracle, are visibly unmoved; Cardinals Riario and Schinner
and other ecclesiastics stare at the scene in mingled astonishment and
terror; across from the altar, kneeling on a prie-dieu carved with
grotesques, Julius II looks on in quiet dignity, as if he had known
all along that the Host would bleed. Technically this is one of the
best of the stanze frescoes: Raphael has distributed his figures
skillfully around and above the window that mounts into the wall; he
has designed them with firmness of line and careful execution; and
he has brought to flesh and drapery a new depth and warmth of
coloring. The figure of the kneeling Julius is a revealing portrait of
the Pope in his final year. Still the warrior strong and stern,
still the proud King of Kings, he is a man worn with his toils and
combats, clearly marked for death.
During these major labors (1508-13) Raphael produced several
memorable Madonnas. The Virgin with the Diadem (Louvre) reverts to
the Umbrian style of modest piety. The Madonna della Casa Alba -
literally "the Lady of the White House"- is a graceful study in pink
and green and gold, with the large and flowing lines of Michelangelo's
sibyls; Andrew Mellon contributed $1,166,400 to the Soviet
Government in exchange for this picture (1936). The Madonna di
Foligno (Vatican) shows a lovely Virgin and Child in the clouds, a
ghastly Baptist pointing to her, a stout St. Jerome presenting to
her the donor of the picture, Sigismondo de' Conti of Foligno and
Rome; here Raphael, under the influence of the Venetian Sebastiano del
Piombo, achieves a new splendor of luminous color. The Madonna
della Pesce (Prado) is altogether beautiful: in the face and mood
of the Virgin; in the Child- never surpassed by Raphael; in the
youthful Tobit presenting to Mary the fish whose liver has restored
his father's sight; in the robe of the angel who guides him; in the
patriarchal head of St. Jerome. In composition, color, and light
this painting can bear comparison with the Sistine Madonna itself.
Finally Raphael in this period raised portrait painting to a
height that only Titian would reach again. The portrait was a
characteristic product of the Renaissance, and corresponds to the
proud liberation of the individual in that flamboyant age. Raphael's
portraits are not numerous, but they all stand on the highest level of
the art. One of the finest is Bindo Altoviti. Who could surmise that
this gentle but alert youth, healthy and clear-eyed, and as pretty
as a girl, was no poet but a banker, and a generous patron of
artists from Raphael to Cellini? He was twenty-two when so
portrayed; in 1556 he died at Rome after a noble but disastrous and
exhausting effort to save the independence of Siena from Florence. And
of course to this period belongs the greatest of all portraits, the
Julius II of the Uffizi Gallery (c. 1512). We cannot say that this
is the original that first came from Raphael's hand; possibly it is
a studio replica; and the marvelous copy in the Pitti Palace was
made by none other than that rival portraitist, Titian. The fate of
the original is unknown.
Julius himself died before the Stanza d'Eliodoro was finished, and
Raphael wondered whether the great plan of the four stanze would
be carried out. But how could a pope like Leo X, wedded to art and
poetry almost as deeply as to religion, hesitate? The young man from
Urbino was to find in Leo his most loyal friend; the living genius
of happiness was to know under a happy pope his happiest years.
IV. MICHELANGELO
1. Youth: 1475-1505
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We have left to the last Julius' favorite painter and sculptor, a
man rivaling him in temper and terribilita, in power and depth of
spirit- the greatest and saddest artist in the records of mankind.
Michelangelo's father was Lodovico di Lionardo Buonarroti Simoni,
podesta or mayor of the little town of Caprese, on the road from
Florence to Arezzo. Lodovico claimed distant kinship with the counts
of Canossa, one of whom was pleased to acknowledge the relation;
Michael always prided himself on having a liter or two of noble blood;
but ruthless research has proved him mistaken. `051722
Born at Caprese on March 6, 1475, and named, like Raphael, after
an archangel, Michelangelo was the second of four brothers. He was put
out to nurse near a marble quarry at Settignano, so that he breathed
the dust of sculpture from his birth; he remarked later that he had
sucked in chisels and hammers with his nurse's milk. `051723 When he
was six months old the family moved to Florence. He received some
schooling there, enough to enable him, in after years, to write good
Italian verse. He learned no Latin, and never fell so completely under
the hypnosis of antiquity as did many artists of the time; he was
Hebraic not classic, Protestant in spirit rather than Catholic.
He preferred drawing to writing- which is a corruption of drawing.
His father mourned the preference, but finally yielded to it, and
apprenticed Michael, aged thirteen, to Domenico Ghirlandaio, then
the most popular painter in Florence. The contract bound the youth
to stay with Domenico three years "to learn the art of painting"; he
was to receive six florins the first year, eight the second, ten the
third, and presumably shelter and food. The boy supplemented
Ghirlandaio's instruction by keeping his eyes open as he wandered
through Florence, seeing in everything some object for art. "Thus,"
reports his friend Condivi, "he used to frequent the fish market and
study the shape and hues of fishes' fins, the color of their eyes, and
so for every part belonging to them; all which details he reproduced
with the utmost diligence in his painting." `051724
He had been with Ghirlandaio hardly a year when a combination of
nature and chance turned him to sculpture. Like many other art
students he had free access to the gardens in which the Medici had
disposed their collections of antique statuary and architecture. He
must have copied some of these marbles with especial interest and
skill, for when Lorenzo, wishing to develop a school of sculpture in
Florence, asked Ghirlandaio to send him some students of promise in
that direction, Domenico gave him Francesco Granacci and
Michelangelo Buonarroti. The boy's father hesitated to let him make
the change from one art to the other; he feared that his son would
be put to cutting stone; and indeed Michael was so used for a time,
blocking out marble for the Laurentian Library. But soon the boy was
carving statues. All the world knows the story of Michael's marble
faun: how he chiseled a stray piece into the figure of an old faun;
how Lorenzo, passing, remarked that so old a faun would hardly have so
complete a set of teeth; and how Michael remedied the fault at one
blow by knocking a tooth out of the upper jaw. Pleased with the
boy's product and aptitude, Lorenzo took him into his home and treated
him as his son. For two years (1490-2) the young artist lived in the
Palazzo Medici, regularly ate at the same table with Lorenzo,
Politian, Pico, Ficino, and Pulci, heard the most enlightened talk
about politics, literature, philosophy and art. Lorenzo assigned him a
good room, and allowed him five ducats ($62.50?) a month for his
personal expenses. Whatever works of art Michael might produce
remained his own, to dispose of as he wished.
These years in the Medici Palace might have been a period of
pleasant growth had it not been for Pietro Torrigiano. Pietro one
day took offense at Michael's banter, and (so he told Cellini),
"clenching my fist, I gave him such a blow on the nose that I felt
bone and cartilage go down like biscuit beneath my knuckles; and
this mark of mine he will carry to the grave." `051725 It was so:
Michelangelo for the next seventy-four years showed a nose broken at
the bridge. It did not sweeten his temper.
In those same years Savonarola was preaching his fiery gospel of
puritan reform. Michael went often to hear him, and never forgot those
sermons, or the cold thrill that ran through his youthful blood as the
prior's angry cry, announcing the doom of corrupt Italy, pierced the
stillness of the crowded cathedral. When Savonarola died, something of
his spirit lingered in Michelangelo: a horror of the moral decay about
him, a fierce resentment of despotism, a somber presentiment of
doom. Those memories and fears shared in forming his character, in
guiding his chisel and his brush; lying on his back under the
ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he remembered Savonarola; painting The
Last Judgment, he resurrected him, and hurled the friar's
fulminations down the centuries.
In 1492 Lorenzo died, and Michael returned to his father's house. He
continued his sculpture and painting, and now added a strange
experience to his education. The prior of the hospital of Santo
Spirito allowed him, in a private room, to dissect corpses. Michael
performed so many dissections that his stomach revolted, and for a
time he could hardly hold any food or drink. But he learned anatomy.
He had an absurd chance to show his knowledge when Piero de' Medici
asked him to mold a gigantic snow man in the court of the palace.
Michael complied, and Piero persuaded him to live again in the Casa
Medici (January, 1494).
Late in 1494 Michelangelo, in one of his many hectic moves, fled
through the winter snow of the Apennines to Bologna. One story says
that he was warned of Piero's coming fall by the dream of a friend;
perhaps his own judgment predicted that event; in any case Florence
might not then be safe for one so favored by the Medici. At Bologna he
studied carefully the reliefs by Iacopo della Quercia on the facade of
San Petronio. He was engaged to finish the tomb of St. Dominic, and
carved for it a graceful Kneeling Angel; then the organized
sculptors of Bologna sent him warning that if he, a foreigner and
interloper, continued to take work out of their hands, they would
dispose of him by one or another of the many devices open to
Renaissance initiative. Meanwhile Savonarola had taken charge of
Florence, and virtue was in the air. Michael returned (1495).
He found a patron in Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, of the collateral
branch of the Medici. For him he carved a Sleeping Cupid, which
had a strange history. Lorenzo suggested that he treat the surface
to make it look like an antique; Michael complied; Lorenzo sent it
to Rome, where it was sold for thirty ducats to a dealer who sold it
for two hundred to Raffaello Riario, Cardinal di San Giorgio. The
Cardinal discovered the cheat, sent back the Cupid, recovered his
ducats. It was later sold to Caesar Borgia, who gave it to
Guidobaldo of Urbino; Caesar reclaimed it on taking that city, and
sent it to Isabella d'Este, who described it as "without a peer
among the works of modern times." `051726 Its later history is
unknown.
With all his versatile ability Michael found it hard to earn a
living by art in a city where there were almost as many artists as
citizens. An agent of Riario invited him to Rome, assuring him that
the Cardinal would give him employment, and that Rome was full of
wealthy patrons. So in 1496 Michelangelo moved hopefully to the
capital, and received a place in the household of the Cardinal. Riario
did not prove generous; but Iacopo Gallo, a banker, commissioned
Michael to carve a Bacchus and a Cupid. One is in the Bargello
at Florence, the other in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
The Bacchus is an unpleasant representation of the young god of wine
in a state of bibbling intoxication; the head is too small for the
body, as may be fitting in a toper; but the body is well designed, and
smooth with an androgynous softness of texture. The Cupid is a
crouching youth, more like an athlete than a god of love; possibly
Michelangelo did not name it so incongruously; as sculpture it is
excellent. Here, almost at the outset, the artist distinguished his
work by showing the figure in a moment and attitude of action. The
Greek preference for repose in art was alien to him, except in the
Pieta; so- with the same exception- was the Greek flair for
universality- for depicting general types; Michelangelo chose rather
to portray an individual imaginary in conception, realistic in detail.
He did not imitate the antique, except in costumes; his work was
characteristically his own, no renaissance, but a unique creation.
The greatest product of this first stay in Rome was the Pieta
that
is now one of the glories of St. Peter's. The contract for it was
signed by Cardinal Jean de Villiers, French ambassador at the papal
court (1498); the fee was to be 450 ducats ($5,625?); the time
allowed, one year; and Michael's banker friend added his own
generous guarantees:
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I, Iacopo Gallo, pledge my word to his most reverend Lordship that
the said Michelangelo will finish the said work within one year, and
that it shall be the finest work in marble which Rome today can
show, and that no master of our day shall be able to produce a better.
And in like manner... I pledge my word to the said Michelangelo that
the most reverend Cardinal will disburse the payments according to the
articles above engrossed. `051727
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There are some blemishes in this glorious group of the Virgin Mother
holding her dead Son in her lap: the drapery seems excessive, the
Virgin's head is small for her body, her left hand is extended in an
inappropriate gesture; her face is that of a young woman clearly
younger than her Son. To this last complaint Michelangelo, as reported
by Condivi, made answer:
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Do you not know that chaste women maintain their freshness far
longer than the unchaste? How much more would this be the case with
a virgin into whose breast there never crept the least lascivious
desire which would affect the body! Nay, I will go further, and hazard
the belief that this unsullied bloom of youth, besides being
maintained in her by natural causes, may have been miraculously
wrought to convince the world of the virginity and perpetual purity of
the Mother. `051728
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It is a pleasant and forgivable fancy. The spectator is soon
reconciled to that gentle face, untorn by agony, calm in her grief and
love, the bereaved mother resigned to the will of God, and consoled by
holding for some final moments the dear body here cleansed of its
wounds, freed from its indignities, resting in the lap of the woman
that bore it, and beautiful even in death. All the essence and tragedy
and redemption of life are in this simple group: the stream of
births by which woman carries on the race; the certainty of death as
the penalty for every birth; and the love that ennobles our
mortality with kindness, and challenges every death with new birth.
Francis I was right when he pronounced this the finest achievement
of Michelangelo. `051729 In all the history of sculpture no man has
ever surpassed it, except, perhaps, the unknown Greek who carved the
Demeter of the British Museum.
The success of the Pieta brought Michelangelo not only fame, which
he humanly enjoyed, but money, which his relatives were ready to enjoy
with him. His father had lost, with the fall of the Medici, the little
sinecure that Lorenzo the Magnificent had given him; Michael's older
brother had entered a monastery; the two younger brothers were
improvident, and Michael became now the main support of the family. He
complained of this necessity, but gave generously.
Probably because the disordered finances of his relatives called
him, he returned to Florence in 1501. A unique assignment came to
him in August of that year. The Operai or Board of Works at the
cathedral owned a block of Carrara marble thirteen and a half feet
high, but so irregularly shaped that it had lain unused for a
hundred years. The Board asked Michelangelo could a statue be chiseled
out of it. He agreed to try; and on August 16 the Operai del Duomo and
the Arte della Lana (the Wool Guild) signed the contract:
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That the worthy master Michelangelo... has been chosen to fashion,
complete, and finish to perfection that male statue called Il
gigante, of nine cubits in height... that the work shall be completed
within two years dating from September, at a salary of six golden
florins per month; that what is needed for the accomplishment of
this task, as workmen, timbers, etc., shall be supplied him by the
Operai; and when the statue is finished the Guild consuls and the
Operai... shall estimate whether he deserve a larger recompense, and
this shall be left to their consciences. `051730
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