Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D

earlier of two famous Villas d'Este; Pirro Ligorio prepared the plans,

the Zuccari decorated the casino; and the terraced gardens still

attest the fine taste and reckless wealth of the Renaissance

cardinals.

The most popular architect in or about Rome in this age was

Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola. Coming from Bologna to study the classic

ruins, he formed his style by marrying the Pantheon of Agrippa to

the Basilica of Julius Caesar, seeking to combine cupola and arches,

columns and pediments; and, like Palladio, he wrote a book to

propagate his principles. He achieved his first triumph at

Caprarola, near Viterbo, by designing for Cardinal Farnese another

vast and luxurious Palazzo Farnese (1547-9); and ten years later he

built a third at Piacenza. But his most influential work was done at

Rome in the Villa di Papa Giulio for Pope Julius III, the Porta del

Popolo, and the church of the Gesu (1568-75). In this famous

edifice, built for the rising Jesuits, Vignola designed a nave of

impressive breadth and height, and converted the aisles into

chapels; later architects would make this church the first clear

manifestation of the baroque style- curved or contorted forms

surfeited with ornament. In 1564 Vignola succeeded Michelangelo as

chief architect at St. Peter's, and shared in the honor of raising the

great dome that Angelo had designed.

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VII. MICHELANGELO: THE LAST PHASE: 1534-64

-

Through all these years Michelangelo had survived as an unruly ghost

from another age. He was fifty-nine when Clement died, but no one

seemed to think that he had earned the right to rest. Paul III and

Francesco Maria of Urbino fought over his living body. The Duke, as

executor for Julius II, clamored for completion of his uncle's tomb,

and flourished a contract long since signed by Angelo. But the

imperious pontiff would not hear of it. "For thirty years," said

Paul to Buonarroti, "I have wanted you to enter my service; and now

that I am Pope will you disappoint me? That contract shall be torn up,

and I'll have you work for me, come what may." `052355 The Duke

protested, but finally settled for a much smaller mausoleum than

Julius had dreamed of. The knowledge that the tomb was an abortion

shared in darkening the Titan's later years.

In 1535 the triumphant Pope issued a brief appointing Michelangelo

chief architect, sculptor, and painter at the Vatican, and proclaiming

his eminence in each field. The artist was made a member of the

papal household, and was given a life pension of 1200 crowns

($15,000?) a year. Clement VII, shortly before his death, had asked

him to paint a fresco of The Last Judgment behind the altar of the

Sistine Chapel. Paul proposed that this commission should now be

carried out. Michael was reluctant; he wanted to carve, not paint;

he was happier with hammer and chisel than with the brush. The very

size of the wall to be painted- sixty-six by thirty-three feet-

might have given him pause. Nevertheless in September, 1535, aged

sixty, he began his most famous picture.

Perhaps the repeated frustrations of his life- the maimed

mausoleum of Julius, the destruction of his statue of that pope at

Bologna, the unfinished facade of San Lorenzo, the unfinished Medici

tombs- had accumulated in him a bitterness that poured itself into

this consummation of divine wrath. Memories of Savonarola may have

come back to him across forty years- those dire prophecies of doom,

those denunciations of human wickedness, clerical corruption, Medicean

tyranny, intellectual pride, and pagan joys, those blasts of hell-fire

searing the soul of Florence; now the dead martyr would speak again,

from the most intimate altar in Christendom. The somber artist whom

Leonardo had called learned in Dante would soak himself anew in the

brine of the Inferno, and put its horrors on the wall where for

generations to come future popes might have that inescapable

judgment before them as they read the Mass. And meanwhile, in this

citadel of a religion that had till lately scorned and maligned the

human body, he would be a sculptor even with the brush, and would

paint that body in a hundred conditions and attitudes, in the

contortions and grimaces of agony, in the drowsy then excited

resurrection of the dead, in inflated angels blowing the fateful

summons, in a Christ still showing His wounds, yet strong enough, with

His titanic shoulders and Herculean arms, to hurl into hell those

who had thought themselves superior to the commandments of God.

The sculptor in him ruined the painting. This stern puritan, who day

by day became more religious, insisted on carving in color massive and

muscular bodies, until the angels that art and poetry had conceived as

happy children, gracious youths, or lithesome girls, became in his

hands athletes racing through the skies, and damned and saved alike

were worthy of salvation if only because they were made in the image

and likeness of God, and even Christ Himself, in His majestic anger,

became an incarnation of the Adam of the Sistine ceiling, a god made

in the image and likeness of man. There is too much flesh here,

there are too many arms and legs, biceps and swelling calves, to

lift the spirit to contemplate the wages of sin. Even the lecherous

Aretino thought these pullulating nudes were a bit out of place.

Everyone knows how Paul III's master of ceremonies, Biagio da

Cesena, complained that such a celebration of the human form would

more fitly adorn a wineshop than the chapel of the popes; how

Michelangelo avenged himself by painting Biagio among the damned;

and how Paul, when Biagio begged him to order the erasure of the

portrait, replied with excellent humor and theology that not even a

pope can release a soul from hell. `052356 Yielding to protests like

Biagio's, Paul IV bade Daniele da Volterra paint breeches on the

more glaring parts; whereupon Rome called the poor artist il

Braghettone, the breeches tailor. The noblest figure in the dark

panorama is completely clothed- Mary, whose raiment is the Master's

last triumph in the painting of drapery, and whose look of horror

and mercy is the one redeeming element in this apotheosis of human

ferocity.

After six years of labor the picture was unveiled for the

Christmas celebration of 1541. A Rome now entering upon a religious

reaction against the Renaissance accepted The Last Judgment as

good theology and great art. Vasari pronounced it the most wonderful

of all paintings. Artists admired the anatomy, and were not offended

by the muscular exaggerations, the bizarre attitudes, the carnal

excess; on the contrary many painters imitated these mannerisms of the

Master, and formed the mannerist school that began the decadence of

Italian art. Even laymen marveled at the foreshortenings- which gave

parts of the picture the semblance of relief- and the acute sense of

perspective that had made the lower figures two meters in height,

the middle figures three, the upper figures four. We who view the

fresco today cannot judge it fairly; it has been injured by

Daniele's tailoring, a further draping of some figures in 1762, and

the dust and candle smoke and natural darkening of four centuries.

After some months of rest Michelangelo began (1542) work on two

frescoes in the chapel that Antonio da Sangallo had built in the

Vatican for Paul III. One represented the martyrdom of St. Peter,

the other the conversion of St. Paul. Here again the aging artist lost

himself in violent exaggerations of the human form. He was

seventy-five when he completed these pictures, and he told Vasari that

he painted them against his will, and with great effort and

fatigue. `052357

He did not feel too old for sculpture; indeed, he said, the hammer

and chisel kept him in health. Even during the painting of The Last

Judgment he had sought refuge and consolation now and then with the

marbles in his studio. In 1539 he carved his stern and powerful

Brutus (in the Bargello), worthy of the greatest Roman portrait

sculpture. Perhaps he meant it to sanction the recent tyrannicide of

Alessandro de' Medici in Florence, and to serve as a reminder to

future despots. Eleven years later, in a tenderer mood, he carved

the Pieta that stands behind the high altar of the Florentine

cathedral. He hoped to make this his own sepulchral monument, and he

worked on it feverishly, often continuing his labor on it at night

by the light of a candle fixed in his cap. But an overfurious blow

of the hammer so injured the statue that he abandoned it as

irrevocably spoiled. His servant Antonio Mini begged it as a gift,

received it, and sold it to a Florentine. It is an astonishing product

for a man of seventy-five years. The body of the dead Christ is

represented without exaggeration; the figure of Mary, unfinished, is

tenderness petrified; and the noble face of the hooded Nicodemus could

well portray, as some have thought, Michelangelo himself, who now so

often meditated on the Passion of Christ.

His religion was essentially medieval, darkened with mysticism,

prophecy, and the thought of death and hell; he did not share the

skepticism of Leonardo or the blithe indifference of Raphael; his

favorite books were the Bible and Dante. Toward the end of his life

his poetry turned more and more on religion:

-

Now hath my life across a stormy sea,

Like a frail bark, reached that wide port where all

Are bidden, ere the final judgment fall,

Of good and evil deeds to pay the fee.

Now know I well how that fond phantasy,

Which made my soul the worshiper and thrall

Of earthly art, is vain; how criminal

Is that which all men seek so willingly.

These amorous thoughts which were so lightly dressed-

What are they when the double death is nigh?

The one I know for sure, the other dread.

Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest

My soul, that to His great love on high,

Whose arms to clasp us on the cross are spread. `052358

-

The old poet reproached himself for having composed in past years

some sonnets to love. But these were apparently poetic exercises

rather than passions of the flesh. The sincerest sonnets in

Michelangelo's Rime are addressed to an elderly widow or a

handsome youth. Tommaso Cavalieri was a Roman noble who played at

painting. He came to Angelo (c. 1532) for instruction, and bewitched

his teacher with the beauty of his face and form, the grace of his

carriage and manners. Michael fell in love with him, and wrote to

him sonnets of such frank admiration that some have been led to

place Michelangelo with Leonardo among the famous homosexuals of

history. `052358a Such fond expressions of man to man were common in

the Renaissance, even among assiduous heterosexuals; their extreme

language was part of the poetic and epistolary ritual of the time;

we can draw no conclusions from them. We note, however, that-

outside of poetry- Michelangelo seems to have been indifferent to

women until he met Vittoria Colonna.

His friendship with her began about 1542, when she was fifty and

he was sixty-seven. A woman of fifty can easily stir the embers of a

sexagenarian, but Vittoria had no mind for it; she felt herself

still bound to the Marquis of Pescara, now seventeen years dead.

"Our friendship is stable," she wrote to Michelangelo, "and our

affection very sure; it is tied with a Christian knot." `052359 She

sent him 143 sonnets, good but negligible; he replied in sonnets

warm with admiration and devotion, but tarnished with literary

conceits. When they met they talked about art and religion, and

perhaps she confessed to him her sympathy with the men who were trying

to reform the Church. Her influence upon him was profound; all the

finest spiritual elements of life seemed gathered up in her piety,

kindness, and fidelity. Something of his pessimism cleared away when

she walked and talked with him; and he prayed that he might never

again be the man he had been before they met. He was with her when she

died (1547). For a long time thereafter he remained "downstricken as

if deranged," and he reproached himself for not having kissed her face

as well as her hand in those last moments. `052360

It was shortly before her death that he assumed his last and

greatest responsibility in art. When Antonio da Sangallo passed away

(1546), Paul III asked Michelangelo to undertake the completion of St.

Peter's. The weary artist protested again that he was a sculptor,

not an architect; perhaps he had not forgotten his failure with the

facade of San Lorenzo. The Pope insisted, and Angelo yielded with

"infinite regret"; but, Vasari adds, "I believe His Holiness was

inspired by God." For this culminating task of his career the artist

refused additional remuneration, though the Pope repeatedly pressed it

upon him. He set to work with an energy hardly to be expected of a man

in his seventy-second year.

As if St. Peter's were not burden enough he took upon himself in the

same year two other major enterprises. To the Palazzo Farnese he added

a third story, a cornice acclaimed by all for its beauty, and the

two upper tiers of a court that Vasari judged the finest cortile

in Europe. He designed a spacious flight of steps to the top of the

Capitoline hill, and placed on the summit the ancient equestrian

statue of Marcus Aurelius. Later, aged eighty-eight, he began to erect

at the farther end of this plateau the Palazzo del Senatore, with

its lordly double staircase; and he drew up plans for the Palazzo

dei Conservatori at one side of the Senate Hall, and the Museo

Capitolino at the other. Even he could not live long enough to carry

out all these plans, but the structures were completed on his

designs by Tommaso Cavalieri, Vignola, and Giacomo della Porta.

When Paul III died (1549) some doubt arose whether his successor,

Julius III, would continue Angelo as architect-in-chief at St.

Peter's. Michael had rejected Antonio da Sangallo's plan as making for

so dark a church that (he said) it would have been dangerous to public

morals. `052361 The dead man's friends persuaded two cardinals to warn

the Pope that Buonarroti was spoiling the edifice. Julius supported

Angelo; but under a later pontiff, Paul IV (for popes came and went in

quick succession in Michelangelo's life), the Sangallo faction

returned to the attack, alleging that the artist, now eighty-one,

was in his second childhood, was tearing down more than he built up,

and was planning quite impossible things at San Pietro. Time and again

Michael thought of resigning and accepting the repeated invitations of

Duke Cosimo to resume residence in Florence; but he had conceived

the dome, and would not leave his post until that conception was on

the way to realization. In 1557, after years of thought on the

problem, he constructed in clay a small model for the massive

cupola, whose width and weight were the perilous ponderables of the

enterprise. Another year was spent in making a large model in wood,

and drawing up plans for construction and support. The dome was to

be 138 feet in diameter and 151 feet in its own height, with its

apex 334 feet from the ground; it was to rest on a corniced base

upheld by four gigantic arches at the transept crossing of the church.

A "lantern" or open-faced smaller cupola was to rise sixty-nine feet

above the main dome, and a cross was to reach thirty-two feet higher

still as the pinnacle of the whole majestic edifice, 435 feet in total

height. The comparable dome that Brunellesco had raised over the

cathedral of Florence, and whose beauty Michelangelo modestly

pronounced unsurpassable, measured 138 1/2 feet in width, 133 in its

own height, 300 from ground to apex, 351 with its lantern. These two

domes were the most audacious undertakings in the history of

Renaissance architecture.

Pius IV succeeded Paul IV in 1569. Once again the enemies of the

aging Titan sought to replace him. Worn out with a long war of dispute

and recrimination, he submitted his resignation (1560). The Pope

refused to accept it, and Michelangelo continued as chief architect of

St. Peter's till his death. Then it became clear that his critics

had not been wholly in the wrong. Just as in sculpture he often

attacked the marble block with no other preparation than an idea in

his head, so in architecture he seldom put his plans upon paper,

rarely confided them even to his friends, but merely made blueprints

for each part of the edifice as the time approached to build it.

When he died he left no definite plans or models for any portion

except the dome. Consequently his successors were free to adopt

their own ideas. They changed his- and Bramante's- basic conception of

a Greek cross to a Latin cross by elongating the eastern arm of the

church, and fronting it with a high facade that made the cupola

invisible on that side except from a quarter of a mile away. The

only part of the building that is Angelo's is the cupola, which was

erected from his plans, with no substantial change, by Giacomo della

Porta in 1588. It is unquestionably the noblest architectural sight in

Rome. Rising in stately curves from drum to lantern, it crowns with

majesty the immense pile beneath, and gives to classic columns,

pilasters, architraves, and pediments a comprehensive unity rivaling

in splendor any known structure of the ancient world. Here again

Christianity sought a reconciliation with antiquity: the temple of the

worship of Christ placed the dome of the Pantheon (142 feet wide by

142 feet in total height) upon the Basilica of Constantine as Bramante

had vowed to do, and dared to raise classic columns to a lofty stature

unparalleled in the records of antiquity.

Michelangelo continued to work till his eighty-ninth year. In

1563, at the request of Pius IV, he transformed a part of the Baths of

Diocletian into the church and convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli. He

designed the Porta Pia, one of the city gates. He made for the

Florentines in Rome a model for a church; Vasari, perhaps too

enthusiastic about his old teacher and friend, pronounced the proposed

building "as beautiful as ever man beheld"; `052362 but Florentine

funds in Rome ran short, and the edifice was never built.

At last the Titan's incredible energy failed. About his

seventy-third year he had begun to suffer from the stone. He seems

to have found some palliative in medicine or mineral waters, but, he

said, "I put more faith in prayers than in medicines." Twelve years

later he wrote to a nephew: "As regards my condition, I am ill with

all the troubles that are wont to afflict old men. The stone

prevents me from passing water. My loins and back are so stiff that

I often cannot climb upstairs." `052363 Yet till his ninetieth year he

went out in all weathers.

He took the approach of death with religious resignation and

philosophical good humor. "I am so old," he remarked to Vasari,

"that death often pulls me by the cape and bids me go with

him." `052364 A famous bronze relief by Daniele da Volterra shows a

face lined with pain and haggard with age. In February, 1564, he

grew weaker day by day, and spent most of the time sleeping in his old

armchair. He made no will, but merely "left his soul to God, his

body to the earth, and his goods to his nearest relations." `052365 He

died on February 18, 1564, aged eighty-nine. His body was taken to

Florence and was buried in the church of Santa Croce, with

ceremonies that lasted several days. Vasari devotedly designed for him

a sumptuous tomb.

It was the judgment of some contemporaries, and has been the

judgment of time, that despite a multitude of defects he was the

greatest artist who ever lived. He exemplified fully the definition

given by Ruskin of "the greatest artist"- as he "who has embodied,

in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas"-

i.e., ideas that "exercise and exalt the highest faculties of the

mind." `052366 He was, to begin with, a master draftsman whose

drawings were among the most treasured gifts and thefts of his

friends. We can see some of these drawings today in the Casa

Buonarroti at Florence or in the Cabinet des Dessins of the Louvre:

sketches for the facade of San Lorenzo, or for The Last Judgment,

a lovely study for a sibyl, a St. Anne almost as subtly conceived as

Leonardo's, and the strange drawing he made of Vittoria Colonna

dead, with mystic countenance and wasted breasts. In one of the

conversations reported by Francisco de Hollanda he reduced all arts to

design:

-

The science of design, or of fine drawing... is the source and

very essence of painting, sculpture, architecture, and of every form

of representation, as well too as of all the sciences. He who has made

himself a master in this art possesses a great treasure.... All the

works of the human brain and hand are either design itself or a branch

of that art. `052367

-

As a painter he remained a draftsman, far less interested in color

than in line, seeking above all to draw an expressive form, to fix

in art some human attitude, or to convey through a design a philosophy

of life. The hand was that of Pheidias or Apelles, the voice was

Jeremiah's or Dante's. On one of his passages between Florence and

Rome he must have stopped at Orvieto and studied the nudes that

Signorelli had painted there; these, and the frescoes of Giotto and

Masaccio, gave some hints to a style that was nevertheless unlike

anything else that history has preserved. Far beyond and above the

others, even beyond Leonardo, Raphael, and Titian, he brought to his

art, and brought out in his art, nobility. He did not dally with

decoration or triviality; he cared nothing for prettiness, landscapes,

architectural backgrounds, arabesques; he let his subject stand out

stark and unadorned. His mind was caught by a high vision, to which he

gave form, as well as the hand could, in the shape of sibyls,

prophets, saints, heroes, and gods. His art used the human body as its

medium, but those human forms were to him the tortured embodiments

of his hopes and terrors, his confused philosophy, and his

smoldering religious faith.

Sculpture was his favorite and characteristic art because it is

the preeminent art of form. He never colored his statues, feeling that

form was enough; even bronze had too much color for him, and he

confined his sculpture to marble. `052368 Whatever he painted or built

was sculptural, even to St. Peter's dome. He failed as an architect

(barring that sublime cupola) because he could hardly conceive a

building except in terms and proportions of the human body, and

could barely suffer it to be more than a receptacle of statuary; he

wanted to cover all surfaces, instead of making surfaces an element of

form. Sculpture was a fever with him; the marble, he thought,

obdurately hid a secret, which he was resolved to extricate; but the

secret was in himself, and was too intimate for full revelation.

Donatello helped him a little, della Quercia more, the Greeks less, in

the struggle to give the inner vision outward form. He agreed with the

Greeks in devoting most of his art to the body, leaving the faces

generalized and almost stereotyped, as in the female figures on the

Medici tombs; but he never achieved- his temper would not let him care

Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D

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