Chapter VI (2)

Almost as traditional was the unfinished picture before which in springtime of 1520 Raphael’s body lay in state. The Transfiguration, Figure 194, repeats the method of the Disputa. The celestial group of Christ and Moses and Elijah is disposed as Perugino would have counselled, in a swaying triangular group set before the gulf of the firmament. Raphael painted this part with his own hand. The lower part, which was left to Giulio Romano to finish, rests on the maxims and practice of Leonardo. An energetic variety compelled into a close balance is the ideal, a formal order which contains and softens otherwise extravagant expressions and gestures. There is perhaps intended not merely an illustration of the Gospel text, but also the contrast between that life of contemplation towards which the soul aspires, and that world of suffering of mind and body which presses closely upon our rare moments of spiritual escape.

Even that world of facts had been very kind to Raphael. It was fitting then that in his last days he should forget the haunting spectre of Michelangelo’s sublimity, and should use his last forces in an imitation which was a sort of gratitude to those two great masters who had set him on the right way. One would like to believe that the Sistine Madonna and the Transfiguration are the sign that Raphael when overtaken by an untimely death was purging himself of an unfruitful rivalry, and becoming once more master of his own soul. Yet since even Michelangelo shipwrecked on the Michelangelesque, it is an open question whether Raphael could ever have permanently recovered his natural equipoise. However that be, Raphael in the glorious years from 1500 to 1512 resumes and perfects every gentle, orderly, and reasonable strain in Italian painting. Whether in portraiture or narrative, in mythology or symbolism, in pictures of the Madonna or in pure decoration, he gave to Italian painting its final stamp. He achieved a grandeur of space composition akin to the movement of a symphony, a hidden structure more appealing than any separate hue or form. His best work rests on a great humility, and his later pride went far towards undoing him as an artist. Such pride was the breath of life and the source of strength to his rival Michelangelo, the fulfiller and perfector of everything that had been insurgent, unbounded and not quite reasonable in the art of Florence.

By a peculiar irony all that was valuable in such truculent and self-sufficing predecessors as Donatello and Bertoldo, Andrea del Castagno, Antonio Pollaiuolo and Luca Signorelli was finally concentrated in the small and ill-favored body of a neurasthenic. There is the tragedy of Michelangelo[69] in its simplest terms. A Titan in capacity to feel and work, he lived in an atmosphere of suspicion and fear. Thrice he ran away from physical danger, once was virtually a military deserter. To unworthy dependent relatives he gave lavishly, scolding and fretting as he gave. He deliberately affronted two of the most courteous and accomplished colleagues, Leonardo da Vinci and Perugino. He suspected the worst of his gracious and generous rival, Raphael. From a Roman studio as unkempt and filthy as its owner, he snarled at the world and himself like a dog from a kennel.

Yet, note the paradox, this snarling is embodied in fine poetry, and this haggard and more than untidy artist is the friend of such elect spirits as Tommaso Cavalieri and Vittoria Colonna. Transient solaces. Near the end of his long life he writes:—

“Alas! Alas! again and once again
I see my past and there I find not one—
In all, not one whole day that has been mine.”

These were the words of a man who was admired like a god and had achieved a lifework of unexampled copiousness and athleticism.

The great enigma, how Michelangelo converted what are usually weaknesses into sources of artistic strength, may best be faced in his life and works. He was born at Caprese in 1475, soon taken back to Florence and put to nurse with a stonecutter’s wife, with whose milk he later used to say he sucked in the mallets and chisels he wielded so powerfully. At thirteen he was articled to Ghirlandaio as a paid assistant and doubtless did some minor work on those prettiest of frescoes in the choir of Santa Maria Novella. Extricating himself from an uncongenial task, he became one of the protegés of Lorenzo de’ Medici, studying the antique marbles of the Medici Gardens under the kindly guidance of old Bertoldo. There he mingled freely for three years in the most learned and gentle society of the time. He mastered anatomy and modelling, searched the compositional secrets of Masaccio. Soon Savonarola’s revolution dismantled that artistic paradise which had been the Medici Gardens, and Michelangelo became what he frequently was afterwards, a fugitive and a solitary man, without either fixed friendships or abiding place.

FIG. 195. Michelangelo. Holy Family of the Doni.—_Uffizi._
]

How he made himself great in sculpture is not our theme. He was thirty and already the master of the David and the Pietà before he began to be a painter. His first commission, in 1505, was for a Holy Family, Figure 195, in medallion form for Agnolo Doni, who at the same time was having his portrait painted by Raphael. The picture as we see it in the Uffizi shows a master who thinks in fresco. The brown flesh, the dull yellows and blues of the draperies could have come from the Brancacci chapel. Remarkable is the complete waiver of charm and sweetness. The superb figures are skilfully contorted into interesting poses, the circle is densely filled and the few interstices left by the main figures are filled with athletic nudes. The aim, which is successfully attained, is an austere grandeur. There is to be no ordinary human appeal in our youthful Lord and his parents.

FIG. 196. Michelangelo. Detail from Cartoon of the Bathers, by the
contemporary engraver, Marcantonio.
]

At this moment Leonardo was already well advanced on the cartoon for the Battle of the Standard, treating it in terms of literal narrative. In 1505 Michelangelo received a signal honor in the commission for the companion fresco, the Battle of Pisa. Both were for the Hall of the Great Council. We can imagine Michelangelo casting about for a reason to abandon a narrative treatment and to find one that could be expressed by the nude. He found it in an incident in Leonardo Aretino’s Chronicle. It seemed that the trumpet found the Florentine men-at-arms bathing in the Arno. Here was the theme of what was properly called The Bathers. Great muscular forms are drawing themselves up the bank, and are hurrying into clothes and armor. We have not a fight, but its alarm and imminence, a fine imaginative substitute for the obvious event. The picture was never executed, and the cartoon, which was the marvel of its day, was soon destroyed, but Michelangelo’s sketches tells us something of the composition, and the contemporary engraver, Marcantonio, Figure 196, has left us a masterly print of the central group. It is plain that Michelangelo made a display of minute anatomy that put his contemporaries to shame, plain also that he subordinated this feature to monumental effect. The failure to execute the fresco and the destruction of the cartoon must count among the capital losses in the history of art.

Burdened already with the impossible task of the tomb of Julius II, Michelangelo was called to Rome to fresco the vault of the Sistine Chapel. Contemporary gossip believed that he was proposed by the jealous and shifty Bramante, architect of St. Peter’s, in the hope of discrediting him. If so, Bramante reckoned ill. At first Michelangelo planned a very modest scheme of colossal figures of Apostles in the twelve spandrels. Soon, dismissing his incompetent helpers, he attacked single-handed the present great scheme. He worked at it four bitter years, and came out of it temporarily crippled and with eyes distorted from the constant strain of looking upwards. The ceiling was unveiled on All Saint’s Day of 1512 and has been a portent ever since.

FIG. 197. Michelangelo. The two Western Compartments of the Ceiling of
the Sistine Chapel: God parting Light from Darkness; God creating
the Sea and Plants. Example of the Decorative Scheme.
]

Enter the Sistine Chapel, turn your back to the overwhelming apparition of the Last Judgment, and your eye will naturally seek the lightest part of the rich decoration. In a long strip, down the centre of the ceiling, made up of nine oblongs alternately large and small, colossal figures stand out against the sky. We see the drama of the Creation and Fall of man. Nude titans play the minor parts in so many simultaneous scenes. The gigantic, draped form of the Eternal dominates the first five. We see him an aged athlete, an expression of utmost physical force, rending chaos asunder into light and darkness; by his touch illumining the sun and moon; Figure 197, drawing out the plants from the earth. I know no more sublime conception in painting than the figure of God assigning the oceans their place, Figure 198. Here is a form that would weigh tons hovering with the lightness of an eagle in space, with extended beneficent arms as solid as reality but coaxed out of the wet plaster with touch and hues as delicate as those of a Whistler symphony. A miracle of conception and of workmanship.

FIG. 198. Michelangelo. God hovering over the Waters. Shows the
decorative use of the so-called “Slaves.”—_Vatican._
]

FIG. 199. Michelangelo. Creation of Adam.
]

The eye will dwell longest on the great fresco of the Creation of Adam, Figure 199. It is all noble energy in the figure of God giving life by His touch, all noble languor in the relaxed form of Adam only dimly conscious of himself and wistful. There could be no truer or more striking illustration of the pessimistic view that life was imposed upon the earth and brought sadness with it. The titan form of Adam has a singular and enigmatic relaxation. He undergoes a gift he has never besought and faces it with something between confusion, mistrust and resignation. Perhaps the splendid body would have been more at ease, had the soul not been added. So in a spirit of Christian pessimism Michelangelo represents Deity sharing its divine powers with the first man.

At the centre of the ceiling is the creation of Eve, again an extraordinary study in lassitude, but with a significant difference in the figure of Eve. The woman, the chosen receptacle and transmitter of life, accepts the gift eagerly. She presses up to God in thankful adoration. No doubts or ambiguities here. And what a figure—fit to be the mother of a race, exulting already in a fecundity that is to be most grievous. Compare her action with the languid and almost disdainful gesture of Adam in the last fresco, and learn that if the world is still peopled it is due to the unreflective and unshaken fealty to life of all Eve’s true daughters.

FIG. 200. Michelangelo. The Temptation and Expulsion from Eden.
]

Perhaps the most decorative subject, if one may use the word of themes so morally impressive, is that which represents the sin of the forbidden fruit and the expulsion from Eden, Figure 200. The elements of pathos which are strong in the story of Genesis are absent. Michelangelo has not deigned to show us a habitable or desirable Eden. We see instead the swiftly changing episodes of a great doom, which culminates in this scene. Marvelous are the paired groups, superb the contrast between careless appetite under the tree of knowledge and utter shame in the exiled pair. One feels that Eve, who shrinks most, will soonest recover. Her mission is still valid in the world of sin and shame. The composition is the first one made up entirely of nudes.

We may pass quickly over the three compartments devoted to the story of Noah. The scale of the figures, especially in the Deluge, is too small to count at the distance from the eye. These three frescoes were the beginning of the work, the proper scale being arrived at through trial and error. Inherently the two small oblongs are among the most beautiful in the ceiling, having a stylistic grace that is less marked in the earlier more august themes. With the charm of Greek intaglios these stories of Noah combine monumentality.

FIG. 201. Michelangelo. The Prophet Jeremiah.
]

I have tried to put myself in the position of a visitor to the Sistine Chapel following the instincts of his eye. At this point, having glanced over the ceiling, his mind might well come in and ask the meaning of a whole of which he is becoming dimly aware. The nine scenes above are simply the historic axioms upon which the Christian scheme of redemption is based. The abstract sparseness of the nine episodes from Genesis is justified by the fact that they are less human events than terms in a great argument, which runs as follows: We were created innocent, sinned in our first parents, were spared in the world-flood and promised eventual redemption.

This prolonged drama of redemption is witnessed by a solemn chorus of draped male and female figures enthroned impressively in the spandrels. Here, representing respectively the pagan and Hebrew world, are seven sibyls and five prophets who had the dim but certain vision of a coming Redeemer. These figures as Hawthorne has well said are “necessarily so gigantic because the weight of thought within them is so massive.” They brood quietly or sway with the burden of yearning. They are magnificently draped and contrast most decoratively with the many nudes of the ceiling. They vary in age and disposition. Contrast the actively inspired and youthful Daniel, or the fiery Ezechiel with the ponderous gravity of Jeremiah, Figure 201. What shades of delicate characterization are in the athletic loveliness of the Delphic Sibyl, Figure 202, the powerfully concentrated senility of The Cumean Sibyl, she who predicted to Virgil the new era of salvation, and the aristocratic aloofness of the Libyan seeress, Figure 203, most daintily preparing her day’s work in divination.

FIG. 202. Michelangelo. The Delphic Sibyl.
]

FIG. 203. Michelangelo. The Libyan Sibyl.
]

Magnificent is the indignant sprawling form of the unwilling prophet Jonah, remanded by the sea to an ungrateful mission. He is the active counterpart of the passive Adam on the ceiling. He obeys under protest. The form itself, foreshortened against the curve of the spandrel, is a masterpiece of draughtsmanship. Decoratively it is the link between the nudes of the ceiling and the draped prophets and sibyls.

Below the prophetic figures, in the older frescoes of the side walls, are set the foreshadowing of the work of salvation in the life of Moses and its accomplishment in the life of Christ, and the drama closes with Michelangelo’s Last Judgment on the altar wall. There Christ separates eternally the saved from the damned, echoing the definitive gesture with which God in the adjoining ceiling separates light from darkness. So the scheme closes with the inexorable logic with which it began.

The decorative task of Michelangelo was to mediate between the prophets and sibyls and the ceiling frescoes above, and likewise to link the great figures with the side walls below. Above, he set a multitude of nude forms. On the massive sides of the twelve thrones are four caryatids in two pairs. At the top of these piers are seated the lithe forms of nude youths, Figure 198, forty in all, supporting medallions and bent into every conceivable attitude that might set off the flexibility and power of these superb young bodies. But however extravagant any single pose may be, it is immediately balanced by an opposing thrust from some other body, so that the whole composition is locked together into an active and thrilling equilibrium. Even the triangles over the coves are filled with huddled nudes most adroitly disposed in the narrow and refractory spaces.

Below the prophets and sibyls, the linking motives are made up of draped figures. Weakest are the caryatid geniuses below each throne. The triangular splays at the corners contain those four bloody and sensational acts which assured the perpetuity of God’s Chosen People—the Raising of the Brazen Serpent, the Slaying of Goliath and of Holophernes, the Hanging of Haaman.

FIG. 204. Michelangelo. Decoration of Cove over Window.
]

In the triangles roofing the coves and in the lunettes about the arched window heads are family groups of the ancestors and precursors of Christ. Figure 204. The mood of anticipation which has been calm and official in the prophets becomes agitated, passionate, personal in these half hidden groups. So many pilgrims of eternity yearn for the fulfillment that shall give meaning to their wanderings—a promised goal and rest. Very subtle and beautiful is the contrast between the groups sundered by the window heads, individually meditative, and those which blend their longing in the close relations forced by the triangular coves. What has begun as noble abstraction finishes in terms of almost inexpressible tenderness. In color the whole gigantic composition is unified by a sonorous chord of yellow and violet which is moderately asserted in the ceiling and pushed to the utmost in the spandrels. Of the color John La Farge has written: “The unity is so great, the balance of effects so harmonious, that it is only by study that we see expressed in the methods of the painting the ancient rules, handed down by practice, which unite with the latest teaching of modern scientific coloring.” What a mind it took to hold the tumultuous and pathetic details of this great work within an enveloping order and calm!

FIG. 205. Michelangelo. The Last Judgment.
]

In framing his great work out of nudes relieved by draped figures, Michelangelo renewed the Grecian practice. Precisely the difference between the Sistine ceiling and the metopes of the Parthenon, or the frieze of Pergamon, raises the question—What does the nude of Michelangelo express? I do not find in it, at least in the Sistine ceiling, much of that terribleness, _terribiltà_, which has been remarked by critics from Vasari to Henri Beyle. It seems to me rather an art of lassitude and relaxation, the reluctantly awaking Adam being the clue to the mood. Except for the gestures of God and Eve, the gestures and poses are unspecific. The lithe bodies of the slaves are twisted only that they may attain consciousness of powers which have no use. The relaxation which marks nearly all the nudes, whether in the stories or in the incidental ornament, is not that of fatigue after action, nor yet that of preparation for an ordeal. In barren lassitude we have expressed powers which do not imply action or use, but breathe a great melancholy. We are far from the splendors of passion and achievement, we see humanity confused at a fate that calls itself God, a passive factor in an arbitrary process that makes the glory of the flesh a vain thing. As a humanist, Michelangelo asserts that failing glory, as a Christian he accepts the nothingness of mankind and the rightness of God’s inscrutable and apparently cruel designs. Perhaps the spell of Michelangelo, his æsthetic, to put it pedantically, is simply the noble resignation with which the humanist accepts the Christian pessimism as regards this world. And here I may note that Rodin has significantly shown that even the forms of Michelangelo are not uprising and resilient like the antique, but compressed and yielding like those of the Christian Gothic sculptors.

Twenty-one years after the Sistine ceiling was unveiled, Michelangelo began reluctantly the great fresco of the Last Judgment, Figure 205. He worked on it for seven years, and it was unveiled on Christmas Day of 1541. How the choristers had the heart to chant the angelic message of peace and good will before it, I cannot imagine. Michelangelo was sixty-six years old, a disillusioned and embittered man, an alien in the corrupt and pleasure loving Rome of Paul III. He has put into the Christ all his contempt for mankind. The Christ who earlier wrathfully hurled the darts in the Umbrian plague banners has become a far darting Apollo, Figure 206, rejoicing in his dire task. Behind him the murky air is full of hurtling contorted angels, in aspect quite indistinguishable from fiends, who bear the implements of the Passion. Below, the just and unjust rise or fall in knots and festoons of writhing nude bodies all equally sinister. The conception is violently corporeal, and never elsewhere in painting has the human body been used with such ingenuity and power. But it is a power that defeats itself. I believe the spectator is not so much appalled as confused before the Last Judgment. Its vehemence seems so unrelieved and insensate. If this be indeed the goal of mankind, no wonder moody Adam in the ceiling above faces his Creator with doubt and a hint of distrust.

FIG. 206. Michelangelo. Christ with the Virgin and the Apostles. From
the Last Judgment.
]

Its sheer display of force won all contemporaries, and the French critic and superman, Stendhal, has highly praised the work for its burning energy. While not sharing his enthusiasm, I gladly refer the reader to his admirable pages. In my own opinion the creative ardor of Michelangelo had waned by this time. He offers, instead, his spleen, which is more valuable than most men’s genius, and his amazing technical skill. Michelangelo has become Michelangelesque. That is deplorably true in the frescoes for the Pauline Chapel which were finished in 1547, his seventy-second year. Nothing is left but sensationalism, and the Pope does well not to exhibit these works. As regards humanity, Michelangelo’s vein is completely exhausted. He still is capable of exquisite calculation, as in the design for the dome of St. Peter’s, still retains a dæmonic capacity for work and emotion, but the sculptor in him is nearly dead and the painter completely so. The poet of the rugged sonnets has superseded them both. When he died at 89, in 1564, the little ill-favored body was honored like that of a king. His sheer power had swept the whole rising generation of artists under his sway. To their own hurt and to the bankruptcy of the Golden Age.

Such forms as Michelangelo’s are tolerable only when possessed by that melancholy poetry of his which gives them meaning. If the serene intelligence of a Raphael had not found emotions to fill such forms, if Michelangelo himself in his later years falls back on a monotonous formula of terribleness, what hope was there for such uninspired imitators as the Venustis, Volterras, and Vasaris? One and all, they entertained monstrous delusions of effortless attainment—cleverly contorted their nudes, shrewdly calculated their terrors. And the Roman art of the Golden Age, forgetting both the wise humility of Umbria and the reasonable pride of Florence, suddenly collapsed in the ugliest and most irrational ostentation. Michelangelo had passed—to fulfill and to destroy.

ILLUSTRATIONS FOR CHAPTER VI

A CONTEMPORARY LIST OF GREAT ARTISTS, BEFORE 1510

In an offhand mention in _The Courtier_ Baldasarre Castiglione tells
us who seemed to be great artists to a cultured and well-informed
gentleman about the year 1508. Titian had not yet emerged and of the
older men only Leonardo da Vinci and Mantegna are remembered. As
seniors, they are the first mentioned.

“Again various things give equal pleasure to the eyes, so that we can
with difficulty decide what are more pleasing to them. You know that
in painting Leonardo da Vinci, Mantegna, Raphael, Michelangelo,
Giorgio da Castelfranco are very excellent, yet they are all unlike in
their work; so that no one of them seems to lack anything in his own
manner, since each is known as the most perfect in his style.”

_The Book of the Courtier by Count Baldesar Castiglione_, translated
by Leonard Ekstein Opdycke, New York, 1903, p. 50.

MICHELANGELO ON RENAISSANCE COUNTERPOISE

It is said then that Michelangelo once gave his advice to Marcoda
Siena, his pupil, that “one should make the figure pyramidal, spiral,
(_serpentinata_) and multiplied by one, two, and three.” Lomazzo
_Trattato_, Milan, 1484, p. 23. The pose, that is, should be contained
geometrically, should display opposing thrusts, and should be
mathematically proportioned within the inclosing geometrical form.

VASARI ON THE “MODERN STYLE”

Vasari’s account of the Grand Style or “Third Manner,” in the Preface
to Part III (De Vere’s translation, Vol. IV, pp. 79–85) is still
authoritative. He praises the artists before Leonardo, but finds in
them a certain hardness, lack of finish and uncertainty of
proportions. The change to the perfect manner was caused by the
discovery of ancient marbles.

“After them [the predecessors of Leonardo], their successors were able
to attain to it through seeing excavated out of the earth certain
antiquities cited by Pliny as amongst the most famous, such as the
Laocoon, the Hercules, the Great Torso of the Belvedere, and likewise
the Venus, the Cleopatra, the Apollo, and an endless number of others,
which, both with their sweetness and their severity, with their fleshy
roundness copied from the greatest beauties of nature, and with
certain attitudes which involve no distortion of the whole figure but
only a movement of certain parts, which are revealed with a most
perfect grace, brought about the disappearance of a certain dryness,
hardness, and sharpness of manner....

[He mentions the contemporary admiration of such precursors as Francia
and Perugino.]

“But their error was afterwards clearly proved by the works of
Leonardo da Vinci, who, giving a beginning to that third manner which
we propose to call the modern—besides the force and boldness of his
drawing, and the extreme subtlety wherewith he counterfeited all the
minutenesses of nature exactly as they are—with good rule, better
order, right proportion, perfect drawing, and divine grace, abounding
in resources and having a most profound knowledge of art, may be truly
said to have endowed his figures with motion and breath.

“There followed after him, although at some distance, Giorgione da
Castelfranco, who obtained a beautiful gradation of colour in his
pictures ...; and not inferior to him in giving force, relief,
sweetness, and grace to his pictures, with his colouring, was Fra
Bartolommeo di San Marco. But more than all did the most gracious
Rafaello da Urbino, who, studying the labours of the old masters and
those of the Moderns, took the best from them, and, having gathered it
together, enriched the art of painting with that complete perfection
which was shown in ancient times by the figures of Apelles and Zeuxis,
nay, even more, if we may make bold to say it, as might be proved if
we could compare their works with his. Wherefore nature was left
vanquished by his colours....

“In the same manner, but sweeter in colouring and not so bold, there
followed Andrea del Sarto, who may be called a rare painter, for his
works are free from errors.

* * * * *

“But he who bears the palm from both the living and the dead,
transcending and eclipsing all others, is the divine Michelangelo
Buonarotti, who holds the sovereignty not merely of one of these arts,
but of all three together. This master surpasses and excels not only
all those moderns who have almost vanquished nature, but even those
most famous ancients who without a doubt did so gloriously surpass
her; and in his own self he triumphs over moderns, ancients, and
nature, who could scarcely conceive anything so strange and so
difficult that he would not be able, by the force of his most divine
intellect and by means of his industry, draughtsmanship, art, judgment
and grace, to excel it by a great measure; and that not only in
painting and in the use of colours under which title are comprised all
forms, and all bodies upright or not upright, palpable or impalpable,
visible or invisible, but also in the highest perfection of bodies in
the round, with the point of his chisel.”

UNITY OF DESIGN IN THE RENAISSANCE

The humanist Benedetto Varchi, renewing the debate which Leonardo da
Vinci had started concerning the relative rank of sculpture and
painting, sent the text of his lecture to Michelangelo and asked for
his opinion. The sculptor writes in 1549:

“In my opinion painting should be considered excellent in proportion
as it approaches the effect of relief, while relief should be
considered bad as it approaches the effect of painting. I used to
consider that sculpture was the lantern of painting and that between
the two things there was the same difference as that between the sun
and the moon. But now that I have read your book, in which, speaking
as a philosopher, you say that things which have the same end are
themselves the same, I have changed my opinion; and I now consider
that painting and sculpture are one and the same thing, unless greater
nobility be imparted by the necessity for a keener judgment, greater
difficulties of execution, stricter limitations and harder work. And
if this be the case, no painter ought to think less of sculpture than
of painting and no sculptor less of painting than of sculpture. By
sculpture I mean the sort that is executed by cutting away from the
block: the sort that is executed by building up resembles painting.
That is enough, for as one and the other, that is to say, both
painting and sculpture proceed from the same faculty, it would be an
easy matter to establish harmony between them and to let such disputes
alone, for they occupy more time than the execution of the figures
themselves. As to that man [Leonardo da Vinci] who wrote saying that
painting was more noble than sculpture, as though he knew as much
about it as he did of the other subjects on which he has written, why
my serving-maid would have written better!”

From Robert W. Carden, _Michelangelo, a Record of his Life_, Boston
and New York, 1913, a book which from Michelangelo’s letters gives a
very intimate view of the sculptor’s character.

SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS ON THE GRAND STYLE

No critic of art has better expressed the ideal of the Grand Style
than Sir Joshua Reynolds. I quote from the third of his _Discourses_,
in the admirable edition of Roger E. Fry, New York, 1906. pp. 51 ff.

“Every language has adopted terms expressive of this excellence. The
_gusto grande_ of the Italians, the _beau idéal_ of the French and the
_great style_, _genius_ and _taste_ among the English, are but
different appellations of the same thing. It is this intellectual
dignity, they say, that ennobles the Painter’s Art; that lays the line
between him and the mere mechanic: and produces those great effects in
an instant, which eloquence and poetry, by slow and repeated efforts,
are scarcely able to retain....” [The grand style is seen to rest upon
a sort of generalizing tendency.] “The whole beauty and grandeur of
the Art consists, in my opinion, in being able to get above all
singular forms, local customs, particularities and details of every
kind.” [The artist] “being enabled to distinguish the accidental
deficiencies, excrescences, and deformities of things, from their
general figures, he makes out an abstract idea of their forms more
perfect than any one original; and, what may seem a paradox, he learns
to design naturally by drawing his figures unlike to any one object.”
[Sir Joshua advocates the study of the antique, not to imitate any
single work, but to master the principle that underlies them all.]
“Beauty and simplicity have so great a share in the composition of the
great style, that he who has acquired them has little else to learn.
It must not, indeed, be forgotten that there is a nobleness of
conception, which goes beyond any thing in the mere exhibition of
perfect form; there is an art of animating and dignifying the figures
with intellectual grandeur, of impressing the appearance of
philosophic wisdom, or heroic virtue. This can only be acquired by him
that enlarges the sphere of his understanding by a variety of
knowledge, and warms his imagination with the best productions of
ancient and modern poetry.”

KENYON COX ON THE CLASSIC SPIRIT

The ideals of the High Renaissance are eloquently, if incidentally,
defined by the late Kenyon Cox in _The Classic Point of View_, New
York, 1911. pp. 3–5.

“The Classic spirit is the disinterested search for perfection; it is
the love of clearness and reasonableness and self-control; it is,
above all, the love of permanence and of continuity. It asks of a work
of art, not that it shall be novel or effective, but that it shall be
fine and noble. It seeks not merely to express individuality or
emotion, but to express disciplined emotion and individuality
restrained by law. It strives for the essential rather than the
accidental, the eternal rather than the momentary—loves impersonality
more than personality, and feels more power in the orderly succession
of the hours and the seasons than in the violence of earthquake or of
storm. And it loves to steep itself in tradition. It would have each
new work connect itself in the mind of him who sees it with all the
noble and lively works of the past, bringing them to his memory and
making their beauty and charm a part of the beauty and charm of the
work before him. It does not deny originality and individuality—they
are as welcome as inevitable. It does not consider tradition as
immutable or set rigid bounds to invention. But it desires that each
new presentation of truth and beauty shall show us the old truth and
the old beauty, seen only from a different angle and colored by a
different medium. It wishes to add link by link to the chain of
tradition, but it does not wish to break the chain.”

THE END OF THE RENAISSANCE AND THE COMING OF FEAR

An artistic collapse whether in an artist or a nation is usually due
to a prior collapse in morale. Florence suffered such loss of face
when the Imperialists stormed the city and crushed the Republic. We
may study the disaster in Michelangelo’s personal case and in its
effect on the citizenry at large. Michelangelo was military engineer.
Writing from Venice, Sept. 25, 1529, he describes his desertion with
singular objectivity:

“I had intended to remain in Florence to the end of the war, having no
fears for my own safety. But on Tuesday morning, the 21st of
September, a certain person came out by the Porta a San Nicolò while I
was engaged in inspecting the bastions, and whispered in my ear that I
must remain there no longer if I valued my life. He accompanied me to
my house, dined there, brought me horses, and never left my side until
he had carried me out of Florence, declaring that it was for my good
that he so acted. Whether it were God or the devil I cannot say.”

From Robert W. Carden, _Michelangelo, a Record of his Life_, Boston
and New York, 1913, p. 168.

Florence suffered not from hallucinations, as this seems to have been,
but from the humiliation and confusion incident upon defeat and
foreign occupation. I translate from Benedetto Varchi’s _Storia_, the
extract in Ancona and Bacci’s _Manuele della Letteratura Italiana_,
Vol. II, p. 506.

“The city of Florence when her liberty was lost was full of such
sorrow, of such terror, of such confusion, that it can hardly be
described or even imagined.... The nobles were indignant among
themselves and inwardly resented being scorned and vilified by the
lowest classes; the plebeians in extreme need, would not refrain at
least from relieving their minds about the nobility; the rich, how
they could manage not to lose their property; the poor, day and night,
what they should do not to die utterly and of famine; the citizens
were dismayed and desperate, because they had spent and lost a lot:
the peasants, much more, because there remained for them nothing at
all; the priests were ashamed of having deceived the laity; the laity
grieved at having believed the priests; men had become extraordinarily
suspicious and covetous; women immeasurably incredulous and
distrustful: finally, every one with lowered face and staring eyes,
seemed beside himself, and all without exception pallid and bewildered
feared at all times every sort of ill.”

From such a shell-shocked community as this, no serene or noble art
was to be expected. It was much that Florence in bondage still could
nurture the exquisitely morbid art of a Pontormo and the aristocratic
detachment and _finesse_ of a Bronzino.

FIG. 207. Giovanni Bellini. St. Francis receiving the Stigmata.—_H. C.
Frick Coll., New York._
]