Chapter II: Pheidias and Michael Angelo (1)

Different as were the lives and works of the two sculptors whose names are more familiar to us than those of any others, there were, nevertheless, many circumstances of closely related character that affected their careers. But apart from such circumstances the consideration of even those influences which were absolutely different in the one case and in the other, exhibits clearly some of the broader laws of the art practised by them both. In truth, it is the art rather than the individual style of the sculptors that is worth study, for the art is a language, the works but the expression of single ideas; the one is a perpetual and constantly varying power, the other but separate thoughts expressed.

Naturally the two interests, one that of becoming more familiar with the products of the “fine intelligence of noble minds,” the other the more abstract one of a more intimate knowledge of the powers and possibilities of one of the fine arts, are inextricably combined. The study of the two sculptors mentioned is particularly interesting owing to the ever-increasing production of sculpture in our own day; and owing to various conditions in modern life, there is a close relationship in many important matters between us and these two masters of days long past. Therefore, whatever can be certainly learned about them will help us to appreciate more truly the work and workers of to-day and to-morrow. Nothing can help more to attain this appreciation and sympathy than the study of the great workers of past ages, even when they may to a casual glance seem to be of somewhat remote interest.

The work of men such as Pheidias and Michael Angelo cannot be considered by any serious student as in fact remote from our time and interests. The study of the Past, particularly that part filled by Greece, becomes every day more and more general and the influence of the Renaissance in Italy upon modern thought and work is seen on every hand; here we come to the first noteworthy fact regarding these two sculptors. It is not going too far to say that all the best Greek sculpture, that is to say, what was produced during the latter half of the fifth century before Christ and the fourth century, was strongly influenced by Pheidias and that his influence shows itself intermittently until the end of the ancient world.

It would of course be too much to claim Pheidias as the originator of all the qualities in sculpture which are apt, nowadays, to be named Pheidian, but as the master who most adequately expressed the ideals held in his time so far as sculpture allowed of their expression, he may be used as the type; and among the varied interests which Michael Angelo and the other students of the Renaissance found in Greek work were several that may properly be called Pheidian.

This influence of Greek work on the Renaissance can hardly be over estimated. It shows itself in many ways and with varying force,—sometimes producing direct imitation of ancient works, then again becoming manifest in new work done with the intention of reviving the spirit of the ancient world. Michael Angelo did not fall under the spell as completely as many of his less vigorously original contemporaries, but it was no more to be entirely avoided by him than one of the laws of nature. Thus with the work of the Greeks directly affecting us to-day in a very similar way to that in which it affected the Italians in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and with the work of the later period, deeply tinctured with the Grecian dye, also influencing us, it becomes deeply interesting to find in what the greatest artists of the two periods were alike and wherein they differed one from the other.

The influence of Pheidias on the art of his race was not so much that of the originator or inventor as it was that of the poet, who gathering the various and unconnected beauties that are felt by all, though less keenly than by him, binds them together by the indefinable power of his genius and gives back to the admiring world not separate things of beauty but a standard of the beautiful and perfect. And this power of genius deals with such finenesses, is so subtle, that oftentimes it is almost beyond the power of words to make clear the manner of its working. As the sensitiveness of the photographic plate is greater than that of the eye, so the trained and perceptive eye notes much that can only with difficulty be expressed by words. The genius is felt, it thrills and vivifies the observer, but it cannot be expounded like a problem in mathematics.

For this reason, we must believe, the few great writers on these matters are oftentimes scoffed at by persons whose eyes have not been trained to see nor their hearts to understand. Not that the scoffers can be blamed for this unhappy sterility of their powers, for in most cases the circumstances of life have not been of that fortunate kind which would enable them to acquire the finer faculties. They are only to be blamed in so far as either through envy or stupidity they refuse to believe that others may be endowed with power which is lacking to them—power dependent upon long and arduous training. It is a curious but familiar phenomenon that the person who will not hesitate an instant to admit that the trained rider or sportsman or oarsman can ride, shoot or row better than he can, will energetically claim for himself as fine-seeing an eye, or a mind as keenly interpretative, as the practised artist or the scholar. That is, he asserts that the exercises of the body need training, but those of eye and brain do not, a theory manifestly absurd.

The genius of Pheidias is so ultimate in its fineness that it needs long training before it can be properly appreciated. If this is doubted, one has but to consider the fact, that among all the numerous references to him and his work which are preserved for us in ancient writers, not one mentions him, as his elder contemporaries Myron, Pythagoras, Kalamis or many others are mentioned, as having been the first to institute any particular detail of carving. No new treatment of the hair, no new way of representing the body, no special scheme of proportion are attributed to him, and yet the absolute consensus of opinion was that he was the unrivalled master of them all. Fashions changed, and a new one, that of making collections, arose, which demanded the satisfaction of individual tastes, but Pheidias’s fame knew no eclipse.

Besides this subtle quality in his genius, this weaving of the various beautiful threads spun by others into one consummate stuff, there are other qualities that render his work difficult to appreciate. One is that the ideals both of religion and of life were very different from those of to-day, so that we have to lay aside all preconceived notions and at first regard him as children who wonder but do not understand. This is the hardest task the student ever has to master, to free himself from the bonds of the conventions, beliefs and circumstances common to his own day and study the work of another time with (so far as he can accomplish it) an understanding sympathy with the conventions, beliefs and circumstances belonging to those other days. Still a further difficulty lies in the fact that there does not exist in the world one single work of which we can say: this is truly and completely by Pheidias. The marble figures from the Parthenon show his quality in many respects clearly but these we know were worked upon by assistants. Other works by him exist in copies, but for the most part these copies can be shown to be bad and should be used as evidence only with the utmost care. Yet, notwithstanding these difficulties, the image that we have of him is, it can scarcely be doubted, clearly defined in the main outlines.

How different is all this in the case of Michael Angelo! Here our embarrassment is of a character diametrically opposed and comes from the fact that we are so burdened with details about his life and work that the really important matters are partially obscured by trivialities. Contemporaries and fellow-workmen wrote his life; his letters and poems have been preserved; documents of all sorts regarding his works exist, and the works themselves are where they can be easily seen.

Beyond all these aids to our knowledge of the man we have, again, the more vital one that the age in which he lived is almost as well understood as our own, and many of the greater currents of thought and action were but little different to those of the present time. Unlike the Pheidian time, but like to-day, his was not a period when governments deeply believed in the protection of their Gods nor one in which the individual was scarcely considered except as a detail of the state, nor when portrait statues were almost unknown. Conquest for the love of gain, and commonwealths subdued to one will, were the rule. The truly Greek period in the development of Italy, the time of the blossoming of Venice, of Siena, of Florence had given way to the Alexandrian epoch. Though the idea that the will of the masses should govern the state was fortunately not yet formulated, the development of individualism was well under way, and instead of men governing their lives by general ideals they all sought to raise themselves on the shoulders of their less fortunate brothers to enjoy a little while the glory of a special and peculiar fame. Hence called as he was to lend his power to the satisfaction of such desires as these, Michael Angelo’s work was in many cases, in those, that is, where he was working for a master other than his own instinct, tinged with a character utterly out of accord with that of Pheidias, and yet curiously enough even in these works there are signs of a strong undercurrent of feeling which would have bound him and Pheidias together as the most sympathetic friends, thus showing that at bottom art is not governed by circumstance of time or place.

There were however certain very important aspects in which life as Michael Angelo saw it in Italy, and particularly in Florence, was curiously similar to what it was in Athens in the fifth century B.C. The climate and general appearance of the two countries is even now not unlike, and it must have been much less so in the time when the hills of Greece were so forest-grown that Pan and the nymphs could really live in comfort there, and before modern improvements had eradicated many of the individual peculiarities of Italy. Then too the habits of the cultivated classes were similar. Under very different forms the principles of education seem to have been the same. The schooling shown in Castiglione’s Cortegiano is like that given the Grecian youth. It was an education which comprised, both in Greece and in Italy, music, drawing, a knowledge of the thought and actions of past generations and a mastery of all those exercises that conduced to self-defence or to the more perfect development of the body. Similar training naturally taught the men of these two worlds to see life in very similar ways, and although the teachings of the Catholic Church were very different from those of the Greek religion in regard to the relations between men and women, yet life and instinct were stronger than the holy teachings, and in this point too the simplicity and naturalness of the Greek found its counterpart in Italy.

It is easy to see that the power exerted by these various influences on the art of sculpture was very great, more so even than on the sister art of painting, for it is on the realisation of what constitutes a fine body, on the equal simplicity of treatment of the woman’s form and the man’s, and the knowledge of what ideas can be best interpreted in terms of form, that the art of sculpture depends. Art is but the translation of emotion, and each particular art has a particular way of accomplishing the translation; and in this, painting and sculpture are more closely connected than any two other arts, so much so that sculptors in the two greatest periods—the Greek and the Renaissance—rarely considered their work as finished until the power of colour had been used to heighten the effect, and often practised the two arts coincidently. But during these two periods the limits imposed by the materials of the various arts were clearly recognised and closely adhered to, and in the best sculpture of the Renaissance there is no more attempt to represent landscape or other purely colour effects than in the Parthenon. Sometimes, however, as in the drapery of the Moses or the modelling of the Pietà in St. Peter’s, Michael Angelo does seem to overstep the limits of sculpture and to seek for effects which could be more simply and much more intelligibly given in painting than in stone; effects that need the manifold devices of light and shade and colour which are at the disposal of the painter rather than the sculptor.

This is, however, a rare weakness in the works of Michael Angelo, and one that apparently never entered those of Pheidias. One reason for this is that the art of painting was more completely comprehended in Italy than in Greece, and the Italian artists, more commonly than the Grecian, practised both arts. Hence, great painter as well as great sculptor, endowed with a readiness of hand, such as scarcely any other artist ever had, to reproduce whatever his mind imaged, it is no wonder that Michael Angelo at times went beyond the bounds of one art and seemed magically to interfuse the beauties of both of them. It would have been a greater wonder had he not done so. It was not a sign of his weakness so much as of his strength, of the inability of any one art to satisfy the artist’s desire and ideal. In this greater complexity, which shows at times in the detail of his work, Michael Angelo differed from Pheidias, but, almost invariably, the two artists, while differing in their feeling for line, or gesture, or substance, treat the human figure and its accessories in the same way. In both one sees a distinct and necessary dwelling on the nude.

Where the human figure is chosen as the object of a work of art, there are but two chief means by which to represent the emotions it contains, one the expression of the face, one the action of the body as a whole. It is in the representation of the face, the most palpable index of the emotions, that painting, with its power over almost infinitesimal lights and shades, finds fullest scope for its power, while it is in the greater lines of the frame and the larger gestures that sculpture satisfies herself. So it is that in the sculptural work of both Michael Angelo and Pheidias one finds drapery treated not, as was distinctly the case in the statues of Praxiteles, for its own special beauty apart from the whole work, but as a means of emphasising the beauty of the body whose details it hid.

Look at the group of three women from the western pediment of the Parthenon, or the Lemnian Athena, or the Caryatids of the Erechtheum (Plate LII)—for these are utterly Pheidian in character even if not by the master himself—or the figures on the frieze of the Parthenon (Plate LVII) or the Hegeso relief. In all these the drapery ripples over the shoulders and breasts, breaking in great falls around the waist and legs to disappear and fade away in little curling waves around the feet, not hiding the soft details of the figure underneath but serving rather as a frame to emphasise the beauties and set them in true relation to the surroundings. That there was any ethical need of hiding the figure would have seemed the height of absurdity to the Greek or the Italian. Out of the dark it comes and back to the dark it goes in this Adamite condition, so why should the artist not use it so if it serves his purpose?

Thus it has been used in all times when there was a vital art, and such times have been distinguished for greater sanity of thought and health of body than when art was governed by mediæval fanaticisms. Michael Angelo’s figures are as distinguished for this quality as are those shaped by the Grecian chisel. His feeling for the value of the nude is so strong that he can hardly suffer the drapery at all. The Moses, the Madonnas, the Medici Princes are to all intents in large measure undraped. Considered as draped figures they distinctly lack the temperance and quiet nobility of the Greek figures, for the reason that although his feeling towards the relation of draped and nude parts is the same, Michael Angelo does not attain his end in as consummate a way. He makes too sharp a distinction between the parts that are really draped, the parts that are but seem not to be, and the nude. But in one point of this same nature the two artists are completely alike. They both regarded the human figure from the purely artistic point of view as a means to suggest certain ideas. The religious meaning, the question as to its sanctity or unhallowedness, no more occurred to them than to question the advisability of warming themselves before the fire when they were cold because there were fires in Hell. They were completely natural.

In regard to the lack of complexity and to the greater repose, it may be admitted that Pheidias has the advantage over Michael Angelo whose works, true index as they are of his character, suffered from the time in which he lived—his character suffered and hence his work. His was a time of scepticism and hence of worry. The tranquillity that marked the Greek mind was rarely found in his day. Aretino was planting the destructive roots of modern journalism, and except, in a way marked by strong affectation, at certain courts, one would have had to go far to find Platonic Symposia or Olympic gatherings. The cloudy brow of Michael Angelo himself as well as of many of his figures is a sign how the perplexity of the times preyed upon the sculptor and in turn affected not only the chief motive of many of his works but also their very details.

And, if we admit the truth, this worry and perturbation is more natural to us than is the Greek grace and calm which, to those who do not understand the time, seems unnatural and forced. It was not so, however. The Greek was never forced, but though he felt intensely, he considered that the possession and exercise of control over emotion was as much to be desired as the power which found expression in beating back barbarian hordes. The tenderness of Greek friendships is proverbial, but the whole tone of Greek tragedy is of passion held in check,—carried in the heart rather than worn on the face. Slaves and servants gave way to noisy grief, but not their masters. A Greek of the Periclean age could scarcely have understood the worn, wearied, soul-troubled look of the Pensieroso. It was not that the Greek was unimpassioned, but he never let his passions govern him. He guided them as a rider guides a restive horse—as the youths on the Parthenon guide theirs—calming and soothing them lest the animal become the master and break away from the chosen path.

This difference in the character of the two races was due largely to religion, which had the most marked effect on the work produced in the two countries. One is apt to think, when one sees the limitless mass of churches, decorated by painter and sculptor, in Italy, and the unending array of lesser works of distinctly religious intent, that no art could be more religious than that of Italy. But just as in the conduct of individuals it is the spirit rather than the form of action that is the true index to their character, so in art it is the feeling the work shows, and not merely its outer form, which indicates its true nature and value. Now not merely in the number of religious works was Greece in the Periclean days as distinguished as ever Italy was, but she was far more noteworthy, in that her religion was a much more vital impulse than that of Italy. This is certainly true of the Periclean as opposed to the Medicean age.

In the light of present knowledge the circumstances that led to these conditions are discernible. Like every innocent race the Greeks had a firm belief in the Gods, beings developed in their minds by very varied influences, and for the most part not of a character to serve as guides to ideal conduct after the race had once gained the capacity for using its mind in a logical way. One or two of these beings were, however, as noble as any such conceptions at any time. This power to use the mind rationally was not yet a national possession when Pheidias grew up. It was just becoming so. The development of the mind, the strength of it, was there, but for a few decades circumstances turned the thoughts of the people away from philosophic consideration to more ecstatic modes in which old conceptions were clung to with passionate fondness and made more beautiful, but a change of belief was the work of a following generation.

These circumstances were chiefly a consequence of the Persian Wars. Greece was threatened with destruction. Athens was harried, and the glories of the Acropolis were razed to the ground. Phœnix-like they disappeared in fire to have an image of themselves more splendid in its youth and vigour rise as a light to all the world. But though the barbarian had for a moment seemed master of the situation, the Greeks had, with the active help of the Gods, been the final victors and it was in the service of thanks to their divine helpers that Pheidias found his chief employment. It was only in the very early years of the Renaissance that the Italians experienced any such miracles as those which Pheidias’s elder contemporaries had known—as, for instance, at the battle of Ravenna—and the effect on them then was much the same as it had been on the Greeks. It was the actual presence of the Gods at critical moments that stirred the Greeks. In Athens Athena’s snake led them to safety, at Salamis the Aiakidoi inspired the heroes with their battlecry, and Pan himself urged the weary messenger over the mountain passes. The Greeks no more doubted that their victory was due to assistance lent them by the Gods than that there had been a war. One event was as real to them as the other, so it was natural for them, as soon as their hearths were once more lit, to render thanks to their Divinities by raising images of them on all sides, that they might never forget them, and by building for the houses of their Gods as beautiful temples as could by any possible means be made.

We may frankly concede that the grandeur of this work, the generousness of it, can only be understood when one fully grasps the fact that a Greek temple was, what the Christian’s is not, the house of the Lord. In it but few and most private services were performed,—no processions, no crowds of more or less attentive worshippers, no expounding of the word, nothing whatever of that sort. The temple was the sacred dwelling place of the deity, and the curious no more thought of entering it than of opening uninvited their fellow-citizen’s door. It was a free gift to the God and not to be thought of as a source of satisfaction to the builders except in the same way as it pleases a lover to have his mistress accept some gift at his hands. This feeling is repeated frequently in Pindar and in other poets inspired by the ‘golden muse.’ So it was that, flushed with the excitement of a great cause nobly won, the Greeks turned the full force of their keen, glad energy to works that showed their own greatness by manifesting with the sharpness of full understanding the form of their ideals.

In our day, animated by so different interests and ambitions, it is hard to sympathise with this natural idealistic work done in Athens, and it is perhaps even harder to understand why it was that Pheidias and the other artists were not called on to erect portrait statues of the great leaders of the war as were the artists of the Renaissance. There is mention of a statue to Miltiades, and this is all. The reason becomes clear immediately we consider well what were the fundamental principles of conduct as taught by the poets, who were in those days in large measure the formulators of public opinion. Pindar is as clear-spoken about this as need be, and he but repeats what one finds in the fragments that are preserved of Solon’s writings and of other earlier writers. He tells us that what is natural is best and that the deed done without the deity is best left unspoken (Olym. IX), and again (Nem. I) that each of us has his special power and we must earnestly endeavour according as Nature shows the way. This is to be the moral of our action, while that of our thought is that man is as nothing (Nem. VI), ephemeral creature naught knowing what he is or what he may be, nothing but a mirage-dream (Pyth. VIII).

Under the spell of such stern teaching as this it is no wonder that Pheidias was not employed, as was Michael Angelo, in depicting for an inquiring posterity the outer husk of the protagonist of his day. Nor was it merely when he was called on to decorate Athens with his accomplished powers that Pheidias found guiding principles of this stern sort, but even in his other great work, the Olympian Zeus, he was governed in the same way. By the Greek, victory in the games was no more to be aspired to without the help of the Gods than was victory in battle, and it was not praise for the winner but gratitude to the Gods that was mete when Nike laid the ‘golden crown’ upon the athlete’s brow. For it is the Gods who, as Pindar sings, guard the deep-breasted plain of Sparta and grant success in the great games. Fame is to be sought but it is to be the fame of honourable deeds (Pyth. VIII), but even this is of less value than happiness and only he who has won both has attained the acme of bliss (Pyth. I). Such men are almost unknown, for the soul of honour is tarnished by lust of gain (Nem. IX). Thus were the athletes in that “age of heroic prize-men” taught that physical power was of value, but only as it was a stepping-stone to moral purity. No portraits of such youths as these unless the Gods marked them as their own with the triple crown. The deep-delved researches of epigraphist and excavator show us how rare was that event.

Called upon to embody for the chosen youth of Greece their idea and image of the guardian deity who meted out unquestioned justice to their strife, Pheidias had to depict as it were a masculine counterpart to the Goddess who made Athens her own. That he was as successful in the one task as in the other is instantly apparent to one who notes the quality of the praise bestowed upon his work by the highly trained critics of the classic period. None speak of his figures as they do of Myron’s, for instance, as deceiving the beholder by their realism. There is no question as to the mastery over the material as with Kalamis and Pythagoras,—no suggestion of conventionalism as with Polykleitos, none of overrefinement as with Praxiteles,—but all agree that his works were such nobly adequate representations of the divine beings that they added a new glory to the religion of which they were the perfected expression.

Still another noteworthy peculiarity of this religion in its effect on his work remains to be mentioned. Both he and Michael Angelo had at different times now mere mortals, now deities, to represent. In the case of the Attic master this led to a greater unity of performance than was possible with the Florentine. Between the dwellers on Olympus and those on the broad-bosomed Earth there was to Pheidias’s mind only a difference in degree, whereas to the believer in the Roman doctrines there was no real similarity between the heavenly hosts and the inhabitants of this vale of tears; and where such was suggested, it was so as a symbol, not as a representation. To the Greek the Gods were merely his grander, nobler, more powerful brethren, blessed with the same virtues and troubled by similar faults, differing principally from the dwellers on earth by usually escaping the results due to giving way to passion. Even they were not blessed with absolute immunity and freedom of action. Zeus himself was subject to Fate, but in the main the Gods, at least in their outward form, were but more beautiful men and women. Hence when called upon to carve the most noble being whom he could imagine, and equally when carving ideal youths and maidens on the Parthenon, he could only carve the same forms he saw about him every day idealised by his imagination. Whichever branch of his art he followed trained him for the other.

That such conditions and beliefs as these were very different from those under which Michael Angelo had to work needs no elaborate exposition. How different they were in their effect on the art of Pheidias and the happiness of the period for such an artist becomes clearer the more one studies. There is still another point to consider, however,—what might be called a more practical one than the influences of religion, and in this regard, too, Pheidias was the more favoured. I refer to the political conditions of the time, and the relations of Pheidias to his employers.

The lack of original documents makes it impossible for us to follow the course led by Pheidias from its fortunate rise to its unhappy close, but that in most ways he was much to be envied by Michael Angelo cannot be questioned. Athens was at the height of her prosperity; freed from foreign or internal foes, she was at liberty to pursue her ends as occasion demanded or as consideration showed was best. It was a time of thanksgiving and hope. No such condition of government as this was known to Michael Angelo, nor did his country have the advantage of being led by as high-minded a statesman, and probably as wise a one, as ever lived. So long as Pericles was leader of the state, Pheidias was his friend and helper. Here was no worry for the artist, no change of master, no blighting of cherished hopes, all which ills were suffered by Michael Angelo; on the contrary, existence in the midst of a most highly cultivated community—a community moved by a common search after ideal ends, a community which must have been a constant inspiration to the sculptor to equal the expectations it had of him. With the rise of mob rule brought on by the momentary successes won by certain demagogues came the downfall of Pericles and in his train Pheidias. But his great work was finished then. He had nothing to fear when he laid aside his chisel, and fortunately he was not left long to mourn the fast vanishing nobility of his city and race. The time of calm self-confidence had passed and the time of trouble was threatening. Only a short time elapsed before the tide of disaster engulfed the whole country, and if we would seek a counterpart to the worn and restless spirit that sometimes appears in Michael Angelo’s work, we can find it in the later Greek masters—even Praxiteles shows traces of it. But it is not mere likenesses we are in search of, so much as explanations and the clarification of certain phenomena of art.

The effect of these conditions of life and thought on Pheidias was more strong than on other sculptors of the time because the greater sensitiveness and impressibility of his nature rendered him a more encompassing recipient for ideas and feelings than most of his contemporaries. But the qualities that show in his work with especial sharpness are found diffused throughout all the work of the period, and there is one very noticeable characteristic of this work which distinguishes it markedly from the work produced by Michael Angelo’s fellow-workmen. It is the emphasis laid on youth. Donatello, Verrocchio, Desiderio and many others often represented youthful figures; but the representation of youth and early manhood could scarcely be said to distinguish the work of the Florentine from other epochs, yet this is exactly what can be said of the product of the early Greek and particularly the Attic School.

Look at the statues of youths and maidens, the never-fading ghosts of past days, which the Attic chisel carved and the Attic soil has preserved for us. Look at the young Apollos and their not less glorious brethren, the athletes. Look at the guardians above the temple porches—incarnations of youthful vigour even when the bearded head or matronly form give sign of elder years. Look at the vases “with brede of marble men and maidens overwrought.” Finally look well at the statues of God and Goddess—even these have youth eternal moulded in their full, strong figures.

And it is pleasant to reflect that it is not the sculptor’s art alone which found satisfaction in thus dwelling on the most beautiful forms of human life, but the painters and the poets too immortalise the entrancing splendours of the youthful form. Greek art of this time presents us with the indubitable evidence of a belief, rooted deep as life itself, that the everlasting joy of completest beauty was to be found in the well-conditioned body of youth or maiden. What a degradation the ascetic interpretation of the Holy Writ brought in the art of the Renaissance! Many youthful figures do we find there, but they were chosen as much for the sake of the quaintness of extremely youthful forms as for the beauty inherent in vigorous development. The place of the fine-drawn, well-groomed figures of the Greek youths and maidens is taken by jolly, pot-bellied babies. Over the altars and among the graves they scramble, and up the marble columns, to launch themselves, heedless as screaming swallows, over the groined ceiling. From North to South and across Italy from Sea to Sea this breed of fascinating babies spread—their father the Church, their mother the great human heart of the Italian race. And then, dulling the pleasant impression that such figures make upon the mind, we are met on all sides by haggard figures of men and women expressive only of a bitter ardour to seek salvation by pain.

The wanness of Botticelli, the pain and trouble of Michael Angelo, the mere ordinarily healthy look of Ghirlandaio, these are what take the place of the deep-breasted, broad-shouldered, strong-pulsed, magnificent Greeks—some repetition among these latter, ’tis true, but marvellous in their vigour and constancy and impulsiveness. Or what poets can the Medicean time show who sing of ideals and principles in the same full-throated, calm, incisive way as Pindar or Sophocles sang them? We have instead a scornful wrath or playful fancy. The deity is no longer friendly but terrible, and dainty mistresses usurp the place of the God-compelling Aphrodite. The momentary, not the eternal, is the interest of the day.

Some there were, Greek in spirit and in deed: Dante in part of his later work, so far as a Catholic could be. The Vita Nuova in its heart-broken passion, the Convito in its complexity, are purely Italian, but passages of the Divine Comedy and the Letters might be the work of one of the Attic dramatists, so intense are they, so cool, so assertive of the power of right over wrong. But an artist much more Greek than Dante and one who is often, but very mistakenly, thought to resemble Michael Angelo, was Tintoretto. His was a Greek sense of form, his was a Greek sense of beauty, and his was a completely and absolutely Greek sense of what constituted true portraiture. There were others too of this group, but they are rare and far between; men who seem to have been born two thousand years too late, or else just in time to save the world from a worship of what was mentally warped and physically unsound.

When one considers that the art of sculpture has found its chief employment in the service of religion, it becomes plain why living among a people whose religion led to asceticism, even though the age was largely sceptical, Michael Angelo should impress his work with a feeling quite opposed to that found in the works of Pheidias. Scepticism there was in ancient Greece too, but not strong enough to free Pheidias entirely from the bonds of the religion to which he was from infancy accustomed. Furthermore, a scepticism that found much fuel for its flames in the misconduct of the Vicar of Christ and his less powerful imitators would have a very dissimilar effect on the mind from that which was based on true mental development. The one was the natural sloughing of the skin, the other the amputation of a diseased member.

The conditions at Rome had more effect on the formation of character in those days than anything else, and they cannot have seemed much less rotten to Michael Angelo than to Hildebrand five hundred years earlier. The feeling that Christ was essentially the man of sorrows, which affected the early artists, had passed from men’s minds, and in regard to his comeliness there was nothing to prevent an artist working in a Greek spirit; but employed though Michael Angelo was by the Popes, they used him by no means always on religious work.

And Michael Angelo also suffered, as Pheidias did not, from having many masters. These were causes to destroy any Pheidian-like unity in Michael Angelo’s work, but causes much more potent to work him injury were the characters of the men for whom he worked, prince as well as Pope. It was, doubtless, in many respects fortunate for a young artist to have the freedom of the court of Lorenzo de’ Medici, but while Lorenzo might help such a man as Michael Angelo at the beginning of his career, he was hardly the man to inspire his more mature years. At any rate he died while Michael Angelo was still young, and thenceforth the latter worked for men with whom he can have had but little sympathy. Men of great energy they were, but with the exception of Alexander VI, in the main corrupt or stupid. To work for such men under any circumstances must have been trying, but when one thinks of their refusal to allow Michael Angelo to work as he saw fit, one does not wonder that at times he was nervously irritable.

Obviously such a life would have been trying to a man of more ordinary clay than Michael Angelo, but to him, endowed, as he was, with enormous powers of mental application and sensitive as only poets are, it must at times have been little less than torture. He knew that the golden age of his country had passed. He saw Florence humbled and Rome sacked. The statesmen were men of mean ambition and the clergy men of lax morals. Nothing could stop the degeneration. Political reformers and saintly enthusiasts had matched themselves against the ever-increasing debasement of Italy, and one after another they had all been overcome. From the days of the doubtful reforms of Crescentius or Cola da Rienzi through the period of the passionate recalling of Christ by Francis of Assisi to the time of bitter invective of Savonarola, reformers had given their lives in the attempt to save their beloved Italy from the error of her ways, and all had failed. It was not a time for hope but for sorrow, and it needed a firm belief in the Divine Word to save one from despair—or at least discontent.

It is from his sonnets and letters rather than from his sculpture that we can obtain a view of Michael Angelo’s thoughts and feelings. Not that the latter does not show certain moods of the artist very clearly, but, as in the Pietà, it is more ideal than personal, more the expression of dreams than of his actual experience. In the sonnets, on the other hand, he gives vent to his own innermost feelings. In them we find frequent expression of deep despair, but bitterly as he grieved for the death of Savonarola, there is no evidence that he thereat lost faith in humanity. It may well have been his admiration of Vittoria Colonna that saved him from misanthropy. As his intercourse with her was undoubtedly the purest joy and her death the keenest sorrow of his later years, so there may have been some similarly sweetening influence during the summer of his life. The knowledge of his career that we possess is great, but it does not tell us this. It is for our purposes, perhaps for all, better that this should be so. At least it makes it easier to compare him with Pheidias, of whose life we have no such details whatever.

Such were some of the general conditions affecting the point of view of these two men. The effect they had on particular work becomes evident with the study of the separate monuments. One point is, to begin with, very noticeable. It is that of the eight works by Pheidias mentioned distinctly by ancient writers seven are representations of deities, and the eighth of an ideal being. There can be no question that he made other works, but that these alone were preserved by tradition certainly affords safe grounds for the deduction that his genius was most congenially employed and most fully displayed in such work. In the case of Michael Angelo, while we know of work like the statue of Julius or the Battle Cartoon (not to mention his youthful efforts) that have nothing to do with religion, yet his mind also turned to religious subjects and his greatest works are entirely of this character.

Curiously enough it is when employed on subjects drawn from the ancient world that Michael Angelo is most unlike the great Greek. His Pietà, the Madonna of Bruges (Plate LIII) and Victor (Plate LIV) are more Pheidian than his Bacchus (National Museum, Florence; Plate LV) or his Eros (South Kensington Museum; Plate LVI). These are Greek of a kind, but they are Alexandrian rather than Pheidian. They are as foreign to any conceptions of the fifth century as they are to those of the Catholic Church. The drunken, tottering Bacchus is as different from the early conception of the God, who was thought of almost more as the sunshine that makes the grape than as the juice itself, as the shrinking and self-conscious Venus of the Capitol is from the Venus of Cnidos. In his sensuality the Bacchus is un-Pheidian and in the humour introduced in the group by the presence of his companion he is equally so. Humour was not lacking to the Athenian, as the drama shows, but the fields of sculpture and painting were not considered the proper place for its display.

In still another point is the statue of Bacchus comparable not to the early but to the late Greek work, and that is in the realism of the modelling and the action of the figure. Such modelling bears no relation to the broad treatment of Pheidias. The latter shows no such _morbidezza_, nor would he have dwelt on the repulsive unsteadiness of the pose. Whoever it was that carved the famous Borghese Anacreon, and it was some contemporary of Pheidias, shows us how the earlier Greek artist felt towards drunkenness. The figure is under the influence of his much-sung God Dionysos, but he is shown in attitude of mental ecstasy not of physical uncontrol. What stamps the Bacchus and the Eros (and much of his other work) as non-Greek is a lack not exactly of beauty, but of delicacy and refinement, of charm. But each of these characteristics that differentiates Michael Angelo’s work from that of the Greek stamps it as a work of the Renaissance. The pleasure in technical excellence, the realism and the representation of unpleasantness are all qualities that recur over and over again in the work of this vigorous, capable, unflinching, unbelieving period.

Similar un-Pheidian qualities show in the figure of Eros in London, which if not by Michael Angelo, is at least made entirely in his spirit. The same realism of modelling is seen in the treatment of the head and face, the same choice of an action inexpressive of the deepest meaning of the figure. It is still less Pheidian in the vividness and intentness of the action and expression which are not explained by the figure itself, but the meaning of which is left to the imagination of the beholder to discover. Dramatic quality of this sort is rarely found in Pheidian work. The statues carved in that time were self-explanatory. Single figures were often represented as intent or as full of movement as the Eros, but their action is not motived by something outside themselves. Hence they do not puzzle the beholder. The Anacreon, the Discobolus need no explanation, but Michael Angelo’s Eros needs to be grouped (at least in imagination) with some other figure before it can be understood. It is like Myron’s Marsyas, splendid and suggestive but incomplete.[32] Separate figures of the Parthenon pediments are as dramatic as the Eros, but then they form part of a group and as such their meaning was perfectly clear.

An instance is found in one of the group of Gods on the eastern end of the frieze of the Parthenon (Plate LVII). The figure is commonly called Ares. He is seated forward on his throne, and holds one raised knee between his clasped hands. Such an attitude, so lacking in grandeur, so suggestive of restlessness, is well suited to the fiery God of Battles and shows how free and ungoverned by conventions Pheidias could be. The group as a whole is a perfect expression of the power of the master, to be simple as a child in this treatment of the Olympians and yet never to fail to produce work of supreme beauty.

This simplicity one notices in all Pheidian work, separating it sharply from the later work in Greece and from most of the work in Italy, particularly from that of Michael Angelo. Pheidias is not in the least affected, but at the same time he is not actualistic. Of the hundreds of figures in the full round and in relief that decorated the Parthenon there is not one, nor even a group, that does not seem absolutely and utterly simple and real. And yet there is not one of them which close study does not reveal to be a marvellous composite of actions and forms and draperies and expressions which all bear the stamp of idealisation (Plate LVIII). The effect of perfection that the work conveys is due perhaps to Pheidias not having tried to idealise in any vague or artificial way, but to his combining an absolute dependence on Nature for his models with a capacity of seeing, and solely representing, their essential beauties. So while his figures are ideal in the sense that they are more perfect than average mortals, yet they do not seem unapproachable and unaccountable.

Now this, we may freely grant, cannot be said of Michael Angelo’s work. His figures are simple, yet it is not the simplicity of Nature but of Art. A passing glance may find them equal to the Pheidian works, but a more careful study shows that though true to Nature and possible in action, they are, in respect to both body and attitude, improbable. They are composed, and hence in a way untrue. The Pheidian beings seem those of the Golden Age—perfect and unconcerned; while the others oftentimes seem interested in their own perfection and desirous that it should be admired. One knows enough of Michael Angelo to know that though self-conscious, such thoughts were far from his mind and if, as I think, they are to be seen in his work, it only shows that the time was stronger than the man, for he lived in a period when affectation was not uncommon. The grandeur of the Greek figures, as manifest in figurines as in colossal works, is due to the beauty dependent on a mental poise; that of the Florentine figures is due to their size and suggestion of physical strength and to their facial and bodily expression that imply the capacity of untold depths of passion—quite as physical a consideration as that of size.

Of course it may be said that the Eros is merely a study of the human frame in a rather complicated position, but even so, my contention that the figure is un-Pheidian still remains true.

The strength of the action exhibited by this figure of Eros, the tremendous play of muscle while at the same time the figure is thought of not as in motion but as at rest, is what one finds in very many figures painted and carved by Michael Angelo and forms one of the most distinctive characteristics of his work. It shows in the Slaves, in the Medici figures, in some of the sacred groups, in lesser measure but yet distinctly in the David and Moses, and as clearly as possible in the paintings of the Sistine Chapel. It is due to this in large degree that these works are so well known, for they strike the eye of the casual and impatient sightseer and they are remembered with much greater vividness than work of a quieter and less excited character. In the hands of a genius like Michael Angelo such treatment of the human figure, and the choice of such positions, seem natural and give no sense of exaggeration or restlessness.

It is commonly held that genius is limited by no law, and in so far as is meant thereby to imply that no bounds can be set to the concepts of great minds, this is true; in the attempt to express such concepts to others, however, the genius equally with less endowed mortals must be limited by the laws that govern the material in which he seeks to find expression. The penetration of a Sophocles or a Shakespeare into the mysteries of life can have no measure set to it, but when they tell us their thoughts, their words are bound by the laws of verse. No final explanation can be given for the teeming imagination of Michael Angelo, but some of his works may be criticised for not conforming to the laws of space or material that govern the arts of painting and sculpture. He sometimes shows a lack of _taste_.

Genius shows in every touch of Michael Angelo’s hand, whether with brush or chisel, but at times his work is unsatisfactory owing to its exaggeration. No admiration is too great for specific qualities in everything he did, but it is clear that the conception of beauty was not held by him as essential. To Pheidias, on the other hand, it was of primal importance.

A comparison of the Parthenon pediments with the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel may make clear my meaning. This is not the place for fine analysis of either composition. Suffice it to say that in each case the space has been filled by the decoration with a perfection and adequacy that has never been again approached, but I think it will be generally admitted that the chief impression of the pediments, shattered though they are, is of beauty, while that of the ceiling is of power. Michael Angelo tried at times to express in paint and stone what cannot be clearly expressed in those substances. This was what I have referred to as lack of taste. His Last Judgment is a striking case in point. He attempted in that work to do what Milton or Dante succeeded in doing better with more suitable means. Even the Chief Actor in the scene lacked the quality of grandeur which Michael Angelo seems usually to have found no difficulty in suggesting. It is perhaps because he felt the inadequacy of stone or paint for the full expression of his ideas that he left so many works uncompleted.