Chapter II: Pheidias and Michael Angelo (2)

Michael Angelo’s figures of Night and Dawn and certain figures in the Sistine Chapel may be criticised for the exaggeration of their pose, though how extraordinarily successful they are can be seen by comparing them with similar figures by Vasari or other imitators of the master, which invariably appear to be insecure and in danger of falling. The difference in the kind of imitators who followed Pheidias, and those who succeeded Michael Angelo, shows well one difference in their genius and the effect on art in general that the two men had.

Both men had numerous pupils and followers, but in the earlier time such men served to keep Greek sculpture at its highest level, in the later they brought on a rapid degradation of the art in Italy. The reason for this different result is plain. Just as most people now see nothing in Michael Angelo’s work but strongly modelled figures and vigorous poses, not knowing enough of his life to comprehend what were the thoughts he desired to express, so the artists in his own day thought the magnificence of his work lay in its exterior form. Imitating this they succeeded in producing only figures with unnaturally protuberant muscles placed in uncomfortably contorted positions. Vasari and Bandinelli are two instances in point. The painted figures of the former are as foolish in their assertion of would-be grandeur as is possible to conceive, and there are few things uglier or coarser than the group of Hercules and Cacus by the latter.

In Michael Angelo this insistence on the muscular development of figures is an accident perhaps due to his delight (a pure Greek delight) in mere physical strength, such as he himself possessed, but it is not the most telling characteristic of his work. The truly essential part of his work is the thought which his figures embody. His followers, being men of little originality, as is shown by their trying to assume his peculiarities, naturally succeeded not in making work like his, but work which in reality serves to show their dissimilarity to their master. It was unfortunate, also, that the very qualities which attracted them were of a nature that if misunderstood lead to a more rapid debasement of art and life than almost any other, for a love of mere physical strength is a love of what allies one to the beasts of the field. Their work unites them not so much to Michael Angelo as to the maker of what (with the exception of the Laocoon) is probably the ugliest and most brutal work preserved to us from antiquity—the Farnese Hercules.

All this was very different in the case of Pheidias and his school. In his work there was nothing superficial to catch the eye, no peculiarity except the perfection and beauty that one feels instantly and yet cannot, without much care, explain on what it depends. What was there then for other artists to do if they felt his was perfect sculpture and they desired to work towards it? His figures were calm and stately. His greatness lay in his conception of the being he was called upon to represent—in his point of view, that is. This showed itself not in a technical skill superior to that of his fellow-workers, for the artists then as in the Renaissance were in the main equally skilful, but in a mass of infinitesimal details which not so much by themselves separately as by their combination gave his work its everlasting charm. It would not have taken a quick-witted Greek long to realise that to produce Pheidian works he must look at life in a Pheidian way, and the more successful his imitations the more calm, restrained and careful would they be. This Pheidian point of view was such that his followers were turned toward spiritual repose as the source of inspiration for their works rather than toward restless activity.

The complexity of the attitudes of Michael Angelo’s figures is scarcely more noticeable than the multiplicity of the subjects he was called upon to produce. Life was more complicated in his day than in that of Pheidias, and there were more varied demands made upon the artist than in the ancient times. While Pheidias, so far as we know, had to make works solely for the state or for some public purpose, Michael Angelo was forced to gratify the whim of various powerful employers. Oftentimes such work, as for instance the Sistine Chapel, was of public character, but more often it was not, so that in place of striving to embody the ideals of the state whose greatest artist he was, he had to bend and mould his genius to satisfy the personal ambitions of his masters. The story of the Julian tomb illustrates this sad and thwarted part of his career. Not only was he prevented from carrying out work already undertaken in the way which he considered best, but also he was forced to do that for which he felt himself unprepared by previous training and unfitted by lack of interest in the subject.

That this was his mood at the time when, notwithstanding his arguments, Pope Julius II compelled him, in 1508, to begin the work in the Sistine Chapel, is known. If, when working against his will, he produced the most wonderful bit of decorative and architectural painting the world knows, one can but wonder what limit his talent would have reached had he ever carried to completion any of his great sculptural undertakings. Just as his capacity for mingling in his figures deep thought and powerful action shows not a greater but rather a more varied genius than that of Pheidias, so his capacities as painter, as architect, as engineer show that circumstances led him to much greater variety of activity than probably any ancient artist ever experienced. Not that this varied activity must needs imply the possession of greater powers. It implies merely the capacity of using an intellect highly trained in one way for the accomplishment of purposes of more than one kind. That is, it implies the possession by the artist of adaptability and of common sense in its finest form, and the possession of these qualities was not a rare characteristic in the Renaissance. Men of all kinds showed it, but it is most marked when it appears as part of the mental outfit of painters and of sculptors, men who too often adopt a pose of what they consider simplicity and lack of knowledge of the world, as though ignorance were the stepping-stone to great art. This was not the condition of things in the Renaissance, nor, so far as the little evidence we have allows us to judge, in Greece. It created no surprise when Van Eyck and Rubens were considered as proper persons to be entrusted with affairs of state, nor when the military protection of his city was put into the hands of Michael Angelo, nor when Leonardo laid out the irrigation system of Lombardy. Life is more complicated now and in many lines work has to be more specialised—but this is no reason why artists should be stupid.

The fact that the talents required for painting and sculpture are not incompatible is clearly shown by Michael Angelo’s works. The most common criticism passed on them, and one that is in part true, is that his sculptures are at times too pictorial while at others his paintings are too sculptural. Certain it is that parts of the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel look, at first sight, more like sculptured figures than like painted decorations. Michael Angelo was unquestionably aware of this, and the effect was intentionally sought by him. To state as a rule of art that work on the flat should always look flat is a mistake. There is no law of optics or of architecture which demands this.

The application of the laws of art must depend on the individual practitioner.[33] In treating the figures in the Sistine Chapel in a sculpturesque way Michael Angelo produced a work more like the Parthenon in the perfection with which the decoration is adapted to its position than is elsewhere to be seen. He has used painting, that is to say, in much of his design to suggest sculpture, which is the richer and more suitable adjunct to most parts of architecture,[34] and thereby produced a complex architectural work instead of producing merely a painting which, like many of those in Venice, might equally well be placed anywhere else.

A comparison will make the point plain. Take most modern decoration of a similar sort and how infinitely feeble and accidental it seems! Look at the decorations of the Pantheon in Paris, of the Boston Public Library, and the difference may be seen. Great painting one may see there, but not great decoration of architectural works; and ceiling or wall paintings are nothing else. Any one of these paintings taken from its present position would look equally well on any other wall large enough to hold it, or in any gallery, and would also have equal meaning there. Not so Michael Angelo’s work. As a whole it could be put nowhere except where it is, and if cut in pieces each bit would cry out in its solitude and demand the juxtaposition of the other parts. The work is as perfect a finishing of the Chapel as though it were some natural growth. This is equally true of the sculptures of the Parthenon. How inconsequent and unmeaning they look when taken from their natural place is shown in the British Museum by the Athenæum Club and Hyde Park Gate in London.

Michael Angelo’s other paintings also have a sculpturesque look. This is partly due to the fact that the foreground, where atmosphere has little effect, is more studied than the background. To him as to Pheidias the human figure was of the deepest interest, but its natural surroundings of little or none, so the figures are drawn with a distinctness and illumined with an intensity of light which make them look more solid and material than many a painter’s work. It does not mean that Michael Angelo failed to understand the function of painting as a Fine Art. The true function of art is the presentation of the ideal and this is done by the translation of emotion. This translation of emotion, when accomplished with the motive of giving pleasure by pleasing the senses or elevating the mind, produces the noblest art, for this search for pleasure is in healthy minds but the search for beauty, and beauty is the suggestion of the ideal. This being the general function of Art each one of the Fine Arts follows in ways individual to itself the search after beauty in the translation of emotion. Music is the most subtle and architecture is the most general of the arts, and poetry the most commonly understood, while painting and sculpture, the terms of which are hardest to define, are the most closely related. As an art architecture is an expression of man as a social animal. Painting and sculpture are its proper adjuncts. Painting ought to be merely the representation by colour of three dimensional spaces in two dimensions, while sculpture should attempt nothing but the rendering of forms in full or partial relief. Each art _per se_ has special powers, but when used as a detail of work of another kind, its peculiarities must then be suppressed till it is in accord with the work of which it is a portion or detail.

Now this is exactly what Michael Angelo accomplished. It is natural for painting, since it cannot represent figures in the round, to lay most emphasis on the face, but when it is used to ornament the separate parts of an architectural work, it must generalise its own peculiarities and use them to enrich the architectural scheme. For in so far as painting thus used impresses the beholder with its excellence as painting, by just so far has the architecture become a frame for the painting and the painting failed to be a glory added to the architecture. Michael Angelo was a great enough genius to be able to use painting perfectly as an additional splendour to his architecture.

You do not think of the figures or pictures on the Sistine ceiling as separate works—in large measure the composition is such that you cannot—so much as the finishing ornament of the Chapel. This is because the artist did not put the greatest amount of expression into the faces, it permeates equally the whole body. Thus these grand creatures look like sculpture, which is in fact, as more similar in its permanence to architecture, the noblest means of decorating a building. Ceilings cannot, it is true, be covered with carved figures, and great care should be chosen in the scenes depicted on them, for they do not offer a suitable position in which to hang pictures that are primarily conceived as pictures. This was a common mistake of the Venetians, who covered the ceilings of the Ducal Palace, Santa Maria del’ Orto and countless other buildings with elaborate paintings of subjects that have no architectural significance and cannot be thought of as scenes taking place in the heavens. They are in fact large easel pictures and as such would be better seen if hung upright on the wall than in their present position.

In the Sistine Chapel Michael Angelo showed his complete understanding of painting as an ornament and finish to architecture, and in his easel paintings he manifests, if not as complex effects as some painters, at least as full a knowledge of what constitutes painting, from its roots of drawing and composition to the full blossom of colour and expression. Perhaps the most marked peculiarity of his paintings is the lack of complex backgrounds of any sort, whether of landscape, or drapery, or architecture. This again allies him to the Greeks, not to those of any one age in especial, but to all, for the most marked difference (leaving the less important matters of medium and technique aside) between their paintings and those of modern times is, that they did not consider backgrounds as a part to be treated with much elaboration or care.

The Greek painter, we know, presented his scene with only enough suggestion of the surroundings in which the figures stood for the beholder to understand the general character of the spot where the action was taking place. He lavished his care on the figures, and did nothing to distract the full attention of the beholder from them. Michael Angelo did the same. In so far as he rivets your whole attention to the figures on the canvas, his painting is sculpturesque, but this word cannot be applied to his work in the sense that he was ignorant of the principles of painting as an art of expression. That in his painting as in his sculpture he tended to overstep what are generally considered the proper limits of the art is true, but this was due rather to great knowledge than to any imperfect understanding. At such times he was striking out into the unknown realms of discovery and searching for new possibilities for the arts of which he was the most accomplished master of the time.

I have tried to show how the general beliefs and ideals of the people among whom they lived would have tended to differentiate these two artists one from the other in certain ways and to ally them in certain others. But different or similar, can it be said of either: this one is the greater? I think not, even though one recognises that Michael Angelo certainly gave more varied expression to his genius. Neither of them shows a more complete understanding of the arts, or embodies a fuller realisation of the ideal in his figures, than the other.

Take for example Pheidias’s statues of Athena and Michael Angelo’s of the Madonna. No artist could express all each of these beings suggests in one figure, but it would be a hard task to find anything that they did not show in one or the other of their several presentations. We know with considerable accuracy what was the grandeur of the Athena Parthenos, the guardian of her chosen people, and we also know the divine rage felt by Athena the warrior Goddess driving Poseidon from the sacred citadel; and finally we know by literary and probably by ocular evidence with what consummate grace Pheidias represented Athena the ideal of Attic maidenhood. There are many other statues of the Goddess by other artists and from other periods but none I believe that add to the realisation these three give us of what Athena was to the Athenians.

In the same way Michael Angelo shows us the feeling of his time towards the Virgin. In the figure at Bruges we see the youthful figure—the Virgin of the Visitation. In the partially finished group in Florence there is more trouble in the face, the feeling expressed in the words “behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing” and “they understood not the saying that he spake unto them” (Plate LIX). In the Pietà in St. Peter’s her heart is numb with grief—the flood of sorrow that has whelmed her is

“Such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound or foam,
When that which draws from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.”

Her figure as shown us by other lesser men seems trivial or incomplete when these are remembered.

If one considers the larger undertakings of the two men, the Parthenon and the Sistine Chapel, one cannot say that either surpasses the other, though one can say with absolute security that neither has ever been approached. In these works they show themselves the masters of all craftsmen. Note the way in which the composition of the Parthenon groups suits the long, low triangular space in which they are placed, each group, taken as a whole, being made up of numerous lesser groups which are quite perfect by themselves and so interwoven by means of upraised arms or turned bodies or bits of floating drapery, that it is only after careful observation that one sees how the artist made various parts unite into one perfect whole. It is the acme of architectural sculpture. It seems simple, but one searches in vain among the pediment groups that have been made since for one that can approach it even distantly in merit. It is this same intertwining of simple, unforced separate parts into one grand, living completeness that marks out the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel as a thing apart and unequalled.

To compare the more private, perhaps more personal works, of the two men is impossible, for the reason that nothing of this sort made by Pheidias has been preserved for us. There are a few such by Michael Angelo, some from his earliest years, as the Battle of the Centaurs, others like the David or perhaps the Eros. From these we get a suggestion regarding the ideas which Michael Angelo thought were to be expressed by sculpture. The bas-relief showing the Battle of the Centaurs can, however, scarcely be taken into consideration, for it is a work of his mere boyhood and shows little except unusual power for a youth and an interest, which apparently did not last, in subjects drawn from ancient art. The man’s unconventional and powerful nature is shown by the fact that in his mature years he did not ever, as most contemporary painters and sculptors did, try to copy the antique in any way. His own mind was too active for him to adopt either the subjects or modes of other men’s work. So, too, in the case of Pheidias, his work does not suggest that of any predecessor, but in later periods of Greek sculpture the figures which hark back in some way to Pheidian originals are innumerable.

In the David, in the figures in the Medici Chapel and those for the Julian tomb one sees the same strained look: physical calm and great strength combined with a marked expression of mental restlessness and trouble, undoubtedly significant of Michael Angelo’s own feeling of weariness and of the ‘powerful trouble’ that beset the world. Pheidias came just at the acme of a great period. Michael Angelo, on the other hand, felt that the light in the sky was that of the waning day, not of the sunrise. His figures are sad; those by Pheidias are quiet and peaceful. Society and the artist were in harmony in the case of the Greek; they were not in accord in the case of the Florentine.

Every point we study brings us to the same conclusion, that while each of these men was the supreme master of his time and of incomparable capacity, Pheidias had less to struggle against than Michael Angelo; and through being able to carry out his ideas unhampered, he had a better effect on his followers than Michael Angelo, whose works are in the main monuments of thwarted purpose. Each sought unceasingly to embody in his work ideals of beauty beyond the influence of contemporary events. In the one case this was possible, in the other not. To the Greek, contemporaneity was nothing, to the Italian, it was all. Where Pheidias was called on to decorate the chief public building of Athens with scenes of war which were known only by popular tradition and which were instinct with poetry, Michael Angelo had to depict a battle that was a mere incident of border warfare. Each of these men, however, enriched the world with works that are unsurpassed, and similar work will never again be accomplished.

With the passing of the Greek world passed the ideals that inspired Pheidias. Others came and faded away again with Michael Angelo. Their works are immortal in the sense that in their kind they cannot be superseded. But the arts themselves are not immortal, for this would mean that they could not advance and develop. It is in this power of growth and change and adaptation that art is allied to science, and we turn to the most recent exponent of either with the incommensurable hope that he may have found the master key to beautiful new worlds.