La vie de Michel-Ange
The Life of Michelangelo
Romain Rolland
LIVES OF ILLUSTRIOUS MEN
II. — THE ABDICATION
In te la morte, in te la vita mia.
Then, in that devastated heart, after renunciation of all that had made him live was accomplished, a new life arose, a spring blossomed again, love burned with a clearer flame. But this love had almost nothing selfish or sensual about it. It was the mystical adoration of the beauty of a Cavalieri. It was the religious friendship of Vittoria Colonna — a passionate communion of two souls in God. It was, finally, the paternal tenderness for his orphaned nephews, pity for the poor and the weak, holy charity.
Michelangelo’s love for Tommaso dei Cavalieri is well suited to disconcert the average run of minds — honest or dishonest. Even in the Italy of the late Renaissance, it risked provoking unfortunate interpretations; Aretino made outrageous allusions to it. But the insults of the Aretinos — there are always such — cannot reach a Michelangelo. “They fashion in their hearts a Michelagnolo out of the stuff of which their own hearts are made.”
No soul was purer than Michelangelo. None had a more religious conception of love.
I have often heard, said Condivi, Michelangelo speak of love; and those who were present said that he spoke of it no differently than Plato. For my part, I do not know what Plato said about it; but I know well that after having had so long and so intimate a commerce with him, I have never heard come from his mouth any but the most honorable words, which had the power to extinguish in young men the disordered desires that agitate them.
But this Platonic idealism had nothing literary or cold about it: it was united with a frenzy of thought that made Michelangelo the prey of all beauty he saw. He knew it himself, and said one day when he refused an invitation from his friend Giannotti:
When I see a man who possesses some talent or some gift of the mind, a man who knows how to do or say something better than the rest of the world, I am compelled to fall in love with him, and then I give myself so completely to him that I no longer belong to myself… You are all so gifted that if I accepted your invitation, I would lose my liberty; each of you would steal a morsel of me. Even the dancer and the lute-player, if they were eminent in their art, could make of me what they wished! Instead of being rested, strengthened, and calmed by your company, I would have my soul torn and scattered to all the winds; so that for many days afterward I would no longer know in what world I moved.
If he was thus conquered by the beauty of thoughts, words, or sounds, how much more so must he have been by the beauty of the body!
La forza d’un bel viso a che mi sprona! C’altro non e c’al mondo mi dilecti…
The force of a beautiful face, what a spur it is for me! Nothing in the world is such a joy for me.
For this great creator of admirable forms, who was at the same time a great believer, a beautiful body was divine — a beautiful body was God himself appearing beneath the veil of flesh. Like Moses before the Burning Bush, he approached it only trembling. The object of his adoration was truly for him an Idol, as he said. He prostrated himself at its feet; and this voluntary humiliation of the great man, which was painful even to the noble Cavalieri himself, was all the more strange because often the idol with the beautiful face had a vulgar and contemptible soul, like Febo di Poggio. But Michelangelo saw nothing of it… Saw he nothing of it? He wished to see nothing of it; he completed in his heart the statue barely begun.
The most ancient of these ideal lovers, of these living dreams, was Gherardo Perini, around 1522. Michelangelo later became enamored of Febo di Poggio in 1533, and of Cecchino dei Bracci in 1544. His friendship for Cavalieri was thus neither exclusive nor unique; but it was enduring, and it attained a degree of exaltation that was justified to a certain extent not only by the beauty, but by the moral nobility, of the friend.
Above all others, beyond comparison, he loved, said Vasari, Tommaso dei Cavalieri, a Roman gentleman, young and passionate for art; he drew his portrait on cardboard, life-size — the only portrait he ever drew; for he had a horror of copying a living person unless that person were of incomparable beauty.
Varchi adds: When I saw in Rome Messer Tommaso Cavalieri, he had not only an incomparable beauty, but so much grace of manner, so distinguished a mind, and so noble a bearing, that he well deserved to be loved, the more so the better one knew him.
Michelangelo met him in Rome in the autumn of 1532. The first letter by which Cavalieri replied to Michelangelo’s inflamed declarations is full of dignity:
I have received a letter from you, which was all the dearer to me because it was unexpected; I say unexpected, because I do not judge myself worthy that a man such as you should write to me. As for what has been said to you in my praise, and as for those works of mine for which you assure me you felt no small sympathy, I reply that they were not of a nature to give occasion to a man of genius like yours, such as there exists none — I do not say a peer, but a second on earth — to write to a young man who is barely beginning and who is so ignorant. I cannot believe, however, that you are lying. I believe, yes, I am certain that the affection you bear me has no other cause than the love that a man such as you, who is the personification of art, must necessarily have for those who devote themselves to art and who love it. I am of those, and, as for loving art, I yield to no one. I return your affection, I promise you: never have I loved any man more than you, never have I desired any friendship more than yours… I pray you to make use of me on occasion, and I commend myself to you eternally. Your wholly devoted, Thomao Cavaliere.
Cavalieri seems always to have maintained this tone of respectful and reserved affection. He remained faithful to Michelangelo until his last hour, at which he was present. He kept his confidence; he was the only one thought to have any influence over him, and he had the rare merit of always using it for the good and the greatness of his friend. It was he who persuaded Michelangelo to complete the wooden model of the cupola of Saint Peter’s. It was he who preserved for us Michelangelo’s plans for the construction of the Capitol and who worked to realize them. It was he, finally, who after Michelangelo’s death watched over the execution of his wishes.
But Michelangelo’s friendship for him was like a madness of love. He wrote him delirious letters. He addressed his idol with his forehead in the dust. He called him “a mighty genius… a miracle… the light of our century”; he implored him “not to despise him, because he could not compare himself to him, to whom no one is equal.” He made him a gift of all his present, all his future; and he added:
It is an infinite sorrow to me that I cannot also give you my past, so as to be able to serve you longer; for the future will be short: I am too old… I do not believe that anything can destroy our friendship, although I speak in a very presumptuous manner; for I am infinitely below you… I could as easily forget your name as the food by which I live; yes, I could more easily forget the food by which I live, which sustains only the body, without pleasure, than your name, which nourishes body and soul and fills them with such sweetness that, so long as I think of you, I feel neither suffering nor fear of death. — My soul is in the hands of him to whom I have given it. If I were to cease thinking of him, I believe I would fall dead on the spot.
He made Cavalieri superb presents:
Astonishing drawings, marvelous heads in red and black crayon, which he had made with the intention of teaching him to draw. Then he drew for him a Ganymede borne to heaven by the eagle of Zeus, a Tityos with the vulture feeding on his heart, the Fall of Phaethon into the Po with the chariot of the Sun, and a Bacchanale of children: all works of the rarest beauty and unimaginable perfection.
He also sent him sonnets, sometimes admirable, often obscure, some of which were soon recited in literary circles and known throughout all Italy. Of the following sonnet it has been said that it was “the most beautiful lyric poem of Italy in the sixteenth century”:
With your beautiful eyes I see a sweet light that I can no longer see with my blind eyes. Your feet help me bear a burden that my crippled feet can no longer support. Through your spirit, I feel myself raised to heaven. In your will is all my will. My thoughts take shape in your heart, and my words in your breath. Abandoned to myself, I am like the moon, which one can see in the sky only so far as the sun illuminates it.
More celebrated still is that other sonnet, one of the most beautiful songs ever written in honor of perfect friendship:
If a chaste love, if a higher piety, if an equal fortune exists between two lovers, if the cruel fate that strikes the one strikes also the other, if a single spirit, if a single will governs two hearts, if one soul in two bodies has made itself eternal, carrying both to heaven with the same wings, if love with a single stroke of its golden arrow pierces and burns the entrails of both at once, if the one loves the other and neither loves himself, if they both put their pleasure and their joy in aspiring to the same end both together, if a thousand and a thousand loves would not be the hundredth part of the love, of the faith that binds them, can a movement of spite ever break and untie such a bond?
This self-forgetfulness, this ardent gift of his whole being melting into the beloved being, did not always have this serenity. Sadness gained the upper hand; and the soul, possessed by love, struggled and groaned.
I weep, I burn, I consume myself, and my heart feeds on its pain.
I’ piango, i’ ardo, i’ mi consumo, e ‘l core Di questo si nutriscie…
You who have robbed me of the joy of living, he said elsewhere to Cavalieri.
To these too passionate poems, “the sweet beloved lord,” Cavalieri, opposed his affectionate and tranquil coldness. The exaggeration of this friendship shocked him in secret. Michelangelo apologized:
My dear lord, do not be angered by my love, which addresses itself only to what is best in you; for the spirit of the one must fall in love with the spirit of the other. What I desire, what I learn from your beautiful face, cannot be understood by ordinary men. He who would understand it must first die.
And indeed, the passion for beauty had nothing but the honorable about it. But the sphinx of this ardent and troubled, yet chaste love, was nonetheless disquieting and hallucinated.
To these burning friendships — a desperate effort to deny the nothingness of his life and to create the love for which he was aflame — there succeeded, by good fortune, the serene affection of a woman who knew how to understand this old child, lost and alone in the world, and who brought back into his bruised soul a little peace, a little confidence, a little reason, and the Christian acceptance of life and death.
It was in 1533 and 1534 that Michelangelo’s friendship for Cavalieri had reached its paroxysm. In 1535, he began to know Vittoria Colonna.
She was born in 1492. Her father was Fabrizio Colonna, lord of Paliano, prince of Tagliacozzo. Her mother, Agnes of Montefeltro, was the daughter of the great Federigo, prince of Urbino. Her race was one of the noblest in Italy, one of those in which the luminous spirit of the Renaissance had been best incarnated. At seventeen, she married the Marquis of Pescara, Ferrante Francesco d’Avalos, a great general — the victor of Pavia. She loved him; he did not love her. She was not beautiful. The medals we know of her show a virile, determined, and somewhat hard face: high forehead, long straight nose, short and morose upper lip, slightly protruding lower lip, tight mouth, pronounced chin.
Filonico Alicarnasseo, who knew her and wrote her life, implies, despite all the delicacy of expression he uses, that she was ugly: “When she was married to the Marquis of Pescara,” he says, “she applied herself to developing the gifts of her mind; for, as she did not possess great beauty, she instructed herself in letters, to secure for herself the immortal beauty that does not pass, as the other does.” She was passionately intellectual. In a sonnet, she says herself that “the gross senses, powerless to form the harmony that produces the pure love of noble souls, never awakened in her either pleasure or suffering… A bright flame,” she adds, “raised my heart so high that base thoughts offend it.” In nothing was she made to be loved by the brilliant and sensual Pescara; but, as the unreason of love dictates, she was made to love him and to suffer from it.
She suffered cruelly, indeed, from the infidelities of her husband, who deceived her in her own house, for all Naples to see. Yet when he died, in 1525, she was inconsolable. She took refuge in religion and in poetry. She led a cloistered life in Rome, then in Naples, without at first renouncing the thoughts of the world: she sought solitude only in order to absorb herself in the memory of her love, which she sang in her verses. She was in relations with all the great writers of Italy, with Sadolet, Bembo, Castiglione — who entrusted to her the manuscript of his Cortegiano — with Ariosto, who celebrated her in his Orlando, with Paul Jove, Bernardo Tasso, Lodovico Dolce. From 1530, her sonnets spread throughout all Italy and won her a unique glory among the women of her time. Retired to Ischia, she sang, without tiring, her transfigured love, in the solitude of the beautiful island, amid the harmonious sea.
But from 1534, religion possessed her entirely. The spirit of Catholic reform, the free religious spirit that then sought to regenerate the Church while avoiding schism, took hold of her. It is not known whether she knew Juan de Valdes in Naples; but she was overwhelmed by the preaching of Bernardino Ochino of Siena; she was the friend of Pietro Carnesecchi, of Giberti, of Sadolet, of the noble Reginald Pole, and of the greatest of those reforming prelates who in 1536 constituted the Collegium de emendanda Ecclesia: Cardinal Gaspare Contarini, who strove in vain to establish unity with the Protestants at the Diet of Ratisbon, and who dared to write these strong words:
The law of Christ is a law of liberty. One cannot call government that whose rule is the will of one man, inclined by nature to evil and driven by innumerable passions. No! All sovereignty is a sovereignty of reason. Its object is to lead by just paths all those subject to it toward their just end: happiness. The authority of the pope is, it too, an authority of reason. A pope must know that it is over free men that he exercises this authority. He must not, at his pleasure, command or forbid or dispense, but only according to the rules of reason, the divine Commandments, and Love — a rule that brings everything back to God and to the good.
Vittoria was one of the most exalted souls of this small idealist group, where the purest consciences of Italy were united. She corresponded with Renee of Ferrara and with Marguerite of Navarre; and Pier Paolo Vergerio, later a Protestant, called her “one of the lights of truth.” But when the Counter-Reformation movement began, directed by the merciless Caraffa, she fell into a mortal doubt. She was, like Michelangelo, a passionate but weak soul: she needed to believe, she was incapable of resisting the authority of the Church. “She tormented herself with fasts, with hair-shirts, until she had nothing but skin on her bones.” Her friend Cardinal Pole restored her peace by compelling her to submit, to humble the pride of her intelligence, to lose herself in God. She did it with an ecstasy of sacrifice. If only she had sacrificed herself alone! But she sacrificed her friends along with her; she denied Ochino, whose writings she delivered to the Inquisition in Rome; like Michelangelo, this great soul was broken by fear. She drowned her remorse in a desperate mysticism:
You have seen the chaos of ignorance in which I was, and the labyrinth of errors in which I walked, the body perpetually in motion to find repose, the soul always agitated to find peace. God willed that it should be said to me: Fiat lux! and that it should be shown to me that I was nothing, and that all was in Christ.
She called for death as a deliverance. She died on February 25, 1547.
It was at the time when she was most deeply penetrated by the free mysticism of Valdes and Ochino that she made the acquaintance of Michelangelo. This sad and tormented woman, who always needed a guide on whom to lean, had no less need of a being weaker and more unhappy than herself, on whom to lavish all the maternal love with which her heart was full. She applied herself to hiding her trouble from Michelangelo. Serene in appearance, reserved, a little cold, she transmitted to him the peace that she herself sought from others. Their friendship, begun around 1535, was intimate from the autumn of 1538, and entirely built in God. Vittoria was forty-six; he was sixty-three. She lived in Rome, at the cloister of San Silvestro in Capite, below the Monte Pincio. Michelangelo lived near Monte Cavallo. They met on Sundays in the church of San Silvestro al Monte Cavallo. The friar Ambrogio Caterino Politi would read them the Epistles of Saint Paul, which they would discuss together. The Portuguese painter Francisco de Hollanda has preserved for us the memory of these conversations in his four Dialogues on Painting. They are the living portrait of this grave and tender friendship.
The first time Francisco de Hollanda went to the church of San Silvestro, he found the Marchioness of Pescara there, with some friends, listening to the pious reading. Michelangelo was not there. When the Epistle was finished, the amiable woman said, smiling, to the foreigner:
“Francisco de Hollanda would no doubt have preferred to hear a discourse by Michelangelo rather than this sermon.”
To which Francisco, foolishly offended, replied:
“What, Madam, does it seem to Your Excellency that I have no sense for anything else and that I am good only for painting?”
“Do not be so susceptible, Messer Francesco,” said Lattanzio Tolomei, “the Marchioness is simply convinced that a painter is good for everything. So highly do we Italians esteem painting! But perhaps she said that in order to add to the pleasure you have had that of hearing Michelangelo.”
Francisco dissolves in apologies, and the Marchioness says to one of her servants:
“Go to Michelangelo, and tell him that I and Messer Lattanzio have stayed after the end of the religious service in this chapel, where it is agreeably cool; if he would be kind enough to spend a little of his time, it will be great profit for us…” But, she added, knowing Michelangelo’s wildness, “do not tell him that Francisco de Hollanda, the Spaniard, is here.”
While awaiting the return of the messenger, they go on chatting, trying to think of a way to lead Michelangelo to speak of painting without his noticing their intention; for if he noticed it, he would immediately refuse to continue the conversation.
There was a brief moment of silence. There was a knock at the door. We all expressed the fear that the master might not have come, since the reply was so prompt. But my lucky star willed that Michelangelo, who lived very nearby, was at that moment on his way toward San Silvestro; he was walking along the Via Esquilina, toward the Baths, philosophizing with his disciple Urbino. And as our messenger had met him and brought him back, it was he himself who stood in person on the threshold. The Marchioness rose and remained long in conversation with him, standing, apart from the others, before she invited him to take a seat between Lattanzio and herself.
Francisco de Hollanda sat down beside him; but Michelangelo paid no attention to his neighbor — which stung him sharply. Francisco said, with a vexed air: Truly, the surest way not to be seen by someone is to place oneself directly in front of his eyes.
Michelangelo, astonished, looked at him and immediately apologized with great courtesy:
“Forgive me, Messer Francesco; in truth, I had not noticed you, because I had eyes only for the Marchioness.”
Meanwhile Vittoria, after a brief pause, began, with an art that one could not praise enough, to speak of a thousand things in an adroit and discreet way, without touching on painting. One would have said she was someone besieging a strong city, with effort and art; and Michelangelo had the air of a watchful and suspicious besieged man, who sets posts here, raises drawbridges there, plants mines elsewhere, and keeps the garrison alert at the gates and on the walls. But at last the Marchioness prevailed. And truly, no one could have defended himself against her.
“Come now,” she said, “one must admit that one is always vanquished when one attacks Michelangelo with his own weapons, that is, with ruse. We shall have, Messer Lattanzio, to speak to him of lawsuits, of papal briefs, or else… of painting, if we wish to reduce him to silence and have the last word.”
This ingenious detour leads the conversation to the terrain of art. Vittoria speaks to Michelangelo about a pious building she plans to erect; and at once Michelangelo offers to examine the site and sketch a plan.
“I would not have dared ask you so great a service,” replies the Marchioness, “although I know that you follow in all things the teaching of the Savior, who humbled the proud and raised the humble. Thus those who know you esteem the person of Michelangelo even more than his works, while those who do not know you personally celebrate the least part of you, that is, the works of your hands. But I praise no less your so often withdrawing to solitude, fleeing our idle conversations, and instead of painting all the princes who come to beg you, having devoted nearly your whole life to a single great work.”
Michelangelo modestly declines these compliments and expresses his aversion for babblers and idlers — great lords or popes — who think themselves permitted to impose their company on an artist, when already his whole life is not enough to accomplish his task.
Then the conversation passes to the highest subjects of art, which the Marchioness treats with a religious gravity. A work of art, for her as for Michelangelo, is an act of faith.
“Good painting,” says Michelangelo, “approaches God and unites with him… It is only a copy of his perfections, a shadow of his brush, his music, his melody. Thus it is not enough that the painter be a great and skillful master. I think rather that his life should be pure and holy, as far as possible, so that the Holy Spirit may govern his thoughts…”
Thus the day passes, in these truly sacred conversations, of a majestic serenity, in the setting of the church of San Silvestro, unless the friends prefer to continue the discussion in the garden that Francisco de Hollanda describes for us, “near the fountain, in the shade of the laurel bushes, seated on a stone bench set against a wall all covered with ivy,” from which they looked down on Rome, unfolding at their feet.
These fine conversations did not last, unfortunately. The religious crisis through which the Marchioness of Pescara was passing broke them off abruptly. In 1541, she left Rome to shut herself in a cloister, at Orvieto, then at Viterbo.
But often she would leave Viterbo and come to Rome, solely to see Michelangelo. He was taken with her divine spirit, and she returned it well. He received from her and kept many letters, full of a chaste and very sweet love, and such as that noble soul could write. At her wish, adds Condivi, he executed a nude Christ who, taken down from the cross, would fall like a lifeless corpse at the feet of his holy mother, if two angels did not support him by the arms. She is seated beneath the cross; her face weeps and suffers; and, with both arms open, she lifts her hands to heaven. On the wood of the cross one reads these words: Non vi si pensa quanto sangue costa. — Out of love for Vittoria, Michelangelo also drew Jesus Christ on the cross, not dead, as he is usually represented, but alive, his face turned toward his Father, and crying out: “Eli! Eli!” The body does not abandon itself, without will; it writhes and clenches in the last agonies.
Perhaps Vittoria also inspired the two sublime drawings of the Resurrection, which are at the Louvre and at the British Museum. In the one at the Louvre, the herculean Christ has flung aside with fury the heavy slab of the tomb; he still has one leg in the grave, and, head raised, arms raised, he hurls himself toward heaven in a rush of passion that recalls one of the Captives at the Louvre. To return to God! To quit this world, these men, whom he does not even look at, and who crawl at his feet, stupid, terror-stricken! To tear himself free from the disgust of this life, at last, at last! — The drawing at the British Museum has more serenity. Christ has risen from the tomb: he floats, his vigorous body drifts in the air that caresses him; arms crossed, head thrown back, eyes closed, in ecstasy, he ascends into the light like a ray of sun.
Thus Vittoria reopened to Michelangelo’s art the world of faith. She did even more: she gave flight to his poetic genius, which the love of Cavalieri had awakened. Not only did she enlighten him on the religious revelations of which he had the obscure presentiment; but, as Thode has shown, she gave him the example of singing them in his verses. It was in the early days of their friendship that Vittoria’s first Spiritual Sonnets appeared. She sent them to her friend as she wrote them.
He drew from them a consoling sweetness, a new life. A beautiful sonnet that he addressed to her in reply testifies to his grateful tenderness:
Blessed spirit who, by an ardent love, keeps alive my old heart, near to dying, and who, among your goods and your pleasures, singles me out alone among so many nobler beings — as you once appeared to my eyes, so now to my soul you show yourself, to console me. Wherefore, receiving this benefit from you who thinks of me in my cares, I write to thank you. For it would be great presumption and great shame if I claimed to give you miserable paintings in exchange for your beautiful and living creations.
In the summer of 1544, Vittoria returned to live in Rome, at the cloister of Santa Anna, and she remained there until her death. Michelangelo went to see her. She thought affectionately of him, she tried to bring a little comfort and pleasure into his life, to make him little gifts in secret. But the suspicious old man, “who would accept presents from no one,” even from those he loved best, refused her this pleasure.
She died. He saw her die, and he spoke this touching word, which shows what chaste reserve their great love had kept:
“Nothing grieves me so much as to think that I saw her dead, and that I did not kiss her forehead and her face, as I kissed her hand.”
“This death,” said Condivi, “for a long time left him utterly stupefied: he seemed to have lost his senses.”
“She wished me very great good,” he said sadly later, “and I no less to her. Death has robbed me of a great friend.”
He wrote two sonnets on this death. The one, wholly steeped in the Platonic spirit, is of a rough preciosity, of a hallucinated idealism; it seems a night streaked with lightning. Michelangelo compares Vittoria to the hammer of the divine sculptor, which strikes sublime thoughts from matter:
If my rude hammer fashions the hard rocks now into one image, now into another, it is from the hand that holds it, guides it, and directs it that it receives its motion; it moves, driven by a force outside itself. But the divine hammer, which in heaven rises, creates its own beauty and the beauty of others by its unique force. No other hammer can forge itself without a hammer; that one alone gives life to all the others. And because the blow it strikes on the anvil is all the stronger as the hammer rises higher in the forge, that one has risen above me, up to heaven. That is why it will bring my work to completion, if the divine forge now lends it its aid. Until now, on earth, it was alone.
The other sonnet is more tender, and proclaims the victory of love over death:
When she who wrung so many sighs from me withdrew from the world, from my eyes, from herself, nature, which had judged us worthy of her, fell into shame, and all who saw it, into tears. — But let not death boast today of having extinguished this sun of suns, as it has done with others! For Love has conquered, and made her live again on earth and in heaven, among the saints. Wicked and criminal death thought to stifle the echo of her virtues and tarnish the beauty of her soul. Her writings have done the contrary: they illuminate her with more life than she had in her life; and by death she has conquered heaven, which she did not yet possess.
It was during this grave and serene friendship that Michelangelo executed his last great works of painting and sculpture: the Last Judgment, the frescoes of the Pauline Chapel, and — at last — the Tomb of Julius II.
When Michelangelo had left Florence in 1534 to settle in Rome, he thought, freed from all his other labors by the death of Clement VII, that he could finish the tomb of Julius II in peace, and then die with his conscience relieved of the burden that had weighed upon his whole life. But scarcely had he arrived when he let himself be chained again by new masters.
Paul III summoned him and asked him to serve him. Michelangelo refused, saying he could not; for he was bound by contract with the Duke of Urbino until the tomb of Julius was completed. Then the pope fell into a rage and said: “For thirty years I have had this desire; and now that I am pope, I could not satisfy it? I shall tear up the contract, and I will have you serve me, in spite of everything.”
Michelangelo was on the point of fleeing. He thought of taking refuge near Genoa, in an abbey of the Bishop of Aleria, who was his friend and had been that of Julius II: he could have comfortably finished his work there, in the vicinity of Carrara. The idea also occurred to him to retire to Urbino, which was a peaceful place, and where he hoped to be well received in memory of Julius II: he had already sent one of his men there to buy a house.
But, at the moment of deciding, his will failed him, as always; he feared the consequences of his acts, he flattered himself with the eternal illusion, eternally deceived, that he could get by with some compromise. He let himself be tied up again, and he continued to drag his ball and chain to the end.
On September 1, 1535, a brief of Paul III named him chief architect, sculptor, and painter of the Apostolic Palace. Since the preceding April, Michelangelo had accepted to work on the Last Judgment. He was entirely occupied by this work from April 1536 to November 1541, that is, during Vittoria’s stay in Rome. In the course of this enormous task — no doubt in 1539 — the old man fell from the scaffolding and badly injured his leg. “From pain and anger, he would not be treated by any doctor.”
He detested doctors and showed a comical anxiety in his letters when he learned that one of his family had been imprudent enough to seek their care. Fortunately for him, after his fall, Master Baccio Rontini of Florence, his friend, who was a doctor of great wit and very attached to him, took pity on him, and went one day to knock at the door of his house. No one answering, he went up and searched from room to room until he came to the one where Michelangelo lay. Michelangelo was in despair when he saw him. But Baccio would not leave and did not quit him until he had cured him.
Like Julius II before him, Paul III came to watch Michelangelo paint and gave his opinion. He was accompanied by his master of ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena. One day, he asked the latter what he thought of the work. Biagio, who was, says Vasari, a very scrupulous person, declared that it was supremely improper to have represented so many indecent nude figures in so solemn a place; this was, he added, a painting fit to decorate a bathhouse or a tavern. Michelangelo, indignant, portrayed Biagio from memory after he had left; he represented him in Hell, in the form of Minos, with a great serpent coiled around his legs, in the midst of a mountain of devils. Biagio complained to the pope. Paul III mocked him: “If Michelangelo had only put you in Purgatory,” he said, “I might have done something to save you; but he has placed you in Hell, and there I can do nothing: in Hell there is no redemption.”
His desire would have been, after the death of Vittoria, to return to Florence, to “lay his weary bones beside his father, in rest.” But having served the popes all his life, he wished to devote his last years to serving God. Perhaps Vittoria had urged him to it, and he was fulfilling one of her last wishes. One month before the death of Vittoria Colonna, on January 1, 1545, Michelangelo was in fact named by a brief of Paul III prefect and architect of Saint Peter’s, with full powers to raise the edifice. He did not accept without difficulty: and it was not the pope’s entreaties that decided him to load the shoulders of a septuagenarian with the heaviest burden he had yet borne. He saw it as a duty, a mission from God:
“Many believe — and I believe — that I have been placed at this post by God,” he wrote. “Old as I am, I do not wish to abandon it; for I serve out of love for God, and I place in him all my hopes.”
He accepted no payment for this sacred task.
He found himself at grips with numerous enemies: “the sect of San Gallo,” as Vasari says, and all the administrators, suppliers, and contractors of the construction, whose frauds he denounced and over which San Gallo had always turned a blind eye. “Michelangelo,” says Vasari, “delivered Saint Peter’s from thieves and brigands.”
A coalition formed against him. Its leader was the brazen Nanni di Baccio Bigio, an architect whom Vasari accuses of having robbed Michelangelo and who aimed to supplant him. Word was spread that Michelangelo knew nothing about architecture, that he was wasting money and only destroying the work of his predecessor.
“I am not obliged,” he said to Cardinal Cervini, “to communicate to you, or to anyone, what I must or wish to do. Your business is to oversee the expenditures. The rest concerns only me.” — Never did his untameable pride consent to share his plans with anyone. To his workers who complained, he replied: “Your business is to mason, to carve, to do your carpentry, to do your trade, and to execute my orders. As for knowing what I have in my mind, you will never learn it: for that would be against my dignity.”
He would not have been able to sustain himself for a single instant against the hatreds such conduct provoked without the favor of the popes. Thus, when Julius III died and Cardinal Cervini became pope, Michelangelo was on the point of leaving Rome. But Marcellus II was only a passing figure on the throne; and Paul IV succeeded him. Once again assured of sovereign protection, Michelangelo continued to fight. He would have thought himself dishonored, and he would have feared for his salvation, had he abandoned the work.
“Against my will, I was charged with it,” he said. “For eight years now I have worn myself out in vain, amid all the troubles and all the fatigues. Now that the construction is advanced enough to begin vaulting the cupola, my departure from Rome would be the ruin of the work, a great disgrace for me, and for my soul a very great sin.”
His enemies did not disarm; and the struggle, for a time, took on a tragic character. In 1563, Michelangelo’s most devoted assistant at Saint Peter’s, Pier Luigi Gaeta, was thrown into prison on a false charge of theft; and the head of works, Cesare da Casteldurante, was stabbed. Michelangelo replied by naming Gaeta in Cesare’s place. The Committee of Administration dismissed Gaeta and named Michelangelo’s enemy, Nanni di Baccio Bigio. Michelangelo, beside himself, no longer came to Saint Peter’s. The rumor was spread that he had resigned his functions; and the Committee appointed Nanni as his substitute, who immediately assumed the role of master.
He counted on wearing down the old man of eighty-eight, sick and moribund. He did not know his adversary. Michelangelo immediately went to find the pope; he threatened to leave Rome if justice were not done him. He demanded a new investigation, convicted Nanni of incompetence and falsehood, and had him dismissed. That was in September 1563, four months before his death. Thus to his last hour, he had to struggle against jealousy and hatred.
Let us not pity him. He knew how to defend himself; and, dying, he was capable, all alone, as he once said to his brother Giovan Simone, of “tearing to pieces ten thousand of that breed.”
Beyond the great work of Saint Peter’s, other architectural labors occupied the end of his life: the Capitol, the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, the staircase of the Laurenziana in Florence, the Porta Pia, and above all the church of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini — the last of his great projects, aborted like the others.
The Florentines had asked him to erect the church of their nation in Rome; Duke Cosimo himself wrote him a flattering letter on the subject; and Michelangelo, sustained by his love for Florence, undertook the work with a youthful enthusiasm. He told his compatriots “that if they carried out his plan, neither the Romans nor the Greeks would ever have had anything like it: — words, says Vasari, such as never came from his mouth, either before or after; for he was extremely modest.” The Florentines accepted the plan without changing anything. A friend of Michelangelo, Tiberio Calcagni, executed under his direction a wooden model of the church: “it was a work of such rare art that no church like it had ever been seen, for beauty, richness, and variety. Construction was begun, 5,000 scudi were spent. Then the money ran out, work stopped, and Michelangelo suffered the most violent grief.” The church was never built, and even the model has disappeared.
Such was the last artistic disappointment of Michelangelo. How could he have had the illusion, in dying, that Saint Peter’s, barely begun, would ever be realized, that any of his works would survive him? He himself, had he been free, might have destroyed them. The history of his last sculpture, the Deposition from the Cross in the Cathedral of Florence, shows what detachment from art he had reached. If he still continued to sculpt, it was no longer from faith in art, but from faith in Christ, and because “his spirit and his strength could not refrain from creating.” But when he had finished his work, he broke it. “He would have destroyed it entirely, if his servant Antonio had not begged him to give it to him.”
Such was the indifference that Michelangelo, near death, showed toward his works.
Since the death of Vittoria, no great affection had illuminated his life. Love had departed:
Fiamma d’amor nel cor non m’e rimasa; Se ‘l maggior caccia sempre il minor duolo, Di penne l’alm’ho ben tarpat’e rasa.
The flame of love has not remained in my heart. The greater evil always drives out the lesser: I have clipped and shorn the wings of the soul.
He had lost his brothers and his best friends. Luigi del Riccio had died in 1546, Sebastiano del Piombo in 1547; his brother Giovan Simone in 1548. He never had close relations with his last brother, Gismondo, who died in 1555. He had transferred his need for family affection, gruff as it was, to his orphaned nephews, to the children of Buonarroto, his most beloved brother. There were two: a daughter, Cecca (Francesca), and a son, Lionardo. Michelangelo placed Cecca in a convent; he provided her a trousseau, paid her pension, went to see her; and when she married, he gave her one of his properties as a dowry. He personally took charge of Lionardo’s education, who was nine when his father died. A long correspondence, often recalling that of Beethoven with his nephew, testifies to the seriousness with which he fulfilled his paternal mission. This was not without frequent rages. Lionardo often tested the patience of his uncle; and that patience was not great. The young man’s bad handwriting was enough to throw Michelangelo into a fury. He saw it as a lack of respect:
Never do I receive a letter from you without getting a fever before I can read it. I do not know where you learned to write! Little love!… I believe that if you had to write to the greatest ass in the world, you would take more care… I have thrown your last letter into the fire, because I could not read it: I therefore cannot reply to it. I have already told you and repeated to you to the point of exhaustion that each time I receive a letter from you, the fever comes upon me before I manage to read it. Once and for all, write to me no more! If you have something to tell me, find someone who knows how to write; for I need my head for other things than to exhaust myself deciphering your scrawl.
Distrustful by nature, and made more suspicious still by his disappointments with his brothers, he had few illusions about the humble and fawning affection of his nephew: this affection seemed to him to be directed above all at his strongbox, which the boy knew he would inherit. Michelangelo did not refrain from telling him so. Once, being ill and in danger of death, he learns that Lionardo has rushed to Rome and made some indiscreet inquiries; he writes to him, furious:
Lionardo! I have been ill, and you have run to Ser Giovan Francesco to see if I was leaving anything. Haven’t you enough of my money in Florence? You cannot deny your race or fail to resemble your father, who drove me from my own house in Florence! Know that I have made a will in such a way that you have nothing more to expect from me. Therefore go with God, and never show yourself before my eyes, and never write to me again!
These fits of anger hardly disturbed Lionardo, for they were generally followed by affectionate letters and gifts. A year later, he rushed to Rome again, lured by the promise of a present of 3,000 scudi. Michelangelo, wounded by his self-interested eagerness, writes to him:
You came to Rome in a furious hurry. I do not know whether you would have come as fast if I had been in poverty and lacked for bread! You say it was your duty to come, out of love for me. — Yes! the love of a woodworm! If you had love for me, you would have written: “Michelangelo, keep the 3,000 scudi and spend them on yourself: for you have given us so much that it is enough for us; your life is dearer to us than fortune…” — But for forty years you have lived off me, and never have I received from you so much as a kind word.
A serious matter was the question of Lionardo’s marriage. It occupied uncle and nephew for six years. Lionardo, docile, humored the uncle from whom he would inherit; he accepted all his observations, let him choose, discuss, and reject the matches that presented themselves: he seemed indifferent. Michelangelo, on the contrary, was passionate about it, as if it were he who was to marry. He regarded marriage as a serious business, of which love was the least condition; fortune did not come much more into account: what mattered was health and respectability. He gave rough advice, devoid of poetry, robust and positive:
It is a weighty decision: remember that between man and woman there must always be a difference of ten years in age; and take care that the one you choose is not only good but healthy… I have been told of several persons: one pleases me, another does not. If you are thinking about it, write to me then, in case you have more pleasure in one than in another: I will tell you my opinion… You are free to take one or the other, provided she is noble and well-bred, and rather without a dowry than with a large one — so as to live in peace… A Florentine tells me that you have been told about a girl of the Ginori house and that she pleases you. She does not please me — that you take for a wife a girl whose father would not give her to you if he had enough to provide a suitable dowry. I wish that whoever wants to give you a wife should give her to you, and not to your fortune… You have only to consider the health of soul and body, the quality of blood and morals, and, moreover, who her parents are: for that is of great importance… Take the trouble to find a woman who would not be ashamed to wash the dishes, if need be, and to look after the affairs of the household… As for beauty, since you are not exactly the handsomest young man in Florence, do not worry about it, provided only that she is not crippled or repulsive.
After much searching, it seems they have found the rare bird. But at the last moment, a disqualifying defect is discovered:
I hear she has poor eyesight: which does not seem to me a small flaw. Therefore I have promised nothing yet. Since you have not promised anything either, my advice is that you disengage yourself, if you are certain of the thing.
Lionardo grows discouraged. He is surprised at his uncle’s insistence on wanting to marry him off. “That is true,” replies Michelangelo, “I desire it: it is good, so that our race should not end with us. I know well that the world would not be shaken by it; but after all, every animal strives to preserve its species. That is why I wish you to marry.”
At last Michelangelo himself grows weary; he begins to find it ridiculous that it is always he who concerns himself with Lionardo’s marriage, while the latter seems to take no interest. He declares he will meddle no further: “For sixty years I have concerned myself with your affairs; now I am old, and I must think about my own.”
Just at that moment, he learns that his nephew has become engaged to Cassandra Ridolfi. He rejoices, congratulates him, and promises a dowry of 1,500 ducats.
Lionardo marries. Michelangelo sends his good wishes to the young couple and promises a pearl necklace for Cassandra. His joy does not prevent him from warning his nephew that “although he does not know these matters very well, it seems to him that Lionardo should have settled all questions of money very precisely before bringing the woman into his house: for there is always in such questions a seed of discord.” He ends with this waggish recommendation:
“Come now! And now, try to live; and think about it well, for the number of widows is always greater than that of widowers.”
Two months later, instead of the promised necklace, he sends two rings to Cassandra — one set with a diamond, the other with a ruby. Cassandra, in thanks, sends him eight shirts. Michelangelo writes:
They are beautiful, especially the cloth, and they please me greatly. But I am sorry you went to this expense; for I lacked nothing. Thank Cassandra well for me, and tell her I am at her disposal to send her whatever I can find here, in the way of Roman articles or others. This time, I sent only a small thing; another time, we shall do better, with some object that will please her. Just let me know.
Soon came the children: the first, named Buonarroto, at Michelangelo’s wish; the second, named Michelangelo, who died shortly after birth. And the old uncle, who invited the young couple to visit him in Rome in 1556, never ceased to take an affectionate part in the joys and sorrows of the family, but without ever allowing his own to concern themselves with his affairs, or even his health.
Beyond his family relations, Michelangelo did not lack for illustrious or distinguished friendships.