The Life of Michelangelo, Part I — The Struggle

La Vie de Michel-Ange — Partie I : La Lutte

There is, in the Museo Nazionale of Florence, a marble statue that Michelangelo called the Victor*. He is a naked young man, with a beautiful body, his curling hair falling on his low forehead. Standing erect, he sets his knee upon the back of a bearded prisoner who bends and thrusts his head forward like an ox. But the victor does not look at him. At the moment of striking, he stops; he turns aside his sorrowful mouth and his irresolute eyes. His arm bends back toward his shoulder. He recoils; he no longer wants the victory, it disgusts him. He has conquered. He is conquered.*

This image of heroic Doubt, this Victory with broken wings, which alone of all the works of Michelangelo remained until his death in his studio in Florence, and which Daniele da Volterra, the confidant of his thoughts, wished to set upon his catafalque — it is Michelangelo himself, and the symbol of his whole life.

⁂

Suffering is infinite, it takes every form. Sometimes it is caused by the blind tyranny of things: poverty, illnesses, the injustices of fate, the wickedness of men. Sometimes it has its hearth within the being itself. It is then no less pitiable, nor less inevitable; for one has had no choice of one’s being, one has asked neither to live, nor to be what one is.

This last suffering was that of Michelangelo. He had the strength, he had the rare good fortune to be cut out to struggle and to conquer; he conquered. — But what then? He did not want victory. That was not what he wanted. — Tragedy of Hamlet! Poignant contradiction between a heroic genius and a will that was not heroic, between imperious passions and a will that did not will!

Let no one expect that, after so many others, we shall see in this a further greatness! Never shall we say that it is because a man is too great that the world does not suffice him. Restlessness of spirit is not a sign of greatness. Every want of harmony between being and things, between life and its laws, even among great men, is owing not to their greatness: it is owing to their weakness. — Why seek to hide this weakness? Is the one who is weaker less worthy of love? — He is far more worthy of it, for he has more need of it. I do not raise statues of inaccessible heroes. I hate the cowardly idealism which turns its eyes away from the miseries of life and from the weaknesses of the soul. We must say it to a people too sensible to the deceiving illusions of sounding words: the heroic lie is a cowardice. There is but one heroism in the world: to see the world as it is — and to love it.

⁂

The tragic of the destiny I present here is that it offers the image of an innate suffering which comes from the depths of the being, which gnaws him without respite, and which will not leave him before having destroyed him. It is one of the most powerful types of that great human race which, for nineteen centuries, has filled our West with its cries of grief and of faith: — the Christian.

One day, in the future, in the depth of the ages — (if the memory of our earth still survives) — one day, those who shall be will lean over the abyss of this vanished race, like Dante on the edge of Malebolge — with a mingling of admiration, of horror, and of pity.

But who shall feel it better than we, who were mingled, as children, in these anguishes — who saw struggling there the beings dearest to us — we, whose throat knows the acrid and intoxicating odour of Christian pessimism — we who needed, on certain days, to make an effort not to yield, as others do, in moments of doubt, to the vertigo of the Divine Nothingness!

God! Eternal Life! Refuge of those who do not succeed in living here below! Faith, that art very often only a want of faith in life, a want of faith in the future, a want of faith in oneself, a want of courage and a want of joy!… We know upon how many defeats your sorrowful victory is built!…

And it is for this that I love you, Christians, for I pity you. I pity you and I admire your melancholy. You sadden the world, but you embellish it. The world will be poorer when your sorrow shall no longer be in it. In this age of cowards, who tremble before pain and noisily claim their right to happiness, which is most often only the right to the unhappiness of others, let us dare to look upon pain face to face and to venerate it! Praised be joy, and praised be sorrow! The one and the other are sisters, and both are holy. They forge the world and swell great souls. They are strength, they are life, they are God. Whoever loves them not both, loves neither one nor the other. And whoever has tasted them knows the price of life and the sweetness of leaving it.

Romain Rolland

He was a Florentine burgher — of that Florence with the sombre palaces, with the towers springing up like lances, with the supple and dry hills, finely chiselled against the violet sky, with the black spindles of their little cypresses and the silver scarf of the olive-trees quivering like waves — of that Florence of pointed elegance, where the pale ironic face of Lorenzo de’ Medici and Machiavelli with his great cunning mouth met the Primavera and the chlorotic Venuses of Botticelli, with their pale-gold hair — of that Florence feverish, proud, neurotic, a prey to every fanaticism, shaken by every religious or social hysteria, where each man was free and each man was a tyrant, where it was so good to live and where life was a hell — of that city of citizens intelligent, intolerant, enthusiastic, full of hatred, with the sharp tongue, with the suspicious spirit, spying on one another, jealous of one another, devouring one another — that city, where there was no place for the free spirit of a Leonardo — where Botticelli ended in the hallucinated mysticism of a Scottish puritan — where Savonarola with his goat’s profile, with his burning eyes, made his monks dance in rounds around the pyre that burned works of art — and where, three years later, the pyre was raised again to burn the prophet.

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Of this city and of this time he was, with all their prejudices, their passions, and their fever.

Certainly he was not tender toward his compatriots. His open-air genius, with the broad chest, despised their art of cliques, their mannered spirit, their flat realism, their sentimentalism, their morbid subtlety. He was rough with them; but he loved them. He had not for his fatherland the smiling indifference of Leonardo. Far from Florence, he was eaten with nostalgia. All his life he exhausted himself in vain efforts to live there. He was with Florence in the tragic hours of war; and he wished “to return there at least dead, since living he had not been able to.”

Old Florentine, he had the pride of his blood and of his race. He was prouder of it than even of his genius. He would not allow himself to be regarded as an artist:

“I am not the sculptor Michelagniolo… I am Michelagniolo Buonarroti…”

He was aristocrat of mind and had all the prejudices of caste. He went so far as to say that “art ought to be practised by nobles, and not by plebeians.”

He had of the family a religious conception, antique, almost barbaric. He sacrificed everything to it and wished that others should do the same. He would have, as he said, “sold himself for it as a slave.” Affection entered there for very little. He despised his brothers, who well deserved it. He despised his nephew — his heir. But in him, in them, he respected the representatives of his race. Ceaselessly this word returns in his letters:

”… Our race… la nostra gente… to sustain our race… that our race may not die…”

All the superstitions, all the fanaticisms of this hard and strong race, he had them. They were the clay of which his being was formed. But from this clay there sprang the fire that purifies all things: genius.

⁂

Whoever does not believe in genius, whoever does not know what it is, let him look at Michelangelo. Never was man so its prey. This genius did not seem of the same nature as he was: it was a conqueror that had rushed into him and held him enslaved. His will counted for nothing in it; and one might almost say: for nothing his mind and his heart. It was a frenzied exaltation, a formidable life within a body and a soul too weak to contain it.

He lived in a continual fury. The suffering of this excess of force with which he was as it were swollen obliged him to act, to act ceaselessly, without an hour of rest.

“I wear myself out with work as no man ever did,” he wrote; “I think of nothing else but to work night and day.”

This morbid need of activity made him not only pile up tasks and accept more commissions than he could execute: it degenerated into mania. He wanted to sculpt mountains. If he had a monument to build, he lost years in the quarries choosing his blocks, building roads for their transport; he wanted to be everything: engineer, labourer, stone-cutter; he wanted to do everything himself, to raise palaces, churches, all alone. It was the life of a galley-slave. He did not even allow himself the time to eat and to sleep. At every instant in his letters this lamentable refrain returns:

“I have scarcely time to eat… I have not the time to eat… For twelve years I have ruined my body with fatigue, I have lacked the necessary… I have not a sou, I am naked, I suffer a thousand pains… I live in misery and in trouble… I struggle with poverty…”

This misery was imaginary. Michelangelo was rich; he made himself rich, very rich. But what good did it do him? He lived like a poor man, bound to his task, as a horse to its mill. No one could understand why he tortured himself thus. No one could understand that he was not master to refrain from torturing himself, that it was a necessity for him. Even his father, who had many traits of resemblance with him, reproached him:

Your brother has told me that you live with a great economy, even in a wretched fashion: economy is good; but misery is bad: it is a vice that displeases God and men; it will harm your soul and your body. As long as you are young, it will still go; but when you are no longer so, the maladies and infirmities, that will have taken their birth in this evil and wretched life, will all come to light. Avoid misery, live with moderation, take care not to lack the necessary, beware of excess of work…

But no counsel ever did any good. Never did he consent to treat himself in a more humane fashion. He fed on a little bread and wine. He slept scarcely a few hours. When he was at Bologna, busy with the bronze statue of Julius II, he had but one bed for himself and his three assistants. He lay down fully clothed and booted. Once his legs swelled; the boots had to be cut open: as they were taken off, the skin of his legs came with them.

This frightful regimen brought it about that, as his father had warned him, he was constantly ill. One finds in his letters the traces of fourteen or fifteen serious illnesses. He had fevers that more than once brought him near to death. He suffered from his eyes, his teeth, his head, his heart. He was eaten with neuralgia, above all when he slept; sleep was a suffering to him. He was old early. At forty-two he had the feeling of his own decrepitude. At forty-eight he writes that if he works one day, he must rest four. He obstinately refused to be treated by any physician.

More than his body, his mind suffered the consequences of this life of frenzied labour. Pessimism undermined him. It was in him a hereditary ill. Young, he wore himself out reassuring his father, who seems to have had, at moments, attacks of delusional persecution. Michelangelo was himself more affected than the one whom he tended. This unremitting activity, this crushing fatigue from which he never came to rest, delivered him defenceless to all the aberrations of his mind which trembled with suspicions. He distrusted his enemies. He distrusted his friends. He distrusted his kin, his brothers, his adopted son; he suspected them of impatiently awaiting his death.

Everything disquieted him; even his own people made fun of this eternal disquiet. He lived, as he says himself, “in a state of melancholy, or rather of madness.” By dint of suffering, he had ended by taking a sort of taste for suffering, he found in it a bitter joy:

The more pleases me what most harms me. E piu mi giova dove piu mi nuoce.

Everything had become for him a subject of suffering — even love — even what was good.

My joy is melancholy. La mia allegrez’ è la maninconia.

No being was less made for joy, and better made for sorrow. It is sorrow alone that he saw, it alone that he felt in the immense universe. All the pessimism of the world is summed up in this cry of despair, of a sublime injustice:

A thousand joys are not worth one single torment!… Mille placer non vaglion un tormento!…

⁂

“His devouring energy,” says Condivi, “separated him almost entirely from all human society.”

He was alone. — He hated: he was hated. He loved: he was not loved. He was admired and feared. At the end, he inspired a religious respect. He dominates his century. Then, he grows a little calmer. He sees men from above, and they see him from below. But never is he two. Never has he the rest, the gentleness granted to the humblest of beings: to be able, for one minute of his life, to fall asleep in the affection of another. The love of a woman is denied him. Only the cold and pure star of Vittoria Colonna’s friendship gleams an instant in that deserted sky. All around is the night, crossed by the burning meteors of his thought: his desires and his delirious dreams. Never did Beethoven know such a night. For this night was in the very heart of Michelangelo. Beethoven was sad through the fault of the world; he was gay by nature, he aspired to joy. Michelangelo had in him the sadness that makes men afraid, and that all flee by instinct. He made a void around him.

That was nothing yet. The worst was not to be alone. The worst was to be alone with oneself, and to be unable to live with oneself, not to be master of oneself, to deny oneself, to combat oneself, to destroy oneself. His genius was coupled with a soul that betrayed it. People speak sometimes of the fatality that pursued him and prevented him from executing any of his great designs. This fatality was himself. The key to his misfortune, what explains the whole tragedy of his life — and what has been least seen or least dared to be seen — is his want of will and his weakness of character.

He was irresolute in art, in politics, in all his actions and in all his thoughts. Between two works, two projects, two parties, he could not bring himself to choose. The history of the monument of Julius II, of the façade of San Lorenzo, of the tombs of the Medici, is the proof of it. He began, began, did not reach the end. He willed and did not will. Scarcely had he fixed his choice than he began to doubt it. At the end of his life he no longer finished anything: he came to be disgusted with everything. It is claimed that his tasks were imposed on him; and the responsibility for this perpetual fluctuation from one project to another is laid upon his masters. People forget that his masters had no means of imposing them upon him, if he had been resolved to refuse them. But he did not dare.

He was weak. He was weak in every way, by virtue and by timidity. He was weak by conscience. He tormented himself with a thousand scruples that a more energetic nature would have cast aside. He believed himself obliged, by an exaggerated feeling of his responsibility, to do mediocre tasks that any foreman would have done better in his place. He knew neither how to fulfil his engagements, nor how to forget them.

He was weak by prudence and by fear. The same man whom Julius II called “the terrible,” “terribile,” was qualified by Vasari as “prudent” — too prudent; and he who “made everyone afraid, even the popes,” was afraid of everyone. He was weak with princes. And yet, who despised more than he those who were weak with princes — “the pack-asses of princes,” as he called them? — He wanted to flee the popes; and he stayed, and he obeyed. He tolerated insulting letters from his masters, and answered them humbly. At moments he revolted, he spoke proudly; — but he always yielded. Until his death he struggled, without strength to fight. Clement VII, who — against current opinion — was, of all the popes, the one who showed him the most kindness, knew his weakness; and he had pity on him.

He lost all dignity in love. He humbled himself before scamps like Febo di Poggio. He treated as a “powerful genius” a being amiable but mediocre, like Tommaso de’ Cavalieri.

At least love makes these weaknesses touching. — They are only sadly painful — one dares not say: shameful — when fear is the cause of them. He is taken suddenly with panic terrors. He flees then, from one end of Italy to the other, pursued by fear. He flees from Florence in 1494, terrified by a vision. He flees from Florence in 1529 — from besieged Florence, which he was charged with defending. He flees as far as Venice. He is on the point of fleeing into France. He is ashamed afterward of this folly: he repairs it, he returns to the besieged city, he does his duty there to the end of the siege. But when Florence is taken, when the proscriptions reign, how weak and trembling he is! He goes so far as to court Valori, the proscriber, the man who had just put to death his friend, the noble Battista della Palla. Alas! He goes so far as to deny his friends, the Florentine exiles.

He is afraid. He has a mortal shame at his fear. He despises himself. He falls ill from disgust with himself. He wants to die. People think that he is going to die.

But he cannot die. There is in him an enraged force to live, that is reborn each day, to suffer more. — If he could at least tear himself from action! But that is forbidden him. He cannot do without acting. He acts. He must act. — He acts? — He is acted upon, he is carried away in the cyclone of his furious and contradictory passions, like one of Dante’s damned.

How he must have suffered!

Oilme, oilme, pur reiterando Vo’l mio passato tempo e non ritruovo In tucto un giorno che sic stato mio!

Woe unto me! Woe! In all my past, I do not find a single day that has been mine!

He addressed despairing appeals to God:

…… O Dio, o Dio, Dio! Chi piu di me potessi, che poss’ io?

O God! O God! O God! who can do more in me than I myself?

If he was hungry for death, it was because he saw in it the end of this maddening slavery. With what envy does he speak of those who are dead!

You are no longer in the fear of the change of being and of desire… The succession of hours does not do you violence; necessity and chance do not lead you… I can scarcely write it without envy.

To die! To be no more! No more to be oneself. To escape from the tyranny of things! To escape from the hallucination of oneself!

Ah! grant, grant that I may no more return to myself!

De, fate, c’ a me stesso piu non torni! ⁂

I hear this tragic cry come from the sorrowful face whose anxious eyes still look at us, at the museum of the Capitol.

He was of medium stature, broad-shouldered, strongly built and muscular. His body deformed by work, he walked, his head raised, his back hollowed and his belly forward. So a portrait by Francisco de Hollanda shows him: standing, in profile, dressed in black; a Roman cloak on his shoulders; on his head, a cap of cloth, and over this cap, a great hat of black felt, pulled down low. He had a round skull, a square forehead, swollen above the eyes, furrowed with wrinkles. The hair was black, thin, dishevelled and curling. The eyes, small, sad, and strong, were horn-coloured, changing and spotted with yellowish and bluish flecks. The nose, broad and straight, with a bump in the middle, had been broken by a blow of Torrigiani’s fist. Deep folds ran from the nostril to the corner of the lips. The mouth was fine; the lower lip projected a little. Sparse side-whiskers, a faun’s beard, forked, not thick, and four or five inches long, framed the cheeks hollowed under prominent cheekbones.

In the whole of the physiognomy, sadness, uncertainty dominate. It is indeed a face of the time of Tasso, anxious, gnawed by doubts. His piercing eyes inspire, call for, compassion.

⁂

Let us not bargain it from him. Let us give him this love to which he aspired all his life, and which was refused him. He has known the greatest misfortunes that can befall a man. He saw his fatherland enslaved. He saw Italy delivered for centuries to the barbarians. He saw liberty die. He saw, one after another, those whom he loved disappear. He saw, one after another, all the lights of art go out.

He remained alone, the last, in the falling night. And, on the threshold of death, when he looked behind him, he had not even the consolation of telling himself that he had done all that he ought, all that he could have done. His life seemed to him lost. In vain, it had been without joy. In vain, he had sacrificed it to the idol of art.

The monstrous labour to which he had condemned himself, during ninety years of life, without a day of rest, without a day of real life, had not even served to execute a single one of his great projects. Not one of his great works — of those to which he was most attached — not one was finished. An irony of fate willed that this sculptor should succeed in bringing to completion only those paintings which he made against his will. Of his great labours, which had brought him by turns so many proud hopes and torments, some — (the cartoon of the War of Pisa, the bronze statue of Julius II) — were destroyed during his lifetime; the others — (the tomb of Julius II, the Medici chapel) — miscarried pitifully: caricatures of his thought.

The sculptor Ghiberti tells, in his Commentaries, the story of a poor German goldsmith of the Duke of Anjou, “who was the equal of the ancient Greek statuaries,” and who, at the end of his life, saw destroyed the work to which he had consecrated his life. — “He saw then that all his labour had been useless; and, throwing himself on his knees, he cried: ‘O Lord, master of heaven and of earth, thou who makest all things, let me no more go astray and follow others than thee; have pity on me!’ And at once he gave all that he had to the poor, withdrew into a hermitage, and there died…”

Like the poor German goldsmith, Michelangelo, having come to the end of his life, contemplated bitterly his life lived in vain, his useless efforts, his works unfinished, destroyed, unaccomplished.

Then he abdicated. The pride of the Renaissance, the magnificent pride of the soul free and sovereign of the universe, denied itself with him “in that divine love which, to take us, opens its arms upon the cross.”

… Volta a quell’ amor divino C’aperse a prender noi ‘n croce le braccia.

The fecund cry of the Ode to Joy was not uttered. It was, to the last breath, the Ode to Sorrow and to Death that delivers. He was conquered, entirely.

⁂

Such was one of the conquerors of the world. We who enjoy the works of his genius, it is in the same fashion that we enjoy the conquests of our ancestors: we no longer think of the blood spilled.

Non vi si pensa Quanto sangue costa.

I have wished to spread this blood before the eyes of all, I have wished to make float, above our heads, the red banner of heroes.

“I fall from time to time into a great melancholy, as happens to those who are far from their hearth.” (Letter of 19 August 1497. Rome)
He was thinking of himself, when he made his friend Cecchino dei Bracci, one of the banished Florentines who lived in Rome, say: “Death is dear to me; for I owe to it the happiness of returning to my fatherland, which, living, was closed to me.” (Poems of Michelangelo, Carl Frey edition, LXXIII, 24)
The Buonarroti Simoni, originally from Settignano, are mentioned in the Florentine chronicles from the twelfth century onward. Michelangelo did not ignore this: he knew his genealogy. “We are burghers of the noblest race.” (Letter to his nephew Lionardo, December 1546) — He was indignant that his nephew should think of ennobling himself: “It is not to respect oneself; everyone knows that we are of old Florentine burgher stock and as noble as anyone whatever.” (February 1549) — He tried to raise up his race, to make his kin resume the old name of Simoni, to found in Florence a patrician house; but he always came up against the mediocrity of his brothers. He blushed to think that one of them (Gismondo) drove the plough and led the life of a peasant. — In 1520, Count Alessandro of Canossa wrote to him that he had found in his family archives proof that they were kin. The information was false; but Michelangelo believed it; he wished to acquire the castle of Canossa, claimed cradle of his race. His biographer Condivi inscribed, on his indications, among the number of his ancestors Beatrice, sister of Henry II, and the great Countess Matilda.

In 1515, on the occasion of the coming of Leo X to Florence, Buonarroto, Michelangelo’s brother, was named comes palatinus, and the Buonarroti received the right to place in their arms the patta of the Medici, with three lilies, and the pope’s monogram.
“I have never been,” he continues, “a painter nor a sculptor who makes a trade of art. I have always guarded myself from it for the honour of my race.” (Letter to Lionardo, 2 May 1548)
Condivi.
Letter to his father, 19 August 1497. — He was not “emancipated” by his father until 13 March 1508, at thirty-three years of age. (Official act, registered the following 28 March)
Letters, 1507, 1509, 1512, 1513, 1525, 1547.
There were found, after his death, in his house at Rome, 7 to 8,000 ducats of gold, valued at 4 or 500,000 francs of today. Moreover, Vasari says that he had already given on two occasions to his nephew 7,000 scudi, and 2,000 to his servant Urbino. He had large sums placed at Florence. The Denunzia de’ beni of 1534 shows that he then possessed six houses and seven estates at Florence, Settignano, Rovezzano, Stradello, San Stefano de Pozzolatico, etc. He had a passion for land. He bought it constantly: in 1505, 1506, 1512, 1515, 1517, 1518, 1519, 1520, etc. That was in him a peasant heredity. Moreover, if he amassed, it was not for himself: he spent for others, and deprived himself of everything.
There follow some counsels of hygiene which show the barbarism of the time: “Above all, take care of your head, keep yourself moderately warm, and never wash yourself: have yourself cleaned, and never wash yourself.” Letters: 19 December 1500.
Letters, 1506.
In September 1517, at the time of the façade of San Lorenzo and the Christ of the Minerva, he is “ill, near death.” In September 1518, at the quarries of Seravezza, he falls ill from overwork and worries. New illness in 1520, at the time of the death of Raphael. At the end of 1521, a friend, Lionardo sellajo, congratulates him on “being recovered from an illness from which few escape.” In June 1531, after the taking of Florence, he no longer sleeps, no longer eats, his head and heart are sick; this state lasts until the end of the year; his friends believe him lost. In 1539, he falls from his scaffolding at the Sistine, and breaks his leg. In June 1544, he has a very serious fever; he is cared for in the house of the Strozzi, at Florence, by his friend Luigi del Riccio. In December 1545 and January 1546, he has a dangerous relapse of this fever, which leaves him very weakened; he is again cared for at the Strozzi’s, by Riccio. In March 1549, he suffers cruelly from the stone. In July 1555, he is tortured by gout. In July 1559, he suffers again from the stone and from pains of every sort; he is very weakened. In August 1561, he has a stroke; “he falls without consciousness, with convulsive movements.”
“Febbre, fianchi dolor’, morbi ochi e denti.” Poems, LXXXII.
July 1517. Letter written from Carrara to Domenico Buoninsegni.
July 1523. Letter to Bart. Angiolini.
At every instant in his letters to his father: “Do not torment yourself…” (Spring 1509) — “It grieves me that you should live in such anguish; I beg you, think no more of it.” (25 January 1509) — “Do not be frightened, do not make yourself one ounce of sadness.” (15 September 1509)

Old Buonarroti seems to have had, like his son, attacks of panic terror. In 1521 (as we shall see further on), he suddenly fled from his own house, crying that his son had driven him out.
“In the sweetness of a perfect friendship there is often hidden an attack on honour and on life…” (Sonnet LXXIV, to his friend Luigi del Riccio, who had just saved him from a grave illness, 1546)

See the fine letter of justification, which his faithful friend Tommaso de’ Cavalleri, whom he unjustly suspected, wrote him on 15 November 1561: — “I am more than certain never to have offended you; but you believe too easily those in whom you should least believe…”
“I live in continual distrust… Trust no one, sleep with your eyes open…”
Letters of September and October 1515 to his brother Buonarroto: ”… Do not mock at what I write to you… One should mock no one; and, in these times, to live in fear and anxiety for one’s soul and for one’s body cannot harm… At all times it is good to disquiet oneself…”
Often in his letters he calls himself “melancholy and mad” — “old and mad” — “mad and wicked.” — Elsewhere he defends himself against this madness with which he is reproached, alleging “that it has never harmed anyone but himself.”
Poems, XLII.
Che degli amanti è men felice stato Quello ove ‘l gran désir gran copia affrena C’una miseria, di speranza piena.

“Less is the bliss of him who loves, in the fullness of enjoyment that quenches desire, than misery great with hope.” (Sonnet CIX, 48)
“Everything saddens me,” he wrote… “Good itself, by reason of its too short duration, weighs on and oppresses my soul no less than even ill.”
Poems, LXXXI.
Poems, LXXIV.
See the years he spent in the quarries of Seravezza, for the façade of San Lorenzo.
Thus, for the Christ of the Minerva, the commission for which he had accepted in 1514, and which he was distressed at not having begun in 1518. “I die of sorrow… I feel like a thief…” — Thus, for the Piccolomini chapel at Siena, for which he had signed in 1501 a treaty stipulating that he would deliver his work in three years. Sixty years later, in 1561, he was still tormenting himself over the unfulfilled engagement!
“Facte paura a ognuno insino a’ papi,” Sebastiano del Piombo wrote him, 27 October 1520.
Conversation with Vasari.
Thus, in 1534, when he wishes to flee Paul III, and ends by letting himself be chained to the task.
Such the humiliating letter of Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici (the future Clement VII), 2 February 1518, where he suspects Michelangelo of having been bought by the Carrarese. Michelangelo bows, accepts, writes “that he holds to nothing else in the world but to please him.”
See his letters and those he had written for him by Sebastiano del Piombo, after the taking of Florence. He is anxious about his health, about his torments. He publishes a brief in 1531 to defend him against the importunities of those who abused his complaisance.
Compare the humble letter of Michelangelo to Febo, in December 1533, with the answer of Febo, in January 1534, beggarly and vulgar.
”… If I do not possess the art of sailing on the sea of your powerful genius, it will excuse me and will not despise me, because I cannot compare myself with it. He who is unique in all things can have no equal.” (Michelangelo to Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, 1 January 1533)
”… I have hitherto been on my guard against speaking to the exiles and having dealings with them; I shall guard myself even more in future… I speak to no one; in particular, I do not speak with the Florentines. If I am greeted in the street, I cannot however do otherwise than answer in a friendly fashion; but I pass on. If I knew who are the Florentine exiles, I would not answer in any way…” (Letter from Rome, in 1548, to his nephew Lionardo, who warned him that he was being accused at Florence of having relations with the exiles, against whom Cosimo II had just promulgated a very severe edict)

He does much more. He denies the hospitality he had received, ill, at the house of the Strozzi:

“As for the reproach made me of having been received and cared for, during my illness, in the house of the Strozzi, I consider that I was not in their house, but in the chamber of Luigi del Riccio, who was very attached to me.” (Luigi del Riccio was in the service of the Strozzi.) — There was so little doubt that Michelangelo had been the guest of the Strozzi, and not of Riccio, that he himself, two years earlier, had sent the Two Slaves (now at the Louvre) to Roberto Strozzi, to thank him for his hospitality.
In 1531, after the taking of Florence, after his submission to Clement VII, and his overtures to Valori.
Poems, XLIX. (Probably around 1532)
Ibid., VI. (Between 1504 and 1511)
… … . Ne tem’ or piu cangiar vita ne voglia, Che quasi senza invidia non lo scrivo… L’ore distinte a voi non fanno forza, Caso o necessita non vi conduce…

(Poems, LVIII. — On the death of his father, 1534)
Ibid., CXXXV.
The description that follows is inspired by the various portraits of Michelangelo: above all by that of Marcello Venusti, which is at the Capitol, of the engraving by Francisco de Hollanda, which dates from 1538–1539, of that of Giulio Bonasoni, which is of 1546, and of the description by Condivi, made in 1553. His disciple and friend Daniele da Volterra, and his servant, Antonio del Franzese, drew, after his death, several busts of him. Leone Leoni engraved, in 1560, a medal with his effigy.
Thus he was still seen by those who had his coffin opened in 1564, when his body was brought back from Rome to Florence. He seemed to be sleeping, his felt hat on his head, and on his feet his boots with spurs.
Condivi. The portrait by Venusti represents them as quite broad.
Around 1490–1492.
… L’affectuosa fantasia, Che l’arte mi fece idol’ e monarca,…

(Poems, CXLVII. — Between 1555 and 1556)

”… The passionate illusion which made of art for me an idol and a monarch…”
He called himself “sculptor,” not “painter.” “Today,” he writes on 10 March 1508, “I, Michelangelo, sculptor, have begun the paintings of the chapel (Sistine).” — “This is not my craft,” he wrote a year later… “I am wasting my time without profit.” (27 January 1509) — He never changed his opinion on this point.
Poems, CXLVII.
Dante: Paradiso, XXIX, 91.

Davide cholla fromba e io choll’ archo, Michelagniolo.

He was born, on 6 March 1475, at Caprese, in the Casentino. Harsh country, “fine air,” rocks and beech woods, dominated by the spine of the bony Apennine. Not far off, Francis of Assisi saw the Crucified appear on Mount Alvernia.

The father was podestà of Caprese and Chiusi. He was a violent, anxious man, “fearing God.” The mother died when Michelangelo was six years old. They were five brothers: Lionardo, Michelagniolo, Buonarroto, Giovan Simone, and Sigismondo.

He was put to nurse with the wife of a stone-cutter of Settignano. Later, in jest, he attributed to this milk his vocation as a sculptor. He was sent to school: he busied himself there only with drawing. “For this he was ill regarded and often cruelly beaten by his father and his father’s brothers, who had a hatred for the profession of artist, and to whom it seemed a shame to have an artist in their house.” Thus, as a child, he came to know the brutality of life and the solitude of the spirit.

His obstinacy won out over that of his father. At thirteen he entered, as an apprentice, the studio of Domenico Ghirlandaio — the greatest, the most wholesome of Florentine painters. His first works had so much success that the master, it is said, was jealous of the pupil. They parted at the end of a year.

He had taken a disgust for painting. He aspired to a more heroic art. He passed into the school of sculpture which Lorenzo de’ Medici maintained in the gardens of San Marco. The prince took an interest in him: he lodged him at the palace, he admitted him to the table of his sons; the boy found himself at the heart of the Italian Renaissance, in the midst of antique collections, in the poetic and erudite atmosphere of the great Platonists: Marsilio Ficino, Benivieni, Angelo Poliziano. He was intoxicated with their spirit; living in the antique world, he made himself an antique soul: he was a Greek sculptor. Guided by Poliziano, “who loved him much,” he sculpted the Battle of the Centaurs and the Lapiths.

This proud bas-relief, where strength and impassive beauty alone reign, reflects the athletic soul of the adolescent and his wild games with his rough companions.

He used to go to the church of the Carmine to draw the frescoes of Masaccio, with Lorenzo di Credi, Bugiardini, Granacci, and Torrigiano dei Torrigiani. He did not spare his comrades the gibes, being less skilful than he. One day he attacked the vain Torrigiani. Torrigiani smashed his face with a blow of his fist. He boasted of it later: “I closed my fist,” he related to Benvenuto Cellini; “I struck him so violently on the nose that I felt the bones and cartilages crush like a wafer. So I have marked him for all his life.”

⁂

Paganism had not extinguished Michelangelo’s Christian faith. The two enemy worlds disputed for his soul.

In 1490 the monk Savonarola began his inflamed preachings on the Apocalypse. He was thirty-seven. Michelangelo was fifteen. He saw the small and frail preacher, whom the Spirit of God devoured. He was frozen with dread by the terrible voice which, from the pulpit of the Duomo, hurled the thunderbolt upon the pope, and suspended over Italy the bloody sword of God. Florence trembled. People ran in the streets, weeping and crying like madmen. The richest citizens: Ruccellai, Salviati, Albizzi, Strozzi, asked to enter the orders. Scholars, philosophers, Pico della Mirandola, Poliziano, themselves abdicated their reason. Michelangelo’s elder brother, Lionardo, became a Dominican.

Michelangelo did not escape the contagion of dread. When he drew near, the one whom the prophet had announced: the new Cyrus, the sword of God, the small misshapen monster — Charles VIII, king of France — Michelangelo was seized with panic. A dream maddened him.

One of his friends, Cardiere, a poet and musician, saw the shade of Lorenzo de’ Medici appear to him one night, clothed in rags, in mourning, half naked; the dead man ordered him to warn his son Piero that he was going to be driven out and that he would never return to his fatherland. Michelangelo, to whom Cardiere confided his vision, urged him to tell everything to the prince; but Cardiere, who was afraid of Piero, did not dare. One of the following mornings, he returned to Michelangelo and said, full of dread, that the dead man had appeared to him again: he had the same costume; and as Cardiere, lying down, gazed at him in silence, the phantom had slapped him, to chastise him for not having obeyed. Michelangelo violently reproached Cardiere and obliged him to go on foot, on the spot, to the villa of the Medici, Careggi, near Florence. Halfway, Cardiere met Piero: he stopped him and told him his tale. Piero burst out laughing and had him drubbed by his grooms. The prince’s chancellor, Bibbiena, said to him: “You are a madman. Whom do you believe Lorenzo loves best, his son or you? If he had had to show himself, it would have been to him and not to you!” Cardiere, hustled and jeered at, returned to Florence; he told Michelangelo of the failure of his errand, and so convinced him of the misfortunes that were about to crash down on Florence that Michelangelo, two days later, fled.

This was the first attack of those superstitious terrors which were to reproduce themselves more than once in the rest of his life, and which laid him low, whatever shame he felt at them.

⁂

He fled as far as Venice.

Scarcely out of the furnace of Florence, his over-excitement fell. — Returned to Bologna, where he spent the winter, he completely forgets the prophet and the prophecies. The beauty of the world takes him back. He reads Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Dante. He passes through Florence again, in the spring of 1495, during the religious festivals of the Carnival and the enraged struggles of parties. But he is now so detached from the passions devouring one another around him that, by a sort of defiance against the fanaticism of the Savonarolists, he sculpts his famous Sleeping Cupid, which his contemporaries took for an antique. He remains besides only a few months at Florence; he goes to Rome, and, until the death of Savonarola, he is the most pagan of artists. He sculpts Drunken Bacchus, Dying Adonis, and the great Cupid, the very year that Savonarola has burned “the Vanities and the Anathemas”: books, ornaments, works of art. His brother, the monk Lionardo, is hunted down for his faith in the prophet. Dangers accumulate on Savonarola’s head: Michelangelo does not return to Florence to defend him. Savonarola is burned: Michelangelo is silent. No trace of this event in any of his letters.

Michelangelo is silent; but he sculpts the Pietà:

On the knees of the Virgin, immortally young, the dead Christ lies, seems to sleep. The severity of Olympus floats on the features of the pure goddess and of the God of Calvary. But an unspeakable melancholy mingles with it; it bathes those beautiful bodies. Sadness has taken possession of Michelangelo’s soul.

⁂

It was not only the spectacle of miseries and crimes that came to darken him. A tyrannical force had entered into him, no more to let him go. He was a prey to that fury of genius, which no longer allowed him to draw breath until his death. Without illusions about victory, he had sworn to conquer, for his glory and for that of his kin. The whole weight of his cumbersome family rested upon him alone. It obsessed him with demands for money. He lacked it, but he made it his pride never to refuse: he would have sold himself, in order to send to his kin the money they demanded. His health was already growing impaired. Bad food, cold, damp, excess of work, were beginning to ruin it. He suffered from his head, and he had one side swollen. His father reproached him with his way of living: he did not tell himself that he was responsible for it.

“All the pains I have endured, I have endured them for you,” Michelangelo wrote him later.

”… All my cares, all, I have them through love for you.”

⁂

In the spring of 1501, he returned to Florence.

A gigantic block of marble had been entrusted, forty years earlier, by the Opera del Duomo to Agostino di Duccio to carve from it the figure of a prophet. The work scarcely begun had remained interrupted. No one dared take it up again. Michelangelo took charge of it, and, from this rock of marble, he made the colossal David come forth.

It is told that the gonfalonier Piero Soderini, coming to see the statue he had commissioned from Michelangelo, made a few criticisms, to attest his taste: he blamed the thickness of the nose. Michelangelo went up on the scaffolding, took a chisel and a little marble dust, and, while lightly moving the chisel, made the dust fall little by little; but he took good care not to touch the nose, and left it as it was. Then, turning toward the gonfalonier, he said:

“Look now.

— Now,” said Soderini, “it pleases me much better. You have given it life.”

“Then Michelangelo came down, and laughed silently.”

One thinks one reads this silent scorn in the work. It is a tumultuous force at rest. It is swollen with disdain and melancholy. It stifles within the walls of a museum. It needs the open air, “the light on the square,” as Michelangelo said.

On 25 January 1504, a commission of artists, of which Filippino Lippi, Botticelli, Perugino, and Leonardo da Vinci were members, deliberated on the site that would be assigned to the David. At Michelangelo’s request, it was decided to set it up before the Palace of the Signoria. The transport of the enormous mass was entrusted to the architects of the cathedral. On 14 May, in the evening, the marble Colossus was brought out of the wooden shed where it had been encamped, by demolishing the wall above the door. In the night, people of the populace threw stones at the David, in order to break it. A good guard had to be kept. The statue advanced slowly, bound upright and suspended so as to swing freely without striking the ground. Four days were needed to bring it from the Duomo to the Old Palace. On the 18th, at midday, it arrived at the appointed place. Guard continued to be kept around it, at night. In spite of all precautions, one evening it was stoned.

Such was that Florentine people, who are sometimes given as a model to ours.

⁂

In 1504, the Signoria of Florence set Michelangelo at odds with Leonardo da Vinci.

The two men did not love each other. Their common solitude should have drawn them together. But if they felt themselves distant from the rest of men, they were even more so from each other. The more isolated of the two was Leonardo. He was fifty-two — twenty years older than Michelangelo. — Since the age of thirty, he had left Florence, whose harshness of passions was intolerable to his delicate, somewhat timid nature, and to his serene and sceptical intelligence, open to everything, understanding everything. This great dilettante, this man absolutely free and absolutely alone, was so detached from fatherland, from religion, from the whole world, that he was at ease only with tyrants, free of spirit, like himself. Forced to leave Milan in 1499 by the fall of his protector, Ludovico il Moro, he had entered the service of Cesare Borgia in 1502; the end of the prince’s political career, in 1503, constrained him to return to Florence. There his ironic smile found itself in the presence of the sombre and feverish Michelangelo, and exasperated him. Michelangelo, wholly given over to his passions and to his faith, hated the enemies of his passions and of his faith, but he hated still more those who had no passion and were of no faith. The greater Leonardo was, the more aversion Michelangelo felt for him; and he did not neglect an occasion to show it him.

“Leonardo was a man of handsome figure, of pleasing and distinguished manners. He was strolling one day with a friend in the streets of Florence. He was dressed in a pink tunic, falling to the knees; on his breast floated his beard, well curled and arranged with art. Near Santa Trinita some burghers were chatting: they were discussing together a passage of Dante. They called Leonardo, and asked him to clarify the meaning for them. At that moment Michelangelo was passing. Leonardo said: ‘Michelangelo will explain to you the verses of which you are speaking.’ Michelangelo, believing that he meant to mock him, replied bitterly: ‘Explain them yourself, you who made the model of a bronze horse and were not capable of casting it, but who, to your shame, stopped midway!’ — Thereupon he turned his back on the group and continued his way. Leonardo remained, and he blushed. And Michelangelo, not yet satisfied and burning with the desire to wound him, cried: ‘And those capons of Milanese who thought you capable of such a work!’”

Such were the two men whom the gonfalonier Soderini set one against the other in a common work: the decoration of the Hall of the Council in the Palace of the Signoria. It was a singular combat between the two greatest forces of the Renaissance. In May 1504, Leonardo began the cartoon of the Battle of Anghiari. In August 1504, Michelangelo received the commission for the cartoon of the Battle of Cascina. Florence divided itself into two camps for one or the other rival. — Time has equalized everything. The two works have disappeared.

⁂

In March 1505, Michelangelo was called to Rome by Julius II. Then began the heroic period of his life.

Both violent and grandiose, the pope and the artist were made to understand each other, when they did not collide one with another with fury. Their brains seethed with gigantic projects. Julius II wished to have built for himself a tomb worthy of ancient Rome. Michelangelo took fire for this idea of imperial pride. He conceived a Babylonian design, a mountain of architecture, with more than forty statues of colossal dimensions. The pope, enthused, sent him to Carrara to have cut in the quarries all the marble needed. Michelangelo remained more than eight months in the mountains. He was a prey to a superhuman exaltation. “One day as he was ranging the country on horseback, he saw a mount that dominated the coast: the desire seized him to sculpt it entire, to transform it into a colossus visible from afar to navigators… He would have done it, if he had had the time, and if he had been allowed.”

In December 1505 he returned to Rome, where the blocks of marble he had chosen began to arrive by sea. They were transported to St. Peter’s Square, behind Santa Caterina, where Michelangelo lived. “The mass of stones was so great that it excited the stupefaction of the people and the joy of the pope.” Michelangelo set to work. The pope, in his impatience, came ceaselessly to see him, “and conversed with him as familiarly as if he had been his brother.” To come more conveniently, he had a drawbridge thrown from the corridor of the Vatican to Michelangelo’s house, which assured him a secret passage.

But this favour did not last long. The character of Julius II was no less trepidatious than that of Michelangelo. He took fire by turns for the most different projects. Another design seemed to him more fit to eternize his glory: he wished to rebuild St. Peter’s. He was urged on by Michelangelo’s enemies. They were numerous and powerful. They had at their head a man of a genius equal to Michelangelo’s, and of a stronger will: Bramante of Urbino, the pope’s architect and Raphael’s friend. There could be no sympathy between the sovereign reason of the two great Umbrians and the wild genius of the Florentine. But if they decided to combat him, it was no doubt because he had provoked them to it. Michelangelo imprudently criticized Bramante and accused him, rightly or wrongly, of malversations in his works. Bramante at once decided to ruin him.

He took from him the favour of the pope. He played on the superstition of Julius II; he reminded him of the popular belief, according to which it was of evil omen to have one’s tomb built in one’s lifetime. He succeeded in detaching him from the projects of his rival, and substituted his own. In January 1506, Julius II decided to rebuild St. Peter’s. The tomb was abandoned, and Michelangelo found himself not only humiliated but in debt because of the expenses he had made for the work. He complained bitterly. The pope had his door closed against him; and as he kept returning to the charge, Julius II had him driven from the Vatican by one of his grooms.

A bishop of Lucca, who was present at the scene, said to the groom:

— “Do you not know him, then?”

The groom said to Michelangelo:

— “Forgive me, sir, but I have received this order, and I must execute it.”

Michelangelo returned home and wrote to the pope:

“Holy Father. I have been driven out of the palace this morning by order of Your Holiness. I make known to you that from today on, if you have need of me, you may have me sought anywhere other than at Rome.”

He sent the letter, called a merchant and a stone-cutter, who lodged with him, and said to them:

“Find a Jew, sell everything that is in my house, and come to Florence.”

Then he mounted his horse and departed. When the pope received the letter, he sent after him five horsemen, who reached him toward eleven in the evening at Poggibonsi, and delivered to him the following order: “Immediately upon receipt of this, you will return to Rome, under pain of our disgrace.” Michelangelo replied that he would return when the pope kept his engagements: otherwise, Julius II should not hope to see him again.

He addressed this sonnet to the pope:

Lord, if ever proverb be true, it is surely that which says that he who can, never wills. You have believed in tales and in gossip, you have rewarded him who is the enemy of truth. As for me, I am and have been your good old servant, attached to you as the rays to the sun; and the time I lose does not afflict you! The more I wear myself out, the less you love me. I had hoped to grow great through your greatness, and that your just balance and your mighty sword would be my only judges, and not the lying echo. But heaven makes a mock of every virtue, by placing it in this world, if it must there await fruits from a dry tree.

The affront he had received from Julius II was not the only reason that had determined Michelangelo to flight. In a letter to Giuliano da San Gallo, he lets it be understood that Bramante wanted to have him assassinated.

Michelangelo gone, Bramante remained sole master. The day after his rival’s flight, he had the first stone of St. Peter’s laid. His implacable rancour pursued Michelangelo’s work, and arranged matters so as to ruin it forever. He had the populace plunder the worksite of St. Peter’s Square, where the blocks of marble for Julius II’s tomb were piled up.

Meanwhile the pope, enraged at the revolt of his sculptor, sent brief after brief to the Signoria of Florence, where Michelangelo had taken refuge. The Signoria summoned Michelangelo, and said to him: “You have played the pope a trick such as the king of France himself would not have done. We do not want, because of you, to engage ourselves in a war with him: so you must return to Rome; we will give you letters of such weight, that any injustice done to you would be done to the Signoria.”

Michelangelo was obstinate. He posed his conditions. He demanded that Julius II allow him to make his tomb, and he meant to work at it not in Rome any longer, but in Florence. When Julius II went to war against Perugia and Bologna, and his summonses became more menacing, Michelangelo thought of passing into Turkey, where the sultan offered through the Franciscans to have him come to Constantinople, to build a bridge at Pera.

At last, he had to yield; and, in the last days of November 1506, he went grumbling to Bologna, where Julius II, victorious, had just entered through the breach.

“One morning, Michelangelo had gone to hear mass at San Petronio. The pope’s groom caught sight of him, recognized him, and led him before Julius II, who was at table at the palace of the Sixteen. The pope, irritated, said to him: ‘It was for you to come and seek Us (in Rome); and you waited until We came to find you (in Bologna)!’ — Michelangelo knelt and asked pardon in a loud voice, saying that he had not acted out of malice, but out of irritation, because he had not been able to bear being driven out as had been done. The pope remained seated, his head lowered, his face inflamed with anger, when a bishop, whom Soderini had sent to take Michelangelo’s defence, wished to interpose, and said: ‘Let Your Holiness be so good as not to pay heed to his foolishness: he has sinned through ignorance. Outside their art, painters are all alike.’ The pope, furious, cried: ‘You say to him a rudeness which We have not said to him. The ignorant one is you!… Go away, and may the devil carry you off!’ — And as he did not go, the pope’s servants threw him out with blows of the fist. Then the pope, having discharged his anger on the bishop, had Michelangelo approach, and pardoned him.”

Unhappily, to make his peace with Julius II, he had to pass through his caprices; and the all-powerful will had again turned. There was no longer question of the tomb, but of a colossal bronze statue, which he wished to have raised to himself at Bologna. Michelangelo in vain protested “that he knew nothing of the casting of bronze.” He had to learn it; and it was a life of frenzied labour. He lived in a wretched room, with a single bed, where he slept with his two Florentine assistants, Lapo and Lodovico, and with his founder Bernardino. Fifteen months passed in vexations of every sort. He quarrelled with Lapo and Lodovico, who robbed him.

“That scamp Lapo,” he wrote his father, “gave to understand to everyone that it was he and Lodovico who did all the work, or at least that they did it in collaboration with me. He could not get into his head that he was not the master, until the moment when I put him out: then, for the first time, he perceived that he was in my service. I drove him off like a beast.”

Lapo and Lodovico complained loudly; they spread in Florence calumnies against Michelangelo, and managed to extort money from his father, on the pretext that he had robbed them.

Then it was the founder, whose incapacity revealed itself.

“I should have believed that Master Bernardino was capable of casting, even without fire, so much faith I had in him.”

In June 1507, the casting failed. The figure came out only as far as the waist. Everything had to be begun again. Michelangelo remained occupied with this work until February 1508. He nearly lost his health.

“I have scarcely time to eat,” he writes to his brother… “I live in the greatest discomfort and in extreme trouble; I think of nothing but to work night and day; I have endured such sufferings, and I endure such, that I believe that if I had the statue to make once again, my life would not suffice for it: it has been a labour of a giant.”

For such fatigues, the result was wretched. The statue of Julius II, raised in February 1508 in front of the façade of San Petronio, remained there only four years. In December 1511, it was destroyed by the party of the Bentivogli, enemies of Julius II; and Alfonso d’Este bought the fragments, to have a cannon made of them.

⁂

Michelangelo returned to Rome. Julius II imposed on him another task, no less unexpected and yet more perilous. To the painter, who knew nothing of the technique of fresco, he ordered to paint the vault of the Sistine Chapel. One would have said he took pleasure in commanding the impossible, and Michelangelo in executing it.

It seems that it was Bramante who, seeing Michelangelo return to favour, drove him to this task, in which he thought his glory would founder. The trial was the more dangerous for Michelangelo as in this same year 1508 his rival Raphael began the painting of the Stanze of the Vatican, with incomparable happiness. He did everything to throw off the redoubtable honour; he went so far as to propose Raphael in his place: he said that it was not his art and that he would not succeed in it. But the pope persisted, and he had to yield.

Bramante raised for Michelangelo a scaffolding in the Sistine Chapel, and some painters were sent from Florence, having experience of fresco, to lend him their assistance. But it was decreed that Michelangelo could have help of no kind. He began by declaring Bramante’s scaffolding unusable and by raising another. As for the Florentine painters, he took a dislike to them, and, without further explanation, he turned them out. “He had pulled down, one morning, everything they had painted; he shut himself up in the chapel, would no longer open it to them, and refused to be seen even in his own house. When the joke seemed to them to have lasted long enough, they decided to return to Florence, deeply humiliated.”

Michelangelo remained alone, with a few labourers; and, far from the greater difficulty restraining his boldness, he enlarged his plan and decided to paint not only the vault, as was at first in question, but the walls.

The gigantic labour began on 10 May 1508. Sombre years — the sombrest and the most sublime of this whole life! It is the legendary Michelangelo, the hero of the Sistine, whose grandiose image is and must remain graven in the memory of humanity.

He suffered terribly. His letters of the time bear witness to a passionate discouragement, which could not be satisfied by his divine thoughts:

“I am in great depression of spirit: it is now a year that I have not received a grosso from the pope; I ask him nothing, because my work does not advance enough to seem to me to deserve a remuneration. This is owing to the difficulty of the work, and to this not being my profession. Thus I lose my time without result. God assist me!”

Scarcely had he finished painting the Deluge, when the work began to grow mouldy: the figures could no longer be distinguished. He refused to continue. But the pope would admit no excuse. He had to set to work again.

To his fatigues and his anxieties, his kin added still further by their hateful importunities. His whole family lived on his back, abused him, pressed him to death. His father did not cease to groan, to be anxious about money matters. He had to spend his time giving him courage, when he himself was overwhelmed.

Do not agitate yourself, these are not things in which life is at stake… I will never let you lack for anything, as long as I myself have something… Even if everything you have in the world were taken from you, you shall lack nothing as long as I exist… I would rather be poor and know you alive, than have all the gold of the world and have you dead… If you cannot, like others, have the honours of this world, let it suffice you to have your bread; and live with Christ, good and poor, as I do here; for I am wretched, and I torment myself neither for life nor for honour, that is to say for the world; and I live in very great pains and in infinite distrust. For fifteen years I have not had a good hour; I have done everything to support you; and never have you acknowledged it, nor believed it. God pardon us all! I am ready, in the future, as long as I live, always to act in the same way, provided only that I can!

His three brothers exploited him. They expected money from him, a position; they drew without scruple on the small capital he had amassed at Florence; they came to be housed with him at Rome; they had themselves bought, Buonarroto and Giovan Simone, a shop in trade, Gismondo, lands near Florence. And they knew him no gratitude for it: it seemed that all this was owed them. Michelangelo knew that they exploited him; but he was too proud not to let them do it. The scamps did not stop there. They behaved badly and ill-treated their father in Michelangelo’s absence. Then he burst out in furious threats. He led his brothers like vicious schoolboys, with whip-strokes. He would have killed them, if need be.

Giovan Simone,

It is said that one who does good to the good makes him better, but that benefits make the wicked more wicked. For many years I have been seeking, with good words and good ways of acting, to bring you back to a life that is honest and at peace with your father and with the rest of us, and you are always worse… I could speak to you at length; but they would be only words. To have done, know with certainty that you possess nothing in the world; for it is I who give you maintenance to live, for love of God, because I believed you were my brother like the others. But now I am certain that you are not my brother; for if you were, you would not have threatened my father. You are rather a beast, and I shall treat you as a beast. Know that one who sees his father threatened or ill-treated has the duty to expose his life for him… Enough on this!… I tell you that you possess nothing in the world; and if I hear so much as the least thing of you, I shall come to teach you to squander your goods and to set fire to the house and the lands that you have not earned; you are not where you think. If I come over your way, I shall show you things that will make you weep burning tears and know on what you found your arrogance… If you want to apply yourself to act well, to honour and to venerate your father, I shall help you like the others, and, shortly, I shall procure you a good shop. But if you do not act so, I shall come, and I shall arrange your affairs in such a way that you shall know who you are, and that you shall know exactly what you have in the world… Nothing more! Where words fail me, I supply by facts.

Michelagniolo at Rome.

Two more lines. For twelve years, I have led a wretched life throughout Italy, I bear every shame, I suffer every pain, I tear my body with every fatigue, I expose my life to a thousand dangers, solely to aid my house; — and now that I have begun to raise it a little, you amuse yourself by destroying in one hour what I have built up in so many years and with so much pains!… Body of Christ! That shall not be! For I am a man to break to pieces ten thousand of your sort, if it is necessary. — Therefore, be wise, and do not push to the extreme one who has very different passions from yours!

Then it is Gismondo’s turn:

I live here in distress and in very great fatigue of body. I have no friend of any kind, and I want none… It is but a very short time that I have had the means to eat to my satisfaction. Cease to cause me torments; for I could no longer bear an ounce of them.

Finally the third brother, Buonarroto, employed at the Strozzi’s house of trade, after all the advances of money Michelangelo had made him, harasses him impudently and boasts of having spent more on him than he has received:

I should like to know, of your ingratitude, Michelangelo writes him, from where you get your money; I should like to know whether you take account of the 228 ducats you took from me at the bank of Santa Maria Nuova, and of so many other hundreds of ducats I have sent to the house, and of the pains and the cares I have had to maintain you. I should like to know whether you take account of all this! — If you had intelligence enough to recognize the truth, you would not say: “I have spent so much of my own,” and you would not have come to dun me here, to torment me with your affairs, without remembering all my past conduct toward you. You would have said: “Michelangelo knows what he has written us; if he does not do it now, it is because he must be prevented by something we do not know: let us be patient.” When a horse runs as much as he can, it is not good to give him the spur, that he may run more than he can. But you have never known me, and you do not know me. God pardon you! It is He who has granted me the grace to suffice for all that I have done to help you. But you shall not recognize it until you no longer have me.

Such was the atmosphere of ingratitude and envy in which Michelangelo struggled, between an unworthy family that harassed him and bitter enemies who spied on him, counting on his failure. And he, during this time, accomplished the heroic work of the Sistine. But at the price of what desperate efforts! He came near to abandoning everything and fleeing again. He believed he was going to die. He would perhaps have wished it.

The pope grew angry at his slownesses and his obstinacy in hiding his work from him. Their proud characters clashed together like storm-clouds. “One day,” says Condivi, “Julius II having asked him when he would have finished the chapel, Michelangelo answered him, according to his habit: ‘When I can.’ The pope, furious, struck him with his cane, repeating: ‘When I can! When I can!’ Michelangelo ran home and made his preparations to leave Rome. But Julius II dispatched an envoy to him, who brought him 500 ducats, calmed him as well as he could, and excused the pope. Michelangelo accepted the excuses.”

But the next day they began again. The pope ended, one day, by saying to him with anger: “Then you wish me to have you thrown down from your scaffolding?” Michelangelo had to yield; he had the scaffolding taken down, and uncovered the work on All Saints’ Day, 1512.

The brilliant and sombre feast, which receives the funereal reflections of the Feast of the Dead, well suited the inauguration of this terrible work, full of the Spirit of the God who creates and who kills — devouring God, into whom hurls itself, like a hurricane, all the force of living.

Poems, I (on a sheet at the Louvre, near sketches of the David).
Michelangelo liked to say that he owed his genius to “the fine air of the country of Arezzo.”
Lodovico di Lionardo Buonarroti Simoni. — The true name of the family was Simoni.
Francesca di Neri di Miniato del Sera.
The father remarried, some years later, in 1485, with Lucrezia Ubaldini, who died in 1497.
Lionardo was born in 1473; Buonarroto, in 1477; Giovan Simone, in 1479; Sigismondo, in 1481. — Lionardo became a monk. Thus Michelangelo became the eldest, the head of the family.
Condivi.
To tell the truth, one has difficulty in believing in this jealousy of so powerful an artist. I do not think, in any case, that it was the cause of Michelangelo’s hasty departure. He kept, even in his old age, respect for his first master.
This school was directed by Bertoldo, pupil of Donatello.
The Battle of the Centaurs and the Lapiths is in the Casa Buonarroti in Florence. Of the same time is the Mask of the Laughing Faun, which won Michelangelo the friendship of Lorenzo de’ Medici; and the Madonna of the Stairs, bas-relief of the Casa Buonarroti.
It was around 1491.
They died shortly after, in 1494: Poliziano, asking to be buried as a Dominican, in the church of San Marco — the church of Savonarola; — Pico della Mirandola, clothed, for dying, in the Dominican habit.
In 1491.
Lorenzo de’ Medici was dead on 8 April 1492; his son Piero had succeeded him. Michelangelo left the palace; he returned to his father, and remained some time without employment. Then Piero took him back into his service, charging him to buy him cameos and intaglios. He sculpted then the colossal marble Hercules, which was first at the Palazzo Strozzi, then bought in 1529 by Francis I, and placed at Fontainebleau, whence it disappeared in the seventeenth century. Of this time is also the Wooden Crucifix of the convent of San Spirito, for which Michelangelo studied anatomy on cadavers, with such fierceness, that he fell ill from it (1494).
Condivi.

Michelangelo’s flight took place in October 1494. A month later, Piero de’ Medici fled in his turn, before the rising of the people; and popular government installed itself in Florence, with the support of Savonarola, who prophesied that Florence would carry the Republic to the whole world. This Republic recognized, however, one king: Jesus Christ.
He was there the guest of the noble Giovanni Francesco Aldovrandi, who came to his aid on the occasion of certain difficulties with the police of Bologna. He worked then on the statue of San Petronio, and on a little statue of an angel for the tabernacle (Arca) of San Domenico. But these works have no religious character. It is always proud force.
Michelangelo arrived in Rome in June 1496. The Drunken Bacchus, the Dying Adonis (Bargello Museum) and the Cupid (South Kensington) are of 1497. — Michelangelo seems also to have drawn, at this same time, the cartoon of a Stigmatization of Saint Francis, for San Pietro in Montorio.
On 23 May 1498.
It has always been said until now that the Pietà was executed for the French cardinal Jean de Groslaye de Villiers, abbot of Saint-Denis, ambassador of Charles VIII, who commissioned it from Michelangelo for the chapel of the kings of France, at St. Peter’s. (Contract of 27 August 1498). M. Charles Samaran, in a work on the House of Armagnac in the Fifteenth Century, has established that the French cardinal who had the Pietà sculpted was Jean de Bilhères, abbot of Pessan, bishop of Lombez, abbot of Saint-Denis. Michelangelo worked at it until 1501.

A conversation of Michelangelo with Condivi explains by a thought of chivalric mysticism the youth of the Virgin, so different from the wild, withered Mater Dolorosa, convulsed with sorrow, of Donatello, Signorelli, Mantegna, and Botticelli.
Letter from his father, 19 December 1500.
Letter to his father. Spring 1509.
Letter to his father, 1521.
In August 1501. — In the preceding months, he had signed with Cardinal Francesco Piccolomini a contract, which he never executed, for the decoration of the Piccolomini altar at the cathedral of Siena. It was one of the remorses of his whole life.
Vasari.
Michelangelo said to a sculptor who was striving to arrange the light in his studio in such a way that his work might appear to advantage: “Do not give yourself so much trouble; what counts is the light on the square.”
The detail of the deliberations has been preserved. (Milanesi: Contratti artistici, pages 620 and following)

The David remained, until 1873, in the place which had been assigned to it by Michelangelo, before the Palace of the Signoria. Then the statue, which the rain had attacked in an alarming fashion, was transported to the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence, in a special rotunda (Tribuna del David). The Circolo artistico of Florence is now proposing to have a copy of it executed in white marble, to raise it in its ancient place, before the Old Palace.
Contemporary account, and Florentine Histories of Pietro di Marco Parenti.
Let us add that the chaste nudity of the David shocked the modesty of Florence. Aretino, reproaching Michelangelo with the indecency of his Last Judgment, wrote him in 1545: “Imitate the modesty of the Florentines, who hide under leaves of gold the shameful parts of their handsome Colosso.”
Allusion to the equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza, left unfinished by Leonardo, and of which the Gascon archers of Louis XII amused themselves by taking the plaster model as a target.
Account of a contemporary (Anonymous of the Magliabecchiana).
They had imposed upon him the humiliation of painting a victory of the Florentines over his friends, the Milanese.
Or the War of Pisa.
Michelangelo’s cartoon, alone executed, by 1505, disappeared in 1512, at the time of the riots provoked at Florence by the return of the Medici. The work is no longer known except by fragmentary copies. The most famous of these copies is the engraving by Marcantonio. (The Climbers) — As for Leonardo’s fresco, Leonardo sufficed to destroy it. He wished to perfect the technique of fresco; he tried an oil-based ground that did not hold; and the painting, which he abandoned in discouragement in 1506, no longer existed even in 1550.

Of this period of Michelangelo’s life (1501–1505) are also the two circular bas-reliefs of the Madonna and the Child, which are at the Royal Academy of London, and at the Bargello Museum in Florence; — the Madonna of Bruges, acquired in 1506 by Flemish merchants; — and the great tempera panel of the Holy Family of the Uffizi, the finest and most carefully wrought of Michelangelo’s. Its puritan austerity, its heroic accent, are roughly opposed to the effeminate languors of the Leonardesque art.
At least Bramante. Raphael was too much the friend and beneficiary of Bramante not to make common cause with him; but there are no proofs that he acted personally against Michelangelo. Nevertheless, Michelangelo accuses him in formal terms: “All the difficulties that arose between Pope Julius and me are the doing of the jealousy of Bramante and of Raphael: they sought to ruin me; and truly Raphael had good reason for it; for what he knew of art, he held from me.” (Letter of October 1542 to an unknown person. — Letters, Milanesi edition, pages 489–494)
Condivi, whom his blind friendship for Michelangelo makes a little suspect, says: “Bramante was driven to harm Michelangelo by his jealousy in the first place, and also by the fear he had of Michelangelo’s judgment, which discovered his faults. Bramante, as everyone knows, was given over to pleasure and a great spendthrift. The treatment he received from the pope, however high it might be, not sufficing him, he sought to gain on his works, by having his walls built of bad materials, of insufficient solidity. Everyone can see this in his constructions at St. Peter’s, at the corridor of the Belvedere, at the cloister of Santo Pietro ad Vincula, etc., which it has been necessary recently to support with cramps and buttresses, because they fell, or would have fallen in a little time.”
“When the pope changed his fancy, and the barques arrived with marbles from Carrara, I myself had to pay the freight. At this same time stone-cutters whom I had had come from Florence for the tomb arrived in Rome; and as I had had installed and furnished for them the house Julius had given me behind Santa Caterina, I found myself without money and in great embarrassment…” (Letter already cited of October 1542)
On 17 April 1506.
All this account is taken textually from a letter of Michelangelo of October 1542.
I place it at this date, which seems to me the most likely, although Frey, without sufficient reason, in my opinion, carries the sonnet back to about 1511.
Poems, III. — See Annexes, I, at the end of the second cahier.

“The dry tree” is an allusion to the oak which figures in the arms of the Della Rovere (family of Julius II).
“This was not the only cause of my departure; there was still another thing, of which I prefer not to speak. It is enough to say that this made me think that, if I stayed at Rome, this city would be my tomb rather than the pope’s. And this was the cause of my sudden departure.”
18 April 1506.
Letter of October 1542.
Ibid.
End of August 1506.
Condivi. — Michelangelo had already had the idea of going to Turkey, in 1504; and, in 1519, he was in relations with “the lord of Adrianople,” who asked him to come execute paintings for him.

It is known that Leonardo da Vinci had also been tempted to pass over to Turkey.
Letter to his father, 8 February 1507.
Letters to his brother, of 29 September and 10 November 1507.
So at least claims Condivi. It is to be noted however that, even before Michelangelo’s flight to Bologna, there had been question of having him paint the Sistine, and that this project then little pleased Bramante, who was seeking to remove from Rome his rival. (Letter of Pietro Rosselli to Michelangelo, in May 1506)
Between April and September 1508, Raphael painted the chamber called of the Signature. (School of Athens and Disputa of the Holy Sacrament)
In the letters of 1510 to his father, Michelangelo laments over one of these assistants, who is good for nothing, “but to have himself waited on… This occupation was certainly what I lacked! I had not enough of them already!… He makes me wretched as a beast.”
Letter to his father, 27 January 1509.
Letters to his father, 1509–1512.
Giovan Simone had just brutalized his father. Michelangelo writes to him:

“I have seen from your last letter how things stand, and how Giovan Simone behaves. I have not had worse news in ten years… If I had been able, the very day I received your letter, I would have mounted my horse and put everything back in order. But since I cannot, I write to him; and if he does not change his nature, or if he carries off but a single toothpick from the house, or if he does anything whatever to displease you, I beg you to inform me of it: I will obtain a leave from the pope and I will come.” (Spring 1509)
Letter to Giovan Simone. Dated by Henry Thode: spring 1509 (in Milanesi’s edition: July 1508).

Note that Giovan Simone was then a man of thirty. Michelangelo was only four years older than he.
To Gismondo, 17 October 1509.
Letter to Buonarroto, 30 July 1513.
Letters, August 1512.
I have analyzed the work in the Michel-Ange of the collection: Les Maîtres de l’Art. I do not return to it here.

Roct’ è l’alta cholonna.

Michelangelo emerged from this labour of Hercules, glorious and broken. From holding, for months, his head thrown back to paint the vault of the Sistine, “he had so injured his sight that for a long time after he could not read a letter, nor look at an object, except by holding them above his head, in order to see them better.”

He himself jested about his infirmities:

The strain has given me a goitre, like the water gives to the cats of Lombardy… My belly points toward my chin, my beard turns up toward heaven, my skull rests upon my back, my chest is like that of a harpy; the brush, dripping on my face, has made a motley tiling of it. My loins have entered my body, and my behind makes a counterweight. I walk haphazard, without being able to see my feet. My skin lengthens in front and shrivels behind: I am stretched like a Syrian bow. My intelligence is as baroque as my body: for one plays badly with a bent reed…

One must not be the dupe of this good humour. Michelangelo suffered from being ugly. For a man such as he, more in love than anyone with physical beauty, ugliness was a shame. One finds the trace of his humiliation in some of his madrigals. His sorrow was the more cutting in that he was, all his life, devoured by love; and it seems that he never was paid in return. Then he folded back into himself and confided to poetry his tenderness and his pain.

From childhood he composed verses: it was an imperious need to him. He covered his drawings, his letters, his loose sheets with thoughts that he then took up again and reworked ceaselessly. Unfortunately, he had burned, in 1518, the greater number of his poems of youth; others were destroyed before his death. The little that remains to us nonetheless suffices to evoke his passions.

The most ancient poem seems to have been written at Florence, around 1504:

How happy I lived, so long as it was granted me, Love, to resist victoriously thy rage! Now, alas! I bathe my breast in tears, I have felt thy strength…

Two madrigals, written between 1504 and 1511, and probably addressed to the same woman, have a poignant expression:

Who is he who by force leads me to thee… alas! alas! alas!… closely chained? And I am free though!…

Chi è quel che per forza a te mi mena, Oilme, oilme, oilme, Legato e strecto, e son libero e sciolto?

How is it possible that I am no longer mine? O God! O God! O God!… Who has torn me from myself?… Who can do more in me than I myself? O God! O God! O God!…

Come puo esser, ch’io non sia plu mio? O Dio, o Dio, o Dio! Chi m’ ha tolto a me stesso, Ch’ à me fusse piu presso O più di me potessi, che poss’ io? O Dio, o Dio, o Dio!…

From Bologna, on the back of a letter of December 1507, this youthful sonnet, whose sensual preciosity evokes a vision of Botticelli:

Bright and well set with flowers, how happy is the crown upon her golden hair! How the flowers press one against the other on her forehead, contending to be the first to kiss it! The robe that clasps her breast and falls beneath is happy all the day. The cloth of gold is never weary of brushing her cheeks and her neck. More precious yet is the fortune of the ribbon edged with gold, which gently touches with a light pressure the bosom it enwraps. The girdle seems to say: “I would clasp her always…” Ah!… And what then would my arms do!

In a long poem of an intimate character — a sort of confession that it is difficult to cite exactly — Michelangelo describes, with a singular crudity of expressions, his anguishes of love:

When I remain a day without seeing thee, I can find no peace anywhere. When I see thee, thou art for me as food to him who is famished… When thou smilest at me, or when thou greetest me in the street, I take fire like powder… When thou speakest to me, I blush, I lose my voice, and suddenly my great desire is extinguished…

Then come groans of grief:

Ah! infinite suffering, that tears my heart, when it thinks that she whom I love so much loves me not! How am I to live?…

… Ahi, che doglia ‘nfinita Sente ‘l mio cor, quando li torna a mente, Che quella ch’io tant’ amo amor non sente! Come restero ‘n vita?…

These lines also, written near studies for the Madonna of the Medici chapel:

Alone, I remain burning in the shadow, when the sun strips the world of its rays. Everyone rejoices; and I, stretched on the earth, in sorrow, I groan and I weep.

Love is absent from the powerful sculptures and paintings of Michelangelo; he has there made heard only his most heroic thoughts. It seems he was ashamed to mix in them the weaknesses of his heart. To poetry alone has he confided himself. It is there that one must seek the secret of this fearful and tender heart beneath its rough envelope:

Amando, a che son nato? I love: wherefore was I born?

⁂

The Sistine finished, and Julius II being dead, Michelangelo returned to Florence and came back to the project that lay at his heart: the tomb of Julius II. He engaged himself by contract to make it in seven years. For three years he consecrated himself almost exclusively to this work. In this relatively tranquil period — period of mature melancholy and serenity, in which the furious seething of the Sistine subsides, like a tempestuous sea returning into its bed — Michelangelo produced his most perfect works, those that realize best the equilibrium of his passions and his will: Moses, and the Slaves of the Louvre.

It was but an instant: the stormy course of his life resumed almost at once; he fell back into the night.

The new pope, Leo X, undertook to take Michelangelo away from the glorification of his predecessor and to attach him to the triumph of his house. It was for him a question of pride, more than of sympathy; for his Epicurean mind could not understand the sorrowful genius of Michelangelo: all his favours were for Raphael. But the man of the Sistine was an Italian glory: Leo X wished to domesticate it.

He offered Michelangelo to raise the façade of San Lorenzo, the church of the Medici, in Florence. Michelangelo, stimulated by his rivalry with Raphael, who had profited by his absence to become at Rome the sovereign of art, let himself be drawn into this new task, which it was materially impossible for him to accomplish without neglecting the old one, and which was to be for him a cause of unending torments. He tried to persuade himself that he could carry on at once the tomb of Julius II and the façade of San Lorenzo. He counted on unloading the bulk of the work onto an assistant and on executing himself only the principal statues. But, after his habit, he intoxicated himself little by little with his project, and soon he could no longer bear to share its honour with another. Far more, he trembled lest the pope wish to withdraw it from him; he begged Leo X to bind him to this new chain.

Naturally it became impossible for him to continue the monument of Julius II. But the saddest was that he did not succeed any better in raising the façade of San Lorenzo. It was not enough to reject every collaborator: with his terrible mania of wanting to do everything by himself, by himself alone, instead of remaining at Florence and working on his work, he went to Carrara to supervise the extraction of the blocks. He found himself there grappling with difficulties of every sort. The Medici wished to use the quarries of Pietrasanta, recently acquired by Florence, in preference to those of Carrara. For having taken the side of the Carrarese, Michelangelo was insultingly accused by the pope of having been bought; and for having had to obey the pope’s orders, he was persecuted by the Carrarese, who came to an understanding with the Ligurian boatmen: he could no longer find a single barque from Genoa to Pisa to transport his marbles. He had to build a road, in part on piles, across the mountains and the marshy plains. The people of the country would not contribute to the expenses of the road. The labourers knew nothing of their task. The quarries were new, the workmen were new. Michelangelo groaned:

“I have undertaken to wake the dead, in wishing to tame these mountains and bring art here.”

Yet he held firm:

“What I have promised, I shall execute, in spite of everything; I shall make the most beautiful work that has ever been made in Italy, if God assists me.”

How much strength, enthusiasm, genius lost in vain! At the end of September 1518, he fell ill at Seravezza, from overwork and worries. He knew well that his health and his dreams were being consumed in this life of labourer. He was obsessed by the desire to begin at last his work, and by the anguish of not being able to. He was harried by his other engagements which he could not fulfil.

“I die of impatience, because my bad destiny does not allow me to do what I wanted… I die of sorrow, I feel like a cheat, although it is not my fault…”

Returned to Florence, he ate his heart out waiting for the arrival of the marble convoys; but the Arno was dry, the barques laden with blocks could not come up the river.

At last they arrived: is he going to set to work, this time? — No. He returns to the quarries. He insists on not beginning until he has gathered, as before for the tomb of Julius II, a whole mountain of marble. He always puts off the moment of beginning; perhaps he fears it. Has he not promised too much? Has he not engaged himself rashly in this great work of architecture? It is not his trade: where could he have learned it? And now he can advance no more, nor retreat.

So many pains did not even succeed in assuring the transport of the marbles. Of six monolithic columns sent to Florence, four broke on the way, one in Florence itself. He was the dupe of his workmen.

In the end the pope and the cardinal de’ Medici grew impatient at so much precious time uselessly lost in the midst of quarries and muddy roads. On 10 March 1520, a brief of the pope released Michelangelo from the contract of 1518 for the façade of San Lorenzo. Michelangelo received notice of it only by the arrival at Pietrasanta of the teams of workmen sent to replace him. He was cruelly wounded by it.

“I do not reckon to the cardinal,” he said, “the three years that I have lost here. I do not reckon to him that I am ruined by this work of San Lorenzo. I do not reckon to him the very great affront that was done me, in giving me this commission, and then taking it from me: and I do not so much as know why! I do not reckon to him all that I have lost and all that I have spent… And now this can be summed up thus: Pope Leo takes back the quarry with the cut blocks; there remains to me the money I have in hand — 500 ducats — and they give me back my liberty!”

It was not his protectors that Michelangelo had to accuse: it was himself, and he knew it well. That was the worst pain. He struggled against himself. From 1515 to 1520, in the plenitude of his strength, and overflowing with genius, what had he done? — The insipid Christ of the Minerva — a work of Michelangelo in which Michelangelo is not! — And he could not even finish it.

From 1515 to 1520, in those last years of the great Renaissance, before the cataclysms that were to end the springtime of Italy, Raphael had painted the Loggias, the Chamber of the Conflagration, the Farnesina, masterpieces in every genre, raised the Villa Madama, directed the construction of St. Peter’s, the excavations, the festivals, the monuments, governed art, founded a school without number; and he died in the midst of his triumphant labour.

⁂

The bitterness of his disillusions, the despair of the lost days, the ruined hopes, the broken will, are reflected in the sombre works of the period that follows: the tombs of the Medici, and the new statues of the monument of Julius II.

The free Michelangelo, who did, all his life, but pass from one yoke to another, had changed master. Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, soon pope under the name of Clement VII, reigned over him from 1520 to 1534.

People have been very severe with Clement VII. No doubt, like all those popes, he wished to make art and artists the servants of his racial pride. But Michelangelo has not too much cause to complain of him. No pope loved him so much. None showed a more constant and more passionate interest in his works. None better understood his weakness of will, taking, when necessary, his defence against himself, and preventing him from scattering himself in vain. Even after the revolt of Florence and the rebellion of Michelangelo, Clement changed nothing in his dispositions toward him. But it did not depend on him to calm the unrest, the fever, the pessimism, the deadly melancholy, that gnawed this great heart. What did the personal kindness of a master matter? He was always a master!…

“I have served the popes,” Michelangelo said later, “but it was by constraint.”

What did a little glory and one or two beautiful works matter? It was so far from all that he had dreamed!… And old age was coming. And all was darkening around him. The Renaissance was dying. Rome was to be sacked by the Barbarians. The menacing shadow of a sad God was to weigh upon the thought of Italy. Michelangelo felt the tragic hour coming; and he suffered from a stifling anguish.

After having torn Michelangelo from the inextricable enterprise in which he was bogged down, Clement VII resolved to launch his genius in a new path, where he meant to watch him from close at hand. He entrusted him with the construction of the chapel and of the tombs of the Medici. He intended to reserve him entirely to his service. He even proposed to him to enter the orders, offering him an ecclesiastical benefice. Michelangelo refused; but Clement VII paid him nonetheless a monthly pension, triple of what he asked, and made him a gift of a house in the neighbourhood of San Lorenzo.

All seemed in a good way, and the work for the chapel was being carried on actively, when suddenly Michelangelo abandoned his house and refused the pension of Clement VII. He was crossing a new crisis of discouragement. The heirs of Julius II did not pardon him for having abandoned the work undertaken; they threatened him with proceedings, they brought his loyalty into question. Michelangelo was driven frantic at the idea of a lawsuit; his conscience gave the right to his adversaries and accused him of having failed in his engagements: it seemed to him impossible to accept money from Clement VII, as long as he had not restored what he had received from Julius II.

“I work no longer, I live no longer,” he wrote. He begged the pope to intervene with the heirs of Julius II, to help him to restore all he owed them:

I will sell, I will do everything necessary to bring about this restitution.

Or else, that he be permitted to consecrate himself entirely to the monument of Julius II:

I aspire more to come out of this obligation than to live.

At the thought that, if Clement VII came to die, he would be abandoned to the proceedings of his enemies, he was like a child, he wept and despaired:

If the pope leaves me thus, I shall be unable to remain in this world… I do not know what I am writing, I have completely lost my head…

Clement VII, who did not take very seriously this despair of an artist, insisted that he should not interrupt the work of the Medici chapel. His friends understood nothing of his scruples and urged him not to give himself the ridicule of refusing his pension. One shook him up sharply, for having acted without reflection, and begged him in future no more to abandon himself to his whims. Another wrote him:

I am told that you have refused your pension, abandoned your house, and ceased your work: this seems to me an act of pure madness. My friend, my compère, you are playing your enemies’ game… Concern yourself no more with the tomb of Julius II, and take the pension; for they give it heartily.

Michelangelo was obstinate. — The papal treasury played him the trick of taking him at his word: it suppressed the pension. The poor man, at bay, was reduced, some months later, to ask for again what he had refused. He did it at first timidly, with shame:

My dear Giovanni, since the pen is always bolder than the tongue, I write you what I have been wanting to say to you several times these days, and what I have not had the courage to express to you face to face: may I still count on a pension?… If I were certain not to receive it any more, that would change nothing in my dispositions: I would not work less for the pope as much as I could; but I would arrange my affairs accordingly.

Then, hounded by necessity, he returns to the charge:

After having reflected well, I have seen how much this work of San Lorenzo lies at the heart of the pope; and since H. H. has accorded me, of himself, a pension, with the design that I might have more convenience to serve him promptly, it would be retarding the work not to accept: I have therefore changed my mind; and I, who up until now did not ask for this pension, ask for it now, for more reasons than I can write… Will you give it to me, having it reckoned from the day it was accorded me… Tell me at what moment you prefer that I take it.

They wanted to give him a lesson: they turned a deaf ear. Two months later, he had still received nothing. He was forced to claim the pension more than once in the sequel.

He worked, all while tormenting himself; he complained that these cares were impediments to his imagination:

… Worries can do much upon me… One cannot work with one’s hands at one thing, and with one’s head at another, above all in sculpture. They say that all this serves as a spur to me; but I say that they are bad spurs, which dispose one to turn back. It is already more than a year that I have not received a pension, and I struggle with poverty: I am very alone, in the midst of my pains; and I have so many of them, that they occupy me more than art: I have not the means to have anyone to serve me.

Clement VII showed himself sometimes touched by his sufferings. He had his affectionate sympathy expressed to him. He assured him of his favour, “as long as he lived.” But the incurable frivolity of the Medici took the upper hand; and, instead of unburdening him of a part of his labours, he made him new commissions: among others, that of an absurd Colossus, whose head would have been a bell-tower, and whose arm a chimney: Michelangelo had to busy himself for some time with this baroque idea. — He had also to be constantly grappling with his workmen, his masons, his carters, whom apostles forerunners of the eight-hour day tried to debauch.

At the same time his domestic troubles only grew. His father became more irritable and more unjust with age; one day he took it into his head to flee from Florence, accusing his son of having driven him out. Michelangelo wrote him this admirable letter:

Dearest father, I was much surprised yesterday not to find you at home; and now that I learn that you complain of me and that you say I drove you out, I am still more astonished. From the day I was born until today, I am certain never to have had the intention of doing anything, great or small, that displeased you; all the pains I have borne, I have always borne them out of love for you… I have always taken your part… A few days ago I was still telling you and promising you to devote to you all my strength, as long as I lived; and I promise it to you again. I am stupefied that you should so quickly have forgotten all this. For thirty years you have tried me, you and your sons; you know that I have always been good to you, as much as I could, in thought and in action. How can you go and repeat everywhere that I have driven you out? Do you not see what reputation you make for me? That was all I lacked at present, with my other cares; and all these cares, I have them through love for you! You reward me well!… But let it be as it will: I want to persuade myself that I have never ceased causing you shame and harm; and I ask your pardon for it, as if I had done so. Pardon me, as a son who has always lived ill and who has done you all the harm one can do in this world. Once again, I beg you, pardon me as a wretch that I am; but do not give me this reputation that I have driven you out; for my reputation matters more to me than you think: in spite of everything, I am still your son!

So much love and humility disarmed only for an instant the embittered spirit of the old man. Some time later, he was accusing his son of robbing him. Michelangelo, pushed to the extreme, wrote him:

I no longer know what you want of me. If it is a burden to you that I should live, you have found the good means to rid yourself of me, and you will soon enter again into possession of the keys of the treasure that you claim I keep. And you will do well; for everyone in Florence knows that you were an immensely rich man, that I have always robbed you, and that I deserve to be chastised: you shall be highly praised!… Say and cry of me whatever you will, but do not write to me any more; for you no longer let me work. You compel me to remind you of all you have received from me, for twenty-five years. I would not say it; but at last I am quite forced to say it!… Take good care… One dies but once, and one does not come back afterward to repair the injustices one has done. You have waited until the eve of death to do them. God help you!

Such was the help he found among his own.

“Patience!” he sighed in a letter to a friend. “May God not allow that what does not displease Him displease me!”

In the midst of these griefs, the work did not advance. When the political events that overturned Italy in 1527 came on, not a single statue of the Medici chapel was yet ready. Thus, this new period of 1520 to 1527 had done nothing but add its disillusions and its fatigues to those of the previous period, without having brought to Michelangelo the joy of a single finished work, a single design realized, for more than ten years.

Poems, I.
Vasari.
Poems, IX. See in the Annexes, II.

This poem, written in the burlesque style of Francesco Berni, and addressed to Giovanni da Pistoia, is dated by Frey to June–July 1510. In the last lines, Michelangelo alludes to his difficulties of work during the execution of the frescoes of the Sistine; and he excuses himself, alleging that this is not his trade:

“Defend then, Giovanni, my dead work, and defend my honour; for painting is not my affair. I am not a painter.”
Henry Thode has rightly brought into light this trait of Michelangelo’s character in his first volume of Michelangelo und das Ende der Renaissance, 1902. Berlin.
”… Since the Lord renders to souls their bodies after death, for eternal peace or torment, I beg that He leave mine, though ugly, in heaven, as on earth, beside thine: for a loving heart is worth as much as a beautiful face.”…

… Priego’l mie benchè bructo, Com’è qui teco, il voglia im paradiso: C’un cor pietoso val quant’un bel viso…

(Poems, CIX, 12)

“Heaven seems rightly to be angered that I should mirror myself so ugly in your eyes so fair.”

Ben par che’l ciel s’adiri, Che’n si begli ochi i’mi veggia si bructo…

(Ibid., CIX, 93)
The first complete edition of Michelangelo’s poems was published by his great-nephew at the beginning of the seventeenth century, under the title: Rime di Michelangelo Buonarroti raccolte da M. A. suo nipote, 1623, Florence; it is altogether erroneous. Cesare Guasti gave, in 1863, in Florence, the first nearly exact edition. But the only truly scientific and complete one is the admirable edition of Carl Frey: Die Dichtungen des Michelagniolo Buonarroti, herausgegeben und mit kritischem Apparate versehen von Dr Carl Frey, 1897, Berlin. It is to this that I refer in the course of this biography.
On the same sheet are drawings of horses and of men fighting.
Poems, II. See in the Annexes, III.
Ibid., V.
Poems, VI.
Ibid., VII. See in the Annexes, IV.
The expression is Frey’s, who dates the poem, without sufficient reason in my opinion, to 1531–32. It seems to me much younger.
Poems, XXXVI. See in the Annexes, V.
Poems, XIII.

Of the same time, a famous madrigal which the composer Bartolommeo Tromboncino set to music before 1518:

“How shall I have the courage to live without you, my love, if I cannot ask your assistance, in departing? These sobs, these tears, these sighs, with which my wretched heart follows you, have shown you, lady, my coming death and my martyrdom. But if it is true that absence will never make forgotten my faithful servitude, I leave my heart with you: my heart is no longer mine.” (Poems, XI. — See in the Annexes, VI)
Sol’ io ardendo all’ ombra mi rimango, Quand’ el sol de suo razi el monda spoglia; Ogni altro per piaciere, e io per doglia, Prostrato in terra, mi lamento e piangho.

(Ibid., XXII)
Poems, CIX, 35.

Compare these verses of love, where love and sorrow seem to be synonymous, to the voluptuous ecstasy of the juvenile and awkward sonnets of Raphael, written on the back of the drawings for the Disputa of the Holy Sacrament.
Julius II died on 21 February 1513, three months and a half after the inauguration of the frescoes of the Sistine.
Contract of 6 March 1513. — The new project, more considerable than the original, included 32 large statues.
Michelangelo seems during this time to have accepted only one commission: the Christ of the Minerva.
The Moses was to be one of the six colossal figures crowning the upper storey of the monument of Julius II. Michelangelo did not cease to work on it until 1545.
The Slaves, on which Michelangelo was working in 1513, were given by him in 1546 to Roberto Strozzi, the Florentine republican, then exiled in France, who made a present of them to Francis I.
He did not spare him demonstrations of tenderness; but Michelangelo made him afraid. He felt ill at ease with him:

“When the pope speaks of you,” writes Sebastiano del Piombo to Michelangelo, “it seems that he speaks of one of his brothers; he has almost tears in his eyes. He told me that you were brought up together, and he protests that he knows you and loves you: but you make everyone afraid — even the popes.” (27 October 1520)

Michelangelo was mocked at the court of Leo X. He lent himself to mockery by his imprudences of speech. An ill-advised letter that he wrote to Cardinal Bibbiena, patron of Raphael, made the joy of his enemies. “Nothing else is spoken of at the palace but your letter,” Sebastiano said to Michelangelo; “it makes everyone laugh.” (3 July 1520)
Bramante was dead in 1514. Raphael had just been named superintendent of the construction of St. Peter’s.
“I want to make of this façade a work that shall be a mirror of architecture and of sculpture for all Italy. The pope and the cardinal [Giulio de’ Medici, the future Clement VII] must decide quickly, if they want me to make it, or not. And if they want me to make it, a treaty must be signed… Messer Domenico, give me a firm answer regarding their intentions. That would give me the greatest joy.” (To Domenico Buoninsegni, July 1517)

The treaty was signed with Leo X on 19 January 1518. Michelangelo engaged himself to raise the façade in eight years.
Letter of Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici to Michelangelo, 2 February 1518: “Some suspicion has been awakened in us that you may be of the party of the Carrarese out of personal interest and that you may wish to depreciate the quarries of Pietrasanta… We let you know, without entering into other explanations, that His Holiness wills that all the work undertaken be executed with the blocks of marble of Pietrasanta, and no others… If you acted otherwise, it would be against the express desire of His Holiness and ours, and we would have good reason to be seriously irritated with you… Banish then this stubbornness from your spirit.”
“I have gone as far as Genoa to seek barques… The Carrarese have bought up all the boatmasters… I must go to Pisa…” (Letter of Michelangelo to Urbano, 2 April 1518) — “The barques I had hired at Pisa have never come. I believe they have played me a trick: it is my lot in all things! Oh, a thousand times cursed the day and the hour when I left Carrara! It is the cause of my ruin…” (Letter of 18 April 1518)
Letter of 18 April 1518. — And, a few months later: “The quarry is very steep, and the people are completely ignorant: patience! one must tame the mountains and instruct the men…” (Letter of September 1518 to Berto da Filicaja)
The Christ of the Minerva, and the tomb of Julius II.
Letter of 21 December 1518 to the cardinal of Agen. — Of this time seem to be the four shapeless statues, scarcely roughed out, of the Boboli grottoes. (Four Slaves, for the tomb of Julius II)
Letters, 1520 (Milanesi edition, page 415).
Michelangelo entrusted the task of finishing this Christ to his clumsy disciple Pietro Urbano, who “crippled it.” (Letter of Sebastiano del Piombo to Michelangelo, 6 September 1521) The sculptor Frizzi, of Rome, repaired the damages as best he could.

All these disappointments did not prevent Michelangelo from seeking new tasks to add to those that crushed him. On 20 October 1519, he signed the request of the Academicians of Florence to Leo X, to bring back the remains of Dante from Ravenna to Florence; and he offered himself “to raise to the divine poet a monument worthy of him.”
On 6 April 1520.
The Victor.
In 1526, Michelangelo had to write to him each week.
“He adores everything you do,” writes Sebastiano del Piombo to Michelangelo; “he loves it as much as one can love. He speaks of you so honourably, and with so much affection, that a father would not say of his son all that he says of you…” (29 April 1531) — “If you would come to Rome, you would be all that you wished, duke or king… You would have your share of this papacy, of which you are the master, and of which you can have and do what you will.” (5 December 1531)

(One must, in truth, make allowance, in these protestations, for the Venetian boasting of Sebastiano del Piombo.)
Letter of Michelangelo to his nephew Lionardo (1548).
The works were begun as early as March 1521, but were not pushed actively except from the elevation of Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici to the papal throne, under the name of Clement VII, on 19 November 1523. — (Leo X had died on 6 December 1521, and Adrian VI had succeeded him from January 1522 to September 1523.)

The original plan included four tombs: those of Lorenzo the Magnificent, of Giuliano his brother, of Giuliano duke of Nemours his son, and of Lorenzo duke of Urbino his grandson. In 1524, Clement VII decided to have added to them the sarcophagus of Leo X, and his own, assigning to them the place of honour. — See Marcel Reymond: L’Architecture des tombeaux des Médicis (Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1907).

At the same time, Michelangelo was charged with constructing the Library of San Lorenzo.
It concerned for him the order of the Franciscans. (Letter of Fattucci to Michelangelo, on behalf of Clement VII, 2 January 1524)
March 1524.
Letter of Michelangelo to Giovanni Spina, agent of the pope. (19 April 1525)
Letter of Michelangelo to Fattucci. (24 October 1525)
Letter of Fattucci to Michelangelo. (22 March 1524)
Letter of Lionardo sellajo to Michelangelo. (24 March 1524)
Letter of Michelangelo to Giovanni Spina. (1524, Milanesi edition, page 425)
Letter of Michelangelo to Giovanni Spina. (29 August 1525)
Letter of Michelangelo to Fattucci. (24 October 1525)
Letter of Pier Paolo Marzi, on behalf of Clement VII, to Michelangelo. (23 December 1525)
Letters from October to December 1525. (Milanesi edition, pages 448–449) See in the Michel-Ange of the collection Les Maîtres de l’Art a summary of this strange affair, and Michelangelo’s project.
Letter of Michelangelo to Fattucci. (17 June 1526)
Henry Thode dates this letter to around 1521. In Milanesi’s collection, it figures (wrongly) at the date of 1516.
Letters (June 1523).
Letter of Michelangelo to Fattucci. (17 June 1526)
The same letter, of June 1526, says that a statue of a captain has been begun, as well as four allegories of the sarcophagi, and the Madonna.

Oilme, Oilme, ch’i’ son tradito…

The universal disgust with things and with himself threw him into the Revolution, which broke out in Florence in 1527.

Michelangelo had until then carried into political affairs the same indecision of spirit from which he always had to suffer in his life and in his art. Never did he succeed in reconciling his personal sentiments with his obligations toward the Medici. This violent genius was moreover always timid in action; he did not risk himself to struggle against the powers of this world on the political and religious terrain. His letters show him always anxious for himself and for his kin, fearing to compromise himself, denying the bold words it happened he uttered, in a first movement of indignation against some act of tyranny. At every instant he writes to his kin to take care, to be silent, to flee at the first alarm:

Do as in the time of the plague, be the first to flee… Life is worth more than fortune… Stay at peace, make yourselves no enemies, trust no one, save God, and say of no one either good or ill, because one does not know the end of things; occupy yourselves only with your own affairs… Meddle with nothing.

His brothers and friends mocked his anxieties and treated him as a madman.

“Do not mock me,” Michelangelo replied saddened, “one should not mock anyone.”

The perpetual trembling of this great man has nothing in it that lends itself to laughter. He was rather to be pitied for his wretched nerves, which made of him the plaything of terrors against which he struggled, without being able to make himself master of them. He had only the more merit, on coming out of these humiliating attacks, in constraining his body and his sick thought to bear the danger which his first impulse had been to flee. He had besides more reasons to fear than another, for he was more intelligent, and his pessimism foresaw only too clearly the misfortunes of Italy. — But, for him with his natural timidity to let himself be drawn into the Florentine revolution, it was necessary that he should be in an exaltation of despair which made him unveil the depth of his soul.

This soul, so fearfully folded back upon itself, was ardently republican. One sees it from the words of flame that escaped him at times, in moments of confidence or of fever — in particular in the conversations he had later with his friends Luigi del Riccio, Antonio Petreo, and Donato Giannotti, and which the latter reproduced in his Dialogues on the Divine Comedy of Dante. The friends were astonished that Dante should have placed Brutus and Cassius in the lowest degree of Hell, and Caesar above. Michelangelo, questioned, makes the apology of tyrannicide:

If you had read attentively the first cantos, he said, you would have seen that Dante has only too well known the nature of tyrants, and that he knew with what chastisements they deserved to be struck by God and by men. He places them among the “violent against the neighbour,” whom he has punished in the seventh Circle, by plunging them into the boiling blood… Since Dante has recognized this, it is impossible to admit that he did not recognize that Caesar was the tyrant of his fatherland and that Brutus and Cassius massacred him with justice; for he who kills a tyrant kills not a man, but a beast with a human figure. All tyrants are devoid of the love that everyone must naturally feel for his neighbour, they are deprived of human inclinations: they are therefore no longer men, but beasts. That they have no love for the neighbour is the evidence itself: otherwise they would not have taken what belongs to others, and would not have become tyrants by trampling underfoot the others… It is therefore clear that he who kills a tyrant does not commit a murder, since he kills not a man, but a beast. Thus Brutus and Cassius did not do a crime in massacring Caesar. First, because they killed a man whom every Roman citizen was bound to kill, by the order of the laws. Second, because they killed not a man, but a beast with a human figure.

Thus Michelangelo found himself in the front rank of the Florentine rebels, in the days of national and republican awakening which followed at Florence the news of the taking of Rome by the armies of Charles V, and the expulsion of the Medici. The same man who, in ordinary times, recommended to his kin to flee politics as one flees the plague, was in a state of over-excitement such that he no longer feared either one or the other. He remained at Florence where were plague and revolution. The epidemic struck his brother Buonarroto, who died in his arms. In October 1528, he took part in the deliberations for the defence of the city. On 10 January 1529, he was chosen, in the Collegium of the Nove di milizia, for the works of the fortifications. On 6 April, he was named, for a year, governatore generale and procuratore of the fortifications of Florence. In June, he went to inspect the citadel of Pisa, and the bastions of Arezzo and Livorno. In July and August, he was sent to Ferrara, to examine the famous defensive works there, and to confer with the duke, great connoisseur in fortifications.

Michelangelo recognized that the most important point in the defence of Florence was the hill of San Miniato; he decided to assure this position with bastions. But — one does not know why — he came up against the opposition of the gonfalonier Capponi, who sought to remove him from Florence. Michelangelo, suspecting Capponi and the Medici party of wishing to rid themselves of him in order to prevent the defence of the city, installed himself at San Miniato and no longer budged from there. But his diseased mistrust welcomed all the rumours of treason that always circulate in a besieged city, and that, this time, were only too well founded. Capponi, suspect, had been replaced as gonfalonier by Francesco Carducci; but as condottiere and governor general of the Florentine troops, the disquieting Malatesta Baglioni had been named, who was later to deliver the city over to the pope. Michelangelo presaged the crime. He communicated his fears to the Signoria. “The gonfalonier Carducci, instead of thanking him, reprimanded him insultingly; he reproached him with being always suspicious and fearful.” Malatesta learned of Michelangelo’s denunciation: a man of his temper recoiled before nothing to set aside a dangerous adversary; and he was all-powerful at Florence, as generalissimo. Michelangelo believed himself lost.

I was however resolved,

he writes,

I was however resolved to await without fear the end of the war. But on Tuesday morning, 21 September, someone came outside the San Niccolò gate, where I was at the bastions; and he said in my ear that if I wished to save my life, I could no longer remain in Florence. He came with me to my house, he ate with me, he brought me horses, and he did not leave me until he had seen me out of Florence.

Varchi, completing this information, adds that Michelangelo “had 12,000 florins of gold sewn into three quilted shirts in the form of skirts, and that he fled from Florence, not without difficulty, by the Justice gate which was the least guarded, with Rinaldo Corsini and his pupil Antonio Mini.”

“Whether it was God or the devil that pushed me, I do not know,” Michelangelo writes, a few days later.

It was his habitual demon of insane terror. In what dread must he have been, if it is true, as is reported, that on the way, at Castelnuovo, stopping at the house of the former gonfalonier Capponi, he communicated to him by his tales such a shock, that the old man died of it a few days afterward!

On 23 September, Michelangelo was at Ferrara. In his fever, he refused the hospitality the duke offered him at the castle, and continued his flight. He arrived, on 25 September, at Venice. The Signoria, having had notice of it, sent him two gentlemen, to put at his disposal everything he might need; but, ashamed and wild, he refused, and withdrew apart, to the Giudecca. He did not yet believe himself far enough away. He wanted to flee into France. The very day of his arrival at Venice, he addresses an anxious and trepidatious letter to Battista della Palla, agent of Francis I in Italy for the purchase of works of art:

Battista, very dear friend, I have left Florence to go to France; and, arrived at Venice, I have inquired about the road: I have been told that, to go there, it was necessary to pass through the German countries, which is dangerous and painful for me. Do you still have the intention to go there?… I beg you, inform me of it, and tell me where you wish that I await you: we will go together… I beg you, answer me, on receipt of this letter, and as fast as you can; for I am consumed by the desire to go there. And if you no longer have desire to go there, let me know it, that I may decide, cost what it may, to go alone…

The French ambassador at Venice, Lazare de Baïf, hastened to write to Francis I and to the Constable of Montmorency; he urged them to profit by the occasion to attach Michelangelo to the court of France. The king at once had a pension and a house offered to Michelangelo. But this exchange of letters naturally took a certain time; and when Francis I’s offer arrived, Michelangelo had already returned to Florence.

His fever had fallen. In the silence of the Giudecca, he had had leisure to blush at his fear. His flight had made a great noise at Florence. On 30 September, the Signoria decreed that all those who had fled should be banished as rebels if they did not return before 7 October. On the appointed date the fugitives were declared rebels, and their goods confiscated. However, Michelangelo’s name did not yet figure on the list; the Signoria left him a final delay, and the Florentine ambassador at Ferrara, Galeotto Giugni, informed the Republic that Michelangelo had had too late knowledge of the decree, and that he was ready to return, if he were pardoned. The Signoria promised her pardon to Michelangelo; and she had a safe-conduct brought to him at Venice by the stone-cutter Bastiano di Francesco. Bastiano delivered to him at the same time ten letters from friends who all conjured him to return. Among them all, the generous Battista della Palla addressed him an appeal full of love of fatherland:

All your friends, without distinction of opinion, without hesitating, with one voice, exhort you to return, in order to preserve your life, your fatherland, your friends, your goods, and your honour, and to enjoy the new times, which you ardently desired and hoped for.

He believed that the golden age had returned for Florence, and he had no doubt of the triumph of the good cause. — The unhappy man was to be one of the first victims of the reaction, after the return of the Medici.

His words decided Michelangelo. He returned — slowly; for Battista della Palla, who went to meet him at Lucca, waited for him for long days, and was beginning to despair. At last, on 20 November, Michelangelo returned to Florence. On the 23rd, his sentence of banishment was lifted by the Signoria; but it was decided that the great Council would remain closed to him for three years.

From then on, Michelangelo did his duty bravely to the end. He resumed his place at San Miniato, which the enemies had been bombarding for a month; he had the hill fortified anew, invented new engines, and saved, it is said, the campanile, by garnishing it with bales of wool and mattresses suspended by ropes. The last trace one has of his activity during the siege is a piece of news of 22 February 1530, which shows him climbing on the dome of the cathedral, to observe the movements of the enemy, or to inspect the state of the cupola.

Meanwhile, the foreseen misfortune accomplished itself. On 2 August 1530, Malatesta Baglioni betrayed. On the 12th, Florence capitulated, and the Emperor handed the city over to the pope’s commissary, Baccio Valori. Then the executions began. The first days, nothing stopped the vengeance of the victors; Michelangelo’s best friends — Battista della Palla — were among the first struck. Michelangelo hid himself, it is said, in the bell-tower of San Niccolò-oltr’Arno. He had just reasons to fear: the rumour had spread that he had wanted to demolish the Medici palace. But Clement VII had not lost his affection for him. According to Sebastiano del Piombo, he had shown himself much saddened by what he learned of Michelangelo, during the siege; but he contented himself with shrugging his shoulders and saying: “Michelangelo is wrong; I have never done him any harm.” As soon as the first wrath of the proscribers had fallen, Clement VII wrote to Florence; he enjoined them to seek Michelangelo, adding that if he would continue to work at the tombs of the Medici, he should be treated with all the regard he deserved.

Michelangelo came out of his hiding-place and resumed his work to the glory of those whom he had combated. The wretched man did more: for Baccio Valori, the instrument of the pope’s base works, the murderer of his friend Battista della Palla, he consented to sculpt the Apollo drawing an arrow from his quiver. Soon he was to deny the Florentine exiles. Lamentable weakness of a great man, reduced to defend by cowardices the life of his artistic dreams against the murderous brutality of material force, which at its pleasure could stifle him! It is not without reason that he was to consecrate all the end of his life to raising to the apostle Peter a superhuman monument: more than once, like him, he must have wept on hearing the cock crow.

Obliged to lying, reduced to flattering a Valori, to celebrating a Lorenzo, duke of Urbino, he burst forth in grief and shame. He threw himself into work, he put into it all his rage of nothingness. He did not sculpt the Medici; he sculpted the statues of his despair. When the lack of resemblance in his portraits of Giuliano and Lorenzo de’ Medici was pointed out to him, he answered superbly: “Who will see it in ten centuries?” Of the one, he made Action; of the other, Thought; and the statues of the base, which comment on them — Day and Night, Dawn and Twilight — all tell of the exhausting suffering of living and the scorn of what is. These immortal symbols of human sorrow were finished in 1531. Supreme irony! No one understood them. A certain Giovanni Strozzi, seeing the formidable Night, made concetti:

Night, which you see so gracefully sleeping, was sculpted by an Angel in this rock; and, since she sleeps, she lives. If you do not believe it, wake her, and she will speak to you.

Michelangelo replied:

Sleep is dear to me. Dearer still to me is to be of stone, while the wrong and the shame last. Not to see, not to hear is great good fortune for me: therefore, do not wake me, ah! speak low!

Caro m’è ‘l sonno et piu l’esser di sasso, Mentre che ‘l danno et la vergogna dura. Non veder, non sentir m’è gran ventura; Pero non mi destar, deh! parla basso.

There is sleep then in heaven, he cried in another poem, since one alone appropriates what was the good of so many men!

And Florence enslaved replies to his groans:

Be not troubled in your holy thoughts. He who believes he has stripped you of me, does not enjoy his great crime because of his great fear. Less is the bliss of him who loves, in the fullness of enjoyment that quenches desire, than misery great with hope.

One must think what the sack of Rome and the fall of Florence were for the souls of that time: a frightful bankruptcy of reason, a collapse. Many did not rise again from it.

A Sebastiano del Piombo falls into a pleasure-loving scepticism:

I have come to this point that the universe might crumble, without my caring, and I laugh at every thing… It does not seem to me that I am yet the Bastiano I was before the sack, I cannot come back to myself.

Michelangelo thinks of killing himself:

If ever it be permitted to take one’s own life, it would be most just that this right should belong to him who, full of faith, lives a slave and wretched.

He was in a convulsion of mind. He fell ill in June 1531. Clement VII strove in vain to calm him. He had it said to him by his secretary and by Sebastiano del Piombo not to overwork himself, to keep the measure, to work at his ease, to take a walk sometimes, not to reduce himself to the state of a labourer. In the autumn of 1531, his life was feared for. One of his friends wrote to Valori: “Michelangelo is worn out and emaciated. I have spoken of it recently with Bugiardini and Antonio Mini: we were agreed that he has not long to live, if one does not seriously concern oneself about it. He works too much, eats little and badly, and sleeps still less. For a year, he has been gnawed by pains of the head and heart.” — Clement VII was indeed alarmed by it; on 21 November 1531, a brief of the pope forbade Michelangelo, under pain of excommunication, to work at anything else than at the tomb of Julius II and at those of the Medici, in order to spare his health and “to be able longer to glorify Rome, his family, and himself.”

He protected him against the importunities of the Valori and of the rich beggars, who came, according to habit, to wheedle works of art and to impose on Michelangelo new commissions. “When they ask you for a picture,” he had him write, “you must tie your brush to your foot, make four strokes, and say: ‘The picture is made.’” He interposed himself between Michelangelo and the heirs of Julius II, who were becoming menacing. In 1532, a fourth contract was signed between the representatives of the duke of Urbino and Michelangelo, concerning the tomb: Michelangelo promised to make a new model of the monument, much reduced, to finish it in three years, and to pay all the expenses, as well as 2,000 ducats, for all that he had already received from Julius II and his heirs. “It is enough that one find in the work,” Sebastiano del Piombo wrote to Michelangelo, “a little of your odour” (un poco del vostro odore). — Sad conditions, since it was the bankruptcy of his great project that Michelangelo was signing there, and he still had to pay for it! But from year to year, it was in truth the bankruptcy of his life, the bankruptcy of Life, that Michelangelo signed in each of his despairing works.

After the project of the monument of Julius II, the project of the tombs of the Medici collapsed. On 25 September 1534, Clement VII died. Michelangelo, for his good fortune, was then absent from Florence. For a long time, he had lived there in disquiet; for Duke Alessandro de’ Medici hated him. Without the respect he had for the pope, he would have had him killed. His enmity had increased still further since Michelangelo had refused to contribute to the enslavement of Florence by raising a fortress to dominate the city: — trait of courage which shows well enough, in this fearful man, the greatness of his love for his fatherland. — Since that time, Michelangelo expected anything from the duke; and he owed his salvation, when Clement VII died, only to chance which made him at that moment be outside Florence. He returned there no more. He was not to see her again. — That was the end of the Medici chapel; it was never finished. What we know under this name has only a distant relation with what Michelangelo had dreamed. There scarcely remains of it the skeleton of the wall decoration. Not only had Michelangelo not executed half the statues, and the paintings he projected; but when his disciples later strove to recover and complete his thought, he was no longer even capable of telling them what it had been: such was his renunciation of all his undertakings that he had forgotten everything.

⁂

On 23 September 1534, Michelangelo returned to Rome, where he was to remain until his death. It had been twenty-one years since he had left it. In these twenty-one years, he had made three statues of the unfinished monument of Julius II, seven unfinished statues of the unfinished monument of the Medici, the unfinished vestibule of the Laurenziana, the unfinished Christ of Santa Maria of the Minerva, the unfinished Apollo for Baccio Valori. He had lost his health, his energy, his faith in art and in fatherland. He had lost the brother he loved best. He had lost his father, whom he adored. To the memory of the one and the other he had raised an admirable poem of sorrow, unfinished like everything he did, all burning with the passion of dying:

… Heaven has torn you from our misery. Have pity on me, who live as one dead!… You are dead to death, and you have become divine; you no longer fear the change of being and of desire: (I can scarcely write it without envy…) Destiny and Time, which bring us only the doubtful joy and the sure misfortune, do not dare cross your threshold. No cloud darkens your light; the succession of hours does not do violence to you, necessity and chance do not lead you. Night does not extinguish your splendour; day, however clear it be, does not enhance it… By your death, I learn to die, my dear father… Death is not, as is believed, the worst for him whose last day is the first and the eternal day, near the throne of God. There I hope and I believe to see you again, by the grace of God, if my reason tears my frozen heart from the earthly clay, and if, as every virtue, the most high love grows in heaven between father and son.

Nothing then any longer holds him on earth: not art, not ambition, not tenderness, not hope of any kind. He is sixty, his life seems finished. He is alone, he no longer believes in his works; he has the longing for death, the passionate desire to escape at last “the change of being and of desire,” “the violence of the hours,” the tyranny “of necessity and chance.”

Alas! Alas! I am betrayed by my days that have fled… I have waited too long,… time has fled me, and behold, I find myself old. I can no more repent, nor recollect myself, with death beside me… I weep in vain: no misfortune is equal to the time one has lost…

Alas! Alas! when I turn my eyes toward my past, I do not find a single day that has been mine! False hopes and vain desire — I recognize it now — have held me, weeping, loving, burning and sighing — (for not one mortal affection is unknown to me) — far from the truth…

Alas! Alas! I go, and I do not know where; and I am afraid… And if I am not mistaken — (oh! God grant that I be mistaken!) — I see. Lord, I see the eternal chastisement for the evil I have done in knowing the good. And I no longer know what to hope for…

Poems, XLIX.
Letter of September 1512, on the subject of what he had said about the sack of Prato by the Imperial troops, allies of the Medici.
Letter of Michelangelo to Buonarroto (September 1513).
“I am not a madman, as you think…” (Michelangelo to Buonarroto, September 1515)
Michelangelo to Buonarroto (September and October 1512).
In 1545.
It is for Donato Giannotti that Michelangelo made the bust of Brutus. A few years before the Dialogue, in 1536, Alessandro de’ Medici had just been assassinated by Lorenzino, who was celebrated, as another Brutus.
De’ giorni che Dante consumò nel cercare l’Inferno e ‘l Purgatorio. — The question that the friends are discussing is to know how many days Dante spent in Hell: is it from Friday evening to Saturday evening, or from Thursday evening to Sunday morning? Recourse is had to Michelangelo, who knew the work of Dante better than anyone.
Michelangelo — (or Giannotti, who speaks in his name) — is careful to distinguish from tyrants the hereditary kings or the constitutional princes: “I do not speak here of princes who possess their power by the authority of centuries, or by the will of the people, and who govern their city in perfect accord of mind with the people…”
6 May 1527.
Expulsion of Ippolito and Alessandro de’ Medici. (17 May 1527)
2 July 1528.
Busini, according to the confidences of Michelangelo.
Condivi. — “And certainly,” Condivi adds, “he would have done better to lend his ear to good counsel; for when the Medici returned, he was beheaded.”
Letter of Michelangelo to Battista della Palla. (25 September 1529)
Segni.
Letter of Michelangelo to Battista della Palla. (25 September 1529)
22 October 1529.
He wrote him new letters, conjuring him to return.
Four days earlier, his pension had been taken from him by decree of the Signoria.
According to a letter of Michelangelo to Sebastiano del Piombo, he would have had also to pay the Commune a fine of 1,500 ducats.
“When pope Clement and the Spaniards came to lay siege before Florence,” Michelangelo relates to Francisco de Hollanda, “the enemies were long held up by the engines I had had raised upon the towers. One night, I had the exterior of the walls covered with sacks of wool; another, I had ditches dug, which I filled with powder, in order to burn the Castilians; I made their torn limbs leap into the air… This is what painting serves for! It serves for engines and instruments of war; it serves to give a proper form to bombards and arquebuses; it serves to throw bridges and to fashion ladders; it serves above all for the plans and proportions of fortresses, of bastions, of ditches, of mines and counter-mines…”

(Francisco de Hollanda: Dialogue on painting in the city of Rome. Third part, 1549)
Letter of Sebastiano del Piombo to Michelangelo. (29 April 1531)
Condivi. — As early as 11 December 1530, Michelangelo’s pension was reinstated by the pope.
Autumn 1530. — The statue is at the Museo Nazionale of Florence.
In 1544.
In these same years, the sombrest of his life, Michelangelo, by a savage reaction of his nature against the Christian pessimism that stifled him, executed works of an audacious paganism, such as the Leda caressed by the Swan (1529–1530), which, painted for the duke of Ferrara, then given by Michelangelo to his pupil Antonio Mini, was carried by the latter to France, where it was destroyed, it is said, around 1643, by Sublet des Noyers, for its lasciviousness. A little later, Michelangelo painted for Bartolommeo Bettini a cartoon of Venus caressed by Love, of which Pontormo made a picture which is at the Uffizi. Other drawings, of a grandiose and severe shamelessness, are probably of the same epoch. Charles Blanc describes one of them, “in which one sees the transports of a violated woman, who struggles robustly against a more robust ravisher, but not without expressing an involuntary feeling of happiness and pride.”
Night was probably sculpted in the autumn of 1530; it was finished in the spring of 1531; Dawn, in September 1531; Twilight and Day, a little later. — See Dr. Ernst Steinmann: Das Geheimnis der Medicigräber Michel Angelos, 1907, Hiersemann, Leipzig.
Poems, CIX, 16, 17. — Frey dates them to 1545.
Michelangelo imagines a dialogue between Florence and the banished Florentines.
Poems, CIX, 48. See in the Annexes, VII.
Letter of Sebastiano del Piombo to Michelangelo (24 February 1531). It was the first letter he wrote him after the sack of Rome:

“God knows how happy I have been that after so many miseries, troubles and dangers, the all-powerful Lord has left us alive and in good health by his mercy and his pity: a thing truly miraculous, when I think of it… Now, my compère, that we have passed through water and fire, and that we have known things unimaginable, let us thank God for everything, and this little of life that remains to us, let us pass it at least in rest, as far as possible. One must count very little on what Fortune will do, so wicked and painful is she…”

Their letters were opened. Sebastiano recommends Michelangelo, who was suspect, to disguise his handwriting.
Poems, XXXVIII. See in the Annexes, VIII.
”… Non voria che ve fachinasti tanto…” (Letter of Pier Paolo Marzi to Michelangelo, 20 June 1531) — Cf. letter of Sebastiano del Piombo to Michelangelo. (16 June 1531)
Letter of Giovanni Battista di Paolo Mini to Valori. (29 September 1531)
”… Ne aliquo modo laborare debeas, nisi in sepultura et opera nostra, quam tibi commisimus…”
Letter of Benvenuto della Volpaja to Michelangelo. (26 November 1531)
“If you had not the shield of the pope,” Sebastiano writes him, “they would leap like serpents.” (Saltariano come serpenti.) (15 March 1532)
The only matter remaining was to deliver for the tomb, which was to be raised at San Pietro in Vincoli, six statues begun and not finished. (Without doubt, Moses, the Victory, the Slaves, and the figures of the Boboli grotto)
Letter of Sebastiano del Piombo to Michelangelo. (6 April 1532)
Many a time, Clement VII had to take Michelangelo’s defence against his nephew, the Duke Alessandro. Sebastiano del Piombo relates to Michelangelo a scene of this sort, where “the pope spoke with so much vehemence, fury and resentment, in terms so terrible, that it is not permitted to write them.” (16 August 1533)
Condivi.
Michelangelo had executed, partially, seven statues (the two tombs of Lorenzo of Urbino and of Giuliano of Nemours, and the Madonna). He had not begun the four statues of Rivers which he wished to make; and he abandoned to others the figures for the tombs of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and of Giuliano brother of Lorenzo.
Vasari asked Michelangelo, on 17 March 1563, “in what fashion he had thought of the paintings on the walls.”
They no longer even knew where to place the statues already made, nor what statues he had wanted to make for the niches that remained empty. In vain Vasari and Ammanati, charged by Duke Cosimo I with finishing the work undertaken by Michelangelo, addressed themselves to him: he no longer remembered anything. “Memory and spirit have gone before me,” he wrote in August 1553, “to await me in the other world.”
Michelangelo received the right of Roman citizenship on 20 March 1546.
Buonarroto, dead of the plague, in 1528.
In June 1534.
Poems, LVIII. See in the Annexes, IX.
Poems, XLIX. See in the Annexes, X.