Читать книгу Michelangelo - Romain Rolland - Страница 6

Michelangelo was born on the sixth of March, 1475, at Caprese, in Casentino, of the ancient family of the Buonarroti-Simoni, who are mentioned in the Florentine chronicles from the twelfth century. His father, Lodovico di Lionardo Buonarroti-Simoni, was then Podesta of Caprese and Chiusi. His mother, Francesca di Neri di Miniato del Sera, died when he was only six years old, and some years later his father married Lucrezia Ubaldini. Michelangelo had four brothers: Lionardo, who was two years his senior; Buonarroto, born in 1477; Giovan Simoni, born in 1479; and Sigismondo, born in 1481. His foster-mother was the wife of a stone-cutter of Settignano and in later years he used to jokingly attribute his vocation to the milk upon which he had been nourished. He was sent to school in Florence under Francesco da Urbino, but he busied himself only in drawing and neglected everything else. "Because of this he greatly irritated his father and his uncles, and they often beat him cruelly, for they hated the profession of an artist, and, in their ignorance of the nobility of art, it seemed a disgrace to have one in the house."[1]

The elder Buonarroti, however, was, like his son, more violent than obstinate, and he soon allowed the boy to follow his vocation. In April, 1488, Michelangelo, by the advice of Francesco Granacci, entered the studio of Domenico and David Ghirlandajo.

That was the most famous studio in Florence. Domenico was an indefatigable worker who "longed to cover with stories the entire circuit of the walls of Florence" and possessed of a calm, simple and serene spirit, satisfied merely to exist without tormenting itself over subtleties. This fortunate being, who died at forty-four, leaving an immense mass of completed work in which the magnificence and the moral force of Florence still live, was the best guide that could have been given to the young Michelangelo. Domenico was then, from 1486 to 1490, in the fulness of his power, and at work on his masterpiece, the paintings in the Tornabuoni Chapel in S. Maria Novella.

It has been said that his influence on Michelangelo amounted to nothing, and it is true that we find no direct trace of it except in two drawings in the Louvre and the Albertina. Still, exact imitation is very rare with Michelangelo. He was made of too stubborn stuff ever to be much affected by masters or surroundings. He felt contempt for Raphael because he was impressionable, "and drew his superiority not from nature, but from study." I do not believe, however, that the time he spent in the school of Ghirlandajo had no effect upon him. Even if it did not influence his style or his method of working, he must have gained from the master of S. Maria Novella and from his wholesome work a healthy point of view and a physical and moral vigour which could have been given him by no other artist in Florence—not even the two great sculptors, Pollajuolo and Verrocchio, who were indeed not there at that time—and which acted as a powerful balance to the neuroticism of the Botticellian school. I do not doubt that Ghirlandajo helped to lay the foundations from which arose the art of the young Michelangelo devoted to the expression of force and so contemptuous of morbid sentiment.

Ghirlandajo's school was enthusiastically open-minded toward everything interesting in art. It was eclectic and encouraged intellectual curiosity. Michelangelo while he was there studied passionately both the old and the new Florentine painters and sculptors: Giotto,[2] Masaccio,[3] Donatello, Ghiberti, Benedetto da Majano, Mino da Fiesole, Antonio Rossellino and possibly, even at that time, Jacopo della Quercia and also the Flemish and the German artists, then very much in vogue in Italy, especially at the court of the Medici.[4] He made a copy in colour of Martin Schongauer's Temptation of St. Anthony and went to the Florentine fish-market to take notes for it. Later on he contemptuously disowned Flemish realism, but a trace of it was left in him always and in many of his drawings there appears a certain taste, extraordinary in an idealist, for types of marked naturalism which are sometimes trivial or almost caricature. Condivi asserts that these first attempts of Michelangelo met with such success that Ghirlandajo grew jealous.

"To take from him the credit of this copy (of the Schongauer) Ghirlandajo used to say that it came out of his atelier, as if he had had a part in it. This jealousy showed very clearly when Michelangelo asked him for the book of drawings wherein he had sketched shepherds with their flocks and dogs, landscapes, monuments, ruins, etc., and he refused to lend it to him. As a matter of fact, he always had the reputation of being rather jealous, because of his disagreeable treatment not only of Michelangelo, but also of his own brother, for when he saw the latter making good progress and showing great promise, he sent him to France, not so much for his benefit, as has been alleged, as that he himself might remain first in his art at Florence. I have mentioned this," adds Condivi, "because it has been said to me that Domenico's son was in the habit of attributing the divine excellence of Michelangelo to the training given by his father, who really did not help him in any way. It is true that Michelangelo never complained of him, but on the contrary praised him as much for his art as for his conduct."

It is very difficult to say how much is true in this story. I am reluctant to ascribe so contemptible a jealousy to Ghirlandajo, and repeat it only because of the last line where Condivi is constrained to remark on the esteem which Michelangelo, when he was an old man, expressed for his former master. Such admiration for other artists is too rare with him not to have especial weight in this case.

There is no doubt that a disagreement did arise between the master and the scholar, for though Michelangelo had in 1488 signed a contract of apprenticeship which stipulated that he should remain three years with Ghirlandajo,[5] the very next year he went with his friend Granacci into the school of Bertoldo.

Bertoldo, a pupil of Donatello, was director of the School of Sculpture and of the Museum of Antiquities maintained by Lorenzo de' Medici in the gardens of S. Marco. I think that the real reason why Michelangelo separated himself from Ghirlandajo was that after a year of feeling his way he had just discovered the essence of his genius and was drawn toward sculpture with irresistible force. It was really from painting that he was separating himself and never afterward did he consider it as his art. We might almost say that if painting has immortalised him it is in spite of himself. He never wished to be considered as anything but a sculptor.[6]

Two things drew him to Bertoldo: the hope of finding the tradition of Donatello and the fascination of the antique. He found something even more valuable there in the friendship of the prince and of the élite of the Florentine thinkers. Lorenzo took an interest in him, lodged him in the palace and admitted him to his son's table, and in this way Michelangelo found himself at the very heart of the Renaissance, in the midst of the humanists and the poets and in intimate relation with all whom Italy counted most noble; with Pico della Mirandola, with Pulci, Benevieni and especially with Poliziano, "who loved him greatly and urged him to study, although that was hardly necessary."[7]

Surrounded by this atmosphere of lofty paganism he became intoxicated with the classic idea and became himself a pagan; he made the heroic forms of Greece live again while putting into them his own savage vigour. Following the suggestions of Poliziano he wrought the bas-relief of the Combat of the Centaurs and the Lapithæ of the Casa Buonarroti, in which the figures are athletic and struggling and the faces impassive and proud. He carved the bestial face of the Laughing Satyr with its violent and strained expression as of one who was not used to laughter, and a little later the relief of Apollo and Marsyas.

Nevertheless this paganism did not touch his Christian faith at all. The struggle that was to endure almost all his life had already begun within him between those two hostile worlds which he vainly tried to reconcile. In 1489 and 1490 Savonarola began in Florence his fiery sermons on the Apocalypse and Michelangelo went to hear them with all the rest of Lorenzo's circle. He had been brought up very religiously by his father, a kind, God-fearing man of the old style, and his brother Lionardo in 1491, under the influence of Savonarola, entered the Monastery of the Dominicans at Pisa.

He could not remain indifferent to the burning words of a prophet who was like an elder brother of the prophets of the Sistine and whose sombre visions and fiery purity must have pierced the heart of the youth who listened to the preaching in S. Marco or the Duomo. I am convinced, nevertheless, that historians have very much exaggerated the effect of this influence on Michelangelo. In the beginning he certainly did not feel very strongly the heroic grandeur of the frail little preacher who from his high pulpit launched his lightnings against pope and princes. His first impression seems to have been almost entirely one of terror; he did not escape from the contagion of fear which seized the entire city at the thunder of the gloomy prophecies which held the bloody sword of God suspended over Italy and which filled the streets of Florence with people weeping madly. When at last there came the new Cyrus, foretold by the monk of S. Marco, Charles VIII, King of France, Michelangelo was seized with panic and fled to Venice (1494).

These superstitious terrors, irrational and uncontrollable, which reappeared more than once in Michelangelo's life do not prove anything in favour of his Savonarolaism. It might be supposed on the contrary that a true disciple of Savonarola would have remained beside his master rather than have abandoned him in the hour of danger. These panics which he could not control prove nothing but the unhealthy over-excitement of his nerves, which his reason fought against in vain all his life. It would be hard to find in his work at that period any appreciable effect of the ideas of Savonarola. The impassive Virgin with the robust child—the bas-relief in bronze of the Casa Buonarroti—is far more a school piece by a pupil of Donatello than a religious work. What we know of the little wooden crucifix, carved in 1494 for the prior of the Convent of S. Spirito, shows us the artist without mysticism and with a passion for the observation of nature, who was eagerly studying anatomy from corpses until their putrefaction made him ill and forced him to stop. At Bologna, where he lived in 1449 after his flight from Florence, and where he heard of the results of Savonarola's preachings—the expulsion of the Medici, the death of Pico della Mirandola and of Poliziano and the scattering of the little circle of Florentine poets and philosophers—he spent his time in reading Petrarch, Boccaccio and Dante to his protector, the noble Gianfrancesco Aldovrandi, and when he worked at the Arca (tabernacle) of S. Domenico it was to carve that athletic angel, superb and expressionless, which contrasts so strikingly with the pious figure of Niccolo dell'Arca to which it is the pendant. He was evidently much more occupied in studying and assimilating the imposing manner of Jacopo della Quercia, his indolent and heavy but powerful Siennese precursor, than in meditating on the prophecies of Savonarola.

He returned to Florence in 1495, and arrived in the midst of the struggle of the two parties, the "Arrabtiati" and the "Piagnoni," at the very height of the carnival. He was consulted about the construction of the hall of the Grand Council in the Palace of the Signory. The Virgin of Manchester which suggests the school of Ghirlandajo may be attributed to this period, and also the Entombment of the National Gallery, which with all its sad grandeur is proud and cold.

Michelangelo left Florence in June, 1496. He went to Rome and in that town so full of classic memories he absorbed himself in classic works. It is fair to say that he was never so pagan as from 1492 to 1497, the years during which the tragedy of Savonarola was enacted. This is the period of the colossal Hercules[8] in marble (1492), of the famous sleeping Cupid, wrought in the very heart of mystical Florence—and sold as an antique to Cardinal Riaro (1496)—of the large Cupid of the South Kensington, of the Dying Adonis of the Museo Nazionale and of the Drunken Bacchus which E. Guillaume calls the nearest to the antique of all modern works. These last statues, made in Rome the very year of the Bruciamento delle Vanità, when the Florentine "Piagnoni" danced in fanatic zeal around bonfires of works of art, seem almost like a defiance launched against the puritanism of Savonarola. His older brother, Lionardo, a monk at Viterbo, who was forced to flee from his monastery because of his Savonarolaist convictions, joined him in Rome and Michelangelo gave him some money with which to return to Florence, but he did not go with him. The ever-growing danger which threatened the prophet and his followers did not draw him back to his country and Savonarola's death—he was burnt in May, 1498—has not left a trace in any of his letters.[9]

I do not mean to say that he was entirely untouched by that grand and tragic drama. He was by nature silent and never spoke of what he felt most deeply, and he was also prudent and afraid of compromising himself. If Savonarola's ideas did have some influence on him it was at a later time when, in his advanced age, under the influence of strong and deep friendships, the disillusions of life and the fear of the hereafter, religious preoccupations gained with him the place of first importance. He was not among those who, like Botticelli, in 1498, consented to the dethronement of the pagan pride of the Renaissance. Religious he certainly was and a Christian as always, but his proud Christianity was not that of the rest of the world. He was never understood by his own time. Even when he was painting the Last Judgment, and his faith was most ardent, he must have scandalised the devout. He was altogether a Platonist. He could have said with Lorenzo de' Medici and his illustrious friends of the gardens of S. Marco that "without studying Plato one could neither be a good citizen nor an enlightened Christian." Savonarola undoubtedly admired and loved Plato. Still he felt the object of art to be religious edification and showed that ideal to artists in "the face of a pious woman when she is praying, illuminated by a ray of divine beauty."[10] Michelangelo despised that art made for the devout and left it to the Flemings.[11] He had a horror of sentimentality and almost of sentiment. "True painting," he said, "never will make any one shed a tear."[12]

It should contain no expression of religion or worship, for "good painting is religious and devout in itself. Among the wise nothing more elevates the soul or better raises it to adoration than the difficulty of attaining the perfection which approaches God and unites itself to Him."[13] He believed himself to be more religious in creating beautiful, harmonious human bodies than in searching for a psychological or moral expression intended "for women, especially for the old or the very young, or for monks, nuns and those who are deaf to true harmony."[14] The Pietà of St. Peter's, undertaken the year of Savonarola's death, has a more Christian character than the earlier works of Michelangelo, but this Christianity is still far from conforming to the expressive and pathetic ideal of the artists of the fifteenth century, or from the tragic expression and agony of suffering of the virgins of Donatello, Signorelli or Mantegna. Very different indeed is the noble harmony of this group and the calm beauty of the young Virgin on whose knees rests the supple body of Christ relaxed like that of a sleeping child. Even though Michelangelo explained the eternal youth of the Virgin[15] by an idea of chivalric mysticism it is evident that at that time the desire for beauty was as strong in his heart as any regard for faith and that there was a certain relationship between these beautiful Gods of Calvary and those of Olympus whose charm had intoxicated him.

PIETÀ St. Peter's, Rome (1498-1500).

Michelangelo spent two years on the Pietà.[16] In the spring of 1501 he returned to Florence and there met Cardinal Piccolomini, with whom he signed a contract to deliver in three years' time, for the sum of five hundred ducats, fifteen figures of apostles and saints for the Piccolomini altar in the Cathedral of Sienna. This was the first of those overpowering commissions which Michelangelo never hesitated to undertake in the first intoxication of his imagination without any just estimate of his powers and which weighed on him all his life, like remorse. In 1504 he had delivered only four of the figures and sixty years later in 1561 he was still tormented by the thought of this unfulfilled contract.

Another undertaking, more tempting to him by its very difficulty, took entire possession of him a few months after he had made the agreement with Cardinal Piccolomini.

A gigantic block of marble had been delivered in 1464 to Agostino di Duccio by the Board of Works of S. Maria del Fiore to be used for the statue of a prophet. The work had been interrupted at this point. The Gonfalonier Soderini wanted to entrust the completion of it to Lionardo da Vinci, but in August, 1502, it was given to Michelangelo and he set to work on it at once. From that block of marble came forth the colossal David. By January 25, 1504, the work was completed and a commission of artists among whom were Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, Lionardo da Vinci and Perugino was considering where it should be placed. They hesitated between the Loggia dei Lanzi and the entrance of the Palace of the Signory. The latter position was decided upon at the expressed preference of Michelangelo. The architects of the Duomo, Simone del Pollajuolo (Cronaca), Antonio da San Gallo, Baccio d'Agnolo and Bernardo della Cecca were charged with the transportation of the enormous mass of stone which was placed in position on the eighth of June, 1504, on the left of the entrance to the Palazzo Vecchio where until then the Judith of Donatello had stood.

To-day the David is in the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence. There it is in too confined a space. That colossus needs the open air, he stifles under the roof of a Palace and his disproportion to everything around him is shocking. We can perhaps judge better what he really is from the reproduction in bronze, which on the hill of San Miniato raises its inspiring silhouette above the town. There the irregularity of the details disappears in the impression of the whole. Incredible energy emanates from that gigantic force in repose—from that great face in the small head, and from that huge body with the slender waist, thin arms and the enormous hands with swollen veins and heavy fingers.

All of Michelangelo is there in that mixture of proud nobility and almost barbarous vulgarity. He is all there, and he only, entirely regardless of his subject. The head of the David with its wrinkled forehead, thick eyebrows and scornful lips—a type that he often used afterward—is, like the heads of Lorenzo and of Giuliano de' Medici, a lyric work into which Michelangelo poured his own sadness, disdain and melancholy.

Michelangelo had not waited to finish this work before accepting other commissions which he was to abandon along the way. In 1502 a David[17] in bronze for Pierre de Rohan, Maréchal de Gié, the favorite of Louis XII, which in the end was finished by Benedetto da Rovezzano in 1507 and sent, after the disgrace of Rohan, to the new royal favourite, Florimond Robertet, Secretary of Finance.

In 1503 he undertook twelve statues for the Cathedral of Florence, but began only one, a St. Matthew, which was never finished and is now in the Accademia delle Belle Arti. His vacillating, uncertain genius, wherein discouragement succeeded to enthusiasm, drove him into planning works with fierce energy and then almost immediately so diverted his attention that he could not force himself to finish them.

DAVID Accademia delle Belle Arti, Florence.

In 1504 the Florentine Signory brought him into competition with another great irresolute, Lionardo da Vinci, whose universal intellectual curiosity was, no less than the temperament of Michelangelo, an eternal obstacle to the achievement of his great undertakings. The two men seem to have met about 1495. They could not have understood each other very well, for they both stood alone, each in his own way. Lionardo was now fifty-two years old. When he was thirty he had left Florence, where the bitterness of the political and religious passions was unbearable to his delicate and slightly timid nature and to his serene and sceptical intelligence which was interested in everything but refused to take sides. Driven back to Florence by the death or ruin of his protectors, the Duke of Milan and Cæsar Borgia, he came into contact there from the very first with Michelangelo entirely absorbed in his own faith and passions, however changing they might be, and who, while he hated the enemies of his party and of his faith, hated still more those who had neither party nor faith. Brutally and publicly, on many occasions, Michelangelo made Lionardo feel his aversion for him.

When the Gonfalonier Soderini put the two in direct competition in a common work, the decoration of the Council Hall in the Palace of the Signory, the rivalry was intense. In May, 1504, Lionardo began the cartoon of the Battle of Anghiari. In August, 1504, Michelangelo received the order for the cartoon for the Battle of Cascine. Florence was divided into two camps keenly enthusiastic for one or the other of the rivals. Time has made them equal, for both pictures have disappeared. Michelangelo's cartoon, finished in March, 1505, was apparently destroyed about 1512, during the disturbances in Florence which resulted from the return of the Medici, and even the fragments which in 1575 were still preserved by the Strozzi in Mantua have been lost.[18]

As for Lionardo's fresco, he succeeded in destroying it himself. He took it into his head to try to perfect the technique of fresco and he gave himself up once more to his evil spirit of invention and once more everything was lost. He tried a glaze of oil which did not hold, and the painting which he abandoned in 1506 in discouragement by 1550 no longer existed.

The two cartoons of Lionardo and Michelangelo had time, nevertheless, to exert a blinding fascination over all Italian painting. They formed the style and influenced the thought of artists from 1506 on but without being able to transmit their own grandeur. Lionardo, who had a cavalry combat to represent, reasoned out coldly, as nearly as we can tell,[19] all the circumstances of a battle and then reproduced them with his marvellous lucidity which was perhaps a little too analytic to interpret the excitement of passion.

Michelangelo, who was given an episode of the war of 1364 against the Pisans under the leadership of the condottiere John Hawkwood (Giovanni Acuto) had intentionally turned his back on history and the real subject and painted naked men bathing, noble in form and free in movement, in the classic manner.[20]

The two masterpieces contained each of them the germ of a different danger; in Lionardo's the excess of analysis, in Michelangelo's the excess of abstraction. This last was the most dangerous of the two but both were of the intellect and agreed in substituting for the charm of life and of real and spontaneous movement the formula of types and of logical action.

THE HOLY FAMILY Painted for Agnolo Doni (between 1501-1505) National Gallery, London.

The influence of this work became at once universal and tyrannical. Benvenuto Cellini says in 1559: "The cartoon of Michelangelo was placed in the palace of the Medici, that of Lionardo in the Hall of the Pope. As long as they remained there they were the school of the world." Raphael copied them many times from October, 1504, until July, 1505. Fra Bartolommeo was inspired by them and Andrea del Sarto, when he was very young, spent whole days in studying them. Among the artists who taught themselves in that school are Perino del Vaga, Rosso, Battista Franco, Salviati, Vasari, Bronzino, Ridolfo Ghirlandajo, Cellini, Pontormo, Jacopo Sansovino, Franciabigio, Aristotele da San Gallo, F. Granacci, Bandinelli, Morto da Feltro, Lorenzetto—almost all the famous men of the period. This influence was certainly more dangerous than useful. The first fruits of it were the sudden unpopularity—almost like a decree of exile of all the charming primitive painters, like Pinturicchio[21] and Signorelli[22] at Rome (1508) just after their masterpieces at Sienna and Orvieto and Perugino at Florence (1504) four years after the exquisite decoration of the Cambio of Perugia—and the loss of so much grace, elegance and vigour sacrificed to a form of beauty undoubtedly superior, but to which everyone can not attain. Instead of giving them a broader point of view, the admiration for Lionardo and Michelangelo narrowed and limited their followers. During 1508-1509 Pope Julius II had the frescoes of Sodoma, Perugino, Signorelli and Piero della Francesca put aside to leave space for Raphael. Thenceforth everyone was governed by the same ideal, and whoever felt in himself fancy, imagination and youth gave them up in favour of an attempt at breadth and power which were not for him. Filippino Lippi renounced his serious simplicity for pedantic dilettanteism and affected gestures. Instead of being the first in the second rank Lorenzo di Credi, Ridolfo Ghirlandajo, Raffaellino del Garbo and Piero di Cosimo preferred to be the last of the first rank.

The same rivalry which had brought about the competition between Michelangelo and Lionardo in the Council Hall appears again in a series of works which belong to this Florentine period (1501-1505). These are representations of the "Holy Family" in which Michelangelo attempts to solve the same problem of composition as Lionardo and Fra Bartolommeo in placing the figures in a circle. Such are the two circular bas-reliefs, the Madonna and Child of the Museo Nazionale made for Taddeo Taddei and the Holy Family of the Academy of Fine Arts in London made for Bartolommeo Pitti. Chief of them all is the great picture in distemper of the Holy Family of the Uffizi painted for Agnolo Doni—a heroic work filled with the lofty serene life of Olympus and the Parthenon. The painting is the most carefully executed of all Michelangelo's. The colouring, blue, rose, orange and golden brown, has an effect that is rather inharmonious, but young and fresh. The aerial perspective is mediocre and the composition shows as usual Michelangelo's supreme contempt for the sentiment of the subject. He has filled the background with graceful nude figures simply because he considered them to be beautiful—"per mostrare maggiormente l'arte sua essere grandissima," says Vasari, and except for the type of face used for St. Joseph there is nothing religious about the group of the Holy Family. The impression is religious, nevertheless, through its grace, sweetness and proud strength. We feel that Michelangelo desired to contrast the puritan and virile sobriety of this work with the voluptuous languor of the art of Lionardo.

The calm Madonna of Bruges belongs also to this period. This was bought in 1506 by two Flemish merchants, John and Alexander Mouscron, who placed it in their chapel where Dürer had already seen it during his travels in Belgium in 1521.