The Wonder Of The Renaissance

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

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Nine people out of ten, if asked to name the greatest artist who ever lived, would reply Michael Angelo Buonarotti, who was born in 1475 at Castel Caprese, a small town near Florence, of which his father was chief magistrate. The babe was put out to nurse with the wife of a marble worker, and in later days the great sculptor jokingly attributed his vocation to his foster-mother’s milk. His father had other ideas for him, and used a stick freely to impress on the lad the advantages of a commercial career, but Michael Angelo was obstinate and intractable. At last the father gave way, and when the son was thirteen he apprenticed him to Ghirlandaio for three years. Long before his apprenticeship was out, the boy had shown a preference for sculpture. His talent in modeling was brought to the notice of Lorenzo de Medici, who nominated him for the famous ‘Garden School’ of sculpture which he had founded under the direction of Donatello’s chief assistant Bartoldo. The ruler of Florence, pleased with the progress of his protege took him to his household, and made him an allowance of 500 ducats a month. This lasted till 1492, when Lorenzo died, and the youth had to make his own way in the world. Meanwhile a new influence came into his life.

In 1400, when Michael Angelo was boy of fifteen, Savanarola had begun to preach his impassioned sermons in Florence. The whole city trembled at the terrible voice, which hurled thunderbolts at the Pope himself. All Florence was like a revival meeting; people rushed about the street weeping and shouting, wealthy citizens became monks, high officials abdicated their positions.

Michael Angelo for the first time in his life was afraid, afraid of the unknown horrors predicted for Florence. He was miserable under the degenerate Piero de Medici, a stupid tyrant who wasted his time and his talent by commanding him to model a statue in snow. One night a poet friend of the sculptor dreamt that the dead Lorenzo appeared to him and bade him warn Piero that soon he would be driven from his house, never to return. He told the Prince, who laughed and had him well cudgelled; he told Michael Angelo, who believed and fled to Venice.

That was in October 1494. A month later Piero fled in his turn, and Florence, with the support of Savonarola, was declared a republic, owning no king but Jesus Christ. Michael Angelo soon got over his superstitious terrors. That winter he spent at Bologna in learned circles, and forgetting Savonarola, he read Dante and Petrarch; he was absorbed by the beauty of Nature and the dignity of the antique world. At the very time when his contemporaries at Florence were fanatically indulging in a religious revival, Michael Angelo seemed to assert his paganism by carving a ‘Sleeping Cupid’ so full of Greek feeling that it was sold in Rome to the Cardinal San Giorgio as an antique by a Greek sculptor. When he discovered he had been cheated, the deceived collector was so delighted to think a living Italian could rival the dead Greeks that he sent for the young sculptor and took him under his protection. In 1496, while the Florentines were heaping pagan pictures, ornaments, and books on Savonarola’s ‘Bonfire of Vanities’, when his own brother, the monk Leonardo, was being prosecuted for his faith in the Friar, Michael Angelo in Rome seemed anxious to prove himself a pagan of pagans, producing a ‘Bacchus,’ an ‘Adonis,’ and the lovely ‘Cupid’ which is now at South Kensington.

On May 23, 1498, the fickle populace of Florence turned against its idol. Savonarola was burnt to death at the stake. Still Michael Angelo appeared to take no notice. No mention of Savonarola or his martyrdom can be found in any of the sculptor’s letters.

But in his own art he made his own comment. From 1498 to 1501 he worked feverishly, perhaps remorsefully, on a marble group the like of which had never before been seen; a Virgin whose haunting face is impressed with a ‘sorrow more beautiful than beauty’s self,’ across whose knees is lying a Christ of such serene physical beauty and perfection that we say, ‘His is not dead but sleepeth.’

This was Michael Angelo’s confession to his Maker, the supreme ‘Pieta’ at St. Peter’s Rome: a work of which the exquisite beauty is only equalled by its ineffable sadness. Botticelli, too, was more moved by the end of Savonarola than ever he had been by his preaching. But Botticelli was then an old man: Michael Angelo had just turned twenty three and was only on the threshold of his career. Already his pagan days were over. Melancholy claimed him for her own, and never after let him go. In five years he had established his reputation as the greatest sculptor in the world, but then, as now, glory is not necessarily remunerative. His family believed he was making a fortune; and too proud to acknowledge his true poverty-stricken condition, he starved himself to give alms to his kindred. His own father pestered and abused him worst of all; his whole family bled him white, and then denounced him as being mean.