(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:
Most artists who had received a papal commission of this magnitude began their work with an army of assistants. Bramante, with a show of giving his enemy every assistance, brought some experienced fresco-painters from Florence and erected a scaffolding whereby they might get at the ceiling. Furious and suspicious of everything and everybody, Michael Angelo began by declaring Bramante’s scaffolding to be useless and by raising another. Next he got rid of his assistants. One morning he got there early, destroyed everything they had done, locked himself in, and refused to admit the Florentines.
During the next four years, working feverishly and in secret, the sculptor accomplished the mightiest series of paintings in the world. He had endless troubles and difficulties. The work was new to him, and he had to learn its technique as he went along. Hardly had he finished painting one panel, ‘The Deluge,’ when the surface became mouldy and had to do it all over again. All this time his relatives badgered him for money; the Pope, irritated at his secrecy and seeming slowness, threatened to have him thrown from the top of his scaffolding, and at last, worn out, but still not content with his creations, Michael Angelo, after lying for four years on his back to paint this ceiling, once more stood erect and allowed the scaffolding to be taken down on All Saints Day 1512.
His worst enemies were amazed at the greatness and magnitude of his achievement. Raphael, great enough himself to fear no rival, was the first to praise it, thanking God aloud that he had been born in the same century. No photographs can do justice to what Raphael and his contemporaries then saw. In default of the original, we can but show a single figure, and let the imagination do the rest.
Michael Angelo divided the great ablong space of the ceiling into nine principal sections, or rather three groups of three scenes each. The first group, illustrating ‘The Creation of the World,’ consisted of (1) ‘God Dividing Light from Darkness,’ (2) ‘God Creating the Luminaries,’ and (3) ‘God Blessing the Earth’. The second group, illustrating ‘The Fall of Man’, showed (4) ‘The Creation of Adam’, (5) “The Creation of Eve,’ and (6) ‘The Temptation and Fall.’ The last three, illustrating the uselessness of sacrifice under the old dispensation, represented (7) ‘The Sacrifice of Noah,’ (8) ‘The Deluge,’ and ‘The Drunkenness of Noah.’ These nine panels were knit together by a connecting framework in which were placed single figures of Prophets, Sibyls, and other decorative figures, lunettes and triangles, so that the whole appeared as an elaborate architectural roof ornamented with reliefs and sculptured figures among which nine great pictures had been inserted.
The work was completed, but Michael Angelo at thirty-seven was an old man. His health was shattered. Working for months on end with his head thrown back had strained his neck and brought on painful swellings on the glands; his sight was injured to such an extent that for long afterwards he could not read a book or letter unless he held it above his head. Then, when the old Pope, satisfied at last, might have rewarded the heroic artist Julius died and was succeeded by Leo X, who had work for Raphael, but none for Michael Angelo.
The harassed sculptor went back to Florence, where he set to work on another masterpiece of sculpture, the ‘Tomb of Lorenzo de Medici,’ with its beautiful recumbent figures of ‘Night’ and ‘Morning,’ ‘Dawn’ and ‘Twilight.’ Worse troubles were in store for him. Disgusted with all things, including himself, he threw himself into the revolution which convulsed Florence in 1527. Though no engineer like Leonardo, the republican revolutionaries put him in charge of the fortification of the city. Distrustful of everybody, Michael Angelo feared that Malatesta Baglione, the general of the Florentine troops, might betray the city to the troops of the new Pope (Clement VII); his warning unheeded by the authorities, he feared the hostility of the powerful commander, and giving way to attack of nerves he fled to Venice for his life. There he was safe and might have gone to France, but an appeal to his honor brought him back to Florence. Once more he took his place in the fighting line, and six months later Malatesta Baglione, as he foresaw, betrayed the city to the Emperor.
Irony of fate! The life of the wretched sculptor was spared in order that he might work again for the glory of those tyrants, the Medici, against whom he had fought. In 1534, another Pope, Paul III, called him to Rome to enter on a new project. Again the sculptor was asked to paint, to cover the immense wall at the entrance to the Sistine Chapel with a fresco representing ‘The Last Judgment’. He began the work when he was sixty one, and again shutting himself up, accomplished the task in a little over five years. It was no work for an old man of nearly seventy, and the following year the sculptor had to turn from painting to architecture; by command of the Pope he designed the mighty Dome which to all the world today is the sign and symbol of the Eternal City.
Vasari, who visited the old man when he was eighty eight, gives a wonderful picture of Michael Angelo’s last years. He lived like a poor man, ate hardly anything but a little bread and drank but a little wine. Unable to sleep, he would get up at night to work with his chisel, and made himself a paper helmet in which a candle was fixed, so that he might have light to work without embarrassing his hands.
On February 12, 1564, the old man spent the whole day on his feet working at a ‘Pieta’. Two days afterwards he was seized with fever, but with his usual obstinacy refused to see a doctor or to go to bed. On the 17th he consented to be put to bed, and fully conscious, dictated his will, bequeathing ‘his soul to God and his body to the earth’. About five o’ clock on the following afternoon, surrounded by his faithful servant and a few friends, the worn-out genius breathed his last and found that rest which had never been granted him in life.
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