Biagio da Cesena, the pope's master of ceremonies, complained that so many naked figures made the painting more appropriate for bath-rooms and stables than for a chapel. What was the surprise of Biagio, when the painting was thrown open to the public, to find that the infernal judge Minos, with ass's ears, was his own portrait! He begged the pope to punish the artist; but Paul replied, "If the painter had placed thee in purgatory, I should have used every effort to help thee; but since he has put thee in hell, it is useless to have recourse to me, because ex infernis nulla est redemptio."
Paul IV. later complained that the figures were shamefully nude, and desired to have them covered. "Tell his Holiness," said Michael Angelo, "that this is a mere trifle, and can be easily done; let him mend the world, paintings are easily mended." Paul finally had the nude figures draped by Daniele da Volterra, who thereupon bore the nickname of "the breeches-maker."
While painting this picture, the artist fell from the scaffold and injured his leg seriously. He refused to allow anything to be done for him, but his friend, the surgeon Rontini, forced his way into the house, and cared for him until he recovered.
These eight years had been the happiest of Michael Angelo's life. Before this time he had been cold in manner, often melancholy, and sometimes overbearing; now he was gentle, cheerful, and affectionate. He had written home in early life, "I have no friends; I need none, and wish to have none." Now he had found, what every human being needs, a friend whose tastes and aspirations were like his own. At sixty, he met and loved Vittoria Colonna, a woman whose mind was henceforward to be his inspiration, and whose sweet nature was to be his rest and satisfaction forever. For such a mind as Michael Angelo's there are few kindred spirits. Fortunate was he that the blessed gift came, even though late in life.
Vittoria was the daughter of Fabrizio Colonna, and the widow of Marchese di Pescara, the two highest nobles and generals of her time. Tenderly reared and highly educated, she had married at nineteen, her husband soon after engaging in the wars of the time. He was wounded at Pavia, and died before his young wife could reach him. He was buried at Milan, but the body was afterwards removed to Naples with great magnificence.
Vittoria, childless, well-nigh heart-broken, turned to literature as her solace. She desired to enter a convent; but the bishop of Carpentros, afterwards a cardinal, and an intimate friend of Vittoria, hastened to Paul III., who forbade the abbess and nuns of San Silvestro, on pain of excommunication, to permit her to take the veil. Vittoria must not be lost to the world.
When her poems were published, says T. Adolphus Trollope, in his life of this charming woman, "copies were as eagerly sought for as the novel of the season at a nineteenth-century circulating library. Cardinals, bishops, poets, wits, diplomatists, passed them from one to another, made them the subject of their correspondence with each other and with the fair mourner."
Hallam says, "The rare virtues and consummate talents of this lady were the theme of all Italy in that brilliant age of her literature."
Vittoria Colonna is one of the best illustrations in history of what a noble and intellectual woman can do for the upbuilding of society. Many gifted men gave her a sincere affection, and she held that affection while life lasted. She was well read in history, religious matters, and classic literature. Her first visit to Rome was a continued ovation. Even the Emperor Charles V. called upon her. Unselfish, sympathetic, with a gentle and winsome manner that drew every one into confidence, she proved herself a companion for the most highly educated, and a helper for the lowly.
When she visited Ferrara, Duke Hercules II., who had married Renée of France, the daughter of Louis XII., received her, says Trollope, "with every possible distinction on the score of her poetical celebrity, and deemed his city honored by her presence. He invited, we are told, the most distinguished poets and men of letters of Venice and Lombardy to meet her at Ferrara. And so much was her visit prized that when Cardinal Giberto sent thither his secretary, Francesco della Torre, to persuade her to visit his episcopal city, Verona, that ambassador wrote to his friend Bembo, at Venice, that he had like to have been banished by the Duke, and stoned by the people, for coming there with the intention of robbing Ferrara of its most precious treasure, for the purpose of enriching Verona."… The learned and elegant Bembo writes of her that he considered her poetical judgment as sound and authoritative as that of the greatest masters of the art of song… Bernardo Tasso made her the subject of several of his poems. Giovio dedicated to her his life of Pescara, and Cardinal Pompeo Colonna his book on "The Praises of Women;" and Contarini paid her the far more remarkable compliment of dedicating to her his work "On Free Will."
"Paul III. was," as Muratori says, "by no means well disposed towards the Colonna family. Yet Vittoria must have had influence with the haughty and severe old Farnese. For both Bembo and Fregoso, the Bishop of Naples, have taken occasion to acknowledge that they owed their promotion to the purple in great measure to her."
It is probable that she first met Michael Angelo in the year 1536. He was then sixty-one, and she forty-six. "A woman," says Grimm, "needs not extreme youth to captivate the mind of a man who discovers in her the highest intelligence… She belonged to that class of women who, apparently with no will of their own, never seek to extort anything by force, and yet obtain everything which is placed before them… How tenderly she exercised her authority over Michael Angelo, who had never before been approached; whom she now for the first time inspired with the happiness of yielding to a woman, and for whom the years which she passed at that time in Rome she made a period of happiness, which he had never before known… Whenever we contemplate the life of great men, the most beautiful part of their existence is that, when meeting with a power equal to their own, they find one worthy of measuring the depths of their mind… There is no deeper desire than that of meeting such a mind; no greater happiness than having found it; no greater sorrow than to resign this happiness, whether it be that it has never been enjoyed, or that it has been lost."
Francesco d'Ollanda, a portrait-painter, has described one of the Sundays which he spent in the company of Michael Angelo and Vittoria, "the latter of whom he calls beautiful, pure in conduct, and acquainted with the Latin tongue; in short, she is adorned with every grace which can redound to a woman's praise."
When Michael Angelo arrived at her home on that Sunday, Vittoria, "who could never speak without elevating those with whom she conversed and even the place where she was, began to lead the conversation with the greatest art upon all possible things, without, however, touching even remotely upon painting. She wished to give Michael Angelo assurance." She said to him, "I cannot but admire the manner in which you withdraw yourself from the world, from useless conversation, and from all the offers of princes who desire paintings from your hand, – how you avoid it all, and how you have disposed the labor of your whole life as one single, great work."
"Gracious lady," replied Michael Angelo, "these are undeserved praises; but, as the conversation has taken this turn, I must here complain of the public. A thousand silly reproaches are brought against artists of importance. They say that they are strange people, that they are not to be approached, that there is no bearing with them. No one, on the contrary, can be so natural and human as great artists… How should an artist, absorbed in his work, take from it time and thought to drive away other people's ennui?.. An artist who, instead of satisfying the highest demands of his art, tries to suit himself to the great public, who has nothing strange or peculiar in his personal exterior, or rather what the world calls so, – will never become an extraordinary mind. It is true, as regards the ordinary race of artists, we need take no lantern to look for them; they stand at the corner of every street throughout the world, ready for all who seek them… True art is made noble and religious by the mind producing it. For, for those who feel it, nothing makes the soul so religious and pure as the endeavor to create something perfect, for God is perfection, and whoever strives after it is striving after something divine. True painting is only an image of the perfection of God, a shadow of the pencil with which he paints, – a melody, a striving after harmony."
And then, says d'Ollanda, "Vittoria began a eulogium upon painting; she spoke of its ennobling influence upon a people, – how it led them to piety, to glory, to greatness, until the tears came into her eyes from the emotion within."
For ten or twelve years, in the midst of long separations and many sorrows, this affection of Vittoria and Michael Angelo shed its transcendent light over two great lives. It was impossible not to love a woman with such tenderness, sympathy, and sincerity. We may admire a beautiful or a brilliant woman, but if she lacks tenderness and sincerity the world soon loses its allegiance. When political changes made it necessary for her to leave Rome and go to the Convent of St. Catherine at Viterbo, Michael Angelo wrote her daily, while he painted in the Pauline Chapel, after the "Last Judgment" was finished, the "Crucifixion of Peter," and the "Conversion of Paul." In 1542 she wrote him tenderly, "I have not answered your letter before, thinking that if you and I continue to write according to my obligation and your courtesy, it will be necessary that I leave St. Catherine's Chapel, without finding myself with the sisters at the appointed hours, and that you must abandon the Pauline Chapel, and not keep yourself all the day long in sweet colloquy with your paintings … so that I from the brides of Christ, and you from his vicar, shall fall away."
However she may chide him for writing too frequently, his words and works are most precious to her. When he paints for her a picture, she writes, "I had the greatest faith in God, that he would give you a supernatural grace to paint this Christ; then I saw it, so wonderful that it surpassed in every way my expectations. Being emboldened by your miracles, I desired that which I now see marvellously fulfilled, that is, that it should stand in every part in the highest perfection, and that one could not desire more nor reach forward to desire so much. And I tell you that it gave me joy that the angel on the right hand is so beautiful; for the Archangel Michael will place you, Michael Angelo, on the right hand of the Lord at the judgment day. And meanwhile I know not how to serve you otherwise than to pray to this sweet Christ, whom you have so well and perfectly painted, and to entreat you to command me as altogether yours in all and through all."
What delicate appreciation of the genius of the man she loved! How it must have stimulated and blessed him! But more than all else she loved Michael Angelo for the one thing women value most in men, the strength and constancy of a nature that gives a single and lasting devotion.
She gave to Michael Angelo a vellum book, containing one hundred and three of her sonnets, and sent him forty new ones which she composed at the convent of Viterbo. These he had bound up in the same book which he received from her; her for whom, he said, "I would have done more than for any one else whom I could name in the world." He wrote back his thanks with the sweet self-abnegation of love.
"And well I see how false it were to think
That any work, faded and frail, of mine,
Could emulate the perfect grace of thine.
Genius, and art, and daring, backward shrink.
A thousand works from mortals like to me
Can ne'er repay what Heaven has given thee."
She inspired him to write poetry. "The productions of our great artist's pen," says John Edward Taylor, "rank unquestionably in the number of the most perfect of his own or any subsequent age. Stamped by a flow of eloquence, a purity of style, an habitual nobleness of sentiment, they discover a depth of thought rarely equalled, and frequently approaching to the sublimity of Dante."
Several of his most beautiful sonnets were to Vittoria: —
"If it be true that any beauteous thing
Raises the pure and just desire of man
From earth to God, the eternal fount of all,
Such I believe my love: for, as in her
So fair, in whom I all besides forget,
I view the gentle work of her Creator;
I have no care for any other thing
Whilst thus I love. Nor is it marvellous,
Since the effect is not of my own power,
If the soul doth by nature, tempted forth,
Enamored through the eyes,
Repose upon the eyes which it resembleth,
And through them riseth to the primal love,
As to its end, and honors in admiring:
For who adores the Maker needs must love his work."
"If a chaste love, exalted piety,
If equal fortune between two who love,
Whose every joy and sorrow are the same,
One spirit only governing two hearts, —
If one soul in two bodies made eterne,
Raising them both to Heaven on equal wings, —
If the same flame, one undivided ray,
Shine forth to each, from inward unity, —
If mutual love, for neither's self reserved,
Desiring only the return of love, —
If that which one desires the other swift
Anticipates, impelled by an unconscious power, —
Are signs of an indissoluble faith,
Shall aught have power to loosen such a bond?"
John Edward Taylor.
In 1544 the Colonna estates were confiscated by the pope, after a contest between Paul III. and the powerful Colonnas, in which the latter were defeated, and Vittoria retired to the Benedictine Convent of St. Anna. Here her health failed. The celebrated physician and poet Fracastoro said, "Would that a physician for her mind could be found! Otherwise, the fairest light in this world will, from causes by no means clear, be extinguished and taken from our eyes."
At the beginning of 1547 she became dangerously ill, and was conveyed to the palace of her relative Giuliano Cesarini, the only one of her kindred in Rome. She died towards the last of February, 1547, at the age of fifty-seven.
She requested to be buried like the sisters with whom she last resided, and so entirely were her wishes carried out that her place of sepulture is unknown.
Michael Angelo staid beside her to the very last. When she was gone he almost lost his senses. Says his pupil, Condivi, "He bore such a love to her that I remember to have heard him say that he grieved at nothing so much as that when he went to see her pass from this life he had not kissed her brow or her face, as he kissed her hand. After her death he frequently stood trembling and as if insensible."
He wrote several sonnets to her memory.
"When the prime mover of my many sighs
Heaven took through death from out her earthly place,
Nature, that never made so fair a face,
Remained ashamed, and tears were in all eyes.
O fate, unheeding my impassioned cries!
O hopes fallacious! O thou spirit of grace,
Where art thou now? Earth holds in its embrace
Thy lovely limbs, thy holy thoughts the skies.
Vainly did cruel Death attempt to stay
The rumor of thy virtuous renown,
That Lethe's waters could not wash away!
A thousand leaves, since he hath stricken thee down,
Speak of thee, nor to thee would heaven convey,
Except through death, a refuge and a crown."
Henry W. Longfellow.
The monument of Julius had at last been completed, and placed in the Church of San Pietro in Vincola. In 1546, Antonio di San Gallo, the director of the building of St. Peter's, died, and Michael Angelo was commissioned to carry forward the work. Fortunately Vittoria lived to see this honor conferred upon him.
He was now seventy-one years old. For the remaining eighteen years of his life, he devoted himself to this great labor, without compensation. When Paul III., with Cardinal Marcello, summoned Michael Angelo to talk over some alleged defects, the aged artist boldly replied to the cardinal, "I am not nor will I consent to be obliged to tell, to your eminence or any one else, what I ought or wish to do. Your office is to bring money and guard it from thieves, and the designing of the building is left to me." Then he said to the pope, "Holy Father, you see what I gain; if these fatigues which I endure do not benefit my soul, I lose both time and labor." The pope, who loved him, placed his hands on his shoulders, saying, "You benefit both soul and body: do not doubt."
When asked if the new dome would not surpass that of the Duomo of Florence, by Brunelleschi, he said, "It will be more grand, but not more beautiful."
Michael Angelo lived very simply in Rome, though he had amassed a large property, most of which he left to his nephew Leonardo, to whom and his family he was tenderly attached. When this nephew was married, the sculptor wrote him "not to care about a great dowry, but that you should look to a healthy mind, a healthy body, good blood, and good education, and what sort of family it is… Above all, seek the counsel of God, for it is a great step."
Michael Angelo was devotedly attached to Urbino, who had been his servant for twenty-six years, and who loved him so much, says Vasari, "that he had nursed him in sickness, and slept at night in his clothes beside him, the better to watch for his comforts." One day the artist said to him, "When I die, what wilt thou do?" – "Serve some one else," was the reply. "Thou poor creature, I must save thee from that," said the sculptor, and immediately gave him two thousand crowns.
At Urbino's death, when his master was about eighty, Michael Angelo wrote Vasari, in deep grief, of his "infinite loss." "Nor have I now left any other hope than that of rejoining him in Paradise. But of this God has given me a foretaste, in the most blessed death that he has died; his own departure did not grieve him, as did the leaving me in this treacherous world, with so many troubles. Truly is the best part of my being gone with him, nor is anything now left me except an infinite sorrow."
The artist was again and again urged to return to Florence, by the reigning dukes, but he replied, "You must see by my handwriting that I touch the twenty-fourth hour, and no thought is now born in my mind in which death is not mixed."
He was implored on every side to carve statues and paint pictures. He promised Francis I. of France a work in marble, in bronze, and in painting. "Should death interrupt this desire," said Michael Angelo, "then, if it be possible to sculpture or paint in the other world, I shall not fail to do so, where no one becomes old."
He furnished plans for several Roman gates which Pius IV., who succeeded Paul IV., wished to rebuild, and made designs for various other buildings and public squares. He erected the Church of St. Mary of the Angels, amid the ruins of the Baths of Diocletian. "Nothing exists in architecture," says Mr. Heath Wilson, "which exceeds the plan of this church in beauty and variety of form. The general proportions are so harmonious, the lines of the plan so gracefully disposed, the form of the whole so original, that, without looking at the elevations, the eye is delighted by the evidence on all sides of the imagination, taste, and skill shown by the venerable architect in this superb work."
The great sculptor never ceased to work or to study. When old he drew a picture representing himself as an aged man in a cart, with these words underneath: Ancora impara (still learning). He painted but two portraits, one of Vittoria Colonna, and one of young Tommaso dei Cavalieri, whom he tenderly loved. To this youth, whom Varchi, the Florentine professor and court scholar, declared to be the most attractive young man he had ever known, Michael Angelo wrote this beautiful sonnet: —
"Through thee I catch a gleam of tender glow,
Which with my own eyes I had failed to see;
And walking onward step by step with thee,
The once oppressing burdens lighter grow.
With thee, my grovelling thoughts I heavenward raise,
Borne upward by thy bold, aspiring wing;
I follow where thou wilt, – a helpless thing,
Cold in the sun, and warm in winter days.
My will, my friend, rests only upon thine;
Thy heart must every thought of mine supply;
My mind expression finds in thee alone.
Thus like the moonlight's silver ray I shine:
We only see her beams on the far sky,
When the sun's fiery rays are o'er her thrown."
His last work was a group of the Virgin and the dead Christ, which he intended should be placed on an altar over his own tomb; but it was left unfinished from a flaw in the marble, and is now in the cathedral in Florence. Vasari found the aged artist working at it late at night, when he had arisen from his bed because he could not sleep. A tallow candle was placed in his pasteboard cap, so as to leave his hands free for work. Once, as they were looking at the statue, Michael Angelo suffered the lantern which he held in his hand to fall, and they were left in darkness. He remarked, "I am so old that Death often pulls me by the cape, and bids me go with him; some day I shall fall myself, like this lamp, and the light of life will be extinguished."
To the last Michael Angelo was always learning. He used often to visit the Vatican to study the Torso Belvedere, which he declared had been of the greatest benefit to him.
In 1563-64 he was elected vice-president of the Florentine Academy of Fine Arts. That winter his strength failed rapidly, though all was done for him that love and honor could possibly do, for he had many devoted friends among all classes, and was constantly aiding artists and others. He did not fear death, for he said, "If life be a pleasure, since death also is sent by the hand of the same master, neither should that displease us."
Between three and four o'clock in the afternoon of the 18th of February, 1564, the same month in which Vittoria died, the great man passed away, in the ninetieth year of his age. Daniele da Volterra, Condivi, and Cavalieri stood by his bedside. His last words to them were, "I give my soul to God, my body to the earth, and my worldly possessions to my nearest of kin."
The pope and the Romans were determined to keep the dead Michael Angelo in Rome; but his wish had been to lie in Florence. The body, therefore, was conveyed to the latter city, disguised as a bale of merchandise, and buried in Santa Croce, on Sunday night, March 12th, the Tuscan artists following with their lighted torches, accompanied by thousands of citizens. In the month of July a grand memorial service was held, in the Church of San Lorenzo, for the illustrious dead, paintings and statuary surrounding a catafalque fifty-four feet high.
After thirty years of voluntary exile, the melancholy, solitary, great-souled man lay in his native Florence. He had loved liberty and uprightness. He had been ambitious, and devoted to his masterly work, with the will-power and intensity which belong to genius. He had allowed no obstacles to stand in his path, – neither lack of money nor jealousy of artists. He had faith in himself. He spoke sometimes too plainly, but almost always justly. Cold and unapproachable though he was, children loved him, and for them he would stop and make sketches on the street. He had the fearlessness of one who rightly counts manhood above all titles. He was too noble to be trifling, or petty, or self-indulgent. Great in sculpture, painting, poetry, architecture, engineering, character, he has left an imperishable name. Taine says, "There are four men in the world of art and of literature exalted above all others, and to such a degree as to seem to belong to another race; namely, Dante, Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Michael Angelo."