Part 2 (1/2)

What Shelley wrote upon this statue may here be introduced, since it combines both points of view in a criticisour

”The countenance of this figure is theof Bacchus It looks drunken, brutal, and narrow-minded, and has an expression of dissoluteness the ure is stiff, and the manner in which the shoulders are united to the breast, and the neck to the head, abundantly inharether without unity, as was the idea of the deity of Bacchus in the conception of a Catholic On the other hand, considered reat merits The arms are executed in the reat energy, and the lines which describe the sides and thighs, and the hest order of boldness and beauty It wants, as a work of art, unity and simplicity; as a representation of the Greek deity of Bacchus, it wants everything”

Jacopo Gallo is said to have also purchased a Cupid froreat plausibility, that this Cupid was the piece which Michelangelo began when Piero de' Medici's coh, and that it therefore preceded the Bacchus in date of execution It has also been suggested that the so-called Cupid at South Kensington is the work in question We have no authentic inforton Cupid is certainly a production of the o, hidden away in the cellars of the Gualfonda (Rucellai) Gardens at Florence, by Professor Miliarini and the famous Florentine sculptor Santarelli On a cursory inspection they both declared it to be a genuine Michelangelo The left ared, and the hair had never received the sculptor's final touches Santarelli restored the arm, and the Cupid passed by purchase into the possession of the English nation This fine piece of sculpture is executed in Michelangelo's proudest, hteen, a ht knee, while the right hand is lowered to lift an arrow froround The left hand is raised above the head, and holds the bohile the left leg is so placed, with the foot firround, as to indicate that in a , and send it whistling at his adversary This choice of a elo's style; and, if we are really to believe that he intended to portray the God of love, it offers another instance of his independence of classical tradition No Greek would have thus represented Eros The lyric poets, indeed, Ibycus and Anacreon, i like the ind on an oak, or striking at his victim with an axe

But these romantic ideas did not find expression, so far as I aelo's Cupid is therefore as original as his Bacchus Much as critics have written, and with justice, upon the classical tendencies of the Italian Renaissance, they have failed to point out that the Paganism of the Cinque Cento rarely involved a servile ience of its spirit Least of all do we find either of these qualities in Michelangelo He drew inspiration froht to Nature for thethe conception he had formed Unlike the Greeks, he invariably preferred the particular to the universal, the critical estions of the possibilities of action He carved an individual being, not an abstraction or a generalisation of personality The Cupid supplies us with a splendid illustration of this criticisy, before he had for Nature and of reproducing what he saw, it not only casts light upon the spontaneous working of his genius, but it also sho the young artist had already coard the in those rough platonic sonnets, he always spoke of love as masterful and awful For his austere and ling, but a masculine tyrant, the tamer of male spirits

Therefore this Cupid, adorable in the power and beauty of his vigorous manhood, elo iure is fro a series of nobly varied line-harret is that tie should have spoiled the surface of the marble

VI

It is natural to turn frolish nation, which has recently been ascribed to Michelangelo I mean the Madonna, with Christ, S John, and four attendant ures, once in the possession of Mr H Labouchere, and now in the National Gallery We have no authentic tradition regarding this tement is the elo Internal evidence froree probable No one else upon the close of the fifteenth century was capable of producing a composition at once so coroup forer at the book she holds, and the young S John turned round to coures with the exquisitely blended youths behind hienii upon the left hand are unfinished; but had the picture been completed, we should probably have been able to point out another nificent episode in the composition, determined by the transverse line carried froh the open book and the upraised arenius on the right side Florentine painters had been wont to place attendant angels at both sides of their enthroned Madonnas Fine exaht be chosen froels inged and clothed like acolytes; the Madonna was seated on a rich throne or under a canopy, with altar-candles, wreaths of roses, flowering lilies It is characteristic of Michelangelo to adopt a conventional inality In this picture there are no accessories to the figures, and the attendant angels are Tuscan lads half draped in succinct tunics The style is rather that of a flat relief in stone than of a painting; and though weof Ghirlandajo's influence, the spirit of Donatello and Luca della Robbia are more apparent That it was the work of an inexperienced painter is shown by the failure to indicate pictorial planes In spite of the marvellous and intricate beauty of the line-coraduated distances which ht perhaps have been secured by execution in bronze or ard to ideal loveliness or dignity, but accurately studied fro models This is very obvious in the heads of Christ and S John The two adolescent genii on the right hand possess a high degree of natural grace Yet even here what strikes oneof their arms and breasts, the lithe alertness of the one lad contrasted with the thoughtful leaning languor of his cos of cores for his picture of the Golden Age have lines of equal dignity and simple beauty been developed I do not think that this Madonna, supposing it to be a genuine piece by Michelangelo, belongs to the period of his first residence in Rome In spite of its immense intellectual power, it has an air of i it to the time spent at Florence after Lorenzo de' Medici's death, when the artist was about twenty years of age

Isummarily with the Entombment in the National Gallery The picture, which is half finished, has no pedigree It was bought out of the collection of Cardinal Fesch, and pronounced to be a Michelangelo by the Munich painter Cornelius Good judges have adopted this attribution, and to differ from them requires some hardihood Still it is painful to believe that at any period of his life Michelangelo could have produced a composition so discordant, so unsatisfactory in soly

It bears indubitable traces of his influence; that is apparent in the figure of the dead Christ But this colossal nude, with the s, ree; whereas the rest of the picture shows no trace of that manner I am inclined to think that the Ento upon soelo at the advanced period when the Passion of our Lord occupied his thoughts in Ro must have been i, the coe The colouring, so far as we can understand it, rather suggests Pontorood friend, Jacopo Gallo, was again helpful to hi this Roman residence The Cardinal Jean de la Groslaye de Villiers Francois, Abbot of S Denys, and coi, wished to have a specily articles were drawn up to the following effect on August 26, 1498: ”Let it be known anddocureed with the elo, sculptor of Florence, to wit, that the said master shall in Mary clothed, with the dead Christ in her arolden ducats of the Papal mint, within the term of one year from the day of the co the payrees to disburse suuarantee and surety given by Jacopo Gallo ”And I, Jacopo Gallo, pledge elo will finish the said ithin one year, and that it shall be the finest work in marble which Rome to-day can show, and that no master of our days shall be able to produce a better And, in like e elo that theto the articles above engrossed To witness which, I, Jacopo Gallo, haveto the date of year, elo at once to the highest place a the artists of his time, and it still remains unrivalled for the union of subli The mother of the dead Christ is seated on a stone at the foot of the cross, supporting the body of her son upon her knees, gazing sadly at his wounded side, and gently lifting her left hand, as though to say, ”Behold and see!” She has the sest immense physical force We feel that such a wo a man's corpse upon her ample lap and in her powerful arms Her face, which differs from the fe woht that her age should correspond more naturally to that of her adult son Condivi reports that Michelangelo explained hiswords: ”Do you not know that chaste woer than the unchaste?

How in, into whose breast there never crept the least lascivious desire which could affect the body? Nay, I will go further, and hazard the belief that this unsullied bloo maintained in her by natural causes, ht to convince the world of the virginity and perpetual purity of the Mother This was not necessary for the Son On the contrary, in order to prove that the Son of God took upon himself, as in very truth he did take, a human body, and became subject to all that an ordinary man is subject to, with the exception of sin; the hu superseded by the divine, was left to the operation of natural laws, so that his person revealed the exact age to which he had attained

You need not, therefore, ard to these considerations, I er relatively to her Son than women of her years usually appear, and left the Son such as his ti,”

adds Condivi, ”orthy of soian, and would have been little short of marvellous in most men, but not in him, whom God and Nature fashi+oned, not merely to be peerless in his handiwork, but also capable of the divinest concepts, as innus which we have of his make clearly manifest”

The Christ is also soesting no lack of strength, but subordinating the idea of physical power to that of a refined and spiritual nature Nothing can be more lovely than the hands, the feet, the arms, relaxed in slumber Death becoure, froe, the cross, the brutal lance have been erased Michelangelo did not seek to excite pity or to stir devotion by having recourse to those mediaeval ideas which were so passionately expressed in S Bernard's hymn to the Crucified The aesthetic tone of his dead Christ is rather that of some sweet solemn strain of cathedral music, some motive from a mass of Palestrina or a Passion of Sebastian Bach Almost involuntarily there rises to the enius of earthly loveliness bewailed by everlasting beauty--

_E'en as a corpse he is fair, fair corpse as fallen aslu by and ad the Pieta ascribed it to Christoforo Solari of Milan, surna happened to overhear theraved the belt upon the Madonna's breast with his own name This he never did with any other of his works

This ious feeling was placed in the old Basilica of S Peter's, in a chapel dedicated to Our Lady of the Fever, Madonna della Febbre Here, on the night of August 19, 1503, it witnessed one of those horrid spectacles which in Italy at that period so often intervened to interrupt the rhythm of roo Borgia, Alexander VI, lay in state froh altar; but since ”it was the most repulsive, monstrous, and deformed corpse which had ever yet been seen, without any forure of humanity, sha it was transferred to the chapel of Our Lady of the Fever, and deposited in a corner by six hinds or porters and two carpenters, who had , they stripped the tiara and the robes of office from the body, wrapped it up in an old carpet, and then with force of fists and feet rammed it down into the box, without torches, without a le person to attend and bear a consecrated candle” Of such sort was the vigil kept by this solenoble obsequies of hi the loftiest throne of Christendoe The ivory-sainst that festering corpse of his Vicar on earth, ”black as a piece of cloth or the blackest mulberry,” what a hideous contrast!

VIII

It es Madonna here This is a marble statue, well placed in a chapel of Notre Daainst a black marble niche, with excellent illuelesque, the execution careful, the surface-finish exquisite, and the type of the Madonna extremely similar to that of the Pieta at S Peter's She is seated in an attitude of alnity, with the left foot raised upon a block of stone The expression of her features isof sternness, which seems inherent in the h wishi+ng to step doards from the throne, her infant Son One arht hand is thrown round to clasp her left This attitude gives grace of rhythm to the lines of his nude body True to the realiselo at the commencement of his art career, the head of Christ, who is but a child, slightly overloads his slender figure Physically he resembles the Infant Christ of our National Gallery picture, but has more of charenuine product of Michelangelo's first Roman manner; and the position of the statue in a chapel ornaes family of Mouscron renders the attribution almost certain

However, we have only two authentic records of the work a the period of Michelangelo's residence in Florence (1501-1504), says: ”He also cast in bronze a Madonna with the Infant Christ, which certain Flemish merchants of the house of Mouscron, a ht for two hundred ducats, and sent to Flanders” A letter addressed under date August 4, 1506, by Giovanni Balducci in Roelo at Florence, proves that so the sculptor's property at Florence

Balducci uses the fe about this work, which justifies us in thinking that it may have been a Madonna He says that he has found a trustworthy agent to convey it to Viareggio, and to shi+p it thence to Bruges, where it will be delivered into the hands of the heir of John and Alexander Mouscron and Co, ”as being their property” This statue, in all probability, is the ”Madonna in elo wrote to his father froed his father to keep hidden in their dwelling It is difficult to reconcile Condivi's statement with Balducci's letter The forht by the Mouscron family was cast in bronze at Florence The Madonna in the Mouscron Chapel at Notre Daes Madonna is the piece which Michelangelo executed for the Mouscron brothers, and that Condivi rong in believing it to have been cast in bronze That the statue was sent soiven, appears froned it to the heir of John and Alexander, ”as being their property;” but it cannot be certain at what exact date it was begun and finished

IX

While Michelangelo was acquiring immediate celebrity and immortal fame by these three statues, so different in kind and hitherto unrivalled in artistic excellence, his family lived someretchedly at Florence Lodovico had lost his small post at the Custoer than the sculptor, were noing up Buonarroto, born in 1477, had been put to the cloth-trade, and was serving under the Strozzi in their warehouse at the Porta Rossa Giovan-Si a vagabond life for some while, joined Buonarroto in a cloth-business provided for theave his eldest brother ise of forty he settled down upon the paternal far into the condition of a common peasant

The constant affection felt for these not very worthy relatives by Michelangelo is one of the finest traits in his character They were continually writing begging letters, gru himself in order to maintain theave, the more they demanded; and on one or two occasions, as we shall see in the course of this biography, their rapacity and ingratitude roused his bitterest indignation Nevertheless, he did not swerve froenerous nature and steady will had traced He reuardian of their interests, the custodian of their honour, and the builder of their fortunes to the end of his long life The correspondence with his father and these brothers and a nephew, Lionardo, was published in full for the first time in 1875 It enables us to coraphical notice; and I radually, by successive stipplings, as it were, to present a miniature portrait of one as both admirable in private life and incomparable as an artist

This correspondence opens in the year 1497 Froust 19, we learn that Buonarroto had just arrived in Rome, and informed his brother of certain pecuniary difficulties under which the faave advice, and proether