Michael Angelo Buonarroti Part 9

To the same.

_From_ ROME (_Oct. 1509_).

"BUONARROTO,-I hear by your last how that all are well, and how Lodovico has another office. It all pleases me, and I encourage him to accept it if it will allow him to return when necessary to his post in Florence. I am here just as usual, and shall have finished my painting by the end of next week, that is, the part of it I began; and when I have uncovered it I believe I shall receive my money, and I will endeavour again to get leave to come to you for a month. I do not know whether it will be, but I need it for I am not very well. I have no time to write more. I will tell you what happens.

"MICHAEL ANGELO, Sculptor, in Rome."(114)

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THE DELPHIC SIBYL

SISTINE CHAPEL, ROME (_Reproduced by permission from a photograph by Sig. D. Anderson, Rome_)

The work was exposed to view upon November 1, 1509. So at the longest possible estimate of time from May 10, 1508, to November 1, 1509, Michael Angelo took four hundred and sixty-two working days to paint it. The more probable, in fact, almost certain estimate of the time occupied in painting the fresco, as we now see it, is from the time his a.s.sistants left him, about New Year's Day 1509, to November 1 in the same year, or two hundred and thirty-four working days. As the plaster could only be painted on whilst wet, we can tell, by the marks of the divisions between the separate days' plasterings, how many days the larger individual figures took. One of the largest and most prominent, as well as one of the finest and most finished, the Adam in the Creation of Man, was painted in three sittings only. The lines of the junctions of the plaster may be seen in a photograph; one is along the collar bone, and one across the junction of the body and the thighs. There is also a division all round the figure, an inch or so from the outline, so we know that the beautiful and highly finished head and neck were painted in one day; the stupendous torso and arms in another; and the huge legs, finished in every detail, in a third.

Such power of work and of finish is utterly inconceivable to any artist of to-day. Some will even excuse the imperfection of the study of a head by saying that they had only three or four sittings.

Condivi a.s.serts, and Vasari follows him, that the part uncovered in November 1509, was the first half of the whole vault, beginning at the large door of entrance and ending in the middle. But Albertini states in his _Mirabilia Urbis_(115) that the upper portion of the whole vaulted roof had been uncovered when he saw it in 1509, and this statement is corroborated by the work itself. There is a distinct enlargement of the style from the Sin of the Sons of Ham through the series of the Creation and the Athletes to the Prophets and Sibyls, and again from the first of these, near the large door, to those near the altar wall. So it may have been the complete work on the flat part of the vault that was shown to the world, including the story of the Creation and Fall of Man; and it was not, therefore, so very unreasonable of Bramante to propose that Raphael should continue the work, for he probably did not know of Michael Angelo's intention of commemorating the promise of the Redeemer by his prophets and sibyls upon the curved surface of the vaulting. Michael Angelo was naturally indignant at his action, but Julius, who probably was the only man who knew Michael Angelo's scheme, commanded him to complete his work.

We gather from a letter to his father that the scaffolding for completing the painting of the vault was not put up on September 7, 1510.

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THE PROPHET JOEL

SISTINE CHAPEL, ROME (_By permission of the Fratelli Alinari, Florence_)

_To_ LODOVICO DI BUONARROTA SIMONI, _in Florence_.

_From_ ROME, _September 7, 1510._

"DEAREST FATHER,-I have received your last, and hear with the greatest anxiety that Buonarroto is ill; therefore, as soon as you see this, go to the Spedalingo(116) and make him give you fifty or an hundred ducats; you may need them. Arrange that all things necessary be provided in good time, and that there be no lack of money. Let me tell you how that I am waiting to receive from the Pope five hundred ducats, well earned, and he should give me as much again to put up the scaffolding and go on with the other part of my work. And he has gone from here without leaving me any orders. I have written him a letter. I do not know what will follow. I should have come to you immediately on the receipt of your last, but if I left without permission I doubt the Pope would be angry, and I should lose all that I ought to have.

Nevertheless, let me know immediately if Buonarroto should still be very bad, because if you think I ought to come I will ride post and be with you in two days, for men are worth more than money.

Let me know at once, for I am very anxious.

"On the 7th day of September.

"Your MICHAEL ANGELO, Sculptor, in Rome."(117)

The following note tells of the end of the work:

"I have finished the Chapel which I painted. The Pope is very well satisfied, but other things do not happen as I wished. Lay blame on the times, which are unfavourable to art." It is a note by Michael Angelo in the Buonarroto ma.n.u.scripts of the British Museum, but undated. It is probably of October 1512, and marks the close of this period of enormous work. The decoration of the Sistine Chapel now consisted, firstly, on the flat of the vault, of Michael Angelo's history of the Creation and the Fall of Man, of the Punishment of the Flood, and the Second Entry of Sin into the World; secondly, on the pendentives, of the Prophets and Sibyls proclaiming the coming of a Redeemer; and thirdly, of the Ancestors of Christ, filling the arches of the windows and the arches on the two end walls. Those on the altar wall are now covered by angels bearing the instruments of the Pa.s.sion of Christ, parts of the great fresco of the Last Judgment, finished by Michael Angelo thirty years afterwards. At Oxford there are two drawings after these two destroyed frescoes of the Ancestors of Christ series. Fourthly, at the four corners the four great Deliverances of the Chosen People, emblems of the Redemption; fifthly, below, between the windows, a row of the figures of the Popes by Sandro Botticelli and others; these are still in existence, except the three that were on the wall of the high altar, now occupied by the Last Judgment.

They were the earliest of the Popes, St. Peter probably in the centre.

Lastly, below again, the great series of frescoes of the History of Christ and the History of Moses by Sandro Botticelli, Domenico del Ghirlandaio, Cosimo Rosselli, Pietro Perugino, Bernardino Pintoricchio, Luca Signorelli, and Bartolomeo della Gatta. This splendid series forms a worthy predella to the epic work of Michael Angelo above; that they are worthy the one of the other is the highest compliment that can be paid to either. These stories well repay prolonged study, and help to keep our mind fresh to enjoy the idea of the advance Michael Angelo made in the art of painting. It is very instructive to compare his work with these frescoes of men who were almost his contemporaries. Above the altar three of this series were destroyed to make way for the Last Judgment; they were all three by Perugino, and represented the a.s.sumption of the Virgin in the centre, the Nativity on the right, and the finding of Moses on the left.

At the opposite end, over the great door, were two pictures by Domenico del Ghirlandaio, representing the Resurrection of Christ, and Michael contending with Satan for the Body of Moses, completing the series of the lives of the Redeemer and of his prototype in the Old Testament: Moses, the Deliverer. These last two works were destroyed for the ridiculous caricatures of Arrigo Fiammingo and Mattei da Lecce. Ultimately the Tapestry woven after the cartoons by Raphael, now at South Kensington Museum, completed the cycle of decoration down to the ground level.

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THE PROPHET EZEKIEL

SISTINE CHAPEL, ROME (_By permission of the Fratelli Alinari, Florence_)

When Pope Julius prevented Michael Angelo from going on with his beloved project of the Tomb and made him paint the vault, the master set to work to produce a similar conception to the Tomb in a painted form. The vault became a great temple of painted marble and painted sculptures raised in mid-air above the walls of the chapel. The cornices and pilasters are of simple Renaissance architecture, the only ornaments he allowed himself to use being similar to those he would have used as a sculptor. Acorns, the family device of the della Rovere, rams' skulls, and scallop sh.e.l.ls, and the one theme of decoration that Michael Angelo always delighted in-the human figure. The Prophets and Sibyls took the positions occupied by the princ.i.p.al figures designed for the Tomb, like the great statue of Moses.

The Athletes at the corner of the ribs of the roof were in place of the bound captives, two of which are now in the Louvre, and the nine histories of the Creation and the Flood fill the panels like the bronze reliefs of the Tomb. The detail and completeness of this fresco are the best refutation of the frequent criticism that Michael Angelo did not finish his work. The fact is, that he finished more than any one. Had Michael Angelo done no work but this vault of the Sistine Chapel, it would have represented an output equal in quant.i.ty alone to that of the most prolific of his brother Italian artists. It is veritably a large picture-gallery of his works in itself. An idea of its numerical magnitude may be got by dividing it up into its component units and making an inventory of them.

The vault itself, according to Heath Wilson, is one hundred and thirty-one feet six inches long, by forty-five feet two and a half inches wide at the large door end, and forty-three feet two and a half inches at the altar end, an area of nearly six thousand square feet, which apparently does not represent the arch measurement but only the plane covered by the arch, nor does it take account of the triangular and semicircular s.p.a.ces above the windows. This vast surface is divided into:-

Four large pictures stretching over more than one-third of the width of the roof, and containing from five to more than forty-five figures, some of them twelve feet in height.

Five pictures, half the size of the last, with from one to eight figures in each.

Twenty colossal nude figures of Athletes.

Ten circular medallions.

Seven large figures of Prophets.

Five large figures of Sibyls; these Prophets and Sibyls would be eighteen feet high if they stood upright, and most of them have secondary figures of angel boys between them, twenty-three in all.

Twenty-four decorative pilasters of two children each, in monochrome.

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THE PROPHET DANIEL

SISTINE CHAPEL, ROME (_By permission of the Fratelli Alinari, Florence_)

Four large triangular compositions representing the Redemptions of Israel, and containing from five to twenty-two colossal figures.

Eight triangular s.p.a.ces above the windows, representing the Ancestors of Christ, containing from two to four colossal figures.

Twenty-four groups in the semicircular s.p.a.ces above the windows, also of the Ancestors of Christ, of from one to four colossal figures.

Ten large figures of children forming brackets under the figures of Prophets and Sibyls, at the springing of the arches between the windows.

Twenty-four bronze-coloured colossal figures filling up the s.p.a.ces in the architectural framework.

Thus, the vault may be regarded as a gallery of one hundred and forty-five separate pictures by Michael Angelo. There is one reservation, and that is, that the twenty-four groups of two children forming pilasters are in pairs, of the same outline but reversed; as they are differently lighted they may still be taken as different pictures. These pilasters form the sides of the thrones of the Prophets and Sibyls, and repeating them in reversed outline on either side of the same throne has a very valuable decorative effect, well known to the old Italian workmen, who frequently repeated the forms of their fruit and flower decorations in this manner, by the expedient of reversing the paper-p.r.i.c.king from one and the same cartoon. It is interesting to find Michael Angelo resorting to this simple trick to get the effect of balance in figure decoration. The light and shade of the reversed figures follow the general scheme of the illumination, so that the figures traced from the same cartoons look very dissimilar when painted, but if the outlines are traced from a photograph, and reversed on the corresponding figures, they will be seen to coincide.

It seems impossible to explain the exactness in any other way, a few measurements on the vault itself would make it certain. Probably the same method was employed in transferring the twenty-four bronze-coloured decorative figures also.

The historical sequence of the events in the nine pictures on the central s.p.a.ce of the vault represents the Story of the Creation, the Fall, the Flood, and the second entry of Sin into the world, demonstrating the need for a scheme of Salvation, promised by the Prophets and Sibyls in the second part of the decoration. The series represented is an old invention, and all the scenes may be found in Byzantine and early Italian works; but the new treatment gives them a character of grandeur only equalled by the Old Testament narrative which they ill.u.s.trate. All the human figures and most of the angels appear to be dominated by an idea of impending doom, but they n.o.bly act their part in a fateful present, although they know that the future cannot be changed by any effort of theirs, however n.o.ble it may be. They are all fatalists, but all n.o.ble in their pessimism; they reflect the mind of the artist. The individual motives of the figures, their grouping and their action, are frequently taken from earlier art, especially sculpture, and they show how carefully and reverently Michael Angelo studied the works of his predecessors, Ma.s.saccio, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Donatello, and Jacopo della Quercia.

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