Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/244

Rh 230 MICHELANGELO Nevertheless Ludovico Buonarroti, who in the troubles of 1494 had lost a small permanent appointment he held in the customs, and had come to regard his son Michelangelo as the mainstay of his house, had been repeatedly urging him to come home. A spirit of family duty and family pride was the ruling principle in all Michelangelo s conduct. During the best years of his life he submitted himself sternly and without a murmur to pinching hardship and almost superhuman labour for the sake of his father and brothers, who were ever selfishly ready to be fed and helped by him. Having now, after an illness, come home in 1501, Michelangelo received the request from the cardinal Francesco Picco- lomini to adorn with a number of sculptured figures a shrine already begun in the cathedral of Siena in honour of the most distinguished member of his house, Pope Pius II. Four only of these figures were ever executed, and those not apparently, or only in small part, by the master s hand. A work of greater interest in Florence itself had diverted him from his engagement to his Sienese patron. This was the execution of the famous colossal statue of David, popularly known as the Giant. It was carved out of a huge block of marble on which another sculptor, Agostino d Antonio, had begun unsuccessfully to work forty years before, and which had been lying idle ever since. Michelangelo had here a difficult problem before him. Without much regard to tradition or the historical character of his hero, he carved out of the vast but cramped mass of material a youthful, frowning colossus, which amazed every beholder by its freedom and science of execu tion, and its victorious energy of expression. All the best artists of Florence were called in council to determine on what site it should be set up, and after much debate the terrace of the Palace of the Signory was chosen, in prefer ence to the neighbouring Loggia dei Lanzi. Here accord ingly the colossal David of Michelangelo took, in the month of May 1504, the place which it continued to hold ever after wards, until ten years ago, in 1873, it was removed for the sake of protection to a hall in the Academy of Fine Arts. Other works of sculpture by the same indomitable hand also belong to this period : among these another David, in bronze, and on a smaller scale ; a great rough- hewn St Matthew begun but never completed for the cathedral of Florence ; a Madonna and Child executed on the commission of a merchant of Bruges ; and two un finished bas-reliefs of the same subject. Neither was Michelangelo idle at the same time as a painter. Leaving -disputed works for the moment out of sight, he in these days at any rate painted for his and Raphael s common patron, Angelo Doni, the Holy Family now in the Uffizi at Florence. And in the autumn of 1504, the year of the completion of the David, he received from the Florentine state a commission for a work of monumental painting on an heroic scale. Leonardo da Vinci had been for some months engaged on his great cartoon of the Battle of Anghiari, to be painted on the wall of the great hall of the municipal council. The gonfaloniere Soderini now procured for Michelangelo the commission to design a companion work. Michelangelo chose an incident of the Pisan war, when the Florentine soldiery had been surprised by the enemy in the act of bathing : he dashed at the task with his accustomed fiery energy, and had carried a great part of the cartoon to completion when, in the early spring of 1505, he broke off the work in order to obey a call to Rome which reached him from Pope Julius II. His unfinished cartoon showed how greatly Michelangelo had profited by the example of his elder rival, Leonardo, little as, personally, he yielded to his charm or could bring himself to respond to his courtesy. The work of Michelangelo s youth is for the most part comparatively tranquil in character. His early sculpture, showing a degree of science and perfection un equalled since the antique, has also something of the antique serenity. It bears strongly the stamp of intel lectual research, but not by any means that of storm or strain. In the cartoon of the Bathers, he on the other hand appropriated and carried further the mastery, which Leonardo had first asserted, over every variety of violent action and every extreme of energetic movement. In it the qualities afterwards proverbially associated with Michelangelo his furia, his terribilith, the tempest and hurricane of the spirit which accompanied his unequalled technical mastery and knowledge first found expression. With Michelangelo s departure to Rome early in 1505 the first part of his artistic career may be said to end. It will be convenient here to recapitulate its principal results in sculpture and painting, both those preserved, and those recorded but lost. SCULITUIIE. Florence, 1489-94. Head of a Faun, National Museum, Florence (?). Condi vi describes Michelangelo s first essay in sculpture as a head of an aged faun with a front tooth knocked out, this latter point having been an afterthought suggested by Lorenzo dei Medici. The head is commonly identified with one in the National Museum at Florence, which, however, bears no marks of Michelangelo s style, and is in all probability spurious. Madonna Seated on a Step, Casa Buonarroti, Florence. This bas-relief is a genuine example of Michelangelo s early work in the Medicean school under Bertoldo. It is executed in low relief in imitation of the technical style of Donatello ; but the attitudes and characters of the figures, and the long-drawn, somewhat tormented folds of drapery, recall rather the manner of Jacopo della Quercia. Cen- tauromachia, Casa Buonarroti. A fine and unquestionably genuine work in full relief, of probably somewhat later date than the last- mentioned ; Michelangelo has followed the antique in his con ception and treatment of the nude, but not at all in the arrange ment of the subject, which occurs frequently in works of ancient art. Bologna, 1494-95. Kneeling Angel, supporting the shrine of St Dominic. This is the figure, with crisp hair, short resolute features, and drapery clinging to show the limbs, on the right- hand side of the spectator as he fronts the altar. The prettier and more engaging figure at the opposite end was long taken to be Michelangelo s work, but is really that of Niccolo dell Area. Michelangelo also finished the figure of St Petronius on the cornice of the same altar, begun by the same Niccolo, and executed one of St Proculus which has perished. Florence, 1495-96. St John in the Wilderness, Berlin Museum. During the year between Michelangelo s return from Bologna and his first departure to Rome he executed, as has been narrated above, a statue of S. Giovannino for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco dei Medici. This had for centuries been supposed lost, when in 1874 it was declared to have been found in the possession of Count Gualandi- Rossalmini at Pisa. Vehement and prolonged discussions arose as to the authenticity of the work, and at last it was bought for the Berlin Museum, where its genuineness is with apparently good reason maintained. The stripling saint stands naked but for a skin about his loins, holding a honeycomb in his left hand and lifting to his mouth a goat s horn full of honey with his right. Restoration of an antique group of Bacchus and Ampelus, Uffizi Gallery, Florence. This interesting restoration of an antique torso, by the addition of a head, the lower part of the legs, and the accessory figure of an attendant genius, a plinth, and mask, is not one of the works traditionally ascribed to Michelangelo; but has lately, and as it seems rightly, been claimed for him on internal evidence. decumbent Cupid, bought by the cardinal San Giorgio as an antique. This work, which played an important part in Michel angelo s history, is unfortunately lost. Rome, 1495-1501. Kneeling Cupid, South Kensington Museum, London. This beautiful statue of an athletic youth kneeling on the ri^ht knee, looking over his right shoulder, with the right hand lowered and the left raised, and having a quiver on the ground beside him, is acknowledged on internal grounds as an early work of Michelangelo. There is some ambiguity about the character and action of the personage; but the work is usually identified with the Cupid which Michelangelo is recorded to have executed at this time for Jacopo Galli. Bacchus and Young Faufy National Museum, Florence. This is unquestionably the &quot; Bacchus&quot; commissioned by the same patron. The finely-framed but soft- limbed youthful god, his weight supported somewhat staggeringly on the left leg, holds up a wine cup in his right hand, and with his loosely-hanging left hand holds a, cluster of grapes, at which a child-faun standing a little behind him grasps and nibbles. The surface highly finished and polished, as in the Berlin St John. Virgin Lamenting the Dead Christ, St Peter s, Rome. This group, executed for the French abbot of St Denis, is the finest of all