Page:The Life of Michael Angelo.djvu/226

158 It is incorrect, as some would have us believe, that he was indifferent to the worship of the saints and the Virgin. It would be a pretty idea to make a Protestant of the man who devoted the last twenty years of his life to building the temple of the Apostle Peter, and whose last work, interrupted by death, was a statue of St. Peter. We cannot forget that, on various occasions, he wished to undertake great pilgrimages—in 1545 to San Giacomo di Compostello, in 1556 to Loreto, and that he belonged to the brotherhood of San Giovanni Decollato (St. John the Baptist). But it is true that, like every great Christian, he lived and died in Christ. "I live in poverty with Christ," he wrote to his father in 1512, and when dying he begged them to remember the sufferings of Christ. From the time of his friendship with Vittoria Colonna, and especially after her death, his faith assumed a more exalted character. At the same time that his art was devoted almost exclusively to the glory of the Passion of Christ, his poetry was absorbed in mysticism. He abjured art and took refuge in the large, widespread arms of the crucified Jesus.

"The course of my life has reached, on a stormy sea and in a fragile boat, the common port where we land to