Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/408

356 his knee, waiting to rise and go forth, these weary Titans reclining at their feet, are immortal allegories of life and death, of thought and action. In this Dawn, wearily waking out of sleep, in this Night sunk in death-like slumber, Michelangelo gave utterance to the grief and shame of his own soul, and the burden of his eternal regrets. If anything were needed to tell us this, the lines which he wrote on the Notte, would be enough to show the thoughts that were working in his brain, when, at the bidding of a Medici Pope, he carved these marbles within the walls of captive Florence.

In his early works, drawing his inspiration from antique marbles, Michelangelo had given expression to the radiant beauty and god-like strength of manhood; in the masterpieces of his middle period, the pride of life, the moral and physical sovereignty of man, had been the thought that was uppermost in his mind. In the creations of his latter days we read the sense of revolt and resistance, of scorn and suffering, which opposition and injustice had aroused in his breast, until last of all, every other feeling gives way to profound melancholy and unutterable weariness, and the wish to see and feel nothing, to sleep and wake no more.

In 1534, Michelangelo's father died at the age of