# The Life of Michael Angelo/Despair

III
DESPAIR
Oilme, Oilme, ch'i' son tradito. …
Universal disgust of things and of himself threw him into the Revolution, which broke out in Florence in 1527.
Up to that time Michael Angelo had shown in political matters the same indecision of mind from which he ever suffered in his life and in his art. Never did he succeed in conciliating his personal opinions with his obligations towards the Medici. This violent genius was, moreover, ever timid in action; he would not run the risk of struggling against the powerful ones of this world on the ground of politics and religion. His letters show him to have been ever anxious over himself and the members of his family, fearing to compromise himself and denying the bold words which he sometimes uttered in a first movement of indignation against some act of tyranny. At every moment he was writing to his family to tell them to take care, to keep silent, and flee at the first alarm.
"Act as you would in plague time—be the first to ​flee . . . Life is worth more than fortune . . . Remain in peace, make no enemy, confide in no one save God, and say neither good nor evil of any one, for we know not the end of things. Occupy yourself solely over your business . . . Meddle with nothing."
His brothers and friends laughed at his disquietude and said that he was crazy.
"Do not laugh at me," replied the saddened Michael Angelo; "one ought not to laugh at any one."
There was nothing, indeed, to laugh over in the perpetual agitation of this great man. He was rather to be pitied for his wretched nerves, which made him the victim of terrors against which he struggled in vain. All the more merit was due to him, on recovering from these humiliating attacks, for forcing his sick body and mind to face the danger, from which it was his first impulse to flee. Moreover, he had more reason to fear than another, for he was more intelligent, and, with his pessimistic outlook, he saw but too clearly the misfortunes which were about to fall on Italy. But, to have allowed himself, naturally timid as he was, to be drawn into the Florentine Revolution he must have been at the height of despair, which revealed the bottom of his soul.
Michael Angelo's soul, so timorously retired within itself, was ardently republican. We see this from the fiery words which, in confidential or feverish moments, sometimes escaped from him, particularly in the conversations which he had later with his friends Luigi ​del Riccio, Antonio Petreo and Donato Giannotti, and which the last named reproduced in his "Dialogues on the Diane Comedy." The friends expressed astonishment that Dante should have placed Brutus and Cassius in the last degree of Hell and Cæsar above. Michael Angelo questioned on the point, spoke in favour of tyrannicide:
"If you had attentively read the first cantos," he said, "you would have seen that Dante knew the nature of tyrants only too well, and what punishments they deserved to receive from God and man. He places them among those who have been 'violent against their neighbour,' and punishes them in the seventh circle by plunging them into boiling blood . . . Since Dante recognised that, it is impossible to admit that he did not recognise that Cæsar was the tyrant of his country and that Brutus and Cassius did right to massacre him. For he who kills a tyrant, kills not a man but a beast with human face. All tyrants are devoid of the love which every one ought to naturally feel for his neighbour. They are deprived of human inclinations; they are no longer, therefore, men but brutes. That they possess no love for their neighbour is evident, otherwise they would not have taken what belonged to others, and would not have become tyrants by trampling others ​under foot ... It is therefore clear that he who kills a tyrant does not commit murder, since he kills not a man but a beast. Thus, Brutus and Cassius did not commit a crime in assassinating Cæsar. Firstly, because they killed a man whom every Roman citizen, in accordance with the laws, was obliged to kill. Secondly, because they did not kill a man but a brute with a human face."
Thus Michael Angelo found himself, in the days of the national republican awakening which followed in Florence on the news of the taking of Rome by the armies of Charles V. and the expulsion of the Medici, in the front rank of Florentine revolutionaries. The same man who, in ordinary times, advised the members of his family to flee from politics as they would from the plague was in such a state of excitement that he feared neither the one nor the other. He remained in Florence, where there was both the plague and the revolution. The epidemic seized his brother Buonarroto, who died in his arms." In October 1528 he took part in the deliberations concerning the defence of the city. On January 10, 1529, he was chosen in the Collegium of the Nove di milizia to superintend the work of fortifying it. On April 6 he was appointed, for one year, governatore generale and procuratore of the fortifications of Florence. In June he ​went to inspect the citadel of Pisa and the bastions of Arezzo and Leghorn. In July and August he was sent to Ferrara to examine the famous defences there and confer with the Duke—a great authority on fortifications.
Michael Angelo recognised that the most important strategical point of Florence was the hill of San Miniato, so he decided to make this position secure by means of bastions. But—why we know not—he met with opposition from the gonfaloniere Capponi, who sought to remove him from Florence. Michael Angelo, suspecting Capponi and the Medicean party of wishing to get rid of him, in order to prevent the defence of the city, took up his quarters at San Miniato and moved not an inch. But his unhealthy distrust welcomed all the rumours of treason which ever circulate in a besieged town, and which, on this occasion, were only too well founded. Capponi, suspected, had been replaced as gonfaloniere by Francesco Carducci; but they had appointed condottiere and governor-general of the Florentine troops the disquieting Malatesta Baglioni, who was later to deliver the city into the hands of the Pope. Michael Angelo foresaw the crime, and communicated his fears to the Seigniory. "The gonfaloniere Carducci, instead of thanking him, reprimanded him insultingly; he reproached him with always being suspicious and full of fear." Malatesta heard of Michael Angelo's denunciation. A man of his stamp stuck at nothing to get rid of a dangerous adversary, and, as general-in-chief, he was all-powerful in Florence. Michael Angelo thought that he was lost.
THE ERYTHRAEAN SYBIL
From the Sistine Chapel
Varchi, completing these particulars, adds that Michael Angelo "had twelve thousand gold florins sown in three shirts stitched in the form of petticoats, and that he fled from Florence, not without difficulty, by the Justice Gate, which was the least guarded, accompanied by Rinaldo Corsini and his pupil, Antonio Mini."
"I know not whether it was God or the devil who urged me to the step," wrote Michael Angelo a few days afterwards.
It was his habitual demon of insane terror. In what a state of fright he must have been, if it is true, as is related, that, stopping on the way at Castelnuovo at the house of the ex-gonfaloniere Capponi, he gave him such a shock by his narratives that the old man died a few days afterwards!
On September 23 Michael Angelo was at Ferrara. In his excitement he refused the hospitality which the Duke offered him at his castle and continued his flight. On September 25 he reached Venice. The Seigniory, informed of his arrival, sent two noblemen to him with instructions to place everything at his disposal of which he might be in need; but, ashamed and unsociable, he refused their offer and withdrew out of the way to ​Giudecca. He felt that he was not yet sufficiently far away. His idea was to flee to France. On the very day of his arrival in Venice he sent an anxious and trembling letter to Battista della Palla, the agent whom Francis I. had appointed in France for the purchase of works of art.
"Battista, very dear friend," he wrote, "I have left Florence to go to France, and, on reaching Venice, I have made inquiries as to the route. They tell me that, to go there, I must pass over German territories, which is dangerous and difficult for me. Do you still intend to go there ? . . . I beg you to inform me and say where you would like me to wait for you. We will travel together ... I beg you to reply to me on receiving this letter and as soon as possible, for I am burning with a desire to go there. And if you no longer wish to go, tell me, so that I may decide, cost what it may, to go alone. . . ."
The French Ambassador in Venice, Lazare de Baïf, hastened to write to Francis I. and to the Connétable de Montmorency, pressing them to profit by the opportunity to attach Michael Angelo to the Court of France. The King immediately offered Michael Angelo an allowance and a house. But this exchange of letters naturally took a certain time, and when Francis' offer came the artist had already returned to Florence.
His feverish excitement had abated. Amidst the silence of Giudecca he had had the leisure to blush at his fear. His flight had produced a great sensation in Florence. On September 30 the Seigniory decreed that all who had fled should be banished, as rebels, unless they ​returned before October 7. On this date the fugitives were declared to be rebels and their property was confiscated. However, Michael Angelo's name did not yet appear on the list. The Seigniory granted him a further delay, and the Florentine Ambassador in Ferrara, Galeotto Giugni, informed the Republic that Michael Angelo had heard of the decree too late, and that he was ready to return if they would pardon him. The Seigniory promised, and by the hand of the marble-cutter Bastiano di Francesco sent a safe conduct to Venice. Bastiano at the same time handed Michael Angelo ten letters from friends, all of whom implored him to return. One of them was an appeal, full of love for the fatherland, from the generous Battista della Palla.
"All your friends, without distinction of opinion, without hesitating and with a single voice," he wrote, "exhort you to return, in order to preserve your life, your country, your friends, your property and your honour, as well as to enjoy the new times which you so ardently desired."
He believed that the golden age had returned for Florence, and doubted not that the good cause had triumphed. But the unfortunate man, after the return of the Medici, was to be one of the first victims of the reaction.
His words caused Michael Angelo to make up his mind. The sculptor returned, but slowly; for Battista della Palla, who had gone to Lucca to meet him, waited many days for him and at last began to despair of ever seeing him. At last, on November 20, Michael Angelo re-entered ​Florence. On the 23rd his sentence of banishment was annulled by the Seigniory, but it was decided that the Grand Council should be closed to him for three years.
Henceforth Michael Angelo did his duty bravely. He went back to his post at San Miniato, which the enemy had been bombarding for a month. He again fortified the hill, invented new engines of war, and, it is said, saved the "Campanile" by protecting it with bales of wool and mattresses suspended by cords. The last trace which we have of his activity during the siege is a piece of news of February 22, 1530, which describes him climbing on to the dome of the Cathedral, either to observe the movements of the enemy or to inspect the condition of the cupola.
However, the misfortunes which he had foreseen occurred. On August 2, 1530, Malatesta Baglione betrayed the city. Florence capitulated on the twelfth, and the Emperor handed it over to the papal commissary, Baccio Valori. Then the executions began. In the ​early days nothing stayed the vengeance of the conquerors. Michael Angelo's best friends, including Battista della Palla, were the first to suffer. Michael Angelo hid himself, it is said, in the steeple of San Niccolò-oltr' Arno. He had good reasons for fear: the news had got abroad that he had intended to demolish the Palace of the Medici. But Clement VII. had not lost his affection for him. If we are to believe Sebastiano del Piombo, he had been deeply grieved by what he heard of Michael Angelo during the siege; but he contented himself with shrugging his shoulders and saying, "Michael Angelo is in the wrong; never have I harmed him." As soon as the anger of the proscribers was beginning to subside, Clement VII. wrote to Florence, directing that Michael Angelo should be found and, if he were willing to continue work on the tombs of the Medici, treated with all the respect he merited.
Michael Angelo came out from his hiding-place and resumed his work to the glory of those against whom he had fought. The unfortunate man did more: for Baccio Valori, the man who did the Pope's dirty work, the murderer of his friend Battista della Palla, he consented to carve his statue of "Apollo drawing an Arrow from his Quiver." Soon he was to disown the banished Florentines. Lamentable weakness on the part of a great man, forced to defend the life of his artistic dreams by acts of cowardice and against the murderous brutality of material strength, which could, at its will, have stifled ​him! It is not without reason that he was to devote the whole of the end of his life to the work of raising a superhuman monument to the Apostle Peter. More than once, like him, must he have wept on hearing the crowing of the cock.
Forced into lying, reduced to flattering a Valori and to celebrating a Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, he was consumed with sorrow and shame. He threw himself into his work, put into it all his useless rage. He did not carve the Medici, but statues representing his despair. When the lack of resemblance in his portraits of Julian and Lorenzo de' Medici was pointed out to him, he superbly replied, "Who will see it ten centuries hence?" One of them he called "Action"; the
THE LIBYAN SYBIL
From the Sistine Chapel
"Night, whom you see so sweetly sleeping in this stone, was by an Angel carved, and since she sleeps, she lives: if you believe me not, awake her, and she will speak."
Michael Angelo replied:
"Sleep is dear to me, but dearer still to me it is to be a stone, while shame is shameless and while crimes bear sway. To neither see nor hear is my good fortune, therefore rouse me not, but speak low."
"Is all heaven deep in slumber," he cries in another poem, "since a single being has appropriated the wealth of so many men?"
And the enslaved Florence replies to his moans:
"Be not troubled in your holy thoughts. He who ​thinks that he has robbed you of me does not benefit by his great crime because of his great fear. The fulness of pleasure, which extinguishes desire, is a less joy to lovers than misery, which is full of hope."
We must try to imagine what the sack of Rome and the fall of Florence meant to the men of those days: the bankruptcy of justice—the most terrible of cataclysms. Many never recovered from it.
Men like Sebastiano del Piombo became laughingly sceptical.
"I have reached such a point that, for all I care, the world may come to an end. I laugh at everything … It does not seem to me that I am still the Bastiano I was before the sack. I cannot recover myself."
Michael Angelo thought of committing suicide.
"If ever it is permissible to kill oneself, it would indeed be just that this right should belong to the one who, though full of faith, lives in slavery and misery."
His mind was thoroughly upset. In June 1531 he ​fell ill. Clement VII. tried in vain to appease him. Through his secretary and Sebastiano del Piombo he advised him not to overwork himself, to show restraint, to work at his ease, to take a walk now and then, and not reduce himself to the state of a labourer. In the autumn of 1531 they feared for his life. One of his friends wrote to Valori: "Michael Angelo is extenuated and emaciated. I spoke about him recently with Rugiardini and Antonio Mini, and we came to the conclusion that, unless he is seriously looked after, he will not live long. He works too much, eats little and badly, and sleeps still less. For the past year he has been racked with pains in his head and heart." Clement VII. grew alarmed, and, on November 21, 1531, issued a brief forbidding Michael Angelo, under pain of excommunication, to work at anything else than the mausoleum of Julius II. and that of the Medici, in order to husband his health and thus be able "to glorify Rome, his family and himself all the longer."
He protected him against the importunities of men like Valori and the rich beggars who, according to the custom of those days, came to beg for works of art and imposed fresh commissions upon him. "When they ask you for a picture," he wrote to him, "you ought to attach your brush to your foot, make four strokes, and say, 'the picture is painted.' " He interposed between ​Michael Angelo and the heirs of Julius II., who were becoming threatening. In 1532 a fourth contract was signed between the representatives of the Duke of Urbino and Michael Angelo on the subject of the mausoleum, the latter promising to make a new model of the monument, very reduced in size, to complete it in three years, and to pay all the expenses, as well as 2000 ducats, in view of what he had already received from Julius II. and his heirs. "It will suffice," wrote Sebastiano del Piombo to Michael Angelo, "if a little of your odour (un poco del vostro odore) is found in the work." Sad conditions, since, in signing them, Michael Angelo was confessing to the failure of his great project, and had to pay into the bargain! But, in truth, from year to year it was the failure of his life, the failure of life itself, to which Michael Angelo subscribed in each of his despairing works.
VICTORY
From the group in the National Museum, Florence
​On September 23, 1534, Michael Angelo returned to Rome, where he was to remain until his death. It was twenty-one years since he had left it. In these twenty-one years he had made three statues for the uncompleted mausoleum of Julius II., seven unfinished statues for the uncompleted monument of the Medici, the unfinished vestibule of the "Laurenziana," the unfinished "Christ" of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, the unfinished "Apollo" for Baccio Valori. He had lost his health, his energy, his faith in art and in the fatherland. He had lost his favourite brother. He had lost the father whom he adored. To the memory of both he had addressed a poem (unfinished, like everything he did) admirable for its note of sorrow and its passionate yearning after death.
"… Heaven has snatched you from our wretchedness. Have pity on me, I who live, like a dead man. … You are dead to death and have become divine. You no longer feel the fear of a change of being and desire. I can hardly write of it without envy. Destiny and Time, which bring us but doubtful joy and sure misfortune, no longer dare to cross your threshold. No cloud obscures your light; the course of the hours lays not violent hands upon you; necessity and chance guide not your steps. Night obscures not your splendour; Day, however bright, heightens it not … By thy death, dear father, I learn how to die … Death is not, as people believe, the worst thing, for the last day is the ​first—the eternal day—near to the throne of God. There I hope and believe I shall see you once more, if, by the grace of God, my mind snatches my frozen heart from the terrestrial mud, and if, like every virtue, perfect love increases in heaven between father and son."
Nothing, then, retained him any longer upon earth: neither art, nor ambition, nor tenderness, nor hope of any kind. He was sixty years of age and his life seemed to be over. He was alone. He had lost all faith in his works. He yearned after death; his passionate desire was at last to escape from "the change of being and desire," from "the violence of the hours," from the tyranny "of necessity and chance."
"Alas! alas! I am betrayed by my days which have fled . . . Too long have I waited . . . Time has passed and here I find myself in years. I neither can prepare nor repent now that Death treads upon my steps . . . I weep in vain, for he who loses time can know no greater loss. . . .
"Alas! alas! in retrospect I find not a single day that I can call my own. Fallacious hopes and vain desires (I recognise it now) have kept me weeping, loving, burning and sighing (for not a mortal affection has been unknown to me) far from Truth. . . .
"Alas! alas! I go, but do not well know where. Fear is upon me . . . And if I am not deceived (O God, grant that I am!) I see, O Lord, the eternal punishment for the evil which I have done in knowing prosperity. Hope alone is mine ! . . ."
* ↑ "Poems," xlix.
* ↑ Letter of September 1512 on the subject of what he had said about the sack of Prato by the Imperiaux, allies of the Medici.
* ↑ Letter from Michael Angelo to Buonarroto. (September 1512.)
* ↑ "I am not insane, as you believe. . . ." (Michael Angelo to Buonarroto, September, 1515.)
* ↑ Michael Angelo to Buonarroto. (September and October 1512.)
* ↑ In 1545.
* ↑ It was for Donato Giannotti that Michael Angelo made the bust of Brutus. A few years before the Dialogue, in 1536, Alessandro de' Medici had been assassinated by Lorenzino, who was hailed as another Brutus.
* ↑ "De' giorni che Dante consumo nel cercare l'lnferno e 'I Purgatorio." The question discussed by the friends concerned the number of days Dante spent in Hell. Was it from Friday to Saturday evening, or from Thursday evening to Sunday morning? They had recourse to Michael Angelo, who knew Dante's work better than any one.
* ↑ Michael Angelo—or Giannotti who speaks in his name—takes care to distinguish between tyrants and hereditary kings, or constitutional princes. "I do not speak here of princes who possess their power through the authority of centuries or through the will of the people, and who govern their town in perfect accord with the people ..."
* ↑ May 6, 1527.
* ↑ Expulsion of Hippolyte and Alessandro de' Medici. (May 17, 1527.)
* ↑ July 2, 1528.
* ↑ Busini, according to confidences of Michael Angelo.
* ↑ Condivi. "And certainly," adds Condivi, "he would have done well to listen to the good advice, for when the Medici returned he was beheaded."
* ↑ Letter from Michael Angelo to Battista della Palla. (September 25, 1529.)
* ↑ Segni.
* ↑ Letter from Michael Angelo to Battista della Palla. (September 25, 1529.)
* ↑ October 22, 1529.
* ↑ He wrote him fresh letters, imploring him to return.
* ↑ Four days before, his allowance had been suppressed by the Seigniory.
* ↑ According to a letter from Michael Angelo to Sebastiano del Piombo he had also to pay a fine of 1500 ducats to the Commune.
* ↑ "When the Pope Clement and the Spaniards besieged Florence," related Michael Angelo to Francis of Holland, "the enemy were long arrested by the machines which I had constructed on the towers. One night I covered the exterior of the walls with sacks of wool; on another, I had trenches dug and filled with powder to burn the Castilians. I had their torn members blown into the air … There, that is what painting is good for! It is good for machines and instruments of war; it is good for giving bombardes and arquebuses a convenient form; it is good for building bridges and ladders; it is especially good for the plans and proportions of fortresses, bastions, trenches, mines, and countermines …" (Francis of Holland's "Dialogue on Painting in the City of Rome." Third part, 1549.)
* ↑ Letter from Sebastiaao del Piombo to Michael Angelo. (April 29, 1531.)
* ↑ Condivi. Michael Angelo's allowance had been re-established by the Pope on December 11, 1530.
* ↑ Autumn 1530. This work is in the Museo Nazionale in Florence.
* ↑ In 1544.
* ↑ During these same years, the darkest of his life, Michael Angelo, through a savage reaction of his nature against the Christian pessimism which stifled him, executed some works noteworthy for their audacious paganism, such as his "Leda caressed by the Swan" (1529–1530), which, painted for the Duke of Ferrara, then given by Michael Angelo to his pupil Antonio Mini, was taken by the latter to France, where it was destroyed, it is said, about 1643, by Sublet des Noyers, owing to its lasciviousness. A little later Michael Angelo painted for Bartolommeo Bettini a cartoon of "Venus caressed by Cupid," from which Pontormo painted a picture, which is in the Uffizi. Other drawings, grandiose and severe in their indecency, probably belong to the same period. Charles Blanc describes one of them, "in which we see the transports of joy of a ravished woman, who struggles lustily against her stronger ravisher, but not without expressing an involuntary feeling of happiness and pride."
* ↑ "Night" was probably carved in the autumn of 1530 and finished in the spring of 1531; "Dawn" in September 1531; "Twilight" and "Day" a little later. (See Dr. Ernst Steinmann's "Das Geheimnis der Medicigräber Michel Angelos," 1907, Hiersemann, Leipzig.)
* ↑ "La notte che tu vedi in si dolci atti Dormir, fu da un Angelo scolpita.  In questo sasso, e perche dorme, ha vita: Destala se nol credi, e parleratti."
* ↑ "Caro m’è ’l sonno et piu l’esser di sasso, Mentre che ’l danno e la vergogna dura.  Non veder, non sentir m’è gran ventura; Pero non mi destar, deh! parla basso!" (Poems, cix, 16, 17. Frey dates them 1545.)
* ↑ Michael Angelo imagines a dialogue between Florence and the banished Florentines.
* ↑ "Poems," cix, 48. (See Appendix, vii.)
* ↑ Letter from Sebastiano del Piombo to Michael Angelo (February 24, 1531). It was the first letter which he wrote to him after the sack of Rome. "God knows how glad I have been that, after so many miseries, troubles, and dangers, the all-powerful Lord, through his mercifulness and pity, has left us living and in good health—a truly miraculous thing, when I think of it … Now, my friend, that we have passed through fire and water, and supported unimaginable things, let us thank God, and spend the little life which remains to us as much as possible in rest. We must count very little on what Fortune will do for us, so wicked and painful is she. …" Their letters were being opened. So Sebastiano recommended Michael Angelo, who was a suspect, to disguise his writing.
* ↑ "Poems," xxxviii. (See Appendix, viii.)
* ↑ " . . . Non voria che ve fachinasti tan to. ..." (Letter from Pier Paolo Marzi to Michael Angelo, June 20, 1531.) Cf. letter from Sebastiano del Piombo to Michael Angelo. (June 16, 1531)
* ↑ Letter from Giovanni Battista di Paolo Mini to Valori. (September 29, 1531.)
* ↑ " . . . Ne aliquo modo laborare debeas, nisi in sepultura et opera nostra, quam tibi commisimus. . . ."
* ↑ Letter from Benvenuto della Volpaja to Michael Angelo. (November 26, 1531.)
* ↑ "If you had not the Pope’s protection," wrote Sebastiano to him, "they would dart like serpents" ("Saltariano come serpenti"). (March 15, 1532.)
* ↑ But six statues, some commenced, others unfinished (doubtless the "Moses," the "Victory," the "Slaves," and the figures of the Boboli grotto) were now to be delivered for the mausoleum, which was to be erected at San Pietro in Vincoli.
* ↑ Letter from Sebastiano del Piombo to Michael Angelo. (April 6, 1532.)
* ↑ Many times had Clement VII. to defend Michael Angelo against his nephew, the Duke Alessandro. Sebastiano del Piombo related to Michael Angelo a scene of this kind, in which "the Pope spoke with such vehemence, fury, and resentment, in terms so terrible, that it is not permissible to write them down." (August 16, 1533.)
* ↑ Condivi.
* ↑ Michael Angelo had executed, partially, seven statues (the two tombs of Lorenzo d’Urbino and of Julien de Nemours, and the Madonna). He had not commenced the four statues representing Rivers, which he intended to make; and he abandoned to others the figures for the tombs of Lorenzo the Magnificent and of Julien, Lorenzo’s brother.
* ↑ Vasari asked Michael Angelo on March 17, 1563, "what his plans had been regarding the mural paintings."
* ↑ It was not even known where the statues already finished were to be placed, nor what statues he had intended to place in the empty niches. In vain did Vasari and Ammanati, commissioned by Duke Cosmo I. to complete Michael Angelo’s work, apply to him. He could remember nothing. "Memory and mind have outstripped me," he wrote in August 1557, "to await me in the other world."
* ↑ Buonarroto, who died of the plague in 1528.
* ↑ In June 1534.
* ↑ "Poems," lviii. (See Appendix, ix.)
* ↑ "Poems," xlix. {See Appendix, x.)