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THE POPULAR EDUCATOR. 



found it necessary to retire to Venice, where his artistic tastes 

 must even then have received many fresh impulses. Already 

 he had turned his attention to sculpture, which was always 

 perhaps his own favourite art, and certainly the one which gave 

 most colour to his peculiar genius. At that time, sculpture 

 was just beginning to revive after its long condemnation to 

 wooden figures of saints during the Middle Ages ; and original 

 works in marble or bronze were once more being produced in 

 Florentine studios. Excavations were largely carried on among 

 Roman ruins by the De Medici and others, and every new 

 statue or fragment of a statue recovered from the debris of the 

 Empire was hailed as a treasure by the critics and connoisseurs 

 of the new school. Michel Angelo had thus formed his tastes 

 in sculpture upon Greek and Roman models, whose immense 

 superiority to all other statuary he immediately perceived. 

 This leaning toward plastic art undoubtedly helped in giving 

 his mind its distinctly classical twist. He framed his ideas in 

 great part upon the torsos of the Eoman world. His " Sleeping 

 Cupid" was his first great success as a sculptor, and soon 

 after the production of this work he betook himself to Rome, 

 and received a warm welcome. There, the antique paintings 

 on the Thermae of Titus, which produced so deep an effect upon 

 the style of Raffael, also aided in confirming his admiration 

 for the classical spirit. From that time forward he stands 

 forth decidedly as the chief leader in the revived classicist 

 movement which was destined to sweep everything before it. 

 Yet the principal work of his first Roman period was not a 

 classical figure at all, but a Pietd, or group of the Dead Christ 

 and His Mother, a subject of a sort derived from mediaeval 

 usage, but treated from his own new point of view. Indeed, 

 the infusion of the classical spirit into Christian art may be 

 regarded as the special and distinctive aim of the great sculp- 

 tor's life. 



The thirty years of Michel Angelo's full manhood were mainly 

 passed at Florence, where he was chiefly employed at work as 

 a painter ; but he also often went to Rome. To this period 

 belong his frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, drawn 

 from the principal passages of Scripture history, and ranking 

 among his greatest masterpieces. But in 1530 he was called 

 upon to undertake a very different task, which strikingly shows 

 the width of range and the versatility of the Renaissance 

 Italians. He became for a time a practical military engineer. 

 Like Lionardo, in fact, Michel Angelo had studied engineer- 

 ing as part of his artistic profession. He was a painter and a 

 culptor before everything ; but in a country and age when 

 painting was still largely subordinated to architecture being 

 employed for the most part as a means of decoration for the 

 walls of churches and palaces every painter and sculptor, 

 from Giotto downward, had also been an architect ; and every 

 architect is of course to some extent almost necessarily an 

 engineer as well. In fact, the line between industrial life and 

 artistic life was not yet so tightly drawn as it is at present. 

 Every man busied himself with a greater number of occupa- 

 tions, and moved more freely over a wider range, than in our 

 modern subdivided societies, with their infinite gradations of 

 function. So, when the Emperor Charles V. threatened siege to 

 Florence in his great Italian war (1530), Michel Angelo was 

 set to overlook the defences of the San Miniato Fort. But 

 even so he did not give up his taste as a sculptor, going 

 from the works at the fort to his studio, and never wholly relin- 

 quishing his own occupations even in the midst of such war- 

 like preparations. During the peace which followed, Michel 

 Angelo began his colossal fresco of the Last Judgment, in the 

 Sistine Chapel, which kept him steadily at work for eight years. 

 This vast design may be considered the greatest monument 

 produced by his magnificent genius. It has in it something of 

 the grand proportions of the man himself, for Michel Angelo 

 delighted in greatness, physical as well as intellectual ; and his 

 statue of David, the strong young man rejoicing in his youth 

 and vigour, and with great brawny yet well-proportioned limbs, 

 may be set beside his picture of the Last Judgment as the 

 measure of his highest moods, the one in sculpture, the other in 

 painting. 



After the completion of his great fresco, Michel Angelo was 

 invited to Rome in 1546, to become the architect of the largest 

 and, in its way, the grandest building upon earth. He was 

 given charge of the vast cathedral of St. Peter's, whose comple- 

 tion in its present form had been commenced by Pope Leo X., 



the son of his old patron, Lorenzo de Medici. Leo had brought 

 with him from Florence to Rome the artistic, philosophic, and 

 literary tastes of his father's court ; and during his Papacy, 

 the capital of still united Christendom became also the chief 

 centre for the new thought and revived handicraft of the 

 Renaissance. Leo himself had long been dead, but his suc- 

 cessors continued the work he had begun, and for the most 

 part kept up the artistic traditions of his time. It was to 

 design and superintend the erection of the vast dome of 

 St. Peter's that Michel Angelo, now in the ripe maturity of 

 his genius, at seventy years of age, was called to the Papal 

 city. He held the post of chief architect to the day of his 

 death, outliving no less than five Popes. The dome itself, one 

 of the grandest architectural achievements of the world, still 

 stands as the final monument of its designer's magnificent 

 ideas. No other equals it in size or technical points of con- 

 struction. St. Peter's as a whole, though overwhelming from 

 its enormous dimensions and mere mass, does not now strike the 

 fancy or the imagination so much as the more solemn, varied, 

 and beautiful cathedrals of mediaeval times, with their pointed 

 arches, their rich decorations, their splendid towers, their noble 

 lanterns, and their exquisitely graceful windows. In fact, it is 

 now generally felt that the artistic revival of the fifteenth and 

 sixteenth centuries, immense as was the good it wrought in 

 painting and sculpture, was a misfortune so far as architecture 

 was concerned. The one great art which had flourished with 

 native originality through the Middle Ages was the art of 

 building. Here alone had the mediaeval intellect struck out a 

 line for itself, and by slow and tentative efforts developed a 

 style of ecclesiastical architecture admirably adapted both to 

 the tone of mind of the builders and to the purposes of the exist- 

 ing creed. The Renaissance artists, on the other hand, in their 

 revulsion from everything mediaeval, and their reverence for 

 everything classical, were disposed to cast over almost all that 

 had been done in this the one truly progressive art, and to 

 return almost strictly to classical models, so far, at least, as 

 these could be accommodated to the uses of the Christian 

 religion or the needs of modern European life. But while the 

 gloom, the richness, and the variety of the so-called " Gothic " 

 cathedrals suit admirably the genius of mediaeval thought, it 

 must be allowed that the breadth, the light, the vastness, and 

 the large open spaces of St. Peter's and the other Renaissance 

 buildings harmonise far better with the temper and the wants 

 of their contemporary artists. The great painters needed room 

 to cover with their splendid frescoes, open ground to view their 

 colossal works of sculpture, and light to fall upon their decora- 

 tive designs. For such purposes the Sistine Chapel, St Peter's, 

 and the corridors of the Vatican were admirably adapted ; and 

 thus it was that Michel Angelo and his contemporaries turned 

 naturally from the glories of mediaeval architecture to the 

 broader, freer, and more open style of the classical or pseudo- 

 classical revival. 



The great painter and sculptor lived to see art pass wholly 

 from its mediaeval into its modern stage within his own lifetime. 

 He died at Rome in his eighty-ninth year, February 18th, 1564. 

 His remains were carried to his native city of Florence, and 

 were there interred. Throughout his life, Michel Angelo was 

 distinguished above everything by the massive, grandiose, 

 masculine character of his work. Whatever he did, he did 

 with characteristic energy, thoroughness, and mastery. Un- 

 like Lionardo, he finished what he began. His studies were 

 universal, at least in everything that directly or indirectly bore 

 upon art. Following Lionardo, he went deeply into anatomy, 

 which he made the basis of all his work in sculpture. He was 

 the first statuary since the Greco-Roman period who always 

 correctly represented the muscles of his subject in every 

 attitude. In pure intellectual greatness, too, Michel Angelo 

 was almost as grand as in the artistic sphere. His sonnets 

 are striking poems of a unique and remarkable kind, full 

 of the calm grandeur and sublime power of the man. His 

 artistic work was so almost exclusively decorative, however, 

 that it is for the most part entirely confined to Italy, being 

 mainly composed of frescoes, sculptured ornaments, and other 

 adjuncts to special buildings ; so that he cannot be judged of at 

 first hand except by those who can visit Rome and Florence for 

 themselves. Nor does his style easily lend itself even to en- 

 graving; his pictures and sculptures are for the most part too 

 wholly subordinated to the necessities and harmonies of their 



