MICHAEL ANGELO. . 009 



low in his whole composition. Noblesse oblige was borne with him in his every 

 fibre. He was impatient of everything low or mean, and his temper was, like 

 his nature, fiery and impetuous. Yet he was always forgiving, always gentle, 

 unless his dignity as a man was insulted. He was never peevish nor irritable. 

 He led a lonely life. Kind to all and lavish of his slender means in the allevia- 

 tion of want or of misery, he yet had no intimates. He had no friends but two. 

 and yet think who were those two. Savanarola and Vittoria Colonna. It is 

 probable that he loved the latter, but it was a love in which sense had nothing 

 whatever to do. In the lofty, serene regions where his giant spirit lived the at- 

 mosphere was too pure and rare for the senses to dwell. She must indeed have 

 been a woman of the loftiest and most perfect type, this famed Vittoria di Col- 

 lonna, to have won Michael Angelo's love. 



Popularly most famous for his work in the Sistine and Pauline chapels at 

 Rome, and for the dome of St. Peter's, his lofty genius is best shown in the 

 chapel of the Medici attached to the church of San Lorenzo in Florence. Here 

 the mausoleum of the Medici commands an attention which, once given, is given 

 always. The great figures of "Day" and " Sleep " and " Night," of "Aurora" 

 and " Crepuscule," enchain the beholder. These figures are tremendous. Look- 

 ing at them you are brought to know what thoughts fill the human breast when 

 the perfection of human intellect grapples with the mysterious problems of man's 

 origin and destiny. They are the symbols of humanity's struggles with the tre- 

 mendous and unseen forces of nature. A great intellect has flung itself into the 

 marble and wrought out thoughts rather than human beings. Michael Angelo is 

 the one man who has sculptured ideas. These statues are not Greek, and belong 

 to a different race. The Greek sculptured beauty in repose — his gods, when 

 they suffer, are serenely majestic, and they smile calmly even with the fox gnaw- 

 ing at their vitals. Even in the Laocoon the suffering is subdued grace. But 

 Michael Angelo belonged to a different race. The mysterious Etrurian, whose 

 civilization was old and gray and heavy with the weight of his own completeness 

 ere a stone was laid on the seven hills by the Tiber, transmitted to Michael An 

 gelo along with his blood, his sombre thoughts and his mystic moods. Etrurian, 

 and not Italian, no tradition of Aryan race inspired his soul or informed his 

 mind. He was of the old gods ; he dwelt with Saturn and Hyperion beneath the 

 dim umbrageous recesses of the woods, rather than with Jove and Apollo and 

 the other deities of the new era. And the tremendous truths caught and known 

 by an older and truer civilization than the world of his day knew has left their 

 giant shadows as an incubus on his soul. 



The artist pictured the difficulties he labored under in his great work of 

 painting the Sistine chapel, described the wonderful productions of his genius on 

 those walls and ceilings, drew a beautiful comparison between him and Raffaelle, 

 who was in most cases his antithesis ; related the subsequent life of Michael An- 

 gelo, sketched his character with a light but bold touch, and closed with a mag^ 

 nificent picture of the Medici Mausoleum, when the tombs were opened in 1857 

 and the bodies, many of them, were found plundered of their ornaments. " There 



