THE

FIRST VISIT TO ROME.

13

angelo to this Lorenzo de' Medici, directly he got to Rome, completes and corrects the story as told by his biographer. It shows too, that from his early youth Michelangelo was animated by that scrupulous integrity which remained the rule of his life. Nothing less than the stir which this affair made would induce us to believe that at the end of the 15th century and in Rome any one could have taken a statue of the youthful Florentine master for an antique. Vasari tells us, it is true, that the Cardinal had no taste for art whatever, and that he was a very ignorant man.

Michelangelo lived in Rome from 1496 to 1501. How were these five years occupied? This is just what we do not perfectly know. He was already famous, in all the vigour of youth, and we can hardly suppose that the four statues now in existence which date from this time were the only works which occupied him there. For, not to mention the fifteen figures for the library of Siena Cathedral, which were ordered by Cardinal Piccolomini, of which we have but very inadequate information, though four of them seem to have been completed, we only know of the Bacchus, the Cupid of the South Kensington Museum, the Adonis of the Uffizi at Florence, and the Pietà now at St. Peter's, which belong to this first stay in Rome. The Bacchus was ordered by an amateur, named Jacopo Galli: the Pietà by Cardinal Jean de la Grolaye de Villiers, Abbot of St. Denis, Ambassador of Charles VIII. to Alexander VI., and not by Cardinal Amboise, as Condivi and Vasari think. As to the Adonis of the Uffizi at Florence, it is probably the statue which Michelangelo began directly he got to Rome, and of which he speaks in his letter to Lorenzo de' Medici.

The Pietà of St. Peter's reveals the course which Michelangelo was going to take more distinctly than any of his

early works. The marble shall no longer represent the beauty of form in an abstract and general manner; it shall translate, under the touch of a mighty hand, the thoughts and feelings of the artist's soul. "The greatest artist may not shut up his conceptions in the heart of the marble; he needs a hand obedient to the thought to make the block give it forth. An obedient hand'will ever try to give the stone a voice it has never had before." This Virgin possesses the youthful yet grave beauty which is peculiar to Michelangelo's women. The form of the Christ stretched out upon his mother's knees, even in the repose of death, bears marks of the sufferings which the God-man has just passed through. The undeniable beauty of the legs, the joints, the extremities, is a foreshadowing of the most perfect and characteristic works of the master.

The production of this Pietà was a great event in Rome, still we know that its strongly-marked expressions, its 'speaking forms" created some astonishment. Vasari is satisfied with treating as "fools" those who maintained that Michelangelo had given the Virgin too youthful an appearance, for the true age which he had allowed the Christ.

Condivi, with less brevity and contempt, has given us the explanation which he had from Michelangelo himself. "Don't you know," he said, "that chaste women keep their youthful looks much longer than others? Isn't this much more true in the case of a Virgin who had never known a wanton desire to leave its shade upon her beauty! . . .

. . It

is quite the contrary with the form of the 'Son of God,' because I wanted to show that he really took upon him human flesh, and that he bore all the miseries of man, yet without sin."

Whatever be the value of Michaelangelo's explanation,

the individuality which is the dominant feature of his genius, and which shows itself in intended and deliberate expressions, is already plainly manifest in these early works. Hereafter it is destined to become still more marked and to be the covering of that powerful, lofty, original form which makes the slightest works of Buonarroti immortal creations. Michelangelo will increase in greatness and surpass every one who has gone before him; his giant imagination will hurl forth upon the world new forms truer than life. Intoxicated with his own genius, he will climb the loftiest summits of art; he will go to the utmost limits of rash daring, even into excesses; but, from his first steps, it is a giant who is striding onward, and if at the end of his long course he has preserved the fervour and activity of youth, he has never known the uncertainty, the feebleness, the groping after a road, which generally make the setting out into life so bewildering.

ROBERTET-LEONARDO DA VINCI-THE CLIMBERS-POPE JULIUS II. AND HIS TOMB-BUONARROTI'S RAGE, FLIGHT AND SUBMISSION AT BOLOGNA-COLOSSAL STATUE OF THE

POPE.

A

A.D. 1501 TO A.D. 1508.

FTER the expulsion of the Medici, Florence was for some years the scene of incessant conflicts. The death of Savonarola, which secured the defeat of the violent reformers, brought the moderate party into power, and men began again with more eagerness than ever to cultivate the arts, which had been for a moment proscribed by the fiery Dominican. Michelangelo longed to see his native place again, and soon found the opportunity to return. At the works of Santa Maria del Fiore there had been for a long time an enormous block of Carrara marble, which several sculptors had tried in vain to make use of, but had only succeeded in spoiling. Soderini had urged Leonardo da Vinci to take it in hand, but he had declared that he could do nothing with it. Some friends wrote to Michelangelo. He wanted no temptation to undertake an impossibility; he