Chapter IV (1)

LIONARDO DA VINCI, 1452-1519--MICHAEL ANGELO, 1475-1564--RAPHAEL, 1483-1520--TITIAN, 1477-1566.

We have arrived at the triumph of art, not, indeed, in unconsciousness and devotion, but in fulness and completeness, as shown in the works of four of the greatest painters and men whom the world ever saw. Of the first, Lionardo da Vinci, born at Vinci in the neighbourhood of Florence, 1452, it may be said that the many-sidedness which characterized Italians--above all Italians of his day--reached its height in him. Not only was he a painter, a sculptor, an architect, and engineer, but also one of the boldest speculators of the generation which gave birth to Columbus, and was not less original and ingenious than he was universally accomplished--an Admirable Crichton among painters. There is a theory that this many-sidedness is a proof of the greatest men, indicating a man who might have been great in any way, who, had his destiny not found and left him a painter, would have been equally great as a philosopher, a man of science, a poet, or a statesman. It may be so; but the life of Lionardo tends also to illustrate the disadvantage of too wide a grasp and diffusion of genius. Beginning much and finishing little, not because he was idle or fickle, but because his schemes were so colossal and his aims so high, he spent his time in preparation for the attainment of perfect excellence, which eluded him. Lionardo was the pioneer, the teacher of others, rather than the complete fulfiller of his own dreams; and the life of the proud, passionate man was, to him self mortification. This result might, in a sense, have been avoided; but Lionardo, great as he was, proved also one of those unfortunate men whose noblest efforts are met and marred by calamities which could have hardly been foreseen or prevented.

Lionardo da Vinci was the son of a notary, and early showed a taste for painting as well as for arithmetic and mathematics. He was apprenticed to a painter, but he also sedulously studied physics. He is said, indeed, to have made marvellous guesses at truth, in chemistry, botany, astronomy, and particularly, as helping him in his art, anatomy. He was, according to other accounts, a man of noble person, like Ghirlandajo. And one can scarcely doubt this who looks at Lionardo's portrait painted by himself, or at any engraving from it, and remarks the grand presence of the man in his cap and furred cloak; his piercing wistful eyes; stately outline of nose; and sensitive mouth, unshaded by his magnificent flowing beard.

He was endowed with surprising bodily strength, and was skilled in the knightly exercises of riding, fencing, and dancing. He was a lover of social pleasure, and inclined to indulge in expensive habits. While a lad he amused himself by inventing machines for swimming, diving, and flying, as well as a compass, a hygrometer, etc. etc. In a combination from the attributes of the toads, lizards, bats, etc. etc., with which his studies in natural history had made him familiar, he painted a nondescript monster, which he showed suddenly to his father, whom it filled with horror. But the horror did not prevent the old lawyer selling the wild phantasmagoria for a large sum of money. As something beyond amusement, Lionardo planned a canal to unite Florence with Pisa (while he executed other canals in the course of his life), and suggested the daring but not impossible idea of raising _en masse_, by means of levers, the old church of San Giovanni, Florence, till it should stand several feet above its original level, and so get rid of the half-sunken appearance which destroyed the effect of the fine old building. He visited the most frequented places, carrying always with him his sketch-book, in which to note down his observations; he followed criminals to execution in order to witness the pangs of despair; he invited peasants to his house and told them laughable stories, that he might pick up from their faces the essence of comic expression.[4] A mania for truth--alike in great and little things--possessed him.

Lionardo entered young into the service of the Gonzaga family of Milan, being, according to one statement, chosen for the office which he was to fill, as the first singer in _improvisatore_ of his time (among his other inventions he devised a peculiar kind of lyre). He showed no want of confidence in asserting his claims to be elected, for after declaring the various works he would undertake, he added with regard to painting--'I can do what can be done, as well as any man, be he who he may.' He received from the Duke a salary of five hundred crowns a year. He was fourteen years at the court of Milan, where, among other works, he painted his 'Cenacolo,' or 'Last Supper,' one of the grandest pictures ever produced. He painted it, contrary to the usual practice, in oils upon the plastered walls of the refectory of the Dominican convent, Milan. The situation was damp, and the material used proved so unsuitable for work on plaster, that, even before it was exposed to the reverses which in the course of a French occupation of Milan converted the refectory into a stable, the colours had altogether faded, and the very substance of the picture was crumbling into ruin.

The equestrian statue of the old Duke of Milan by Lionardo excited so much delight in its first freshness, that it was carried in triumph through the city, and during the progress it was accidentally broken. Lionardo began another, but funds failed for its completion, and afterwards the French used the original clay model as a target for their bowmen.

Lionardo returned to Florence, and found his great rival, Michael Angelo, already in the field. Both of the men, conscious of mighty gifts, were intolerant of rivalry. To Lionardo especially, as being much the elder man, the originator and promoter of many of the new views in art which his opponent had adopted, the competition was very distasteful, and to Michael Angelo he used the bitter sarcasm which has been handed down to us, 'I was famous before you were born.'

Nevertheless Lionardo consented to compete with Michael Angelo for the painting in fresco of one side of the council-hall, by the order of the gonfaloniere for the year. Lionardo chose for his subject a victory of the Florentines over the Milanese, while Michael Angelo took a scene from the Pisan campaigns. Not only was the work never done (some say partly because Lionardo _would_ delay in order to make experiments in oils) on account of political troubles, but the very cartoons of the two masters, which all the artists of the day flocked to see, have been broken up, dispersed, and lost; and of one only, that of Michael Angelo, a small copy remains, while but a fragment from Lionardo's was preserved in a copy made by Rubens.

Lionardo went to Rome in the pontificate of Leo X., but there his quarrel with Michael Angelo broke out more violently than ever. The Pope too, who loved better a gentler, more accommodating spirit, seemed to slight Lionardo, and the great painter not only quitted Rome in disgust, but withdrew his services altogether from ungrateful Italy.

At Pavia Lionardo was presented to Francis I, of France, who, zealous in patronizing art, engaged the painter to follow Francis's fortunes at a salary of seven hundred crowns a year. Lionardo spent the remainder of his life in France. His health had long been declining before he died, aged sixty-seven years, at Cloux, near Amboise. He had risen high in the favour of Francis. From this circumstance, and the generous, chivalrous nature of the king, there doubtless arose the tradition that Francis visited Lionardo on his death-bed; and that, while in the act of gently assisting him to raise himself, the painter died in the king's arms. Court chronicles do their best to demolish this story, by proving Francis to have been at St Germain on the day when Lionardo died at Cloux.

Lionardo was never married, and he left what worldly goods he possessed to a favourite scholar. Besides his greater works, he filled many MS. volumes, some with singularly accurate studies and sketches, maps, plans for machines, scores for music (three volumes of these are in the Royal Library at Windsor), and some with writing, which is written--probably to serve as a sort of cipher--from right to left, instead of from left to right. One of his writings is a valuable 'Treatise' on painting; other writings are on scientific and philosophic subjects, and in these Lionardo is believed to have anticipated some of the discoveries which were reached by lines of close reasoning centuries later.

Lionardo's genius as a painter was expressed by his uniting, in the very highest degree, truth and imagination. He was the shrewdest observer of ordinary life, and he could also realize the higher mysteries and profounder feelings of human nature. He drew exceedingly well. Of transparent lights and shadows, or chiaroscuro, he was the greatest master; but he was not a good colourist. His works are very rare, and many which are attributed to him are the pictures of his scholars, for he founded one of the great schools of Milan or Lombardy. There is a tradition that he was, as Holbein was once believed to be, ambidextrous, or capable of using his left hand as well as his right, and that he painted with two brushes--one in each hand. Thus more than fully armed, Lionardo da Vinci looms out on us like a Titan through the mists of centuries, and he preaches to us the simple homily, that not even a Titan can command worldly success; that such men must look to ends as the reward of their travail, and before undertaking it they must count the cost, and be prepared to renounce the luxurious tastes which clung to Lionardo, and which were not for him or for such men as he was.

Lionardo's great painting was his 'Last Supper,' of which, happily, good copies exist, as well as the wreck of the picture itself. The original is now, after it is too late, carefully guarded and protected in its old place in the Dominican convent of the Madonna della Grazia, Milan. The assembled company sit at a long table, Christ being seated in the middle, the disciples forming two separate groups on each side of the Saviour. The gradations of age are preserved, from the tender youth of John to the grey hairs of Simon; and all the varied emotions of mind, from the deepest sorrow and anxiety to the eager desire of revenge, are here portrayed. The well-known words of Christ, 'One of you shall betray me,' have caused the liveliest emotion. The two groups to the left of Christ are full of impassioned excitement, the figures in the first turning to the Saviour, those in the second speaking to each other,--horror, astonishment, suspicion, doubt, alternating in the various expressions. On the other hand, stillness, low whispers, indirect observations, are the prevailing expressions in the groups on the right. In the middle of the first group sits the betrayer; a cunning, sharp profile, he looks up hastily to Christ, as if speaking the words, 'Master, is it I?' while, true to the Scriptural account, his left hand and Christ's right hand approach, as if unconsciously, the dish that stands before them.[5]

A sketch of the head of Christ for the original picture, which has been preserved on a torn and soiled piece of paper at Brera, expresses the most elevated seriousness, together with Divine gentleness pain on account of the faithless disciple, a full presentiment of his own death, and resignation to the will of the Father. It gives a faint idea of what the master may have accomplished in the finished picture.

During his stay at Florence Lionardo painted a portrait of that Ginevra Benci already mentioned as painted by Ghirlandajo; and a still more famous portrait by Lionardo was that of Mona Lisa, the wife of his friend Giocondo. This picture is also known as 'La Jaconde.' I wish to call attention to it because it is the first of four surpassingly beautiful portraits of women which four great painters gave in succession to the world. The others, to be spoken of afterwards, are Raphael's 'Fornarina,' Titian's 'Bella Donna,' and Rubens' 'Straw Hat.' About the original of 'La Jaconde' there never has been a mystery such as there has been about the others. At this portrait the unsatisfied painter worked at intervals for four years, and when he left it he pronounced it still unfinished. 'La Jaconde' is now in the Louvre in nearly ruined condition, yet a judge says of it that even now 'there is something in this wonderful head of the ripest southern beauty, with its airy background of a rocky landscape, which exercises a peculiar fascination over the mind.'

There is a painting of the Madonna and Child Christ said to be by Lionardo, and probably, at least, by one of his school, and which belongs, I think, to the Duke of Buccleuch, and was exhibited lately among the works of the old masters. The group has at once something touching and exalted in its treatment. The Divine Child in the Mother's arms is strangely attracted by the sight of a cross, and turns towards it with ineffable longing, while the Virgin Mother, with a pang of foreboding, clasping the child in her arms, seeks to draw him back.

The fragment of the cartoon in which Lionardo competed with Michael Angelo, may be held to survive in the fine painting by Rubens called 'the Battle of the Standard.' Of a famous Madonna and St Anne, by Lionardo, the original cartoon in black chalk is preserved under glass in our Royal Academy.[6]

Michael Angelo Buonarroti, born at Castel Caprese near Tuscany, 1475, is the next of these universal geniuses, a term which we are accustomed to hold in contempt, because we have only seen it exemplified in parody. After Lionardo, indeed, Michael Angelo, though he was also painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, poet, musician, might almost be regarded as restricted in his pursuits, yet still so manifold was he, that men have loved to make a play upon his name and call him 'Michael the angel,' and to speak of him as of a king among men.

Michael Angelo was of noble descent, and though his ancient house had fallen into comparative poverty, his father was mayor or podesta of Chiusi, and governor of the castle of Chiusi and Caprese. Michael Angelo was destined for the profession of the law, but so early vindicated his taste for art, that at the age of thirteen years he was apprenticed to Ghirlandajo. Lorenzo the Magnificent was then ruling Florence, and he had made a collection of antique models in his palace and gardens, and constituted it an academy for young artists. In this academy Michael Angelo developed a strong bias for sculpture, and won the direct patronage of the Medici.

To this period of his life belong two characteristic anecdotes. In a struggle with a fellow-student, Michael Angelo received a blow from a mallet in his face, which, breaking bone and cartilage, lent to his nose the rugged bend,

'The bar of Michael Angelo.'

An ill-advised member of the Medician house, while entertaining a party of guests during a snowstorm, sent out the indignant artist to make a snow man within sight of the palace windows. These anecdotes bear indirectly on the ruling qualities of Michael Angelo--qualities so integral that they are wrought into his marble and painted on his canvas--proud independence and energy.

Before going farther I wish to guard against a common misapprehension of Michael Angelo--that he was a haughty, arrogant man, absolutely narrow in his half-idolatrous, half-human worship of art. Michael Angelo was severe in place of being sweet; he was impatient of contradiction; he was careless and scornful of ceremony; and in his very wrath at flattery and hypocrisy, he was liable to sin against his own honesty and sincerity. But he was a man with a lofty sense of duty and a profound reverence for God. He was, unlike Lionardo, consistently simple, frugal, and temperate, throughout his long life. If he held up a high standard to others, and enforced it on them with hardness, he held up a higher standard to himself, and enforced it on himself more hardly still. He was a thoroughly unworldly man, and actions which had their root in unworldliness have been ascribed unjustly to a kind of Lucifer pride. Greed, and the meanness of greed, were unknown to him. He worked for the last ten years of his life (under no less than five different Popes) at his designs for St Peter's, steadfastly refusing pay for the work, saying that he did it for the honour of God and his own honour. He made many enemies and suffered from their enmity, but I cannot learn that, except in one instance, he was guilty of dealing an unworthy blow at his opponents. He was generous to his scholars, and without jealousy of them, suffering them to use his designs for their own purposes. He said, 'I have no friends, I need none, I wish for none;' but that was in feeling himself 'alone before Heaven;' and of the friends whom he did possess, he loved them all the more devotedly and faithfully, because they were few in number.

One need only be told of his love for his old servant Urbino, whom he presented with two thousand crowns to render him independent of service; and when the servant was seized with his last illness Michael Angelo nursed him tenderly, sleeping in his clothes on a couch that he might be ready to attend his patient. When his cares were ended, Michael Angelo wrote to a correspondent--'My Urbino is dead--to my infinite grief and sorrow. Living, he served me truly; and in his death he taught me how to die. Of Michael Angelo's more equal friendship with Vittoria Colonna I hope my readers will read at leisure for themselves. No nobler, truer friendship ever existed. It began when the high-born and beautiful, gifted, and devout Marchesa de Pescara--most loyal of wives and widows, was forty-eight, and Michael Angelo sixty-four years of age. After a few years of privileged intercourse and correspondence, which were the happiest years in Michael Angelo's life, it ended for this world when he stood mourning by her lifeless clay. 'I was born a rough model, and it was for thee to reform and re-make me,' the great painter had written humbly of himself to his liege lady.[7]

Italy, in Michael Angelo's time, as Germany in Albert Dürer's, was all quickened and astir with the new wave of religious thought which brought about the Reformation. Ochino and Peter Martyr, treading in the footsteps of Savonarola, had preached to eager listeners, but 'in Italy men did not adopt Lutheranism, though they approached it;' and in all the crowd of great Italian artists of the day, Michael Angelo shows deepest traces of the conflict--of its trouble, its seriousness, its nobleness. He only, among his brethren, acted out his belief that the things of the world sank into insignificance before those thoughts of God and immortality which were alone fully worthy of the soul. And it was, as to a religious work for which he was fitted, that he at last gave himself up to the raising of St Peter's. We shall have next in order the life of a man who had all the winning qualities which Michael Angelo wanted, but we shall hardly, through the whole range of history, find a nobler man than Michael Angelo.

After his first visit to Rome, 1496, Michael Angelo executed his colossal statue of David. In 1503 he entered into the competition with Lionardo for the painting of one end of the Council-hall, in Florence, which has been already mentioned. For this object he drew as his cartoon, 'Pisan soldiers surprised while bathing by a sudden trumpet call to arms.' The grand cartoon, of which only a small copy exists, was said to have been torn to pieces as an act of revenge by a fellow-sculptor, whom Michael Angelo had offended.

Michael Angelo was invited to Rome by Julius II. in 1504 to aid in erecting the unapproachable monument which the Pope projected raising for himself. Then commenced a series of contentions and struggles between the imperious and petulant Pope and the haughty, uncompromising painter, in which the latter certainly had the best of it. At one time in the course of the quarrel, Michael Angelo departed from Rome without permission or apology, and stoutly refused to return, though followed hotly by no less than five different couriers, armed with threats and promises, and urged to make the reparation by his own gonfaloniere. At last a meeting and a reconciliation between Michael Angelo and the Pope were effected at Bologna. Michael Angelo designed for Pope Julius II, not only the statue of Pope Julius at Bologna, which was finally converted into a cannon, and turned against the very man whose effigy it had originally presented, but also for that tomb which was never completed, the famous figure of Moses seated, grasping his beard with one hand.

While employed at the tomb, Michael Angelo, then in his fortieth year, was desired by the Pope to undertake the decoration of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Here, again, the hand of an enemy is said to have been at work. Michael Angelo, with the first place as a sculptor, was inexperienced in fresco painting; while Raphael, who was taking the place of Lionardo as Michael Angelo's most formidable rival (yet whom it is said Michael Angelo pointed out as the fittest painter of the ceiling), and who was then engaged in painting the Vatican chambers, had already achieved the utmost renown. It was anticipated by secret hostility, so records tradition, that Michael Angelo would fail signally in the unaccustomed work, and that his merit as an artist would pale altogether before that of Raphael's. I need hardly write how entirely malice was balked in the verdict to which posterity has set its seal.

Michael Angelo brought artists from Florence to help him in his great undertaking, for over the chapel, whose walls had already been painted by older artists--among them Ghirlandajo, was an enormous vault of 150 feet in length by 50 in breadth, which Michael Angelo was required to cover with designs representing the Fall and Redemption of Man. But the painter was unable to bear what seemed to him the bungling attempts of his assistants; so dismissing them all and destroying their work, he shut himself up, and working in solitude and secrecy, set himself to evolve from his own inner consciousness the gigantic scenes of a tremendous drama. In 22 months (or, as Kugler holds, in three years, including the time spent on the designs) he finished gloriously the work, the magnitude of which one must see to comprehend. On All Saints' Day, 1512, the ceiling was uncovered, and Michael Angelo was hailed, little though he cared for such clamorous hailing, as a painter indeed. For this piece of work Michael Angelo received 3000 crowns.

Pope Julius died, and was succeeded by Leo X. of the Medician house, but, in spite of early associations as well as of mother country, Michael Angelo was no more acceptable to the Pope--a brilliantly polished, easy-tempered man of the world, who filled the chair of St Peter's, than Lionardo had been. Leo X, greatly preferred Raphael, to whom all manner of pleasantness as well as of courteous deference was natural, to the two others. At the same time, Leo employed Michael Angelo, though it was more as an architect than as a painter, and rather at Florence than at Rome. At Florence Michael Angelo executed for Pope Clement VII., another Medici, the mortuary chapel of San Lorenzo, with its six great statues, those of the cousins Lorenzo de Medici and Giuliano de Medici, the first called by the Florentines 'Il Pensièro,' or 'Pensive Thought,' with the four colossal recumbent figures named respectively the Night, the Morning, the Dawn, and the Twilight.

In 1537 Michael Angelo was employed by his fellow citizens to fortify his native city against the return of his old patrons the Medici, and the city held out for nine months.

Pope Paul III., an old man when elected to the popedom, but bent on signalizing his pontificate with as splendid works of art as those which had rendered the reigns of his predecessors illustrious, summoned another man, grown elderly, Michael Angelo, upwards of sixty years, reluctant to accept the commission, to finish the decoration of the Sistine Chapel; and Michael Angelo painted on the wall, at the upper end, his painting, 'The Last Judgment.' The picture is forty-seven feet high by forty-three wide, and it occupied the painter eight years. It was during its progress that Michael Angelo entered on his friendship with Vittoria Colonna.

For the chapel called the Paolina or Pauline Chapel Michael Angelo also painted less-known frescoes, but from that time he devoted his life to St Peter's. He had said that he would take the old Pantheon and 'suspend it in air,' and he did what he said, though he did not live to see the great cathedral completed. His sovereign, the Grand Duke of Florence, endeavoured in vain with magnificent offers to lure the painter back to his native city. Michael Angelo protested that to leave Rome then would be 'a sin and a shame, and the ruin of the greatest religious monument in Christian Europe.' Michael Angelo, like Lionardo, did not marry; he died at Rome in 1563, in his eighty-ninth year.

His nephew and principal heir,[8] by the orders of the Grand Duke of Florence, and it is believed according to Michael Angelo's own wish, removed the painter's body to Florence, where it was buried with all honours in the church of Santa Croce there.

The traits which recall Michael Angelo personally to us, are the prominent arch of the nose, the shaggy brows, the tangled beard, the gaunt grandeur of a figure like that of one of his prophets.

While Michael Angelo lived, one Pope rose on his approach, and seated the painter on his right hand, and another Pope declined to sit down in his painter's presence; but the reason given for the last condescension, is that the Pope feared that the painter would follow his example. And if the Grand Duke Cosmo uncovered before Michael Angelo, and stood hat in hand while speaking to him, we may have the explanation in another assertion, that 'sovereigns asked Michael Angelo to put on his cap, because the painter would do it unasked.'

The solitary instance in which Michael Angelo is represented as taking an unfair advantage of an antagonist, is in connection with the painter's rivalry in his art with Raphael. Michael Angelo undervalued the genius of Raphael, and was disgusted by what the older man considered the immoderate admiration bestowed on the younger. A favourite pupil of Michael Angelo's was Sebastian Del Piombo, who being a Venetian by birth was an excellent colourist. For one of his pictures--the very 'Raising of Lazarus' now in the National Gallery, which the Pope had ordered at the same time that he had ordered Raphael's 'Transfiguration'--it is rumoured that Michael Angelo gave the designs and even drew the figures, leaving Sebastian the credit, and trusting that without Michael Angelo's name appearing in the work, by the help of his drawing in addition to Sebastian's superb colouring, Raphael would be eclipsed, and that by a painter comparatively obscure.

The unwarrantable inference that the whole work was that of one painter, constituted a stratagem altogether unworthy of Michael Angelo, and if it had any existence, its getting wind disappointed and foiled its authors. When the story was repeated to Raphael, his sole protest is said to have been to the effect that he was glad that Michael Angelo esteemed him so highly as to enter the lists with him.

We can judge of Michael Angelo's attainments as a poet, even without having recourse to the original Italian, by Wordsworth's translations of some of the Italian master's sonnets, and by Mr John Edward Taylor's translations of selections from Michael Angelo's poems.

Michael Angelo was greater as an architect and a sculptor than as a painter, because his power and delight lay in the mastery of form, and in the assertion, through that mastery, of the idealism of genius. It is not necessary to speak here of the mighty harmonies and the ineffable dignity of simplicity, somewhat marred by the departure from Michael Angelo's designs, in St Peter's. It has been the fashion to praise them to the skies, and it has been a later fashion to decry them, in awarding a preference to the solemn shades and the dim rich dreaminess of Gothic architecture. Both fashions come to this, after all, that beauty, like these great men of genius of old, is many-sided.

In Michael Angelo's works of sculpture a weird charm attaches to his monuments in honour of the Medici in the chapel of San Lorenzo, Florence. Perhaps something of this weirdness has to do with the tragic history of the men, and with a certain mystery which has always shrouded the sculptor's meaning in these monuments.

Mrs Jameson quotes an account of Michael Angelo at work. An eye-witness has left us a very graphic description of the energy with which, even in old age, Michael Angelo handled his chisel:--"I can say that I have seen Michael Angelo at the age of sixty, and, with a body announcing weakness, make more chips of marble fly about in a quarter of an hour than would three of the strongest young sculptors in an hour,--a thing almost incredible to him who has not beheld it. He went to work with such impetuosity and fury of manner, that I feared almost every moment to see the block split into pieces. It would seem as if, inflamed by the idea of greatness which inspired him, this great man attacked with a Vigenére."

In painting Michael Angelo regarded colouring as of secondary importance. He is not known to have executed one painting in oil, and he treated oil and easel-painting generally as work only fit for women or idle men. While he approached the sublime in his painting, it was by no means faultless. Even in form his efforts were apt to tend to heaviness and exaggeration, and the fascination which robust muscular delineation had for him, betrayed him into materialism. Fuseli's criticism of Michael Angelo's work, that Michael Angelo's women were female men, and his children diminutive giants, is judged correct. Incomparably the greatest painting of Michael Angelo's is his ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It includes upwards of 200 figures, the greater part colossal, as they were to be looked at, in the distance, from below.

'The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel contains the most perfect
works done by Michael Angelo in his long and active life. Here
his great spirit appears in noblest dignity, in its highest
purity; here the attention is not disturbed by that arbitrary
display to which his great power not unfrequently seduced him in
other works. The ceiling forms a flattened arch in its section;
the central portion, which is a plain surface, contains a series
of large and small pictures, representing the most important
events recorded in the book of Genesis--the Creation and Fall of
Man, with its immediate consequences. In the large triangular
compartments at the springing of the vault are sitting figures
of the Prophets and Sibyls, as the foretellers of the coming
Saviour. In the soffits of the recesses between these
compartments, and in the arches underneath, immediately above
the windows, are the ancestors of the Virgin, the series leading
the mind directly to the Saviour. The external of these numerous
representations is formed by an architectural frame-work of
peculiar composition, which encloses the single subjects, tends
to make the principal masses conspicuous, and gives to the whole
an appearance of that solidity and support so necessary, but so
seldom attended to in soffit decorations, which may be
considered as if suspended. A great number of figures are also
connected with the frame-work; those in unimportant situations
are executed in the colour of stone or bronze; in the more
important, in natural colours. These serve to support the
architectural forms, to fill up and to connect the whole. They
may be best described as the living and embodied _genii_ of
architecture. It required the unlimited power of an architect,
sculptor, and painter, to conceive a structural whole of so much
grandeur, to design the decorative figures with the significant
repose required by the sculpturesque character, and yet to
preserve their subordination to the principal subjects, and to
keep the latter in the proportions and relations best adapted to
the space to be filled.'--_Kugler_.

The pictures from the Old Testament, beginning from the altar, are:--

1. The Separation of Light and Darkness.
2. The Creation of the Sun and Moon.
3. The Creation of Trees and Plants.
4. The Creation of Adam.
5. The Creation of Eve.
6. The Fall and the Expulsion from Paradise.
7. The Sacrifice of Noah.
8. The Deluge.
9. The Intoxication of Noah.

'The scenes from Genesis are the most sublime representations of
these subjects;--the Creating Spirit is unveiled before us. The
peculiar type which the painter has here given of the form of the
Almighty
Father has been frequently imitated by his followers, and even by
Raphael, but has been surpassed by none. Michael Angelo has
represented him in majestic flight, sweeping through the air,
surrounded by _genii_, partly supporting, partly borne along with
him, covered by his floating drapery; they are the distinct
syllables, the separate virtues of his creating word. In the
first (large) compartment we see him with extended hands,
assigning to the sun and moon their respective paths. In the
second, he awakens the first man to life. Adam lies stretched on
the verge of the earth in the act of raising himself; the Creator
touches him with the point of his finger, and appears thus to
endow him with feeling and life. This picture displays a
wonderful depth of thought in the composition, and the utmost
elevation and majesty in the general treatment and execution. The
third subject is not less important, representing the Fall of
Man, and his Expulsion from Paradise. The tree of knowledge
stands in the midst; the serpent (the upper part of the body
being that of a woman) is twined around the
stem; she bends down towards the guilty pair, who are in the act
of plucking the forbidden fruit. The figures are nobly graceful,
particularly that of Eve. Close to the serpent hovers the angel
with the sword, ready to drive the fallen beings out of Paradise.
In this double action, this union of two separate moments, there
is something peculiarly poetic and significant: it is guilt and
punishment in one picture. The sudden and lightning-like
appearance of the avenging angel behind the demon of darkness has
a most impressive effect.'--_Kugler_.

The lower portion of the ceiling is divided into triangles, occupied by the Prophets and Sibyls in solemn contemplation, accompanied by angels and genii. Beginning from the left of the entrance their order is--

1. Joel.
2. Sibylla Erythræa.
3. Ezekiel.
4. Sibylla Persica.
5. Jonah.
6. Sibylla Libyca.
7. Daniel.
8. Sibylla Cumæa.
9. Isaiah.
10. Sibylla Delphica.

'The prophets and sibyls in the triangular compartments of the
curved portion of the ceiling are the largest figures in the
whole work; these, too, are among the most wonderful forms that
modern art has called into life. They are all represented
seated, employed with books or rolled manuscripts; genii stand
near or behind them. These mighty beings sit before us pensive,
meditative, inquiring, or looking upwards with inspired
countenances. Their forms and movements, indicated by the grand
lines and masses of the drapery, are majestic and dignified. We
see in them beings, who, while they feel and bear the sorrows of
a corrupt and sinful world, have power to look for consolation
into the secrets of the future. Yet the greatest variety
prevails in the attitudes and expression: each figure is full of
individuality. Zacharias is an aged man, busied in calm and
circumspect investigation; Jeremiah is bowed down, absorbed in
thought, the thought of deep and bitter grief; Ezekiel turns
with hasty movements to the genius next to him, who points
upwards with joyful expectation, etc. The sibyls are equally
characteristic: the Persian, a lofty, majestic woman, very aged;
the Erythræan, full of power, like the warrior goddess of
wisdom; the Delphic, like Cassandra, youthfully soft and
graceful, but with strength to bear the awful seriousness of
revelation.'--_Kugler_.

'The belief of the Roman Catholic Church in the testimony of the
sibyl is shown by the well-known hymn, said to have been composed
by Pope Innocent III, at the close of the thirteenth century,
beginning with the verse--

"Dies iræ, dies illa,
Solvet sæclum in favilla
Teste David cum Sibylla."

It may be inferred that this hymn, admitted into the liturgy of
the Roman Church, gave sanction to the adoption of the sibyls
into Christian art. They are seen from this time accompanying the
prophets and apostles, in the cyclical decorations of the
church.... But the highest honour that art has rendered to the
sibyls has been by the hand of Michael Angelo,
on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Here in the conception of a
mysterious order of women, placed above and without all
considerations of the graceful or the individual, the great
master was peculiarly in his element. They exactly fitted his
standard, of art, not always sympathetic, nor comprehensible to
the average human mind, of which the grand in form and the
abstract in expression were the first and last conditions. In
this respect, the sibyls on the Sistine Chapel ceiling are more
Michael Angelesque than their companions the prophets. For these,
while types of the highest monumental treatment, are yet men,
while the sibyls belong to a distinct class of beings, who convey
the impression of the very obscurity in which their history is
wrapt--creatures who have lived far from the abodes of men, who
are alike devoid of the expression of feminine sweetness, human
sympathy, or sacramental beauty; who are neither Christians nor
Jewesses, Witches nor Graces, yet living, grand, beautiful, and
true, according to laws revealed to the great Florentine genius
only.

Thus their figures may be said to be unique, as the offspring of
a peculiar sympathy between the master's mind and his subject. To
this sympathy may be ascribed the prominence and size given them,
both prophets and sibyls, as compared to their usual relation to
the subjects they environ. They sit here on twelve throne-like
niches, more like presiding deities, each wrapt in
self-contemplation, than as tributary witnesses to the truth and
omnipotence of Him they are intended to announce. Thus they form
a gigantic frame-work round the subjects of the Creation, of
which the birth of Eve, as the type of the Nativity, is the
intentional centre. For some reason, the twelve figures are not
prophets and sibyls alternately--there being only five sibyls to
seven prophets,--so that the prophets come together at one angle.
Books and scrolls are given indiscriminately to them.

'The Sibylla Persica, supposed to be the oldest of the sisterhood, holds the book close to her eyes, as if from dimness of sight, which fact, contradicted as it is by a frame of obviously Herculean strength, gives a mysterious intentness to the action.

'The Sibylla Libyca, of equally powerful proportions, but less closely draped, is grandly wringing herself to lift a massive volume from a height above her head on to her knees.

'The Sibylla Cumana, also aged, and with her head covered, is reading with her volume at a distance from her eyes.

'The Sibylla Delphica, with waving hair escaping from her turban, is a beautiful young being, the most human of all, gazing into vacancy or futurity. She holds a scroll.

'The Sibylla Erythræa, grand, bare-headed creature, sits reading intently with crossed legs, about to turn over her book.

'The prophets are equally grand in structure, and though, as we have said, not more than men, yet they are the only men that could well bear the juxtaposition with their stupendous female colleagues. Ezekiel, between Erythræa and Persica, has a scroll in his hand that hangs by his side, just cast down, as he turns eagerly to listen to some voice.

'Jeremiah, a magnificent figure, with elbow on knee and head on hand, wrapt in meditation appropriate to one called to utter lamentation and woe. He has neither book nor scroll.

'Jonah is also without either. His position is strained and ungraceful, looking upwards, and apparently remonstrating with the Almighty upon the destruction of the gourd, a few leaves of which are seen above him. His hands are placed together with a strange and trivial action, supposed to denote the counting on his fingers the number of days he was in the fish's belly. A formless marine monster is seen at his side.

'Daniel has a book on his lap, with one hand on it. He is young, and a piece of lion's skin seems to allude to his history.'[9]

In the recesses between the prophets and sibyls are a series of lovely family groups, representing the genealogy of the Virgin, and expressive of calm expectation of the future. The four corners of the ceiling contain groups illustrative of the power of the Lord displayed in the especial deliverances of his chosen people. Near the altar are:

Right, The Deliverance of the Israelites by the Brazen Serpent.

Left, The Execution of Haman.

Near the entrance are:

Right, Judith and Holofernes.

Left, David and Goliath.[10]

Michael Angelo was thirty-nine years of age when he painted the ceiling of the Sistine. When he began to paint the 'Day of Judgment' he was above sixty years of age, and his great rival, Raphael, had already been dead thirteen years.

The picture of the 'Day of Judgment,' with much that renders it marvellous and awful, has a certain coarseness of conception and execution. The moment chosen is that in which the Lord says, 'Depart from me, ye cursed,' and the idea and even attributes of the principal figure are taken from Orcagna's old painting in the Campo Santo. But with all Michael Angelo's advantages, he has by no means improved on the original idea. He has robbed the figure of the Lord of its transcendant majesty; he has not been able to impart to the ranks of the blessed the look of blessedness which 'Il Beato' himself might have conveyed. The chief excellence of the picture is in the ranks of the condemned, who writhe and rebel against their agonies. No wonder that the picture is sombre and dreadful.

Of the allegorical figures of 'Night' and 'Morning' in the chapel of San Lorenzo, there are casts at the Crystal Palace.

A comparison and a contrast have been instituted between Michael Angelo and Milton, and Raphael and Shakespeare. There may be something in them, but, as in the case of broken metaphors, they will not bear being pushed to a logical conclusion or picked to pieces. The very transparent comparison which matches Michael Angelo with his own countryman, Dante, is after all more felicitous and truer. Michael Angelo with Lionardo are the great chiefs of the Florentine School.

Raphael Sanzio, or Santi of Urbino, the head of the Roman School, was one of those very exceptional men who seem born to happiness, to inspire love and only love, to pass through the world making friends and disarming enemies, who are fully armed to confer pleasure while almost incapable of either inflicting or receiving pain. To this day his exceptional fortune stands Raphael's memory in good stead, since for one man or woman who yearns after the austere righteousness and priceless tenderness of Michael Angelo, there are ten who yield with all their hearts to the gay, sweet gentleness and generosity of Raphael. No doubt it was also in his favour as a painter, that though a man of highly cultivated tastes, 'in close intimacy and correspondence with most of the celebrated men of his time, and interested in all that was going forward,' he did not, especially in his youth, spend his strength on a variety of studies, but devoted himself to painting. While he thus vindicated his share of the breadth of genius of his country and time, by giving to the world the loveliest Madonnas and Child-Christs, the most dramatic of battle-pieces, the finest of portraits, his noble and graceful fertility of invention and matchless skill of execution were confined to and concentrated on painting. He did not diverge long or far into the sister arts of architecture and sculpture, though his classic researches in the excavations of Rome were keen and zealous; a heap of ruins having given to the world in 1504 the group of the that a writer of his day could record that 'Raphael had sought and found in Rome another Rome.'

Raphael was born in the town of Urbino, and was the son of a painter of the Umbrian School, who very early destined the boy to his future career, and promoted his destination by all the efforts in Giovanni Santi's power, including the intention of sending away and apprenticing the little lad to the best master of his time, Perugino, so called from the town where he resided, Perugia. Raphael's mother died when he was only eight years of age, and his father died when he was no more than eleven years, before the plans for his education were put into action. But no stroke of outward calamity, or loss--however severe, could annul Raphael's birthright of universal favour. His step-mother, the uncles who were his guardians, his clever, perverse, unscrupulous master, all joined in a common love of Raphael and determination to promote his interests.

Raphael at the age of twelve years went to Perugia to work under Perugino, and remained with his master till he was nearly twenty years of age. In that interval he painted industriously, making constant progress, always in the somewhat hard, but finished, style of Perugino, while already showing a predilection for what was to prove Raphael's favourite subject, the Madonna and Child. At this period he painted his famous _Lo Sposalizio_ or the 'Espousals,' the marriage of the Virgin Mary with Joseph, now at Milan. In 1504 he visited Florence, remaining only for a short time, but making the acquaintance of Fra Bartolommeo and Ghirlandajo, seeing the cartoons of Lionardo and Michael Angelo, and from that time displaying a marked improvement in drawing. Indeed nothing is more conspicuous in Raphael's genius in contra-distinction to Michael Angelo's, than the receptive character of Raphael's mind, his power of catching up an impression from without, and the candour and humility with which he availed himself unhesitatingly of the assistance lent him by others.

Returning soon to Florence, Raphael remained there till 1508, when he was twenty-five years, drawing closer the valuable friendships he had already formed, and advancing with rapid strides in his art, until his renown was spread all over Italy, and with reason, since already, while still young, he had painted his 'Madonna of the Goldfinch,' in the Florentine Gallery, and his 'La Belle Jardinière,' or Madonna in a garden among flowers, now in the Louvre.

In his twenty-fifth year Raphael was summoned to Rome to paint for Pope Julius II. My readers will remember that Michael Angelo in the abrupt severity of his prime of manhood, was soon to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel for the same despotic and art-loving Pope, who had brought Raphael hardly more than a stripling to paint the '_Camere_' or '_Stanze_' chambers of the Vatican.

The first of the halls which Raphael painted (though not the first in order) is called the Camera della Segnatura (in English, signature), and represents Theology, Poetry, Philosophy, with the Sciences, Arts, and Jurisprudence. The second is the 'Stanza d'Eliodoro,' or the room of Heliodorus, and contains the grandest painting of all, in the expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple of Jerusalem (taken from Maccabees), the Miracle of Bolsena, Attila, king of the Huns, terrified by the apparition of St Peter and St Paul, and St Peter delivered from prison. The third stanza painted by Raphael is the 'Stanza dell' Incendio' (the conflagration), so called from the extinguishing of the fire in the Borgo by a supposed miracle, being the most conspicuous scene in representations of events taken from the lives of Popes Leo III, and IV.; and the fourth chamber, which was left unfinished by Raphael, and completed by his scholars, is the 'Sala di Constantino,' and contains incidents from the life of the Emperor Constantine, including the splendid battle-piece between Constantine and Maxentius. At these chambers, or at the designs for them, during the popedoms of Julius II., who died in the course of the painting of the Camere, and Leo X., for a period of twelve years, till Raphael's death in 1520, after which the 'Sala di Constantino' was completed by his scholars.

Raphael has also left in the Vatican a series of small pictures from the Old Testament, known as Raphael's Bible. This series decorates the thirteen cupolas of the 'Loggie,' or open galleries, running round three sides of an open court. Another work undertaken by Raphael should have still more interest for us. Leo X., resolving to substitute woven for painted tapestry round the lower walls of the interior of the Sistine Chapel, commanded Raphael to furnish drawings to the Flemish weavers, and thence arose eleven cartoons, seven of which have been preserved, have become the property of England, and are the glory of the Kensington Museum. The subjects of the cartoons in the seven which have been saved, are 'The Death of Ananias,' 'Elymas the Sorcerer struck with Blindness,' 'The Healing of the Lame Man at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple,' 'The Miraculous Draught of Fishes,' 'Paul and Barnabas at Lystra,' 'St Paul Preaching at Athens,' and 'The Charge to St Peter.' The four cartoons which are lost, were 'The Stoning of St Stephen,' 'The Conversion of St Paul,' 'Paul in Prison,' and 'The Coronation of the Virgin.'

In those cartoons figures above life-size were drawn with chalk upon strong paper, and coloured in distemper, and Raphael received for his work four hundred and thirty gold ducats (about _£650_), while the Flemish weavers received for their work in wools, silk, and gold, fifty thousand gold ducats. The designs were cut up in strips for the weavers' use, and while some strips were destroyed, the rest lay in a warehouse at Arras, till Rubens became aware of their existence, and advised Charles I, to buy the set, to be employed in the tapestry manufactory established by James I. at Mortlake. Brought to this country in the slips which the weavers had copied, the fate of the cartoons was still precarious. Cromwell bought them in Charles I.'s art collection, and Louis XIV, sought, but failed, to re-buy them. They fell into farther neglect, and were well-nigh forgotten, when Sir Godfrey Kneller recalled them to notice, and induced William III, to have the slips pasted together, and stretched upon linen, and put in a room set apart for them at Hampton Court, whence they were transferred, within the last ten years, for the greater advantage of artists and the public, to Kensington Museum.

The woven tapestries for which the cartoons were designed had quite as chequered a career. In the two sacks of Rome by French soldiers, the tapestries were seized, carried off, and two of them burnt for the bullion in the thread. At last they were restored to the Vatican, where they hang in their faded magnificence, a monument of Leo X, and of Raphael. An additional set of ten tapestry cartoons were supplied to the Vatican by Raphael's scholars.

Raphael painted for the Chigi family in their palace, which is now the Villa Farnesina, scenes from the history of Cupid and Psyche, and the Triumph of Galatea, subjects which show how the passion for classical mythology that distinguishes the next generation, was beginning to work. To these last years belong his 'Madonna di San Sisto,' so named from its having been painted for the convent of St Sixtus at Piacenza, and his last picture, the 'Transfiguration,' with which he was still engaged when death met him unexpectedly.

Raphael, as the Italians say, lived more like a '_principe_' (prince) than a '_pittore_' (painter). He had a house in Rome, and a villa in the neighbourhood, and on his death left a considerable fortune to his heirs. There has not been wanting a rumour that his life of a principe was a dissipated and prodigal life; but this ugly rumour, even if it had more evidence to support it, is abundantly disproven by the nature of Raphael's work, and by the enormous amount of that work, granting him the utmost assistance from his crowd of scholars. He had innumerable commissions, and retained an immense school from all parts of Italy, the members of which adored their master. Raphael had the additional advantage of having many of his pictures well engraved by a contemporary engraver named Raimondi.