WOMAN IN ART
admiration and love a literary setting, as did Petrarch to his Laura, Abelard to Heloise, and others, thus assuring us of exalted womanhood, if not perfect.
It was not mere beauty of color and curve that captured the eye and mind of the great Florentine master of chisel and brush; one cannot read his sonnets without knowing that the goddess of his heart exercised an influence far nobler than the art it helped to ennoble.
Let an early sonnet acquaint us with a high-souled woman, to whom it was written:
"When divine Art conceives a form and face,
She bids the craftsman for his first essay
To shape a simple model in her clay:
This is the earliest birth of Art's embrace.
From the live marble in the second place
His mallet brings into the light of day
A thing so beautiful, that who can say
When time shall conquer that immortal grace?
Thus my own model I was born to be—
The model of that nobler self, whereto,
Schooled by your pity, lady, I shall grow.
Each overplus and each deficiency
You will make good. What penance then is due
For my fierce heat, chastened and taught by you?"
In another sonnet Michael Angelo soliloquizes his appreciation of Vittoria's spirit and its divine source.
"The beauty thou discernest, all is hers;
But grows in radiance as it soars on high
Through mortal eyes unto the soul above;
'Tis there transfigured; for the soul confers
On what she holds, her own divinity;
And this transfigured beauty wins thy love."
Now and again his sonnets have the tone of a scripture like this:
"Thy beauty is no mortal thing; 'twas sent
From heaven on high to make our earth divine."
The sonnets came to the artist as came his sculptural motifs, through clouds of disappointment, and the sometime failures that must be the accidental notes in life's harmonies for soul enrichment. In later years the inspiring helpful spirit left this world. To the great man, it was as he wrote, "an irreparable
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