The Life of Michael Angelo/Solitude

by Romain Rolland

III

SOLITUDE

L'anima mia, che chon la morte parla . . .^[1]

Thus he lived alone with his humble friends—his assistants and his madcap acquaintances, and with other friends still more humble—his domestic animals, his fowls and his cats.^[2]

In reality he was alone; and he became so more and more. "I am always alone," he wrote to his nephew in 1548, "and I speak to no one." Little by little he had separated himself not only from man's society but even from their interests, their needs, their pleasures and their thoughts.

The last passion which attached him to the men of his time—his republicanism—had become extinguished in its turn. Once more it had sprung into life at the time of the two serious illnesses of 1544 and 1546, when Michael Angelo had been received by his friend Riccio at the house of the Strozzi, who were republicans and proscripts. Convalescent, Michael Angelo begged Robert Strozzi, a refugee in Lyons, to remind the King of France of his promises, adding that if Francis I. came and re-established liberty in Florence he would undertake to raise a bronze equestrian statue to him on the Piazza della Signoria at his own expense.^[3] In 1546 he gave to Strozzi, in recognition of the hospitality he had received, the two "Slaves," which Strozzi presented to Francis I.

But this was merely an outburst of political fever—the last one. In some passages of his Dialogues with Giannotti, in 1545, he expresses almost Tolstoy's thoughts on the uselessness of struggling and of non-resistance to evil.

"It is a piece of great presumption to dare to kill any one, for we cannot know with certainty whether his death will lead to any good or whether any good will come from his death. Consequently I cannot bear those men who believe that it is impossible to produce good unless they begin with evil—that is, with murder. Times change, new events arise, desires are transformed and men grow tired. . . . And, after all, the unforeseen always happens."

The same Michael Angelo who had spoken in favour of tyrannicide now grew irritated against revolutionaries who imagined they could change the world at a stroke. He well knew that he had been one of them, and it was himself whom he condemned bitterly. Like Hamlet, he had doubts about everything now—his thoughts, his hatreds, and everything he had believed. He turned his back on action.

"That honest man," he wrote, "who replied to some one: 'I am not a statesman, I am an honest man and a man of common sense,' spoke the truth. If only my works in Rome gave me as little worry as affairs of State!"^[4]

The truth was he no longer hated. He could no longer hate. It was too late.

Ahime, lasso chi pur tropp' aspetta,
Ch' i' gionga a suoi conforti tanto tardj!
Ancor, se ben riguardj,
Un generoso, alter' e nobil core
Perdon' et porta a chi l' offend' amore.^[5]

He lived at Macel de' Corvi, on the forum of Trajan. There he had a house with a little garden. He occupied it with a valet,^[6] a servant and his domestic animals. He was not fortunate with his servants, "all of whom," says Vasari, "were dirty and negligent." He often changed them and complained bitterly.^[7] He had as many difficulties with them as Beethoven had; and his "Ricordi" (Notes), like Beethoven's Notebooks, mention these household quarrels. "Oh, that she had never been here!" he wrote in 1560, after dismissing a servant named Girolama.

His room was as dark as a tomb,^[8] "spiders created there a thousand pieces of work and unwound their little distaffs."^[9] Halfway up the staircase he had painted a figure of Death, bearing a coffin on his shoulders.^[10]

He lived like a poor man, ate hardly anything,^[11] and, "being unable to sleep, used to get up at night to work with his chisel. He had made a helmet of paper, and kept a lighted candle above the middle of his head, which lighted the work without embarassing his hands."^[12] The older he grew the more solitary he became. He felt the need, when all Rome was asleep, of taking refuge in nocturnal work. Silence was a blessing to him, night a friend.

"O Night, O sweet though sombre time, when every effort ends in peace, he who extols you clearly sees and comprehends, and he who honours you is full of discernment. You cut with your scissors every weary thought, which the damp shadow and the quiet penetrate; and often from this earth you carry me, in imagination, to that heaven where I hope to go. O shadow of death, which stops all misery, the enemy of the soul and the heart, O supreme and effectual remedy of the afflicted, you render health to our ailing flesh, you dry our tears, you relieve us of our fatigue, and you rid the good of hatred and disgust."^[13]

Vasari visited the old man one night and found him in his deserted house engaged on his tragic Pietà" and wrapped in meditation.

"When Vasari knocked, Michael Angelo rose and came to the door, with a candlestick in his hand. Vasari wished to look at the piece of sculpture, but Michael Angelo let the light fall, so that they were in darkness. And whilst Urbino was fetching another, the Master turned towards Vasari and said: 'I am so old that death frequently drags at my mantle to take me, and one day my person will fall like this light.' "

He was absorbed by the idea of death: from day to day it became gloomier and more attractive. "There is not one of my thoughts," he said to Vasari, "on which death is not deeply engraved."^[14] It seemed to him, now, to be the only happiness in life.

"When my past is before me—and that is so every moment—I then well know, O false world! the error and the fault of the human race. He who ends by consenting to listen to your flatteries and your vain delights prepares painful sorrows for his soul. He knows well—he who has had experience—how often you promise the peace and prosperity which you do not possess, nor ever will. Consequently, the least favoured being is he who remains the longest here below; whilst he who lives the shortest time the more easily returns to Heaven. …^[15]{

"Having reached my last hour, after many years of life, I tardily recognise, O world, your charms! You promise peace, and you possess it not; you promise rest, which dies before birth. … This I say and know from experience: he alone is elected to Heaven whose death follows closely on his birth."^[16]

On his nephew Leonardo fêting the birth of his son, Michael Angelo blamed him severely.

"This pomp displeases me. It is not permissible to laugh when the whole world is weeping. It is senseless to celebrate such a fête in honour of one who has just been born. You should reserve your gladness for the day on which a man who has lived well dies."^[17]

And in the following year he congratulated him on having lost his second son shortly after birth.

Nature, which, through his passionate existence and the peculiar character of his intellectual genius, he had up to then neglected,^[18] was a source of consolation to him in his declining years. In September 1556, when fleeing from Rome, which was threatened by the Spanish troops of the Duke of Alba, he passed by Spoleto and there remained five weeks, in the midst of the oak and olive woods, penetrated through and through by the serene splendour of the autumn. It was with regret that he returned to Rome, to which he was recalled at the end of October. "I have left more than half of myself over there," he wrote to Vasari, "for verily peace is to be found only in the woods."

Pace non si trova senon ne boschi.^[19]

And on returning to Rome the old man of eighty-two composed a beautiful poem to the glory of the fields and country life, which he contrasted with city vanities. This was his last poetical work and it contains all the freshness of youth.^[20]

But in nature, as in art and as in love, it was God for whom he was seeking, and to whom he daily drew nearer. He had always been a believer. Though he was not to be easily deceived either by priests or monks or devotees of either sex, and though, should an opportunity offer, he treated them without tenderness,^[21] there was never, it would seem, the slightest doubt in his faith. At the time of the illness or death of his father and brothers, his first concern was ever that they should receive the sacrament.^[22] He had a boundless confidence in prayer, "which he regarded as more efficacious than all the medicines in the world";^[23] he attributed to its power all the good which had come to him and believed that it preserved him from evil. In his solitude he was subject to crises of mystic adoration. By chance the recollection of one of these has been handed down to us: a contemporary narrative shows us the ecstatic face of the hero of the Sistine, praying, alone, at night, in his garden in Rome, and imploring with his sorrowful eyes the starry sky.^[24]

It is incorrect, as some would have us believe,^[25] that he was indifferent to the worship of the saints and the Virgin. It would be a pretty idea to make a Protestant of the man who devoted the last twenty years of his life to building the temple of the Apostle Peter, and whose last work, interrupted by death, was a statue of St. Peter. We cannot forget that, on various occasions, he wished to undertake great pilgrimages—in 1545 to San Giacomo di Compostello, in 1556 to Loreto, and that he belonged to the brotherhood of San Giovanni Decollato (St. John the Baptist). But it is true that, like every great Christian, he lived and died in Christ.^[26] "I live in poverty with Christ," he wrote to his father in 1512, and when dying he begged them to remember the sufferings of Christ. From the time of his friendship with Vittoria Colonna, and especially after her death, his faith assumed a more exalted character. At the same time that his art was devoted almost exclusively to the glory of the Passion of Christ,^[27] his poetry was absorbed in mysticism. He abjured art and took refuge in the large, widespread arms of the crucified Jesus.

"The course of my life has reached, on a stormy sea and in a fragile boat, the common port where we land to give an account and a reason for every good and impious work. Consequently, I recognise now how full of errors was the passionate illusion which made me turn art into an idol and a monarch; and I see clearly what every man desires for his hurt. What are amorous, vain and joyous thoughts now that I approach two deaths? Of one I am certain, and the other threatens me. Neither painting nor sculpture are any longer capable of calming the soul, turned towards that divine love which opens, to take us, its arms upon the cross."^[28]

But the purest flower which faith and suffering sent forth in the old sorrowful heart of Michael Angelo was divine charity.

This man, whom enemies accused of avarice,^[29] never ceased, the whole of his life, to assist the unfortunate, both known and unknown. Not only did he ever show the most touching affection for his old servants and for those of his father—for a certain Mona Margherita, whom he took into his house after the death of old Buonarroti, and whose decease caused him "more distress than if she had been a sister";^[30] for a humble carpenter, who had worked on the scaffolding of the Sistine Chapel, and for whose daughter he provided a dowry;^[31] but he was constantly giving to the poor, and especially to the disreputable poor. He liked to associate his nephew and niece with these acts of charity, to inspire them with a taste for similar actions, and to get them to carry them out, without his name being mentioned, for he desired that his charity should remain a secret.^[32] "He loved better to do good than to be seen doing it."^[33] By a trait of exquisite delicacy, he thought above all of poor young girls, for whom he secretly sought to provide small dowries, in order to enable them to marry or to enter a convent.

"Try to find out a needy citizen who has a daughter to marry or to put in a convent," he wrote to his nephew. "I refer to those who, being in need, are ashamed to beg. Give him the money I send you, but secretly; and act in such a manner that you will not let yourself be deceived. …"^[34]

And elsewhere he says:

"Inform me if you are acquainted with yet another noble citizen who is in very great need, and especially if he has girls at home. It would please me to do him a kind turn, for the salvation of my soul."^[35]

---

1. "Poems," cx.
2. "The fowls and Messer Cock triumph," wrote Angiolini to him in 1553, during one of his absences. "But the cats are disconsolate at seeing you no more, although they do not lack food."
3. Letter from Riccio to Ruberto di Filippo Strozzi (July 21, 1544).
4. Letter to his nephew Leonardo (1547).
5. "Poems," cix, 64.
   
   "Woe to me, fatigued by too long a wait, woe to me who attain too late the goal I had desired! And now, do you not know it? A generous, proud and noble heart pardons, and offers love to he who has offended it."
   
   Michael Angelo here imagines a dialogue between the poet and a Florentine exile. It is possible that he wrote the poem after the assassination of Alessandro de' Medici by Lorenzino in 1536. It appeared for the first time in 1543, with music by Giacomo Archadelt.
6. Among his servants I note, out of curiosity, a Frenchman, named Richard—"Riccardo franzese" (June 18, 1552. "Ricordi," p. 606).
7. "I should like to find," he wrote to Leonardo, "a good, clean servant. But that is very difficult: they are all dirty and debauched ('Son tutte puttane e porche') . . . I give ten jules a month. I live poorly, but I pay well" ("Letters," August 16, 1550).
8. "La mia scura tomba..." ("Poems," lxxxi).

9. Dov' è Aragn' e mill' opre et lavoranti
   Et fan di lor filando fusaiuolo.

   (The same.)

10. On the coffin was the following epitaph:

    Io dico a voi, ch' al mondo avete dato
    L'anima e 'l corpo e lo spirto 'nsieme:
    In questa cassa oscura è 'l vostro lato."

    (The same, cxxxvii.)

       "I tell you, you who gave soul, body, and spirit to the world at one and the same time—in this dark box you hold everything."

11. "He was very sober. When a youth he remained content with a little bread and wine, in order to devote himself entirely to work. In his old age, from the time he painted 'The Last Judgment,' he used to drink a little, but only in the evening, when the day's work was over, and in the most moderate manner. Although he was rich, he lived like a poor man. Never or rarely did a friend eat with him. He did not like presents, as he always felt obliged to make a return. His sobriety made him watchful and caused him to need very little sleep" (Vasari).
12. Vasari, noticing that he did not use wax lights, but candles made of goat fat, sent him forty pounds of the latter. His servant brought them to him, but Michael Angelo refused to accept them. "Sir," said the servant, "they have broken my arms, and I don't want to take them back to the house. If you do not want them, I will stick them in this heap of mud which is before your door and will light them all." Michael Angelo replied: "Put them down then, I do not want you to play pranks at my door" (Vasari).
13. See Appendix, xxii ("Poems," lxxviii).
       Frey dates this poem about 1546, when "The Last Judgment" and the Pauline Chapel were being painted. Grimm considers that it was written a little later, about 1554.
       Another poem on night ("Poems," lxxvii) is of the greatest poetical beauty, but is more literary and a little affected.
14. "Non nasce in me pensiero che non vi sia dentro sculpita la morte" ("Letters," June 22, 1555).
15. See Appendix, xxiii ("Poems," cix, 32).
16. The same, xxiv (the same, cix, 34).
17. Letter to Vasari, dated "I know not what day of April 1554" ("A di non so quanti d'aprile 1554").
18. In spite of the years which he spent away from towns, at Carrara or at Seravezza, he had always paid little attention to nature. Landscape has a very small place in his work; it is reduced to a few summary indications in his frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. In this respect, Michael Angelo differs from his contemporaries Raphael, Titian, Perugino, Francia, and Leonardo da Vinci. He despised the landscapes of the Flemish masters, then much in favour. "Rags," he said, "ruins, green fields shaded with trees, rivers, and bridges—what are called landscapes—and with many figures here and there" ("Dialogues" of Francis of Holland).
19. "Letters," December 28, 1556.
20. I refer to the unfinished poem of one hundred and fifteen lines beginning with the words:

    Nuovo piacere e di magiore stima
    Veder l'ardite capre sopr' un sasso
    Montar, pasciendo or questa or quella cima . . .

    "It is a fresh and ever relished pleasure to see the daring goats climb upon a rocky hill, browzing first on one and then upon another peak . . ."
       I here follow the opinion of Frey, who dates the poem October to December 1556. Thode attributes it to Michael Angelo's youth, but does not give, it seems to me, a sufficiently good reason for so doing.

21. In 1548, when dissuading his nephew Leonardo from making a pilgrimage to Loreto, he advised him rather to spend his money in charity. "For if you give money to the priests, God knows what they will do with it!" (April 7, 1548).
       Sebastiano del Piombo having to paint a monk at San Pietro in Montorio, Michael Angelo thought that this monk would spoil everything. "The monks having caused the perdition of the world, which is so large, it would not be astonishing if they ruined a little chapel."
       At the time when Michael Angelo was seeking a wife for his nephew, a devout lady came to see him, and, after preaching him a sermon and exhorting him to piety, offered him for Leonardo a pious girl, who possessed good principles. "I told her in reply," wrote Michael Angelo, "that she would do much better to occupy herself with spinning and weaving than in fussing around people in this way and bargaining with holy things" ("Letters," July 19, 1549).
       He wrote fierce Savonarola-like poems against those guilty of sacrilege and simony in Rome. For instance, the sonnet commencing with the words:

    Qua si fa elmj di chalicj e spade,
    E 'l sangue di Christo si vend' a giumelle . . .

    "There, with chalices, they make swords and helmets; and the blood of Christ is sold with both hands . . ."

22. Letter to Buonarroto, on the subject of his father's illness (November 23, 1516). Letter to Leonardo, on the subject of the death of Giovan Simone (January 1548): "I should like to know if he confessed and if he received the sacrament. If I knew that this was so, I should suffer less . . ."
23. "Più credo agli orazioni che alle medicine" (Letter to Leonardo, April 25, 1549).
24. ". . . In the year of Our Lord 1513, in the first year of the pontificate of Leo X., Michael Angelo, who was then in Rome—and I believe, unless I am mistaken, that it was in the autumn—one night, in the open air, in a garden of his house, prayed and raised his eyes to heaven. Suddenly he saw a marvellous meteor, a triangular sign, with three rays: one, pointing towards the east, bright and smooth, like the blade of a polished sword, but with a hook at the end; the other, the colour of a ruby, blue red, stretching over Rome; and the third, the colour of fire and forked, and of such a length that it reached as far as Florence . . . On seeing this divine sign Michael Angelo went into the house to fetch a piece of paper, a pen, and some colours; he drew the apparition, and when he had finished the sign disappeared …" (Fra Benedetto: "Vulnera diligentis," third part. MSS. Riccardianus 2985. Quoted by Thode from Villari.)
25. Henry Thode.
26. When Leone Leoni, in 1560, engraved a medal bearing the effigy of Michael Angelo, the latter had traced on the reverse the figure of a blind man, led by a dog, with the inscription: "Doceboiniquos vias tuas et impii ad te convertentur" (Vasari).
27. e.g. His " Crucifix," the "Entombment of Christ," "Christ taken down from the Cross," and the "Pictà."
28. Appendix, xxv ("Poems," cxlvii).
    This sonnet, which Fray rightly considers the finest that Michael Angelo ever wrote, dates from 1555-1556.
    A large number of other poems express, in a form that is less beautiful but with equal emotion and faith, a similar sentiment (see Appendix, xxvi).
29. These rumours were circulated by Aretino and Bandinelli. The Duke of Urbino's Ambassador related, in 1542, to any one who would listen to him that Michael Angelo had become immensely rich by lending upon usury the money he had received from Julius II. for the monument he had not executed. Michael Angelo had, to a certain extent, shown that there was ground for these accusations by the hardness which he sometimes showed in business—for instance, in the case of Signorelli senior, against whom he proceeded in 1518 for a loan made in 1513—and by a peasant-like instinct for hoarding, a rapacity which was united with his natural generosity. He amassed money and property, but, so to say, in a manner that was mechanical and hereditary. In reality, he was extremely negligent in business. He did not keep accounts. He did not know what he possessed, and he gave freely. His family drew ceaselessly on his capital. He made royal presents to his friends and servants. The majority of his works were given, not sold; and he worked gratuitously at St. Peter's. No one condemned love of money more severely than he did. "Avidity of gain is a very great sin," he wrote to his brother Buonarroto. Vasari indignantly protests against the calumnies of the enemies of Michael Angelo, and recalls the many things his master gave: to Tommaso de' Cavalieri, Bindo Altoviti, Sebastiano del Piombo, and Gherardo Perini, priceless drawings; to Antonio Mini, the "Leda," with all the cartoons and models; to Bartolommeo Bettini, an admirable "Cupid kissing Venus"; to the Marquis of Vasto, a "Noli me tangere"; to Roberto Strozzi, the two "Slaves"; to his servant Antonio, "Christ taken down from the Cross," &c. "I do not think," he concludes, "that a man who gave such things, worth thousands of scudi, can be taxed with avarice."
30. Letters to Giovan Simone (1533); and to Leonardo Buonarroti (November 1540).
31. Vasari.
32. "It seems to me that you neglect almsgiving too much," he wrote to Leonardo (1547).
    "You write to me that you would like to give this woman four gold crowns for the love of God. That pleases me" (August 1547).
    "Be careful to give in cases where there is real need, and not to give through friendship, but for the love of God. … Do not say whence the money comes" (March 29, 1549).
    "You are not to mention me in any way" (September 1547).
    "It would please me better if you expended the money you spend in presents for me in alms for the love of God, for I believe there is much poverty in our midst" (1558).
    "Old as I am, I should like to do a little good in almsgiving. For I cannot and know not how to do good in any other way" (July 18, 1561).
33. Condivi.
34. Letter to Leonardo (August 1547).
35. The same (December 20, 1550).
    Elsewhere he makes inquiries about one of the Cerretani, who had a daughter to put in a convent (March 29, 1549). His niece Cecca interceded with him on behalf of a poor girl who was entering a convent, and, quite happy, he sent her the sum for which she asked (to Leonardo, May 31, 1556).
    "To marry a poor young girl," he says somewhere, "is also a way of giving alms."