elled what he saw-the elaborate coarser muscles of later years. He seems indeed to have preferred them. He knew not how to invest his figures with a maidenlike tenderness; he almost always aims at the colossal female form. His Roman models may have been to blame for this. The Roman ladies early exhibited a kind of power in their aspect which makes its way also into Raphael's works. In his paintings he endeavors to soften this, but in his studies it appears unveiled. Michael Angelo's women are no Iphigenias, but seem more like sisters of Lady Macbeth. And thus Michael Angelo's Dawn is no Greek figure, such as the sleeping Ariadne in the Vatican, or the Niobe, but a Roman woman, as far removed in her form from the antique as the naked female figures of Dürer and the German school were from Michael Angelo himself. We will take the Venus of Milo as the embodied ideal of the greatest sculptor. What does he say to us in his work? Not only does the countenance speak, but everything speaks in her from the armless shoulders downwards, all the lines round the body and bosom are mirrored before us, as the verses of some exquisite poem linger in the ear. And what do they say? Just what Homer and Æschylus and Sophocles say-legends, charming poems of the beauty of a people who have vanished, and of the splendor of their existence, enchanting us when we long to dream, making us increasingly happy when happiness is around us merry, lovely, serious, thundering music, but bringing neither happiness, nor love, nor terror itself into our souls. No verse of Sophocles or Pindar affects us like Goethe and Shakspeare; no remembrance is awakened of the ideal in our own breast, when Antigone speaks and acts, or when we look at the Venus of Milo. Magnificent forms they are but still shadows, which, unlike the living type of our own day, appear no longer formed of flesh and blood when we place beside them Goethe's Iphigenia or Shakspeare's Juliet, in whose words we seem to listen to the expression of love which would enchant us from the lips we love most. From the eyes of Raphael's Madonnas, glances come to us which we understand; but who ever hoped for that in Grecian statues? The Greeks, who worked for themselves and their age, can not fill our hearts. Since they thought and wrote, and carved, new world-exciting thoughts have arisen, under the influence of which that work of art must be formed which is to lay hold of our deepest feelings. A strange coldness is breathed forth from the history of the ancient world. The masses appear to us cold as shady woods in the hot summer-single individuals seem solitary and unconnected with the rest. In spite of the vast deeds which enthusiasm prompts them to accomplish, they infuse this feeling into me. The life that they lead has something mo tionless in it, like the progress of a work of art. I see characters of such a fixed stamp, that our own appear eclipsed by the contrast; but that is wanting which is the element of our own day, which in its extreme becomes fanaticism, melancholy, despondency, and which in a less degree we call a disposition of the mind, a longing, and foreboding. They live and die without scruple, and their philosophy never frees itself from mist, to lose itself in mist again. No feeling of unsatisfactory longing makes them desire death as an admission to higher thoughts, but, taking farewell of life, they bid farewell likewise to the sun, and descend calmly into the cool twilight of the lower world. It is as if a breath of that shadowy repose, into which they then sink completely, had encircled them even in life, and had kept their thoughts uniformly fresh. They knew nothing of the restless impulse which impels us to meet uncertain events, they knew nothing of that which Goethe calls the "dullness" of his nature, the alternating up and down into distinct and misty perception, the sadness which the sight of aught completed awakens in the soul. They felt none of this; none of this swaying hither and thither by destinies within, none of this seeking after repose, at discord with themselves, with society, and with the thoughts of the time. Their estimation of things was always clearly defined, and the thoughts of those who felt otherwise were like single clouds which never obscured the sun to the entire people nor darkened their sky. Whatever Greek sculptor wished to fashion beauty, represented her as an immortal being with an eternal smile. He knew not the shuddering feeling of the transitoriness of the earthly, which snatches from our souls the delight we experience at the sight of beauty. Dark clouds form with us the background to the brightest production. Our masters have a greater affinity with us than those of the ancients. Goethe and Shakspeare are indispensable to me; I would give up the ancient poets for them, if I had to choose. And so, too, I would not exchange Michael Angelo for Phidias. It would be as if I were to give up my own child for a stranger, though the strange one might appear fresher, stronger, and more brilliant. This inner affinity is of course the only thing which raises Michael Angelo above the Greeks. To me it nevertheless surpasses all other considerations. Wherever his art may be compared with that of the Greeks, it stands lower; but wherever the comparison ceases, there is an advance; and in the Aurora, this is stamped most purely. In the Last Judgment, Michael Angelo has represented in every stage this half-unconscious rising from sleep and restoration to thought; while in the Dying Slave, he has portrayed the sinking into the dream of death. In the whole range of sculptor, I know nothing finer than the countenance of this youth. In the Aurora, the feeling that fills her shines forth from every movement, wherever we look at her. We see her struggling against an intense weariness of body and mind; she has already supported herself on her arm, and is partly raised; she has placed her foot to step forward, and sinks back again. How magnificently has Michael Angelo, in the movement of the left arm, expressed the stretching out of the limbs at waking: the elbow is raised, and the hand, extended over the shoulder, lays hold of the folds of the veil. An entire symphony of Beethoven lies in this statue. When the Night was exhibited for the first time, among the verses affixed to it, after the custom of the age, was one running thus: "Night, whom you see slumbering here so charmingly, has been carved by an angel, in marble. She sleeps, she lives. Waken her, if you will not believe it, and she will speak." The author of the verse was one of the artist's strongest political opponents. To it he made the statue itself reply, "Sleep is dear to me, and still more that I am stone, so long as dishonor and shame last among us; the happiest fate is to see, to hear nothing; for this reason waken me not, I pray you, speak gently." He was now near to sixty years of age. How imperceptibly the age of a great being glides on while we write of him or read of him. He was back in Rome again. The Pope-whose interest he had opposed in Florence-Clement VII., if not absolutely reconciled to him, yet drew him near to his designs, and engaged him to work upon the great papal enterprises of the imperial city. The friends of the artist, also, were beginning to be anxious about him. They represented to the Pope how he worked too much, slept little, eat little and badly, and was racked by rheumatism, headache, and giddiness. They desired that he might be saved from the keen air of the sacristy, in which he was working, that he might be permitted to finish his Madonna in the study, where more ease and comfort might be around him. The weary old man, racked by these various pains, and stirring the affections of reverent friends, was himself just finishing, in addition to his paintings in the chapel, the strong and graceful touches giving life to the Dawn and the Day. Also, we do not see that much money was flowing into the grand old man's coffers. He presided himself over the quarrying of his marble in Carrara, and managed the transit of it with a skill which watched the future form growing in the insensate stone, and so provided against the possibility of failure, flaw, or fault. It is amusing enough, too, in a grim kind of way, to see once more the terms upon which the artist and the Pope stood in relation to each other. Clement held him tightly occupied upon papal work by giving him to understand that a bull of excommunication would be hurled against him, if he worked for anybody but the Pope. So far the Pope decidedly had the best of it; for, in those days, no one could curse so effectually as he, and yet Clement said that Michael Angelo was one to whom nothing could be refused, although he does seem to have refused him rest, and to have evaded his claims for payment. The Pope used to say he never dared to sit down when conversing with Michael Angelo, for he would certainly have done the same; and if he ordered him to put on his hat in his presence, it was only because he assuredly would have put it on without that invitation. Beneath all these difficulties, however, arose another great work of our artist's, the Sacristy of San Lorenzo. Michael Angelo, however, outlived Clement by many years, and, although the relationship may have had its littlenesses of unpleasantness, it does not produce upon us the grand effect of the surly but strong old despot, Julius. We do not suppose the artist would have memorialized Clement as a mighty Moses, in stone; he was quite nervous, timid, deceitful; well, anything the reader likes to imagine possessing those attributes. Paul III. was a Pope of that age, which means nothing very captivating in morals or manners; but he was an old friend and employer of Michael Angelo, who had made designs for two candelabra for him, which now stand in the Sacristy of St. Peter's. Upon his elevation to the Papal chair, he instantly sent for Michael Angelo, telling him to consider himself in his employ. The artist excused himself by an engagement with Duke D'Urbino. "It is now thirty years," exclaimed the Pope, with vehemence, “I have had this desire, and now that I am Pope, shall I not be able to affect it? Where is the contract, that I may tear it?" The desire thus vehemently expressed, was especially for the painting of that Last Judgment, to which reference has been made, completing our artist's share in the glories of the Sistine Chapel. Fifteen hundred and thirty-six-sixtyone years of age; there is a lifetime before the old man yet-a lifetime yet, containing perhaps his most world-renowned and marvelous immortality, including also the most precious joys and griefs men can know. Our author refers to the solitude of this great mind; he had become old in solitude. "I have no friends," he writes in his earlier years; "I need none, and wish to have none." Few of the vast intelligences who have filled the world ever have been companioned. Perhaps it is true, that while love is the want and need of all minds friendship is rarely granted to the greatest. There are exceptions, but they are rare. There are sighs and echoes in some of the sonnets of our artist of a disappointed heart, but no name is mentioned; if he were disappointed, he took up his grief, went with it on his way, prosecuted his work of solitude-his dream, his pencil, his chisel-wrangled with his popes, and in his rough, native dignity, evidently, from some anecdotes, would give them back growl for growl. At last, however, when about sixty-two, came the soft hand that woke this aged Endymion-the Diana to whom it belonged was nearly the same age; he met at last Vittoria Colonna; she stood in the rank of the foremost nobility of Europe; there had seemed a probability of her husband becoming King of Naples. When she came to Rome she was received by the Pope as became a princess of her rank. It will be supposed that it was the charm of kindred sympathies which drew these into their close and intimate affection with each other. She was able to exercise an authority over the artist, very sweet to feel, and which moulds and makes a man's genius, which he had never felt before, and for the want of which those grand women he limned in stone lack something of the tenderness which Christian grace and holiness give to womanhood. Why should it ever be thought that it is essential to woman's empire over genius that she should be young? A frolicsome kitten might be just as powerful as many a pretty girl, or even woman; it is the intelligence, it is the sympathy, the naïvete, and the soul, which are the property of no age especially, but which certainly do frequently shine in matured years. None but a religious nature could have met the being of this great man, and Vittoria Colonna's was not only a religious nature, she seems to have looked at, inquired into, and to have been somewhat impressed by the Reformation ideas of the time. When the artist Francesco D'Orlanda was first introduced to them, she apologized to him because he found them engaged studying the Fra Ambrosio on the Pauline Epistles; and old as he was, she inspired our artist to cultivate poetry again. The sonnets between them are known, in which the past is glorified, and the present made radiant by resignation, and compensation beheld in the future. Only about five or six years this tender intimacy continued; then her life sank, clouded round by trials. She was an old woman, and life was decaying; the artist not only addressed her in a sonnet of immortal affection: to console her by a rare feat of art, he painted her likeness, and showed her herself as young and immortal in her own earthly beauty. She died in 1547. Michael Angelo saw her to the last. Upon her death, the old man-dare we call him old? almost lost his senses; and years afterwards, he said to Condivi, he repented nothing so much as having only kissed her hand, and not her forehead and cheeks also, when he went to her at her last hour. Such legends as these redeem love back again to its own dominion; they show us what is its nature; they lighten deathbeds and coffins with smiles from eternity, and triumphantly say, "As love's beginning was not, so neither can its end be here." The old man still toiled on, and now he draws near to that portion of his life for which the world thinks he was born. The efforts to rear St. Peter's had been failures. Bramante, San Gallo, Raphael had long since passed away, when Michael Angelo was to execute that work, which, beyond any other, was to gain him among his contemporaries the name of great. Julius III. was now Pope; he had succeeded to Paul III., 1549. It certainly seemed that our artist also in that year was at death's door. We read of his sharp diseases and pains, in addition to his age; he owed his illness especially to his utter carelessness about himself, and his regardlessness of life. We have no patience here to linger over the multitude of little personal jealousies which interfered with his vast plans in St. Peter's. His predecessors had not been sparing of money; on the contrary, they had encouraged a vast retinue of inferior workmen about the building; it had thus become a source of wealth to many, who were either promptly dismissed or cut short in their wages by Michael Angelo, who was parsimony itself, and very consistently he could be parsimonious here, as he received not the slightest pay himself, and when the Pope attempted to force upon him a sum of money, promptly sent it back. The old man seems to have been plain spoken enough; and indeed it needed the promptness and decision of a Julius Cesar or a Cromwell, with an army of painters, sculptors, and architects, and scheming cardinals to boot. To these he often gave grave offence: The Cardinals Salviati and Cervini, to whom the care of the building had especially been consigned, had allowed themselves to be gained over by San Gallo's old party, and induced Julius III. to call a Council, before which Michael Angelo should defend himself. All those who had hitherto been engaged in St. Peter's Church were to meet together, and to give evidence that the building had been destroyed by Michael Angelo's new plan. The gentlemen had a number of complaints. Immense sums had been expended without their having been told wherefore; nothing had been communicated to them of the manner in which the building was to be carried on; they were completely useless. Michael Angelo treated them as if the matter did not concern them at all; he pulled down, so that it was a sorrow to all who saw it. This was what they expressed in a written document. Yet their criticism was not satisfied with such general statements. The special point in question was the transverse arches, stretching right and left from the centre of the church, where the dome was to be raised, and each of which terminated in three chapels. Michael Angelo's adversaries asserted that by this arrangement too little light reached the interior, a fact which even the Pope confidentially communicated to him. He replied that he wished those with whom the reproof originated to answer at the spot. The cardinals 64 now came forward, and Cervini declared that it was he who had made the assertion. "Monsignore," replied Michael Angelo, above those already there." "I intend placing three other windows "You never gave a hint of that," answered the cardinal. To which Michael Angelo rejoined: Nor was I bound to do so, nor will I bind myself to give your lordship, or any one else, information of my intentions. Your office is to furnish money, and to take care that it is not stolen. As regards the building plan, that concerns me alone." And then turning to the Pope: Holy Father," he said, "you know what I get for my money, and that if my work does not tend to the saving of my soul, I shall have expended time and trouble in vain upon it!" Julius placed his hand on his shoulder. "Your eternal and temperal welfare," he said, "shall not suffer from it. There is no fear of that." The conference ended, and Michael Angelo had rest from his adversaries, so long as Julius III. lived. 66 Then came succeeding to the Papal chair, Caraffa, "The familiar old man with the death's head face." ciate the most demoniacal cruelties for the suppression of heresy with this terrible old man; even an accidental meeting with a heretic, imposed a fine of five hundred ducats for the first offence, and death for the second. He has been spoken of as a skeleton filled with fire. At first, he seems to have lent himself to the faction existing, of course, against Michael Angelo, who was at this time eighty-one years of age; ultimately, he judged more wisely. He cared less about art than any of the immediately preceding Popes, but he determined that St. Peter's should advance rapidly, and he did more for the building than any of his predecessors. At this time, too, it is with an affecting interest that we read utterances from the great architect which are new to him as expressions of experience-a tender love for the mountains, the woods, and the clouds. These had not been spoken of in his periods of strength, manhood, and health, and quietude, if he ever knew quiet. Factions were busy round him in the city; then the Spaniards, too, laid siege to Rome, and his advice was sought, but he had fled to Spoleto. Dear old man, we can well conceive that in addition to all other turmoils, he did not need the turmoils of a military engineer at his eleventh hour. All solitary and alone, he plunged among the hills, visited the hermits of the mountains, and he writes, "I have left more than half my soul there, for truly there is no peace but in the woods." Robert Browning, in his charming poem, Old Pictures in Florence, has expressed the delight he has felt, in wandering through that noble city of modern art and artists, in exercising the gift God has given him of marking In the mild decline of those suns like moons, Who walked in Florence, besides her men, We know of no life which more solemnly illustrates the meaning and intention of tnat Poem, the story of "the life long toil till the lump be leaven," and the story of The race of man That receives life in parts to live in a whole, And grow here according to God's clear plan. The life of Michael Angelo, more than any life we could easily refer to, exhibits, on a grand scale, these lessons-the saintliness of work, the consecration to ideals in life and art. In him the Vulcan of labor wrought ever beneath the animation and inspiration of the Venus of beauty. He was accustomed to say, "Those figures alone are good, from which the labor is scraped off, when the scaffolding is taken away." The lesson of work-the spirituality of work, shines through his life. At near eighty years of age, we read of his beginning in marble a group of four figures for a dead Christ, because, he said, to exercise himself with the mallet was good for his health. He wrought on beneath the pressure of disappointments, and the annoyance and persecutions of men who wrought for pay, his consolation was that he wrought for his art, his ideal, for his work. Eminently he teaches, as he lives, that beauty is truth, and truth beauty. His pictures, especially, more than his sculptures, are, as Cardinal Polaotus said, pictures should be mute theologians, they should delight, teach, and persuade: the end of a picture should be theology. To him the invisible was all; he shows how possible it is for the great artist, even as a saint of God, to endure as seeing him who is invisible. His emaciated body, his life of toil and self-denial, seem to say That, when this life is ended, begins There's a fancy some lean to and others hateNew work for the soul in another state, Where it strives and gets weary, loses and wins; Where the strong and the weak, this world's congeries, Repeat in large what they practised in small, Yet I hardly know. When a soul has seen And through earth and its noise, what is Heaven's serene, When its faith in the same has stood the test Why, the child grown man, you burn the rod, He seems to us in these last hours of life to look especially sublime! Friends or companions had all fallen around him, and left him very lonely among his great works. What a procession he had seen pass away since the time when he had heard Savonarola preach in his native city! Now, by day and night, we see him anxiously tending the death couch. of his old servant, and when he died, he turned with a most anxious sympathy to the widow of one, we suppose, to him more a friend than a servant. Would he go on with St. Peter's? He said he longed to go home and lay his bones by his fathers. But he might not do so; he had begun, in God's name, he would persevere. He saw the end of another papacy; we may conceive his life to have been more than grave and serious-religious. But during these years, he grieves that he has done so little for his soul; yet no indications of a very good Papist come forth from him. His aspirations were Christian, they were not Catholic; he felt and expressed in sonnets that he had now reached the bounds of life, and now waited for his birth hour. There came upon him, it has been said, an invincible appetite for dying-a soft, sublimé melancholy clothed all impressions. He says, "It is twenty-four o'clock, and no fancy comes to his mind but death is sculptured on it." He died of extreme old age-and after his life, no one has any right to say that |