William Wetmore Story

“ Their gods looked down upon earth through the noblest forms of Phidias with serenity, heedless of the violent struggles of humanity—like grand and peaceful presences. Even in the Laocoön, which stepped to the utmost permitted bounds of the antique sculpture, there is the restraint of beauty, and suffering is modified to grace. But here in these Titans of Michel Angelo there is a new spirit—better or worse, it is new. It represents humanity caught in the terrible net of Fate, storming the heavens, Prometheus-like, breaking forth from the bonds of convention, and terrible as grand. ”

“ His mighty arm is outstretched, and from his extended fingers an electric flash of life seems to strike into the uplifted hand of Adam, whose reclining figure, issuing from the constraint of death, and quivering with this new thrill of animated being, stirs into action, and rises half to meet his Creator. Nothing could be more grand than this conception, more certain than its expression, or more simple than its treatment. Nothing, too, has ever been accomplished in art more powerful, varied, and original than the colossal figures of the sibyls and the prophets. ”

“ I strove to act up to my best principles; but life is difficult, and man is not wise, and our opinions are often incorrect. Still, I strove to act according to my nature; to do the things which were fit for me, and not to be diverted from them by fear of any blame; to keep the divine part in me tranquil and content; and to look upon death and life, honor and dishonor, pain and pleasure, as neither good nor evil in themselves, but only in the way in which we receive them. ”

“ They defy criticism, however just, and stand by themselves outside the beaten track of art, to challenge our admiration. So also, despite all his faults and defects, how grand a figure Michel Angelo himself is in history, how high a place he holds! His name itself is a power. He is one of the mighty masters that the world cannot forget. Kings and emperors die and are forgotten,—dynasties change and governments fall,—but he, the silent, stern worker, reigns unmoved in the great realm of art. ”

“ Their voices were heard no more singing by shadowy brooks, their faces peered no longer through the sighing woods; and of all the mighty train of greater and lesser divinities and deified heroes to whom Greece and Rome had bent the knee and offered sacrifice, Orpheus alone lingered in the guise of the Good Shepherd.
Christianity struck the deathblow not only to pagan Art, but for a time to all Art. Sculpture and Painting were in its mind closely allied to idolatry. Under its influence the arts slowly wasted away as with a mortal disease. ”

“ Only by having all can the mind have its full grasp of art. It is too often insisted in our days that a man to be great in one art must devote himself exclusively to that; or if he be solicited by any other, he must merely toy with it. Such was not the doctrine of the artists of old, either in ancient days of Greece or at the epoch of the Renaissance. Phidias was a painter and architect as well as a sculptor, and so were nearly all the men of his time. ”

“ DISTORTIONS OF THE ENGLISH STAGE AS INSTANCED IN “MACBETH.”
Art is art because it is not nature, is the motto of the Idealisti; Art is but the imitation of nature, say the Naturalisti. The truth lies between the two. Art is neither nature alone, nor can it do without nature. No imitation, however accurate, for imitation’s sake makes a good work of art in any other than a mechanical sense. And every work of art in which the objects represented are inaccurately or imperfectly imitated is in so far deficient. But art works by suggestion as well as by imitation. ”

“ In making them, the weight of this unexplained mystery of life hung over him; the struggle of humanity against superior forces oppressed him. The doubts, the despair, the power, the indomitable will of his own nature are in them. They are not the expressions of the natural day of the world, of the glory of the sunrise, the tenderness of the twilight, the broad gladness of day, or the calm repose of night; but they are seasons and epochs of the spirit of man—its doubts and fears, its sorrows and longings and unrealized hopes. ”

“ The marble gods, which had lain dethroned and buried in the earth for so many centuries, rose with renewed life from their graves, and reasserted over the world of Art the dominion they had lost in the realm of Religion. It is useless to rehearse the familiar names that then illumined the golden age of Italian art, where shine preëminent those of Leonardo, the widest and most universal genius that perhaps the world has ever seen; of Michel Angelo, the greatest power that ever expressed itself in stone or color; of Raffaelle, whose exquisite grace and facile design have never been surpassed ”

“ You at once feel yourself to be in the presence of an influence, serious, grand, impressive, and powerful, and of a character totally different from anything that sculpture has hitherto produced, either in the ancient15 or modern world. Whatever may be the defects of these great works, and they are many and evident, one feels that here a lofty intellect and power has struggled, and fought its way, so to speak, into the marble, and brought forth from the insensate stone a giant brood of almost supernatural shapes. ”

“ All poetry is thus allegorical. The wind will always have wings until it ceases to blow. These myths are simply poetic moulds of thought, in which vague sentiments, ideas, and facts are wrought together into an express shape. Think what your own literature or thought would be without the old Grecian poems. Let the reason reject them as it will, and drive them out into the cold, the imagination will run forth and bring them back again to warm and cherish them on its breast. Facts, as facts, are but dead husks. The spirit cannot live upon them. ”

“ These royal persons, once so gay and proud and powerful, some of whom patronized Michel Angelo, and extended to him their gracious favor, and honored him perhaps with a smile, now so utterly dethroned by death, their names scarcely known, or, if known, not reverenced, while the poor stern artist they looked down upon sits like a monarch on the throne of fame, and, though dead, rules with his spirit and by his works in the august realm of art. ”

“ We have thus far considered Michel Angelo as a sculptor, painter, and architect. It remains to consider him as a poet. Nor in his poetry do we find any difference of character from what he exhibited in his other arts. He is rough, energetic, strong, full of high ideas, struggling with fate, oppressed and weary with life. He has none of the sweet numbers of Petrarca, or the lively spirit of Ariosto, or the chivalric tones of Tasso. ”

“ He could not have been a pleasant companion, and he was never a lover of woman. His friendship with Vittoria Colonna was worlds away from the senses,—worlds away from such a connection as that of Raffaelle with the Fornarina. They walked together in the higher fields of thought and feeling, in the region of ideas and aspirations. Their conversation was of art, and poesy, and religion, and the mysteries of life. They read to each other their poems, and discoursed on high themes of religion, and fate, and foreknowledge. ”

“ To attribute to Him our own passions is universal, with the mass. To deify man or to humanize God is the rule. You deify that beautiful character named Christ, and you humanize God by representing Him as inspired with anger and cruelty beyond anything in our system. You attribute to Him a scheme of the universe which is to me abhorrent. Will you excuse me if I state thus plainly how it strikes one who belonged to a different age and creed, and who therefore cannot enter into the deep-grained prejudices and ideas of your century and faith? ”

“ What lends itself still more to this interpretation is the character and expression of both the statues of Lorenzo and Giuliano, and particularly that of Lorenzo, who leans forward with his hand raised to his chin in so profound and sad a meditation that the world has given it the name of Il Pensiero—not even calling it Il Pensieroso, the thinker, but Il Pensiero, thought itself; while the attitude and expression of Giuliano is of one who helplessly holds the sceptre and lets the world go, heedless of all its crime and folly, and too weak to lend his hand to set it right. ”

“ And turning round, one may see the Baptistery celebrated by Dante, and those massive bronze doors storied by Ghiberti, which Michel Angelo said were worthy to be the doors of Paradise. History and romance meets us everywhere. The old families still give their names to the streets, and palaces, and loggie. Every now and then a marble slab upon some house records the birth or death within of some famous citizen, artist, writer, or patriot, or perpetuates the memory of some great event. ”

“ Great as Michel Angelo was as a sculptor, he seems even greater as a painter. Not only is the design broader and larger, but there is a freedom of attitude, a strength and loftiness of conception, and a beauty of treatment, which are beyond what he reached, or perhaps strove for, in his statues. The figure of Adam, for instance, is not more wonderful for its novelty27 and power of design than for its truth to nature. ”

“ Art also sent forth a sudden and glorious coruscation of genius, beginning with Cimabue and Giotto, to shake off the stiff cerements of Byzantine tradition in which it had so long been swathed, and to stretch its limbs to freer action, and spread its wings to higher flights of power, invention, and beauty. ”

“ In fact, Michel Angelo injured, and in some cases nearly ruined, most of his statues by the very impatience of his genius. Thus the back head of the Moses has been struck away by one of these blows, and everywhere a careful eye detects the irreparable blow beyond its true limit. This is not the Michel Angelo whom we are to reverence and admire; this is an abbozzatore roughing out the work. There is no difficulty in striking off large cleavings of marble at one stroke—any one can do that; and it is pitiable to find him so engaged. ”

“ You profess absolute faith in the teaching of Christ. You profess to consider his life as the great exemplar for all men. Do you follow it? Do you, for instance, think it in accordance with his teaching or his example to devote your lives selfishly to the laying up of riches for your own individual luxuries, to clothe yourselves in purple and fine linen, to make broad your phylacteries, or to use vain repetitions in your prayers as the heathen do, standing in the synagogues and at the corners of the streets, and to play the part of Dives while Lazarus is starving at your gates? ”

“ The most absolute realism will not answer the higher demand of the imagination for ideal truth. Art is not simply the reproduction of nature, but nature as modified and colored by the spirit of the artist. ”

“ They have roused the age out of that dull conventionalism in which it had fallen asleep. They have stimulated thought, revivified sentiment, and reasserted with word and deed the necessity of nature as a true basis of art.
As in the arts of painting and sculpture, so in the drama and on the stage a strong reaction is taking place against the stilted conventionalism and elaborate artifice of the last generation. ”

“ Again, if he meant to distinguish the one artist from the other as a maker of ἀγάλματα, or statues of divinities, he is wrong; for the chryselephantine Hera of Polyclitus rivaled the Athena of Phidias. The plain fact is that Aristotle did not mean to distinguish one of these great artists from the other in any such way. He is perfectly right in the terms he applies to each; but he did not say, nor could he have intended to say, that one was a σοφὸς λιθουργός or an ἀνδριαντοποιός, and the other was not—since, as we know, both of them were λιθουργοί and ἀνδριαντοποιοί, and he must have known it. ”

“ We sought to keep ourselves just, obedient to our best instincts, temperate and simple, looking upon life as a noble gift of the gods, to be used for noble purposes. We believed, beside this, that virtue should be practiced for itself, and not through any hope of reward or any fear of punishment219 here or hereafter. To act up to our highest idea of what was right was our principle, not out of terror or in the hope of conciliating God, but because it was right; and to look calmly on death, not as an evil, but as a step onward to another existence. To desire nothing too much ”

“ I answered. “Do we not believe that virtue is the grand duty of man? Do none of us seek to live heroic lives, and sacrifice ourselves to do good to the world and to our brothers?”
“Certainly, you lead heroic lives; but your great principle is humility—your great motive, reward or fear. You profess to look on this life220 as mean and miserable, and on yourselves as creatures of the dust; and you declare that you have no claim to be saved from eternal damnation by leading a just life, but only by a capricious election hereafter. ”

“ It may almost be said that in a certain sense they are great, not in despite of their faults, but by very virtue of these faults. In them is a spirit which was unknown to the Greeks and Romans. They sought the simple, the dignified, the natural; beauty was their aim and object. Their ideal was a quiet, passionless repose, with little action, little insistence of parts. Their treatment was large and noble, their attitude calm. No torments reach them, or if passion enter, it is subdued to beauty ”

“ If he admired Petrarca, it was as a philosopher and a patriot,—for his canzone to Liberty, not for his sonnets to Laura. Dante, whom he called Stella di alto valor, the star of high power, was his favorite poet; Savonarola his single friend. The “Divina Commedia,” or rather the “Inferno” alone, he thought worthy of illustration by his pencil; the doctrines of the latter he warmly espoused. “True beauty,” says that great reformer, “comes only from the soul, from nobleness of spirit and purity of conduct.” And so, in one of his madrigals, says Michel Angelo. ”