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Famous European Artists

by Sarah Knowles Bolton · English · Gutenberg #39380 · 623,468 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Famous European Artists

Author: Sarah Knowles Bolton


        
Release date: April 5, 2012 [eBook #39380]

Language: English

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Produced by Darleen Dove, Martin Pettit and the Online
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file was produced from images generously made available
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FAMOUS EUROPEAN ARTISTS

BY SARAH K. BOLTON

AUTHOR OF "POOR BOYS WHO BECAME FAMOUS," "GIRLS WHO BECAME
FAMOUS," "STORIES FROM LIFE," "FAMOUS AMERICAN AUTHORS,"
"FAMOUS AMERICAN STATESMEN," "SOCIAL STUDIES IN
ENGLAND," "FROM HEART AND NATURE,"
"FAMOUS MEN OF SCIENCE," ETC.

"Do not act as if you had ten thousand years to throw away.
Death stands at your elbow. Be good for something while you live,
and it is in your power."--MARCUS AURELIUS.

NEW YORK
THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO.
46 EAST FOURTEENTH STREET


COPYRIGHT, 1890, BY
THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO.

C. J. PETERS & SON,
TYPOGRAPHERS AND ELECTROTYPERS,
146 HIGH STREET, BOSTON.


TO MISS ELIZABETH C. BULLARD
WITH THE APPRECIATION AND ESTEEM
OF THE AUTHOR.


[Illustration: MICHAEL ANGELO.]




PREFACE.


Hermann Grimm says, "Reverence for what is great is a universal
feeling.... When we look at great men, it is as if we saw a victorious
army, the flower of a people, marching along.... They all speak one
common language, know nothing of castes, of noble or pariah; and he who
now or in times to come thinks or acts like them rises up to them, and
is admitted into their circle."

Possibly, by reading of these great men some may be led to "think and
act like them," and thus "be admitted into their circle." All of these
possessed untiring industry and a resolute purpose to succeed. Most were
poor in early life.

S. K. B.




CONTENTS.

                         PAGE.
MICHAEL ANGELO               7

LEONARDO DA VINCI           66

RAPHAEL OF URBINO          105

TITIAN                     155

MURILLO                    203

RUBENS                     246

REMBRANDT                  286

SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS        318

SIR EDWIN LANDSEER         367

TURNER                     396




MICHAEL ANGELO.


Who has ever stood in Florence, and been warmed by her sunlight,
refreshed by her fragrant flowers, and ennobled by her divine art,
without saying with the poet Rogers,--


     "Of all the fairest cities of the earth,
     None is so fair as Florence. 'Tis a gem
     Of purest ray; and what a light broke forth
     When it emerged from darkness! Search within,
     Without, all is enchantment! 'Tis the Past
     Contending with the Present; and in turn
     Each has the mastery."


Pitiful in her struggles for freedom, the very centre of art and
learning in the fifteenth century, she has to-day a charm peculiarly her
own.

"Other though not many cities have histories as noble, treasures as
vast; but no other city has them living, and ever present in her midst,
familiar as household words, and touched by every baby's hand and
peasant's step, as Florence has.

"Every line, every road, every gable, every tower, has some story of the
past present in it. Every tocsin that sounds is a chronicle; every
bridge that unites the two banks of the river, unites also the crowds
of the living with the heroism of the dead.

"The beauty of the past goes with you at every step in Florence. Buy
eggs in the market, and you buy them where Donatello bought those which
fell down in a broken heap before the wonder of the crucifix. Pause in a
narrow by-street in a crowd, and it shall be that Borgo Allegri, which
the people so baptized for love of the old painter and the new-born art.
Stray into a great dark church at evening time, where peasants tell
their beads in the vast marble silence, and you are where the whole city
flocked, weeping, at midnight, to look their last upon the dead face of
their Michael Angelo. Buy a knot of March anemones or April arum lilies,
and you may bear them with you through the same city ward in which the
child Ghirlandaio once played amidst the gold and silver garlands that
his father fashioned for the young heads of the Renaissance. Ask for a
shoemaker, and you shall find the cobbler sitting with his board in the
same old twisting, shadowy street-way where the old man Toscanelli drew
his charts that served a fair-haired sailor of Genoa, called Columbus."

Florence, Shelley's "Smokeless City," was the ardently loved home of
Michael Angelo. He was born March 6, 1475, or, according to some
authorities, 1474, the Florentines reckoning time from the incarnation
of Christ, instead of his birth.

Lodovico Buonarotti, the father of Michael Angelo, had been appointed
governor of Caprese and Chiusi, and had moved from Florence to the
Castle of Caprese, where this boy, his second child, was born. The
mother, Francesca, was, like her husband, of noble family, and but
little more than half his age, being nineteen and he thirty-one.

After two years they returned to Florence, leaving the child at
Settignano, three miles from the city, on an estate of the Buonarottis'.
He was intrusted to the care of a stone-mason's wife, as nurse. Living
among the quarrymen and sculptors of this picturesque region, he began
to draw as soon as he could use his hands. He took delight in the work
of the masons, and they in turn loved the bright, active child. On the
walls of the stone-mason's house he made charcoal sketches, which were
doubtless praised by the foster-parents.

Lodovico, who was quite too proud for manual labor, designed that his
son should become a dealer in silks and woollens, as probably he would
thus amass wealth. With such a project in mind, he was certainly unwise
to place the child in the exhilarating air of the mountains, where
nature would be almost sure to win him away from the counting-room.

When the boy was old enough he was sent by his father to a grammar
school in Florence, kept by Francesco of Urbino, a noted grammarian. He
made little progress in his studies, for nearly all of his time was
spent in drawing and in visiting the _ateliers_ of the different artists
of the city. Vasari says he was beaten by his father and other elders;
but the beatings did no good,--indeed, they probably made the quiet,
self-poised lad more indifferent to trade and more devoted to art.

Fortunately, in these early years, as has so often happened to men of
genius, Michael Angelo found a congenial friend, Francesco Granacci, a
talented youth of good family, lovable in nature, and a student in art.
He was a pupil of one of the best painters in Italy, Domenico
Ghirlandaio. He loaned drawings to Michael Angelo, and made the boy of
fourteen more anxious than ever to be an artist.

Lodovico at last saw that a lad so absorbed in art would probably be a
failure in silk and wool, and placed him in the studio of Ghirlandaio,
with the promise of his receiving six gold florins the first year, eight
the second, and ten the third.

Granacci, who was nineteen, and Michael Angelo now worked happily
together. The master had undertaken to paint the choir of the Church of
Santa Maria Novella, and thus the boys were brought into important work.

One day, when the painters were absent, Michael Angelo drew the
scaffolding, with all who worked on it, so perfectly that Ghirlandaio
exclaimed, when he saw it: "This youth understands more than I do
myself." He also corrected one of the master's drawings, the draped form
of a woman. Sixty years afterwards, when this sketch was shown to
Michael Angelo, he said, "I almost think that I knew more art in my
youth than I do in my old age."

The young artist now painted his first picture, a plate of Martin
Schoengauer's of Germany, representing St. Anthony tormented by devils.
One pulls his hair, one his garments, one seizes the book hanging from
his girdle, one snatches a stick from his hand, while others pinch, and
tease, and roll over him. Claws, scales, horns, and the like, all help
to make up these monsters. Michael Angelo went to the fish-market, and
carefully studied the eyes and scales of the fish, with their colors,
and painted such a picture that it was mistaken for the original.

After a year spent with Ghirlandaio, the master seems to have become
envious, and the three-years' contract was mutually broken, through a
fortunate opening for Michael Angelo. Cosmo de' Medici, "Pater Patriae,"
had collected ancient and modern sculptures and paintings, and these art
treasures were enriched by his grandson, Lorenzo the Magnificent, who
opened them to students, with prizes for the best work. He founded an
academy and placed it under the charge of Bertoldo, the favorite
disciple of Donatello.

Lorenzo made himself the idol of the people by his generosity,
consideration, and unquestioned ability to lead. He arranged public
festivities, and wrote verses to be sung by girls as they danced in the
public square, in the month of May. All the young people knew and loved
him.

On one of these festive occasions, when the triumphal procession of
Paulus AEmilius was being represented, Granacci found an opportunity of
winning Lorenzo's favor, and thereby gained access to the art treasures.
At once he thought of his friend, and Michael Angelo was soon studying
the marbles and pictures of the great Medici.

The boy of fifteen quickly made friends with the stone-masons, and,
getting from them a piece of marble, began to copy the antique masque of
a faun. However, his work was not like the original, but the mouth was
open so that the teeth were visible. When Lorenzo came among the pupils
he observed the masque and praised it, but said to the boy, "You have
made your faun so old, and yet you have left him all his teeth; you
should have known that at such an advanced age there are generally some
wanting."

At once Michael Angelo broke out a tooth, filling the gum as though it
had dropped out. When Lorenzo came again he was delighted, and told the
boy to send for his father. Lodovico came reluctantly, for he was not
yet reconciled to the choice of "art and poverty" which his son had
made.

Lorenzo received him cordially and asked his occupation. "I have never
followed any business," was the reply; "but I live upon the small income
of the possessions left me by my ancestors. These I endeavor to keep in
order, and, so far as I can, to improve them."

"Well," said Lorenzo, "look around you; and, if I can do anything for
you, only apply to me. Whatever is in my power shall be done."

Lodovico received a vacant post in the customhouse, and Michael Angelo
was taken into the Medici palace and treated as a son. For three years
he lived in this regal home, meeting all the great and learned men of
Italy: Politian, the poet and philosopher; Ficino, the head of the
Platonic Academy; Pico della Mirandola, the prince and scholar, and many
others.

Who can estimate such influence over a youth? Who can measure the good
that Lorenzo de' Medici was doing for the world unwittingly? To develop
a grand man from a boy, is more than to carve a statue from the marble.

Michael Angelo was now of middle height, with dark hair, small gray
eyes, and of delicate appearance, but he became robust as he grew older.

Politian was the tutor of the two Medici youths, Giovanni and Giulio,
who afterwards became Leo X. and Clement VII. He encouraged Michael
Angelo, when eighteen, to make a marble bas-relief of the battle of
Hercules with the Centaurs. This is still preserved in the Buonarotti
family, as the sculptor would never part with it. The head of the faun
is in the Uffizi gallery.

Michael Angelo now executed a Madonna in bronze, and copied the
wonderful frescos of Masaccio in the Brancacci Chapel of Santa Maria del
Carmine (usually called the Carmine Chapel), the same which inspired
Fra Angelico, Raphael, and Andrea del Sarto. "The importance of these
frescos arises from the fact that they hold the same place in the
history of art during the fifteenth century as the works of Giotto, in
the Arena Chapel at Padua, hold during the fourteenth. Each series forms
an epoch in painting, from which may be dated one of those great and
sudden onward steps which have in various ages and countries marked the
development of art. The history of Italian painting is divided into
three distinct and well-defined periods, by the Arena and Brancacci
Chapels, and the frescos of Michael Angelo and Raphael in the Vatican."

While Michael Angelo was copying these paintings of Masaccio, he took no
holidays, and gave the hours of night to his labors. Ambition made work
a delight. He studied anatomy like a devotee. Dead bodies were conveyed
from the hospital to a cell in the convent of Santo Spirito, the artist
rewarding the prior by a crucifix almost as large as life, which he
carved from wood.

The youth could but know his superiority to others, and was not always
wise enough to conceal his contempt for mediocrity, or for the young men
who played at life. One of his fellow-students, Torrigiani, grew so
angry at him, probably from some slighting remark, that he struck him
with his fist, disfiguring his face for life. Michael Angelo is said to
have merely replied to this brutal assault, "You will be remembered only
as the man who broke my nose." Torrigiani was at once banished, and
died miserably in the Spanish Inquisition.

In April, 1492, Lorenzo the Magnificent died, in the very prime of his
life. Michael Angelo was so overcome that for a long time he was unable
to collect his thoughts for work. The self-reliant young man, cold
outwardly, had a warm and generous heart.

He went home to the Buonarotti mansion, opened a studio, purchased a
piece of marble and made a Hercules four feet in height. It stood for
many years in the Strozzi Palace in Florence, was sold to France, and is
now lost.

Piero de' Medici succeeded to his father Lorenzo, who is said to have
remarked that "he had three sons: the first good, the second clever, the
third a fool. The good one was Giuliano, thirteen years old at the death
of his father; the clever one was Giovanni, seventeen years old, but a
cardinal already by favor of the pope, whose son had married a daughter
of Lorenzo's; and the fool was Piero."

In January, 1494, an unusual storm occurred in Florence, and the snow
lay from four to six feet deep. Piero, with childish enthusiasm, sent
for Michael Angelo and bade him form a statue of snow in the courtyard
of the palace. The Medici was so pleased with the result that he brought
the artist to sit at his own table, and to live in the same rooms
assigned to him by Lorenzo his father.

Piero is said, however, to have valued equally with the sculptor a
Spaniard who served in his stables, because he could outrun a horse at
full gallop.

Piero was proud, without the virtues of his father, and soon alienated
the affections of the Florentines. Savonarola, the Dominican monk of San
Marco, was preaching against the luxuries and vices of the age. So
popular was he, says Burlamacchi, that "the people got up in the middle
of the night to get places for the sermon, and came to the door of the
cathedral, waiting outside till it should be opened, making no account
of any inconvenience, neither of the cold, nor the mud, nor of standing
in winter with their feet on the marble; and among them were young and
old, women and children, of every sort, who came with such jubilee and
rejoicing that it was bewildering to hear them, going to the sermon as
to a wedding.

"Then the silence was great in the church, each one going to his place;
and he who could read, with a taper in his hand, read the service and
other prayers. And though many thousand people were thus collected
together, no sound was to be heard, not even a 'hush,' until the arrival
of the children who sang hymns with so much sweetness that heaven seemed
to have opened. Thus they waited three or four hours till the _padre_
entered the pulpit, and the attention of so great a mass of people, all
with eyes and ears intent upon the preacher, was wonderful; they
listened so that when the sermon reached its end it seemed to them that
it had scarcely begun."

Piero's weakness and Savonarola's power soon bore fruit. Michael Angelo
foresaw the fall of the Medici, and, unwilling to fight for a ruler whom
he could not respect, fled to Venice. But his scanty supply of money was
soon exhausted, and he returned to Bologna, on his way back to Florence.

At Bologna, the law required that every foreigner entering the gates
should have a seal of red wax on his thumb, showing permission. This
Michael Angelo and his friends neglected to obtain, and were at once
arrested and fined. They would have been imprisoned save that
Aldovrandi, a member of the council, and of a distinguished family, set
them free, and invited the sculptor to his own house, where he remained
for a year. Together they read Dante and Petrarch, and the magistrate
soon became ardently attached to the bright youth of nineteen.

In the Church of San Petronio are the bones of St. Domenico in a marble
coffin; on the sarcophagus two kneeling figures were to be placed by
Nicolo Pisano, a contemporary of Cimabue. One was unfinished in its
drapery, and the other, a kneeling angel holding a candelabrum, was not
even begun. At Aldovrandi's request Michael Angelo completed this work.
So exasperated were the artists of Bologna at his skill that he felt
obliged to leave their city, and return to Florence. What a pitiful
exhibition of human weakness!

Meantime Piero had fled from Florence. Charles VIII. of France had made
a triumphal entrance into the city, and Savonarola had become lawgiver.
"Jesus Christ is the King of Florence," was written over the gates of
the Palazzo Vecchio, hymns were sung in the streets instead of ballads,
the sacrament was received daily, and worldly books, even Petrarch and
Virgil, and sensuous works of art, were burned on a huge pile. "Even Fra
Bartolomeo was so carried away by the enthusiasm of the moment as to
bring his life-academy studies to be consumed on this pyre, forgetful
that, in the absence of such studies, he could never have risen above
low mediocrity. Lorenzo di Credi, another and devoted follower of
Savonarola, did the same."

Michael Angelo, though an ardent admirer of Savonarola, and an attendant
upon his preaching, seems not to have lost his good judgment, or to have
considered the making of a sleeping Cupid a sin. When the beautiful work
was completed, at the suggestion of a friend, it was buried in the
ground for a season, to give it the appearance of an antique, and then
sold to Cardinal San Giorgio for two hundred ducats, though Michael
Angelo received but thirty as his share. Soon after, the cardinal
ascertained how he had been imposed upon, and invited the artist to
Rome, with the hope that the hundred and seventy ducats could be
obtained from the dishonest agent who effected the sale. Vasari states
that many persons believed that the agent, and not Michael Angelo,
buried the statue for gain, which seems probable from all we know of
the artist's upright character.

Michael Angelo went to the Eternal City in June, 1496. He was still
young, only twenty-one. "The idea," says Hermann Grimm, in his scholarly
life of the artist, "that the young Michael Angelo, full of the bustle
of the fanatically excited Florence, was led by his fate to Rome, and
trod for the first time that soil where the most corrupt doings were,
nevertheless, lost sight of in the calm grandeur of the past, has
something in it that awakens thought. It was the first step in his
actual life. He had before been led hither and thither by men and by his
own indistinct views; now, thrown upon his own resources, he takes a new
start for his future, and what he now produces begins the series of his
masterly works."

Michael Angelo's first efforts in Rome were for a noble and cultivated
man, Jacopo Galli: a Cupid, now lost, and a Bacchus, nearly as large as
life, which Shelley declared "a revolting misunderstanding of the spirit
and the idea of Bacchus." Perhaps the artist did not put much heart into
the statue of the intoxicated youth. His next work, however, the Pieta,
executed for Cardinal St. Denis, the French ambassador at Rome, who
desired to leave some monument of himself in the great city, made
Michael Angelo famous. Sonnets were written to the Pieta, the Virgin
Mary holding the dead Christ.

Of this work Grimm says: "The position of the body, resting on the
knees of the woman; the folds of her dress, which is gathered together
by a band across the bosom; the inclination of the head, as she bends
over her son in a manner inconsolable and yet sublime, or his, as it
rests in her arms dead, exhausted, and with mild features,--we feel
every touch was for the first time created by Michael Angelo, and that
that in which he imitated others in this group, was only common
property, which he used because its use was customary....

"Our deepest sympathy is awakened by the sight of Christ,--the two legs,
with weary feet, hanging down sideways from the mother's knee; the
falling arm; the failing, sunken body; the head drooping backwards,--the
attitude of the whole human form lying there, as if by death he had
again become a child whom the mother had taken in her arms; at the same
time, in the countenance there is a wonderful blending of the old
customary Byzantine type,--the longish features and parted beard, and
the noblest elements of the national Jewish expression. None before
Michael Angelo would have thought of this; the oftener the work is
contemplated, the more touching does its beauty become,--everywhere the
purest nature, in harmony both in spirit and exterior.

"Whatever previously to this work had been produced by sculptors in
Italy passes into shadow, and assumes the appearance of attempts in
which there is something lacking, whether in idea or in execution; here,
both are provided for. The artist, the work, and the circumstances of
the time, combine together; and the result is something that deserves to
be called perfect. Michael Angelo numbered four and twenty years when he
had finished his Pieta. He was the first master in Italy, the first in
the world from henceforth, says Condivi; indeed, they go so far as to
maintain, he says further, that Michael Angelo surpassed the ancient
masters."

How could Michael Angelo have carved this work at twenty-four? His
knowledge of anatomy was surprising. He had become imbued with great and
noble thoughts from Savonarola's preaching, and from his ardent reading
of Dante and Petrarch; he was eager for fame, and he believed in his own
power. And, besides all this, he was in love with art. When a friend
said to him, years afterwards, "'Tis a pity that you have not married,
that you might have left children to inherit the fruit of these
honorable toils," he replied, "I have only too much of a wife in my art,
and she has given me trouble enough. As to my children, they are the
works that I shall leave; and if they are not worth much, they will at
least live for some time. Woe to Lorenzo Ghiberti if he had not made the
gates of San Giovanni; for his children and grandchildren have sold or
squandered all that he left; but the gates are still in their place.
These are so beautiful that they are worthy of being the gates of
Paradise."

The Pieta is now in St. Peter's. When some person criticised the
youthful appearance of the Virgin, and captiously asked where a mother
could be found, like this one, younger than her son, the painter
answered, "In Paradise."

"The love and care," says Vasari, "which Michael Angelo had given to
this group were such that he there left his name--a thing he never did
again for any work--on the cincture which girdles the robe of Our Lady;
for it happened one day that Michael Angelo, entering the place where it
was erected, found a large assemblage of strangers from Lombardy there,
who were praising it highly; one of them, asking who had done it, was
told, 'Our Hunchback of Milan;' hearing which, Michael Angelo remained
silent, although surprised that his work should be attributed to
another. But one night he repaired to St. Peter's with a light and his
chisels, to engrave his name on the figure, which seems to breathe a
spirit as perfect as her form and countenance."

Michael Angelo was now urged by his father and brother to return to
Florence. Lodovico, his father, writes him: "Buonarotto tells me that
you live with great economy, or rather penury. Economy is good, but
penury is bad, because it is a vice displeasing to God and to the people
of this world, and, besides, will do harm both to soul and body."

However, when his son returned, after four years in Rome, carrying the
money he had saved to establish his brothers in business, the proud
father was not displeased with the "penury." This self-denial the great
artist practised through life for his not always grateful or
appreciative family. He said in his old age, "Rich as I am, I have
always lived like a poor man."

Matters had greatly changed in Florence. Savonarola and his two
principal followers, excommunicated by Pope Alexander VI., because they
had preached against the corruptions of Rome, calling his court the
Romish Babylon, had been burned at the stake.

While the mob had assisted at the death of the great and good friar, the
people of Florence were sad at heart. Michael Angelo, who loved him and
deeply loved republican Florence, was sad also, and perhaps thereby
wrought all the more earnestly, never being frivolous either in thought
or work.

Upon his return to Florence, Cardinal Piccolomini, afterwards Pius III.,
made a contract with him for fifteen statues of Carrara marble to
embellish the family chapel in the cathedral of Siena. Three years were
allowed for this work. The artist finished but four statues, Peter,
Paul, Gregory, and Pius, because of other labors which were pressed upon
him.

The marble Madonna in the Church of Notre Dame at Bruges was carved
about this time. "This," says Grimm, "is one of Michael Angelo's finest
works. It is life-size. She sits there enveloped in the softest drapery;
the child stands between her knees, leaning on the left one, the foot of
which rests on a block of stone, so that it is raised a little higher
than the right. On this stone the child also stands, and seems about to
step down. His mother holds him back with her left hand, while the right
rests on her lap with a book. She is looking straight forward; a
handkerchief is placed across her hair, and falls softly, on both sides,
on her neck and shoulders. In her countenance, in her look, there is a
wonderful majesty, a queenly gravity, as if she felt the thousand pious
glances of the people who look up to her on the altar."

An opportunity now presented itself for the already famous sculptor to
distinguish himself in his own city. Years before a marble block,
eighteen feet high, had been brought from Carrara to Florence, from
which the wool-weavers' guild intended to have a prophet made for Santa
Maria del Fiore. One sculptor had attempted and failed. Others to whom
it was offered said nothing could be done with the one block, but more
pieces of marble should be added.

Michael Angelo was willing to undertake the making of a statue. He was
allowed two years in which to complete it, with a monthly salary of six
gold florins. His only preparation for the work was a little wax model
which he moulded, now in the Uffizi. He worked untiringly, so that he
often slept with his clothes on, to be ready for his beloved statue as
soon as the morning dawned. He had shut himself away from the public
gaze by planks and masonry, and worked alone, not intrusting a stroke
to other hands. He felt what Emerson preached years later, that "society
is fatal." The great essayist urged that while we may keep our hands in
society "we must keep our head in solitude." Great thoughts are not born
usually in the whirl of social life.

Finally, when the statue was finished in January, 1504, and the colossal
David stood unveiled before the people, they said: "It is as great a
miracle as if a dead body had been raised to life." Vasari says Michael
Angelo intended, by this work, to teach the Florentines that as David
"had defended his people and governed justly, so they who were then
ruling that city should defend it with courage and govern it uprightly."

The statue weighed eighteen thousand pounds, and required forty men four
days to drag it by ropes a quarter of a mile to the place where it was
to stand in the Piazza della Signoria. Notwithstanding that the praise
of the sculptor was on every lip, still there was so much jealousy among
the artists that some of their followers threw stones at the statue
during the nights when it was being carried to the Piazza, and eight
persons were arrested and put in prison.

Vasari tells a story which, whether true or false, illustrates the
character of those who profess much because they know little. "When the
statue was set up, it chanced that Soderini, whom it greatly pleased,
came to look at it while Michael Angelo was retouching it at certain
points, and told the artist that he thought the nose too short. Michael
Angelo perceived that Soderini was in such a position beneath the figure
that he could not see it conveniently; yet, to satisfy him, he mounted
the scaffold with his chisel and a little powder gathered from the floor
in his hand, when striking lightly with the chisel, but without altering
the nose, he suffered a little of the powder to fall, and then said to
the gonfaloniere, who stood below, 'Look at it now.'

"'I like it better now,' was the reply; 'you have given it life.'
Michael Angelo then descended, not without compassion for those who
desire to appear good judges of matters whereof they know nothing." But
the artist very wisely made no remarks, and thus retained the friendship
of Soderini. In 1873, after nearly four centuries, this famous statue
was removed to the Academy of Fine Arts in the old Monastery of St.
Mark, lest in the distant future it should be injured by exposure.

Work now poured in upon Michael Angelo. In three years he received
commissions to carve thirty-seven statues. For the cathedral of Florence
he promised colossal statues of the twelve apostles, but was able to
attempt only one, St. Matthew, now in the Florentine Academy. For Agnolo
Doni he painted a Madonna, now in the Tribune at Florence. The price was
sixty ducats, but the parsimonious Agnolo said he would give but forty,
though he knew it was worth more. Michael Angelo at once sent a
messenger demanding a hundred ducats or the picture, but, not inclined
to lose so valuable a work by a famous artist, Agnolo gladly offered the
sixty which he at first refused to pay. Offended by such penuriousness,
Michael Angelo demanded and received one hundred and forty ducats!

In 1504, Gonfaloniere Soderini desired to adorn the great Municipal Hall
with the paintings of two masters, Leonardo da Vinci and Michael Angelo.
The latter was only twenty-nine, while Da Vinci was over fifty. He had
recently come from Milan, where he had been painting the "Last Supper,"
which, Grimm says, "in moments of admiration, forces from us the
assertion that it is the finest and sublimest composition ever produced
by an Italian master."

And now with this "first painter in Italy" the first sculptor, Michael
Angelo, was asked to compete, and he dared to accept the offer.

He chose for his subject an incident of the Pisan war. As the weather
was very warm, the Florentines had laid aside their armor and were
bathing in the Arno. Sir John Hawkwood, the commander of the opposing
forces, seized this moment to make the attack. The bathers rushed to the
shore, and Michael Angelo has depicted them climbing the bank, buckling
on their armor, and with all haste returning the assault.

"It is not possible," says Grimm, "to describe all the separate figures,
the fore-shortenings, the boldness with which the most difficult
attitude is ever chosen, or the art with which it is depicted. This
cartoon was the school for a whole generation of artists, who made their
first studies from it."

Da Vinci's painting represented a scene at the battle of Anghiari, where
the Florentines had defeated the Milanese in 1440. "While these cartoons
thus hung opposite to each other," says Benvenuto Cellini, "they formed
the school of the world." Raphael, Andrea del Sarto, and others made
studies from them. Da Vinci's faded, and Michael Angelo's was cut in
pieces by some enemy.

Before the artist had finished his painting he was summoned to Rome by
Pope Julius II., the great patron of art and literature, who desired a
monument for himself in St. Peter's. The mausoleum was to be three
stories high; with sixteen statues of the captive liberal arts, and ten
statues of Victory treading upon conquered provinces, for the first
story; the sarcophagus of the pope, with his statue and attendant
angels, for the second; and, above all, more cherubs and apostles.

"It will cost a hundred thousand crowns," said the artist.

"Let it cost twice that sum," said the pope.

At once Michael Angelo hastened to the marble quarries of Carrara, in
the most northern part of Tuscany, where he remained for eight months.
His task was a difficult one. He wrote to his father after he had gone
back to Rome, "I should be quite contented here if only my marble would
come. I am unhappy about it; for not for two days only, but as long as I
have been here, we have had good weather. A few days ago, a bark, which
has just arrived, was within a hair's-breadth of perishing. When from
bad weather the blocks were conveyed by land, the river overflowed, and
placed them under water; so that up to this day I have been able to do
nothing. I must endeavor to keep the pope in good humor by empty words,
so that his good temper may not fail. I hope all may soon be in order,
and that I may begin my work. God grant it!"

When the marble reached Rome, the people were astonished, for there
seemed enough to build a temple, instead of a tomb. The sculptor resided
in a house near the Vatican, a covered way being constructed by the pope
between the _atelier_ and the palace, that he might visit the artist
familiarly and see him at his work.

Meantime an envious artist was whispering in the ears of Julius that it
was an evil omen to build one's monument in one's lifetime, and that he
would be apt to die early. This was not agreeable news, and when Michael
Angelo returned from a second journey to Carrara the pope refused to
advance any money, and even gave orders that he should not be admitted
to the palace.

With commendable pride the artist left Rome at once, and hastened to
Florence, leaving a letter in which he said, "Most Holy Father,--If you
require me in the future, you can seek me elsewhere than in Rome."

The proud Julius at once perceived his mistake, and sent a messenger to
bid him return, on pain of his displeasure. But Michael Angelo paid no
attention to the mandate. Then Julius II. applied to Soderini the
Gonfaloniere, who said to the sculptor, "You have treated the pope in a
manner such as the King of France would not have done! There must be an
end of trifling with him now. We will not for your sake begin a war with
the pope, and risk the safety of the state."

The Sultan Bajazet II., who had heard of Michael Angelo's fame, now
urged him to come to Turkey and build a bridge between Constantinople
and Pera, across the Golden Horn. Soderini tried to persuade him that he
had better "die siding with the pope, than live passing over to the
Turk," and meantime wrote Julius that he could do nothing with him. The
pope saw that kindness alone would win back the self-reliant and
independent artist, and finally prevailed upon him to return to Rome.

When he arrived, Julius, half angry, said, "You have waited thus long,
it seems, till we should ourselves come to seek you."

An ecclesiastic standing near officiously begged his Holiness not to be
too severe with Michael Angelo, as he was a man of no education, and as
artists did not know how to behave except where their own art was
concerned.

The pope was now fully angry, and exclaimed, "Do you venture to say
things to this man which I would not have said to him myself? You are
yourself a man of no education, a miserable fellow, and this he is not.
Leave our presence." The man was borne out of the hall, nearly fainting.

Michael Angelo was at once commissioned to make a bronze statue of
Julius, fourteen feet high, to be placed before the Church of St.
Petronio, in Bologna. When the pope wished to know the cost, the artist
told him he thought it would be about three thousand ducats, but was not
sure whether the cast would succeed.

"You will mould it until it succeeds," said the pope, "and you shall be
paid as much as you require."

When the clay model was ready for the pope to look at, he was asked if
he would like to be represented holding a book in his left hand.

"Give me a sword!" he exclaimed; "I am no scholar. And what does the
raised right hand denote? Am I dispensing a curse, or a blessing?"

"You are advising the people of Bologna to be wise," replied Michael
Angelo.

The bronze statue was a difficult work. The first cast was unsuccessful.
The sculptor wrote home, "If I had a second time to undertake this
intense work, which gives me no rest night or day, I scarcely think I
should be able to accomplish it. I am convinced that no one else upon
whom this immense task might have been imposed would have persevered. My
belief is that your prayers have kept me sustained and well. For no one
in Bologna, not even after the successful issue of the cast, thought
that I should finish the statue satisfactorily; before that no one
thought that the cast would succeed."

After the statue was completed, Michael Angelo, at the earnest request
of the helpless Buonarotti family, went back to Florence, and carried
there what he had earned. Grimm naively remarks, "I could almost suppose
that it had been designed by Fate, as may be often observed in similar
cases, to compensate for Michael Angelo's extraordinary gifts by a
corresponding lack of them in the family." The case of Galileo,
struggling through life for helpless relatives, is similar to that of
Michael Angelo.

He was soon summoned again to Rome, not to complete the monument, as he
had hoped, but to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He hesitated
to undertake so important a work in painting, and begged that Raphael be
chosen; but the pope would not consent.

He therefore began to make designs, and sent for some of his boyhood
friends to aid him, Granacci and others. His method was to make the
first draught in red or black chalk on a very small scale. From this he
marked out the full-sized cartoons or working drawings, nailing these to
the wall, and cutting away the paper around the figures. He soon found
that his assistants were a hinderance rather than a help, and, unable to
wound their feelings by telling them, he shut up the chapel and went
away. They understood it, and, if some were hurt or offended, Granacci
was not, but always remained an earnest friend.

Michael Angelo now worked alone, seeing nobody except his color-grinder
and the pope. His eyes became so injured by holding his head back for
his work that for a long period afterwards he could read only by keeping
the page above his head. After he had painted for some time the walls
began to mould, and, discouraged, he hastened to the pope, saying, "I
told your Holiness, from the first, that painting was not my profession;
all that I have painted is destroyed. If you do not believe it, send and
let some one else see." It was soon found that he had made the plaster
too wet, but that no harm would result.

He worked now so constantly that he scarcely took time to eat or sleep,
and became ill from overexertion. In the midst of his labors and
illness, he writes his father, "Do not lose courage, and let not a trace
of inward sadness gain ground in you; for, if you have lost your
property, life is not lost, and I will do more for you than all you have
lost. Still, do not rely upon it; it is always a doubtful matter. Use,
rather, all possible precaution; and thank God that, as this
chastisement of heaven was to come, it came at a time when you could
better extricate yourself from it than you would perhaps have been
earlier able to do. Take care of your health, and rather part with all
your possessions than impose privations on yourself. For it is of
greater consequence to me that you should remain alive, although a poor
man, than that you should perish for the sake of all the money in the
world.

Your MICHAEL ANGELO."


He writes also to his younger brother, Giovanni Simone, who appears to
have spent much and earned little: "If you will take care to do well,
and to honor and revere your father, I will aid you like the others and
will soon establish you in a good shop.... I have gone about through all
Italy for twelve years, leading a dog's life; bearing all manner of
insults, enduring all sorts of drudgery, lacerating my body with many
toils, placing my life itself under a thousand perils, solely to aid my
family; and now that I have commenced to raise it up a little, thou
alone wishest to do that which shall confound and ruin in an hour
everything that I have done in so many years and with so many fatigues."

Meantime the pope, as eager as a child to see the painting which he knew
would help to immortalize himself, urged the artist to work faster, and
continually asked when it would be finished and the scaffolding taken
down. "When I can, holy father," replied the artist. "When I can--when I
can! I'll make thee finish it, and quickly, as thou shalt see!" And he
struck Michael Angelo with the staff which he held in his hand.

The sculptor at once left the painting and started for Florence. But
Julius sent after him, and gave him five hundred crowns to pacify him.
It certainly would have been a pecuniary saving to the pontiff not to
have given way to his temper and used his staff!

When half the ceiling was completed, at Julius's request the scaffolding
was removed, and all Rome crowded to see the wonderful work on All
Saints' Day, 1509.

Kugler says, "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 its 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 paintings represent God the Father separating the light from the
darkness; he creates the sun and moon; surrounded by angels, he commands
the waters to bring forth all kinds of animals which can live in the
sea; he breathes into man the breath of life; he forms Eve; both are
driven from the garden; Abel is sacrificed; the flood comes; Noah and
his family are saved in the ark.

Grimm thus describes a portion of this marvellous painting: "Adam lies
on a dark mountain summit. His formation is finished; nothing more
remains than that he should rise, and feel for the first time what life
and waking are. It is as if the first emotion of his new condition
thrilled through him; as if, still lying almost in a dream, he divined
what was passing around him. God hovers slowly down over him from above,
softly descending like an evening cloud. Angel forms surround him on
all sides, closely thronging round him as if they were bearing him; and
his mantle, as if swelled out by a full gust of wind, forms a flowing
tent around them all. These angels are children in appearance, with
lovely countenances: some support him from below, others look over his
shoulder. More wonderful still than the mantle which embraces them all
is the garment which covers the form of God himself, violet-gray
drapery, transparent as if woven out of clouds, closely surrounding the
mighty and beautiful form with its small folds, covering him entirely
down to the knees, and yet allowing every muscle to appear through it. I
have never seen the portrait of a human body which equalled the beauty
of this. Cornelius justly said that since Phidias its like has not been
formed....

"God commands and Adam obeys. He signs him to rise, and Adam seizes his
hand to raise himself up. Like an electric touch, God sends a spark of
his own spirit, with life-giving power, into Adam's body. Adam lay there
powerless; the spirit moves within him; he raises his head to his
Creator as a flower turns to the sun, impelled by that wonderful power
which is neither will nor obedience....

"The next picture is the creation of Eve. Adam lies on his right side
sunk in sleep, and completely turned to the spectator. One arm falls
languidly on his breast, and the back of the fingers rest upon the
ground.... Eve stands behind Adam; we see her completely in profile....
We feel tempted to say she is the most beautiful picture of a woman
which art has produced.... She is looking straight forward; and we feel
that she breathes for the first time: but it seems as if life had not
yet flowed through her veins, as if the adoring, God-turned position was
not only the first dream-like movement, but as if the Creator himself
had formed her, and called her from her slumber, in this position."

The pope was anxious to have the scaffolding again erected, and the
figures touched with gold. "It is unnecessary," said Michael Angelo.
"But it looks poor," said Julius, who should have thought of this before
he insisted on its being shown to the public. "They are poor people whom
I have painted there," said the artist; "they did not wear gold on their
garments," and Julius was pacified.

Raphael was now working near Michael Angelo in the Vatican palace, but
it is probable that they did not become friends, though each admired the
genius of the other, and Raphael "thanked God that he had been born in
the same century as Michael Angelo." But there was rivalry always
between the followers of the two masters.

Raphael was gentle, affectionate, sympathetic, intense, lovable; Michael
Angelo was tender at heart but austere in manner, doing only great
works, and thinking great thoughts. "Raphael," says Grimm, "had one
excellence, which, perhaps, as long as the world stands, no other
artist has possessed to such an extent,--his works suit more closely the
average human mind. There is no line drawn above or below. Michael
Angelo's ideals belong to a nobler, stronger generation, as if he had
had demigods in his mind, just as Schiller's poetical forms, in another
manner, often outstep the measure of the ordinary mortal.... Leonardo
sought for the fantastic, Michael Angelo for the difficult and the
great; both labored with intense accuracy, both went their own ways, and
impressed the stamp of nature on their works. Raphael proceeded quietly,
often advancing in the completion only to a certain point, at which he
rested, apparently not jealous at being confounded with others. He
paints at first in the fashion of Perugino, and his portraits are in the
delicate manner of Leonardo: a certain grace is almost the only
characteristic of his works. At length he finds himself in Rome, opposed
alone to Michael Angelo; then only does the true source of power burst
out within him; and he produces works which stand so high above all his
former ones that the air of Rome which he breathed seemed to have worked
wonders in him.... Raphael served the court with agreeable
obsequiousness; but under the outward veil of this subservient
friendliness there dwelt a keen and royal mind, which bent before no
power, and went its own way solitarily, like the soul of Michael
Angelo."

The Sistine Chapel was finished, probably, in 1512, and Michael Angelo
returned with ardor to the Julius monument, which, however, had been
reduced in plan from the original. He worked on the central figure,
Moses, with great joy, believing it would be his masterpiece. "This
statue," says Charles Christopher Black of Trinity College, Cambridge,
"takes rank with the Prometheus of AEschylus, with the highest and
noblest conceptions of Dante and Shakespeare."

"He sits there," says Grimm, "as if on the point of starting up, his
head proudly raised; his hand, under the arm of which rest the tables of
the law, is thrust in his beard, which falls in heavy, waving locks on
his breast; his nostrils are wide and expanding, and his mouth looks as
if the words were trembling on his lips. Such a man could well subdue a
rebellious people, drawing them after him, like a moving magnet, through
the wilderness and through the sea itself.

"What need we information, letters, supposititious records, respecting
Michael Angelo, when we possess such a work, every line of which is a
transcript of his mind?"

Emerson truly said, "Nothing great was ever achieved without
enthusiasm." No work either in literature or art can ever be great, or
live beyond a decade or two, unless the author or artist puts himself
into it,--his own glowing heart and earnest purpose. Mr. Black well
says, "The highest aim of art is not to produce a counterpart of nature,
but to convey by a judicious employment of natural forms, and a wise
deviation where required, the sentiment which it is the artist's object
to inculcate."

The statues of the two chained youths, or "Fettered Slaves," which were
too large after the monument had been reduced in size, were sent to
France. The "Dying Slave" will be recalled by all who have visited the
Renaissance sculptures of the Louvre. Grimm says, "Perhaps the tender
beauty of this dying youth is more penetrating than the power of
Moses.... When I say that to me it is the most elevated piece of
statuary that I know, I do so remembering the masterpieces of ancient
art. Man is always limited. It is impossible, in the most comprehensive
life, to have had everything before our eyes, and to have contemplated
that which we have seen, in the best and worthiest state of feeling....
I ask myself what work of sculpture first comes to mind if I am to name
the best, and at once the answer is ready,--the dying youth of Michael
Angelo.... What work of any ancient master do we, however, know or
possess which touches us so nearly as this,--which takes hold of our
soul so completely as this exemplification of the highest and last human
conflict does, in a being just developing? The last moment, between life
and immortality,--the terror at once of departing and arriving,--the
enfeebling of the powerful youthful limbs, which, like an empty and
magnificent coat of mail, are cast off by the soul as she rises, and
which, still losing what they contained, seem nevertheless completely
to veil it!

"He is chained to the pillar by a band running across the breast, below
the shoulders; his powers are just ebbing; the band sustains him; he
almost hangs in it; one shoulder is forced up, and towards this the head
inclines as it falls backwards. The hand of this arm is placed on his
breast; the other is raised in a bent position behind the head, in such
an attitude as in sleep we make a pillow of an arm, and it is fettered
at the wrist. The knees, drawn closely together, have no more firmness;
no muscle is stretched; all has returned to that repose which indicates
death."

A year after the Sistine Chapel was finished, Pope Julius died, and was
succeeded by Leo X., at whose side the artist had sat when a boy, in the
palace of Lorenzo the Magnificent. He was a man of taste and culture,
and desired to build a monument to himself in his native Florence. He
therefore commissioned Michael Angelo to build a beautiful, sculptured
facade for the Church of San Lorenzo, erected by Cosmo de' Medici from
designs of Brunelleschi.

For nearly four years the sculptor remained among the mountains of
Carrara, and the adjacent ones of Serravezza, taking out heavy blocks of
marble, making roads over the steep rocks for their transportation, and
studying architecture with great assiduity.

Meantime, Michael Angelo writes to his "Dearest father: Take care of
your health, and see whether you are not still able to get your daily
bread; and, with God's help, get through, poor but honest. I do not do
otherwise; I live shabbily, and care not for outward honor; a thousand
cares and works burden me; and thus I have now gone on for fifteen years
without having a happy, quiet hour. And I have done all for the sake of
supporting you, which you have never acknowledged or believed. God
forgive us all! I am ready to go on working as long as I can, and as
long as my powers hold out."

Later he hears that his father is ill, and writes anxiously to his
brother, "Take care, also, that nothing is lacking in his nursing; for I
have exerted myself for him alone, in order that to the last he might
have a life free of care. Your wife, too, must take care of him, and
attend to his necessities; and all of you, if necessary, must spare no
expenses, even if it should cost us everything."

Finally the facade of San Lorenzo was abandoned by Leo X., who decided
to erect a new chapel north of the church, for the reception of
monuments to his brother and nephew, Giuliano and Lorenzo. The artist
built the new sacristy, bringing thither three hundred cart-loads of
marble from Carrara.

Leo died in 1521, and was succeeded by Adrian, who lived only a year,
and then by Clement VII., the cousin of Leo X. He was a warm friend of
Michael Angelo, and so desirous was he of keeping the artist in his
service that he endeavored to have him take holy orders, but the offer
was refused.

Like the other popes he wished to immortalize his name, and therefore
gave the artist the building of the Laurentian library, adjoining San
Lorenzo.

Meantime the relatives of Pope Julius were justly angry because his tomb
was not completed, and threatened to imprison the sculptor for not
fulfilling his contract. All art work was soon discontinued through the
sacking of Rome by Charles V. of Germany, in 1527. Upon the inlaid
marble floor of the Vatican the German soldiers lighted their fires, and
with valuable documents made beds for their horses which stood in the
Sistine Chapel. Rome had ninety thousand inhabitants under Leo X. A year
after the conquest, she had scarcely a third of that number.

The Florentines now expelled the Medici, revived the republic, and
appointed Michael Angelo to superintend the fortifications and defences
of Florence. He had always loved liberty. Now he loaned his funds freely
to the republic, fortified the hill of San Miniato, was sent to Ferrara
by the government to study its fortifications, and also on an embassy to
Venice. He showed himself as skilful in engineering as in architecture
or painting.

With quick intuition he soon perceived that Malatesta Baglioni, the
captain-general of the republic, was a traitor, and, warned that he
himself was to be assassinated, he fled to Venice.

Here, in exile, he probably wrote his beautiful sonnets to Dante, whose
works he so ardently admired.


     "How shall we speak of him? for our blind eyes
     Are all unequal to his dazzling rays.
     Easier it is to blame his enemies,
     Than for the tongue to tell his highest praise.
     For us he did explore the realms of woe;
     And, at his coming, did high heaven expand
     Her lofty gates, to whom his native land
     Refused to open hers. Yet shall thou know,
     Ungrateful city, in thine own despite,
     That thou hast fostered best thy Dante's fame;
     For virtue, when oppressed, appears more bright.
     And brighter, therefore, shall his glory be,
     Suffering of all mankind most wrongfully,
     Since in the world there lives no greater name."

     SOUTHEY.


Venice offered Michael Angelo all possible inducements to remain, and
Francis I. of France eagerly besought the artist to live at his court;
but his heart was in Florence, and thither he returned, and bravely
helped to defend her to the last. When the Medici were again triumphant,
and freedom was dead, the artist being too great a man to imprison or
kill, he was publicly pardoned by the pope, and went sadly to his work
on the monuments in the Medici Chapel of San Lorenzo.

Here he labored day and night, eating little and sleeping less, ill in
body and suffering deeply in heart for his beloved Florence; working
into the speaking stone his sorrow and his hopes. In 1534 the Medici
Chapel was completed,--a massive piece of architecture, executed at an
almost fabulous expense. On one side is the tomb of Giuliano de' Medici,
the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, with his statue in a sitting
posture, holding in his hand the baton of a general. Beneath him, over
the tomb, are the statues Day and Night. Opposite is the tomb of Lorenzo
de' Medici, the grandson of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and the father of
Catherine de' Medici. It is clad in armor, with a helmet overshadowing
the grave features. The Italians call it Il Pensiero ("Thought," or
"Meditation").

Hawthorne said of this statue, "No such grandeur and majesty have
elsewhere been put into human shape. It is all a miracle--the deep
repose, and the deep life within it. It is as much a miracle to have
achieved this as to make a statue that would rise up and walk.... This
statue is one of the things which I look at with highest enjoyment, but
also with grief and impatience, because I feel that I do not come at all
to that which it involves, and that by and by I must go away and leave
it forever. How wonderful! To take a block of marble, and convert it
wholly into thought, and to do it through all the obstructions and
impediments of drapery."

Some authorities believe that the statue usually called Lorenzo was
intended for Giuliano. Michael Angelo himself, when remonstrated with
because the portraits were not correct likenesses, replied that he "did
not suppose people a hundred years later would care much how the dukes
looked!"

Under this statue are Dawn and Twilight. Ruskin calls these, with Night
and Day, "Four ineffable types, not of darkness nor of day--not of
morning nor evening, but of the departure and the resurrection, the
twilight and the dawn, of the souls of men."

Day is a gigantic figure of a man; Night, of a woman in a profound
sleep, with her foot resting on a thick bundle of poppy-heads. When this
statue was exhibited for the first time, Giovanni Batista Strozzi wrote
a verse, and attached it to the marble:--


     "Carved by an Angel, in this marble white
     Sweetly reposing, lo, the Goddess Night!
     Calmly she sleeps, and so must living be:
     Awake her gently; she will speak to thee."


To which Michael Angelo wrote the following reply:--


     "Grateful is sleep, whilst wrong and shame survive
     More grateful still in senseless stone to live;
     Gladly both sight and hearing I forego;
     Oh, then, awake me not. Hush--whisper low."


Of Day, Mrs. Oliphant says, in her "Makers of Florence," "Bursting
herculean from his strong prison, half heroic, nothing known of him but
the great brow and resolute eyes, and those vast limbs, which were not
yet free from the cohesion of the marble, though alive with such strain
of action."

Twilight is the strong figure of a man. Dawn, or Morning, Grimm
considers "the most beautiful of all. She is lying outstretched on the
gently sloping side of the lid of the sarcophagus. Not, however,
resting, but as if, still in sleep, she had moved towards us; so that,
while the upper part of the back is still reclining, the lower part is
turned to us. She is lying on her right side; the leg next us, only
feebly bent at the knee is stretching itself out; the other is half
drawn up, and with the knee bent out, as if it was stepping forward and
seeking for sure footing. An entire symphony of Beethoven lies in this
statue."

In 1534, the same year in which the Medici statues were finished,
Michael Angelo's father died, at the age of ninety. The artist gave him
a costly burial, and wrote a pathetic poem in his memory. The beloved
brother, Buonarotto, had died in Michael Angelo's arms. His young mother
had died years before when he went to Rome, scarcely more than a boy.


     "Already had I wept and sighed so much,
     I thought all grief forever at an end,
     Exhaled in sighs, shed forth in bitter tears.

            *       *       *       *       *

     For thee, my brother, and for him who was
     Of thee and me the parent, love inspires
     A grief unspeakable to vex and sting.

            *       *       *       *       *

     Full ninety times the sun had bathed his face
     In the wet ocean, ending his annual round
     Ere thou attainedst to the Peace Divine.

            *       *       *       *       *

     There, where (to Him be thanks!) I think thee now,
     And hope to see again if my cold heart
     Be raised from earthly mire to where thou art.

            *       *       *       *       *

     And if 'twixt sire and son the noblest love
     Still grows in Heaven, where every virtue grows,
     While giving glory to my heavenly Lord,
     I shall rejoice with thee in Heaven's bliss."


Clement was now dead, and Paul III. was in the papal chair. He, like the
others, desired that Michael Angelo should do some great work to
immortalize his reign. Clement had wished the artist to paint the "Last
Judgment" in the Sistine Chapel, and when Paul urged the carrying-out of
this plan, Michael Angelo excused himself on account of the contract
with the heirs of Julius II.

"It is now thirty years," cried Paul III., "that I have had this desire;
and, now that I am pope, shall I not be able to effect it? Where is the
contract, that I may tear it?"

One day he appeared in the studio of the painter, bringing with him
eight cardinals, all of whom wished to see the designs for the "Last
Judgment."

The artist was still at work on Moses. "This one statue is sufficient to
be a worthy monument to Pope Julius," said the cardinal of Mantua. Paul
III. refused to release Michael Angelo, and he began work on the Sistine
Chapel.

The painting was not completed until nearly eight years had passed.
There are three hundred figures and heads in this vast fresco. Says M.
F. Sweetser, in his concise and excellent life of Michael Angelo, "About
Christ are many renowned saints,--the Madonna, gazing mildly at the
blessed and redeemed souls; Adam and Eve, curiously regarding the
Judge; and a group of pleading apostles, bearing their emblems. These
are surrounded by a vast throng of saints and martyrs, safe in Heaven,
all of whom exemplify the saying that 'Michael Angelo nowhere admits,
either into heaven or hell, any but the physically powerful.' Below the
Judge are four angels blowing trumpets towards the four quarters of the
universe, and four others holding the books by which the dead are to be
judged. Under these the land and sea are giving up their dead.... As a
work of art, the Last Judgment was one of the grandest productions of
the famous art-century."

Biagio da Cesena, the pope's master of ceremonies, complained that so
many naked figures made the painting more appropriate for bath-rooms and
stables than for a chapel. What was the surprise of Biagio, when the
painting was thrown open to the public, to find that the infernal judge
Minos, with ass's ears, was his own portrait! He begged the pope to
punish the artist; but Paul replied, "If the painter had placed thee in
purgatory, I should have used every effort to help thee; but since he
has put thee in hell, it is useless to have recourse to me, because _ex
infernis nulla est redemptio_."

Paul IV. later complained that the figures were shamefully nude, and
desired to have them covered. "Tell his Holiness," said Michael Angelo,
"that this is a mere trifle, and can be easily done; let him mend the
world, paintings are easily mended." Paul finally had the nude figures
draped by Daniele da Volterra, who thereupon bore the nickname of "the
breeches-maker."

While painting this picture, the artist fell from the scaffold and
injured his leg seriously. He refused to allow anything to be done for
him, but his friend, the surgeon Rontini, forced his way into the house,
and cared for him until he recovered.

These eight years had been the happiest of Michael Angelo's life. Before
this time he had been cold in manner, often melancholy, and sometimes
overbearing; now he was gentle, cheerful, and affectionate. He had
written home in early life, "I have no friends; I need none, and wish to
have none." Now he had found, what every human being needs, a friend
whose tastes and aspirations were like his own. At sixty, he met and
loved Vittoria Colonna, a woman whose mind was henceforward to be his
inspiration, and whose sweet nature was to be his rest and satisfaction
forever. For such a mind as Michael Angelo's there are few kindred
spirits. Fortunate was he that the blessed gift came, even though late
in life.

Vittoria was the daughter of Fabrizio Colonna, and the widow of Marchese
di Pescara, the two highest nobles and generals of her time. Tenderly
reared and highly educated, she had married at nineteen, her husband
soon after engaging in the wars of the time. He was wounded at Pavia,
and died before his young wife could reach him. He was buried at Milan,
but the body was afterwards removed to Naples with great magnificence.

Vittoria, childless, well-nigh heart-broken, turned to literature as her
solace. She desired to enter a convent; but the bishop of Carpentros,
afterwards a cardinal, and an intimate friend of Vittoria, hastened to
Paul III., who forbade the abbess and nuns of San Silvestro, on pain of
excommunication, to permit her to take the veil. Vittoria must not be
lost to the world.

When her poems were published, says T. Adolphus Trollope, in his life of
this charming woman, "copies were as eagerly sought for as the novel of
the season at a nineteenth-century circulating library. Cardinals,
bishops, poets, wits, diplomatists, passed them from one to another,
made them the subject of their correspondence with each other and with
the fair mourner."

Hallam says, "The rare virtues and consummate talents of this lady were
the theme of all Italy in that brilliant age of her literature."

Vittoria Colonna is one of the best illustrations in history of what a
noble and intellectual woman can do for the upbuilding of society. Many
gifted men gave her a sincere affection, and she held that affection
while life lasted. She was well read in history, religious matters, and
classic literature. Her first visit to Rome was a continued ovation.
Even the Emperor Charles V. called upon her. Unselfish, sympathetic,
with a gentle and winsome manner that drew every one into confidence,
she proved herself a companion for the most highly educated, and a
helper for the lowly.

When she visited Ferrara, Duke Hercules II., who had married Renee of
France, the daughter of Louis XII., received her, says Trollope, "with
every possible distinction on the score of her poetical celebrity, and
deemed his city honored by her presence. He invited, we are told, the
most distinguished poets and men of letters of Venice and Lombardy to
meet her at Ferrara. And so much was her visit prized that when Cardinal
Giberto sent thither his secretary, Francesco della Torre, to persuade
her to visit his episcopal city, Verona, that ambassador wrote to his
friend Bembo, at Venice, that he had like to have been banished by the
Duke, and stoned by the people, for coming there with the intention of
robbing Ferrara of its most precious treasure, for the purpose of
enriching Verona."... The learned and elegant Bembo writes of her that
he considered her poetical judgment as sound and authoritative as that
of the greatest masters of the art of song.... Bernardo Tasso made her
the subject of several of his poems. Giovio dedicated to her his life of
Pescara, and Cardinal Pompeo Colonna his book on "The Praises of Women;"
and Contarini paid her the far more remarkable compliment of dedicating
to her his work "On Free Will."

"Paul III. was," as Muratori says, "by no means well disposed towards
the Colonna family. Yet Vittoria must have had influence with the
haughty and severe old Farnese. For both Bembo and Fregoso, the Bishop
of Naples, have taken occasion to acknowledge that they owed their
promotion to the purple in great measure to her."

It is probable that she first met Michael Angelo in the year 1536. He
was then sixty-one, and she forty-six. "A woman," says Grimm, "needs not
extreme youth to captivate the mind of a man who discovers in her the
highest intelligence.... She belonged to that class of women who,
apparently with no will of their own, never seek to extort anything by
force, and yet obtain everything which is placed before them.... How
tenderly she exercised her authority over Michael Angelo, who had never
before been approached; whom she now for the first time inspired with
the happiness of yielding to a woman, and for whom the years which she
passed at that time in Rome she made a period of happiness, which he had
never before known.... Whenever we contemplate the life of great men,
the most beautiful part of their existence is that, when meeting with a
power equal to their own, they find one worthy of measuring the depths
of their mind.... There is no deeper desire than that of meeting such a
mind; no greater happiness than having found it; no greater sorrow than
to resign this happiness, whether it be that it has never been enjoyed,
or that it has been lost."

Francesco d'Ollanda, a portrait-painter, has described one of the
Sundays which he spent in the company of Michael Angelo and Vittoria,
"the latter of whom he calls beautiful, pure in conduct, and acquainted
with the Latin tongue; in short, she is adorned with every grace which
can redound to a woman's praise."

When Michael Angelo arrived at her home on that Sunday, Vittoria, "who
could never speak without elevating those with whom she conversed and
even the place where she was, began to lead the conversation with the
greatest art upon all possible things, without, however, touching even
remotely upon painting. She wished to give Michael Angelo assurance."
She said to him, "I cannot but admire the manner in which you withdraw
yourself from the world, from useless conversation, and from all the
offers of princes who desire paintings from your hand,--how you avoid it
all, and how you have disposed the labor of your whole life as one
single, great work."

"Gracious lady," replied Michael Angelo, "these are undeserved praises;
but, as the conversation has taken this turn, I must here complain of
the public. A thousand silly reproaches are brought against artists of
importance. They say that they are strange people, that they are not to
be approached, that there is no bearing with them. No one, on the
contrary, can be so natural and human as great artists.... How should an
artist, absorbed in his work, take from it time and thought to drive
away other people's ennui?... An artist who, instead of satisfying the
highest demands of his art, tries to suit himself to the great public,
who has nothing strange or peculiar in his personal exterior, or rather
what the world calls so,--will never become an extraordinary mind. It is
true, as regards the ordinary race of artists, we need take no lantern
to look for them; they stand at the corner of every street throughout
the world, ready for all who seek them.... True art is made noble and
religious by the mind producing it. For, for those who feel it, nothing
makes the soul so religious and pure as the endeavor to create something
perfect, for God is perfection, and whoever strives after it is striving
after something divine. True painting is only an image of the perfection
of God, a shadow of the pencil with which he paints,--a melody, a
striving after harmony."

And then, says d'Ollanda, "Vittoria began a eulogium upon painting; she
spoke of its ennobling influence upon a people,--how it led them to
piety, to glory, to greatness, until the tears came into her eyes from
the emotion within."

For ten or twelve years, in the midst of long separations and many
sorrows, this affection of Vittoria and Michael Angelo shed its
transcendent light over two great lives. It was impossible not to love a
woman with such tenderness, sympathy, and sincerity. We may admire a
beautiful or a brilliant woman, but if she lacks tenderness and
sincerity the world soon loses its allegiance. When political changes
made it necessary for her to leave Rome and go to the Convent of St.
Catherine at Viterbo, Michael Angelo wrote her daily, while he painted
in the Pauline Chapel, after the "Last Judgment" was finished, the
"Crucifixion of Peter," and the "Conversion of Paul." In 1542 she wrote
him tenderly, "I have not answered your letter before, thinking that if
you and I continue to write according to my obligation and your
courtesy, it will be necessary that I leave St. Catherine's Chapel,
without finding myself with the sisters at the appointed hours, and that
you must abandon the Pauline Chapel, and not keep yourself all the day
long in sweet colloquy with your paintings ... so that I from the brides
of Christ, and you from his vicar, shall fall away."

However she may chide him for writing too frequently, his words and
works are most precious to her. When he paints for her a picture, she
writes, "I had the greatest faith in God, that he would give you a
supernatural grace to paint this Christ; then I saw it, so wonderful
that it surpassed in every way my expectations. Being emboldened by your
miracles, I desired that which I now see marvellously fulfilled, that
is, that it should stand in every part in the highest perfection, and
that one could not desire more nor reach forward to desire so much. And
I tell you that it gave me joy that the angel on the right hand is so
beautiful; for the Archangel Michael will place you, Michael Angelo, on
the right hand of the Lord at the judgment day. And meanwhile I know not
how to serve you otherwise than to pray to this sweet Christ, whom you
have so well and perfectly painted, and to entreat you to command me as
altogether yours in all and through all."

What delicate appreciation of the genius of the man she loved! How it
must have stimulated and blessed him! But more than all else she loved
Michael Angelo for the one thing women value most in men, the strength
and constancy of a nature that gives a single and lasting devotion.

She gave to Michael Angelo a vellum book, containing one hundred and
three of her sonnets, and sent him forty new ones which she composed at
the convent of Viterbo. These he had bound up in the same book which he
received from her; her for whom, he said, "I would have done more than
for any one else whom I could name in the world." He wrote back his
thanks with the sweet self-abnegation of love.


     "And well I see how false it were to think
       That any work, faded and frail, of mine,
       Could emulate the perfect grace of thine.
     Genius, and art, and daring, backward shrink.
       A thousand works from mortals like to me
       Can ne'er repay what Heaven has given thee."


She inspired him to write poetry. "The productions of our great artist's
pen," says John Edward Taylor, "rank unquestionably in the number of the
most perfect of his own or any subsequent age. Stamped by a flow of
eloquence, a purity of style, an habitual nobleness of sentiment, they
discover a depth of thought rarely equalled, and frequently approaching
to the sublimity of Dante."

Several of his most beautiful sonnets were to Vittoria:--


     "If it be true that any beauteous thing
     Raises the pure and just desire of man
     From earth to God, the eternal fount of all,
     Such I believe my love: for, as in her
     So fair, in whom I all besides forget,
     I view the gentle work of her Creator;
     I have no care for any other thing
     Whilst thus I love. Nor is it marvellous,
     Since the effect is not of my own power,
     If the soul doth by nature, tempted forth,
     Enamored through the eyes,
     Repose upon the eyes which it resembleth,
     And through them riseth to the primal love,
     As to its end, and honors in admiring:
     For who adores the Maker needs must love his work."

     "If a chaste love, exalted piety,
     If equal fortune between two who love,
     Whose every joy and sorrow are the same,
     One spirit only governing two hearts,--
     If one soul in two bodies made eterne,
     Raising them both to Heaven on equal wings,--
     If the same flame, one undivided ray,
     Shine forth to each, from inward unity,--
     If mutual love, for neither's self reserved,
     Desiring only the return of love,--
     If that which one desires the other swift
     Anticipates, impelled by an unconscious power,--
     Are signs of an indissoluble faith,
     Shall aught have power to loosen such a bond?"

     JOHN EDWARD TAYLOR.


In 1544 the Colonna estates were confiscated by the pope, after a
contest between Paul III. and the powerful Colonnas, in which the
latter were defeated, and Vittoria retired to the Benedictine Convent of
St. Anna. Here her health failed. The celebrated physician and poet
Fracastoro said, "Would that a physician for her mind could be found!
Otherwise, the fairest light in this world will, from causes by no means
clear, be extinguished and taken from our eyes."

At the beginning of 1547 she became dangerously ill, and was conveyed to
the palace of her relative Giuliano Cesarini, the only one of her
kindred in Rome. She died towards the last of February, 1547, at the age
of fifty-seven.

She requested to be buried like the sisters with whom she last resided,
and so entirely were her wishes carried out that her place of sepulture
is unknown.

Michael Angelo staid beside her to the very last. When she was gone he
almost lost his senses. Says his pupil, Condivi, "He bore such a love to
her that I remember to have heard him say that he grieved at nothing so
much as that when he went to see her pass from this life he had not
kissed her brow or her face, as he kissed her hand. After her death he
frequently stood trembling and as if insensible."

He wrote several sonnets to her memory.


     "When the prime mover of my many sighs
     Heaven took through death from out her earthly place,
     Nature, that never made so fair a face,
     Remained ashamed, and tears were in all eyes.
     O fate, unheeding my impassioned cries!
     O hopes fallacious! O thou spirit of grace,
     Where art thou now? Earth holds in its embrace
     Thy lovely limbs, thy holy thoughts the skies.
     Vainly did cruel Death attempt to stay
     The rumor of thy virtuous renown,
     That Lethe's waters could not wash away!
     A thousand leaves, since he hath stricken thee down,
     Speak of thee, nor to thee would heaven convey,
     Except through death, a refuge and a crown."

     HENRY W. LONGFELLOW.


The monument of Julius had at last been completed, and placed in the
Church of San Pietro in Vincola. In 1546, Antonio di San Gallo, the
director of the building of St. Peter's, died, and Michael Angelo was
commissioned to carry forward the work. Fortunately Vittoria lived to
see this honor conferred upon him.

He was now seventy-one years old. For the remaining eighteen years of
his life, he devoted himself to this great labor, without compensation.
When Paul III., with Cardinal Marcello, summoned Michael Angelo to talk
over some alleged defects, the aged artist boldly replied to the
cardinal, "I am not nor will I consent to be obliged to tell, to your
eminence or any one else, what I ought or wish to do. Your office is to
bring money and guard it from thieves, and the designing of the building
is left to me." Then he said to the pope, "Holy Father, you see what I
gain; if these fatigues which I endure do not benefit my soul, I lose
both time and labor." The pope, who loved him, placed his hands on his
shoulders, saying, "You benefit both soul and body: do not doubt."

When asked if the new dome would not surpass that of the Duomo of
Florence, by Brunelleschi, he said, "It will be more grand, but not more
beautiful."

Michael Angelo lived very simply in Rome, though he had amassed a large
property, most of which he left to his nephew Leonardo, to whom and his
family he was tenderly attached. When this nephew was married, the
sculptor wrote him "not to care about a great dowry, but that you should
look to a healthy mind, a healthy body, good blood, and good education,
and what sort of family it is.... Above all, seek the counsel of God,
for it is a great step."

Michael Angelo was devotedly attached to Urbino, who had been his
servant for twenty-six years, and who loved him so much, says Vasari,
"that he had nursed him in sickness, and slept at night in his clothes
beside him, the better to watch for his comforts." One day the artist
said to him, "When I die, what wilt thou do?"--"Serve some one else,"
was the reply. "Thou poor creature, I must save thee from that," said
the sculptor, and immediately gave him two thousand crowns.

At Urbino's death, when his master was about eighty, Michael Angelo
wrote Vasari, in deep grief, of his "infinite loss." "Nor have I now
left any other hope than that of rejoining him in Paradise. But of this
God has given me a foretaste, in the most blessed death that he has
died; his own departure did not grieve him, as did the leaving me in
this treacherous world, with so many troubles. Truly is the best part of
my being gone with him, nor is anything now left me except an infinite
sorrow."

The artist was again and again urged to return to Florence, by the
reigning dukes, but he replied, "You must see by my handwriting that I
touch the twenty-fourth hour, and no thought is now born in my mind in
which death is not mixed."

He was implored on every side to carve statues and paint pictures. He
promised Francis I. of France a work in marble, in bronze, and in
painting. "Should death interrupt this desire," said Michael Angelo,
"then, if it be possible to sculpture or paint in the other world, I
shall not fail to do so, where no one becomes old."

He furnished plans for several Roman gates which Pius IV., who succeeded
Paul IV., wished to rebuild, and made designs for various other
buildings and public squares. He erected the Church of St. Mary of the
Angels, amid the ruins of the Baths of Diocletian. "Nothing exists in
architecture," says Mr. Heath Wilson, "which exceeds the plan of this
church in beauty and variety of form. The general proportions are so
harmonious, the lines of the plan so gracefully disposed, the form of
the whole so original, that, without looking at the elevations, the eye
is delighted by the evidence on all sides of the imagination, taste, and
skill shown by the venerable architect in this superb work."

The great sculptor never ceased to work or to study. When old he drew a
picture representing himself as an aged man in a cart, with these words
underneath: _Ancora impara_ (still learning). He painted but two
portraits, one of Vittoria Colonna, and one of young Tommaso dei
Cavalieri, whom he tenderly loved. To this youth, whom Varchi, the
Florentine professor and court scholar, declared to be the most
attractive young man he had ever known, Michael Angelo wrote this
beautiful sonnet:--


     "Through thee I catch a gleam of tender glow,
     Which with my own eyes I had failed to see;
     And walking onward step by step with thee,
     The once oppressing burdens lighter grow.
     With thee, my grovelling thoughts I heavenward raise,
     Borne upward by thy bold, aspiring wing;
     I follow where thou wilt,--a helpless thing,
     Cold in the sun, and warm in winter days.
     My will, my friend, rests only upon thine;
     Thy heart must every thought of mine supply;
     My mind expression finds in thee alone.
     Thus like the moonlight's silver ray I shine:
     We only see her beams on the far sky,
     When the sun's fiery rays are o'er her thrown."


His last work was a group of the Virgin and the dead Christ, which he
intended should be placed on an altar over his own tomb; but it was left
unfinished from a flaw in the marble, and is now in the cathedral in
Florence. Vasari found the aged artist working at it late at night, when
he had arisen from his bed because he could not sleep. A tallow candle
was placed in his pasteboard cap, so as to leave his hands free for
work. Once, as they were looking at the statue, Michael Angelo suffered
the lantern which he held in his hand to fall, and they were left in
darkness. He remarked, "I am so old that Death often pulls me by the
cape, and bids me go with him; some day I shall fall myself, like this
lamp, and the light of life will be extinguished."

To the last Michael Angelo was always learning. He used often to visit
the Vatican to study the Torso Belvedere, which he declared had been of
the greatest benefit to him.

In 1563-64 he was elected vice-president of the Florentine Academy of
Fine Arts. That winter his strength failed rapidly, though all was done
for him that love and honor could possibly do, for he had many devoted
friends among all classes, and was constantly aiding artists and others.
He did not fear death, for he said, "If life be a pleasure, since death
also is sent by the hand of the same master, neither should that
displease us."

Between three and four o'clock in the afternoon of the 18th of February,
1564, the same month in which Vittoria died, the great man passed away,
in the ninetieth year of his age. Daniele da Volterra, Condivi, and
Cavalieri stood by his bedside. His last words to them were, "I give my
soul to God, my body to the earth, and my worldly possessions to my
nearest of kin."

The pope and the Romans were determined to keep the dead Michael Angelo
in Rome; but his wish had been to lie in Florence. The body, therefore,
was conveyed to the latter city, disguised as a bale of merchandise, and
buried in Santa Croce, on Sunday night, March 12th, the Tuscan artists
following with their lighted torches, accompanied by thousands of
citizens. In the month of July a grand memorial service was held, in the
Church of San Lorenzo, for the illustrious dead, paintings and statuary
surrounding a catafalque fifty-four feet high.

After thirty years of voluntary exile, the melancholy, solitary,
great-souled man lay in his native Florence. He had loved liberty and
uprightness. He had been ambitious, and devoted to his masterly work,
with the will-power and intensity which belong to genius. He had allowed
no obstacles to stand in his path,--neither lack of money nor jealousy
of artists. He had faith in himself. He spoke sometimes too plainly, but
almost always justly. Cold and unapproachable though he was, children
loved him, and for them he would stop and make sketches on the street.
He had the fearlessness of one who rightly counts manhood above all
titles. He was too noble to be trifling, or petty, or self-indulgent.
Great in sculpture, painting, poetry, architecture, engineering,
character, he has left an imperishable name. Taine says, "There are four
men in the world of art and of literature exalted above all others, and
to such a degree as to seem to belong to another race; namely, Dante,
Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Michael Angelo."




LEONARDO DA VINCI.


"The world perhaps contains no example of a genius so universal, so
creative, so incapable of self-contentment, so athirst for the infinite,
so naturally refined, so far in advance of his own and of subsequent
ages. His countenances express incredible sensibility and mental power;
they overflow with unexpressed ideas and emotions. Michael Angelo's
personages alongside of his are simply heroic athletes; Raphael's
virgins are only placid children, whose sleeping souls have not yet
lived." Thus writes Taine of Da Vinci, in his "Travels in Italy."

[Illustration: LEONARDO DA VINCI.]

Mrs. Jameson calls Leonardo da Vinci, in her "Early Italian Painters,"
"_The_ miracle of that age of miracles. Ardent and versatile as youth;
patient and persevering as age; a most profound and original thinker;
the greatest mathematician and most ingenious mechanic of his time;
architect, chemist, engineer, musician, poet, painter!"

Hallam, in his "History of the Literature of Europe," says of the
published extracts from the great volumes of manuscript left by
Leonardo, "These are, according to our common estimate of the age in
which he lived, more like revelations of physical truths vouchsafed to
a single mind, than the superstructure of its reasoning upon any
established basis. The discoveries which made Galileo, Kepler, Castelli,
and other names illustrious--the system of Copernicus--the very theories
of recent geologists, are anticipated by Da Vinci within the compass of
a few pages, not perhaps in the most precise language, or on the most
conclusive reasoning, but so as to strike us with something like the awe
of preternatural knowledge. In an age of so much dogmatism, he first
laid down the grand principle of Bacon, that experiment and observation
must be the guides to just theory in the investigation of nature.

"If any doubt could be harbored, not as to the right of Leonardo da
Vinci to stand as the first name of the fifteenth century, which is
beyond all doubt, but as to his originality in so many discoveries,
which probably no one man, especially in such circumstances, has ever
made, it must be by an hypothesis, not very untenable, that some parts
of physical science had already attained a height which mere books do
not record."

This man, whom Vasari thinks "specially endowed by the hand of God
himself," was born in 1452, at Castello da Vinci, a village in the Val
d'Arno, near Florence. His father, Piero Antonio da Vinci, was a notary
of the republic, a man of considerable property and influence. When he
was twenty-five, he married the first of his four wives, Albiera di
Giovanni Amadori, in 1452, and brought home his illegitimate son,
Leonardo, born the same year, whom she tenderly cared for as her own.

Of Leonardo's mother, Caterina, little is known, save that five years
later she married, presumably in her own circle. Among the twelve other
children who came into the home of the advocate, Leonardo was the
especial pet and pride, probably because he seemed to have been given
all the talents originally intended for the Da Vinci family.

The handsome boy, whose "beauty of person," says Vasari, "was such that
it has never been sufficiently extolled," and with "a grace beyond
expression," cheerful, eager, enthusiastic, and warmhearted, when sent
to school, learned everything with avidity. "In arithmetic he often
confounded the master who taught him, by his reasonings and by the
difficulty of the problems he proposed." He had that omnivorous appetite
for books which Higginson calls the sure indication of genius.

He loved nature intensely. He studied every flower and tree about the
country home; made companions of the river Arno, the changing clouds,
and the snow-capped mountains. Passionately fond of music, he not only
learned to play on the guitar and lute, but invented a lyre of his own,
on which he improvised both the song and the air.

On the margins of his books he sketched such admirable drawings that his
father took them to Andrea Verrochio, a famous Florentine artist, who
was "amazed," and advised that the youth become a painter. Leonardo
entered the studio of Verrochio when he was about eighteen, and at once
became deeply absorbed in his work. He began to make models in clay,
arranging on these soft drapery dipped in plaster, which he drew
carefully in black and white on fine linen; also heads of smiling women
and children out of terra cotta: already he had that divine gift of
painting the "Da Vinci smile," which seems to have been born with him
and to have died with him. He studied perspective, and with his
fellow-students made chemical researches into the improvement of colors.

Verrochio was engaged in painting a picture of St. John baptizing
Christ, for the monks of Vallombrosa, and requested Leonardo to paint an
angel in the left-hand corner, holding some vestments. When the work was
finished, and Verrochio looked upon Leonardo's angel, "a space of
sunlight in the cold, labored old picture," as W. H. Pater says, in his
"Studies in the History of the Renaissance," Verrochio became so
discouraged "because a mere child could do more than himself," that he
would never touch the brush again. This work is now in the Academy of
Fine Arts in Florence.

About this time, according to Vasari, Leonardo made his famous shield
_Rotella del Fico_. "Ser Piero da Vinci, being at his country house, was
there visited by one of the peasants on his estate, who, having cut down
a fig-tree on his farm, had made a shield from part of it with his own
hands, and then brought it to Ser Piero, begging that he would be
pleased to cause the same to be painted for him in Florence. This the
latter very willingly promised to do, the countryman having great skill
in taking birds and in fishing, and being often very serviceable to Ser
Piero in such matters. Having taken the shield with him to Florence,
therefore, without saying anything to Leonardo as to whom it was for, he
desired the latter to paint something upon it.

"Accordingly, he one day took it in hand, but, finding it crooked,
coarse, and badly made, he straightened it at the fire, and, giving it
to a turner, it was brought back to him smooth and delicately rounded,
instead of the rude and shapeless form in which he had received it. He
then covered it with gypsum, and, having prepared it to his liking, he
began to consider what he could paint upon it that might best and most
effectually terrify whomsoever might approach it, producing the same
effect with that formerly attributed to the head of Medusa. For this
purpose, therefore, Leonardo carried to one of his rooms, into which no
one but himself ever entered, a number of lizards, hedgehogs, newts,
serpents, dragon-flies, locusts, bats, glow-worms, and every sort of
strange animal of similar kind on which he could lay his hands; from
this assemblage, variously adapted and joined together, he formed a
hideous and appalling monster, breathing poison and flames, and
surrounded by an atmosphere of fire; this he caused to issue from a
dark and rifted rock, with poison reeking from the cavernous throat,
flames darting from the eyes, and vapors rising from the nostrils in
such sort that the result was indeed a most fearful and monstrous
creature; at this he labored until the odors arising from all those dead
animals filled the room with a mortal fetor, to which the zeal of
Leonardo and the love which he bore to art rendered him insensible or
indifferent.

"When this work, which neither the countryman nor Ser Piero any longer
inquired for, was completed, Leonardo went to his father and told him
that he might send for the shield at his earliest convenience, since, so
far as he was concerned, the work was finished; Ser Piero went
accordingly one morning to the room for the shield, and, having knocked
at the door, Leonardo opened it to him, telling him nevertheless to wait
a little without, and, having returned into the room, he placed the
shield on the easel, and, shading the window so that the light falling
on the painting was somewhat dimmed, he made Ser Piero step within to
look at it. But the latter, not expecting any such thing, drew back,
startled at the first glance, not supposing that to be the shield, or
believing the monster he beheld to be a painting; he therefore turned to
rush out, but Leonardo withheld him, saying,--'The shield will serve the
purpose for which it has been executed; take it, therefore, and carry it
away, for this is the effect it was designed to produce.'

"The work seemed something more than wonderful to Ser Piero, and he
highly commended the fanciful idea of Leonardo; but he afterwards
silently bought from a merchant another shield, whereon there was
painted a heart transfixed with an arrow, and this he gave to the
countryman, who considered himself obliged to him for it to the end of
his life. Some time after, Ser Piero secretly sold the shield painted by
Leonardo to certain merchants for one hundred ducats, and it
subsequently fell into the hands of the Duke of Milan, sold to him by
the same merchants for three hundred ducats."

Leonardo painted also the "Head of Medusa," in the Uffizi Gallery,
twined about with green, hissing serpents.

For the King of Portugal he painted a cartoon for a tapestry
curtain,--"Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden." Of the flowers and
fruits in this picture, Vasari says, "For careful execution and fidelity
to nature, they are such that there is no genius in the world, however
godlike, which could produce similar results with equal truth." This
cartoon is lost.

The "Madonna della Caraffa," celebrated for the exquisite beauty of the
flowers with dew upon them, which stood in a vase by the Virgin, and was
highly prized by Clement VII., has also disappeared. The "Adoration of
the Magi" and a "Neptune in his Chariot drawn by Sea-horses" were among
Da Vinci's works at this time.

He was also studying military engineering, completed a book of designs
for mills and other apparatus working by water, invented machines for
dredging seaports and channels, and urged the making of a canal from
Pisa to Florence, by changing the course of the Arno, a thing
accomplished two hundred years later.

Still he did not neglect his painting. He went about the streets of
Florence looking for picturesque or beautiful faces, which he
transferred to his sketch-book, always carried at his girdle. He
attended the execution of criminals to catch the expression of faces or
contortion of limbs in agony. Yet so tender-hearted was he, that, Vasari
says, "When he passed places where birds were sold, he would frequently
take them from their cages, and, having paid the price demanded for them
by the sellers, would then let them fly into the air, thus restoring to
them the liberty they had lost."

He loved art. He said, "In the silence of the night, recall the ideas of
the things which you have studied. Design in your spirit the contours
and outlines of the figures that you have seen during the day. When the
spirit does not work with the hands, there is no artist.... Do not
allege as an excuse your poverty, which does not permit you to study and
become skilful; the study of art serves for nourishment to the body as
well as the soul.... When all seems easy, it is an unerring sign that
the workman has but scant ability and that the task is above his
comprehension."

Enjoying all athletic exercises; so strong that he could bend a
horseshoe in his hands; exceedingly fond of horses, of which he owned
several,--he still found time to be the life and joy of the brilliant
society of Florence; always leading, always fascinating with his
intelligent conversation and elegant address. And yet the ambitious
Leonardo was not satisfied in Florence. The Medici did not encourage him
as they did Michael Angelo. Possibly they felt that he lacked a steady
and dominant purpose. He finally made up his mind to try his fortune
elsewhere, and wrote the following letter to Lodovico Sforza, Regent of
Milan:--

"MY MOST ILLUSTRIOUS LORD,--Having seen and duly considered the
experiments of all those who repute themselves masters and constructors
of warlike instruments, and that the inventions and operations of the
said instruments are not different from those in common use, I will
endeavor, without derogating from any one else, to make known to your
Excellency certain secrets of my own, and, at an opportune time, I shall
hope to put them into execution, if they seem valuable to you. I briefly
note these things below:--

"1. I have a method of making very light bridges, fit to be carried most
easily, with which to follow the flight of enemies; and others, strong
and secure against fire and battle; easy and commodious to lift up and
to place in position. I have methods also to burn and destroy those of
the enemy.

"2. I know, in case of the siege of a place, how to take away the water
from the ditches, and to make an infinite variety of scaling-ladders and
other instruments pertinent to such an expedition.

       *       *       *       *       *

"4. I have also kinds of cannon most commodious and easy to carry, with
which to throw inflammable matters, whose smoke causes great fright to
the enemy, with serious injury and confusion.

"5. I have means, by excavations and straight and winding subterranean
ways, to come to any given point without noise, even though it be
necessary to pass under moats and rivers.

       *       *       *       *       *

"8. When the operations of artillery are impossible, I shall construct
mangonels, balistae, and other engines of marvellous efficacy, and out of
the common use; and, in short, according to the variety of events, I
shall build various and infinite means of offence.

"9. And when it shall happen to be upon the sea, I have means of
preparing many instruments most efficient in attack or defence, and
vessels that shall make resistance to the most powerful bombardment; and
powders and smokes.

"10. In time of peace I believe I can satisfy very well and equal all
others in architecture, in designing public edifices and private houses,
and in conducting water from one place to another. I can carry on works
of sculpture, in marble, bronze, or terra cotta, also in pictures. I can
do what can be done equal to any other, whoever he may be. Also, I
shall undertake the execution of the bronze horse, which will be the
immortal glory and eternal honor of the happy memory of my lord your
father, and of the illustrious honor of Sforza."

The result of this letter was a summons to the court at Milan, where
Lodovico, though dissolute, was proud to surround himself with the most
brilliant men and women of the age. Leonardo took with him a silver
lyre, made in the shape of a horse's head, designed by himself, on which
he played so skilfully that the duke and his court were enchanted.
"Whatever he did," says Vasari, "bore an impress of harmony,
truthfulness, goodness, sweetness, and grace, wherein no other man could
ever equal him." Such a union of gentleness and sincerity with genius!
Who could withstand its influence!

At Milan Leonardo remained for nineteen years, and here some of his most
remarkable works were done.

One of the first pictures painted for the Regent was a portrait of a
favorite, the beautiful Cecilia Gallerani, a gifted woman, skilled in
music and poetry. Leonardo painted for her a picture of the Virgin, for
which she probably was the model. The infant Saviour is represented as
blessing a new-blown Madonna rose, the emblem of St. Cecilia.

The next portrait--it is now in the Louvre--was that of another beauty,
loved by the duke, Lucrezia Crivelli, formerly called La Belle
Feronniere, who was a favorite of Francis I. "The face," says Mr.
Sweetser, "is at once proud and melancholy, with a warm and brilliant
coloring and soft pure lines, the head full of light, and even the
shadows transparent." In honor of both these portraits Latin poems were
written by the poets of the time.

Leonardo also painted two fine portraits of the lawful duke, Gian
Galeazzo Sforza, and his wife, Isabella of Aragon, the latter picture
"beyond all description beautiful and charming," now preserved in the
Ambrosian Library. When these persons were married, Leonardo invented
for the entertainment of the guests at the wedding feast a mechanical
device called "The Paradise," a representation of the heavens and the
revolving planets, which opened as the bride and bridegroom approached,
while a person in imitation of the Deity recited complimentary verses.

Leonardo now began on the great equestrian statue of the warrior
Francesco Sforza. He studied ancient works of art, especially the
equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, made almost countless
drawings of horses in repose or on the battle-field, many of which are
still preserved at Windsor Castle, studied every movement of live horses
and every muscle of dead ones, and did not complete his clay model for
ten long years. A genius like Da Vinci spends ten years on the model of
an equestrian statue, and yet some artists of the present day, men and
women, paint and mould horses or human beings after a few weeks or
months of study, and expect to win fame!

When the clay model was exhibited in public at the royal wedding of the
sister of Gian Galeazzo to the Emperor Maximilian, the enthusiasm was
very great. All Italy talked of it, and poets and critics extolled it as
beyond the works of Greece or Rome. Unfortunately the ensuing wars
depleted the treasury of Milan, and prevented the work from being cast
in bronze. When the French entered Milan in 1499, it became a target for
the archers. Two years later the Duke of Ferrara asked the use of the
model that a bronze horse with a statue of himself might be made; but
the King of France refused, and the model finally disappeared.

During these years Leonardo founded the Milan Academy. Probably many of
the manuscript volumes which he left were notes of lectures delivered to
the students. He must have spoken to them on botany, optics, mechanics,
astronomy, hydrostatics, anatomy, perspective, proportion, and other
matters. He wrote a book on the anatomy of the horse. "He also," says
Vasari, "filled a book with drawings in red crayons, outlined with the
pen, all copies made with the utmost care from bodies dissected by his
own hand. In this book he set forth the entire structure, arrangement
and disposition of the bones, to which he afterwards added all the
nerves, in their due order, and next supplied the muscles, of which the
first are affixed to the bones, the second give the power of cohesion
or holding firmly, and the third impart the motion."

Leonardo said in his notes, "The painter who has obtained a perfect
knowledge of the nature of the tendons and muscles, and of those parts
which contain the most of them, will know to a certainty, in giving a
particular motion to any part of the body, which and how many of the
muscles give rise and contribute to it; which of them, by swelling,
occasion their shortening, and which of the cartilages they surround. He
will not imitate those who, in all the different attitudes they adopt or
invent, make use of the same muscles in the arms, back, or chest, or any
other parts.... It is necessary that a painter should be a good
anatomist, that in his attitudes and gestures he may be able to design
the naked parts of the human frame, according to the just rules of the
anatomy of the nerves, bones, and muscles; and that, in his different
positions, he may know what particular nerve or muscle is the cause of
such a particular movement, in order that he may make that only marked
and apparent, and not all the rest, as many artists are in the habit of
doing; who, that they may appear great designers, make the naked limbs
stiff and without grace, so that they have more the appearance of a bag
of nuts than the human superficies, or, rather, more like a bundle of
radishes than naked muscles."

Leonardo irrigated the dry plains of Lombardy by utilizing the waters of
the Ticino River, visiting many cities and towns throughout Lombardy
for this purpose, and carefully studying the canals of Egypt under the
Ptolemies. He studied ancient architecture also. In his epitaph,
composed in his lifetime, he calls himself, "The admirer of the
ancients, and their grateful disciple. One thing is lacking to me, their
science of proportion. I have done what I could; may posterity pardon
me."

He designed a palace for Count Giovanni Melzi, at Vaprio, which became a
favorite home for him, especially in the time of war--the residence of
his beloved pupil, Francesco Melzi.

In 1492, after Leonardo had been eleven years at the Court of Milan,
Lodovico, unscrupulous and immoral, married the gentle and saintly
Beatrice d'Este. Leonardo conducted the grand wedding festivities, and
designed and decorated the bride's apartments in the Castello della
Rocca, making a beautiful bath-room in the garden, adorned with colored
marbles and a statue of Diana. While the regent in no wise discontinued
his profligate habits, he yet desired to please his wife, by gratifying
her taste for religious things. As she had shown an especial fondness
for the Dominican church and convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie,
Lodovico ordered them reconstructed and embellished for her. In the
refectory, the artist painted kneeling portraits of Beatrice, her
husband, and their two little children, Maximilian and Francesco; but
they have long since faded.

About the year 1496, Leonardo began his immortal work in the refectory,
The "Last Supper." Here, where daily the sweet and broken-hearted wife
came to remain for hours in meditation and prayer before the tomb of the
Duchess Bianca, from which she sometimes had to be removed by force,
Leonardo came daily to his masterpiece. Sometimes he would go to his
work at daybreak, and never think of descending from his scaffolding to
eat or drink till night, so completely absorbed was he in his work. "At
other times," says Bandello, "he would remain three or four days without
touching it, only coming for an hour or two, and remaining with crossed
arms contemplating his figures, as if criticising them himself. I have
also seen him at midday, when the sun in the zenith causes all the
streets of Milan to be deserted, set out in all haste from the citadel,
where he was modelling his colossal horse, and, without seeking the
shade, take the shortest road to the convent, where he would add a few
strokes to one of his heads, and then return immediately."

Leonardo made a cartoon of the whole picture, and separate studies of
each figure. Ten of these are now in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.

He was long absorbed in his head of Christ. He used to say that his hand
trembled whenever he attempted to paint it. At last, in despair, he
asked counsel of a friend, Bernardo Zenale, who comforted him by saying,
"Oh, Leonardo, the error into which thou hast fallen is one from which
only the Divine Being himself can deliver thee; for it is not in thy
power nor in that of any one else to give greater divinity and beauty to
any figures than thou hast done to these of James the Greater and the
Less; therefore, be of good cheer, and leave the Christ imperfect, for
thou wilt never be able to accomplish the Christ after such apostles."

Leonardo finished the work in about three years. Beatrice, as might have
been expected from such an ill-assorted union, died of sorrow in five
years after her marriage. Lodovico, as has been often the case before
and since in the world's history, realized too late the wrong he had
done, and now strove to remedy it by causing a hundred masses a day to
be said for her soul, shutting himself up in remorse for two weeks in a
chamber hung with black, only coming forth to do penance at the
sanctuaries where his lovely and neglected wife had worshipped. He now
wished to make her last resting-place, Santa Maria delle Grazie, as
beautiful as possible, and hastened Leonardo at his work on the "Last
Supper" that he might see it completed, meantime raising a magnificent
tomb to the memory of his neglected Beatrice.

The prior of the convent could not understand why Leonardo should
meditate over his work, and, likewise in haste to have the picture
finished, complained to Lodovico, who courteously entreated the artist
to go on as rapidly as possible. Vasari says, "Leonardo, knowing the
prince to be intelligent and judicious, determined to explain himself
fully on the subject with him, although he had never chosen to do so
with the prior. He therefore discoursed with him at some length
respecting art, and made it perfectly manifest to his comprehension that
men of genius are sometimes producing most when they seem to be laboring
least, their minds being occupied in the elucidation of their ideas, and
in the completion of those conceptions to which they afterwards give
form and expression with the hand. He further informed the duke that
there were still wanting to him two heads, one of which, that of the
Saviour, he could not hope to find on earth....

"The second head still wanting was that of Judas, which also caused him
some anxiety, since he did not think it possible to imagine a form of
feature that should properly render the countenance of a man who, after
so many benefits received from his Master, had possessed a heart so
depraved as to be capable of betraying his Lord, and the Creator of the
world; with regard to that second, however, he would make search, and
after all--if he could find no better--he need never be at any great
loss, for there would always be the head of that troublesome and
impertinent prior. This made the duke laugh with all his heart; he
declared Leonardo to be completely in the right: and the poor prior,
utterly confounded, went away to drive on the digging in his garden, and
left Leonardo in peace."

The "Last Supper" was painted in oils instead of fresco, and soon began
to fade. In 1515, when Francis I. was in Milan, he was so impressed with
the picture that he determined to carry it back to France, and tried to
find architects who could secure it from injury by defences of wood and
iron so that it could be transported, but none could be found able to do
it, and the project was abandoned. The painting was soon damaged by the
refectory lying for some time under water. Later one of the monks made a
doorway through it, cutting off the feet of Christ. In 1726 an artist
named Belotti restored(?) it, leaving nothing untouched but the sky. His
work proved unsatisfactory, and Mazza repainted everything except the
heads of Matthew, Thaddeus, and Simon. The indignant people soon
compelled him to cease, and the prior who had permitted it was banished
from the convent.

In 1796, when Napoleon entered Italy, the troops used the refectory as a
stable. Three or four years later, it again lay under water for two
weeks. At present, one is able to perceive only the general design as
the work of Leonardo. Excellent copies were made by Da Vinci's pupils,
so that the great picture has found its way into thousands of homes.

The Saviour and his apostles are seated at a long table, in a stately
hall. On the left is Bartholomew; next, James the Less; then Andrew,
Peter, Judas holding the money-bag, John, with Christ in the centre,
Thomas on his right hand, then James the Greater, Philip, Matthew,
Thaddeus, and Simon. The moment chosen by the painter is that given by
Matthew: "And as they did eat, he said, Verily I say unto you, that one
of you shall betray me. And they were exceeding sorrowful, and began
every one of them to say unto him, Lord, is it I?"

Mrs. C. W. Heaton says of this picture, in her valuable life of Da
Vinci, "In his dramatic rendering of the disciples, Leonardo has shown
the boldest and grandest naturalism. They are all of them real, living
men with passions like unto us--passions called for the moment by the
fearful words of the Master, 'One of you shall betray me,' into full and
various play."

Most who visit Milan to see the lace-work in stone of its exquisite
cathedral, go also to the famous painting which tells alike the story of
a great artist struggling to put immortal thoughts into his faces, and
the story of the remorse of a human being in breaking the heart of a
lovely woman. Had it not been to atone to Beatrice, probably the "Last
Supper" would never have been painted in Santa Maria delle Grazie. Thus
strangely has the bitterness of one soul led to the joy and inspiration
of thousands!

In 1498, Louis XII. came to the throne of France, and laid claim to the
duchy of Milan, enforcing his claim by arms. Lodovico fled, but was
captured by the French, and kept a prisoner for ten years, until his
death. Leonardo went back to his old home in Florence, taking with him
two persons, his friend Luca Paciolo, who had lived with him three
years at Milan, the author of _De Divina Proportione_, for which book
the artist made sixty drawings; and his beautiful pupil Salai, his son
as he called him, "a youth of singular grace and beauty of person, with
curling and wavy hair, a feature of personal beauty by which Leonardo
was greatly pleased." From this dear disciple the artist painted many of
his angels' heads.

Florence had changed since he went away, scarcely more than a boy. Now
he was in middle life, forty-eight years old, the famous painter of the
"Last Supper," the polished and renowned scholar. His first work on his
return was an altar-piece for the Annunciata Church,--the Madonna, St.
Anna, and the infant Christ. The cartoon, now in the Royal Academy at
London, caused the greatest delight. "When finished, the chamber wherein
it stood was crowded for two days by men and women, old and young, as if
going to a solemn festival, all hastening to behold this marvel of
Leonardo's, which amazed the whole population."

He now painted two noble Florentine ladies, Ginevra Benci, a famous
beauty, and the Mona Lisa, the third wife of Francesco del Giocondo, the
latter of whom it is conjectured that Leonardo loved.

Vasari says, "Whoever shall desire to see how far art can imitate
nature, may do so to perfection in this head, wherein every peculiarity
that could be depicted by the utmost subtlety of the pencil has been
faithfully reproduced. The eyes have the lustrous brightness and
moisture which is seen in life, and around them are those pale, red, and
slightly livid circles, also proper to nature, with the lashes, which
can only be copied as these are with the greatest difficulty; the
eyebrows also are represented with the closest exactitude, where fuller
and where more thinly set, with the separate hairs delineated as they
issue from the skin, every turn being followed and all the pores
exhibited in a manner that could not be more natural than it is; the
nose, with its beautiful and delicately roseate nostrils, might be
easily believed to be alive; the mouth, admirable in its outline, has
the lips uniting the rose-tints of their color with that of the face in
the utmost perfection, and the carnation of the cheek does not appear to
be painted, but truly of flesh and blood; he who looks earnestly at the
pit of the throat cannot but believe that he sees the beating of the
pulses, and it may be truly said that this work is painted in a manner
well calculated to make the boldest master tremble, and astonishes all
who behold it, however well accustomed to the marvels of art.

"Mona Lisa was exceedingly beautiful; and while Leonardo was painting
her portrait, he took the precaution of keeping some one constantly near
her, to sing or play on instruments, or to jest and otherwise amuse her,
to the end that she might continue cheerful, and so that her face might
not exhibit the melancholy expression often imparted by painters to the
likenesses they take. In this portrait of Leonardo's, on the contrary,
there is so pleasing an expression, and a smile so sweet, that while
looking at it one thinks it rather divine than human, and it has ever
been esteemed a wonderful work, since life itself could exhibit no other
appearance."

No wonder Grimm says, "He who has seen the Mona Lisa smile is followed
forever by this smile, just as he is followed by Lear's fury, Macbeth's
ambition, Hamlet's melancholy, and Iphigenia's touching purity."

Pater says of the Mona Lisa, "'La Gioconda' is, in the truest sense,
Leonardo's masterpiece, the revealing instance of his mode of thought
and work. In suggestiveness, only the 'Melancholia' of Duerer is
comparable to it; and no crude symbolism disturbs the effect of its
subdued and graceful mystery. We all know the face and hands of the
figure, set in its marble chair, in that cirque of fantastic webs, as in
some faint light under sea. Perhaps of all ancient pictures time has
chilled it least.

       *       *       *       *       *

"The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand
experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of
humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of
thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of
the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea."

One feels with Michelet, when he says, "It fascinates and absorbs me. I
go to it in spite of myself, as the bird is drawn to the serpent." I
have found myself going day after day to the Louvre to linger before two
masterpieces; to grow better through the womanhood of the Venus de Milo,
and to rest in the peaceful, contented smile of the Mona Lisa. Nobody
can forget the perfect hand. One seems to feel the delicacy of the
loving touch which Leonardo gave as he painted through those long yet
short four years, leaving the portrait, as he declared, unfinished,
because of his high ideal of what a painting should be. The husband did
not purchase the picture of the artist--did he not value the beauty? It
was finally sold to Francis I., for four thousand gold crowns, an
enormous sum at that day.

After Da Vinci had been two years in Florence, Caesar Borgia, the son of
Pope Alexander VI., appointed him architect and general engineer. He
travelled through Central Italy, making ramparts and stairways for the
citadel of Urbino, machinery at Pesaro, designing a house and better
methods of transporting grapes at Cesena, and finer gates at Cesenatico.
At one place he lingered to enjoy the regular cadence of the waves
beating on the shore; at another, his soul filled with music, he was
soothed by the murmur of the fountains. But Caesar was soon obliged to
flee into Spain, and Leonardo could no longer hold the position of
engineer.

Pietro Soderini, who had been elected gonfaloniere for life, was the
friend of both Leonardo and Michael Angelo. He wished to have these two
greatest artists paint each a wall in the Hall of the Palazzo Vecchio.
Michael Angelo chose for his subject a group of soldiers surprised by
the enemy while bathing in the Arno; Leonardo, a troop of horsemen
fighting round a standard, a scene from the battle of Anghiari, fought
by the Florentines against the North Italians. Vasari says, "Not only
are rage, disdain, and the desire for revenge apparent in the men, but
in the horses also; two of those animals, with their fore-legs
intertwined, are attacking each other with their teeth, no less fiercely
than do the cavaliers who are fighting for the standard."

Vasari thinks it "scarcely possible adequately to describe ... the
wonderful mastery he exhibits in the forms and movements of the
horses.... The muscular development, the animation of their movements,
and their exquisite beauty, are rendered with the utmost fidelity."

When the rival cartoons of Michael Angelo and Da Vinci were publicly
exhibited, the excitement was great between the followers of each
artist. When Da Vinci began to paint upon the wall, in oils, as in the
"Last Supper," the colors so sank into it that he abandoned the work.
Soderini accused him of having received money and not rendering an
equivalent, which so wounded the pride, of the artist that his friends
raised the amount which had been advanced to him, and offered it to the
gonfaloniere, who generously refused to accept it. Da Vinci had already
become offended with Soderini's treasurer, who offered him a portion of
his pay in copper money. Leonardo would not take it, saying, "I am no
penny-painter."

In 1504, Da Vinci's father died, and the artist became involved in
lawsuits with the other twelve children, who seem to have disputed his
share in the property.

At this time Leonardo made drawings for the raising of the Church of San
Giovanni (the Baptistery), and the placing of steps beneath it. "He
supported his assertions with reasons so persuasive that while he spoke
the undertaking seemed feasible, although every one of his hearers, when
he had departed, could see for himself that such a thing was
impossible." They could not understand that they had a genius in their
midst some centuries in advance of his age. He made three bronze figures
over the portal of the Baptistery, "without doubt the most beautiful
castings that have been seen in these latter days."

Tired of lawsuits, and his ineffectual efforts toward the raising of the
Baptistery, he gladly went back to Milan, having been invited thither by
Marechal de Chaumont, the French governor, after an absence in Florence
of six years. He seems to have been straitened in circumstances, for he
had but thirty crowns left, and of these he generously gave thirteen to
make up the marriage portion of the sister of his beloved Salai.

For seven years during this second sojourn in Milan, he was prosperous
and happy. He built large docks and basins, planned many mills, enlarged
and improved the great Martesan canal, two hundred miles long, "which
brings the waters of the Adda through the Valtellina and across the
Chiavenna district, contributing greatly to the fertility of the garden
of Northern Italy," and painted several pictures. "La Monaca," now in
the Pitti Palace, is the half-length figure of a young nun. Taine says,
"The face is colorless excepting the powerful and strange red lips, and
the whole physiognomy is calm, with a slight expression of disquietude.
This is not an abstract being, emanating from the painter's brain, but
an actual woman who has lived, a sister of Mona Lisa, as complex, as
full of inward contrasts, and as inexplicable."

"Flora," a beautiful woman in blue drapery, holding a flower in her left
hand, believed by many to be a portrait of Diana of Poitiers, is at the
Hague, where the Hollanders call it "Frivolity" or "Vanity." Leda, the
bride of Jupiter, with the twins, Castor and Pollux, "playing among the
shell-chips of their broken egg," is also at the Hague.

Probably the celebrated _La Vierge aux Rochers_ ("The Virgin among the
Rocks") was painted at this time. Of this Theophile Gautier says, "The
aspect of the Virgin is mysterious and charming. A grotto of basaltic
rocks shelters the divine group, who are sitting on the margin of a
clear spring, in the transparent depths of which we see the pebbles of
its bed. Through the arcade of the grotto, we discover a rocky
landscape, with a few scattered trees, and crossed by a stream, on the
banks of which rises a village. All this is of a color as indefinable as
those mysterious countries one traverses in a dream, and accords
marvellously with the figures. What more adorable type than that of the
Madonna! it is especially Leonardo's, and does not in any way recall the
Virgins of Perugino or Raphael. Her head is spherical in form; the
forehead well developed; the fine oval of her cheeks is gracefully
rounded so as to enclose a chin most delicately curved; the eyes with
lowered eyelids encircled with shadow, and the nose, not in a line with
the forehead, like that of a Grecian statue, but still finely shaped;
with nostrils tenderly cut, and trembling as though her breathing made
them palpitate; the mouth a little large, it is true, but smiling with a
deliciously enigmatic expression that Da Vinci gives to his female
faces, a tiny shade of mischief mingling with the purity and goodness.
The hair is long, loose, and silky, and falls in crisp meshes around the
shadow-softened cheeks, according with the half-tints with incomparable
grace."

This picture was originally on wood, but has been transferred to canvas.
There are three pictures of this scene; the one in the collection of the
Duke of Suffolk is believed to be the original, while that in the Louvre
is best known.

Of the Virgin seated on the knees of St. Anne, now in the Louvre, Taine
says, "In the little Jesus of the picture of St. Anne, a shoulder, a
cheek, a temple, alone emerge from the shadowy depth. Leonardo da Vinci
was a great musician. Perhaps he found in that gradation and change of
color, in that vague yet charming magic of chiaroscuro, an effect
resembling the crescendoes and decrescendoes of grand musical works."

"St. John the Baptist," in the Louvre, is one of the few pictures, among
the many attributed to Leonardo, which critics regard as authentic. "St.
Sebastian," now in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, was purchased by the
Tsar of Russia in 1860, for twelve thousand dollars.

When the French were driven out of Lombardy, Da Vinci left Milan, in
1514, and, taking his devoted pupils, Salai, Francesco Melzi, and a few
others with him, started for Rome, whither Michael Angelo and Raphael
had already gone. Leo X. was on the papal throne: he cordially welcomed
him, and bade him "work for the glory of God, Italy, Leo X., and
Leonardo da Vinci." However, the pope gave him very little to do. "The
pontiff," says Vasari, "was much inclined to philosophical inquiry, and
was more especially addicted to the study of alchemy. Leonardo,
therefore, having composed a kind of paste from wax, made of this, while
it was still in its half-liquid state, certain figures of animals,
entirely hollow and exceedingly slight in texture, which he then filled
with air. When he blew into these figures he could make them fly
through the air, but when the air within had escaped from them they fell
to the earth.

"One day the vine-dresser of the Belvedere found a very curious lizard,
and for this creature Leonardo constructed wings made from the skins of
other lizards, flayed for the purpose; into these wings he put
quicksilver, so that when the animal walked the wings moved also, with a
tremulous motion; he then made eyes, horns, and a beard for the
creature, which he tamed and kept in a case; he would then show it to
the friends who came to visit him, and all who saw it ran away
terrified."

When the pope asked him to paint a picture, Leonardo immediately began
to distil oils and herbs for the varnish, whereupon the pontiff
exclaimed, "Alas! this man will assuredly do nothing at all, since he is
thinking of the end before he has made a beginning to his work." It is
supposed that Leonardo painted for Leo X. the "Holy Family of St.
Petersburg," with the bride of Giuliano de Medici as the St. Catherine.

Louis XII. of France having died, the brilliant young Francis I.
succeeded him January 1, 1515, and soon after won back Lombardy to
himself in battle. At once Leonardo, who had been painter to King Louis
while in Milan, joined himself to Francis, not wishing to remain in
Rome. He was received by that monarch with the greatest delight, and
given the Chateau of Cloux with its woods, meadows, and fish-ponds, just
outside the walls of the king's castle at Amboise. Here he abode with
his dear pupils, who were content to live in any country so they were
with Da Vinci; and was allowed a pension of seven hundred crowns of gold
and the title of Painter to the King.

He was sixty-three. He had done many great things, but now, with ease
and every comfort, perchance his genius would be more brilliant than
ever. When about this age, Michael Angelo had completed his wonderful
statues in the Medici chapel, and later even painted his "Last Judgment"
and planned the great dome of St. Peter's. But Leonardo, the versatile,
luxury-loving, "divine Leonardo," no longer urged to duty by necessity,
did nothing further for the world. He mingled in the gayeties of the
court, walked arm in arm in his gardens with the beautiful Salai, his
long white hair falling to his shoulders, and made a unique automaton
for the great festivities of the conquering young king at Pavia, a lion
filled with hidden machinery by means of which it walked up to the
throne, and, opening its breast, showed it filled with a great number of
fleurs-de-lis. He soon fell into a kind of languor that presaged the
sure coming of death.

In early life he had been so devoted to science that Vasari tells us "by
this means he conceived such heretical ideas that he did not belong to
any religion, but esteemed it better to be a philosopher than a
Christian." Now he turned his thoughts toward the Catholic church, and
made his will, which recommends his soul "to God, the glorious Virgin
Mary, his lordship St. Michael, and all the beautiful angels and saints
of Paradise." He wishes that at his obsequies "there shall be sixty
torches carried by sixty poor persons, who shall be paid for carrying
them according to the discretion of the said Melzi, which torches shall
be shared among the four churches above named."

To his beloved pupils, ever with him, he gives his property. Nine days
after this, says Vasari, May 2, 1519, at the age of sixty-seven,
Leonardo died in the arms of his devoted King, Francis I.; but later
historians have considered this doubtful. He was buried under the
flag-stones in the Church of St. Florentin at Amboise.

In the religious wars which followed, the church was demolished, the
gravestones sold, and the lead coffins melted for their metal. Many
persons have tried to find the grave of the great master, and M. Arsene
Houssaye made a last and perhaps successful attempt in 1863. He says,
"More than one Italian had gone to Amboise for the purpose of finding
the tomb of Leonardo da Vinci, and had gazed sadly on the spot where the
church once stood, now covered by thick growing covert.

"The gardener's daughter had been often questioned, and it was she who
first gave me the idea, some years ago, of seeking for the tomb of the
painter of the 'Last Supper,' but I do not know whether the fact of her
having the painter's name sometimes on her lips arose from the fact of
her hearing him spoken of by her father or by visitors. She it was who
pointed out to me the spot where the great painter of Francis I. might
be found; a white-cherry tree was growing there, whose fruit was so rich
from the fact of its growing above the dead.

"On Tuesday, the 23d of June, 1863, the first spadeful of earth was
turned up before the mayor and the archbishop of Amboise. I set the men
to work on three different spots, some to reconnoitre the foundations of
the church, others to look for the ossuary, and the rest to search the
tombs. It was necessary to dig down deeply, the soil having risen over
the site of the church to the height of two or three yards....

"The 20th of August we lighted on a very old tomb, which had been, at
the demolition of St. Florentin, covered with unequal stones. No doubt
the original tombstone had been broken, and, out of respect for the
dead, replaced by slabs belonging to the church, and bearing still some
rude traces of fresco painting.... It was in the choir of the church,
close to the wall, and toward the top of the plantation, where grew the
white-cherry tree.

"We uncovered the skeleton with great respect; nothing had occurred to
disturb the repose of death, excepting that towards the head the roots
of the tree had overturned the vase of charcoal. After displacing a few
handfuls of earth, we saw great dignity in the attitude of the majestic
dead.... The head rested on the hand as if in sleep. This is the only
skeleton we discovered in this position, which is never given to the
dead, and appears that of a deep thinker tired with study.... I had
brought with me from Milan a portrait of Leonardo da Vinci ... and the
skull we had taken from its tomb corresponded exactly with the drawing.
Many doctors have seen it, and consider it to be the skull of a
septuagenarian. Eight teeth still remain in the jaws, four above and
four below.... The brow projects over the eyes, and is broad and high;
the occipital arch was ample and purely defined. Intellect had reigned
there, but no especial quality predominated.

"We collected near the head some fragments of hair or beard, and a few
shreds of brown woollen material. On the feet were found some pieces of
sandals, still keeping the shape of the feet....

"The skeleton, which measured five feet eight inches, accords with the
height of Leonardo da Vinci. The skull might have served for the model
of the portrait Leonardo drew of himself in red chalk a few years before
his death. M. Robert Fleury, head master of the Fine Art School of Rome,
has handled the skull with respect, and recognized in it the grand and
simple outline of this human yet divine head, which once held a world
within its limits."

In 1873 Italy raised a monument to her great genius, at Milan. His
statue stands on a lofty pedestal, which has four bas-reliefs,
representing scenes from his life. At the four corners are placed
statues of his principal scholars,--Cesare da Sesto, Marco d' Oggione,
Beltraffio, and Andrea Solario.

All Leonardo's precious manuscripts were bequeathed to Francesco Melzi,
and unfortunately became scattered. About the end of the seventeenth
century they were mostly in the Ambrosian Library at Milan; but the
French under Napoleon took fourteen of the principal manuscripts,
leaving only two, which now form the "Codex Atlantico" at Milan. The
latter is a collection of four hundred of Leonardo's drawings and
manuscripts. One volume on mathematics and physics is among the Arundel
Manuscripts, at the British Museum. At Holkham is a manuscript of the
_Libro Originali di Natura_.

In 1651 Raphael Trichet Dupresne, of Paris, published a selection from
Da Vinci's works on painting, the _Trattato della Pittura_, which has
been reprinted twenty-two times in six different languages, "one of the
best guides and counsellors of the painter." A "Treatise on the Motion
and Power of Water" was published later. In 1883 Jean Paul Richter,
Knight of the Bavarian Order of St. Michael, after years of labor over
the strange handwriting of Da Vinci, from right to left across the page,
published much of the work of the great painter, reproducing his
sketches by photogravure. He had access to the manuscripts in the Royal
Library at Windsor, the Institute of France, the Ambrosian Library at
Milan, the Louvre, the Academy of Venice, the Uffizi, the Royal Library
of Turin, the British and South Kensington Museums, and Christ Church
College, Oxford.

Richter says, "Da Vinci has been unjustly accused of having squandered
his powers by beginning a variety of studies, and then, having hardly
begun, thrown them aside. The truth is that the labors of three
centuries have hardly sufficed for the elucidation of some of the
problems which occupied his mighty mind."

Leonardo's astronomical speculations, his remarks on fossils, at that
time believed to be mere freaks of nature, his close study of botany,
his researches in chemistry, color, heat, light, mechanics, anatomy,
music, acoustics, and magnetism, have been an astonishment to every
reader.

Among his inventions were "a proportional compass, a lathe for turning
ovals, an hygrometer; an ingenious surgical probe, a universal joint,
dredging machines, wheelbarrows, diving-suits, a porphyry color-grinder,
boats moved by paddle-wheels, a roasting-jack worked by hot air, a
three-legged sketching-stool which folded up, a revolving cowl for
chimneys, ribbon-looms, coining presses, saws for stone, silk spindles
and throwers, wire-drawing and file-cutting, and plate-rolling
machines." No wonder he was called the "all-knowing Leonardo."

All his work as a poet is lost, save one sonnet:--


     "Who cannot do as he desires, must do
     What lies within his power. Folly it is
     To wish what cannot be. The wise man holds
     That from such wishing he must free himself.
     Our joy and grief consist alike in this:
     In knowing what to will and what to do;
     But only he whose judgment never strays
     Beyond the threshold of the right learns this.
     Nor is it always good to have one's wish;
     What seemeth sweet full oft to bitter turns.
     My tears have flown at having my desire.
     Therefore, O reader of these lines, if thou
     Wouldest be good, and be to others dear,
     Will always to be able to do right."


In Richter's works of Leonardo are many fables: "A razor, having come
out of the sheath in which it was usually concealed, and placed itself
in the sunlight, saw how brightly the sun was reflected from its
surface. Mightily pleased thereat, it began to reason with itself after
this fashion: 'Shall I now go back to the shop which I have just
quitted? Certainly it cannot be pleasing to the gods that such dazzling
beauty should be linked to such baseness of spirit. What a madness it
would be that should lead me to shave the soaped beards of country
bumpkins! Is this a form fitted to such base mechanical uses? Assuredly
not. I shall withdraw myself into some secluded spot, and, in calm
repose, pass away my life.'

"Having therefore concealed itself for some months, on leaving its
sheath one day and returning to the open air, it found itself looking
just like a rusty saw, and totally unable to reflect the glorious sun
from its tarnished surface. It lamented in vain this irreparable loss,
and said to itself, 'How much better had I kept up the lost keenness of
my edge, by practising with my friend the barber. What has become of my
once brilliant surface? This abominable rust has eaten it all up.' If
genius chooses to indulge in sloth, it must not expect to preserve the
keen edge which the rust of ignorance will soon destroy."

Richter also gives many pages of terse moral sentiments, showing that Da
Vinci, in his more than thirty years of writing,--he began to write when
he was about thirty,--had thought deeply and probably conformed his life
to his thoughts.

"It is easier to contend with evil at the first than at the last.

"You can have no dominion greater or less than that over yourself.

"If the thing loved is base, the lover becomes base.

"That is not riches which may be lost; virtue is our true good, and the
true reward of its possessor. That cannot be lost, that never deserts
us, but when life leaves us. As to property and external riches, hold
them with trembling; they often leave their possessor in contempt, and
mocked at for having lost them.

"Learning acquired in youth arrests the evil of old age; and if you
understand that old age has wisdom for its food, you will so conduct
yourself in youth that your old age will not lack for nourishment.

"The acquisition of any knowledge is always of use to the intellect;
because it may thus drive out useless things, and retain the good.

"Avoid studies of which the result dies with the worker.

"Reprove your friend in secret, and praise him openly."

In the midst of the corruption of that age, we hear no word breathed
against the character of this eager, brilliant, many-sided man. He won
from his pupils the most complete devotion, and he seems to have given
as fond an affection in return. This possibly satisfied the craving of
the human heart for love. Perhaps, after all, life did not appear as
satisfactory as he could have wished, with all his worship of the
beautiful, for he says, "When I thought I was learning to live, I was
but learning to die." He seemed at the zenith of his powers when death
came; but who shall estimate the value of a life by its length? He said,
"As a day well spent gives a joyful sleep, so does life well employed
give a joyful death.... A life well spent is long."




RAPHAEL OF URBINO.


"In the history of Italian art Raphael stands alone, like Shakespeare in
the history of our literature; and he takes the same kind of rank--a
superiority not merely of degree, but of quality.... His works have been
an inexhaustible storehouse of ideas to painters and to poets.
Everywhere in art we find his traces. Everywhere we recognize his forms
and lines, borrowed or stolen, reproduced, varied, imitated,--never
improved.

[Illustration: RAPHAEL OF URBINO.]

"Some critic once said, 'Show me any sentiment or feeling in any poet,
ancient or modern, and I will show you the same thing either as well or
better expressed in Shakespeare.' In the same manner one might say,
'Show me in any painter, ancient or modern, any especial beauty of form,
expression, or sentiment, and in some picture, drawing, or painting
after Raphael I will show you the same thing as well or better done, and
that accomplished which others have only sought or attempted.'

"To complete our idea of this rare union of greatness and versatility as
an artist with all that could grace and dignify the man, we must add
such personal qualities as very seldom meet in the same individual--a
bright, generous, genial, gentle spirit; the most attractive manners,
the most winning modesty."

Thus writes Mrs. Jameson of the man of whom Vasari said, "When this
noble artist died, well might Painting have departed also, for when he
closed his eyes, she too was left, as it were, blind.... To him of a
truth it is that we owe the possession of invention, coloring, and
execution, brought alike, and altogether, to that point of perfection
for which few could have dared to hope; nor has any man ever aspired to
pass before him."

Raphael of Urbino was born at Colbordolo, a small town in the Duchy of
Urbino, April 6, 1483. His father, Giovanni Santi, was a painter of
considerable merit, and was possessed also of poetic ability, as he
wrote an epic of two hundred and twenty-four pages, in honor of Federigo
of Montefeltro, then Duke of Urbino. This duke was a valiant soldier,
and a patron of art and literature, who for years kept twenty or thirty
persons copying Greek and Latin manuscripts for his library.

The mother of Raphael, Magia, the daughter of Battista Ciarla, a
merchant at Urbino, was a woman of unusual sweetness of disposition and
beauty of character. Unfortunately she died when Raphael was eight years
old. Her three other children died young.

These years must have been happy ones to the gentle, loving child. Their
home was in the midst of the snowy peaks of the Apennines, looking
towards the blue Adriatic. It is not strange that he became a worshipper
of the beautiful. Nature soon grows to be an inspiring companion to
those who love her. She warms the heart with her exquisite pictures of
varied earth and sky; she caresses us with the glow of sunlight and the
fragrance of flowers; she sings us to rest with the melody of the sea
and the murmur of the trees and the brooks.

Giovanni Santi married for his second wife Bernardina, the daughter of
the goldsmith, Pietro di Parte, a woman of strong character, but lacking
the gentleness of Magia. Two years after this marriage he died, leaving
Raphael doubly orphaned at eleven years of age. What prospect was there
that this boy, without father or mother, without riches or distinguished
family, would work his way to renown?

The will of Giovanni left the Santi home to Bernardina as long as she
remained a widow, and the child to her care and that of his brother, a
priest, Don Bartolomeo. The latter does not appear to have been a very
saintly minister, for he and Bernardina quarrelled constantly over the
property, quite forgetting the development of the boy left in their
charge. Finally Magia's brother, Simone di Battista Ciarla, came to an
understanding with the disputants, and arranged that the lad, who had
worked somewhat in his father's studio, should be placed under some
eminent painter.

Pietro Perugino was chosen, an artist who had one of the largest
schools in Italy, and who was noted especially for his coloring and
profound feeling. It is said that when he examined the sketches of the
boy, he exclaimed, "Let him be my pupil: he will soon become my master."

Perugino had been a follower of Savonarola, but after he had seen that
good man put to death, he gave up his faith in God and man. When he was
on his death-bed, he refused to see a confessor, saying, "I wish to see
how a soul will fare in that Land, which has not been confessed."

For nine years Raphael worked under Perugino at Perugia, studying
perspective and every department of art, and winning the love of both
master and pupils. When he was seventeen, Passavant, in his life of
Raphael, says, the young artist painted his first works, his master
being in Florence: a banner for the church of the Trinita of Citta di
Castello, and the "Crucifixion." The banner has the "Trinity" on one
sheet of canvas, and the "Creation of Man" on the other. The
"Crucifixion" was bought by Cardinal Fesch at Rome, and at the sale of
his paintings, in 1845, was purchased for about twelve thousand five
hundred dollars. It is now in Earl Dudley's collection.

About this time the "Coronation of the Virgin" was painted for Madonna
Maddalina degli Oddi, a lady of great influence, who obtained for
Raphael several commissions, concerning which he expresses great joy in
his letters. How many are willing to employ an artist after he is
famous; how few before! A woman had the heart and the good sense to help
him in these early years, and she helped the whole art world thereby.

This picture was kept in the Franciscan church at Perugia until 1792,
when it was sent to Paris, but was restored to Italy by the treaty of
1815, and is now in the Vatican.

For a friend of Perugia he painted the beautiful Connestabile Madonna.
"The mother of the Saviour," says Passavant, "a figure of virginal
sweetness, is walking in the country, in early spring, when the trees
are still bare, and the distant mountains are covered with snow. She is
walking along pensively, reading in a little book, in which the child in
her arms also looks attentively. Nothing could be found more exquisite.
Everything in it shows that Raphael must have devoted himself to it with
especial ardor."

This picture, only six and three-fourths inches square, was sold in 1871
to the Emperor of Russia for sixty-six thousand dollars.

Raphael left the studio of Perugino in the beginning of 1504, before he
was twenty-one, and painted for the Franciscans, at Citta di Castello,
the "Marriage of the Virgin," now the chief ornament of the Brera
gallery at Milan, and called the "Sposalizio." "The Virgin is attended
by five women, and St. Joseph by five young men who were once Mary's
suitors. The despair of the lovers is shadowed forth by the reeds they
hold; they will never flower; and the handsomest youth is breaking his
across his knees."

Grimm says of this picture, "Next to the Sistine Madonna, it may be
considered Raphael's most popular work. In the figures of this
composition we recognize types of all the different ages of man, which
allow every one who stands before it, whether young or old, to feel as
if the artist had been the confidant of all the thoughts and feelings
appropriate to his period of life.... Raphael's elegance obtrudes itself
nowhere, as with other artists is so often the case. Beside this, the
harmony of his colors, which, although hitting against one another
almost sharply, still have the effect of a bed of flowers whose varied
hues combine agreeably. A youthful delight in the brilliancy of color is
apparent, which later yielded to a different taste. Like Duerer, Raphael
might have confessed, in his ripest years, that while young he loved a
certain garishness of coloring, such as he had afterward renounced."

Raphael now returned to Urbino, where he painted for the reigning duke,
"St. George slaying the Dragon" and "St. Michael attacking Satan." He
made many friends among the noted people of the court, but, full of
ambition, and having heard of the works of Da Vinci and Michael Angelo
at Florence, he was extremely anxious to go to that city. A lady, as
previously, took interest in the boyish artist, and wrote to Pietro
Soderini, the Gonfaloniere of Florence, the following letter of
introduction:--


"_Most magnificent and powerful lord, whom I must ever honor as a
father_,--

"He who presents this letter to you is Raphael, a painter of Urbino,
endowed with great talent in art. He has decided to pass some time in
Florence, in order to improve himself in his studies. As the father, who
was dear to me, was full of good qualities, so the son is a modest young
man of distinguished manners; and thus I bear him an affection on every
account, and wish that he should attain perfection. This is why I
recommend him as earnestly as possible to your Highness, with an
entreaty that it may please you, for love of me, to show him help and
protection on every opportunity. I shall regard as rendered to myself,
and as an agreeable proof of friendship to me, all the services and
kindness that he may receive from your Lordship.

"From her who commends herself to you, and is willing to render any good
offices in return.

"JOANNA FELTRA DE RUVERE, [_sic._]
"Duchess of Sora, and Prefectissa of Rome."


With this cordial letter from the sister of the Duke of Urbino, he
entered the City of Flowers. He was now a youth of twenty-one, slight in
figure, five feet eight inches tall, with dark brown eyes and hair,
perfect teeth, and the kindest of hearts. He was received into the homes
of the patricians, and was asked to paint pictures for them. Meantime
he used every spare moment in study. Especially did the works of
Masaccio and Leonardo da Vinci, says Passavant, "reveal to Raphael his
own wonderful powers, until then almost concealed. Awakened suddenly,
and excited with the inspiration that seemed all at once to flow in on
him from every side, he pushed forward at once towards the perfection he
was so soon to attain."

He copied the horsemen in Da Vinci's battle of Anghiari; made sketches
from life of the children of the Florentines, in his book of drawings,
now to be seen in the Academy of Venice; stood entranced before the
gates of Ghiberti, and that marvel of beauty, the Campanile of Giotto.

Raphael now painted for his friend, Lorenzo Nasi, the "Madonna della
Gran Duca," now in the Pitti Palace. Until the end of the last century
this picture was in the possession of a poor widow, who sold it to a
bookseller for twelve scudi. Finally the Grand Duke Ferdinand III. of
Tuscany bought it, and carried it with him through all his journeys,
praying before it night and morning. "The bold, commanding, and luminous
style," says Passavant, "in which the painting stands out from the
background, makes the figure and divine expression of the head still
more impressive. Thanks to all these qualities united, this Madonna
produces the effect of a supernatural apparition. In short, it is one of
the masterpieces of Raphael."

Another Madonna on wood, thirty-five inches in diameter, owned by the
Terranuova family until 1854, was purchased for the Berlin Museum, for
thirty-four thousand dollars.

After some other works, Raphael went back to Urbino and Perugia, but,
eager and restless for Florence, he soon returned to that city and was
cordially welcomed. His enthusiasm inspired every artist, and his modest
deference to the opinions of others won him countless friends; "the only
very distinguished man," as Mrs. Jameson says, "of whom we read, who
lived and died without an enemy or a detractor!" Between 1506 and 1508,
besides the Temfi Madonna now of Munich, and the Colonna Madonna at
Berlin, the Ansidei Madonna was painted for the Ansidei family of
Perugia as an altar-piece in the church of S. Fiorenzo. It represents
the Virgin on a throne, with Jesus on her right knee, and an open book
on her left, from which mother and child are reading. The painting was
purchased in 1884 by the National Gallery for the Duke of Marlborough
for the enormous sum of three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

On the marriage of his patrician friend, Lorenzo Nasi, he painted for
him the "Madonna with the Goldfinch," called also the "Madonna del
Cardellino," now in the Uffizi. The Virgin is seated holding a book,
while St. John is offering to the infant Saviour a goldfinch, which the
child is about to caress. Another picture, painted for his intimate
friend Taddeo Taddei, a learned Florentine, "The Holy Family under the
Palm Tree," round, and forty-two and three-fourths inches in diameter,
was purchased by the Duke of Bridgewater, for sixty thousand dollars,
and is now in the possession of Lord Ellesmere, in London.

Again Raphael returned to the court of Urbino, always winning to himself
the most educated and the noblest among the distinguished men and women.
Pietro Bembo, secretary to Leo X. and a cardinal under Paul III., one of
the most celebrated writers of the time, was very fond of Raphael; Count
Baldassare Castiglione, a writer and diplomatist, was one of the
artist's most loved companions; Bernardo Divizio da Bibiena, author of
"La Calandra," the first prose comedy written in Italy, loved him as a
brother; Francesco Francia and Fra Bartolomeo, the noted artists, were
his ardent friends.

Something beside genius drew all these men and scores of others to
Raphael. Vasari says, "Every vile and base thought departed from the
mind before his influence. There was among his extraordinary gifts one
of such value and importance that I can never sufficiently admire it,
and always think thereof with astonishment. This was the power accorded
to him by Heaven, of bringing all who approached his presence into
harmony; an effect inconceivably surprising in our calling, and contrary
to the nature of our artists, yet all, I do not say of the inferior
grades only, but even those who lay claim to be great personages, became
as of one mind once they began to labor in the society of Raphael,
continuing in such unity and concord, that all harsh feelings and evil
dispositions became subdued and disappeared at the sight of him.... Such
harmony prevailed at no other time than his own. And this happened
because all were surpassed by him in friendly courtesy as well as in
art; all confessed the influence of his sweet and gracious nature, which
was so replete with excellence, and so perfect in all the charities,
that not only was he honored by men, but even by the very animals, who
would constantly follow his steps and always loved him."

"We find it related that whenever any other painter, whether known to
Raphael or not, requested any design or assistance of whatever kind at
his hands, he would invariably leave his work to do him service; he
continually kept a large number of artists employed, all of whom he
assisted and instructed with an affection which was rather as that of a
father to his children than merely as of an artist to artists. From
these things it followed that he was never seen to go to court, but
surrounded and accompanied, as he left his house, by some fifty
painters, all men of ability and distinction, who attended him thus to
give evidence of the honor in which they held him. He did not, in short,
live the life of a painter, but that of a prince.

"Wherefore, O art of painting! well mightest thou for thy part, then,
esteem thyself most happy, having, as thou hadst, one artist, among thy
sons, by whose virtues and talents thou wert thyself exalted to heaven.
Thrice blessed indeed mayest thou declare thyself, since thou hast seen
thy disciples, by pursuing the footsteps of a man so exalted, acquire
the knowledge of how life should be employed, and become impressed with
the importance of uniting the practice of virtue to that of art."

Raphael allowed people to pursue their own course, without attempting to
dominate. He said to Cesare da Sesto, one of Da Vinci's most
distinguished pupils, "How does it happen, dear Cesare, that we live in
such good friendship, but that in the art of painting we show no
deference to each other." Finally, however, Cesare adopted Raphael's
methods from choice.

Raphael was modest in manner, never monopolizing the time or
conversation of others. He made the best of things, overlooking the
petty matters which some persons allow to wear and imbitter their
dispositions. He worked hard, performing an amount of labor which has
been the astonishment of the world ever since his death; he was somewhat
frail in body; he was not rich in this world's goods; sweet in nature
and refined in spirit, it is to be presumed that he kept his troubles in
his own heart, unspoken to others. He loved ardently, and was as
ardently loved in return. He was appreciative, sympathetic, tender, and
gracious.

Herrmann Grimm says, "Such men pass through life as a bird flies through
the air. Nothing hinders them. It is all one to the stream whether it
flows through the plain smoothly in one long line, or meanders round
rocks in its winding course. It is no circuitous way for it, thus to be
driven right and left in its broad course; it is sensible of no delay
when its course is completely dammed. Swelling easily, it widens out
into the lake, until at length it forces a path for its waves; and the
power with which it now dashes on is just as natural as the repose with
which it had before changed its course.

"Raphael, Goethe, and Shakespeare had scarcely outward destinies. They
interfered with no apparent power in the struggles of their people. They
enjoyed life; they worked; they went their way, and compelled no one to
follow them. They obtruded themselves on none; and they asked not the
world to consider them, or to do as they did. But the others all came of
themselves, and drew from their refreshing streams. Can we mention a
violent act of Raphael's, Goethe's, or Shakespeare's?

"Goethe, who seems so deeply involved in all that concerns us, who is
the author of our mental culture, nowhere opposed events; he turned
wherever he could advance most easily. He was diligent. He had in his
mind the completion of his works. Schiller wished to produce and to gain
influence; Michael Angelo wished to act, and could not bear that lesser
men should stand in the front, over whom he felt himself master. The
course of events moved Michael Angelo, and animated or checked his
ideas. It is not possible to extricate the consideration of his life
from the events going on in the world, while Raphael's life can be
narrated separately like an idyl."

Raphael, while still under Perugino, had received from Donna Atalanta
Baglioni the order for an "Entombment" for the Church of the
Franciscans. This he painted in 1507. A century later the monks sold it
to Pope Paul V., who had it removed to the Borghese Palace in Rome.

The body of Christ is being borne to the tomb by two men. The weeping
Magdalen is holding his hand, and the Virgin is fainting in the arms of
three women.

Grimm says, "The bearers of the body move along, conscious of carrying a
noble burden. And Christ, himself, beauty, serenity, and mercy dwell in
him in fullest measure, as if his spirit still both informed his body
and glorified it. Only Raphael could undertake to paint this. No one
before or after him could so simply and naturally picture the earthly
form, irradiated with heavenly light."

"St. Catherine of Alexandria," painted at this time, now in the National
Gallery of London, says Passavant, "is one of the works which nothing
can describe; neither words nor a painted copy, nor engravings, for the
fire in it appears living, and is perfectly beyond the reach of
imitation."

"La Belle Jardiniere," in the Louvre, considered one of the best and
most beautiful of Raphael's works, represents the Virgin in the midst of
rich landscape, the ground covered with grass and flowers, while the
infant Christ looks up to her with great tenderness. It is said that the
model was a lovely flower-girl to whom the painter was much attached.

While finishing this picture he was called to Rome by the famous Pope
Julius II., and went to the Eternal City with great hope and delight.

He was now twenty-five, and the most important work of his life lay
before him. Julius II. had refused to take possession of the rooms in
the Vatican which had been used by the depraved Alexander VI. He said,
when it was suggested to remove the mural portraits of that pope, "Even
if the portraits were destroyed, the walls themselves would remind me of
that Simoniac, that Jew!"

Michael Angelo was already at work upon the great monument for Julius.
Now the pope desired to enlarge and beautify the Vatican, and make that
his monument as well. He received Raphael with the greatest cordiality.
It is said that when Raphael knelt down before him, his chestnut locks
falling upon his shoulders, the pope exclaimed, "He is an innocent
angel. I will give him Cardinal Bembo for a teacher, and he shall fill
my walls with historical pictures." Julius commissioned him to fresco
the hall of the judicial assembly, called "La Segnatura." The first
fresco, done between 1508 and 1509, is called "Theology" or the "Dispute
on the Holy Sacrament" (_La Disputa_).

"In the upper part appear the three figures of the Holy Trinity, each
surrounded by a glory. Above all is the Almighty Father, in the midst of
the seraphim, cherubim, and a countless host of angels, who sing the
'Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts.' Below the Father, amidst the
saints of the celestial kingdom, the Saviour is enthroned; a little
lower, the Holy Spirit is descending on men.

"At the right of the Saviour, the Virgin is seated, bending towards him
in adoration; and at her left is St. John the Baptist, who is pointing
towards him. On a large half-circle of clouds, which extends to the
extreme limits of the picture, are seated patriarchs, prophets, and
martyrs, representing the communion of saints. Commencing at the extreme
point to the right of Christ, we see the apostle St. Peter, holding the
Holy Scriptures and the two keys.... At his side, in the expectation of
mercy and pardon, is Adam, the father of the human race. Near Adam is
St. John, the apostle loved by Christ, writing down his divine visions;
afterwards, David, the head of the terrestrial family of our Lord, the
sweet psalmist who sang the praises of God; then St. Stephen, the first
martyr; and lastly, a saint half concealed by the clouds.

"On the other side, at the right of the spectator, is St. Paul, holding
a sword in remembrance of his martyrdom, and also as a symbol of the
penetrating power of his doctrine. By his side is Abraham, with the
knife to sacrifice Isaac, the first type of the sacrifice of Christ;
then the apostle St. James, the third witness of the transfiguration of
the Saviour, the religious type of hope, as St. Peter is of faith and
St. John of love. Moses follows with the tables of the law. St. Lawrence
corresponds to St. Stephen; and lastly we perceive a warlike figure,
which is believed to be St. George, the patron saint of Liguria; in
honor, no doubt, of Julius II., who was born in that country.

"The Holy Spirit, under the form of a dove, surrounded by four cherubim,
who hold the four books of the Gospel open, is descending upon the
assembly of believers.

"This sort of council, expressing theological life, is united in a
half-circle around the altar, on which the Eucharist is exposed on a
monstrance. Nearest to the altar, on both sides, come the four great
fathers of the church, the columns of Roman Catholicism; to the left,
St. Jerome, the type of contemplative life, absorbed in profound
meditation on the Scriptures; near him are two books, one containing his
'Letters,' the other the Vulgate. Opposite is St. Ambrose, active
especially in the militant church: he is raising his eyes and hands
towards heaven, as if delighted with the angelic harmonies. St.
Augustine, whom he converted to Christianity, is beside him, and is
dictating his thoughts to a young man seated at his feet. His book on
the 'City of God' is lying by him. St. Gregory the Great, clothed in the
tiara and pontifical mantle, is opposite St. Augustine. His book on
Job, with the superscription, 'Liber Moralium,' is also on the ground
beside him."

Besides these, among the fifty or more figures, are other priests and
philosophers, all discussing the great questions pertaining to the
redemption of the world.

The pope was so overjoyed on the completion of this picture that he is
said to have thrown himself upon the ground, exclaiming, with uplifted
hands, "I thank thee, great God, that thou hast sent me so great a
painter!"

With _La Disputa_ the romance of Raphael's life begins. While he was
painting this, tradition says that he fell in love with Margherita, the
daughter of a soda-manufacturer, who lived near Santa Cecilia, on the
other side of the Tiber. Passavant says, quoting from Missirini, "A
small house, No. 20, in the street of Santa Dorotea, the windows of
which are decorated with a pretty framework of earthenware, is pointed
out as the house where she was born.

"The beautiful young girl was very frequently in a little garden
adjoining the house, where, the wall not being very high, it was easy to
see her from outside. So the young men, especially artists,--always
passionate admirers of beauty,--did not fail to come and look at her, by
climbing up above the wall.

"Raphael is said to have seen her for the first time as she was bathing
her pretty feet in a little fountain in the garden. Struck by her
perfect beauty, he fell deeply in love with her, and, after having made
acquaintance with her, and discovered that her mind was as beautiful as
her body, he became so much attached as to be unable to live without
her." She has been called "_Fornarina_," because she was long supposed
to be the daughter of a baker (_fornajo_).

On the rough studies made for the _Disputa_, now preserved in Vienna,
London, and elsewhere, three love sonnets have been found in the
artist's handwriting, showing that while he mused over heavenly
subjects, with the faces of Peter and John before him, he had another
face, more dear and beautiful than either, in his mind. Eugene Muntz,
the librarian to the _Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts_, who says of these
sonnets, "So great is his delicacy of feeling, his reserve and
discretion, that we can scarcely analyze his dominant idea," gives the
following translation:--

"Love, thou hast bound me with the light of two eyes which torment me,
with a face like snow and roses, with sweet words and tender manners. So
great is my ardor that no river or sea could extinguish my fire. But I
do not complain, for my ardor makes me happy.... How sweet was the
chain, how light the yoke of her white arms around my neck. When those
bonds were loosed, I felt a mortal grief. I will say no more; a great
joy kills, and, though my thoughts turn to thee, I will keep silence."

"Just as Paul, descended from the skies, was unable to reveal the
secrets of God," so Raphael is unable to reveal the thoughts of his
beating heart. He thanks and praises love, and yet the pain of
separation is intense. He feels like "mariners who have lost their
star."

To this love he was probably constant through life, the short twelve
years which remained. When he painted the Farnesina, the palace of the
rich banker, Agostino Chigi, years afterward, Vasari says, "Raphael was
so much occupied with the love which he bore to the lady of his choice,
that he could not give sufficient attention to the work. Agostino,
therefore, falling at length into despair of seeing it finished, made so
many efforts by means of friends and by his own care that after much
difficulty he at length prevailed on the lady to take up her abode in
his house, where she was accordingly installed, in apartments near those
which Raphael was painting; in this manner the work was ultimately
brought to a conclusion."

He painted her portrait, now in the Barberini Palace, it is believed, in
1509. It represents a girl "only half-clothed, seated in a myrtle and
laurel wood. A striped yellow stuff surrounds her head as a turban, and
imparts something distinguished and charming to her features," says
Passavant. " ... With her right hand she holds a light gauze against her
breast. Her right arm, encircled with a golden bracelet, rests on her
knees, which are covered by red drapery. On the bracelet Raphael has
inscribed his name with the greatest care."

The face did not seem to me beautiful when I saw it in Rome a few years
ago, but certainly does not lack expression, making one feel that the
mind which Raphael discovered "to be as beautiful as the body" was
equally potent with the warmhearted artist.

Grimm says, "The portrait of the young girl or woman in the Barberini
Palace is a wonderful painting. I call it so because it bears about it
in a high degree the character of mysterious unfathomableness. We like
to contemplate it again and again.... Her hair is brilliantly black,
parted over the brow, and smoothly drawn over the temples, behind the
ear; the head is encircled with a gay handkerchief, like a turban, the
knots of which lie on one side above the ear, pressing it a little with
their weight.

"She is slightly bent forward. She sits there with her delicate shoulder
a little turned to the left; she seems looking stealthily at her lover,
to watch him as he paints, and yet not to stir from her position,
because he has forbidden it. It seems to him, however, to be a source of
the most intense pleasure to copy her accurately, and in no small matter
to represent her otherwise than as he saw her before him. We fancy her
to feel the jealousy, the vehemence, the joy, the unalterable
good-humor, and the pride springing from the happiness of being loved by
him. He, however, painted it all because he was capable of these
feelings himself in their greatest depth. If his pictures do not betray
this, his poems do."

Muntz says, "From a technical point of view, the work is a masterpiece.
Never, perhaps, has Raphael given such delicacy and subtlety to his
carnations; never did he create a fuller life; we can see the blood
circulate; we can feel the beating pulse. Thus the picture is a
continual source of envy and despair to modern realists."

Crowe and Cavalcaselle, in their life of Raphael, speak of the "warm
tone of flesh burnished to a nicety and shaded with exceptional force,"
in this picture. "The coal-black eyes have a fascinating look of
intentness, which is all the more effective as they are absolutely open,
under brows of the purest curves.... The forehead has a grand arch, the
cheeks are broad, the chin rounded and small. The contours are all
circular. The flesh has a fulness which characterizes alike the neck,
the drooping shoulders, and the arms and extremities."

Passavant thus speaks of a portrait in Florence, which belonged to the
Grand Duke of Tuscany. "This portrait in the Pitti Palace bears a strong
resemblance to the Madonna di San Sisto (Dresden Museum), with this
difference, however, that the features of the Virgin are ennobled. The
woman in the portrait is a handsome Roman, but of quite individual
character. Her form is powerful, her costume sumptuous, her beautiful
black eyes flash, her mouth is refined and full of grace.

"If this portrait, as may well be believed, represents the same person
as that of the Barberini house, we are compelled to admit that the
countenance, always intelligent, of this young girl, had become
wonderfully animated in the time between the execution of the two
portraits. However," he adds, "it would be indeed astonishing if
constant intercourse with the author of so many masterpieces, and one of
the most perfect human organizations that nature ever produced, should
have failed to influence the facile character of a young girl. This
second portrait, to judge by the manner in which it is painted, must
belong to the last years of Raphael's life."

With this fervent and lasting love for Margherita in his heart, Raphael
painted the other three mural paintings in the Vatican hall: the
"Parnassus," Apollo surrounded by the Nine Muses, Homer singing, Dante
and Virgil conversing, with Pindar, Sappho, Horace, Petrarch, Ovid, and
others; "Jurisprudence," with Emperor Justinian and Gregory IX., the one
founding the laws of the State, the other the laws of the Church; the
"School of Athens," with the masters of ancient philosophy and science
assembled.

On the left we see the most ancient of the philosophic schools gathered
around Pythagoras. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are surrounded by
their pupils; Archimedes and Zoroaster are the central figures of the
interested group. Diogenes sits on the central steps of the grand hall
where more than fifty great men are assembled.

Passavant says, "In the 'School of Athens,' Raphael showed the full
power of his genius, and that he was completely master both of his style
and of his execution. In the part of this picture requiring great
learning, it is possible, and indeed highly probable, that Raphael
consulted the most erudite of his friends, and amongst others the Count
Castiglione, who had just come to settle at Rome.

"However this may be, to Raphael alone belongs the great honor of having
succeeded in representing, in a single living and distinct image, the
development of Greek philosophy. It was Raphael who conceived the idea
of grouping the personages according to the rank they occupy in history,
and rendered the tendencies of these philosophers apparent, not merely
by ingenious grouping, but also by their actions, their attitudes, and
countenances.

"This fresco, in which he rose to such dignity and to such a grand
style, is justly considered as the most magnificent work the master ever
produced. It does, indeed, unite the technical experience of drawing,
coloring, and touch--the conquests of the more modern schools--to the
severity bequeathed to them by the more ancient ones....

"A great era in arts, as in literature, does not always follow the
appearance of an extraordinary genius. It comes on gradually, and its
progress may be noted. It has its infancy, and with it the simplicity
belonging to that age; then its youth, with the grace and sentiments
natural to youth; afterwards maturity, with its increased power.

"Raphael was the highest expression of the art of the sixteenth century;
he attained its greatest perfection. He was a continuation of the chain
of artists in his time, and was its last and brightest link."

Eugene Muntz calls this papal hall, the Stanza della Segnatura, "the
most splendid sanctuary of modern art. The profundity of ideas, the
nobility of the style, and the youthful vitality which prevails in every
detail of the decoration, make up a monumental achievement which is
without parallel in the annals of painting, without equal even among the
other works of Raphael himself."

During the three years' work in this hall, Raphael painted several other
pictures: the magnificent portrait of Pope Julius II., now in the Pitti
Palace; the "Madonna di Foligno," now in the Vatican, a large
altar-piece for Sigismondo Conti di Foligno, private secretary to the
pope; the Virgin seated on golden clouds surrounded by half-length
angels against a blue sky. "A burning globe, with a rainbow above it, is
falling from the sky. According to tradition this globe is a bomb, and
bears reference to the danger incurred by Sigismondo at the siege of
Foligno, his native town, and the rainbow may be considered symbolical
of the reconciliation of the donor with God."

The Madonna della Casa d'Alba, round, on wood, only nine and one-half
inches in diameter, was originally in a church at Nocera de Pagani, in
the Neapolitan States, and later was owned by the Duke of Alba, at
Madrid. The Duchess of Alba gave it to her doctor, in her will, for
curing her of a dangerous disease. She died very soon, and the doctor
was arrested on suspicion of poison, but was finally liberated. The
painting came into the possession of the Emperor of Russia, for seventy
thousand dollars, and is in the Hermitage.

The "Madonna del Pesce," the gem of the Italian Gallery of the Madrid
Museum, which some persons rank equal to the Sistine Madonna, represents
the Virgin holding the Child, who rests his hand on an open book.
Tobias, holding a fish, and led by an angel, implores a cure for his
father's blindness.

Raphael also executed for the wealthy Agostino Chigi, the _protege_ of
Julius II. and Leo X., the frescos in the Church Santa Maria della Pace.
Cinelli tells this anecdote: "Raphael of Urbino had painted for Agostino
Chigi, at Santa Maria della Pace, some prophets and sibyls, on which he
had received an advance of five hundred scudi. One day he demanded of
Agostino's cashier (Giulio Borghesi) the remainder of the sum at which
he estimated his work. The cashier, being astonished at this demand, and
thinking that the sum already paid was sufficient, did not reply. 'Cause
the work to be estimated by a judge of painting,' replied Raphael, 'and
you will see how moderate my demand is.'

"Giulio Borghesi thought of Michael Angelo for this valuation, and
begged him to go to the church and estimate the figures of Raphael.
Possibly he imagined that self-love, rivalry, and jealousy would lead
the Florentine to lower the price of the pictures.

"Michael Angelo went, accompanied by the cashier, to Santa Maria della
Pace, and, as he was contemplating the fresco without uttering a word,
Borghesi questioned him. 'That head,' replied Michael Angelo, pointing
to one of the Sibyls, 'that head is worth a hundred scudi.'... 'And the
others?' asked the cashier. 'The others are not less.'

"Some who witnessed this scene related it to Chigi. He heard every
particular, and, ordering, in addition to the five hundred scudi for
five heads, a hundred scudi to be paid for each of the others, he said
to his cashier, 'Go and give that to Raphael in payment for his heads,
and behave very politely to him, so that he may be satisfied; for if he
insists on my also paying for the drapery, we should probably be
ruined.'"

From 1512 to 1514, Raphael frescoed the second Vatican hall, La Stanza
d'Eliodoro. The first mural painting was "The Miraculous Expulsion of
Heliodorus from the Temple at Jerusalem," the angels attacking him as he
is taking the money destined for widows and orphans.

The second fresco is the "Miracle of Bolsena," where, in the reign of
Urban IV., a priest, who doubted the reality of transubstantiation, saw
the blood flow from the Host while he was celebrating mass. These are
called the most richly colored frescos in the world, exceeding the
celebrated ones of Titian in the Scuola di San Antonio, at Padua.

The third fresco represents the "Deliverance of St. Peter from Prison,"
and the fourth, Attila arrested in his march on Rome in 452, by the
apparition of St. Peter and St. Paul. A frightful hurricane is raging at
the time, and the Huns are filled with terror. Leo X., who had succeeded
Julius II., desired to be immortalized instead of St. Leo, so, with a
touch of human nature not entirely spiritual, caused himself and his
court, driving the French under Louis XII. out of Italy, to be painted
in the picture. Passavant says, "A few very animated groups of soldiers
had to be sacrificed; but on the whole the composition gained by the
alteration, from the contrast of the calm gentleness of the pontiff with
the ferocity of the barbarians. In execution this fresco may be
considered as one of the most perfect by this master."

While this second room in the Vatican was being painted, Raphael, as
usual, was engaged also in other work.

In the Chigi palace, or Farnesina, he painted the beautiful fresco,
"Galatea." The subject is taken from the narrative of Philostratus about
the Cyclops. "In the fresco," says Passavant, "Galatea is gently sailing
on the waves. Love guides the shell, which is drawn by dolphins, and
surrounded by tritons and marine centaurs, who bear the nymphs. Little
cupids in the air are shooting arrows at them. All these figures form a
contrast with the beautiful Galatea, whose languid eyes are raised to
heaven, the centre of all noble aspirations.

"Galatea is an image of beauty of soul united to that of the body. It
is, indeed, a sort of glorified nature; or, rather, a goddess clad in
human form. Raphael's genius defies all comparison, and has attained in
this masterpiece a height which approaches very nearly to perfection."

This fresco won the most enthusiastic praise. His friend, Count
Castiglione, wrote him in hearty commendation, and Raphael replied,--

"As for 'the Galatea,' I should think myself a great master if it
possessed one-half the merits of which you write, but I read in your
words the love you bear to myself. To paint a figure truly beautiful, I
should see many beautiful forms, with the further provision that you
should be present to choose the most beautiful. But, good judges and
beautiful women being rare, I avail myself of certain ideas which come
into my mind. If this idea has any excellence in art I know not,
although I labor heartily to acquire it."

How modest the spirit of this letter, and how fully it shows that the
young artist lived in an ideal world, filled with exquisite things of
his own creating. Some natures always see roses instead of thorns,
sunshine behind the clouds; believe in goodness and purity rather than
in sin and sorrow; and such natures make the world lovelier by their
uplifting words and hopes.

The famous artist, now thirty-one, had become wealthy, and had built for
himself a tasteful and elegant home on the Via di Borgo Nuova, not far
from the Vatican. "The ground floor of the facade was of rustic
architecture, with five arched doors, four of which were for the
offices, and the one in the centre for the entrance to the house. The
upper story was of Doric order, with coupled columns, and five windows
surmounted by triangular pediments. The entablature which surmounted the
whole was of a severe style; imitated from the antique. This beautiful
building no longer exists. The angle of the right of the basement, which
now forms a part of the Accoramboni palace, is the only part that
remains."

Raphael's friends, with that well-meant, but usually injudicious
interference which is so common, were urging him to bring a wife into
his home. His uncle, Simone di Battista di Ciarla, seems to have been
anxious, for the artist writes him in 1514, "As to taking a wife, I will
say, in regard to her whom you destined for me, that I am very glad and
thank God for not having taken either her or another. And in this I have
been wiser than you who wished to give her to me. I am convinced that
you see yourself that I should not have got on as I have done."

Another person seemed equally anxious for his marriage. Cardinal
Bibiena, who had been Raphael's intimate friend when he lived in
Urbino, had long been desirous that he should marry Maria, the daughter
of Antonio Divizio da Bibiena, his nephew. Evidently Raphael was engaged
to her, for he writes to this uncle, Simone, "I cannot withdraw my word;
we are nearer than ever to the conclusion." As the matter was deferred
year by year--as many writers believe, because Raphael, loving
Margherita, was unwilling to marry another--he was saved from the
seeming necessity of keeping his promise, by Maria's death some time
previous to his own. She is buried in Raphael's chapel in the Pantheon,
not far from his grave. He had met and loved Margherita in 1508, six
years earlier, and possibly after his engagement to Maria. Margherita
was in his house when he died, and to her he left an adequate portion of
his property.

This year, 1514, Bramante, the architect of St. Peter's, having died,
Raphael was appointed his successor. Perceiving that the four columns
which were to support the cupola had too weak a foundation, the first
work was to strengthen these. He executed a plan of the church, which
some think superior to that which Michael Angelo carried out after
Raphael's death. He studied carefully the architectural works of
Vitruvius, and planned several beautiful structures in Rome.

Raphael also had the oversight of all the excavations in and around
Rome, so that pieces of antique statuary, which were often found, might
be carefully preserved. "To this end," wrote Leo X., "I command every
one, of whatever condition or rank he may be, noble or not, titled or of
low estate, to make you, as superintendent of this matter, acquainted
with every stone or marble which shall be discovered within the extent
of country designated by me, who desire that every one failing to do so
shall be judged by you, and fined from one hundred to three hundred gold
crowns."

The third hall of the pope, called the Stanza del Incendio, was painted
from 1514 to 1517. The first fresco is "The Oath of Leo III.," who,
brought before the Emperor Charlemagne for trial, was acquitted through
a supernatural voice proclaiming that no one had the right to judge the
pope.

The second fresco is "The Coronation of Charlemagne by Leo III.," thus
signifying that the spiritual power is above the temporal power. The two
principal portraits are, however, Leo X. and Francis I., who formed an
alliance in 1515.

The third and finest picture is "The Conflagration of the Borgo Vecchio
at Rome." The other pictures were executed in part by the pupils of
Raphael. This was by his own hand. In 847 a fire broke out in Rome,
which extended from the Vatican to the Mausoleum of Adrian. The danger
from the high wind was very great, when Pope Leo IV. implored divine
aid, and at once the flames assumed the form of a cross, and the fire
was quenched. "Several of the figures," says Passavant, "are considered
as perfect and inimitable, amongst others the two beautiful and
powerful women who are bringing water in vases, and whose forms are so
admirably delineated under their garments agitated by the wind."

The last fresco shows the "Victory of Leo IV. over the Saracens at
Ostia." The pope, Leo IV., with the face of Leo X., is on the shore,
engaged in prayer.

At this time Raphael made sepia sketches for the Loggie leading to the
apartments of the pope; thirteen arcades, each arcade containing four
principal pictures. Forty-eight of these scenes are taken from the Old
Testament, and four from the life of Christ. Taken together, they are
called "Raphael's Bible." Vasari said of the decorations in the Loggie,
"It is impossible to execute or to conceive a more exquisite work."
Catherine II. of Russia had all these Loggie paintings copied on canvas,
and placed in the Hermitage, in a gallery constructed for them, like
that in the Vatican. This gallery cost a million and a half of dollars.

In these busy years, 1515 to 1516, the famous cartoons for the Sistine
Chapel were made. Sixtus IV. had built the chapel. Michael Angelo, under
Julius II., had painted in it his "History of the Creation," and
"Prophets and Sibyls." And now Raphael was asked to make cartoons for
ten pieces of tapestry, to be hung before the wainscoting on high
festivals. The cartoons are, "The Miraculous Draught of Fishes,"
"Christ's Charge to Peter," "The Martyrdom of St. Stephen," "The
Healing of the Lame Man," "The Death of Ananias," "The Conversion of
St. Paul," "Elymas struck with Blindness," "Paul and Barnabas at
Lystra," "St. Paul Preaching at Athens," and "Saint Paul in Prison." The
cartoons were sent to Arras, in Flanders, and wrought in wool, silk, and
gold. Brought to Rome in 1519, they were hung in St. Peter's, on the
feast of St. Stephen.

The enthusiasm of the Romans was unbounded. Vasari says this work "seems
rather to have been performed by miracle than by the aid of man." These
tapestries, after many changes, are now in the Vatican, much soiled and
faded. Of the cartoons, twelve feet by from fourteen to eighteen feet,
with figures above life-size, seven of them are to be seen in the South
Kensington Museum. They were purchased at Arras by Charles I., on the
recommendation of Rubens. They are yearly studied by thousands of
visitors. Grimm calls the cartoons "Raphael's greatest productions." He
considers the "Death of Ananias" "as the most purely dramatic of all his
compositions."

"Compared with these," says Hazlitt, "all other pictures look like oil
and varnish; we are stopped and attracted by the coloring, the
pencilling, the finishing, the instrumentalities of art; but _here_ the
painter seems to have flung his mind upon the canvas. His thoughts, his
great ideas alone, prevail; there is nothing between us and the subject;
we look through a frame and see Scripture histories, and are made actual
spectators in miraculous events.

"Not to speak it profanely, they are a sort of a revelation of the
subjects of which they treat; there is an ease and freedom of manner
about them which brings preternatural characters and situations home to
us with the familiarity of every-day occurrences; and while the figures
fill, raise, and satisfy the mind, they seem to have cost the painter
nothing. Everywhere else we see the means; here we arrive at the end
apparently without any means."

Raphael was now overwhelmed with orders for pictures. He had shown
worldly wisdom--a thing not always possessed by genius--in having his
works engraved by men under his own supervision, so that they were
everywhere scattered among the people.

In 1516 he decorated the bath-room of his friend Cardinal Bibiena, who
lived on the third floor of the Vatican. The first sketch represents the
Birth of Venus; then Venus and Cupid, seated on dolphins, journey across
the sea; she is wounded by Cupid's dart; she pulls out the thorn which
has pierced her. The blood, falling on the white rose, gives us,
according to tradition, the rich red rose. These paintings were
certainly of a different nature from the others in the Vatican, and,
while Passavant thinks it strange that a spiritually minded cardinal
should have desired such pictures, they were nevertheless greatly
admired and copied.

This same year, 1516, one of Raphael's most celebrated Madonnas was
painted, the one oftener copied, probably, than any other picture in
the world, "The Madonna della Sedia," now in the Pitti Palace. The
Virgin, with an uncommonly sweet and beautiful face, is seated in a
chair (_sedia_), with both arms encircling the infant Saviour, his baby
head resting against her own. Grimm says, "Mary has been painted by
Raphael in different degrees of earthly rank; the Madonna della Sedia
approaches the aristocratic, but only in outward show, for the poorest
mother might sit there as she does. Gold and variegated colors have been
used without stint.... The dress of the mother is light blue; the mantle
which she has drawn about her shoulders is green, with red and
willow-green stripes and gold-embroidered border; her sleeves are red
faced with gold at the wrists. A grayish brown veil with reddish brown
stripes is wound about her hair; the little dress of the child is
orange-colored, and the back of the chair red velvet. The golden lines
radiating from the halo around the head of the child form a cross, and
over the mother's and John's float light golden rings. All the tones are
flower-like and clear.... A harmonious glow irradiates it, which,
partaking of a spiritual as well as a material nature, constitutes the
peculiarity of this work, and defies all attempts at reproduction.
Pictorial art has produced few such works which actually in their beauty
exceed nature herself, who does not seem to wish to unite so many
advantages in one person or place....

"Raphael's Madonnas have the peculiarity that they are not
distinctively national. They are not Italians whom he paints, but women
raised above what is national. Leonardo's, Correggio's, Titian's,
Murillo's, and Rubens's Madonnas are all in some respects affected by
their masters' nationality; a faint suggestion of Italian or Spanish or
Flemish nature pervades their forms. Raphael alone could give to his
Madonnas that universal human loveliness, and that beauty which is a
possession common to the European nations compared with other races.

"His Sistine Madonna soars above us as our ideal of womanly beauty; and
yet, strange to say, despite this universality, she gives to each
individual the impression that, owing to some special affinity, he has
the privilege of wholly understanding her. Shakespeare's and Goethe's
feminine creations inspire the same feeling....

"All Raphael's works are youthful works. After finishing the Sistine
Madonna, he lived only three years. At thirty-five years of age (and he
did not survive much beyond this), the largest portion of human life is
often still in the future. The events of each day continue to surprise
us, and to seem like adventures. Raphael was full of these fresh hopes
and anticipations when a cruel fate snatched him away. His last works
betray the same youthful exhilaration in labor as his first. His studies
from nature made at this time have a freshness and grace which, regarded
as personal manifestations of his genius, are as valuable as his
paintings. He was still in process of development.... What in our later
years we call illusions still enchanted him. The easy, untrammelled life
at the court of the pope wore for him, to the last, a romantic glamour,
and the admiration of those who only meant to flatter sounded sweet in
his ears, even while he saw through it. Everything continued to serve
him; with the gospel of defeat his soul was still unacquainted."

The Sistine Madonna, with the Virgin standing on the clouds in the midst
of myriads of cherubs' heads, St. Sixtus kneeling on the left, and St.
Barbara on the right, was painted in 1518 for the Benedictine Monastery
of San Sisto, at Piacenza, from which it was purchased in 1754 by
Augustus III., Elector of Saxony, for forty thousand dollars. It was
received at Dresden with great joy, the throne of Saxony being displaced
in order to give this divine product of genius a fitting home. It is
said that the famous Correggio, standing before this picture, exclaimed
with pride, "I too am an artist!"

Passavant says, "It was the last Virgin created by the genius of
Raphael; and, as if he had foreseen that this Madonna would be his last,
he made it an apotheosis."

It is interesting to sit in the Dresden gallery alone, before the
Sistine Madonna, which has the face of the beloved Margherita, and note
the hush that comes upon the people when they pass over the threshold.
They seem to enter into the feelings of the artist. It is said that many
a poor and lonely woman, bent with years, has wept before this
painting.

The eyes of the Virgin look at you, but they do not see you. The eyes
are thinking--looking back into her past with its mysteries; looking
forward perchance into a veiled but significant future. These eyes, once
seen, are never forgotten, and you go again and again to look at them.

Raphael's "Christ Bearing the Cross" (_Lo Spasimo_) is considered a
masterpiece, from its drawing and expression. Some think it equal to
"The Transfiguration." The ship which was carrying it to Palermo was
lost with all on board. Nothing was recovered save this picture, which,
uninjured, floated in a box into the harbor of Genoa. It is now in
Madrid.

Another well-known work of 

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