and Maria, whom Michelangelo is said to have loved.  Lorenzo’s successor, Piero, did not long retain the power his father had left him; he was vain and impetuous, and, trying to rule without the Signoria, placed Pisa and Livorno in the hands of Charles VIII of France, who was on his carnival way to Naples.  Savonarola chased him out, and sacked the treasures of his house.  He died in exile.  It was his brother Giuliano who returned, Savonarola being executed in 1512.  Giuliano was a better ruler than his brother, but he behaved like a despot till his brother Giovanni became Pope, when he resigned the government of Florence to his nephew Lorenzo, the son of Piero, and while he became Gonfaloniere of Rome and Archbishop, Lorenzo became Duke of Urbino and father of Catherine de’ Medici of France.  It is this Giuliano and Lorenzo de Medici that Michelangelo has immortalised with an everlasting gesture of sorrow and contempt.  On the right is the tomb of Giuliano, and over it he sits for ever as a general of the Church; on the left is Lorenzo’s dust, coffered in imperishable marble, over which he sits plotting for ever.  The statues that Michelangelo has carved there have been called Night and Day, Twilight and Dawn; but indeed these names, as I have said, are far too definite for them:  they are just a gesture of despair, of despair of a world which has come to nothing.  They are in no real sense of the word political, but rather an expression, half realised after all, of some immense sadness, some terrible regret, which has fallen upon the soul of one who had believed in righteousness and freedom, and had found himself deceived.  It is not the house of Medici that there sees its own image of despair, but rather Florence, which had been content that such things should be.  Some obscure and secret sorrow has for a moment overwhelmed the soul of the great poet in thinking of Florence, of the world, of the hearts of men, and as though trying to explain to himself his own melancholy and indignation, he has carved these statues, to which men have given the names of the most tremendous and the most sweet of natural things—­Night and Day, Twilight and Dawn; and even as in the Sistine Chapel Michelangelo has thought only of Life,—­of the Creation of Man, of the Judgment of the World, which is really the Resurrection,—­so here he has thought only of Death, of the death of the body, of the soul, and of the wistful life of the disembodied spirit that wanders disconsolate, who knows where?—­that sleeps uneasily, who knows how long?

FOOTNOTES: 

[108] Not of the Evangelists, but of St. John:  the medallions are the Four Evangelists.

[109] See Donatello, by Lord Balcarres, p. 136 (London, 1904), where a long comparison is made of the doors of Donatello, Ghiberti, and Luca della Robbia.

[110] Even politically, too, as Guicciardini tells us.

XIX.  FLORENCE