Michelangelo eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 83 pages of information about Michelangelo.

Michelangelo eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 83 pages of information about Michelangelo.

[Footnote 1:  See notes on the Life of Michelangelo Buonarotti in the Blashfield-Hopkins edition of Vasari.]

To a man of Michelangelo’s austere temperament, intensely masculine in his predilections, the beauty of womanhood was not fully revealed.  His sibyls can scarcely be counted as women; they belong to a world of their own, neither human nor divine.  It was only in his few Madonnas that we can trace his feminine ideal, an ideal noble and dignified, rather than beautiful.  The Madonna of the bas-relief is proud rather than tender, the Virgin of the Pieta is grand rather than lovely.  These were works of his youth.  Later in life, when he had known the blessing of a good woman’s friendship, he developed a new ideal in the gentle and delicate womanhood of the Virgin of the Last Judgment.

Michelangelo has been compared to two great masters of dissimilar arts, Milton and Beethoven.  There are striking points of similarity in the men themselves, in stern uprightness of character, in scorn of the low and trivial, in lofty idealism.  The art of all three is too far above the common level to be popular; it requires too much thinking to attract the superficial.  In poetry, in music, and in sculpture, all three utter the profoundest truths of human experience, expressed in grand and solemn harmonies.

II.  ON BOOKS OF REFERENCE.

The original materials for the study of Michelangelo’s life and work are the two biographies by his contemporaries, Vasari and Condivi.  Vasari’s was the first of these (1550), and like the other portions of his “Lives of the Painters” contained many inaccuracies.  It was to correct these that Condivi published his little book a few years later.  This rival effort aroused Vasari’s wrath, and after Michelangelo’s death he issued an enlarged edition of his own book, unscrupulously incorporating all that was valuable in Condivi’s work, and adding thereto many reminiscences of the master’s life.  The fame of Vasari’s monumental work caused Condivi’s little book to be entirely forgotten for long years, and it has been one of the tasks of modern scholarship to restore it to its true place.  Even now, however, there is no available form of Condivi’s biography for American readers, though Vasari’s “Lives” in Mrs. Foster’s translation is found in most libraries.  The latest edition of Vasari, published in 1897, contains annotations by Mr. and Mrs. E.H.  Blashfield, and A.A.  Hopkins, which correct all the statements in the light of recent authorities.

Far more valuable even than the early biographies is the mass of existing documents of the Buonarotti family, including contracts, letters, poems, and memoranda, and containing data for a full and exact biography of the master.  Unfortunately, however, this great storehouse of material has been for all these centuries a sealed treasure, given up only little by little, to successive generations of scholars.  When Hermann

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Michelangelo from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.