It is a relief to fix our eyes upon the central portion.  Here the painter expressed an idea at once noble and original.  The figure of the Christ has not the delicate beauty of the dead Christ in the Pieta, or the finished elegance of the Christ Triumphant, but he has the splendid vigor of a forceful character.  The Mother, less grand and noble than in the bereavement of the Pieta, less proud than in her young motherhood, is a gentle and lovely creature.  Thus the intensely masculine is completed by the delicately feminine, and the artist shows us ideal types of manhood and womanhood.

XVI

PORTRAIT

In the pictures of this collection we have learned something of the work of Michelangelo as a sculptor and a painter.  He was an artist whose personality was so strongly impressed upon his work that we have come thus to know, to a certain extent, the man himself.  His, as we have seen, was not a happy nature, and many of the circumstances of his life conspired against his happiness.

In his early youth he seemed strangely aware of his own superior gifts and was often so overbearing that he made enemies.  The story is told of a quarrel he had with a young man named Torrigiano, in whose company he was copying some frescoes in a church in Florence.  Stung by some tormenting words of Michelangelo, Torrigiano retaliated with a blow of the fist, which crushed his companion’s nose, and disfigured him for life.

Michelangelo’s real education began in the palace of Lorenzo the Magnificent, who discovered the lad’s talent and made him a favorite.  “He sat at the same table with Ficino, Pico, and Poliziano, listening to dialogues on Plato, and drinking in the golden poetry of Greece.  Greek literature and philosophy, expounded by the men who had discovered them, first moulded his mind to those lofty thoughts which it became the task of his life to express in form.  At the same time he heard the preaching of Savonarola.  In the Duomo and the cloister of S. Marco another portion of his soul was touched, and he acquired that deep religious tone which gives its majesty and terror to the Sistine."[37] In the gardens of S. Marco he had Lorenzo’s fine collection of antiquities to study, and learned from them the secrets of Greek sculpture.

[Footnote 37:  Symonds, in Renaissance in Italy:  The Fine Arts.]

In all these opportunities it would seem that Michelangelo was a most fortunate person.  Nor did he lack proper appreciation; the Pieta placed him at once on a pinnacle of fame, and the David was heartily admired.

It was when he entered the service of the Pope that his troubles began.  He was never thereafter a free man.  His genius was at the disposition of a series of men, each ambitious for his own fame, and caring little for the artist’s personal aspirations.  His proud nature was bitterly humiliated by this sacrifice of his independence.  Sometimes he openly rebelled, but in the end was always obliged to yield to papal authority.