Michelangelo in the Bargello

 

Edward Hutton ended his tour of the Bargello, the sculpture gallery in Florence, with a discussion of Michelangelo, "that beautiful, strong and tragic soul." Michelangelo's most famous works are not in the Bargello but there was still the figure of the Greek god Bacchus, the great Roman Brutus, a lovely relief of the Madonna and Child, as well as a Pieta apparently intended for his own tomb.

There follows Michelangelo (1475-1564). It is with a sort of surprise that one comes fact to face with that sorrowful, heroic figure, as though, following among the flowers, we had come upon some tragic precipice, some immense cavern too deep for sight. How, after the delight, the delicate charm of the fifteenth century, can I speak of this beautiful, strong, and tragic soul? It might almost seem that the greatest Italian of the sixteenth century has left us in sculpture little more than an immortal gesture of despair, of despair of a world which he has not been content to love. His work is beautiful with the beauty of the mountains, of the mountains of which he alone has found the spirit of man. His figures, half unveiled from the living rock, are like some terrible indictment of the world he lived in, and in a sort of rage at its uselessness he leaves them unfinished, and it but half expressed;--an indictment of himself too, of his own heart, of his contempt for things as they are. Yet in his youth, he had been content with beauty—in the lovely Pieta of S. Pietro, for instance, where, on the robe of Mary, alone in all his work he has placed his name; or in the statue of Bacchus, now here in the Bargello, sleepy, half drunken with wine or with visions, the eyelids heavy with dreams, the cup still in his hand. But already in the David his trouble is come upon him; the sorrow that embittered his life has been foreseen, and in a sort of protest against the enslavement of Florence, that nest where he was born, he creates this hero, who seems to be waiting for some tyranny to declare itself.

The Brutus, unfinished as we say, to-day in the Bargello, he refused to touch again, since that city which was made for a thousand lovers, as he said, had been enjoyed by one only, some Medici against whom, as we know, he was ready to fight. If in the beautiful relief of Madonna we find a sweetness and strength that is altogether without bitterness or indignation, it is not any religious consolation we find there, but such comfort rather as life may give when in a moment of inward tragedy we look on the stars or watch a mother with her little son. …

The unfinished Pieta in the Duomo, it is said, he carved for his own grave: like so much of his great tragical work, it is unfinished, unfinished though everything he did was complete from the beginning. For he is like the dawn that brings with it noon and evening, he is like the day which will pass into the night. In him the spirit of man has stammered the syllables of eternity, and in its agony of longing or sorrow has failed to speak only the word love. All things particular to the individual, all that is small or of little account, that endures but for a moment, have been purged away, so that Life itself may make, as it were, an immortal gesticulation, almost monstrous in its passionate intensity—a mirage seen on the mountains, a shadow on the snow. And after him, and long before his death, there came Baccio Bandinelli and the rest, Cellini the goldsmith, Giovanni da Bologna, and the sculptors of the decadence that has lasted till our own day. With him Italian art seems to have been hurled out of heaven; henceforth his followers stand on the brink of Pandemonium, making the frantic gestures of fallen gods.

 

 

###

 

Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 296-7.

Florence: Laurentian Library

Edward Hutton concluded his tour of the church of S. Lorenzo, the resting place of the Medici, with a reflection on that famous family, and a visit to the famed Laurentian Library.

The cloisters, where Lorenzo walked often enough, are beautiful, and then from them one passes so easily into the Laurentian Library, founded by Cosimo Vecchio, and treasured and added to by Piero and Lorenzo il Magnifico, but scattered and partially destroyed by the vandalism and futile stupidity of Savonarola and his puritans in 1494…

 

Perhaps the most precious thing here is the Pandects of Justinian, taken by the Pisans from Amalfi in 1335, and seized by the Florentines when they took Pisa in 1406. Amalfi prized them above everything she possessed. Pisa was ready to defend them with her life, Florence spent hundreds of thousands of florins to possess herself of them—for in them was thought to lie the secret of the law of Rome. Who knows what Italy, under the heel of the barbarian, does not owe to these faded pages, and through Italy the world? They were, as it were, the symbol of Latin civilization in the midst of German barbarism. Here too is that most ancient Virgil which the French stole in 1804. Here is Petrarch’s Horace and a Dante transcribed by Villani; and, best of all, the only ancient codex in  the world of what remains to us of Aeschylus, of what is left of Sophocles. It is in such a place that  we may best recognize the true greatness of the abused Medici. Tyrants they may have been, but when the mob was tyrant it satisfied itself with destroying what they with infinite labour had gathered together for the advancement of learning, the civilization of the world…. To the Medici we owe much of what is most beautiful in Florence—the loveliest work of Botticelli, of Brunellesco, of Donatello, of Lippo Lippi, of Michelangelo and the rest, to say nothing of such a priceless collection of books and MSS. as this. …

 

It is not, however, this humble and almost nameless grave that draws us to-day to the Segresta Nuova, but the monument carved by Michelangelo for two lesser and later Medici: Giuliano, Duc de Nemours, who died in 1516, and Lorenzo, Duc d’Urbino, who died in 1519….It is this Giuliano and Lorenzo de Medici that Michelangelo has immortalized 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 realized 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. … 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? ###

 

 

 

 

Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 244-248. 

Vatican: Sistine Chapel and Stanze della Segnatura

 I agree with Edward Hutton that Michelangelo's work in the Sistine Chapel is difficult to comprehend or take in. It's not just the crowds of tourists but the sheer monumentality is overwhelming. I also prefer the relatively small and intimate Stanze della Segnatura where, despite a room full of people, you are free to linger and explore the four walls at leisure before being swept into the Sistine Chapel.

 

Above these, supported by marvelous and gigantic images of sybyls, of prophets, of slaves, and athletes, stretches the roof of Michelangelo, that new heaven which is the old earth, beautiful with the life of man, his love which brought disaster and all joy, the wild story of the world, which ends on that vast wall above the altar where he has painted not the Last Judgment, it might seem, but the Resurrection.

 

This ceiling, so heavy with life that it always seems to crush us under the weight of its tremendous story, was painted for Pope Julius II., the condotierre, between the years 1506 and 1512…. (216)

 

But this profound and wonderful vision of life by no means decorates the chapel of the Popes; it dwarfs it. The air is so full of shapes that we can see nothing.  In this space… Michelangelo, whose spirit always seems to be brooding over some immense sorrow, has created a tremendous and a terrible crowd of figures, each one of which seems to accuse the Papacy and God Himself of some tragic crime committed upon mankind….  Here we are devoured by insatiable dreams—and how should we answer and satisfy them? (222-223)

 

Raphael: School of Athens.

 

But, after all, what strikes us most in this picture dealing so easily and surely with the greatest matters, is its value as just a picture, its decorative value, that is, its marvelously lovely expression, not of any profound or subtle thought but of its own element, a certain spaciousness, confined as we perceive at last, within very narrow material limits, but that seems infinite. It is the very triumph of decorative art, come at last to perfection in one who had been the pupil of Pietro Perugino. The difficulty of such an achievement, greater here by far than in the ‘Disputa.’ For there all heaven lay open to our eyes, is scarcely felt till in an effort to understand what is really consummate in the art of Raphael—and no man has been praised so much for the wrong things—we perceive here his real triumph. That palace or temple, all of earth, full of the measured beauty of the work of man, is not less infinite in its spaciousness after all than the whole circuit of the world, the limitless kingdom, light on light, of the sky. And this is the real triumph of Raphael, not that he has summed up the ancient and the medieval world and expressed them in the terms of the Renaissance, but that into that narrow, cramped room he has brought an infinite beauty. (227)

 

### 

 

 Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922.

Rome: St. Peter's

 Edward Hutton did not like St. Peter's. He was disappointed and disconcerted by its largeness. "Nothing is so feeble as largeness if it be not ordered and contrived with beauty." I can agree with much of what he says, but every time I am in Rome, I try to attend Mass in St. Peter's and it is always something special. Maybe it is just the feeling you get in the midst of a small congregation of worshippers gathered from all over the world while crowds of tourists walk through the vast interior. 

   

 

 

The Popes, themselves, who, vandals as they have ever been, were never guilty of an act more barbarous than the destruction of the most famous church in Christendom, one thousand one hundred and fifty years old at the time Nicholas V pulled it down in order to build—well the beautiful and sumptuous failure we see, which, though it has been too much decried, is in fact without a sense of reverence. It is a little blatant in its pride and a stranger to humility. It seems to praise God in the language one might use to a king for the sake of impressing the populace, but not sincerely…. (181)

 

S. Peter’s seems vulgar in a compromise between beauty and ostentation…. The whole place is blasphemous in the confusion of its intention. It is not Greek, nor Latin, but Barbarian, and what beauty it has, and it has much, is by reason of that confusion a barbarian beauty, fundamentally insane and romantic. The richness of the material is lost in the largeness of the church, the precious in a multitude of riches. One’s attention wanders, nothing there can hold it. the place is less a church than a city in whose streets one may wander all day long searching in vain for God…. (185)

 

Michelangelo was already seventy years old when he became capo-maestro. Refusing all payment, he worked, he said, ‘for the love of God, the Blessed Virgin, and S. Peter.’ Bound though he was by the plans and achievements of his predecessors, he was able to discard the design of Sangallo, which besides filling the church with darkness would have involved the destruction of the Sistine chapel. He took up again the plan of Bramante, a Greek Cross under a dome. “I will throw the Pantheon there up into the sky,’ he is reported to have said. Every effort was made by the disciples of Sangallo and Giulio Romano to displace him, but the Pope not only confirmed him in his office, but also gave him even greater power than before. When he died in 1564 he had finished the drum and made the plans for the dome which Giacomo della Porta finished in 1590.It remains the only perfectly beautiful part of the church…. (182-3)

In 1640 della Porta died, and Paul V appointed Carlo Maderna architect. At the order of the Pope he abandoned both Bramante’s and Michelangelo’s designs, adopting Rossellino’s, namely a Latin Cross; for it had become necessary to impress the North with that long nave at the head of which the altar might gleam and the faithful be edified. … (182)

 

Maderna finished the façade in 161. Fifty-three years later Bernini completed the Piazza with its beautiful colonnades and fountains… (1830

 

The strong and spiritual art of Florence, of the Tuscan realists, passes at last into absolute beauty only perhaps, here at any rate, in the early work of Michelangelo, of which S. Peter’s holds the most precious example. The Madonna della Pieta, in the first chapel of the south aisle, remains the most beautiful as it is the most perfect of the many works which came from that strong and ruthless hand, so marvelously tender for once. It was carved for the Cardinal di San Dionigi, called the Cardinal Rovano, not long after the Bacchus of the Bargello in Florence. Madonna is seated on the stone where the Cross was raised, her dead Son in her lap. ‘He is of so great and so rare a beauty,’ says Condivi, ‘that no one beholds Him but is moved to pity. It is a figure truly worthy of the humanity which belonged to the Son of God and to such a Mother; nevertheless, some there be who complain that the Mother is too young compared to the Son. One day as I was talking to Michelangelo of this objection: “Do you know,” he said, “that chaste women retain their fresh looks much longer than those who are not chaste? How much more, therefore, a virgin in whom not even the least unchaste desire ever arose?" ... Michelangelo was about twenty-four or twenty-five years old when he had finished that work. It brought him fame and a great reputation, and there, alone in all his work, on the hem of Mary’s robe, he has carved her name. (189-190)

 

###

 

Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922.

Michelangelo in the Bargello

Edward Hutton ended his tour of the Bargello, the sculpture gallery in Florence, with a discussion of Michelangelo, "that beautiful, strong and tragic soul." Michelangelo's most famous works are not in the Bargello but there was still the figure of the Greek god Bacchus, the great Roman Brutus, a lovely relief of the Madonna and Child, as well as a Pieta apparently intended for his own tomb.

There follows Michelangelo (1475-1564). It is with a sort of surprise that one comes fact to face with that sorrowful, heroic figure, as though, following among the flowers, we had come upon some tragic precipice, some immense cavern too deep for sight. How, after the delight, the delicate charm of the fifteenth century, can I speak of this beautiful, strong, and tragic soul? It might almost seem that the greatest Italian of the sixteenth century has left us in sculpture little more than an immortal gesture of despair, of despair of a world which he has not been content to love. His work is beautiful with the beauty of the mountains, of the mountains of which he alone has found the spirit of man. His figures, half unveiled from the living rock, are like some terrible indictment of the world he lived in, and in a sort of rage at its uselessness he leaves them unfinished, and it but half expressed;--an indictment of himself too, of his own heart, of his contempt for things as they are. Yet in his youth, he had been content with beauty—in the lovely Pieta of S. Pietro, for instance, where, on the robe of Mary, alone in all his work he has placed his name; or in the statue of Bacchus, now here in the Bargello, sleepy, half drunken with wine or with visions, the eyelids heavy with dreams, the cup still in his hand. But already in the David his trouble is come upon him; the sorrow that embittered his life has been foreseen, and in a sort of protest against the enslavement of Florence, that nest where he was born, he creates this hero, who seems to be waiting for some tyranny to declare itself.

The Brutus, unfinished as we say, to-day in the Bargello, he refused to touch again, since that city which was made for a thousand lovers, as he said, had been enjoyed by one only, some Medici against whom, as we know, he was ready to fight. If in the beautiful relief of Madonna we find a sweetness and strength that is altogether without bitterness or indignation, it is not any religious consolation we find there, but such comfort rather as life may give when in a moment of inward tragedy we look on the stars or watch a mother with her little son. …

The unfinished Pieta in the Duomo, it is said, he carved for his own grave: like so much of his great tragical work, it is unfinished, unfinished though everything he did was complete from the beginning. For he is like the dawn that brings with it noon and evening, he is like the day which will pass into the night. In him the spirit of man has stammered the syllables of eternity, and in its agony of longing or sorrow has failed to speak only the word love. All things particular to the individual, all that is small or of little account, that endures but for a moment, have been purged away, so that Life itself may make, as it were, an immortal gesticulation, almost monstrous in its passionate intensity—a mirage seen on the mountains, a shadow on the snow. And after him, and long before his death, there came Baccio Bandinelli and the rest, Cellini the goldsmith, Giovanni da Bologna, and the sculptors of the decadence that has lasted till our own day. With him Italian art seems to have been hurled out of heaven; henceforth his followers stand on the brink of Pandemonium, making the frantic gestures of fallen gods.

 

 

###

 

Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 296-7.

Florence: The Medici and the Laurentian Library

Edward Hutton concluded his tour of the church of S. Lorenzo, the resting place of the Medici, with a reflection on that famous family, and a visit to the famed Laurentian Library.

The cloisters, where Lorenzo walked often enough, are beautiful, and then from them one passes so easily into the Laurentian Library, founded by Cosimo Vecchio, and treasured and added to by Piero and Lorenzo il Magnifico, but scattered and partially destroyed by the vandalism and futile stupidity of Savonarola and his puritans in 1494…

 

Perhaps the most precious thing here is the Pandects of Justinian, taken by the Pisans from Amalfi in 1335, and seized by the Florentines when they took Pisa in 1406. Amalfi prized them above everything she possessed. Pisa was ready to defend them with her life, Florence spent hundreds of thousands of florins to possess herself of them—for in them was thought to lie the secret of the law of Rome. Who knows what Italy, under the heel of the barbarian, does not owe to these faded pages, and through Italy the world? They were, as it were, the symbol of Latin civilization in the midst of German barbarism. Here too is that most ancient Virgil which the French stole in 1804. Here is Petrarch’s Horace and a Dante transcribed by Villani; and, best of all, the only ancient codex in  the world of what remains to us of Aeschylus, of what is left of Sophocles. It is in such a place that  we may best recognize the true greatness of the abused Medici. Tyrants they may have been, but when the mob was tyrant it satisfied itself with destroying what they with infinite labour had gathered together for the advancement of learning, the civilization of the world…. To the Medici we owe much of what is most beautiful in Florence—the loveliest work of Botticelli, of Brunellesco, of Donatello, of Lippo Lippi, of Michelangelo and the rest, to say nothing of such a priceless collection of books and MSS. as this. …

 

It is not, however, this humble and almost nameless grave that draws us to-day to the Segresta Nuova, but the monument carved by Michelangelo for two lesser and later Medici: Giuliano, Duc de Nemours, who died in 1516, and Lorenzo, Duc d’Urbino, who died in 1519….It is this Giuliano and Lorenzo de Medici that Michelangelo has immortalized 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 realized 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. … 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? ###

 

 

 

 

Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 244-248.

Vatican: Sistine Chapel and Stanze della Segnatura

I agree with Edward Hutton that Michelangelo's work in the Sistine Chapel is difficult to comprehend or take in. It's not just the crowds of tourists but the sheer monumentality is overwhelming. I also prefer the relatively small and intimate Stanze della Segnatura where, despite a room full of people, you are free to linger and explore the four walls at leisure before being swept into the Sistine Chapel.

 

Above these, supported by marvelous and gigantic images of sybyls, of prophets, of slaves, and athletes, stretches the roof of Michelangelo, that new heaven which is the old earth, beautiful with the life of man, his love which brought disaster and all joy, the wild story of the world, which ends on that vast wall above the altar where he has painted not the Last Judgment, it might seem, but the Resurrection.

 

This ceiling, so heavy with life that it always seems to crush us under the weight of its tremendous story, was painted for Pope Julius II., the condotierre, between the years 1506 and 1512…. (216)

 

But this profound and wonderful vision of life by no means decorates the chapel of the Popes; it dwarfs it. The air is so full of shapes that we can see nothing.  In this space… Michelangelo, whose spirit always seems to be brooding over some immense sorrow, has created a tremendous and a terrible crowd of figures, each one of which seems to accuse the Papacy and God Himself of some tragic crime committed upon mankind….  Here we are devoured by insatiable dreams—and how should we answer and satisfy them? (222-223)

 

Raphael: School of Athens.

 

But, after all, what strikes us most in this picture dealing so easily and surely with the greatest matters, is its value as just a picture, its decorative value, that is, its marvelously lovely expression, not of any profound or subtle thought but of its own element, a certain spaciousness, confined as we perceive at last, within very narrow material limits, but that seems infinite. It is the very triumph of decorative art, come at last to perfection in one who had been the pupil of Pietro Perugino. The difficulty of such an achievement, greater here by far than in the ‘Disputa.’ For there all heaven lay open to our eyes, is scarcely felt till in an effort to understand what is really consummate in the art of Raphael—and no man has been praised so much for the wrong things—we perceive here his real triumph. That palace or temple, all of earth, full of the measured beauty of the work of man, is not less infinite in its spaciousness after all than the whole circuit of the world, the limitless kingdom, light on light, of the sky. And this is the real triumph of Raphael, not that he has summed up the ancient and the medieval world and expressed them in the terms of the Renaissance, but that into that narrow, cramped room he has brought an infinite beauty. (227)

 

### 

 

 Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922.

Rome: St. Peter's Basilica

Edward Hutton did not like St. Peter's. He was disappointed and disconcerted by its largeness. "Nothing is so feeble as largeness if it be not ordered and contrived with beauty." I can agree with much of what he says, but every time I am in Rome, I try to attend Mass in St. Peter's and it is always something special. Maybe it is just the feeling you get in the midst of a small congregation of worshippers gathered from all over the world while crowds of tourists walk through the vast interior. 

   

 

S. Peter’s

 

The Popes, themselves, who, vandals as they have ever been, were never guilty of an act more barbarous than the destruction of the most famous church in Christendom, one thousand one hundred and fifty years old at the time Nicholas V pulled it down in order to build—well the beautiful and sumptuous failure we see, which, though it has been too much decried, is in fact without a sense of reverence. It is a little blatant in its pride and a stranger to humility. It seems to praise God in the language one might use to a king for the sake of impressing the populace, but not sincerely…. (181)

 

S. Peter’s seems vulgar in a compromise between beauty and ostentation…. The whole place is blasphemous in the confusion of its intention. It is not Greek, nor Latin, but Barbarian, and what beauty it has, and it has much, is by reason of that confusion a barbarian beauty, fundamentally insane and romantic. The richness of the material is lost in the largeness of the church, the precious in a multitude of riches. One’s attention wanders, nothing there can hold it. the place is less a church than a city in whose streets one may wander all day long searching in vain for God…. (185)

 

Michelangelo was already seventy years old when he became capo-maestro. Refusing all payment, he worked, he said, ‘for the love of God, the Blessed Virgin, and S. Peter.’ Bound though he was by the plans and achievements of his predecessors, he was able to discard the design of Sangallo, which besides filling the church with darkness would have involved the destruction of the Sistine chapel. He took up again the plan of Bramante, a Greek Cross under a dome. “I will throw the Pantheon there up into the sky,’ he is reported to have said. Every effort was made by the disciples of Sangallo and Giulio Romano to displace him, but the Pope not only confirmed him in his office, but also gave him even greater power than before. When he died in 1564 he had finished the drum and made the plans for the dome which Giacomo della Porta finished in 1590.It remains the only perfectly beautiful part of the church…. (182-3)

In 1640 della Porta died, and Paul V appointed Carlo Maderna architect. At the order of the Pope he abandoned both Bramante’s and Michelangelo’s designs, adopting Rossellino’s, namely a Latin Cross; for it had become necessary to impress the North with that long nave at the head of which the altar might gleam and the faithful be edified. … (182)

 

Maderna finished the façade in 161. Fifty-three years later Bernini completed the Piazza with its beautiful colonnades and fountains… (1830

 

The strong and spiritual art of Florence, of the Tuscan realists, passes at last into absolute beauty only perhaps, here at any rate, in the early work of Michelangelo, of which S. Peter’s holds the most precious example. The Madonna della Pieta, in the first chapel of the south aisle, remains the most beautiful as it is the most perfect of the many works which came from that strong and ruthless hand, so marvelously tender for once. It was carved for the Cardinal di San Dionigi, called the Cardinal Rovano, not long after the Bacchus of the Bargello in Florence. Madonna is seated on the stone where the Cross was raised, her dead Son in her lap. ‘He is of so great and so rare a beauty,’ says Condivi, ‘that no one beholds Him but is moved to pity. It is a figure truly worthy of the humanity which belonged to the Son of God and to such a Mother; nevertheless, some there be who complain that the Mother is too young compared to the Son. One day as I was talking to Michelangelo of this objection: “Do you know,” he said, “that chaste women retain their fresh looks much longer than those who are not chaste? How much more, therefore, a virgin in whom not even the least unchaste desire ever arose?... Michelangelo was about twenty-four or twenty-five years old when he had finished that work. It brought him fame and a great reputation, and there, alone in all his work, on the hem of Mary’s robe, he has carved her name. (189-190)

 

##

 

Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922.