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 Æschylus, 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?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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