The Life of Michelangelo BuonarrotiSymonds, John Addington
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The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti
Symonds, John Addington
Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1475-1564
The companion figure has not equal grace. Athletically muscular,
though adolescent, the body of this young man, whose hands are tied
behind his back, is writhed into an attitude of vehement protest and
rebellion. He raises his face with appealing pain to heaven. The head,
which is only blocked out, overweighs the form, proving that
Michelangelo, unlike the Greeks, did not observe a fixed canon of
proportion for the human frame. This statue bears a strong resemblance
in feeling and conception to the Apollo designed for Baccio Valori.
There are four rough-hewn male figures, eccentrically wrought into the
rock-work of a grotto in the Boboli Gardens, which have been assigned
to the Tomb of Julius. This attribution involves considerable
difficulties. In the first place, the scale is different, and the
stride of one of them, at any rate, is too wide for the pedestals of
that monument. Then their violent contortions and ponderous adult
forms seem to be at variance with the spirit of the Captives. Mr.
Heath Wilson may perhaps be right in his conjecture that Michelangelo
began them for the sculptural decoration on the façade of S. Lorenzo.
Their incompleteness baffles criticism; yet we feel instinctively that
they were meant for the open air and for effect at a considerable
distance. They remind us of Deucalion's men growing out of the stones
he threw behind his back. We could not wish them to be finished, or to
lose their wild attraction, as of primeval beings, the remnants of dim
generations nearer than ourselves to elemental nature. No better
specimens of Buonarroti's way of working in the marble could be
chosen. Almost savage hatchings with the point blend into finer
touches from the toothed chisel; and here and there the surface has
been treated with innumerable smoothing lines that round it into skin
and muscle. To a man who chiselled thus, marble must have yielded like
softest freestone beneath his tools; and how recklessly he wrought is
clear from the defective proportions of one old man's figure, whose
leg below the knee is short beyond all excuse.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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