I do not mean to say that he was entirely untouched by that grand and tragic drama. He was by nature silent and never spoke of what he felt most deeply, and he was also prudent and afraid of compromising himself. If Savonarola's ideas did have some influence on him it was at a later time when, in his advanced age, under the influence of strong and deep friendships, the disillusions of life and the fear of the hereafter, religious preoccupations gained with him the place of first importance. He was not among those who, like Botticelli, in 1498, consented to the dethronement of the pagan pride of the Renaissance. Religious he certainly was and a Christian as always, but his proud Christianity was not that of the rest of the world. He was never understood by his own time. Even when he was painting the Last Judgment, and his faith was most ardent, he must have scandalised the devout. He was altogether a Platonist. He could have said with Lorenzo de' Medici and his illustrious friends of the gardens of S. Marco that "without studying Plato one could neither be a good citizen nor an enlightened Christian." Savonarola undoubtedly admired and loved Plato. Still he felt the object of art to be religious edification and showed that ideal to artists in "the face of a pious woman when she is praying, illuminated by a ray of divine beauty."[10] Michelangelo despised that art made for the devout and left it to the Flemings.[11] He had a horror of sentimentality and almost of sentiment. "True painting," he said, "never will make any one shed a tear."[12]
It should contain no expression of religion or worship, for "good painting is religious and devout in itself. Among the wise nothing more elevates the soul or better raises it to adoration than the difficulty of attaining the perfection which approaches God and unites itself to Him."[13] He believed himself to be more religious in creating beautiful, harmonious human bodies than in searching for a psychological or moral expression intended "for women, especially for the old or the very young, or for monks, nuns and those who are deaf to true harmony."[14] The Pietà of St. Peter's, undertaken the year of Savonarola's death, has a more Christian character than the earlier works of Michelangelo, but this Christianity is still far from conforming to the expressive and pathetic ideal of the artists of the fifteenth century, or from the tragic expression and agony of suffering of the virgins of Donatello, Signorelli or Mantegna. Very different indeed is the noble harmony of this group and the calm beauty of the young Virgin on whose knees rests the supple body of Christ relaxed like that of a sleeping child. Even though Michelangelo explained the eternal youth of the Virgin[15] by an idea of chivalric mysticism it is evident that at that time the desire for beauty was as strong in his heart as any regard for faith and that there was a certain relationship between these beautiful Gods of Calvary and those of Olympus whose charm had intoxicated him.
Michelangelo spent two years on the Pietà.[16] In the spring of 1501 he returned to Florence and there met Cardinal Piccolomini, with whom he signed a contract to deliver in three years' time, for the sum of five hundred ducats, fifteen figures of apostles and saints for the Piccolomini altar in the Cathedral of Sienna. This was the first of those overpowering commissions which Michelangelo never hesitated to undertake in the first intoxication of his imagination without any just estimate of his powers and which weighed on him all his life, like remorse. In 1504 he had delivered only four of the figures and sixty years later in 1561 he was still tormented by the thought of this unfulfilled contract.
Another undertaking, more tempting to him by its very difficulty, took entire possession of him a few months after he had made the agreement with Cardinal Piccolomini.
A gigantic block of marble had been delivered in 1464 to Agostino di Duccio by the Board of Works of S. Maria del Fiore to be used for the statue of a prophet. The work had been interrupted at this point. The Gonfalonier Soderini wanted to entrust the completion of it to Lionardo da Vinci, but in August, 1502, it was given to Michelangelo and he set to work on it at once. From that block of marble came forth the colossal David. By January 25, 1504, the work was completed and a commission of artists among whom were Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, Lionardo da Vinci and Perugino was considering where it should be placed. They hesitated between the Loggia dei Lanzi and the entrance of the Palace of the Signory. The latter position was decided upon at the expressed preference of Michelangelo. The architects of the Duomo, Simone del Pollajuolo (Cronaca), Antonio da San Gallo, Baccio d'Agnolo and Bernardo della Cecca were charged with the transportation of the enormous mass of stone which was placed in position on the eighth of June, 1504, on the left of the entrance to the Palazzo Vecchio where until then the Judith of Donatello had stood.
To-day the David is in the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence. There it is in too confined a space. That colossus needs the open air, he stifles under the roof of a Palace and his disproportion to everything around him is shocking. We can perhaps judge better what he really is from the reproduction in bronze, which on the hill of San Miniato raises its inspiring silhouette above the town. There the irregularity of the details disappears in the impression of the whole. Incredible energy emanates from that gigantic force in repose—from that great face in the small head, and from that huge body with the slender waist, thin arms and the enormous hands with swollen veins and heavy fingers.
All of Michelangelo is there in that mixture of proud nobility and almost barbarous vulgarity. He is all there, and he only, entirely regardless of his subject. The head of the David with its wrinkled forehead, thick eyebrows and scornful lips—a type that he often used afterward—is, like the heads of Lorenzo and of Giuliano de' Medici, a lyric work into which Michelangelo poured his own sadness, disdain and melancholy.
Michelangelo had not waited to finish this work before accepting other commissions which he was to abandon along the way. In 1502 a David[17] in bronze for Pierre de Rohan, Maréchal de Gié, the favorite of Louis XII, which in the end was finished by Benedetto da Rovezzano in 1507 and sent, after the disgrace of Rohan, to the new royal favourite, Florimond Robertet, Secretary of Finance.
In 1503 he undertook twelve statues for the Cathedral of Florence, but began only one, a St. Matthew, which was never finished and is now in the Accademia delle Belle Arti. His vacillating, uncertain genius, wherein discouragement succeeded to enthusiasm, drove him into planning works with fierce energy and then almost immediately so diverted his attention that he could not force himself to finish them.
In 1504 the Florentine Signory brought him into competition with another great irresolute, Lionardo da Vinci, whose universal intellectual curiosity was, no less than the temperament of Michelangelo, an eternal obstacle to the achievement of his great undertakings. The two men seem to have met about 1495. They could not have understood each other very well, for they both stood alone, each in his own way. Lionardo was now fifty-two years old. When he was thirty he had left Florence, where the bitterness of the political and religious passions was unbearable to his delicate and slightly timid nature and to his serene and sceptical intelligence which was interested in everything but refused to take sides. Driven back to Florence by the death or ruin of his protectors, the Duke of Milan and Cæsar Borgia, he came into contact there from the very first with Michelangelo entirely absorbed in his own faith and passions, however changing they might be, and who, while he hated the enemies of his party and of his faith, hated still more those who had neither party nor faith. Brutally and publicly, on many occasions, Michelangelo made Lionardo feel his aversion for him.
When the Gonfalonier Soderini put the two in direct competition