Michelangelo by G. K. Chesterton
From Illustrated London News, May 15, 1909; Daily News,
Feb. 29, 1908;
There is one great artist whose art
was ultimately sacred and seraphic, yet in its labour and technique peculiarly
strenuous and military; if one looked at his work only one would think of a
harsh angel, an angel in armour. How comes it that this man actually bore the
name of the Archangel Michael—Michelangelo? How comes it that a contemporary
and more gracious artist happened to be christened after a more gracious
archangel—Raphael?
Ordinary people call the great
sculptor Michael Angelo, because that is his ordinary name. The most
penetrating and spiritual personalities also call him Michael Angelo, because to
them he is indeed the Angel Michael. It is foolish, indeed, to talk about the
paganism of the Renaissance; Michael Angelo was more decisively Christian than
any other artist after Christianity; much more Christian than Fra Angelico. His
splendid sculpture called The Slave could not have been created in
simple slave earning times; it represents a huge and heaving human figure
struggling to be free. In short, there was a man whose surname was Buonarotti;
we have never heard of that name, and it is doubtful if he had ever heard of it
himself: I mean as a part of himself. All tradition has called him Michael the
Angel because all tradition has felt him to be Michael the Angel. Michael
destroyed the devils by smiting them; Michael Angelo destroyed the Titans by
creating them. Here then the two essentials of a state are at one. The same
words, "Michael the Angel," would spring to the mouth both of the
learned and the quite unlearned man. The literate and the illiterate are
combined; and together they sweep the world. But the cultured man is left alone
in the middle: for he says "Buonarotti."
What do you feel first if I mentioned
Michael Angelo? It might be the sense of the majestic hands of Man upon the
locks of the last doors of life; large and terrible hands, like those of that
youth who poises the stone above Florence, and looks out upon the circle of the
hills. It might be that huge heave of flank and chest and throat in The
Slave, which is like an earthquake lifting a whole landscape; it might be
that tremendous Madonna, whose charity is more strong than death. Anyhow, your
thoughts would be something worthy of the man's terrible paganism and his more
terrible Christianity. Who but God could have graven Michael Angelo; who came
so near to graving the Mother of God?
Though Michael Angelo was original,
he was sufficiently traditional to be praised for his originality. In spite of
the current argument for artistic novelties, it is not true that the world
received the originality of the old artists as it does the novelty of the new
artists. There was plenty of neglect, plenty of negative injustice, plenty of
petty criticism or private spite; but the utterly uncomprehending and angry
reaction against the new art is a new thing. Any artist who does not see the
difference is failing in the very first thing in which an artist should
succeed. He is failing in measurement, which is a great part of judgment. He is
failing in a matter of proportion, which fools call a matter of degree.
There is a figure in one of Michael Angelo's
frescoes in which the legs are somewhat lengthened so as to give an
overwhelming impression of flying through the air. But if the legs had been
extended indefinitely, like the two parallel straight lines that could never
meet, if they had wandered away in two endless strips over the whole of the
Sistine Chapel, they would not produce any impression of rushing or of anything
else. But the modern sensationalist has no notion of effecting anything except
by extending it; by tugging its nerves out telescopically like some form of
Asiatic torture, and increasing the pleasures of man by interminably pulling
his leg. And that is why some of us feel the presence of something stupid and
even barbaric in all this progress and acceleration, because it is but the
elongation of one line and the exaggeration of one idea.
We all know this about modern art.
Michelangelo and Whistler were both fine artists; but one is obviously public,
the other obviously private, or, rather, not obvious at all. Michelangelo's
frescoes are doubtless finer than the popular judgment, but they are plainly
meant to strike the popular judgment. Whistler's pictures seem often meant to
escape the popular judgment; they even seem meant to escape the popular
admiration. They are elusive, fugitive; they fly even from praise. Doubtless
many artists in Michelangelo's day declared themselves to be great artists,
although they were unsuccessful. But they did not declare themselves great
artists because they were unsuccessful: that is the peculiarity of our own
time, which has a positive bias against the populace.