According to Vasari he found time, even in those excited months, to continue work secretly on the tombs of the Medici, and also to paint, for Alfonso of Ferrara, the least characteristic of his works, Leda and the Swan. It was a strange product for a man so slightly sexual and so generally puritan; and perhaps it came from a temporarily disordered mind. It showed the swan copulating with Leda. Alfonso was something of a lecher between wars, but apparently he had not chosen the subject. The messenger whom he sent to secure the promised work expressed disappointment when he saw it, saying, “This is a mere trifle,” and made no effort to secure it for the Duke. Angelo gave the picture to his servant Antonio Mini, who took it with him to France, where it passed into the collection of the omnivorous Francis I. It remained at Fontainebleau until the reign of Louis XIII, when a high official ordered it destroyed because of its indecency. How far this order was carried out, and what was the later history of this original, is unknown. A copy remains in the vaults of the London National Gallery.61
When Florence fell to the returning Medici, Battista della Palla and other republican leaders were put to death. Michelangelo hid himself for two months in the house of a friend, expecting at any moment a like fate. But Clement thought him worth more alive than dead. The Pope wrote to his ruling relatives in Florence bidding them seek out the artist, treat him with courtesy, and offer him the renewal of his pension if he would resume work on the tombs. Michael agreed. But again, as with the mausoleum of Julius, the mind of pontiff and artist had conceived more than the hand could execute, and the Pope could not live long enough to see the enterprise through. When Clement died (1534) Michelangelo, fearful that Alessandro de’ Medici would do him harm now that his protector was gone, took the first opportunity to slip off to Rome.
A profound and somber sadness marks the tombs, and the solemn Madonna de’ Medici that Angelo also carved for the Sacristy. Historians fond of democracy (and exaggerating its scope in Florence) have generally assumed that the recumbent figures symbolize a city mourning its forced surrender to tyranny. But this interpretation is probably fancifuclass="underline" after all, they had been designed while the Medici ruled Florence reasonably well; they had been carved for a Medici Pope unfailingly kind to Angelo, and by an artist indebted to Medici from his youth; it is not clear that he intended to condemn the family whose tombs he was preparing; and his representations of Giuliano and Lorenzo have nothing derogatory about them. No, these figures express something deeper than the love of liberty by the rich few to rule the poor unhindered by a Medici house usually popular with the people. They express rather Michelangelo’s weariness with life, the fatigue of a man all nerves and titanic uncompassable dreams, who found himself buffeted by a thousand tribulations, harassed in almost every enterprise by the dull recalcitrance of matter, the obtuseness of power, and the called-in loans of borrowed time. Angelo had enjoyed but few of life’s delights: he had no friends on a par with his mind; woman seemed to him only a smooth anatomy threatening peace; and even his most majestic triumphs were the issue of exhausting toil and pain, the unfinishable symphonies of melancholy meditation and inescapable defeat.
But when Florence had fallen to her worst tyrants, and terror ruled where once Lorenzo had governed happily, the artist who had carved a criticism of life, and no mere theory of government, in the marbles of the Medici shrine, felt that those melancholy figures expressed, as well, the glory gone of the city that had nursed the Renaissance. On the unveiling of the statue of Night the poet Gianbattista Strozzi wrote a quatrain of literary exposition:
The Night thous seest here, posed gracefully
In act of slumber, was by an angel wrought
Out of this stone. Sleeping, with life she’s fraught.
Wake her, incredulous wight; she’ll speak to thee.
Michelangelo pardoned the complimentary pun on his name, but rejected the interpretation. He gave his own in four lines that are the most revealing in his poetry:
Caro m’è il sonno, e più l’esser di sasso
Mentre che ‘l danno e la vergogna dura.
Non veder, non sentir m’è gran ventura;
Però non mì destar; deh! parla basso.—
Dear is my sleep, but more to be mere stone,
So long as ruin and dishonor reign.
To see naught, to feel naught, is my great gain;
Then wake me not; speak in an undertone.62
XI. THE END OF AN AGE: 1528–34
Clement did not die until he had made one more reversal of policy, and had crowned his disasters by losing England for the Church (1531). The spread of the Lutheran revolt in Germany had created for Charles V difficulties and dangers that might, he hoped, be eased by a general council. He urged this upon the Pope, and was angered by repeated excuses and delays. Irritated in turn by the Emperor’s award of Reggio and Modena to Ferrara, Clement veered again toward France. He accepted a proposal of Francis that Caterina de’ Medici should marry the King’s second son Henry, and he signed secret articles binding himself to help Francis recover Milan and Genoa (1531).63 At a second conference in Bologna (1532) between Pope and Emperor, Charles again proposed a general council at which Catholics and Protestants might meet and find some formula of reconciliation; he was again rebuffed. He suggested a marriage of Catherine with Francesco Maria Sforza, imperial vicar in Milan; he found that the proposal came too late; Catherine was already sold. On October 12, 1533, Clement met Francis at Marseille, and there married his niece to Henry, Duke of Orléans. It was a prime defect of the Medici as popes that they thought of themselves as a royal dynasty, and sometimes rated the glory of their family above the fate of Italy or the Church. Clement tried to persuade Francis to make peace with Charles; Francis refused, and had the audacity to ask papal acquiescence to a temporary alliance of France with the Protestants and the Turks against the Emperor.64 Clement thought that this was going a bit too far.
“Under these circumstances,” says Pastor, “it must be considered fortunate for the Church that the Pope’s days were numbered.”65 He had already lived too long. At his accession Henry VIII was still Defensor fidei, defender of the orthodox faith against Luther; and the Protestant revolt had as yet proposed no vital doctrinal changes, but only such ecclesiastical reforms as the Council of Trent would legislate for the Church in the next generation. At Clement’s death (September 25, 1534) England, Denmark, Sweden, half of Germany, part of Switzerland had definitely broken away from the Church, and Italy had submitted to a Spanish domination fatal to the free thought and life that had for good or evil marked the Renaissance. It was beyond doubt the most disastrous pontificate in the history of the Church. Everyone had rejoiced at Clement’s accession, everyone rejoiced at his death; and the rabble of Rome repeatedly defiled his tomb.66