His religion was essentially medieval, darkened with mysticism, prophecy, and the thought of death and hell; he did not share the skepticism of Leonardo or the blithe indifference of Raphael; his favorite books were the Bible and Dante. Toward the end of his life his poetry turned more and more on religion:
Now hath my life across a stormy sea,
Like a frail bark, reached that wide port where all
Are bidden, ere the final judgment fall,
Of good and evil deeds to pay the fee.
Now know I well how that fond phantasy,
Which made my soul the worshiper and thrall
Of earthly art, is vain; how criminal
Is that which all men seek so willingly.
These amorous thoughts which were so lightly dressed—
What are they when the double death is nigh?
The one I know for sure, the other dread.
Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest
My soul, that turns to His great love on high,
Whose arms to clasp us on the cross are spread.58
The old poet reproached himself for having composed in past years some sonnets to love. But these were apparently poetic exercises rather than passions of the flesh. The sincerest sonnets in Michelangelo’s Rime are addressed to an elderly widow or a handsome youth. Tommaso Cavalieri was a Roman noble who played at painting. He came to Angelo (c. 1532) for instruction, and bewitched his teacher with the beauty of his face and form, the grace of his carriage and manners. Michael fell in love with him, and wrote to him sonnets of such frank admiration that some have been led to place Michelangelo with Leonardo among the famous homosexuals of history.58a Such fond expressions of man to man were common in the Renaissance, even among assiduous heterosexuals; their extreme language was part of the poetic and epistolary ritual of the time; we can draw no conclusions from them. We note, however, that—outside of poetry—Michelangelo seems to have been indifferent to women until he met Vittoria Colonna.
His friendship with her began about 1542, when she was fifty and he was sixty-seven. A woman of fifty can easily stir the embers of a sexagenarian, but Vittoria had no mind for it; she felt herself still bound to the Marquis of Pescara, now seventeen years dead. “Our friendship is stable,” she wrote to Michelangelo, “and our affection very sure; it is tied with a Christian knot.”59 She sent him 143 sonnets, good but negligible; he replied in sonnets warm with admiration and devotion, but tarnished with literary conceits. When they met they talked about art and religion, and perhaps she confessed to him her sympathy with the men who were trying to reform the Church. Her influence upon him was profound; all the finest spiritual elements of life seemed gathered up in her piety, kindness, and fidelity. Something of his pessimism cleared away when she walked and talked with him; and he prayed that he might never again be the man he had been before they met. He was with her when she died (1547). For a long time thereafter he remained “downstricken as if deranged,” and he reproached himself for not having kissed her face as well as her hand in those last moments.60
It was shortly before her death that he assumed his last and greatest responsibility in art. When Antonio da Sangallo passed away (1546), Paul III asked Michelangelo to undertake the completion of St. Peter’s. The weary artist protested again that he was a sculptor, not an architect; perhaps he had not forgotten his failure with the façade of San Lorenzo. The Pope insisted, and Angelo yielded with “infinite regret”; but, Vasari adds, “I believe His Holiness was inspired by God.” For this culminating task of his career the artist refused additional remuneration, though the Pope repeatedly pressed it upon him. He set to work with an energy hardly to be expected of a man in his seventy-second year.
As if St. Peter’s were not burden enough he took upon himself in the same year two other major enterprises. To the Palazzo Farnese he added a third story, a cornice acclaimed by all for its beauty, and the two upper tiers of a court that Vasari judged the finest cortile in Europe. He designed a spacious flight of steps to the top of the Capitoline hill, and placed on the summit the ancient equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius. Later, aged eighty-eight, he began to erect at the farther end of this plateau the Palazzo del Senatore, with its lordly double staircase; and he drew up plans for the Palazzo dei Conservatori at one side of the Senate Hall, and the Museo Capitolino at the other. Even he could not live long enough to carry out all these plans, but the structures were completed on his designs by Tommaso Cavalieri, Vignola, and Giacomo della Porta.
When Paul III died (1549) some doubt arose whether his successor, Julius III, would continue Angelo as architect-in-chief at St. Peter’s. Michael had rejected Antonio da Sangallo’s plan as making for so dark a church that (he said) it would have been dangerous to public morals.61 The dead man’s friends persuaded two cardinals to warn the Pope that Buonarroti was spoiling the edifice. Julius supported Angelo; but under a later pontiff, Paul IV (for popes came and went in quick succession in Michelangelo’s life), the Sangallo faction returned to the attack, alleging that the artist, now eighty-one, was in his second childhood, was tearing down more than he built up, and was planning quite impossible things at San Pietro. Time and again Michael thought of resigning and accepting the repeated invitations of Duke Cosimo to resume residence in Florence; but he had conceived the dome, and would not leave his post until that conception was on the way to realization. In 1557, after years of thought on the problem, he constructed in clay a small model for the massive cupola, whose width and weight were the perilous ponderables of the enterprise. Another year was spent in making a large model in wood, and drawing up plans for construction and support. The dome was to be 138 feet in diameter and 151 feet in its own height, with its apex 334 feet from the ground; it was to rest on a corniced base upheld by four gigantic arches at the transept crossing of the church. A “lantern” or open-faced smaller cupola was to rise sixty-nine feet above the main dome, and a cross was to reach thirty-two feet higher still as the pinnacle of the whole majestic edifice, 435 feet in total height. The comparable dome that Brunellesco had raised over the cathedral of Florence, and whose beauty Michelangelo modestly pronounced unsurpassable, measured 138½ feet in width, 133 in its own height, 300 from ground to apex, 351 with its lantern. These two domes were the most audacious undertakings in the history of Renaissance architecture.
Pius IV succeeded Paul IV in 1569. Once again the enemies of the aging Titan sought to replace him. Worn out with a long war of dispute and recrimination, he submitted his resignation (1560). The Pope refused to accept it, and Michelangelo continued as chief architect of St. Peter’s till his death. Then it became clear that his critics had not been wholly in the wrong. Just as in sculpture he often attacked the marble block with no other preparation than an idea in his head, so in architecture he seldom put his plans upon paper, rarely confided them even to his friends, but merely made blueprints for each part of the edifice as the time approached to build it. When he died he left no definite plans or models for any portion except the dome. Consequently his successors were free to adopt their own ideas. They changed his—and Bramante’s—basic conception of a Greek cross to a Latin cross by elongating the eastern arm of the church, and fronting it with a high façade that made the cupola invisible on that side except from a quarter of a mile away. The only part of the building that is Angelo’s is the cupola, which was erected from his plans, with no substantial change, by Giacomo della Porta in 1588. It is unquestionably the noblest architectural sight in Rome. Rising in stately curves from drum to lantern, it crowns with majesty the immense pile beneath, and gives to classic columns, pilasters, architraves, and pediments a comprehensive unity rivaling in splendor any known structure of the ancient world. Here again Christianity sought a reconciliation with antiquity: the temple of the worship of Christ placed the dome of the Pantheon (142 feet wide by 142 feet in total height) upon the Basilica of Constantine as Bramante had vowed to do, and dared to raise classic columns to a lofty stature unparalleled in the records of antiquity.